Guild Wars 2

I reckon in 9 out of 10 cases community managers from other forums would swoop into this thread and congratulate Kraag with a big fat sweaty handshake for the insane amount of detail and passion he put into his posts.

But we live in ANet/NS country, so your sincere attempts to improve the game are worth less than dirt.

Kanebrake.6192:

Plenty of people are angry and disillusioned with wvw. But what’s the point of expressing that? It won’t fix anything. Anet isn’t going to suddenly say “Wow, those folks are really mad! We need to do something about this!” Well they will but the “fix” will be in the form of forum infractions and bans.

I hope it atleast prevents some sales.

JMadFour.9730:

so being able to swap places with a clone that doesn’t exist anymore is a “defensive part of the skill set”? that really does sound like a bug to me. was the Mesmer meant to swap places with nothing?

because that patch note does not say you can’t switch places with the clone anymore. it says you can’t switch with the clone if the clone is already gone. i.e. the clone has to exist, in order to switch places with it.

Combos in Street Fighter 2 were a ‘bug’ too.

SPvP was officially abandoned, so I don’t see why they would still put in new maps.

Even more than the CDIgnorance, I was depressed because of the always-same topics that pop up here and that never get addressed by the devs.
Just look at the front page, and go back 5 pages or 50 pages. It always the same issues that have never been addressed, not once since launch.
It was like groundhog day in the days when I visited these forums almost daily. Reading the WvW forums alone is intense masochism (not to mention staying with this game).

The icing on the cake is that the only kind of discussion that doesn’t constantly repeat, which is WvWing talk (not even concrete XvsYvsZ matchup threads but general chat) was banned!

It’s not a surprise people get tired of it eventually.

I think hot join 5v5 doesn’t work and is the wrong avenue. Better would be, for pros like newbies alike, a 2v2/3v3 solo queue. Not only would it reduce wait times since teamlets would be filled up quicker, individual contribution would be greatly magnified meaning that there should be less 10v500 blowouts and leaving with a even the most basic MMR system. Losing the first couple times to determine the proper MMR stats isn’t as traumatic for newbies as some devs think.

grifflyman.8102:

Victory.2879:

Reading between the lines:

No new maps are currently in development for wvw due to lack of any resources devoted to it.

If they do decide to have a new map, it will be at least 6-12 months away.

GvG 5,10,15,20 man maps will never happen despite being Anet’s best chance of making a decent esport out of it and re energising guilds.

This makes me so kittening sad. I guess I’m moving to the next game that offers WvW….

Camelot is still years away unfortunately.

Nymph of Meliai.6739:

the EotM maps are great… don’t confuse map design with game play.

The problem is not the EotM map… the problem is the way in which players have chosen to play the map because they don’t really have anything to play for other than boh and karma.

This is why points and thus defending are important to wvw… without them then the game would just become a big pvd karma train.

That’s like saying Big Rigs isn’t objectively a kitten game because it’s your job as players to just approach it with the right mindset (check out YT).

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

These are interesting ideas!
We have always tried to stay 5v5 to be consistent with the Conquest game mode, but I like what you were trying to solve there with the restriction of skills/traits.

Look, I’m not trying to be rude and I appreciate your forum engagement, but why do you ask us this? There is still a huge CDI about new game modes from last year. Yet we have not heard a SINGLE THING coming out of that.
Are you (Anet) essentially saying that all of our ideas and hopes from then, that it was all for nothing, and that we now start over?
It feels like Groundhog day. Every half year a dev comes into the forum and asks us about new game modes, better ladders, etc. without addressing the MILLIONS of ideas we already expressed about it, not least in your very own CDIs. And of course, nothing ever comes of it, not even a kittening status update! It’s like we’re all playing a giant game of “pretend”.

Xia.3485:

Edit: I wonder what the statistics on WvW players vs PvE players looks like, how much overlap they have and the income derived from both these demographics. I wonder if that also corresponds to manpower dedicated to the mini-game. Would be fun to see.

What else do you expect when you have a lawn but the owner only waters one half of it?
Do you point at the barely watered half and say “oh, but look dried up and ugly it is! the other one is so lush and green! I shouldn’t waste any more water on that ugly dried up one!”
Good logic, genius.

I for my part shave daily, thus I interpreted this metaphor which was used a fair time ago, that ANet will attempt to introduce many, but smaller, balance tweaks, over regular and shortish intervals, rather than large revisions every few months
This would also greatly enhance the capability of the PvP team (?) to respond to individual trouble makers, since there would be a much smaller change catalog to tackle with each update.
However we have seen the exact opposite to that. Or I’d rather say not the exact opposite but the inverse, with smaller or medium tweaks over a excruciatingly long time period.
So has shaving been abandoned? What is the state of the balancing process 2014?

Vladeemer.5076:

So, we can infer that “loyal player”=“I play your game for free and demand to be rewarded for doing so.”

How could Anet not bend before such a compelling argument?

So player loyalty is only defined by pulling out your credit card and buying cash shop fluff.
Wow.
I’m at a loss for words.

Harbinger.8637:

I think it’s a well known fact that there’s not much competition in this game. Even Anet knows that, that’s why they been going the route they have. Just making pvp more accessible to everyone.

Gw2 pvp is fun and great at times, however if you’re looking for something more competitive you’re better off going somewhere else.

Why should we just accept that though? The game launched with grand promises of competitive PvP and a excellent pedigree (GW1).

Also you’re acting as if things like a robust leaderboard or matchmaking system just benefit e-sports-types. They do not. The main reason I personally don’t play sPvP anymore is because of the lack of things like that.
You might find the games itself sufficiently fun (I do not, I find them a poor game mode) but there is such a thing as “meta-fun”. The most prolific “meta-fun” in MMOs is probably loot and rewards. But PvPers care more about leaderboards, tournaments, etc. than just straight up loot.

McWolfy.5924:

StanleyJohny.8047:

I think that ANet already learned that they shouldnt write something before thay got it ready to upload into the game.

Edge, account bound wxp was ready month ago befor they released, new masterys are ready since 4-5 months or more. They just delay everything as long as possible.

They delayed it for another bulletpoint on the Grand Feature Update is the kicker.
That’s all we are, another bulletpoint.

Alasteir.7031:

No, this is normal. Play any Blizzard game and you’ll frequently run into issues. Play any online game and you’ll find problems like this. Remember Diablo III release? Remember how every WoW patch would almost have an entire day of extended maintenance because Blizzard, after years of these issues, still run into “unforeseen cirumstances”?

That makes neither the Diablo III launch nor this screwup any less so.
You’re acting as if such problems are the standard rather than the exception. I know anecdotally of dozens of games who launched either beta or proper without any such hiccups. You’re falsely conflating “normality” (as perceived by you) with “justifiability”. But I could tell you a million things that are “normal” but still not “justifiable”.
Additionally the 1-2+ week existence of a simple rewards bug is much harder to defend than difficulties in launching an ambitious, vast, decade-long project.

Besides, who says we need to fix this exact bug? Just let it be dormant if it can’t be fixed timely and instead include a kind of override, like making all previous rewards/tickets junk and issue a second new set to (hopefully) all players.

Relax, a massive screwup is a recall that leads to deaths of innocent people, or a loss of consumer’s credit card information.

Once again an unneeded diversion from the central point and once again you already embed the counterpoint to your own argument within it. With your juxtaposing the loss of human life vs. loss of credit card information you already admit defeat towards your little “wit”. All is, of course, relative. This is a massive screwup in MMO space.

This is normal. You know why? Because they’re human; one simple oversight in a simple line of code, in which fat finger syndrome accidentally causes a typo can have huge consequences in game bug wise. But given, giving a video game company some slack requires some understanding of programming and game design and just how difficult it can be. Even the most skilled expert will make mistakes in their field of expertise. You’re naive if you think otherwise, and add the fact that Anet’s intentions, and day to day activities are not known to the public nor demonstrable, any claims suggesting intentional faults are disingenuous.

I simply do not reckon such a bug takes more than a week to fix, not when they exactly do not have such major and long-lasting screwups often in their “Living World” programme. By far the fastest-fixed bugs, however, receives the Gemstore. Do you still try to rationalize the oh-so-delicate nature of these Gemstore bugs that requires even the “most skilled experts” to fix more than a week?
That is, I wouldn’t understand it if they actually deployed a number of devs to it rather than one single intern.
Why is it (compared from a bug:update ratio) WvW that suffers the most? This is a rhetorical question because the clear answer is lack of dedication and a lack of test servers.

A fix would be 3 clicks away, too. Just make it impossible fully building more than x sieges in t for a single individual.
Still wouldn’t prevent innocent morons building the obvious grief-siege standing around tho.

We’re rolling into the second week of borked rewards for a large number of players, which is not the first time. Other ventures would see such a massive screwup as a much-needed wake-up call that maybe there is a systematic flaw underneath it.
Do you, ANet?

Evan Lesh.3295:

Roe.3679:

Start small, man. Basic template it still better than no template.

Why not discuss the best possible system? Scheduling and phasing feature releases is our deal :P Plus, there’s no way we can avoid remaking the entire feature later unless we are good about scoping all possibilities.

You PvP guys really are in no position to have that mindset.

The leak about new modes they are supposedly working on is from, what, last September?
Supposing they started last summer with that endeavour, it takes them as long to develop that new game mode as it takes Ubisoft to release a new AC or Activision a new CoD?

Ignore the troll and applaud the suggestion!

Nothing is off the table.

Rezz.8019:

You’re supposed to start your letter with “Dear Anet”, and end it with “Best Regards”

Anyway, I think Anet understands the balance and they know what has to be changed. They just have very limited manpower to do it.

*they dedicate very little manpower
/fixed.

Welcome to Neo-Anet. Or should I say Nexon-Anet?

It’s silly that you still do those Ready Ups that obviously don’t get much attention.
The reason being that you talk at us but not to us. The one demographic that seems to be your audience, core WvWers, has no reason to watch it.
There are many issues and community developments that WvW has that could be discussed — note, discussed. Just because your streamers discuss a game matter doesn’t mean the company should feel pressured to instantly deliver. In turn, just because you don’t want to commit to said “pressure” doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give your streamers that freedom so they can create an actually relevant discussion.

I echo OPs, which is why I too uninstalled last month, though I was funtionally inactive for half a year already (sans the forums, because I like arguing too much).
I’d like to repost a little HD remastered collection of two recent posts of mine, which combined makes actually a neat I-quit-manifesto itself.

GW1 would not be half the game if it weren’t for its 3 expansions.
GW2 improvements two years on literally are laughable compared to the one GW1 had at this point in time.

There hasn’t been a single full endgame dungeon since the Living Story doctrine began (one overall, Fractals, which was before they decided on quantity over quality)
You might say the handful instances we got delivered via LS count as “endgame dungeons”. First of all endgame, at least to me, implies not being able to finish something on the first 1-2 try, i.e. it has longevity (of which reasonable difficulty is a major part), which of course isn’t compatible with the 2 week framework of LS. But more importantly, to anyone who wasn’t around at exactly that time interval, they are irrelevant. They don’t exist anymore.
No new zones. Expansions gave us entire continents.
There has only been exactly one full, ingame earnable armor set. And it’s tied to an insane amount of grind. Each expansion of GW1 gave us dozens of new armor skins, all ingame acquirable.
The new weapon skins have mostly either been locked behind a (legally unregulated) gambling wall, or were festival skins like Toy/SAB weapons, which is a shame.

In almost two years, we got 5 new traits per class + one healing skill. I haven’t done the math, but in — wait for it — GW1 I reckon there were over 1000 new skills (separating it by class is meaningless because you could dual-class), 4 new professions and several new weapon types.

What exactly is happening here? Well it’s not hard to lift the curtain a bit. NCSoft is keeping this game on life-support mode and is essentially milking it’s established consumer base. The profits of this, however, don’t go into improving and advancing the game itself. Since this company is a multinational corporation with several (dozens?) of MMOs under it’s hood, they mainly flow into subsidizing other upcoming projects.
Since due to the anemic life-support approach there is probably very little comparative growth amonst the GW2 user base still in the established Western markets, the only way to grow it’s base is via the release in the biggest untapped market, China, where this strategy will be continued (whereas another way to grow it would be via an expansion, which traditionally is the biggest marketing coup a game can receive after it’s release).

The history of Anet and PvP reminds me of a person. He was a cute kid when he was little, smart, and paid attention in school, got good grades. But some things went wrong down the trajectory towards adulthood and now he has a beergut, neckbeard, smells faintly of alcohol and has questionable political beliefs. He dropped out of college, too.
He’s didn’t even become a “bad” person. It’s not something that he could “work on” — he just grew up into the person he is now, for better or worse, and he is happy with his menial job and his life consisting of frozen dinners and TV. And he doesn’t do drugs or is unemployed, you know? It’s not as bad as it could be.

What I’m trying to say, the honeymoon of great PvP that we had 2005-2009 was ultimately just a phase in ANet’s life. It’s futile to look back on this and tell the ANet of now: Look, you were so cute in this photograph! You had such good grades in junior high school!
because just like that person can’t become a cute kid again no matter how hard we wish, ANet won’t become a PvP heavyweight again. And if we can’t accept the beergut-sporting ANet of now, we better just move on.

This is not a I-quit thread, this is a thread were Yoh (and now I) offer an insight into our reasons why we leave/left. And despite what you say, they are reasons.
People who say we should create “constructive topics” about “issues” miss that firstly people like Yoh WERE the very people who were constantly creating those exact topics and posts, only for those to be ignored, and secondly, if you only ever offer critique on a specific detail you lose the perspective of the larger picture behind the reason why people are leaving. It’s not the fine details that makes people quit.

This would be a lot more useful if you define “skimpy” and seperate it by armor class.

Light: Fine as is.
Medium: We need more skimpy.
Heavy: We need generally more lighter looking choices which includes skimpy.

The history of Anet and PvP reminds me of a person. He was a cute kid when he was little, smart, and paid attention in school, got good grades. But some things went wrong down the trajectory towards adulthood and now he has a beergut, neckbeard, smells faintly of alcohol and has questionable political beliefs. He dropped out of college, too.
He’s didn’t even become a “bad” person. It’s not something that he could “work on” — he just grew up into the person he is now, for better or worse, and he is happy with his menial job and his life consisting of frozen dinners and TV. And he doesn’t do drugs or is unemployed, you know? It’s not as bad as it could be.

What I’m trying to say, the honeymoon of great PvP that we had 2005-2009 was ultimately just a phase in ANet’s life. It’s futile to look back on this and tell the ANet of now: Look, you were so cute in this photograph! You had such good grades in junior high school!
because just like that person can’t become a cute kid again no matter how hard we wish, ANet won’t become a PvP heavyweight again. And if we can’t accept the beergut-sporting ANet of now, we better just move on.

lordkrall.7241

And if people really want to spy they can quite easily bypass a restriction like that as well.

No crap. If it were that easy, I’d say even someone as … gifted as ANet would have implented that solution already. My proposal was merely a bandaid, or rather gauze.

The only thing it would do is punish normal people rather than those spying. /

I think you overstimate the number of people who
-live under one roof
-are active at the same times
-play both WvW
-play both WvW on different servers (didn’t specify it, but I actually meant accounts with different servers to them. Else it wouldn’t make a difference, of course)
-do not spy/grief for each other
No doubt there exist such people. No doubt there also exist people who unwittingly duped and got banned or unwittingly farmed at a infinite respawn spot and got banned.
I think one of those accounts not being able to play WvW is a bit less harsh than being banned over one of the examples I mentioned above.

And why would you even need to be on another server for that matter?
It is fully possible to have only one account on one server and still spread information from that server to other servers.

Yes it’s possible, but if the spy/griefer doesn’t have an account on the server he’s spying for, what’s the point for him? He never gets to play with his “friends” and servermates.
I’m sure you can come up with a million exceptions but that doesn’t defeat that this only applies to a tiny minority.

The root problem was the utterly moronic PvE/WvW-Server coupling, or at least the way it was handled.
With PvE servers now gone, there is literally no reason to still retain this husk of a system for WvW exclusively. Make it a faction thing (with more factions than traditional MMOs, i.e. 2 or 3, have, but less than current servers) and make server transfers a non-trivial matter in this new system, like atleast once a month, costing a fairly steep price that isn’t interchangeable with gold/gems.

lordkrall.7241:

I am still waiting for a suggestion about how you even CAN stop spying?

IP restrictions. You can’t participate in WvW if your IP was recently associated with another account (presumably your primary one).

Deli.1302:

It would be kinda stupid to make changes when the game just came out in China, don’t you think?

Because we saw so many improvements to WvW in the previous 21 months.

I just ate a delicious soup

Transparency would be admitting the sPvP team was massively scaled back into a skeleton crew shortly after release due to disappointingly low Conquest player numbers and resource allocation pressure for the Living Story.

Thedenofsin.7340:

A new game mode is a bad idea.

You misunderstand, as you showed in an earlier post, the whole “new game mode” idea. You equated it with a “fourth leg” to PvE/sPvP/WvW. But no one means that. We mean maps with different objectives than holding cap points, within sPvP.
I think you are pretty alone with the notion that a new game mode within sPvP is a bad idea, though you would have had the sole company of some stubborn ANet devs and directors until circa mid 2013 (which is 3 years after every fan already told them Conquest only would be a horrible, horrible idea)

There is no reason not to include it except to fuel our anger and frustration.

We just got the last update a quarter year ago, be more patient.

Draknar.5748:

Very true. Considering the vast majority of players has yet to succeed on either of those bosses would imply the content is hard. The hard part of course is getting everyone to listen and follow directions, but isn’t that the hard part of all end-game/raid content? Organizing and getting everyone to do what they are supposed to do. Sure there are gear checks in games with treadmills (WoW), but hypothetically if everyone automatically got BiS gear when they started a raid, it will all boil down to following directions, that’s it. There’s a specific way this fight needs to happen to win, so you have to do it a specific way. Every single raid boss in every game boils down to following directions, with gear checks creating artificial difficulty (where some games make monsters X levels higher, thus reducing your damage, GW2 just adds on HP for the same effect).

Teq/Wurm are just as difficult as any other game’s raid bosses, these just require significantly more coordination because of the sheer number of players required to succeed.

With more than 100 players participating on each such event, you basically dilute the individual contribution to homeopathic levels.
When people demand harder content, they don’t just demand harder content for the maybe 500-5000 PVE commanders in the game.

Konig Des Todes.2086:

I find it hilariously pathetic how so many people are complaining about the lack of ArenaNet responses.

Go to any other official game forum, especially MMOs, and you will be hard pressed to see developer posts as common as ArenaNet’s amount of posts. Honestly, I prefer for them to post less. So that they don’t have to deal with the constant bull that is this and similar threads, and can instead save their brain cells.

We are not asking for quantity in responses — we are asking for quality in responses. Once again the toxic conveyor-belt-philosophy behind LS bleeds into other parts related to GW2.

GW1 would not be half the game if it weren’t for its 3 expansions.
GW2 improvements two years on literally are laughable compared to the one GW1 had at this point in time.

There hasn’t been a single full endgame dungeon since the Living Story doctrine began (one overall, Fractals, which was before they decided on quantity over quality)
You might say the handful instances we got delivered via LS count as “endgame dungeons”. First of all endgame, at least to me, implies not being able to finish something on the first 1-2 try, i.e. it has longevity (of which reasonable difficulty is a major part), which of course isn’t compatible with the 2 week framework of LS. But more importantly, to anyone who wasn’t around at exactly that time interval, they are irrelevant. They don’t exist anymore.
No new zones. Expansions gave us entire continents.
There has only been exactly one full, ingame earnable armor set. And it’s tied to an insane amount of grind. Each expansion of GW1 gave us dozens of new armor skins, all ingame acquirable.
The new weapon skins have mostly either been locked behind a (legally unregulated) gambling wall, or were festival skins like Toy/SAB weapons, which is a shame.

In almost two years, we got 5 new traits per class + one healing skill. I haven’t done the math, but in — wait for it — GW1 I reckon there were over 1000 new skills (separating it by class is meaningless because you could dual-class), 4 new professions and several new weapon types.

What exactly is happening here? Well it’s not hard to lift the curtain a bit. NCSoft is keeping this game on life-support mode and is essentially milking it’s established consumer base. The profits of this, however, don’t go into improving and advancing the game itself. Since this company is a multinational corporation with several (dozens?) of MMOs under it’s hood, they mainly flow into subsidizing other upcoming projects.
Since due to the anemic life-support approach there is probably very little comparative growth amonst the GW2 user base still in the established Western markets, the only way to grow it’s base is via the release in the biggest untapped market, China, where this strategy will be continued (whereas another way to grow it would be via an expansion, which traditionally is the biggest marketing coup a game can receive after it’s release).

playard.6035:

Sigh, have fun in blobs wars then. It’s built-in laggy already, few know what hits what, who hits whom, everyone spams the keyboard like monkeys dropping AoE and DPS all around, and low FPS on even decent hardwares. EotM FTW.

There is seriously no room to improve in Guild Wars 2’s World vs. World. GG, I guess.

This is your reaction to valid criticism?
You are an unpleasant person then.
There have been hundreds of threads suggesting other ways to ameliorate the blob problem.

Branden Gee.2150:

Elrey.5472:

Call me crazy, but I do believe some info about the next update, even if it’s just “hey, we’ll give you a potato in 4 weeks” would calm down the people impatience… such is the gw2 community hunger.

While we’d love to give you a time and date of when we’re sending out the potato, remember that during the development process we may discover that a baked potato would be even better. So instead of getting the potato of your dreams you end up with something completely unexpected.

It often happens that a mashed potato with gravy is even better still, unfortunately gravy requires more dev time. So we end up shipping a mashed potato without gravy to meet our promise of ship time or we push back the time and date of when we are shipping again and again. You get your mashed potato with gravy but it is delivered much later than it was expected.

Worst of all that is when we realize that potatoes are way too mainstream and that yams are where it’s at now. And I think we all know how reactions seem to go when we ship yams instead of potatoes.

So in a lot of cases the best we can do is tell you that we are still in the kitchen cooking things up, we’re reading your feedback, and that we’re excited to get the meal out to you soon™.

I think the problem of your company isn’t that you occasionally serve the potato with or without gravy, or even yams, instead, but that you serve the wrong tables altogether.
Possibly you even confuse the restaurant you’re supposed to serve and take the potatoes, walk out of the building, walk across the street, into the other restaurant, and serve a unwitting customer there. Who was really waiting for sushi.

What update in the past 6-12 months was truly sPvP centric? All you changed was rewards rewards and rewards. And about a bi-annually balance update.
Rewards make no better PvP game mode.

Pavel.8531:

Lol… quoting my 9 months old post feels kinda sad… Or rather – we passed the “sad” stage, now we are in the “pathetic” one.

edit: And Kaos, better edit/delete your post, or you will get 2 infraction points for being disrespectful to the anet staff, I can’t send PMs for pretty much the same post as you.

Why, tho? I think he was being respectful to the unpaid intern who was the sole staff on WvW.

The score distribution is on all leagues (except the 6-team NA gold, obviously) literally exactly the same. I am not kittening making this up. Check the tables on mos.millennium.
If this isn’t a failure of matchmaking I don’t know what is.

BUT ACCORDING TO STATISTICS ITS WIDELY PLAYED! EVEN THE MOST POPULAR SPVP MAP.
Yeah. That is because it is the farm map.

Seriously, the reason they haven’t removed the map yet is most likely because of their “statistics” not showing it as hated. Actually mindful player input itself is disregarded.

Molten playerbase

What about the promise they’ll rework the dungeons “one by one”?
Have they abandoned that idea after Aether Path (not to mention they didn’t rework it, just add a path and remove another)?
Was that another lie?

+1 as long as we also turn PvE jumping puzzles into PvP zones.

Sorry, Anet, but you can’t artificially generate interest in this game’s sPvP.

Kraag Deadsoul.2789:

TL;DR: Figure out how to change the WvW profit model, and everything else will fall into place.

We had many large threads were we discussed exactly that. And they got noted, a dev even posted in them.
We suggested everything, from alternate siege weapon skins to server pride paraphernalia to finisher skins (realized but hardly WvW specific).
The ball’s in ANets court.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Because historical weapons dont have the visual impact players want.

Show me a GS in this game that looks even half as badas as those.

silvermember.8941:

Nick.6972:

Here’s an idea, perhaps we should start a Kickstarter.
Maybe they can’t afford more employees?

if we are to believe the forums that WvW is dead, then I am nearly certain you wont be able to generate 10 bucks yet alone 100k in salary and benefits for 1 yr.

I think there are plenty of WvWers who’d donate, the problem is just that we don’t trust ANet with our money any longer.

Wasn’t it in the talks, like, a year ago, that they wanted to make Ascended obtainable via WvW?

It really breaks my heart to see threads like this pop up every day but, them never receiving dev attention.
It’s futile brother.