Guild Wars 2

They probably envisioned it as a system where AP wouldn’t be too difficult to get a lot of over time (which would fit with the massive chests being virtually the same).

Instead, the acquiring of AP feels like an economics lesson in scarcity and only gets harder and harder over time, instead of staying at relatively the same level of difficulty. As some have pointed out in the past, achievement points only get more stingy instead of giving big chunks.

Making it too easy to acquire them leads to devaluing of the skins and devaluing of the near-religious level of effort that some have put into having the highest AP possible. Making it too hard to acquire them for puny gains invalidates the effort of the near-religious in the opposite direction, by giving them nothing to do, or giving them a task list that would discourage even the most hardcore zealot.

At some point, Anet has to ask themselves whether AP content is something they want newer players to be encouraged to participate in. As it is now (to give you a personal example) I’ve been playing for probably about 1 year of the game’s life, in total, taking breaks into account. In that time, I’ve managed to acquire ~5300 achievement points.

I have not gone after the points hardcore, but I haven’t actively ignored them either – kind of a mixed bag of effort. For example, I’ve got most of The Emperor done (which required going out of my way on funds significantly) and I’ve probably done about a third of the classic jumping puzzles. I don’t want to go through my whole list and break it down, but the gist is that I’ve gone out of my way in some respects and in others, I’ve not.

Does ~5300 for roughly 1 year’s worth of participation in the game’s life seem reasonable to you guys? (That’s not a rhetorical question – I’m interested in what you think about it.)

Aenaos.8160:

It wasn’t me.
/really it wasn’t me 15chars.

Now I have that song by Shaggy stuck in my head.

I was tabbed out and then I pulled the game up and it just struck me how beautiful this game is. Especially the jungle. It’s just breathtaking sometimes.

I know I criticize a lot about this game, but the atmosphere is one thing I wouldn’t change. <3

Ayrilana.1396:

Labjax.2465:

Ayrilana.1396:

It has nothing to do whether it can or cannot be done. It’s that it likely has not been done at this point and there’s little point is trying to search all over for one that uses that specific example when the concepts are the same regardless.

Customers are more likely to report on a negative experience than otherwise else.

This is fast reaching critical mass of ridiculousness. Context affects the application of the concepts………………….

You are just repeatedly ignoring my point, failing to refute it, and insisting that I’m wrong. This is reminiscent of that Monty Python sketch…

No. That’s what you’re doing.

Context matters little with the concept I was attempting at trying to explain to you. Customers are more likely to report about a negative experience than anything contrary to that.

This thread isn’t about customers…!

Ayrilana.1396:

It has nothing to do whether it can or cannot be done. It’s that it likely has not been done at this point and there’s little point is trying to search all over for one that uses that specific example when the concepts are the same regardless.

Customers are more likely to report on a negative experience than otherwise else.

This is fast reaching critical mass of ridiculousness. Context affects the application of the concepts………………….

You are just repeatedly ignoring my point, failing to refute it, and insisting that I’m wrong. This is reminiscent of that Monty Python sketch…

The mastery point system is problematic for the same reason that the hero point system is. Linking up generalized points to acquisition that is too specific and too high in quantity at the same time.

This wouldn’t necessarily be an issue if MPs and HPs were spent on bonus content (example of bonus content being something like the acquisition of extra Hearts in Ocarina of Time), but both are spent on primary content instead (example: getting the Hookshot in Ocarina of Time).

I think the WvW PoH system was a step in the right direction for HPs and MPs in general. I would like to see both HPs and MPs given more of that kind of design; allow people to get points through more generalized acquisition and when they stop needing them, they can spend excess currency on things that pertain to the content (e.g. what already exists with PoH, where the tokens can be spent on WvW consumables).

Ayrilana.1396:

Focus on the concepts and not the examples please. You’re not going to find a source that specifically addresses reviews on company review websites.

/facepalm

Yes, because addressing live reviews on companies in a scientific way would be very difficult to do, for reasons that I’ve already stated (mainly, the perception about confidentiality and consequences). Which is why your stuff about negativity being more memorable than positivity turns out to be meaningless, as it could very easily be balanced out (or even trumped) by reluctance to post a negative review that could be linked back to employee name.

How many times do I have to restate the same point.

Ayrilana.1396:

Fine, since you seem to still have issues. Read it as needs not met vs otherwise. I don’t see the need to argue over something that has absolutely nothing to do with what I was talking about.

What sources? I have posted sources in a recent post if you would scroll up. The vonvept of people most likely to review or comment about a negative experience is not solely about employee reviews. You need to understand that there are concepts that can be applied to a vast range of subjects.

It does have to do with what you’re talking about though. It seems the only reason you see it as irrelevant is because you believe so firmly that negatives are remembered far more than anything else.

Ok, I see you posted some in response to somebody else. Let’s see, source one:

The researchers found that there was “relatively more positive manipulation than negative manipulation, even though the order of magnitude of the two is similar.” The big takeaway is that the system is being manipulated with fake positive and fake negative reviews—and that’s all negative for consumers who are using them to try and make smart choices.

Ok, so this is just about fake reviews and even says that positive manipulation happens more than negative manipulation.

Second source: Talks entirely about customers. Yes, it references a bias to remember negative more than positive, but it doesn’t talk about employees and the resistance they would face compared to a customer. For instance (as I have stated) an employee might be reluctant to say something negative, for fear of it coming back to them. A customer generally has no such reason to fear repercussions.

Third source:

Take the work of Teresa M. Amabile, a professor of business administration and director of research at the Harvard Business School. She asked 238 professionals working on 26 different creative projects from different companies and industries to fill out confidential daily diaries over a number of months. The participants were asked to answer questions based on a numeric scale and briefly describe one thing that stood out that day.

“We found that of all the events that could make for a great day at work, the most important was making progress on meaningful work — even a small step forward,” said Professor Amabile, a co-author of “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement and Creativity at Work” (Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). “A setback, on the other hand, meant the employee felt blocked in some way from making such progress. Setbacks stood out on the worst days at work.”

After analyzing some 12,000 diary entries, Professor Amabile said she found that the negative effect of a setback at work on happiness was more than twice as strong as the positive effect of an event that signaled progress. And the power of a setback to increase frustration is over three times as strong as the power of progress to decrease frustration.

As Professor Baumeister noted in his study, “Many good events can overcome the psychological effects of a bad one.” In fact, the authors quote a ratio of five goods for every one bad.

This looks to be the closest to what we’re talking about, in relevance. Unfortunately, it still doesn’t mean much. It says nothing about how likely employees are to report bad events (beyond a confidential journal), if they perceive there may be consequences.

It indicates that conceptually, there is some imbalance, but that if enough positive happens to a particular person, it can outweigh the bad. So I’ll give you that you’re right about the general concept, but there is no reason to believe that you are right about how it applies to the current situation.

You need to understand that you can’t just apply concepts to a wide range of subjects wily nilly, without taking into account the quirks of that particular environment.

Ayrilana.1396:

No it didn’t matter. I was talking specifically about negative reviews. If was not talking about those where people had their needs met or exceeded. Please don’t add things to my argument that were not even there. Thanks.

Saying it’s well documents does not mean that I don’t have an argument. I can provide several links and such but people will just be “oh well that’s not credible” and so on. You’re taught in marketing classes about this as well.

Yeah, ok…

It’s not that they are afraid to. People that are disappointed with anything for whatever reason are more likely to go on and review something to vent than someone whose expectations were met or exceeded.

You referenced expectations being met or exceeded as a direct comparison to that of disappointment. I have added nothing.

Twice now you’ve indicated you have sources to back up your claim, but rather than simply post them in the first place (which would save you a lot of trouble in defending yourself) you dodge doing so by insisting that people would say “oh well that’s not credible.” Which means your “credible” sources are either incredibly shaky and non-academic or you don’t actually have any to reference. I see no other reason why you’d go to so much trouble to make a show of having your point backed up, but resist the golden opportunity to end the argument with iron-clad source material.

Furthermore, I’m not sure what marketing classes have to do with employee reviews. That sounds like something that would back up an argument for consumer reviews, not employees.

Ayrilana.1396:

Not really. It’s well documented that those who have negative impressions/experiences are the ones most likely to be vocal about it. Lumping those that had their needs met with those with needs exceeded didn’t matter as I was not arguing specifically about the differences between them.

“It’s well documented” = “I don’t have an argument at this point, but I’d rather not admit that I’ve been driven into that particular corner.”

The lumping did matter and I explained why in my post. It doesn’t matter whether you were arguing about the differences between met and exceeded. The differences are relevant to the argument.

You don’t get to personally decide what is and isn’t relevant to an argument. That’s not how reasoning works.

Just watched some gameplay footage of Black Desert beta. The UI absolutely kills the appeal for me. Good looking game if you turn the UI off, it seems. Otherwise, yuck.

I’m very particular about UI design and visual appeal in general, and I can’t stand games that feel like one team designed the atmosphere (environment, characters, etc.) and then some random other team made a bland, generic UI and gave zero kittens about how it meshes with the atmosphere of the game.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Glassdoor is like the forums: the unhappiest people post passionately and thoughtfully; the happy people often don’t even know about it.

Not saying that the critiques are necessarily wrong or baseless — just that glassdoor isn’t offering any insight to what “really” goes on at ANet.

I disagree:

Unlike being a consumer of a game, an employee has reasons to withhold negative feedback. Namely, avoiding the risk of connection between review and name, and (especially if they have quit or been fired) having reason to simply move on with their life and find something else so that they can pay their bills.

Also unlike being a consumer of a game, opinions about games are almost entirely subjective. Most complaints are a matter of taste, which is easily seen in the passionate disagreement between people about the quality of a single feature or design choice.

Employment is largely standardized, with common complaints from lower echelon employees; poor management, being asked to do extra work for no or poor compensation, lack of upward mobility, being micro-managed, etc.

Although one’s opinion of management can, for example, be somewhat opinion-based, compensation is pretty much fact-based, as are some other aspects of employment.

The thing is, some people are confusing commonality and importance. The complaints being talked about are common in jobs because the standards of a strong workplace/workforce are mostly the same. The fact that many jobs induce such complaints is not ok (but that’s a discussion for another time). The point is that the product is invariably going to be impacted by the quality of the workforce.

However, due to video games being such a subject experience, it’s difficult to argue one way or another whether any particular company is being run poorly overall. You might have 50 people making compelling arguments for why the game is going downhill and 50 making compelling arguments for why it’s not. And neither is necessarily wrong or right.

So the reason I said I disagree is because I think reviews have the possibility of offering insight into the functioning of a company. The thing is, it’s not all that relevant to us as players beyond speculation. Those of us who already have issues with the game will tend to use it to confirm what we already (think) we know. Those of us who love the game will tend to write it off as an angry minority of disgruntled employees.

And of course no game company is jumping at the opportunity to give us real statistics about the health of their game to confirm our suspicions one way or another. They will do their best to give out statistics only if they can spin them to make the game look like a success. No company wants to give off the impression of sinking because it will induce more abandoning of ship from players.

Sometimes I accidentally start to be that guy because I’m running past mobs and then I realize that I’m going to be that guy, guilt overtakes me, and I stop to kill the mobs that are on the guy, even if it kills me in the process (which it doesn’t, cause I’m too pro, lololol).

I wish there was a way to like glance at somebody’s keyboard and see if they’re AFK, cause what I hate is when I rez somebody who turns out to be AFK and there’s that moment where “I’m going to help somebody!” turns into “I just set somebody up to get killed again while they’re AFK….”

But it’s not always the case, so I usually rez people anyway. #TeamRez

Ayrilana.1396:

It’s not that they are afraid to. People that are disappointed with anything for whatever reason are more likely to go on and review something to vent than someone whose expectations were met or exceeded.

Partly true, but not really. It’s misleading to lump “expectations met” and “expectations exceeded” together like that.

People who are polarized to either extreme – frustration or excitement – are more likely to go talk about it. People in the middle, whether they fall more toward slightly disappointed or fall more toward slightly impressed, are less likely to say anything due to the experience being forgettable and therefore not lasting in their mind long enough to motivate them to say something.

This is generally speaking, mind you.

In some specific contexts, such as the experiencing of video game content, what you’ve said can easily be true because the people who are satisfied, or “very satisfied” may be too busy playing the game to talk about how amazing they think it is.

In the context of employment, that same reasoning is missing. You would have to control for employees who posted a review shortly after quitting or being fired, versus employees who didn’t, to get any realistic idea of how that impacts their choice to review compared to the extreme they fall on. Some employees, for example, might quit to go in a different direction and leave a positive review regardless, either because they liked the job or because they want to look good if the review somehow comes back to their name.

Which can muddy the waters in yet another way. There are so many ways for it to be muddied, which is why I said the thing about the details of the reviews being more important than the existence of negative ones. Details are a lot harder to forge, without looking like a bad fiction story.

PopeUrban.2578:

“Peer review” sites are inherantly biased toward negative reviews because those with nothing bad to say don’t want to burn bridges, risk their career, or alienate future employers.

Wait, what? Don’t you have this backwards? Why would someone who has only good things to say be afraid to say them?

It’s not the presence of negative reviews that can mean something. It’s the details in those reviews that can potentially mean something.

Expect this to get deleted, since it’s talking about an Anet employee by name in a not-positive fashion. (I don’t mean that in a tin foil hat way… it’s just how things go.)

As for the credibility of the source… use your own mind and decide for yourself. That’s the best advice I can give.

I hate to say it because I love it when games feel like an experience where developers listen, but…

Sometimes I wonder if Anet listens to their players too much. Now before you get out the pitchforks and rant at me all about how Anet hardly listens at all, keep in mind that I’m not talking about listening, as in “giving players exactly what they asked for,” I’m talking about listening as in “giving players a general concept they asked for, made with limited resources and a distinctly human team.”

There is a lot of flack about raids being in the game at all, but there was a CDI for them. There is flack about masteries, but there was a CDI for horizontal progression. People asked for variations on these things in passionate and lengthy detail.

And Anet more or less said, “Ok, it’ll take a while, but we’ll consider it.” And then they did it.

Problem is, every new feature has to fit into the rest of the game. If you shoehorn it in, it looks horribly out of place. So what happens? Anet team molds the concept to fit into what already exists in GW2. In the process, the “in a vacuum” concept that players thought they wanted ends up looking quite different.

On top of that, you end up with more and more segmented development resources for all the different features and systems. And unless every new feature/system produces profit to match its maintenance and growth (which is unlikely) that means the dev team gets thinner and thinner in scope and it becomes ever harder to continue building a game that looks unified in its goals and design.

The result, as I am seeing it, is a veritable theme park / talent show kind of experience, where the game is both very much the same in every feature and very much like crossing a line and walking into a different game; the result of a concerted effort to maintain a unified vision, despite making a game with teams that are off in Nebraska, Alaska, and Zimbabwe (figuratively speaking).

In other words, despite their (seeming) intentions, the game looks more and more like a hodgepodge over time. This is not necessarily all good or all bad, but it does create this weird atmosphere where somebody can absolutely be loving the game one minute, only to cross an invisible line and be hating it the next. Reason being that the line between varying visions is so paper-thin and hard to see.

A good example of this in my eyes is the design regarding account-bound and soul-bound features and items. To me, the game tends to be inconsistent on this position; some aspects are all about account-bound freedom and some seem to go into soul-bound territory, justified on reasons that would otherwise be dismantled in favor of account-bound in another part of the game. This actually makes a lot of sense in the context of numerous teams working together on the same game, with limited time and effectiveness in communicating with each other.

One team goes on their interpretation or gets word from team leader / manager X. Then the other team gets their version of the story. And next thing you know two teams are working on two fundamentally different design philosophies; philosophies that may well make perfect, reasoned sense within the context of what their team is designing, but looks somewhat odd when added to the big picture.

I’m sure Colin and others in similar positions do what they can to keep the vision unified, but if there’s a never-ending list of features and teams to keep track of, they could be (and probably are) looking at a nightmarish organizational task.

Nike.2631:

How about YOU ‘keep up’ and stop acting like this is some unique incident in the history of MMO gaming. A coder goofs, players get unintended advantage, they fix it, players kvetch, they DO NOT CHANGE IT BACK TO SCREWED UP. The course of events here — including players that were benefiting from the mistake stamping their feet — is as predictable as the sunrise and the phases of the moon.

But really, lets take this up again in a month and see where we stand. My money is on this topic never once drawing so much as a red name post, much less them reverting it in any way.

How about you go outside and take a deep breath because you’re clearly more worked up about this than I am and I’m one of the people complaining about the change. Frankly, it isn’t even relevant to me anymore unless I decide to get more character slots and make more alts, and even then I could just do HPs in HoT, which I did on most of my characters.

But sue me for arguing the principle of the thing and caring about the concerns of other players. I haven’t acted like it’s unique at all. You’re the one who came into the thread for the sole purpose of going off on people for asking for the feature design to be different:

Why? WHY? Because you KNOW that proof of heroics were never meant to be transferable the same way you can’t shuffle hero points from character to character. They missed a step and a minor exploit grew out of it and when people complained they were inconvenienced while exploiting a loophole they brought attention to it and lo and behold Anet FIXED IT.

But you knew that. You just wanted to add a dramatic sigh to your wishing you could go back to exploiting it.

You want an elite spec? Play. The. Character.

So who is being dramatic again? I don’t think anybody gives two hoots what your money is on. Providing feedback isn’t about making bets on what will be listened to.

NecroN.8306:

So Colin’s response is to belittle and berate their customers into believing that their visual nerfs that happen to coincide with their big eSports push have nothing to do with each other. Hmmm. Their HoT expansion showed all this great visual candy to help push sales then they take it away and we are supposed to believe what? So I guess what we have here is false advertisement. Anet knew they were going to remove these visuals after millions of customers purchased their expansion pack. Oh Anet lawyer up.

I don’t think there’s anything technically wrong with the way Colin worded his post – in fact, it’s pretty positive on the whole. There’s a bit of a fatherly wristslap tone in there, but the issue with that is largely one of audience, I think. He addresses it to the community as a whole (regardless of whether that is his intention) but most people in the community are already pretty reasonable in how they go about communicating.

There is a minority who goes berserk and a slightly larger minority who goes kind of berserk and a slightly larger minority who gets kind of condescending when things go wrong.

The majority would seem to be people who are mostly tempered, reasonable, and offer an absolute boatload of suggestions and constructive criticism. The main issue with his tone is that he appears to be addressing the minority tone of feedback.

One of the things I’ve noticed in my stint in leadership positions, in part from the advice of somebody more experienced, is that if you largely ignore a certain kind of attitude and instead focus on the other attitude that you’re happy about, it can be quite helpful (e.g. the idea of rewarding good behavior and not condemning or rewarding bad behavior). I’m probably oversimplifying the psychology of it a bit, but that’s the general gist.

The result can be (though of course there is no guarantee, since people differ) that those who tend to approach with a poor attitude eventually lose interest in using a bad attitude to approach because it literally gets them nothing. Meanwhile, they’re subtly realizing that the use of a good attitude does get results, so they start leaning more in that direction.

Calling out bad attitudes (as opposed to ignoring them and focusing on the good) isn’t a black and white thing that never works. I’ve seen it work in my life a few times. But I think it’s usually something that works for individuals in limited context, not groups. The issue with calling out the attitude of a group, or even the performance of a group, is that you’re lumping everyone together into the same category, when the variations are as large as the group size.

I don’t expect a game developer to be a communication expert though. I just thought I’d share some stuff I’ve learned about communication. And heck, maybe they can learn something from it. If any of y’all are super interested (Anet or community members) I recommend the book Difficult Conversations.

mexay.3902:

Stay positive, stay constructive and stay reasonable. We get what we want by providing constructive feedback, not mindless abuse and tantrums.

Well… not quite. Yes, it’s good to try to keep things cool and constructive.

But doing so is no guarantee of getting any particular thing any one or group of us wants, any more than throwing a tantrum is.

Be constructive and reasonable out of respect, certainly. But people shouldn’t do it expecting results, or they will find themselves in tantrum mode sooner or later.

LovelyVirus.9432:

Fist thing they must listen is : Stop trying to make this game become an E-Sport like MOBA . This is MMORPG . Focus on WvW , contents , storyline , event , …. Those are strengths of their game .

From what Colin said on reddit (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3v24hg/the_reduced_visual_noise_changes_have_to_stop_gw2/cxk2o2z)

The visibility stuff has little to do with E-Sports and “the PvP pro league is pretty much entirely a marketing team thing and has almost no impact on the dev team.”

So you can put the pitchfork away on that.

Baamoink.4281:

Probably because there’s far more toxicity on the official forums

And yet, to my knowledge, most of the time when there is a dev post on the forums, it is received very warmly. Sure, there’s the random kittenhead or two who decides to try to take a potshot, but that’s what moderators are for.

I’d be interested to know why they think reddit is better for communication, but I’d probably have to go read reddit to see the response on why.

Somehow I doubt toxicity is it. There is plenty of negativity and criticism on reddit. The only real difference is the interface and, perhaps the number of people who use it? I suppose it could be a matter of this forum being archaic software and not even having a good search function, but then, dev posts are highlighted in the tracker, so I dunno!

ZudetGambeous.9573:

kuritsutian.2987:

Grind is optional

I never understood this response yet I hear it all the time.

Yes of course the grind is optional. This is a video game, the whole thing is optional. How is this relevant to the discussion?

The grind is optional in ALL MMO’s. You never have to grind if you don’t want to. But compared to the optional grind in other MMO’s GW2 has much more grind for a similar level of achievement.

At least based on my personal experience with SWG, SWTOR, WoW, Rift, LOTRO, WildStar and GW2.

Thank god somebody gets this.

When your primary goal-based content is grindy, either it’s not optional (much like gearing up in treadmill games) or all of it is optional (including treadmill gearing in other games).

Here’s an example of how jacked the logic is that people use: In Rift (assuming the mechanics are still the same) there’s something called Instant Adventures, that are sort of like a variety show of open world repeatable quests. I could therefore look at Rift and say, “The gear grind is completely optional. You can play Adventures all day without having to grind anything.” Which would technically be true, but it misses the point; if you’re after the primary content in Rift (raids and treadmill gearing) then the grind is not optional.

Much like how in GW2, you can do open world events, or EotM, or heck, jumping puzzles, but if you’re after the primary goal-based content in GW2 (skins and end-game gear) then the grind is not optional.

Whether somebody considers these things optional depends on how much they care about the primary content in the game. How people walk around thinking that GW2’s primary content is not primary content simply because they don’t care that much about it is beyond me. It’s superimposing opinion into fact, is what it is.

I mean it isn’t that hard to figure out what 90% of the game goals are (it’s skins – and since the mini acc bound, minis to a lesser extent). WvW tournament tokens have skins amongst their rewards, high-end sPvP has skins amongst its rewards (Glorious Armor), raiding is (from what we’ve heard so far) going to lead to legendary armor, Tequatl, Jungle Wurm, Carapace Armor, Bladed Armor, Chak, Leyline… ascended and legendary gear are like the one clear instance where power effectiveness and desirable skins overlap. But outside of raids, which are relatively recent, the power aspect of legendary and ascended gear is barely noticeable or useful.

Hell, people call it Fashion Wars 2 for a reason. Sure, I’ll grant the deniers that GW2 has various content that is easy to access without heavy grinds and it’s got enough variety that if you ignore end-game goals then you can keep yourself busy pretty well. But if you’re after end-game goals, the grind really is just as bad or worse as many other games in the market. Some call it optional, but for many of us, no end-game goal means no reason to log in. So the grind is not optional for those of us who feel that way… it’s that or leave.

Meanwhile, Anet acts like its game has no treadmills, while putting out “optional” content that will take the average player (especially newer players, with no end in sight) more time to complete than games have existed for.

Nike.2631:

Labjax.2465:

It doesn’t matter what they were intended to be.

You think? Because the fact they changed it says otherwise.

Oh wow, they changed it? Who knew. It’s not like that’s what this thread is about or anything.

Keep up, I’m talking about peoples’ reactions, which obviously don’t care what the original intention was. They care about how they would like it to function. This isn’t rocket science. Please don’t be obtuse.

I don’t mean this as an insult, OP, but…

Your post kinda reads like a break-up ultimatum to a girlfriend (or boyfriend) who you’re still in love with, but isn’t right for you. Since Anet is not one person and can’t be reasoned with in that way, I recommend you leave and don’t look back. It’ll hurt some, but it’s no good sticking around with somebody who you feel doesn’t care about you.

For my own part, I’m kind of at a point where I basically dink around in game if I feel like it and stay far away from the stuff that I don’t like. That’s kind of what I do with games when I’m on the verge of drifting away though. You sound like you might be better off quitting outright.

Paradox.1380:

It was stated before that not all changes make it in the notes because the departments don’t always report all the changes that made it into the build. It’s as simple as that.

Every single game I play (some by bigger companies than ANet) have undocumented changes in their patch notes.

Why should anyone be ok with this though? It’s sloppy.

It’s one thing to miss one or two changes. It’s another to miss a veritable laundry list of them. Part of the pull of MMO communities is the virtual world that we take part in. If we need to go read a complaint thread on the forums and then follow a link to reddit to see half the updates for a patch (a list that only exists because of sheer community dedication), that hurts our ability to stay on top of what the virtual world is.

Furthermore, missing patch notes can hurt the pull of the game in general, to log in. I’m sometimes excited to log in after reading patch notes because of some change that looks interesting. For example, had the Tarir Key thing been in the notes, I might have logged in today with excitement to look at the difference for myself. Instead, I read the notes and saw mostly bug fixes.

That hurts them more than it hurts me.

Nike.2631:

Starfall.6425:

With things like this I just have to shake my head and ask “Why?”

Why? WHY? Because you KNOW that proof of heroics were never meant to be transferable the same way you can’t shuffle hero points from character to character. They missed a step and a minor exploit grew out of it and when people complained they were inconvenienced while exploiting a loophole they brought attention to it and lo and behold Anet FIXED IT.

But you knew that. You just wanted to add a dramatic sigh to your wishing you could go back to exploiting it.

You want an elite spec? Play. The. Character.

It doesn’t matter what they were intended to be. A lot of people never agreed with that intention in the first place. Of course they’re going to complain and ask why.

TexZero.7910:

Caro.2730:

I think they do not get that most of the player base don’t care about e-sports and just want to have fun with friends. And what is there to watch? All the beautiful animations are dying. There’s nothing to watch.

Take the tinfoil hat off for just 2 seconds…..

It’s not about e-Sports, it’s about creating a more dynamic and easier to read combat. This applies to Raids and future content where the mobs do more than just face tank you.

Carry on.

Whatever the reason, they should be looking into ways to shut out the spell effects of OTHER players on the client end, rather than destroying everybody’s across the board. As it is, people have demonstrated that the changes made virtually no difference for large-scale content.

The problem seems to be one of player quantity, not animation size. URGH.

I mean, seriously, either do it on the client end or just remove the animations entirely, Anet. You aren’t going to fix this problem by destroying a few skills. It’s all or nothing. Make your choice and commit, but don’t give us this halfway nonsense that doesn’t even accomplish what it set out to do. You only put yourself in an indefensible position.

Turamarth.3248:

Here is the dev post for this change.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

The chest, containing Proofs, being account bound is a bug. Earning specializations (skills and traits) is intended to be character progression. Ex: If you want to fully train up your warrior, you actually need to play your warrior for some amount of time. I say some amount of time since Tomes of Knowledge have allowed players to bypass a lot of existing character progression.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Notarized-Scroll-Frustration/first#post5679528

Ya know… sometimes… it’s more important to take into account how players are going to use a feature than it is to stick to your guns on a self-imposed design rule.

I think there are a lot of people who are frustrated with the new specializations being a character bound slog to begin with. This doesn’t help, with that.

I’m just glad I got mine done, so I don’t have to worry about crap like this. And btw Anet, I used the soulbound bug a couple times to get character progression on a character who hadn’t earned the heroics. Somehow, I still understand how to play both characters. Must be something to do with the part where I leveled them to 80 and played them a bunch in end-game – yes, even the ones I used a sizable number of Tomes on.

I’m not sure where in your theoretical model a player is going to level up a character completely with Tomes, get their elite spec without playing the character, and then have that somehow hurt your game. The option to do all of the character progression still exists, even in this hypothetical. What harm does it do for people to be able to avoid it until end-game?

Most who do this sort of thing are going to be people leveling up alts for the nth time. People who are already familiar with the classes and the game in the first place. A new player is not going to materialize 80 Tomes and an alt to get Proofs, to avoid playing their new character.

This is one of those things that makes sense on paper, but looks very odd when put into practice.

Misguided.5139:

I think they do, but I also believe they don’t always think in terms of player psychology. For instance, half the problem on the forums right now is that before the expansion came out we had much more open and direct lines of communication with the development team. This set the expectation among players (rightly or not is irrelevant, we are talking human nature here) that such dialog would continue. A number of people have expressed the opinion (which I don’t share, just to be clear) that the developers “took their money and ran” and I think this is precisely the result of what has been a dramatic decline in communication. There may be excellent reasons for this, but again they do not matter in the eyes of the players expressing these opinions.

Another example was the elite specialization debacle, which they have acknowledged they mishandled. If you read between the lines, you could see what was about to happen unfolding. Players talked for weeks about how they couldn’t wait to dive into the expansion with their elite specializations. Required numbers of points were datamined and no one took the opportunity in any of the (which I recall being plentiful) threads on the subject to say, “hey guys, I can’t give you the exact numbers, but it is going to be a significant investment of time and will require playing part of the expansion”. The biggest hint of the impending disaster came (I think) just a couple ofdays before the release of the expansion with a cryptic comment about how they couldn’t wait until we could explore the new areas and (roughly) “start unlocking” the elite specs.

There are plenty of other possible examples. Mind you, there is nothing unique about this. I’ve seen it in every mmo I have played, the Aion summer event from a few years back that resulted in all the cities being filled with characters jumping in place or running against walls being my favorite.

I think so many problems (e.g. Broken reward structures) could be avoided if more developers spent a bit more time thinking like players.

Yeah… I think the devs themselves try to, many of them, but it’s near impossible to get there fully because they are working full time as devs.

Vayne.8563:

Nah they’re still doing lots of things differently. I don’t remember a whole lot of expansions that came out without a new tier of gear and without raising the level cap. I mean if you wanted the absolute best gear in most games you had to run dungeons and raids.

This game continues to be different. It’s just not different in the way people specifically want it to be.

Sort of. I wasn’t thinking just of the “doing things differently” part as a generalized statement, but I can see why you’d think that from the way I worded my post. Even so, look at raids and the climate they have created… it’s not all that different from your standard MMO. Ascended being how it is and stats being how they are, it’s basically a gear grind if you didn’t have tons of ascended sets prior to HoT.

Misguided.5139:

I think the majority of posters just want to feel like they matter as customers and that the things that are important to them are also important to the Dev team, even if the players don’t always get exactly what they want.

Oh, I agree. And I’m not sure that Anet management (or whoever it is who makes the calls about communication) understands this, or cares if they do understand it.

Swift.1930:

Most likely it’s a holiday thing; she is listed as the Forum Communications Team Lead, which pretty much means her main responsibility is responding to/consolidating feedback from (or having a team do that for her) hooligans like us who type stuff all the time. Gotta say that she probably earned the break the minute she stepped into the forums, haha. Okay, maybe not all of us are that bad. =P

Probably. She was support team, I believe, prior to getting the forum communications title though, so it’s hard to say for sure what all responsibilities they put on her. Forum communications may be a sometimes role and her role may be shifting over time as well.

Office politics, changing priorities, and all that.

Yeah, there is a lot of negativity to take in. Can’t say I’d jump at the job. Would certainly be a unique kind of challenge though. Part of me would want to try that sort of job, just to see what kind of mood and presentation I could sow among forummers from that kind of position.

To be fair, some of them may be on holiday/vacation. Big content releases are often stressful and overwork employees, and we’re hitting the Thanksgiving/Christmas cycle.

On top of that, what are they going to say? Most of the complaints I’ve read since HoT’s release (my own included) are about overarching system design and the general direction of the game as a whole. They could say “here’s what we intended” or “sorry it isn’t going the way you thought it would,” but if they have a vision and what they produced is in line with that vision, I don’t see them having much to say about it.

I don’t like some of the things Anet does, as a company (which is a gigantic understatement) but we need to remember that dev does not = god on a AAA game. A dev could be anyone from a guy who writes code off a task list, to a guy who is leading a team of developers.

And historically, Anet’s devs have been kept in silence for the most part, due to Anet’s tight-lip policy about development. I can’t imagine trying to say anything under that kind of watchful eye, especially if you’re a peon.

What we need is more blunt communication from somebody like Colin, of the “this is how it is” and “we have no plans for X at this time” variety. But I don’t know if Colin has that kind of bluntness in his genes, much less would get it approved by the people above him. For a time, we had Gaile stepping in and saying stuff, but the communication from her seems more sparse of late. Not sure if due to holidays or they clamped down even more on communication again.

Or heck, maybe they’re pulling her into other projects, so she doesn’t have as much time for it. Companies are like that sometimes.

morrolan.9608:

I’m sure its something like that but my problem with it is that they haven’t utilised the gem store nearly as much as they could have for cosmetic items. Not to mention the armor they do release is kind of limited in style.

Well… I think it was a major mistake when they committed to the “outfits” way of doing things at the store, but it could be yielding more profit than skin sets for all I know.

I do agree with you that some aspects of the store feel very underutilized in general. I think they should put a bit more focus on items like the campfire group bonus thingy and the box o’ fun. Extra Credits series did a pretty good talk on why items like that work well.

I wouldn’t say GW2 has become hardcore overall. It’s mostly that the majority of past open world content was yawnmashbuttonsfacerollzergwanderlust.

HoT zones are the first time you need a group to do map completion (or you can be super skilled, but let’s face it, most la-dee-da explorer types are not super skilled at twitch mechanics or class strategy). And by super skilled, I don’t mean “good.” I mean really really good. You don’t solo champs on a timer, for example, with basic video game prowess. That’s the stuff of knowing your class inside and out, and getting timing down to a tee.

Previously, most of the “hardcore” content was either instanced or it was “off to the side” in this area that you don’t really need or want to think about unless you’re really invested. Teq, Jungle Wurm, and Dungeons… all either instanced or off the beaten path.

In HoT zones, there is no such thing as la-dee-da exploring. Mobs slam you with CC, burst you down like you’re in a PvP match, and generally aren’t happy about you having the gall to exist in the same universe as them.

Some will read this and think, “It’s not that hard. In fact, it’s easy for me.” And that may be true… for some of you. But for the la-dee-da folks that made up most of the pre-HoT open world crowd, it is a challenge and an ice-cold one at that. We’re talking faceroll world boss train and “hey, there’s a flower.. allow me to drag five wasps behind me while I go get it” caliber of average skill level.

Think of it like a spectrum, from 1 to 5, where 1 is super dee duper la dee da and 5 is I got a good deal on Newegg for my corsair mechanical keyboard, but I prefer red over brown, razornagamousekeybindsthirtythreepercentrepeatingofcourse.

The majority of primary focus open world players are probably somewhere in the 2-3 range. So yeah, HoT maps are a bit of a culture shock.

People keep coming back to the manifesto because it was such a show of “we’re doing things differently” and a lot of people believed them. They had no reason not to believe them, either – in the beginning (to my knowledge anyway) they stayed pretty true to that manifesto.

Over time, they only seem to be drifting further away from it. I kinda feel bad for them because they have to eat their words now and the manifesto is going to follow them until this game is dead and buried, and probably long after. The manifesto they wanted didn’t get them the monetary success they wanted, so it keeps evolving. I’m pretty sure it’s as simple as that.

Well said, Eir. From the stuff I saw a year or however long ago (or 2 years? dang, time flies, I can’t even keep track) EQNext understands this on some level in spirit, even if not in the exact words.

I wonder if they will pull it off though.

Gibson.4036:

This is the tragedy of GW2. It seemed like it had a clear vision for a specific audience, but that changed shortly after launch. Over the last three years, ArenaNet’s design goals have lurched about first trying to please one core audience and then another, systematically alienating each one as they are abandoned in favor of the the next target of ArenaNet’s “iteration”.

Jack of all trades, but master of none…

Superior Rune of the Citadel and Superior Rune of Infiltration have something in common:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_the_Citadel

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Superior_Rune_of_Infiltration

Their number 6 is a passive activation (like all runes) but they are both bonuses that could be much more useful (imo) if we had a window in which to activate them, rather than having them go off passively.

Citadel, you summon a bomb, and Infiltration, you cloak for 4 seconds.

What I’m suggesting is when the 6 gets triggered for these runes, you get a temp ability that is available for something like five seconds and hitting the ability will activate the bonus.

Why I’m suggesting this is because runes like Citadel and Infil have what are, to me, potentially neat bonuses, but are unappealing due to their 6 being near impossible to use strategically.

For example, getting cloaked for four seconds when I’m close to dying might be useful if I’m able to see that the ability is available and use it, but may only succeed in confusing and surprising me if triggered passively, especially since it’s on a sixty second cooldown. Meaning that it’s especially hard to keep track of.

Similarly, Citadel’s 6 bomb might be useful as is, if I’m in melee constantly and taking damage, but is going to be a pure dice roll of usefulness if I’m moving in and out of melee, switching targets, etc.

Valentine.4286:

And HoT got alot of solo content. And it was designed as such. Still ppl get mad because there is some stuff not made for solo. There is both, and that is good.

And since you could fill up 10 posts with evidence AND you felt the need to mention that, I would like to see it. Thx in advance…

What solo content did HoT get?

I can think of two things off-hand. Adventures and more Living Story. That’s about it.

forum. page. bug. ugh.

CETheLucid.3964:

I’m not worried about you giving me an explanation in your first paragraph. I’m a reasonably patient person.

I’m very much worried that you’re inconsistent and outright dodging the discussion in your first paragraph and you have 13 more paragraphs after the fact.

That’s not a discussion. That’s a rant.

You’re one to talk about avoiding the argument when you’re trying to take the moral high ground as a means to avoid an actual discussion with regards to what you said.

You flat out said you will not name names. Paragraph one. Ergo, we can’t have a discussion.

Your unnamed paper angels of MMO integrity are the bestestestest ones and GW2 ranks below them.

Interesting idea of a ‘discussion’ you have there.

In the time it took you to write this and your other reply, you could have read the rest of what I said. Apparently you didn’t.

I don’t think there are words in the english language. That do justice. To how nonsensical your position is right now. You are insisting that I’m dodging when you admitted that you avoided reading 90% of what I wrote.

I even told you if you wanted names, you could PM me. But you conveniently cut that part out of your quote to make it look like I’m dodging.

Good god man. All this effort to try to dismiss me without addressing the content of what I’ve said. I recommend you log out of the forums and enjoy the game, because you clearly aren’t interested in talking about it critically.

Solid Gold.9310:

The OP is just another person complaining about the people that have complaints.

When he has his own complaints about the game, hypocritical.

:/ Yup. It never ends.

Legionnaire.4059:

A: The game was too easy before and thats why it is called MMO you don’t solo , it is not a single player game. Also staying face to face atacking is really boring , i really like the thing that mobs have more actions like leaps and dodges.

Ok, this is just your opinion about difficulty.

Legionnaire.4059:

A: Nobody forces you , if you are too lazy and want to get gold rank from the 1st try this thing won’t get you far. Tip: watch a video on youtube , somebody who made gold rank , learn from it! PS: I’m not a hardcore player and i’m not that good at this kind of things but i try do my best.

I can agree some Adventures are really hard or some of them its not your type for example Shooting Gallery for me i can’t even get silver , probably i have to practice more. But don’t tell me none of this are your type because i don’t believe you.

Nobody forces you to log in either, technically. Maybe we just shouldn’t anymore.

Legionnaire.4059:

A: Because you can’t go and study Medicine and become a Mechanic thats why. Gliding is not for Tyria you can’t glide there , bouncing mushrooms none of them in Tyria and so on…

Yet you can get XP for fractal masteries outside of fractals, so…

Legionnaire.4059:

*Q: Why do we have to get masteries in order to lvl them up? It’s not enough that we have to get experience? OR I just want to explore why do i have to lvl them up?
A: I don’t know guys but this sends me to think the logic here it’s something like that : "Why do they force us to play? We paid for this game , i just want to explore like in a simulator … ". That’s the jungle you have to learn in order to master it !

Mastering something and exploring something are two different things. Why we would need to master the jungle to explore it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Legionnaire.4059:

A: Of course the things are more expensive now there are many new things to craft. Nothing changed it was like before the expansion , every major updates did that. For example when Ascended Crafting came out. For example Silk scraps from 8 copper to 3 silver back then , linen also … They had to do something also with leather it was too cheap , you could sell it at vendor if you had too much of it.

Leather changed, as you said. Fractal rewards got mangled. Demand for ascended skyrocketed due to raids. And Anet literally did nothing to alleviate this, even though they had to have known that raids would make demand for ascended gear go through the roof.

Legionnaire.4059:

Doing dungeons just for gold is absolutely sad , yea you won’t see many people doing dungeons these days probably because of that nerf (lol) or because NEW CONTENT! Now you can make more gold by selling these mats if you don’t need them than running a dungeon even if the reward wasn’t nerfed.

This is partly true, though as someone pointed out in another thread, if you need some of the mats that you get, you can’t just up and sell all of them or you’re going backwards, despite getting some gold. Part of the reason it’s lucrative to sell certain mats right now is because so many people want them for crafted items.

Legionnaire.4059:

• Time Gated stuff – i don’t like waiting in for something in order to get it and i don’t talk about doing events to get to a boss or something like that , when i say waiting i mean afk/not doing anything until the event spawns without beign able to progress in that time.

• Some bosses don’t reward enough compared to time spend killing. Or maybe i’m wrong because i’m not an economist.

I don’t like these either.

CETheLucid.3964:

Are you serious with that?

You make a vague comparison based on these unnamed paragons of MMO integrity, but you’re just so gosh darn respectful that you loathe to name names.

Because that’s totally fair and not at all contradictory to what you’ve stated in making the comparison in the first place.

According to these unnameable paper angels, GW2 is mediocre (or in the middle) in regards to integrity VS grifting fiends.

Got it.

Yeah. That doesn’t pass muster. But I’m not reading through the rest of that wall of text to see if you make it make sense.

When your first paragraph is flawed in reasoning, I’m not inclined to read the remaining 13.

LOL, ok. You are cute. You ask for an explanation and because I don’t give you all of what you want in my first paragraph, you dismiss my whole post.

You are so transparent man. It’s obvious you don’t want to face down any real arguments against the game. You are just looking for ways to get out of it with dismissive statements.

I get it tho. Sometimes people don’t want what they like to get tarnished by arguments against it. Just next time save me the trouble of writing out what I did and tell me off the bat that you’re afraid to talk about the flaws your precious game might have.

Vavume.8065:

My logic tells me you are probably also a clicker.

Clicking = bad/ineffective is a horrible misconception.

Yes, there are a number of people who use clicking and are inefficient, in part because of it. But I have known people who were clickers who performed top notch with it.

Personally, I use keybinds because I have a tremor, so clicking is an utter nightmare of misclicks for me, especially in stuff like PvP where it gets intense. But most people don’t have tremors and can be quite effective with clicking, same as keybinds, if they know what they’re doing.

Eirdyne.9843:

In general I understand your frustrations. However, I feel the real struggle with Heart of Thorns is the lack of preparedness the game has up until Heart of Thorns. I often cite WoW (because it is familiar to people). This is another case of that. WoW’s first expansion was Burning Crusade. In that the big issue people had was that it made the game too easy. Before Burning Crusade peaking above 1000 damage on anything was “INSANE DAMAGE”. People made videos about it. After Burning Crusade you could sneeze and accidentally level camps.

It’s a problem of transition. All games have had this from WoW forward. This is the big problem with the video game industry. They ape everything. There really has been no meaningful innovations since 2004. There has been intense deterioration of the industry ever since then. Guild Wars 1 was headed in the right direction simply because it stuck to the pre-WoW model that armor and gear didn’t make you. Skills did.
Guild Wars 2… has been trying to do both: Armor AND skills make you. But actually, there’s a third party in all this: traits. And traits are entirely something new coming over from WoW. You could argue the RR system in DAoC was Traits, but not really.

The real problems with Heart of Thorns is the massive delete pressing of old content by the Devs that really screwed over the new and rising players by moving the game away from Open-World and into dungeon/group content. Heart of Thorns has utterly provided for those people who want to group. It has utterly failed to provide for those that wanted to explore.

The reasons for this are mostly an ineptitude in the development or a forced rush (more likely) on the devs to get HoT out before it was ready. Content ends about level 41 in Masteries. After that you’re moving into achievement points to get Mastery Points. This wouldn’t be so bad if they were accomplish-able solo, but a good chunk don’t. This game has always had more to do in the open-world than dungeons. People really liked that. This game has always been more about getting credit for tagging a creature in an event than running in a group for an event. Heart of Thorns removed that. What happened to the Silverwastes is a real tragedy.

Heart of Thorns requires you to have a lot of Masteries finished to really get on with its content. Unfortunately, by then you’ve already got on with that content long enough you’re not interested.

I pretty much have lost all interest to level up my masteries further. Sure, there’s excitement that I’m nearly finished, but the drive left me fast.

This seems to be the issue with many of us. We’re more skilled with jumping puzzles than we were when the game started. So, Verdant Brink was great. If they’d stuck with that it would have been an incredible game. Instead Verdant Brink turns into Auric Basin. Beautiful, but samey and most of just ran through. Tangled Depths… samey and ran through. Dragon’s Stand? Samey, ran through.

Heart of Thorns needed to cash in more on Gliders, Exploration, and Puzzles. Raids are definitely puzzles, but a puzzle with one set of difficulties. The very first boss is pretty much hard-mode. Doable, but the ‘fail bar’ is a bit high for the first boss. This goes back to the issue of what happened to WoW. It used to be Rogues were sappers, Mages sheepers, Warriors tanks, and Priests healers. Add one more for flavor. This created a really unique experience to grouping because what your class did was not just exciting to you but part of everyone else’s experience too. Today it is hammed. Everything is done ‘mechanically’ rather than giving us the mechanics, a camp, and leaving it up to us as to how it plays out. Some of this is attempted by Anet: very clearly attempted. Our creatures are just there and we just kill them. The encounters are organic this way, but clunky. Attacks in this game are fast. That’s not a good or bad thing, but something to take note. Attacks are fast and we can’t really sort them out from one another. This becomes the experience of watching blurs. By contrast older games had the sense that we were here to play the game so we might as well sit back and watch the whole show. When you do an attack in any game 2006 or older, the game does a full animation. That means spells take longer, actions take longer, and there’s just generally more time in fights. While this stretches leveling out a bit, it does mean we actually get to see a fair bit of the full game go off. WoW today is all instant casts and instant attacks. Boring. Mindless. Patterned. Guild Wars 2 has always been on the edge of this. We totter back and forth.

In short, there’s really no refuge out there.

I wish this wasn’t true, but it probably is. :|

CETheLucid.3964:

You don’t put any names to your examples. One wonders what lofty paragons of integrity your basis for comparison lies in.

Who are you comparing to that Anet is in the middle of with regards to people who have maintained their integrity VS companies who are trying to grift you at every turn?

I generally don’t shout praises of other MMOs by name on the GW2 forums, out of respect for it being their platform and all. So sorry, I’m not going to be giving detailed examples from other games. I guess if you really want to hear what I have to say on it and aren’t just blowing defensive air in my direction, then you can PM me.

The general gist is, some things are designed such that money is a priority and spending is encouraged, but not required. The darker side is the stuff that is designed such that human psychology is taken advantage of and manipulated to eke out as much profit as possible. This game has some of both.

Psychological manipulation, due to manipulation being something people aren’t supposed to notice, is generally not going to be obvious to the average person at first glance. So if you’re working from a casual overview, you won’t necessarily see it. It’s also not a black and white thing. Some psychological manipulation is used to help people have a better experience. For instance, graphic design could, in some respects, be categorized under psychological manipulation – you’re using known information about where the eyes goes to direct peoples’ attention where you want it.

But you can also do things like draw people in and then once you have your hooks in, you hit them with the price tag. This is the main theme of F2P marketing and micro transactions in general. It’s why P2W games are so hated… cause they literally draw you in with the allure of a free game and then once you’re invested in the game, you get hit with a metric ton of micro transactions that you need to make to get anywhere.

GW2 is obviously not like that. If it was, I wouldn’t be having this conversation. I would be far far away. But it’s hard to deny some of the subtle hooks in place. For instance, you can invest a huge amount of time into the game to get a legendary weapon (the pinnacle of prestige in the game), or you can buy gems with RL money and convert them to gold to help you along. People say this is ok because it’s optional and that’s partly true; they aren’t making you pay RL money to get the highest prestige item. But the pull and allure of it is undeniable.

Giving free stuff every now and then in the gem store is cool and all, but it’s not necessarily a shining beacon of integrity. Grocery stores do the same; they give you samples. Although it can be well-intentioned, there is no reason to believe that it is by default. Giving a sample can be a good way to whet the appetite of people who haven’t participated in the store experience yet. It shows them, “This is the kind of stuff you could be getting from here all the time.”

Anyway, I will cut it here for now. I could probably go on at length on this subject.

CETheLucid.3964:

Labjax.2465:

I can’t speak for NCSoft as a whole, as I don’t follow most of their titles.

Right off the bat, Anet != NCSoft. Anet is a subsidiary. They are their own people.

Labjax.2465:

I’ve seen game companies that cling to integrity and I’ve seen game companies that try to grift you at every turn. Anet is somewhere in the middle right now.

This you say as they’re giving away free gem shop items right now.

Not to mention the entirety of season 1 and 2, every major update and systems change from then till’ now (WoW would have made maybe three expansions from it), dozens of holidays and special events, new wvw and pvp maps (of which you can play without HoT)…

Yeah. Real greedy folks. Really “grifting” you at every chance they can get. /s

Maybe you better go back and reread what I said.

RemiRome.8495:

Labjax.2465:

You work 60 hours a week, but you have the time to come on the forums and argue about ascended gear?

Hmm.

I smell hyperbole.

60 hours to work
56 hours to sleep
49 hours to argue on forums
3 hours to learn what hyperbole means

it checks out.

You forgot eating, drinking, going to the bathroom, grooming (assuming he bothers since he’s a lawyer), going to therapy for being a lawyer, rethinking his life, going to internet forums to argue.

No, wait, you’re right. It does check out.

Get it? Cause lawyers are stereotyped as having soulless jobs? I’m so funny.

But in all seriousness, I find it hard to believe. If I worked 60 hours a week as a lawyer, the last thing I’d want to do on my off time is argue on internet forums. I mean, I’ve seen stranger things, but ya know, it’s also frightfully easy to claim anything on the internet.