Guild Wars 2

Because the game was originally sold to the type of customer who doesn’t raid (“casuals”).

With Anet’s abrupt decision to cater to a different type of customer (“traditional” MMO players), many of the original customers won’t take to the resulting change in content.

That’s why you’re seeing so much unhappiness with raids.

Doubt it. Most likely, SAB returned only because they needed something to counter the predicted uproar over the cancellation of Legendaries. (The decision to cancel probably happened way before the actual announcement.)

Just a flesh wound.3589:

So? That doesn’t mean it all wasn’t calculated beforehand to manage reactions.

They’re a corporation and they had some bad news to give. He didn’t wake up one fine morning and decide to axe legendary crafting and rush over to make an announcement about it on the Forum. All that would be thought about and discussed at meetings over a period of time. Their lawyers would have to be consulted and they would need to check the relevant laws in the various countries to calculate what impact it would have. What he said on the forum would need to be written out, and that also looked over by their lawyers. Once they knew that they were going to cut the crafting, they undoubtably discussed how to mitigate expected negative reactions, and Sab came up as an option, was approved and it was debugged and made ready to go.

Of course a plan was made up to minimize the impact. That’s what cooperation do. They don’t just wing it and pray.

For sure. It’s not a coincidence that SAB and bunny ears just came out.

Bread and circuses FTW.

You know when they announced the dissolving of the Legendary team, but not when it was dissolved. Could have been something that happened quite a while ago and they’re only telling us now.

They’re too proud to get rid of them. Maybe in 6 months they’ll shave another 10 seconds off the stealth fountain?

The appeal is that it’s not the Desert BL. That’s how bad the Desert BL is.

They should have reverted at least 4 months ago. And we’re looking at at least 2 months before this even happens, if it happens: they’re still trying to salvage the failed BL. It might be too late to make any difference right now, much less in 2 months.

And that’s not even considering what awful mechanics they insert into the Alpine BL before bringing it back.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Instead we’ll launch the quarterly update with improvements to Desert, use that as an opportunity to get the community’s feedback on those changes, then we’ll swap to Alpine when it’s ready.

So the same exact plan as before. No perceptible change whatsoever.

Have they done it? No.

Have they given a date for when it’ll happen? No.

So when? “When it’s ready.”

Seriously?

Asumita.2174:

Well, it’s been said that they will make up for their mess up starting with the April update… We’ll see.

I take the following word for word:

“I strongly believe that we will in fact entertain you. We’re a team of people who love the game that you love, and are working on things we’re confident you’ll love. But I’m not here to convince you of that, and I wouldn’t expect you to take my word for it. You can make that judgment in April, and each subsequent time we ship. I will work to make you happy, and I’ll do it by making you happy with what we ship, not with what we promise to ship.”

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Legendary-weapons-6/page/9#post6062496

You’re still taking what they say word for word? LOL.

Of course it’s been scrapped. We all know Mike O’Brien’s disdain for WvW. You think he would put more resources in WvW when PvE and PvP are in massive crisis mode?

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Zero Day.2594:

You know… “False” advertisement for legendary weapons was the the first time they did “false” advertisement. cough cough manifesto.

But yeah, let’s write this one off again as “nothing is set in stone”!

:D

It amuses me every time someone complains about the manifesto after all these years.

Well, Mark O’Brien himself invoked the manifesto in this last statement about cancelling Legendaries. So it’s fair game to complain about it.

Getting rid of Colin was the right thing to do: he was doing a terrible job. But let’s not be so foolish to make him into a scapegoat. Anet’s problem is still there.

Don’t forget the atlas.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

When you quote someone you need to put in the link or the full quote.

Nope. No need for the full quote. If he’s going to use the manifesto to justify his actions, then let’s see how consistent they’ve been following their manifesto. Or is he just cherry picking the parts he needs to invoke right this moment?

From the thread about cancelling the Legendaries (Mike O’Brien):

I wrote in the Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto in 2010…

Can someone remind me of some of the important points in the Manifesto so we can see what an excellent job they’ve been doing following their core principles?

• Fix the power creep.
• Delete the new BL, revert 99% of the new features introduced in HoT: airship, stealth fountain, etc.
• Remove the guild grind, helping make small guilds relevant again.
• Hire a new game director who is willing to view the game mode through the eyes of those who actually play the game mode.

None of these will happen.

There’s always this conflict between PPT players and “fights” players, each calling the other names. But both are needed.

There’s a symbiosis, you need both types of players to have an active WvW. Without the “fights” players, WvW devolves into karma trains jumping to the most empty BL and without the PPT players calling out enemy positions, fights can’t be found.

They let stealth get way out of hand, but aren’t willing to nerf it just for WvW. And so WvW loses another part of gameplay that often brought some excitement.

maddoctor.2738:

Ohoni.6057:

The point is, the game ran a certain way, HoT changed several things about how the game runs that annoyed many of the regular customers, whether you agree with their reasoning or not is irrelevant. The question is whether the new customers they’ve gained are worth more to them than the existing customers that they’ve made to feel alienated and underappreciated.

What if the amount of those “regular” customers wasn’t as high as Anet wanted so they made changes to bring more players into the game, including players that left the game due to its older direction?

That’s exactly what happened. Anet wanted more customers and was willing to sacrifice the old regulars. The problem is their gamble didn’t pay off (HoT sales were quite low).

As for players who quit a long time ago, people thought they would flood back into the game with the release of HoT but it didn’t happen at all. In WvW, for example, everyone was predicting a population boom of returning players that would, at least temporarily, take care of the drastic population disparities between servers. Nothing like that happened.

It seems for most people, you get one chance at their business. Once they leave, they’re not coming back.

Ropechef.6192:

These are the people that come into my Fine dining Japanese/ Asian Restaurant. Order Chicken tenders with fries, Complain to me about how I don’t have hamburgers, (yes this does happen)

GW2 was a hamburger joint that decided overnight they wanted to become a fine dining establishment. Both restaurant types have their place, but when you make a switch like that your old customers are going to be unhappy. And that’s what we’re seeing.

Now the question is whether (1), there’s enough people interested in fine dining to make up for losing their hamburger eaters, and (2) whether the fine diners are going to look past the “stigma” that this place used to be a hamburger joint not long ago.

Looking at the poor sales of HoT, it doesn’t look good.

Wasn’t there a Kitchen Nightmares where this exact thing happened? Maybe Anet should call Gordon Ramsay.

If they get rid of the stealth fountain (which they should), they’re going to have a lot of unhappy people who grinded their balls off getting the upgrades. The funny thing is, if they hadn’t made everything so grindy this wouldn’t be a problem. They doubly screwed themselves here.

Of course, it could be that they don’t want to get rid of the fountain because they think it’s a great mechanic. That’s most likely the case.

Jumpin Lumpix.6108:

I don’t know why as a paying customer of HoT that I should be pared with people who don’t even own the expansion pack and cannot even make any of the meta builds or be seriously competitive.

When Anet decided against (the promised) elite specializations as “sidegrades” and made them OP compared to core specializations, they created this problem.

It either makes players quit the game (leading to longer queues) or torment players like you with their underpowered builds. And poor sales of HoT make this problem even worse.

This just shows how out of touch they still are despite all their talk of improving WvW.

If they don’t they insist on adding, into the old BL, all the garbage that made Desert BL terrible, I don’t see how scrapping the desert BL wouldn’t be possible.

But they probably will insist, I suppose.

sarahlynn.6943:

1. It seems that most are disgruntled with the new maps. Is Anet willing to admit it’s error and go back? I have heard nothing about plans for change from Anet. Propositions from players are plentiful. Has the great Anet spoken?

If you read their latest statements, they still think they can fix the new BL.

sarahlynn.6943:

2. Does Anet actually care that people are leaving? I’m serious. Do the new game purchases more than make up for the gem purchases of existing players that leave?

Anet’s history with WvW speaks for itself. It’s clear they don’t care for the WvW game mode at all. Sure, they’ve made a few recent announcements, but seems more like a product of desperation — very poor HoT sales seems to have put them back into “give us your suggestions, we’ll work on the, we promise” mode. And by now, if you’re fooled by this, that’s on you.[/quote]

sarahlynn.6943:

4. Any advice regarding games that have similar systems to WvW?

Some are in the works but as far as I know, none will be out any time soon. However, Anet has let WvW gameplay become poor enough to warrant quitting, even without a viable alternative.

Overhyped, overpriced, grindfest that underdelivers. That’s why.

Why compromise? Anet’s in the weak negotiating position. They’re obviously under immense pressure and very desperate right now as evidenced by their apparent interest in WvW (and management shakeup). Now is the time to push for the changes you really want.

The problem is that Anet sold the game to one group of people (super casuals) and then turned completely around with HoT to attract more traditional MMO players. No one ends up being satisfied. And that’s where we are now.

Because they gamble on hitting it big with their newest shiniest project instead of steadily improving and developing older content.

Business-wise: an absolutely terrible idea.

Selling the game to casuals for 3 years, then suddenly turning a 180 with HoT to sell to more “traditional” MMO customers… you just end up losing both types of gamers.

When they don’t delete the DBL, you’ll know that this was all talk, as usual.

Balthazzarr.1349:

One further note to this… Some people have said that switching back to Friday would bring people back into WvW.. I highly doubt that! Some positive changes to the new BL’s will bring people back… the night we have reset is really a small nit compared to these new terrible BL’s imo.

Switching away lost GW2 a ton of players. But it’s not symmetric. Switching back isn’t going to get those players to return.

But it will trick the remaining playerbase to stick around a little longer, hoping for some miracle fix to WvW.

They’re going to megaserver WvW. Don’t waste your money transferring.

Nokaru.7831:

Are you willing to give up content you care about for this?

They’re asking for easy mode because they aren’t getting any content. There’s nothing to give up.

Tyler Bearce.3427:

Hey guys, as many of you know, we changed WvW match reset times from Friday to Saturday as part of the Heart of Thorns release. We made this change primarily because sometimes we need to run hotfix builds on Fridays, and with the expansion launch we expected to need to do this more than usual.

Don’t forget the other stated reason for moving:

the emergent gameplay that has come from reset. It has become one of the most exciting times for WvW and we would really love for more players to have the opportunity to experience it. We have many more players logging in on Saturday than on Friday which means with this change many more people will be available to experience the rush of claiming objectives for their world during reset.

What happened to that?

gemini.7156:

Yes , i will buy it, I just beg ANet to listen to the community

The reason they don’t have to listen is because people like you are willing to buy it sight unseen.

When they’ve put in all the failed mechanics that everyone hates about the new BL: that’s when the old BL returns.

At this point, you might as well wait for the next expansion so that you won’t end up paying for both HoT and the next one.

gloflop.3510:

I have no clue what they have done in the development team of ArenaNet. WvW was killed (sorry to say it that clear). PvP was not thought through with all its consequences. If I were the boss, I would step in and replace some key persons.

Could be that the boss is the source of the problem.

gennyt.3428:

Until I see real meaningful changes, this is just Anet pandering to players because a massive new triple A MMO just launched.

That’s exactly the reason they’ve suddenly all showed up to “communicate.” They’ve done precisely the same thing every single time a competitor launches. And every single time: three weeks later, they completely vanish back into thin air.

But this time it’s for real, right?

Rewards are not the problem. The fact that WvW survived for so long before HoT tells us this. PvP players want to PvP, and will do so despite low rewards. But when the quality of PvP declines, so does the population. And the quality right now is abysmal: from the power creep to the awful new map mechanics to the awful new map.

Substance E.4852:

The game is no where near popular enough for it to remembered as any watershed though it is a blatant example of what not to do when running an online game.

Let’s just hope the WvW-like games that are in development learn something from this because it sure doesn’t look like Anet’s ever going to.

Buy Some Apples.6390:

Mike O’Brien

Lol. And finally, an hour later, people are starting to up-vote my comments here again. It’s all good. I just hope the WvW community can dial down the answer and focus on working with us.

kittening hypocrite!

It’s just one of the many signs that he doesn’t acknowledge (or worse yet, he doesn’t even realize) that he and Anet are the problems; that they are the ones who put WvW in its current position — not the WvW community.

Seriously. What rational person is going to “work with them” after seeing them time and again promise to “listen” and then end up doing the exact opposite of what’s needed to be done.

briggah.7910:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Not sure what the OP is talking about. According to the announcements, they’re on exactly the same path they were on before this new hype train.

One example shows it all: Their intention is still to put in all the failed features of HoT into the Alpine BL.

Might want to give better feedback before calling everything a failure. This is the problem with many of the threads. Some of you complain yet never actually give a solution on what you are complaining about. I don’t care about the past feedback as its pretty clear to me now that they are trying to listen. As far as I can see you saw nothing good from HoT because to you everything is a failure. Here I’m going to show you how to do it.

What I’d like to see removed/changed about the new map are the barriers, pop up walls and whatever applies cripple to me when no players are not around. Things like these only make it harder to move around the maps. Too many high places to fall from which again make it harder to move around the maps. Maps are a little too big as there are places I’ve haven’t even been to because there are no reason to even go there. Middle event either needs to be removed or changed into something else as it favors the larger servers mostly. Can’t think of anything else off top..

wow that was hard giving feedback…

Absolutely nothing you just suggested hasn’t been suggested 1000 times before in here. It has been proven time and again that giving suggestions to Anet is a complete waste of time. You may be fooled again and again and again and again by their empty promises of “listening” not everyone is so easily deceived.

Veles.1405:

Dusty and Kuru – By “right path” I mean that we have commitments to at least some actions that will help us get on track. We are nowhere close and I am not hyped or optimistic that we will get a perfect end result. My point is that for once we need to stop just complaining and yelling “OMG Anet killed WvW” every time they say anything. That behavior forces them to not talk to us and keep hiding what they are doing since someone always reacts negatively.

I don’t think one big update will fix everything, just like I don’t think reverting the changes will fix everything. Look back 6 months or more on the forums and you’ll see threads complaining about a different set of problems. I’m not expecting anything amazing, but this is our last chance as a community to save the game mode so I I’d rather we do it step by step, evaluate what works and doesn’t, and communicate both ways. The dev responses on the AMA suggested that is the general philosophy moving forward with WvW, and that is the first step (of many) in the right direction.

This is their standard procedure when they feel they need to hype something. They come in to the forums (or reddit in this case) in a big show of force and make it sound like exciting things are happening. Then they vanish into thin air.

Worse yet, read their comments again: they have actually not changed direction at all with respect to WvW. They are still committed to the exact same failed features. They haven’t even bothered to change (again) their nonsensical excuse for reset on Saturday.

Daroon.1736:

Bearded.6485:

Daroon.1736:

Bearded.6485:

cosmicegg.8502:

Wow this list is growing, no wonder they’re slow to respond to the community

Joining some of his fellow colleagues
•Jon Peters
•Chris Whiteside
•Eric Flannum
•Steve Fowler
Jeff Grubb

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/43rwr8/jeff_grubb_leaves_anet/

Multiple employees mass leaving any organization usually indicates a disconnect between leadership and the employees doing the work. This is especially true when the people leaving are managers and/or team leaders.

Generally it is also a good indication that either :

A: Those ‘leaving’ were Incompetent
B: The management above them are Incompetent

Typically if those leaving were Incompetent then they would be fired, not just leaving.

Upper and Middle management never get fired, they ‘leave’ or ‘move on to other projects’

sinking ship —> people leaving —> sinking even worse —> damage control firings —> … sunk, most likely.

Sirbeaumerdier.3740:

lighter.2708:

Getting cyber bullied for playing warrior, anet please do something
they say they want to come to my house and kill me and all that mean stuff

It’s a sad reality where ppl want to win at all cost and their victories to mean whatever they need to. I have all the sympathy in the world for you. Rest assure I will never ask you to play something you don’t want to. Winning is not worth that much.

I’m pretty sure his post was satire.

Not sure what the OP is talking about. According to the announcements, they’re on exactly the same path they were on before this new hype train.

One example shows it all: Their intention is still to put in all the failed features of HoT into the Alpine BL.

Dayra.7405:

population imbalance (and emptiness of most maps most of the time) is what killed WvW, not the BL. The new BLs just had the problem, that to few people for the smaller old BL maps are much to few people for larger new maps.

The thing we urgently need in my view is map-capacity fits player-numbers, neither to much map such that WvW degenerates to a PvE(D)-race nor to few map such that you sit in queue when you want to play.

If their balance work solve this WvW-problem, WvW get a change to restart, if not all they do is useless.

Nope. It was indeed the new BL that put WvW into its current death spiral. Just look at the queued EB maps with totally empty BLs. Just look at the fact that WvW population fell like a rock, never to recover, after HoT came out — despite everyone promising people would flock back to WvW at release.