Actually they specified that they had trouble getting the map switching to work on the world-map (wvw world map) on the live version.
They had problem with the rotation, not just bringing Alpine back without HoT content. They are not trying to bring Alpine back without HoT content, They want to mess it up with the Hot stuff that made everyone leave WvW in the first place rather than just bring back Alpine without the HoT content like players asked for.
They should bring back Alpine without the HoT content and not switch it DBL while working on it instead of doing what they tried to do..
Very much this. It’s pretty clear they still don’t realize that the HoT content was what put WvW in the position it’s in today. I find that really amazing.
From the reddit AMA on moving resets to Saturday:
“This is a conversation we’re going to need to have with y’all. We moved to Saturday because sometimes we do a build on Fridays and just about the time we wanted to activate the build was during the reset time. So we thought it would be better if there was no conflict in the timing of those things. Since people love Friday, but we might do a build on Friday, we need to talk about exactly what time of day would be good for the community, and then adjust based on that.”
So they still think maybe, sometimes having a new build on Fridays is worth losing probably 20% – 25% of weekly activity? Either they’re not being straightforward with the real reason reset is on Saturday, or they really don’t care about the loss of population.
This comparison has been made before. It’s exactly like New Coke… except that Coca-Cola reacted really fast for such a large company. Anet, however hasn’t reacted at all. They still talk as if it’s 2013; as if population imbalance is WvW’s biggest problem; as if the features from HoT weren’t a complete disaster.
We still intend to eventually bring back the Alpine Borderlands map, but it’s not as simple as just toggling it back on. We don’t have the tech for rotating between the two borderlands built yet, and the map itself required a significant amount of content updates to support all of the features that were added to WvW as part of the HoT update.
LOL!!! So they want to spend valuable dev time adding to the old BL all the awful mechanics they introduced into HoT? Talk about having zero clue.
Dungeons are dead.
Fractals are the new dungeons.
And Raids are the new Fractals.
So don’t expect much work on fractals. Also, the Next Big Thing will bump fractals to dead status, so the best you can hope for is for that to come later rather than sooner.
if you’re thinking of buying HoT for WvW, you might want to think twice. WvW is pretty much dead because of the “features” from HoT. Check out the WvW forum if you don’t believe it.
Only 300,000 bought HoT, so by now the maximum playerbase isn’t going to be much higher than that, considering the power creep and how much they nerfed core.
Does it matter how soon it comes? Just look at their track record on WvW development. It’s going to be a disaster.
2) They are already working on another map.
Imagine how bad that’s going to be.
Maybe a week or two before the release of Crowfall or CU (whichever comes first) they’ll start hyping something. Too little too late, of course, but that’s likely what they’ll do.
Considering they sold only about 300,000 copies of HoT and that non-HoT players are generally going to quit (especially if they play WvW or sPvP), it’s not surprising that a ton of people left the game.
It was casual at launch. But shortly after (a few months) they introduced Ascended gear; it’s been steadily more and more grindy up to the present, where everything they introduce now must have grind.
You’d be a fool to waste gems transferring now as they’re almost certainly going to megaserver WvW.
Yes it gets checked and they get banned, but you need to do your part and properly report the offenders via in-game report, and if some reason you are unable to select them to access the report feature, video record what the offender(s) are doing and send it in to exploits@arena.net with details such as what server you are on, what time and date you recorded the footage and what borderland it was on.
Dream on. Even if you happen to have video running 24/7 and happen to capture them on it, still nothing will be done for months if not years- and then they will just hop on to an alt account and start over.
Gave up reporting years ago as a complete waste of time as nothing ever came of multiple reports from hundreds of people.
But don’t stop believing, after all, the tooth fairy is real, right?
You don’t have to record 24/7, there is magical stuff like shadowplay and gvr these days. I have seen many people I have reported banned and not come back. If you aren’t going to do your part, how can you complain?
You didn’t read his post? He did do his part but Anet didn’t do theirs. That’s been the norm for 3 years.
I’d be satisfied if they put more than half the actual changes in the patch notes.
Let’s test this theory:
“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could stealth an army for 2 minutes?”
Yep, sounds like good advice.
Geez guys its just a suggestion. I dont really see how hard it is, seeing they can just add invisible walls everywhere.
Yeah. Add invisible walls everywhere. That sounds about right for Anet: the same level of work and effort as cut-and-pasting the deserted BL’s map right on top of the old BL’s map.
Did they ever get back to us on that?
I don’t understand, what’s one aspect of this game that is challenging. I hopped into HoT a few days ago after a year break and beat the story in a matter of two days. Cleared all exploration in the next two days. There is nothing in this game that isn’t casual… Unless all you complainers expect free kitten.
Thats due to the lack of content, the story is way to short.
The story was only a tid bit shorter than the original story.
The 1-80 story? Wat? HOT is far shorter. 1-80 is a legitimate single player length for an mmo, the single player story in HOT is way way to short.
Thats due to the lack of content, the story is way to short.
the reason the game is not casual friendly is because its too short?
No him clearing the story in 2 days is due to it being to short, nothing to do with whether HOT is casual friendly or not.
oh and what’s that got to do with the thread?
Because the story is so short, Anet takes the path of stretching out the content by putting in loads and loads of grind…. which is what makes the game no longer casual friendly.
They already tried free transfers. It was the worst thing to happen to WvW (until HoT came out, of course). If Anet has any job openings for WvW, you should apply. You’d be a good fit there.
Would still loved to craft my own though. My bank is full of saved up cooking ingredients and yet I have to buy food from TP. It would cost me zero gold if I could just use my stocks.
sell your stocks and buy the food on the TP, you’d possibly even make money.
The game is by no means perfect and some aspects deserve constructive criticisms but i think its abit ridiculous to complain that you are getting screwed over as a non expansion owner.
Considering only around 300,000 copies of HoT were sold, it’d be really foolish for Anet not to cater even more to non-expansion owners.
I would be saying the opposite the money is in the paying customers dunno why you would be catering for the non paying customers.
And if you can’t front up the 40 or so $ or don’t want too you probably don’t even like the game much anyway.
- At that number, there’s no way they can support their business. They need the money that core-only players put into the gemstore
- At that number, what you would probably call “freeloading” players are even more important because without them, the paying population would be so small they wouldn’t have enough people to play with… they quit because of this and it’s all over.
- Never heard of the word “value?” What if the next expansion is $1000. You’d obviously not pay for it. So you probably don’t even like the game anyway, right?
There was a possibility of developing it into an e-sport — 3 years ago. Way too late now.
The game is by no means perfect and some aspects deserve constructive criticisms but i think its abit ridiculous to complain that you are getting screwed over as a non expansion owner.
Considering only around 300,000 copies of HoT were sold, it’d be really foolish for Anet not to cater even more to non-expansion owners.
I’m sure they’d have preferred to wait until after the finals, but balance and gameplay was so awful they couldn’t help but patch early.
They balance every 6 months, not 3. They’ve more recently promised every 3, but we’ll have to see that to believe it.
If you want more playstyle/build diversity, then you’d probably be a bit better off in WvW — just because there are more playstyles available there….
except that game mode is even more dead than PvP.
They can’t win with the elite specs model.
If Anet, as promised, created elite specs that were side-grades, that’d mean a lot of players would end up staying with core specs. Those players are going to be unhappy because they’d feel like they wasted their $50.
On the other hand, if Anet creates OP elite specs (which is what happened), everyone “gets their money’s worth” because everyone now plays a new build with new traits and skills. Of course, this makes those who didn’t buy the expansion very upset because they’re now underpowered. The problem is that this is a LOT of people, judging by HoT sales numbers (estimated to be only 300,000).
Either way, a lot of customers are going to be unhappy. Anet put themselves in a no-win situation and now everyone is suffering.
It’s too late now, but in the very beginning they should have gone the way of Magic: the Gathering…. periodically (perhaps yearly?) wipe the slate clean and introduce all new traits/skills. That way:
- The game always stays fresh.
- OP skills/traits are less of a disaster because at worst they’ll be wiped away during the next cycle.
- Your balance team gets a lot more experience balancing and (hopefully) improves from the experience.
When something like a name change can’t be done, it’s probably due to poor programming practices.
They put themselves in a position where they can’t win:
If they make an elite spec that’s too weak to be used, then everyone playing that profession will be unhappy they didn’t get anything new. So they have to make the elite specs OP, killing build variety and pushing those without the expansion to quit. And considering the poor expansion sales, that’s a disaster.
This is one of the reasons they should have gone the Magic: the Gathering route (Type II, or whatever it’s called these days): where periodically, so many skills/traits are replaced that you have to play a new build.
You’d have to drop the full-priced expansion model to do this though.
Going to be difficult to get a proper breakdown of guild types involved since ANet are the only ones with any idea who are allowed to say anything. I figure they’re looking for how to get PvE players interested as well, but they’re not going to do a WvW update and forget to invite any WvW guilds.
Hi. I see that you’re new here.
It’s not “forgetting” if they do it on purpose, so technically he’s right.
Probably too honest about the state of WvW.
More fun with numbers.
All numbers are rough, but ought to be good enough for discussion.
The Q4 2015 revenues were in excess of 37,000 Mn Korean Won. That’s 37,000,000,000. The Korean Won is currently converting at 1000 KW to $0.84. That means that GW2 revenue in dollars is actually ~$31,000,000.
But wait a minute. Recent Gem store sales have been bouncing around north of 20,000 and south of 23,000 MN KW per quarter. Say we set a generous (i.e, low) rough median for recent quarter sales via gem store of 21,000 Mn KW, or $17,600,000. Subtract that out and HoT sales are about 13,400,000. I’m comfortable with that assumption because the report cites stability in other GW 2 revenue.
Divide that $13.4M by the $50 minimal price tag and you get about 268,000 copies sold. Now, that’s not going to be exact. Some people bought the $75 and some the $100 bundle, but retail establishments paid the wholesale price. My guess is that retail sales trumped the more expensive bundles and actual sales numbers may be in excess of 300,000, but probably not by that much.
Very rough, but enough to evaluate the relative success of the product. For one thing, the number, whatever it actually is, is nowhere near (20+%) of the 1.5M monthly logins claimed in the recent Fortune article, and that’s not excluding any PFF adopters. I can certainly believe that the powers-that-be at NCSoft and ANet are not delighted.
Interesting.
That means of those 1.5 million monthly logins, 80% (those who didn’t get HoT) are likely to, or have already, quit the game.
Reasoning: HoT’s specializations weren’t the advertised sidegrades but were rather upgrades — major upgrades. Also, core-only players actually lost playable content. In this kind of situation, the options are to buy HoT, or slowly (or quickly) lose interest and quit.
Pretty bad sign.
At this point, why are you surprised at this?
Yes. Nothing is worse than QQ posts about QQ posts. It’d be great to downvote them.
Good news is they seem to have come to the same conclusions, considering they now talk all the time about being focused on making a lot more content and making the game less grind-y. But we’ll see.
The grind exists because they need filler because they are unable to create enough real content in the time that they have.
So making the game less grindy and creating more content? Not going to happen.
That may be the case. But if a new group takes up the mantle, and the Old Guard dies, what does it matter?
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LOL. As if people are quitting because they can’t handle change. No. People are quitting because Anet has “developed” WvW into oblivion. There isn’t going to be a new group taking up the mantle.
I forsee many moving on even after they see what is in the update as well.
People will move on because of what they see in the update. Anet’s vision is clearly completely different from WvW players’. There’s no chance they deliver.
You can give all the rational arguments that want, all backed up by viewer numbers… it doesn’t matter. Anet has zero interest in GvG.
It’s too bad because supporting GvG instead of sPvP two or three years ago: that might have gotten GW2 into real esports (as opposed to the laughingstock that it currently is).
In any case, it’s too late. People are going to come back to the game anyway.
At this point, they’d be fools to not move on from WvW.
HoT’s botched WvW “improvements” reduced the WvW population levels so much that it’d be hard to justify putting any dev time into it now.
If they’re smart, they’d just chalk it up as an epic fail and cut their losses by halting all WvW development. If they’re really smart, they’d do exactly that and also string along those who inexplicably have hope by promising a massive overhaul “soon.”
Leaving point meant also leaving her and I never leave her.
Give me a break.
People stuck around in WvW for years despite the awful/lack of support from Anet. After all that, they’d just quit simply because they didn’t want to spend a few hours learning a new map? No.
Having to learn a new map has absolutely zero to do with why most WvW players have quit the game.
The problem with the new map isn’t that people aren’t learning it, or didn’t have time to learn it. The problem is that it’s terribly designed for the kind of gameplay most WvW players enjoy.
So you’re comparing GW2 twitch numbers with BnS numbers from before BnS was out? Hilarious!
Simply change the scoring system so that the value of each tick is determine by how many enemy is currently on all the WvW maps. Basically if you are out-manned and have say 5 players online and the enemy has 20 and is night capping everything they would need to control 4 times more stuff than you for each of the teams ticks to equal.
Furthermore the tick value would be low and have overall less effect on the score as compared to prime time when tick values are high because of the higher enemy.
So get a lead, then have everyone quit for the week so no one can catch up? Have players yell at servermates because their presence on the map helps the other servers get more points?
We have been saying this stuff for years and A-Net is not listening.
Anet’s communication policy will practically ensure we’ll get an overhaul based on their vague interpretation of what the players want.
Anet reads the forums, but do not directly engage. Without asking for reasons behind a suggestion or criticism you are trying to fix an issue with limited understanding. You have as much chance at fixing the issue as you have of not fixing it at all or making it worse.
As a direct result of this policy Anet doesn’t really release anything to the publikittenil the core is firmly set in stone. The beta weekends for the Desert BLs is a good example of this. Many of the issues raised then caused people to sour on the BLs with no changes made. Not that meaningful changes were possible at that point; the so-called Beta weekends were stress tests at best, or publicity events at worst.
They already have a very firm and inflexible idea of what they think WvW should be. Whether they read feedback or not, they’re simply not going to change anything of importance as long as it goes against their vision. Unfortunately, their vision is 180 degrees away from what actual WvW players enjoy.
The new BL’s a sunk cost. It has pretty much zero redeeming value. Just delete it.
My opinion of that news is that the “red alert” was triggered in the WvW department, specially with the upcoming MMOs this year that can take away players, so they need very one to stay around.
What this will represent to WvW resurgence? Simple, a bunch of pretty words to make you stick around in a livestream literally a couple of weeks from now that will divide the forums into supporters of change and pessimists (or more likely realists).
ANET will then go back internally and the following scenario plays out:
“We made it! We bought ourselves some time! Now from that dream list what can we truly deliver?”
“Only more golems Sir”
“Then by god soldier, add Golems to that game, add Beta, Delta, Zeta and whatever other letter of the greek alphabet you can think of Golem in there. Make it so that Golem Week is forgotten and pray, pray to all your deities, that the players love it!”
This is likely right. They’ve done this before when other competitors came out or were about to come out. They’ll say a few nebulous words about exciting updates. Maybe flood the forums for a couple days with dev posts. Then when the time passes, it’s all back to normal: no communication while discovering more ways to insert PvE into WvW.
Every “improvement” they make makes WvW worse and worse. So are you sure you want them to do anything “soon?”