Guild Wars 2

Rethinking Nicolas the Traveller idea:

What if Nicolas successor doesn’t simply collect stuff from a map, but from certain locations in the whole game? Week 1 would be rare spawns in ruins in any zone, Week 2 would be rare spawns in caves/mines, week 3 in Ogre territory, etc. An additional dropchance from events in those locations.

People would finally feel rewarded to explore hidden mines, corners of Tyria… you can’t drop mystic coins in all of the maps

timmyf.1490:

Remember when Southsun had those Magic Find buffs? What if there was just an NPC – Nicholas-style – who moved between zones every day. He gives you a buff with +MF EXP Karma Coin only within the zone.

I love that idea, but I also think that events feel too unrewarding compared to champions. Also exploring feels too unrewarding to me, why not have the champions roam around instead of waiting on a location to be killed?

Lasur Arkinshade.4107:

What we need, and I am honestly not sure how best to achieve this, is a reward structure that inherently rewards people more for playing the widest variety of events throughout the game, and for playing them as intended (ie not intentionally failing the events for more champion spawns or whatever).

The first idea that comes to mind is something similar to what you did with hearts and map completion or what a lot of other MMOs do with quests and loremaster-esque achievements: An achievement with some meaningful reward (likely a title) for completing events in a particular zone. What if there was an achievement for completing every event in Queensdale that gave you the title “Queen’s Protector” or an achievement for completing every event in Brisban Wildlands that gave you the title “Tamer of the Wildlands”? Something like that I imagine would encourage people to do those events – even if it only works once, which is why we’d need some sort of more comprehensive reward structure overhaul for the long term.

good one, this is one of the ideas we discussed during the horizontal progression CDI. The problem imho with that idea was that people would eventually have to wait for events with longer spawn timers. Waiting for an event to happen isn’t fun. Some ideas (which surely aren’t perfect either):

• reward for doing a number of unique events in a row (without having to do all in a map). Why not give us a champion bag after 3 unique events. 2 Champion bags after 6 unique events etc. Reset would be at 5 champion bags.

• like above but a more hardcore approach: reset when using a waypoint. This would prevent players from using waypoints only to find events near waypoints.

I agree with Anthony, that events should be the core of the game experience. Or in a different perspective: exploration should be the core of the game experience. Imho DryTop is a good start since people search the map for events, BUT over time people learn the timetables, learn the location of the events, so the experience will feel more and more like a grind (as people always do the same, contrary to Anets vision of adding new events while increasing the intervalls for older events to spawn).

I think Anet should try to realize the once dropped vision of having tons of events in a map rather than only a few which repeat constantly. Now with the incentive to do these events (map-progress) it would make the experience much less stale.

Sure, trains would get hurt since people have to look out for events in other places than the known ones, but it wouldn’t get boring as fast. Also I’d suggest to add more desireable rewards to the last two/three tiers.

it’s in the blogpost:

These backpacks don’t take much to build, but they’ll guide players up from novice to adept crafting in each discipline

Almost everyone (looking at this thread http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2eqmu5/discussion_september_feature_pack_2014_announced/) is disappointed of the feature pack so far. It hurts.

I think it’s really time to rethink the policy (is there really a need to do a CDI to discuss this?) and to get more transparent. I’ve never seen so many people disappointed about this game…

Belzebu.3912:

but the new backpieces seems to be end level crafting, so rewarding the veterans.

only crafting level 0-399, so no exotic lv.80 backbags. Not for veterans.

Colin, I think it won’t hurt to try it, even the ones who don’t like the idea can probably be convinced if it turns out to be well made. It’s certainly better than moving on the way it is now.

I guess you’re right phys

Clerigo.9475:

I stopped playing GW2 last week, and i wont return until you guys deliver what was promised.

Normally I stop reading here, having us users stating that “things were promised” is the first step of devs ignoring us. For the record: nothing was promised as everything is subject to change.

Even if you seem to acknowledge the difficulty of finding something useful in these forums, you should consider: thousands of player replies with tens of thousands of different opinions.

once upon a time… http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/uowdy/looking_at_the_difference_in_the_gw2_team_ama_and/

it was a nice experience

I’d love to see a Anet AMA again, with a lot of direct answers. Could go a long way in times like these when the community isn’t happy about the communication imho. It would take one day (or two) of every devs time to repair Anets image.

thinking of it, maybe it would be a good idea to vote for representatives for each sub-forum (forum-users) who then collect questions for the devs which would be adressed once each month or so.

These representatives each would open a reddit-thread to collect questions, up- and downvotes could help them to filter out popular questions while they still should skim through the thread to find interesting ones that haven’t been upvoted as well.

just an idea, this would at least make it easier for the devs to find out what is important for us instead of having to spend a lot of time in the forums.

Rauderi.8706:

But are they limited in expressing opinions or statements of liking?

Forum: “I have X idea on how to Y.”
Dev: “Oh, I like that idea. We’ll look into it.”

The acknowledgement is a simple way to show us that our ideas are getting heard.

I can clearly remember that (edit: oops wrong name) Chris Whiteside did appreciate certain ideas a couple of times during the horizontal progression CDI. (which had an impact on the game as it is now, as I linked earlier)

The thing is… he seems to be one of the few who has time to do this (which is/was often after work, so this tells A LOT about him as a person as well as his motivation to keep communication running). I guess we can’t/shouldn’t expect this from the developers since they have a great game to work on.

It’s a tough nut to crack, I think it would be best to dedicate specific people to communication, and I mean not someone who works on the game. It has to be someone who has a direct line to the team which works on specific things.

If I had the money I would probably hire someone for each sub-forum (sPvP, WvW, Dungeons,…) who commutes between dev-workplace and forum, who makes notes and asks a few questions without hindering the devs from doing their work. Someone who is as passionate about the sub as the players who play that specific content all the time. And whose main job is to talk to us in a Gaile Grey-frequency.

I can’t find the post anymore, when will the new CDI begin? And it’s about changing the policy/communication?

DDCarvalho.2071:

After 2 years of game without a precursor, I want that precursor crafting as much as any 1k+ hours player without a precursor, but I really think that people talking about it (or SAB) in this thread are going off-topic, just because a dev is watching the thread.

Well, I talk about it because it seems to me that the community-reaction on the delay of pc-crafting is the reason why we haven’t seen roadmaps for 2014 anymore.

I ask myself this: what is worse?

• the scenario after the delay of precursor crafting
• the scenario when no one knows how the future of GW2 will look like

In the first scenario at least we had a bunch of things to look forward to, to focus on – and most of them implemented (which means: happy customers). In the later scenario we have no idea what to look forward to and are afraid of the things they might not add ever. There might be new features added along the way, but our focus is still on other things.

… and think about how scenario 1 could have been better if Anet could have clarified exactly what it is that makes it last longer – open brutal honest communication.

polls (as I mentioned here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Communicating-with-you/page/19#post4334333) would be a bad idea imho.

• you only get the results of the forum-goers (a minority)
• you can’t be sure someone isn’t making scripts in order to manipulate the votes
• people would rage about each others votes (see: Evon vs. Kiel)
• as Colin said: priority may shift because of many factors, like illness of a dev, unpredictable bugs, etc.
• we don’t know which features we have to sacrifice in order to bring the developer to the feature we want (e.g. development on SAB —> no new maps in the near future) as long as we have no insight in what everybody is working on.

Anet has the numbers what people are doing in the game anyway. I too think that you shouldn’t trust those numbers too much though, for example:

People aren’t in the open world. This could mean that people don’t enjoy the open world. Personally I would enjoy the open world if we could find something of value while exploring.

Ohoni.6057:

snip

And what if the results would look like this?:

A. SAB World 3 —> 32%
B. An Aetherblade Retreat style dungeon --> 40%
C. A Not So Secret-like jumping puzzle in the new zone —>28%

Quite even results. Furthermore, the survey (when holding on to the policy) would more look like this:

A. SAB World 3
B. ?? can’t talk about future projects
C. ?? can’t talk about future projects

Zok.4956:

But the result of the poll could also be “only 10% liked the SAB, but 80% liked the LS2.0 so far” .. which could lead to some other priorities or some confirmation for A-Net.

A good designed customer survey can be a very informative and powerful instrument for a company. Please do not trivialize it.

I think you don’t get what I was trying to say. My point is that the outcome of a survey could make more peope unhappy because of the shift in development which would result. When we don’t have background knowledge about what needs to be sacrificed in order to work on something specific, there’s no point imho.

ColinJohanson.2394:

This post would be in an effort to help drive, and help create discussion.

So there is no discussion in that sticky but you expect discussion about the raised questions in new threads.

I would suggest to add a direct link to a new thread to each issue (created by a dev) which adresses those questions. Otherwise people would probably create a single thread about the sticky and discussion would be hard to follow (see CDI).

People would post their ideas/thoughts about those specific questions when they know that devs would focus on these threads first.

laokoko.7403:

I dont’ see how it matters. how many of last cdi issue were even addressed.

I can only talk about the horizontal progression CDI: tons of it. DryTop looks like a direct result from those thread. Also that they have made the living story repeatable, the permanent missions etc. People who participated in that thread and play the game certainly know.

btw. this suggested sticky-idea is no discussion like the CDIs. It’s a post in each sub which tells us what thoughts Anet has on high priority stuff they’re working on, which gets updated with each new step in that direction which makes it into the game.

Why would this be good? Because we’d know that they have stuff xy in high priority and are working on it.

I’d be happy to see a test-run though, before doing it for every sub. I’m not 100% sure how it will look like.

I think polls wouldn’t have valuable results because of this:

Q: How important is SAB for you?
A: Very important —> tons of people
B: Neutral
C: I can’t stand it

Anet: Ok, you voted for SAB, our map-designers will now stop working on new maps and focus on SAB only. You’ll get world 3 in 3 months, no new maps in the near future.
Us: O______o noooooo

As long as we have no idea how ressources are managed and what needs to be sacrificed in order to make something else happen, polls would make little sense imho.

DonRobeez.3560:

I have been a huge fan of GW1 -snip-

Posts like these (bla… I quit!!) are in no way helpful and contribute nothing in this forum to make GW2 a better game. Making the game more similar to GW1 is a very vague statement (it’s not as simple as we’ve seen with the trait-revamp) and adding a mode from a game with a healer-system into GW2 isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be.

Anet stated more than once that they are testing different gamemodes and don’t find that these live up to their standards, so it’s their right to not implement it if it doesn’t work as you might think.

That’s one of the problems, people in the community aren’t listening when Anet explains why they haven’t done anything specific. You just ignore it and state: GW1 had it —> GW2 must have it or I quit.

Colins sticky would certainly remind people like you what Anet stated in the past (in case you might have missed their arguments). I’m sure most of the info “won’t be read” by some of the players who WANT certain things.

Blaeys.3102:

It is in the company’s best interest (imo) to get ahead of those messages and clarify their intent. You need to make statements about your intentions regarding SAB and 5 player dungeons – because, right now, everyone is forming negative impressions based on off hand, 20 second soundbites from a busy trade show.

Get ahead of the message – quell the panic – and clarify the company’s position regarding those features/content types (because, again, if you dont, people will make assumptions – in most cases, negative). In these kind of situations, silence is its own form of communication (and not a good form).

well they did clarify this already in the mentioned interview to an extent, people don’t read long clarifications though. A few minutes after the interview was live reddit and the forums were full of “SAB is dead, RIP SAB” posts and people who haven’t read the interview would think that the devs have no intent on developing more content for SAB.

What they did say: not in the near future. It’s pretty clear that you need the dev for the new map(s?) imho since the LS leads us westwards.

They could have clarified that bit though… either SAB or new Maps. Correct me if I’m wrong.

It seems that the game is just too big to have people work on stuff without making others die in frustration.

The only solution I could make out of that would be to expand – hire more experts to have more ressources working on the different aspects of the game. Communication wouldn’t help really since you can’t split a developer.

Dev X who is responsible for A, B and C is working on B. A&C-Fans: BOOOOOO!!

like: fgs, why is the trading-post still not filterable? —> because the dev responsible for this is deep into a new system which hasn’t been announced yet. The team responsible is working on the question of… (add bulletpoint from Colins list).

Maybe a big step towards improving communication would be for Anet to tell us who works on what (not in detail but as a overview).

This could help people understand why certain areas/features aren’t being worked on currently – like the SAB example a few posts above.

A lot of people are frustrated, for example, that Anet stated that dungeons aren’t actively being worked on currently. If Anet would state what those “dungeon developers” are working on in general (scripting events for instances, creating instance-layouts,… idk) and then tell us that they are currently busy doing their job, maybe on something that hasn’t been in the game yet – but still nothing specific, some people would get it.

pelle ossa.9705:

do you know about arenanet = 350+ ppl?

so please tell me how many map designers Anet has! And then tell me how many of those are as good as Mr.SAB.

tanf.8917:

Ok, lets take something that actually exist, for example, SAB. How many topics there is about SAB? a lot. Players tried to communicate with you, asking SAB to be back, over & over & over again, and what do we get in return? “SAB will not be returning for awhile”.

That’s not how communication works. So i’m gonna pass.

Some people might not realise the limited ressources Anet has. SAB was a project of a developer who creates new maps (if I remember correctly), currently we venture into new territory and got a new map (DryTop) in the first episodes. It would be really surprising if we stop now in progressing westwards, so I’d assume we get more map(s) soon.

People wanted new maps, everyone wants new maps.

Why would Anet priorize SAB over new maps? Even if SAB fans really want it, it would hurt the core game.

If you ask 10 people what they want you’ll get 20 different answers. You can’t expect Anet to give a answer to everyones questions when they try to keep the new maps a secret. And why are they keeping new maps a secret? I guess it’s to keep expectations on a realistic level.

I guess the Atlas experience gives me the impression how things can turn out pretty bad when left unchanged.

I hope the devs won’t stay away from this and similar topics because a bunch of people try to derail the threads again and again.

seriously frustrated wvwer, this is not a bug-list, start reading the actual topic

Arghore.8340:

@Darmikau, that was an interesting thread to go through, I skimmed through 7 pages, but from what I got from that the discussion was very interesting, insightful, respectful (both ways – though possibly the rating system helped there as well), and here I thought LoL was rage hell on earth…

I agree, it’s a good example of valuable user-developer discussion. I love rating systems as well, user-posts who troll or can’t contribute will get folded so that you don’t have to go through that nonsense – which is also discouraging for trolls or people who can’t contribute in a respectful manner.

I really think that the forums need an overhaul, since communication between us and the devs is made through the forums and those can get pretty overwhelming to read – which takes more time for the devs than they have.

I made this suggestion before, implement new features in the forums to increase readability.

you derail the thread guys, keep your suggestions elsewhere please

why all those suggestions Lich? Have you any idea what this topic is all about?

I agree that something to capture any progression should be quite of value. Look at the CDI threads and the feedback now, people cannot see how their contribution helped the development. Maybe they haven’t seen all of the posts in there (the threads were massive) or maybe they can’t remember, but those threads had influence on the game as it is today imho.

It could look like this:

• Oct.14 Character development pre- and post lv.80

• Nov.14 Character development pre- and post lv.80 —> we tried to open up new ways for horizontal progression by adding …

• Jan.15 Character development pre- and post lv.80 —> we tried to open up new ways for horizontal progression by adding … --> Feedback shows that it didn’t work out exactly as we thought, we think development pre 80 is fine now but post lv.80 needs work still

etc.

Edit: sorry, I didn’t read the post well enough, Colin mentioned that updates will be made; my mistake.

I don’t fully get it (what are major-threads?) but I think it sounds like a good idea.

cainejw.7142:

Now, this is part of the problem. You say it did, but you can’t say how. Say how!

Well it should be obvious for people who participated in the CDI and play the game.

I participated in the CDI about horizontal progression and we discussed map / zone rewards. This was what I suggested, dev-reply in the source-link:

Fill the existing maps with tons of things to do. I mean: tons and tons of things. And may these be just little things… the world has to feel more alive.

…and then combine this with progression. The more people find, the more they unlock. And the more they can unlock for others (in the sense of triggering new events).

summary: progression in specific zones via a huge variety of things to do (something for everyone – fighters, explorers, collectors, lore-lovers, treasure hunters,…………

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/CDI-Character-Progression-Horizontal/page/29#post3445128

I very much feel like comments like this had a big impact on the creation of DryTop.
Just an example.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

This said I personally feel that there is room for maneuver and a policy adjustment to be more inclusive.

I am really looking forward to seeing how the next CDI goes as that could lead to some more open discussion for sure.

I wonder if it’s even in our power to make policy adjustments possible in the future. The thing is: I don’t have the feeling that you devs don’t want to talk about your work, but that you aren’t allowed to… and I’m not sure if the person who is responsible for that policy is even interested in a change.

if you say it’s possible, I guess I have to trust you

good morning Chris! Take your time, welcome back!

hm thoughts thoughts thoughts…

Anet: We work on precursor crafting because we want to take out the rng factor to obtaining one
Us: Yeah, great!! Can’t wait.
Anet: (later) we had to scrap that feature because it doesn’t work with system xy
US: booo

alternative Anet answer: we had to scrap that feature but as you know it’s still a high priority for us to take out that rng factor here. We had to scrap it because… problem x, y, z.
Us: well that actually sounds like a legit problem.
Anet: yeah. We think that because there are that many problems with implementing that system we should admit having made a mistake by not implementing it in the first place.
Us: oh. Well this sounds like we’ll never see precursor crafting then???
Anet: We looked at what needed to be different to implement such a system from day1. We want you to get that epic experience so our teams are working on new legendaries with that in mind. We will put in parts of that new system for new craftable pieces (like the vine backpiece) and will collect your feedback about those. This will help us to find the most satisfying precursor crafting system that we can create for you (and us).

So admitting mistakes, acknowleding current problems and at the same time showing that the intentions to make someting out of it… even pointing to some smaller steps that will be done and collecting our feedback …

… I can’t think of how this would anger most of the playerbase.

I wasn’t sure about those glassdoor reviews I saw posted above but after taking a look at it it’s really quite interesting. Reviews (I looked at the latest ones in Jul/Aug 14 are really positive and the cons are elaborated quite constructive and aren’t hopeless at all. It seems that communication is THE big problem in the company, not only communication between players and devs but also internally.

I really hope they find an experienced pro in that area who can help the company in that department. Reading those glassdoor reviews Anet seems a really great place to work anyway, I wouldn’t have expected this when I think about all the frustration the devs must experience when interacting with “the internet”.

Taushullu.6180:

• Suggestion: Anonymous Dev Accounts/Posts

I don’t like the idea that devs should risk their job by going behind their employer’s back. There needs to be found a solution which makes everyone happy. The teams aren’t that big and internally I think it’s probably quite clear who knows what and who works on what, so the risk seems quite high.

it must be really frustrating for devs when they work for months on a project (like EotM) just to get the response from players that “it’s not WvW”. This is only an example, there are more. People state things like that about DryTop, sPvP maps,…

Because of this I understand why devs would hate to read forum posts (tons of non-constructive, non-respectful posts among the better ones).

Personally I love reading constructive posts on reddit. I downvote players who answer in non-respectful ways regularly. The reddit-tool remembers those downvotes and marks those players with red tags for me, so it’s really easy for me to skip their postings. This way reading through reddit threads without constantly getting the bad vibes is relatively easy for me.

Prysin.8542:

which in hindsight can be seen as a bad policy. Just look at the dissatisfaction on these forums, that policy is the sole cause of that. […]

I understand your point, but how would you suggest to prevent future outrages about features that get announced (like the precursor hunt) and possibly scrapped later on because it doesn’t meet Anets standards?

People will scream that they’d rather want a bad implementation than nothing at all, but this would lead to a game where half-baked stuff is implemented which would lower the quality of the game as a whole.

I think that the minimalistic forum structure is a big problem for readability. It looks nice, but it’s quite difficult to read through big threads and focus on a specific idea.

The imdb message boards has some nice features that would certainly help analysing threads like the CDI one.

• you reply not on the thread as a whole but on the posts within. If you don’t want to discuss a certain idea it’s easy to see where another idea starts. The answers on a post are indented (is this the right word? english isn’t my main language, sorry).
• merging wouldn’t destroy the whole thread since ideas are still structured and can be followed easily.
• you can minimise posts. It would be helpful I think if devs could (on their own account or dev-account) tag certain users as “destructive” so that their posts have a different colour or get minimized automatically. This would certainly decrease the frustration when reading a thread since devs could easily skip trashtalk.

I love the CDI’s and parttaking in them, but I think it’s very hard to follow ideas in there and it’s very difficult to read when you’re a day away. There needs to be a certain structure.

You can’t change the Thread-structure over night, but I think doing the CDIs on platforms like reddit (which have a much more readable layout) until the forum-changes are done would go a long way.

• new ideas and answers to it are seperated from different ideas and answers automatically
• You could ask a reddit-responsible to disable the downvote-function.
• when you install a tool (forgot the name) you can tag other users in order to increase recognition of those users.
• you can easily minimise posts (and their follow up posts) which makes it much easier to find new idea-strings

TL:DR: I think that the simplistic forum structure is a big hindrance to good and productive communication. There are very good examples of forum-features out there which help in readablity and filtering bad posts(posters).

PS: such a simple thing as forum-avatars would make it much easier to find well liked posters and/or identify forum trolls.

Edit: example of reddit-structure: http://i.imgur.com/3QEqsQ2.jpg

Dusty Moon.4382:

The whiners don’t count anything that is not something they are interested in. That is why I and others on this forum have stated that players only look at what they are interested in, not the whole picture of the game (looking at a tree and ignoring the forest).

exactly, WvWers still whine about getting NO updates since release while they got a whole map (EotM) which took months to develop… still they state that EotM is not a WvW map. Instead of bringing constructive criticism how EotM could be turned into something they feel is more in the spirit of WvW or bringing ideas how to include some features from EotM into classic WvW maps they favour whining about NOTHING NEW.

I think the first thing that should be happening is a big ban-wave to all of the users who derail threads. You can perfectly observe it in this thread, people start claiming some nonsense and others jumping the bandwagon, which makes a further constructive discussion impossible.

Yes, people have a right to get angry, but they have no right to claim assumptions that Anet doesn’t care, that it’s too late already or that PR wrote that statement. This isn’t not only not helpful but those killerphrases cut down any constructive discussion.

And then, when only people who can voice their opinion in a respectful manner are among us, constructive communication can happen.

Why is it bad to give people a variety of things to do in order to work towards a goal? I don’t get that attitude from players in GW2, at all. You should show mastery of different aspects of the game in order to qualify for something extraordinary. This is only the light version (5 fractal relics, seriously?), imagine what you’ll gonna have to do when precursor-crafting goes life.

Maybe one or two guys will never finish this backpiece because they don’t touch fractals, still it’s a win for Anet if only 20% of the players who learn to know fractals this way find out that they enjoy it and continue playing. (about myself: I always hated the dungeon-speedrunning/elitist attitude but I tried fractals anyway and found out it’s actually really fun since there are tons of players out there who enjoy casual runs also)

I like that you have to do specific and not generic things to work on that item. It points people to things they woulnd’t see otherwise, which is a good thing. The requirements are really low too.

Vayne.8563:

People will scroll their mouse, but in that view, suck at the game and leave. You overestimate people. Most of this game wouldn’t really be playable in first person. It would be most useful for screen shots.

If you ask me the game is already unplayable when fully scrolled in, you see your big character from the back but nothing much else. You already have to zoom out a bit to make combat any effective. (I don’t know if this is true for all races though, playing small-created norn mostly)

Why not make 1st person not work when in-combat? Have it scroll out automatically when engaging in combat.