This can’t be possible. Some big new MMO launched and it was going to be the end of the world. The game must be completely dead and everyone else must have left to play that new game.
I’m guessing it’s the WvW league that has people rolling in. Remember today was reset day.
Okay TTS might not be able to start the Teq event, but I know my guild would be willing to start it for TTS. I’m sure many guild leaders who are also members of TTS would be in the same boat.
I’m sure many would be happy to contribute influence and merits to keep TTS going.
When people complain about the megaserver, they often announce that Anet is doing this just because they don’t want to merge servers. Well, I’ve played on all of the higest population servers, and I can tell you why server mergers aren’t going to work.
In Blackgate and TC, when doing popular content, I’m often shunted to overflow. On TC, you can end up in overflow just going to DR for example. I’ve gone to the Shatterer and Claw of Jormag and ended up in overflows.
The problem is on the same server, at the slower times of day, I still can’t necessarily get someone to help me kill the giant in Diessa Plateau.
Even busier servers at off hours can have dead zones.
No one is going to merge Black Gate and Tarnished Coast. They’re going to merge lower pop servers, which would then STILL experience the same problems I have.
Imagine new people in the game, who come in and get to mid level zones. Even on big servers, they might run into no people. People are doing WvW now, or they’re doing the current LS content, and they want to explore the zones.
The megaserver technology will combine people in those zones from ALL the maps, not just a few lower pop servers.
Server merges will not help this game. They are not a solution to Anet’s problems.
And if Anet wants to come out with expansions, and seeing mass migrations to newer areas, they’re going to need something like the mega server….NOT server mergers.
You can’t usually tell how a patch will go till you play it. You can’t judge a book by it’s cover. I’ll reserve judgement until I see what it’s like playing the patch.
I’m a big fan of this change. To me, this is the best and biggest change of the entire patch. For people in other countries who play on US servers, or people who play at odd hours like I do, this patch is a godsend.
And I don’t think it’ll hurt some groups of people as much as they perceive it will.
Good ideas OP, but I’m operating under a different set of suppositions than you are.
First of all, the changes you’re, in my opinion, won’t solve the future problems Anet has. What if this was the groundwork for coming out with an expansion?
Anet has said, and shown, that they’re worried about dividing the population to finely. One of the things that worries them most is the introduction of new maps. When that happens, as in most games, everyone will be on the new maps. Anet doesn’t want to necessarily make every new map as good to go to as every other new map, because that would again divide the player base. The world is too big. The world will get even bigger with new zones.
People are treating this mega server technology as a one off suggestion, instead of a step in the development of the future of the game. WIthout knowing the rest of what Anet has planned (and we honestly won’t know that because they’d be foolish to tell us this early out), we can’t really make suggestions like this.
On the surface, suggestions like this might seem good…but they can’t take into account the rest of what the game designers have in the works. This isn’t the end of the story, this is the beginning of the story.
It’s like trying to suggestion a war strategy without knowing what all the forces are doing. You might get a lot of people agreeing with you, but none of us knows for sure exactly why this has been implemented the way it has…we can only guess.
My guess is that when new zones, or an expansion comes out, they’ll need technology to get people together in old zones.
Because at that point, most people are going to move on to the expansion content.
I’m not sure I understand this.
The OP is right in saying that words can hurt. Words can even kill.
There are two different things going on here.
One is that people who attack other people personally should be banned from the game. Verbal attacks against other people should not be tolerated.
By the same token, there’s also the fact that there a certain sensitivity the comes from being bullied over a long period of time you can’t relate to unless you’ve been bullied yourself. There comes a point where each person who’s been bullied has to look at their life, their emotions, and ask themselves whether or not they’re going to continue to allow other people to get to them. Some people say this is growing a thick skin, but it’s not.
It’s taking control of your personal space. It’s taking control of your enjoyment of life. Whether something said is wrong or right, your need for people to respect you on any level is going to end in tears, because not all people are respectful. So you need to make a decision. To I allow these people to win, or I do I win myself by not giving them power.
I know I chose the second way.
I don’t get most of the above responses. Anet was pretty clear about what was going on and has been clear about it for a very long time.
They used to include features in the living story releases, together, like the account wallet. QoL updates.
They divided these, saying that they’d make a feature only patch because they wanted the focus on the living story.
These are the features that would have come out since January.
That’s what it is, and that’s what they said it was supposed to be.
Anet didn’t hype this patch nearly as much as fans did.
We already have a mount. Go to the cash shop and buy yourself a broom.
A really hope anet come to their senses and cancel the mega-server before there’s a mass migration back to WoW, Aeon, Rift and Final Fantasy 14.
The mega server will more likely save the game than kill it. Everyone on an underpopulated server is complaining, people playing at off hours are complaining and people who play on busy servers are complaining that they can’t get on their servers because you people keep guesting to them.
This is probably the best bit about the entire patch. It’s a major improvement to the game. Time will bear this out.
I don’t understand the idea of trinity balance.
Does that means that healer can defeat a fighter? That’s not balance, that’s making healer OP.
Your right, it would. Balance would be each not being able to kill the other. A tank is suppose to be good at taking damage without dying and not dish it out (that’s the dps job). A healer is suppose to heal damage and not dish it out. A tank vs healer, if balanced and all variables equal (eg. player skill), should result in a stalemate. The healer doesn’t do enough damage to break a tank’s…well…tank and the tank can’t out damage the healer’s healing.
And the third leg of the trinity? The DPSer? Can’t out-DPS heals or tankiness either? Or DPS can kill both. That sounds OP to me. And probably why the DPS:tank:healer ratio in trinity games is always terrible, causing groups to wait around forever just to get a group together.
That’s funny , because in WoW my dungeon wait times are less than 10 minutes as a dps and I don’t need to wait for raids because of guild/flex/Oqueue/open raid, etc.
I don’t know you must be blessed or only running the absolute newest content, because people I know tell me otherwise.
No, they were busy kittening up the server system creating community-destroying Overflows nobody asked for. Oh well.
Except that lots of people asked for it. You may not personally like it, but the idea of underflow systems has been around a long time and people complaining about not getting on their home server for big events were complaining. In essence people outlined a problem and Anet created a system to fix that problem.
I’m pretty sure even now the people who find fault with the mega server are a relatively small percentage of the community (and that’s before anyone’s tried it out).
On topic: This was always supposed to be a feature patch, not a content patch.
For PvE it’s definitely the best. For PvP and WvW your mileage may vary. Not everyone is in agreement there.
There are also areas in PvE where Berserker gear isn’t as good, but they’re few and far between, like the Tequatl fight.
I’ve been over this whole thread and noticed a common trend amongst the angry posts… and that is a mischaracterization or misunderstanding of what was said.
I have no doubt at all that this will be a purely positive experience for many players, and at worst a neutral change for others.
Sorry, but I disagree.
I fully understand what Anet has said so far, and this change will drastically change the way I play this game to the extent I will leave the game.
Right now I only do dailies/monthlies and the 2 world mega-bosses – Teq and Wurm. That is it. There is nothing else that interests me anymore.
I do these 2 events on a semi-daily basis, with TxS, This change means we will no longer be able to organise for and do these events in our accustomed way. Despite the loot being utter crap, particularly with Wurm, many in the guild still enjoy doing this, as much for the social camaraderie as for the challenge.
If Anet changes these 2 events, i.e. dumbs them down to accommodate the megaserver changes. they will become as meaningless kittenterer or Maw and there will be no reason for TxS to exist.
You’re making an assumption TxS or TTS won’t be able to do these events…but you don’t know that for sure. Those guilds are pretty popular. I’m pretty sure Anet doesn’t want to kitten them off.
Why not at least wait to see what’s said before jumping to a conclusion?
I’ve gone many times recently to Divinty’s Reach only to find that I’m on an overflow. This will put me on a server with people I know, instead of being on a random overflow from every single server.
This isn’t a bad things for cities, it’s a good thing.
They said they’ll be making changes to stuff like world boss schedules. Did you not see the number of complaints about overflows and people not being able to get into their home server that occurs pretty much every single time and big world event happens?
This is a long overdue change. I’m sure there’s more to it, since we have two more days of blogposts about it.
The TA Aetherblade path is both newer and longer than most other dungeon paths. I don’t have a problem with more dungeons being added, but I question what percentage of the population actually enjoys/does dungeons.
I wish Anet would publish stats on that.
That’s a really good solution to a thorny problem. +1 OP.
So if you’re in a party your loot threshold is greatly reduced and you can use a staff.
This is very similar to the system that was in Guild Wars 1 for 8 years, for towns and outposts (because the rest of the game was instanced). It worked famously there. I expect it will work here too.
In fact, there are a lot of advantages to the Guild Wars 1 model over the current Guild Wars 2 model that this should fix.
Low pop servers is one thing. Having people complaining about guesting is another.
No system is going to be perfect, but out of a number of imperfect systems, this is the best I’ve seen.
As for RPers, I suspect you’ll end up on servers with lots of RPers, just by the people in your guilds and friends lists.
Changes come around and everyone always yells the sky is falling. I’d at least wait to hear the rest of the stuff Anet has to say before jumping to conclusions.
Keep promotion TESO, it will make you feel better about buying the game, trust me, lol
Promotion? I played GW1 ( still much better than GW2 ), still play GW2 ( obviously, not as often nowadays ) and I bought TESO to test it. Are you surprised? It’s the biggest MMO name in the recent years to premiere this year, in a couple of days.
Open your eyes.
TESO will be another SWToR.
You do realize SWTOR is considered more successful than GW2, right?
That is assuming we are basing success on the amount of money earned.Right, because Anet had to lay off half their staff….oh wait…that was SWToR. Guild Wars 2 performed to expectations and SWToR performed under expectation. That’s the reality.
On topic: The OP is talking about life in cities. I don’t play MMOs to spend time in cities. I’m out exploring the world. I don’t see why adding stuff to cities will make the game all that much better.
I mean aren’t people complaining that there arent’ enough people out in the world. Why make cities more appealing? The open world is where we really need people.
You go out exploring the world when you have Quests/lvling/getting materials, killing world bosses and pretty much “any adventure” to do, alone or grouped, so having more “appealing” in cities, would make your view much better while sitting your big hairy charr butt in LA/and the other capitols when you’re not out there in the world.
Isnt this a mmo? Dont ppl spend lots of time in Cities? then why not to have an Arena for duels with other players watching? Why not have a Tavern Fight ? Why not have race contest? or anything else???
Explain to me why you think adding those things would hurt your gameplay?
I Guess NPC talking is enough for you, if i want to watch ppl talk i would go watch a movie, not play a videogame.
I don’t think any of them would hurt my game play. I’m just not sure any of them will help my game play.
Everyone likes what they like and wants what they want. You want Anet to put time and energy into something you like. Fair enough.
I want them to put time and energy into stuff I like.
The problem is, at least from the perspective of a primarily WvW player, that the devs have been taking the game AWAY from the original vision. Just about everything that has been added to WvW has promoted a mindless zerg behavior instead of the broad-spectrum strategy-based warfare that was originally intended. As I said before, it’s not an issue of how much time it takes to make changes … it’s an issue of which things were worked on and which ones were ignored. I don’t think that anyone can claim that WvW is in a better place today than it was 15 months ago (aside from possibly the implementation account-wide WXP and the elimination of repair costs … minor changes in my opinion), and that’s about as kitten ing an indictment as I can think of.
I disagree. I would however agree that it is very easy to get by with zerg mentality at lower WvW ladder ranks. I do not play WvW on a top 3 server, but I imagine that there isn’t much zerg mentality on the top 3 and I’m fairly confident that a coordinated team who doesn’t zerg will win against zerging. It’s just that at lower ranks where servers do not have enough WvW focused players to keep a cap on the map at all times (or even any of the time) what ends up mattering most is how many players your server has on the map.
I’m not really sure how much they could do to disincentivize zerging. Ideally, a lone player defending a tower, keeping watch for enemies, and calling out when the tower is about to be attacked should be rewarded as much or even more than a person that is part of a zerg running around stomping undefended towers, but from a developer’s perspective it is nearly impossible to differentiate between that defending scout from an afk leecher.
The problem is rather simple, and so is the solution. In the time since launch Anet buffed the individual rewards that came from player kills and flipping objectives. That promotes zerg behavior because it is flat out the most effective way to get rewarded … and has virtually nothing to do with winning the match (spare me the references to reward chests). There really is no reason for players to sacrifice those rewards in favor of actually holding objectives … or more importantly, holding key objectives that leverage the battlefield for taking other objectives. Roaming zergs flipping towers is pretty much the standard now, and even playing on a mid-tier server I’ve often watched in amazement as enemy zergs avoid each other in favor of flipping an unguarded tower … without anyone ever bothering anymore to upgrade or defend it.
If ANet actually wanted to encourage the kind of strategic play style that WvW was intended to provide they would make karma, WXP, and loot some kind of function of PPT. Win the match (or have the most accumulated PPT per tic or per hour or per six hours or per day … whatever) and you get more loot. Take away the loot for capturing anything and you’d have a totally different (and in my opinion, better) game.
Too dependent upon relative player populations you say?? Absolutely … which is another critical flaw that they have ignored since day one. Go back six months ago and check the original WvW CDI on population balance and see how far that got in spite of a lot of good suggestions from a lot of very earnest players.
Any way you look at it, the original vision for WvW was outstanding and the few original shortcomings could have been addressed by now if anyone at ANet cared enough to do so. They haven’t, though, and the changes they have made drove everything in the wrong direction. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any online game concept squandered so badly.
The problem with that reward structure happens when a server simply can’t compete with the other servers in the same tier. Sometimes it really is a matter of numbers.
So the servers that win get all the rewards and there’s no real reason for a server that’s going to lose to come and play at all.
I’m not sure how to solve that problem but I’m sure it would be a problem if rewards were given only to those who dominate.
You forgot duels and mounts.
I KID!
Excellent list, and I can tell you’re approaching it from a developer’s point of view.
May I suggest the addition of a crosshair/reticle for your suggested freelook toggle?
Third-party mods that risk tagging the user as a hacker are already doing this, so it would be wise to accommodate this in-game.Some other random spitballs:
A user-definable key for a 180° turn.
A toggle to show or hide the titles of other players.
When walking, a character should not be able to step off of ledges (like Minecraft’s crouch behaviour). With that in mind, make it so that players can choose between the behaviour of the walk button, so it can be hold or toggle.
Tearaway chat tabs to allow for multiple floating chat windows all showing different channels.
New paper-doll inventory slots for minipets and food. Minipets placed in these slots should automatically show in-world without the need to double-click them in the inventory, and food stacks placed in these slots should be automatically consumed until the stack runs out.
Oh, and my current favourite. Completely scalable and moveable UI elements like in GW1. While I can understand the desire of the developers to have the user interface constrained by them so it appears “tidy”, a player should be able to tailor the UI to completely suit their needs.
If that means obscuring their viewport into the world with health bars, buffs, debuffs, inventory windows, maps and quest trackers in seemingly random positions and sizes, so be it. It should be the user’s choice, not the developer’s. It is, after all, a user interface.Dang, one more:
Sort out the scaling of text when switching to compact UI mode!
This is particularly noticeable when opening the BLTC window, where text looks like it is defaulting to badly scaled bitmap fonts instead of smoothly scaling Truetype/Opentype typefaces.
There’s already a user-definable key to do a 180. It’s called “About Face” you an access it from the Options/Control Options section of the Options menu.
I don’t care if half the posters under me start throwing rocks at me but I am sorry to say I am giving Anet one last chance after the big fancy patch with lots of glitter to announce a big news with lots of new content because I am sick and tired of to log each day to do the same crap over and over and over…
EVERYBODY I know left this game and I don’t have enough arguments left to make people come back to play. I don’t know if Anet realizes that if this goes on with new skins and crap half the player base don’t care about this game will die soon enough. Don’t get me wrong I love guild wars and have been here from the start but there has been absolutely nothing to keep players here for the past 2 years other than farming and zerging. Wow is getting a new big expansion, ESO is coming out soon and in a near future Everquest will be out and if Anet doesn’t figure out that content is what keeps people from going away well I’m sad to say it’s not living story that will make your player base grow….
I know everybody is saying that we must be patient and all but wake up we are in 2014, games come out half a dozen each week, we have given enough patience into this game to at least get something in return for it, not patching and adding stuff that has been mentioned from the start, I know it takes time to make a game and what ever argument people come up with but in this era of gaming with all the choices a person gets it’s more about who gives the client the more stuff to make sure he doesn’t go elsewhere.
I am also not saying that Anet doesn’t care about this kind of thread but any kind of little info even if it’s insignificant just to let us know something big other then patches is coming in a near future would shut me up and make me log with a smile every day….
Thanks for reading and if you want to start kicking me for what i just said well please do.
Things will start rolling faster once China launches and not until. That’s a good business decision by Anet not a bad one.
Did they do things wrong? Perhaps. In our eyes, oh most certainly, but what about in theirs?
At the end of the day it boils down to Anet has their own plans that they intend to follow.
I just want to point out these two tidbits. After working with another company in the MMO business for what will soon be four years, I can assure you that your interpretation of how the MMO industry works is unfortunately flawed.
Because the reality of the matter is that in a community-driven game where profits are made on the basis that players are retained, success is found solely when the catered audience feels as though you (as the producer) have not failed them.
Producers for this industry need only portray their own vision, not abide strictly to it. The audience playing and paying for the support of the game simply has precedence in terms of their vision over the producers. Yes, producer vision is essential – for a product without a desired destiny or major features cannot sell – however selling points of a game in this industry rely solely on the fact that the producers’ vision of the game parallels that of its targeted audience to a degree it can bring a profit.
I want to note that I do not blame any particular section of the company because we don’t have that information to place a target. Mis-communication between branches can kill a company. Micro-management by executives can. Poor development cycles and lazy developers can. Even moderators not communicating with staff and staff not with project managers can.
I’ve seen the game I’ve worked on lose 96% of its yearly stable income sources in a single patch cycle within a month of that release. I’ve seen player toxicity rise to levels where over sixty percent of active players have received at least one account suspension. I’ve seen hacking prevention updates/auto-banning implementations deny over 30% of the playerbase access to the game in one go.
And what’s the worst aspect? The game was slated for success on launch. It reached a million players within its first year as a F2P title with almost literally zero ad campaigning. It’s surviving only because of its first-year/vanilla profit success.
These are the side effects of a game not being maintained well. As an employee, I can assure you that all of these faults are because of a mis-aligned company vision. When the company fails to assume the perspective of the players, the company fails entirely.
I’m not saying GW2 is dead or dying – no – it built way too much hype for that to happen for a long time, and has made a fair share of money on release due to the $60 sign-up fee. I assure you the launch profits were huge based on the number of people I know personally who pre-ordered the game and never played it again after the first week. What I am saying is that ANet is establishing a bad track record; one that isn’t sustainable. Experimenting is great, but it shouldn’t come at the cost of necessary implementations, and if it hasn’t, then there are serious issues pertaining to the teams involved with what should be considered as “standard” game implementations and updates. ANet’s vision cannot just be their own – that is – if they want to succeed as a business, especially in this industry; they need to adopt the players’ vision (I’m not referring to ludicrous posts about demands asking for easymode content and everything being free in the gem store, etc.), and utilize the professional experience they have to make their product the best, because striving for anything less isn’t good enough.
No idea what you’re basing this “bad track record” on, but I don’t think that the game is really in that situation.
Basically there are too many people who really do like the game for it to be in those straights. It doesn’t work for certain types of players…that’s 100% true. It really wasn’t designed for those players.
There are enough people it DOES work for to keep this game running for a long, long time.
You don’t have the numbers to back that up. Just because you think something’s true, doesn’t make it true.
There are entire categories of core features that are missing or underdeveloped. Post-80 content, lasting non-ls content, teamplay mechanics, meaningful guild activities, CPU optimization, UI customization, skills, weapons, classes, races, non-gemstore armors and so on. If you read recent glassdoor reviews by employees (both the good and the bad ones), the general sentiment is that the company is stretched too thin trying to accommodate the frantic LS pace.
Post 80 content? Have as much as any other MMO
teamplay and meaningful guild activities? That’s there
The game is always being optimized, hence we’re able to not have culling anymore
UI customization is not something every MMO allows. In fact most don’t.
weapons, classes, races, etc are just fine. We have those. We have non gemstore armours too.Is this an april 1st post? Where are GvG and HA? Where are Underworld, FoW, Deep, Urgoz, DoA, and Sorrow’s Furnace? Where are the new classes & skills (a handful of skills and traits are fine, but not alone after a year and a half)? Culling wasn’t so much an optimization but a bug fix to enable people to see the enemy…
In Guild Wars 1, where was the WvW, The Fractals of the Mists, the 32 dungeon paths (33?) that exist in Guild Wars 2.
Where was the markpetplace, the jumping puzzles, the guild missions?
It’s different content. You may have that HA and GvG was stand out content, but I never touched either of them. The Deep and Urgoz’s Warren I did once. FoW was okay.
Do you really think the majority of the player base ran the Underworld?
I never said gw2 didn’t have non-LS content, but it’s mostly the same content as day 1.
Sure, most of it. But there’s been stuff added. A new dungeon path, a completely revamped set of three dungeon paths, five fractals (in fact the entirety of FoTM wasn’t here at launch). Some of those jumping puzzles that were added are pretty big actually. The new TA path> The Tequatl and Wurm encounter.
And you know it’ll be a long time before I forget the Marionette. It may not be here now, but I sure played the hell out of it.
There’s been plenty of content and there’s plenty of content coming. Hell, I played the hell out of the Nightmare Tower too.
There are entire categories of core features that are missing or underdeveloped. Post-80 content, lasting non-ls content, teamplay mechanics, meaningful guild activities, CPU optimization, UI customization, skills, weapons, classes, races, non-gemstore armors and so on. If you read recent glassdoor reviews by employees (both the good and the bad ones), the general sentiment is that the company is stretched too thin trying to accommodate the frantic LS pace.
Post 80 content? Have as much as any other MMO
teamplay and meaningful guild activities? That’s there
The game is always being optimized, hence we’re able to not have culling anymore
UI customization is not something every MMO allows. In fact most don’t.
weapons, classes, races, etc are just fine. We have those. We have non gemstore armours too.Is this an april 1st post? Where are GvG and HA? Where are Underworld, FoW, Deep, Urgoz, DoA, and Sorrow’s Furnace? Where are the new classes & skills (a handful of skills and traits are fine, but not alone after a year and a half)? Culling wasn’t so much an optimization but a bug fix to enable people to see the enemy…
In Guild Wars 1, where was the WvW, The Fractals of the Mists, the 32 dungeon paths (33?) that exist in Guild Wars 2.
Where was the markpetplace, the jumping puzzles, the guild missions?
It’s different content. You may have that HA and GvG was stand out content, but I never touched either of them. The Deep and Urgoz’s Warren I did once. FoW was okay.
Do you really think the majority of the player base ran the Underworld?
Most of Arenanets manpower is focused on LS? I’d like you to back that up with some sources. But people will believe whatever they choose to believe sourced or otherwise, so I suppose, carry on.
Yes, you are using apologetic wrong, considering I’m not apologizing for anet. Pointing out discrepancies in what people think or assume happens vs what actually happens isn’t apologizing. It’s informing.
Some people feel there hasn’t been enough content. Others feel there has been some, but would have liked more. Still others feel there was just enough. And others still feel it was too much. No matter what they do, no matter what approach they take, they cannot please everyone. The best thing they can do is make their plans and move forward with them, even if it means stepping on some people’s toes. If you don’t like their choices, there are plenty of other games out there.
@Nage, is it starting to feel like we’re trying to bail water out of the Titanic here?
I don’t have any source. These are my assumptions based on what gets put into the game. Of course like all assumptions they may or may not be true but guess what? You don’t have any source either. So exactly what was your point, other than belittling me?
Again, you don’t have inside info afaik. So how exactly can you inform people when both sides are talking about stuff they don’t have hard data on.
Sure thing, I agree with you. You can’t please everyone, but that doesn’t mean that everything you do is perfect and feedback shouldn’t be given. I understand that you lots love GW2 and there’s nothing wrong with that, but please relax and let other people post their dissenting opinion without accusing them of impatience or stubborness, or dismissing them because they don’t have a source when you don’t have any either.
Maybe it feels like that because it’s what you are doing? On that matter, where is Vol? Haven’t seen him lately.
Off I go to another game, because apparently I shouldn’t bother posting.
This is a great post. Someone posted a positive thread, with a positive opinion. It’s immediately assaulted by someone who’s leaving (again, against forum rules), and you’re telling me I should let people post their negative stuff (when most threads are negative anyway).
You’re in a positive thread, contradicting the positive person. I’m supporting the OP, that’s all.
Plenty of negative threads I’ll never post in, because there’s plenty wrong with Guild Wars 2 that needs to be fixed.
But realistic expectations? I’ll always defend that.
@Nage:
Oh really? Then why would you hire 2 programmers instead of 1, if having 2 doesn’t mean faster/more work?I know some of the manpower “gets lost” on the management and coordination side. I know that if 1 guy can complete a task in 24 hours, having 24 guys on the same job doesn’t necessarily mean that the task will be completed in 1 hour, but you get my point. Nobody is saying that they don’t work enough, in fact I think they work too much. Many just don’t like what their managers makes them work on.
These mental gymnastic exercises are getting tiring.
Look I’m not the one trying to compare an eight year old non-MMO with a brand new MMO. It’s a pointless exercise, no matter who’s doing it. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sequel. Lord of the Rings followed onto the Hobbit, but as literary works they have very little in common. The same is true of Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2.
The complexity of a bigger program requires far more management. It’s not like other MMOs have forums with different types of complaints. No matter where you go, it’s always the same. Some people don’t like some stuff and other people do. That’s all it is.
So someone comes and posts that he thinks the updates look promising and someone else has to come in and say he’s uninstalled (when leaving posts are against forum rules).
It’s not like more than 50% of the threads on these forums aren’t complaints. There are plenty of those. But many of those complaints aren’t realistic from my point of view.
I’ll cut the chase short because my english isn’t that great and I’m short on time.
Some people feel like GW2 hasn’t been adding enough meat. When you come in and tell those people (in this case cesmode, but I could be in his place as well) that content takes time and people are impatient you are being apologetic (or am I using this word wrong?) and avoiding the elephant in the room, the living story.
Please don’t tell me that I’m asking too much or being impatient when we both know that weren’t most of Arenanet manpower focused on LS we could have had plenty of “expansion-like” stuff like we had in GW1.
@Nage: GW2 is much bigger then GW1. So is the number of people that worked/are working on it. Moot point.
Also hello Chris, I love you <3
More people doesn’t mean faster work. It never has. It never will.
Bigger programs are exponentially harder to manage than smaller ones. That’s all there is to it. Guild Wars 2 is harder to manage, even with more people (which doesn’t necessarily make it easier to manage anyway but that’s another story).
It’s easier to manager a smaller project with fewer employees than a bigger project with more employees. A LOT easier.
I wish people would try not to talk for entire demographics If you don’t like an update or feature, then you don’t like it. I know a few RPers who loved this. Shrugs.
I’m sorry but when I look back at GW1 development cycle and compare it to GW2’s I find your posts, Lanfear, apologetic, rather than finding myself impatient.
I’m not sure why some people aren’t willing to acknowledge that this game is a bigger, more ambitious, more expensive and more complex project that Guild Wars 1 was. There really is no comparison.
Guild Wars 1 didn’t have a Z axis, a cash shop, an open world, underwater combat, multiple starter zones (for a single game). It didn’t have five races. It didn’t have different personal stories for different characters (everyone who played Prophecies had the same story and did the same missions. The only difference was a few profession quests, which were minor anyway).
Do you realize how many quests Prophecies had at launch? You should look it up some time. About the same number as Guild Wars 2 has hearts. But Guild Wars 2 launched with 1500 dynamic events. It didn’t have 25 missions, but it has 50 missions roughly per personal story, some of which are different from others.
Even if you add in Factions AND Nightfall, there’s still more content in Guild Wars 2. And the problems with having a format like WvW alone is it’s own special complication for developers.
Guild Wars 1 was a great game for its time, but face it. WIth no marketplace, no z-axis and no open world, it was a far easier game to manage.
A game can either be small and relatively bug free (and even in Rifts case it was still missing features and had a horrible security bug) or it can be large and ambitious but it will need to be built while people play.
I don’t believe there’s a middle ground.
As i said, mmo is not a genre there is only the scale of a project. Just because your peers are garbage doesn’t mean you also have to be garbage.
Industry disruptor – across many industries they keep popping up, because apparently they keep proving people who believe “there is no middle ground” wrong.
People are mainly arguing a decline of standards from gw1 to gw2. Gw1 wasn’t fully featured or bug-free during release, but it was done right.
also, all your examples? all recent games – and again i have to repeat games these days are released “unfinished” except for a few.
Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. So comparing it to MMOs (which are larger and more complex) is pointless.
Saying that GW1 wasn’t an MMO is extremely nit-picky.
That’s not the case. It’s far easier to control an instanced environment than to control an open one. With hundreds of people at one time you have a completely different type of game, with completely different types of problems. Guild Wars 1 had issues, but most of the game was played in areas where Anet had to deal with no more than 24 people at max in those zones. In most cases not nearly that many.
The very fact that the game is larger and far more ambitious makes it harder to manage. The amount of money that went into making the game makes it harder to wait to release.
Comparing an eight year old non-MMO, to a brand new MMO (with the greater costs reflected in the production of it) make it a comparison that can’t be made in good faith.
It’s like saying my old calculator never had the bugs my computer has. Well yeah, because one is a calculator and one is a computer. The more you try to do, the more you’re likely to have problems with.
Hell just the addition of a Z axis makes this game more ambitious. A trading post makes it more ambitious. Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. It didn’t have the same budget. It didn’t have the same expectations. And it launched into a game genre scene that was very different from what it is today.
A game can either be small and relatively bug free (and even in Rifts case it was still missing features and had a horrible security bug) or it can be large and ambitious but it will need to be built while people play.
I don’t believe there’s a middle ground.
As i said, mmo is not a genre there is only the scale of a project. Just because your peers are garbage doesn’t mean you also have to be garbage.
Industry disruptor – across many industries they keep popping up, because apparently they keep proving people who believe “there is no middle ground” wrong.
People are mainly arguing a decline of standards from gw1 to gw2. Gw1 wasn’t fully featured or bug-free during release, but it was done right.
also, all your examples? all recent games – and again i have to repeat games these days are released “unfinished” except for a few.
Guild Wars 1 wasn’t an MMO. So comparing it to MMOs (which are larger and more complex) is pointless.
Keep promotion TESO, it will make you feel better about buying the game, trust me, lol
Promotion? I played GW1 ( still much better than GW2 ), still play GW2 ( obviously, not as often nowadays ) and I bought TESO to test it. Are you surprised? It’s the biggest MMO name in the recent years to premiere this year, in a couple of days.
Open your eyes.
TESO will be another SWToR.
You do realize SWTOR is considered more successful than GW2, right?
That is assuming we are basing success on the amount of money earned.
Right, because Anet had to lay off half their staff….oh wait…that was SWToR. Guild Wars 2 performed to expectations and SWToR performed under expectation. That’s the reality.
On topic: The OP is talking about life in cities. I don’t play MMOs to spend time in cities. I’m out exploring the world. I don’t see why adding stuff to cities will make the game all that much better.
I mean aren’t people complaining that there arent’ enough people out in the world. Why make cities more appealing? The open world is where we really need people.
Real life doesn’t work this way. I’m guessing 9 out of every 10 MMOs launched too early. That’s because projects tend to run over both budget and time. That means that eventually you run out of money. You have to launch to recap some of the years you’ve spent paying people to work.
There really are no easy answered here.
Real life is that some companies are able to pull off a project on a larger scale, and some can’t. There is no easy answer of course but when starting a project, one thing you never want to do is biting more than what you can chew.
Anet made a brand that is Guild Wars; it set a standard to that brand. It made another product promising it to be on a larger scale. For the sake of argument let’s say this product failed (that’s how the people who negatively see it believe). From the consumer’s perspective do you think they care if a company made ends meet or do they care more about what product they have on their hands? This is to give you an understanding of what people think when they express disappointment in the game.
Whether it was a good business decision or not is a different story and it is mainly about profit, potential gains and sustainability.
From a consumer point of view, consumers learn what is and isn’t realistic. How many MMOs came out polished with all the features they’re supposed to have? WoW? Nope. Rift? Nope. Guild Wars 2? Nope. SWToR? Nope.
I can’t name a single MMO that had every feature. WoW, at launch, was down almost as often as it was up. There were glaring errors for the first couple of years, even though it was a fun game.
Warhammer, Age of Conan, Lotro, DDO, AIon all launched with a raft of bugs. Maybe if one company gets it right and launches without a raft of bugs, missing features and problems, you’d have a point. But none of them have. Not one.
So a consumer can either not play MMOs, not play MMOs when they come out, or learn the industry and realize why things are the way they are.
Every MMORPG forum looks like every other MMORPG forum. People complain about missing features, about balance, about bugs, about greed, about pay to win. They all have very similar threads.
You’d have more of a point if other games launched ready, but none of them did. There are games like Rift which had a great launch. But it was a pitifully small world that I was done with in a couple of months, with nothing left to do but collect sparklies.
A game can either be small and relatively bug free (and even in Rifts case it was still missing features and had a horrible security bug) or it can be large and ambitious but it will need to be built while people play.
I don’t believe there’s a middle ground.
You’re very correct Nage, people have no patience. Many don’t even seem to know what it is anymore. They forget that Rome was not built in a day. The same goes for any form of entertainment, video games especially.
Well, being patient towards a game might hold true with games which are advertised as an early access title, but for complete titles some companies just push it too far.
Games aren’t made like they are used to, only a few companies test and polish their game properly. Basically someone somewhere pushed the game before it was ready.
Building games takes years so they should have taken the time needed to polish it properly than release it half baked.
Real life doesn’t work this way. I’m guessing 9 out of every 10 MMOs launched too early. That’s because projects tend to run over both budget and time. That means that eventually you run out of money. You have to launch to recap some of the years you’ve spent paying people to work.
This game was in development for five years. During that time rent and utilities were paid, salaries were paid, but the money from Guild Wars 1, Anet’s only other product wasn’t huge. So they had to make a preorder.
They never gave a release date. They wanted to wait longer, but people got impatient and started complaining, even though when they made the preorder Anet refused to give any release date.
They couldn’t have kept developing forever without creating bad blood. People said, and anyone around then will remember, I don’t CARE if it’s ready I just want to play it. This wasn’t just like one or two people. Forums were filled with people who didn’t want to wait.
So Anet released the game. That’s the reality. They might have been better off holding off on release, but then a different group of people would have been upset.
There really are no easy answered here.
I think the update is a good start too but as cesmode has pointed out a lot of this stuff has been a very long time in coming. Some people aren’t patient enough to let a game develop at its own pace, which is what all MMOs need.
I’m sure that in other new MMOs there’ll be a ton of problems after launch (there always is) and I’m sure it’ll take years to get those problems fixed.
As I’ve said in another thread, before they can fix and patch it, it’ll be over.
April Fools Day is an ANet tradition. It’s something Guild Wars 1 players look forward to every year. And you know, there’s little enough of Guild Wars 1 in this game.
Sure Anet should have thought to put a way to turn it off in, but they didn’t and by the time they can, it’ll be over, so why make 87 threads about it. It’s too late for it to change. Maybe next year it will.
In the mean time, it’s one day out of the 365 days in the year. I feel bad for the people getting headaches, but people who just don’t like it because they don’t find it funny….there’s plenty of threads already addressing that.
There are a lot of things that should be done in an ideal world but they weren’t done and we have a situation at this time were implementing this list in its entirely would likely take more than a couple of years, assuming everything else wasn’t being worked on.
You can say that it’s all fast stuff, but you don’t really know that, and frankly, neither do I. But I’ve seen how long other updates have taken and I’m not convinced that this team can work faster without producing more bugs than we currently have to deal with.
Edit: It’s a great list. But even if it was all an priority it will never all happen in one update. Not even most of it.
I’m not saying it’s all fast stuff. Things like reworking rewards or choosable overflows or fixing pathing issues are slow stuff – and that’s why they’re in the very end of the list. But many things are relatively easy to fix (like, again, “use all” on stacks), and I’d be ultimately more happy if fast things came first because I can enjoy them now and wait for content-like features, as otherwise I may get fed up with small nuisances and leave before they even start rolling out the heavy stuff.
GW2 is not an indie game, and it even reminds me more of Windows 8 – “Let’s change what our freshly graduated marketing guys showed in their cool PowerPoint presentation, let’s never fix what buyers ask for and cover the rest with advertising” – not to Microsoft’s extent of course, but the direction looks similar. As a serious business, ANet should understand that at some point glad veterans become more important than 1-time buyers who wouldn’t even understand that half of my list is worth working on – which the failure of Windows 8 has proved. But “new players” are more or less finite, new games (unlike OSs) are coming out, so now may be the right time to think about their own “solid foundation”.
I don’t like the analogy of comparing this to Windows 8. First of all, a lot of things people have asked for were fixed. Not all the things. As already pointed out, there’s only some much time to fix things. That’s just logic. So some things got fixed, some things are on the list of things to fix.
When the game first started we couldn’t craft from the bank, we could only craft from inventory. They fixed that. We still can’t mystic forge from the bank though. That has yet to be fixed.
And things that should be easy in a program this big and complex often aren’t. Changes made in one place, which might look like easy changes can (and do) affect other systems.
I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done. It’s a good list. And I’m sure over the course of time many of these changes will appear. But they’ll gradually filter into the game. Most people would rather get to fight the next dragon.
I’m a developer in my own field and I see many if not most of these features as “things which should’ve been there from the start” and “things which require tiny amount of time but are not as PRable so they have ultimately low priority”.
I submit that what the game should have launched with is completely 100% irrelevant to the conversation at hand. What matters is that these things aren’t here now and a lot of people want them here. That’s all that matters. And it doesn’t change how long these changes will take. Unless you have access to the Anet code, you can’t possibly know how long this stuff would take. You can guess, pretty much like everyone else.
The big problem here is that, again, people have expectations based on an ideal world. In an ideal world, Anet would have had an extra year or two in development before they launched. That would have been an ideal world.
But the game lauched early for a lot of reasons, probably some of them financial and some of them marketing. You can’t develop a game forever. You have to release at some point.
Also, there was a staff change, quite a major one during development in which one of the key developers left Anet to develop another game, and he took at least a couple of key staffers with him (possibly more).
There are a lot of things that should be done in an ideal world but they weren’t done and we have a situation at this time were implementing this list in its entirely would likely take more than a couple of years, assuming everything else wasn’t being worked on.
You can say that it’s all fast stuff, but you don’t really know that, and frankly, neither do I. But I’ve seen how long other updates have taken and I’m not convinced that this team can work faster without producing more bugs than we currently have to deal with.
Edit: It’s a great list. But even if it was all an priority it will never all happen in one update. Not even most of it.
A list of everything about the game that can be improved is useful. But I don’t believe everything listed is “needed” though some would be nice. Moving stuff directly from a guild bank to the bank for example would be nice…but I’m not sure I need that feature. I actually prefer some of the features that are coming up in the patch. Better PvP rewards, for example, will make it so that I actually PvP, because I hate spending time in PvP, as it felt wasted. That’s a game changer for me.
The account wardrobe, in a lot of ways, is also a game changer.
A large portion of these suggestions would be greatly welcome in the game. Implementing all of them would probably take a couple of years with the devs doing nothing but that.
It’s easy to ask for stuff to be done. It’s hard to get stuff done. Some of these features may come out or be added to the game at some point. They’ll never all be added in one patch.
The people who find everything released by arena net beyond great are even more obnoxious than those who complain./
Strictly a matter of opinion. Both sides have people that blow things out of all proportion to make points. I understand why people might not like this, but I wish I could play this way all the time. lol
Whatever happens with this patch, it’s still only the beginning. There will be more changes moving forward. We at least have a new dragon to look forward to (which many people prefer to chasing Scarlet).
I think you have to change your clock in your bios, not in your windows.
Better call the fun police… ANet can’t let loose one gag one day of the year.
We’re not saying they can’t. We’re saying that the people who want to turn it off should at least have the option.
And if they want to change their computer clock for a day they can. The solution is there, even if some people can’t use it.