Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

Donari.5237:

I’ve been pleased at the uptick as well! I do wish we had some more concrete comments on what’s actually coming. Not nitty gritty details, but more like “at some point we’ll have a third heavy profession” or “we do intend to open up a zone the size of Frostgorge.” And then if worst comes to worst and the coding just won’t work or whatever, you can say “We’re really sorry, but you remember how we talked about a third heavy profession? This weird thing came up that made it unplayable as designed, we have to start over when we have time.”

My sense is that many would be forgiving, but many others would not. I don’t drive the Revelation Train, but I’ve seen a “We’re going to do this… uhhh… no, never mind” scenario work out poorly for game companies, from cancelled titles to reduced features or simple delays. (Won’t name names, but I’m talking broadly, not specifically to Guild Wars/Guild Wars 2 or ArenaNet.)"

You’re basically throwing the baby out with the bath water there. Sure, some will be annoyed, but will it be any more than the people who are currently annoyed? The fact that it’s a decision that has been clearly communicated (hopefully with a little explanation of why the decision was made) will help a great deal with managing people’s expectations.

Keeping everything secret because unreasonable people might be mad is a ridiculous notion, IMHO.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Emtiarbi.3281:

I Think something like this would be appreciated.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Yes, I like that, too! I’ll pass along the suggestion.

I’d love it too, however I sense that given your company’s reluctance to discuss anything that isn’t about to drop onto the servers in the next couple of weeks I don’t think it’ll happen.

As it is, the future of GW2 is far too vague for me to be all that excited about any changes or additions that may or may not be making their way to the game. I’ve stopped playing and I mostly don’t even bother reading the forums or website
anymore because there is no meaningful information on what’s coming being shared there by ArenaNet.

Ranael.6423:

If anything it couldn’t have been planned before the end of WvW tournament (to be sure that players playing PvE and WvW wouldn’t have to decide which activity they’d do) which will be around mid October which is also the start of Halloween festival…. then that leads to early November.

Doesn’t make sense to me. They have reduced the amount you need to do in WvW to get credit for this tournament so that won’t tie everyone up for weeks on grinding sentries, camps and so on and as you don’t have to do the LW stuff in two weeks any more it’s not like you have to do rush through everything a the same time now.

Similarly, this is the third year for most of the Halloween content and the second year for the “Blood and Madness” content so I don’t see why it should be a choice of which to do for most players.

Continuing the Living World at the same time as the WvW tournament and Halloween would give those of us who have no interest in WvW or repeating the Halloween content for the second (third) year in a row something to do.

I suspect that they consider that having any event in the game is enough.

steveway.3167:

Since the first part of the LS was 4 episodes, I would imagine this last part is also 4 episodes. That would put the finale on 12/16. I would think they would possibly start the wintersday activities either the next week (12/23) or the following week (12/30). Although starting on the 30th would be a late start. Regardless they shouldn’t need another break.

I suspect that we won’t see four episodes when it comes back in November, more likely two maybe three; last year Wintersday ran from the 10th of December to the 21st of January, I suspect it’ll be much the same this year, I would guess it will run from the 2nd of December to mid-January. A fourth episode on the 16th is really not on the cards as they don’t seem to be capable of running two things at once (as in they can’t seem to run a WvW season and the Living World at the same time, despite the fact that the WvW season is introducing nothing new, well, apart from some redone achievements).

I would guess that this will be another “Festival of the Four Winds”-style rehash too, it’s still “Blood and Madness”, if they were moving the story on then they would have given it a new name. So no new content for another two months. That makes it, what, over 6 months this year without any new content and they added light content for the other 6 or so months.

A significant departure from their new releases every two weeks last year.

Arlee.7038:

Everything with the Bloody Prince was new last year; so that would be the story instance, the new scavenger hunt, all the interactions between the Mad King and the Prince during the Lunatic Inquisition, and new weapon and armor skins.

Plus the patch last year had a lot of things completely unrelated to the event with it. All of those sorts of things have been moved to Feature Patches, so the event patch(es) should mostly just be for the event itself. Because of that I don’t think it’s too crazy to think they might have more planned for this year. Plus they also can break it up into two October patches.

Well, I don’t think any of that is happening because, according to the recent news post, “Blood and Madness will be returning to Guild Wars 2 on October 21 and remain active until the return of Season 2” so it’s Blood and Madness again, the same release as last year. This confirms that there will be no new content from August 12th to November the 4th then we will probably have two Season 2 releases. This will be followed by Wintersday which will run from December until mid-late January.

If you’re happy with that then that’s great, good for you, I on the other hand think it’s ridiculous how little they’ve actually delivered this year considering that this is pretty much their way of retaining people in PVE.

DoctorOverlord.8620:

Sometimes the short-sightedness of some of the GW2 community is really amazing. I can’t believe how anyone could say this is not something that badly needed to be done. There should have been a tutorial or similar functions in the game at launch.

ColinJohanson.2394:

I want to make it clear: what we used to have absolutely wasn’t good enough for our standards of retaining new users.

MatthewMedina.5419:

But we were seeing a lot of places where people who would otherwise have become active users were churning out prematurely because of the issues that we’re addressing with the NPE.

These quotes are reminders that ArenaNet has the real numbers and statistics of the playerbase. We do not. We have our personal perceptions of the game which are certainly biased and may be very inaccurate. ArenaNet would not have wasted the money and time to make these changes if they had not seen hard numbers showing there was a problem with the new player experience that needed to be fixed.

On a general note here yes ArenaNet had lots data that indicated that there was a problem, I gave back feedback about it during the beta too, about the need for tutorials for dodging, conditions and so on.

They had lots of data that identified flaws in the starter game, it doesn’t necessarily have to follow that the solution they implemented was the best solution for those flaws (or even a solution at all). Will the changes turn off more players than they retain? No-one really knows until the data can be gathered again.

misterman.1530:

Anyone have any suggestions?

Personally, I’m looking at my Steam catalogue while I wait to see what they’re doing next.

I have a lot of games there that I bought in various sales and hardly ever played (or even installed quite often). Might take a break from MMOs for a while.

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

Hi there,

As a follow-up to Colin’s post, we want you to know that we’re working kitten fixing bugs in the New Player Experience system. We’re also using this opportunity to make a few changes to its design to take into account the feedback we’ve been reading. We’re aiming to deploy the fixes early next week.

As Colin explained (make sure to read this post and that one if you haven’t!), this is a complex, “big picture” system that has a lot of components. We want it to benefit all players and improve your game experience overall.

We understand that this is an important topic for the community and appreciate that players have been talking about it. We’ve been triaging bug reports, developing fixes for them and discussing what design changes we will bring to you next week. We’ll continue to both work on the next updates and read the feedback from the community on this topic!

Thank you

I’ll be very interested in seeing what you do with the redesign work, it’ll be a great metric of the kind of speed you can muster there. If you can deliver a solution to the bugs and some of the issues in that time then kudos to you all.

However, once again I feel I have to say that this would have gone better if you were a bit more open about what you were planning on changing in the game. Redesign and reworking a feature after feedback will always be more expensive than soliciting that feedback first and incorporating it (where appropriate) in the work the first time.

If your first thought is “our company policy forbids that” then, well, a company’s policies should be set up to help the company, not to hinder it. Maybe it’s time for a change of policy?

Vayne.8563:

Reyouka.7039:

….. Rangers can’t actually control their pets, one of the main draws of the class, until level 24. Are you freaking kittenting me?

That’s not true. I control my pet on my ranger and I’m not level 24. From where are you getting your information?

From the chart posted, I assume, according to that F3 (recall) would unlock at level 22 and F4 (swap pets) would unlock at level 24, I’m hoping that is not the case with Rangers.

I only regret that I have but one face to palm.

Thanks Robert, I missed that.

What happened to the top ten? Did I miss it?

Hang on a second, from looking at this chart are you seriously telling me that profession “F1-F4” abilities are unlocked from level 4, ??, 22 and 24? Are you really telling me that Elementalists get air and earth at 22 and 24? Are you actually saying that Rangers can’t even recall their pet before level 22? Or swap until level 24?

Dear god! This has to be one of the most ridiculous changes I’ve ever seen in any game. The way you delayed getting trait points last feature patch to give the “illusion” of character progression was bad enough but this level gating sure trumps it!

Wow, you actually intended for this to happen and you continue to sell minis that people will not be able to see? Seems an odd intention.

Oh well, it’s something they’ll be working on in the future, so hang in there and we can look forward to reading about “exciting” changes coming to the mini system in a year or so, “Players will now be able to see their own minis at all times”.

Such excitement! I can hardly wait!

Arlee.7038:

Idk, Mad King was significantly different last year than the year before, we could see a similar progression in it this year.

Eh, maybe, I didn’t think there was all that much in new content last year they replaced the scavenger hunt with a much shorter one and a couple of brief instanced encounters.

I am expecting something more like the return of the Festival of the Four Winds. Minor tweaks.

Yep, Halloween again, the same as last year, it shouldn’t cause a break in the LW schedule (and neither should Christmas) because it will more than likely be the same content as last year (which was much the same as the first year with a couple of new instances) and as such is hardly a substitute for the LW content.

They took a break from the living world between seasons one and two from March 18th – July 1st about three and a half months, now they’re taking a break from August 12th to November the 4th. Another three months.

I think this is insane and I don’t think that “Feature Packs” or a WvW Season is a substitute for Living World content. Nor, for that matter, is a rehashed Festival of the Four Winds, Halloween or other real world holiday, those are things that should just be running alongside the Living World content.

nastyjman.8207:

I’m voting with my wallet. I’m purchasing $20 gems today.

If you’re happy with the game and you can then I think you should and I hope you enjoy whatever you buy with them.

Sharen Graves.1276:

Well don’t forget that the WvW stuff is only a month long and then we still have the Mad King Halloween that usually ends Oct 31st. If you look at the dates the 4th is the next Tuesday after Halloween.

WvW is pretty irrelevant when it comes to the Living World (and I personally find it dull). The Mad King will be what, the same content as last year? With a tweak or a bug-fix to an event here or there?

Both of those sound like something that should just run in the background while the Living World carries on.

I’ve spent so much on this game since launch, more than any subscription I’ve paid and I have to say that I’m done spending money too until they start delivering better content. I’m not “deleting my account” or anything and I’ll keep an eye on it and log in now and then but I’m done spending money on this game.

The news that Season 2 won’t relaunch until November is the final straw for me, I liked Season 2, I thought that the game finally had hit its stride and I started spending real money again and then they take a 3 month break.

November the 4th according to Dulfy.

http://dulfy.net/2014/09/10/gw2-season-2-living-story-returns-nov-4/

This is ridiculous! You took three months between season one and two, then season two ran for only 4 releases and now you’re taking another three month break?

What the hell are people supposed to do without Living World releases?

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

They end at the same level, but now require you to be L10 to do the entire storyline. Previously, a lot of players found it very frustrating to have to interrupt the story steps to level up constantly to keep up.

I found that frustrating too, I wanted to be able to level up characters through the personal story alone. Unfortunately you haven’t fixed the problem. You’ve instead increased the size of the interruption between story steps and think that it’s fine because you get more of them at a time.

Vayne.8563:

The skill point challenges are irrelevant since you can’t use the skills to later anyway. They unlock when you need them.

I’m just stunned this is so painful for some people.

The skill challenges are a great source of XP so you “need” them just as much as you do renown hearts or events because of, you know, the desire to level up.

I’ve always built up skill points for when I unlock them and having to backtrack to the start to get skill challenges, vistas, pois and so on in order to finish the maps is counter intuitive.

I hope they swiftly add a “you’ve done this before do you want to just unlock everything at level one” button to bypass this kind of silliness.

Shen Slayer.3058:

And all the players in-game I know love the idea of a level increase. Let’s get some thing straight here, the people here constitute a very very very small minority of players.

Anet, please don’t listen to a handful of players. Keeping it the same is keeping the status quo, the game needs a change, either level increase or content.

I don’t understand this, what do you think that a level cap increase will actually achieve? How do you think it will change the status quo? Imagine in the morning they increase the level cap to 100. So everyone will have to level up to, lets say, level 100 and then get exotic gear? And then what?

We’re all right back where we are now, apart from the people with level 80 ascended items.

How would anything be different just because we’re at level 100?

Shen Slayer.3058:

I really hope so, that’s probably the only way to retain veteran players, beside new content.

So you think adding more levels will retain players? I doubt it. Especially with the sheer cost of ascended crafting.

I know it’d pretty much be the end for me. They’d need to put out some amazing content to justify a level cap increase.

Eh, not excited no, I’m quite interested in the collections (which seems to be mainly new achievements for the wardrobe, etc) and the TP changes are welcome (and long, long overdue) but there are no real exciting features coming in this pack, IMO. There are some welcome improvements but it’s difficult to be excited about performance improvements, new commander colours and so on.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Those ‘fortnightly updates’ isn’t really true. It’s 4-5 short story contents 2-3 times a year.

Hasn’t been true since about December, IIRC, I don’t think they’ve said anything about fortnightly updates in quite a while.

I hope they get back onto season two soon, “taking a break” after just four updates is surprising to me.

Guhracie.3419:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

P.S: Top Ten list will be out before the CDI.

Does this mean the top ten list will be posted today?

Yeah, I’m very curious to see this top ten list too.

GOSU.9574:

I am quite sure Anet is well aware of this blight issue that has been brought up multiple times since the Commander Tag fire sale began. I am just hoping they take action instead of “waiting to see how this shakes out”. It’s not gonna be pretty……

How would they “take action”? Nothing that those players are doing is “wrong”, as such, it’s just pointless and visually noisy. There’s nothing they can really do.

Hopefully, people will get bored and turn their tags off pretty quickly, otherwise you’ll have to follow the one guy who doesn’t have a tag.

Karizee.8076:

I remember 2 years ago when Blizzard was all over this forum predicting they were going to kill GW2 with MoP but that plan kinda backfired in their face and they lost 3.5 million players. Looks like they are setting up to lose another 3.5 million with their next expac fail.

“Blizzard was all over this forum” two years ago? Really? At launch? I can’t say I remember that.

jdawgie.1835:

Blizzard taking me from Anet as a supporter and fan. NEVER gonna happen. Truth be told I agree with the thread creator to a degree. However Blizzard is famous for giving not a single thought about there vets. Blizz wud rather have 12 year olds running around instead of there B.C. vets.

And like you said we love this game so rest easy bro

Eh, you can support and be a fan of more than one game, you know? You don’t have to be “against” WoW just because you’re “for” GW2.

Anyway, I don’t agree that blizzard “don’t care for the vets”, they look like they’re building an expansion pack that might get me back.

I res everybody I see, apart from where the person is dead and it’s tequatl or wurm or some other “boss fight” where I’m constantly in combat (seriously, there’s always a waypoint nearby). I need no reward but the occasional “ty” is appreciated.

In turn it’s very rare that I don’t get ressed, I suspect it only really happens when other people have their hands full avoiding attacks or just don’t notice me.

Gaia Orunitia.5794:

I want a Dark Knight Quaggan.

OoooooOOoo! Quaggan will eat your soul!

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

More information will be released next week about features that are more suited to veteran players.

Have an e-hug!

bluberblasen.9684:

Hi,
I’m a poor player in this game.. but 120 gold is nothing…
:-)

No, you’re not poor if you consider 120 g “nothing”.

Ohoni.6057:

No doubt someone will say but you never did idea ‘x’ or idea ‘Y’ !!!!

Well that’s one of the reasons why we are reluctant to talk about the road map and secondarily we don’t always agree with what some want but we always stay informed.

Look. Some people are going to be upset no matter what you do. Promise something and never deliver? People will be upset. Never promise anything, leaving the future a murky Sargasso? People will be upset. So ignore that people will be upset and do what’s right. If you promise things and you have a good reason for not delivering, just explain what that reason is, any sensible players will understand and move on.

“Sorry, we planned to do X, but then we decided that Y would be a better idea, and it made X obsolete/impossible/time consuming, so we abandoned it and moved on to Z instead.”

So long as you’re open and honest with us, the bulk of the players will understand, and maybe suggest ways to make X still work, or improve Z to make it more like X, or who knows what we can accomplish together. You know how tons of bugs are never found until a million players are crawling over the new content? Sometimes design ideas are the same way, and the earlier you can get players crawling over the ideas, the sooner potential directions can become apparent. There have been plenty of features that have gone live, or nearly gone live, only for players to point out why that was a bad idea in the first place and it takes a while to fix it.

In any case, this game needs to do a better job of giving players hope. It needs to present a more distant future, however vague, that is more than two weeks out. We need to know where this game is headed in the long term, rather than just wandering in a fog. I’ve said this before, but it’s like on the West Wing, where the President said that sometimes you have to throw your hat over the wall, to make a declaration of intent, so that people know that you’re actually striving towards something and not just floating in place.

We know that you have a policy to not talk about things until they’re ready to launch, but that policy is toxic, and it needs to go.

Exactly, I 100% agree. “Quoted for extreme truth”, as the kids say.* Darned if you do, double-darned if you don’t.

Note: * They may not actually say this. I’m too old for this internet thing, it’ll never catch on.

Edit: really, you say kitten instead of the word for “condemned to hell”? Ok… seems mild to me but, darn it all to heck, I’ll play along.

I have to say I’m not sure what kind of communication you guys are looking at improving, on the one hand you’ve repeatedly told us you won’t be sharing details about what’s in development because it’s against company policy, while Mike O’Brien talks about sharing “the longer-term roadmap” but then talks about something that is not a roadmap.

I’m confused, what kind of communication are you talking about if not sharing information about what’s in the works? That’s what I’m most interested in.

The “Guild Missions Improvements” sound like a nice start but I think that the only way it’s going to actually work is if they introduce a means of “batching” waypoint travel for guilds.

For example, you’re about to start a mission in Snowden Drifts so one of the officers issues a “Rallying Call” to Snowden Drifts which pops up a “Would you like to travel to <waypoint> in Snowden Drifts with your guild?” message on everyone’s screen, with a countdown or 30 seconds or so, when everyone answers or the 30 seconds is up the game waypoints everyone into a map instance that can handle everyone, starting a new instance if needed.

This would enable large guilds to get as many of their players as possible into a map to play together and stop the need for taxiing.

Nick.6972:

How is it relevant to WvW?

It’s not, I assume you saw this post in the WvW forums? I saw it in the general forum so I suspect there’s some glitch where new posts are appearing in a number of forums.

Curae.1837:

Canach is a smart guy, but not an entirely nice guy. And tbh I think the story really calls for someone like that.

Yeah, I was hoping he’d be the Sylvari representative in my little group and delighted when it became apparent that he would be joining. He seems committed to working his debt off, and I think that he’ll provide a nice balance to the other scooby-gang like NPCs (I love them all, btw).

In the party, he knew his role and played the glowering thug to make sure that people wouldn’t get too close to the illusionary Anise.

I didn’t notice anything too off about him in the summit, although Anise and him were continuing their mutual poking of one another and she was obviously grating on his nerves. Nothing too bad there, in fact I thought that the player character’s threatening manner seemed more out of place there.

Ayakaru.6583:

People only do that if the gift is very specific, like a piece of clothing.
Normally, in holland at least, it’s considered an insult when you leave a price tag or include a receipt. It’s like saying; this is how much you mean to me and not a cent more.

A gift receipt doesn’t include the price. It’s there so that if you need to you can exchange it for a different size or whatever, of course, if you’re actually getting a different size then you’re holding one in your hands and so you know the price.

Morsus.5106:

The problem with conditions is not that it can’t 100k burst, the problem is it doesn’t play well with others. 5 Bleeding rifle warriors can only stack 25 bleeds, doing around the same damage as 2 bleeding rifle warriors.

Exactly, this is a serious issue in the game because of the way conditions work, those 2 bleeding rifle warriors also negate the efforts of any other builds based on bleeds.

This has been an issue since day one and continues to be one of my bugbears because nothing has been done and it appears that Anet don’t consider it a problem.

Vayne.8563:

You need to have someone in the guild remove stuff and send it to you. It’s the only way.

Can’t you guest back to the world the guild bank is on? (Genuine question, haven’t a clue).

locoman.1974:

How is your karma?. You can get a full set of exotics from temple armor, temple of grenth gives berserker stats that’s usually the best one for warriors in PvE. You can get a full set for 252000 karma.

Oh wow, thanks I didn’t know that they’d “fixed” the problem with the stats for temple armour!

Well, I’m off to Grenth on my charr warrior, a zerker set will go nicely with his knights set.

1: Anet chooses.

I vote for number one “Anet chooses” because there’s the best chance of something useful coming of it: if we vote for “popular” topics then there is no guarantee that anything will ever be used because our “biggest issue” may not even be a concern for Anet.

Andlat Helsonr.1284:

ColinJohanson.2394:

We also have a lot of people at ArenaNet and you’ve only seen what some them are working on this last year or two. Since we can’t share a road map of what they’re doing per our company policy, all I can answer is I hope when we’re able to show you what all we’ve been doing in total someday in the future – you’re as excited as we are about it.

I wonder if it is GW2 related work, or they are planning on going for a new title… Time will tell, I suppose.

If it ain’t GW2 news then it ain’t news.

ColinJohanson.2394:

The reality is things like these sort of lists of “what is the team doing” like my old state of the game blogs created expectations. When plans, or implementation details changed, or we threw out whole systems because they weren’t good enough – I left the team looking bad for making them break those expectations. I’ve been asked to no longer do those blogs and instead focus on only doing the type of announcements we’ve done this year of stuff that is guaranteed to ship in a reasonable time-frame after we announce it. Things like the living world journal, structure of content for season two of living world, feature packs one, feature pack two, etc.

Ok, so you set out a laundry list of features and you guys didn’t deliver on them. The real problem there was that you didn’t let us know that you wouldn’t be delivering on them, or give any reasons. So you created those expectations and then “wandered off” the path, if you’d managed and corrected them when it became obvious that a feature or piece of content would slip then the team wouldn’t have looked bad and neither would you.

ColinJohanson.2394:

For everything you’re not hearing about…I can only say don’t assume that means we’re not working on it, most of us who build the game all day play the game constantly all night, and are just regular Gw2 players like a lot of you. We’re looking for a lot of the same things out of the game that you are, and we read the feedback from the community constantly.

Right here you’re again setting up expectations that you cannot control, you’ve mentioned too many features that haven’t shown up yet and are now in some kind of “limbo”. If you cancel or put them on the back burner but don’t communicate that fact then you’re not managing expectations. People assume they’re still being worked on and then find out in some random interview that they’re not and the rage ensues.

I personally am incredibly sceptical whenever I read any statement like this from you guys, there are too many “it’s still being worked on and we’re really excited at the idea of being able to talk more about it later on when it’s ready” posts, posts that are basically just empty soothing noises.

You reading the feedback means little if it’s not a two way street with communication in both directions.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Since we can’t share a road map of what they’re doing per our company policy, all I can answer is I hope when we’re able to show you what all we’ve been doing in total someday in the future – you’re as excited as we are about it.

There’s that “excited to tell you in the future” thing again. Change your policy: a company’s policies are not commandments handed down from heaven. They can be changed when they’re not working or just not working as well as they could. You’ve done it more than once already.

Anyway, thank you for your time, Colin.

This thread has bugged out. Annoying.

ColinJohanson.2394:

ipan.4356:

May I ask, “not allowed” by whom? You guys are the developers. Who do you need permission from?

Sorry that should say: “Our company policy is not to talk about what’s in development”.

I think that unless that policy is changed – without a willingness to talk about and seek feedback on what’s actually coming up – then any attempt on you or Chris Whiteside’s to “increase communication” with us will fall flat.

Mike O Brien.4613:

We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.

Well, the problem is that you are now saying nothing until it’s a week or so before it’s ready to go, at which time it’s generally too late to get feedback that can be acted on. Once something lands on the servers it tends to be left “as is” for a long period of time. By that I mean you guys don’t tend to iterate on the design, barring bug fixes you all move on to the next job and the feature or content is left for weeks or months as it is. If that’s always what happens then giving feedback begins to seem pointless.

Look at the Commander Tag changes, if feedback had been sought on those during or immediately prior to implementing them then Zack (<3) and Tyler (<3) could have enjoyed their weekend off rather than having to come in and rewrite anything. My point, ultimately, is that you’re trying to “protect” us by managing expectations and ensuring that the “ZOMG ANet lied” rage is kept to a minimum but doing so results in features that aren’t all they could be if you had sought more direct feedback on implementations earlier in the design and development cycle when it would cost you less in time and resources to act on it.

Mike O Brien.4613:

Don’t read that as meaning that we don’t want to talk with you about the longer-term roadmap. The intention of the CDI threads is to talk with you about the roadmap. We want to talk design philosophy with you and hear how you want to see the game evolve. When those discussions trigger development, we’ll work internally until we have something we’re proud of before we’ll announce it.

Have the CDI threads been good? I mean, from what I can see there are a lot of suggestions made there but very little feedback from you guys either in the threads or afterwards. They are certainly not a “roadmap” in any sense of the word I’ve ever seen used (I have 18+ years as a software engineer, that’s horrifying to see written down) as they give us no visibility at all and no idea what to expect or when.

While we’re on the subject, I don’t know how many changes have been made as a result of the CDIs but from looking at the suggestions in the commander CDI the only thing that has happened from there is that the tag is now account bound (which is a logical progression taken from all the other areas of the game that have become account wide, WvW rank, ascended weapons and armour and so on) and 4 different coloured tags. They’re good and they’re welcome changes but are any of the other suggestions there being considered or worked on? Are any changes to the functionality of the commander system being implemented?

I pick that as a recent example, and I’m not pressing for an actual answer to those questions but the same questions hang over all the CDIs: is anything actually being done with the suggestions made? As the weeks turn to months and there’s still no sign of the CDI having had any effect on the game it gets frustrating and people (me included) start to question if there’s any real purpose to them. If they were just a fad that has been dropped and they have been dropped so I’m glad that you will be reinstating them.

Mike O Brien.4613:

I’m going to support the team in consolidating and focusing as necessary, so that we can be clear to the community where you can go to get a response.

I very much look forward to seeing that. Thank you, Mike.

Aedelric.1287:

Ten more mini Queen Jennah’s.

rolls eyes

But with shoes on this time so she’s not like some grubby urchin.