Guild Wars 2

Does ANet really expect the players to take each character through all the living story S2 chapters to make it the new zone? I understand that the story in GW2 is sole bound, but making the new zones soul bound as well is just poor design.

Season 1 zerg contents were always buggy and ANet couldn’t keep up with the number of bugs they had to fix on each release. So they went back to more solo or small group contents which is less buggy because easier to QA. I doubt we will see ever contents like season 1 anytime soon. Also they are focusing more on the lore and back story fillers which honestly I couldn’t care less about…but at least we have less bugs…

Big Boss.7902:

Their focus is on people who buy gems.

Any content that does not directly result in people buying gems is given a back seat.

A new continent, won’t directly result in someone buying gems.
A new permanent dungeon won’t directly result in someone buying gems.
A new map for WvW won’t directly result in someone buying gems.

A new theme for LS with new items based on that current hyped theme put in the gem store will.*

*Much less work than a new continent and keeps the cash flow ticking over on a more regular bases.

I’ve been away for over a year and it is actually shocking how little content has been added to this game.

The LS and all it’s contents might produce some revenue, but the main focus of ANet is the new player base and new markets for the game. I couldn’t possibly imagine a player who has played the game for over two years still throwing money (not gold -> gems) in the gem store every week…Back when I was a new player, I was spending tons of cash in the gems store buying bags/banks slots, finishers, skins, tons RNG keys (This one still hurts the most) and bunch of other stuff. It was costing me almost 5 times a subscription cost per month, until I realized that the gem store is a none-stop train with nothing to show for it. I saw this late, but better late than never…That said, there is always more chance of a new player buying gems mostly because when you start the game everything looks cool until you realize the sad truth…but its also not easy to maintain a free-to-play MMO with 200+ people working on it everyday. I don’t disagree with ANet’s business model, but I wish the contents were more solid than the living story stuff…This way they would keep the veteran players happy and attract new players as well, all with the same kind of contents and I am not talking about an expansion.

As a WvW player (for most part), I don’t regret not buying anything in the gem store for the past year or so, but I really wish it was the opposite because GW2 has a strong core and it’s not a bad MMO.

At the end of the day “its just business, nothing personal”….

Great move by ANet but why can’t we use badges of honor instead of gold? 2g is actually a pretty high price for some of us (WvW’ers), meanwhile sitting on 30k badges of honor..

This is gotta be one of the smartest strategies I have ever seen…

• Community unhappy
• Announce a feature that would rage the community
• Watch the community complain
• Announce that they listened to us and reverting the change
• Become the hero again and everyone happy ever after
• Continue with no contents but they listened to us at least

Today was a good day.

Its almost the end of the work day and no sign of the forum mobs cleaning the heck out of this thread and remove every post disagreeing with the gem store change…

“it’s just business nothing personal…”

By the way, where are the forum mobs today?

GW2 December patch notes.

“Removed the ability to exchange Gold to Gems due to its complexity on new players. You can now obtain in-game Gems only with a swipe of your credit card.”

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ok, guys. Some of you are unhappy about this change, I can see that. BUT… quite honestly, most of you are sort of (I hate to use the word) ranting (sorry!) instead of offering suggestions.

I assure you, the team leader told me not 15 minutes ago, they will listen to suggestions.

• Does that mean you get everything you want? Probably not.
• Does that mean you should suggest something? Yes, of course! Because they’re expecting player input.

So you want lower increments? Think it through and present a suggestion! You want XYZ in the interface? Post that idea. You would rather see something else? Post what you think about that other thing. Please don’t get into the whole “I’m going to kick the devs and their little dogs, too” because it’s not doing you or us any good at all.

I’m not here to apologize. I’m here to communicate and right now, the communication is coming in without a whole lot of substance. Over to you for suggestions and constructive input!

How about a CDI on this topic? /sarcasm

Its amazing how everyone fails to see that ANet’s focus is the new players base and new $$$ markets for the game.

oh man…I think the forum mobs are going to have a busy day tomorrow banning people from the forums and deleting comments.

Welcome to another free to play MMOs. Anet is no different than the other thousands cash shop MMOs game studio out there.

“it’s just business nothing personal…”

A SHAMEFUL DISPLAY…….

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Yargesh.4965:

CureForLiving.5360:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Palador.2170:

I think they’re going to muck it up and do something stupid with the LS ending.

That’s the spirit!

. (-:

Chris

I must say I’m extremely impressed at how well you take all this non-stop and nonconstructive criticism… I’d say sorry for the players… but I can only speak for myself… I think you’re doing a good job though if that helps.

Agree

Thanks Cure and Yar,

It’s all part of working on a game together. We have to take the downs with the ups.

The community in general has been pivotal in the evolution of the game and long may that last.

Chris

There wouldn’t have been any criticism if you guys didn’t go and ruin the masterpiece that was created by the core team. but instead you prefer to deal with all the negatively and all….Hire back the core team, get rid of the living story and now we got a game worth logging in again….

you can buy it from the gem store after exchanging ~$400 real dollars to gold. If you need it that bad….$400 is 40 hours of minimum pay job at the rate of $10/hour. So should take anyone a week max to get one….

Gaile Gray.6029:

……

• Trial accounts [,,,,,] will not have access to World-versus-World

Thank you……..

So I wonder how this free trial access would affect WvW? more spies? more supply trolls? more tag watching?

Honestly the free trial accounts should not have access to WvW…

Edit: Trial accounts will have access to Edge of the Mists but will not have access to World-versus-World

The solution is simple: use players rank

Use the player’s WvW rank to allow the amount of supply they pick up based on a timer. For example a rank 10 player is allowed 1 supply per 1 hour. A rank 100 player is allowed 10 supply per 5 min and so on….

I used to get 1-3 silvers as a reward of doing a heart in level 60-80 zones when 100 gems was costing 2 golds. Today exchanging gold for 100 gems is almost 10 golds, but doing the same heart still gives 1-3 silvers. The same goes for dungeon or WvW or fractal rewards.
Just saying doing a heart in level 80 should at least give 50 silvers….

Only took 2 years for the first useful post from the WvW team. Thank you.

The best part is when ANet is going on a long break, they just throw a bunch of WvW tournaments at us and say here is the contents for the next 2 month….They don’t even bother setting up new achievements for the tournament or fix any of the bugs….but they added commander tag colors….so that is something I guess….

Jessica Boettiger.2563:

Basically removing the achievement requirement during a tournament is an experimental step we took to reduce the incentive for achievement grinding. We want people to play WvW, and not focus too heavily on satisfying achievement requirements.

If we find that players prefer having numerous things to check off a list, then we would certainly take that feedback into account and consider it for future tournaments.

Meanwhile PvE gets tons of new achievements and WvW gets 5 achievement points for a tournament.

We should all just accept the fact that NA players have become the QA for the China GW2 patches. You still want a bug free version of GW2, then you might as well install the Chinese version of the game.

Lets see how many pages of comments we get this time, and then wait and see how many of those suggestions will be implemented or discussed. Last time we had 30 pages of great suggestions by players and all were ignored.

The game runs on NCSoft servers along other MMOs. The skill lag in WvW will be here until the end. Wildstar also has major skill lags….Anet should just stop with the false promises and tell us they can’t fix the lag in WvW…..treat us like real people for once please….

Another 2 months of no contents. Oh wait, we haven’t had any new contents for the last year or so.

So after all this time, they still didn’t so anything about the 2v1 situation among servers and tiers.

The final fight of the living is nothing more than a cheap way by the devs to create an illusion of a challenging boss fight.

Having to fight a boss with other mobs spawning at the same time and dodging red markers on the ground is not challenge, it is called unfair fight….

None of the bosses in the living story have any mechanics. They just have big AoEs with CC with other smaller vets mobs spawning at the same time. In other words, they are just copy/paste from other boss or mobs.

You want us to solo a fight boss in the living story then give us a real boss with new mechanics to solo…/sigh who I am I kidding.

Didn’t die but after 30 minutes of the fight, the boss was still 80% health. Logged off and moved on….

So let me get this straight. The living story chapters are now 200 gems per chapter for the players who miss to log in during the 2 weeks period. But does that mean a buggy release is acceptable for the players who get it for free during the 2 weeks?

It is 2 days after the release and the totems events and some other ones are still bugged. The NPCs disappearing and some of the events don’t start. Is that how the new Living Story season 2 will continue to be released?

People defend software bugs and mistakes in programs, but honestly this is unfair for the players who logging during the 2 weeks to play the the contents to deal with so many bugs.

The idea of paid contents was supposed to bring more quality to the table. I guess that is not the case.

Edit: So what I meant by the title was that the players who play during the free weeks basically QA the contents before it goes from free to 200 gems price.

Can confirm it is still bugged after the patch. Anet’s dev Derby was there waiting with us.

Paul Belz.7351:

Hey guys,

Just wanted to pop in and say that we are investigating the issues with the iron marches content as fast as we can so that we can get you guys back to progressing through the episode. These issues are indeed proving quite tricky to nail down (it’s not as simple as they simply won’t restart) but we are working hard to get everything addressed as quickly as possible.

Thanks for understanding and sorry for the inconvenience.

Maybe ANet’s game studio should stop with these kind of events and focus on something that is doable within the development team.

Definitely missing some of the old large zerg contents in PvE.

They did this so that you feel like getting more contents by repeating the same thing over and over.

Not complaining about the LS2 but it just feels like the story is too short or not a lot of things to do after beating the story (which takes 15 min or so). There was too many problems with LS1, but at least it felt like a lot more contents to login every day for 2 weeks and play.

ArchonWing.9480:

As someone who’s dealt with business issues a lot, I understand that a good deal of customers are scum, entitled, and think it’s a simple issue when it’s clearly not. And there’s certainly a lot of that here too.

However, that doesn’t really change the nature of my job, as long as they’re paying customers. When demands are unreasonable, then they won’t be met, that’s fine, but the most important part, especially to the customers that are decent human beings and that will stay with you is to be forthright, and to make your words mean something. That means, “We estimate this time frame…” instead of a vague “it’s done when it’s done”. If it’s wrong, then well, it was an estimate, not a guarantee. It doesn’t matter if that customer is screaming, it’s not right for me to dismiss it as “dude, you could live without it for a few more days, couldn’t you?”. It may be right, but it doesn’t matter. The customer’s time is important!

And to be fair, I think the last response about the developers having families and stuff to be a little unprofessional even it were funny, but this isn’t a serious climate so it can pass. Yea, I wish that kind of excuse would work where I was around. It does exhibit a certain attitude though. Well, I don’t care too much, though there are many around here without a sense of humor and that’s hard to account for.

I think both customers and employees of Anet should realize that the customer frustration is directed towards Anet as an entity, not at the employees, necessarily, and it is wrong for angry gamers to shoot the messenger. That is, I understand that well, things are outside your control, but at the same time one can’t take it personally either. Too much.

Ultimately, my point is that it is really wrong to levy attacks on dissatisfied customers because it’s ultimately irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if the item in question is required or not. If I buy a chocolate bar at the grocery store and it turns out to be in terrible safe, you’d bet I’d be complaining, and if they tried to tell me “well, you don’t need chocolate”, that would be a good reason to avoid that store. The unfortunate truth is that if customers put up with the businesses’s negligence, there is no incentive for them to change, really. Though this goes the other around too… if the customer is complaining regardless but still here, then why bother.

Overall, I think this company could have more respect for its customer’s time (hey that search function…) when it comes to issues such as this and bigger ones. If this was an isolated incident, people would most likely be screaming less, but there’s been other fiascos and also lack of communication with other big changes such as megaservers and stuff so this kind of dissastication tends to fester. I mean the product is good but it could definitely be better and improving communication I think will save hassle on all ends. There’s a lot of people out there willing to shell out more money for this game. Give them a reason to I’d say.

I read a lot of comments on this forum, but this comment sums up everything about the players vs. ANet vs. Forum support team very nicely.

So are we going to get free gems because of this inconvenience? Lets says 100 gems per day until you fix the bug?

I guess this is karma for ANet for throwing us a pointless Season 2 as a time filler while they go on a tour of the great wall of China and abandon NA/EU players.

Its only been 9 days since they discovered the bug. Name a MMO game studio that fixes bugs under ten days? Also this is not a game breaker and doesn’t need to be priority compared to some other issues. At the end of the day, it is only a weapon skin which will be forgotten in less than 2 months. That said, it is WvW after all, so lower your expectations….

I am sorry but this suggestion really sucks.

First of all, charging money for unreleased contents will not guarantee better quality of the contents.

Second…Selling small DLC in a cash shop MMO is a bad business model. If you want to pay for contents then there are many good Sub MMOs out there….Mixing the two won’t fly nice….

Third….If people pay for the future content and it turns out buggy or released with some other issues, can you imagine the uproar in the community?….

If ANet actually makes the mistake and start charging for future contents, then it will definitely be the end of it for many players…but ANet usually makes a lot of mistakes and never listens.

At the end of the the day, the new focus of the game is towards the new player base and the new markets for GW2 and not its fans…..

ETA for CDI?

12 pages of comments about how the developers are doing their job. Do people expect the developers NOT to do their job? I am really puzzled by some of these nonsense comments about devs doing their job or not?

Honestly what did you guys really expect?

I am sorry to tell you, but the end of your free ride in the land of Tyria is finally here.

Pinkus.2860:

Zylonite.5913:

Turin.6921:

Zylonite.5913:

Reading these comments tells me how people only look at the surface of things and ignore the truth.

First of all, there is not a lot of new players in NA and EU who go and purchase the game today. Most people who want to play GW2 already have the game. That means this is directed to another group of people: China market.

Second of all, this direction goes against everything that GW2 has stood by and that is the free contents updates they always advertised. The cost of 200 gems or the gold exchange rate is irrelevant here and a waste of space on the forums.

Last but not least, this strategy by ANet doesn’t sound promising financially. I understand a game studio needs money to survive but this sounds a bit like a cry of depression for cash.

Just my 2 cents….

So what you want a game to be sustained absolutely for free without any kind of monetizing?How many new players would care about the past content anyway… A new player has to first go through:

-leveling
-personal story
-world events
-dungeon and fractals
-WvW and sPvP
-World completion
-The current Living Story
-High level crafting

And after all these he might be thinking of checking on the past content. I really doupt that anyone will care that much unless the patch are huge and meanigful (like extra maps or races and amazing dungeons etc). But then they will actaully worth the price.And that he can still take the episodes for FREE with like 2-4 days of very moderate game times.
And that is without the festivals- you can easily make 20-30g in 3 hours in the pavillion.

Again it is sad to read another useless comment on how to farm gold to pay 200 gems for living story chapters.

The issue is much deeper than the cost of the contents but nobody sees it. The promise of free contents are now false and this MMO is now moved from a complete buy to play model to pay to play. It doesn’t matter if it is the past contents or whatever….

The point here is that how far will ANet go and will we ever see a gem price on future living story or other contents? Is this a sign that GW2 model of buy to play has failed abd are they just testing the community on how far we will tolerate.

That said, I understated a game studio costs money to run and the devs need to pay thier bills. But has the direction of the game brought this on itself? Did they push us to kitten the bi-weekly gem stories that everyone finally got turned off by it? And now the gem store is nothing more than a show room of stuff with no buyers….

I think you need to retire that tinfoil hat mate. Gem store purchases are booming and ‘buying’ old content you may have missed is perfectly reasonable. I find it hard to believe that most people couldn’t log in for 15 seconds to unlock the story during the 2 week period…

So you are saying they will never start to charge for future living story patches? The way I see it, this is just a test to see how the community will react to the pay for content idea. If it works out and people like yourself OK this model, then ANet can easy add a gem cost for future contents. That said, see you in 8 months when the living story 3 will cost gems to unlock for everyone.

Turin.6921:

Zylonite.5913:

Reading these comments tells me how people only look at the surface of things and ignore the truth.

First of all, there is not a lot of new players in NA and EU who go and purchase the game today. Most people who want to play GW2 already have the game. That means this is directed to another group of people: China market.

Second of all, this direction goes against everything that GW2 has stood by and that is the free contents updates they always advertised. The cost of 200 gems or the gold exchange rate is irrelevant here and a waste of space on the forums.

Last but not least, this strategy by ANet doesn’t sound promising financially. I understand a game studio needs money to survive but this sounds a bit like a cry of depression for cash.

Just my 2 cents….

So what you want a game to be sustained absolutely for free without any kind of monetizing?How many new players would care about the past content anyway… A new player has to first go through:

-leveling
-personal story
-world events
-dungeon and fractals
-WvW and sPvP
-World completion
-The current Living Story
-High level crafting

And after all these he might be thinking of checking on the past content. I really doupt that anyone will care that much unless the patch are huge and meanigful (like extra maps or races and amazing dungeons etc). But then they will actaully worth the price.And that he can still take the episodes for FREE with like 2-4 days of very moderate game times.
And that is without the festivals- you can easily make 20-30g in 3 hours in the pavillion.

Again it is sad to read another useless comment on how to farm gold to pay 200 gems for living story chapters.

The issue is much deeper than the cost of the contents but nobody sees it. The promise of free contents are now false and this MMO is now moved from a complete buy to play model to pay to play. It doesn’t matter if it is the past contents or whatever….

The point here is that how far will ANet go and will we ever see a gem price on future living story or other contents? Is this a sign that GW2 model of buy to play has failed abd are they just testing the community on how far we will tolerate.

That said, I understated a game studio costs money to run and the devs need to pay thier bills. But has the direction of the game brought this on itself? Did they push us to kitten the bi-weekly gem stories that everyone finally got turned off by it? And now the gem store is nothing more than a show room of stuff with no buyers….

Reading these comments tells me how people only look at the surface of things and ignore the truth.

First of all, there is not a lot of new players in NA and EU who go and purchase the game today. Most people who want to play GW2 already have the game. That means this is directed to another group of people: China market.

Second of all, this direction goes against everything that GW2 has stood by and that is the free contents updates they always advertised. The cost of 200 gems or the gold exchange rate is irrelevant here and a waste of space on the forums.

Last but not least, this strategy by ANet doesn’t sound promising financially. I understand a game studio needs money to survive but this sounds a bit like a cry of depression for cash.

Just my 2 cents….

I am sorry but this is the most pointless thread I have ever read on the forums.

Why make these kind of suggestions when we already know it is a waste of time? GW2 is a cash-shop MMO (Nothing wrong with that model as long as it knows its limits) and will never be a subscription based game.

Three things that will never happen in GW2:

• Expansion
• Subscription
• Rewards

All that said, it is still one of the best MMOs out there even though some parts of the game (WvW) are abandoned by the developers.

1. To remind myself why I play other games.
2. To see if my WvW S2 chest is delivered.
3. To remember how amazing this game used to be by having a moment of silence in the character creation screen.

It’s amazing that people still have faith in getting their rewards someday.

This thread will expand to another 20-30 pages of comments with no response/update from ANet and eventually people will forget about it and move on….meanwhile all the issues on the China support list are dealt with at the highest priority levels. EU/NA is basically doomed since the focus $$ is somewhere else…

Welcome to the reality…