Well my theory on the commander colors was an attempt to add another gold sink to fight inflation. I hope they realize it’s a misguided shot (as many of the commanders that would actually USE such color coding probably aren’t the types gold farming).
Whenever it comes to a lot of features, I’m of two minds.
Personally, I would prefer a game just give players all the tools. Wanna mix and match outfits? Go for it, but accept that the end result isn’t always going to be pretty and sometimes there’s not going to be any way to make EXACTLY the look you want work.
Want First Person View? Go for it, just understand that it’s NOT for combat, and that if you’re in FPV and some Abomination stomps you in the face from behind, that’s YOUR problem.
But on the other hand… oh good God do I know how stupid people can be. And if you give them all the tools, it’s support that has to handle all that inane stupidity. Like “these two pieces clip! How could you break this game! This happens EVERY TIME you release a new look!” or “This game is totally bugged! I can’t see what’s happening! I’m dying to things I can’t see! WTF ANET???!!!!”
I feel I’m in Chris Rock skit with some of these things:
“Now I’m not saying they shouldn’t do that… but I understand…”
Well there are some ppl that they are not upset because THEY DON’T DO WHAT WE WANT but because WE DON"T KNOW WHAT THEY EVEN INTEND TO DO. When the game was new devs keep us informed in some ways where we could have speculate what will be next but right now we have a black wall.. It is bad because if it will be like that for more time people start to think " why should i even support this game if i don’t know if it have any future".
I hope that new feature pack will give us some answers but right now I can only hope and cross my fingers
Also in my opinion(!!!!) they should rather go for expansion if they want keep ppl happy but it is only small chance because gemstore do the job just fine.
And that is exactly the mistake Arena.net has and continues to make. Because they SHOULD continue to present their roadmap if they want good dialogue. They SHOULD continue to keep the communication channels open. They SHOULDN’T have been run off by the little twerps that make unreasonable demands and refuse to accept anything less than everything.
But at this point, in order to resume that, they’d need to napalm these forums, because now there is too much distrust, venom, anger, and spite for any attempts to met with anything other than bitterness, scorn, and disdain. The pool is now poison. The water is acidic. It needs to be drained and chlorinated before they have any hope of trying again.
Anyone have a better suggestion other than not playing at all?
Not exploiting events in CS might be a good start.
Lol i didn’t know that there is censorship on this forum,but as i see it is(second post of thread opener deleted). Any way it would be nice to know what direction is game having, also if they say something by themself (like pre crafting) they should do it.
The “roadmap” that people ask for is a mixed bag from a developer standpoint, and a lot of it has to do with developers having no earthly clue how people work.
When they tried their roadmap in 2012, the end result FELT extremely negative, mostly because of a small minority of the player base who decided every declaration of intent was a promise and used it as an excuse to be combative and belligerent whenever any one of those little bullet points wasn’t met.
These people ARE entitled brats, and they exist in every MMO and think it is perfectly acceptable to be abusive and vicious whenever they don’t get everything they want exactly when they want it.
Where Arena.net made a critical mistake was by then retreating from further communication… and I think it’s because they don’t realize that these entitled brats didn’t rise up because of the roadmap. They rose up because THAT IS WHAT THEY DO. They’re little kittens, and they will ALWAYS exist. If you don’t give them something to rage about, they will MAKE UP something to rage about.
The retreat on Arena.net’s part only got worse because once they ran away from the table, that allowed the trolls to set the environment, one that was extremely toxic and vile, and they were given legitimacy BECAUSE Arena.net ran away from the table.
Interviews (like this one) are blown completely out of proportion because of that distrust. Reasonable explanations for why that interview would come off poorly are ignored. Changes are immediately assumed to be to players’ detriment and somehow intended to drive gem store sales. Any probes into forum sentiment is met immediately with hostility.
And now otherwise perfectly reasonable people here are fighting each other, because of that environment. There’s no trust or implied genial intent, it’s simple to slap a “white knight” or “hater” label on someone else and eschew any meaningful conversation that might require you to reassess just what HAS been said.
I remember in those first CDIs warning Chris Whiteside that you CAN’T run away for PRECISELY this reason.
It IS fixable, but I suspect many people wouldn’t find the fallout worth it. Arena.net would need to find some people with very thick skins and the power and willingness to drop the Perma BanHammer.
It’s going to kitten people off, but the only way to fix this environment now is with napalm; making it clear that if you refuse to approach in a cordial manner, and instead only with derision and scorn that you will get punched in the mouth and not be allowed to speak again.
So basically they’re selling us what’s cheap and easy. Great.
Seriously, what is even the point of outfits?
Stuff that falls outside “normal” armor designs that can be used in combat… i.e. the reason why most players were completely uninterested with the original town clothes (stuff that required a bit more effort to do and were not particularly well adopted by the player base).
+1 Vayne. Although, I do have to say, their silence has spoken volumes and will be extremely hard to retract.
Their silence will be forgotten within a matter of weeks save for the perennially kitten that look for any reason they can to be angry.
Like it always has.
You were infracted because you called out the developers on the forums. That has been expressly forbidden multiple times. It’s hardly something they’ve installed as a policy in secret yesterday.
Also, this “entitled” argument is such a straw man. The community is obviously not entitled to get everything it wants (especially since players want different things), but I do not understand this obsession with needing to be okay with being fed dog poop. If you’re okay with it, Arenanet has trained you well and that’s your prerogative, but if people are unhappy with the direction of a product they had high expectations for, it’s their prerogative to voice their concern as well. If you want everyone with a complaint to leave the game, you’re no less selfish than the people you accuse, and you’re going to be left playing a pretty empty game.
I don’t think you’re quite getting my point.
It has nothing to do with “being okay with being fed dog poop.” It’s that Arena.net is GOING to feed you what you think is dog poop, no matter how much you whine and cry on their official forums. Their entire motivation is doing what they think will get the most people spending money on their game.
Because they don’t owe you transparency. They don’t HAVE to give you the roadmap. The only thing they HAVE to do is keep hitting the monetary goals NCSoft has no doubt set for them.
And they aren’t wrong. As much as the forum has railed against multiple changes, the money flowing in suggests that Arena.net ISN’T struggling and apparently are hitting their goals every single time. Until they don’t, I wouldn’t hold your breath on them worrying too much about making the forum goers happy.
On the other hand, I think games have a special kind of relationship between player and developer because of the way they are constructed; with MMOs in particular, they are updated and changed to improve them, and often the active community gets some feature requests fulfilled somewhere along the line.
And right there is what I dispute.
Because you DON’T have a “special kind of relationship”, and to be perfectly blunt and cold… you never did. “AAA” games are as much a business as movies, TV, music or any other form of entertainment. At the end of the day, no matter how much you think you are “invested”, the developers do not see you in the same way. They will do whatever they think will make them money, not what will make forum goers glow happily.
The emotional investment is ENTIRELY one-sided. Arena.net is a company. You are just a customer. If you are looking for the earnest interaction that comes from a handful of people just trying to create a fun experience for the niche they’ve settled on, then the indie scene is over in the corner of the Internet over there.
But in this section of the pool, don’t fool yourself. The “AAA” experience requires big money. It is corporate gray. It is big business, and people like you and I, my friend, are just a number.
It’s an attempt to appeal to a larger group than town clothes did because town clothes weren’t compatible for combat.
Whether or not the change WORKED… well, I’ve personally seen more outfits in game than people in town clothes before. Your mileage may vary.
The issue isn’t that it wouldn’t be a good idea to be more open. It absolutely would. But they are under no obligation to.
The issue is the player entitlement. “They NEED to talk to us!” No. They don’t. This ISN’T a partnership (or a marriage as I heard one player describe it some time ago). You’re just a guy who dropped $60 on a game, a game that you have. Transaction complete. Or someone who spent $ on gems and bought an outfit or weapon skin. Transaction complete.
Anything you get beyond that is a courtesy, and should be received as such. Screaming at them because they won’t be transparent is 100% wrong. Claiming they are lazy, don’t care, aren’t listening, etc… because they won’t give you the roadmap to their future plans is 100% wrong.
Is it good business sense if they clam up and say nothing? No, and I’ve said multiple times Arena.net’s PR and communication is terrible. But they do NOT owe it to you. If you cannot accept that policy, your power is to not support them.
That’s a good point. It might very well be in ANet’s best interest to promote more transparency. However, “in their best interest” does not mean they are required to do so. In the end, no matter how reasonable our requests for information seem to us, our only power is to refrain from spending. My stance toward GW2 now is that I play it when I feel like it, and don’t spend money anymore because I believe that ANet does not want to provide what I want to see. I have no rancor towards them for it, but see no reason to support the company any more than I already have.
I like this man. He gets it.
To a point, with one exception. I invest time and energy into the game…and I want to keep on doing that, but I want it to be worth it not just now, but in the future. Surely if I’m investing my time in something, I have some right to know if I’m wasting it or not. Because if it’s changing, and they don’t tell me and I leave..I could have been doing something else.
I’m here for the long haul. I like the game. I’m having fun. I don’t see myself not having fun next week. But if suddenly Anet were to introduce open world PvP into the game, I’d have to rethink my commitment.
And you can just as easily rethink that commitment when a patch drops that throws open world PvP into the game.
Players really like to embrace this delusion (because that’s what it really is) that if they know what is in the pipeline, that they can save the developer from making a horrible, game-breaking mistake. They want to believe they can save a game from itself IF WE WOULD JUST KNOW WHAT’S COMING!
It doesn’t work that way. If a developer decides [x] is something that the game must have to achieve [y], there is next to nothing player feedback can do to change their mind. In GW2’s case, I can think of ONE time that a player revolt actually got Arena.net to do a 180 (the Flamekissed light armor set), and even that was centered around something cosmetic.
If Arena.net decided open-world PvP was something the game needed to expand its audience, the players could set this forum literally on fire, and it wouldn’t matter. Having access to the “roadmap” wouldn’t help players at all, they’ve just convinced themselves it would because it makes them feel important.
No one is asking them to fulfill the communities request (I’m not at least lol)… we just want to know what on earth are they doing???
And guess what? They DON’T have to tell you what they are planning either. They answer to their bosses and their shareholders.
You. Are. Neither.
(Unless you actually do have shares in NCSoft that I am unaware of, in which case I would wonder why you aren’t calling up your broker for information…)
Anything they provide outside of that digital license or physical disc is a courtesy, and players really need to start treating it as such. You have gotten what you have paid for. You deserve, and are owed, nothing else.
@ Vayne
They are communicating with us…via blogs, feature packs, twitch and updates.What exactly do you want from them? What to expect each year? They’ve done that in the past and because they’ve changed their minds (I guess due to iteration), the forums have slammed them for it. Do you want it quarterly? ie what we will be doing in the next 3 months, or every 6 months? You ask for transparency, but they’re not going to answer the community about every single “issue” that comes up. If you see a suggestion in an update…great…if not…well consider it as not going to happen.
Who do you want speaking? Any Dev or someone in particuar?
How do you want it delivered? Blog form, Twitch, or interview by magazines or at one of the cons?
I’m not sure the community would ever be happy with communications because people just seem to go nuts….(SAB)….whenever they DO make any type of announcement.
shrugedit: I’m not trying to be confrontational or anything, I ask the questions because I’m curious.
The issue is that those people who will twist everything said into a promise, start lynch mobs over every perceived slight, etc… will ALWAYS exist. They WILL seek to be as combative and disruptive as possible.
Running away from the table only makes those trolls STRONGER. It allows them to dictate the environment and create toxicity like we have here.
It’s not fair. It’s not right. But that’s how it is, and game developers need to understand that and interact ANYWAY. You IGNORE the trolls, you don’t walk away from the table.
If there is one thing that REALLY irritates me about gamers, is this idea that they are somehow owed, or should expect transparency or a road map. Gamers continue to push this narrative that they are somehow in a “relationship” or a “partnership” with the games and the developers.
You. Are. Not.
You are nothing more than a CUSTOMER. Period. One of millions of people. You are owed nothing but the product you purchased, a product you have been given for the money that has been exchanged. Anything you get beyond that is merely an added bonus.
Get it through your skulls. They do NOT have to listen to you. They do NOT have to do what you request. While it may certainly be a good idea to keep an ear on what your customers are saying, they are under ZERO obligation to comply to anything you say.
If you absolutely cannot accept the policies of a company, if you honestly think they are not listening to your wants and are actively ignoring you, you walk away and stop supporting that company.
THAT is your power. Nothing more.
Well, as we forgive the employees for being thrust into an interview they were not prepared for, let’s not forget that it DOES highlight a major problem Arena.net has… a very poor public front.
Who was responsible for putting these guys IN that spot to begin with? For while the uproar is starting to settle as rationality sets back in, this bursts of rage from the fanbase CAN be avoided to THIS degree if you as a company put the right face on things… which Arena.net (and a lot of game companies for that matter), frequently fails to do.
Local chat only gets bad when you find those farming groups (like the people exploiting Blix) who KNOW they’re not playing the game the way its intended, and just don’t care. They’re focused entirely on grinding their phat loots, and get unfathomably furious when that gravy train is disrupted.
They are the absolute dregs of the GW2 community. I will honestly say outside of those cesspools, the in game community in GW2 is among the best I’ve ever experienced in an MMO.
The problem is that the guy answering that question, Devon Carter, his area of expertise is WvW combat development. That’s the reason HE knows for it not being implemented. Why the community WANTS it isn’t necessarily why the developers DON’T, and one may very well have nothing to do with the other.
Oh, the PR and communication of Arena.net is TERRIBLE. That is hardly breaking news, and while I don’t think it’s fatal flaw to the company (at the end of the day, the game and the revenue it generates trumps all else), that horrible public front doesn’t exactly help rouse the masses in delight.
I had gotten intrigued by the norn during their introduction in Eye of the North. Ranger has always been one of my favorite class archetypes through several games (especially the old PnP varities).
Maybe I just got lucky, but I hit it off with my very first norn ranger. From the moment she loaded up at the start of the Great Hunt, it fit so very perfectly.
Well right. That’s my point. The whole interview screams, “We are way out of our comfort zone here. Halp.”
And don’t you think that’s a little unfair then? That’d be like cornering the Chairman of Commerce and then causing a minor riot when he wouldn’t give you the answers you wanted about Water Quality Control.
I mean, I get the initial surge of disbelief. It was a VERY bad, awkward interview, and it featured a lot of really disjointed answers, highlighting one massively huge weakness at Arena.net (PR and communication). But at the end of the day, it was one bad interview with a guy that was out of the element he was being asked about.
The sky ISN’T falling. It’s okay… at least on this score.
I think what really helps is that when you read something that makes you ask yourself, “Are people really THAT stupid?”
Remind yourself of this answer.
“Yes. Yes they are.”
Sorry, in the corporate world, the customer is the shareholders. We paying peasant players are nothing more than a revenue stream. The company sets revenue targets based on operating costs and put metrics in place to measure the results. As long as the revenue targets are met, there is no incentive to change anything.
Yes… uh… thank you for saying EXACTLY what I was saying. Congratulations?
But you DON’T have a right to the roadmap if Arena.net doesn’t want to provide it. You don’t own a piece of the company. If they say “we aren’t going to tell you what we are planning”, that is the end of the discussion.
You get to decide to accept that or not. If not, you walk away and let your wallet speak for you. If enough people join you, the company learns their lesson, or it withers on the vine.
Now on THAT score, the interview was poorly done and the answers were not well phrased and PR friendly. But I think we ALL know Arena.net is rather poor on that score, and have been for some time.
Actually, you’re forgetting the “and tell all my friends that I’m walking away, and all the online communities I’m a part of, and anyone on this street corner who will listen, etc. etc.” part that comes after the walking away. Reputation is a huge part of business, and one (or many) extremely dissatisfied customer(s) can do a lot more to hurt it than one (or many) extremely satisfied customer(s) can do to help it.
This is true. And if you honestly believe Arena.net doesn’t care about their product or what their customers truly want, you SHOULD spread that word of mouth. THAT’S how you get a company to change course.
What DOESN’T help is complaining that you’re not getting the “transparency” that is not owed to you in any way, shape, or form.
Well, I think you should say the reason was not satisfactory… for YOU.
For me, I can totally see Arena.net support getting flooded by bug reports that the game is broken, they can’t see themselves and can’t tell if they are dodging and they’re dying to mobs they can’t see and how could you break this game like you do every patch…
Long story short, I can very easily see combat in FPV mode being near impossible to manage, many many many players not knowing how to use it properly, and getting angry at Arena.net for that lack of knowledge.
I don’t think it’s as simple as just switch it on, and any auto dump out of FPV mode in combat wouldn’t be just a little bit of coding that would go off without a lot of bug fixing.
Just because you don’t like the reason doesn’t mean it’s not a valid reason.
And ya know what… it doesn’t matter that you don’t know where the game is going.
It’s NOT YOURS. Period. Arena.net does NOT owe you transparency. They do NOT have to give you a road map. They do NOT have to give you [x], [y], and/or [z], nor do they have to give you reasons why they aren’t giving you those things.
You are NOT a share holder. You are NOT their boss. You are a CUSTOMER. If you don’t like their PR, if you don’t like what they are saying, your power is to walk away and not support them.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Ironically, the simplicity of that power is also in some ways the greatest one. Because if enough people think like you and walk away, THEN you have the opportunity to get what you want, or the company will wither.
But you have to be willing to walk away and take your money with you.
When it comes to new races, Arena.net’s statements have been pretty much like anything else. “Nothing if off the table.”
As far as the Personal Story goes, I really do think it needs to go, and honestly, with the assumptions that Living Story Season 2 uses, I earnestly think it is on the way out. I could see keeping the PS elements up to choosing an order, but beyond that… let it out to pasture. It has served its purpose.
Well, I understood the psychological trick of making it temporary… as long as Arena.net was planning to add to it. Every time, it would be fresh and new and get players excited.
But if it’s off even the back burner at this point, especially for the people who invested gems into the continue coin, then what has been produced most definitely SHOULD be released as permanent content.
It would simply be the right thing to do.
There’s a reason they can say… and a reason they can’t say tied to it.
I actually DO believe that they don’t want to implement 1st person view because of the problems it would create in combat.
The unsaid part is because they hold very little faith that the bulk of the player base would understand what FPV is good for and that they would FLOOD Arena.net bug support claiming their “game is broken because they can’t see anything and everything is messed up and how could you ruin my game with this recent patch…”
In other words, they don’t want to deal with the idiots who wouldn’t know what to do with FPV, and frankly, there’s a lot of idiots out there.
I do apologize, because the shot was misdirected and it was not appropriate.
It just gets… tiring (that’s the word I’m looking for), that every time Arena.net says ANYTHING, be it in an interview or feature pack post, or stream, or whatever… players come out of the woodwork screaming like Chicken Little that Arena.net doesn’t care, they’re lazy, they don’t listen, they hate their fans, it’s the end of the world, the game is going to die tomorrow if they don’t change their mind, etc… etc…
I get it, you’re not getting what you want and you don’t like the reason given. But for crying out loud, they’re not doing it to spite you. Their reason is given, and frankly, I’m more willing to buy the reasons given of the people with the code right in front of them and the limitations they have than the legion of armchair developers who have decided “NO! YOU’RE WRONG!”
Then in two months time, the rage froths over, just in time for another statement to stir up all the dander all over again. It’s like people on this forum (and the Internet as a whole, I suppose) WANT to be angry, and will seek out reasons to rage like a hatred-seeking missile.
It’s just tiring. And I’m sorry for lashing out.
If the goal is to drop SAB from the development cycle, then it absolutely should be enacted as permanent content. There’s absolutely no reason not to.
And here we have further evidence why Arena.net doesn’t talk to their fans.
Every time they do, the players lose their kitten.
What we see is another example of two groups that want two entirely different things that are mutually exclusive. Either you’re going to have “exclusive skins” for certain content, or you won’t. There is no middle ground to appeal to. SOMEONE is going to be kittened off.
There’s no way everyone walks away happy from this issue. The people who don’t get what they want in these cases REALLY need to take a deep breath, accept that you won’t always get what you want, and move on.
No game is going to give you everything.
Why is that somehow heroic or good? You’re still being a kitten and wasting everyone’s time, I can only assume because you think they don’t deserve to have the option of doing what they’re doing. Vigilantes may be idolized in popular fiction, but they are not welcomed in the real world. Let ANet deal with with things they don’t like.
Because intentionally failing events runs completely contrary to the spirit of the game, and you know it. Really, it could be considered an exploit and therefore bannable. And it CERTAINLY doesn’t justify the toxic response thrown at people who were legitimately trying to play the game as intended.
And considering that Arena.net DID snap that little exploit shut (though not as quickly as many would have liked), would rather prove that the “intentional fail” crowd WAS 100% in the wrong.
See if you ban those people you get the reputation of censorship, no matter how unreasonable they are. If you don’t ban them, they destroy the forum. It really really is a lose situation for Anet.
But I still think they need to be more transparent.
There comes a point where it is infinitely better to have people badmouthing your place of business on Yelp rather than right in your lobby. It’s more along the lines of lose/lose considerably less.
It’s also very easy to counter the cries of censorship by (gasp) being open about why someone was banned. Gaile Gray used to have epic responses back in the GW1 days about why people were ACTUALLY banned, leaving trolls absolutely “rektd” when what REALLY happened was brought to light. Those skilled takedowns were a large part of the reason why there was little to no complaints about how players were treated by Arena.net in game.
It certainly takes more effort to create a stable community, but it CAN be done. Arena.net would need to invest a lot more manpower into it though than what they are currently. The moderation of these forums is extremely poor (and in the spirit of full disclosure, I admit to serving a two week forum suspension for telling some of those moderators EXACTLY how I feel about the quality of their their work in terms that were very aggressive and not constructive).
It wasn’t right, and I apologize for it in retrospect, but it doesn’t change that I do not like how the moderators do their jobs here, and I make no bones about it.
(edited by chemiclord.3978)
The fact that they can’t speak about the long-term plans for SAB to me means they’ve halted development of it for now. Meaning we should not expect it any time soon.
It’s just so frustrating when they’ve already invested the time for 2 installments of the game (2 worlds with multiple levels), gem store purchase items (coin and boombox), multiple minis, created great music, achievements, etc. And now it has just stopped.
I am deeply disappointed by this. I’m not one to jump to conclusions, but Matt’s response to the question really points to the fact that SAB is something they might work on after they are happy with PvE, PvP, and WvW changes. I mean I’m happy they are addressing those as well, we were just hoping SAB will be done in conjunction with those other update, instead of them working on it after everything else.
And I don’t get the people who hated it being happy it isn’t coming back. I mean, it’s not like you guys were playing it anyway, what affect does it have on you whether or not it is returning. Continue not playing it, we don’t care.
Being one of those “haters”, I am glad they’ve ceased development on it. I felt (and still feel) it was wasted effort in a pitiful side game to appeal to some old 8-bit days of old school platforming. I felt it added little to the GW2 experience that could have been better spent elsewhere.
That said, I don’t understand why they would just let what already IS done sit there off the table. Since the development is on the back burner, why not throw the two worlds that ARE done permanently in game? So, on that score, I’m with ya.
The thing about it is that… there’s GOING to be a segment of the player base who are ALWAYS going to be kittened off. They are ALWAYS going to be loud and boorish and irritating. They are hellbent on being angry and insulted, and will outright make up reasons to be insulted if they have to.
Is it right? No. But these people are GOING to be here, and they are GOING to be trolls. Arena.net can’t let them direct the discourse on the forums. Lock every loaded discussion they attempt to start. Ban them if you have to. But stop running away from them.
It’s not just Arena.net, for the record. More and more companies are dialing back from dialogue with their players, and it’s just as stupid when they do it. Stop letting the extremes dictate the interaction, for kitten’s sake.
Any chance there’s a business reason behind the silence. Not letting competitors plan their launches around their launch? Because that sort of thing happens all the time.
My general experience is that developers really couldn’t give one tenth of one kitten about what another developer is doing. Their plates are so full with what they are doing they really can’t waste it worrying about what [x] over in [y] studio might be doing if they know something is happening on [z].
Now publishers are more in tune with that, and sure I suppose it’s possible NCSoft is sending down the order to keep things close to the vest. But considering how much of this new era of silence concurs nearly perfectly with all the hot-coal raking the fans did over Arena.net’s 2013 intentions, I’m inclined to believe that Arena.net has decided speaking candidly with their player base simply isn’t worth the grief.
This is BS if that’s what they mean. It doesn’t matter if it fits in or not, it’s fun. It doesn’t have to fit the living story to be a recurring event. SAB was really fun, and something I always looked forward to. If they aren’t going to add any more worlds, at least make it available for players to enjoy the first two worlds.
Ya know, I’d be on board with that.
I’m perfectly fine with them pulling the plug on further development, but I don’t see any reason why they can’t open up what has been done now on a permanent basis.
I think you’re right in fact I truly believe they are building an expansion what I don’t understand is their complete unwillingness to divulge their plans. What sense does it make to let players leave because they have no news or nothing to look forward too? I mean if you’re building it why not just tell people and squash all of the negative publicity surrounding these doubts and concerns. You don’t have to set a date, you don’t have to give specifics, just knowing it’s coming would be enough for most people to stick around, or continue to invest money. I know I’d open my wallet again if I knew this was in the pipeline because their would be the security of knowing it would be more of a long term investment. Not knowing anything formally is why I won’t spend anymore money.
I have never in all my years of gaming seen a company do more harm to themselves through pathetic marketing practices as Anet. They are by far their own worst enemies.
Because they’ve been down that road. They TRIED to be transparent, and lay out their plans a year in advance.
The moment ANY of it changed, even in the slightest, the fanbase went on a rampage and started spitting the most vile, disgusting, entitled, bratty venom I had seen since the WoW message boards.
I do believe their silence is now because they do not believe they CAN be candid with their fans without their fans losing their collective kitten. And I don’t entirely blame them, even though I do think they should be open anyway.
Being one of the people who HATED the Super Adventure Box, I am glad their dropping it and focusing on content that is more than a pathetic appeal to 8-bit platforming nostalgia.
I do think there IS a degree of “been there, done that” in the MMO genre. But I also believe that is because of PLAYERS, not DEVELOPERS.
People, as a general rule, do NOT like change. They don’t particularly like new things. They like what they are used to, and I don’t think it’s any accident that a large part of “suggestions” on these forums are for things that have become convention to the MMO genre (combat trinity, power creep in gear and character progression, instanced raids, the dreaded “m word”).
Players are their own worst enemy at times. We CLAIM we want new stuff, but in reality, we want to go back to OLD stuff (the cries for expansion are by far loudest for Cantha, an area GW1 already visited). It’s certainly not LIMITED to the MMO market; for example, for all the crying that other games and movies are just recycled sequels, if you look at the sales charts, sequels and remakes outright dominate.
Players are the greatest force of stagnation in our games. We DON’T want new. We DON’T want different. Just give us more of the same. We kinda… WANT to be bored, because it means that we aren’t getting pushed out of our comfort zone with what we know we like.
Ironically, this is more likely to happen if substantial numbers of MMO customers stop demanding that MMO’s fill their every free moment.
There is so much truth in this statement. The level of expectations some swaths of players demand from MMOs is simply beyond absurd (and its not just GW2). I see quite frequently complaints of “I’ve spent 1500+ hours on this game, and now I’m bored! I need more stuff to do!”
It’s ridiculous, and it reinforces the idea that MMO players are whiny, entitled brats. There is NO other form of entertainment where that amount of time sink would be considered a waste of money or effort. Only MMOs.
It’s no wonder there are groups that are chronically disappointed with every game and MMO they play. What they expect and demand is impossible in every way, shape, and form.
I think what Nerelith is trying to get at is that in the course of a debate, there is a burden of argument.
Defending the status quo does not require presenting argument. They CAN provide counter-argument, but at the the end of the day, the status quo wins by deflating the argument of the other side.
CHANGING the status quo carries the burden of argument. THEY are the ones that have to convince others change is necessary. Otherwise, the status quo wins simply by default.
It’s the traditional terms of victory in any debate.
That’s all fine and good, but I have gotten literally 0 exotic drops since launch. 0. Not a single exotic has dropped for me off of a mob or from a chest. Since launch. There’s a point where it gets out of control.
But… in this case… so what?
What does an exotic drop give you that isn’t readily available? The entire “rewards” issue seems tied to old MMO thinking where “item color = awesome.” Really? What would it change if EVERY mob dropped one exotic guaranteed? Would you wear it? Probably not. Would you use it for a skin? Unlikely.
I get the psychological aspect of seeing those yellow and orange items pop up, but really… that’s all it is. Psychological. At the end of the day, the items themselves aren’t very rewarding… there’s no real significant power creep (even with the Ascended items now), and the entire point of the cosmetic approach is that there’s good looks to be found at every item rarity.
So, I still really have a hard time grasping just what “rewarding” CAN be in the game, much less what it SHOULD be.
The really only egregious thing I can think of are the items that as far as I can tell Arena.net INTENDS to be obscenely rare. That’s something I think can and should have some changes.
The question that I keep coming back to is what exactly WOULD be rewarding in this game.
I think there is this lingering stigma from the MMO genre that “item color = awesome”, and that if you don’t get [x] amount of items of the item color you’re looking for, then its not rewarding enough.
Even WITH the added ascended grind, I think the real “reward” in this game is SUPPOSED to be item appearance, of which you can find a bevy across ALL item rarities.
Yes, the RNG if you’re looking for a specific something IS punishing (like precursors or ascended chests or fractal weapons), and that DOES need to change. But outside of those horribly rarified things (that Arena.net seems to like where its at for reasons that are annoying to be sure), I think the “reward” level is acceptable.