Guild Wars 2

Rifter.6591:

This has been a known complained about issue since beta? and they still havent fixed it?

Jesus i need to stop coming to the forums it makes my head hurt to much.

How could they leave such a key system in the game broken for that long, how hard can it be to scale loot with the rest of the scaling this isnt rocket science.

Because they didn’t listen to their beta testers. We told them a lot of things that they ignored. They’re now realizing we were right all along.

I think I understand the theory behind it: drop T1 mats in a T1 map and T6 mats in a T6 map so that players have the option of farming for the tier of mats they require, rather than always getting T6 mats on every map.

However, the problem is that the rate for all mats is fairly low, and we still get garbage loot in addition to regular loot, so that doesn’t encourage us to play in other zones. I have no problem with the mat situation, but I do have a problem with getting Lvl 15 gear on my Lvl 50, as that doesn’t encourage me to stay there for very long.

According to the devs, the pet is supposed to act as nearly half of the ranger’s overall “power”. Think the rough stat was 40% or sommat.

But the pet is, at best, an NPC. It can’t dodge, it can’t think, it can’t do much of anything except attack or flee. It runs into aggro like a moron, it stands still like a moron, and it dies like a moron.

Until the pet is fixed, the ranger will be forever handicapped by this severe limitation to their functionality.

Stark.1350:

Alright, kitten. What would you like to discuss? What about this patch upsets you SO much?

Oh, just for you, I’ll get right on a post that details exactly what’s wrong with this patch. And then when you and all of the other game’s defenders promptly shrug off all of the complaints with the same tired excuses, I’ll point to those posts as proof of concept: you don’t care about the reason behind the complaints, you just want them to go away.

But that’ll wait until tomorrow. I have work in the morning.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Yeah I know right. why can’t they do it like every other MMO where they test it for weeks and weeks on a PTS and then have 16-18 hours of downtime on patch day and then have the patch launch for 2 hours then have the servers crash.

Stupid Anet, please try to be more like SWTOR, we need more downtime and crashing please!

The nerve of them… making us restart our clients… jerks..

You’ve never played another MMO, have you?

I’ve played F2P MMOs that never had any of the problems you’re expressing and still delivered massive content patches on a regular basis.

There is no excuse for a triple-A developer having so many game-breaking bugs in your new patch that the client needs to be restarted several times. You may be fine with such mediocrity but not everyone agrees with you.

I would. I’ve witnessed at least three, and a guildmate told me that it’s been closer to five by now.

It’s clear they didn’t test this patch before they rolled it. Again.

Heijincks.9267:

Oh, I’m whining about the complaints? Where? It doesn’t change the fact that people are overreacting. Like I mentioned with a workaround to the influence problem, it’s really not as big of a deal as some people make it out to be.

No, it’s not a big deal in your opinion.

Which is precisely my point. You don’t actually want a discussion about the problems, because you don’t think they are problems. And you’re just going to dismiss whatever arguments are presented. So why bother? You want to sit there and complain about a lack of “maturity” in the complaints, but if they were presented maturely, they wouldn’t even get a reaction. The last time the player base was loud and vocal about a problem in the game (Nov), guess what? The dev team responded. Big cryfest about the AoE nerf proposal, and guess what? Devs responded again. But they’ve never responded to mature, intelligent discussion, and neither have their defenders.

So the question is: If being mature and intelligent doesn’t work, but throwing a fit gets you heard and listened to, which reaction will you default to if you want something done?

Stark.1350:

Complaints could be spoken in a mature, respectful manner that promotes intelligent discussion and helpful ideas – not “OMMMMGGGG THE WORLD IS FREAKING ENDING” with absolutely ridiculous, untrue claims that people haven’t even touched yet.

Heijincks.9267:

No, it’s not that there’s “absolutely nothing in it that deserves to be complained about”. It’s that the complaints are a result of an overreaction.

No, the people who complain about complaints aren’t looking for a “mature” discussion.

They just want the dissenters to go away completely.

I’ve tried having mature, adult discussions about numerous topics in this forum before, and the responses were equally as childish, rude, and dismissive as the complaints you’re whining about right now.

You don’t want an actual discussion, you want everyone to shut up and be happy that they got “free content”. I don’t see anything wrong with complaining about a patch that is arguably one of the worst to date, perhaps only surpassed by the November patch and how dysfunctional that was.

So you’re suggesting that the new patch is perfect, then? That there’s absolutely nothing in it that deserves to be complained about?

If so, then I respect your point of view but I think it’s narrow-minded.

If not, why are you begrudging people for expressing their opinions on the subject?

RyuDragnier.9476:

I facepalm at the people complaining about the kill 40 in X zones. I mean come on, what’s so hard about killing 40 mobs in Plains of Ashford and Wayfarer Foothills?

What was so hard about killing 60 mobs anywhere in the world?

Nothing? Good, glad we agree. So why did they change it to a clearly inferior system, then?

penatbater.4710:

Just so we’re clear, by old I meant the one before this one, wherein there’s a random chance of having some requirements that you might’ve disliked (underwater combat, vet killing, etc). o.o

I was talking about the original model, where there were four requirements and all of them could be completed in virtually any location in the game.

But yes, I would even prefer the new randomized daily requirements over the “new new” choose-your-poison daily requirements we have now.

penatbater.4710:

Would you really rather have the old system than the new one?

Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. See below for a verbal version of my answer.

It was faster, easier, and far superior to the new model. It allowed me to play where I want, when I want. That’s what it should be.

OrianZeta.1537:

I’ve not brought this mentality to GW2. I am bringing the mentality of GW to GW2, and that was not about stats. Light armor was base 60. Medium base 70. Heavy base 80. Weapons topped out with the same base damage, there weren’t six freaking tiers of rarity or with level requirements.

You had two upgrades from there: a prefix and a suffix. That was it. Come up with a build and a skill bar, you’re in business. Have fun.

This here is insipid stat-chasing. It’s boring and depressing. The devs have brought antiquated mentality, not Guild Wars players. We were doing just fine at level 20 chasing skills, showing off cosmetic shinies and playing content.

Ditto.

I came from many MMOs. I usually leave around the time that the grind becomes unbearable, because I don’t like chasing stats. I just want to have fun and feel as though I’m being rewarded and progressing in the world. GW1 catered to my desire by giving me a small leveling curve, mostly cosmetic progression pursuits (so I could pick and choose which to pursue), and I could spend time playing the game.

GW2, on the other hand, is now becoming mostly about completing my dailies (which now take longer to do than ever before) and trying desperately to stay equipped close to other players at max level. That’s just like every other MMO, it’s stat-chasing.

No, I don’t need Ascended gear to play the game, but I need it if I want to be anything close to optimal. And GW1 didn’t make me choose between playing at an optimal level and playing for fun. So why the hell is GW2, the game that “takes everything you love about GW1”, not following that same path?

Chickenshoes.6250:

Sounds like the “playstyle” everyone wants is to log in for free laurel.

No, the “playstyle” I want is the original four dailies.

They were perfectly fine as is. ANet had no reason to go meddling in them and screw them up like they did here.

Oh, but I know the common replies: “it’s optional” and “the new dailies are easier for me personally so they’re fine”. Well hang on a minute, aren’t they “optional”? So why is it that you feel they needed to be changed to cater to you when they were perfectly fine as they were originally designed?

The only folks arguing that the changes are “fine” clearly didn’t even try to complete the original daily requirements, which could be done on any map and finished more quickly and easily than the current ones. If you can easily do 40 kills in one specific zone then why is 60 kills anywhere in the world a problem for you? If 13 types of monsters is easy then why is 15 so hard? If you have no trouble gathering, guess what, that was one of the original requirements. And if you can’t do 5 events, are you even really playing the game?

Face it. The old model was not only fine, it was better than the new model.

The original dailies were the best ones, to be honest.

60 kills, 15 enemy types, 20 gatherings, 5 events. You notice a common theme here? They were all completely unrestricted. You could complete them anywhere. This was a good thing because it allowed people to play the game however they wanted, wherever they wanted to.

Then ANet decides to screw with a perfectly working system by adding new daily requirements, some of which require specific locations to complete (aquatic slayer for example), others of which were bugged and didn’t work, and still others that encouraged kitten poor game play instead of smart tactical game play.

But that wasn’t enough, oh no. Now we have this “pick 5 of 9” setup, and the requirements are more specific than ever before. Kill monsters in a specific zone, run a specific dungeon, complete personal story steps, use the Mystic Toilet….Keg Brawl is on there for Abaddon only knows what reason. And they all offer less achievement points now, so now you feel even less rewarded than ever for doing your dailies and you have to do more work to complete them.

We’ve gone from a game designed to be “played the way you want to” to a game that sounds more like “play the way the developers want to”.

And no, “it’s optional” isn’t a valid excuse. Something being optional doesn’t excuse poor game design, not now or ever. And it especially doesn’t excuse taking a working design and destroying it.

My immediate reaction is “totally appalled”.

Daily requirements I’ve seen thus far:

• Personal Story Completer (impossible to do if you’re not an altoholic or have a lot of friends who haven’t finished theirs)
• Skill Point Completer (also requires an alt)
• Mystic Forge User
• Keg Brawl Stealer
• Fractals Completer
• Daily Mists Invasion Defender
• Region-Specific Kill Counts

What happened to “play the game the way you want to”? All of these are horribly restrictive options that force you to go to places and to perform tasks that you might not do on a daily basis. Even with as many options as there are, you’re being restricted far more than you used to be. It used to be that you’d “kill x enemies”, “kill x types of enemies”, “gather x items”, and just like that, you’d be done.

But no, that was far too open and provided me with too many options! Now instead, I’ve got to kill x enemies while in a specific portion of the map and while the moon is in the proper alignment. And then I have to play WvW, or run a dungeon every day, or do Keg Brawl, just to get a single laurel. And then I get to repeat the process every day so that I can keep equipping my characters with Ascended items.

MUCH BETTER! THANKS!

My enthusiasm for this game has been slowly waning. I went from an avid fan and day one pre-purchaser to a complete skeptic, disillusioned about the path ANet’s chosen. And now that dailies are actually tangibly harder to achieve on a regular basis (to the point where all of my available login time will now have to be dedicated just to this task just so I can manage to get Ascended gear some time this year), this patch just might be my last. Other MMO’s I’ve hated for one reason or another, but at least they at least had the dignity to let me play in whatever region of the game I wanted and do whatever objectives I wanted in a given day while still feeling rewarded for doing so.

Sorry, ANet, but I’ve run out of patience. I said back in Dec and Jan that this Jan/Feb/March patching session would be a make-or-break patch for many players. I think I just might be joining the exodus after today’s disappointment. I’ll stick around for a bit to see if maybe there’s anything else worth staying for, but I’m not very optimistic right now.

You botched dailies, you botched guild missions (which was the big selling point of this patch), you didn’t make nearly enough balance fixes (and in some cases made areas of the game much worse)….I just don’t see the improvement I had been hoping for.

Poledo.3256:

I’d turn myself into a dragon and walk around giving people blue items.

So you’d be just like the dragons we already have?

Geotherma.2395:

Ah yes, my skill in reading has declined a bit over the years.

Fixed that for ya. You’re welcome.

But the models that are followed for active players are usually Subscription games, where you can more accurately calculate how many players are “continuing on”. Whereas people in Guild Wars 2 know that they don’t have to log in, so its very difficult to compare this game to a free to play or a sub game by any standard.

It’s really not, though. Check how many players logged in over the last month, everyone else is clearly not active. Even if you argue that “maybe they took a holiday”, fair enough, but that still doesn’t mean they’re actively playing the game as of this instant.

It’s like measuring subscriptions on a monthly basis (which most companies do), and in fact ANet likely already does this to some degree internally. So all they have to do now is publish that data.

But after the 3000 “game is dying/dead” threads, it gets hard to take any of them seriously or draw any sort of intelligent information from. An expansion is upcoming, and I assume that this will bring more players back.

Whatever happened to “I don’t trust information from anyone except a developer”? Not one developer has stated that an expansion is upcoming in the near future. The only source of that rumor is an outside source. It may well be true, mind, but if you’re going to trust that rumor then it makes you entirely hypocritical on your earlier point of view.

Soon you can send gem items to people as well, which will also help their profits and increase the fun of the game. They will be focusing on global holidays which I’m sure the global player base will enjoy.

Which are both nice things. But neither of those things provides genuine retention to the point of consistency. If you’re only logging in for the holiday events, you’re not a consistently online player.

From experience with past MMO’s and noticing the trend in players to call apocalypses far too early, I simply dislike most of the posts solely because they offer no optimistic points. This isn’t generalized, but as a whole it is very hard to find people who can constructively comment on the game from both sides. They are also releasing more rewards for our favorite areas, this should help as well. They are learning as they go, and its a good sign for things to come.

And this is why reading helps. Because I’ve never said that the game is dying.

In fact I’ve outright said that I don’t even doubt the claim that the game’s population has increased, in accordance with Colin’s assertions. However, I also said that I don’t for one second believe that the data is statistically significant. I think it’s much lower than we’re being led to believe, given sales data to date, and I think there’s a reason they’re not providing it for public viewing: because it would indicate that the game isn’t doing as well as they’re trying to make it sound.

If you’re arguing that you don’t like when people claim the game is dying, then I feel it necessary to point out that you’re clearly arguing with someone else, not me.

Red Falcon.8257:

-snip-

Yes, having some communication as opposed to the total void of communication in the past is a good first step. However, it’s only one step, that doesn’t mean the journey is finished. You don’t stop trying to learn how to drive a car once you’ve figured out where the gas pedal is, unless your intention is to drive through your garage door.

Now they need to work on effective communication. Not giving us two diametrically opposed replies to the same question, for example.

Geotherma.2395:

Seems like their doing “ok”. /shrug I just play the game, plenty of people here.

http://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/155585.pdf?attachmentId=155585
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/186137/Strong_Guild_Wars_2_sales_help_NCsoft_to_record_quarter.php#.USv1XKWcH8k
http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/05/ncsoft-earnings-report-shows-healthy-growth/

Psst. If you’d taken my advice and gone reading back through the thread, you might have noticed this snippet:

Okay, since there is clearly a great number of people posting in this thread who don’t understand the terms we’re working with, a quick recap.

Total sales != number of active players != number of concurrent players.

Total sales refer to the total sales of the game (which, to date, is over 3 million copies). “Active players” refers to the number of people still playing, which is somewhere between 0 and 3 million. “Concurrent players” refers to the maximum number of players online at the same time.

All three of those links refer to sales, which in no way gives any indication of how many players the game still has.

See? It’s important to read a thread before replying, so that you don’t end up saying something that has already been covered.

IndigoSundown.5419:

-snip-

Appreciated, but someone else has already pointed this error out for me.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Yeah just for clarity, someone asked about balancing various under-used weapons and said something about “dual pistol mesmer” as an example, I figured that’s what he calls off-hand pistol and answered using the same verbiage asked. I’ve found travelling abroad, as well as across the fan base everyone uses different terms for part of the game, people still ask me all the time about our quest system for example, it’s easier to just respond with the terms they use so they understand.

Oh, so it was the other guy (the one interviewing you) who hasn’t played the game before.

So we should really be blaming the interviewers for discussing a game they don’t know much about. Fair enough. I’ll redirect my not-quite-facepalm to them instead, since if they’re interviewing about a particular game, it would certainly help to know about the game first.

But I guess that never stopped G4.

Though, casual question for ya, Colin….you do realize that condition damage and direct damage are just alternate forms of providing damage, and that one isn’t necessarily inherently more powerful if they both produce equal damage over a different span of time, right?

Ursan.7846:

Thanks for the reply, Colin. Though the overreaction over the internet is always highly amusing. Not everyone thinks the devs are completely clueless and grasp at every scrap of information in order to confirm their biases. I swear!

I don’t think they’re clueless, I just think they demonstrate on a regular basis that they don’t always know what they’re doing.

BIG difference. :p

Geotherma.2395:

-snip-

Er, but your “point” is wrong. WoW rather regularly reports its player count, as do many other subscription games. Even some F2P games do it. That’s how we constantly know how many people are playing games like WoW, they outright tell people how many subscribers they have. That’s how most companies work, usually because they have investors to answer to.

There’s at least one site online that gets its data for active player counts from said companies and/or press reports: http://mmodata.blogspot.com/

So the data is obviously out there, at least for most companies.

Worth noting that ANet was reporting some of these figures back when the figures made it sound like the game was doing great. But then they fell silent after the initial two weeks. Now we’re hearing nothing about concurrent or active players. It was only just recently that we even got raw sales figures, and they showed a significant drop in sales since the first two weeks. It’s clear that people just aren’t buying the game that much any more. So either the recent uptick in players is people coming back, or it’s purely due to sales (which would mean that it’s a much smaller increase than they’re implying). I don’t deny that it’s possible the game is growing, I only question how much that growth really is.

It’s not coincidence when a company goes from bragging about its sales to total silence. It’s not exactly conspiratorial to suggest that perhaps the reason they’re no longer bragging about their numbers is because there’s no longer anything there to brag about.

And, as I’ve stated multiple times, I’d be fine with being proven wrong. I’ve directly said that if the devs came in here and posted the data to prove that the game’s growth is significantly high, I’d withdraw my point. But the devs have remained quiet, and have continued to do so, despite this topic being brought up many, many times since the game’s release.

You choose to ignore that fact. But it has not escaped my own observation, and I am convinced that the reason is because they don’t want us knowing that the game isn’t growing as fast as they want it to seem.

….

I didn’t quite facepalm, so much as drop my head into my hands to hide my facial reaction. I just….wow. I don’t really know what to say here.

This isn’t something you just casually get wrong.

I could make a list of things but I’d settle for just one….fix the bloody camera!

That’s one change that would dramatically improve my experience with the game, and everyone else’s too.

Paulytnz.7619:

You can’t really compare loot from Skyim to GW2. Why do I say this? GW2 has a trading system where you can SELL what you get and don’t want to other players and use the money to BUY what you want/need. That just does not happen in skyrim from memory, oh wait you could sell junk items to vendors which I would get a lot of which btw you can also do in GW2. :p

We’re not comparing the sale value of loot.

We’re talking purely about the subjective sense of feeling “rewarded” for your play. And I’m saying that Skyrim did it better, at least for me, than GW2 has ever done. If GW2 was doing half as good of a job, I think most of my complaints about the game would have been answered by now.

Besides that you also get the dungeon tokens from doing dungeons which is meant to be the true rewards (to get the skins).

Which takes a little over 23 runs of the dungeon to obtain. That’s about a week if you’re grinding every path daily. Just thought I should add that note that you clearly forgot to add.

Funny thing? In Skyrim, I never had to grind a dungeon 23 times to be adequately rewarded for my hard work. I ran it once.

Yes, again, “you can’t really compare the loot from Skyrim and GW2”, but if we’re talking subjectively from the point of view of “do I feel truly rewarded for my time investment”, the answer is obviously no, not if I’m comparing it to Skyrim’s dungeons anyways.

Geotherma.2395:

I did, I ignore xfire and other pages that are not 100% accurate. I’d trust a dev over a website and over a player who doesn’t like a game. Saying that because they are having a sale they are doing bad makes no sense, as my previous post mentioned.

Now I know you haven’t read the thread.

As I said, go do that now. You shouldn’t jump into a conversation you’re not a part of if you’re not willing to go back and read everything that was said in that conversation.

Arisal.9740:

That’s funny because I just looked up how Wow did in the 1st 7 years and it looks like gw2 still sold more than wow did in the same time frame: http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/11/seven_years_of_world_of_warcra.php

Gw2 – ~6 months to 3 million (accounts)
Wow – ~8 months to 2 million (subs)

Sure it was a different time, but common, lets not be so pessimistic. Since when did 3 million become a bad number!?

3 million isn’t a bad number. It’s just not as meaningful to sell 3 million in 2013 as it would have been back in 2004.

Sort of like how all these new movies have vastly outsold classic movies from the 90s and 80s, but that’s not really as meaningful in an age where a movie ticket costs 10 times as much as it used to.

The markets then and now are completely different beasts.

Oh, and secondary note: WoW continued to sell at an exponential rate for its first two years. GW2 has slowed to a near halt after six months. WoW’s newest expansion outsold GW2 in the same span of time and it was widely considered a failure. So I do hope you’re not about to claim that GW2 is going to be the next WoW when it isn’t even able to output nearly the same sales figures as a 10-year-old game.

Geotherma.2395:

Using the word resort denotes you have some sort of insider info on how the company is doing. Care to show proof other than a outside program/blog post?

Someone hasn’t been reading this thread.

Go do that, then I’ll consider answering your question.

Raine.1394:

Since the 1/28 patch culling, which used to be episodic, is now a universal and continuous problem. Always now in events, but running into the TP in LA will demonstrate this as well. When you run in the place will be empty. In a few seconds you will be in a sea of other players. Culling has gotten worse. But, what would you like more, a stable balanced game or monthly events? As we have seen, you can’t have both.

Agree with the sentiment, though from what I can tell, we apparently can’t have either one.

The monthly events, provided they work as intended (and to date, they never have), only seem to increase the number of bugs we have. We do get bug fixes, but as soon as one is fixed, two more spring up. I understand that games are complex creatures, but….seriously, this sort of thing would be caught in a PTR server rather quickly and avoided. Instead we’re kinda just expected to roll with it, like having such major bugs at this stage is somehow “charming”.

JonPeters.5630:

Actually this is not true and is something we are actively looking at.

“There’s a cap on condition stacks of 25. In a scenario where you have two thieves attacking a boss and one of them can achieve a stack of 25 by themselves, the other one essentially becomes useless because they’ve got nothing to stack on. Is anything being done to address that to make them less redundant?

Colin: Currently no.

These two statements cannot co-exist.

You need to start having internal discussions about what you disclose publicly before you disclose it. I love that you’re trying to talk to us more, it’s a big step forward….but now we’re getting conflicting information from different developers.

The precursor system is both in development and yet it’s not. AoE nerfs are both in the works and they’re not, and they’ll be across the board but still individually assessed. And now, condition damage is both an active priority and not currently being looked at.

No more Schrodinger responses, here, please. Get on the same page, all of you, and give us one answer.

eisberg.2379:

-snip-

Yes, and that’s sort of my point.

If they’re having to resort to sales this early, and are being outsold by all three of the formerly named games at their current stages of development (all three had better sales per week on average than GW2 does right now), then the odds are good that they’re not doing very well.

maddoctor.2738:

TERA had a sale 20 days after release (May 19th), had another one on May 26th, both at half price and another one in September (at a price of 9.99$!) only 4 months after release.

Erm, the end of April to the beginning of September is most certainly not a four month period.

Mackdose.6504:

-snip-

Okay, since there is clearly a great number of people posting in this thread who don’t understand the terms we’re working with, a quick recap.

Total sales != number of active players != number of concurrent players.

Total sales refer to the total sales of the game (which, to date, is over 3 million copies). “Active players” refers to the number of people still playing, which is somewhere between 0 and 3 million. “Concurrent players” refers to the maximum number of players online at the same time.

Got it? Good.

No one, least of all me, said that their concurrency figures are directly related to their sales figures. This is just you not reading my post properly. What I said was that the sales figures are down, which in turn means that the overall growth of the player base might not be as significant as the devs want us to believe.

You state that it doesn’t matter how much growth there is, but no, it absolutely does matter, because if the growth is relatively small, then it’s nigh meaningless. In which case, you’re relying primarily on player retention for your continued sustenance rather than true growth.

Initial sales are always the primary source of income for every game in the initial months of a game’s release. Don’t forget that the developers are not only recouping development costs for creating the game, but also maintenance and distribution costs over the early months as well. Yes, it’s likely they made their money back, no one’s questioning that.

But micro-transactions are the long-term monetary model, not the short-term model. Once you’ve saturated the market with sales of the game and can no longer rely on that source of income (and ANet’s getting to that point now), it’s the micro-transactions that keep you going.

I’m not sure you even understand where my skepticism is coming from, so it’s hard for you to adequately judge how misplaced it is.

My point is that everyone posting in here with bold confidence is doing so without any figures in front of them, only the word of a developer that the game’s overall population has increased. Well, that’s nice, but that’s not numbers, that’s a very easily manipulated PR statement.

The actual numbers don’t paint nearly as rosy of a picture: visible decreases in sales and a downtrend on Xfire and other related sites. Then there’s the more anecdotal stuff: individual accounts of the player count, continued silence about the game’s concurrency and active player counts (when previously they were all too willing to brag about them), etc. It all doesn’t add up very positively. No, the game’s not dying, it may even be growing as they claim, but it’s likely not as large of a growth as they’re trying to imply.

Now you can certainly argue the validity of those statistics and you’re welcome to it, but it’s outright false to claim that the “nay-sayers” in this thread have less facts than you. In fact, they have more backing up their arguments than you do. You’re running on the word of a single dev and nothing else. And the continued silence of the developers in discussions like this should have you at least a bit concerned, because it’d be all too easy for them to hand over statistics that prove the game is doing great….but only if those statistics exist. Usually the reason for a company hiding statistics is because they paint an unfavorable light, one that works against the choice narrative of the time.

Case in point: ANet was bragging about 2 million sold copies of the game after only two weeks of the game’s release. Then they went dead silent on the figure for the longest time, causing people to question how much it was actually growing. People argued and debated and fought over it until finally in Jan, we found out that they were now up to 3 million….meaning that it took them four months to gain the same number of players as they gained in the opening two weeks of the game’s release….not nearly the beautiful picture of growth that they had been implying all this time.

I don’t deny that they may be telling the truth and the game is growing. I believe it. I simply question how significant the growth actually is. And if you were learning from their past statements, then you would be, too.

Heijincks.9267:

What claim didn’t you make? That you said the player population was dropping? What I attacked was your point that GW2’s player population was dropping as reflected in sales by saying that it is far too ambiguous.

And if you’d read this post before replying to it, you’d know that I said that the statistic is not entirely meaningless as you want it to be, since GW2’s sales have dropped off faster than those of other major triple-A games in recent memory. It took them 4 months to sell as many copies as they sold in the first two weeks of the game’s release. Like it or not, that’s a statistic that has some meaning to it.

There is no official data on sales other than “3 million+ sales at launch”. Any claim you make now would be assumptive. You said you liked numbers right? To make the claim that GW2 isn’t selling well “after the locusts left” is based on what?

That GW2 had “major” sales? Tell me, how many sales has GW2 held? As far as I know, there were only two (or three if I forgot any). Both times the sales were limited (and only lasted a week), and having that many sales over that many months isn’t really anything surprising. If GW2 really wasn’t selling well at all, what stopped Anet from doing a price cut instead, or even repeat what TERA did?

Well let’s see….working backwards, there’s the sale now, the long sale during December, and the Black Friday sale.

Having three sales over the first six months of your game’s launch isn’t a big deal?

How many sales did Rift, TERA, or even SWTOR have in that same period? Lemme answer that for you: none. They saw no reason to devalue their product when it was still selling just fine at its original market price.

Let’s face it. Something going on sale is not necessarily indicative of sales performance. Things that are selling very well even has frequent sales (like many Steam games for instance). Even if they just launched.

Except that MMOs are not Steam.

This is a buy-to-play game. The game’s initial sales are its primary source of money in the initial months of the game’s release. The Gem Store is its long-term source of revenue, certainly, but the game sales are the big deal in this first several months, and if they were doing as well as they’d hoped, they wouldn’t feel pressured to have sales. You can argue that the sale during the holidays was normal, and I’d be okay with that….but now they’re having a sale in February. Do they expect a lot of people to be buying their family members a late Valentine’s Day gift? It’s relatively clear that they’re not doing all that well if they have to throw another sale.

If you can still sell your triple-A at $60, you don’t typically drop its price. Using your “Steam” example, many new releases into Steam don’t typically go on sale if they happen to release shortly before a major Steam sale. Skyrim didn’t go on sale until a sale months later, after the initial saturation levels had been tapped out.

critickitten.1498:

And it still has nothing to do with the concurrency rate or the number of players currently playing the game.

Unless you’re going to say that the rest of your post was not about your initial statement, then I think it has a lot to do with “concurrency rate or the number of players currently playing the game”.

Not reading, again.

I’m saying that the sales figures have nothing to do with concurrency or the number of active players. That’s rather obvious in context if you invest the proper amount of time into reading the posts you reply to.

I’m not going to deny the possibility that the player population could be dropping. I am not arguing in defense of “increasing player population”. With that said, with whatever information we have right now, it is far more likely that it is not the case. Saying Anet is being deceptive requires a lot of assumptions.

I’m not arguing that the player base is in decline right now. Again, you’re clearly not reading what I write if you think that I’m saying that.

I’m saying that the scale of this increase they’re claiming is questionable since the sales figures don’t seem to reflect a high level of growth, and that the player base is most definitely a lot lower now than it was at the start of the game.

cargan.5689:

roll an alt

Make people re do the story line with no reward?? I would rather watch an ED Wood omnibus

Hate to do it again, but….GW1 did it. There’s no reason why GW2 can’t do it, too.

Believe it or not, some people enjoy replaying missions for the story, and don’t want to make a new alt just to re-experience it. GW1’s missions were replayable, why exactly can’t GW2’s be replayed (with slight alterations so that you can’t change an already-made decision point in the campaign)?

This is one of those small things that would’ve made a big difference if it had been rolled on release.

HannaDeFreitas.4236:

Even if Anet posted server statistics you would say they are made up.
Because you want to believe in what you believe, regardless of all evidence pointing against your claims.

No, because I believe numbers, and I believe there is a reason we’re not getting to see them.

If I was Colin and saw your post I would file you a lawsuit for defamation and send to you to beg in the streets, but he hasn’t done so, so maybe he’s not as bad as you think.

….and you would lose that lawsuit horribly because you would have no legal standing under the legal definition of “defamation”, and then I’d counter-sue to cover the court costs, so perhaps it’s a good thing you’re not Colin because you’d be an awful lot poorer by the end of the whole affair, and you’d have been wasting taxpayer money on a frivolous lawsuit.

Don’t threaten lawsuits when you clearly don’t know what they’re for. >_>

Heijincks.9267:

Too bad you didn’t read my post, because surprise, it didn’t have any disagreement with yours. A tl;dr of my response simply states that you made a moot point.

No, your post was attacking a point you thought was a weakness in my post, except that I never made such a claim.

Yes, a game’s sales always decline in the months after its release. No, that doesn’t mean the statistic is meaningless, as many other triple-A MMOs were still selling better than GW2 in the months following their initial release, even after the locusts had left. Combined with the fact that GW2 has needed to have multiple major sales in the less-than-half-a-year after its initial release means that it’s clearly not selling well.

And it still has nothing to do with the concurrency rate or the number of players currently playing the game.

Bloodstealer.5978:

GW2 is eseentially a F2P package so any account created has to be considered active

No. That’s not how “activity” is measured in any MMO, whether F2P or otherwise.

Its status as a buy-once-pay-forever game doesn’t mean it magically denies the normal rules. An “active” account is one that has been playing the game recently and continues to do so. And you’re welcome to argue what “recently” means (though I’d maintain you’re no longer technically active after a full month of no logins myself), but there is no way that you can rationalize “active” to mean “any account ever made”.

The dev team specified that they saw a growth in the player count after the holidays, so I wager that they started at ~1-2 million active at the game’s release, took a nosedive early and then another in November, and then climbed slightly in December. That doesn’t mean they have 3 million active players, it means they more than likely have a healthy player base closer to a half million players.

Total speculation on my part, absolutely, but until ANet goes public with their numbers, that’s all we have to go on. We know for a fact it’s not three million active players (that would imply that no one has left the game since release, which we all know isn’t true), so it’s somewhere between 0 and 3 million. Were I to guess, I’d say probably between 500k and 1 million. That seems about right, given the way other games have played out over time. Rift lost about half its players, SWTOR dropped to around 30% of its original numbers, etc. I think with the negative public backlash, GW2 is likely closer to SWTOR’s numbers than they would like to admit.

But hey, I’d be happy to be proven wrong. It’d be nice to know the game is more successful than it seems to be. The thing I want people to note is that the devs could easily make this discussion, and could’ve made all previous discussions of this nature, go away if they start releasing concurrency and active player counts for the game. But they never did. The last time we got any concurrency figures was at the game’s release, and then never again after that. Now you may not be a suspicious sort of person, but as for me, I find it hard to believe that they just decided to stop bragging about how good they’re doing. Companies only start to hide things when they’re not doing as well as they want it to appear.

Vayne.8563:

I guess you guys don’t play games like Skyrim or Dragon Age.

I have. Have you? Because I’ll tell ya, in my experience, Skyrim’s dungeons have always felt more rewarding than GW2’s. I would regularly find items that I could actually use in my adventures, an experience that I’ve never felt in GW2’s dungeon.

In fact, the only GW2 dungeon to date that has given me loot that justified the time I spent in it was Fractals, where I see the color yellow and even the color gold with some degree of frequency. Yet to date, I have never got a yellow or gold item from other dungeons. Never.

Heijincks.9267:

-snip-

jobah.7241:

-snip-

People like to reply to posts they didn’t actually read, so I’ll do you the same courtesy and not read a word of what you said.

Come back after you’ve actually read what I said and are ready to have a mature, adult discussion about it.

Yes, ANet has said that the player count is increasing. However, that claim comes with zero metrics behind it. Ever notice how the last time we got an actual measurement of concurrency numbers was back when the game was still in beta? If ANet posted their concurrency numbers now, there’d be no way for any person on this forum to argue that the game hasn’t lost any players. None.

Colin saying “the population is increasing” isn’t data. Data is numbers, numerical evidence, hard FACTS. Not claims that come from a guy who has already been caught in double talk in this very forum before. This is the same guy who claimed that the Flame and Frost updates would be “adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards via new reward systems taking advantage of our open persistent world”, then promptly backpedaled and claimed that the laurels would have nothing to do with precursors, and that in fact there was no promise of precursor updates made except the scavenger hunt (which they aren’t even working on).

An increase by 1% and an increase by 0.1%, both are increases. But one is more significant than the other. I don’t deny that his claim may be true, I only doubt how valid that data actually is. I suspect, since we’re already seeing yet another sale on GW2, that the increase isn’t nearly as much as they want people to think it was.

Now it’s true, every game experiences less sales and less players as time goes on. Especially MMOs, where a good half of the playerbase leaves for other games within a month or two of release, having exhausted all of the content. And with GW2 having no true “endgame”, the content is exhausted much faster, and there’s no repeat content or replayability to keep them around.

But there is absolutely no denying that GW2 has lost players. Quite a significant amount, in fact. Any number of people can verify this for you with their own anecdotes. My own anecdotes are my friends list (which is full of people who have played and then quit forever) and my guilds (one of which is full of friends of mine who no longer play, and another which has regularly culled 30-50 people from its roster every month due to inactivity since I joined it). When you add all of these individual stories up, it adds up to a clear fact: the game HAS lost players. How many? Who knows, you’re free to debate that as much as you want. But it has lost players. There are not three million active players on GW2. This is undeniable fact, and the sooner we get over that hill, the better.

And for the umpteenth time: if I hate GW2 so much, why have I poured over a hundred dollars of my money into the game, and why did I convince over a half dozen of my own friends to join the game? Why am I trying to maintain seven different characters, and why have I logged in nearly every day since the game released, and why do I have over 1k hours logged in the game to date? Seriously, why? Because I like wasting time and money? Obviously not, but this is all the white knights can throw at me, anymore. I don’t believe everything the dev team says, ergo I must be a hater who is only hoping for the game to fail. I’m not a hater, I’m a disappointed fan who wants to see ANet get this game back to basics and stop trying to be WoW. I didn’t buy this game because I really wanted to play a cheaper WoW, I bought this game because of my love for GW1 and I wanted to see where Tyria would take me next. But the dev team is trying to be something it’s not, and they need to knock it off and build their game to be more of the spiritual successor to GW1 it was meant to be. TESO (which I maintain will probably be a worse game) will come along and sweep away a large portion of GW2’s population by offering the same experience with a new dev team, if ANet doesn’t change the way it treats its customers and handles its game.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I’d posit that it’s probably reaching saturation; anyone who wants it has it and people who don’t want it wouldn’t buy it without a reason to. Hence “it’s cheaper”.

I also got an email from Blizzard about WoW being 75% off. That’s another game entirely, but it supports the idea that there is a point where more new people simply aren’t going to play your game. Without a subscription coming in, and with rather significant community pressure not to buy Gems, there’s a recipe for real bad potential.

It’s not just saturation, it’s competition. There are just so many games out there now, many of which are free, that are competing for a limited number of gamers and a limited amount of free time.

Notice that WoW’s recent sales (and their special offers intended to bring back older players) mainly got started after their player population turned into a good approximation of an arterial bleed.

With so much competition out there, it’s rare for any game to maintain the same population it started with. Nowadays you have good opening numbers, then you lose nearly 50% of your players in the first month or two, and eventually you level off at a much lower figure than you started with.

GW2 is in a good position for the time being because it doesn’t have a lot of direct competitors that do some of the same things they do. However, we’ll see what happens when TESO comes out. If the game defies my expectations and manages to be really good, then GW2 will see another sharp decline in players, I suspect.

Morpeth.5318:

Proof? Sources? Anything…? My server is as busy as ever.

And Hurricane Sandy didn’t hit my apartment building, so there’s no proof that it ever happened.

….see how ridiculous that logic is? Seriously, just because you aren’t affected by it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Don’t be ignorant. Everyone knows that the player population has dropped off considerably, as it does with every game. There are plenty of servers that have complained of low traffic. Just because your server is fine doesn’t mean there isn’t a decline overall.

You might be able to argue about how much of a decline it is, but I do hope you’re not attempting to imply that there has never been a drop in players.

Is the player base declining? That’s a fairly easy to answer question: yes.

Their sales dropped off tremendously after the first month. They went from selling two million copies in two weeks….to just recently breaking three million back in January. And it’s known that the player base was already in decline as early as November, given the reactions to changes being made at that time and the subsequent damage control rush from the devs following the event.

Now it’s technically not all doom and gloom. According to Colin, their numbers “went up” after the holidays….though to be fair, that could mean anything since he didn’t specify how much that “increase” was. However, if we’re to take the home page’s most recent announcement as evidence of a problem, I’m guessing that their sales are doing badly enough that they’re starting to get really worried.

So, yes, the game’s in decline. I don’t think it’ll be enough of a decline that the game keels over and dies, necessarily, but it’s certainly not on pace to compete with WoW either.

Shanna.4762:

They could phase it for people who haven’t done their story yet, or instance it if they absolutely had to. I have a feeling that Orr will eventually or gradually begin to change over time. They don’t have to get rid of the dungeon, either because the lost city could stay lost while the outside gradually grows more vegitation and wildlife, and less undead and replaces that aspect with other things even if it’s really just a change in skins. One of the bigger forts could grow into the new city in Orr, or a new one could be founded by Queen Jennah for humanity since humans desperately need more places to live….Or it could be the first real Pact lead City, or some long lost descendant or relative in some fashion to the last King.

On the issue of it changing too much in a short period of time….If you consider what we saw in the story, and how fast that growth took place in that gigantic temple….Then it would not really be too unbelievable for it to change gradually, over the span of a year. It’s magic after all

All of that within a year?

And you think that’s a reasonable, believable level of development? Considering that it took decades to build Divinity’s Reach, and over a century for the Pale Tree to grow to the size it is today, I’d say you’re completely out of your mind if you think that the entire continent of Orr is going to go from “dreary hellhole of Tyria” to “thriving metropolis” in a year’s time.

I believe in a game world that makes sense and develops over time, certainly, but it needs to develop over the proper amount of time. No visible changes would show themselves in a year’s time, even with magic, because we’ve already seen how far magical growth can go….and it’s not THAT far. Everything you’ve just suggested would take decades, if not centuries, to occur in the world of Tyria….and you want it “gradually” phased in over the course of a single year?

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Just a quick note—I said the odds of it dropping was closer to .005 than the 1 in a million or so that was tossed out. Those aren’t the exact odds, but if my math is correct, 10 players running the event every day might expect one staff to drop after about 7 months. (And we haven’t been out that long.)

So about 0.05%.

Er….with a drop rate that low, I think it should be an Ascended tier weapon minimum to be perfectly frank. That’s extremely rare for just an Exotic tier weapon to be.

Bonefield.9813:

My point about maintaining status quo was separate from my opinion on Orr, and directed at the idea that they can’t change things because it always needs to be the same for the sake of the personal story. My opinion on the necessity of ArenaNet actually showing progress in the cleansing of Orr is based on the fact that the story itself makes a major point of that. That’s the future the writers chose to paint for Orr. They could have just as easily left it at Zhaitan being dead, and leaving Orr as a testament to the fact that dragon corruption is irreversible; instead, most of the final chunk of the personal story is dedicated to finding a way to save it. This is the point at which most MMO stories shuttle players off to the next expansion, leaving the supposedly hopeful future of the area in limbo for the life of the game.

A middle ground is fine. I would be disappointed if it changed overnight, and was instantly entirely different. But the cleansing itself is supposed to be something of a magical process, and we do have a race that can start plant growth apparently at will (and have managed to do so even in Orr, in some places—see Caer Shadowfain). I don’t expect it to suddenly be a different place. Visually and thematically, I think it’s an amazing, beautiful, bittersweet area, and slowly shifting the tone from “utterly corrupted” to “cleansed and in the process of healing” wouldn’t change that.

The problem is that it’s hard to argue that such a change can be properly conveyed within a reasonable span of time.

All previously existing examples of major growth took place over many years, not months. Normal growth for a single tree takes years. Regrowth of a major ecosystem takes far far longer, and “it’s magic” doesn’t offer enough of a shoulder shrug when even the magical instances of growth aren’t largely significant. Even the extremely magical Pale Tree took over a hundred years to grow before it bore the first of the Sylvari race.

Expecting it to occur at any point within even a ten year span is still a bit unreasonable. I could see a tiny bit of growth within ten years, but….visibly recovered? Not by a long shot.

Bonefield.9813:

Maintaining status quo is incompatible with their goal of creating an ongoing story that affects the actual game world.

No it isn’t. At least not in the sense you’re trying to make it out to be. You’re trying to make it sound like the world can’t be “changing” if Orr doesn’t start showing signs of growth, to which I will repeatedly point out the reality of the world you’re trying to change.

Firstly, Orr was underwater for nearly 150 years after a massive cataclysm that destroyed the city of Arah and much of the continent, forcing the entire pennisula to slide into the ocean. Then it was brought back up from the depths as an undead wasteland for Zhaitan in 1219, and it’s been that way for over a hundred more years up to the present day.

Expecting everything to start turning green and full of life in less than a year of real time when it became what it is today over the course of 250 in-world years is completely unrealistic and would destroy any sense of in-world immersion that the game might have had.

The world can still be “changing” without radically altering the entire appearance and function of several maps in the game. True, I think it needs to be more than just “a fountain in LA got broken”, but there’s clearly a middle ground in there and it needs to be considered.

Max Lexandre.6279:

I don’t see ANY POINT IN FUTURE EXPANSIONS without higher level cap.

You will launch expansions where we start at endgame???

I can’t understand. I supose leveling system is useless AT ALL. We all should start as level 80, there is no point anymore, no objective.

I wonder what is expansions all about, new areas? lol, new story? lol.
Without level cap, without any more items type or better items… Future expansions can’t be more than a new story and some new maps.

YOU GUYS must understand that if there is new maps, new items, new things, the market will change anyways, with or without higher level cap.

Well let’s see….

• New Story Content
• New Zones
• New Equipment
• New Races
• New Professions
• New Weapon Types and Skills
• New Utility/Elite Skills
  (to name a few items)

Nope, you’re absolutely right, there would just be no depth whatsoever to an expansion if it doesn’t have a level cap increase!

[/sarcasm]

Dante.1508:

I agree with you completely, i feel orr should change completely, the quote i chose above was suppose to be how guildwars 2 worked, it is not the case at all its exactly like every other mmo..

WoW used phasing to make its game world change as a result of major events, and it’s hardly the only MMO out there that has made use of this method to change its in-game content as a result of major events.

And a previous poster already illustrated some of the problems that it tends to cause. New players don’t know what the game originally looked like, and miss out on lots of prior content simply because they joined the game later. That tends to be a deterrent for some people.

And to those complaining about changes and them missing content, i say you should have purchased guildwars 2 earlier, and they missed what 4 events/holidays now that content is gone for good too…

If it’s anything like GW1, the holiday content will likely return next year in some fashion.

And all of the non-holiday content is still accessible in-game (with the exception of the one-time-only Karka events, and honestly, no one in their right mind wants to replay those), so I don’t know what you’re talking about. I strongly suspect that Flame and Frost will also be a permanent in-game addition in some form or another, too, given that they’re investing such time and effort into the “Living Story” model.

I don’t think that just because you bought a game a year or two later than me, that you somehow deserve less content than me. That’s not a good way to sustain your player base, much less grow and expand upon it.

Dante.1508:

I disagree, Guildwars 1 story/campaign was nothing like Guildwars 2 setup, makes me wonder how some of these people say they played Guildwars 1…

And yes i agree op we need more open world content. be it stories, quest hubs whatever..

I played GW1 for several years. Mechanically, it’s exactly the same. You reach a certain location or point in the story, you’re pulled out of the main world into a heavily instanced event, you do whatever the quest tells you, and then you’re dropped back out of it.

But I’ll bite. Please, do explain how different they are, since I obviously have no clue what I’m talking about. I’m going to enjoy this.

Orr was destroyed and left underwater for almost 150 years before Zhaitan brought it back up from the depths of the ocean.

And people seriously think that this level of death and decay is going to be healed in a single year just because some leafy tart stabbed a sword into a puddle of water? O_o

Absolutely not. I think it’d drag any sense of believability right out of the game if it went back to being green and happy and full of wildlife in such a short time.

Yes, they said they wanted a changing world, but that’s too much change far too quickly.

Ricky Da Man.5064:

lets face it, I said a campaign, just a campaign in the same mould as gw1’s it was an epic adventure, now you do your single player story and then bits and bats all over the place.

That’s precisely how GW1 did its story missions, too. You’d do a mission, then a couple of intermediate run-around quests, then another mission. It was bits of story sprinkled in between bits of doing other stuff. In fact, in GW1 you could actually skip the bulk of the story content in many cases and just run around the maps if you wanted….sort of like how GW2 works, also.

There is no core difference between GW1 and GW2 in that aspect. None. People need to take off their nostalgia goggles, take a good hard look at the actual mechanics, and then realize how similar they really are. They revolve around the same core concept:

1) You have to be in a particular location to start the mission.
2) They have an “expected” level, but you can conceivably run it at whatever level you want.
3) You’re removed from the main world and dropped into a personalized instance that only your party members can join you in.
4) You’re given specific objectives to complete before the mission is over, at which point you can exit the instance.

The only real differences are that GW1’s missions could be run in any particular order (which was stupid), that nearly all of them were balanced for party play rather than the solo experience (which was stupid), and that GW1’s missions could be replayed infinitely (which is actually a feature I miss, but I can understand why they might not do it in a game whose narrative changes based on storyline decisions).

You can argue that the “feel” is very different, but mechanically, they’re really NOT all that different at all.

Nalora.7964:

Personally I admire people who have achieved greatness. I do not have to achieve that same greatness myself, I only need a chance to forge my own. This is the idea behind it.

And so do I.

Problem is, “legendaries” are by no means a symbol of a player’s greatness as of right now.

Arekai.5698:

Anet also said they wouldn’t add gear treadmill.

Actually to be fair to the devs, they never made that claim.

We mostly just assumed that when they said that GW2 would “take everything we love about GW1” that it meant “no gear treadmill” since that was one of the most beloved features of GW1 for many people (including most of my friends, who have since left GW2).

Woo boy, were we wrong or what?