Guild Wars 2

JonathanSharp.7094:

Syeria.4812:

Thank you so much for this post. I’ve seen that “two developers” comment taken so far as to have people claim that only two people in total work on all of PvP.

It’s ok, given what was said, and the way human communication works, it’s understandable why players were saying that. I just wanted to clear it up a little.

Hi Jonathan, thanks for being so open about this.

I’m just a little bit concerned with balance changes. It seems that you have representatives for WvW and PvP which is good. However, I don’t do PvP and I really don’t care for WvW (although I do it just for the monthly achievement but again, I don’t care if the class Im playing is useless in WvW).

My concern is for PvE. Based on the team structure you’ve given so far (and again, I hope I’m not misunderstanding the process of reviewing balance changes), I’m getting the impression (that I hope you’ll correct) there is no developer champion for PvE (hearts, dungeons, dynamic events, general open world veteran and champion mob encounters, etc).

I raise this concern because, and as I’ve already repeatedly mentioned in the Mesmer forums, certain balance changes to the Mesmer due to PvP are impacting PvE gameplay. I don’t do PvP on Mesmer so I really have no idea how “OP” the class is that it will merit nerf upon nerf every patch, but it’s disheartening to see this because as I was leveling the Mesmer, I was struggling with it more than other classes (necro, engineer, ranger) until about level 40-ish, and continue to struggle with it when it comes to loot tagging for DE encounters that are AoE centric.

I would just like to have a little bit of clarification if and how PvE concerns are handled during balance change discussions.

Looking forward to your reply.

Thanks!

EDIT: I also would like to know if you would consider, or if there are already, class champions within the development team. Class champions = developers assigned more or less to focus on just one or two classes in terms of conceptual development and playtesting balance changes across the board (PvE, WvW, PvP).

Slark.1263:

I wish I knew of a place to file complaints and also positive comments.

I have have some GW2 staff that I feel are not helping the company as a whole because they were being disrespectful and/or negligent in there duties.

Hi Slark, I tend to agree with you but I cannot say more as I have already incurred numerous infractions just for raising this topic.

Slark.1263:

I have also had some GW2 staff that were very helpful and I do like to leave positive comments when people go beyond what I expect.

Yeah, I can relate. I’m one of those people too. I do complain when I see something that could be done better, but when I see that real effort and passion is done in making things better, I make sure to provide positive feedback. I’m the type of guy who really does answer customer satisfaction survey questions. Unfortunately, I don’t think this system exists in GW2 yet.

Slark.1263:

I do not know how to actually file a ticket about problems with the staff because there is a risk of the person you are complaining about actually seeing your complaint, deleting it, and then banning my account.

You can send an email to forums@arena.net for forum moderation issues.

As for general complaints and grievances about the game, that’s what I’m asking about on here, and nobody is answering my question considering the fact that my other thread which, let me just put it, was a bit more passionate in tone, was immediately infracted.

Anyway, I hope one of the mods or support people provide an answer to the correct channel to raise complaints/grievances in this game because complaint threads are deleted by mods.

Phy.2913:

PiSquare.2904:

Slic have you gone full mental? Tier 6 mats are supposed to be hard to obtain. Also everyone farming gets 2-3 every 40 min (wich is an exaggeration, i can get way more than that). Also you get the silver you can buy them with during those 40 min.

Why? And says who? T6 shouldn’t cost 20 times more than a T5. There are better ways to add arbitrary grind or slow down progress without making one of the most needed materials harder to get than a rare.

T6 mats are necessarily that rare because they are “end-game” mats. Please imagine, if you will, that they were not as rare. That means people will get bored with the game more easily. The point of the “grind” is to make sure that you keep playing longer – and I don’t mean that in a negative way. These mats, as PiSqure already mention, are meant to be rare. I suppose it’s just a difference of perspective but for me, there’s no point of having “rare” mats if they’re as easy to get as grains of sand on a beach.

You mentioned of better ways to slow down progress. Could you care to cite some? The problem I think we’re going to have if you start citing example are that these examples will impact other areas of the game unfairly. Crafting has to have a difficulty curve as well. Right now, it’s already one of the easiest ways to level up… provided, of course, that you are rich (either in-game or in real life).

So I’ve been wondering for a while now who did the voice acting for Male Sylvari and Arlon and I actually posted a thread on it but nobody was able to give answers. However, I found out today who it is by searching IMDB.

AND GUESS WHAT….

Some characters bear strong resemblances to how the real life actors/actresses who voiced them look like.

MIND. BLOWN.

Okay so let me show you:

Caithe: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3575884544/nm1312566
Arlon: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm78287360/nm0283594
Male Sylvari : http://www.imdb.com/media/rm916043008/nm1422365
Male Asura: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm119046912/nm0134269
Queen Jennah: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3062412544/nm0354937
Professor Gorr: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1058056448/nm1290815
Tybalt: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2828057088/nm0911616
Rytlocke: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm735741184/nm0089710
General Soulkeeper: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm3124541440/nm0846834

I dunno if it’s just me but I can totally see the resemblance. Of course you have to stretch your imagination a bit (like imagining them in a different skin color or having fur, or having no facial hair, etc), but I literally compared them side by side with google search screenshots of character models in game and there really IS a strong resemblance.

Also, you’d never guess who voiced Zojja (yes, I may be late to the story but I learned about this just today): http://www.imdb.com/media/rm1477870592/nm1260407

Bonus:
Turns out Mr. Sparkes is hot: http://www.imdb.com/media/rm2271523328/nm1232261

Hi guys… I finally found out who it is! It’s Brandon Bales!

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1422365/

And for Arlon it’s: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0283594/

great idea!

thanks, ill be joining as well. hopefully one of you are online.

Hello. This happened to us today as well (not me personally). Our fifth got dc-ed on the 3rd fractal and when he got back, he couldn’t join our instance. We we forced to 4 man that and the next 5 ones (not sure if we could have actually gotten a new member for the next level of fractal but we just soldiered on without a fifth).

Uloi.8593:

pyronix.4081:

SeventhSon.8172:

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

I LOL’ed.

Signs of a good software company with mature software engineering processes —> prioritizing fixes for existing content first before releasing new content or changed content, the rationale being that if you do it in reverse, you will keep releasing new content which will always contain bugs, and which will be a nightmare to do NNIT (no negative impact testing) with, and it will be a vicious cycle of new content = more bugs to fix, and the people on the bug fixing team will never see the end of it.

Speaking to devs and to ANet development team in general, please consult best practices as per ITIL, and apply modern project management and software engineering principles PLEASE.

I’m providing you the wikipedia link below. You’re welcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

Sweet good to see you have a job at the one company in the world that allows devs to decide on the priority of things. You know cause that makes total business sense.

I often tell my internal customers, no you can’t have this new feature because we have to fix these bugs that you have decided are lower priority. Oh wait I do not do any of that because I’m not an arrogant 30 something who read a few books and now thinks he knows better than all the dumb kitten people who pay his salary.

Wow… u mad bro? Ad hominem attack right there without knowing context.

I never said devs should be the ones deciding priority of changes. I said devs and development team (which, if you don’t know, includes Project Managers and stakeholders). More to the point, this actually applies to the project managers and decision makers higher up in the chain since they have lateral visibility on various aspects of the business. These are the people who decide which changes need to be coded/fixed first.

Secondly, I’d hate to work for your company. If clients are demanding changes while there are pending bug fixes in the pipeline, best practice would be to do risk analysis and advise your clients that there is a possibility that their requested change would aggravate existing bugs, create newer bugs, make older bugs harder to fix, etc. That is what makes business sense. In the long run, your clients will appreciate your service better if you make sure that they understand the situation and the risk involved.

If they want to push ahead despite all of this, well that’s fine and that’s their call. But really, I don’t see clients (in the sense that we are ANet’s clients) demanding to have class balance issues prioritized over class bug issues. If you would like to opine differently, please cite your source.

Also, I’m not 30 something. I’m younger than that.

Also, the people who pay my salary in real life know better than me which is why they’re the once making sure we know ITIL. There is a reason it’s called “best practices”. Dude, go do research and check out how many top IT companies are using ITIL or a similar paradigm before you randomly bash people in the forum with your rage. You’re not being constructive at all.

Hello,

Let me try to help you decide by listing PROs and CONs (strictly PvE speaking)

Single Target Mobs/Champions/etc: Mesmers

Why?
Mesmer: Very good damage output from Warden/Zerker/Duelist in terms of raw damage. Very survivable against single targets due to clone on dodge traits, decoy, and other escape mechanics. If built as glass cannon, has more survivability than Necros built as glass cannons due to escape mechanics and threat drop
Necro: Not so much straight up damage except for dagger (which requires you to be up close and personal). Minions die easily (even if going minion master build) to dungeon bosses. Minions will also be detrimental in dungeons as they might accidentally pull mobs (due to very bad AI)

—

Hearts: Any of the two

Why?
Mesmer and Necros play very differently but based on experience, you’re fine doing hearts with any of these two. Mesmer has a slight advantage by dying less often especially after you get the clone on dodge trait but a decently skilled and traited Necro should have no problem. In terms of speed buffs, necros have slight advantage as they have 1 weapon speed buff (warhorn #5), a signet that gives a passive speed buff, and a utility skills that gives you 30 seconds of speed on a 60 second cooldown. My conclusion in this area is that choose whatever character suits your playstyle.

—

Dynamic Events: Necros

Why?
Mesmers: are one of the worst (if not THE worst) AoE classes in this game. We have limited AoE skills, and 1 AoE weapon (sword) that that requires you to be in melee range to be effective. AoE options as Mesmer would include equipping focus for the Warden (which has great AoE damage) but he doesn’t really move from where he appears initially so your targets have to be stationary plus he takes a really long time to do another round of attack. Another AoE option is the berserker from the Greatsword. Both are phantasms and die VERY easily once enemies attack them.
Necros: on the other hand are one of the best AoE damagers in this game. between the staff skills, the marks, the traited lifeblasts that pierce and give vulnerability, the aoe poison, bleeds and weakness from scepter and off-hand daggers = YUM YUM LOOT.

—

Party Support: If you are skilled = Mesmer. If not so skilled = Necros

Why?
In terms of utility to a party, mesmers and necros are about even when you’re talking about just sheer potential to be useful to partymates. HOWEVER, it takes so much more skill to be useful as a Mesmer than as a Necro. As Necro, your staff skills and Wells will already do AoE damage +benefit your allies. It really doesn’t take a skilled player to make Necros do a ton of help to other players. As a Mesmer, you get access to exotic effects like ethereal effects, chaos storm, phantasms that provide infinite regen to party mates (as long as they are alive), and so on. However, you need to be more skilled in playing the game to be as equally beneficial to the party as a Necromancer can be with his eyes closed.

—

Future Outlook: Necros

Why?
This is purely from a personal point of view and you are welcome to take my opinion any way you want but based so far on impression from the way developers are handling the Mesmer class, they seem to want to drive this class to the ground with numerous nerfs and such (primarily to balance PvP, but which hurt PvE). Mesmers don’t get as much attention as Necros (as you can obviously see by the lack of amount of developer interaction in the Mesmer class forum) as opposed to Necros. If you look at the patch notes since release, Mesmers have been continually receiving nerfs, while Necros sometimes get nerfed, sometimes get buffed. A developer also already commented in one of the threads here in the forum that they are actively looking at making the Necro better. However, no such information, not even a hi-hello, has been given to the Mesmer class.

Source: I have an 80 Mesmer and a 48 Necro.

EDIT: Btw, I forgot to add, you can totally make a ranged nuker warrior if you want a straight up nuker. If you need more information, head to the ranger forums (strange advice, I know). They are crying rivers of tears because they claim both theif and wars are better at ranged than they are. You might be able to figure out in their forums exactly why.

Utilities: right now, when I’m soloing, I’m running with either

1. All signets – 10% of the time (power, locust, and the life force giving one)
2. All wells – 30% of the time
3. All minions – the rest of the time just to not die so quickly

When in parties/dungeons, it either #2 or #3 (mostly #2).

For purely personal (O/C) reasons, I don’t want to mix and match utility skill types >_< But again, I’m open to ideas.

Gawna.6519:

Jaglavak.5806:

So much that if there was a options ingame to join Zhaitan I’d do it in a heartbeat just to have the opportunity to mangle Trahearne to death.

That is amazing! So funny! Agreed, though.

Hahahaha! Count me in!

I love this thread! So much creative discussion. My favorite so far is the “Trahearne is really a traitor” angle. If only forum threads had a poll functionality… we can take a vote on how best to dispatch of this useless plot device.

@Ridley:

I was not exactly disappointed w/ the reveal but I would have preferred that they did not do the reveal at all since it gives that much more mystery to the order (although okay… to be honest, I was surprised who it turned out to be and I was literally – “omg omg omg” – while I was watching the reveal exchange).

I hope they flesh out the story in future patches. I would LOVE to know how the prior OoW master got corrupted, how it happened, and what they did to kill him. There is just so much potential in terms of story telling for this order (and Durmond Priory, since they’re always out and about digging up strange things).

Some background: I’ve been an MMORPG gamer for 10+ years now, and I started playing WoW even before BC.

No, this is not a complaint thread, this is actually thank you + please give people a chance thread.

It was my first time to do FotM earlier today on my level 46 necromancer. I tried doing a frac earlier during the weekend with some guildmates, got the Cliffside (Colossus) one, and people kept dying to the wind blowing part (I died just once on that part, in fairness to me).

In my server (Sanctum of Rall), the “elitism” has gone so far as people requiring you to be level 80 even just to do Frac 1. I will not discuss how divisive this is becoming in this thread because there are already a lot of threads open about that so let’s move along…

Before you start judging, I do understand this mindset, and I can totally understand where they are coming from. It isn’t really a big deal to me because – hey, eventually I’ll be 80 too and get to do all these cool frac things, right?

But one group was advertising for just 1 more for Frac 1 in LA. I hesistantly messaged the person asking to join. I was hesitant being that:

1) It’s a PUG, and the skill level required in this game for dungeons is much less PUGgable than WoW
2) Chances are, people running Frac 1’s are sub 80’s and we would be a bunch of underlevelled noobs dying over and over again

But you know… I wanted to learn, and was willing to pay the repair cost. It would be disappointing, of course, if we couldn’t even finish 1 fractal, but at least I’ll learn from the experience.

To my surprise, the group was composed of 4 level 80’s (3 of which were warriors), a thief, and noob me. I don’t know how they reacted when they saw I wasn’t 80, but they were sure nice enough not to make a comment.

So we entered FotM, and I was nervous. I was afraid I’d mess things up for their group. One thing that dungeons here in GW2 has made me realize is that you’re better off if you’re a console gamer. That wasn’t me. I never played console games, I did not have the dexterity and eye-hand coordination gleaned from countless hours of Mario or Zelda or whatever you guys play on consoles. I’m an RPG games on the PC guy through and through – text based games, turn based games, etc, but I was never an action gamer. I couldn’t dance dance revo to save my life.

So imagine my apprehension running FotM. The fact that you have to time your dodges in this game was already extremely taxing for me, what more in dungeons where “skill” is interpreted based more on how quickly you can react, rather than on how well put-together your gear is (like it is in WoW – yes, I am one of those people who love spreadsheets and softcap/hardcap haste discussions).

…

Anyway, 2 fractals later and we were actually doing very well (I am not sure if it is just me or because we had 3 warriors they’re really that OP). I hardly died or get downed, I made sure to give regen to the tanks, keep the enemies as blinded as often as possible – you know, just do common sense things to help out the group as much as I can.

At the 3rd fractal, one of the warriors got DC-ed. When he came back, he couldn’t join us any longer.

Very long story short – I four-manned 5 more fractals with just 3 other very patient, very nice Australian guys, and I am now at level 3 difficulty.

The fractals are amazing, especially Solid Ocean, and Uncategorized. The Urban Warfare was the one I didn’t like the most.

So anyway, a big thanks to those Aussies (I sadly was not able to add their ID’s) for giving a noob a chance, and hopefully this will encourage other level 80’s to give lowbie noobs a chance if they’re running the lower levelled fracs.

Here’s the last part of our Solid Ocean encounter and you can see what a total noob I am and yet we were still able to do it with just four of us.

http://youtu.be/gNQYvfbZCPc

—

A Special Note to the Forum Moderators:

Dear Moderators,

I am trying to be as civil and constructive as possible in this thread by providing feedback and suggestions based on what I am being paid in real life to do, and I am imploring, as a fellow human being, that you do not yet again mistake the content, intent, and context of this post as a “complaint” thread as have been repeatedly done in various posts throughout this weekend.

Believe it or not, the headaches you have been trying to assuage in these forums all weekend long are tied in one way or the other to one or more issues with organizational, development, and project management processes related to those detailed above. It is unfortunate that you’re getting the tail-end of the sting by being the first line of support, but let me just remind you that as forum moderators, you should be working WITH your community to bring harmony to this forums, and not against it.

My only request is, should you deem it necessary to close this thread, to ensure that you communicate what I have written here to someone within your organization capable of enacting change and making decisions instead of just relegating it to the forum trashbin as you have done countless “complaint” threads that actually contain valid feedback.

Everything I have said here are observations, feedback, and suggestions, and you would not hurt to evaluate their credibility, and assess the improvement opportunities that your organization can garner from this feedback.

This thread took 4 odd hours to write. Please do not let that effort be in vain. This should be proof, among others, that I DO care for this game, and I WANT this game to be better.

—

P.S. It is 5 in the morning in my timezone. I apologize in advance for any typos, wrong tenses, spelling mistakes, etc. English is not my first language – I’m just saying that just to clarify, not to excuse myself from poor grammar.

Event management triggers during the abnormal state. It ensures that controls are in place to escalate issues and restore normal operations. I am giving a rating of 2-Poor in this area as evidenced by the slow/non-response of ANet to the bugs in the recent lost shores event and the community dividing issues surrounding the event, and the continuing silence/non-response to customer feedback on the event.

An event management system that works is evidenced by transparent communications from leadership with regards to the current status of the system, a reassurance that normal operations will be swiftly restored, and most importantly, concrete action within an acceptable (to the customer) time period.

Finally, problem management. What could I say here that I have not already said in the Service Transition section? Oh yes. Please have a proper Problem Management process in place. I don’t know if it would be too much to ask but give us BUG ID’s we can track. This way, we know if, indeed, “hard work”, as Robert Hrouda would put it, is being done. It would give your customers concrete reassurance that these issues are acknowledged and are being addressed. That would also greatly help your forum moderators by alleviating the sheer volume of topics being opened due to game bugs.

We, as your customers, are as invested in the improvement of this game as you are. We want to see those bugs fixed definitely more than you do since we are the ones who paid for the game. I say this with no sense of entitlement, but with the common sense logic of wanting to get what I paid for.

5. Continual service improvement (CSI) – The perspective of CSI on improvement is the business perspective of service quality, even though CSI aims to improve process effectiveness, efficiency and cost effectiveness of the IT processes through the whole lifecycle.

My Overall Rating: [N/D]

Comments: This is purely internal to your organization. I’m just hoping you have this in one form or the other because this is just as important to your organization as the rest of the other parts of the Service Lifecycle.

4. Service Operation – Service Operation (SO) aims to provide best practice for achieving the delivery of agreed levels of services both to end-users and the customers. Service operation is the part of the lifecycle where the services and value is actually directly delivered.

List of covered processes:
a. Event management – ²
b. Incident management – ⁴
c. Request fulfillment – ⁴
d. Problem management – ¹
e. Access management – ³

My Overall Rating: ³

Comments: As is the pattern, let me focus on the positive side first. A quick check in the Account and Technical Support forums should already give you an idea of why Incident Management and Request Fullfillment got the highest marks in this area. Gaile Gray and her team handle issues and address concerns in a very professional, orderly manner. A user-friendly system exists (support.guildwars2.com) where users can raise account-related and tech-support-related incidents. I have raised some tickets to the support queue as well and I find the resolution times and handling of my concerns acceptable.

I gave a score of 3-Acceptable for Access Management. I want to give more, but Access Management deals with ensuring that only people who have the correct access and authorization can use the service, and the continuing problem with spammers (and to a lesser extent now, botters) put a dent in this. However, improvement in this area have been noticed. Please keep up the good work.

Event management deals with an organization or a system’s ability to respond to exceptional conditions. This is different from capacity management in that event management concerns itself with the process and structure of escalation/resolution in case of abnormal conditions (any type), while capacity management deals with planning for expected capacity. Let me put this in the context of the recent Lost Shores weekend.

From a capacity management point of view, the analysis should have come first and foremostly from the Marketing deparment. The Lost Shores event was a widely announced and hyped event. Given this, the capacity planner should have taken concurrent system logins + total number of GW2 accounts sold and registered, and used this to analyze how much capacity the servers can handle versus the expected number of people attending the event. If there were doubts that the system can handle it, this should have been raised to Game Design (to design the event in such a way that it will not eat up bandwidth or processing load) and/or Infrastructure Support (to make sure that all servers are ready and able to handle expected load) and/or Procurement (to purchase more servers to handled the load). In short, capacity management happens BEFORE the fact.

Knowledge Management. This is the process of ensuring that knowledge gained within the organization is documented, stored, and used to improve the service, guide decision making and strategy planning. ANet, you already have one very fantastic resource to get inputs from – these forums. People have been providing constructive feedback and criticism, and here and there, some acknowledgement from game designers can be found. However, it seems that Knowledge Management process is not being used because this information is not being translated into results. You already know the feedback to one-time events from Halloween and from other games. You already know what happens when you hold an event in a single place. You already know (or I hope you do know) that killing Champion Karkas are boring as watching paint dry. The bigger question now is, why are these information not being translated into better decisions?

By collecting, organizing, and categorizing information from various sources available to you (forums, customer feedback, incident tickets, server load and capacity, business intelligence from your databases, etc), you should have been able to design the events better – and by better I mean in a way that is enjoyable to the majority. Sure, the new area is lovely, but at the moment, they’re just eye candy – all form, no substance.

Change Evaluation. Let me try putting this in my own words – the reality is that IT companies do not have enough budget, time or resources to implement all requested changes. This is where change evaluation comes in. Change evaluation is how you decide which changes you will prioritize based on expected risk (impact to live environment), cost, urgency, and importance. I do believe that you are performing Change Evaluation, but my personal opinion is that you’re not doing it correctly, and that you’re doing it to the detriment of your company.

Let me explain. In relation to bug fixes, I would like to call in question your team’s prioritization in development efforts. I do not pretend to know why you choose to prioritize class balance changes over bug fixes (as class balance changes are not as urgent or as critical as a majority of reported bugs requiring fixes), but let me tell you the impression that this is creating in the minds of your customers. It says to your customers, “we really don’t care if your class is broken, we care more that class X gets nerfed while our favorite class Y continues to be viable in PvE, PvP, the moon, the stars, and the universe and galaxies beyond” (apologize for the barely masked contempt but we all know X = mesmers and necros, Y = warriors).

Even the way classes are nerfed do not seem to undergo proper change evaluation in terms of strategic planning. Classes are nerfed due to PvP, but no consideration is given for the PvE aspect. Bugs that continually make certain concept builds unworkable, in the meantime, still continually collect dust in the forum bug lists.

My suggestion is this – more transparent communication. Class balance is a very very delicate issue. Players tend to identify strongly and vehemently with the classes they are playing. You should not view this as negative by any means, but rather, pat yourselves on the back for creating classes that people want to play. Leverage on this, and make it work for you, and for us.

If you are going to make changes, walk us through your thought and design process. WoW made this same mistake in their early years where it seemed like they were just swinging the nerf bat repeatedly on certain classes, but later on, their game designers switched tunes and started communicating more openly, even inviting discussion with the community on why certain abilities have been nerfed. Guess what? I, for one, learned to trust them again. This is what you have to do. You sorely need to earn the trust of your player base back. Between the Lost Shores fiasco, the mile long buglists that remain unresolved, and the heavy-handed moderation in these forums, your customers are looking for reassurance that they made the right choice – that this game is still worth their time and money.

Let me digress a bit. I am trying my best to be as objective as possible while I type this, but let me just say that if I could write a heart-rending Shakesperean impassioned plea – it would be a plea for this – transparency. Tell us what your plans us so that there will no longer be any second-guessing, no more class forums with redundant threads discussing the same things over and over and over again wondering about the if’s and why’s and when’s with no resolution in sight.

That being said, let’s move on to the next area.

Service Validation. Take note, while this is one line item along with Testing in the list above, service validation is actually a different concept from testing and I will discuss this separately. Service validation means analysing, across your service lifecycle, whether your service (as a whole, not just your software or servers or databases) can support the design and service goals created during Service Design phase.

Let me point out evidence of how you’re not doing so well in this area. Since a few months ago, players have been reporting that there are certain steps in certain personal story questlines that are impossibly hard to do alone. Jeffrey Vaughn, content designer, responded to the community by asking us, the players, to cite which specific instances this happened. The surprise here is that there is an obvious, specific and consistent set of circumstances where encounters need to be toned down in difficulty – and a content designer should not have to crowd source this information. A simple scan through the event scripts, or database player activity logs, or something should already provide a clue which encounters need to be toned down. A properly designed service should provide tools for the teams operating and supporting the service (e.g. Content Designers) to appropriately correct, fix, or modify application behavior that revolve around a specific criteria.

How is this related to Service Validation? The situation I illustrated above simply shows that your content designers are not empowered with the correct tools to align operational behavior with design goals. Jeffrey wanted to re-design the personal story quests to be more forgiving, but he couldn’t do it efficiently and independently to the extent that he has to acquire this information from the players instead of just consulting some tool on his end that could provide him details on which quests contain waves of mobs of size N or greater, or which quests most people died on.

By performing Service Validation, project leaders (prior to release) and operation managers (in live environment) are able to identify gaps in the service that do not support, but rather deviate, from the design goal, and appropriately fix these. Tying into the previous example, if Service Validation was done, then people would have had foresight that there might come a time when they have to modify a set of quests in personal story lines with a specific criteria, and ensure that the appropriate tools and processes are deployed on to the people who can resolve these issues (in this case, the content design team).

Testing. This area encompasses QA, UAT, and other forms of QC and testing. Let me begin with words of good will as such – “I know you are trying your best.”

Let me then follow this up with the following words, “But there are times that you have to use your brain, not your brawn.”

Frankly, ANet, I do not know where or how to begin discussing this with you. I am coming here from a state of extreme apallment. WoW has 10 million++ subscribers, and this is one area that they are doing very well in so there’s really no excuse. I don’t know if this is a command decision from some higher up in you company to push changes with the full knowledge that they contain very obvious, embarassing bugs, or if there is simply a lack in compliance to industry standard quality control processes (I’m really hoping it’s the latter, the lesser of two evils, because if it is the former, then it becomes a question of morals and ethics of people leading and making decisions in ANet).

Let me give you two very obvious instances of what I deem as shocking violations of any form of quality control or testing.

i) On my engineer, there is a trait called Deployable Turrets (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Deployable_Turrets). The expectation set by this trait is that ALL of your turrets can be deployed using the ground targeting mechanic. I really don’t know what kind of testing you do, but a person playing an engineer figures out that something is really really wrong with this trait the very instant he gets it. The trait only works for two out of the four turrents Engineers have. There’s no complicated situation or circumstances or set of events that have to transpire in sequence for this bug to occur. It’s right there, in your face, and it’s not working. The fact that you were able to make this work for two of the turrets, but not all of them, actually raises more questions – what kind of testing did you perform? why has this not been addressed after more than 5 months? do your devs even play the classes they make? and so on.

ii) on my necromancer, there is a trait called Greater Marks (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Greater_Marks). Again, this is a no-brainer. Thankfully, the effects of the marks are increased, but again, very obviously, there is a bug in the targeting reticle.

I have cited these two instances because these are cases where you can’t miss the bug even if you purposely wanted to. They are very very obvious, and should have been caught and fixed in testing, and as a customer, the thought that these in your face bugs still remain after such a long period of time makes me apprehensive about the level of commitment your team really has in bug fixing.

It would have been more understandable if these were subtle bugs wherein you need to do several steps to reproduce it, or if they were not immediately apparent to the player unless you go through the combat log and check it.

3. Service Transition – Service transition relates to the delivery of services required by a business into live/operational use, and often encompasses the “project” side of IT rather than “BAU” (business as usual). This also covers topics such as managing changes to the “BAU” environment.

List of ITIL processes in Service Transition (ST):
a. Transition planning and support – ³
b. Change management – ¹
c. Service asset and configuration management – [N/D]
d. Release and deployment management – ⁴
e. Service validation and testing – ¹
f. Change evaluation – ¹
g. Knowledge management – ²

My Overall Rating: ²

Comments: Let’s focus first on what has been done right – you have great release and deployment management. There are very few, almost rare reports that updates to the game data stored locally incurred negative impact. The deployment process as it is visible to the customer is painless – we start the application, and the game updates itself. There is no need to download files elsewhere, and the updates do not corrupt our game and make it unplayable (something which has often happened with other MMO’s – even WoW).

Now let’s focus on the (pink) elephant in the room – the underlying cause of the myriad issues that so many people in the pages of these forums have been crying about day in and day out, but have been minimally acknowledge or addressed.

Change Management. Change management ensure that changes you perform on the application OR on the service do not negatively impact the quality of service being provided on the production environment. In companies practicing ITIL, a change manager is a role performed by a person, and that person ensures that any form of modification in the client/application code, server code, infrastructure, or even in the service being provided is approved thoroughly by all stakeholders, have passed the necessary quality control gates, and is fit to be moved to Production.

As a person who has been in the IT industry for several years, working both with SME’s and giant multinational clients, let me just say that frankly, sirs and madammes, you have one of the worst change management systems in place, and it’s painful not only for us – your customers, but it’s obviously painful for you as well. You have bugs that you have no idea how to resolve, probably buried in tons of code changes you do not have proper control of, and I feel that even though your content designers and developers are doing their best, they are not doing it efficiently. If this were not the case, there would not be kilometric bug lists in class forums that, up till now, have not yet been significantly shortened or addressed. Another obvious symptom is that your bug fixes keep creating further bugs (case in point, Mesmer berserker damage nerf due to a bug created by a recent bug fix).

By practicing correct and appropriate change management processes, your organization is forced to track changes through the application lifecyle. Your technical leaders gain visibility on what proposed changes can harm working status quo in production, your developers and testers (if you have any, because it seems that you don’t – but I’ll get to that later) are forced to perform systems integration testing, no negative impact testing, and other quality control measures that will ensure that the change you will bring to Production will work, and will not create more problems.

2. Service Design – Service design addresses how a planned service solution interacts with the larger business and technical environments, service management systems required to support the service, processes which interact with the service, technology, and architecture required to support the service, and the supply chain required to support the planned service.

List of covered processes:
a. Design coordination – [N/D]
b. Service Catalogue – ²
c. Service level Management – ²
d. Availability Management – ⁴
e. Capacity Management – ²
f. IT Service Continuity Management (ITSCM) – [N/D]
g. Information Security Management System – ⁴
h. Supplier Management – [N/D]

My Overall Rating: ²

Comments: Let’s kick off with the good stuff. You clearly did well in terms of planning for availability. Your servers are hardly down given that the game is still in the first half of its first year. The game is very reliable during normal operations (i.e. this process does not take into account abnormal circumstances like the recent lost shores event). Another good area is ISMS. You continually communicated with your customers with regards to account security. You took proactive steps to ensure that hacking is kept minimally. You alerted users who are using e-mail accounts which have been externally compromised. You provided services (e-mail authentication upon changing of login IP addresses, mobile authentication) that contributed to keeping your customer’s information secure.

One of the key areas for improvement is Service Level Management. While you, as the service provider, does not have explicit or contractual obligations to your customers apart from what has been specified in the EULA, there is an implicit expectation from consumers that a certain level or quality of service should be provided. Any barriers that decrease this level of quality should be acted upon quickly, and service levels should be restored as soon as possible, or in the situation where this is not possible or realistic, proper communication channels are created aand expectations are set with your customers.

As evidenced not only by the lack of clear communication during the recent event, but also by the lack of transparency in acknowledging various issues with the software and service and providing a clear direction from your team moving forward, I have to give you a mediocre score in this area. You are not the worst of the worst since the game is still up and running and functioning nominally, but there is certainly a lot of room to improve upon.

Another key area for improvement is capacity management. This is different from availability management in the sense that while your service is consistently online and available, the service drastically drops in quality in correlation to changes in concurrent connections. Capacity planning is an analysis based on expected demand vs available resources. From a service-oriented point of view, this does not cover only technical areas (e.g. “horrible lag”) but encompass other areas as well. As a customer, I have the impression that your company underestimated your subscriber base and staffed resources that could not meet the demands of a much larger volume of users. This is evidenced by the very slow progress in fixing class bugs and issues, the staffing of forum moderators who are probably consistently overwhelmed by the number of forum posts they have to monitor, and the inability to provide timelines for project completion (which is another interrelated symptom of poor project management).

Finally, and while not as important operationally – but equally if not more important strategically, is your Service Catalogue. Your service offerings are extremely basic. I know that you have already announced the introduction of more services in the future, but the lack of a communicated timeline for when these services will become available (e.g. Name Change, Paid Server Transfers, etc) is hurting customer impression of continuous improvement in this game. Also, I find it strange that while your revenue stream is partially (or perhaps largely) dependent on the cash shop, the items you sell there are not interesting enough for me to want to buy them. I would like to see cash shop weapon skins that can be used in combat, cash shop armor skins that can be used in combat, mini pets that do not eat up the slots in my bag; these are things that will not make my in-game character more powerful per se, but will make me want to spend real life money on these items. As it stands, the only valuable items I can buy for gems are inventory upgrades.

Hello ANet,

The past 3 days have been really rough on you, hasn’t it?

I myself have gone the full circle of disappointment, rage, pain, withdrawal, and acceptance, not only with your game, but more relevantly with the quality of service you are providing. This is my attempt to have closure with the horrible nightmare of the past 36 hours – by giving you a point by point constructive feedback based on one of the most successful and widely used service management paradigms.

To give you a background on why I think I am qualified to give this opinion, I work for one of the top three (in terms of IT services, Server and Enterprise hardware, personal and consumer PC’s and laptops) multinational companies in the world. I will not name my company, but let’s just say that if you ever used a printer, chances are, it was made by the company I work for.

One of the things that are ingrained in every single employee of my company are the concepts of ITIL. Having said this, I am ITIL Foundations and ITIL RCV (Release, Control, and Validation) certified – but really, you don’t need to be certified to realize this because a lot of the points I will raise below are common sense.

You’re not a “young” software company by any means, so I believe that there will be those among you (probably not the developers per se, but your project managers and leads) who have heard of ITIL.

If you need a comprehensive overview, the article on Wikipedia is excellent, and I will be using this document as my primary guide in providing feedback and suggestions as this is very accessible to the public: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

While I will do a rundown of every major ITIL process, I will comment only to the items which are (painfully) obvious to us, consumers of the service you are providing. I will rate the game and your service on the following scale:

N/D = No Data/Not Evident to the Public
1 = Poor
2 = Mediocre
3 = Acceptable
4 = Good
5 = Excellent

1. Service Strategy – Service Strategy relies largely upon a market-driven approach. Key topics covered include service value definition, business-case development, service assets, market analysis, and service provider types

List of covered processes:
a. Strategy Management – ⁴
b. Service Portfolio Management – [N/D]
c. Financial management for IT services – [N/D]
d. Demand Management – ⁴
e. Business relationship management – ³

My Overall Rating: ⁴

Comments: You did a good job in this area. In a landscape quickly filling up with WoW clones, you took advantage of the fact that your primary competitor’s age is showing, and while the service and game they provide is top class, you identified the need for a fresh take on established norms. This in turn was translated into an equivalently tempting value proposition to the market and have subverted long time fans and subscribers from WoW into your game (me included).

SeventhSon.8172:

wow, Ned .. brutal.

Guess if i got my head chopped off I would be too.

I LOL’ed.

Signs of a good software company with mature software engineering processes —> prioritizing fixes for existing content first before releasing new content or changed content, the rationale being that if you do it in reverse, you will keep releasing new content which will always contain bugs, and which will be a nightmare to do NNIT (no negative impact testing) with, and it will be a vicious cycle of new content = more bugs to fix, and the people on the bug fixing team will never see the end of it.

Speaking to devs and to ANet development team in general, please consult best practices as per ITIL, and apply modern project management and software engineering principles PLEASE.

I’m providing you the wikipedia link below. You’re welcome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Technology_Infrastructure_Library

awesome video guys… very funny!

I levelled my Necro to 46 today.

So far, I really enjoy my necro WITHOUT the minions (I mean, they’re cool and I like the idea of them, but their AI is just really really horrible – especially the fleshgolem – and I really don’t want to micromanage them).

However, it seems that my survivability takes a large hit whenever I don’t have them around.

Can someone advise a newbie Necro on how to be survivable w/o pets? I don’t do any form of PvP by the way – just strictly hearts, dynamic events, and dungeons.

I am using Scep/Dag + Staff and have invested in Blood (15), Death (10), and Soul Reaping (10) trait lines, but open to any ideas.

Thanks!

SundayTrash.9562:

A exploit is still a exploit no matter how you look at it, and besides I am only calling out people who loot it more than once.

Please tell me how looting the chest more than once on different characters whilst doing the whole thing end to end repeatedly is an exploit? It’s a one time event, yes, but it’s a one-time event PER character. Please get that into your skull.

Halloween was a one-time event. I got the Mad King’s Slippers on 4 different characters. Following your logic, that would have been an exploit too huh? Again, logic check pls.

Anyway, I’m done with this thread. You can cry all the river of tears that you want. My faith in ANet has wavered greatly over the past 48 hours but I’m just hoping they see through the vile intent of this thread and decide better.

This topic is the most braindead thing in this cesspool of forum tears that I’ve read today, and believe me, after the clusterfrog of this Lost Shores event, I thought I’ve seen the worst.

For the people who got DC’ed during the last minutes of the event and never got the chest, I’m very sorry. ANet has already said they will do something about it.

Now, for the other hypocrites on this thread calling out to ban those who spent 6-8 hours of their lives working against an extremely annoying event with their guildmates to re-run these event. For me, the event was very horrible. Between the lag, the bugs, and dying over and over and over again, I did not enjoy it. But guess what? I’m definitely not a rich player. I have less than 10 gold to my name ACROSS all characters. I just wanted the 20 slot bags (which I cannot normally afford), and that took precedence – and I worked for it each and every single time and I CONTRIBUTED to making sure that Ancient Karka stayed dead (and it’s irrelevant but let me just mention that I was physically sick – fever due to tonsillitis – the whole time, and I was literally shivering in cold sweat while doing this event for 8++ hours).

I can’t believe that there are people who would be turning against other people in the community who made it able for those who were not able to do the event initially, and for those who have already done the event to help overflow servers that had the event running but had NO ONE in them to finish the event.

If there’s any one or any thing to blame here, blame it on how the event was designed.

A game exploit implies that you earned some form of reward disproportionate to the effort spent, and none of that happened here.

If you’ve actually done the event from start to finish three times back to back, believe me, even if I had gotten 6 precursors out of it (and just fyi – I got zero precursors and a lot of trash exotics and rares that I just vendored), the reward would be just enough to compensate for the horrible experience.

So what’s the right thing next steps here?

The right thing to do here is for ANet to apologize and appropriately compensate those who WORKED HARD but did not get the reward, for ANet to design future events better, and for people to stop turning on players who helped underpopulated overflow servers finish their event.

My thanks to the rest of the wonderful community who posted threads on which overflow servers were still running.

Now to the rest of the folks complaining about:

1) how RL > game and they did not have the time to do the event
2) how other people spent 6-8 hours of their lives grinding the event to get the bags and accessories and they didn’t for whatever reason

YOU ARE THE ONES WHO ARE SELFISH. You expect people who have worked hard (REALLY REALLY HARD – I cannot overstate this enough) to get the rewards to be banned simply because you did not think out of the box and wondered “hey, maybe I can do this on my other characters… let me check what the people in the forums are talking about”. You should be rightfully ashamed by trying to bring down others who were justly compensated for the effort they put in.

Btw, I live in Asia. The event started for me at 4AM. I finished at 12:30 in the afternoon. And I’m still sick (much better now though, thanks for asking). So please stop with the excuses. Like in real life, you need to identify windows of opportunities and act on it ASAP, or that window will close. You don’t go, “Omg, please please don’t hire those people who were able to attend the job interview on time because I was not able to go.”

Seriously. Logic check please.

Hi,

If this forum is not the proper channel to air complaints about the game or the service (as evidenced by the 3 undeserved infractions I have accumulated over the past 24 hours), can you please provide the proper channel your paying customers can send their grievances to without getting canned replies and having infraction points against them?

1)graphics (1-bad…10-amazing) – ⁸
2)sound(1-bad…10-amazing) – ⁸
3)story concept/originality (1-boring…10-captivating) – ⁴
4)loot/reward (1-lost all my money…10-gained amazing items) – ³
5)stability (1-extremly buggy…10-no bugs) – ¹
6)network connection/speed (1-laggy,disconnections, 10 – perfect connection) – ¹
7)mini events length (1-to long/short…10-just right) – ²
8)overall event length (1-to long/short…10-just right) – ¹
9)overall Satisfaction (1-worst experience ever,10-best experience ever) – ¹

Be prepared to have your feedback “merged” and lost in the sea of tears that can be found on this thread by one of the moderators: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lostshores/Lost-Shores-Feedback-Thread-1

That’s how they’re handling any form of negativity towards this event.

I don’t think they’ll delete it. Storing character information does not come at a very large cost (at the most, it’s just a few MBs in their hard drives).

Any decent MMO company will not delete free trial accounts especially if it holds the promise of earning more money if your friend does buy the game so if I were you, I wouldn’t worry.

rickets.1386:

The community came through in a big way tonight. I wish i could say the same for Anet.

Agree. While the fail event was so much fail, it was heartening to see people going out of their way and rezzing you whilst in danger of being downed themselves.

This event was a horrible horrible experience for me, but thank you so much for being such a great community.

Eveningstar.6940:

Sovta.4719:

As long as players give them money why should they care?

Because caring cultivates loyalty, which drives a successful title.

MMORPGs aren’t a commodity market. MMORPGS are online communities that compete intensely for player investment. Strong communities lead to stable revenue and steady growth.

Very well said. +1 to you. ANet would do well to continually remember this.

I was about to create a separate topic for this but let me just add my own suggestions to this thread:

1. Color posts responded to by a member of the ANet team (content designers, developers, etc) DIFFERENTLY from posts responded to only by forum moderators.

The problem is that there are a lot of red posts with topics that I want one of the developers or designers to respond to (e.g. one time events, how bad the last shore event was, etc) and I’m always duped into scrolling through pages of these threads hoping for a response from ANet only to be disappointed to find that it’s just one of the moderators slapping people’s wrists with the usual canned “stay on topic” or “this thread has been locked because we don’t like what you said and we don’t like you” and so on (of course I’m paraphrasing but you get my point).

2. What Lheimroo said. I don’t want to scroll and look through 26 pages of text to see the official dev response. I just want to know ANet’s stance on the issue. That’s it.

3. I don’t have twitter. Please stop sending live up to the minute updates solely via twitter or facebook. I rely on this forum and the dev tracker to keep me up to date on what information have been announced so far.

Narcemus.1348:

They prefer to reference the Charr being roman. I personally see them as a concoction of Roman/Mongol/Industrial Era England.

Oh yeah.. you’re right – especially with the references to legions and such. +1 to you!

Konig Des Todes.2086:

This is an isolated case, so it’s unlikely to be a case of all sylvari. It’s most likely that the sylvari is smelling cooking and that’s making it hungry.

Being sylvari, their way of phrasing and the reason for their feelings are still fairly new so poorly explained and said, left for many misinterpretations – this is not the only such line.

It’s either that, or some of them actually want to eat the other “meatier” races (Norns… beware around Sylvari). I mean, humans eat vegetables right? >_<

Curuniel.4830:

Someone was asking about ‘Your Herald’ recently. Apparently we have a number of stalkers – although I can’t help but like the idea of the Herald doing the stalking single-handedly (as part of a Destiny’s Edge project albeit) and then illegally selling the information on to third parties…

For some reason this made me LOL IRL)

Tinni.4351:

I agree with this totally! If you choose the Grawl as your tribe, you get to go to Dredgehaunt Cliffs and the Order of Whispers agent there is a sylvari who runs a homestead full of Orphan Norn kids (and one Charr orphan). I had met her before on my main who is part of the Durmand Priory. Never once would have guessed she was Order of Whispers. Just seemed like a nice lady who wanted kids but couldn’t have kids on account of being a Sylvari and thus taking care of kids who needed a mother. But no, no, she’s a Whispers agent keeping an eye on things for the Order. Was totally shocked! But that’s how it should be, if you can tell person X is a spy, then person X is not a very good spy.

Oh my goodness. Thanks for sharing this tidbit. Order of Whispers continue to tickle my imagination everywhere in the game.

Case in point, my necro right now is in Vigil just because I want to have all 3 account medals for successful initiation into an order (can you sense the masked disappointment? i’m such an OoW fanboi). In fields of ruin map where majority of the vigil quests happen initially, there’s a door beside a farm. You won’t even notice that you can interact with it unless you happen to hover your mouse over it or press Ctrl.

The door leads down to a path and behold, there’s a very small room at the end containing OoW agents keeping tabs on the developments between Renegades, Separatists and Ebonholde.

Best faction ever! Haha!

But you’re right Tinni. I will give Priory another chance. I completed enough quests to get the initiation medal but I have not progressed further than that on my engineer.

TY!

MasterGeese.4756:

1. I don’t have a sylvari. What does Trahearne do in the sylvari questline? Does his character get developed at all there? Or is he just another, “Hey I need your help get the Orrian MacGuffin for me plz”.

As a person who has played 3 Sylvari characters on different personal story arcs, I am going to say that it does not help to be Sylvari. He arrives out of nowhere after the first arc of the Sylvari story, then he does exactly what you just mentioned up till you start working with the Orders. Actually it’s more of like:

Pale Tree: oh by the way, Trahearne has arrived. he’s like, a scholar in Orr, ya know?

And Caithe is like:

Caithe: ZOMG I can’t wait to see him again.

And then you go meet Trahearne and he’s like:

Trahearne: Hello chump. I’ve spent years studying Orr. You do not know it yet but I will take over your story despite the fact that I will be utterly useless in ALL of your quests and I will keep dying despite carrying the legendary greatsword Caladbolg which you rightly deserved not withstanding the fact that I’m a necromancer and necromancers can’t equip greatswords in this game, but apparently ANet run out of budget and hired mediocre substandard scriptwriters so you’re stuck with me. In the meantime, I need these chores done. Now go.

So in short, Syvlari actually get the short end of the deal because we have to endure him from level 10 or so onwards.

Garenthal.1480:

Didn’t Arena Net claim they wanted to distance themselves from allowing lore to be driven by references to popular culture?

When did they say this? I’ve been playing this game for more than a month and I always thought the races to be strongly tied or influenced by pop culture races (real and mythical)/demographics, or certain time periods in human history similar to how races are in WoW.

Norn = Vikings/Norsemen
Humans = Medieval Europe
Sylvari = Elves/celtic lore
Asura = ?
Charr = Chinese? (basing on how your home instance is called a “Canton” plus the Charr’s industrialization)

Hylek = Aztecs (due to worship of the sun, names of Hylek characters, etc)
Tengu = Native Americans (due to how their regions are named, etc)
Grawl = Native Americas as well? (due to shamanism, etc)
Skritt = Ghettos
Ogre = ?
Quaggans = Mentally Challenged

The Inquest. Because a lot of my personal beliefs are in line with their mindset. Plus, they’re so cuuuute.

Who are these beings? Why do I never encounter any member of their group? How did I automatically become a member of their group? I mean the free goodies and all are nice but whenever I get mail from them I can’t help thinking, “Whuuttt?? Who the frog are you people and why do you keep talking to me?!”

I tried checking the Wiki. There’s just one line about them there.

Hermes.7014:

Male sylvari with an english accent? Perhaps you’re referring to Liam O’Brien.

Hi Hermes, can you cite your source? I tried searching for Liam O Brien in youtube and he doesn’t sound similar to the Sylvari character (but of course he might just have a different natural accent than when he voices a character).

As for the english accent, I’m curious as to what particular English accent this is. The male sylvari doesn’t pronounce words like they do on Harry Potter, but it’s not any of the American accents I’m familiar with either.

Thanks, tho!

aside from the problem indicated above, the other problem i have with the flesh golem is that there are times when it will just stand there and not attack the mob i’m attacking. the same goes for the other minions. >_<

Harbinger.8637:

I can’t even do anything. All my abilities have a +2 second delay…

2 seconds?? dood you’re lucky. it takes about 30 seconds for my clicks to take effect. this includes changing weapons and rezzing.

Hmm… maybe it’s really a personal preference. To be honest, I found the concept of having a personal story refreshing and very enjoyable compared to other MMO’s like WoW. Maybe you guys play the game with a different mindset, but I really dig the fact that my character is a main actor in the story leading to the defeat of the Elder Dragons. It made me that much more invested in the character of my Avatar.

I really don’t think, “gosh, everyone else playing this game is playing THE hero as well”. There’s a certain level of suspension of disbelief that you need to get past and just enjoy imagining your avatar as the hero.

I certainly don’t have problems with the dialogue. As someone who never played Mass Effect or Dragon Age or SW:TOR, I came into this game with just the expectation that the story telling would be just like WoW – you know, you come across an NPC, help her kill the spiders in her apple orchard, and you’re done – and you can’t help feeling that you’re doing chores for people. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they had actually fleshed out a story for YOUR character in this game, and this is actually one of the highlights of GW2 for me.

The dialogue really doesn’t bother me, and I like it enough that I take the time to listen to them talk.

What I am really deeply concerned about, however, is the fact that after level 40, the story shifts from you on to Trahearne. I have nothing good to say about this guy, and it was such a major disappointment to have him “star” in the story when you’re the one doing the actual footwork. Whatever virtual sense of accomplishment you have on your character goes down the drain. It really doesn’t help that his character is very bland, very unconvincing, and very very flat.

ANet, I DON’T want to be part of a “team” as the other people here have indicated. I would have beem extremely fine with the state of the personal story, were it not for Trahearne. I play this game, I’m the one doing the stuff – why should anyone else get credit? It just doesn’t make sense to me.

Personal stories must remain just that – a story centered around YOUR character.

As for the dialogue, I love the dialogue in this game, whether it be the one off dialogues in the cities, or the dialogues in the personal story. The voice acting is fine for me. Again, all of these are good, except for Trahearne. I don’t know why there is a radical shift in quality when it came to this character but it seems that everything that could go wrong with Trahearne just really went really really wrong (voice acting, dialogue, role in the personal story, etc etc).

ifelldown.5426:

I have to say that they should not have made a big deal about this event nor should they have made it the free trial period. That was a terrible event. You could elaborate on it quite a bit with the terrible items, worthless store items, poor communications, aweful execution and weak content. It’s vitual buffet of horrible.

This. Exactly this. I echo this sentiment. What a disappointment.

The Asura have really good voice acting. Trahearne… well, let’s just say that all the things they did right in all the other aspects of the game was not done right with this character.

I really really really dig the Male Sylvari voice. I have 3 Sylvari male characters and I never tire hearing his dialogue. Very good voice acting.

Can someone please tell me what English accent this is?

Also, Arlon’s voice acting and accent is adorable.

To be honest, I find the voice acting in this game really good minus Trahearne’s. Bland character, bad voice acting, takes over your story. What were you thinking, ANet?!?! Still crossing my fingers that he dies in some future patch. I seriously cannot stomach this guy any more.

But anyway, going back, appreciate it if someone could tell me who voiced Male Sylvari and Arlon, and what accent this is?

Thanks.

UncrushablePigeon.8760:

1 hour ago they said on Twitter: “Hey folks, we are looking into the events that are not working. ^MK”

So I assume they’re working on the missing Noll. They said we’d be able to finish Phase 1, so I’m sure they’re working on it.

hey, thanks for the update and taking the time to copy it here.

again though, it just goes to show how frogged up their communications are. not everyone is on twitter. people expect updates through the forums and it’s just really annoying when they provide updated information through a different channel that not everyone really checks.