Guild Wars 2

Morrigan.2809:

I really don’t understand why people find it necessary to spill venom all over the forums.

Mostly seeking attention. One or two posts (in Suggestions forum) is sufficient to tell Arenanet “I don’t like this and here’s what I think you should do.” One or two threads is sufficient to create a dialog and brainstorm with other players.

The handful of players who flood the General forum with complaints don’t want to do either. They’re acting like children throwing a tantrum – for several it has gone beyond trying to sound reasonable and just repeating the same stuff over and over because they like the attention it brings from other people repeating the same answers over and over. No one is getting anywhere with the subject because there is no dialog, just shouting.

Break the cycle. If no one is feeding into their tantrum they will get tired and go away. Like a small child, constantly giving in just to make them shut up will only encourage the behavior.

There is no point to drama without an audience.

Arson, was that really so important you had to say it three times?

tOss.9024:

Man, I would hate to be a developer with, some of, the modern gaming community as hostile as it is now. .

I’d imagine it’s a lot like being in a live performance field like theater or a musician. If you just read the critics’ reviews you’ll be convinced you’re the worst performer ever and no one would ever come to see you perform. Even if you gave a free show during a rainstorm people would rather get wet than be in the same room with you.

Then you actually go out to perform a concert or a play, and you look out at a packed house and realize there are thousands of people who all gave of their time and money just to see you… and you realize that the critics are just sad little men who want to make you feel bad.

The staff have access to a LOT more data about what goes on in their games than we do. Most of the people posting here, for all their posturing, don’t have a clue about what they’re talking about.

Gehenna.3625:

You seem to have a maximum reward per minute need. Don’t forget this is not your job. Your boss isn’t there to improve your efficiency in time spent. I suppose that in line with the term DPS I shall call you a RPS’er. You know Reward Per Second player..

Then: “Why did you climb Mt. Everest?”

“Because it’s there.”

Now: “Why did you climb Mt. Everest?”

“Because I get $50 a foot per climb.”

“Also, I believe he meant that people are just shouting out opinions like “something isn’t good enough improve it!” and that’s okay, but if you try and call that criticism you are awful wrong.”

I just call it kittening… er, female dogging.

dalendria,

LOL it’s an example that shows the cream doesn’t always rise to the top. People don’t always make rational decisions. Betamax was a better format than VHS, but letter codes are cooler and “beta” is Greek for “B” which makes it sound like it’s ok but not great. If the format was called “Ultramax” from the start we wouldn’t even have heard of VHS.

Your commitment to excellence is commendable, but not too common in the world today. Most people are after the quick buck, the quick fix, follow the pack and are afraid to do things that set them apart from their peers.

To many people, want and need are the same thing. There’s a shiny new sword that you can only get by killing the Green Spotted Bandersnitch that spawns once a month? It’s stats are exactly the same as the weapon a beginning Weaponsmith can craft but it glows blue and shoots off black sparks when it hits something? Some people will obsess about it so much that they will camp the spawn point for the next 3.5 weeks, sleeping in shifts with their buddies so that someone is always watching for the spawn, until they get that chance. Then heaven help the random guy who wanders along and kills the Bandersnitch before they can get it!

Kailthir.6384:

We have beautiful artistic scenery, very diverse races, classes that are for the most part are differet, and not more of the same. The music score is pretty much spot on. Oh and STORY… they beat Bioware SWTOR at their own game. The story (atleast so far) is amazing! Unlike SWTOR they didn’t VO the side quests etc, spent that time on creating content. Smart move.
.

SWTOR plays out like a single player game (albeit one with alternate storylines to explore) that was turned into an MMO mid-development. I think if they had kept out the MMO “features” and released it as KoTOR 3 it would have been a much better game, and much more profitable.

Gauradan.8361:

@muthax Server capacity is based on the number of accounts on the server, not on the number of people playing on that server at a given time. When a server is full, you can’t choose that server anymore. It’s not like you can choose the server, then you have to wait in some queue like in WoW.

Then why do “full” servers go down to “high” early in the morning, then back to “full?” Are you saying that thousands of people cancel their accounts every day, then thousands more replace them with brand new accounts?

At $60 a box that kind of turnover is tremendous… Arenanet must have pulled in over $1 billion gross by now…

But seriously, they did this in the beginning to keep certain servers from being overcrowded and others underpopulated, but they seem to have gone back to a more traditional method of controlling populations.

If I understand the situationn correctly, several Skill Points in the game are not resetting correctly, and people have been transferring to other servers where (hopefully) the SP reset and they can activate it, then transfer back later. They can do this even when the original server is “full” because the pop eventually drops to the point where they can transfer back.

Kailthir.6384:

And people like you, all they do is troll the forums. How about constructive criticisim. Instead of telling fanboys how much of a fanboy they are, how about actually identifying issues you are having and giving multiple viable solutions to those issues.

I have seen you post many times before. You stoke the flame quite a bit but offer very little if nothing in return.
.

Oh, don’t worry about “big cheese.” He has nothing to offer any real discussion and my skin is too thick to feel this mosquito’s bite. When someone tosses around terms like “fanboy” and “hater” it makes it easy to dismiss their position without making an effort to understand it. It’s a sign of intellectual laziness – “I don’t have to think about this, he’s just a fanboy/hater so his opinions aren’t worth anything.”

I extend big cheese the same consideration. Whatever he wants to say about me, doesn’t bother me in the slightest. He’s shooting blanks.

“Is this thread still going?”

Well, to be honest it’s just a handful of posters with an axe to grind at this point. Flooding the board with complaints makes it seem like a big deal until you realize that it’s a few people ranting and a few more going “yeah! you tell em!” while the rest of us just sigh and try to ignore them.

Token.6501:

As the Taoist says, “the soup is just right,” the world is exactly what it should be. Our expectations have no special power to make it different.

Thanx for getting it.

Eh, I gave you the benefit of the doubt and figured you were getting all riled up because you care about the game. Obviously you’re the other sort.

Ronin.8095:

Oh and ythat you’re omniscient, apparently. Seeing as you know me, my personality, my gaming habits, my chips on my shoulders and everything else about me. Amazing talent you’ve acquired there. How do I get to be so all-knowing too?

Live a few more years. I used to be just like you. You need seasoning.

Seriously. Ten years ago I was posting to other sites’ forums, raging because people wouldn’t step up to fix the glaring problems with whatever I was interested in at the time. I had all the answers and no one wanted to hear them. Eventually you learn that it’s just not possible to MAKE people see what is right in front of them, so you either kill yourself trying or accept it. I accept it.

Nothing is perfect, but what they got right, they got very right.

Oh, Ronin, I think I remember you mentioning you were 33 yrs old… I’m a bit older than you, so you might want to take my advice and dial back the venom a little. It will do nothing but lead to an early heart attack. Just some friendly advice, young one.

I hope that chip on your shoulder doesn’t lead to back problems later in life.

“Every thread? It’s about 5 of 1000’s which is less than .005%. Stop being an exaggarating drama queen.

I don’t complain about all the hundreds of posts you make repeating yourself, if you want me to do so, it’s not going to be hard to collate them all and put them in a thread for you to see.”

Interesting… call me an exaggerating drama queen only to be one yourself in the very next paragraph. I won’t call you a troll of course… but… I understand you all too well.

In the simplest sense, more customers = more money. But there are some rules of thumb businesses go by, such as 20% of the customers bring in 80% of the profits. The exact numbers vary, but these are the “gem buyers” who spend money for more character and bank slots, who run around the city in their funny hats, buy gems to trade for gold to buy influence points for their guild, etc.

These are not the people threatening to quit. They are the “other” 20%, where 20% of the customers cause 80% of the problems. They cost money (they’ve been making the mods here work overtime lately) and drive away customers with their attitude.

If you owned a restaurant, and someone came in and bought an expensive steak dinner, you’d be happy, and want your customer to be happy, right? What if he spent the rest of the night sitting at the table and yelling that the steak was too tough, the wine tastes like vinegar, there was a fly in his soup and the waiter told him to eat around it… how much will you put up with before you tell him to leave? Yes, he paid for his meal, but that doesn’t give him the right to disturb your other customers, and in the long run that one customer could cost you dozens.

The game is what it is. This is the game that the developers wanted to make. Demanding that it become a completely different game just to please you is not going to end well for you. And because there is no monthly fee, it soon reaches the point where Arenanet would rather see you move on than continue to disrupt the activities of the players who actually like the game as it is.

Um, my post didn’t mention DR at all until a roundabout mention regarding “grinding” and “farming” at the end. It was about people with too-short attention spans dismissing the games as dead and moving on to the next one because they lack the perspective to appreciate them. And how developers expect this to happen and plan for it. I saw it as a casual user over the last year and a half, I can’t imagine people who have spent the last 10 years in this industry would find such an attitude surprising.

Yes, if you go into every thread on the GD board and post “DR is killing the game!” over and over again, it’s going to get old fast. I hear there’s a new game coming out in a month or two, I’m sure that will be much more to your tastes than the last five or six.

dalendria.3762:

In every major company I have worked at, we consider bugs that prevent accessibility to features, content and functionality, to be Severity 1. Release Management will not allow a technology solution to go to production with Severity 1 and Severity 2 defects. It is not just major companies that take this stance. In QA and Release Management best practices, these are considered common approaches.

Obviously you’ve never worked for Microsoft. Since establishing themselves as the dominant general-purpose software company their motto has been “ship it now, fix it whenever.”

The gaming market is much more forgiving. You can’t test every possible combination of hardware so situations come up where pairing Processor A with Video Card X means the weapon animations don’t work right, or running the game on Processor G with Video Card Q causes the computer to randomly blow up/melt. A lot of bugs only affect a tiny percentage of players, but when four or five of them come to the forums to complain it seems like the game is as broken down as a 30-year old pickup truck on a farm in Iowa.

Vorch.2985:

GW2 will do swimmingly with it’s model. IMO, the only two MMOs that can justify a sub anymore are WoW (idk why people still play it) and Rift (hate or love the game, mad props to Trion for actually giving a crap about their players).

Rift is a wonderful game, one of the best CRPGs I’ve ever played, single- or multiplayer, and the first game since the original Neverwinter Nights that I really could not put down. It’s also the only MMO I’ve maintained a subscription for, continuous since the day it opened to the public until April 2013. I’ve taken breaks to try other games like SWTOR and TERA but found Rift to be more to my liking. The rate of bug fixes and content releases is such that I don’t ever regret paying a monthly fee even if I don’t log in for a few weeks.

I do have to admit, though, as a casual player the pace of the game and lack of kill and loot stealing in GW2 is spoiling me to the point where I’m not sure about going back to Rift for a while.

If the “grinder” is frustrated by the way GW2 plays out, I sympathize, but I feel like someone wrote the game just for me. If I were to organize a project of this magnitude, it would turn out very similar though I am a little disappointed that the DEs don’t have a more lasting effect on the world. I’d write out subplots of DE chains that last anywhere from hours to weeks and make semipermanent changes to the world. But that’s just me…

damianlxl.3621:

Any word on when those unclaimed character names are being released?

Probably low priority while they work on game bugs, botting issues, customer satisfaction and so on.

Ronin.8095:

It’s a really really odd business strategy they have. How can we annoy all of our users? Our fanboys will still love us, but how can we really stick it to the newcomer or convert?

DR is the way to do it boys. DR and nothing else.

I’m well aware of your opinion towards DR from the dozens of threads about it. My take on it is that it is a temporary measure, perhaps too hastily implemented, to control the bleeding while they seek to stop gold farmers from stealing the accounts of unsupecting players.

It’s not the selling that’s the problem, like most criminals the gold sellers don’t care how many rules they break, or who they hurt. In the long run, losing thousands of paying customers because they spent $60 on the game only to lose their account to a hacker within a week will hurt more than chasing away the ADHD crowd by changing the way the game is played.

Also, I think it’s a matter of design philosophy. If you rushed to 80 to farm high-level mats and buy/create a legendary weapon within single-digit weeks of the playing the game, you’re doing it wrong, according to Arenanet developers. So they want to discourage this kind of play by making it more rewarding to explore the entire map whether before or after your toons are max level.

I intend to create a legendary weapon eventually, but I haven’t even started on that journey yet, and I’m not in any hurry to get there.

Soulwatcher.2604:

I have one word for you “Gem$” with out the sale of Gem$ Anet will shut this game down faster then you can blink your eye!

But the people I’m talking about refuse to loosen their grip on the credit card to pay a monthly fee. Why would they buy gems when they just want to pass the time until the next MMO release?

You’re talking about the Farmville crowd there, where a single “whale” spends enough to subsidize the game for thousands of free players. Arenanet only needs a small number of these players and they are not among the group I posted about.

“Ever consider that you are talking about a large number of people and making generalizations is silly?”

I dabbled in anthropology in college, though it never really was a focus. Have you tried talking about a large number of people without making generalizations?

There are these “ultimate fighter” shows on Spike or something… go apply to train and compete, then win one of the championships. Now go watch a bunch of people sit at a computer pressing buttons. Discuss with them how skilled/unskilled various classes are in PvP. Try not to laugh.

Subscription-based MMOs usually give a free month with purchase, so immediately on release there is a tidal wave of players who rush through the game as fast as possible and complain that the game isn’t enough (or is too much) like WoW.

They flood the servers, then complain because they can’t get online fast enough because the servers are flooded. They complain there aren’t enough servers, when new servers open they complain because their buddy got stuck on the new server and can’t join the old server’s guild. They grind through the content like a starving man at a buffet then complain they ran out of things to do. They complain there aren’t enough players at max level, and then when the players get there they complain the newer players are noobs.

After 30 days, the credit card starts getting charged for the subscription fees, and like a cloud of locusts these players disappear into thin air. Server populations drop and all those new servers created to handle the overload are no longer necessary. Late-comers are stranded there and by the time they can move to a more populated server most of the players there are at max level so the new (old) server still seems underpopulated.

A minority of these locust-like players may remain because they have extra cash to afford a sub or don’t have a new game to go to. They harass players in game and post messages to the effect that the mass exodus means Game X is dead and will shut down shortly. They pretend to care about the game but don’t actually say anything constructive or even appear to care about building a communitiy within the game. They are just passing the time until Game Y is released so they can begin the process again.

I’ve seen this happen several times, in the last year or so several games have premiered and expanded. Rift, Cataclysm, SWTOR, TERA, The Secret World, GW2, MoP have been released and the Storm Legion expansion is coming in a few weeks. I don’t play WoW but I’ve tried several games on the list and they have all followed the same pattern.

The only exception with GW2 is that the game does not follow the subscription model, and so there is nothing pushing the locusts onward except the release of WoW’s and eventually Rift’s expansions. On the other hand, losing a chunk of belligerent and impossible to please players to another game doesn’t mean as much to Arenanet because they don’t rely on the sub fees to survive.

Not that it matters in this case because the majority of these players only pay for the box and cancel before the subscription fees kick in. So losing these players, whether they leave on their own or are encouraged to move on because of Arenanet’s actions, don’t make a dent in the long-range plans for GW2 or any other game.

You’re not fooling anyone. The game designers are a smart bunch, and they’ve been studying these trends for years. Yes, newcomers like Bioware make missteps and overestimate the effect their personal tweaks will have on the games and their players. But for the most part it is normal and expected that the game population will drop sharply around a month after launch, when the shiny begins to wear off and the ADHD crowd moves on to the next big thing.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which this happens to GW2, because there is nothing inherent to the game that really pushes these players onwards, once you buy the box you can come back to it a week, a month, a year later for no additional cost. The current drop is mostly due to MoP and will rebound when the shiny wears off there too. The handling of “farming” and “grinding” habits in the short term and long term may also have an effect in encouraging these players to move on, but I suspect it won’t be permanent. They’ll always have a free game to come back to between releases.

TransparentlyOpaque.1824:

Varyag.3751:

Most professions have easy mode builds.

Tell me what the elementalist easy mode is please?

Fire.

Anyone who doesn’t want to keep the dirty money can send their coppers to me.

Translation: “Guys playing these classes keep kicking my kitten in PvP.”

Guy with no job or gf bugs his parents until they buy GW2 for him.

Guy spends 20 hrs a day farming. In 2 weeks has five legendary weapons, kewlest armor in the game, etc. Shows off to other players.

Guy who has a job and a social life gets jealous because he only just got to level 80. Spends $500 on gems so he can buy legendary weapons from jobless guy on TP.

Arenanet profits. Nope, DR doesn’t help them, it’s in their best financial interest to have people running around convincing other people to buy gems to make up for lack of playing time. It’s a design philosophy issue that they don’t WANT people spending 20 hrs a day farming just so they can show off their kewl lewt. It’s about enjoying the journey, not taking shortcuts to the end.

We need more threads about this topic. Because everyone knows the more complaints there are on page 1 of General Discussion the faster the CEO will wave his magic wand and make everything right.

Making threads about it here won’t do anything either, but hey, it gives the Mods something to do.

They recently added “Selling Gold” to the options both in chat and mail reports, to reduce confusion about which option applies.

Sins.2806:

Is there really only me who is worried about how this system seems to limit how much they can add to existing zones without the system adding alot of problems to players?

Yeah, it’s pretty much just you. The system needs tweaking but the gist of it is “doing a variety of different things will continue producing normal results, doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over will eventually yield no results.”

Adding to the variety of things to do will not impact doing the same thing repeatedly, except that you will now have more choices for the variety of things part.

On the internet or in real life, some people simply always think they are smarter than the scammers… they walk away after “winning” the shell game and holding a couple twenties in their hand, then realize their wallet is missing…

I know what happened… the Janitor accidentally bumped the “Skill Point” switch and turned it off. While you’re back there, check the Diminishing Returns Setting dial and because some joker seems to have turned it all the way up.

It completely escapes me why anyone would think 1c = “buying gold.” Did you shave a sliver off a penny and send it to them?

DPS = Damage Per Second.

Any toon can carry a weapon, therefore any toon can do some amount of damage over a period of time. Everyone is DPS.

Any toon can select a healing skill that works on other players’ toons, and any toon can revive fallen toons. Everyone is a Healer.

Any toon can block attacks from enemies, distract enemies who are attacking other players’ toons, and beef up your ability to stay on your feet with Vitality and Toughness bonuses. Everyone is a Tank.

People insist on following a single role because that is more familiar to them and what is familiar is easier and more comforting than learning new ways of doing things. Likewise the Great Hamster Wheel of Gear Upgrades and wanting to rush through everything so they can brag they were one of the first to kill Mrughmrutugh the Unintelligible in his lair at the end of the last dungeon in the game.

That’s the great thing about choices. If you don’t want to learn a different way to play, or if you can’t handle doing things a different way, there are other games that offer new stuff to do in old ways. This game offers new stuff to do in new ways. Take your pick.

If only there was some sort of “Suggestions” forum where you could post things like this…

Something like:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions

This is a non-issue. Taking a 1c “gift” attached to an email in order to delete the email is necessary and in no way supports gold sellers. Supporting gold sellers – and breaking the TOS – involves voluntarily exchanging real money for fake money. You are not buying anything here.

Life is full of disappointments. It’s a game, you didn’t actually lose anything. I’ve put four items into the forge and gotten one of the items back. It’s a gamble and when you gamble sometimes you lose.

As for not getting items restored, it’s Arenanet’s game and Arenanet makes the rules. If you play their game you accept this. I accept it.

So, you lost your job, your wife left you, your kid’s in the hospital, your car got repo’d and your dog died? Geez man I really feel bad for you, life is tough like that sometimes but things will get better…

Wait, wrong browser, this isn’t an email from my cousin… so you lost some digital items because of a game bug? Sunnuvakitten. Life goes on.

And you do? I am stating an opinion, not facts. It does not matter at all whether you agree with me or not.

As I said in my original post… they probably have some kind of software to automate the process. I do not have access to the servers or any information beyond what you have. No player posting on these forums has that info.

“Source for this data?”

Observation and estimation, this not scientific research.

Remember that the grandfather of MMOs, Dungeons & Dragons, was never intended to be PvP balanced – in fact low-level mages were intentionally weak and could not survive most situations if played alone. The purpose of the game was for a small group to work together, and protecting a near-useless wizard in the beginning paid off in mid-level when he can fireball approaching enemies and kill or severely weaken them before engaging in melee combat.

I came from games like Baldur’s Gate, where playing a mage required a party of various classes for support, to Neverwinter Nights, where playing a mage was challenging even with a melee type NPC henchman, to Rift where mages were expected to stand next to a warrior as an equal.

You cannot unring the bell, with these expectations you can’t reduce the effectiveness of ranged attacks to make melee more attractive without causing an outcry from people who are used to doing it the other way around. Look at what happens with something as basic as giving tank/healing role characteristics to every class…

Jestunhi.7429:

Or they just saw “tolunart.2095” on these forums?

Occam’s razor.

“Usually” the best answer is not necessarily the correct answer. I get an email seconds after login, it’s not waiting for me. There are many thousands of people online, if gold sellers are restricted to mailing people who post on the forums they are catching a few hundred people but missing 100,000 more.

Vzur.7123:

Renegadeimp.8439:

Dopplegangr.9678:

tolunart.2095:

“I don’t play X any more” does not mean death. It means you choose to spend your money elsewhere. How many MMOs have actually shut down all their servers and closed up within six months of release? A year?

I’d say pretty much every MMO besides WoW is dead. I don’t know anyone that still plays AoC, Rift, Aion, Tera, SWTOR, etc. I’m guessing the same will be true for GW2 soon.

You need to know more people then. I know plenty that actively play all those you named.

Just because the games arent as popular as WoW doesnt mean that none of them are a success.

It’s not that black and white. There are degrees of success, and the more successful an MMO is, the more likely it is to expand and evolve – into something worth playing longterm.

Lots of MMOs are still in business, but don’t make enough money to keep growing. Nobody wants to pump development money into a game, if there won’t be a decent return on that investment.

So it really depends on how you define success. Is it just being able to stay afloat? Or much more than that?

Well, to me “dead” means “no longer in business.” Companies that are spending more than they make quickly close. I just looked up Age of Conan and Warhammer Online, two games that are generally said to have “died” soon after release, and there are announcements regarding server maintainance and game development for Sept 2012. Clearly, even if “you” are not playing these games, someone is.

Success does not mean “more popular than WoW.” If a game is still in operation after 1 year, 5 years, or whatever then it is doing something right, even if it is not WoW.

Dopplegangr.9678:

tolunart.2095:

“I don’t play X any more” does not mean death. It means you choose to spend your money elsewhere. How many MMOs have actually shut down all their servers and closed up within six months of release? A year?

I’d say pretty much every MMO besides WoW is dead. I don’t know anyone that still plays AoC, Rift, Aion, Tera, SWTOR, etc. I’m guessing the same will be true for GW2 soon.

You’re the expert… so their servers are shut down, hm? They must have cancelled the Rift expansion, I’ll have to ask for my money back.

They probably have some kind of 3rd party software that detects and emails anyone logging into the area. I usually get mails immediately upon login or entering a new area, faster than most humans could click on my toon, paste a message and send the email, so the process is most likely automated.

This is one reason why simply banning UserX won’t stop them, they need to develop the capability to detect and block the software that is being used, it doesn’t matter whether UserX is banned he’ll just switch to UserY or UserZ accounts and continue.