Guild Wars 2

YES YES YES to the above. This happens almost every other patch now! Some change that either isn’t considered worth mentioning or is considered to be “controversial” gets implemented, totally disrupts part of the game, and causes crazy overreaction because it’s like the billionth time that has happened.

Imagine a world where we knew about this need ahead of time and we saw a screenshot. Someone says, “the gem starting amount should be lower because blah blah” and it starts out at 100gems instead of 400gems. In that world, this patch went out and we’re all happy and talking about the better drop rates for candy corn, the awesome new time lord outfit (that’s what I call it), and speculating about the upcoming patch. A few people whine about not being able to get 50 gems and the community mostly shrugs.

Take us to that world. I want to go to there.

I’ve gotten 10 from the Trick or Treat bags, and that came with just a few hours of play. Unless they drastically nerf the bags (and I really hope that is the furthest thing from their mind right now…), I should get plenty of wrappers to get chances in. Do I love that someone can just buy their way to several? Not really. But I mean, if you’ve got enough “stupid money” to buy chances at a halloween skin, why not just buy the gold for the skin?

This needs to be changed swiftly to add in the 100 gems option a lot of people have mentioned. This should not be a “next feature pack” change, this is an emergency asap change. 16 pages in just this one thread in roughly 12 hours. Two reddit posts full of the same amount of rage. This is distracting everyone because it is easily interpreted as a cash grab, just show us some goodwill and demonstrate that it isn’t.

My simple suggestion, start at 100 gems, then 200, then 400, then 800. I don’t love having to buy more gems than I might want to use, but at least make it so that I can add on a little gold to top off whatever gems I actually purchase.

400 gems to start is way way way way too high.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

The Adopt-a-Dev program is a voluntary program. The developers who participate do so in their own free time and they choose from the guilds who apply to the program. If you want to see more developers participating in the lower tiers, then encourage more of the lower-tiered guilds to apply.

I hate that a few jerks are turning this ugly. I thought this was a fantastic idea and I hope you can do it more often for more types of content when you have the opportunity.

I really would like to hear a dev or Gaile chime in on this, because it’s a commonly asked question and I’m betting there’s a good reason for it that we don’t know.

Get skins you want and understand they might be available again, that’s my advice. There are good reasons to lock off content, “you should have been there” ain’t one

phys.7689:

wwwes.1398:

The more I think about it, the more I think the problem lies with the way that exotics just drop from anywhere at any time. The feeling you get from attacking some random enemy and getting an exotic item (or even a rare) is not the same as when you get it from a chest or a boss. If the loot tables were adjusted to make super valuable things MUCH MUCH more likely to drop from bosses and chests than from mobs, that would make people happier.

This should be coupled with measures to clip the outliers of RNG and give better/worse luck after a streak, but I think that this would be considered a very positive change.

Also, throw different types of items into the mix. I’m guessing 99.99% of players salvage the blues/greens they get, why even bother? Who’s going to equip a blue piece of armor at level 80? Instead, why not just award the mats and the luck directly? Asking for minis to be added to the loot tables is probably asking too much, but getting random minis is also something that would be fun.

problem is this would further lower the value of regular monsters. perhaps if regular monsters represented consistent progress, and bosses/special enemies/chests represented spike progress it could work.

However if you just make bosses more valuable you get even more pressure to do things like boss train, or ignoring everything except bosses in dungeons

Well, I think that the mobs should have loot tables very similar to what they have now. Just no exotics, not even a possibility of exotics. And maybe drop luck and mat bags instead of a constant stream of weapons and armor that, again, will never be used by anyone except to salvage.

But this is off-topic from RNG. And this must be coupled with measures to stop hot and cold streaks. I struggle to think how we can really do this while keeping RNG from being directly tied to your account, but maybe it is tied to a character instead of the account. I think a buff/debuff system would be the way to go.

So what quantifies as bad luck? I’d say the percentage of times you get exotics from a loot table, since presumably there ARE some items flagged as being more valuable than others. But others may differ in that opinion.

The more I think about it, the more I think the problem lies with the way that exotics just drop from anywhere at any time. The feeling you get from attacking some random enemy and getting an exotic item (or even a rare) is not the same as when you get it from a chest or a boss. If the loot tables were adjusted to make super valuable things MUCH MUCH more likely to drop from bosses and chests than from mobs, that would make people happier.

This should be coupled with measures to clip the outliers of RNG and give better/worse luck after a streak, but I think that this would be considered a very positive change.

Also, throw different types of items into the mix. I’m guessing 99.99% of players salvage the blues/greens they get, why even bother? Who’s going to equip a blue piece of armor at level 80? Instead, why not just award the mats and the luck directly? Asking for minis to be added to the loot tables is probably asking too much, but getting random minis is also something that would be fun.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Palador.2170:

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

That’s the spirit!

. (-:

Chris

Wait, can you see these posts? Awkward……

Don’t knock a new zone, especially if it’s a jungle zone. I want non-risen gorillas, man. But I think that’s the format of Living Story from now on. Personally, I think it’s better, or at least it would be far superior if we got stuff just a bit more often.

Overall, I’m excited about what’s coming up, though. Glad they posted the preview, even if it’s a week late.

If I was forced to guess, I’d guess that they intended to announce “something” a month ago or earlier, but they decided to wait until they reached a certain threshold, one that has still not been achieved. So they’re constantly on the precipice of being able to announce whatever vague thing they’re doing.

Of course, I have no more evidence for this than the people do about absolutely nothing coming down the pipeline. So yeah.

In general, if you ask yourself the question, “is my behavior something that might make players stop playing the game?” and the answer could be construed as “yes”, you should probably stop doing what you’re doing.

You did the right thing to report. Arenanet’s support team likely considers it a great day when they can find and ban people for doing stuff like this.

vifesprit.3514:

I want to thank John Corpening. He proves to me that a certain degree of transparency in ANET communication is possible.

THIS is a good example of what it should be.

For the first time in many years, we have information on the future of the game and we can react before changes are made.

I do hope everyone remembers that that post is absolutely meaningless except that it says what they’re thinking. And that is a good thing, because if they can say stuff like that with the knowledge that it is meaningless, then they can discuss the future of the game and new ideas without breaking their policy. Tho as mentioned many times, it is still an asinine policy.

In fairness, game economist said the candy corn thing was a miscalculation. There was a lot of candy corn in people’s banks, but he got the distribution wrong, meaning he thought there was more available than there actually was.

Well, that would still be an answer. We’re not actually getting any statements on this whatsoever. And at this point, it’s too late/doesn’tmatter/whatever. I hope that when all is said and done, this was a fluke and not the new trend..

Serophous.9085:

Paradox.1380:

Just so everyone is aware the first years Festivals were laid out and designed around the fact that they wanted content they could reuse as groundwork for the years after. This is how it will be most Halloween, Christmas, etc will be largely the same with small differences because that how ANet set it up from the beginning. They don’t’ wanna do massive overhauls of the event year after year.

This

If this is the case, I do wish they would just tell us this is the case and put out some sort of preview that includes some teasers for whatever new stuff. It’s too late for it now, of course. But pretty ridiculous that they plan for the content to be the same year after year and also that they are treating that idea like it’s something to be ashamed of.

Gaile, know that at least to me, you are a tremendous asset and I look forward to you having a role that continues to grow. Not everyone can do what you do, I know I couldn’t.

That said, in the immediate sense, getting somebody to talk or post about Mad Kings Day is really overdue. Today we saw leaks from a preview of the Chinese client hit Reddit. So it’s definitely true that we are exclusively being left in the dark at this point.

I do hope my messages aren’t among the ones that need to be pruned. I try to keep things on an even keel,, civil and understanding, even though I am impassioned by nature.

But the company’s policy is unacceptable, it is untenable in the long run, and it is directly responsible for a great deal of player ennui.

Azure The Heartless.3261:

wwwes.1398:

No. The difference is in silence, ragers AND casual players leave in equal numbers. It is a fantasy to suggest that with silence you don’t have to worry about people who are angry about the games direction. And a difficult fantasy to maintain, too, since we are in a thread full of that.

Sure you still have to worry, but at the same time you have liberty to work on developing whatever you want and not have to put up with “but you said we’d get this!!”

Silence alone is not the issue. Silence and a long time between updates is.

What you get in that instance is vastly more people being upset because a feature is thrown in that they didn’t really want while no attention is paid to something considered more important..

That is what created this latest controversy in the first place.

John Smith.4610:

Cakemeister.5792:

I just want magic find to make a difference.

Magic find makes a huge difference.

Hmm….. the account-based magic find, was that a previous attempt to try and solve the problem we’re discussing right now?

Regardless, as it stands, as my account magic find has increased, I find myself getting rares quite often, but exotics drop at roughly the same rate they always did for me. So I always assumed that the exotic drop rate was not tied directly to the drop rate for other items. Perhaps I’m very wrong about that.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Simzani.4318:

It is a CDI on guild halls and there is one on gvg, it means that they don’t even had think about begining to discuss it at lunch. Previous CDI showed that what’s in the CDI stay in the CDI. I’m curious to see what they want us to discuss that we will never have.

Hi Sim,

Not sure what you mean, can you elaborate please?

Chris

Pretty sure he meant “launch” instead of “lunch”. And forgive me if I’m being presumptive, but I’m guessing you guys have records of the discussion of gvg and guild halls and what not, possibly even a written plan of intent, but recognize that once it’s time to implement a new system, it’s silly to just blindly follow concepts you come up with in the very beginning with a different team of people. That’s how things like the How I Met Your Mother finale happen, and it just makes the world a darker place.

I, for one, appreciate that you are doing this and hope it makes you feel more inclined to consult the community when working on other things. An impromptu CDI/brainstorming thread will always get the attention of the people who care.

No. The difference is in silence, ragers AND casual players leave in equal numbers. It is a fantasy to suggest that with silence you don’t have to worry about people who are angry about the games direction. And a difficult fantasy to maintain, too, since we are in a thread full of that.

Berk.8561:

Gaile Gray.6029:

I’m sort of writing to think, but I’d like to understand what truly reaches the point of “I’d like more info, but I’m satisfied with what you’ve been able to tell us right now.”

In other words, people are concerned that if we don’t find out about the changes until they are a done deal that we’re going to be surprised in an unpleasant way by what we get because that’s already happened a few times.

My wife, who is a longtime player of the game and longtime defender of the game against the various trolls that complain about it, has also mostly gotten very tired of the total lack of info. And she pointed out that the history of Guild Wars is full of times when the company tries to surprise the players with something or puts in a fix without telling anyone ahead of time, and it nearly always goes poorly. Like 80% of the time they do this, it is a gigantic disaster that brings the morale of the players down for at least a week. And then is often followed up by the devs having to do a full court press here to defend their decisions.

I do think they want to do better in future, but it’s a bad habit that should always be in the back of their minds. The company has a tendency to think, “this will be easier if we just make a choice ourselves and deal with the blowback later”, and that instinct almost always leads to that blowback being much stronger and longer lasting.

I agree, the only part of the story that bugged me was that whole thing with “mordremoth” being on the tip of our tongue out of nowhere. But everything else led up so nicely to the cliffhanger and I genuinely feel like I’m at the end of Act 1 in a larger story. It’s very cinematic and I can’t wait to see what happens next!

I don’t think they were clear about that at all. If they were clear about it, they would have said it more than just one time in a blog post posted months ago, or wherever you’re taking that from. I have no idea, I’ve not seen anyone post a reference or quote about that.

But even if that were true…. why is it considered out of line to acknowledge that? I don’t actually play Guild Wars 1, but I saw that there was a promo in game promising that the Mad Kings event was coming up that would feature “X, Y, Z and more”…. Why is that not something they’ve done for this game? If they’re going to be releasing the same content pack every year, they really ought to also be releasing the same flavor text about what is featured in that content pack every year.

Like I said, I’m done, either they’ll address this and make me happy or they’ll continue to ignore it and I’ll just stay disgruntled and wait to read the patch notes. It really doesn’t matter in the long run, I just don’t understand why not take the five minutes to answer this. They really could just quote your post and type “^^” and that would answer the question.

lordkrall.7241:

Well, they HAVE told us that the event from last year will repeat.

Later in October, we’ll be bringing back our famous Halloween festivities! Blood and Madness will be returning to Guild Wars 2 on October 21 and remain active until the return of Season 2.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/upcoming-events-in-guildwars2/

I do wonder why they should bother being more transparent when people quite clearly doesn’t even read what they do tell us.

I think most everyone here read that, though you can hardly berate people because they didn’t manage to read a sentence in a blog post from a month ago. Nor can you blame people for thinking that they would release more than just that single sentence by the time the patch is going to hit in a few days. Considering that they’ve done that every single time they’ve released an update in my memory. Jesus, they announced Feature Pack updates with a new blog post every day for THREE WEEKS.

How can anyone pretend that sitting here less than a week before the patch hits with no updates to the news blog other than a set of new minis isn’t unusual? They did a fun promotion for a new event to celebrate Mad King’s Day on Facebook, but it was for a fan event. They promoted that fan content over the content they’re about to provide.

They said nothing of the sort! Events get updated all the time! The Queen’s Pavilion was totally different from one year to the next. It’s a completely fair question to ask whether the event is going to be exactly the same. And it’s something REALLY easy to answer, it takes about 5 minutes and almost no thought to type out a summary of what is same/different, especially if it’s almost identical.

OK, let’s play that game and extend your analogy. Two years ago, you presented Lord Of The Rings on your fancy new home theater screen for all of us and it was amazing. The year after, you showed us The Two Towers and it was exciting. And now this year, you tell us that you’re going to be showing us The Two Towers again. If I then asked you the question, "Wait, does that mean you aren’t showing Return of the King or did you just mistype? " and you refused to answer at all….. I’d probably be a little annoyed and confused. If I then kept asking you that for a month and every time you deliberately dodged that question, I’d start feeling upset.

The point is that if that is true, why not just freaking say that? Heck, if that’s what’s going to be in the game, why not repost the notes from the last event? What if the event IS tweaked? Now you’re arguing something wrong for insisting that they clearly meant is isn’t.

But I’ll drop the Socratic arguments. Let’s assume you’re right. And let’s assume that they won’t elaborate because they don’t want people to post threads about how they’re upset the content hasn’t changed". This whole attitude of “any potentially bad news must be delayed as long as possible” is simultaneously frustrating, insulting and counterproductive. Those threads are already here now and there will be more on Tuesday, so the strategy didn’t work. But the difference is that there are also people like me who weren’t expecting new updates but were expecting to hear a little more about what minor tweaks were made or not made. People that are ALSO annoyed because it feels like they’re hoping to trick us into not realizing it’s recycled content.

I love how everyone keeps posting that sentence as if it contains any more information than “The Battle of Hastings was fought on 14 October 1066”. You can’t say “bringing back our famous Halloween festivities” and expect that to be enough when there have only been TWO such events in GW2 and the last one was an update to the first one.

Yup, I saw that! I saw that probably a month ago in a blog post. Ask for any information other than that and you get nothing. You don’t know it will be the same any more than I know it will be the same, because they have not specified any details whatsoever.

Look, the problem isn’t abstract or in the past where there isn’t something to be done right now. Mad Kings Day. All posts asking what will arrive on Tuesday have been met with silence for months.

That has nothing to do with optimistic sharing, nothing to do with future development. It’s just completely a problem of no communication.

If you are serious about hoping to improve things, then start there. Otherwise this all rings sort of hollow.

The only evidence it will be the same is that every person asking that question is aggressively ignored. There’s literally no actual information on it anywhere from any source.

Inspired.6730:

John Smith.4610:

munkiman.3068:

phys.7689:

Brother Grimm.5176:

…
I’m pretty sure that nobody think there is special code about that.

But we’re a lot to rather think that RNG is bugged in some way, and that’s why, in addition to a “gauss distribution” as described in the previous post, some players are always lucky and some are always unlucky. As the RNG mechanism is all in all quite complex (modified by magic find ; depends on damage done by the player / by his group compared to damage done by other players ; special items with a different table loot ; …), there could be several bugs introduced in the system. Remember that the % of magic find displayed in the hero panel is wrong since months (but the real number is supposed to be correctly applyed), so it wouldn’t be surprising that there are some bugs in the loot mechanism itself.

There are CERTAINLY very vocal players that are convinced of the “secret LUCK stat”.

its not really relevant weather there is a secret luck stat or not. If a random works properly, there will be people who will, will seem lucky, or those who seem unlucky, when compared to the data. This is the normal expectation of the bell curve.

So whether it is a bug or not doesnt matter. The point is these people are bound to exist.

My take on RNG, isn’t that it exist or it’s broken, it’s just that it’s practically everywhere. Neither of those solutions would work anyway, since the game would have to predict what you’re after in the first place, then reward you for failure of what exactly? Do we put a merchant in the game that carries everything a player might want in exchange for a loser token?

This was the first problem I thought of as well. It’s simple to say failure and success, but that’s not an easily definable concept in real life.

If my understanding is correct, as far as the loot tables are concerned precursors are just named exotics. Thus, as far as the RNG is concerned you “win” if you get a named exotic whether it’s a precursor or not.

The reason why getting precursors are the most frequent example of RNG hate used is because players don’t equate other named exotics with precursors. Just as any precursor as a reward is far different than the precursor you want, or at least a valuable one. For example, I expect there would be quite a bit of rage if it were announced that everyone who hadn’t received a precursor in 3000 hours of playing would be sent a Rage via the mail to offset their bad RNG luck.

I don’t think it should work like that, any new system would have to start in the world in which we currently live. AND… any sort of token system should be used EXCLUSIVELY for the attainment of precursor weapons and t6 mats. So you get a stack of 100 bad luck tokens, you throw that into the mystic forge with exotic weapons and you get back a precursor that is account bound. If you throw it in with a small handful of t5 mats, you get a decent number of t6 mats in return. This rewards terrible luck over time and lots of actual gameplay.

Other than that, I think just setting each end of the spectrum to provide timed buffs/debuffs to your account when you have luck that is too good or too bad over a long amount of play would solve the issue. Call it Zommoros Fortune / Zommoros Curse.

Brother Grimm.5176:

I’m going to get some popcorn…..

Might I add that a simple comment from John (or any Dev) that states emphatically that there is NO secret LUCK factor tied to any player / account / character anywhere in the code (or ever has been), might help to squash some of the crazyiness I envision showing up in this thread. Just a suggestion.

He actually DID state this definitively in the question & answer thread, I was glad to hear.

I think the second option would be the way to go. Keeping things as random as possible is always for the best, but since the game is a situation where being an outlier means having a really crappy and frustrating time, I feel taking measures to cull BOTH ends of the spectrum might be a good idea. So people who get two precursors within a week can stand to take some losing RNG, people who play for 1000 hours with no precursor get bonus RNG. If you did it that way and things are balanced already, then there should be slightly less of a net effect on the economy.

John Smith.4610:

There isn’t such thing is some accounts getting stuck lucky. Yes there’s an RNG, yes it’s random and there are streaks and outliers and an even aggregate distribution.

Can you confirm whether it is an RNG that uses some sort of value from the user’s account or whether it is purely random/session based? I have a friend who swears that smack-talking an anet dev during a beta weekend pvp match doomed his account to poor rng for life.

Savoy.6824:

@Azure The Heartless no apology necessary. I guess my original hope when I posted was that a dev would read it and respond. There are several threads about them communicating more and they have even been posting in some of those threads so they appear to be trying. But in my mind, this is why people started complaining in the first place. Because of the lack of news before stuff gets rolled out.

Is there any way I can say this or something like it without sounding rude or entitled. I really dont want to derail the conversation into a thread about how all players like me are a bunch of whiny babies.

I completely understand and agree. I don’t think we ate asking for too much. It just makes me sad. I can’t even threaten to quit because I like the game a lot and I couldn’t quit playing it, I wouldn’t even say I won’t play the Mad King’s content.

I just hope they understand that they are making the experience less enjoyable and leaving a really bitter taste in the mouth of someone who just made the mistake of being overly excited to see what they were going to do next.

skullmount.1758:

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Probably be something when they update the News Blog today, as they do every Tuesday. =)

They probably won’t say anything. Not even a video like for LS ones. It’ll most likely be a copy paste of last years (due to the name they’re using), so why say anything until its announced? That way they can postpone all the threads about how its the same until its out and occupying some of those thread starters (thus anet makes it appear to be better than it actually is).
I really do hope I’m wrong and its different (and better) than last years.

See, here’s the flaw in that strategy, if that is their strategy. The people who would have raged over an announcement that the content is the same are still raging. The only difference is that people like me who just want to know what’s going on and coming up are now ALSO raging. It benefits nobody, least of all Arenanet.

If you are saying those three are the main issues that you found from your experience, then I think that’s definitely good stuff. TY!

Just to be clear, I definitely wasn’t saying that you guys aren’t communicating and problem solving, that’s been fantastic as of late, I was just curious as to what you heard the most in terms of wvw player concerns that you thought might be worthy of attention.

Mark Katzbach.9084:

Gorani.7205:

@Grotesque

I think it is the first time I see/read that a Dev (Jessica Boettinger) really talked about WvW with guilds and I would like to see how she reacted to some questions.

I still consider the “Adopt a Dev” initiative (as it happened) as a failed opportunity to identify the problems of WvW at their roots:
The vast majority (as I could read in the adopt sticky) spend their time in big guilds, in the gold leagues, where coverage is not an issue and where big numbers of players are. They rarely visited silver or bronze league, ran with PUGs, went to off-times e.g. EU night time (which is great for the Devs based in PST time zone).
The goal of the initiative was to get a good picture of the state of the game in its entirety. With the approach that is documented so far, they chose to see the “puffy clouds and butterflies” side of WvW and not the dark sides and problems we so often talked about here on the forums.

You’re making the false assumption that the participating developers took nothing away from their time with their adoptive guilds. This is untrue, many of our developers came back with feedback from interactions with their respective guilds, and in fact, we have a meeting today to discuss feedback, lessons learned and other relevant discussion around the program.

Don’t set yourself up to see changes immediately. The tournament just ended and the team still needs time to parse the feedback, identify issues and prioritize solutions. If you expect immediate change just because the tournament is over, you will be disappointed. Change takes time and careful consideration.

After your meeting and compiling feedback, can you make a post summarizing what you learned? I know you can’t make promises as to what you can fix, but it would be nice to see what’s being talked about.

Nope, nothing! But apparently if you think of the silence about anything related to upcoming features as them just being charming, it’s less irritating. I wouldn’t know myself, I stopped finding it charming awhile back.

Cool! Then maybe someone can confirm that this is the case. Or say that it isn’t. Or should I just do what you’re doing and making assumptions? I guess Lion’s Arch will be fixed in the next patch also.

Not slamming you, neither of us should be in the position of making guesses about something as simple as this, and this marks at least the third time I’ve asked about this over the last month or so, so unless they genuinely don’t know what they’re going to release next week, I feel like my annoyance is well-earned.

As shown above, Guild Wars 1 players have been given information about what is going to be released even though it’s presumably the same sort of thing. Is it out of line to expect that Guild Wars 2 players should receive the same courtesy?

Are we going to get anything today? if there’s not an official preview, can anyone from Anet answer questions people have about what will happen?

And such is the problem with refusing to talk about things in development. It looks exactly the same as if those things were being completely ignored.

But I don’t want to be negative, I want to offer helpful suggestions and solutions, and for this particular problem, Gaile, maybe you should create a sticky FAQ for people who want to know the last announced status of different features that are frequently requested.

I’m going to post one final thing, because I think this is a quick example of the problem. Halloween content is coming up. Presumably it is nearly finalized and the features for it have been known for a long time. You know what I know about it? The title. I could guess that it will be similar content, but nobody’s told me that. I could guess that there will be some new stuff, but nobody’s told me that either.

To be blunt, that SUCKS. I don’t even know the title because it just said “Blood and Madness returns”. Is that the same Blood and Madness? Is it a new iteration? Literally nobody playing your game knows. That’s SO frustrating.

IRT the people asking for an expansion or demanding an expansion, I don’t think you can make them happy unless you have one ready. It is what it is, you practically have to just write them off.

As for myself, I don’t even care about an expansion. I’m one of the players that actually enjoyed what we got in the past and just wants more of the same except in a format that remains available. Presumably I’m a player you need to keep. But we’ve actually had significantly less as of late, so if a person is left without any choice but to extrapolate the future from what we’ve had the last few months, they would probably assume there really won’t be very much to look forward to and that they’d be better off simply finding something else to do for the next few months before coming back.

Or just discount my opinion totally and think about someone more prominent like WoodenPotatoes. All his videos lately have harped on the exact same thing, that we have no idea what we’re supposed to be waiting for. I feel like if such a huge champion of the game is feeling that way, there’s something seriously wrong going on.

DonQuack.9025:

tigirius.9014:

I’m about to start STO’s Delta Rising for example. The expansion is free but they are selling ship upgrade packs. The reason I bought the pack isn’t because I needed it, it wasn’t because it was such a short time period for purchase and it wasn’t because I was forced into purchasing it by the design team, it was because of their transparency.

Clearly wasnt around at the launch of STO. or season 1, 2, 3,

Which only goes to demonstrate that the tide will turn inexorably in the direction of transparency, the only question is how many people will bleed off the population before Anet catches on. This is the worst possible policy to have when trying to get new players and it makes me sad. You create this new player experience designed to hold onto new people, and they will leave soon after they hit 80 because they ask what is coming next and everyone in the game says they have no idea what is coming past the next two months. That fact combined with the fact that we are getting considerably LESS content than we did last year sure makes it seem like the game is dying. That’s SO BAD, because I’m almost certain it’s not true, and that’s why we keep trying to raise flags. It has only a little to do with us wanting to know more, it is much more us saying, “hey, some guildmates are losing interest, help us know what to say to them to keep them playing while we wait”.

Gaile Gray.6029:

nightwulf.1986:

On the subject of telling people what’s not being worked on: Super Adventure Box. There goes the hope of telling people that something isn’t being worked on in an exploding cloud of pixellated glory.

But you know we have said, officially, that SAB will return in the future, right? I don’t know that everyone understood that, but yes, it’ll be back. I honestly and truly don’t know when — and even more honestly, I don’t know if the return has been scheduled. However, I heard the “it will be back” from Colin, and I pretty much rely on that guy for knowing what’s what.

I don’t see enough other people giving you props for this one, Gaile, and I’m going to do that now. Seriously, when I saw you took the time to go and just get a definitive answer on this, it made me happy, because this is the kind of thing that I was hoping to see from an increased forum presence. Just simple answers to questions that are vague enough to not overshare or overpromise. I genuinely don’t care that some people don’t consider this enough, as long as the answers are at least somewhat specific and not just “well, we totally plan to do that within 3 years time”.

That being said (and including headers to make this easier to read)…

We need a roadmap
I have to agree that the lack of a roadmap is hard to adjust to. There’s been a long period with a lack of info or updates and it’s been hard to really feel motivated to keep going. If I didn’t have some super good guildmates to keep things feeling fresh, I don’t think I’d have kept playing.

Beyond that, knowing what Guild Wars will probably have by next year is super cool. A lot of the stuff in Colin’s older roadmap was nice, the main problem was just putting a date on it and overcommitting. If we had that same exact info and instead of “by the end of 2013” it said “within the next year or so and, to be clear, possibly subject to change”, then I don’t think we’d have any problems whatsoever. Colin is a super inspirational guy, let him talk to us again.

We need more than just title/image when living story updates are coming months later
I understand you guys want to keep some surprise in the mix, but there’s definitely a middle ground between undersharing and oversharing, and we are not in the sweet spot there yet. An example of how to slightly build upon that picture, for instance. What kind of land are we going to encounter, is it jungle? More desert? Are there going to be some new enemies to face there? Is there a new world boss? Within the next several updates, will we find a new zone? Will there be more open world events integrated with the living story?

Even just stating open questions that we should be paying attention to in the next few chapters is useful! If you said we should be asking “What happened to Rytlock?” right now, that would be telling us that we’ll get more about that story thread without actually revealing any information. We need nuggets. Tiny little nuggets to get imagination spinning. And since we can’t have more than just the nuggets, we need several of them.

Could you discuss your thoughts on the consumable ingredient market in general and, more specifically, cooking? And I know you can’t comment on that question specifically, but is it fair to say that there IS something you’re hoping to accomplish with these new recipes and that it’s not just some arbitrary value being thrown out there?