Is ArenaNet okay?

Yes... I completely agree. GW is going to die because some people can't deal with enemies that kite. gg to the average GW player.

Seriously: the only legitimate complaint about the AI right now is the problem with 'perma-agro'.

I don't think it is whining to point out a problem. No one is complaining about the chicken run code. They have been doing that for a hot minute now. It's all the other inconsistencies. As for the point of realism though I have two counters. One, this is a fantasy game so realism can pretty much be thrown out the window. Two, the AI is supposed to be significantly less skilled than the players for one reason only. Monsters outnumber any party in any area significantly. They aren't supposed to be clued in on the tactics utilized by players. A comparable and more manageable level of challenge could be achieved by simply making more balanced mobs instead of tweaking the AI to the sadistic degree it has been tweaked.

The average player is the core of the market, hence the qualifier average. Ergo, if the average player dislikes that then it should be removed in order to better serve their core market. It's as simple as that. That's just good business. You don't cater to niche's within your market. If you lose 5% of sales because you removed a feature that only that 5% liked then so be it, you still have the other 95% plus new sales which will probably end up falling into the same split with 5% not liking the game and the other 95% loving it.

Ok thats just uninformed, the mobs are varied and balanced especially in factions but also in NF. do you often see mobs which are all monks or somehtign that you think could be improved? Tactics from the AI? They aren't that much smarter. with very little effort I have been rolling through NF and I don't spend muhc time in pve nor do I consider my builds very carefully. What sadistic level are we talking about I mena I went as a caster through the game twice with no trouble.


and I'm begging those of you who think its too hard to just stop pull back for a second. I may personally dislike you for the tone of your writing here but I still want you to get enjoyment from the game as I do.

Just think for a second about what you do and why you might find it harder post AI. I know you can find other ways to farm as I have and maybe you'll find that you only need to tweak one little thing to go back to dominating the Mobs. I feel strongly all of your are smarter than the mobs. truly I do.


~Cyril

It's not about farming it's about gameplay. Prior to the AI update I had no problem whatsoever cruising through the game. I have a knack for synergistic builds and finding synergies between skills. Post AI I can't even bring myself to bother trying to advance any further in Nightfall because the AI is frustrating.( mass aggro, insanely long chicken runs, long distance aggro, rez shrine camping, need I go on?) What it comes down to though, in the end, is that people who are pleased or indifferent to the AI change are in the minority and unfortunately you can't, or at least shouldn't, cater to a minority in a business model. You should always cater to your majority customers.

I don't know where your evidence for who is the minority or majority comes from, I know I personally don't have statistics for these things since they are almost impossible to collect.

I don't see these problems you just listed very often if at all. I've never been agroed from beyond my bubble. As a former runner I find nightfall has no too long agro issues in the large term I think once they chased me too far but i still lost them.

what I'm trying to show here is that its all anecdotal everyhting people are saying is either BS or personal experience and if our two experiences are so wildly different then you are out of line assuming and calling upon anet for changes based merely upon what you find.

try looking up go for the eyes. that build without any real effort can get you to near the end game.


~cyril

?? So people want to be a hero by killing boar??(south park anyone??)
oh, where are you my dragon slaying heros=P

The bad always out number the good guys, isnt this what make fantasy hero admirable??
Most of the "Evil" have great wisdom, for god sake they own human to the poin human seek mirical and heros.
And yes, I am talking fantasy stories=P
I dont know about you, but I havent read any child kicking, gang left behind hero yet.(might be a good idea someone start one=P fresh market)

Again, I am not saying the current ai is good, I still want the "every race have different AI". The current bug brain AI isnt something to brag about. But I do view from "eating too much and chock to death" to "this steak is too big for me, I will be back later" as an improve. Not a great one, but it is=P I personaly view the A-Net dev as the final boss of GW. I dont know, asking for easier AI sound like asking the opponent to go easy on you in a card game.

And seriously, why cant people just speak for themselves?? Feel boneless with out the word "majority" behind you?? come on, if you want to use the word, do a poll=P

*weekly* listing, from the same NPD group, put GW at #5 despite only 3 days of sales

NPD game sales figures for Oct 22 - Oct 28
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/guild...ml?sid=6161500

It's not a matter of gathering hard data. I don't need hard data to draw the conclusion that a simple majority doesn't like the AI. It's a matter of observation. How many threads about AI have been started? How many have been negative? Do you honestly think those threads are confined to just this board? If each board revolving around Guild Wars accounts for an average cross section of the GuildWars population, and it conceivably can and should, then you can extrapolate a majority from just reading the posts. The 95% and 5% were just arbitrary numbers to demonstrate the futility of catering to a minority market within your consumer base. Whether you see the problems or not doesn't mean they don't exist unless you subscribe to the good old ostrich theory of reality, that being if I can't see it it doesn't exist and therefore can't hurt me. What does matter, and what should provide you with even more evidence, is that a number of people have experienced these problems and have spoken out about them. So based solely on your experience you are prepared to discount all the other people who have experienced these same issues? That's a faulty argument right there. Whether you have experienced these issues personally is immaterial, they exist, they have been experienced by many other people,and they are a problem.

There is also a principle known as statistical representation. I'm sure you've heard a dumbed down version of it in which if one person actually takes the time to say write to their congressman about an issue that one letter actually represents X percentage of the constituents in that area who are just too lazy to write. That principle can be applied here as well, though there are about twenty other formulas which I don't remember to arrive at the percentage which X represents.

As for the go for the eyes build I don't play cookie cutter builds. I never have and I never will. If it has been published in a forum or online I'm not interested. Although I do thank you for your attempt at helping me since I'm sure that was the spirit of mention of that build.

Because in an instance like this the majority speaks as one voice. We are speaking for ourselves we just happen to agree with each other on this point. That's what makes us a majority silly. Again There is no need to do a poll the evidence is readily apparent. Anyway at this point I think the mods have had enough of new threads about hte AI and would just lock a poll.

ArenaNet is ok. Is your work/school/girlfriend/health ok?

True, the topic is on again and again...but is always the same people in it=P
If this is as you say, the majority, shouldnt there be more??
People vote for a reason, so no one vote more than once, and the number will be closer to the truth.

Once again you have to apply the whole statistical representation thing to this. This is yet another principle of business and customer service. Let's say you tick off three customers. Of those three you might get a call from one allowing you the chance to make it right. The other two will simply never come back. Unfortunately that is the way things work in just about any customer service environment, including this one. For every one of us vocally saying, "Hey this stinks!" There are likely two more who just said," This stinks I'm not going to bother to play." And went and bought FEAR instead.

If it was 5k that would be fine.. unfortunatly its like 500gold... that is about the equivalent to killing 5 lvl 10 monsters....



and i really dont see the point you are trying to make by posting a harsh responce. my post was very civil and i used it to express another side of a topic.. thats what forums are for..

I really dont think my post deserved to be broken down

I posted a valid topic and you .. well you posted this..

Very valid statment.. you obviously are a person who is genuinly interested on the topic and are looking to help the side you choose to support emensly.. good job

How is number 5 impressive if it a third chapter with **cough** strong repeat customer sales?

Number 5 among a slew of strong competition that week isnt impressive?

Not if you managed to sell a copy to all of your repeat customers it isn't. With it being a third chapter the first week will be their strongest .. unless of course they pissed off a large portion of them. I get the feeling you would debate day or night just to fluff a post count.

And I get the feeling that you're not capable of making a point without some jab at me personally. But I guess it's pointless to argue with you. If being number 5 isnt impressive to you, then there's no point in me convincing you otherwise.

I agree the 1st week will be strongest sales but I'm confident the NPD figures for November will show Nightfall remaining in the top 10
- probably at a higher rank than 5

what i posted was in response to your seeming to state that new players should have to work much harder to share the nicer things.

[QUOTE]that seemed a bit selfish and if you took undue offence at it i apologize

I see your point
But then you should be familier of the phrase "A good customer bring seven more" as well, since you know the "sale business"
I remeber there is already a poll about players happy with nf, so the happy one X7, and the not happy on X3....well I havent do the math yet, but its realy not the point
See this is what we call "business phrase" you can always find one in whatever situation you are in
Will they help you to find the truth?? maybe, but not a whole lot
Company pay research team for a good reason
Hard number tells more then words

p.s: and incase you are questioning, I know there are players ragequit GW, and yes, I know the number had increase. The only question is "are they the majority they claim to be??"

I agree with pretty much everything else you posted except for this paragraph. Getting a green drop shouldn't be expected and receiving one every 8 or so times isn't too bad considering how some bosses are just a few fights away from an outpost. Now let's just imagine we're in your Guild Wars wet dream. Every green would be worth pennies. That's rediculous. If a green drops everytime the boss gets killed how much could it possibly be worth? This would cause the Guild Wars economy to break down. Sure it's frustrating to not strike it big, but be realistic. You want everyone walking around with that perfect green? There's a reason they are called, "Unique" weapons. Making it hard to farm greens wasn't just ANET's plan to prevent farm bots. It was also meant for, I know it sounds lame, the challenge. That's what you're buying greens for. So you can pay someone else to take the challenge of spending a couple hours farming.

I must say that AI farming, "Improvements" are quite annoying. I don't understand ANET's logic of how we are supposed to obtain Obsidian armor. I for one am not going to buy gold off Ebay. I just can't see the point in paying into someone elses real life bank for a game you might not play much longer. I could understand the AoE nerf. An elementalist shouldn't be able to take out a field of Griffons in just a matter of minutes, but when they nerfed the Griffon spawn completely that was pushing it. Sure it was overused, but so what? I don't think making 3-5k gold every 15 minutes or so was so out of the question. Then they basically ruined farming completely by making pixels so damn smart. Now when a beast falls too low on health they run like the Italian army. That killed troll farming. I guess green farming still remains, but if Karlos gets his way those will be worthless too. I for one actually vote that greens stay somewhat difficult to farm. Otherwise it'll be all about the gold drops. Then everyone will be pissed because that's all about luck. Way to go Karlos.

On the whole how do we view sales statistic from the first week of launch.. keep in mind that a lot of players like myself purchased nightfall before the famous updates. that may have played a big part in the current rank it has now.



So i think that gw may see a steep drop in sales here in the upcoming weeks.
Because i have heard and myself know many folks that dont intend to get nightfall due to the amazing ammount of negative responce the update recieved.

So on the whole i belive that as the top games get good reviews and good customer responces.. gw on the other hand will receive many mixed opinions..

as such it may see the steep drop in sales that im predicting.

And when a game that is used to being in the top 3 for as long as its been release suddenly finds itself in the top 5 instead.. investors see that is a prediction for future behavoir and are more prone to either put pressure on the devs... or to just pull funding alltogether..

Although this is just may opinion I belive its safe to say that we all have a few people we know that enjoy the game.. and we have some that dont enjoy the game.

So regardless of what it is ranked i belive nightfall is a great game.. but the general core gameplay has been severly flawed and needs to be adressed before gw looses a portion of its fanbase.

Night Fall was great. The AI update is beyond terrible. I have many friends that I rarely see on any more since most did farming in thier free time.

If any of you played SWG this is loooking very similar imo. The devs decided to f up one of the core basics of the game. The community has made countless post saying this is idiotic and many have left. Yet the dev team has done nothing to reverse it. Changing the AI back to the way it was would not affect PvP which is usually thier only concern when making updates.

I don't know what the business issue is that they will not admit that the update was a failure and revert back. I'm sure they invested a decent amount of money into making the new AI but they just need to accept the loss of that idea and move back b4 they see a huge loss in overall playerbase (if not too late already).

On the whole i feel GW is still doing well, more so with Nightfall but the 26/10, 27/10 patch prior to release really had me going WTF!! so i suspect it wasnt so much that Nightfall sucks as a game which infact its great fun, but instead it was as mentioned the negativity of the pre-release updates/anti farming measures along with the buggy AI changes that really pissed off alot of existing/repeating customers.

Personally, If Anet should one day really shut down its live servers due to any circumatances in the future, i would appreciate that they would release a final true single player offline standalone game/patch, so that those players who have been supporting Anet all this time get to keep their characters and continue to play it offline or with some limited form of multiplayer/lan capacity.

There are about 20 people constantly complaining about the AI updates. 20 people out of millions doth not a majority make.

And how many boards are there compliants on? 3 to 20 boards? And even if you had 20 new people on each of those boards, 20 ppl x 20 boards = 400 people. That still is nowhere near a majority.

Sorry guys, I'm just not seeing it.

Exactly. and with that I'm out of this thread.


@ Strobo you are correct I was trying to help you, but if you don't want to use somehtign because someone else is using it that is your call and I respect that. Good luck

~ Cyril

It looks like the AI update is indeed horrible because the ones that like it and have no problems with it keep quiet. I've been avoiding discussion about the AI, I like it. And I can understand that people who were defending the AI got tired of it.

Uh ... this is a FAN site which due to the nature of fansites tends to cater to FANS. People that are seriously pissed off don't bother logging on here or ANY FANsite to tell a company that isn't listening .. they just leave the game. Most of the 100k members wound up here due to short comings in the trade system not for the forums. I personally have directed MANY people here while selling with the what? Guru says it is xxK. Anet sends people here and to sites like this with their auto replys from support. Please get a clue on the member base of fansites before assuming it is an accurate sampling of the game. Before suggesting we post somewhere else ... Anet didn't and won't give us a forum to do that.

Leprekan...my response was merely a response to somebody claiming that the majority of people want AI changed based on how many people are complaining here and on other sites. I'm pointing out that calling perhaps 400 people on a FAN site out of millions of people playing GW the majority is simply wrong.

My response has nothing to do with this being a fansite or Anet not having their own boards, so I don't know where you got all that from.

Your initial post was what inspired it. Point being you stated that the post counts from this and other FANsites did not point to a majority of unhappy people. Why would it? This is a FANsite IE a place where FANS come to post. Show me one person in all chat going Yay!!!!!!! I love the new AI. You will find people all over bitching about it. Take your random sample from the game not fansites.

I don't think we have millions playing anymore

Just ignore Leprakan. He tries to pass off garbage as some sort of logic and reason. Bottomline is that it's only a vocal minority of people who are totally unhappy. The majority might get annoyed once in a while by some problems but they can handle it and enjoy the game for the most part.

Trying to skew perception by saying that the majority of people are too pissed off to complain is laughable. People don't hold their tongues when they have complaints. Just look at these boards to see that.

they have ruined the game for me personally, my two favourite things in GW where chest running and farming with my warrior and now both of them are pointless to do. The day the changes where made was the day i stopped playing GW, I was planning on buying on nightfall but after they made those changes i decided it would just be a waste of my money and my time.

Then why are you here? You seem to hate the game and only post to complain about the game. I thought you said this was supposed to be a fansite only?

Sorry about the double post, lag is making editing impossible.

I don't hate the game. I have been playing it since the launch and have been here for every damn nerf in Anet's crusade against the "Chinese farmer".

Anet does NOT host a forum or provide a means of letting them know you are unhappy other than what many have done which is QUIT. Before you say it I know quit. Feel free to either have a rational argument to my posts or to ignore them all together.

Fansite only? ANET SENDS US HERE. Feel free to contact support and read where they send people.

Sorry. But there are no rational arguments to ranting irrational posts. See you in the next game maybe.

Actually, though some people seem to disagree, I think the OP brings up some valid things. Anet is either way too busy this time around, or they're not doing as well as we'd like. I loved NF btw, but I noticed some things were missing. For one, there was no cinematic video like they had for prophecies and factions. And there was a lack of a "kill everyone" event at the end of nightfall pvp weekend. And while people may well be henching all the quests and missions, there is a distrubing lack of people within the outposts and mission areas. I hope this is only because I'm in the later parts of the game, and not everyone moves as fast as me (though I know people do move faster than I do, and I did get the game a week and a half after it came out). Well, here's to hoping Anet is doing fine <crosses fingers>

Sid please dont try to make it look like your better than him or whatever your trying to do..

All you do is come to these sites and argue.. anyone other than maybee 4 people can agree with that.

90% of the time you make no points in what you say.. you only say somthing to try and make someone else look like a flaming troll.. witch is infact what you are.

Leprekan has made some great posts in this thread.. and had it not been for your amazing need to argue with what anyone against you says.. and try to make them look like the bad guy for it.. i bet he would have posted many more good posts.. but unfortunatly everyone that comes here that dosent share your opinion has to get caught up in your unbelivable need to argue...

once again for the millionth time.. go ahead and post here.. but if your going to post.. PLEASE for the love of god.. make a point.. dont just attack someone and try to make them look like an idiot.

Because when you do that the only person looking like an idiot is you..

so yes feel free to argue and debate and anything else you want.. but do it with some good valid points..

because as of right now you are making it even more difficult for people that share the same views as you to even make a point.

Translation: "Stop disagreeing with us or we'll keep calling you a troll because we can't and don't know how to debate"

hehe.. millions... that made me chuckle.

Anyway have u guys noticed that Sid's posts always consists of only 1-2 paragraphs to flame ppl who disagree with him? Come on man you can do better than that. Give us some valid arguments!

Maybe if you guys didnt go out of your way to make a post to bash the guy he wouldnt be responding in the same way. Kind of hyprocritical of you Bart since your post is also one or two lines just to flame someone.

Anyway, yes Anet is doing fine. People tend to exagerrate things too much to support a doomsday theory. And I've seen a few polls that suggest the majority of people are happy with Nightfall.

Disagree with me if you want, but don't dare call me a troll just for doing so.

Can we close this thread yet?

its going nowhere.