Well JR beat me to the perfect post. This is really long and probably unnecessarily so. Here it is anyways.
I stopped playing this game regularly, after several stints on and off during nearly a 2 year period. I wasn’t going to bother posting, but since I invested a couple thousand hours in the game and I failed to call Anet’s offices to voice these issues directly (like I was asked to by some people in #gwp – and yes, I am one of the mods/ops in #gwp on irc.gamesurge.net), I might as well post my 2 cents. And before I blabble on – let me say also, that I know I am one of a million users, I know I got more than my money’s worth out of this game. I don't pretend to have all the answers, assume I know better than the devs, o rthink I am better than anyone else.
I have dealt directly with Investor Relations (IR) and Public Relations (PR) people on a routine basis for about 8 years. I have friends who run IR and PR businesses. I don’t know if the mission of CR at Arenanet is dramatically different than the roles of IR/PR, but I can’t imagine it is too dissimilar. You are the relationship conduit for the constituents (the customers/community in this case) on behalf of Arenanet. Average/poor CR/IR/PR people think they are just a mouthpiece that relays information. The Anet CR seem to routinely hide behind this ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ statement, when in reality the messages going back to the developers clearly do not reflect the important problems in the game or the right issues in the community.
Truly great, valuable CR/IR/PR people are not just ‘messengers’. They are part of an ongoing dialogue and analysis process that builds a strong relationship with their counterparties over time. Good CR/IR/PR people are worth their weight in gold, because they know how to manage issues, translate problem, and build relationships. They draw respect and admiration from the people they interact by making sure those constituents know how their relationship is being dealt with by the company and where the company is addressing their concerns/issues. If CR’s only role is to be messengers and message gathers, then I would say to Anet that you are completely wasting money on CR. My vote (as only one of a million customers) is to fire the entire CR team and just have 1 person post the updates (the messages on Wiki) and outsource the message/information gathering to gwguru/gwonline people or pay the devs to read the forums a little bit in their part time (as they probably do already). You can probably pay gwguru/gwonline mods/owners a weekly fee for their thoughts on the top 10 community concerns, and probably get a better return on investment (or at least as good).
I shouldn’t have to spell this out for you but:
Part of your responsibility as a CR should be to:
1. Acknowledge the existence of an issue.
2. Inform people of where an issue stands and what alternatives are being considered by Anet.
3. Set reasonable expectations of when a resolution will occur to the issue will occur.
This isn’t message sending and collecting. This is part of fixing problems in the community in an active, intelligent way, helping the community and devs address problems.
1: Acknowledge the existence of major issues.
It is just common sense in CR/IR/PR to tell your constituents, we understand XYZ is a problem. Tell your customers you know that the problem exists. Be very actively involved in the process of play-testing new skills/areas. Get your hands dirty and deal with the game head-on, instead of passively lurking in message forums or ‘gathering’ links. Part of a CR/IR/PR’s responsibility is to intelligently determine what are the most pressing issues to relay to their internal company counterparts (in this case the devs). As JR mentioned above – ever since the introduction of the Ritualist (spirit spamming), it is very clear that Soul Reaping has been a problem that eventually grew into grotesque proportions. Everyone in the community who had any remote idea of how this game worked in PvP was totally aware of this, regardless of what the vocal minority of whiners in PVE state. If you are involved in your product and community, then you would obviously know this problem too.
As a CR, you also need to cognitively know the PVE (HM, DOA, etc.), PVP (HA, GVG, etc.) game at a sufficient level so that you can gather upon what is truly an important issue. The feedback to your devs needs to be of a very high quality, and you have to use your brains to shape the direction of the discussion that is ongoing between company and customers around what really matters.
You have to actively be involved in your own product in a very rigorous way in order to keep the dialogue between customer/developer on track. I’m not saying the work the CRs do at Anet is always 100% wrong and off-track, but something is clearly amiss somewhere in the chain of discussion, and a major responsibility of the CR is to keep the discussion and issues on the right tracks – the major issues.
It was totally obvious to me, someone who quit playing HA a long time ago, that the 6v6 change was a terrible idea – becuz there was no fundamental improvement to the gameplay, just a change in party size. If you asked ANY PERSON playing during those early 6v6 test weekends
WHY is HA better in 6v6? you would find very few good reasons, if any. And I know this, because I personally asked more than 10 people just out of personal curiosity. All the answers were garbage like, “I don’t know, but everyone is playing HA now, it’s fun!” or “RA/TA is 4v4, GvG is 8v8, we need a 6v6 area!” It wasn’t rooted in any area that demonstrated significantly better gameplay. Any CR should know what impacts the game and who to listen to – and have their own ability to decipher what is useless crap (whining/non-informed viewpoints) and what is valuable feedback. I read the forums about 6v6 HA, I spoke to players, and I found almost no good reasons why it is better (except the limitation of spike reason, which any intelligent player knows is nonsense).
No one expects you to have a mandate to dictate what is worked or developed, but I don’t see you or Gaile shaping the discussion or understanding what is truly wrong w/ this game so that anything is moving forward in the right direction. Too often the community is left festering until it explodes in rage, rather than the CRs identifying problems early on and cutting things off early on. Instead it is left to linger until it ultimately damages the playerbase because the wrong solution is delivered or the wrong information is being relayed somewhere.
The argument that happy players are playing, while complainers are posting is totally absurd, and I think it reflects a complete naïve viewpoint on what happens in these message forums. A lot of people actively post the same regardless of what the issue is being debated. Sure complainers and whiners are a loud, vocal group. That is the case in any population, anywhere. Welcome to the living, human world. The issue really boils down to an inability to decipher one group’s desires/wants compared to another’s. If you or Anet cannot weight the trade-offs of SR or HA in an intelligent way, rather than just blindly listening to 1 group or 1 stupid poll on a msg forum, then we are back to just message/message gathering and it’s a waste of time. Shut down the process entirely because it lacks an intelligent analysis of the issue.
2: Inform people where an open issue stands.
The comment by Blame the Monks that questions the response – “We are professionals,” (
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...9&postcount=29) is totally accurate. This guy’s constructive criticism is dead on. It’s not fair to dismiss people with zero feedback and give them the, “We are professionals. Don’t worry about it,” line.
You need to tell people where issues stand. What are the possible resolutions? How do you think the game might change? Make a poll and let people vote on it. Some of this work is being done and I commend it. But realize that you have a large player base and you need to disseminate that information to huge group of players. I will address this later (see: Anet needs its own public forums).
Either way, I don’t and most others don’t find it acceptable if there is no follow-up on open issues. As Death_From_Above posted here (
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...&postcount=43), people want to know where things are in terms of development and make sure their feedback is being listened to. Why can’t you have a list on your website of the top 10-20 issues and where they stand in terms of development?
Why can’t you keep an open log of the top 10-20 issues facing the community and update people on where they stand? Example:
Top 10 issues in Guild Wars:
1. Jump command. Being worked on – 50% done.
2. Auction House. Being considered.
3. Jade Isle Map Fix. Being worked on – 80% done.
4. Skill Balance Update including Soul Reaping Nerf. Being worked on – 40% done. SR will likely only trigger 3x every 15 seconds blah blah.
5. HA 6v6 or 8v8? We will consider a change back to 8v8 on May 1st after the evaluation period of 6v6 is complete.
….Etc. etc etc.
Who cares about the damn scribe message on a weekly basis? Why not post a top 10 or top 20 list of what’s important to the community and being looked at by devs? It doesn’t have to be perfect, just something simple on your guildwars.com homepage, so the community knows what is going thru your minds, what is a priority to the CR and thus Anet.
I also understand some of your work has to be kept secret for competitive reasons, but most issues like skill balance can be openly divulged without effecting your competitive positioning.
3: Set reasonable expectations for when a resolution will occur, if ever.
In any relationship, there is an edict known as, “underpromise and overdeliver.” The role of any CR/IR/PR person is usually to make sure this philosophy is followed, because when you overpromise, when you underdeliver, that is when you lose your R – relationship. A child tells his parent he will do his homework, then fails to do it. Toyota tells a customer a new car will last 100,000 miles, and it breaks down. A friend promises another friend, they will help them with a mission in Hard Mode and then logs off the game. People lose credibility, because they fail to deliver on their promises. Anet has done this in several instances, and people feel burned.
It is completely acceptable to tell people that something is technically unfeasible, not a priority, or going to take 2+ years to develop. People understand there are a million other things going on, and do not expect Anet to deliver the impossible.
If you tell people you are going to deliver ATs in 1 month, do it. If you fail to deliver something on time, I don’t see why your attitude suddenly turns into – “Tell them nothing then, because we don’t want to set ourselves up to miss a date again.” That kind of attitude (if that is what you really implied in your message) is just silly. Everyone misses deadlines. I’m behind on my own deadline right now for completing a report as I type this stupid message. But, an honest response of why things are delayed and a new deadline is far superior to a shutdown of information.
Everyone misses deadlines and fails to deliver something on time at some point – but keeping people updated on progress (even if it is delayed) is the right way to build respect with your customers rather than lack of information. Work is complicated. Development is complicated. No one expects unreasonable timeframes. And on the next project/deadline – hopefully the CRs and devs will do a better job of underpromising when a new feature is available and overdeliver. At some point, if you cannot manage your timelines at all… then there is a much bigger problem, obviously.
Final Closing Thoughts:
I think ArenaNet should open its own public msg forums. WoW has its own forums.
It’s time ArenaNet take control of their community and directly deal with polls, questions, and feedback in an active manner. The passive data collecting/link documenting, the off-handed polls @ TGH or anywhere that ignores the rest of the players, is just insufficient and half-ass. It’s just proven itself to be a shoddy process over time. I could be totally wrong here, but it seems to me like ArenaNet needs 1 central location – its own public forums – to disseminate information about
:
1. Existence of major issues
2. Informing people of what is being done to deal with these issues
3. Timelines/thoughts of when these resolutions will occur
A randomly timed chat with Gaile in Lion’s Arch or some random posts in different msg forums that are not owned by Anet, is not a productive way of keeping everything neatly organized and explained to your customers what is going on. Maybe this issue will be fixed with your own Wiki, but I doubt that was its intent.
You may claim that your information gathering to the developers is a perfectly working process in a weekly email. I am personally skeptical. I would say for certain though, your information back to the community in terms of feedback, has been messy and incoherent at best. I suggest you take control of it and organize it in a more intelligent fashion.
And one final rant on PVP – because I think this player base was pretty much ignored by CRs for years…
ATs are a prime example of people at ArenaNet not understanding what the problems of the PvP customer base. ATs will unfortunately and most likely turn out to be a complete waste of development resources and were never needed by the company or its customers. Let me emphasize this further:
When I privately discussed ATs with some people at Anet, a month or two before they came out, they gave me a cursory understanding of what they were, how they worked and what the ATs would be able to do. And it all sounded very interesting, but my first question to them was:
Are you going to release a 3-in-1 game pack for PvP customers or some kind of PvP-only pack to create easier access to the PvP game? And of course, they said it was under discussion. But this is the issue that really matters –
EASE OF ACCESS TO PVP CONTENT.
I would think the CR people should have spent the last 2 years jumping up and down all over this
constant community problem. Here are the major issues that have stunted your customer base, hampered your revenue growth as a company, and reduced returns on investment in your developer/payroll:
1. UAX - A major issue which prevented access to the game at the outset. I’m not going to go into this, because it’s been debated for years. But as Jim1 and others recently pointed out on TGH, it was a big, big mistake (
http://www.guild-hall.net/forum/show...84#post560984).
2. Character/Game Complexity. The need for 50-100 pre-made characters upon PvP login. - The game is overly complex with thousand+ skills, rules, attribute specs, equipment etc. In any normal video game, there are premade characters, equipment/actions (like RTS that default units to do something) and no one new to the game knows what to do – so make 50-100 premades and simplify accessibly to the entertainment.
3. 3-in-1 PvP Pack or free starter edition. The new PvP packs were great. But it’s only common sense that when you release a Nightfall chapter, to offer some kind of marketing special to try to get a NEW PLAYERS to pick-up all your old pvp packs. Were these specials offered? How do you expect to grow your PvP player base without some kind of ongoing deal? Why haven’t you made the core/prophecies pvp edition free and tried to upsell people on chapter 2 and 3 skills? Is the razor/razor blade model not readily apparent to people?
4. Skill Balance. I generally think skill balance has been excellent, but there have been times when it is a mess. I will leave it to Ensign and others who want to micro-analyze every skill in the game to critique Izzy’s work. I have generally found it to be pretty damn good, better than any game I’ve played, but at some points it was too infrequent.
5. Tournaments. For the life of me, I’ve never understood the desire to waste money on $250K tournaments in Taiwan and Leipzig, while never building the player-base for the long-term. The tournament strategy at the outset was all over the place and rewarded a small minority of elite players, while never building a casual player base. Only the Celestial Tournament seems to have made really made much sense to me.
6. Pick-Up GvG Play It shouldn’t take more than 10-15 mins to find a group in GvG or in ANY PART of this game. A casual player should be able to roll a character and enter battle in a short period of time. You need a district which supports this function. Pick-Up pvp play would be easier in all parts of this game, if you included those premades discussed above.
It should be blatantly obvious to any person involved in CR for PvP in Guild Wars that issue #2, #3, and #6 above are far more important to the growth of the player base of Guild Wars, rather than the introduction of ATs. Is that the viewpoint of the CRs and Anet? Do they feel those are the more pressing issues rather than ATs? Did the CR team spend the last 2 years walking into work every Monday and saying… we need UAX, we need 50-100 premades for PVP, we need a free prophecies/core PvP game… we need a pick-up gvg area in the game ?
If so, why do the business managers at Anet choose to spend time on the ATs rather than these other issues? Why not just grow the community and then let some 3rd party organization run their own tournament? It’s truly a mystery to me.
I spent nearly 72 hrs straight playing Domain of Anguish when it was first released. I found a lot of bugs, design problems, and general issues with it.
Why am I playing Domain of Anguish with Lulu/Johann and demonstrating these bugs to him and not Gaile/Andrew from CR? Were the CR people in these newly opened areas, play-testing and interfacing with the players who were there early on? Or do they just sit and wait until the message boards explode into a fury and then say, “We are the messengers and we are listening.” I wonder.
While I understand ArenaNet has gone above and beyond the CR that many other gaming companies offer, it isn’t appropriate to say, “Well we are giving you SOME CR support, while other companies give you absolutely none. Be happy with what you have!” If it the process isn’t being executed properly, why bother doing it at all? If the process isn’t going to deliver great returns for both customers and Anet. Why bother having it at all? It’s just a waste of everyone’s time and money, because things are not getting done and we all just end up bitching at one another. Alpha for PvP was killed for a reason, because it wasn’t delivering returns. The logic explained made 100% sense to me when Izzy and others from Anet explained it. My counterpoint would be that, after 2 years, I cannot see in any way shape or form how CR has benefited the PVP community in a real fundamental way. If this is the same kind of CR we are to expect for GW2, then my view (again as only 1 of millions) is that we are gonna have problems. Because you might get UAX, pick-up GVG and premades right in GW2. But there will be other problems that creep up, and those will get missed like the others did.
I understand PVP is only 1 part of this game, but I think the CR team has a lot of work cut out for it to
earn credibility and respect across the player base and that includes PVE. I also think myself and others need to be realistic. As much as I agree with JR, it would be foolish for any of us to harbor animosities or hold grudges. If the CR people are really going to step up and change how they operate, then I would applaud them and wish them tons of success.
I have spent a lot of time looking at NCSoft… stocks up 60-70% in the last half year, profitability projected on the upswing in ’08. Very nice. We’ll see if Tabula Rasa really hits those #s in 2008. I’m skeptical. Maybe Aion will fair better. But one thing that is unequivocally clear to me, is that Anet could have generated a far larger player base, it could have generated a significantly greater revenue stream if it had effectively listened to its customers and implemented several changes – many of which are very tiny and simple in nature.
Anyway, that is my 2 cents. I would close by saying I really appreciate all the hard efforts of the employees of Anet. I think some of the work they have done has been absolutely stupendous. Izzy and the devs there are rock stars in my book. I think everyone in the community wishes Anet the best of luck with the community and into GW2. I hope it is a smashing success.
). There definately needs to be a CR member who has strong PvP knowledge though. That is definately something Guild Wars has lacked. I play both PvE and PvP, and I can see it is painfully obvious that the PvP community has been heard less than the PvE community.
