Shall Anet open GW2 to the community via democratisation?

The question asked in the title comes directly from EVE revolutionary concept of Council of Stellar Management (short version is here). For those who don't know, CCP (EVE's company) are asking EVE players to elect a body of 9 players that will represent it for 6 months, communicate with CCP via a dedicated forum and attend one or two face-to-face meetings.

In essence, this role is occupied nowdays in the GW World by GW fan forums like GWG, or GWO, or other (with various levels of fan-ness). But we're all unclear on the relationship between Anet (especially since we now loose our CR, if it's not an April's fools), as we don't know for sure that they listen. Sardelac and Riverside on GWG are full of tons of messages, ideas, proposals, complaints, bugs, etc.

I shall also mentioned the extremely usefull Community update webpage on the GW website, but I'm unsure if many people read it (?). Of course, the "community days" were brilliant event and each fanforum had loads of feedback (the occasion to thread-res the GWG ones here). I guess that the Design a Weapon contest shall also be mentioned, and the not-so-updated Scribe newsletter. I even discovered on the GW website a page to thank the fansite gifts!

But even with all this back-and-forth communication, how does Anet know what's important in the middle of all that? And how do they cope with the fact that these websites represent only a minority in the GW population? And how do we, players, know that we're heard (I know that I may have been as I suggested something in Sardelac and saw it implemented)? Gaile and Andrew did and are doing a fantastic job, even if fanforums may give the impression that they're not (look at the Peace out Gaile thread, with so many different posters acknowledging what I just said!).

There's too much scattering of the dialogue between Anet and the community, though I admit that it creates a much more vibrant and rich relationship, but one wonders if it's really effective and efficient. Some might even argue that Anet shall not listen to the community as many times they are wrong (it's true that some suggestions in Sardelac can be, how to say this without offending anyone, quite inappropriate, but they are the customers' expression), or for some that Anet will actually not listen to us because they've got our money (of course, it's a fallacy).

I'm convinced that CCP/EVE decision is the right one, but may be other MMO companies are waiting to see how this works to follow. What do you think? Do you want more democratisation? If so, how would this work in the specific context of GW? What specific shape should it take? And e-board of elected fanforum representatives in direct electronic contact with CRs? Or a global election accross the whole GW population? Shall there be representative of the most "successfull" guilds, so as to ackowledge that GW is guild-based after all?

All argumented opinion is welcome! (if a mod would like to create a poll for this discussion, I'd suggest as a question "Would you like more democratisation in the GW fans-Anet relationship and if so, what shape shall it take?" with answers like "No", "Yes as a globally-elected council", "Yes as a fansite-elected council", "Yes (other)", "May be, I don't know")

The official wiki can serve as the central link between the community and Anet. They have already shown that they can administer themselves, and it would be just as easy for them to set up a "community wiki" where users can jointly maintain a suggestion page. There are tons of MediaWiki plugins for voting, forums and whatnot.

What Gaile Gray should do in her new role is to figure out how to properly channel this player-participatory resource. They get all the energy for free. In fact, the users will fall over themselves trying to be helpful.

Traditional game forums like gwguru are dinosaurs.

Representative democracies sooner or later become corrupt.

Direct democracy is always better.

An in-game poll once in a while would be better. Like Granado Espada's.

(My perfect game would be a mix of GW and GE, XD)

Major problem: those representatives will be likely "hardcore gamers" (Who else is going to be elected, who else is going to be candidate), meaning that their perspective would be somewhat distorted and their input not really going to help make game enjoyable for majority of players

Besides, its power that corrupts. Imagine if Major ecto owners (20+ stacks people) had final word about ecto droprates.

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besides, wasn't GW supposed to have official polls? Back when gaile was still CR we heard something about such plans

The moment any game I play resorts to nonsense like this is the moment I'll quit. We're talking about frigging games, for Pete's sake. Light entertainment.

Except the only reason CCP started doing this sort of thing is because they've been caught corrupting their own game...

Eve is unique in that respect. Not only were devs caught giving paying players in their alliance uber-items by manipulating the database, they were also caught giving out extraordinarily useful information like undocumented formulas regarding movement and damage. Then they tried to lie about it and cover it up.... and then they just pretend that it didn't matter until people stopped talking about it.

You don't really have that in Guild Wars. Furthermore, I'm not particularly impressed by the Guild Wars community as a whole anyway, compared to most other online games. I think Guild Wars has, hands down, the single worst batch of players of any game I've played. I don't like interacting with them in single lines of text chat most of the time, I'll be damned if I want them helping to dictate the design of the game.

So, I guess in short, no, I don't think that would be a good idea for GW. The problem with a democracy is that you get exactly what you deserve. If you have a democracy of 5 million idiots, they're going to produce garbage when you ask them for input, and you're going to get garbage as output. It's bad enough when you ask people to investigate and intelligently pick political candidates in real life (strike up a conversation with a particularly political coworker once to see what I mean), I can't imagine asking them for input on something they have absolutely NO access to, information-wise.

I really would prefer to leave more of the development up to the professionals at ANET than allow the community to influence their decision-making much. ANET knows what it's doing. The community within Guild Wars? I'm not convinced most of them have even figured out how to set their VCR clocks yet, much less provide feedback on a complex system of database structures and decision trees.

Besides, like Gli said, it's a video game. I'm paying to be entertained, not to do ANET's work for them. It's their job to determine how to create a profitable game, not mine, and they don't need a "democracy" to do that. Soliciting opinions is fine, but giving people a say in the specific design? That's just really silly and take the entire concept of gaming right out of the game.

Interesting comment, which is confirmed by this that I read today:
http://www.massively.com/2008/03/08/...-the-wiki-way/
At 3 million unique users per month, a full half of English-speaking WoW players visit WoWWiki every month.

This may actually address the point raised here:
On different criticisms:
True, but as CCP clearly said, the CSM has absolutely no power, it's only created to pass on list of "issues and opinions" by social filtering. CCP is still the one making the decisions and I guess still listening to fansites (but not as a main channel of comm).

I guess I should have strenghtened this fact, which changes nothing to the fact that GW is a game. But, you know as much as I do that it means tons of things. A game where people are ready to buy tons of virtual gold for real money? Or where people farm like mad to get the shiny title? Of course, these are very small groups of people, but I believe (as many in the field) that the MMO genre is going beyond the simple "game" (if not, then why are people coming by millions to WoW and the traditional PC games are in trouble?). It's coming close to social networking (typoe'd "engineering" before!), which means that the company-customer relationship is slightly different.

I have to admit that I may have proposed a non-discussion, I thought of this thread as a real discussion, rather than hammering a point in this or that direction. I've got a few ideas that I'm sprinkling in this thread, but I'm not claiming any strong statement. So please, everyone, be cool .

Not neccessary with a decent community team.

We allready have that, ask Izzy and his cronies.

Which brings up one of many problems with the mechanism: in the case of CCP it won't matter anyway.

The whole problem with CCP to begin with was that they were ignoring problems and players despite strong evidence that their employees were tampering with the system. If the "oversight" has no real power to enact change, there's no point in having them. If CCP changes for the better it's because they choose to, and if they choose not to, the oversight can't force them to.

Which is why I brought up the point of a more direct role in guiding game development. Without some ability to actually enact change, there's no real point. Any democratic system is useless if the voters don't have some mechanism for forcibly backing their desires. You can talk about making changes, but if the rulers choose to ignore you, and you have no ability to muscle them, nothing will happen.

Which brings me back to my original point: I wouldn't trust the community to do something like that... or at the very least I'd trust ANET more.

Another point that comes up: if you do start allowing players more influence, who do you lash out against if they do something you don't like? In other words: if ANET does something I don't like, I can harm them financially by no longer doing business with them. If the players do something I don't like, I can still harm ANET financially, but I'm not hurting the people who are responsible for the problem. I can only pressure them indirectly by trying to get ANET to ignore them, which sort of defeats the whole purpose all over again.

It's nice for a developer to have feedback. However, getting responsible feedback may not be quite as simple as it sounds.

The player usually only cares about what he wants - more money, more power,... but rarely considers what the end effects of such decisions are. Just look at all the crying to get loot scaling removed - and many posters don't even know how prices would behave if loot scaling were removed...

Also, the player just wants more. Rarely does he realize that more also costs development effort.

As I said - responsible feedback is hard to get.

The complaints that ANet doesn't listen to us will be replaced by complaints that the CSM doesn't listen to us.

I read the OP's suggestion with interest. I think such a method as proposed in the OP would weigh the feedback heavily in the direction of hardcore players' views and preferences, as others have noted.

What I would like to see is something more like what Blizzard/WoW has done. ANet should open up its own game forum and moderate said forum itself. I think that is the best and most effective way to "stay in touch" with your customer base.

This won't work out since we need both casual and hardcore gamers making up the testing body.

Though I think ANet should give first beta to people playing GW since 2005. We are their oldest and most loyal fans, we know more about the game than others - we were the ones around when GW was at its peak, so ANet knows we're the ones to listen to to follow a formula of awesomeness.

Playing since beta doesn't necessarily mean that the player is the most loyal fan, more knowledgeable about the game over others, or that listening to them above others will be more beneficial to Guild Wars over someone who joined in later years.

I do agree though with the opinion that a broad spectrum of players would be needed for such a panel. I think that any sole specialized group wouldn't be very helpful, because they may be more inclined to focus on specific areas of the game instead of the game as a whole.

I would worry the community is too immature for that sort of thing. Wouldn't they just vote on representatives by cronyism and popularity contests, rather than who has good insight, and problem solving, and discussion skills? Or do you just mean to have a bunch more forum secretaries who take notes to them...

I think the ability to choose a good enough selection of people from different aspects of the game to represent each major demographic would be extremely difficult. The concept while sound would really be very difficult to implement in a way that helps address each set of concerns. Trying to find the casual gamer guy to elect to represent johnny come casual gamer would not be easy, while the hardcore guy PVE and PVP would be easily found.

I'll say this, at the risk of blasphemy. The "democratic" process of a wiki is slow and tedious with every single subject and topic debated and analyzed to death with any progress or change happening so slow you forget what the original subject matter was. Then once the hot debate has died down someone decides to make a decision and implement anyway. Yes I'm making sweeping generalizations but it's so frustrating one could pull their hair out. I know there are admins on the wiki but it does come with it's own set of politics and popularity contest.

EDIT: I should probably clarify and say I'm only speaking in regards to what the OP is talking about with regards to player information being passed on and decisions made from that with a wiki community. Not speaking of wiki's themselves as they are a better option to pass information to the player that has been proved many times over. I'm just not sure that it would work in the reverse with the community passing information in a valid manner to devs.

On to the original subject matter though, I do think the fact that EVE has an elected body that is only there for 6 months is a superior idea. How these people are picked is of interest but with the rotation of players you can hopefully not only generate loyalty but a wide range of ideas and opinions. If you do happen to fail with some of the elected players then there's a correction process.

In regards to the fansite model not sure that would work or be sustainable. There are so many fansites that come and go, with high burnout rates all around for admins/mods/etc. To assume they know more about the game or what's best is wrong. I do think they have a better touch with overall community opinion on subjects but even this varies from forum to forum and it's style.

And then there's the concept of hardcore players vs. the casual players. MMOG's are for the casual gamer afterall. But their knowledge and ability to forsee the changes they want and to accept those consequences are limited. Then take into account that on this small of a player board their opinions and confidence would be seriously undermined by those who are more serious players. So no real debate or ability to give an honest opinion would exist in front of devs and players such as these.

Too many variables. Do I think a player elected board may help? Yes. Is it the answer communities are looking for? Probably not.

I think it would be a bad idea.As stated people elected would represent what they wanted in the game not the community.You see it all the time on forums.People trying to change the game to what they think it should be.Someone wanted to stop a poster from running 3 hero eles.Give me a break.To many people trying to control how others play.Besides who you going to vote for?Who comes up with the list of those that should serve?

A game ruled by people who dwell in a basement. No thanks.

Well, that's already the people ArenaNet is favouring, for the most part (not that it was always this way) so not much change there

The customer isn't always right, so no.

Democracy in a supposed to be competitive game?

Are you mad?

I can think of 4 people I would trust with this community, myself being one of them.

This is a terrible idea. Most players are idiots (it's true, it's unfair, it's mean, but who cares) and thus idiots would elect idiots to the office.

9 players able to influence the course of a game, with a limited time frame of 6 months, is like a recipe for disaster. You would need 9 individuals who are totally unbiased and do not have agendas of their own, which is highly unlikely to happen. And if the community elected the wrong 9 peeps, it will be a long 6 months to suffer through, during which time, crap ideas may get implemented as "what the players want", and the game goes down the crapper.

If anet really wants the voice of the players and not the voice of players who bother to visit fansite forums, well, why not go and get it then? What do i mean by this? Simple. Implement a suggestion box ingame. How and what form it takes is up to the devs but my idea is probably a suggestions window that pops up when one does /suggest. Let it function like a forum post complete with title and space for posting your suggestion. Add in an autosort filter for the suggestion titles along with post count of sorted suggestions, sorted highest posts first, add a search functionality for the devs only, to search through suggestions and you are golden. Also when a player either logs on or off (whichever the player desires), a popup could appear that asks whether the player would like to make a suggestion and if he says yes, the suggestion window would popup.

This way the devs have a suggestion box that really is the voice of the people, (well those that bother to suggest anyway heh) and is autosorted based on titles. The devs could take a peep at their suggestion box and see that they have 200 posts sorted by "auction house", for example, and decide to read the suggestions in that category and since it is the suggestion with the most number of posts, it can be taken to mean it is the most popular and wanted. Of course whether or not any suggestion is good for the game would still be up to the devs to decide, but it would really be the voice of the players and not that of a small subset of players who bother to visit forums and post. This is just a rather crude form of how it could work in-game, i'm sure someone else could probably come up with something more elegant, but i feel this is better than leaving your fate in the hands of 9 questionable players.

Put me in the lead Director's seat at Arena Net. Then everyone will get what they want... For a price.

Sorry, but I'd much prefer that politics stays out of Guild Wars. In the end all it would do is create more channels to go through and a virtual bureaucracy that has no business being inside this game. Giving players a position of "power", of any sorts, in representation form to influence decisions would lead to disaster.

On a side note - I don't require representation either, nor would I trust another player to properly represent me. If I have an issue that needs to be resolved there are already proper channels in place I can use and have used already with ease in the past.

There are plenty of games out there in which no communication exists. Bugs are never fixed, issues are never addressed, events are never held, and illegal activities burn like forest fires.

Flip that coin and you have games in which the "powers that be" are TOO involved in the community. So much that some players use their friendships with GM's/Devs to manipulate other players, threaten other players, and abuse. GM's also, because they've gotten too involved, play favorites with players, which is equally a bad practice.

As I see it in Guild Wars, we have a happy medium. We know our Devs are watching, we have the ability to talk with them and reps, we know they adjust and address our major concerns. At the same time, they know when its best to stay in the shadows and not become too involved in direct communication as too avoid any heavy influence by the players.


If Guild Wars was, and operated like a virtual world society such as Kaneva, Second Life, or even the old day VRML Cybertown; A place where the creators allowed the citizens to dictate the development of the city- it would make much more sense, but that's not the case.

So I have to say no on any form of Elected Officials to represent us. I have no need, nor any desire for a body to act as my voice. I really have no idea at all why EVE feels the need to pull this stunt, but I don't play EVE so I won't comment. It's just seems an unnecessary measure in an environment that is not developed by the players and because it's not a Virtual Society it should never be developed or heavily influenced by the players in any fashion.

there are very very few people i would trust with this game.

This is just a question of how the voice of the player base can be heard by the devs. There are fundamental issues that should be considered first. Unlike people, opinions are not created equal as can be seen by observing any non-trivial discussion on these fora. Take, e.g., the recent shout-out concerning Loot Scaling and whether it should be removed or not. People without the dimmest idea of what LS is and is not chimed in and voiced their opinion, the less informed the louder. There is a signal out there but it's getting drowned in the noise, and the purpose of any player elected body is to filter out that noise and forward the actual signal to the developers. However, this is not an easy task because those who filter shouldn't let their own opinions affect the outcome at the risk of biasing the signal. Could it work? I remain very doubtful.

Instead of a top level filtering body, a grassroots approach might work better. Let's say that there is a 'great council' of players with their own discussion forum, and every in-game alliance is allowed to have one representative, or ambassador, in that council (alliance age and size restrictions apply to prevent astroturfing). The ambassador of the alliance must be at least moderately informed about issues to be able to adequately represent the point of view of his/her alliance, and thus most of the noise is being cut out on the alliance level. The council can then elect a spokesperson from among themselves who will present a concise, well digested summary of council discussions to the developers. The spokesperson does not filter, just edit, and that is a much easier task. The whole process can be implemented with enough transparency so that every player can make sure that their point of view is adequately taken into account. (I'm not making this up as I go, what I describe is basically a republic.)

The CRs essentially already do what a good elected representative would do. Yes, we could certainly do better if we had someone like Ensign in charge of skill balance, but we could also do several orders of magnitude worse.

Players happy with the game would not vote or become involved in the process at all, loud players with a chip on their shoulder would be making all the changes. Do we really want a bunch of angry idiots in charge of our game?

Hellgate London has also implemented a community driven feedback scheme.

Flagship recently "employed" (in quotes because they aren't paid) community members as part of a "team advocate program" to report on specific areas of the game. So a rep for each of PvP, PvE, Items, UI, Guilds, a rep for each of the character classes. These people are tasked with focusing on the issues of their field, thoroughly understanding them, evaluating/testing them and summarising those issues into a regular report for those who care and can actually do something about it - and then maybe even alpha testing the results. It seems that these people basically had to pass a job interview and fall over in worship of the game to be selected for the task.

Basically they have community members doing parts of what (I imagine) Gaile and Andrew do, and more... but for gratis. I'd post a linky but you need HGL official forums access.

Otherwise - please no voting and no politics in my community representation. I think the ArenaNet employing people for the task is a great way to avoid both.

Please, PLEASE, god no.

I'm playing a game for fun, not to get involved in politics and especially online politics seem to bring the worst out in people.
Second, to please the voters the devs will need to keep bringing out content which will very likely conflict with GW financial model.

Democracy is stupid. Tyrany with the iron fist and the heart of gold is the way to go!

Thanks every1 for the nice contributions. Before I respond to each posts (after all I'm the one who initiated this thread, my responsibility to make it live ... or leave!), I'd like to throw in a few more ideas, trying to push the edge of what we envisage. Remember this is an open discussion, I'm not furthering any of my personal interest, or trying to get an advantage.

Oh and one last time before people mention the "I don't want to give power to a bunch of players" argument: the elected council has no effective power, it's only one additional "node" added to the range of communication channels but one that will be in direct contact with Anet.

note: I like tmakinen's name of "ambassador", it better suits the description and highlights that it's not a real "democracy".

What if this "Great Council of GW players (GCGWP)" would abide by certain representativty rules, such as (these are merely ideas without very specific numbers or boundaries, feel free to modify them, rather than simply criticise them):
1) each major fanforum (i.e. "elite GW site" in Anet terminology, there are 9 of them) and the GWiki shall have exactly one GCGWP representative (no person shall be elected for 2 fanforums);
2) each elected CGWP member has to choose a "Pv side", i.e. PvE or PvP (of course he needs to be able to prove he's active on his side and will be removed from GCGWP if he's lied), and the GCGWP shall have about half of each;
3) the GCGWP shall not have a majority (more thant 2/3rd) of: veteran players (3 years of GW), hardcore players (2000h of play? GWAMM? rank9 glad?), young/old players
4) the 10 "top GW guilds" in PvP can elect a representative (may be use the RAWR cup too?); the 10 biggest and most active PvE guilds (or Alliances?) can elect a representative
5) there shall be a code of conduct for GCGWP members, any breach means you are removed from the GCGWP and become uneligible for 2 years;
6) GCGWP members are elected for 6 months and can't be elected more thant 2 times (as for EVE, there shall be a list of alternate members).

May be 1) can be complemented with 1 or 2 elected member for the 16 Honoured and Specialty GW fansites and 2 representatives (instead of 1) of GWiki? (I'd also suggest that fansite admins cannot be on the GCGWP) And 2) with a "PvE and PvP" status with a certain number of seats? In 3) I wonder whether more representative quotas could be established if Anet asked people questions via the game interface (a very simple "check the option that match your style of playing Guild Wars" screen that is displayed only once)?

Yes I know, it's imperfect and probably full of flaws. And I haven't yet discussed the tasks and responsibilities of the CGWP, but I think it's not yet the time to do so in this thread. At the same time, I proposed these rules (which would make a council of around 15 players?) to try to provoke (not too harshly I hope) a discussion and gather opinions. May be people have similar ideas or can correct my mistake? Or debunk this idea?

I hope that the truth lies at the intersection of perspectives and opinions (and I'm trying to open a debate rather than making a point, just imagine yourself in toga in the MMO equivalent of the Ancient Agora of Athens 25 centuries ago!).

It's a bad idea no matter how you put it.

It'll work for EVE, mainly because EVE is a player dominated game.

One last thought: PLEASE PLEASE leave aside the "politics" aspect for the moment. I promise that we'll talk about it, once the initial discussion has come to more fruits, but if we start with the "prejudices" before we even discussed the meat of this "Great Council of GW Players (GCGWP)", we're doomed to fail this thread and the idea of representativity.

So please, forget this for a few pages, we'll go back to that (because it is inevitable). Just imagine that this is an idea we can shape in any way we can, it's like a blank sheet of paper where we can write our brainstorming ideas. Let us not be limited by concepts from the real-world, at least not for the moment, we're free to event create a new form of representativity.

I'm convinced you're able to do more than one-liners. If you're not willing, I suggest you stay out of this, your point was made clear by your 2 messages.

We have the dev team (they live somewhere on Mars I think) and we have the playerbase. We had one real person who tried to fill the gap, but she's leaving to play another role at Anet (burned out), aka Gaile.

Blizzard always had their own forums (starcraft, warcraft, wow etc.) with several employees posting stuff. That's what we need imo, more Anet peeps on the forums who discuss things with us.

A council will only be another link, we need direct contact.

I think that Fril is working on an important issue here. Designers and developers don't design and develop in vacuum, both positive and negative feedback from the user base (players) is important. The problem is, as has been mentioned, the signal to noise ratio. How can we gather and forward the good (both positive and negative) feedback (the signal) and put a damper on the uninformed, shortsighted or plain old malicious feedback (the noise)? Who is content with the current situation and how the feedback has been affecting the game so far? Can we device ways to do it better?

Please make constructive comments instead of naysaying. I doubt that ANet has the resources to organize anything more than what there is now. It is in the interest of us, the players, to speak with a clear and informed voice to the devs, and anything should be better than the default rowdy mob approach. Don't be so afraid of politics, it is after all taking care of common interests. That the process has been subverted in the real world by unscrupulous SOBs catering to the interests of the privileged few at the expense of everybody else doesn't mean that it must happen in a virtual world as well. For starters, in a virtual economy you don't have to sell your soul to multinational corporations to fund your campaign, and if you do bad decisions it's much easier for people to vote with their feet.

Thanks tmakinen. I think that such a council would actually improve the communication both ways: from Anet's point of view, it's a clearer path to the community to gather and circulate information, but (I hope) not an exclusive one; from our point of view, we get a more direct link and (this is one aim of such council) a more focused feedback that does not hamper Anet's work of implementing the game. In essence, it amounts to breaking Gaile and Andrew's into smaller ones, but in the hands of the players (so it's free for Anet). We would be able to know which Sardelac suggestions have been implemented, some of the factors that influenced such and such decision (of course, council members would be under strict NDAs and Anet would sue anyone using this representation against their rules and interests).

When I thought more about this idea, I realised that this is a direct extension of the "community day" that Anet very successfully organised. Do you remember how cool Billiard's articles were and the feeling that they gave to us, players? At the moment, the dialogue with Anet is a cacophony, and GWG illustrates this perfectly (I'll put aside the trolls, such as the 117 or other dupers) with so many discussions derailing because of this opinion-hammering, PvE-PvP exclusivity, pro-or-against stance. No one is really trying to lower the signal-to-noise ratio because "it's just a game" (if it was, why these hyper-active forums, weekly updates, grind and anger?)

Remember, again, that there are lots of possibilities, because we're not bound to what we know, but can devise a new body that fits our needs. Some say the wiki does that well enough, some say it's not possible. I'm saying: let's try and discuss it.

At the moment I'm putting aside 2 aspects which are directly related: the politics and the trust issue.