A call for more transparency

/signed

A screenshot would do, even if it's still in beta-stage.

If you are asking for /signed, then it beliongs in Sardalec.

There will be no "transparency" as anet are a business in a competitive environment - they are not going to release what they are doing until it is ready.

Anyone expecting GW2 out within 2 years has just no comprehension of what is involved in design/writing such a game. Anet said what they said to inform users why there wouldnt be updates, not to start a countdown.

See ALL the other threads about GW2... you will get the info when THEY (Anet) are ready to give it to you, and no amount of whining will change that part of their business.

/vote close yet another pointless thread and /not signed

you kind of proved the point here, DN Forever WAS on the front of magazines etc, because it was HYPED well before it was ready!! That is EXACTLY what anet are avoiding - waiting until the product is nearly ready before starting the promotion machine.

even Regina has mentioned how they intend to make a big splash with it rather than dribble feed.

The fact that you still frequent these boards also proves that GW2 will have a solid following when it is released (of course, if the gameplay is broken, then that will falter quickly, but thats another story).

/signed

The reason being is they need to be attracting the attention of non GW afficenadios! A mug like me will buy the collectors edition - just because its GW!!!

They should be marketing the game now - creating desire - whetting the mouths. Modern video game marketing is all about that - I saw screens of Assasins Creed 18 months before release - COD4 same -

So I want some "transparency" not for ME but for the good of the game!!!

assassins creed, pleaseeeee. its not even in my hard disk for over a months, unable to live up to the hype.

Cause ATM, GuildWars is the only thing they have.(Even CoH/CoV is nearly dead)

They have the most delicious chicken nuggets in the world

QFT.

Good to know we can always go back to GW1 if GW2 fails to live up to expectations

Speak for yourself, I enjoy the game. Sure it has it's problems, but it's not a bad game.

Just because YOU think a game is bad doesn't make it so. Same as why I don't understand the overhyped Halo games. Played first one on my laptop, was pretty much average. Second requires Vista, looks fugly.

Multiplayer? I know better games.

Also, just as too much hype is bad, saying NOTHING is even worse. Because as you can see, you are still talking about Assassin's Creed. And you will probably remember it, when Assassin's Creed 2 comes out.

Do any of you remember a game called Pray? Pretty good FPS game with some innovative ideas, interesting weapons and enemies. If you don't, I know a simple reason - it wasn't hyped. It was only remembered by FPS fans.

Again, 2-year old silence is a really, really bad marketing.

Aion, Lineage 2.

Divinity Reach, not sure if anyone has seen this but if not heres a crumb.

actually, if anyone here including me lol care to read the Guild Wars 2 wiki page, there's a few changes. but maybe that's been done a long time ago. but still, i didn't know that winning in PvP will make drops better in your world see... or that which i think sucks "Different races will have different advantages and disadvantages"

And if you poke around some more you find an interview with Daniel Dociu <3 the talented! scroll down for more morsels,

and then if you poke around even more, you find the beautiful Ree who lets you listen to japanese songs on her webpage :P

lol, people don't read....

lol mug shot

Overall, Assassin's Creed looks good but it didn't really live up to all the hype that was promoting it. I think that just about every game critic has said this sentiment.

Halo is a very silly game to play on the PC. Microsoft also intentionally delayed the release of the game to PCs to make sure that the game would not compete with the Xbox version and strip sales away from their (starving) console. By the time the game came out, it was already considered dated compared to all the other competition. Why Microsoft bothered to release Halo 2 on the PCs, a game that even Bungie themselves admitted was below par, is beyond comprehension.

It doesn't help your argument when you don't even know the game yourself. Unless you were playing that Left Behind game, you're thinking of Prey.

The real reason why that game didn't sell was that it was just not that good. I don't know why people find that hard to believe, but sometimes the reason why games don't sell is because they are bad.

If you want a game with virtually no hype (except maybe one 90 second trailer), but it had interesting gameplay and a huge fan following, then I would refer to Valve's Portal as the ultimate example. That had a very small development team, virtually no marketing, and yet everybody knows exactly what the Weighted Companion Cube is unless you've lived in a gaming vacuum.

=====

Getting back to the original topic, this topic is quite silly. There's no way that ArenaNet is going to allow more "transparency" because, unlike the government, ANet does not work for taxpaying citizens that have the right to know what their government is doing with their money. At the very least, ANet will say that showing anybody what they have now would be just handing all of their ideas to their competition.

Having said that, I will agree that the GW2 announcement was an extremely botched affair. I cannot believe that they had such a dumb way to encourage Eye of the North game sales: By telling every potential game buyer that they wouldn't make any more major content. Can you imagine anybody else doing this? Would Blizzard say, "Enjoy Wrath of the Lich King while you can! That's the last expansion that we'll ever make!"?

In a way, this is a great example of putting the cart before the horse. Don't hype something when you have absolutely nothing to back it up. My gosh, Guild Wars 2 was the cover story for that PC Gamer article... Everybody expected to see additional game news and maybe the beta by late 2008. Now it's almost two years later, and there's virtually no new information. People were willing to trade a lack of game content for a brand-new game. But take away both, and it's obvious from endless topics like these that people are starting to lose hope and become very jaded.

As one final note, a lot of people talk about how heavy this game is still showing up on Xfire in terms of playing. I will agree that it's being heavily played when you look at the numbers. But I think that most people play not so much that it is good, but because it is dirt cheap. At the moment, Guild Wars costs on the same price scale as simple casual games (like Bejeweled Deluxe or whatever), and there's no online fees. That said, this game blows away most other so-called "free" MMOs in terms of content or style. But when you compare it to any monthly subscription MMORPG, the game starts looking dated. GW used to be able to say that it had the best graphics (especially when compared to WoW), but this isn't true anymore. It also used to have a peerless PvP system, and that's not true anymore either.

It's not like other companies can steal their ideas from concept art or a screenshot, so if they can't even produce a screenshot less than a year before it's supposed to come out, and more than 6 months after they first announced we would have been in the beta stage, then something is very wrong. There's just no way around it. Even if the game is still planned, if at this point it's not trailer or screenshot-worthy, there is a problem. MMO's need to generate hype, they can't expect to release a product like GW without hyping it at least a year in advance. By the time the game comes out the casual players will have forgotten about the franchise to begin with.

I would hate to have to be in Anets public relations and have to try and explain this to the fans.

Prey? This 3D Realms game was much hyped and was listed alongside Duke Nukem Forever on several vaporware lists. After many years development was halted and everybody was pretty surprised when it was restarted. During the initial magazine hype they announced a new concept in FPS games... Portals. Yeah, it helped them to reveal their ideas too early.

Prey Trailer (1998)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XSFxiuID1TY&feature=related

It's Valve. VALVE. Developers, although awfully money-grabbing (1 euro = $1), that have yet to release an... average game.

Because this is GW1 forum, there is no official GW forum (either version, 1 or 2) and I have a right to see if the game is getting any updates?


About all that "they don't release, because they are afraid of thievery" - unless they come up with a diamond farting awesome wonder, they have nothing to worry about.

Instances? Been done.

PvP on equal level? Well... WAR in T4 has level 40's.

Gameplay not affected (too much) by inventory? Well, GW2 will be open-worlded, so I doubt we'll be keeping this one, too.

Low level ca... Sorry, hehe.

While I'm not defending ANet at all, a screenshot is a very strong statement. More than you can imagine. People will look at it, judge the graphics quality, look at the UI interface, and pick it apart from just a single lousy image.

I'm not making this up. Prior to the first Madden game for the Xbox 360, EA made the stupid mistake of releasing some blurry screenshots to the public. Then when the promotional videos for Madden appeared, Penny Arcade went totally ape-crap over them, and even coined the term "bullshot". That is, Gabe and Tycho claimed that the blurry Madden screenshots were totally different from the rendered videos. I.e., the trailers were faked and the game had 16-bit graphics. Of course, when the game finally appeared, then PA had to eat crow.

The point is, it goes to show just how far people will go with a handful of screenshots. Penny Arcade, deemed as some kind of god-comic by gamers, pre-judged Madden just from them and announced that it a failure game.

At times, we can read through your ass/frank posts some interesting and provocative point of view (I think the vaporware thing and comparison with DNF is provocation) which can at times be enlightening. But here you're showing us that you're going way too far into the hypothetical world of "I'm guessing the future". If you're really concerned about GW2, take your concerns to Anet, not to Guru-ers (and try to take a look at your posts from the shoes of other people, even if you could justify that it's not trolling, it does look like a big, ugly trolling attempt to repeat ad nauseam the same stuff).

Expectations and comparisons to other games/companies are killing you (your hopes/sanity/fun) slowly and surely, not GW2, because the vast majority of GW players are not on Guru and even those that are are not so "doom and gloom" about GW2. And there's yet a big bunch of people to come that will jump on the GW2 boat without looking at GW1, because it'll (or may ) be a game worth the bucks they'll pay. You (as I) are only a tiny drop in a relatively big ocean (itself something very small compared to WoW's ocean).

And I don't believe Anet or NCsoft are playing dangerously here, on the contrary they may be taking the risk-avoiding path (in the sense of the global gaming market, not in the sense of its community relationship, although I'd argue that Guru is only a tiny wave). Playing safe for them means angering a few people on Guru (players leaving is probably not due mainly to lack of GW2 info but rather lack of content and fixing stuff like balance), but given Anet business model, they can afford that.

I'd much rather speak of the lack of GW1's community relationship that information on GW2. I'd much rather have an engaging (and dual-way) discussion with CR/M and/or devs, than know what the level cap will be in GW2 or when the beta will be. We're generating hype by ourselves, don't say it was caused by Anet's silence because it wasn't. They've said times and times again that they'll release info when it's ready, end of story, /closethread.

If you love the game, work in a constructive way, and unfortunately I'm not sure that talking on Guru can have any impact on GW1, due to the small size of the Live Team (or the lack of community relation). We're all together spending too much time discussion ghosts, ethereal things that have no existence or fondations on RL, it's just opinions that generate more opinions that generate more debate and we end up "agreeing to disagree". We have a great game in our hands (if you don't think it's great, aren't you wasting your time being here?), let's share our experiences, advise each other, ponder on the current game design (cf. GWAMM discussion), even play together.

But let's stop putting more carts before the horses, or creating more expectations where there should be none.

After discussions with a number of players last summer, I suggested a Developer Blog to the "higher ups" (as some of you called them), for some of the same reasons you want one. You wouldn't get any details such as what the team has completed or exactly what people are working on, but it would have shed some light into how ArenaNet develops games and our development philosophy. But this Developer blog idea was at odds with the strategic goal of making a huge impact in one go, instead of trickling things out, so the project had to be put by the wayside. I'm not saying that a GW2 Developer Blog will never happen, but right now it doesn't fit in with the goal of the company overall regarding GW2. I'll raise the issue again if I see an opening, but right now we continue to be in a holding pattern regarding releasing GW2 information.

I and the other community managers have asked them regularly to give players GW2 information, and we continue to let them know how anxious you are. Every time I read a thread on the forums about wanting GW2 information, I tell them. This goes the same for our other community managers. Even with four community people bugging them constantly to release GW2 information, we as a company are sticking by this strategy.

Vaporware claims are so childish they have to be dismissed ... Fear from intellectual property theft are remotely probable in my opinion ...

From the start I want to say I don't believe complete silence is a healthy approach for the game BECAUSE they already made a bold statement about the gw2 project when Eotn came out.

However, I do believe that Anet has a very talented and very ambitious team and they had set some high milestones for their product; therefore the lack of info is simply because they just haven't reached that level of quality content they want to share with their fanbase

Also consider the fact that they might want to link any major gw2-hype info with revenue from exclusivity content in gaming magazines (which is probably a smart move from a business standpoint, but a low blow for the community). But that is not the developers' fault.

For myself, as a GW player, the lack of info is a bit of a let down, especially since I am the leader of a guild with ever so increasing number of inactive members. I was hoping the transition to gw2 would be smooth, with a lot of things to keep us united in gw1 until the new installment is out. That idea is already out the window, with only 5-8 semi-active members in a 50+ guild roster. Most of them just moved on. I keep in touch with some over the Steam network while we play other games.

I still bealive gw1 is a great game and I have good faith in gw2 but the transition was an utter failure. What would help me understand this whole "silence" fiasco is a some sort of "rationale" from the CR team over why it was "important" to keep it so quiet.

Disclaimer: just my thoughts; I don't speak for anyone else

@ Regina.

That was a very helpful post. Your explanation of the strategy makes the lack of info more understandable. After viewing the PAX Q&A video, it appeared a number of your co-workers would really have liked to say more, too.

Also, letting us know that you have personally challenged the strategy, but were supporting that strategy anyway says you're a good egg. If this represents your opening up to fan community a bit more, I think that's a good thing, too.

Cheers.

1. If you could suggest for Linsey to make a blog, that would rock. I mean she darn near writes blog entries on her talk page regarding making new areas, how to balance, etc.

2. I feel sorry for all involved, that's got to be so repetitive. But, I did not know that you keyed the dev's EVERY time... I guess they can't they didn't know. Keep up the good, albeit hands-tied work.

@Regina
I appreciate your response and I was pleased to hear that you and the folks at Anet have already discussed this idea.

@ the other folks who have posted

1. GW2 is not vaporware, this is such a pointless statement its not even worth discussing.

2. A lot of people have made compelling and intelligent arguments against any GW2 info being released. I do want to point out that I am not asking for code or proprietary information, but rather a general idea of the direction and progress of GW2 development.

I can understand Anets desire to make as big a "splash" in the market as possible, however no information at all means that it is very hard to have a relevant discussion with the group of people who at this point are those most likely to purchase GW2. I don't know if anyone is familiar with the term "potato chip economics" but it is much easier for any company to sell a product to consumers who are already customers. Consequently it behooves Anet to keep us engaged before we completely lose interest.

It sure isn't worth discussing. Check the definition.

It was announced well in advance of release, true. Still hasn't emerged. Or shown any signs of planning on emerging ever.

That, I'd like. She has made more for the community than Regina.

I can understand how that may seem like a good strategy given the large discrepancies between people interested in AoC or WAR and people actually playing them after all the hype died down, but you might wanna mention to the guys upstairs that unlike those games, GW already has a huge player base and we don't mind waiting for a game that's finished, but we also wouldn't mind at least a little teaser here and there, not necessarily giant promises, just to remind us it's there... you know

Given Regina's statement above, I think that you should now drop the argument on the vaporware. You may be right that a definition given somewhere (I heard of the term a long while ago and it wasn't meant to be what it is now) matches the current situation, but it's making no point at all. Did they make a mistake with a "splashy" announcement (I <3 re-reading the PCgamer ) too early? Yes, probably. But why care so much? They're working on it, we'll have 3 books at some point, more information will come, GW1 will have new stuff. I can even predict that Anet will probably make other mistakes, they're not perfect, but I don't see any reason to bash them repeatedly with the same stick (unless it's a much more fundamental thing like balance, syncing, etc.) Until then, can we move to more sensible discussions?

I just hope they take lessons learned from TR and don't make the same mistakes.

http://tinyurl.com/7pusyd

"TR went off the rails on some meandering journeys into research & development for many years burning through lots of cash "

"a project that had already burnt through tens of millions of dollars with almost nothing concrete to show for it"

I second that people need to start dropping the vaporware BS. Regina & Co. have done their best to get us more info (and I thank them for trying!) but the heads upstairs apparently have a different idea in mind on how to promote GW2.

"Did they make a mistake with a "splashy" announcement too early?" I personally think not since if they did not, then we would have been wondering what the hold up has been on at least chapters 4 and 5. THEN would you truly have a "dead game" or at least the illusion of one.

TL;DR: Cut the vaporware crap and give Regina some slack.

1. Denying the truth won't change the universe.
2. Why cut her some slack? She's active two days in a month every 2 months, and even then she's like politicians - says some stuff, but carefully goes around the question.

1)If you can't believe what somebody from anet tells you, the only way you'll ever get any closer to the truth is to go work for them.
2)First, learn to check her discussion page on the wiki more often. Secondly, she does a heck of a lot more talking with the playerbase than Izzy has done.

bet theres info about gw2 after aion gets released sometime this year. im sure ncsoft dont want anything competing with its hype

ps wheres that dev blog Regina

This is a very interesting article, I bet most people will not hear a story like this about TR (obviously not readers of this blog ). Also, of relevance to GW2:

Destination Games knew a long long time before TR went to beta that it wasn’t (going to be) ready even for beta, let alone launch. IMHO NCsoft collectively knew very well that TR wasn’t ready for launch, but went ahead and launched it anyway

TR was in development for 7 years (give or take a bit, and arguably just half that depending on whether you count the bit before there was an official “resetting” of the project (and re-shuffling of staff)).

incidentally, I found Valve’s post-mortem discussions of Team Fortress 2 fascinating, revealing that even for a studio with a perfect record of successes making new IPs they still screwed-up the pre-production work on TF2, and only late into the project did they really turn it around into the shining piece of awesomeness that they finally shipped.

It's not a blog but a wiki "journal" page:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:...naobra/Journal

Actually, she's active everywhere but here on Guru. Funny that.

Are you sure about that? I checked on [email protected] and she's not more vocal. On the other hand the tone is different (I mean both of the forumers and CR?), see:
http://guildwars.incgamers.com/showt...46#post5475246

Honestly, it's nothing new. Gaile had the courage/patience to face a few situations on Guru where a few people were very aggressive. People know that the ambiance on Guru is "tough" and troll-borderline, on average (very high peaks of excellent contributions balanced by quite a number of useless +1's and a few trolls), and I bet the CR is cautious. It's also a lot more time-efficient that way, alas for us.

Do we want info on GW2? Yes.
Are we gonna get info anytime soon regardless of our wishes on said subject? Probably not.

/thread?

Maybe not yet but I think some of us are being far too optimistic... *they just want to surprise us with something reallll gud!* Um, or they're having troubles doing it right.

Me neither actually. I've spend some time on dev forums and a decent mmo takes around 5 years they say and even then there's still a lot to be polished. Even if they use existing code next to new code.

I'm just starting to get a grip of that world, but I already acknowledge the complexity of code and game development nowadays. Time is always against them.

Fril - I see Regina, and the other GW crew, using the community spaces they intended ie: their official wiki. Regina made it clear from the start she was approaching the community in a completely different manner to Gaile.

And your right - "time efficient" is the way to put it. I can't see much business sense in placating aggressive forums which make up a minute percentage of your customer base.

Low? Yes. Zero? No.

I am neutral.
I would like more information (the non-used newsletter isn't working)
I want to give the devs every second they can get to get gw2 running.
I know, it's sad.

Personally, I think they just announced GW 2 too early.. not like it could be avoided or anything, but...

Yeah but what would you have rather had? Have Arenanet not announce GW2 and wonder why the hell the next several chapters were taking so long (just to find out there was no chapter 4,5,6,7,etc) or just patiently wait for GW2?

Choose your answer carefully...

so its decided...
we must spam guru with constant gw2 threads until the devs give in and give us some info ^___^