Guild Wars 2 News Timeline

Then again, aside from the stickied guides, QQ Forums never had the intention to be a serious discussion platform. That is untill some time ago, when Josh made the PvP discussion forum which is heavier moderated than the rest of the forum.

Half of the QQ members doesn't play/rarely plays anymore. It's just a place to hang out.

It has a website: www.guildwars.com

Official websites have NOTHING to do with the quality of a product. I could delete my "official" website for KSMod and just use my forum topic here on Guru, and by your logic, the quality of KSMod would somehow decrease magically, despite being the same version as always?!?!

The website loads and displays fine for me.

I don't recall anyone from the community I hung out with ever visiting GW.com's main site. We went there for the ladder and perhaps the odd picture or two from various events, but that was about it. A game doesn't need an official forum or website to be successful. That is very silly.

I, like most players, never visit official sites, because they are no where near the quality of a fansite. A company which requires money to run simply can't compete against 100,000 people adding/updating data on a fansite every single second of every single day for free. If you want the latest and most up to date information on any game, you'll find it on a fansite or wiki, not the official site. Official sites are for brief official/internal news, like update notes, server notes, tournament notes etc. And you don't need a forum for those things.

No there isn't, that's why you didn't post any. Here's some fun facts for you:

Hellgate London, official website and forum, failed.
Age of Conan, official website and forum, failed.
Fury, official website and forum, failed.

Guildwars, no official forum or website/game information, successful.
Warhammer Online, official forum sits at 392,477 posts, the unofficial forum warhammeralliance.com sits at 4.3 million. That's 11x the posts as the official forum, on one single fansite forum.

It's simple logic. If they don't spend $50,000 per year on an official forum and staff, they can spend $50,000 a year on an additional artist, programmer, advertising, or having a booth at a gaming convention.

Any penny not spent on a forum can be spent on bettering the game.

That's like saying anyone who can't afford to buy a bar of gold will die from cancer at the age of 87.

Concluding that an official forum is a vast waste of time and money has nothing to do with how long a game lasts. Chess & Go never had an official forum, yet people have been playing them for 5,000 years. There is absolutely no correlation between having an official forum and having a successful game.

Your argument is flawed in the fact that Guild Wars, with no official forum, is highly successful. I don't even need to go find a 2nd or 3rd game to support my argument, because just finding 1 game is more than enough to prove you have no idea what you are talknig about. All of your words in all of your posts are canceled out based on that one simple fact.

As for your sub-argument; Please provide one piece of solid evidence supporting your view that a company financially benefits from having an official forum.

The thing I find strange is they give people perfectly good reason to migrate to other games, even other gaming platforms. I mean GW1 is realistically speaking dead, and GW2 is invisible. I think developing in secrecy makes sense sometimes but they went overboard. Can they get an audience anyway for it -- probably, will it lose a lot of the current audience, probably. Doesn't matter to them either way I guess as gamers are just a statistic and there's new ones born everyday. I just find it a strange way to handle things.

That's not a good comparison because the official forum was not live during the pre-launch and launch madness where the game got 800k subs. WHA created a solid community before there was a hint of an official forum. If Mythic had an official forum from the start I think things would not be so lopsided.

Not necessarily, because fansites give freedom that Official sites seldom do.


Anyway, that's not relevant to the original argument: That all online games need an official forum in order to succeed. Bottom line: Not true.

Frankly, I think official sites can be a sham to mislead people that the devs are paying attention. Inde's example of AC2 backs this up.

On the other hand, I will also agree that players do not always know what is best for the game. That's why "good" games are so rare: you have to weed out the bad apples.

Reminds me of a certain forum I moderate. At least Guru is moderated better

Realistically speaking, no game is ever dead, as long as there is at least one person who plays the game. Figuratively speaking, online games are only dead once they are no longer maintained or updated by the company (whichever comes first). In which case, GW is not dead as it still gets content updates and the GW1 servers are still maintained. There are also plenty of people still playing.

Claiming that the lack of information will push potential buyers away is rather silly, because to be honest, you have a chance to push away potential buyers with every new game. You also have a chance to bring in new buyers with every game. It all depends on what is different - and with GW2 being a major difference from GW1, people will both not continue playing the GW series and people will pick up GW2.

This risk was done with each campaign and EN as well.

The only real thing the secrecy does is prevents hype (which is a good thing) and lets people play others games until GW2 is close to release and they release information (and eventually, the game).

Ah I did not know that! But my point is still the same, there is absolutely no evidence supporting a correlation between official fansite & success/monetary-profit.

What did I say and what did you want to understand? Thanks for pointing out the obvious though, but that was not what I meant.

No. It has to do with quality of support, marketing and professionalism. As a parallel: it's where Microsoft wins over open source and it's the reason 90% of people don't use open source, since they're not given the information in an official, clean, professional way.

Again. That is not what I said. We can't have a conversation when you pick on words out of phrases I said different browsers. And I also said the content is pretty low standard besides the browser/OS compatibility issues.

But as you admit yourself you don't use the official site. Because there is nothing there. Which is exactly the problem I was pointing out. So you yourself prove my point.

Hate to hurt your ego, but what you do and what "most players" don't necessarily coincide. In fact the majority GW players don't visit any GW related site since GW does not have a web presence to begin with.

It's just you and me and a couple of other hard core fans that show up on guru or other fan sites and have such discussion. And since you are here on the guru and seem to be pretty active I can assure you, you're nothing like "most players".

And I have never said that. However I did say a MMO with a strong and officially supported community will have more chances as all apps evolve into web apps and as all web apps evolve into social apps.

If twitter would build an MMO that would allow players to twit from ingame, WOW might see some real competition. So what's it gonna be? Twitter getting into MMOs or MMOs getting into Twitter? We'll see. So far GW stands pretty bad with no social community support at all. Nada.

Said company is only supposed to offer the tools in an official space. Not to "run" it. Give users the tools and let them create.

Now let's see. Let's be creative for a second here and just try to imagine one single such tool ANet could possibly offer to improve its player community.

Say... how many guilds and alliances have you been in? How many of those *didn't* have a forum? Where was that forum hosted? In the "middle of nowhere" web corner?

Now had ANet not only provide an official forum but also hosting of private forums for each alliance that would be clearly linked from ingame even (say from the guild roster dialog)... where would we be?

Would it be an improvement over what we have now? Would it strengthen the community feeling? The social aspect of being part of a guild/alliance?

But no... you can't actually entertain such thoughts because you're stuck at being dismissive about any idea as if that gains you personally anything. Do you boost your ego by being dismissive? "I showed that guy with his crappy ideas!"

You mean the *official* wiki? Hosted on wiki.guildwars.com? Ah there you go, the power of the single community tool GW did offer.

Successful in what? Initial selling of the game? Yes.

Successful in entertaining and *maintaining* an online community? I would beg you to evaluate again.

Is scarcity of financial resources a problem at ANet that they need to put in ballance employees fee lunch over an official community site and you know that is the case for a fact?

Unless you have full knowledge of said financial situation, I would trust ANet to know better how to manage their money and priorities. So I unlike you I won't launch myself into making such comments.

I already gave an example with forum support for alliances/guilds. Let me give you a couple more:

* A social site with a linked ingame trading system would "better" the game?

* A social site providing access to the list of ingame friends allowing you to contact them while offline would "better" the game?

* Above said site present as an application on the IPhone would "better" the game? Btw WoW is already exploring the phone app space and now *that* seems to be pretty successful and healthy thinking of them.

Only but a few...

My argument has nothing to do with the "stand alone" success of the GW game box. My argument was about its community and how it is managed. And also my theory is that if GW2 does not provide the proper tools for an online community but another game will, that other game will have the upper hand. It's a matter of who will eventually wake up and do it.

Uncalled for and hostile. You personally know and have reasons to hate me? If not than I would appreciate the respect you show to any stranger. Appreciated.

Please provide evidence that supports a correlation between having an official forum and an increase in profits.

And Wiki.guildwars.com was initially started and maintained by GW players unofficially. Anet took it over years later due to numerous requests for them to do so. I believe this was the case because there were two competing wiki's and people just wanted everyone to focus on one.

When the thread devolves to sentence by sentence argument, we all lose.

shame the old one is still up and people put effort into it when a combined effort on the official one would make it perfect

The old wiki is crap to me, personally. Though it excels in the older information (such as the dialogues from things like Day of the Tengu), it utterly fails in giving accurate lore information. Sad thing about this is that if people go to a wiki for lore information, they go to the wikia, not the wiki which - while lacking lore due to newness and lack of work put into that (which I periodically put in), it actually has correct information on lore, which the wikia does not (just look at the mess that is the Nolani Academy of Arts on the wikia, or the Ice Pillar Dragon page, or the Lighthouse Dragon, or the Kaineng Dragon /facepalm).

then by your own admission about online plugging, surely a BAD wiki is worse than not having an official forum?

I never said anything about an official forum.... I only commented on the wikis...

Besides, wikis are not forums. Forums are for discussions and theories, wikis are for information and facts. That's why on the official wiki there are hardly, if ever, any theories put on pages. And if they are, it's under the Notes - but that to be the case is rare or put in by an uncommon user (unless the theory is highly popular - which would be a "rare" occasion).

The Official wiki is only better because it was more organized. Since it was new with plenty of information to put in, organization was put into effect. The Unofficial wiki is poorly organized with it's categories and it allows too many uncertainties in various sections. (Also, I am a bit biased because the format hurts my eyes when trying to read it >_>).

ok, agreed on the organisation

but having two wikis is far more a problem than no official forum in my honest opinion

Don't like the lack of information in the slightest, but honestly it's wrong to flip out on them and nerd rage over them not spilling anything. Maybe they just don't think it's ready, or maybe they're changing around too much stuff for it to be appropriate to share.

What most companies do when establishing a web presence is to take a look at their competitors websites and assess the good and the bad from them, and also speculate on costs and manpower of their new web site.

Guild Wars have many different official sites and each has its own look (Europe, North America, Asia) with most I presume having different web designers. Not really sure why they did this, but I do wonder if years ago when Anet was looking at the competition (and not just Blizzard) if a forum was put on hold due to costs and manpower.

There are many pros and cons for an official forum as already stated but if it were integrated with the main site, its target audience could visit their website, wiki and forum with just one bookmark!

Although I like the North American design of the Guild Wars site, I would prefer something similar to http://www.bioware.com/ or http://www.eveonline.com/

How did this get sidetracked to whether or not ArenaNet should have official forums?

Case in point: Blizzard has full-time CMs for the WoW forums, and they are much, much worse than Guru.

(but much, much more fun to troll!)

I obv voted that Anet is failing. They have done nothing to make me want to buy GW2.

off-topic:
compared to eve-online and bioware, the gw website look much more informative and well-designed. you see everything of high priority at the "welcome page" and are not forced to click through the website in order to find something useful.

also, the access to forums of other mmorpgs is often linked to the account's status. beside the strong censorship, being unable to post with an inactive account is a big drag.

i don't miss official gw forums because martin and regina do a great job at sharing important information with us on pressing issues and we are allowed to rant on these forums ... at a high quality.


on topic:
i guess, the first real teaser/trailer or any convincing visuals will probably be released between the release of aion and 6 months after that. at the most, online games, especially mmorpgs, need about 6 months to build a decent player base.

i think an official announcement will be placed around x-mas or in march 2010 (27/03/2007 -first announcement).

The later (March 2010) would go against Martin's word. For his credibility, I hope it would be the Holidays, if not PAX - which I hope it to be even more.

He really didn't promise you anything other than information, which can be as little as "Guild Wars 2 will be released sometime within the next 100 years", which would classify as being both correct and information.

Kuntz is right, Martin could be sneaky and get around his 'promise' by simply saying that GW2 exists, and is being worked on.

I'm sure that fact crossed Martin's mind too, which is why he didn't hesitate in making such a superficially grandiose promise. It bought him a few positive responses.

[EDIT: Though to clarify, I do expect significant GW2 info by the end of the year.]

Seriously... you've branded, judged and all ready decided what's going to happen? Stop being so cynical! Yes, we've had some let-downs. Jump on that bandwagon against every gaming company, but I do indeed believe that more GW2 information will be forthcoming this year. It may not be substantial, but the same people will still complain that it's not enough after a few months and the newness of even that wears off.

Yeah, this could be 38 Studios expecting a launch in 2010 and still looking for funding. Things could be worse.

Good to see Inde get pissed off.

Sometimes I feel like the only one genuinely excited about GW2... but then I realize everyone else is excited too, they just hide it in their cynicism. (And hey, I'm cynical too. Guild Wars is such a great game, can lightning strike twice?)

Oh I wasn't saying there would be no info this year, or that it would be bad info. I was just saying no one really promised anything to anyone.

But I know we'll see some solid info within the year. Maybe even within the next 6 weeks!

You should know me better Dan...

Please try to stay on topic and contributing.

I wouldn't say I'm frustrated by the lack of info on GW2. Rather, it acts to make me skeptical about the stability of the whole project. The problem here for Anet is not whether info will come out this year or not...the problem is that that is the question even being argued about, after passing the only previous ETA that the beta would have hit almost a year ago.

I came back to GW in late 2008, hoping to get back into things to be in shape for GW2's GvG. I didn't know of any dates, but subconsciously my expectations (based on the 2007 announcements) led me to believe that it was going to be coming around the corner. But after mentioning GW2 a few times and getting raised eyebrow responses, I came to realize that something had happened to the schedule and that GW2 info had gone dark, with most informed expectations looking more like 2010-12 if anything. After this I've more easily been able to manage my own expectations (very low), and I think more people need to get past this point of cognitive dissonance if they still feel frustrated about GW2 timeline stuff.

I'm not frustrated by the lack of information either, I'm sure A-net have viable reasons for not releasing much info yet. I am also happy to wait for as long as it takes until Gw2.

That is, providing they get the game right ;D.

I recently saw the statement that GW2 was "on schedule" and that all that had changed was that they had decided to delay the beta until the game was much closer to release. There's no way to know if this is actually true, but this point could have been clarified much earlier in the development process. (Note, the official letter in February did not make any reference to GW2 being, or not being, on schedule).

I love how the CM's come on here to show their face and then proceed to say absolutely nothing... again. Some of you say that they're doing a good job, but what exactly are they doing? Correct me if I'm wrong, but all I've seen them do is keeping their lid on GW2, and telling us that the monthly updates are being delayed. There's still no mention of when they're going to fix the XTH last that I checked. And what about being more open with their future big quarterly updates? It's almost August, and no one's even sure if we're going to get a big update yet.

So no, if they're handling communications about the game that they're currently running this badly, why would they say anything about a game that MIGHT come out in a few years? Although I chose option #2, I think if I was to vote again, I'd probably go for #1 this time.

You realize they aren't the people who decide what can and cannot be shown, right? Use some common sense.

It's a tough time to be a Guild Wars CM, I imagine.

There's obviously a "gag order" on leaks (which everyone must admit, ArenaNet runs a very tight ship not to have ANY leaks in 2 1/2 years!)

To try and put a silver lining on this dark cloud of uncertainty, if ArenaNet can do such a great job at keeping secrets, then I trust them to do their job and make a great game.

Wait...they aren't? Anyone can post, but theres a difference between posting and communicating. Yes, the 2 years of no new info is an order from the higher-ups, but I believe it is part of the job description for Regina to communicate with the community and relay criticisms and/or suggestions to the higher-ups. Of course this will rarely solicit any actual action, but from our end it appears as though Regina has not relayed any of the frustration, IE the continued silence and lack of reliable info for over 2 years.

Even if they are not ignoring the community, they are giving the appearance of ignoring the community while leading on the faithful with the GW2 carrot.

I know that it is fairly common for fans to find out about aspects of a company before an official announcement is made, but we already have authors, names of books, and an ETA on one- yet still no announcement. It appears as though Anet cares only enough to do what they want, but not about informing fans/players. Its not that I care much about the books, but this pattern is unfortunate.

People write on these forums like ANET cannot see what they are writing.
Whether we like the way they do business or not, they are determined to do it their way. All the pissing and moaning on the forums has not changed what they are willing to release until they are ready. Myself I can keep on playing GW as I am one who has taken my time and felt no pressure to finish the game. I also have time to play other games until the day GW2 eventually gets finished. All I can do is quote part of an old song:
Que Sera, Sera,
Whatever will be, will be
The future's not ours, to see
Que Sera, Sera
What will be, will be.

You got it wrong RR, people write on these forums the way they do (me included) REGARDLESS of whether Anet can see what we are writing or not. We don't sugar-coat our words the way you might've liked not because we don't think Anet could see. We do it the way we do because that's what we want to communicate. It's that simple.

Little/no reponse might discourage people from posting more. After all, why bother? Some will still continue and post, though. But when most people don't see the point of posting here and leave, the community we have here will die a bleeding death. Look what happened to TGH and its PvP community.

Or better, ask Lonesamurai.

We are not entitled to anything from anet, be that screenshots, news, or videos.