Will Anet's Handling Of GW1 Dissuade You From GW2?

In my opinion Anet did and continues to do a good job with GW1 since I play it (August/September 2007). Many MMO games came and are already gone in the 4 years of GW1 existence, but GW1 still exists and is alive.

So it is highly probable that I will buy GW2 when it is out, since I like the concepts behind the Guild Wars series.

There are flaws, but everyone makes mistakes, and I feel that that Anet tries to avoid many mistakes they made with GW1 for GW2. There will be new mistakes for sure, but it is quite boring if there is a MMO game without any problems: no updates needed, no changes needed, no excitement about what has changed and what problem has been fixed. Such things make and keep the game alive.

I agree. I wouldn't still be playing after 4 years if I didn't think Anet was doing a good job.

I think Anet has handle GW1 in a mixed sort of way. On the one hand they do listen to players and make changes to the game. If you don't believe that then you have not played the game since it frist came out. The number of changes is astounding.

BUT, on the other hand they seem to have an uncanny knack of ignoring some aspects of the game, some problems that IMO are game breakers, like Shadow Form. Other problems, like addressing PvP issues on a more timely basis, are flabergasting to me. Anet came out and touted how streaming updates would make it easier to change the game 'on the fly'. Yet it seems to take them months to change one tiny skill..... This has confused me from day one. If there is a problem, it should be fixed ASAP.

I just hope they continue to listen and respond to their players. I looked at the Aion forum board yesterday to see how the game is doing and I am glad I didn't buy it. It appears that bots are already ruining this brand new game, players are complaining of course, but the silence from the Devs is almost deafening. Anet's community outreach is commenable and I hope it just gets better with GW2.

If Anet's "handling" of GW1 drives away even half of the people that do their incessant complaining about almost everything Anet does on here and in-game, I'll be even more excited about GW2 than I currently am.

I'm sure almost everyone posting in this thread has some complaints about GW and decisions Anet has made; I know I do. I also recognize that they are not perfect and that they have managed to produce a game which has kept my attention for innumerable hours on end without getting old or boring for me. There have been a few times where I've gotten burned out and taken 3-4 months off, but I always come back to it and it's just as exciting as it was before. However, the constant complaints about basically everything Anet does get old quickly, and were I in their shoes, I would have stopped listening to many of the complaints years ago. Some people don't understand that you pick your battles.

I've met Izzy and a good bit of the Anet team and they're good people and nice guys and gals. They want what is best for the game just like the people who play it do. However, I think in an isolated area like this forum, complaints and aggravations get amplified over and over and people do not realize that it would be all but impossible for Anet to try and decide what truly needs to be "fixed." For every change Anet makes, there are going to be people who think its a good change and people that think its a terrible change and a whole bunch in between. It is human nature, I suppose, to believe that the problems WE see with the game and the complaints WE have about it are the only ones that really matter and if we do not see a response to them immediately, they are ignoring the "community." Things could not be further from the truth.

I hope that the out-of-game community will be more laid back and there will be less complaining about things that really, in the greater scheme of the game, do not matter at all. I will be all for discussing serious issues that cause problems in GW2, but if it devolves into complaints about every little thing everyone has a problem with, I suppose I'll participate in the GW2 forums about as much as I have in GW1 forums.

I don't often post, i normally lurk but I thought I would add my two cents. I agree that there have been good and bad things with the way Anet have handled guild wars. Mainly good from my viewpoint.

What I think happens for some/most of these 'easy' fixes which should take a developer 5 minutes etc is that it is never that simple. If it is a skill change you have to view the consequences and knock ons, plan out what it should do and on top of that go through a round of QA to make sure nothing else crept in that shouldn't. In some cases fixes should have happened more quickly (SF being a prime example) but no decent dev team will sit on an issue an not do anything about it. If a major issue isn't fixed in a short amount of time it is most likely that there are meetings going on, fixes being tested but a good solution has not been found. The business might also consider other issues more important to be worked on first instead of what the fans want. I know that the fans keep the business afloat and the dev team are probably aware of that. It doesn't mean the business owners are. Especially when Anet will not lose money for a skill unbalance where they will get more money for adding extra character slots etc. I used to work in the games industry, I have moved industry now but I am still involved with software testing and the QA process.

I think a good example of a rushed skill/fix was signet of ghostly might when there was an exploit that you could cast it on a human player so you could kill anyone within a few seconds including the guild lord. This lead to mayhem for GvG and HA (I was HA'ing at the time and in halls when I had it cast on me).

I am not being a fan boy or saying Anet are the best dev team ever. I personally feel that a little more understanding of issues like this should be communicated by people like gaile gray to the community so we can collectively rage as a forum at issues that the dev team could do more in and not condem them for taknig time coming up with a decent fix and/or having hands being tied by business requirements.

I am sure I will get GW2 but I do hope the two things they do add are an auction house and an offical forum alongside a gaile gray type person.

The only concern I have are people buying items online and having their accounts banned. I hope they have all these problems locked down well before the release of GW2.

Sorry for the long post

I have been playing GW1 for more than 4 years now ever since they released Prophecies, and I have bought every single chapter that they have released plus other micro transactions from their store, not just for myself but my wife's account also.

In fact, I would continue to play GW1 for the next few years, even after GW2 release, since I have already paid for it and not moving to GW2. There are a lot more things to do in GW1 to keep me occupied for years. I dont have much time in a day to play so I have not been playing other games for the past years, but I am thinking of trying out the new Dragon Age from Bioware since all my friends like it. They seem to have bought every game that Bioware has released.

Probably my impression of their poor support for the current game wouldn't be that bad if I keep myself entertained with other games as well rather than just GW1 and I should only play GW1 once in a while.

But do they understand the mistakes they made and how to correct them? Game balance and the deterioration of the economy over the last few years makes me skeptical of that proposition.

Sure, but having their hearts in the right place and producing results are two different things.

ANet creates this problem for themselves. They've never established a unifying ideology behind their nerf choices, and they give squeaky wheels grease. The ad hoc nerfing policy of "nerf it if it's bad for the game" creates opportunities for players to try to define what is "bad for the game" to gain advantage.

If they precommitted themselves to some guidelines and communicated those guidelines to the community, people would organize their expectations around those guidelines. As it is, we have constant tussles about what is unhealthy for the game and why.

You've asked that at least a half dozen times now, and no one other than you seems to think it should be locked. Whatever your beef is, perhaps its time to move on?

The bottom line for me is that GW PvP is still better than any other MMO. Yes, it could have been better and I have some complaints about balance and tournaments and the rest. But the results speak for themselves -- GW is still the standard of the industry. GW pve is also pretty good, with a focus on narrative and exploration and not grind. From what I have read, I think the devs are focused in the right direction for GW2.

GW was a masterpiece -- a true gem. The fact that the gem wasn't quite flawless doesn't make it any less remarkable, or change the fact that its a gem and a bargain. I expect GW2 will be even better, and heopfully even fix the things that GW1 came up short on.

No I didn't. I expressed my feelings on the subject and explained that even though GW has it's issues I'm still rooting for Anet because they've shown that they care about their community. A fanboy is someone who blindly believes that for whatever reason X company or X game is superior to all others. I made no such comment and merely pointed out that there were certain things in GW that made it special for me and I can only hope that they are in GW2. I'm also one of the people who isn't afraid to point out issues with GW but I do so in ways other than shouting about how broken this game is and how bad anet is for being imperfect.

I've been posting here for a long time. You and everybody else should know by now that I'm not even close to a fanboy. There are things that I love about GW and things I dislike or even hate, I just don't bitch and whine about the smallest errors like the majority that missed their Z-keys or lost a good build because of skill nerfs.

If I'm some "blind fanboy that praises everything" because I choose to not attack Anet at every opportunity then I guess I am a fanboy.

Oh and where did they mention that the level cap would actually be raised? I recall hearing it may be raised, or even may be infinite, but nothing was set in stone. I also recall reading about a sort of plateau of power that would greatly reduce the level of power between the higher levels, if they were to reach such high numbers.

If only it were that simple. Again, I think Anet made a good game and has some good people working there, but that does not excuse the obvious problems. It especially does not excuse those problems when the problems are never even acknowledged or dealt with properly, as if the company doesn't exactly know how to solve the problems. These are not isolated incidents that are only brought up on these forums...these are well known issues across all of the GW communities that are never truly resolved.

It is also not just problems I personally see with the game (such as Anet's well documented issues with balance). It is overall general bad trends that have been occurring for years with the company. For example, it is a fact that for the entire Gaile Gray reign, there was nobody at Anet representing the PvP community. Then when the community caused an uproar (here and elsewhere), Andrew Patrick was put in charge for a ridiculously short amount of time (in which frankly not much changed). Now we are back to square one, with nobody representing what is left of the alienated and decimated community.

I have many more examples. These things, to me, are NOT minor issues as many people are stating. They are real flaws that I simply cannot accept. I will not buy GW2 unless I get strong evidence that things are different, and that evidence certainly isn't going to come from GW1.

Actually this guy took the eternal poverty out of pvp by introduction of the zchest and zkeys. Pretty sure he is single handedly responsible for that.

zchest and zkeys are PvP features? How are these suppose to benefit my PvP characters? They are PVE features.

I thought you are going to say better map rotations or pvp skill updates because these impact PvP.

Am very much looking forward to GW2 here. I have all classes completing all campaigns and have just started a 2nd acct. for something to do. I like the random pvp like fa and all pve content. I have tried a lot of other games and I all ways have come back to gw.

Considering there is no way in pve to earn balth faction or reward points the zkey/zchest has to be categorized as a pvp mechanic. The fact that zkeys can be traded has muddied the waters a bit, but nevertheless they are generated by pvp. My point was that Patrick did have a huge impact on the game due to the implementation of the zchest and was not as impotent as others would portray. He was not in position long enough as others have pointed out to address many issues , but he did do something.

Fair. I don't personally know how influencial he was in those decisions. But even if he was influencial, I'm not convinced the implementation of those was necessarily good for the game anyways.

That wasn't really my main point though. He was supposed to be the link between the PvP community and the devs that Gaile Gray never was, and he wasn't. I don't think the PvP community has ever been truly represented or even fully understood by Anet.

Am I gonna buy GW2? Yes, I want to judge it myself, see if they learned from their mistakes. If it's not a fun game, I won't buy the expansions.

Am I gonna forget about the time between EOTN and GW2? Certainly not, it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

Arenanet did a lot of good things that improved the game since release. However they also made some serious mistakes, slow response, bad communication etc. It's still a small company and they even said it themselves that it's a reason why they can only do so much. I expected too much I guess. Money wise it's the best game I ever bought, but I don't care about the money.

However I don't like the two extreme views...the doom and nay sayers versus the always happy fanbois. For the nay sayers, it will never be good enough. The fanbois on the other hand are worthless to give feedback as they never can critisize the game, so this leaves no room for improving the game.

I don't understand why people are complaining about a release date.

It's not like we're all sitting here holding our breaths until it comes out. Right? There will be other games in the mean time for you to play and have fun with.

Look at Diablo fans. They've been waiting for D3 for what, nine years? While I want that to come out too, I'm not going to hold my breath and close my eyes and complain that it isn't coming out fast enough.

Don't solely wait for GW2. Go ahead and play other stuff. When it comes out, if you don't already know that it's out, I'm sure you'd see it on a shelf, or displayed somewhere. Doesn't mean you have to give up what you've already been playing for it, too.

I'd rather them take the time they need and get it done right, then rush it to appease the majority of guru-ers (And general Q_Qers and naysayers. Not just guru-ers) and have it be a half assed, half finished game.

That would just spark even more Q_Q.

I don't recall A-net (Or NC for that matter) ever saying, "Oh, Guild Wars 2 will be done on X day of Y year at Z time."

So, why work ourselves into a tizzy over the time it's making to create? Quality takes what quality needs. I have no qualms with that.

*cough* XTH *cough*

Gaile Gray at one time was representing pvp as well as pve. However back in those days she was getting verbally destroyed by pvp'rs not really here but sites like TGH where they roasted her with reckless abandon until she couldn't deal with it anymore. There has been unfortunate mishaps on the part of the player community that contributed to the ongoing problems in pvp as well as on the part of Anet. The community is not blameless.

So the top secret balance forums, Izzy in IRC all the time, and top pvp'rs invited over and over again for balance input is no player representation? There has been plenty of representation but the 64,000 dollar question is why has it borne no fruit?

Pls, lets just pretend that fiasco never happened,lol.

That's easy. Players can only provide so much help with game balance. They're all incentivized to give you biased information. If you can convince the design team to give you an advantage, you win more. Players that like a certain play style will attempt to undermine other play styles. So if you really do understand the game better than the developers, you lie.

The Test Krewe makes sense. It's fine to ask players for information about prospective problems with your game, provided that there's an NDA and you prevent them from organizing.

It's not fine when they understand the game better than you do as the developer. If you're responsible for game balance and you don't understand the game at the level that Ensign does, you're going to end up with an imbalanced game. The players will always be one step ahead of you, and they also have an opportunity to attempt to take advantage of you if you ask them for feedback because you can't sort the truth from the lies.

CR was getting hammered by a community that knew they were being falsely represented. The community is not blameless, but I wouldn't blame them for being upset in that situation. (JR explained it better in a post so full of truth it was deleted. Frown.)

Izzy is not a rep, he is a dev. The community needed a link between the players and the devs for all those times Izzy wasn't around. But either way, you bring up a good point. Why has it borne no fruit? Well...I guess that just goes to another problem I have with Anet. We probably know what that is.

They are NOT pvp features. How do zkeys/zchests make the quality of PvP better? Explain that.

Just because PvEers started to farm RA more often because of zkeys/zchests doesn't make the quality of GW PvP any better.

I will never play any product by Anet/Ncsoft ever again, they have atrocious security and even worse customer support. it is quite easy to roll back chars to a previous state after a hack cuased by terrible client/master account security. F!ck the koreans.

Zaishen Elite, PvP without one of the Ps... Player vs static AI is the realm of PvE, a one time popular 'farm' when zkeys were new.

However you can't bring heroes into it.
If you try to it says
Heroes cannot be brought into PvP (or something along those lines)

So technically it's PvP.

You can't NOW. But you can solo farm it, just as you always could... and for being technical, Player Versus Player... where is the other player? Player versus AI controlled opponents is what passes for PvP nowdays? Or does PvP mean something else?

Edit: From the official Guild Wars Wiki.

"Player versus Environment (PvE) refers to gameplay in which players compete against computer-controlled opponents, rather than the human-controlled opponents one finds in Player versus Player (PvP)."

Yes, that does describe Zaishen Elite quite accurately.

That's because SHE DIDN'T KNOW SHIT ABOUT PVP, and this transcends the matter of whether she was or wasn't a good CR.

And let's not even talk about Andrew Patrick... the community will never, NEVER forget the time he claimed that at VoD, against Melandru dervs and old splinter weapon, you could simply heal up the NPCs if you weren't bad. That proved the guy had not only never played, but not even observed a GvG match.

What made the PvP community really mad is that we've plainly been made fun of.

Your 64,000 dollar question has a 64 cents answer:

They don't listen.

To rephrase that slightly: She was at one point supposed to be representing the PvP community.

This I would agree with. I usually tried to be reasonable and constructive with my criticism, but there were many who took it too far. As for where the finger points, that's a chicken and egg scenario that is still impacting relations today: Was communication so poor because the PvP crowd were a bunch of jaded asshats, or was the PvP community a bunch of jaded asshats because communication was so poor?

For reference and a bit of history, here's a post I made back in March '06. Excuse the sloppy writing.


Izzy hasn't regularly been on IRC in a long time, largely due to the fact that there is no community to be found there anymore.

The 'secret balance forum' was a great step by Izzy toward getting better feedback and improving signal/noise ratio. For a designer to go out of their way to set that up with the goal of improving his output is commendable. That said, he's not in the community field, and it certainly shows. The end result of having the balance forum hasn't been a great deal better than not having it at all.

Quite simply, we need a community manager with PvP smarts who makes the effort to evaluate feedback and push for the right changes (and this has been needed for five years). It seems like asking a lot of ArenaNet, but it really shouldn't be such a stretch.

Back on topic: I am absolutely going to play GW2, because I am certain it will be a great game. Whether or not it will be a fantastic PvP game is yet to be seen, and partly relies on the above.

Oh I'm sorry for my lack of knowledge
Can you actually tell me where those European servers are?

I want to make it clear from the start that I have been severely disappointed with their service in the past. After the BMP lie, I said I wouldn't buy GW2 and even quit GW for a while and tried other games. Without going into details, compared to GW they were all shit. Horrible grindfests, no story to draw you in, ugly ugly ugly etc etc. So I came back and now look forward to GW2 coming out.

I find it quite interesting that so many people who have replied to this thread, obviously haven't checked out all the information on GW2Guru. http://www.guildwars2guru.com/

If you follow interviews they have done, it seems they are aware of the problems they caused themselves in PvP. Having said that GW is still the best PvP you can find....and it seems they are gonna make it better!

The PvE side of things all sounds quite exciting too, so many concerns seem like they will be addressed.

For those saying that their support now is an indication of the support level to expect for GW2.... well sorry that is just gross stupidity. We have a handful of devs left maintaining GW1. The team working on GW2 is much larger and also much larger than when Prophecies was first out and Factions was being developed. We can expect support levels superior to any we have experienced before. Plus the change of direction with micro transactions and paid for expansion content, means they will have far more funds available and far fewer fires to put out.

Most people, in fact nearly everyone who isn't moaning just for the sake of it, agree that NF and then EotN were where GW really started to go wrong. This was largely down to the fact that NF and Factions and Prophecies, had to work as stand alone games. Duplicate skills, power creep and imba builds all sprang from this point, which Anet couldn't redress no matter how hard they tried. That problem will not exist in GW2.

From what I've heard, some are in Germany. I don't know where the rest of them is. Probably France, English and some in Russia.

But it's easy to check, take a language with a district, and the server will be as close to the native area as possible. That's why I get the best ping playing in Polish channels and the worst on American servers.

When you zone, the game chooses the optimal server location for your team or all teams. It was nicely explained here:

http://guildwars.wikia.com/wiki/Server

So if there is a team from America and a team from Europe (in championships, for instance) the game will choose the best territory for both groups. Might be even a Taiwan server, if it happens so.

Funny this. Last time I was in Polish district in Kadaman the server was in Texas. Although I'm way closer to Poland than US&A
I'll try again when I get home

It is just very short sighted to think that the entire company would be dedicated to solely support GW2 release 1 forever and ever and not have any resources for their next release. They have to continue to earn money afterall unless you think their online store has enough revenue to sustain the entire company without them making another new release.

Factions development was delayed and ANet considered that a mistake so much so that they had to apologize to the community and give out a FREE content update in the form of Sorrow Furnace. That was how Sorrow Furnace came about. Does ANet intend to follow that pattern, which they classified as their fault, otherwise they wouldnt have apologized? I doubt it.

Second, ANet only had prophecies then and they were in business for only less than a year meaning that they have to establish themselves, so they were a lot nicer. I have yet to see another Sorrow Furnace type content update since then, throughout the history of GW1.

No idea why. I simply check the pings, they don't lie. Ever. Especially with the low 50-90ms. Even English servers have 2 or 3 times higher ping.

Yes, it is... but it's also unreasonable to think that they will go to the opposite extreme (throw everything into the next expansion or GW3, and let GW2 rot from day 1 with a skeleton support team).

What opposite extreme? It is the CURRENT priority for resource allocation between current game support and future release. Most of their staff are working on the next release while a small number of them maintain the current release. It IS already happening NOW.

Are most players happy with the current level of support? From this thread, the answer seems to be yes, so is it too much of a stretch to think that the same resource allocation would remain unchange going forward?

Daesu if you are going to quote me, at least read what I have said. I did not suggest 'the entire company' will be GW2 support. I merely pointed out that the development team NOW, is much larger than the teams of prophecies and factions COMBINED were THEN.

It is extremely narrow minded to continually naysay everyone elses view based purely on your own suspicions. The business model has evolved. There will be no standalone games being 'bolted on' as expansions, there will be paid content and microtransactions from the start. Expansions will be a continuation of the original release, therefore the original needs to be in full working order and have happy players if they want any further sales.

Actually read what others say and check out some real information, before you say anymore. I can't be the only one who is fed up with you spouting what you THINK as though it is the only possible way things can be.

GW2 is not here NOW. Completely different situation. Really, REALLY dumb to think that ANet will continue in the same fashion immediately after GW2 release. Far more likely they will do as they did with GW1 - divide resources between support and new development... but not all into one or the other.

Am I not entitled to post my own opinions even though I disagree with you. And by the way, your opinion is not shared by everyone either.

Which is why they still have a small number of staff maintaining the current game, which I repeat, most players seem to be satisfied with.

It is really dumb optimistic fanboy-ism to think that GW2 would bring us back to Prophecies level of support that we enjoyed 4.5 years ago or better.

And yes, they will divide resources based on the most recent level of support which most users are satisifed with.

Evolution means that something changed slowly for the better.

It was either devolution or derevolution, if you consider the time between Nightfall and EotN "long".

No, it's a reasonable expectation - based on what they've done in the past in a similar situation.

You are basing your expectations on a completely different situation: GW1 nearing the end of a long and successful life, and GW2 not delivered yet.

No. They will divide resources based on what they deem appropriate. And no business is going to deem it appropriate to all-but-abandon support for a new product, right after release.