>For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat!
I assume you're talking about the axe from silent surf cm. And even if you don't, it's still fitting your general description.
The fix for that axe took more than 6 months (cm release was 18.06.2023, and the fix for the axe to be purchasable happened 07.02.2024). Maybe that's just a me issue, but 6 months is not a time frame I'd describe with the words "no time flat".
>People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW
The same thing applies to a waiting time of 5 years since the last raid.
Our subreddit has two kinds of people: Absolute Doomers and Toxic Positivity "Anet can do no wrong" locked in eternal war. If we found ourselves a third group of people we could play our own little WvW
Or the Heart of the Obscure. Having to go into character selection and back just so you can do proper rift hunting. Was reported since the beginning and just plain ignored.
I said this in the other thread complaining about people being negative. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. If people didn't care about this game they wouldn't be here posting about it.
>The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. If people didn't care about this game they wouldn't be here posting about it.
Pretty much, the day players stop disagreeing, you're in real trouble.
Also, having different opinions isn't hating the game, people scream hatred at anything these days smh.
Tone is important for your information. Guess why ggg cut off community communication even though they are one of the best companies that seek for constructive criticism. You go from constructive to destructive.
I'm really tired of the hurt feelings mentality about criticism, there's a point where you're just childish and running away from your problems using the tone as an excuse.
If I start screaming "your house is burning, asshole" you can't just pretend it's not burning just because I called you an asshole. Don't derail the discussion into me and my manners, we're talking about the game's problems.
Don't even pretend all criticism is bad mannered when all you do is ignore the polite criticism, then latch into the outliers the moment they happen; who more often than, are formerly polite players, now pissed off beyond belief at how you never listen and you never learn; and even negative feedback has a point, highlighting a real problem, no matter whether it's diagnosed correctly or not.
I get not wanting developers to deal with the community's bullshit, positive or negative, it's not their job after all; but that's what Community Managers (CM) are for, hire some, because you clearly have none; or they aren't doing what a CM is supposed to do, which is filtering and condensing what's going on with the community. The developers can't be this out of touch then pretend it's all fine when the game has been fumbling for 2 years now, and counting.
**Edit:** And he blocked me, what a fucking coward lmao.
The day people stop giving feedback and the studios have to go back to paying QA disgusting amounts of money just to test the waters, they'll miss all the free feedback they're getting now, dearly.
Clearly people like myself, who are known to criticize a lot, just want the game to die. That's why i still play it despite the criticisms, cause i obviously hate it and i hope ANet gets shut down, right?
I'm not condoning abuse but it is true, if that abuser didn't have strong feelings to their victim they wouldn't be abusing them. I don't think it's fair at all to equate valid criticism of a video game we pay for to spousal abuse but the basic idea is the same. If you don't care about something at all you wouldn't put time into reading about a game's updates, criticizing the changes.
Nobody was talking about death threats to devs and I'm still yet to see any to prove that happens at all. It would be a federal felony to do such a thing.
You are purposely misunderstanding me at this point. I very clearly said I don't condone abuse, I'm just saying that an abuser has strong feelings to their victim, ie the opposite of apathy which is my overall point.
Mod here. You don't see proof of death threats to devs because I remove them and ban the user who did it and report it to reddit admins.
If you want proof that people send death threats to devs, do a google search, there are literally thousands of stories on it including devs even getting swatted.
Again, this dude brought up dev death threats out of the blue but I'm curious, You've actually seen someone post on reddit that they are planning to travel to anet and murder a specific person? I did a search and as you said there are lots of results but none of them have the actual threat just a report that one was delivered and without detail. In the ones you've seen are they demanding something or else or just stating their intent?
I worked on an mmo for a few years and we got some pretty shitty emails and comments and accusations that we were favoring people or that we should be fired or find a new line of work but nobody ever said they were planning to murder anyone. The closest was someone saying we should die in a fire but nobody took that as he planned to make it happen. It's fucked up.
That is still a death threat. Telling someone or calling for someone to die is a death threat. A death threat does not have to include detailed plans to commit an act. People have even been arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for just calling for someone's death with no plans to do it themselves because the very act of calling for it is a threat.
Huh, that's not the spirit we took it in at the time but I can't say i disagree, it isn't a pleasant experience to be on the receiving end. Is that more the type you see? People calling for rather than personally saying they are going to do it?
The vast majority of death threats made, not just here but everywhere for everything, aren't serious but they all need to be treated as such because you never know if that person is the one that will go through it and most that do don't advertise their plans.
I think I can say that I've never seen any threat on this sub where someone said flat out they were going to do it but almost every single major release, especially balance patches, there is usually at least one that calls for a dev death because of XYZ bullshit.
Off the top of my head I can remember threats off of lack of bug fixes, lack of raids, pvp issues, wvw issues, balance patches (almost every time), upset with quality of content. Hell I even remember one person who was so pissed they had to pay 250g for griffon they threatened over it. Most of them are beyond stupid but it has to be met with the highest punishment because you have to take it seriously just incase. As a mod I don't know who these people are so I do all I can which is ban them and report it to do the admins.
It's not "people want raids, boom, here's raids". They wanted raids for 5 years, and didn't get it, to the point of accepting they were never going to get them back. "Wing 8" has always been a meme, in case you don't know.
Secondly, it's not necessarily them doing what the majority wants when, by their own admission, barely anyone was doing raids. This is why they turned to strikes. Now they turned back to raids, the thing they said no one was playing. Maybe strikes worked so well that the majority will raid (and has been), but it's natural to be critical and skeptical of what seems, so far, as another instance of Anet not having a clear direction.
Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion. It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered". Also, a reward that can't be claimed is among the most serious bugs a game can have. It generates a ton of frustration. If they didn't act on that, what would they act on? Conversely, the list of bugs and bad design that aren't addressed also exists.
I'm not saying your claim in the title is wrong. But your examples need context and are cherry picked.
Lastly, some people hate just because. This is the internet, after all. It's what they come here to do.
The funny thing is that raids really regressed in these 5 years, people quitted the game, tournaments stopped happening so bringing a new raid now might have a lot less impact than it could have had. And then if they dont see the effect they expect by wing 8, they might abandon raids once again. Although tbh the fact that it will have story mode and LCM will probably put it in a much better position
So much this. New raids should have been a thing 4-5 years ago, with maybe 1 or 2 raids a year. That would have kept a endgame raid community together. And it is not like people never suggested to implement a easy story raid mode.
Also if money is an issue, by dear god, sell it for 5 or 10 €. As long as the quality is right, people would buy it.
This comment right here^ can’t agree more. Yep OPs examples are defs cherry picked. “They fixed this specific bug so fast!” Yet more than one bounty has been bugged for years causing them to only spawn on brand new maps ONCE EVER. Although I did see in the patch notes recently Lady Shamshir was finally fixed after what? Over 5 years of it being an issue?
Anet also made raid rewards weekly and strike/fractal rewards daily so of course statistically the latter would be done more. Without a lot more transparency around statistics, saying raids weren’t as popular is pretty meaningless from them - which I think is maybe another cause of frustration.
Also makes me wonder if they actually did the maths and realised raids weren’t as dead as they thought? Or if the new strikes maybe just were not as popular as anticipated so they’re trying to repackage them as a raid to see how that goes.
> Or if the new strikes maybe just were not as popular as anticipated so they’re trying to repackage them as a raid to see how that goes.
I wish they repackaged all strinkes into new raid wings, and stopped having different 10-man game modes.
Just make sure we have free boss selection instead of linear progress and call it a day.
Eli5 What's the difference between raids and strikes. Mechanically they look similar. For raids you just don't have the luxury of facing the boss in the story first.
Raids are seperate instances that tell their own story. For a lot of raid encounters there is a designated tank/ kiter/ someone/ or multiple doing something like greens or lamp on dhuum.
The raids are seperate stories. (Ie 1-3 beingn white mantle, 4 is related but sorta still seperate. 5 is about the underworld/dhuum and 6-7 about Qadim) These stories are only available via raid content. Strikes don’t have the same level of role requirement and imo raid bosses are generally a lot more interesting/ varied. I think some of the best encounters in the game are in raids, in particular Xera, Dhuum and Qadim 1. If you haven’t done or seen them it’s certainly worth a look/ try imo.
>It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered".
>Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion
Which is it? Are we doing facts or feelings? It's disingenuous to chide OP for their opinions, only to have your own opinions as rebuttal
That most people thought it didn't deliver is a fact. If it delivered or not is an individual subjective opinion. That the majority (well, the reddit majority) held the subjective opinion that SotO did not deliver is factual and that's what I was saying.
Edit: I never expressed my opinion.
I must have rubbed you the wrong way somehow. First I was being disingenuous, now I'm talking without data. Pick a criticism.
As you well know, no, there's no data. You're straying from the point of my bringing up the general opinion of whether SotO "delivered": to show that a personal opinion isn't helpful in claiming something deserves praise, because there are opposing opinions. For this argument, a single person disliking SotO would have been enough.
Why you're turning this into a quest to prove I'm wrong about something is beyond me. I'm not gonna insult your intellect by assuming you can't understand my line of argument, which is simple, but I'm also not a fan of the "contradiction for the sake of contradiction" reddit mentality, so I'm leaving it here.
Sure, I have no data. You caught me saying something I can't back up empirically. You won.
I have made a single criticism. You chided OP for an opinions approach, then claim your speculation as fact. If it were factual, it would be provable.
>It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered".
>Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion
Pick one
Arenanet has a lot of nay sayers but I wouldn't say it isn't deserved. If you forget the past and take everything at face value it may seem that way. But arenanet are extremely flip floppy and it shows in their work
I love gw2 but arenanet is managed by people who very clearly don't know what to do.
Strikes who? Raids back on the menu
Dungeons what? Fractals are the way
Go back and polish existing games systems? Maybe after 10 years
Learnings from 10 years of meta events and open world design? Big wyvern fight to the death in the demon realm!
They have some very talented people working there but overall the game has just lacked a focus that gives players confidence in it
there's also a rumor that anet devs get promoted for new ideas instead of making existing ones better.
it's why we went from:
elite specs plus weapons/abilities to (eod)
new weapons/abilities per class to ( soto)
a single weapon across every class ( JW).
anet is just getting lazy and following the corporate gaming meta of " sell less for the same price or more"
The silent surf fix took 6 months and I still cannot buy it if I wanted.
A new Raid after 5 years.
Do you really think that is "fast"?
P.S.: Have you seen the new fractal CM bugs?
>People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW
... It took five years, what do you mean 'boom here comes JW' as if it didn't take half a decade for it to get addressed to the point of it becoming an established meme by that point.
There are also bugs that took ridiculously long to fix or things that are still broken, cherry picking the few that did get a fast response just makes me feel like you're disingenuous.
Speaking of bugs, harb underwater shroud 4 has never existed. It's still just a placeholder copy of core necro underwater shroud 4. There's a tooltip for what it should be when you're out of combat, and simply testing it once would verify that there's a problem. Harb is certainly not the only EoD class that clearly got no testing of its underwater functionality.
And that's not even mentioning more gamebreaking bugs that have existed for far longer, like the teleport spots and other ways to get into closed WvW objectives.
It's pretty rare for bugs to get any response at all, let alone a fast response. The only good thing about that is that the handful of fun bugs are usually left alone, but even that's not always the case--someone at Anet clearly though it was more important to prevent people from mapbreaking out of the Aerodrome, a completely harmless thing to do, than to stop people from glitching into undamaged WvW towers and keeps--which people have complained about for years now.
They've been making strikes in that timeframe, and what are strikes if not just 1 boss raids.
Like i get the complaining I love raids myself but it's not like the instanced PvE community has been left to wither away.
Could we be getting more? Yeah
Could they be doing a lot of stuff better? Yeah
Is it the end of the world? Hell nah
The IBS strikes don't come close to raid level.
EOD Cm strikes and nm HT are pretty good, so that's equivalent to 1 raid.
Soto strikes nm don't come close either.
HTCM and Febe Cm are also good and I'd be willing to consider them equivalent to 1 raid.
So in the last 5 years we got, imo, the equivalent of 2 raids worth of content. In the years prior, we got 7 raids. It's more than nothing but let's not pretend it was adequate.
>They've been making strikes in that timeframe, and what are strikes if not just 1 boss raids.
There's no way you just stupidly tried to compare these.
I mean, this is a little what I'm worried about with Wing 8. If it's made with all the... uh... "care and attention" of say, Fractals of recent years, then OP will be right. Part of what has people asking so much for raids is they're asking for a level of quality that existed in this content in the past but doesn't currently exist anymore. I want to say there is no way new raids will just be hastily stitched together Strikes. But also hopefully fractals wouldn't be hastily repurposed Strikes coming undone at the seams but here we are.
Strikes are just individual bosses, some harder than raids some easier.
The only difference between raids and strikes being the interconnected story (never was too big of a fan, still get why people miss it tho), the rewards being different, and strikes generally lacking boring and repetitive encounters like Escort or Gate.
Again this is not me saying "everything has been perfect so far keep the great work up" like OP, I'm just saying that just because we haven't gotten raids doesn't mean we haven't gotten any raid-like or raid adjacent content, anet aren't perfect but they sure aren't anywhere near as incompetent as this sub makes them out to be
Imagine if people in MMOs like FFXIV were told "oh trials are just 1 boss raids, so they shouldn't do raids anymore!".
> but they sure aren't anywhere near as incompetent as this sub makes them out to be
True, they're even worse since they had to resort to "mini expansions" just to keep the game alive because they can no longer deliver like they used to and the first mini-expansion was a mess of bad writing and re-used content.
Where did I say that they shouldn't do raids anymore? I'm not dicksucking anet they're not perfect but holy shit can we stop acting like they personally came in and kicked your dog?
It's all just hog screeching and proving the spirit of the thread, bunch of people making disingenuous commentary to feel good because they haven't been happy for seven years lol.
''Is it the end of the world? Hell nah'' - that's a standard i would hold it to 😂 even if the expac was completely empty, it wouldn't be the end of world. All players just want a game they like
That's true, and tbh given the money I'm giving I'm quite happy with the game. It could be better, ofc, the game and the studio have an extreme amount of potential and it is disheartening when they don't really live up to that potential but I genuinely think that so far the game has still been pretty good and anet haven't really been doing as bad of a job as some people on this sub would have you belive
It's subjective though. Just bc you're happy with the game doesn't mean others also have to be. Something that's not important to you can be a dealbreaker for someone else. My problem for example is that the game became way too easy. And that lowers open world quality a lot in my eyes. People who wanna brain-afk like that for example
Ehh if you look through the complaints you will realize that it's not about the content that is delivered and rather the quality of said content. And it's critisism, not hate.
For example if you are releasing only 1 fractal a year....that fractal has to be great, period, otherwise it's pointless. Anet has a bad streak with fractals after Nightmare and Shattered Observatory set the bar so high for quality. Lonely tower is pretty much disappointing, at this point they will have to remake a lot of the mechanics to make it good enough and even then it will not be great, just okay.
Then you realize that Anet probably doesn't have the resources to go back and remake said fractal so you are stuck with it and the best thing you can hope for is bug fixes, but that doesn't fix the issue with quality. I fully expected them to rework a lot of stuff for the CM version since normal had a lot of problems with the boss mechanics and pacing of the fight. Instead they reworked nothing and made the fight even more problematic than it was before. Either they didn't play the fractal themselves or they do not have enough time/devs to fix it.
Also way too many reused assets and mechanics, there comes a point where reusing assets so much dilutes the content. Anet is reusing assets like crazy right now whereas it should be in moderation. I mean come on.....
I myself was looking forward to Lonely Tower since fractals are my favorite content in the game. If that is the quality we should expect from here on out then i do not see a point for me to continue playing.
This also made me concerned about a new raid wing, while i like the idea of a new raid if the quality is low then i will just play it once and that's it. It has to be good otherwise it's pointless.
This was just for fractal releases. If you start with story you could ride pages of stuff that were not good enough in terms of quality. While i can find a lot of good things to say about GW2 as a game, the last expansion was not good, it was a miss. EoD and IBS were also very lucklaster as opposed to HoT, PoF, LW3 and LW4. Anet has lost the trust to deliver on quality, the standards have been lowered a lot, maybe too much. They do deliver on their promises and roadmap but if that comes at the cost of quality then it is pointless.
I agree that a lot of the feedback is constructive and justified criticism, but I don't think anyone who has spend any amount of time on this subreddit or the forums can legitimately say that there isn't also a pretty health dose of hate from some.
I see about the same amount of posts about "haters", or complaints about "negative community" or just general toxic positivity ("why are you people so negative???") as the amount of actually downvoted-to-hell hate posts.
Problem is: one group is in the downvote hell at the bottom of the discussion, while the other is often top-voted post. Oh well . . .
WvW is held together by duct tape and dreams. Every reset we get input lag in the big fights, much less disconnects and bugs galore.
Bug updates in WvW take weeks to fix, if they are fixed, and exploits take weeks to never to fix.
Other than the same upgrades with weapons and elite specs everyone gets, WvW hasn't seen new content in years.
And I personally feel the alliance system they are bringing to WvW is to mitigate lag, but it hurts server community and identity, and will truly bring on the Guild Wars, but not the good kind.
Considering there are some bugs and exploits in the game for YEARS and nobody is fixing them, I find the cherry picking "Anet is listening" completely hilarious.
But I have never heard some criticism related to ANet as a megacorp. I hear often that ANet cannot do marketing because most of the communication is a complete mess and quality varies widely depending on who is signed under piece of content.
I hear and experience often that they introduce broken content on day 1 and fixing it in following months on regular basis. They break the same stuff repeatedly, like bosses or meta pre events. Player scaling for certain mobs gets broken damn too often. Sometimes they don't fix content at all.
"but the game is free to play, don't complain because it's free" is basically the primary apology that gets out of white knighting community.
Praise when doing good things, criticize when they doing bad things. If you shut up just because they did one thing before well, it is not how "community feedback" should work. Just filter the nonsensical and empty "Anet bad".
>I always see people talking about “ANet won’t do X because they only care about profits”, or “ANet is just another uncaring megacorp”
While I think criticism like this is stupid and indicative of very low cognitive activity on the part of the critic, I really don't think they get too much hate.
It's basically impossible to put into words how badly ANET fumbled both their company and gw2 for more than a decade. Financially they haven't done well since release until they put what looks to be a skeleton crew working on the game. Reception wise they've never satisfied a critical mass of players. Mainstream presence died completely after heart of thorns released in the state that it did. Communication wise they've flip flopped so much and went back so much on their own word that any recent honesty is basically worthless if you've played the game for enough time.
Basically they've fucked up so bad that I don't think they deserve any better. Any good thing they've ever done has come packaged with 3 other bad things, and there were long stretches of time where we didn't even get the good thing.
imagine a company like anet that did HoT and PoF, releasing a new fractal that is just a cutout / based on assets from a existing map, putting 3 existing bosses on that, and then fuck it up completly because mechanics make no sense and the bugs make it unplayable.
so much for "anet delivers". we thought kanaxai was a shitshow...in retrospect at least it was somewhat playable and somewhat new, even tho it was also just reskinning existing mechanics in the end.
the quality has been going down by quite a margin after PoF. there are a few gems here and there but in general you can feel that the game is getting more and more lackluster. streamlined, rushed, as if the love for details is gone.
i don't think gw2 fans are hating just like that. most of us where always passionate about the game and always kept playing even tho we didn't like some things. its not a shitshow like in other games where people hate on things without reason. most of us give honest criticism.
The worst part is they could have taken the final SotO story instance and built the fractal around that, make the story be about those kryptis leaders that got killed by Eparch or something, a previous failed coup attempt, whatever.
Instead they just recycled an area available in the open world, in the first map of the expansion no less.
It's not even a bad writing issue, it's a pacing issue, a structure issue.
How the hell did anyone think a story the size of SotO was a good idea for a 12-month expansion cycle with just three zones, that's the real issue.
I think they receive too little hate for what they deserve. GW2 feels like a great game led by terribly mismanaged company.
The issue with fractal reward was in the game for 6 months. People were asking for raids for years. If it takes half a year to develop a simple fix and multiple years for a single feature, then there is something wrong and people are rightfully annoyed.
there's a reason why each expansion since eod is less and less content.
the whole " we will release steady content with smaller expansions" is a trope.
does it have to be out for it to be an expansion?
the content is already known.
a house
a spear
a raid
a zone
a repurposed wvw mount
pretty sure IBS had more content than soto and Jw combined.
> does it have to be out for it to be an expansion?
It has to be out (or at least have a full roadmap for the entire expansion) for you to conclusively say that it has less content than previous expansions.
> pretty sure IBS had more content
Bait used to be believable.
>It has to be out (or at least have a full roadmap for the entire expansion) for you to conclusively say that it has less content than previous expansions.
No it doesn't since THE POINT of these "mini-expansions" like SOTO and Janthir Wilds is that they have less content than a normal expansion so they can be released faster.
there was 5 strikes in ibs and dragon response missions plus dragon storm. 3 zones.
soto was.... wait for it.
2 strikes, kryptis response missions, and 3 zones.
is it really bait?
The only people asking for raids were the hardcore community wtf are you saying.. What people were truly asking for is different difficulty tiers so casuals can at least try them. Even a story mode would be fun. This community is hypocritical
Raids (with the exception of a couple encounters) are barely hardcore, I feel like we have to retire this notion. Skill-wise, if you know how to do more than 12k dps and how not to stand in bad and have 9 other people who know the same, they can be cleared pretty easily thanks to power creep. Time-wise, it takes longer to do a full HP or meta train than wings 1-4.
You'd have a point if that was all they were doing, but there's a lot more going on than just those things you mentioned. Can't claim they're slow when you're just ignoring every other patch, content update and maintenance upkeep task.
There's a reason that MMOs are rare and fail. The community is fickle, at best, and niche. So, it's not a surprise that few would want to touch this kind of community with a ten foot pole.
Qadim carpets are still invisible after many years... There are many examples of them taking years of something is not completely game breaking.
What's worse, the game can break completely often. Even small patches can make game unplayable for some time. There are obvious, repeating patterns that should be a subject to regression testing, but they are not. For example, one of the more consistent thing in the game is that when new backpack with glider will release, it will crash the game for some people, disabling gliding for few weeks on WvW and making the skin unusable on open world.
They get both too much and too little. GW2 is one of those games where it's impossible to honestly say "it's great" or "it's dogshit" without following it with ", **but**". There's always something bad about every release, but it's never irredeemable, so it's just a constant feeling of wasted potential and underdelivery.
> it's just a constant feeling of wasted potential and underdelivery
That's the worse part, GW2 is a great game, with best MMORPG combat imo, it only suck when it does out of mismanagement, not because it's inherently bad.
No. I think people have been aggressively apologizing for their underperformance for years. Only rare moments of brilliance in the franchise since GW1, maybe early GW2. Lots of good here, but no, they're criticized appropriately or not enough.
It’s you.
The critique I've seen is mostly valid. They didn't deliver a good expansion, it's a fact.
Edit: Additionally, as you say, if the player base is mostly 18+, why do we still have a story for children and gameplay a 5-year-old could handle? The company should grow with new ideas, not by recycling stale content for years. People have simply lost patience; you can't keep defending bad decisions over and over
The cope cycle has always been “X was bad because they were working on Y” and then “Y was bad because they’ve been working on Z”.
At a certain point even the most passive and forgiving players start to see it.
You can't judge based off one good example, you have to look at the bad too. Players still can't get the cod swimming amonst mere minnows achievement fixed: (https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/120908-cod-swimming-amongst-mere-minnows-still-bugged-at-2930-merged/page/2/).
Bumped less than 2 weeks ago. Think about how long that achievement takes, and experiencing this bug for TWO YEARS.
It's not like their last expansion was that amazing, in fact it was pretty mediocore at best, if you compare it to their greatest hits like Path of Fire or Heart of Thorns. Even some of their Living World content was better than SotO...
And housing and one new weapon is not something that makes me personally burst into storms of enthusiasm, also it seems to use a lot of the assets we already know and had in previous expansions.
So yeah I don't understand why it should be praised that much, but I don't see much "hate" either. I think the overall vibe is just "meh" and I see nothing wrong in that.
The only criticism Anet doesn't get from me is their pricing. They aren't on that mobile game horseshit. League of Legends, where expensive skins used to cost 20 bucks, now has started putting out bundles with exclusive unique items for no less than 250 USD and as much as 500 USD. So Anet gets a pass from me on that.
But otherwise nah, they're mediocre. Not awful but not great. Occasional flashes of brilliance that let us know they are capable of great things. Frequently bland or bugged content.
Hate? Wheres is this 'hate' you speak of?
In the 'negative' spectrum, there are people expressing concerns, dissatisfaction or pointing out past experiences with the game if for no other reason than to temper expectations and remind themselves and others of who ANet is.
In the 'positive' spectrum there are people trying to over-praise positive actions and reactions to feedback of the past, while diminishing the impact of the issues that had to be dealt with in the past, issues that without earnest discussion would remain still, not that some don't persist regardless, years and years later.
So, no, i do not thing they get 'hate', at worst they get legitimate feedback free of empty platitudes that is sometimes actionable, and sometimes not.
I've been with GW2 since beta and the company has made so many bad decisions going against what the players want it's not even funny. There's shit in the game that was broken on release they never fixed. And their communication with the community has been horrible for the vast majority of the game's lifespan.
They absolutely deserve the criticism they get, and often it's spoken by people who have been here a long time who are sick of their patterns of behaviour on certain things. So yeah, people sound hateful. But it makes sense.
That doesn't mean Anet hasn't done good and it doesn't mean the people who are mad hate the game. It's just that Anet grew a certain rep on their own.
> but to me ArenaNet have been one of the most community-driven studios I’ve ever seen.
.. what?
Their old community manager flat out told us we shouldn't post any constructive criticism because "nobody wants to read that, positive things only".
Their forums are so censored you can barely discuss the game there.
They have 300+ devs and communication is mostly limited to Grouch's quarterly PR blogposts, and balance devs reading out patch notes then disappearing. We had way better communication 10 years ago.
They keep doing the same mistakes over and over again and refuse to learn anything.
They left their biggest creators out of their content creator focused video last week, instead filled it with a bunch of blind followers who don't even play the game anymore but are on good terms with the company. Such community focus, wow!
> yeah we realised the majority didn’t like this new style of content so we’re gonna make sure we do it right this time,
You fell for the corpo speak bigtime. They are literally going to do the same thing for JW, same amount of content, except spaced slightly differently. We have yet to see them take any actual feedback into account, like not hiding story progress behind open world events to pad out the runtime.
> am I crazy?
No, you're just in the honeymoon period and don't know Anet.
They don't receive nearly as much hate as they deserve. Every release is a buggy mess and most bugs never get fixed.
Cvirtu has been op for a year now. We had over a year of complete scourge dominance. Why are the braindead garbage builds always the strongest? The hyper casual catering made half my friendlist stop playing.
You speak of raids. It's too late for me, at least. I raided for several years, doing all seven wings... I eventually stopped and left the scene. Now you are telling me there will once again be content locked behind the community I left, tired and jaded.
Also, housing, it would have been a fantastic feature years ago, something that I tried to bring into the game myself by turning the Lost Precipice Guild Hall into a town and making members of my now defunct guild homeowners. Now I am an outsider to the GW2 community, so the social feature will matter little to me.
ANet has the makings of a great studio, but they misplace their efforts often, delaying features that the community craved for to bring in things that were neither needed nor wanted. Also, this upcoming expansion, as well as SotO seem to present themselves as answers to questions that the community has grappled with for years, like Isgarren's tower. If the quality of the answer in Janthir is as low as what SotO gave us, it will be yet another failure using the potential established in the past as a lure.
Time and quality are two things you don't address in your post and they are, to me, the biggest problems with ANet's output.
I hope you are not trying to sell Anet as a company that fixes issues fast.
Any bug you encounter on old content, I can guarantee you it was reported over 5 years ago, and never even looked at.
The heart to obtain the jackal mount has been bugged for 6 years, just as a quick example.
I am not in the same camp as most people. I really enjoy what ArenaNet has built and continues to update. GW2 has allowed me to make new friends, dive hours into every map, long after and complete legendary gear all without a single monthly subscription. In fact the reason I spend so much in the Gem Store is because there are no monthly fees. I get to play at my pace of life no matter where I am in my life journey. I believe the content and the beautiful landscapes they have built is wonderful.
Not all of it is hate. Lots of it is frustration.
ANets keeps making things that would have been perfect if it wasn't for several details that completely bring the whole thing down but look relatively easy to fix. But they keep piling up new stuff without polishing what they leave behind, never to touch it again.
Games that can get away with that scrap content every expansion, so they only have to worry about new stuff.
ANet desperately needs a 'refurbishing team' doing more to improve past content than what the 'QoL core team' is capable of doing.
The current balance team is one of gw2's biggest problems in my opinion. They balance the game through obvious bias and that should never be ok and justified in any way. Where is the professionalism?
Some professions and their e-specs are so neglected, and that alone is destroying the game for many players. Not everyone wants to be forced to play the classes the balance team favors.
They ask their playerbase for feedback but never listens to them, and they let totally gutted prof/e-specs stay gutted just bc of them seemingly having a vendetta against that said prof/e-spec!
So yes! Anet surely deserves the criticism they recieve in this subject.
Not even just the balance team. Class specific exploits how to get into objectives has been in the game for years and there is no will to fix those. I guess those thieves need their special treatment.
Bold of you to assume there's a balance team specifically for WvW. The amount of shenanigans and thoughtless balances have made me realize little to no devs actually play the darn game mode.
WvW could have a competitive etch but for that to happen ANET needs to go back to the whiteboard and reset/nerf everything to square one and balance it from there. Probably the same for PvP but I'm guessing it's not as annoying as WvW due to player cap... maybe.
Hey now, don't undersell their efforts: they're clearly running with the biggest boonblobs and nerfing anything that slows down their karmatrain. Thank goodness they're so diligent about improving the feel for attackers. /s
I'm guessing it's just another case of "not enough resources everyone is working on the expansion". Which wouldn't surprise me to be honest happens a lot.
I think it depends on what kind of people you're talking about. For me personally, I am a mid tier player, as in I am not super casual, like I do daily T4 fractals, Convergence CMs, weekly raids, strikes, some easy strike CMs, but never hardcore CM mode like HT and Cerus. And I play like 2-3 hours daily, sometimes I skip days because of work and being tired that day. And to me, I'll never ever finish GW2 like ever. It has sooo many content to do for me. Currently for example I am doing fishing achievements casually when I have some extra time from fractals and whatnot, and that'll probably satisfy me for like a few months at least. Then I got 2 more sets of Obsidian Armor plus their T2s to complete, I have Ad Infinitum, I have Infinite Fractal Potion (eventually Fractal God), I have LW3-4 legendaries, I have all those legendary starter kits, to work on, plus many many more stuff to do. And I will never finish all of that with like 2-3 hours a day and overall like 10-12 hours a week. So for me, ANet will not receive any hate from me, even if they stopped GW2 completely right now, as I have tons of shit to do. As long as they keep servers running I am good. Even if new content is bad, which to me it kind of this, I still have tons of old good stuff.
But if you are a really hardcore gamer who plays all the CMs, plays GW2 like +6 hours everyday, you'll likely finish the new expansion in a few days maybe, maybe a week or two, at most a month if there are some hard collections to do. If that is the case they might feel like ANet is not doing enough, especially when you compare these expansions to the old ones which also had living world seasons attached to them.
There's a lot more nuance to it, though I'd say the venn diagram of people who play a 10+ year old service game and terminally online is not *quite* a circle, but close. Just don't forget that the people you see posting the most about the game are almost always a vocal minority.
Game development takes time. I don't know what GW2's production cycle is, but when we hear about MMO development the next expansion is generally under production years in advance. GW2 went from concluding with IBS to having a full-on expansion with EoD with content which looked like it had been worked on for quite some time. By comparison, SotO very much looked recycled and rushed — which makes sense given that at the time they thought EoD might be their swan song. If a production cycle for an expansion is about 15 months, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that SotO was scraped together to fill the gap (and bring in a revenue spike with box sales) as they ramped up their continued expansion plan. We'll see with JW if that has any truth to it.
But, to be devil's advocate:
> For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat!
The argument is that stuff like this shouldn't be a problem in the first place. There are a *lot* of bugs in the game which have been around for a long time and don't seem to have any attention for resolution. That, and the recent trend of releasing very high HP sponge encounter designs seem to put people off (strikes, open world, and now fractals).
***
Overall I agree with you and tend to lean towards a more positive outlook. I can at least understand the doomposters *a little bit*, even if they're generally exaggerating.
You are crazy. The content you get these days is subpar to what we got before and in less quantity. ANet set expectations for themselves and they are not delivering. Soto is the first time I started worrying about the game, it feels like miniscule updates.
I don't hate ANet. I disagree with the management of the product which they offer. I'll never frame any effort they've made as "lazy," 'cause I know from experience that making any large-scale collaborative product is a nightmare fiasco at the best of times. Asset re-use, tropey stories; that's not lazy, that's a budgeting issue. There's always glimmers of brilliance in even the shittiest releases -- there's genuine talent behind the scenes. I just don't think they're given enough time or, again, budget, to fully realize their ambitions.
You are crazy, ArenaNet is litteraly taking its player base for cash cows, and there's so many points idk where to start :
The artistic direction is plummeting and no longer keeping up with the age of the graphics engine. The trailers for [HoT ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUk2y0K2m8)and [PoF ](https://youtu.be/iaY9rTnssuw)were far superior visually. The rest is just rehashed/recycled content.
Housing is nothing more than the Guild Hall decoration system adapted to a personal instance for a single player. This is what will keep the shop running at full speed and make players farm for a year as quarterly updates roll out.
The spear for all classes is to save on animation work and duplicate skills. Besides the visual effects, it's not much work.
The new raid has already been announced as a compilation of three events from the new maps, recalibrated in an instance for 10 players. It's a far cry from the first raids, which offered new environments and boss models with unique and novel mechanics. Ultimately, it's just content that will replace strikes and fractals, which are disappearing from the schedule. It's content we will have already experienced on the expansion maps.
The mount is the same as the one in WvW, but with a few added skills to make it useful in PvE. Along the way, it might also encourage players to buy Razziafelis skins from the store.
Ultimately, the only unpredictable novelty is the announcement of a new PvP mode that came out of nowhere but without any concrete information, photos, or videos to showcase it. There’s also no date or format details, so it might even be for 2025. We’re not even sure it will ever reach a beta release (just like the 15v15 mode planned years ago in the GvG style that never made it past the alpha stage).
We are really looking at a bare minimum standard for this expansion, just to maintain the revenue that is now being used to develop GW3.
No, Anet deserves all the ire they receive. They used to be so much better than they've become. They have become so lazy and complacent. Very clear issues that needs addressing don't get touched for months if ever.
I know you people are trying to make a point but you literally don't have a leg to stand on. Do your research before you make these posts. We aren't upset at Anet for no reason. We literally have years of data and proof we can show where they *consistently* fail over and over on basic things.
Tbh no.
My reasoning for this is that I remember when Anet truly didn’t give a shit about us and even had developers shitting on people on Twitter for not liking the DLC writing and saying that there were better ways to do things while giving examples. Players with 1000s of hours were (at least imo) right about most of their criticisms.
This eventually got brushed off as “mansplaining” and other devs joined in to bash players for being “sexist pigs” instead of acknowledging that many people just didn’t like the DLC writing and felt the story could have been done much better regardless of what the writers identify as.
No mention of gender was made except for the devs making the assumption to drag Twitter users and brush off criticisms surrounding story writing.
Ever since then, ANet has really not learned much imo and has continued down a weird downward spiral of just questionable choices and - again - poor writing/not knowing their own narrative story. While players are not necessarily fighting with the devs anymore, it’s just kind of clear at this point that they do not really have the best people for the job. Both in terms of gameplay/mechanics but the actual lore story as well.
This hate didn’t come from nowhere.
I always throught it was funny that people were willing to group up for FAST 5, or Fast5 + EoD, etc... which includes multiple bosses, dropping instances, joining others, losing people halfway through for whatever reason. When raids are essentially just 4-5 bosses in one instance. Albeit, mechanically a little more difficult but I've been in some raid groups that can finish a wing faster than a strike run.
I haven't seen any hate for ANet, just lots of criticism and most of that was constructive, generally from long term players - I'm not one of them, having only played for around 1yr.
After trying maybe a dozen or so over the years, GW2 is the only MMO I have played consistently and enjoyed. Is it perfect? Not even close, but it does outshine all the other MMOs out there, with FFXIV coming in second place.
I would say so.
From my own perspective its because of story. I love fantasy stories so its closer to my heart than anything else.
SotO didnt give us chance to bond with any character. It felt very fast paced and you were thrown pretty much into middle of the war.
If you compare SotO to any other story in GW2 it will have the lowest score. Thats my personal opinion by the way.
I personaly don't hate Anet for their work as their game is absolute gem among MMOs. I wont trash talk them.
And there are the other things like when something is broken, its reported, documented and it takes them multiple months to fix. Thats a problem.
If there is an exploit and nobody is banned. Thats a problem.
And on my last note ill say. If Anet ever gives "out of jail free card" to someone just because they are streamers. After they were being caught of exploiting, cheating etc... Then and probably only then i will flame their decision.
Hope that answered something.
no? because after EOD, all they did was bullshit.
And before EOD, EBS was bullshit too :)
AND finally SoTo was bullshit again....so no. The new expansion is theire last chance. truly.
I haven't played GW2 since 2017 so I have an outsider's perspective now, I still keep in touch with my friends who still play and follow the game somewhat loosely as I greatly enjoyed my time with it back in the day.
I actually think ArenaNet gets away with A LOT when it comes to public perception, especially outside of circles that are active in the game itself. All in all, Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet have a fairly positive reputation and you'll hardly hear a negative word about either the game or the developers from somebody who's not active in the game or has not played it extensively in the past.
It's only when you talk to people who played the game extensively that you start getting any sort of negative feedback. Be it about content pacing or quality of said content when compared with its main competitors in the MMO space, the utter neglect that some areas of the game have been subjected to for years... These are all things that you'll only get from people who have REALLY PLAYED Guild Wars 2.
i actually dont think ive ever seen or heard someone actually shitting on anet, the company/game are too good for anything other than personal gripes really
> ...ArenaNet have been one of the most community-driven studios I’ve ever seen.
Gw2 having a good community and anet the company being community driven are two different things.
> ...“ANet won’t do X because they only care about profits”, or “ANet is just another uncaring megacorp”...
Its very true BUT its also very true that gw2 is possibly the most fairly monetized MMO out there. They gotta make money but they aint trying to skin players alive like some other companies do.
> For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat!
Didnt it take almost a year for the claiming on the SS axe to be claimable? what about other long standing bugs that still dont get fixed. One getting fixed is good but this game has loads of long standing bugs are equally egregious.
> People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW
When was wing 7 released again?
> “Oh but there are balancing difficulties” which always get resolved, I agree with their way of dealing with issues all in one go, giving time to collect the majority of complaints and what people feel.
I always remember how anet tried to nerf chrono's boon output way back when. They would gut the current method only for the community to work around it in a day to get the same effect. It took like 5 patches before anet finnally got chrono to where they wanted it to be. The game has a long history and while its easy to forget alot of the good/bad along the way, plenty of people still remember and feel some kind of way about how things played out. Its not just the big patches. Its the big patches massively spread out with (historically) terrible communication about patches and direction for the game, so all the miss steps players just have to deal with for who knows how many months or years and hope the silent overlords would not only fix things but get the fixes right in the next patch.
I appreciate the spirit of these posts and I do agree the community does give anet the shit end of the time to much sometimes... but its not everyone or even most of the community (how many players are just out there silently enjoying the game not engaging on any forums?). Then there are times where anet rightful deserves to be called out, or at least questioned. Players also should be allowed to voice concern, otherwise whats the fucking point of a forum if all everyone is allowed to do is gargle the balls of the company.
I'm not sure what you mean by community driven company. Just because ANet after every expansion says 'we learned the lesson' it doesn't mean they listen.
I only play wvw and I think that gamemode could even be an e-sport and it could be a lot better in so many ways but anet never gave the attention or importance that it should. I get it that if you are a pve player you have little to complain but wvw players that like massive battles have a lot to say.
As an experienced mmo player that played every mmo out there, wvw is unique, fast and super interesting. Anet not exploiting this just blows my mind.
I'm a competitive-oriented (WvW) player. My main disappointment is that ANet is not experimenting with stuff anymore. It's the same stuff repackaged with every expansion. There is nothing new, and new weapons and specs, etc don't count because every change, in theory, increases the way you can play, but in reality, it decreases play options because the new thing is so broken that you can't play anything else. Meta is the worst it has ever been, and everyone agrees on this.
There are so many competitive game modes ANet can implement, yet they don't. Where is our capture the flag? Instanced & timed assault events? New siege machines and modes related to them? Mount modes in WvW? A new map perhaps? But we get nothing. All the guilds have quit, and most of the time we can't even find organized enemies to fight.
Honestly I do understand the WvW parts, it definitely feels like they meant to improve and just never did. I’m hoping that the upcoming warclaw improvements aren’t just to make it PvE viable, but instead also to start improving the WvW gamemode
It certainly feels like ANet is currently trying to tie up lose ends and take a look at the community again, so I’ll remain hopeful that I’m backing them for the right reasons
Until they fix the years-long neglected issue with people being able to buy dupes of things like Bank Slots -- with the sotware not killing the purchase because you have already reached a maximum, I will consider their other efforts great, but still a tad misplaced. YEARS later, and the problem still persists on many Gemstore purchases.
Gotta take care of the basics people!
> People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW
This is incredibly disingenuous. If you want to know why ANet gets so much flak, you need not look much farther than the raid example for why. They promised 8 wings a year, then walked that back to less and less every following update. Then dropped them for Strikes that never got a consistent release cadence.
One wing in 5 years is way too little and way too late especially when other teams in other MMOs manufacture raids, dungeons, and open world questing content with each expac without so much of a hitch.
We aren't complaining about the devs, rather the business fucks. Devs are doing their best and want to make a good game. Business fucks want microtransactions, deliverables, jira tickets, etc.
When giving criticism of the game, I try (often I fail) to remember to include some examples of how they have done things well too. Because they have done amazing work.
Yea, I do. That's why I mostly always try defending them in most of my replies. I think it was only once or twice that I actually agreed that they did something bad, which also in the end didn't end up mattering much to me as it wasn't a big thing.
Waaaay more hate than it deserves. GW2 isn't a perfect game, but they've still done a great job. And I say that as an elementalist that had suffered greatly over the years.
I still prefer GW2 over any of the other big MMOs.
I agree, Arenanet is the absolute kindest, most accommodating dev team I have seen for a MMO in a long time, and to be consistent with it. I have a few more examples for you to add regarding their support team, some personal and some from associates.
Furthermore, I've had to contact the dev team TWICE for a guild name change, and they responded within the hour, and were super polite about it the entire time.
More than once myself, or another player I know, had to get in touch with support over a player's bad behavior with either spam, harassment, or any of the laundry list of problems that comes from tilted PVP players. Again, prompt, polite, and very transparent where they could be, and honest about the times they could not be for security reasons. Which is fair!
Probably my favorite example of the support team being absolutely based was a few years back when an associate of mine bought HoT and PoF right before it went on sale as a combo pack. About 5-7 days beforehand. They emailed support to kindly ask if it was possible to refund the difference, and the money was on the way within four hours.
Shoutout to the anet support team, NC Soft doesn't pay you guys enough.
Last note; This is the only MMO I have played where FOMO is almost not a thing, at least for me. Most 'limited' items come back eventually in some way. I can probably name two that don't if I try really hard.
"we don't passionately hate things unless we wish they did better"
Example: My Dad was a registered Republican for 50 years, he won't shut up about how much he hates Trump because he really wishes he could still be a Republican in good conscience.
Spot on. For starters, I don't think they can be compared to an AAA studio (Ubisoft has \~20k employees, ArenaNet has 300) but they are very clearly treated as one by some gamers. Whereas companies like Blizzard and Ubisoft are incredibly lackluster in certain areas for seemingly no reason, with ArenaNet you simply have to accept that the company can only do *so much*; they quite literally do not have the workforce to support all our needs and entitlements.
I also think that a lot of criticism should really go out to NCSoft instead of ArenaNet. Guild Wars 1 was clearly a passion project, and such a thing doesn't tend to happen inside a traditional corporate structure with hard deadlines and shareholder pressure. Some of those same creative masterminds are still with ArenaNet now, but they simply are not at liberty to take as many risks as they did for Guild Wars 1.
the same 300 people that created heart of thorns created soto.
one was an amazing expansion. the other felt like a seasonal update.
anet is playing the game of " how much content can we not give while still demanding full price "
game.
it's sure to turn out well
I'm not really on board with this line of thinking. It's a business that aims to maximize profits based on the investments (e.g. worker wages) that they're able to do. They're not going to tell half of their creative workforce to sit on their asses and do nothing, in order to "play a game" where they purposefully release as little content as possible.
It is more logical to assume that they lose more resources on things that don't lead to new content for Guild Wars 2, or that they simply have fewer resource (e.g. tighter deadlines). Considering the discussions that have already taken place on the company's financials, this doesn't seem illogical.
you maximize profits by doing as little as you can for as much as you can.
hence why soto is lack luster.
JW is going to be worse than soto content wise.
IBS has more content than soto.
soto was just a test to see how little they actually need to give us while still demanding near full price for an expansion.
worst part is the community eats it up because of the casual nature of this game.
There 336 on linkedin. So i'd guess that at minimum. Not that that many are working on GW2, some are not developers others are working on unannounced project.
I don't have a source for it! I just googled it and found that number in a few places, but they also don't cite any references.
Suffice to say, they don't have thousands of employees, which is why I think the comparison with AAA studios isn't completely valid.
Did you really just return to my comment to rub that in my face? 😂
If karma mattered to me, I wouldn't be joining these conversations. Everyone knows the opinions are highly divided.
Ubisoft, which is both a publisher and at least a dozen game studios, is an extremely poor point of comparison for a single studio with a single product.
Something more in line in terms of a "AAA studio" comparison would be FromSoft, which has around 400 employees. Despite this, they release a AAA-level title every couple years or so, often with at least one excellent expansion. Still, it's not a great parallel as maintaining an MMO has some additional burdens compared to standalone titles, but the idea that AAA quality on a reasonable timeframe takes thousands of employees is absurd.
>I don't think they can be compared to an AAA studio
Oh NOW they can't be compared, when the fanboys love to compare GW2 to WoW and FFXIV and are convinced it's far better than both.
When it's actual criticism, suddenly they can't be compared, but man do you guys LOVE to compare when it's positive like mounts.
I'm not a fanboy, and I prefer both FFXIV and classic WoW over GW2. No clue why you think my opinion would be so one-dimensional.
You're talking to one person, you know. I do not represent other people and I don't speak foe them.
I liked SotO and look forward to JW. Of course SotO was not as huge as HoT or PoF, but it was never stated that it would.
I bought SotO when it came out and i just finished the story a month ago. Still have lots of achievements and other stuff to do in those areas though.
So for me SotO has kept men entertained until the next expansion.
Yes way more hate than they deserve.
SOTO was not a bad expansion. It had good parts and bad parts as almost everything ever released does.
The new weapons, balance changes, first two maps and the Astral Ward characters are all awesome. Rifting, in particular, was a lot of fun. I already had legendaries, but just did it for fun with guildies once a a week. Convergences seem interesting, but I don't do them much cause I don't need the mats from them. I've heard they can be quite profitable though.
The Kryptis parts of the story and map are a bit mediocre. We didn't really get to know the Kryptis communities, the map has three metas that together are a bit awkward, and mechanics of the final meta are tied into the buff bar, which is horrible. There are a lot of other, very valid complaints on the maps, metas and rushed storylines.
But the overall reaction after the third expansion seemed way out of proportion. Anet didn't really stick the landing sure, but I thought they did deliver a lot of good stuff with SOTO. But people were so angry right after the third update, I had to step away from reddit for a bit.
Seems much better now, or at least less heated. Criticism is fine and might make for better future releases, but the trashing of the whole expansion or whole game is a bit much.
People complain when they care.
Really unhappy players just leave.
The game population is healthy, and by definition forums are populated by actual fans who care.
That’s the best proof ANet does a good job.
Man I had some old friends that trashed on this game purely because it runs on older engines and other technical bs.
I stopped hanging out with them for other reasons but that’s beside the point. I understand this game is older and has some drawbacks in being that way but I do not understand why people hate on games and companies in general. They made a game based on what was available at the time and work/worked around that.
Didn't read, but yeah. Anet doesn't deserve any hate. The upcoming expac is solid. SotO was far from perfect but we received exactly what was announced, if not more. It was fair.
The devs are doing their best, and if their best ain't enough for you. People should quit. Maybe move to EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard games.
I think that, Anet put too much high standards to when releasing content, think about it.
We went from engaging stories, wide maps and metas like the path of fire, living world stories and heart of thorns.
And those projects, were projects that had a long development and thought out story writing. Then because WE as a community because we are never happy with anything coming our way we said that we wanted quicker and more content for us to enjoy.
And they did just that, and it started with End of Dragons all the way to Secrets of the Obscure and the results were there, rushed stories, bland metas, characters from the story being forgotten.
So who's fault is it?
Cause all gaming developers there is not one who doesn't oblige to our needs as gamers. Because they need us more than we need them, so it comes down that we are all hypocrites.
You don't have your facts right. Yes the community always was and will ask for more content but in reality this had nothing to do with what actually happened. The reason why EoD and onwards was rushed was because of NCSoft.
Even if it is not Anet fault and NCsoft doing, we are still the problem here.
We always find out a way to whine about anything, and the rushed content just proves that.
There was a time where everyone was asking for a short time period of content release, whether it was Anet or NCSoft decision behind the curtains I don't really care about it, but that decision was made in spite of our discontent.
NCSoft is one of the most greedy publishers and GW2 is their only successful game. ArenaNet's living world release model was not bringing enough money in, NCSoft forced them to release EoD early. The expansion was clearly rushed because of this. Learning from this they swapped to SoTo model which didn't work so far, hoping the next one will be better.
All this has nothing to do with what community wants. Gaming industry is not your local restaurant trying to satisfy all the customer needs. ArenaNet has certain quata to deliver that NCSoft gives them while trying to keep the community as happy as the can at the same time.
After 10 years if they really adapt to whatever community asked for we would have actually get content not the likes of SoTO. They will just do the absolute minimum to keep money flowing.
Here we go again, the idiotic "let's blame NCSoft for ANet's mistakes" garbage.
Do we need to remind you people that ANet tried to kill GW2 in order to make other projects and it was NCSoft stepping in that stopped it? There wouldn't BE much more GW2 post-Path of Fire had NCSoft done nothing.
While I do agree with some of the points you've made, I have to disagree with one.
The gaming industry is a service where the more costumers you please the more money you make, its a give and take business. And there are too many examples out there that shows this. How do you as a developer please gamers?
By giving them what they want proving even further the point I've made initially, we asked for things, we got it and now we bitch about it.
But what happens if they fed us bs after bs the community will eventually leave, of course the die hard fans will stick around but the casual audience will leave, and to my perspective there are more casual players than die hard fans which means the casual player bring in more money.
I get the point you are trying to make but it really doesn't apply so much in GW2. This game is a niche within the niche gerne of MMOs. It's a f2p game and with 7.5 euros you can buy HoT + PoF during sale which is the biggest bulk and most popular content in the game still, that will entertain anyone for thousands of hours. It's the cheaperst and most casual friendly MMO you can play, it will always maintain some population as long as competition doesn't exist (unlikely anything similar will ever be released). Their main income is through the cash shop, not expansions.
I absolutely love the game and I hope the next expansion will be amazing but they had fed us bs after bs as you called it for long time now, yet both we and the game is still here. They are not really listening though.
WvW players would like a word...
WvW players get angry when they don't get any content updates, but when Anet decides to release it they get angry again. You simply can't win x)
>For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat! I assume you're talking about the axe from silent surf cm. And even if you don't, it's still fitting your general description. The fix for that axe took more than 6 months (cm release was 18.06.2023, and the fix for the axe to be purchasable happened 07.02.2024). Maybe that's just a me issue, but 6 months is not a time frame I'd describe with the words "no time flat". >People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW The same thing applies to a waiting time of 5 years since the last raid.
Seriously, given these examples this post has to be satire.
It's the typical "let's worship ANet" kind of post.
Our subreddit has two kinds of people: Absolute Doomers and Toxic Positivity "Anet can do no wrong" locked in eternal war. If we found ourselves a third group of people we could play our own little WvW
The Mehers, who are in the middle getting bonked by both sides.
Pride monthers vs gigachads. Who wins?
The "Hide friendly visuals effect" QOL is still bugged until now... Wake up Anet.
Or the Heart of the Obscure. Having to go into character selection and back just so you can do proper rift hunting. Was reported since the beginning and just plain ignored.
I said this in the other thread complaining about people being negative. The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. If people didn't care about this game they wouldn't be here posting about it.
>The opposite of love isn't hate, it is apathy. If people didn't care about this game they wouldn't be here posting about it. Pretty much, the day players stop disagreeing, you're in real trouble. Also, having different opinions isn't hating the game, people scream hatred at anything these days smh.
Tone is important for your information. Guess why ggg cut off community communication even though they are one of the best companies that seek for constructive criticism. You go from constructive to destructive.
I'm really tired of the hurt feelings mentality about criticism, there's a point where you're just childish and running away from your problems using the tone as an excuse. If I start screaming "your house is burning, asshole" you can't just pretend it's not burning just because I called you an asshole. Don't derail the discussion into me and my manners, we're talking about the game's problems. Don't even pretend all criticism is bad mannered when all you do is ignore the polite criticism, then latch into the outliers the moment they happen; who more often than, are formerly polite players, now pissed off beyond belief at how you never listen and you never learn; and even negative feedback has a point, highlighting a real problem, no matter whether it's diagnosed correctly or not. I get not wanting developers to deal with the community's bullshit, positive or negative, it's not their job after all; but that's what Community Managers (CM) are for, hire some, because you clearly have none; or they aren't doing what a CM is supposed to do, which is filtering and condensing what's going on with the community. The developers can't be this out of touch then pretend it's all fine when the game has been fumbling for 2 years now, and counting. **Edit:** And he blocked me, what a fucking coward lmao. The day people stop giving feedback and the studios have to go back to paying QA disgusting amounts of money just to test the waters, they'll miss all the free feedback they're getting now, dearly.
You missed the point. I’m not talking about criticism here, constructive criticism is what games fucking need. Now good bye
That actually makes a lot of sense. Didn’t think of it that way
Yes. People complaining are the ones who once loved the game and don't like the current direction. Hate is passion
Clearly people like myself, who are known to criticize a lot, just want the game to die. That's why i still play it despite the criticisms, cause i obviously hate it and i hope ANet gets shut down, right?
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I'm not condoning abuse but it is true, if that abuser didn't have strong feelings to their victim they wouldn't be abusing them. I don't think it's fair at all to equate valid criticism of a video game we pay for to spousal abuse but the basic idea is the same. If you don't care about something at all you wouldn't put time into reading about a game's updates, criticizing the changes.
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Nobody was talking about death threats to devs and I'm still yet to see any to prove that happens at all. It would be a federal felony to do such a thing. You are purposely misunderstanding me at this point. I very clearly said I don't condone abuse, I'm just saying that an abuser has strong feelings to their victim, ie the opposite of apathy which is my overall point.
Mod here. You don't see proof of death threats to devs because I remove them and ban the user who did it and report it to reddit admins. If you want proof that people send death threats to devs, do a google search, there are literally thousands of stories on it including devs even getting swatted.
Again, this dude brought up dev death threats out of the blue but I'm curious, You've actually seen someone post on reddit that they are planning to travel to anet and murder a specific person? I did a search and as you said there are lots of results but none of them have the actual threat just a report that one was delivered and without detail. In the ones you've seen are they demanding something or else or just stating their intent? I worked on an mmo for a few years and we got some pretty shitty emails and comments and accusations that we were favoring people or that we should be fired or find a new line of work but nobody ever said they were planning to murder anyone. The closest was someone saying we should die in a fire but nobody took that as he planned to make it happen. It's fucked up.
That is still a death threat. Telling someone or calling for someone to die is a death threat. A death threat does not have to include detailed plans to commit an act. People have even been arrested, tried, convicted, and jailed for just calling for someone's death with no plans to do it themselves because the very act of calling for it is a threat.
Huh, that's not the spirit we took it in at the time but I can't say i disagree, it isn't a pleasant experience to be on the receiving end. Is that more the type you see? People calling for rather than personally saying they are going to do it?
The vast majority of death threats made, not just here but everywhere for everything, aren't serious but they all need to be treated as such because you never know if that person is the one that will go through it and most that do don't advertise their plans. I think I can say that I've never seen any threat on this sub where someone said flat out they were going to do it but almost every single major release, especially balance patches, there is usually at least one that calls for a dev death because of XYZ bullshit. Off the top of my head I can remember threats off of lack of bug fixes, lack of raids, pvp issues, wvw issues, balance patches (almost every time), upset with quality of content. Hell I even remember one person who was so pissed they had to pay 250g for griffon they threatened over it. Most of them are beyond stupid but it has to be met with the highest punishment because you have to take it seriously just incase. As a mod I don't know who these people are so I do all I can which is ban them and report it to do the admins.
5 years and boom, is the funniest thing I’ve ever read on this subreddit lol
It's not "people want raids, boom, here's raids". They wanted raids for 5 years, and didn't get it, to the point of accepting they were never going to get them back. "Wing 8" has always been a meme, in case you don't know. Secondly, it's not necessarily them doing what the majority wants when, by their own admission, barely anyone was doing raids. This is why they turned to strikes. Now they turned back to raids, the thing they said no one was playing. Maybe strikes worked so well that the majority will raid (and has been), but it's natural to be critical and skeptical of what seems, so far, as another instance of Anet not having a clear direction. Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion. It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered". Also, a reward that can't be claimed is among the most serious bugs a game can have. It generates a ton of frustration. If they didn't act on that, what would they act on? Conversely, the list of bugs and bad design that aren't addressed also exists. I'm not saying your claim in the title is wrong. But your examples need context and are cherry picked. Lastly, some people hate just because. This is the internet, after all. It's what they come here to do.
The funny thing is that raids really regressed in these 5 years, people quitted the game, tournaments stopped happening so bringing a new raid now might have a lot less impact than it could have had. And then if they dont see the effect they expect by wing 8, they might abandon raids once again. Although tbh the fact that it will have story mode and LCM will probably put it in a much better position
So much this. New raids should have been a thing 4-5 years ago, with maybe 1 or 2 raids a year. That would have kept a endgame raid community together. And it is not like people never suggested to implement a easy story raid mode. Also if money is an issue, by dear god, sell it for 5 or 10 €. As long as the quality is right, people would buy it.
This comment right here^ can’t agree more. Yep OPs examples are defs cherry picked. “They fixed this specific bug so fast!” Yet more than one bounty has been bugged for years causing them to only spawn on brand new maps ONCE EVER. Although I did see in the patch notes recently Lady Shamshir was finally fixed after what? Over 5 years of it being an issue? Anet also made raid rewards weekly and strike/fractal rewards daily so of course statistically the latter would be done more. Without a lot more transparency around statistics, saying raids weren’t as popular is pretty meaningless from them - which I think is maybe another cause of frustration. Also makes me wonder if they actually did the maths and realised raids weren’t as dead as they thought? Or if the new strikes maybe just were not as popular as anticipated so they’re trying to repackage them as a raid to see how that goes.
> Or if the new strikes maybe just were not as popular as anticipated so they’re trying to repackage them as a raid to see how that goes. I wish they repackaged all strinkes into new raid wings, and stopped having different 10-man game modes. Just make sure we have free boss selection instead of linear progress and call it a day.
Eli5 What's the difference between raids and strikes. Mechanically they look similar. For raids you just don't have the luxury of facing the boss in the story first.
Raids are seperate instances that tell their own story. For a lot of raid encounters there is a designated tank/ kiter/ someone/ or multiple doing something like greens or lamp on dhuum. The raids are seperate stories. (Ie 1-3 beingn white mantle, 4 is related but sorta still seperate. 5 is about the underworld/dhuum and 6-7 about Qadim) These stories are only available via raid content. Strikes don’t have the same level of role requirement and imo raid bosses are generally a lot more interesting/ varied. I think some of the best encounters in the game are in raids, in particular Xera, Dhuum and Qadim 1. If you haven’t done or seen them it’s certainly worth a look/ try imo.
Not to mention Anet routinely takes on new projects and abandons old ones. Remember dungeons? I remember.
>It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered". >Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion Which is it? Are we doing facts or feelings? It's disingenuous to chide OP for their opinions, only to have your own opinions as rebuttal
That most people thought it didn't deliver is a fact. If it delivered or not is an individual subjective opinion. That the majority (well, the reddit majority) held the subjective opinion that SotO did not deliver is factual and that's what I was saying. Edit: I never expressed my opinion.
>That most people thought it didn't deliver is a fact Great! So then there must be a source to back up this data and I'll see myself out. Have a link?
I must have rubbed you the wrong way somehow. First I was being disingenuous, now I'm talking without data. Pick a criticism. As you well know, no, there's no data. You're straying from the point of my bringing up the general opinion of whether SotO "delivered": to show that a personal opinion isn't helpful in claiming something deserves praise, because there are opposing opinions. For this argument, a single person disliking SotO would have been enough. Why you're turning this into a quest to prove I'm wrong about something is beyond me. I'm not gonna insult your intellect by assuming you can't understand my line of argument, which is simple, but I'm also not a fan of the "contradiction for the sake of contradiction" reddit mentality, so I'm leaving it here. Sure, I have no data. You caught me saying something I can't back up empirically. You won.
I have made a single criticism. You chided OP for an opinions approach, then claim your speculation as fact. If it were factual, it would be provable. >It's clear that the majority didn't think Soto "delivered". >Third, the "ACTUALLY delivering" is just your opinion Pick one
Sure, I have no data. You caught me saying something I can't back up empirically. You won.
Lol I'm not trying to win. So maudlin! I gave a small poke at a small hypocrisy, that's all.
Literal clown take. This is the definition of arguing in bad faith. sOuRcE?
What are you on? All I've said is that OP criticizes OOP post as opinion-based, while only having opinion-based replies 🤷♀️
Arenanet has a lot of nay sayers but I wouldn't say it isn't deserved. If you forget the past and take everything at face value it may seem that way. But arenanet are extremely flip floppy and it shows in their work I love gw2 but arenanet is managed by people who very clearly don't know what to do. Strikes who? Raids back on the menu Dungeons what? Fractals are the way Go back and polish existing games systems? Maybe after 10 years Learnings from 10 years of meta events and open world design? Big wyvern fight to the death in the demon realm! They have some very talented people working there but overall the game has just lacked a focus that gives players confidence in it
the focus is the gemstore
there's also a rumor that anet devs get promoted for new ideas instead of making existing ones better. it's why we went from: elite specs plus weapons/abilities to (eod) new weapons/abilities per class to ( soto) a single weapon across every class ( JW). anet is just getting lazy and following the corporate gaming meta of " sell less for the same price or more"
The silent surf fix took 6 months and I still cannot buy it if I wanted. A new Raid after 5 years. Do you really think that is "fast"? P.S.: Have you seen the new fractal CM bugs?
Also, Cerus CM was supposed to be a bug to the HP but players enjoyed it and anet took credit for that smh.
>People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW ... It took five years, what do you mean 'boom here comes JW' as if it didn't take half a decade for it to get addressed to the point of it becoming an established meme by that point. There are also bugs that took ridiculously long to fix or things that are still broken, cherry picking the few that did get a fast response just makes me feel like you're disingenuous.
Speaking of bugs, harb underwater shroud 4 has never existed. It's still just a placeholder copy of core necro underwater shroud 4. There's a tooltip for what it should be when you're out of combat, and simply testing it once would verify that there's a problem. Harb is certainly not the only EoD class that clearly got no testing of its underwater functionality. And that's not even mentioning more gamebreaking bugs that have existed for far longer, like the teleport spots and other ways to get into closed WvW objectives. It's pretty rare for bugs to get any response at all, let alone a fast response. The only good thing about that is that the handful of fun bugs are usually left alone, but even that's not always the case--someone at Anet clearly though it was more important to prevent people from mapbreaking out of the Aerodrome, a completely harmless thing to do, than to stop people from glitching into undamaged WvW towers and keeps--which people have complained about for years now.
They've been making strikes in that timeframe, and what are strikes if not just 1 boss raids. Like i get the complaining I love raids myself but it's not like the instanced PvE community has been left to wither away. Could we be getting more? Yeah Could they be doing a lot of stuff better? Yeah Is it the end of the world? Hell nah
The IBS strikes don't come close to raid level. EOD Cm strikes and nm HT are pretty good, so that's equivalent to 1 raid. Soto strikes nm don't come close either. HTCM and Febe Cm are also good and I'd be willing to consider them equivalent to 1 raid. So in the last 5 years we got, imo, the equivalent of 2 raids worth of content. In the years prior, we got 7 raids. It's more than nothing but let's not pretend it was adequate.
>They've been making strikes in that timeframe, and what are strikes if not just 1 boss raids. There's no way you just stupidly tried to compare these.
I mean, this is a little what I'm worried about with Wing 8. If it's made with all the... uh... "care and attention" of say, Fractals of recent years, then OP will be right. Part of what has people asking so much for raids is they're asking for a level of quality that existed in this content in the past but doesn't currently exist anymore. I want to say there is no way new raids will just be hastily stitched together Strikes. But also hopefully fractals wouldn't be hastily repurposed Strikes coming undone at the seams but here we are.
Strikes are just individual bosses, some harder than raids some easier. The only difference between raids and strikes being the interconnected story (never was too big of a fan, still get why people miss it tho), the rewards being different, and strikes generally lacking boring and repetitive encounters like Escort or Gate. Again this is not me saying "everything has been perfect so far keep the great work up" like OP, I'm just saying that just because we haven't gotten raids doesn't mean we haven't gotten any raid-like or raid adjacent content, anet aren't perfect but they sure aren't anywhere near as incompetent as this sub makes them out to be
Imagine if people in MMOs like FFXIV were told "oh trials are just 1 boss raids, so they shouldn't do raids anymore!". > but they sure aren't anywhere near as incompetent as this sub makes them out to be True, they're even worse since they had to resort to "mini expansions" just to keep the game alive because they can no longer deliver like they used to and the first mini-expansion was a mess of bad writing and re-used content.
Where did I say that they shouldn't do raids anymore? I'm not dicksucking anet they're not perfect but holy shit can we stop acting like they personally came in and kicked your dog?
It's all just hog screeching and proving the spirit of the thread, bunch of people making disingenuous commentary to feel good because they haven't been happy for seven years lol.
''Is it the end of the world? Hell nah'' - that's a standard i would hold it to 😂 even if the expac was completely empty, it wouldn't be the end of world. All players just want a game they like
That's true, and tbh given the money I'm giving I'm quite happy with the game. It could be better, ofc, the game and the studio have an extreme amount of potential and it is disheartening when they don't really live up to that potential but I genuinely think that so far the game has still been pretty good and anet haven't really been doing as bad of a job as some people on this sub would have you belive
It's subjective though. Just bc you're happy with the game doesn't mean others also have to be. Something that's not important to you can be a dealbreaker for someone else. My problem for example is that the game became way too easy. And that lowers open world quality a lot in my eyes. People who wanna brain-afk like that for example
Ehh if you look through the complaints you will realize that it's not about the content that is delivered and rather the quality of said content. And it's critisism, not hate. For example if you are releasing only 1 fractal a year....that fractal has to be great, period, otherwise it's pointless. Anet has a bad streak with fractals after Nightmare and Shattered Observatory set the bar so high for quality. Lonely tower is pretty much disappointing, at this point they will have to remake a lot of the mechanics to make it good enough and even then it will not be great, just okay. Then you realize that Anet probably doesn't have the resources to go back and remake said fractal so you are stuck with it and the best thing you can hope for is bug fixes, but that doesn't fix the issue with quality. I fully expected them to rework a lot of stuff for the CM version since normal had a lot of problems with the boss mechanics and pacing of the fight. Instead they reworked nothing and made the fight even more problematic than it was before. Either they didn't play the fractal themselves or they do not have enough time/devs to fix it. Also way too many reused assets and mechanics, there comes a point where reusing assets so much dilutes the content. Anet is reusing assets like crazy right now whereas it should be in moderation. I mean come on..... I myself was looking forward to Lonely Tower since fractals are my favorite content in the game. If that is the quality we should expect from here on out then i do not see a point for me to continue playing. This also made me concerned about a new raid wing, while i like the idea of a new raid if the quality is low then i will just play it once and that's it. It has to be good otherwise it's pointless. This was just for fractal releases. If you start with story you could ride pages of stuff that were not good enough in terms of quality. While i can find a lot of good things to say about GW2 as a game, the last expansion was not good, it was a miss. EoD and IBS were also very lucklaster as opposed to HoT, PoF, LW3 and LW4. Anet has lost the trust to deliver on quality, the standards have been lowered a lot, maybe too much. They do deliver on their promises and roadmap but if that comes at the cost of quality then it is pointless.
I agree that a lot of the feedback is constructive and justified criticism, but I don't think anyone who has spend any amount of time on this subreddit or the forums can legitimately say that there isn't also a pretty health dose of hate from some.
I see about the same amount of posts about "haters", or complaints about "negative community" or just general toxic positivity ("why are you people so negative???") as the amount of actually downvoted-to-hell hate posts. Problem is: one group is in the downvote hell at the bottom of the discussion, while the other is often top-voted post. Oh well . . .
WvW is held together by duct tape and dreams. Every reset we get input lag in the big fights, much less disconnects and bugs galore. Bug updates in WvW take weeks to fix, if they are fixed, and exploits take weeks to never to fix. Other than the same upgrades with weapons and elite specs everyone gets, WvW hasn't seen new content in years. And I personally feel the alliance system they are bringing to WvW is to mitigate lag, but it hurts server community and identity, and will truly bring on the Guild Wars, but not the good kind.
Considering there are some bugs and exploits in the game for YEARS and nobody is fixing them, I find the cherry picking "Anet is listening" completely hilarious. But I have never heard some criticism related to ANet as a megacorp. I hear often that ANet cannot do marketing because most of the communication is a complete mess and quality varies widely depending on who is signed under piece of content. I hear and experience often that they introduce broken content on day 1 and fixing it in following months on regular basis. They break the same stuff repeatedly, like bosses or meta pre events. Player scaling for certain mobs gets broken damn too often. Sometimes they don't fix content at all. "but the game is free to play, don't complain because it's free" is basically the primary apology that gets out of white knighting community. Praise when doing good things, criticize when they doing bad things. If you shut up just because they did one thing before well, it is not how "community feedback" should work. Just filter the nonsensical and empty "Anet bad".
>I always see people talking about “ANet won’t do X because they only care about profits”, or “ANet is just another uncaring megacorp” While I think criticism like this is stupid and indicative of very low cognitive activity on the part of the critic, I really don't think they get too much hate. It's basically impossible to put into words how badly ANET fumbled both their company and gw2 for more than a decade. Financially they haven't done well since release until they put what looks to be a skeleton crew working on the game. Reception wise they've never satisfied a critical mass of players. Mainstream presence died completely after heart of thorns released in the state that it did. Communication wise they've flip flopped so much and went back so much on their own word that any recent honesty is basically worthless if you've played the game for enough time. Basically they've fucked up so bad that I don't think they deserve any better. Any good thing they've ever done has come packaged with 3 other bad things, and there were long stretches of time where we didn't even get the good thing.
imagine a company like anet that did HoT and PoF, releasing a new fractal that is just a cutout / based on assets from a existing map, putting 3 existing bosses on that, and then fuck it up completly because mechanics make no sense and the bugs make it unplayable. so much for "anet delivers". we thought kanaxai was a shitshow...in retrospect at least it was somewhat playable and somewhat new, even tho it was also just reskinning existing mechanics in the end. the quality has been going down by quite a margin after PoF. there are a few gems here and there but in general you can feel that the game is getting more and more lackluster. streamlined, rushed, as if the love for details is gone. i don't think gw2 fans are hating just like that. most of us where always passionate about the game and always kept playing even tho we didn't like some things. its not a shitshow like in other games where people hate on things without reason. most of us give honest criticism.
The worst part is they could have taken the final SotO story instance and built the fractal around that, make the story be about those kryptis leaders that got killed by Eparch or something, a previous failed coup attempt, whatever. Instead they just recycled an area available in the open world, in the first map of the expansion no less.
yep, storytelling has gone downhill too.
It's not even a bad writing issue, it's a pacing issue, a structure issue. How the hell did anyone think a story the size of SotO was a good idea for a 12-month expansion cycle with just three zones, that's the real issue.
I think they receive too little hate for what they deserve. GW2 feels like a great game led by terribly mismanaged company. The issue with fractal reward was in the game for 6 months. People were asking for raids for years. If it takes half a year to develop a simple fix and multiple years for a single feature, then there is something wrong and people are rightfully annoyed.
there's a reason why each expansion since eod is less and less content. the whole " we will release steady content with smaller expansions" is a trope.
Yes. It's called bad management.
> each expansion since eod There's been *one* expansion since EoD.
so janthir wilds isn't an expansion?
Is it out already?
does it have to be out for it to be an expansion? the content is already known. a house a spear a raid a zone a repurposed wvw mount pretty sure IBS had more content than soto and Jw combined.
> does it have to be out for it to be an expansion? It has to be out (or at least have a full roadmap for the entire expansion) for you to conclusively say that it has less content than previous expansions. > pretty sure IBS had more content Bait used to be believable.
>It has to be out (or at least have a full roadmap for the entire expansion) for you to conclusively say that it has less content than previous expansions. No it doesn't since THE POINT of these "mini-expansions" like SOTO and Janthir Wilds is that they have less content than a normal expansion so they can be released faster.
we are getting half the content we used to get. at least some people can count.
there was 5 strikes in ibs and dragon response missions plus dragon storm. 3 zones. soto was.... wait for it. 2 strikes, kryptis response missions, and 3 zones. is it really bait?
eod was out for 1 year like soto yet soto is half the content for 80 percent of the price.
The only people asking for raids were the hardcore community wtf are you saying.. What people were truly asking for is different difficulty tiers so casuals can at least try them. Even a story mode would be fun. This community is hypocritical
Raids (with the exception of a couple encounters) are barely hardcore, I feel like we have to retire this notion. Skill-wise, if you know how to do more than 12k dps and how not to stand in bad and have 9 other people who know the same, they can be cleared pretty easily thanks to power creep. Time-wise, it takes longer to do a full HP or meta train than wings 1-4.
You'd have a point if that was all they were doing, but there's a lot more going on than just those things you mentioned. Can't claim they're slow when you're just ignoring every other patch, content update and maintenance upkeep task. There's a reason that MMOs are rare and fail. The community is fickle, at best, and niche. So, it's not a surprise that few would want to touch this kind of community with a ten foot pole.
Qadim carpets are still invisible after many years... There are many examples of them taking years of something is not completely game breaking. What's worse, the game can break completely often. Even small patches can make game unplayable for some time. There are obvious, repeating patterns that should be a subject to regression testing, but they are not. For example, one of the more consistent thing in the game is that when new backpack with glider will release, it will crash the game for some people, disabling gliding for few weeks on WvW and making the skin unusable on open world.
Imagine trying to defend ANet so hard that you blame THE COMMUNITIES for MMOs failing. ANet fanboys are truly a different breed.
They get both too much and too little. GW2 is one of those games where it's impossible to honestly say "it's great" or "it's dogshit" without following it with ", **but**". There's always something bad about every release, but it's never irredeemable, so it's just a constant feeling of wasted potential and underdelivery.
> it's just a constant feeling of wasted potential and underdelivery That's the worse part, GW2 is a great game, with best MMORPG combat imo, it only suck when it does out of mismanagement, not because it's inherently bad.
No. I think people have been aggressively apologizing for their underperformance for years. Only rare moments of brilliance in the franchise since GW1, maybe early GW2. Lots of good here, but no, they're criticized appropriately or not enough.
It’s you. The critique I've seen is mostly valid. They didn't deliver a good expansion, it's a fact. Edit: Additionally, as you say, if the player base is mostly 18+, why do we still have a story for children and gameplay a 5-year-old could handle? The company should grow with new ideas, not by recycling stale content for years. People have simply lost patience; you can't keep defending bad decisions over and over
The cope cycle has always been “X was bad because they were working on Y” and then “Y was bad because they’ve been working on Z”. At a certain point even the most passive and forgiving players start to see it.
You can't judge based off one good example, you have to look at the bad too. Players still can't get the cod swimming amonst mere minnows achievement fixed: (https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/topic/120908-cod-swimming-amongst-mere-minnows-still-bugged-at-2930-merged/page/2/). Bumped less than 2 weeks ago. Think about how long that achievement takes, and experiencing this bug for TWO YEARS.
It's not like their last expansion was that amazing, in fact it was pretty mediocore at best, if you compare it to their greatest hits like Path of Fire or Heart of Thorns. Even some of their Living World content was better than SotO... And housing and one new weapon is not something that makes me personally burst into storms of enthusiasm, also it seems to use a lot of the assets we already know and had in previous expansions. So yeah I don't understand why it should be praised that much, but I don't see much "hate" either. I think the overall vibe is just "meh" and I see nothing wrong in that.
The only criticism Anet doesn't get from me is their pricing. They aren't on that mobile game horseshit. League of Legends, where expensive skins used to cost 20 bucks, now has started putting out bundles with exclusive unique items for no less than 250 USD and as much as 500 USD. So Anet gets a pass from me on that. But otherwise nah, they're mediocre. Not awful but not great. Occasional flashes of brilliance that let us know they are capable of great things. Frequently bland or bugged content.
Hate? Wheres is this 'hate' you speak of? In the 'negative' spectrum, there are people expressing concerns, dissatisfaction or pointing out past experiences with the game if for no other reason than to temper expectations and remind themselves and others of who ANet is. In the 'positive' spectrum there are people trying to over-praise positive actions and reactions to feedback of the past, while diminishing the impact of the issues that had to be dealt with in the past, issues that without earnest discussion would remain still, not that some don't persist regardless, years and years later. So, no, i do not thing they get 'hate', at worst they get legitimate feedback free of empty platitudes that is sometimes actionable, and sometimes not.
I've been with GW2 since beta and the company has made so many bad decisions going against what the players want it's not even funny. There's shit in the game that was broken on release they never fixed. And their communication with the community has been horrible for the vast majority of the game's lifespan. They absolutely deserve the criticism they get, and often it's spoken by people who have been here a long time who are sick of their patterns of behaviour on certain things. So yeah, people sound hateful. But it makes sense. That doesn't mean Anet hasn't done good and it doesn't mean the people who are mad hate the game. It's just that Anet grew a certain rep on their own.
> but to me ArenaNet have been one of the most community-driven studios I’ve ever seen. .. what? Their old community manager flat out told us we shouldn't post any constructive criticism because "nobody wants to read that, positive things only". Their forums are so censored you can barely discuss the game there. They have 300+ devs and communication is mostly limited to Grouch's quarterly PR blogposts, and balance devs reading out patch notes then disappearing. We had way better communication 10 years ago. They keep doing the same mistakes over and over again and refuse to learn anything. They left their biggest creators out of their content creator focused video last week, instead filled it with a bunch of blind followers who don't even play the game anymore but are on good terms with the company. Such community focus, wow! > yeah we realised the majority didn’t like this new style of content so we’re gonna make sure we do it right this time, You fell for the corpo speak bigtime. They are literally going to do the same thing for JW, same amount of content, except spaced slightly differently. We have yet to see them take any actual feedback into account, like not hiding story progress behind open world events to pad out the runtime. > am I crazy? No, you're just in the honeymoon period and don't know Anet.
They don't receive nearly as much hate as they deserve. Every release is a buggy mess and most bugs never get fixed. Cvirtu has been op for a year now. We had over a year of complete scourge dominance. Why are the braindead garbage builds always the strongest? The hyper casual catering made half my friendlist stop playing.
Just you.
You speak of raids. It's too late for me, at least. I raided for several years, doing all seven wings... I eventually stopped and left the scene. Now you are telling me there will once again be content locked behind the community I left, tired and jaded. Also, housing, it would have been a fantastic feature years ago, something that I tried to bring into the game myself by turning the Lost Precipice Guild Hall into a town and making members of my now defunct guild homeowners. Now I am an outsider to the GW2 community, so the social feature will matter little to me. ANet has the makings of a great studio, but they misplace their efforts often, delaying features that the community craved for to bring in things that were neither needed nor wanted. Also, this upcoming expansion, as well as SotO seem to present themselves as answers to questions that the community has grappled with for years, like Isgarren's tower. If the quality of the answer in Janthir is as low as what SotO gave us, it will be yet another failure using the potential established in the past as a lure. Time and quality are two things you don't address in your post and they are, to me, the biggest problems with ANet's output.
I hope you are not trying to sell Anet as a company that fixes issues fast. Any bug you encounter on old content, I can guarantee you it was reported over 5 years ago, and never even looked at. The heart to obtain the jackal mount has been bugged for 6 years, just as a quick example.
The Maw of Torment meta still stalls due to NPC pathfinding bugging out. Their attempts fo fix it have never worked.
it was one of the first vault weeklys i can remember getting too
I am not in the same camp as most people. I really enjoy what ArenaNet has built and continues to update. GW2 has allowed me to make new friends, dive hours into every map, long after and complete legendary gear all without a single monthly subscription. In fact the reason I spend so much in the Gem Store is because there are no monthly fees. I get to play at my pace of life no matter where I am in my life journey. I believe the content and the beautiful landscapes they have built is wonderful.
Tunnel destroyed all hope
Not all of it is hate. Lots of it is frustration. ANets keeps making things that would have been perfect if it wasn't for several details that completely bring the whole thing down but look relatively easy to fix. But they keep piling up new stuff without polishing what they leave behind, never to touch it again. Games that can get away with that scrap content every expansion, so they only have to worry about new stuff. ANet desperately needs a 'refurbishing team' doing more to improve past content than what the 'QoL core team' is capable of doing.
The current balance team is one of gw2's biggest problems in my opinion. They balance the game through obvious bias and that should never be ok and justified in any way. Where is the professionalism? Some professions and their e-specs are so neglected, and that alone is destroying the game for many players. Not everyone wants to be forced to play the classes the balance team favors. They ask their playerbase for feedback but never listens to them, and they let totally gutted prof/e-specs stay gutted just bc of them seemingly having a vendetta against that said prof/e-spec! So yes! Anet surely deserves the criticism they recieve in this subject.
The WvW balance team deserve to be lined up and punted on the shin.
Not even just the balance team. Class specific exploits how to get into objectives has been in the game for years and there is no will to fix those. I guess those thieves need their special treatment.
Of course, they DID fix the choir bell drop into Air on Desert, though. Wouldn't want those filthy non-thieves to have fun.
Bold of you to assume there's a balance team specifically for WvW. The amount of shenanigans and thoughtless balances have made me realize little to no devs actually play the darn game mode. WvW could have a competitive etch but for that to happen ANET needs to go back to the whiteboard and reset/nerf everything to square one and balance it from there. Probably the same for PvP but I'm guessing it's not as annoying as WvW due to player cap... maybe.
There was SUPPOSED to be a dedicated WvW team, now, if they're actually doing anything is another matter entirely.
Hey now, don't undersell their efforts: they're clearly running with the biggest boonblobs and nerfing anything that slows down their karmatrain. Thank goodness they're so diligent about improving the feel for attackers. /s
I'm guessing it's just another case of "not enough resources everyone is working on the expansion". Which wouldn't surprise me to be honest happens a lot.
Maybe they do have a wvw balance team. Doesn't mean this team plays wvw though 😂
Meanwhile I'm just here hoping they fix the lag & skill delay.
I think it depends on what kind of people you're talking about. For me personally, I am a mid tier player, as in I am not super casual, like I do daily T4 fractals, Convergence CMs, weekly raids, strikes, some easy strike CMs, but never hardcore CM mode like HT and Cerus. And I play like 2-3 hours daily, sometimes I skip days because of work and being tired that day. And to me, I'll never ever finish GW2 like ever. It has sooo many content to do for me. Currently for example I am doing fishing achievements casually when I have some extra time from fractals and whatnot, and that'll probably satisfy me for like a few months at least. Then I got 2 more sets of Obsidian Armor plus their T2s to complete, I have Ad Infinitum, I have Infinite Fractal Potion (eventually Fractal God), I have LW3-4 legendaries, I have all those legendary starter kits, to work on, plus many many more stuff to do. And I will never finish all of that with like 2-3 hours a day and overall like 10-12 hours a week. So for me, ANet will not receive any hate from me, even if they stopped GW2 completely right now, as I have tons of shit to do. As long as they keep servers running I am good. Even if new content is bad, which to me it kind of this, I still have tons of old good stuff. But if you are a really hardcore gamer who plays all the CMs, plays GW2 like +6 hours everyday, you'll likely finish the new expansion in a few days maybe, maybe a week or two, at most a month if there are some hard collections to do. If that is the case they might feel like ANet is not doing enough, especially when you compare these expansions to the old ones which also had living world seasons attached to them.
There's a lot more nuance to it, though I'd say the venn diagram of people who play a 10+ year old service game and terminally online is not *quite* a circle, but close. Just don't forget that the people you see posting the most about the game are almost always a vocal minority. Game development takes time. I don't know what GW2's production cycle is, but when we hear about MMO development the next expansion is generally under production years in advance. GW2 went from concluding with IBS to having a full-on expansion with EoD with content which looked like it had been worked on for quite some time. By comparison, SotO very much looked recycled and rushed — which makes sense given that at the time they thought EoD might be their swan song. If a production cycle for an expansion is about 15 months, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that SotO was scraped together to fill the gap (and bring in a revenue spike with box sales) as they ramped up their continued expansion plan. We'll see with JW if that has any truth to it. But, to be devil's advocate: > For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat! The argument is that stuff like this shouldn't be a problem in the first place. There are a *lot* of bugs in the game which have been around for a long time and don't seem to have any attention for resolution. That, and the recent trend of releasing very high HP sponge encounter designs seem to put people off (strikes, open world, and now fractals). *** Overall I agree with you and tend to lean towards a more positive outlook. I can at least understand the doomposters *a little bit*, even if they're generally exaggerating.
There are bugs that have been around since release that haven't been fixed yet
You are crazy. The content you get these days is subpar to what we got before and in less quantity. ANet set expectations for themselves and they are not delivering. Soto is the first time I started worrying about the game, it feels like miniscule updates.
I don't hate ANet. I disagree with the management of the product which they offer. I'll never frame any effort they've made as "lazy," 'cause I know from experience that making any large-scale collaborative product is a nightmare fiasco at the best of times. Asset re-use, tropey stories; that's not lazy, that's a budgeting issue. There's always glimmers of brilliance in even the shittiest releases -- there's genuine talent behind the scenes. I just don't think they're given enough time or, again, budget, to fully realize their ambitions.
You are crazy, ArenaNet is litteraly taking its player base for cash cows, and there's so many points idk where to start : The artistic direction is plummeting and no longer keeping up with the age of the graphics engine. The trailers for [HoT ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOUk2y0K2m8)and [PoF ](https://youtu.be/iaY9rTnssuw)were far superior visually. The rest is just rehashed/recycled content. Housing is nothing more than the Guild Hall decoration system adapted to a personal instance for a single player. This is what will keep the shop running at full speed and make players farm for a year as quarterly updates roll out. The spear for all classes is to save on animation work and duplicate skills. Besides the visual effects, it's not much work. The new raid has already been announced as a compilation of three events from the new maps, recalibrated in an instance for 10 players. It's a far cry from the first raids, which offered new environments and boss models with unique and novel mechanics. Ultimately, it's just content that will replace strikes and fractals, which are disappearing from the schedule. It's content we will have already experienced on the expansion maps. The mount is the same as the one in WvW, but with a few added skills to make it useful in PvE. Along the way, it might also encourage players to buy Razziafelis skins from the store. Ultimately, the only unpredictable novelty is the announcement of a new PvP mode that came out of nowhere but without any concrete information, photos, or videos to showcase it. There’s also no date or format details, so it might even be for 2025. We’re not even sure it will ever reach a beta release (just like the 15v15 mode planned years ago in the GvG style that never made it past the alpha stage). We are really looking at a bare minimum standard for this expansion, just to maintain the revenue that is now being used to develop GW3.
>People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW 1820 days or 4.9 years since the last raid I mean what kinda unaware post is this?
No, Anet deserves all the ire they receive. They used to be so much better than they've become. They have become so lazy and complacent. Very clear issues that needs addressing don't get touched for months if ever. I know you people are trying to make a point but you literally don't have a leg to stand on. Do your research before you make these posts. We aren't upset at Anet for no reason. We literally have years of data and proof we can show where they *consistently* fail over and over on basic things.
Tbh no. My reasoning for this is that I remember when Anet truly didn’t give a shit about us and even had developers shitting on people on Twitter for not liking the DLC writing and saying that there were better ways to do things while giving examples. Players with 1000s of hours were (at least imo) right about most of their criticisms. This eventually got brushed off as “mansplaining” and other devs joined in to bash players for being “sexist pigs” instead of acknowledging that many people just didn’t like the DLC writing and felt the story could have been done much better regardless of what the writers identify as. No mention of gender was made except for the devs making the assumption to drag Twitter users and brush off criticisms surrounding story writing. Ever since then, ANet has really not learned much imo and has continued down a weird downward spiral of just questionable choices and - again - poor writing/not knowing their own narrative story. While players are not necessarily fighting with the devs anymore, it’s just kind of clear at this point that they do not really have the best people for the job. Both in terms of gameplay/mechanics but the actual lore story as well. This hate didn’t come from nowhere.
Did an anet employee write this post?
They always got alot of shit even during HoT/PoF time where GW2 was at its best. Back then the hate surely was stupidly overblown.
I think this sub is a quagmire of hate tbh
I always throught it was funny that people were willing to group up for FAST 5, or Fast5 + EoD, etc... which includes multiple bosses, dropping instances, joining others, losing people halfway through for whatever reason. When raids are essentially just 4-5 bosses in one instance. Albeit, mechanically a little more difficult but I've been in some raid groups that can finish a wing faster than a strike run.
I haven't seen any hate for ANet, just lots of criticism and most of that was constructive, generally from long term players - I'm not one of them, having only played for around 1yr. After trying maybe a dozen or so over the years, GW2 is the only MMO I have played consistently and enjoyed. Is it perfect? Not even close, but it does outshine all the other MMOs out there, with FFXIV coming in second place.
I would say so. From my own perspective its because of story. I love fantasy stories so its closer to my heart than anything else. SotO didnt give us chance to bond with any character. It felt very fast paced and you were thrown pretty much into middle of the war. If you compare SotO to any other story in GW2 it will have the lowest score. Thats my personal opinion by the way. I personaly don't hate Anet for their work as their game is absolute gem among MMOs. I wont trash talk them. And there are the other things like when something is broken, its reported, documented and it takes them multiple months to fix. Thats a problem. If there is an exploit and nobody is banned. Thats a problem. And on my last note ill say. If Anet ever gives "out of jail free card" to someone just because they are streamers. After they were being caught of exploiting, cheating etc... Then and probably only then i will flame their decision. Hope that answered something.
no? because after EOD, all they did was bullshit. And before EOD, EBS was bullshit too :) AND finally SoTo was bullshit again....so no. The new expansion is theire last chance. truly.
probably yes but that doesnt make soto less subpar
I haven't played GW2 since 2017 so I have an outsider's perspective now, I still keep in touch with my friends who still play and follow the game somewhat loosely as I greatly enjoyed my time with it back in the day. I actually think ArenaNet gets away with A LOT when it comes to public perception, especially outside of circles that are active in the game itself. All in all, Guild Wars 2 and ArenaNet have a fairly positive reputation and you'll hardly hear a negative word about either the game or the developers from somebody who's not active in the game or has not played it extensively in the past. It's only when you talk to people who played the game extensively that you start getting any sort of negative feedback. Be it about content pacing or quality of said content when compared with its main competitors in the MMO space, the utter neglect that some areas of the game have been subjected to for years... These are all things that you'll only get from people who have REALLY PLAYED Guild Wars 2.
I think their hearts are in the right place but they are generally bad at their jobs.
i actually dont think ive ever seen or heard someone actually shitting on anet, the company/game are too good for anything other than personal gripes really
Yes, you are indeed crazy
> ...ArenaNet have been one of the most community-driven studios I’ve ever seen. Gw2 having a good community and anet the company being community driven are two different things. > ...“ANet won’t do X because they only care about profits”, or “ANet is just another uncaring megacorp”... Its very true BUT its also very true that gw2 is possibly the most fairly monetized MMO out there. They gotta make money but they aint trying to skin players alive like some other companies do. > For example: earlier there were issues where a fractal achievement reward couldn’t be claimed, people complained and overall drew attention to the issue and it was resolved in nearly no time flat! Didnt it take almost a year for the claiming on the SS axe to be claimable? what about other long standing bugs that still dont get fixed. One getting fixed is good but this game has loads of long standing bugs are equally egregious. > People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW When was wing 7 released again? > “Oh but there are balancing difficulties” which always get resolved, I agree with their way of dealing with issues all in one go, giving time to collect the majority of complaints and what people feel. I always remember how anet tried to nerf chrono's boon output way back when. They would gut the current method only for the community to work around it in a day to get the same effect. It took like 5 patches before anet finnally got chrono to where they wanted it to be. The game has a long history and while its easy to forget alot of the good/bad along the way, plenty of people still remember and feel some kind of way about how things played out. Its not just the big patches. Its the big patches massively spread out with (historically) terrible communication about patches and direction for the game, so all the miss steps players just have to deal with for who knows how many months or years and hope the silent overlords would not only fix things but get the fixes right in the next patch. I appreciate the spirit of these posts and I do agree the community does give anet the shit end of the time to much sometimes... but its not everyone or even most of the community (how many players are just out there silently enjoying the game not engaging on any forums?). Then there are times where anet rightful deserves to be called out, or at least questioned. Players also should be allowed to voice concern, otherwise whats the fucking point of a forum if all everyone is allowed to do is gargle the balls of the company.
I'm not sure what you mean by community driven company. Just because ANet after every expansion says 'we learned the lesson' it doesn't mean they listen.
I only play wvw and I think that gamemode could even be an e-sport and it could be a lot better in so many ways but anet never gave the attention or importance that it should. I get it that if you are a pve player you have little to complain but wvw players that like massive battles have a lot to say. As an experienced mmo player that played every mmo out there, wvw is unique, fast and super interesting. Anet not exploiting this just blows my mind.
can mods give upvote boosts? If yes, then I bet this post got one lmfao.
I'm a competitive-oriented (WvW) player. My main disappointment is that ANet is not experimenting with stuff anymore. It's the same stuff repackaged with every expansion. There is nothing new, and new weapons and specs, etc don't count because every change, in theory, increases the way you can play, but in reality, it decreases play options because the new thing is so broken that you can't play anything else. Meta is the worst it has ever been, and everyone agrees on this. There are so many competitive game modes ANet can implement, yet they don't. Where is our capture the flag? Instanced & timed assault events? New siege machines and modes related to them? Mount modes in WvW? A new map perhaps? But we get nothing. All the guilds have quit, and most of the time we can't even find organized enemies to fight.
Honestly I do understand the WvW parts, it definitely feels like they meant to improve and just never did. I’m hoping that the upcoming warclaw improvements aren’t just to make it PvE viable, but instead also to start improving the WvW gamemode It certainly feels like ANet is currently trying to tie up lose ends and take a look at the community again, so I’ll remain hopeful that I’m backing them for the right reasons
Until they fix the years-long neglected issue with people being able to buy dupes of things like Bank Slots -- with the sotware not killing the purchase because you have already reached a maximum, I will consider their other efforts great, but still a tad misplaced. YEARS later, and the problem still persists on many Gemstore purchases. Gotta take care of the basics people!
they're very nice ppl unfortunately for them, they manage an MMO
Anet is a Great studio (especially at the release of the base game). But Soto felt lackluster
> People complain about a lack of raids and boom, here comes JW This is incredibly disingenuous. If you want to know why ANet gets so much flak, you need not look much farther than the raid example for why. They promised 8 wings a year, then walked that back to less and less every following update. Then dropped them for Strikes that never got a consistent release cadence. One wing in 5 years is way too little and way too late especially when other teams in other MMOs manufacture raids, dungeons, and open world questing content with each expac without so much of a hitch.
Criticism isn't hate.
We aren't complaining about the devs, rather the business fucks. Devs are doing their best and want to make a good game. Business fucks want microtransactions, deliverables, jira tickets, etc.
When giving criticism of the game, I try (often I fail) to remember to include some examples of how they have done things well too. Because they have done amazing work.
Yea, I do. That's why I mostly always try defending them in most of my replies. I think it was only once or twice that I actually agreed that they did something bad, which also in the end didn't end up mattering much to me as it wasn't a big thing.
Waaaay more hate than it deserves. GW2 isn't a perfect game, but they've still done a great job. And I say that as an elementalist that had suffered greatly over the years. I still prefer GW2 over any of the other big MMOs.
They absolutely do, the crybabies here and on their forums are nuts. Some things are justified, but the vast majority of it is just entitled nonsense.
I agree, Arenanet is the absolute kindest, most accommodating dev team I have seen for a MMO in a long time, and to be consistent with it. I have a few more examples for you to add regarding their support team, some personal and some from associates. Furthermore, I've had to contact the dev team TWICE for a guild name change, and they responded within the hour, and were super polite about it the entire time. More than once myself, or another player I know, had to get in touch with support over a player's bad behavior with either spam, harassment, or any of the laundry list of problems that comes from tilted PVP players. Again, prompt, polite, and very transparent where they could be, and honest about the times they could not be for security reasons. Which is fair! Probably my favorite example of the support team being absolutely based was a few years back when an associate of mine bought HoT and PoF right before it went on sale as a combo pack. About 5-7 days beforehand. They emailed support to kindly ask if it was possible to refund the difference, and the money was on the way within four hours. Shoutout to the anet support team, NC Soft doesn't pay you guys enough. Last note; This is the only MMO I have played where FOMO is almost not a thing, at least for me. Most 'limited' items come back eventually in some way. I can probably name two that don't if I try really hard.
ANet markets to quaggan, and once they decide they're angry, they hate you and the egg you came from.
"we don't passionately hate things unless we wish they did better" Example: My Dad was a registered Republican for 50 years, he won't shut up about how much he hates Trump because he really wishes he could still be a Republican in good conscience.
Spot on. For starters, I don't think they can be compared to an AAA studio (Ubisoft has \~20k employees, ArenaNet has 300) but they are very clearly treated as one by some gamers. Whereas companies like Blizzard and Ubisoft are incredibly lackluster in certain areas for seemingly no reason, with ArenaNet you simply have to accept that the company can only do *so much*; they quite literally do not have the workforce to support all our needs and entitlements. I also think that a lot of criticism should really go out to NCSoft instead of ArenaNet. Guild Wars 1 was clearly a passion project, and such a thing doesn't tend to happen inside a traditional corporate structure with hard deadlines and shareholder pressure. Some of those same creative masterminds are still with ArenaNet now, but they simply are not at liberty to take as many risks as they did for Guild Wars 1.
the same 300 people that created heart of thorns created soto. one was an amazing expansion. the other felt like a seasonal update. anet is playing the game of " how much content can we not give while still demanding full price " game. it's sure to turn out well
I'm not really on board with this line of thinking. It's a business that aims to maximize profits based on the investments (e.g. worker wages) that they're able to do. They're not going to tell half of their creative workforce to sit on their asses and do nothing, in order to "play a game" where they purposefully release as little content as possible. It is more logical to assume that they lose more resources on things that don't lead to new content for Guild Wars 2, or that they simply have fewer resource (e.g. tighter deadlines). Considering the discussions that have already taken place on the company's financials, this doesn't seem illogical.
you maximize profits by doing as little as you can for as much as you can. hence why soto is lack luster. JW is going to be worse than soto content wise. IBS has more content than soto. soto was just a test to see how little they actually need to give us while still demanding near full price for an expansion. worst part is the community eats it up because of the casual nature of this game.
You don't gain money from making employees do as little as possible. They're still paying 300 employees' wages, just like in 2014.
What is the source on Anet having 300 employees?? I would have honestly guessed they had less than 50. Holy shit.
There 336 on linkedin. So i'd guess that at minimum. Not that that many are working on GW2, some are not developers others are working on unannounced project.
I don't have a source for it! I just googled it and found that number in a few places, but they also don't cite any references. Suffice to say, they don't have thousands of employees, which is why I think the comparison with AAA studios isn't completely valid.
you're just gonna get downvoted by the casual andy's in this game.
Did you really just return to my comment to rub that in my face? 😂 If karma mattered to me, I wouldn't be joining these conversations. Everyone knows the opinions are highly divided.
o7
Ubisoft, which is both a publisher and at least a dozen game studios, is an extremely poor point of comparison for a single studio with a single product. Something more in line in terms of a "AAA studio" comparison would be FromSoft, which has around 400 employees. Despite this, they release a AAA-level title every couple years or so, often with at least one excellent expansion. Still, it's not a great parallel as maintaining an MMO has some additional burdens compared to standalone titles, but the idea that AAA quality on a reasonable timeframe takes thousands of employees is absurd.
>I don't think they can be compared to an AAA studio Oh NOW they can't be compared, when the fanboys love to compare GW2 to WoW and FFXIV and are convinced it's far better than both. When it's actual criticism, suddenly they can't be compared, but man do you guys LOVE to compare when it's positive like mounts.
I'm not a fanboy, and I prefer both FFXIV and classic WoW over GW2. No clue why you think my opinion would be so one-dimensional. You're talking to one person, you know. I do not represent other people and I don't speak foe them.
the raid echo chamber tis filled with drama content for the public and to tear down the game at any chance
I liked SotO and look forward to JW. Of course SotO was not as huge as HoT or PoF, but it was never stated that it would. I bought SotO when it came out and i just finished the story a month ago. Still have lots of achievements and other stuff to do in those areas though. So for me SotO has kept men entertained until the next expansion.
Yes way more hate than they deserve. SOTO was not a bad expansion. It had good parts and bad parts as almost everything ever released does. The new weapons, balance changes, first two maps and the Astral Ward characters are all awesome. Rifting, in particular, was a lot of fun. I already had legendaries, but just did it for fun with guildies once a a week. Convergences seem interesting, but I don't do them much cause I don't need the mats from them. I've heard they can be quite profitable though. The Kryptis parts of the story and map are a bit mediocre. We didn't really get to know the Kryptis communities, the map has three metas that together are a bit awkward, and mechanics of the final meta are tied into the buff bar, which is horrible. There are a lot of other, very valid complaints on the maps, metas and rushed storylines. But the overall reaction after the third expansion seemed way out of proportion. Anet didn't really stick the landing sure, but I thought they did deliver a lot of good stuff with SOTO. But people were so angry right after the third update, I had to step away from reddit for a bit. Seems much better now, or at least less heated. Criticism is fine and might make for better future releases, but the trashing of the whole expansion or whole game is a bit much.
People complain when they care. Really unhappy players just leave. The game population is healthy, and by definition forums are populated by actual fans who care. That’s the best proof ANet does a good job.
Man I had some old friends that trashed on this game purely because it runs on older engines and other technical bs. I stopped hanging out with them for other reasons but that’s beside the point. I understand this game is older and has some drawbacks in being that way but I do not understand why people hate on games and companies in general. They made a game based on what was available at the time and work/worked around that.
Definitely
Didn't read, but yeah. Anet doesn't deserve any hate. The upcoming expac is solid. SotO was far from perfect but we received exactly what was announced, if not more. It was fair. The devs are doing their best, and if their best ain't enough for you. People should quit. Maybe move to EA, Ubisoft or Blizzard games.
100%
I think that, Anet put too much high standards to when releasing content, think about it. We went from engaging stories, wide maps and metas like the path of fire, living world stories and heart of thorns. And those projects, were projects that had a long development and thought out story writing. Then because WE as a community because we are never happy with anything coming our way we said that we wanted quicker and more content for us to enjoy. And they did just that, and it started with End of Dragons all the way to Secrets of the Obscure and the results were there, rushed stories, bland metas, characters from the story being forgotten. So who's fault is it? Cause all gaming developers there is not one who doesn't oblige to our needs as gamers. Because they need us more than we need them, so it comes down that we are all hypocrites.
You don't have your facts right. Yes the community always was and will ask for more content but in reality this had nothing to do with what actually happened. The reason why EoD and onwards was rushed was because of NCSoft.
Even if it is not Anet fault and NCsoft doing, we are still the problem here. We always find out a way to whine about anything, and the rushed content just proves that. There was a time where everyone was asking for a short time period of content release, whether it was Anet or NCSoft decision behind the curtains I don't really care about it, but that decision was made in spite of our discontent.
NCSoft is one of the most greedy publishers and GW2 is their only successful game. ArenaNet's living world release model was not bringing enough money in, NCSoft forced them to release EoD early. The expansion was clearly rushed because of this. Learning from this they swapped to SoTo model which didn't work so far, hoping the next one will be better. All this has nothing to do with what community wants. Gaming industry is not your local restaurant trying to satisfy all the customer needs. ArenaNet has certain quata to deliver that NCSoft gives them while trying to keep the community as happy as the can at the same time. After 10 years if they really adapt to whatever community asked for we would have actually get content not the likes of SoTO. They will just do the absolute minimum to keep money flowing.
Here we go again, the idiotic "let's blame NCSoft for ANet's mistakes" garbage. Do we need to remind you people that ANet tried to kill GW2 in order to make other projects and it was NCSoft stepping in that stopped it? There wouldn't BE much more GW2 post-Path of Fire had NCSoft done nothing.
While I do agree with some of the points you've made, I have to disagree with one. The gaming industry is a service where the more costumers you please the more money you make, its a give and take business. And there are too many examples out there that shows this. How do you as a developer please gamers? By giving them what they want proving even further the point I've made initially, we asked for things, we got it and now we bitch about it. But what happens if they fed us bs after bs the community will eventually leave, of course the die hard fans will stick around but the casual audience will leave, and to my perspective there are more casual players than die hard fans which means the casual player bring in more money.
I get the point you are trying to make but it really doesn't apply so much in GW2. This game is a niche within the niche gerne of MMOs. It's a f2p game and with 7.5 euros you can buy HoT + PoF during sale which is the biggest bulk and most popular content in the game still, that will entertain anyone for thousands of hours. It's the cheaperst and most casual friendly MMO you can play, it will always maintain some population as long as competition doesn't exist (unlikely anything similar will ever be released). Their main income is through the cash shop, not expansions. I absolutely love the game and I hope the next expansion will be amazing but they had fed us bs after bs as you called it for long time now, yet both we and the game is still here. They are not really listening though.