You made a joke. If Bokiz really wasn't annoyed/fed up with me, responding to his post would have been funnier. This isn't the first thread where he's had a go at me. So egging him on isn't really doesn't help the situation much, funny or not.Originally Posted by Fey
Vayne you are entitled to your opinion like I'm entitled to mine. I think sitting and waiting to see how this will play out instead of doing some kind of damage control is a huge mistake.
Most people do at least a little research before they buy a game and right now everywhere you look is loaded with comments of bait and switch and how the game has been ruined and will probably tank soon. Even with all the deleting and bans the official forums are still loaded with threads popping up about it.
I sincerely doubt A-Net will be releasing anything tomorrow which means they will be losing out on a ton of black friday sales. If they were hoping for more people Christmas is there best chance to get people other than release or free trials (which they screwed up by doing them during an event causing tons of lag, disconnects and bugs).
You imply they're to busy because they have a game to run. Well they just drove off a chunk of there customers and they are way less likely to draw in new customers with all the bad press. If they want to stay busy they better do something to fix this.
Most people don't research games. They really don't. They do the most minimal research anywhere. And if people do research the game, get this, many of them don't MIND vertical progression. The people that do mind seem to be in the minority.
I don't mind vertical progression I only mind gear grind. Now, that's not to say that gear creep is good, but again, Anet made a change and people are assuming that they're not just filling in a gap, they're starting this huge treadmill. And you know, I'm not assuming that.
Campaigning for a change when something is broken and bad is a good idea. Without knowing what Anet is going to do with this, you're making an assumption. What's bad for sales is a small vocal minority that has a belief. I have a different belief.
Should I campaign for change if I don't believe that change is necessarily going to be best for the game?
I'd really like to clarify my position on this.
If this is basically a one time deal, because Anet noticed an ommission and it should have been this way in the first place...in other words, lauched with more vertical progression, I'm fine with it. And that's what Anet is saying.
The fact that it was added after is what's causing the issues. If it was there from the beginning, Bokiz wouldn't be complaining about lost karma (a legit complaint in any event) and Centaur wouldn't be saying we were lied to, because we'd have seen that extra tier and that would have been it.
Anet is saying they're not going to keep doing this, they're doing it because something is missing. For years I've followed the company and they've let me down a lot less than other companies. I don't really suspect they've changed as much as people say they did. Of course, when you have five times the staff, things will be different, but the same guys still run the company.
I don't believe this is the beginning of massive gear progression, I believe this is basically a one time adjustment to what's been missing and if that is the case, I'm fine with it. It's certainly what Anet has said.
What I see is a panicked reaction to a fear of this game becoming a WoW clone or more like WoW. I don't really see that EVER happening.
People are reacting to a change they don't like but to say that that change is the beginning of a trend is premature. You need more data points to make a trend. We don't have enough of them.
To complain loudly and vocally now about a change that Anet saw as necessary is counterproductive to me, because if they did see it as necessary, then it has to remain in. All that this accomplishes is bad publicity.
The other option, of course, is that Anet really is lying to us and has been all along and now that they have our money they're going to change the game. I just don't buy it, sorry.
I legitimately saw the need for a new tier before they did this. That's why I'm not complaining. But if they do it again, you can bet I will be.
This has gone beyond whether adding a gear creep is good for the game or not.
If people do even minimal research all they will see is a ton of complaints that A-Net is an untrustworthy company and that the game is going to go the way of all the other failed MMORPG's that have gone under recently.
Yeah they can not address the problem and I'm sure in a few weeks people will have moved on to different games and won't be complaining as much but the damage will be done. The bad reviews will be out there and they will be stuck with this bad image.
Whether a gear grind in the game is good or bad doesn't change the fact that this was a very bad move from a PR standpoint and they need to fix it before it is to late.
And if Anet backs down, changes it and people leave the game anyway because it was needed? That's the other danger. The fans made the bad publicity. They went way over the top on this. Anet is in damage control. They can't just make a decision in two seconds on how to deal with it.
It's possible that this could damage the game greatly. It's possible this will blow over and some people will leave and some will sign on. But this whole thing could have been avoided if people wouldn't jump to conclusions. You remember the cash shop debacle when everyone freaked out? It came to nothing in the end. It didn't have to be like that. And this didn't have to be this way either.
I don't really believe Anet should make a knee jerk reaction because fans are up in arms. If they saw this as necessary and they take it out, then they're only hurting the game, because ultimately I think they know better than most fans.
I think they might be trying to come up with a compromise, and that takes time.
You say they went over the top but that's A-Net's fault. The sketchy way they have been releasing information and avoiding being clear about their intentions is why the fans did what they had to do.
Chris Whiteside is going to be doing a Q&A on Monday but that's at least a week later than he should have done it. If this was something they really felt the game needed than he should have been able to take a few minutes to answer questions and clearly explain why.
With every other situation they could give us a straightforward answer. When people were freaking out about the cash shop they would clearly state that the only thing that was there that you couldn't get from playing the game was cosmetic items. With the new gear they gave us BS reasons for needing higher stats (bridging the gap... Really?) and if they really had a reason for this other than the fact that this is the first new tier in a gear grind they should have been able to sit down and explain it.
Just to clarify, it's statements like this "This is just the beginning. In November, we’re only adding the first level of Infusions and Ascended Rings and Back slots, so that leaves us a lot of room to build upon these levels of Item progression in future content." that is what I was referring to about them being unclear.
You seem to see this as just the ascended gear for this dungeon but the way it looks to a lot of us is that the item progression in future content means new tiers of gear.
I think they purposefully left it unclear because they were considering adding a gear creep and they were testing the waters.
I don't think it's unclear at all. They are going to add a new level of progression, because it make sense for them to do so. But that doesn't mean they will KEEP adding levels of progression. That's the difference. They made the top level of progression too easy to get, and they'll have to find a way to make this one just a bit harder. Or more time consuming.
No game has infinite content. No game can. People ran out of content, or at least content they were willing to do. Every game has ways of dealing with this. Some games, mostly pay to play, slow play down tremendously. They make leveling a very slow affair, that you have to grind through. They make you repeat dungeons to get gear you need to progress to the next dungeon. They lock you out of dungeons so that you can only do them once per day. And the progress is slow so the content lasts longer.
Anet didn't do this. Anet made a game with relatively few slow points, and people used to grindy games flew threw it. Why wouldn't they, that's how they've been playing MMOs all along. So they run out of content. They're walking around in full exotics and they have no where to go except a legendary that offers only a better skin...if you like that skin. But what if you don't. What if you really don't like any of the legendary skins at all or only a few of them, or the ones you like aren't for the professions you play.
Guild Wars 2 is a huge world and there is a lot to do, but it's not infinite and, like almost all developers, Anet underestimated the amount of time it would take to clear it. Clearly most people do need SOME form of progression. So Anet is added in another tier, while they work on more content.
It would be pointless to add in just skins, because if people don't like those skins ther'es no reason to go for them. If it's stats, well, then you can always reskin them and have the better stats.
It's been said that Anet didn't care of people walked away and played other games, and that's only true to a point. Because a percentage of people who walk away never come back. Maybe even a large percentage. So it's an Anet's best interest to give people stuff to do.
As already pointed out, creating stuff to do takes time and money, and until that stuff is ready, they need a stopgap measure. Something that keeps people playing.
People like me, we'll play anyway. But a lot of people won't. And if a lot of people don't then the game is screwed anyway. The overhead is too high to have only a few people playing. They'd have to scale down staff and expectations of more content.
It's just not as simple as people are making it out to be. And Anet could have said more, except for the fact that no matter what they say, people jump all over it anyway. That's how it's been. It's better for them to craft what they're going to say carefully, because the wrong words will end up causing yet another shit storm, which Anet can not afford.
If fans were reasonable it would be easier, but they're not. So it's not so easy to just put words out there.
That is how you see it because they left the statement up to interpretation.
No matter if they were testing the waters or not this was a poor decision to make this close to the holidays especially since they seem so unprepared for the backlash that they should have expected. Even if they didn't expect it to be this big or vocal they had to know that something like this couldn't be added to the game without some kind of response.
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