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A Message from Andrew Gray


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@MissZenith.1970 said:

  • Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.

What about if ArenaNet were to support some content creators and streamers who are, say, specifically teaching people and inviting their communities to join, because they see the raid community is shrinking and understand it's because of the xp-LFG loop? :thonk:Nothing would change, because the people that are watching those content creators are the people that would need that help the least. I mean, if you're looking at third-party sources for game information, and for some out-of-game help, you are already halfway there. Unfortunately for raids, the people you speak of are a very small part of the game community. Shocking, i know.

In the end, the final truth is that raids are simply a type of content that interests only a small minority of players. Initially some players were also interested in rewards coming from raids, but by now most of those people either obtained them, or gave up. Making steps towards raids won't change that.

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I'm SO glad that this is happening.
I predicted in the past, that the layoffs and the change in directorship will actually be something good for the game.So far, I see a lot of positive changes and if you guys are going to keep being so well organized I'm sure the game will reach a new high!Props to you ANET.

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I am personally committed to Fractals and see them as an area that deserves more focus and attention going forward. I'm happy to announce that Cameron Rich, who worked on Fractals during Season Three, will be taking the reins on a new Fractal as he rolls off his current duties.
Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract.

So in short:

  • It seems they don't even started working on next fractal. Even if this will be on same level as Nightmare and Shattered Observatory (last good fractals that got released) it will take a long time before they got release
  • Raids are really dead content now since they're focusing on strike missions. Strikes are already failure since they're too hard for casual players, too easy for raiders and not rewarding at all so no one really play them and since strikes already failed chances to get content that we actually want are close to zero now

If they would deliver end game content at normal pace, one wind per 3 months and fractals at least every 2 months, there would not be even this problem at first place. One raid and two fractals per year is not enough to keep engagement in game. It's simply not even acceptable in MMO on any level. Best part of all of this is ANet first disregarded raids to the point where people were leaving game since there was nothing new to do for whole year between new wing releases and now they're wondering why raid population is low, and on top of that they created strike missions (that simply no one wants to play) as bridge to content that is already dead because they didn't supported it for years.

We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.
No it's not. Its people simply refusing to put any effort in game. You simply search for build online and learn rotation and search for bosses mechanics. Gear is not a problem since you can use exotic gear. There are raid training guilds. And how situation looks? People don't want to even check metabattle to see if their build is good or read what their skills do and this is why we ended with over 10x difference in damage between open world players and raiders.
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@"Bassdeff.1895" said:

This, I know a lot of people who have skills, know the rotations, who can play their characters extremely well and would be fully capable of raiding. When I ask them why they don't the answer is "Because then I have to deal with raiders."

You know, I bet if all of the players that make these claims got together (I am sure there are at least 10 of them) they could make their own squad and then they wouldn't have to deal with the so called elitist gate keepers that are keeping them from raiding.

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Thank you for getting in touch with the community, and I'm hopeful for the game's future. I am going to point out some criticisms that I have, but understand that these are just the points I feel need addressing, and I am otherwise positive about the state of things.

"I can't go into a ton of details on episodes three and four because, you know, spoilers and all, but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting. "

I find that a little concerning, because I want to be able to log into the map and have it be in the state that I need to be able to do the things I intended to do. I don't want to have to run an hour or more of meta events to reach that point. I hope that whatever "push and pull" there is, it is self-contained to that aspect of the map, and will not define what content we have available to us. I also don't like the sound that eps 3 and 4 will only contain one map again. Once was fine, two is a pattern. A bad pattern. Bjora was a very underwhelming map, even after the second episode, and we expect better moving forward.

" Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated, though I apologize that our silence on the topic raised that concern."

Pity. Those efforts could be better spent on other aspects of the game. I was hopeful that you'd moved on from the small group instanced stuff.

"We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up."

Do not take this as a sign that players want a way to "ease into Raids." We do not. We want the existing raids to be EASIER so that we NEVER have to reach the difficulty level of the existing raids. Do NOT waste time on intermediary content. Nobody wants that. Don't live in the fantasy that GW2's population will ever be into raids as they currently exist.

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:

@Komodoro.7154 said:Will I be able to achiev the achievment of killing (downing ingame) a dev anywhere near? (I'm in Europe) >_>

A quick note on this: we have a weekly Let's Play WvW livestream every Thursday at 3:00 p.m. Pacific Time (UTC-8). Our devs alternate between NA and EU worlds each week, so you have a regular shot at it! You can watch live on twitch.tv/guildwars2

can we have a 'Seige of Anet weekend' event?

where there will be groups of Anets across all WvW tiers as the 4th world, automatically re-occupies SMC every round.The goal is to be the world that claims SMC from Anet

Of course being low in numbers, you guys have 100-200%(?) buff in stats to compensate for it, so each Anet toon is like a SMC lord

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If i may, raids and fractal cms wont ever be content with high participation or mass apeal because they work as aspirational content and most ppl in most mmos dont really get to actually achieve such aspirations but they deff check out the game and create an innitial interest because of such aspirations.

Imo, you should look how to better serve the playerbase that want said content because simppy put watching raid prog on twitch gets ppl asking about the game, gets them wanting to do that content. Plus a happy playerbase from any part of the game it may come is very willing to push their favourite game on discussions online, streams, videos etc.

Furthermore the problem isnt necessarily that ppl dont do harder content therefor they need bedium content, its that the non hardcore content is so easy that ppl dont need to understand the fundemental mechanics of the game to participate in it. The game NEEDS before any medium or hard content (preferably alongside hard content) to be able to teach and incentivise ppl to learn the game, its global mechanics and the more specialised mechanics (classes).

Ff14 has some test which if i understand correctly are basicly healing, dps and tanking dummies with time checks to sorta create the (u need x dps and hps to do this) while wow during wod had sorta the same thing with some scenario pve content which was heal checks and dps checks.

Not only gw2 needs that on a per class basis but also needs that for cc, boons, condies, immunities and every other mechanic the game might have. The game also needs to have rewards in place to incentivise ppl to actually engage with these systems.

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I welcome and looking forward for any new development and fun contents upcoming. I am just a bit stun reading the msg about those who left were not involved in the day to day development. I am not exactly sure what is the purpose or reasoning behind this being mentioned. many of those who left has contributed tremendously in the game up until today. even they are not doing day to day work, I think their contribution worth mentioning. I just feel when I read that sounds like those who left were no longer important. anyway. thanks and looking forward for positive future for gw2.

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I left the game over half a year ago now because I didn't like what I perceived as a lack of communication from Arena Net. Seeing this post gives me hope about the future of the game. Especially seeing that there will be more of a focus on repeatable content, a major factor that I personally thought was lacking. The major balance changes that I've heard went out recently, coupled with the promising information in this post, really makes me excited for the future of the game. Hopefully, this level of communication can remain the standard from now on. I'm still holding out for information on WvW and PvP, but I'm definitely more optimistic towards the game now, then I have been in a very long time. No doubt, there will still be many discouraged and dissatisfied players. However, I feel that the issues identified in this post (communication, layoffs, content) are signs that the devs have been listening the whole time. They've seen the complaints that players have had, and are making major moves to address these issues and provide solutions that please the widest audience. Honestly, I've not been this excited about the game since PoF came out. If this level of openness and communication keeps up, I and many others, will no doubt return to the game excited for the future. Thank you devs for the hard work you've put in!

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:[...]

  • I can't go into a ton of details on episodes three and four because, you know, spoilers and all, but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting.[...]

Feel like WvW? You mean more and more empty servers, horrible balancing (skill- and populationwise) and get totally ignored by Anet?You came with a roadmap for 2020 and telling us something about wvw in pve feeling?

Much wauw...

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Thank you so much for the clear communication, to the extent that you're able! We very much appreciate it and hope to see more in the future.

I'm almost certain I'm gonna get flamed for this but since you're discussing it, these are some of the issues that stop me and/or my friends from joining raids despite wanting to, and I'm going to guess they account for a portion of the issues other people have as well. I'm not asking for all of them to be changed or addressed, I realize that not everybody sees these things as an issue (especially those already raiding), and I'm not trying to start any fights. This is just a sampling of barriers I've seen, even with the strikes in place.

The game is designed in such a way that even people with a similar spec/gear can get as much as 8-10x as much DPS as others based on their rotation (I take that number from something a dev said in the past, I believe it was in a Guild Chat), but rotation is never addressed in-game. Even those that practice based on external builds/sources sometimes just can't 'git gud' enough to hit the higher end of the spectrum due to brain fog, memory issues, coordination problems, tremors, or (insert other possible issues here). There's nothing as demoralizing as looking up a build on Snowcrows and spending a ton of time and money outfitting yourself and practicing the rotation on a golem only to be told that your DPS is low and you should look up a build on Snowcrows, which is something that really happened to a friend of mine in the new strike. Not everybody's skill cap is the same. When your best isn't good enough, what do you do?

Due to the relatively low number of people in a raid group, this means there's less room to take in someone who's still learning their class or the fight. When I raided in another game there were four groups of players, which gave a little bit more leeway for newcomers to learn because the amount of individual responsibility on a single player was lower. I realize raids are balanced around 10 and it's not likely worth taking the resources to change at this point, I'm merely pointing it out because it's a barrier.

Hard dps checks like timers also discourage people, because you can be surviving and doing the mechanics just fine and then fail due to lack of time, which is super frustrating. Maybe they're put in there to ensure you don't waste too much time, but say it's a fight with a 10 minute timer and you get it to 5-10% every pull before the fight ends due to the timer running out. You're wasting 10 minutes per pull just because you don't have a slight more bit of dps, so it really just takes a lot longer overall because you're forced to restart over and over until you manage to have a spectacular run.

When I did the Whisper strike with a PUG, we got the mechanics down fine within a few pulls. It was DPS that held us back, and we were there for about two and a half hours before we killed it. I can't speak for some of the people since it was a PUG, but I know that several of us were geared and in 'meta' specs and had practiced rotations, yet DPS was still our major issue. A 'story mode'/easy difficulty raid with a lower dps threshold like many other games have would allow more people to enjoy 10-man content, and allow people to practice their build in a real-world environment and learn the mechanics of the fights in a lower-stress scenario (for raid fights that take more time to pick them up, since as I said, it wasn't the issue with the strike). Achievement progress/the best loot would be locked to normal and challenge mode versions, as appropriate. I personally think this would do more to step people up to 'normal' raiding than strikes do. I already regularly see people in strike LFGs requiring 50 LI to join their PUG anyways, which explicitly contradicts the 'this comes before raids' philosophy.

Another option would be redesigning combat so that rotation alone doesn't have an exponential impact on DPS, and using skills is more reactive than prescriptive. This would likely require a fairly serious overhaul of at least the way the skill animation/queueing system works, as well as a lot of skills, and I know it's unlikely you'll want to rock the boat that much. I definitely think there's something to be said for skill and practice, but the current dps disparity is quite exponential, and any reworks to even it out a bit could go a long way in making content more accessible.

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Something that would bypass the issue is if you gave raids 2 dificulties, a strike dificulty (easy mode) and cm that harder than the cms we currently have.

What i have noticed is that you guys (anet) are trying very hard to apeal to everyone with their content but that only leads to many players not liking the content for diff reasons (some find it too hard,other too easy for example).

Its much better of an aproach to simply create diff modes that cater to the 2 big demographics, one very easy and one very hard.

(Altho following up from my older post, even if you go for this aproach its always good to actually teach ppl how the game works).

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it makes no sense about the riad, those who do raids do not care if you have done all the strikes, it only matters one thing and it is "LI" even people ask LI to be able to strike ... it would be better to create a section in the riad for new people who can earn "LI" and leave gradually integrating the real riads.

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This sounds really good. I'm hoping the secret content is another expansion as we desperately need some new class, race or specialisations.

In regards to raids I think the main issue is that all the bosses seem to be a pure DPS race and the way to do enough DPS is to memorise a 20-40 step rotation.i know that's what pushed me away from raids despiterreally wanting to experience them. The mechanics for the bosses that I've attempted are very simple. Vanilla WoW level simple and the only thing that held my guild back from progressing was the lack of DPS.

I think if you want raids to appeal to a broader audience you need to focus more on mechanics and less on enrage timers and DPS races. This will allow it to not be exclusively for those that can devote such a long rotation to muscle memory and it will allow for more classes and specialisations to join.When it's a requirement to have a banner slave, chrono tank, druid healer, alacrity and quickness spammers if you want to progress at all that doesn't leave room for most people to play what they want.Obviously it shouldn't be a cake walk, raidsshould still be for the people who put effort in, but the current DPS requirements are ridiculous and excludes most classes and players.

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Strikes aren't going to help get people into raids. The mechanics differences between them and the mechanics of each individual raid encounter are just too large for using them to practice for the raids themselves. While a lot of skills are transferable between encounters, those are usually also already the easiest things to pick up since they tend to relate to rotations, since failing at that just means you try again a few seconds later.

The biggest issues with learning raids comes from encounter specific mechanics, which often end up resulting in long wait times between the points at which they can be attempted again, either because it results in a personal death wherein the player needs to wait until the encounter ends before they can try again, or because it wipes the entire party and the usual activity of either kicking the person who failed said mechanic, or people leaving the party results in another major waiting period while playing the LFG before letting people practice some more.

Having played WoW and FF14 since I stopped playing GW2, they both seem to have more or less ended up addressing that issue. WoW through lower difficulty versions of their raids that slowly increase their mechanics and reduce the amount of leeway that they give for failing them, and FF14 through having most mechanic failures only be personal and allowing infinite combat resurrections at a DPS loss, thus minimising downtime during progression (They also have multiple difficulty tiers, but theirs are a mixed bag when it comes to learning since compared to WoW they basically only have LFR and Mythic difficulties, so the change in mechanics is often huge).

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@Fire Attunement.9835 said:Hey everybody, my name is Andrew Gray. I took over as Content Design Lead a few months back and I want to talk a bit about last year, this year, and what's on the horizon for Guild Wars 2.

First, 2019 was hard. I've been with ArenaNet since 2004 and I can say without question that 2019 was the studio's most challenging. Many of the people who left in 2019 were not involved in the day-to-day development of Guild Wars 2, that much is true--but they were our friends, colleagues, and in some cases literally family. All the teams were affected by saying goodbye to so many colleagues. I'm proud of what we were able to ship under the circumstances, but we also understand the legacy we are trying to carry forward with Guild Wars 2; rather than slip into a status quo, we are all determined to create an even better game moving forward.

We've got our footing and we have exciting plans for the future of GW2. I can't talk about what I'm most excited for yet, but I can tell you 2020 is laying the groundwork for an exciting future. Here are some of the highlights:

Living World

  • Between episodes two and three, we already mentioned we'll be releasing a special new type of content called Visions of the Past; we'll have more details on that at PAX East.
  • I can't go into a ton of details on episodes three and four because, you know, spoilers and all, but I can tell you the map is meta-focused with a push-and-pull feel similar to WvW in a PvE setting. We want maps this season to bring something to them that makes them a permanent part of your play experience. That's why the culmination of Bjora Marches is a world boss and we're striving for high replayability for the episodes three and four map. We want it to be a unique, fun, and rewarding experience that will be part of your daily/weekly play cycle.
  • After episode four, again I'm going to be somewhat vague here, but we want to revisit some of the types of content we pioneered in the past. We learned a lot with Living World Season One and one thing it did very well was to bring the community into the story, and make their actions drive the plot forward. The Nightmare Tower, the election between Evon Gnashblade and Ellen Kiel – these things are memorable experiences because the community's combined efforts had an impact on the world. As you may have noticed, we've been testing tech with things like the boss rush event, that we hope to leverage later on in The Icebrood Saga to create a unique, community experience. But, learning lessons from Season 1, the bulk of this content will be built in a way that it is still playable after the Icebrood Saga comes to a close.
  • Generally, as a team, we are placing a greater emphasis on repeatable content (open world events, world bosses, WvW, and yes, even Fractals (hint hint)). We want to make the types of content that have a lasting, positive impact on the game, so expect that design approach to focus on that more going forward.

On the topic of Fractals…

  • Reports of their death have been greatly exaggerated, though I apologize that our silence on the topic raised that concern.
  • I am personally committed to Fractals and see them as an area that deserves more focus and attention going forward. I'm happy to announce that Cameron Rich, who worked on Fractals during Season Three, will be taking the reins on a new Fractal as he rolls off his current duties. This Fractal will feature a challenge mode. Beyond that, I'm working with the Systems Design team on more plans to keep Fractals fresh and exciting. I'm excited and when everything is ready to share, we'll have more details.

Raids

  • Raids are a trickier beast. They're a unique experience and community that we want to find better ways to support, the biggest challenge in creating more is the small audience they attract. We gathered data to determine why, and the most common answer was that there is a giant leap in difficulty between raids and other endgame content, and there isn't anything to help players work their way up.
  • Our intention was for Strike Missions to be that intermediary step into 10-person content. As we've mentioned before and you've likely noticed, strike missions are getting harder. Once a full suite of strike missions is complete there should be a graceful ramp up to the existing raid content rather than the imposing leap that previously existed, and our hope is once that ramp is in place, the number of players participating in raids will go up. In addition to that, we're striving to make improvements to Strike Missions themselves to make grouping easier, and to improve the rewards. We hope this will help introduce more people to 10-person content, which will in turn increase the number of people interested in Raids.
  • Regardless of if that succeeds or not, we understand the importance of balancing our efforts between accessible content with broad appeal, and content that appeals to the more hard core audience, and recognize that we need to do a better job of supporting the latter.

I'm excited for what's coming next. There's going to be more news coming out throughout this year that will make it pretty kitten clear why, but in the meantime, we're incredibly grateful for all your constructive feedback and continued support of the game.

Thanks for the feedback! The community appreciates it a lot!

Just one thing... If the team does want more people raiding, then some type of difficulty settings need to be in place for that to happen. Making content more accessible, and manageable, is always a good thing.

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