It’s been a year since the last raid wing has come out

[Opopanax.1803]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?Easy ... they can measure how much time a person spends doing different things and how much money they spend. The amount spent would be split into activity categories by the ratio of time spent by that player doing the various things. Then do that for EVERY spending customer and get a complete, comprehensive picture of how total game revenue is generated by each activity.

You guys always make it sound like it a mystery how to figure this out to justify NOT making decisions based on this data. It's in fact very possible for Anet to determine these things.

@Asum.4960 said:The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it.

NO, that is NOT the only way to know how content influences revenues. Jeez, it's like it's the 1600's around here. There ARE ways to measure this.

Eh, no, that does not work at all, especially not with weekly reward gated content.

A 3h weekly clear with friends can make up 90% of a players enjoyment and reason to stay engaged and spending with the game, even if they then spend 30h over the week doing other stuff they feel pretty meh about, like LW content, to keep busy.

Hold on ... I didn't say I was measuring WHY people do things ... I said revenue can be attributed to different activities people do. That's not debatable ... it's fact that this can be done.

Statistically

, it's still relevant and useful measure and in this case, the population is high enough that statistics IS the proper approach to measuring this.

You can make up all the scenarios you want to prove or disprove whatever you like to suit your position; that's just being contrived and the beautiful thing about those exceptional scenarios you want to use ... the statistics of measuring revenue by content category will either show they are statistically significant or not .... that's why those contrived arguments don't make sense to influence what Anet decides or decides not to create for content. Measure revenue generated by content categories DOES make sense to influence that.

We don't have guess what the distribution of revenue is over the content ... it's a measurable thing and I have no doubt there is some level of competence at Anet that is looking at something like this to come to the conclusion they should focus less on creating raids; it took me a whole 15 minutes to think this would be measured ... and it's not unique to MMO's ... an competent business will want to know what product lines are making them the money. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any business that wants to be successful to be measuring these things. The only reason anyone would discourage measuring it is because they think ignoring it makes their argument for certain types of content better.

@Asum.4960 said:The idea that you can just blankly attribute spending according to where time is spent is ridiculous, even if we forget about afk times.

There is nothing ridiculous about statistical approach to measuring revenue per content category. Whatever scenario you want to present will be represented PROPERLY in the resulting revenue distributions EVEN with AFK times or whatever else you think invalidates it.

I guess Anet made the right decision and revenue went up in 2019 with their shift to focusing on the supposed money maker LW only then, and they just forgot to tell the revenue.

I'm not saying statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood.

Besides, it's a self-perpetuating prediction that when you release mostly LW content it then get's mostly played, from which you then conclude statistically it's mostly responsible for the revenue, causing you to then focus on releasing more LW in favour of other content.The point where you know that's likely not how it works is if revenue then plummets by a whopping 25%+ as a lot of people are just getting filler content in which they spend a lot of time but don't really care about, over the content that actually engages them to keep them spending, which they are waiting for.

If there was one LW release every 1-3 years and a Raid Wing/Fractal CM every 3 months, majority playtime (and statistically shown contribution to revenue) would be Raids/Fractals, but like with the over done focus on LW, actual total revenue would also plummet (as LW players lose interest) even as statistics would say more Raids/Fractals = more money.Point is, they would have likely done better catering to both.

If you don't know why people play certain content or what their actual engagement level with it is, which statistics can't accurately tell you as it doesn't necessarily correlate with playtime, especially not for time/reward gated content, then you don't know why people are spending.

If you think Anet too competent to not make such mistakes, then, well..

Besides, non of that accounts for the buzz around content like Raids, like community driven Raid tournaments driving more eyes on the game as official LW announcement streams, which Anet always has been incredibly incompetent in recognising and utilising.

Nothing here invalidates the idea of using statistics to measure what parts of the game result in revenue. You didn't even know it could be done a few hours ago, so I told you how ... now your expertise in the matter is enough that you continuously tell me it's a bad idea? I'm pretty sure you didn't get educated so much in the last few hours that you're qualified to make that claim. That's just another example of wanting people to ignore information that doesn't result in the narrative that you think will get you more raids.

You can make statements that statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood. ... that's just unqualified generalizations ... those generalizations don't mean Anet shouldn't do it or if they do, they will suffer those issues. The bottomline is that no matter what you want to believe how awesome raids are for the game and no matter how you think Anet arrived at the conclusion to slow their development, it's not unreasonable to think that raids aren't being developed because they don't make enough revenue. In fact if you are going to go as far as guessing because of your apparent aversion to 'science' ... lack of revenue is probably the

most

reasonable guess you can have as to why we have reduced raid development. Any indication this can't be measured is nonsense, so don't pretend it's unreasonable to conclude lack of revenue is a ridiculous cause.

One thing I do know ... if raids were making Anet tons of money ... you would have tons of raids being cranked out. You don't need anything but common sense to know that ... but somehow for you it's ridiculous to claim that raids might be cancelled/delayed because they don't make much or any revenue? The fact is this ... you don't want anyone to think there is

anything

bad related to raids because you don't care about the game, you just want raids, at any cost to anyone.

Or you weren't educated enough not to enforce imaginative ideas onto others and to derail them for not buying it. Nothing validates your "Science".

That doesn't make sense .. people use statistics all the time to measure what their customers are doing with their services or goods they are purchasing. The validation is the application of statistics in business.

Yes, but not by you and your expertise.

Let's just say I know enough that I'm not in denial about how businesses use statistics to gather information about what their customers want and where they spend their money. It's interesting you assume I know as little as anyone else here. You are aware that such information is available in courses as basic as a 3 year college business diploma right? ... or maybe you aren't. Let's just say this isn't PhD level stuff. What I do recommend is that you don't assuming there aren't educated people out there that know these things exist, are real and are used frequently.

No industries do their analysis and decision making with such narrow minded data gathering and structure.

What narrow minded data gathering and structure are you referring to? No one is being specific about exactly what Anet is doing so whatever you have in mind behind this statement ... clearly your assumption are beyond what anyone is discussing. I'm simply stating that if Anet wanted to determine revenues associated with different content, they could do so ... and it's not ridiculous to think they are doing some kind of exercise like this to make business decisions. Anyone that thinks otherwise is being rather ignorant.

You have sufficiently proven your point, Obtena. Common sense and numbers are the clear winner here; it is often times pointless to continue arguing with many on this forum. Several even in this thread think they "win" so long as they respond last, even if they leave questions unanswer and simply repeat themselves. I learned long ago that when you recognize those posters, it is rarely helpful to reply to them more than once!

[Asum.4960]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?Easy ... they can measure how much time a person spends doing different things and how much money they spend. The amount spent would be split into activity categories by the ratio of time spent by that player doing the various things. Then do that for EVERY spending customer and get a complete, comprehensive picture of how total game revenue is generated by each activity.

You guys always make it sound like it a mystery how to figure this out to justify NOT making decisions based on this data. It's in fact very possible for Anet to determine these things.

@Asum.4960 said:The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it.

NO, that is NOT the only way to know how content influences revenues. Jeez, it's like it's the 1600's around here. There ARE ways to measure this.

Eh, no, that does not work at all, especially not with weekly reward gated content.

A 3h weekly clear with friends can make up 90% of a players enjoyment and reason to stay engaged and spending with the game, even if they then spend 30h over the week doing other stuff they feel pretty meh about, like LW content, to keep busy.

Hold on ... I didn't say I was measuring WHY people do things ... I said revenue can be attributed to different activities people do. That's not debatable ... it's fact that this can be done.

Statistically

, it's still relevant and useful measure and in this case, the population is high enough that statistics IS the proper approach to measuring this.

You can make up all the scenarios you want to prove or disprove whatever you like to suit your position; that's just being contrived and the beautiful thing about those exceptional scenarios you want to use ... the statistics of measuring revenue by content category will either show they are statistically significant or not .... that's why those contrived arguments don't make sense to influence what Anet decides or decides not to create for content. Measure revenue generated by content categories DOES make sense to influence that.

We don't have guess what the distribution of revenue is over the content ... it's a measurable thing and I have no doubt there is some level of competence at Anet that is looking at something like this to come to the conclusion they should focus less on creating raids; it took me a whole 15 minutes to think this would be measured ... and it's not unique to MMO's ... an competent business will want to know what product lines are making them the money. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any business that wants to be successful to be measuring these things. The only reason anyone would discourage measuring it is because they think ignoring it makes their argument for certain types of content better.

@Asum.4960 said:The idea that you can just blankly attribute spending according to where time is spent is ridiculous, even if we forget about afk times.

There is nothing ridiculous about statistical approach to measuring revenue per content category. Whatever scenario you want to present will be represented PROPERLY in the resulting revenue distributions EVEN with AFK times or whatever else you think invalidates it.

I guess Anet made the right decision and revenue went up in 2019 with their shift to focusing on the supposed money maker LW only then, and they just forgot to tell the revenue.

I'm not saying statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood.

Besides, it's a self-perpetuating prediction that when you release mostly LW content it then get's mostly played, from which you then conclude statistically it's mostly responsible for the revenue, causing you to then focus on releasing more LW in favour of other content.The point where you know that's likely not how it works is if revenue then plummets by a whopping 25%+ as a lot of people are just getting filler content in which they spend a lot of time but don't really care about, over the content that actually engages them to keep them spending, which they are waiting for.

If there was one LW release every 1-3 years and a Raid Wing/Fractal CM every 3 months, majority playtime (and statistically shown contribution to revenue) would be Raids/Fractals, but like with the over done focus on LW, actual total revenue would also plummet (as LW players lose interest) even as statistics would say more Raids/Fractals = more money.Point is, they would have likely done better catering to both.

If you don't know why people play certain content or what their actual engagement level with it is, which statistics can't accurately tell you as it doesn't necessarily correlate with playtime, especially not for time/reward gated content, then you don't know why people are spending.

If you think Anet too competent to not make such mistakes, then, well..

Besides, non of that accounts for the buzz around content like Raids, like community driven Raid tournaments driving more eyes on the game as official LW announcement streams, which Anet always has been incredibly incompetent in recognising and utilising.

Nothing here invalidates the idea of using statistics to measure what parts of the game result in revenue. You didn't even know it could be done a few hours ago, so I told you how ... now your expertise in the matter is enough that you continuously tell me it's a bad idea? I'm pretty sure you didn't get educated so much in the last few hours that you're qualified to make that claim. That's just another example of wanting people to ignore information that doesn't result in the narrative that you think will get you more raids.

You can make statements that statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood. ... that's just unqualified generalizations ... those generalizations don't mean Anet shouldn't do it or if they do, they will suffer those issues. The bottomline is that no matter what you want to believe how awesome raids are for the game and no matter how you think Anet arrived at the conclusion to slow their development, it's not unreasonable to think that raids aren't being developed because they don't make enough revenue. In fact if you are going to go as far as guessing because of your apparent aversion to 'science' ... lack of revenue is probably the

most

reasonable guess you can have as to why we have reduced raid development. Any indication this can't be measured is nonsense, so don't pretend it's unreasonable to conclude lack of revenue is a ridiculous cause.

One thing I do know ... if raids were making Anet tons of money ... you would have tons of raids being cranked out. You don't need anything but common sense to know that ... but somehow for you it's ridiculous to claim that raids might be cancelled/delayed because they don't make much or any revenue? The fact is this ... you don't want anyone to think there is

anything

bad related to raids because you don't care about the game, you just want raids, at any cost to anyone.

Yes, thank you Obtena for educating me on the existence of Statistics and that they are actually used, quite effectively in a multitude of areas and industries, which I absolutely disputed. My apparent aversion to science truly has been cured.Clearly hardcore content is bad and revenue is going up since that's been dealt with, and of course you are right, I don't care about this franchise that I've been playing since over 15 years.

As amusing as it is watching you build up this entire case in your head where I don't believe in statistics or Science as whole apparently, or don't understand to which extend they can and are widely used extremely effectively, while disregarding any counter points about shortcomings and downfalls, I'm tired of arguing against strawmen and ad hominems like usually the case with you, so let's call it a day.

@"Opopanax.1803" said:You have sufficiently proven your point, Obtena. Common sense and numbers are the clear winner here; it is often times pointless to continue arguing with many on this forum. Several even in this thread think they "win" so long as they respond last, even if they leave questions unanswer and simply repeat themselves. I learned long ago that when you recognize those posters, it is rarely helpful to reply to them more than once!

Except, and while I don't like to call people out personally, that's literally Obtena in a nutshell.Complete disregard and dismissal of any points anyone makes they are arguing with without providing tangible counter points, appealing to authority with an unseemly combination of arrogance and ignorance, followed by a construction of a strawman which is then spammed over and over with the dismissal of any actual point made until the opposite eventually grows tired of engaging with that.I can hardly count the amount of discussions I've seen going into the gutter over the years with their arrival and utilising this strategy.

Just repeatedly stating that Anet has ALL the data and therefor is always right in their decision making and it can't be argued because statistics are a perfect and infallible science is just not an appealing or convincing argument, especially when the publicly available numbers clearly reflect some grave miscalculations and decisions over the last year or so.

What exactly those mistakes were can be argued about, but then actually do that instead of just grasping at fallacies.

[Obtena.7952]

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?Easy ... they can measure how much time a person spends doing different things and how much money they spend. The amount spent would be split into activity categories by the ratio of time spent by that player doing the various things. Then do that for EVERY spending customer and get a complete, comprehensive picture of how total game revenue is generated by each activity.

You guys always make it sound like it a mystery how to figure this out to justify NOT making decisions based on this data. It's in fact very possible for Anet to determine these things.

@Asum.4960 said:The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it.

NO, that is NOT the only way to know how content influences revenues. Jeez, it's like it's the 1600's around here. There ARE ways to measure this.

Eh, no, that does not work at all, especially not with weekly reward gated content.

A 3h weekly clear with friends can make up 90% of a players enjoyment and reason to stay engaged and spending with the game, even if they then spend 30h over the week doing other stuff they feel pretty meh about, like LW content, to keep busy.

Hold on ... I didn't say I was measuring WHY people do things ... I said revenue can be attributed to different activities people do. That's not debatable ... it's fact that this can be done.

Statistically

, it's still relevant and useful measure and in this case, the population is high enough that statistics IS the proper approach to measuring this.

You can make up all the scenarios you want to prove or disprove whatever you like to suit your position; that's just being contrived and the beautiful thing about those exceptional scenarios you want to use ... the statistics of measuring revenue by content category will either show they are statistically significant or not .... that's why those contrived arguments don't make sense to influence what Anet decides or decides not to create for content. Measure revenue generated by content categories DOES make sense to influence that.

We don't have guess what the distribution of revenue is over the content ... it's a measurable thing and I have no doubt there is some level of competence at Anet that is looking at something like this to come to the conclusion they should focus less on creating raids; it took me a whole 15 minutes to think this would be measured ... and it's not unique to MMO's ... an competent business will want to know what product lines are making them the money. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any business that wants to be successful to be measuring these things. The only reason anyone would discourage measuring it is because they think ignoring it makes their argument for certain types of content better.

@Asum.4960 said:The idea that you can just blankly attribute spending according to where time is spent is ridiculous, even if we forget about afk times.

There is nothing ridiculous about statistical approach to measuring revenue per content category. Whatever scenario you want to present will be represented PROPERLY in the resulting revenue distributions EVEN with AFK times or whatever else you think invalidates it.

I guess Anet made the right decision and revenue went up in 2019 with their shift to focusing on the supposed money maker LW only then, and they just forgot to tell the revenue.

I'm not saying statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood.

Besides, it's a self-perpetuating prediction that when you release mostly LW content it then get's mostly played, from which you then conclude statistically it's mostly responsible for the revenue, causing you to then focus on releasing more LW in favour of other content.The point where you know that's likely not how it works is if revenue then plummets by a whopping 25%+ as a lot of people are just getting filler content in which they spend a lot of time but don't really care about, over the content that actually engages them to keep them spending, which they are waiting for.

If there was one LW release every 1-3 years and a Raid Wing/Fractal CM every 3 months, majority playtime (and statistically shown contribution to revenue) would be Raids/Fractals, but like with the over done focus on LW, actual total revenue would also plummet (as LW players lose interest) even as statistics would say more Raids/Fractals = more money.Point is, they would have likely done better catering to both.

If you don't know why people play certain content or what their actual engagement level with it is, which statistics can't accurately tell you as it doesn't necessarily correlate with playtime, especially not for time/reward gated content, then you don't know why people are spending.

If you think Anet too competent to not make such mistakes, then, well..

Besides, non of that accounts for the buzz around content like Raids, like community driven Raid tournaments driving more eyes on the game as official LW announcement streams, which Anet always has been incredibly incompetent in recognising and utilising.

Nothing here invalidates the idea of using statistics to measure what parts of the game result in revenue. You didn't even know it could be done a few hours ago, so I told you how ... now your expertise in the matter is enough that you continuously tell me it's a bad idea? I'm pretty sure you didn't get educated so much in the last few hours that you're qualified to make that claim. That's just another example of wanting people to ignore information that doesn't result in the narrative that you think will get you more raids.

You can make statements that statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood. ... that's just unqualified generalizations ... those generalizations don't mean Anet shouldn't do it or if they do, they will suffer those issues. The bottomline is that no matter what you want to believe how awesome raids are for the game and no matter how you think Anet arrived at the conclusion to slow their development, it's not unreasonable to think that raids aren't being developed because they don't make enough revenue. In fact if you are going to go as far as guessing because of your apparent aversion to 'science' ... lack of revenue is probably the

most

reasonable guess you can have as to why we have reduced raid development. Any indication this can't be measured is nonsense, so don't pretend it's unreasonable to conclude lack of revenue is a ridiculous cause.

One thing I do know ... if raids were making Anet tons of money ... you would have tons of raids being cranked out. You don't need anything but common sense to know that ... but somehow for you it's ridiculous to claim that raids might be cancelled/delayed because they don't make much or any revenue? The fact is this ... you don't want anyone to think there is

anything

bad related to raids because you don't care about the game, you just want raids, at any cost to anyone.

Yes, thank you Obtena for educating me on the existence of Statistics and that they are actually used, quite effectively in a multitude of areas and industries, which I absolutely disputed. My apparent aversion to science truly has been cured.Clearly hardcore content is bad and revenue is going up since that's been dealt with, and of course you are right, I don't care about this franchise that I've been playing since over 15 years.

As amusing as it is watching you build up this entire case in your head where I don't believe in statistics or Science as whole apparently, or don't understand to which extend they can and are widely used extremely effectively, while disregarding any counter points about shortcomings and downfalls, I'm tired of arguing against strawmen and ad hominems like usually the case with you, so let's call it a day.

Hey ...YOU asked me:

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?

Why would you ask if you didn't know? Just to make an argument I suspect: Congratulations, you did just that.

What you fail to see is that I gave you an answer that was more than reasonable; YOU gave me the platform to explain this, so don't try to pretend that there is some weird voodoo magic needed to figure out what I'm talking about. There isn't ANYTHING unreasonable in believing that Anet isn't going to develop content that doesn't make them money ... which is something they CAN measure; for some reason that's incomprehensible to you. Believe whatever you want but you need to come to terms with the fact that WHATEVER the reason is ... it was enough. Get over it.

[zealex.9410]

@Cyninja.2954 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@"Raknar.4735" said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?It's not like most Raiders just play Raids, or just make gemstore purchases upon new Raid releases, yet Raids and the prospect of more of them might be the only thing keeping them engaged with the game as a whole (including some LW) and spending.

The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it. If revenue plummets to record depths, as it did, without Raids, Fractals, Expansions and such, it stands to reason that LW isn't what is solely carrying the game - and that those less supported "niches" were quite valuable.

Thread winner right her.

How else would people explain the 180 they did in early January when announcing that work on an expansion has begun? Let that sink in by the way. They announced that they are starting work on an expansion, unlike the 2 times before where work on expansions had progressed far enough to make proper announcements.

There is pretty much only 1 reason for this: to buy time due to terrible financial performance, hopefully keeping players interested until a proper preview can be made. Which then hopefully will keep players hold out long enough until the expansion launches.

@Katary.7096 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Google the release dates of raids starting with wing 4.

What you will find is that the release cadence slowed to 1 wing per year, increasing from 1 per 3/4 year.

It's a perfect example of how additional difficulty has slowed content. Not only that, but adding a challenge mode with 1-time additional rewards, which players can re-run for fun, or completely ingore, hardly splits the community.

It is indicative of either correlation or causation and given the fact that it is reasonable to assume that developing content with multiple difficulty settings takes more time than the same content with static difficulty, we can make a good argument for causation. Though we do not know for certain, since they might have downsized the raid team around the time that wing 4 was in development, we could be attributing the combined delay entirely to the presence of multiple difficulties, when there really were various reasons.Whether the resources spent on the "one and done" type challenge modes are a wise investment is up for debate as far as I am concerned.

Sure we can't be sure that other factors were also not contributing. For example, we know some delay came from the past approach of tying raid releases to story episode releases, which in part also caused delay.

The main argument from a raider perspective always has been:The content development is already very slow, delaying it even further will harm the game mode, from a pure effectiveness of getting players raid ready it makes no sense to offer multiple difficulties.

This, at least for me, was never about exclusivness or denying others access to the content, why else would I and others take our time to actively train new raiders?

It was always about how best to utilize the limited resources given for the game mode without impairing other game modes by demanding additional resources.

@Katary.7096 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:Unlike say an easy mode which would see a split of new raiders training into a potentially ineffective "easy mode" (every one can have their own opinion of how effective this would have been, I have explained why I do not believe this to be useful) and regular mode trainig. That can not be disputed.

Are you sure that split is the correct term in this case? The majority of a hypothetical "easy mode" raid audience should be comprised of people who are generally not interested in raid content and since the "easy mode" raids, according to suggestions from this forum, would effectively be open world content on a smaller map and with a player cap of 10, I do not see large parts the raid community switching over.

I am only looking at easy mode raids from the perspective of preparing and getting players into regular raids. That was the main argument stated in the past for why this would be a worthy endevour. From that perspective, splitting the player base is a bad idea.

If people want to make an argument for story mode raids so players can solo them or similar approaches, I would simply refer to the added work load and the required compensation from some where else.

I would also argue that to get players interested in group content, other fresh content would work just as well and would be better resources spent on. From this perspective strikes are a better approach to hopefully entice players into trying group content.

@Katary.7096 said:

@Cyninja.2954 said:I personally would have gladly accepted no challenge modes in raids if it had meant a faster release cycle for the content.

Ultimately depends on much faster content would have been released. 2 weeks should not have made much of a difference, but 2 months could be a deal worth taking.

Sure and one could argue that developing a pure story mode, intended for story purposes only, with super simplified bosses takes a lot less time than designing an easy mode for training. In fact, many of the strikes are being developed just that way at the moment with shared resources between story mode and the actual strike.

Tbf Mo had confirmed the development of expac 2 way before its reveal.

[Vilin.8056]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?Easy ... they can measure how much time a person spends doing different things and how much money they spend. The amount spent would be split into activity categories by the ratio of time spent by that player doing the various things. Then do that for EVERY spending customer and get a complete, comprehensive picture of how total game revenue is generated by each activity.

You guys always make it sound like it a mystery how to figure this out to justify NOT making decisions based on this data. It's in fact very possible for Anet to determine these things.

@Asum.4960 said:The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it.

NO, that is NOT the only way to know how content influences revenues. Jeez, it's like it's the 1600's around here. There ARE ways to measure this.

Eh, no, that does not work at all, especially not with weekly reward gated content.

A 3h weekly clear with friends can make up 90% of a players enjoyment and reason to stay engaged and spending with the game, even if they then spend 30h over the week doing other stuff they feel pretty meh about, like LW content, to keep busy.

Hold on ... I didn't say I was measuring WHY people do things ... I said revenue can be attributed to different activities people do. That's not debatable ... it's fact that this can be done.

Statistically

, it's still relevant and useful measure and in this case, the population is high enough that statistics IS the proper approach to measuring this.

You can make up all the scenarios you want to prove or disprove whatever you like to suit your position; that's just being contrived and the beautiful thing about those exceptional scenarios you want to use ... the statistics of measuring revenue by content category will either show they are statistically significant or not .... that's why those contrived arguments don't make sense to influence what Anet decides or decides not to create for content. Measure revenue generated by content categories DOES make sense to influence that.

We don't have guess what the distribution of revenue is over the content ... it's a measurable thing and I have no doubt there is some level of competence at Anet that is looking at something like this to come to the conclusion they should focus less on creating raids; it took me a whole 15 minutes to think this would be measured ... and it's not unique to MMO's ... an competent business will want to know what product lines are making them the money. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any business that wants to be successful to be measuring these things. The only reason anyone would discourage measuring it is because they think ignoring it makes their argument for certain types of content better.

@Asum.4960 said:The idea that you can just blankly attribute spending according to where time is spent is ridiculous, even if we forget about afk times.

There is nothing ridiculous about statistical approach to measuring revenue per content category. Whatever scenario you want to present will be represented PROPERLY in the resulting revenue distributions EVEN with AFK times or whatever else you think invalidates it.

I guess Anet made the right decision and revenue went up in 2019 with their shift to focusing on the supposed money maker LW only then, and they just forgot to tell the revenue.

I'm not saying statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood.

Besides, it's a self-perpetuating prediction that when you release mostly LW content it then get's mostly played, from which you then conclude statistically it's mostly responsible for the revenue, causing you to then focus on releasing more LW in favour of other content.The point where you know that's likely not how it works is if revenue then plummets by a whopping 25%+ as a lot of people are just getting filler content in which they spend a lot of time but don't really care about, over the content that actually engages them to keep them spending, which they are waiting for.

If there was one LW release every 1-3 years and a Raid Wing/Fractal CM every 3 months, majority playtime (and statistically shown contribution to revenue) would be Raids/Fractals, but like with the over done focus on LW, actual total revenue would also plummet (as LW players lose interest) even as statistics would say more Raids/Fractals = more money.Point is, they would have likely done better catering to both.

If you don't know why people play certain content or what their actual engagement level with it is, which statistics can't accurately tell you as it doesn't necessarily correlate with playtime, especially not for time/reward gated content, then you don't know why people are spending.

If you think Anet too competent to not make such mistakes, then, well..

Besides, non of that accounts for the buzz around content like Raids, like community driven Raid tournaments driving more eyes on the game as official LW announcement streams, which Anet always has been incredibly incompetent in recognising and utilising.

Nothing here invalidates the idea of using statistics to measure what parts of the game result in revenue. You didn't even know it could be done a few hours ago, so I told you how ... now your expertise in the matter is enough that you continuously tell me it's a bad idea? I'm pretty sure you didn't get educated so much in the last few hours that you're qualified to make that claim. That's just another example of wanting people to ignore information that doesn't result in the narrative that you think will get you more raids.

You can make statements that statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood. ... that's just unqualified generalizations ... those generalizations don't mean Anet shouldn't do it or if they do, they will suffer those issues. The bottomline is that no matter what you want to believe how awesome raids are for the game and no matter how you think Anet arrived at the conclusion to slow their development, it's not unreasonable to think that raids aren't being developed because they don't make enough revenue. In fact if you are going to go as far as guessing because of your apparent aversion to 'science' ... lack of revenue is probably the

most

reasonable guess you can have as to why we have reduced raid development. Any indication this can't be measured is nonsense, so don't pretend it's unreasonable to conclude lack of revenue is a ridiculous cause.

One thing I do know ... if raids were making Anet tons of money ... you would have tons of raids being cranked out. You don't need anything but common sense to know that ... but somehow for you it's ridiculous to claim that raids might be cancelled/delayed because they don't make much or any revenue? The fact is this ... you don't want anyone to think there is

anything

bad related to raids because you don't care about the game, you just want raids, at any cost to anyone.

Or you weren't educated enough not to enforce imaginative ideas onto others and to derail them for not buying it. Nothing validates your "Science".

That doesn't make sense .. people use statistics all the time to measure what their customers are doing with their services or goods they are purchasing. The validation is the application of statistics in business.

Yes, but not by you and your expertise.

Let's just say I know enough that I'm not in denial about how businesses use statistics to gather information about what their customers want and where they spend their money.There's a difference between claim to know enough, and actually learns this execution.

It's interesting you assume I know as little as anyone else here. You are aware that such information is available in courses as basic as a 3 year college business diploma right? ... or maybe you aren't. Let's just say this isn't PhD level stuff. What I do recommend is that you don't assume there aren't educated people out there that know these things exist, are real and are used frequently ... and when you do have a discussion with one of those people, don't dismiss what they know as crazy 'imaginative ideas' that they have to trick people into believing.I have absolutely no doubt with the course, it's only your logic and education I am questioning. Where is the

evidence

to support your claim? Or did your colledge only taught you to only brought out biased opinions? Have you even any experience in this field of work?

No industries do their analysis and decision making with such narrow minded data gathering and structure.

What narrow minded data gathering and structure are you referring to? No one is being specific about exactly what Anet is doing so whatever you have in mind behind this statement ... clearly your assumption are beyond what anyone is discussing. I'm simply stating that if Anet wanted to determine revenues associated with different content, they could do so ... and it's not ridiculous to think they are doing some kind of exercise like this to make business decisions. Anyone that thinks they couldn't do this is being rather ignorant.

Exactly what I said, you just stated you do not know your data and you're not even sure your claim. Therefore whatever logic you think isn't ridiculous is not something that's a proven business decision for Anet that needs to "educate" other fellow members in a gaming forum.

[Vilin.8056]

@Opopanax.1803 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Asum.4960 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

The goal of the game isn't to help raids ... it's to make money. if raids made more money, you would see more raids. Clearly, raids are a big fail for revenues ... enough to cause them to likely be canned permanently.

And yet since we don't have Raid, Fractal and other repeatable hardcore content releases anymore which actually retain players longterm and are just getting short lived LW content, revenue has plummeted to never seen before record lows.

That doesn't make sense. If raids didn't make money, what makes you think they were necessary to keep the players who spent money in the game? What's the point of having a long term goal for players that don't spend enough money to maintain the content they play?

Just because something isn't directly monetizeable doesn't mean it doesn't facilitate revenue in other ways like player retention, either by keeping players directly engaged, serving as future long term goal/ambition, being good for advertisement (community wise in forms of streams or in house) or giving the game a general sense of being alive and having a future.

OK ... but that doesn't change what i said ... if raids were making Anet money, they would continue to develop them. And let's be clear ... NONE of the content in this game is directly monetized except expansions, and we have a pretty good idea that the revenues from expansions isn't what's making this game profitable.

And how would Anet know that content like Raids didn't indirectly drive a decent amount of revenue?Easy ... they can measure how much time a person spends doing different things and how much money they spend. The amount spent would be split into activity categories by the ratio of time spent by that player doing the various things. Then do that for EVERY spending customer and get a complete, comprehensive picture of how total game revenue is generated by each activity.

You guys always make it sound like it a mystery how to figure this out to justify NOT making decisions based on this data. It's in fact very possible for Anet to determine these things.

@Asum.4960 said:The only way to really know is to stop developing them and content like it.

NO, that is NOT the only way to know how content influences revenues. Jeez, it's like it's the 1600's around here. There ARE ways to measure this.

Eh, no, that does not work at all, especially not with weekly reward gated content.

A 3h weekly clear with friends can make up 90% of a players enjoyment and reason to stay engaged and spending with the game, even if they then spend 30h over the week doing other stuff they feel pretty meh about, like LW content, to keep busy.

Hold on ... I didn't say I was measuring WHY people do things ... I said revenue can be attributed to different activities people do. That's not debatable ... it's fact that this can be done.

Statistically

, it's still relevant and useful measure and in this case, the population is high enough that statistics IS the proper approach to measuring this.

You can make up all the scenarios you want to prove or disprove whatever you like to suit your position; that's just being contrived and the beautiful thing about those exceptional scenarios you want to use ... the statistics of measuring revenue by content category will either show they are statistically significant or not .... that's why those contrived arguments don't make sense to influence what Anet decides or decides not to create for content. Measure revenue generated by content categories DOES make sense to influence that.

We don't have guess what the distribution of revenue is over the content ... it's a measurable thing and I have no doubt there is some level of competence at Anet that is looking at something like this to come to the conclusion they should focus less on creating raids; it took me a whole 15 minutes to think this would be measured ... and it's not unique to MMO's ... an competent business will want to know what product lines are making them the money. It's pretty much a prerequisite for any business that wants to be successful to be measuring these things. The only reason anyone would discourage measuring it is because they think ignoring it makes their argument for certain types of content better.

@Asum.4960 said:The idea that you can just blankly attribute spending according to where time is spent is ridiculous, even if we forget about afk times.

There is nothing ridiculous about statistical approach to measuring revenue per content category. Whatever scenario you want to present will be represented PROPERLY in the resulting revenue distributions EVEN with AFK times or whatever else you think invalidates it.

I guess Anet made the right decision and revenue went up in 2019 with their shift to focusing on the supposed money maker LW only then, and they just forgot to tell the revenue.

I'm not saying statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood.

Besides, it's a self-perpetuating prediction that when you release mostly LW content it then get's mostly played, from which you then conclude statistically it's mostly responsible for the revenue, causing you to then focus on releasing more LW in favour of other content.The point where you know that's likely not how it works is if revenue then plummets by a whopping 25%+ as a lot of people are just getting filler content in which they spend a lot of time but don't really care about, over the content that actually engages them to keep them spending, which they are waiting for.

If there was one LW release every 1-3 years and a Raid Wing/Fractal CM every 3 months, majority playtime (and statistically shown contribution to revenue) would be Raids/Fractals, but like with the over done focus on LW, actual total revenue would also plummet (as LW players lose interest) even as statistics would say more Raids/Fractals = more money.Point is, they would have likely done better catering to both.

If you don't know why people play certain content or what their actual engagement level with it is, which statistics can't accurately tell you as it doesn't necessarily correlate with playtime, especially not for time/reward gated content, then you don't know why people are spending.

If you think Anet too competent to not make such mistakes, then, well..

Besides, non of that accounts for the buzz around content like Raids, like community driven Raid tournaments driving more eyes on the game as official LW announcement streams, which Anet always has been incredibly incompetent in recognising and utilising.

Nothing here invalidates the idea of using statistics to measure what parts of the game result in revenue. You didn't even know it could be done a few hours ago, so I told you how ... now your expertise in the matter is enough that you continuously tell me it's a bad idea? I'm pretty sure you didn't get educated so much in the last few hours that you're qualified to make that claim. That's just another example of wanting people to ignore information that doesn't result in the narrative that you think will get you more raids.

You can make statements that statistics don't have uses, they have plenty applications, just that they seem equally often misinterpreted/misunderstood. ... that's just unqualified generalizations ... those generalizations don't mean Anet shouldn't do it or if they do, they will suffer those issues. The bottomline is that no matter what you want to believe how awesome raids are for the game and no matter how you think Anet arrived at the conclusion to slow their development, it's not unreasonable to think that raids aren't being developed because they don't make enough revenue. In fact if you are going to go as far as guessing because of your apparent aversion to 'science' ... lack of revenue is probably the

most

reasonable guess you can have as to why we have reduced raid development. Any indication this can't be measured is nonsense, so don't pretend it's unreasonable to conclude lack of revenue is a ridiculous cause.

One thing I do know ... if raids were making Anet tons of money ... you would have tons of raids being cranked out. You don't need anything but common sense to know that ... but somehow for you it's ridiculous to claim that raids might be cancelled/delayed because they don't make much or any revenue? The fact is this ... you don't want anyone to think there is

anything

bad related to raids because you don't care about the game, you just want raids, at any cost to anyone.

Or you weren't educated enough not to enforce imaginative ideas onto others and to derail them for not buying it. Nothing validates your "Science".

That doesn't make sense .. people use statistics all the time to measure what their customers are doing with their services or goods they are purchasing. The validation is the application of statistics in business.

Yes, but not by you and your expertise.

Let's just say I know enough that I'm not in denial about how businesses use statistics to gather information about what their customers want and where they spend their money. It's interesting you assume I know as little as anyone else here. You are aware that such information is available in courses as basic as a 3 year college business diploma right? ... or maybe you aren't. Let's just say this isn't PhD level stuff. What I do recommend is that you don't assuming there aren't educated people out there that know these things exist, are real and are used frequently.

No industries do their analysis and decision making with such narrow minded data gathering and structure.

What narrow minded data gathering and structure are you referring to? No one is being specific about exactly what Anet is doing so whatever you have in mind behind this statement ... clearly your assumption are beyond what anyone is discussing. I'm simply stating that if Anet wanted to determine revenues associated with different content, they could do so ... and it's not ridiculous to think they are doing some kind of exercise like this to make business decisions. Anyone that thinks otherwise is being rather ignorant.

You have sufficiently proven your point, Obtena. Common sense and numbers are the clear winner here; it is often times pointless to continue arguing with many on this forum. Several even in this thread think they "win" so long as they respond last, even if they leave questions unanswer and simply repeat themselves. I learned long ago that when you recognize those posters, it is rarely helpful to reply to them more than once!

Where's the number?Indeed many responses in this thread were only made for the sake to to be a WINNER of a pointless fight rather than to make out a valid point. And has done so poor a job hiding this intent.

[SoftFootpaws.9134]

There's alot of problems with raids and this is a long thread so I'll just summarise the key points:

• The main attraction of raids is Legendary armor, But its easier to get from WvW and PvP (no one buys it for the appearance), and in those game modes in my experience are actually less toxic, which is ironic. You can just kind of do your own thing and get there eventually, and anyone yelling at you that you "should never have been born" because of your playstyle can just be ignored.

• There's just not enough ways to gather players in this game; the LFG is very bad, even very small meta events often fail. There's too many categories, its too hard to find anything and there's no incentive to join groups. This applies to all of PvE, and WvW as well. Raids suffer the most from this because they need a large amount of players (compared to our average population), to complete. If you can't even gather 50 players for an open-world meta event on a regular basis like Serpent's Ire, trying to gather 10 players for a raid which is even more obscure isn't going to work. Most raiders are from guilds dedicated to it, kind of like how TTS was for us to be able to kill Tequatl, Great Jungle Wurm and Karka Queen back in the day.

• Raids are a replacement for a replacement for a replacement, which is why they were doomed to fail. What I mean is, instead of building on old systems like dungeons, ArenaNet just keeps adding more stuff to replace older stuff with entirely new systems. First it was dungeons, then it was Fractals, then it was raids, now its Strike Missions, and its all just different names for the same type of content that's been mercilessly reinvented instead of just building on it, because the developers always seem to get "burned out" and start over.

The main things that would "fix" raids would be to make LFG more streamlined and easier to use, provide better incentive to join in raids (like how dungeons and Fractals always provided massive amounts of liquid gold), and to start combining all the different systems together; merge all dungeons with Fractals, and merge raids with Strike Missions.

We should only have two systems:

1. Fractals: Tiered 5man instanced private/LFG only.
2. Raids: Untiered 10man instanced public & private (public is the "easy mode").

It's possible to make raids even more popular than Fractals. But you have to let go, and just let it happen.

[zealex.9410]

Wasnt lw participation and fractal/ raid participation kinda close in terms of statistics? Not like less than 5% diff but very compairable nontheless.

[Obtena.7952]

@Vilin.8056 said:I have absolutely no doubt with the course, it's only your logic and education I am questioning. Where is the evidence to support your claim? Or did your colledge only taught you to only brought out biased opinions? Have you even any experience in this field of work?

Yes in fact, significant experience ... and I can assure you that if it wasn't good business practice, it wouldn't be TAUGHT as such in the kinds of courses and reputable institutions I'm talking about. Do you even know what my claim is here? It appears you don't. That's OK ... That's not a lack on my part.

[Vilin.8056]

@zealex.9410 said:Wasnt lw participation and fractal/ raid participation kinda close in terms of statistics? Not like less than 5% diff but very compairable nontheless.Yes, but in case of video games participation level often not necessarily equates to interest level.

For many players these un-conquered contents/achievements serves as motivation drives to continue their character development/progression.

[Vilin.8056]

@Obtena.7952 said:

@"Vilin.8056" said:I have absolutely no doubt with the course, it's only your logic and education I am questioning. Where is the

evidence

to support your claim? Or did your colledge only taught you to only brought out biased opinions? Have you even any experience in this field of work?

Yes in fact, significant experience ... and I can assure you that if it wasn't good business practice, it wouldn't be TAUGHT as such in the kinds of courses and reputable institutions I'm talking about. Do you even know what my claim is here? It appears you don't. That's OK ... That's not a lack on my part.Or perhaps get a real job, participate a real business meeting, construct a real analysis report, with your real life credibility on the line, in which I do not think the experience you claimed to have included these elements, given the way you construct your "science", and the hoax you tried to place on top of it to take advantage on a community of MMO gamers.

I'm gonna end our conversation here, your theory really convinced no one.

[Buran.3796]

@"Raknar.4735" said:

It‘s obvious raids aren‘t doing well population wise to further create more raids, when Anet has to create bridging instanced content just to carry raids. I doubt it will work, not even legendary armour was enough of an incentive to get a vast amount of people to play that type of content. That should tell you enough about its‘ popularity.

PvP's legendary armor costs 1/3 of the gold it takes to craft the PvE one, and albeit that one looks better the gem store has tons of outfits and separated armor pieces with better light effects than the "legendaries". So isn't a surprise that raids don't appeal much people: they require a lot of time, a lot of learning and has high chances to fail, whereas in PvP you can get the job done just hitting the keyboard with your head (even if you are ultrabad, the matchmaking will push you down until you achieve a 50% w/l ratio, which makes you progress perfectly fine.

[Arukayos.1798]

@"Raknar.4735" said:Instanced 10 man content with class roles isn‘t popular in GW2, not played by many and therefore developed less and less, who would have guessed that?Add to that, that some raiders didn‘t want easy modes to push raid popularity and make them more accesible, so that Anet has more reason to develop raids.

Strike Missions, which are nothing more than Raids with 1 boss, will also not solve the problem, since players will not get familiar with the mechanics of the old raids through them.

You reap what you sow, raiders against an easy mode.

I skimmed through majority of your posts in this thread, I don't care enough to read the back-and-forth circlejerk which has ensued but one thing is apparent: you blame raiders for the death of the mode and have some kind of bone to pick with them, coming in with your classic "you reap what you sow, ha ha suck it losers!" blanket statement over and over. Whatever, I don't really care - that's between you and them, I don't know you personally and I have no idea how they hurt you.

But from a purely objective standpoint - asking for more challenging content is hardly an unfair stance. There are various different subsets of players - some who enjoy laid back content, and others who want to constantly be thrust into the feeling of danger. There's nothing wrong with that. The way I see it, the demographic of guild wars is largely the former and this is why raids have not succeeded, plain and simple. The issue is the demographic and target audience of people that gw2 appeals to - not raiders, not the developers.

Between me and my tightly knit community of raider friends, none of us were against an "easy mode" of raids provided we continued to get the challenging content that we play this game for. However, the latter did not happen, and now this subset of players have left to find other avenues to scratch that itch. So it's no surprise that there isn't a large target audience any more - unsurprisingly, when you don't cater to the needs of a certain kind of playerbase, that kind of playerbase ceases to exist.

Also, I highly doubt this content drought has anything to do with participation. Anet had an awful Q4 2019 in terms of revenue, and Q1 2020 isn't looking so hot either with the covid situation. All forms of content barring extremely casual content have ceased to maintain stable content updates. Pvp, WvW, and even fractals. I'd also argue that fractals have very active participation - at any point, there are around 5-6 groups. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of groups running that content every single day, yet we hardly see any updates there.

So yeah, your false vindictiveness really just reeks of some kind of personal bias or prejudice. But trying to mask your personal angst and frustration as objective fact is just cringe worthy and bemusing really. Blaming raiders for wanting challenging content is pretty ironic, as opposed to acknowledging the fact that the demographic and playerbase is the real issue at play combined with the lack of content in general regardless of participation.

There's a reason this game isn't on the Big 4 any more, the dev team saw massive layoffs, and even the expansion launch was tentative with the potential chance of the game going on life-support maintenance mode after the layoffs and content drought. But nah, raiders are to blame for all of this, it's clearly their fault.

[HotDelirium.7984]

@Aizza.4950 said:Strikes aren't raids. They're an absolute joke that bring no true challenge into the game. They don't teach people how to get into raids at all

I do see some challenge in them. Especially with boneskinner and whisper but to me that is still not a true conveyor belt to raid territory. I wish they'd ASK the community and see if this is working but obviously they probably know by now. I'm not a raider, right? So strikes have had this (anecdotal evidence) effect for me- oh ok, some gear is better when you're a certain role, have many buffs, make sure you do the mechanics on certain bosses....literally the stuff most of us kind of know from common sense. But that still doesn't package me up and queue me up for specific raids. They just seem like separate content. It would be like saying bounties get you ready for strike missions.....eh?

[HotDelirium.7984]

@Raknar.4735 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

You know what doesn‘t help the game? Making content only exclusively for a small audience.You know what kills MMORPGs? A low playerbase when the game only caters to a small amount of players.

It‘s obvious raids aren‘t doing well population wise to further create more raids, when Anet has to create bridging instanced content just to carry raids. I doubt it will work, not even legendary armour was enough of an incentive to get a vast amount of people to play that type of content. That should tell you enough about its‘ popularity.

Honestly if it isn't broke don't fix it. The kind of content that I think they excel at is that dynamic PUG events around maps and dungeon 5 person content. Why they went away from that I have no idea. Dungeons and fractals could have been the bread and butter of this game but I guess they wanted to experiment to see if we tap into other markets and/or populations.

[Obtena.7952]

@Vilin.8056 said:

@Obtena.7952 said:

@Vilin.8056 said:I have absolutely no doubt with the course, it's only your logic and education I am questioning. Where is the

evidence

to support your claim? Or did your colledge only taught you to only brought out biased opinions? Have you even any experience in this field of work?

Yes in fact, significant experience ... and I can assure you that if it wasn't good business practice, it wouldn't be TAUGHT as such in the kinds of courses and reputable institutions I'm talking about. Do you even know what my claim is here? It appears you don't. That's OK ... That's not a lack on my part.Or perhaps get a real job, participate a real business meeting, construct a real analysis report...

I can assure you, the work I do is real .. that's why it's not unreasonable for me to think development decisions are based on revenues. If raids made mountains of cash for Anet ... there would be no question; they would be making them as fast as they could. That's not what we have though, so it's not unreasonable to think that Anet isn't making mountains of cash from raids. You don't need anything special to see that.

[Obtena.7952]

@HotDelirium.7984 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:

@Aizza.4950 said:

@Raknar.4735 said:Yeah, I do. Not doing anything also doesn‘t help raids.

You know what helps raids? Making raids.

You know what doesn‘t help the game? Making content only exclusively for a small audience.You know what kills MMORPGs? A low playerbase when the game only caters to a small amount of players.

It‘s obvious raids aren‘t doing well population wise to further create more raids, when Anet has to create bridging instanced content just to carry raids. I doubt it will work, not even legendary armour was enough of an incentive to get a vast amount of people to play that type of content. That should tell you enough about its‘ popularity.

Honestly if it isn't broke don't fix it. The kind of content that I think they excel at is that dynamic PUG events around maps and dungeon 5 person content. Why they went away from that I have no idea. Dungeons and fractals could have been the bread and butter of this game but I guess they wanted to experiment to see if we tap into other markets and/or populations.

Right ... and raids are 'broke' because they don't do the things we need to see in a healthy GW2 MMO. It really doesn't matter how good Anet is at creating dynamic PUG events or anything else. What's important is that they create content that persuades people to spend money in the game. It's entirely possible that as good as Anet is at making raids, that content was not a big revenue earner for them.

if anything, the move away from instanced content isn't a experiment to tap other markets, it's a move to focus on the market it's already captured.

[Deeyra.1476]

@Aizza.4950 said:Today marks the 1 year anniversary since wing 7 came out. The longest drought we’ve had with really no end in sight. RIP raid community.

At least we have strikes that bore the raiders to sleep right?

What are you talking about? They release 6 raids per month or how was it?

[voltaicbore.8012]

@"Clyan.1593" said:

Another funny thing is how many casual players avoid the "harder" strike missions completely. So again it's less a question of beginner friendlyness rather than honest ambition to improve.

This is a huge, huge point that deserves attention and repeating.

As any raider can tell you, people who wanted to raid have been doing so since before there were guides, arcdps, and a plethora of other resources available. I avoided raids for the longest time simply because it felt like a hassle to get into, but through some coincidences I fell into a guild with a good training leader, took a few training runs, killed a few bosses, and have slightly warmed to the idea of doing more raiding. But only slightly! I know roughly what it takes to succeed in several encounters in several roles on several classes... but I just don't feel like putting in much more effort to get better. I'll run forgiving dps builds like condi FB or power soulbeast, but I'll only pull around 16K overall and don't feel like training to push into the 20/30K+ ranges. It's not a lack of resources or people willing to help me. I just don't feel like doing it. I chronotanked a bit on some failed VG runs just to learn it and definitely could stand to improve... but eh. Just don't feel like doing it.

I think the majority of players are even less motivated than I am. Anet could do all it wants to promote raid-preparation stuff, but short of an easy mode bereft of any real risk of failure, I don't think that will really get at the underlying lack-of-ambition problems that Clyan mentioned.

EDIT: lol it seems the thread really escalated past this stage of discussion by the time I actually posted this response. All I wish to add is that the financial picture is likely not as easy to determine as "measure how much the presence of raids boost revenue" AND "measure how much the absence of raids drops revenue." There are many things going on, some of which are more nebulous but might still have an impact on numbers. Maybe the absence of raids concurring with some high profile departures/uneasy feeling in the air about lack of future developments/etc is what contributed to the drop, and it's not always easy to disentangle all the confounding variables. That's not to say that it's entirely impossible to measure, but it's also likely far less clear than many of us are assuming it is.

[Juan.6124]

Anet doesn't provide updates to raids, pvp, wvw, dungeons and only just announced that there will be a fractal at some point. This is an MMO but 95% of development goes into singleplayer story, achievements and open world. Sad. They even nerfed the once in a lifetime raid cm rewards by cutting the duration of butternut squash soups in half.

Strike Missions are done by content deprived raiders and non raiders who dont even bother with WoJ or Boneskinner because it's too difficult for them, meaning the intention of Strikes (bridge to raids) is not in their interest. Cold War is just like the pre event of Tarir where you fight off waves of Mordrem while waiting for the meta to start. Fraenir has like 15 seconds of invulnerabilty and while in Icebrood form it doesn't even attack for most of the time. WoJ has bugs since release like instant deaths of players or the boss turning invisible that haven't even been aknowledged. Is this gonna turn out like dungeons? Ship it and forget about it?

[skarpak.8594]

HoT release peak twitch viewers: 10kPoF release peak twitch viewers: 17k

one little raid tournament by teapot peak twitch viewers: 27k

:3

[Swagger.1459]

@"Aizza.4950" said:Today marks the 1 year anniversary since wing 7 came out. The longest drought we’ve had with really no end in sight. RIP raid community.

At least we have strikes that bore the raiders to sleep right?

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97028/a-message-from-andrew-gray

“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.”

[Opopanax.1803]

@Swagger.1459 said:

@"Aizza.4950" said:Today marks the 1 year anniversary since wing 7 came out. The longest drought we’ve had with really no end in sight. RIP raid community.

At least we have strikes that bore the raiders to sleep right?

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/97028/a-message-from-andrew-gray

“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.”

If they would fix their engine to turn visual vomit down, I think they would have a better shot at getting people into 10 man content. Without that, 5 man is more than enough visuals to still try to see what is going on.

[HotDelirium.7984]

if anything, the move away from instanced content isn't a experiment to tap other markets, it's a move to focus on the market it's already captured.

There seems to be direct and indirect ways of creating revenue. Direct is like buying gems for the myriad of skins that are constantly on the market or even past episodes and indirect is just from time spent in game that might eventually lead to a direct purchase. On some level I don't think raids ever had a correlation to direct revenue aside from access from purchasing the game and expansions; many people already bought them years ago. Earning the appropriate gear and training can all be done in game so while I love free content if they really thought raids would have lead to huge amounts in direct revenue I think it was a pretty silly assumption.

[HotDelirium.7984]

If they would fix their engine to turn visual vomit down, I think they would have a better shot at getting people into 10 man content. Without that, 5 man is more than enough visuals to still try to see what is going on.

The only way around that, to some degree is miniziming the model limit but even at the lowest that makes some enemies disappear unless clicked on. The visual DIARRHEA I like to call it is a bit of a nuissance. I usually do PVE so I used arcdps to turn off damage numbers and absolutely love it. WAY too many numbers flying at me to see the combat. Maybe they'll optimize it further because they do prevent you from seeing full animations and effects on other player abilities but we need more of that. Like an option to not see anybody elses abilities or effects at all if we wish.