Jump to content
  • Sign Up

Bobby Stein (dev) comment on Raid


Recommended Posts

@yann.1946 said:

@yann.1946 said:Assume for simplicity that you know that 10% of the players would leave by not adding a specific game mode. Presume that the remaining 90 are split 1% hates it and 89% does not care. Than adding this game mode would have value although it has no broad appeal.Except that I'm hardly can imagine that even a significant part of the active raiding population would leave because there is no new raids anymore.

Then i guess you've not been paying attention? Lots of guilds left because of the perceived drought for example.

+1 this

This is also reflected in WvW as well where end of last year and beginning of this year, a lot of guilds and players started/continued leaving. Servers were down to only 1 full on US and 2 full on EU (can't speak for Spvp since I haven't regularly Spvped in a while and am not aware of many Spvp guild). The developers were even required to completely remove Tier 5 in WvW temporarily. The only reason for recovery here is actually the virus forcing players to stay inside, which made players return for a time being.

It's almost as though lack of content for players desired game mode and in game activity, unrelated to which of the 3 main segments of the game it might be (PvE, Spvp or WvW), makes players quit. Who would have thought?

Yet even all that could be acceptable, if the games revenue was reflecting a positive upturn and ultimately reinforcing the development directions taken, which it has not. At least not up until end of Q1 2020. On the contrary, the game has been on a steady decline.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 102
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"Rednik.3809" said:Good riddance. If gamemode failing to appeal to broad audience, it is a waste of developers time, regardless of how many developers were assigned. WoW and FFXIV raids managed to adapt and succeded, GW2 ones isn't.

That's actually not true at all. And probably the biggest fallacy that gets used on the fora.True, that's way oversimplified, to the point it indeed becomes a fallacy. It's not (and never was) about gamemode not appealing to a broad audience. It's about gamemode appealing to an audience that is way too low in proportion to resources needed to sustain said gamemode. And that
is
a problem. It's all about gain per effort ratio.

I still feel like your argument would only make sense if Raids were this massive undertaking akin to LW where half the company worked on it in multiple teams, giving it their best in cranking out that content, but in the end it still just wasn't enough to maintain the Raid community which had completely unreasonable expectations.

But that's still just not at all what happened.

Anet assigned a tiny team to all of organised/instanced endgame content, never gave them the resources to build up enough content to maintain a healthy community no matter how forgiving the community and low the expectations were, with people just begging for anything at a just somewhat reasonable pace of two content drops a year or so, and then just watched the self-fulfilling prophecy unfold in the statistics, deeming it not worth to invest even the little resources into it that they did before the slow decline, instead of ever giving it a proper shot.

You can literally use any content format and excuse it as "just not working" if it never received enough resources to be made to work.Imo LW didn't ever "work" at the best of times, but imagine the LW team had always just been 5-10 people, releasing a 15-30 minute LW patch every 9+ months - ofc people would then go and say, well LW is just not working, why do they even bother, because nobody would care about it at that point/not stay around and wait for that content specifically.

~5 people out of a ~250 people company creating content that initially appealed to 10-30% of the playerbase of an MMO for the first year or two when it appeared properly supported and coming out at a reasonable pace, is pretty incredible, especially when we consider the level of engagement it garnered from those players.

It's one thing to make some easy accessable auto attack content, slap some great rewards onto it and then watch the participation numbers be fantastic, but beyond the participation statistic looking good on paper, that doesn't make it great and engaging content when a significant amount of those players completing that content are just dredging through it, bored out of their mind, for some shiny and because they are already invested into the game for other reasons and there not being anything else to do.

It's something entirely else to create content that requires player investment and deep engagement with the game just to complete, and seeing the numbers we did for it, especially for how little company resources were spared to create it, not only the amount of people that engaged with Raids, but also the level of engagement of the players that Anet got out of that was impressive.

Seeing how much playtime and joy just <10 people generated with Raids just makes me look at the rest of the Game and wonder wth everybody else is doing.

And as doc said:

@"maddoctor.2738" said:"Game mode" is one way to look at it, but this only takes into account "those that Raid" vs "those that don't Raid". Why not make a comparison between actual content?

How many players enjoy/play the Beetle race or the Skyscale adventure in Grothmar Valley?Or even better, how many even have a Beetle or a Skyscale?How many players enjoy/play Whisper of Jormag or even Shiverpeak Pass Strike Mission?How many players enjoy/play the Light Puzzles in Bjora Marches? Or the Gauntlet of Khan Ur in Grothmar Valley?How many players got the complete map meta achievement of any given Living World Episode?

There are way too many things to compare the "Audience" of Raids with, but it appears that the comparisons around the forums only between "those that Raid" vs "those that don't Raid", as if the latter do absolutely everything else in the game, which is a fallacy. Raids got cancelled because of the "small audience" they attract, I'd like a comparison between the audience of Raids and the audience of any of the above (and more)

The game population is not people who exclusively play Raids vs. people who play everything but Raids.GW2 is chock-full of abandon-content, things ANet tried but never gave proper resources to so it could actually succeed as content form.

Is the concept of Guild Missions content that just inherently doesn't generate enough returns for the resources put in? No, it could have actually been incredibly valuable to the game to have these community building events for guilds, but it just wasn't ever properly supported to see that happen.Are Beetle Races, Adventures, Dungeons, Fractals, Raids, WvW, sPvP, Bounties, soon to be Strikes and on and on and on and on?

Imo, no. But Anet just seems to poke around in the dark, putting content feelers out and just waiting to strike gold and for something they put out to explode in popularity to then put proper resources into it, but that's just not how it usually works. They are putting the cart before the horse.All of these things, Raids included, could have worked and been fantastic for the game and garnering popularity, if they had been backed by a vision and been properly supported.

The problem with GW2, or rather Anet, isn't any one of those pieces of content "not working" or "not being worth the resources", but the company structure that produces it - where seemingly content entirely depends on the passion of a talented dev or small group of devs, to basically pursue something as passion/hobby project to see what will stick, judged by misleading participation statistics which don't show why or how much people care, without ever being supported enough to actually do stick, rather than there being a company vision over what to make of the game and then backing that with resources to make it work.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:True, that's way oversimplified, to the point it indeed becomes a fallacy. It's not (and never was) about gamemode not appealing to a broad audience. It's about gamemode appealing to an audience that is way too low in proportion to resources needed to sustain said gamemode. And that
is
a problem. It's all about gain per effort ratio.

"Game mode" is one way to look at it, but this only takes into account "those that Raid" vs "those that don't Raid". Why not make a comparison between actual content?Exactly. That's why i said this is way more complicated and involves a lot of factors. Nothing in this game exists in vacuum, and every change you do to one content ripples throughout the whole game. So, you can't simply say "89% do not care about raids", for example, because even if they truly don;t care about the content itself, they may care about the "ripples".

And yes, the same goes for every other content, obviously.

The problems with raids, compared with the other stuff you mentioned was that it caused some really massive ripples all over the game. If there was no such a great effort to make a lot of players interested in their existence, the backlash would have been much, much smaller. Perhaps even unnoticeable.Not many players, after all, cared that they couldn't do Liadri, for example. Only one person cared about PvP tournament titles (although that person was so vocal he did manage to make those changed, which still leaves me baffled). There are people that still can't do a number of existing JPs (and, again, almost noone cares). Even the case of Gift of Battle no longer creates such heated arguments it once did.

So, yeah, raids are in a way special here. And it's partly by design, i'm afraid. They were made to be special. And paid the price for it.

Although i do agree, that Anet's methodology of throwing stuff at the wall and looking if it sticks, and abandonig content if they;re even a bit dissatisfied with it doesn't help the game in the long run. I know that it may seem easier (and more fun) to start working on new stuff than trying to fix old stuff trying to make it work better, but that tendency does make the game filled with carcasses of old abandoned ideas. Which isn't exactly showing anything positive to potential new players. Or even to many old ones.

Just as you are dissatisfied with them not supporting raids enough, i am equally dissatisfied with them abandoning dungeons. And i guess both of those contents were abandoned for the same reason - Anet not being willing to allocate enough resources to them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Astralporing.1957" said:That's why i said this is way more complicated and involves a lot of factors.

Yes that comment was also aimed at all the "Raids failed because they attracted a small audience" comments, that has all the same issues. It IS way more complicated than that, but on these forums it appears as if it's not.

And btw I forgot to mention this earlier:

It's about gamemode appealing to an audience that is way too low in proportion to resources needed to sustain said gamemode.

You do realize that if something requires a lot of resources they can lower the amount of resources needed instead of taking far longer to release it, right? If Raids require a lot of Voice Acting or a lot of work for Armor and Weapon skins, they can very easily reduce both of those. The argument that Raids required a lot of resources and that's why their release cadence suffered, only tells us about a severe lack of proper management in the company. Raids that require less resources are perfectly doable (see: Strike Missions) so blaming the "resources" for the lack of releases isn't really accurate.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Astralporing.1957" said:That's why i said this is way more complicated and involves a lot of factors.

Yes that comment was also aimed at all the "Raids failed because they attracted a small audience" comments, that has all the same issues. It IS way more complicated than that, but on these forums it appears as if it's not.

And btw I forgot to mention this earlier:

It's about gamemode appealing to an audience that is way too low in proportion to resources needed to sustain said gamemode.

You do realize that if something requires a lot of resources they can lower the amount of resources needed instead of taking far longer to release it, right? If Raids require a lot of Voice Acting or a lot of work for Armor and Weapon skins, they can very easily reduce both of those. The argument that Raids required a lot of resources and that's why their release cadence suffered, only tells us about a severe lack of proper management in the company. Raids that require less resources are perfectly doable (see: Strike Missions) so blaming the "resources" for the lack of releases isn't really accurate.

Strikes, apparently, were an attempt to do exactly that. Since there were some expectations attached to Raids already, and they knew that breaking those will result in at least part of the raider community being dissatisfied, they decided to replace them with Strikes, that, being a completely new content, had no expectations attached to them whatsoever. This allowed them to invest a lot less resources, but also use that avenue to introduce content of much more varying difficulty (which, if done in raids, would have made a lot of raiders angry).

It's what we were talking again - something didn't work in their previous approach, so, instead of putting a lot of effort into fixing it, they'd rather start over with a new idea.

Same thing they did earlier with dungeons -> Fractals

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Fractals/Dungeons/Strike Missions/Raids = Renamed Side/Abandoned project in Forums section.

Only can say they have a very limited resources to further develop or work on anything simultaneously. Would say the main focus would be Living Story (to keep the game moving, just lacks replay-ability). WvW, Fractals, Dungeons, Strike Missions, Raids or any upcoming additions are probably in the same side bundle. Nothing decisive to propel the game towards any direction.

PS : Its silent, but Alliance is probably waiting... to be worked on.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@yann.1946 said:

@Rednik.3809 said:Good riddance. If gamemode failing to appeal to broad audience, it is a waste of developers time, regardless of how many developers were assigned. WoW and FFXIV raids managed to adapt and succeded, GW2 ones isn't.

That's actually not true at all. And probably the biggest fallacy that gets used on the fora.True, that's way oversimplified, to the point it indeed becomes a fallacy. It's not (and never was) about gamemode not appealing to a broad audience. It's about gamemode appealing to an audience that is way too low in proportion to resources needed to sustain said gamemode. And that
is
a problem. It's all about gain per effort ratio.

Edit:Sort of but not completely, otherwise you could argue the ls should disappear . Its about saturation levels of content (whats enough of a contenttype to keep people playing/happy without overinvesting and its about gains in playernumbers by introducing things in the game.

Assume for simplicity that you know that 10% of the players would leave by not adding a specific game mode. Presume that the remaining 90 are split 1% hates it and 89% does not care. Than adding this game mode would have value although it has no broad appeal.That again is oversimplification. In the end, you don't add a new content in vacuum. I mean, it may be that 89% players do not care about adding such a gamemode. But if, in order to sustain that gamemode, you would need to shift the resources off from the content they like (or in any way affect the things they like), then suddenly you may find that those players are no longer as neutral as before.

And it's even a bit more wider than the gain per effort factor i mentioned before. A good example was the Envoy armor set - there were quite a number of players that, while not really caring about raids or their inclusion in the game at all, suddenly got angry due to PvE legendary armor getting raid-locked.

Well yes my example was an oversimplification, but is was mostly used to show that in some cases things that have no broad appeal can be better investmenst then those that are. (the game doesn't consist out of two groups after all and all these groups are intertwinged). The hardest part in real life is knowing the numbers.

@Astralporing.1957And in retrospect it seems you you didn't get my point at all. Because it's not even about appeal vs resources. It's about the amount of people you gain by having the content vs the amount you would have focusing on something else. It's about diminishing returns of focusing on one content type. That's the reason new maps you add adventures etc to new maps.1 adventure will probably hold more people then an extra event.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I work on the software development industry. While i have absolutely no clue what's going on with Anet specifically, i have seen this kind of behaviour from the inside multiple times.

  • Software is a very mobile industry, in the sense that talent moves around a lot. Building expertise, especially in something specific like gaming development it's not easy nor fast. It's a very top heavy industry, where it's said (and somewhat proven) the top 10% produce 90% of the work. When you lose one of those top talent, it's really hard to replace and can set you back weeks/months. Anet is competing with giants like Blizzard and the likes.
  • Evaluating software project costs it's probably one, if not the hardest task you can imagine. It doesn't matter if it's Anet or Google/FB/Microsoft (i have friends on each one of the latter), many times projects run overbudget/over time. Anet doesn't have the resources nor revenue of those other giants, they have to pick their battles very carefully.
  • They over extended years ago and are clearly on recovery mode. They have a business model they deem sustainable. When something terrible happens and massive layoff occurs, bean counters have the upper hand and you are forced to work on "secure" and easy projects (festivals, minor releases), immediate revenue items (hello cosmetics and skins) or the most effective way to generate future revenue (expansions).

This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is). I'm pretty sure they are absolutely focused, almost every "top talent", dedicated to the next expansion. A fiasco there and we can say goodbye to the studio/GW2. No executive will risk the future of the company on side projects while there is so much on the line.

For those who says "only 5 or 6 developers full time for 4 months", are you kidding? that's an enormous investment for a medium size company like Anet. Keep in mind, you need more than devs to make any project succeed. Project managers, UI designers, QAs and more is required.

Sorry for the text wall.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"disForm.2837" said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"disForm.2837" said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /sI'm quite sure that most of those things you brought up earlier would
not
require a constant effort of dedicated group of devs to keep running.
That
is the difference.

I doubt, for example, that strikes have a dedicated team that does only them and nothing else. If anything, they probably run on even lower resources than raids did. I am absolutely sure, that jumping puzzles, or adventures, do not have even a single dev that is solely dedicated to doing them. They are something that gets done in between some main projects. I'm sure that if raids could have been done the same way, they would not end up abandoned.The same situation goes for WvW, for example - it also can't really sustain itself on limited dev attention, and would need a dedicated team to be kept alive (a team that apparently it also doesn't have).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"disForm.2837" said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Start defining "rest of the game", because raids are clearly small part of the whole game, instanced and basically not related with anything else. What other part of the game is getting updated? WoW, PvP, Dungeons? Stop being sarcastic and write something constructive.

The new expansion is where they plan to make their money, period. Open world, stories, metas, even masteries are way more common than raids. New expansion it's something they can promote, market, SELL. And yes, a new expansion is a complete package even if not every aspect of it is played by everybody.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@disForm.2837 said:

@disForm.2837 said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Start defining "rest of the game"

Rest of the game is anything outside Raids from your context of "raids cater to a small percentage". Unless you can prove without any doubt that those that do not play WVW, PVP, Dungeons, Fractals and Raids play absolutely everything else that you can put in one single package. Because no, what's left after those isn't unified and played by a certain "majority" either.You can find some inspiration here: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1291001/#Comment_1291001

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Astralporing.1957 said:I'm quite sure that most of those things you brought up earlier would not require a constant effort of dedicated group of devs to keep running. That is the difference.

There was no constant effort towards Raids either, there was no dedicated team either as you can clearly see on their wiki pages what those developers that were supposed to be on the Raid team worked on, outside Raids. After the initial 3 Raids of course, those were indeed created by an actual dedicated team.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:I'm quite sure that most of those things you brought up earlier would
not
require a constant effort of dedicated group of devs to keep running.
That
is the difference.

There was no constant effort towards Raids either, there was no dedicated team either as you can clearly see on their wiki pages what those developers that were supposed to be on the Raid team worked on, outside Raids. After the initial 3 Raids of course, those were indeed created by an actual dedicated team.Yes, but notice how you said that it was nowhere close to being enough.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@disForm.2837 said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Start defining "rest of the game"

Rest of the game is anything outside Raids from your context of "raids cater to a small percentage". Unless you can prove without any doubt that those that do not play WVW, PVP, Dungeons, Fractals and Raids play absolutely everything else that you can put in one single package. Because no, what's left after those isn't unified and played by a certain "majority" either.You can find some inspiration here:

So you are saying, that raids are popular, while devs say pariticipation of community in them is low... Hm.... Who do I trust, soem random dude on forums or dev?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@disForm.2837 said:

@disForm.2837 said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Start defining "rest of the game", because raids are clearly small part of the whole game, instanced and basically not related with anything else. What other part of the game is getting updated? WoW, PvP, Dungeons? Stop being sarcastic and write something constructive.

The new expansion is where they plan to make their money, period. Open world, stories, metas, even masteries are way more common than raids. New expansion it's something they can promote, market,
SELL
. And yes, a new expansion is a complete package even if not every aspect of it is played by everybody.

I don't think anyone is arguing that an expansion isn't the right move, if anything that's what should have happened almost a year ago instead of the "Saga".The game desperately needs it and focusing on LW was a terrible (financial and otherwise) decision.

I disagree though that Raids/hardcore instanced PvE is a "small" part of the game as well as that it can't be marketed or doesn't promote the game (see Teapot's Raiding Tournament), as it essentially represents one of the four pillars of GW2, those (imo) being play alone together AA PvE, sPvP, WvW and organised/challenging instanced PvE (or sPvE).I don't think the game can survive catering to just one of those pillars long term, especially if it's the least repeatable, bang for your buck and community building one, and the current financial trend shows that.An expansion, especially if it once again just caters to that one aspect of the game, may prolong that decline with sales and hype, but not for all that long.

Yes, more people engage with Story content and things like masteries than more specific/contained aspects of the game, but for how long? It's a tremendous amount of workload compared to any other type of content (sPvE, sPvP, WvW) for at best a few hours of engagement for most players in return, except for maybe another "niche" like meta events, which are at least some degree of repeatable, even if personally boring to me as it's just yet more auto attacking to "win".

As for Raids being instanced and not really having anything to do with the rest of the game, so is every LW map really when you think about it.

A dungeon, guild mission, fractal, Raid, PvP/WvW updates etc. would imo be a lot more enriching to the game, especially with how saturated the game is with OW maps at this point, most of which are in desolation.

I also disagree with that an Expansion is a "complete package", at least after PoF. HoT might have been pretty close to that, but PoF pretty much just catered to that one niche/pillar of the game as well, which then had to get carried fairly hard by quick follow up content with LW S4 to keep people engaged.An Expansion is definitely a much better package than LW, coming with things like Elite Specs which drastically shape the game and it's replayability, but it's far from complete without direct contributions to the other, more repeatable/longterm viable, pillars - which is imo what the game needs to be sustainable for much longer.

@Bakeneko.5826 said:

@disForm.2837 said:This is what we are seeing now, they don't have the workforce, the resources or the freedom to work on "side" projects that cater to small percentage of the population (whatever that percentage is)

Of course that's because the rest of the game is played by everyone and is one complete package and not split in many different types of content. Only Raids cater to a small percentage and nothing else. /s

Start defining "rest of the game"

Rest of the game is anything outside Raids from your context of "raids cater to a small percentage". Unless you can prove without any doubt that those that do not play WVW, PVP, Dungeons, Fractals and Raids play absolutely everything else that you can put in one single package. Because no, what's left after those isn't unified and played by a certain "majority" either.You can find some inspiration here:

So you are saying, that raids are popular, while devs say pariticipation of community in them is low... Hm.... Who do I trust, soem random dude on forums or dev?

Raid participation was indeed low, after release cadence slowed down to one content drop a year with Wing 4 and on and more and more people abandoned ship since it wasn't worth waiting around for most.

Raids were fairly popular all things considered when they were properly supported and felt like they had a future and made players comfortable in getting invested in that content.Very few will pick up or stick around for any type of content if it's only delivered in small doses once a year, doesn't matter if that's Raids, Story etc.

The problem with Anet seems to be that they just look at statistics and what's played a lot when it comes to what they put their resources into, which sounds reasonable on paper, except for the fact that what's overall played a lot is what's getting resources invested into it in the first place, luring people in with new shiny and frequent releases.So they just keep dumping resources into the same thing in LW, while every other part of the game, along with the game as a whole, slowly withers away.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Asum.4960" said:I don't think anyone is arguing that an expansion isn't the right move, if anything that's what should have happened almost a year ago instead of the "Saga".The game desperately needs it and focusing on LW was a terrible (financial and otherwise) decision.

I think as well that was a travesty and more of a consequence of the state of the company more than a well thought and clear roadmap. . They needed something out, fast. Companies don't plan in terms of mere quarters, at least not with big projects like MMO games, i can assure you Anet have a roadmap for at least the next year (albeit they will never share it ofc).

I disagree though that Raids/hardcore instanced PvE is a "small" part of the game as well as that it can't be marketed or doesn't promote the game (see Teapot's Raiding Tournament), as it essentially represents one of the four pillars of GW2, those (imo) being play alone together AA PvE, sPvP, WvW and organised/challenging instanced PvE (or sPvE).

Honestly, high end content by definition is not for the masses. You have to agree that an average Joe on gw2 is far away from clearing raids. And yes, every game needs that high end content, that's fact, for those that actually made it that high. My comment is more on the context that they are putting their house in order and raids are far from being the most profitable thing on the game.

I don't think the game can survive catering to just one of those pillars long term, especially if it's the least repeatable, bang for your buck and community building one, and the current financial trend shows that.

Absolutely, we need a bit of everything.

I also disagree with that an Expansion is a "complete package", at least after PoF. HoT might have been pretty close to that, but PoF pretty much just catered to that one niche/pillar of the game as well, which then had to get carried fairly hard by quick follow up content with LW S4 to keep people engaged.An Expansion is definitely a much better package than LW, coming with things like Elite Specs which drastically shape the game and it's replayability, but it's far from complete without direct contributions to the other, more repeatable/longterm viable, pillars - which is imo what the game needs to be sustainable for much longer.

Well, that's the point. They prefer (imo, wisely) to work on the expansion instead of any other part of the game. Raids/fractals, etc can be added later on top of that. It's even more efficient that way, since a new specs may change how the game is played, so you can design instances around that.

I think, and that's me ofc, after the expansion they will focus on those other pillars you mentioned. Every part of the game attract their own player base and need attention. Hell, i absolutely loved MOTA even when i don't touch PvP at all (i play to relax and fun, PvP stress me out way too much).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"disForm.2837" said:Honestly, high end content by definition is not for the masses. You have to agree that an average Joe on gw2 is far away from clearing raids. And yes, every game needs that high end content, that's fact, for those that actually made it that high. My comment is more on the context that they are putting their house in order and raids are far from being the most profitable thing on the game.

Ofc, I just think a lot of people have grown tired of Anet "putting the house in order" and "laying foundations for the future" over the last ~5 years, and feel like it's never going to get to the point where stuff is finally sorted out and the nice furniture is coming in and all that.

While catching their feet is perfectly understandable considering semi recent events, in the greater context of how the game has been managed since launch (causing a lot of the issues down the road which it seems almost everyone but Anet saw coming) I don't blame anyone for getting restless about there still not being solid content pipelines for at least the core content pillars instead of quite the opposite.

@"disForm.2837" said:Well, that's the point. They prefer (imo, wisely) to work on the expansion instead of any other part of the game. Raids/fractals, etc can be added later on top of that. It's even more efficient that way, since a new specs may change how the game is played, so you can design instances around that.

I think, and that's me ofc, after the expansion they will focus on those other pillars you mentioned. Every part of the game attract their own player base and need attention. Hell, i absolutely loved MOTA even when i don't touch PvP at all (i play to relax and fun, PvP stress me out way too much).

I absolutely agree with focusing on the expansion considering how much rests on it's success, although I do wonder how they can commit so many resources into LW while having next to nothing available for everything else. But at least it seems like we are finally getting a new Fractal CM after 3 years at least, so that is something.

For the X content can be added later, I think especially for those of us who have been around since the Beta/launch, that just means it ain't coming, or at the very least is years away, at this point. We ran on hope for so many things for so long, it's just out of gas.If Anet doesn't directly announce that something is coming "soon", it might as well be dead and buried.

I ofc hope the next Expansion won't be another PoF with all but one aspect of the game completely forgotten, both in the expansion release and post expansion support, but until I see that confirmed, the assumption for me, and I think many others, is that it's going to be business as usual at this point.As I said, Anet not only spent all of their "hope to be catered too in the future" currency with much of their community, they are way in debt with it.

I'm glad you understand that parts of the game you yourself don't enjoy or play for whatever other reason add to it's appeal and are important to it's success though, even if they have grown into smaller and smaller niches due to lack of support, and should not be forgotten going forward - if we want this ship to keep going for some time still.I think too many miss or like to ignore the importance of a game appearing "alive" across the board, and how that can appeal to new players and retain old players even if they themselves have no intend in experiencing many of those aspects any time soon or even ever.

There is a reason that after nothing but LW for a year the game was pretty much known to be on life support in and outside of much of it's community, with plenty new players being scared away by the fact that aside from some short story every couple months there is nothing fresh and active for them to jump in to look forward too.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:I'm quite sure that most of those things you brought up earlier would
not
require a constant effort of dedicated group of devs to keep running.
That
is the difference.

There was no constant effort towards Raids either, there was no dedicated team either as you can clearly see on their wiki pages what those developers that were supposed to be on the Raid team worked on, outside Raids. After the initial 3 Raids of course, those were indeed created by an actual dedicated team.Yes, but notice how you said that it was nowhere close to being enough.

On the contrary.Let's call W the amount of work needed to create a new Raid Wing. Let's call D the amount of developer time assigned to Raids. Then the result of W/D can be the number of months required to complete a Raid wing, let's call it M.We have the equation: W/D = M of course it's way more complicated than that but let's keep it simple for the sake of argument.Yes one way to decrease the value of M and have faster Raid releases, is to increase the amount of developer effort assigned to Raids. But, that's not the only way, reducing the value of W can have the same result. The argument of "Raids didn't get developer resources because they weren't popular enough" is very weak if you think about the equation above.

All I'm saying is that if they wanted faster Raid releases they could have faster releases and developers assigned to Raids would have very little to do with it. The release cadence was pre-determined (to align with episode releases) and someone higher up thought that this release cadence would be enough. Popularity and revenue had a much smaller role to play, at least compared to what is given all the time on the forums, as I've demonstrated that they could decrease the interval between Raid releases without assigning more resources to them. Simply by making Raids simpler, I think that would be preferred over their slow release.

That's it, management, scheduling, lack of insight and probably developer stubbornness is what resulted in that slow release cadence.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Bakeneko.5826" said:So you are saying, that raids are popular, while devs say pariticipation of community in them is low... Hm.... Who do I trust, soem random dude on forums or dev?

I never said Raids are popular I'm not sure where you got that impression. I simply went away of the comparison "those that Raid" vs "those that do not Raid" and want to make a comparison between "those that Raid" vs "those that do content A" instead. Because as I said, I doubt that "those that do not Raid" are ALL playing EVERYTHING else the game has to offer to put them in the same package. So do you think that those who don't run Raids, do absolutely everything else or not (in a given Living World episode, not including PVP, WVW or Fractals)?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:All I'm saying is that if they wanted faster Raid releases they could have faster releases and developers assigned to Raids would have very little to do with it. The release cadence was pre-determined (to align with episode releases) and someone higher up thought that this release cadence would be enough.Factually untrue. We know that the release cadence was planned to be to have fractal and raid instances every other LS chapter. That would make them more like 6-7 months long, not 9-11. Compared to their planned schedule, they were usually one LS behind (or, in case of W5, one episode an a whole expansion behind). That wasn't planned. That was them not being able to catch up to their own schedule. And W7 wasn't even tied to that, it released one month after last LS4 episode, so its delay was even more obviously not a result of what you were talking about, but simply a consequence of them not being able (for whatever reason) to release it earlier.

That whole hypothesis of yours was never supported by anything beyond your own ideas.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@maddoctor.2738 said:

@"Bakeneko.5826" said:So you are saying, that raids are popular, while devs say pariticipation of community in them is low... Hm.... Who do I trust, soem random dude on forums or dev?

I never said Raids are popular I'm not sure where you got that impression. I simply went away of the comparison "those that Raid" vs "those that do not Raid" and want to make a comparison between "those that Raid" vs "those that do content A" instead. Because as I said, I doubt that "those that do not Raid" are ALL playing EVERYTHING else the game has to offer to put them in the same package. So do you think that those who don't run Raids, do absolutely everything else or not (in a given Living World episode, not including PVP, WVW or Fractals)?Funny how you don;t notice that you yourself are one pushing for that special treatment of raids when you are asking for them to be treated differently than all those other contents by developers.Mirror puzzles in Bjora Marches? A one-off job, probably done by some dev in between other, more important projects. We'll possibly never see a repeat of them either. Jumping puzzles are something that happens more often, but here, again, it's not a major project, it's not on schedule, and we're never guaranteed to get any with the next content release. They will do one when they feel like it, but when they have no time or resources they will not bother, and noone will complain due to it. Raids are not like that. If they were developed in the same way, with next wings not on schedule, but only done when the devs doing them had a free time to work on another one, ypu can bet you would be even more critical of Anet's approach to them than you're now.

You expected raids to be treated as something special, something similar to WvW and SPvP (but with far better dev support than those). Something separate from the normal flow of PvE. So, don't be surprised now if everyone else is also looking at them the same way.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@"Astralporing.1957" said:We know that the release cadence was planned to be to have fractal and raid instances every other LS chapter

How do we -know- this? Got a developer quote when they specifically said that?Also, it's curious to check the time frame:Out of the Shadows: Chaos Isles FractalRising Flames: noneA Crack in the Ice: Nightmare FractalThe Head of the Snake: Bastion of the PenitentFlashpoint: noneOne Path Ends: Shattered Observatory

Now there are two releases without a Fractal or Raid release, Rising Flames and Flashpoint. Guess which 2 episodes were worked on by the "Design Lead" of the so called "Raid Team". I will spoil it for you: Rising Flames and Flashpoint. So your "Factually untrue. " is factually false. Raid releases were delayed not because they had extra work to do for those Raids, but because Raid team members (and even the Lead) worked on Living World episodes. You are telling me that using the Raid Team to make Rising Flames and Flashpoint wasn't planned and was a decision made "on the fly"? Please get real, the entire schedule above was pre-determined before S3 even started.

That doesn't change my point of "if they wanted faster Raid releases, they could've simply made Raids simpler", I'm not really sure how is that disputed.

And W7 wasn't even tied to that, it released one month after last LS4 episode, so its delay was even more obviously not a result of what you were talking about, but simply a consequence of them not being able (for whatever reason) to release it earlier.

W7 was delayed thanks to Voice Acting work. And as I was talking about, if something external like VA was the problem, they could've easily reduce the amount of VA needed for W7 to make it on time.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...