Zok.4956

The comments/highlights in their statement simply provide a brief overview of some of the key figures and their reasons. The absence of comments/highlights in their statement on a topic does not mean that the topic is not included in the financial figures in the report. A quote from the report: "Marketing expenses increased by 126% qoq, driven by advertising for the launch of new titles and expansion pack on a domestic and overseas basis," "expansion pack" could be GW2, but "launch of new titles" means not only another game, but more than one other game. New game releases usually have a higher marketing budget (because they have a chance of higher sales) than game expansions. Another quote from the report: "Legacy PC online games posted KRW 93.2 billion, up 6% qoq with various content updates and expansion pack launching effect". The could include Lineage, AION, B&S and GW2, because they all were up qoq (only Lineage 2 has less sales qoq). So, their above statement are about several games. Agreed.

EoD was released in February 2022, which is around in the middle of 2022 Q1. Do you have an official (which means from NCSoft) source of your statement, that EoD sales (including pre-purchase sales) that happened during (and before) 2022 Q1 were not reported in 2022 Q1, but in 2022 Q2? Thanks. According to NCSoft's previous statements (and their financial rules), sales are reported on an accrual basis in the quarter in which they occurred. Deviating from this, only the sales of pre-purchases of a game or expansion are reported in the quarter in which the corresponding release took place. PoF was released September 22, which is Q3. Therefore, all PoF pre-orders and current Q3 sales up to September 30th were reported in Q3. Of course, the PoF purchases in October were only reported in Q4. Did you mean this? If not, it would be nice if you could give me an official source.

Interesting comparison. Because when I saw Ignaxious for the first time, the fight somehow reminded me of the Seitung meta final boss fight. 😉

Good point. That's not entirely out of the question. The expansion isn't quite finished yet and you could therefore view part of the sales as "income" and part of the sales as "advance payments", if NCSoft's financial reporting rules allow something like that. But so far there hasn't been anything like that in the past. There may have been questions about this on the analyst call, but I didn't listen to that. However, saying something did amazingly well can mean all sorts of things if the marketing department isn’t more specific. 😉

The new GW2 Sales/Revenue/Earnings Report 3Q-2023 has been published. Therefore here is my annotated overview of the GW2 quartely revenue from 3Q-2012 (release) until the actual reporting quarter, which is now 3Q-2023: Quarterly revenue for the third quarter of 2023 is KRW 20.977 billion. As mentioned in previous quarters, I consider quarterly revenue above KRW 20 billion to be quite good and sustainable for the game. However: The SotO expansion was released in Q3 2023. And I would actually have expected that there should have been a clear upward sales peak because of this. Especially since the pre-sales sales of the expansions are also reported financially in the release quarter. For me, two conclusions are therefore most obvious: Either the SotO sales were not that good, or the SotO sales were good, but the trend of general sales decline from the previous quarters continued in Q3 and thus weakened the sales peak. How do you see it? EDIT: Updated Image to inline-attachement

Yes, it is a characteristic of this game mode that such comparisons have little meaning as to who is "better". This is a question that the numbers cannot really answer. Because you can't really distinguish who has handled their coverage numbers better, only who has more or less or different coverage types. And in the end it's like always: "bigger is better".

There are so many things in WvW that could make you wonder that. The answer to all of these is probably: Because some Anet dev thought it was a good idea at some point. But that doesn't mean it was really a good idea or even makes sense. Maybe because fighting/attacking/defending is sometimes fun for some players? If you can free yourself from playing (only) for certain server numbers that you often cannot influence yourself, WvW can be a lot more fun for those players.

There are only a few situations in WvW where competition is based on skill: Examples: 2 players duel (undisturbed by others), 2 guilds/zergs with the same number of players doing GvG (undisturbed by others). And something like that. Everything else is not based on skill, but just on who has the most players on the map (or in the Zerg) at a certain time of day on a certain day of the week. And sometimes it also depends on if/which two servers go against the third one. Because WvWvW is a three-way fight and the drama caused by this "unfairness" is built into the core of WvWvW (and is sometimes quite fun). It doesn't matter to this result what you try to interpret into any numbers in order to apparently find out which server/team is "better". Because the source of your data does not contain the information "who are the most skilled/best players/teams", the result cannot contain that either (garbage in, garbage out principle). And therefore such numbers are meaningless for a lot of players (not only forum folks).

Unfortunately, this is a mistake that Anet has made a few times when they initially only published a map as an incomplete part. I would therefore much prefer if Anet only published complete maps instead of several map pieces.

For me this WoW patch is completely overpriced and I would not pay one Euro/Dollar for that - because I don't like WoW and playing WoW is not fun for me. What I mean by that: If you compare the amount of game content of different games, this is only possible to a very limited extent and you are almost always comparing apples with oranges. While I'd rather have a big expansion a la HoT or PoF (every year 😉), because I don't particularly like these bite-sized expansion updates, I still think the price for the expansion is still OK.

If you simplify strongly enough and, for example, lump together different opinions from different players, you can always construct a contradiction, which in reality doesn't necessarily have to be one. And: Not only can Anet change their mind over time about how the game is released and marketed, but players can also change their mind over time (and after playing the releases) about which variants they like and don't like. These are not contradictions.

No, his name was Rudolph. And he had a reindeer. Or was one.

Disable "Melee Attack Assist" in your Options.

Thanks for the reminder, I had forgotten that. Sure, first of all the phrase just replaces “expansion”. But the expectation that is created by the wording in the context in which it is said is of course that it will be at least as good as an expansion. So every player will compare it in their head with what they understand as an expansion. So a certain quality is indirectly implied. At least that was the case until HoT was released. Because from then on we have a real expansion with the quality of which other expansions can be compared. In this respect, it was a little more concrete when IBS was announced as “expansion level content”. Because at that time we already had HoT and PoF as a benchmark and therefore that was also a statement about quality.

Raids were not dead before they even started. Raids were a big success (Anets words, not mine) at the start. Anet said themselves back then that they knew that challenging 10-player content was only interesting for a small part of the player base. But the raids in GW2 were a success because a much higher proportion of players raided in GW2 than in other comparable games. What essentially killed raids over the years (at least to the point that Anet said no more raids would be created) were two things. First: Far too little new content/raids. Second: No obvious difficulty ladder. Third: No easy mode/story mode so that even non-raiders can experience the content/environment/story. Anet tried to learn from these mistakes and started strikes as a successor to raids with IBS. And starting with the EOD strikes, Anet tried to further optimize strike creation. By using the same assets for the story and strikes, Anet kills two birds with one stone: the content production of strikes costs less and non-raid non-strike players can experience the same content in “story mode”. So, all in all, Anet seems to have made a lot of mistakes with challenging-10-player-content, but seems to have learned something from them and obviously wants to keep challenging-10-player-content in the game and produce new content for it.

Then you will be happy to read that the Dragon Cycle ended over a year ago. No more dragons to fight. Although: Could you mix something up? Because you don't normally fight dragons in PvP in GW2. You fight against other players.

The game had a very lively PvP community and was even somewhat active in eSports. But because Anet couldn't manage the balancing, the PvP community at the time left because Anet made PvP a joke. You don't seem to think much of other players.

It's not about Anet asking the community for ideas and the community doesn't have any or doesn't want to share them with Anet. The point is that Anet apparently stopped the World-restructioning-alliances project after at least 2 WvW devs left for other studios months ago and Anet doesn't seem to want to put a lot of (2 WvW devs) additional development resources into it. Which is why the half-finished World-Restructuring-Alliance project is stopped, cleaned up a bit and then this unfinished version is permanently incorporated into the game. Several of the recent changes seem to give me the impression that Anet is trying to get the most consistent revenue from the game with minimal effort, and therefore Anet only seems to care about the areas/players that (probably) generate the most revenue . In WvW, even though it was referred to as a "cornerstone" (by the now former?) devs/management at the time, it does not currently appear to be one of the areas that Anet's sales focus prioritizes. Why should WvW players be happy about this move? That's funny. Because with the current state of the game, those who have the biggest blob win, but not necessarily those who play the best. Therefore, winning doesn't matter and the whole WR/Alliance project had the real goal of alleviating the current imbalance in order to give meaning *afterwards* to winning/losing.

Wow, thats around 8 years ago, and when I revisit the maps they still feel fresh and fun and much more lively than EoD maps. About half of the studio hasn't worked on GW2, but has been developing one or more other projects/games for a long time. However, as this did not work out as NCSoft expected, mass layoffs ultimately occurred in 2019, including Mike O'Brien (President and co-founder of ArenaNet and executive producer of GW2) leaving the studio. The financial downturn was later stopped, also thanks to Covid, because many more people played video games.

Because they are a small convenience item for wealthy players who have everything else.

Maybe this helps:

Better players are already more powerful. Your suggestion would be a type of vertical progression, the mastery system was introduced as an alternative to this.

Godot will answer your questions. Just wait a moment until he gets here.

Competitive is player generated content, so here are the WvW special tasks: Flip Stonemist with a group consisting only of healers kill 100000 enemy players defend 1000 towers Color three borderlands completely in your team color at the same time Flip a keep solo Win a 50v50 GvG where no player in your squad is allowed to go downstate and my favorite: Get 1000000 Karma in EotM without defeating a single enemy player Please don't hate me if they add these to the WT. 😇

Well, it's funny how you respond to something and then refute it that I didn't even write. Or did you agree with me and just wanted to be more general and I misunderstood your intention? I think your answer is more suitable as a counter to the opinions that say you should blindly trust Anet because Anet already knows exactly what they are doing. This is overly simplified but there is truth in it. And from “what sticks” you can then learn for the future what works and what doesn’t work. With the WT, Anet has now created a tool with which they can do exactly that much more easily and quickly. Anet has implemented something here (battle pass, but without payment) that already works for this purpose in other games.