[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

11 hours ago, Captain Crapface.7528 said:

On the contrary, I'd like my skills to be more than "press x to damage".

Yeah, there is "too much" but there's also "not enough". Let's try and find the middle ground, shall we?

Yes, obviously, like with most things, both extreme ends of the spectrum are bad. But you were mocking one end of the spectrum specifically. Just because someone doesn't enjoy overcomplicated skills (not just me), it has nothing to do with whether they enjoy reading or not. Skill description should not be a space for long paragraphs, and they necessitate them, then it should be a red flag.

There are many skills that have relatively complex behavior yet are simple to use and have concise description. Good example is Binding Blade on Guardian GS. It's AoE projectile that has optionally second pull mechanic, or you can skip the pull and just let it do damage, and you can also use it to fish thieves in stealth. 

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

23 hours ago, Captain Crapface.7528 said:

Grug no like many words. Many words scary.

No wonder we're yet to nerf broken specks, if people refuse to even bloody read what they do.

You need to understand that the skills are just one square button that you press and action happens. There's a limit to its reasonable complexity. You have on average around 15 more buttons to press, so no one wants to read an essay about what a single button press does. I used it as an illustration about how the skill design degenerated over the years.

[WTF is wrong with Berserker's Stance in WvW]

15 hours ago, Lan Deathrider.5910 said:

Welcome to a relic of when they nerfed Resistance but did not adjust every skill that granted it. See also, Healing Signet.

Lol, yes, we are in the bizarre situation where the Dolyak signet heals 150% more than the signet called "Healing Signet". It's just a space filler really.

[WTF is wrong with Berserker's Stance in WvW]

When seeing all the perma-resistance vindicators and elite ele specs, I still just don't even remotely understand how 40 secs cooldown is warranted. How could 4 secs of resistance each 40 seconds be exploited by the warrior...

[WTF is wrong with Berserker's Stance in WvW]

Can someone explain to me WTF is going on with Berserker's Stance in WvW? It has 25 sec cooldown in PVP but 40?!?!?! in WvW? All the skill does is to give player mere 4 seconds of resistance and barely enough adrenaline to fill one of 3 adrenaline bars...? How is 40 second cooldown for just 4 seconds of resistance and ~10 adrenaline even remotely warranted? O_o There is no way this is intentional, and not a mistake.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

On 8/30/2024 at 10:28 PM, Rogue.8235 said:

The level of economic/market analysis is astounding.  I also like how you covered all the ratio metrics to solidify your point, such as CLC:CAC.  Also, of note, is your presentation of the metrics used to measure, quantify, and analyze through regression models the behavioral characteristics of the MMORPG market segment.  This is on par with the best Mintel reports i've ever seen.  IBIS also has nothing on this quality research.

 

No, you're idea is not the best marketing plan for the game.  This is predicated on the absence of any evidence that such a plan would have any measurable success.  Since there is no evidence to to even support such a hypothesis, the analysis is a non-starter.  Basically, it's a waste of time to determine whether or not releasing active player numbers helps with CAC.  There is no discernible correlation between an MMO releasing such numbers and revenue.  I looked through Mintel reports, and nothing.

I don't think you should be using words like correlation when you can't even handle difference between your and you're.

Anyway, it's impossible to dispute that one health of playerbase is major decision factor for new players when deciding whether to play a new MMO game specifically. 

I've seen several influencers in MMO scene (Asmongold, Preach, etc...) dismiss GW2 under the assumption that the game is dead. The latter one, Preach, regretted this assumption once he gave the game a try, the former one still hasn't since he still assumes the game is just dead, as it has 0 presence in marketing space, and only source of the playerbase health data are  the highly misleading steam charts numbers.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

41 minutes ago, mungozen.2379 said:

As I have stated a few times "there are enough players" but how do I know?  You can log in and play most game modes most times of day and find people there to play.  You can join guilds with dozens to hundreds of active players at a given time.  You can call out in map chat or post in LFG and people will help you.

What do you think matters more, a report stating how many players are playing a game, or logging in and seeing enough players in game?

Your assertion that 'most reasonable people' will not try a game based upon the player numbers is exactly why you don't show those numbers.  It creates a false narrative about the quality of the game.  Logging in and experiencing the game will tell you if enough people are playing it for what you want to do.

Which leads to the question 'how many is enough?'  We could say 'enough to do the largest events' which would be 50ish.  Yet for all the metas full of players, sometimes multiple maps worth, we still have DRM which see minimal activity.  Is GW2 under-populated because most of the player base will never go to a DRM?

And yet, with minimal effort, you can use LFG/Guild and find enough players to form a DRM group.

I think I am a reasonable person and I do not judge a book by it's cover.  Player activity statistics mean very little in terms of my enjoyment in a game, and don't sway my decision making process at all.  Yes, I agree, you do need enough people to enjoy a game, but that is after deciding if the story, the themes, the art, the game mechanics etc are worth playing.  If the game isn't worth playing, then who cares how many people are playing it?

So how would Anet best sell their game?  By having people log in and get hooked on what the game is about, not how many people are playing it.

Yes, it's impossible to really have a conversation with you as you are unable to perceive the situation through any other perspective than your own. It's not about you, it's about ArenaNet/NCSoft. It's not about you being a happy player, it's about Anet/NCSoft making more money. When they pay the sponsored segments in YouTube video, they don't care about you, or people like you. No one cares about what you personally think about about the game or how do you approach trying out new games.

ANet can not sell their games by "having people log in" because most people will never get to the log in stage. They will dismiss the game as dead long before they even get to the thought of downloading the installer.

Then you may ask the question "Well, if ANet doesn't care about me, and only about making money (through the means of acquiring more players), why should I care about them?" - The answer to that is simple. The more players there are, the longer the lifespan of the game will be, so the longer will it stay alive.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

17 hours ago, mungozen.2379 said:

Yet you started playing this game without any player statistics?  Can you back up this claim that player activity is a 'top 3' factor in choosing a game?  What you believe is obvious isn't obvious to me.  Educate me on why player numbers factually matter to a new player.  As long as there are enough players then what else matters?  How does that contextualize to GW2?

I started to play the game at launch in 2012 - 12 years ago. It's very different trying to get players to try a game at launch VS trying to get players to try out 12 years old game for the first time.

Player numbers matter in MMO games specifically because in MMO games, other players and interaction with them is the core of the game experience to such a degree that if there's not enough of them, certain content and game modes can end up being straight up unplayable (inability to find enough people for dungeon, raid, events or pvp matches).

I am starting to suspect you are trolling at this point by intentionally pretending that you can't understand the concept of separating existing players of GW2, who are aware of the state of the game and health of the playerbase, from the potential new players, whom have never played the game, and whom will be doing just a rough estimates and assumptions about these factors based on external statistics, such as concurrent player numbers.

I am still going to try it one last time to explain that perspective. Imagine you'd get tired of GW2, and decided to try another MMO, let's say New World. You'd assume that the scale of the world is roughly (I swear to god is someone comes around and says "but actually GW2 is bigger in scale" I am gonna lose my kitten. Read the "roughly" word.) comparable to GW2, in terms of world scale, and you would therefore assume the reasonable amount of players for the game to not feel like a complete wasteland. You then come across only public statistic about the game's playerbase: https://steamcharts.com/app/1063730 - 4k players daily peak. Based on that, most reasonable people will simply assume the game is dying, and give up on even giving it a try. 4k is just not enough players to fill a world of that scale with sufficient density of player to player interactions, especially if you split that number up between regional servers.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

6 hours ago, Cyninja.2954 said:

In this case: very stable and recently growing thanks to the JW launch.

How do you know it's growing? We could tell that, if we got the hard numbers, but we don't. So what data do you base this on?

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

13 hours ago, wolfof.1842 said:

That would mean 5 million concurrent players logged in the same time.
Please tell us when you find a MMO with this many players 😃 

Yeah, I came here to tell him how delusional he is but thanks for doing it for me 🙂

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

1 hour ago, mungozen.2379 said:

What does that have to do with the publicly releasing the population of a game?

Do you think people care about how many other players are in the game when there are enough players to enjoy most of the content most of the time?

Yes. And not's just that I think it, it's that it is easily observable. When it comes to MMO games specifically, the health of the playerbase is in fact one of the top 3 factors players use to decide whether they give it a try.

I mean why would you even ask this when the answer is so obvious?

You keep forgetting that we are not talking about GW2 players, but the potential new players the ANet's advertising is targeted at. They know nothing about how GW2 works, and how alive the maps/instanced content groups are. They just go to steam charts, look at the numbers and say "meh".

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

1 minute ago, wolfof.1842 said:

I think you are in minority, actively not watching trailers... first time I heard this today honestly

Not only that but he's also not what this thread is about. It's not about people whom already play GW2, it's about ANets inability to properly attract new people to play the game. GW2 that has this unfortunate kitten cake aura. It reminds me of those videos of edible cakes that look like hyper realistic real world object. GW2 is essentialy a kitten cake. It looks like kitten from the outside, but once you take a knife and cut into it, you realize it's just a cake, and a really good one at that. But ANet markets it just as a kitten, forgetting to mention its a cake.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

6 hours ago, SoftFootpaws.9134 said:

one thing to keep in mind is an active account is not a player;. some hardcore players have a few dozen accounts or more and many have at least two.

Yes, but they are almost never concurrent. It makes little to no sense for players with alt account to run the game twice, because they can't really farm both at once, unless they use bots. They will usually log out of one account and log back into another, so multiple accounts will never be counted as concurrent during one specific point in time. You probably didn't read, but I explicitly stated peak. 

I have explicitly said peak concurrent daily players, meaning a largest number of players active at an exact point in time during 24 hour, one-day period. And then ANet would simply release the average. Let's say "In August of 2024, the peak concurrent daily players ranged between 28k to 43k." That's it.

I mean look above me. Everyone is just arguing about what these numbers could be, so it's all the more reason to have specific numbers instead of people arguing with each other about the data no one has access to. It is literally in the best interest of ANet, the game itself, existing players and potential new players for these numbers to be public. There's no scenario where releasing the numbers could hurt the game in any way in its current state.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Look at it this way - Currently, ANet pays many YT content creators to have short sponsored segment in their videos showing GW2 trailer in the background while reading off some pre-written promotion statement. If the part of the statement contained a sentence that GW2 has "Millions of unique players playing every month with around 40k concurrent players on average.", the whole sponsored segment would hit totally different. And the money spent of it would've paid off much, much more.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

4 hours ago, Solvar.7953 said:

Even if player numbers are released, it can be measured in all sorts of different ways.  People who bought JW?  People who log in at least once day/week/month (what time frame is chosen will affect the numbers).  People who own any expansion/have ever bought the game, etc.

So I doubt releasing numbers would do much to counter 'its a dead game' argument - those who want to push that argument will say based on those numbers, it is a dead game, or that the numbers are bogus, or whatever.

 

Simply - daily concurrent players peak, regardless of what kind of content they have. I'd include even F2P account players. There's no ambiguity in how to measure this particular stat.

And yes, it would very, very easily counter its a dead argument. GW2 has concurrent player numbers around the center of the Steam's top 100 most played games ladder. So if the GW2 player numbers are around 30-50k daily concurrent players peak, then that would put it alongside most popular titles, like Terraria, DayZ, FFXIV, Destiny 2, etc... which all are considered very much alive games.

You could then confront anyone who says GW2 is a dead game by saying that if they consider GW2 dead, then all the other widely popular games in Steam's top 100 played ladder are also dead by their standards, which is obviously not true.

There's simply no scenario for GW2 in which releasing the player numbers stats could hurt the game. It could only help it. It would be extremely cheap yet very effective marketing tool.

[Best marketing step ANet could do right now - RELEASE PLAYER NUMBERS]

I am seeing ANet spending more money recently on marketing in forms like paying advertised segments in youtuber videos. But both average consumers as well as influencers seem to share the same sentiment: "It's a dead game" - and it's impossible to argue against it, especially when they bring up the steam charts numbers. On Steam, GW2 averages around 5k concurrent players. 

Most of the hardcore GW2 fans know that Steam player count is only a small fraction, since GW2 had its own non-Steam launcher forever, but none of the players the advertising campaign is targeted at are aware of that. It's clear that the game is very much alive. I assume that the Steam players are about 1/10th of the playerbase. That would put it at the same level as Elden Ring and at about 10x as popular as New World. It would put the game's state in the perspective, which would likely convince a lot of people. The health of playerbase is especially important decision factor when it comes to MMO genre.

So IMO the best thing ANet could do, marketing wise, is to make those numbers public and be proud of them. For a 14 year old game, GW2 is doing extremely well, so it makes no sense to hide this fact from the potential new customers. 

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

9 hours ago, Triptaminas.4789 said:

Also for OP of this thread.. bladesworn isn't played not because it's complex, it's because it's biggest pile of kitten in this game, had a niche in some game modes but they patched it out.

Og warriors would build a shrine for anet in their basements if kittensworn actually becomes playable

I think this kind of proves my point. It doesn't perform above the average, but not below the average either. They balanced it on level with other warrior specs, but now no one wants to deal with all the clunky and complicated flow charging, perfect timing and gunsaber BS when the damage output doesn't exceed berserker monke pressing F2 followed by F1.

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

9 hours ago, igmolicious.5986 said:

The biggest issue with complexity here is that ANET has already taken the stance that complexity shouldn't be grounds for better performance (dps/support/etc.), so the complexity is only there as a gimmick, and not as a means to do more damage/healing. When given the option of a complex solution that performs the same as a simple solution, most people are going to pick the simple solution.

Yes, this is exactly what I mean. If overly complex skills can't output more value (damage, conditions, CC, healing or boons) because they'd became unbalanced if used by people who've mastered them, then there's no incentive to use overly complex weapons/abilities. And the main problem then becomes that you have so many playstyles on paper (the weapons and skills are available) but no one uses them in practice, because it's not viable. You pay with increased cognitive load and chance of failure, and you get nothing in return compared to simple skills.

I am a bit biased because I spent overwhelming majority of my time in WvW, where by the time you are done chaining your 5-action combo to perfectly execute complex skill, the thief has already exited and re-entered stealth 3 times and is already mounted on warclaw on his way to capture camp on the other side of the map, so your slow moving explosive orb of doom or something hits the place where the thief's grandma used to live many decades ago.

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

15 minutes ago, coro.3176 said:

It's already a word, and OP is misusing it here.

 

What you mean misusing? We are users of a "live service" game and we are getting some new "features" (weapons) that are more difficult to use but offer no added value in exchange for that difficult. It fits well. 

Or would you argue that ANet puts as much or more effort into iterative improvement of gameplay/skills design now than it did post launch?

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

1 hour ago, Xelqypla.6817 said:

I understand where you are coming from.

However, many of us enjoy the complexity as it keeps us engaged.

The reason I, and I imagine many others, don't play with your notable examples is because they aren't very enjoyable. Like, with the case of Revenant Scepter, I'd much rather just play Thief Specter.

 

57 minutes ago, Dean Calaway.9718 said:

You mean SOME players, mostly cat owners, give up on it, I love the Ranger spear, I haven't had time to try any others yet but I have seen players complain how "complex" it is... really?

It takes a whole of 2 minutes to read all the skills and start practicing with the thing, I haven't enjoyed the game so much in I don't remember how long and right now I'm just concerned people will QQ enough to get it nerfed since there's plenty of enemies in Janthir that I'm one-shoting.

This is not just an opinion. I would not have written this if I saw players actually running with these weapons in PvE, WvW or PVP. If the opposite was the case I would have assumed it's just me. There are many other complex systems like for example Vindicator's Double-Legend or Harbinger's Blight, and people seem to use those because the complexity is rewarded by better gameplay, but there are other cases where it's just complex, without any reward in terms of more interesting gameplay.

People simply don't use these weapons or profession mechanics. It's not that I think it, it's that it is easily observable.

What really made me post this is that's it's frustrating that some weapons on some professions are just a "spacers". They occupy a list of the available weapons so the class has more playstyles on the paper, but they aren't viable due to unfinished design. And the most frustration comes from the fact that the design will probably never be fixed, because they essentially haven't touched the new weapons after their official launch. Warrior's "melee Pistol" debacle is another notable example that comes to mind.

[More Complexity != Better Gameplay]

I keep seeing thins pattern ever since EoD. It appears that the gameplay team is unable to realize that simply adding more complexity does not mean better gameplay. 

Since EOD, there have been some weapon skills that have their mechanics more complicated that the entire weapon skillbars from the core game. At some point, this complexity becomes so frustrating and hard to keep track of the players just give up on it. Notable examples:

- Nearly no one plays Bladesworn

- Nearly no one uses Guardian off-hand pistol

- Nearly no Rev players use Scepter

This complexity enshittification has unfortunately crept up also into the Spear skills design, where once again, mechanics of some skills are a whole book to read. As an example - Guardian Spear skill 5 tooltip has more words than all Guardian Greatsword skill tooltips combined. 

New weapons should open up new gameplay styles, but skill complexity does not mean opening up new gameplay style, it just means more complexity to deal with. 

The Warrior spear is relatively OK for example, since it provides much needed ranged non-condi weapon for Warrior (the Rifle has been brutally neglected for years), but in many other cases, skills of these weapons are so overcomplicated people just give up on using them. The skills still need to be balanced, so even the complex skills must not be outliers in terms of capability. But this ultimately means than even if you learn overly complicated, perfectly timed chain of actions to executed the complicated skill precisely, you will often not get any better result than pressing a single key of some simple, basic weapon skill. 

Apparently programmers have given up too, since the overcomplicated wonky behavior is hard to bugfix. Guardian pistol 5 still doesn't work reliably to this day (over half a year after being added).

Sure, we players always welcome more playstyles, but complexity is not a playstyle.

[WvW & PvE Warclaw no longer forward dashes on jump]

Every single mount has some special charged jump ability that works by holding the jump key longer.

Raptor: Leap

Springer: Rocket Jump

Skimmer: Hover

Jackal: Blink

Griffon: Climb

With Warclaw, they kittened up, because Warclaw already has a jump, but the people doing the feature design had absolutely 0 creativity, so when they were figuring out the new features for PVE Warclaw, that one brain cell was only able to copy existing pattern: "lETS gIve waRCLaW SPEcIaL JUMp".

Now they ended up with two special jumps they are unable to map to keys correctly. 

So now we are in this embarrassing situation where every single mount has advanced jump ability mapped on the second press of the jump button, except Warclaw. It's especially embarrassing since it's not even hard to solve. The WvW Warclaw should have remained exactly the same, and PVE should trigger boosted jump on pressing dodge key after jumping. It would achieve the exactly same effect without kittening up WvW Warclaw or the consistency with all other mount controls.

If it was, at the very least somewhat creative. But they essentially just made another Jackal, jump mechanics-wise. 😞

[WvW & PvE Warclaw no longer forward dashes on jump]

I just wish that key mapping of mount abilities worked... FOR ALL MOUNTS, consistently. There's currently no key mapping setup that doesn't break anything in both PvE and WvW.

Don't have this mount ability 1/2 nonsense. Just add Mount 1-5 skill key bindings that completely override weapon skill keybindings when mounted. That's it. Right now it's this weird BS where part of the ability skill bar hotkeys "bleed through" from the weapon hotkeys, while other part is overriden, but only for some specific mount types. It's ridiculous.

[WvW & PvE Warclaw no longer forward dashes on jump]

1 hour ago, HekateKitty.1796 said:

Then what's the point of us having the Disable Conditional Mount Movement Ability Input option? Not to mention the fact that Raptors long jump skill is triggered when jumping.

Yes, exactly. I call BS on that statement. It's especially concerning given that if anyone should know, it's ArenaNet staff....

[Warclaw Lance does not work if Mount Abillity 2 and Weapon Skill 4 are bound to the same hotkey.]

I know, but this has been reported dozens of times and consistently ignored by ANet. The only reason people are rediscovering this bug now is that they broke Warclaw's WvW dash and people are trying to fix it using binding hotkeys.

It's super infuriating because there's a workaround to make custom Warclaw ability keys somewhat work, but it will break other PvE mount ability keys... The game is in such a sad state.

[Idea: Allow Gift of Battle and Gift of Exploration to be traded for each other.]

This is great idea but it's not gonna happen. Most people don't want to go through the torture of 100% world completion more than once. WvW on the other side is relatively fun. So amounts of people with huge stockpiles of unused gifts of battle are significant. If you allowed to trade them, people would suddenly start crafting a lot more legendary weapons, which would hit ANet's earning significantly, as Trading Post legendaries are one of the main source of the income. Many people just buy legendaries off of the TP to avoid the world completion torture.