Gw2 is its own worst enemy

[battledrone.8315]

2 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

I believe the point was that there should have been no need to watch any video for most players to realize New World was a trainwreck about to happen. For me, all it took was a general description of the game from the developer.

that just means, that it wasnt a game for you. considering the resources they had, there was an actual chance for it to be good.

they had over a million players at launch. the market is clearly there.

[Astralporing.1957]

10 minutes ago, battledrone.8315 said:

they had over a million players at launch.

And most of those players went in just to see things, and were either not intending to stay, or didn't read the game description too well.

That's exactly a result of a good marketing aimed at wrong target group - people come, but leave soon after. Which is fine if you are going to sell an one-time-purchase singleplayer game (once), but not for MMOs.

I mean, even Amazon realized their design had a problem. Remember the moment when they suddenly started deemphasizing the fact that the game was designed as an open-world PvP sandbox? That was when they realized that even among people interested in their game people that like open world PvP are a minority.

The bugs and other launch issues were just an icing on a cake.

Edited January 22, 2022 by Astralporing.1957

[Bakeneko.5826]

15 minutes ago, battledrone.8315 said:

that just means, that it wasnt a game for you. considering the resources they had, there was an actual chance for it to be good.

they had over a million players at launch. the market is clearly there.

No, he is right. New World was supposed to be unplayable mess - New game company, known for only failed games (Ahem.. Grand tour on playstation) takes on MMO of all things, with mechanics like open wold PvP that are proven not to work. By the company who loves money above all else. It was disaster to happen.

 

10 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

That's exactly a result of a good marketing for bad quality product

fixed it

[Yakubyogami.7586]

This game has been out for years. The chances advertising will yield enough new players to make a ROI on the marketing costs is minimal. Those that left the game out of boredom will very likely hear about the expansion and come back to check it out, or at least read reviews before purchasing.

Word of mouth is, and has always been, the best advertising. The nice thing about it is, it's free.

As a side note, how "good" a game (or aspect of a game) is tends to be dependent on the opinion of the person judging it. Personally, my favorite game right now is Cyberpunk 2077. I wish it had more content and/or was a MMO, but it has kept me entertained. As good as the combat is in GW2, I stopped playing some time back and am waiting on the expansion release.

Necro with pewpew? Yes plz.

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Yakubyogami.7586 said:

This game has been out for years. The chances advertising will yield enough new players to make a ROI on the marketing costs is minimal.

Sure marketing didn't pay off for FF XIV. None at all. [/sarcasm]

[Sobx.1758]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Sure marketing didn't pay off for FF XIV. None at all. [/sarcasm]

...on the other hand, lets wait 2 months to see the ff player numbers stabilize a little 🤔 

[Knighthonor.4061]

History. People are bound to repeat it

[Chaosi.4182]

Lol it seems like most players are just.. “ok” with it and this company doesn’t seem to care that much. Do people not wanna make money? More players equals more money which in turn equals more funding. Better cosmetics, more leeway to change things up. With Lost Ark on the way as well this game is hemorrhaging. And btw gw2 combat isn’t that special. Bdo has surpassed 300k+ players monthly like a few weeks ago and it has better action combat. Gw2 has better story of course but .. thats it really. 

[Lord of the Fire.6870]

19 hours ago, Sobx.1758 said:

...on the other hand, lets wait 2 months to see the ff player numbers stabilize a little 🤔 

They are because you can't go in because the server are full I mean so full that they won't let you buy the game

8 hours ago, Chaosi.4182 said:

Lol it seems like most players are just.. “ok” with it and this company doesn’t seem to care that much. Do people not wanna make money? More players equals more money which in turn equals more funding. Better cosmetics, more leeway to change things up. With Lost Ark on the way as well this game is hemorrhaging. And btw gw2 combat isn’t that special. Bdo has surpassed 300k+ players monthly like a few weeks ago and it has better action combat. Gw2 has better story of course but .. thats it really. 

Well I saw this on google trend that BDO is over Gw2 which was surprising but that not the point.

The core problem is I saw what  is happening here a lot in other MMOs.

 

'People come on the board pointing huge flaws in the game which will drive players out of the game when not fixed, white knights jumping in to fight them off this happens then over months if not years without reaction from the developer/publisher.'

 

I saw this kind of pattern several times this is not my first MMO and I know how it ends....

 

On the other side people usually a fast to click when things are 'not to their liking' on board and because the last word isn't said until EoD comes out or shortly after  the tension goes up the closer the release is. So people will more and more complaining about stuff which should have been fixed or at least should have an official response to.

[battledrone.8315]

On 1/22/2022 at 9:18 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

And most of those players went in just to see things, and were either not intending to stay, or didn't read the game description too well.

That's exactly a result of a good marketing aimed at wrong target group - people come, but leave soon after. Which is fine if you are going to sell an one-time-purchase singleplayer game (once), but not for MMOs.

I mean, even Amazon realized their design had a problem. Remember the moment when they suddenly started deemphasizing the fact that the game was designed as an open-world PvP sandbox? That was when they realized that even among people interested in their game people that like open world PvP are a minority.

The bugs and other launch issues were just an icing on a cake.

if  you dont get people to actually try the game, then its dead pretty much at launch, just like crowfall was

and if a half finished , buggy mess can get over a million players at launch, how much could a GOOD game do?

the mmo market is still there. thats my point.

[Astralporing.1957]

On 1/22/2022 at 6:45 PM, Sobx.1758 said:

...on the other hand, lets wait 2 months to see the ff player numbers stabilize a little 🤔 

Of course they won't stabilize. There will always be big spikes around expansion releases, and smaller spikes around major patches, with dips in-between those. It's just that so far the spikes for each subsequent expansion get higher and higher, and even dips end up at similarily higher levels. And advertizing (even the most basic things like the expansion trailers) are at least partly responsible for this - they bring people to the game, and then the game itself makes them stay.

That's the important combo: the game needs to be good enough to retain new players, the advertizing needs to be enticing enough to bring in new players, and they need to be in sync so the advertizing is aimed at the people that are most likely to like the game, and not at those that would rather play different ones.

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, battledrone.8315 said:

if  you dont get people to actually try the game, then its dead pretty much at launch, just like crowfall was

and if a half finished , buggy mess can get over a million players at launch, how much could a GOOD game do?

At launch? About the same. After all, most people will realize the game is half-finished, buggy mess only after they've had a chance to play it.

5 hours ago, battledrone.8315 said:

the mmo market is still there. thats my point.

Sure it is. What you're missing is that this market is mostly not new players, but old players trying stuff around. Notice, btw, that someone trying out other games does not mean they will leave their old one. That would only happen if the new game were to be an even better fit for them than the current one is. That's why many new MMORPGs have high initial player counts, but those players disappear shortly after - they go back to playing their main games after they've satisfied their curiosity.

New World was not designed to be that game - it would not fulfill that criteria even if it was done perfectly. It was simply designed to be a game of the type that, ultimately does not appeal to all that many players. Not on the western market anyway. The bugs and other issues simply added to that, but were not a primary cause of players not being interested longterm.

[battledrone.8315]

18 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

At launch? About the same. After all, most people will realize the game is half-finished, buggy mess only after they've had a chance to play it.

Sure it is. What you're missing is that this market is mostly not new players, but old players trying stuff around. Notice, btw, that someone trying out other games does not mean they will leave their old one. That would only happen if the new game were to be an even better fit for them than the current one is. That's why many new MMORPGs have high initial player counts, but those players disappear shortly after - they go back to playing their main games after they've satisfied their curiosity.

New World was not designed to be that game - it would not fulfill that criteria even if it was done perfectly. It was simply designed to be a game of the type that, ultimately does not appeal to all that many players. Not on the western market anyway. The bugs and other issues simply added to that, but were not a primary cause of players not being interested longterm.

lol. unless they watched some videos on it first. and you are acting like mmo players are "special" because they 

want to try out new games. tell me, what specific design choices they did wrong?

what would you have done differently to save the day? 

[Zenith.7301]

WoW literally sabotaging itself right and left and the GW2 devs can't even be bothered to try to tap into the organized PvE market and make their endgame instanced PvE more rewarding with greater content cadence.

 

Anet would just rather let FFXIV get all those ex-WoW players for free without competition at all. Just all around bad management.

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, battledrone.8315 said:

lol. unless they watched some videos on it first.

You were specifically talking about numbers at launch. I'd be quite hard to be able to see vids documenting post-launch issues at that point, don't you think?

Quote

and you are acting like mmo players are "special" because they want to try out new games.

Special? No. I'm just talking about the MMORPG market being pretty much stale for many years, with no place to expand it anymore. There's very few new players there, so a new game can for the most part only count on taking players away from an existing game. Which hardly ever happens, unless that other game kittens up in a major way.

So, you can either do what other games are already doing, but better (which is hard, not only because doing better is not easy to achieve - or those other games would already do it themselves, but also due to the player inertia - the difference has to be quite significant before a player decides to abandon years of investment in one game in order to move to a new one), or try to find some new players by going for a niche that is not yet filled (also not easy, because there's not many things that haven;t been tried before).

New World tried to do the latter, but unfortunately for Amazon they picked a niche that is nowadays extremely unpopular in the western MMORPG market.

Quote

tell me, what specific design choices they did wrong?

Well, basing the design around the open world sandbox PvP is a well-known and very old idea. Well known for something that has only a very limited following, and is good only for a niche game, not for an AAA title. It's something that worked when you aimed for 5-digit game populations, but nowadays that's just not enough to carry a big mainstream title. Not in the west anyway.

Quote

what would you have done differently to save the day? 

To save the day? Nothing - New World was beyond saving the moment they finalized their overall design. To save it, they'd have to go to the drawing board and create a new game, with diferent basic design principles.

Edited January 25, 2022 by Astralporing.1957

[Astralporing.1957]

5 hours ago, Zenith.7301 said:

WoW literally sabotaging itself right and left and the GW2 devs can't even be bothered to try to tap into the organized PvE market and make their endgame instanced PvE more rewarding with greater content cadence.

 

Anet would just rather let FFXIV get all those ex-WoW players for free without competition at all. Just all around bad management.

Gw2 cannot win the competition (or even compete on relatively equal ground) with FF XIV by trying to be more like it (or WoW). It should rather try to emphasize its strengths and unique qualities, instead of giving up on them in order to become more like every other game out there.

[voltaicbore.8012]

10 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Gw2 cannot win the competition (or even compete on relatively equal ground) with FF XIV by trying to be more like it (or WoW). It should rather try to emphasize its strengths and unique qualities, instead of giving up on them in order to become more like every other game out there.

Exactly, and I have no idea why so many people find this so hard to understand.

As has been noted several times in this thread (and elsewhere), GW2 is just not built the same way WoW/FFXIV/the other tab-target WoW clones are. Some believe that this choice to build a fundamentally different game was a mistake, and that is a reasonable position to have; trying things outside the tested/accepted formula is always a risky proposition.

What I consider unreasonable is this belief that making a hard pivot now towards the more traditional MMO elements will solve anything. That sounds extremely dumb to me, as it will likely only succeed in turning GW2 into scuffed FF (with weaker-than-FF story) or scuffed WoW (with far less raw content than WoW).

On 1/23/2022 at 7:23 AM, Lord of the Fire.6870 said:

Well I saw this on google trend that BDO is over Gw2 which was surprising but that not the point.

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who's been playing BDO for the past couple of years. BDO's problems are much easier to solve. Players are always hurting for gear and in-game money, so Pearl Abyss (BDO's devs) just gives players easier access to both, and everyone is happy. Even veterans who had to work a lot harder to reach those tiers of gear and money back in the day don't care, because PA was smart enough to only give out access to the second-best tier of stuff, rather than BiS gear and BiS-gear-levels of money.

I could put up a huge wall of text about how of all the games mentioned in threads like these, BDO is interestingly the most relevant one GW2 could adapt from. And no, that doesn't mean RNG gear downgrades or massive amounts of grinding - BDO is just a more tightly managed project that isn't afraid of leaning very hard into what it does well.

[Shadowmoon.7986]

I disagree, the marketing department is this game worst enemy. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

[Bakeneko.5826]

On 1/25/2022 at 12:57 PM, Astralporing.1957 said:

Gw2 cannot win the competition (or even compete on relatively equal ground) with FF XIV by trying to be more like it (or WoW). It should rather try to emphasize its strengths and unique qualities, instead of giving up on them in order to become more like every other game out there.

Could you stop double posting? Edit is a thing.

On 1/25/2022 at 7:33 AM, Zenith.7301 said:

WoW literally sabotaging itself right and left and the GW2 devs can't even be bothered to try to tap into the organized PvE market and make their endgame instanced PvE more rewarding with greater content cadence.

Let me rephrase your question so you can understand the problem WITH your question: If we are out of apple, why arent we using tomatoes in fruit salad? Tomato is fruit as well... WoW and GW2 focuses on different aspects of MMO.

[Alin.2468]

I disagree. A new free game (named Lost Ark) will be the worst enemy of End of Dragons, because it will be released earlier, on 11th of February 2022.

[Astralporing.1957]

3 hours ago, Bakeneko.5826 said:

Could you stop double posting? Edit is a thing.

When i respond to two different people, on two different subjects, i prefer to separate the posts, in order to make the discussion easier to follow. Editing would not help with that.

 

 

[Gibson.4036]

1 hour ago, Alin.2468 said:

I disagree. A new free game (named Lost Ark) will be the worst enemy of End of Dragons, because it will be released earlier, on 11th of February 2022.

I'm pretty sure people who enjoy Korean MMOs are a very different audience than the core of people who enjoy GW2.

I mean, I did try out Archeage, Blade and Soul, Tera and Aion. I had fun playing with the gorgeous BDO character creator they released before launch. They were all a bit of fun to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

If Lost Ark does get a chunk of GW2 players, past and prospective, to try it out, it might be the best thing for EoD. The expansion doesn't get overloaded by new players because a bunch have gone to play tourist in Lost Ark, and when they come back bugs will have been squashed, specs will be rebalanced, and population will be spread across the new zones instead of clumped in the first.

Maybe you can come back in a few months, after both Lost Ark and EoD launch and get settled in, and give us a report.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Gibson.4036

[voltaicbore.8012]

2 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

I'm pretty sure people who enjoy Korean MMOs are a very different audience than the core of people who enjoy GW2.

Although there's some modest overlap, I also think this player separation is quite real.

Korean games simply have a different approach to content, and I could devote a massive wall of text to that subject. Of the many differences, the only one I'll mention here is a sense of narrative cohesion.

It's not so much that the vast majority of Korean titles utterly fail to tell a cohesive story; rather, the problem for me is that such games generally don't even attempt to do it in the first place. It's just not considered a very important element of game design. Even when narrative is given lip service by studios, what passes for narrative in East Asia is on a very different (and I'd argue, very inferior) standard compared to what Western audiences are used to. Again, it's not that Western games are universally more successful at telling a decent story, it's that Korean games often aren't even trying to tell such stories at all.

At least superficially, Lost Ark represents a possible exception to this pattern. The overarching story of why that world looks the way it does, why your character is doing what they're doing, and why your character would even care in the first place - these things are all identifiable and present. Not having played it yet myself, I'm not sure how well these things are woven into what your character is tasked with doing. After all, what's the use of having a great overall story foundation, but all you ever do is meaningless fetch quests and killing X mobs in Y field for no discernible reason?

[battledrone.8315]

On 1/25/2022 at 11:30 AM, Astralporing.1957 said:

You were specifically talking about numbers at launch. I'd be quite hard to be able to see vids documenting post-launch issues at that point, don't you think?

Special? No. I'm just talking about the MMORPG market being pretty much stale for many years, with no place to expand it anymore. There's very few new players there, so a new game can for the most part only count on taking players away from an existing game. Which hardly ever happens, unless that other game kittens up in a major way.

So, you can either do what other games are already doing, but better (which is hard, not only because doing better is not easy to achieve - or those other games would already do it themselves, but also due to the player inertia - the difference has to be quite significant before a player decides to abandon years of investment in one game in order to move to a new one), or try to find some new players by going for a niche that is not yet filled (also not easy, because there's not many things that haven;t been tried before).

New World tried to do the latter, but unfortunately for Amazon they picked a niche that is nowadays extremely unpopular in the western MMORPG market.

Well, basing the design around the open world sandbox PvP is a well-known and very old idea. Well known for something that has only a very limited following, and is good only for a niche game, not for an AAA title. It's something that worked when you aimed for 5-digit game populations, but nowadays that's just not enough to carry a big mainstream title. Not in the west anyway.

To save the day? Nothing - New World was beyond saving the moment they finalized their overall design. To save it, they'd have to go to the drawing board and create a new game, with diferent basic design principles.

its not OWPVP, you can simply turn PVP off in options. just like in wow. the only remnants  from the old game is the

town upgrade system. and the fact, that a half baked attempt like that can waltz in and get over a million sales at launch

also suggests, that there is plenty of market for a new mmo

[vicky.9751]

I will definitely agree that ANET should be doing more promotion, but fans of the mmo/mmorpg genre will always be able to find this game. I mean it takes one google search of "best mmos", and gw2 is the second result. 

 

Edited January 27, 2022 by vicky.9751