What happened to EOD and Anet?

[battledrone.8315]

On 3/4/2022 at 5:39 AM, Shiyo.3578 said:

No. FF14 story is utter trash.

"FF14 is why" means FF14 is popular(due to it being a literal cult fan base hyping it to the extreme) and Anet completely copied its terrible pacing/gameplay/story writing.

the story may get better in the expansions, but the start is painfully bad. both in gameplay , narrative and characters.

apparantly , gw2 has the opposite problem

[Linken.6345]

3 hours ago, Tukaram.8256 said:

I wonder if they will import batteries to the rest of maps, or will bots just be useful in Cantha? 

There really should be a better way to charge them... 

You can buy a buff at https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Xunlai_Jade_test_and_promote_jade_tech that last an hour and give you charges even when you map hop.

Why would you need that tho there are no turrets, offencive/defencie buff stations, ziplines or jade tech chests anywere else then the 4 cantha maps

[ASP.8093]

9 hours ago, Tukaram.8256 said:

I wonder if they will import batteries to the rest of maps, or will bots just be useful in Cantha? 

There really should be a better way to charge them... 

Batteries are only useful on maps with special jade-bot chests, teleporters, and offense/defense modules.

The other features of the bot, like the res helper, gliding boost, and any effects from your modules (+Vitality, mount endurance boost, junk conversion, &c.) don't cost any energy.

[Fwog.9387]

I wish i could have just gone to cantha, taken the masteries and gone back to normal content (which is still stale at this point) but anets been on a streak of curating peoples content for them. What not enjoying the new content? You wanna play something else... well lets just nerf your rewards so that you cannot enjoy that either.

You like bauble farming in verdent. Lets kill the drop rate. You like drizzlewood? Let's nerf that too (and break some of the mechanics, last i was there it was buggy as heck, the cannons which were designed for the charr copters would miss every time they were fired and it took 6x longer to kill the boss), its now worth only 2/3 what it was worth per hour when played optimally. 

You like fractals? Ye they messed with that too. 

It is my belief that anet needs to fix the content already in the game, not add more lifeless areas no one cares about. Don't force people to play your dead content by killing what they want to play just so you can make money. If your game dies, you will get nothing. Your game dies when people no longer want to play your game because you couldn't be bothered to pay some people to test your game and answer whether or not the game was even fun. 

[ReaverKane.7598]

On 3/3/2022 at 11:07 PM, Kikokuma.9405 said:

Why does EOD feel like it was made by a completely different company? Why does Jade bots require charges to use? (is this fun?) Why do I now need to stop by a workbench to change out modules on the Jade bot when literally nothing in GW2 ever has required you to do this before? (is this fun?) Why is New Kaineng city Soooo freaking big just for the sake of being so freaking big? It's so empty feeling with nothing to do in it... it's a pain to get around. (is this fun?) Why Are all the new characters being introduced in the story being A-holes just for the sake of being A-holes? (who is writing this?) Like seriously.... WHO MADE THIS EXPANSION?!?! Why is it SO FREAKING BUGGY?!?! This is not Anet quality and I seriously regret preordering this... Last time I preorder anything from Anet on good faith. 

You remember a different Arena Net than i do...
The expansion feels exactly like Arena Net. Overhyped, over-promissed and woefully under-delivered with the unwritten understanding that they'll make it all better with living world, which actually doesn't really happen.

They did seem like they were changing, pure theatre to get the pre-orders going, still the same thing as always.

[aspirine.6852]

On 3/4/2022 at 12:07 AM, Kikokuma.9405 said:

Why does EOD feel like it was made by a completely different company? 

Probably because all the old people that made the original game all left anet?

[Gorem.8104]

2 hours ago, Jaricko.6143 said:

I wish i could have just gone to cantha, taken the masteries and gone back to normal content (which is still stale at this point) but anets been on a streak of curating peoples content for them. What not enjoying the new content? You wanna play something else... well lets just nerf your rewards so that you cannot enjoy that either.

You like bauble farming in verdent. Lets kill the drop rate. You like drizzlewood? Let's nerf that too (and break some of the mechanics, last i was there it was buggy as heck, the cannons which were designed for the charr copters would miss every time they were fired and it took 6x longer to kill the boss), its now worth only 2/3 what it was worth per hour when played optimally. 

You like fractals? Ye they messed with that too. 

It is my belief that anet needs to fix the content already in the game, not add more lifeless areas no one cares about. Don't force people to play your dead content by killing what they want to play just so you can make money. If your game dies, you will get nothing. Your game dies when people no longer want to play your game because you couldn't be bothered to pay some people to test your game and answer whether or not the game was even fun. 

Wait a minute, did they actually nerf Drizzlewood and also it now has bugs? not been there for a bit but I knew about the bauble nerf. Seems to be their only way to push new content instead of just, idk making the new content good and rewarding.... 

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

21 minutes ago, Gorem.8104 said:

Wait a minute, did they actually nerf Drizzlewood and also it now has bugs? not been there for a bit but I knew about the bauble nerf. Seems to be their only way to push new content instead of just, idk making the new content good and rewarding.... 

They also flooded the market with mystic coins via the Mystic Forger daily since mid-January, after the winter sales were over.

I guess Anet assumes that all the multi-account folks like me run out and buy EoD alt-accounts for Antique Summoning Stone gold making now.

Edited March 20, 2022 by TheWaternymphHC.1847

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

I saw this coming from a mile away.  There's three big things that explain why thing went wrong with this expansion:

1. Covid ruined the quality of most things.
2. Trumps election caused roughly one out of every eight people to freak the hell out.
3. Layoffs from NCsoft gutted Anet's roster.  

Combine these three things together, and it is a miracle that EoD turned out as well as it did.  

[Kikokuma.9405]

46 minutes ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

Layoffs from NCsoft gutted Anet's roster.  

Well the Layoffs were because of Anets unannounced other projects being cancelled. I really think at this point (roughly halfway through development of icebrood) is when panic set in and major rewrites were done to icebrood and major work had to be done to start development on a new expansion. A new expansion that I personally don't think they were ready for, i don't think they planed for, and the staff was completely demoralized having tons of staff layed off and projects ruined. It's a perfect storm of garbage that led up to them releasing an unfinished product and now ruining their reputation with their customer base. They now don't have anything to fall back on. Dunno what NCsoft will do with em now when they were already their most underperforming studio. 

[Tukaram.8256]

2 hours ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

They also flooded the market with mystic coins via the Mystic Forger daily since mid-January, after the winter sales were over.

Ah, that must be why the price dropped so horribly.  I sold quite a few when they were over 2 gold, now they are barely 1 gold... bummer ha ha.  Oh well, I will hold on to them until the price (hopefully) goes back up.  Or just ignore them in my bank as per usual.  😎

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

1 minute ago, Tukaram.8256 said:

Oh well, I will hold on to them until the price (hopefully) goes back up.  Or just ignore them in my bank as per usual.  😎

Keep in mind that we have the march sales right now as well. That usually means that people sell almost everything and their grandma on the TP. Especially on days like today when rare services or account upgrades (today: shared inventory slots) go on sale. Unless EoD fizzles out soon, we can probably expect higher MC prices in April... I wish I could just ignore and stockpile them, but once you average 70 MCs per day the bank fills up rather quickly.  

Sadly I doubt we see two or more gold per MC anytime soon again. At least we can get rich from kale and lettuce at the moment.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

1 hour ago, Kikokuma.9405 said:

Dunno what NCsoft will do with em now when they were already their most underperforming studio. 

NCsoft probably has bigger issues than Anet at the moment if I'm not mistaken. And since GW2 did fairly well last quarter compared to Aion, I wouldn't worry too much. Anet's marketing has always been fairly bad and see how far they made it with GW & GW2. 

NCsoft can always try to sell the studio to Microsoft, Amazon or even Netflix in case they finally want to exit the western market. With the current climate in the gaming industry any of these three companies will happily buy Anet.

[Kikokuma.9405]

5 minutes ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

NCsoft probably has bigger issues than Anet at the moment if I'm not mistaken. And since GW2 did fairly well last quarter compared to Aion, I wouldn't worry too much. Anet's marketing has always been fairly bad and see how far they made it with GW & GW2. 

NCsoft can always try to sell the studio to Microsoft, Amazon or even Netflix in case they finally want to exit the western market. With the current climate in the gaming industry any of these three companies will happily buy Anet.

I would agree with you, on paper that is what happened last quarter. Also Last quarter Anet made bank accepting EOD pre orders. What will happen when players dip and they sales on item mall sink to new lows? 
Also they knew what they were doing with Aion's classic launch, It's first quarter it was also above GW2, then last quater it was way below because they just wanted that quick cash injection. They'll close it soon. It's a dead game. 

I hope yer right about them selling Anet to someone that'll treat them better. I don't like NCsoft.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

From my personal experience of my past jobs in the entertainment industry, I'd guess that the sales from pre-orders themselves actually boosted Q3/21 more than Q4/21. Q4 was most likely better because of the large amount of players returning to GW2 in anticipation of EoD and the frustrated Blizzard crowd looking for a new "home". More interesting will be the numbers for Q1/22. Since EoD's reception seems to be fairly lukewarm overall so far, it will be quite interesting to see if Anet can actually monetize the expansion beyond the initial sales.

Or to put it bluntly, you can't expect that many sales of Siege Turtle skins, if you treat a relatively boring leveling mount as semi-exclusive prestige reward and annoy a large portion of your players by doing that.

Since Anet didn't use the opportunity to finally introduce volume discounts for gems like almost all similar games offer nowadays, and the Steam version of GW2 isn't released nor canceled yet, I assume they are quite confident that they can still chase the whales for some more time. Too be completely honest, I'm quite baffled that neither NCsoft nor Anet seem to be interested in broadening the playerbase by attracting new players that fall more into the play-to-earn category like Blizzard did when they introduced the WoW-token.

On 3/21/2022 at 12:52 AM, Kikokuma.9405 said:

I hope yer right about them selling Anet to someone that'll treat them better. I don't like NCsoft.

That sounds a bit like what WoW fans often do when they blame Activision for the bad stuff while praising Blizzard at the same time, although both companies were merged by their former owner into a holding company that operated its branches fairly independent as we know now.

GW2 probably wouldn't even exist without NCsoft, but that doesn't mean that Anet couldn't do better with a different owner.

Edited March 27, 2022 by TheWaternymphHC.1847
confusing typo

[Kikokuma.9405]

5 minutes ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

That sounds a bit like what WoW fans often do when they blame Activision for the bad stuff while praising Blizzard at the same time, although both companies were merged by their former owner into a holding company that operated its branches fairly independent as we know now.

GW2 probably wouldn't even exist without NCsoft, but that doesn't mean that Anet couldn't do better with a different owner.

Really? I've just always heard stories of how NCsoft mistreats their western developers. It always kinda made sense with their apparent lack of support of their western games and lack of advertisement for them as well. Never heard about this. Sorry for my ignorance on this. 

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

NCsoft lacks the understanding of the western market which has been quite obvious since the disaster that the original AION release in the US & Europe turned out to be back in the day. I can't say anything specific about how they treat their subsidiaries internally and on a social level. However I doubt it's much worse than the issues that other Asian companies like Sony had/have internally, because of their differences between "eastern" and "western" corporate culture.

In my last sentence I was actually referring to GW2 in a strict business investment sense. Keep in mind that NCsoft bought Anet roughly three years before even announcing GW2.

To me it always seemed that there was some sort of old rivalry towards Blizzard in the background that helped to propel Anet's ideas and concepts for the GW & GW2 game designs.

However, unlike Blizzard, Anet never really seems to understand what parts of their competitioner's game design works in GW2 and what doesn't fit.

Edited March 21, 2022 by TheWaternymphHC.1847

[battledrone.8315]

7 hours ago, Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:

I saw this coming from a mile away.  There's three big things that explain why thing went wrong with this expansion:

1. Covid ruined the quality of most things.
2. Trumps election caused roughly one out of every eight people to freak the hell out.
3. Layoffs from NCsoft gutted Anet's roster.  

Combine these three things together, and it is a miracle that EoD turned out as well as it did.  

what does trump have to do with it? as a leftist, i stilll dont like him, but i would still take him over sleepy joe.

bunker boy FTW (or a significantly smaller loss)

[Taygus.4571]

On 3/6/2022 at 5:45 PM, Redfeather.6401 said:

The batteries sitting all over the landscape just crack me up. What a garish hole they dug with that thing.

Those really look terrible too, and I juat don't understand whyb they're needed, they don't add anything to game play.

[TheWaternymphHC.1847]

47 minutes ago, Taygus.4571 said:

Those really look terrible too, and I juat don't understand whyb they're needed, they don't add anything to game play.

My best guess would be that the system designer(s) originally wanted to add an optional buff system via the jade tech offensive/defensive protocols for people doing meta events or folks who navigate these zones with fresh or boosted 80s. However without some resource to fuel them, these buffs would become mandatory and people would just buff themselves silly for a few minutes near every portal or waypoint. These buffs stack duration, in case you didn't notice yet. That's probably also the reason why these buffs disappear on map change.

However, system designers being system designers they probably figured that the battery system for the jade bot can be used in other ways as well and added the turrets, chests and what not. Now you have the problem that players would exhaust the charges at some point and had to return to portals, waypoints or hubs to recharge. This is especially bad during long running zone meta-events. Therefore they added the batteries all over the place to ensure that players never run out of them...  

I'd say it's a great example of circular design that should never made it into the game in this iteration. One approach I'd probably tried would be a system that keeps batteries and charging stations at hubs to allow players to buff themselves if they want. At the same time charges would build slowly in the background via a mastery perk, a passive effect in every Cantha map, or a combination of both. This should happen at a lower rate than the offensive/defensive protocols require to keep 100% uptime. That would allow players to quickly grab a buff or open a chest if needed without littering the landscape with bright greenish glowing junk that quite often breaks immersion.

[Taygus.4571]

26 minutes ago, TheWaternymphHC.1847 said:

My best guess would be that the system designer(s) originally wanted to add an optional buff system via the jade tech offensive/defensive protocols for people doing meta events or folks who navigate these zones with fresh or boosted 80s. However without some resource to fuel them, these buffs would become mandatory and people would just buff themselves silly for a few minutes near every portal or waypoint. These buffs stack duration, in case you didn't notice yet. That's probably also the reason why these buffs disappear on map change.

However, system designers being system designers they probably figured that the battery system for the jade bot can be used in other ways as well and added the turrets, chests and what not. Now you have the problem that players would exhaust the charges at some point and had to return to portals, waypoints or hubs to recharge. This is especially bad during long running zone meta-events. Therefore they added the batteries all over the place to ensure that players never run out of them...  

I'd say it's a great example of circular design that should never made it into the game in this iteration. One approach I'd probably tried would be a system that keeps batteries and charging stations at hubs to allow players to buff themselves if they want. At the same time charges would build slowly in the background via a mastery perk, a passive effect in every Cantha map, or a combination of both. This should happen at a lower rate than the offensive/defensive protocols require to keep 100% uptime. That would allow players to quickly grab a buff or open a chest if needed without littering the landscape with bright greenish glowing junk that quite often breaks immersion.

there's buffs just from having charges?

I was only aware of their use for opening chests or using turrets/broken portals etc

[Hypnowulf.7403]

From what I understand of the situation there are a few incorrect statements here, which I just want to point out as somoene who's been following the whole debacle.

First of all, there are still some people from the prior expansions around, it's just that they're the wrong people. Colin Johanson almost sank ArenaNet with what he forced into Heart of Thorns, that was really bad. They brought him back to lead End of Dragons and... Well, here we are! Here we are.

I know that a few important writers left because reasons. And they were writers who were wroking on Guild Wars 2 itself. And they're gone now, because reasons. Including one big name who's now at Bungie.

On top of that, ArenaNet's leadership was beheaded before Colin Johanson was brought on board due to a tiff between him and NCSoft. He wanted to do sagas, NCSoft pushed for an expansion. NCSoft "won" by firing him.

Also, there were layoffs of those working on Guild Wars 2 too. So to say that all of the people that got laid off were working on ArenaNet's unnaounced projects is contrary to what I've read. It's not like it was one layoff that NCSoft was responsible for, either. No, NCSoft hit ArenaNet with the layoffs stick numerous times. I think that hsows in End of Dragons.

In my opinion, Path of Fire and most of LWS4 was the height of Guild Wars 2, and that's when ArenaNet had the right people working on this game. The wrong people were dealt with after the mess that HoTs made. And the right people got pink-slipped somewhere amid LWS4.

Basically, ArenaNet has been a few different groups due to cycling employees. And which part of GW2 you like or not tends to depend on which particular group was developing it. ArenaNet hasn't always been the same group, but some leave, and others leave then return again to GW2's detriment. And the righ tpeople never seem to return.

[TheNecrosanct.4028]

58 minutes ago, Taygus.4571 said:

there's buffs just from having charges?

I was only aware of their use for opening chests or using turrets/broken portals etc

In all the maps you find these offensive/defensive protocol stations. They can buff your offensive/defensive stats. You need charges to use the protocol stations. So it's not that having charges gives you buffs. You can use your charges to get buffs. It stacks duration  (every use of a protocol station gives you 10 minutes of the buffs) and considering we can only hold a maximum of 4 charges, that means you'd have to run around to find multiple batteries or ziplines to stack the buffs to their max.

[Taygus.4571]

47 minutes ago, TheNecrosanct.4028 said:

In all the maps you find these offensive/defensive protocol stations. They can buff your offensive/defensive stats. You need charges to use the protocol stations. So it's not that having charges gives you buffs. You can use your charges to get buffs. It stacks duration  (every use of a protocol station gives you 10 minutes of the buffs) and considering we can only hold a maximum of 4 charges, that means you'd have to run around to find multiple batteries or ziplines to stack the buffs to their max.

I have..used.. those lol. But never noticed they gave a personal buff lol, thanks

Edited March 21, 2022 by Taygus.4571

[Sen.7530]

So much edgy zoomer-style dialogue and cursing. It's breaking the immersion for me. And the first time I saw that nu kaineng white wall I just remember thinking wth is this huge Asian style mall doing in a game ?