The iterative process ruins this game potential

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

This game's peak content release was LW3, into PoF, into LW4. Three teams. Two working on alternating episodes, with one big team working on the expansion. Then the staff was diverted to other fruitless projects for some reason, which led into IBS.

[Azureus.5428]

I do like variety in how my food is served.

[Gibson.4036]

5 hours ago, Azureus.5428 said:

I do like variety in how my food is served.

Given the ubiquity of McDonalds and Hollywood sequels, you and I are in the minority.

Most people value predictability over variety.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Gibson.4036

[Kozumi.5816]

Yeah this game is great but completely mismanaged since day1.

Why it's been perpetually in a meh state.

Edited February 21, 2023 by Kozumi.5816

[Vayne.8563]

2 hours ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

Yeah this game is great but completely mismanaged since day1.

Why it's been perpetually in a meh state.

10 years later, and it's still pretty popular. Lots of MMOs came and all but failed in the same time frame.  Saying it's in a meh state isn't how everyone sees it.

This insistence that it's been mismanaged since day one is a bit hard to prove, considering no one knows if it would be more successful with new management or less successful. What you might think is a better solution or a better game might not do as well. 

 

Like it or not, Guild Wars 2 is a success story.  The fact that some people aren't happy, well that's true of every MMO ever made.

 

[Kozumi.5816]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

10 years later, and it's still pretty popular. Lots of MMOs came and all but failed in the same time frame.  Saying it's in a meh state isn't how everyone sees it.

This insistence that it's been mismanaged since day one is a bit hard to prove, considering no one knows if it would be more successful with new management or less successful. What you might think is a better solution or a better game might not do as well. 

 

Like it or not, Guild Wars 2 is a success story.  The fact that some people aren't happy, well that's true of every MMO ever made.

 

It's actually not.

[Vayne.8563]

8 minutes ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

It's actually not.

It's not what? An example of a successful game?

It's the only MMO I know of released in the 10 year time frame that's not on console that continues to make money every quarter.  It's not making signicantly less now than it did in the aftermath of Heart of Thorns 7 years ago.

Saying it's not successful would require you to define how you define successful. 

[Astralporing.1957]

4 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

It's not what? An example of a successful game?

It's the only MMO I know of released in the 10 year time frame that's not on console that continues to make money every quarter.  It's not making signicantly less now than it did in the aftermath of Heart of Thorns 7 years ago.

Saying it's not successful would require you to define how you define successful. 

Let me guess, you added the "not on console" to eliminate all other succesful MMORPGs (like FFXIV, ESO and Black Desert) in the same timeframe and have GW2 look better in comparison?

[The Boz.2038]

5 hours ago, Kozumi.5816 said:

It's actually not.

It actually is.

[Vayne.8563]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Let me guess, you added the "not on console" to eliminate all other succesful MMORPGs (like FFXIV, ESO and Black Desert) in the same timeframe and have GW2 look better in comparison?

Actually I believe that I don't.  There are several successful MMOs released in that time frame, but of them, I believe Guild Wars 2 stands with most of them. FFXIV is the one example of a game that has done better.

But anyone with any common sense at all would understand you do have to compare apples with apples. If you're available on an extra format, you're going to have extra customers. Not everyone uses a computer. Do you really think that stops this game from being successful? I don't.

I  believe  ESO and Guild Wars 2 are probably equally successful in spite of the fact that ESO is available on console. I acknowledge that FF XIV (the 14th game a very popular series is more successful, just as I acknowledge WoW is more successful). However, I think the Guild Wars 2 is the most successful western MMO that's come out in that time period full stop. I think it's more successful than BDO in the west too.

But you know, the question is simple. Do you or do you not consider this a successful game?  Because having a game more successful doesn't mean that this game isn't successful anyway.

 

It's a successful game whether or not you consider the console aspect. Shrugs.

Edited February 22, 2023 by Vayne.8563

[The Boz.2038]

4 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Let me guess, you added the "not on console" to eliminate all other succesful MMORPGs (like FFXIV, ESO and Black Desert) in the same timeframe and have GW2 look better in comparison?

Black Desert (the one on console), Black Desert Mobile, and Black Desert Online are not the same game. It'd be stupid to count it as the same game in any comparison.

[Astralporing.1957]

8 minutes ago, The Boz.2038 said:

Black Desert (the one on console), Black Desert Mobile, and Black Desert Online are not the same game. It'd be stupid to count it as the same game in any comparison.

Well, in that case Vayne's original comparison is even more flawed. After all, whatever i might think personally about Black Desert Online, from what i know it is still both popular and profitable. And i doubt Vayne didn't hear of it.

[The Boz.2038]

6 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Well, in that case Vayne's original comparison is even more flawed. After all, whatever i might think personally about Black Desert Online, from what i know it is still both popular and profitable. And i doubt Vayne didn't hear of it.

How is it "even more flawed", if Vayne never mentioned it? "That I know of", and BDO is Korean grind-bait; fully expected that someone not in ChiKor has not heard of it.

[Mistwraithe.3106]

On 2/22/2023 at 11:41 AM, Kozumi.5816 said:

Yeah this game is great but completely mismanaged since day1.

Why it's been perpetually in a meh state.

This is such a self contradictory statement. You are saying the game is great, you clearly play it and you've posted 600+ times on the game's forums, but it's meh. After 10 years of development you say the game is great, but it's been completely mismanaged for the last 10 years.

Something doesn't become great by being completely mismanaged for 10 years. It's nonsensical to say so.

Edited February 23, 2023 by Mistwraithe.3106

[Vayne.8563]

18 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Well, in that case Vayne's original comparison is even more flawed. After all, whatever i might think personally about Black Desert Online, from what i know it is still both popular and profitable. And i doubt Vayne didn't hear of it.

What's flawed is your prejudice against stuff I say.  I'm relatively sure that Black Desert Online is pretty popular in the East and not nearly as popular in the West. If the console version is a different version completely that just makes what I said stronger, not weaker.

 

I tend to think that people perusing reddits aren't a bad way to get an indication of how popular a game is. And BDO has about the same number of people browing their reddit as GW 2. If you consider it successful than Guild Wars 2 is successful.

I sort of like how you're willing to contradict me about this game being successful, and not contradict the original post which claims it now, without saying yourself whether you think this is a successful game or not.

 

A lot of games came out in the same time frame. SWTOR, TSW, RIFT, Neverwinter, Archege.  Honestly, where do you think Guild Warse 2 falls in the list of games that have come out in the same time frame.

I'll give you that Final Fantasy XIV is probably more popular, and wider know, but I don't think the rest of them are doing any better or much better and I think the majority of them are doing worse.

 

You call my comparison flawed, but I was refuting someone else who expressed an opinion with nothing to back it up and you said nothing to that guy.  So, do you think this game is successful or not?

 

 

 

[MarzAttakz.9608]

18 hours ago, The Boz.2038 said:

How is it "even more flawed", if Vayne never mentioned it? "That I know of", and BDO is Korean grind-bait; fully expected that someone not in ChiKor has not heard of it.

You're absolutely right about BDO being grind-bait but have you seen their Dev teams patch notes, their development cadence and their live streams? As much as I hated the grind during the year and a half I played, I have utmost respect for their developers. I honestly wish Western Developers would take a page out of the East's books.

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Vayne.8563 said:

What's flawed is your prejudice against stuff I say.  I'm relatively sure that Black Desert Online is pretty popular in the East and not nearly as popular in the West. If the console version is a different version completely that just makes what I said stronger, not weaker.

...well, if you are going to set barriers of success just according to your perceptions, this "list" of MMOs you mentioned earlier out of which GW2 is the only succesful one starts looking more and more to be a list of "just GW2".

Sure, we can manipulate stuff this way to show pretty much anything, but is there a point to it at all, beyond showing that you have a clear bias you're not even trying to hide?

[The Boz.2038]

Just now, Astralporing.1957 said:

...well, if you are going to set barriers of success just according to your perceptions, this "list" of MMOs you mentioned earlier out of which GW2 is the only succesful one starts looking more and more to be a list of "just GW2".

Sure, we can manipulate stuff this way to show pretty much anything, but is there a point to it at all, beyond showing that you have a clear bias you're not even trying to hide?

I see the deliveries of straw have not faltered.

[Astralporing.1957]

2 minutes ago, The Boz.2038 said:

I see the deliveries of straw have not faltered.

Yes, that's exactly what i was pointing out. Thank you for agreeing.

[Vayne.8563]

37 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

...well, if you are going to set barriers of success just according to your perceptions, this "list" of MMOs you mentioned earlier out of which GW2 is the only succesful one starts looking more and more to be a list of "just GW2".

Sure, we can manipulate stuff this way to show pretty much anything, but is there a point to it at all, beyond showing that you have a clear bias you're not even trying to hide?

I didn't say ESO isn't successful.  I didn't even claim SWTOR isn't successful. But there are all sorts of caveats. There are more asian MMO players than western MMO players. Games more popular in the east are likely going to pick up more players because the base is bigger.   FF XIV, I'm guessing is as popular in the east as it is in the west.

But someone can just say straight out this game isn't successful, qualifying nothing at you feel no need to say anything about that guy. At least I attempted to qualify what I saying.

New soft drinks come out all the time and some are successful, but they're not coke or pepsi. Doesn't make them unsuccessful.  Instead of trying to nickle and dime what I'm saying in an attempt to prove it wrong, we asked the simple question, which you've refused to answer.

Is Guild Wars 2 a successful game.  If it's not, I submit to you that only FFXIV is successful in the time frame that these games came out and nothing else. I don't believe that's the case, but if you say this game isn't successful in that time frame, I don't think any other game besides FFXIV is signicantly more successful.

Even a game like SWToR which had a lot going for it. It had a huge company in EA behind it, with a bioware story line, two famous companies. It has the star wars franchise behind it, a massively popular IP. And yet I believe Guild Wars 2 is more successful than SWToR.

 

You can disagree of course, but you still refuse to answer the simplest question. Do you consider Guild Wars 2 successful?

If you say no, how do you support that and how you define success.

If you say yes, you're agreeing with me, and have no reason to have attacked my post, without commenting on the post of the guy who said it's not with no reasoning and no argument.

 

You can't have it every way.

[Astralporing.1957]

2 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

You can disagree of course, but you still refuse to answer the simplest question. Do you consider Guild Wars 2 successful?

Yes. I never said it wasn't. I objected purely to the way your argument was heavily biased to present GW2 as the only succesful MMORPG out of a group that was very carefully crafted to exclude every other succesful MMORPG.

2 hours ago, Vayne.8563 said:

If you say no, how do you support that and how you define success.

If you say yes, you're agreeing with me, and have no reason to have attacked my post, without commenting on the post of the guy who said it's not with no reasoning and no argument.

He was presenting an opinion. You were not. You were trying to present a fabricated and heavily edited data as objective reality. And i happen to be allergic to this kind of argumentation.

BTW, you didn't even address the core of the previous argument, because it wasn't really about being succesful. It was about being mismanaged.

Again: is gw2 succesful? I'd say it is (at least to some degree - and definitely more succesful than a lot of other games i have seen). Does that however mean it is well managed? Well, no, it does not. As it happens, while i agree that GW2 is succesful, i also agree that it is being badly mismanaged since the very beginning, and this management likely heavily hampers the game potential, and causes it to be far less succesful than it could be.

The primary source of success for GW2 is, as i  see it, not how well it is done, or how well it is managed, but something else entirely - the fact that within whole MMORPG zone it happens to primarily aim at a niche where there's no competition at all. In short, GW2 is succesful not because it's better than others at supplying certain kind of gameplay and content. It's succesful because it is the only game that supplies this kind of content. There's simply no other game most of GW2 players could move to. Or at least no other MMORPG game.

So, yeah, i can have it both ways.

 

 

[Vayne.8563]

14 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Yes. I never said it wasn't. I objected purely to the way your argument was heavily biased to present GW2 as the only succesful MMORPG out of a group that was very carefully crafted to exclude every other succesful MMORPG.

He was presenting an opinion. You were not. You were trying to present a fabricated and heavily edited data as objective reality. And i happen to be allergic to this kind of argumentation.

BTW, you didn't even address the core of the previous argument, because it wasn't really about being succesful. It was about being mismanaged.

Again: is gw2 succesful? I'd say it is (at least to some degree - and definitely more succesful than a lot of other games i have seen). Does that however mean it is well managed? Well, no, it does not. As it happens, while i agree that GW2 is succesful, i also agree that it is being badly mismanaged since the very beginning, and this management likely heavily hampers the game potential, and causes it to be far less succesful than it could be.

The primary source of success for GW2 is, as i  see it, not how well it is done, or how well it is managed, but something else entirely - the fact that within whole MMORPG zone it happens to primarily aim at a niche where there's no competition at all. In short, GW2 is succesful not because it's better than others at supplying certain kind of gameplay and content. It's succesful because it is the only game that supplies this kind of content. There's simply no other game most of GW2 players could move to. Or at least no other MMORPG game.

So, yeah, i can have it both ways.

 

 

I didn't say it was or wasn't mismanaged though. I have certainly thought it was at different points in time. That's an opinion as well.

 

But if someone says it was mismanaged and that's why it's not a successful game, then I have every right to complain about the conclusion of it not being a successful game, regardless of my opinions on its mismanagement.

 

At the current time, I'm not so sure it is mismanaged. I think there are some questionable design decisions that I don't agree with, but not being a game designer, I'm not all that qualified to say that.  But I have enough experience with MMOs to venture the opinion that this game is one of the more successful MMOs to come out in the last say 12 years.   Not the most successful one, but one of the more successful ones. 

And yeah, I think you do need to compare it to other games of the same ilk, because sub games are different from free to play games and this game really is sort of in it's own class.  Though it's advertised as a free to play game and the core game is, it's really a buy to play game.  There aren't that many.

 

Even games with so-called "optional" subs are not really in the same boat. 

At the end of the day, I think footnotes when comparing has always been fair game. Nothing exists in a vacuum. You may think that's sneaky or underhanded, but to me this is fair.

But all cateogories or emphasis aside, I still think this is a successful game either way.

The fact that you think I'm doing something sneaky by categorizing the game and comparing it to games with similar backgrounds is your issue not mine. 

[Taclism.2406]

Arguing over a notion this vague is fruitless because it entirely depends whats your subjective measure of success ... Total playerbase? Revenue? Player Retention? Growth? How much is needed for it to be successfull or not?
By call of duty / candy crush numbers, every single MMO that ever existed (even wow when it was at its peak popularity) is a failure.
If successful is providing fun to those who enjoy it and "continuing to exist" (= making more revenue than expenses), every MMO is successful until it is not.

That being said, I somewhat agree with Kozumi and Astralporing (without going as far as "completely missmanaged") gw2 feels to me like a good game, that could have been much greater if it had either more focus or more vision (which would help define how you'd manage your teams). And I say that as someone that's only started playing during the pandemic (The only content that released as I played was Champions, EoD and S1 😕), but didnt experienced the changes at Anet between Vanilla & S4.

Right now, too many parts of the game feels to me like an accumulation of good ideas that barely tie together and/or arent properly explained / maintained / refined / balanced / integrated with the rest of the game. What we have left is still good, but if the playerbase wasnt that divided in content they play AND opinions, it might be easier to grow and push one step further. 
 

Edited February 23, 2023 by Taclism.2406

[Gibson.4036]

2 hours ago, Taclism.2406 said:

That being said, I somewhat agree with Kozumi and Astralporing (without going as far as "completely missmanaged") gw2 feels to me like a good game, that could have been much greater if it had either more focus or more vision (which would help define how you'd manage your teams). 
 

If I was forced to boil down all my criticism of GW2 to one thing, this is it. ArenaNet had a strong vision they presented before launch. The extent GW2 still delivers on that vision is what keeps me coming back.

But, my ten+ year experience is that ArenaNet feels like it is constantly lurching after new visions.

This is what the "iterative process" discussion missed. Some accused critics of wanting nothing to change and praised the ability to adapt. But! Adaptability should happen within a strong vision of who you want to be and what you want to do. There's plenty of room to adapt within that, but if you keep adapting the vision itself, you burn a lot of energy and goodwill and find yourself going in circles.

[Bladestrom.6425]

2 hours ago, Gibson.4036 said:

If I was forced to boil down all my criticism of GW2 to one thing, this is it. ArenaNet had a strong vision they presented before launch. The extent GW2 still delivers on that vision is what keeps me coming back.

But, my ten+ year experience is that ArenaNet feels like it is constantly lurching after new visions.

This is what the "iterative process" discussion missed. Some accused critics of wanting nothing to change and praised the ability to adapt. But! Adaptability should happen within a strong vision of who you want to be and what you want to do. There's plenty of room to adapt within that, but if you keep adapting the vision itself, you burn a lot of energy and goodwill and find yourself going in circles.

 

'lurch' is a subjective evaluation of change, the discussion didn't miss it because its your personal opinion and  adaptability and vision are not mutually exclusive. I think Anet has a strong vision,  its still a friendly non toxic game, it still has the same core game elements including those that make it unique in the market etc etc.   

 

There's a saying in software development,  'fail fast and fail often' - that means don't be that doomsayer that grasps onto failures, instead constantly learn and evolve and listen and celebrate and expand on success.

Edited February 23, 2023 by vesica tempestas.1563