Has the GW2 design philosophy changed?

[Obtena.7952]

7 hours ago, willow.8209 said:

maybe. maybe not. This can no longer be assumed IMO. 

That doesn't make sense. What stakeholder is more interested or critically tied to seeing GW2 continue as a profitable game than Anet?

Edited September 13, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Tanek.5983]

14 hours ago, Smoky.5348 said:

I believe this system is in use for weapon master cheevos. For those, it's easier to check what weapon dealt the killing blow than to check what you hit them with last and whether you actually used that weapon for most of your damage. But for nourishment dailies, I'm guessing the new team just coincidentally chose that on-death event and didn't think it'd make a difference to use a more broad one. The fact the new team used a more forgiving event for other kill dailies tells me they didn't think everything through, either for being rushed or not knowing the game engine perfectly. Unfortunately, it's still a pretty edge case thing unless you're around a lot of players all the time, so who knows how long it could take for ANET to take notice.

I just ran into this with another "kill x" daily that I had not gotten before this week. It was to kill 10 enemies in heart of maguuma. Same deal where I needed to get the killing blow. (I hope this is not the case with one of the weeklies I have to kill 10 champions. We'll see.)

As you say, it is generally easy enough to get those kills. I hope ANet does take a look at it sooner rather than later, though, because it adds a completely unnecessary anti-cooperation element.

[Solvar.7953]

For most games, a small percentage of the players make up a large percentage of cash shop buys.  Maybe Anet has identified what that group of players want, and is really only catering to them (since that is what makes the money), and thus really don't care about the populate as a whole.

But that could also be shortsighted - if the game lost a lot of players for whatever reason, some of those big spenders might also stop playing because their friends are no longer players, there are not enough players to do certain events, etc.

Or it maybe Anet is just taking shots in the dark - a lot of past content seemed like this (they tried something, it didn't attract the interest they were hoping, and it was pretty much never touched again).  I don't mind Anet taking chances like that, my big complaint is that Anet seems to double down and seem to say "People should really like/do this content, so we'll lock certain things behind it", instead of just admitting that people don't find it interesting.

The daily system (new and old) has similar issues - it really seems to be trying to get people to do certain content they otherwise would not do.  I'm not sure how long that will be sustainable before players start think that they are spending a lot of time doing things that they don't find fun, so why are they doing that at all?

[Tanek.5983]

4 hours ago, Solvar.7953 said:

The daily system (new and old) has similar issues - it really seems to be trying to get people to do certain content they otherwise would not do.  I'm not sure how long that will be sustainable before players start think that they are spending a lot of time doing things that they don't find fun, so why are they doing that at all?

This, I think, is not a bad thing for the dailies to try to do. Dailies were why I and others I know tried dipping into WvW at times. I never felt like I was forced to do things I did not find fun and that was mostly because there were options. (At least until that decade of dragons thing anyway. For that, I did need to do some PvP because darn it I was getting that cape and even there the dailies helped me. I would only PvP when a daily came up to play an unranked match. This was because I figured the daily would encourage others to be there as well and I would not be the only newbie ruining the lives of the actual competent PvP players in there. 😁)

As a matter of fact, despite the bugs so far, I think expanding the kind of things in those dailies with the new system was a good idea. I have now gone and done some of the content I'd skipped over while in previous expansions.

So this is a worthy goal in my mind. What we need back, though, are the OPTIONS. Because yeah, if you narrow those options this much, then it will start feeling like we are forced to run the content we don't find fun if we want to complete the daily/weekly.

[Danikat.8537]

The dailies often do prompt me to do things I wouldn't otherwise do, the old system did the same and I don't think that's a bad thing. Especially since you don't really miss out on anything if you don't do all of them every day so there's no harm in skipping ones you know you don't want to complete. Yes that means getting less AA and therefore fewer rewards, but I doubt anyone really wants everything that's in the Wizard's Vault. Even though I missed most of the first week and several days since then I've already managed to get all the items I really wanted and I'm down to getting currencies and materials I could get in other ways, or skins I don't really want but might as well collect because I might use them one day.

What makes them fun to me is when it escalates. I go to a map just for the daily and end up doing a whole meta-event I haven't done in a while, or there's someone doing a jumping puzzle who didn't know it existed until then and I end up showing them how to start another one they've never been able to find, or I go to WvW for a few quick dailies and end up in a squad taking Stone Mist. (That last one means I really got carried away because EB is my least favourite WvW map so I'd have to have been in a squad for a while and having a good time to follow them there.)

Of course that doesn't always happen. There's days when I just do the dailies as quickly as I can and then move on to something else, or skip them entirely because I want to prioritise something else or don't have time even for something that quick, but the possibility that it can lead to other things I didn't plan to do is part of what makes it fun for me.

[Astralporing.1957]

18 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

That doesn't make sense. What stakeholder is more interested or critically tied to seeing GW2 continue as a profitable game than Anet?

You are mistaking something. What Anet (or rather NCSoft, because Anet doesn't seem to be an independent entity anymore) is interested in is not really creating a profitable game, but something more direct - generating profit. That does not need to be tied to ensuring longterm profitability of GW2. In fact, looking at what's happening more recently, it's far more likely they have assumed the well-known strategy of appeasing shareholders by caring only about next few quarters, and being able to show some shortterm increases in statistics - even if it were to come at a cost of significant issues further in the future. And as for their longterm strategy, if it still exists, we already know since around the end of LS4 that it is not tied to GW2 at all.

[Danikat.8537]

Anet has never been an independent entity. They've been a wholly owned subsidiary of NCSoft since before GW1 was announced so any impact NCSoft has on the game has been there since day 1.

[Obtena.7952]

5 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

You are mistaking something. What Anet (or rather NCSoft, because Anet doesn't seem to be an independent entity anymore) is interested in is not really creating a profitable game, but something more direct - generating profit. That does not need to be tied to ensuring longterm profitability of GW2. In fact, looking at what's happening more recently, it's far more likely they have assumed the well-known strategy of appeasing shareholders by caring only about next few quarters, and being able to show some shortterm increases in statistics - even if it were to come at a cost of significant issues further in the future. And as for their longterm strategy, if it still exists, we already know since around the end of LS4 that it is not tied to GW2 at all.

The motivation isn't in question here; profit, long term sustainability, WHATEVER. That wasn't the point being made. Again, the point being made ... Anet isn't making business decisions about the game frivolously without putting in the work to justify those changes ... because they are SIGNIFICANTLY affected by those decisions. 

 

Edited September 14, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Astralporing.1957]

1 hour ago, Obtena.7952 said:

The motivation isn't in question here; profit, long term sustainability, WHATEVER. That wasn't the point being made. Again, the point being made ... Anet isn't making business decisions about the game frivolously without putting in the work to justify those changes ... because they are SIGNIFICANTLY affected by those decisions.

I'm not saying they make those decisions frivolously. I am saying that the reasons why they make them may not be in the best interest of the players (or the survival of the game) at all. because what is good for the game might not be the same as what is good for Anet. Moreover, what might be good for Anet, might not (again) match what would be good for NCSoft.

And all that is even when we assume that all the decisions being made are sound, and well-thought out, when in reality history is full of business decisions that were based on faulty premises, bad data (or its interpretation), or just whimsical reactions of someone in charge.

[kharmin.7683]

9 minutes ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

 or just whimsical reactions of someone in charge.

That would certainly explain a lot of the balance changes.

[Obtena.7952]

1 hour ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

I'm not saying they make those decisions frivolously. I am saying that the reasons why they make them may not be in the best interest of the players (or the survival of the game) at all. because what is good for the game might not be the same as what is good for Anet. Moreover, what might be good for Anet, might not (again) match what would be good for NCSoft.

And all that is even when we assume that all the decisions being made are sound, and well-thought out, when in reality history is full of business decisions that were based on faulty premises, bad data (or its interpretation), or just whimsical reactions of someone in charge.

Sure, you aren't saying decisions are made frivolously, but the post you are you quoting from me is part of a thread of discussion from someone that was implying they were. In otherwords, your comments to me a little out of context for the post you quote. 

But sure, you aren't wrong. Not all decisions are in the best interests of every stakeholder, including Anet if those decisions are are made to satisfy some sort of 'handed down' mandate from the majority investors (NC Soft? I don't know ...)

 

Edited September 14, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Teknomancer.4895]

Well based on the latest update , look for the focus to be squarely on automating as much as possible and bringing in new players:

Quote

We’ll be updating some of our existing bonus events to reduce the amount of manual developer effort required to run them, which will make it easier to deploy them more regularly. We’re also carving out some dev time to add entirely new bonus events to the rotation in the future, with the goal of having bonus events occur much more regularly.

[snip]

With the reprioritizing, we will not be opening the Alliances system to beta testing this year. We will refocus on delivering an always-on version of World Restructuring to players as soon as possible. From there we want to evaluate the new player experience, collect your feature requests, and monitor live data to allow us to make World Restructuring the best system that it can be.

Emphases added.

[Hashberry.4510]

Automate it please, get it done, start a new game, quit mangling this one.

[JusticeRetroHunter.7684]

32 minutes ago, Teknomancer.4895 said:

Well based on the latest update , look for the focus to be squarely on automating as much as possible and bringing in new players:

Emphases added.

Charitably, this is a good thing. The manual aspect was them pouring in tremendous manhours to create theme-park gameplay….months and months of dev time that would be burned through the player base in hours. It made no sense.

Hopefully what they mean by automation, is for the gameplay to be more complex, more or less player driven. Developers don’t make the content, players do…and that’s a way better trajectory to follow…because it means dev time can actually be given to improving upon old and abandoned systems, and focusing on bigger and better projects.

could automation also mean pointless daily quest grinding? It could…and that would suck…ideally you want the game to be novel, not repetitive but some people can’t see the sun rise, and are arguing about the wrong things. If they do happen to listen to players well I just hope that they are not listening to the whiny majority that can’t do basic maths.

Edited September 14, 2023 by JusticeRetroHunter.7684

[willow.8209]

4 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Sure, you aren't saying decisions are made frivolously, but the post you are you quoting from me is part of a thread of discussion from someone that was implying they were.

I didn't go back and read all the pages to see if you might mean someone else, but if you mean me, I've been trying to say the same thing as what @Astralporing.1957has been saying. Though they said it better.

[Obtena.7952]

8 minutes ago, willow.8209 said:

I didn't go back and read all the pages to see if you might mean someone else, but if you mean me, I've been trying to say the same thing as what @Astralporing.1957has been saying. Though they said it better.

Sure, and what they said also doesn't change my point ... so when you or anyone else is going to try to tell me that Anet is 'maybe, maybe not' the most significant stakeholder in seeing GW2 be a successful game, moreso than any group of players, that isn't accurate. There is no "maybe,. maybe not" and it's not an assumption ... It's just true.

Again, if Anet isn't THE most significant stakeholder in seeing the game be successful, then who is? It's CERTAINLY not players.

Edited September 14, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[willow.8209]

I mean we could theoretically argue over semantics all day, but I think we have all said similar things in different ways.

[Astralporing.1957]

10 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

Sure, and what they said also doesn't change my point ... so when you or anyone else is going to try to tell me that Anet is 'maybe, maybe not' the most significant stakeholder in seeing GW2 be a successful game, moreso than any group of players, that isn't accurate. There is no "maybe,. maybe not" and it's not an assumption ... It's just true.

Again, if Anet isn't THE most significant stakeholder in seeing the game be successful, then who is? It's CERTAINLY not players.

Actually, players are far more invested in seeing this game succeed. From Anet's point of view it'd be perfectly fine to see this game fail if to them it seemed like a sound business decision.

[Vayne.8563]

13 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

You are mistaking something. What Anet (or rather NCSoft, because Anet doesn't seem to be an independent entity anymore) is interested in is not really creating a profitable game, but something more direct - generating profit. That does not need to be tied to ensuring longterm profitability of GW2. In fact, looking at what's happening more recently, it's far more likely they have assumed the well-known strategy of appeasing shareholders by caring only about next few quarters, and being able to show some shortterm increases in statistics - even if it were to come at a cost of significant issues further in the future. And as for their longterm strategy, if it still exists, we already know since around the end of LS4 that it is not tied to GW2 at all.

Anet hasn't been an independent entity since before Guild Wars 1 launched. It was a whole owned subsidiary. NcSoft owned it. We have been told by people that they generally kept a hands off policy, but we don't really know how true it is. We don't know that NcSoft never instructed Anet to do stuff before. We just have rumors from people who don't know saying that NcSoft is doing this now, but whether they've done  it in the past or not we don't know.

[DaFishBob.6518]

All I have to say is NCSoft has said they want to make their games more "play to win" which I guess tends to be code for grind when it comes out of the mouth of a South Korean video game company. Is that something GW2's original design philosophy tends to be or not? If not then GW2's working design philosophy may be changing.

[Obtena.7952]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Actually, players are far more invested in seeing this game succeed. From Anet's point of view it'd be perfectly fine to see this game fail if to them it seemed like a sound business decision.

That doesn't make sense. Even if it was a sound business decision to let the game fail from Anet's point of view, that still is more significant to them than it is to players. Even if players have many hours of time invested in playing, they get nothing from doing so other than being entertained and should have the reasonable expectation that these kinds of games do have a lifecycle.

For Anet, the game means jobs for employees, a business, reputation, dealing with owners/investors, etc ...

In otherwords, Anet has LOTS more riding on this game than any player does, EVEN if the decision they come to is to let it fail. 

Edited September 14, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Astralporing.1957]

15 minutes ago, Obtena.7952 said:

For Anet, the game means jobs for employees, a business, reputation, dealing with owners/investors, etc ...

In otherwords, Anet has LOTS more riding on this game than any player does, EVEN if the decision they come to is to let it fail. 

Again, you are working under mistaken assumption that all this hinges on this specific, single game's success. It does not. They may as well decide that it hinges on success of those other projects we know they are currently working on. Or, even better, NCSoft could decide it for them.

Hint: the game may be important to them, but it does not mean it's success is. Or that "success" for them means the same as for us.

[Obtena.7952]

2 hours ago, Astralporing.1957 said:

Again, you are working under mistaken assumption that all this hinges on this specific, single game's success. It does not. They may as well decide that it hinges on success of those other projects we know they are currently working on. Or, even better, NCSoft could decide it for them.

Hint: the game may be important to them, but it does not mean it's success is. Or that "success" for them means the same as for us.

Again, my point here is Anet is not making business decisions that would in the end, purposefully harm them, regardless of the impacts it would have on GW2. It's an assumption on my part that this means Anet wants GW2 to continue to be successful? OK, that's fine for me ...  but IMO, it's a REALLY GOOD assumption.

There isn't really a discussion here. If you have convinced yourself it's not in Anet's best interests to do what is best to see this game continue to be successful, despite the fact they have (to my knowledge) no other significant sources of revenue to replace GW2 revenues if it were to fail AND the fact that everything they do points to wanting the game to continue to be a success ...  you're going to have to explain that theory a little deeper than "don't assume things". 

I mean, I'm all open to whatever theory you have as to why GW2 being successful to Anet isn't important them and how that is related to the decisions they make for the game. Do you have one or are you just being contrarian because you don't like decisions they are making?

Edited September 15, 2023 by Obtena.7952

[Astralporing.1957]

6 hours ago, Obtena.7952 said:

I mean, I'm all open to whatever theory you have as to why GW2 being successful to Anet isn't important them and how that is related to the decisions they make for the game. Do you have one or are you just being contrarian because you don't like decisions they are making?

It's quite clear to me that they are winding down resources they assign to GW2 project. Since it seems to happen at the time when they seem to be hiring fo other projects, it's most likely it's because those resources are more important for them elsewhere. It's unavoidable that such strategy will have a negative impact on GW2's prospects and its longterm success - and yet they seem completely fine with it. Sure, it does not mean they want the game to fail, but it certainly means its success became far less important to them than whatever else they may have on platter now. It's like with GW1 when they started developing GW2 - they did not want it to fail, but they didn't really care about it continued wellbeing past the point of GW2's launch either. And likely the only reason why it was not cancelled outright was because it required relatively minimal costs to automate and keep running.

In short, while people at Anet (and NCSoft) do not intentionally make decisions that would harm them, it does not mean those decisions would not harm GW2. What helps NCSoft might harm Anet. What helps Anet, might harm GW2. And so far it seems that at least one of those things is indeed happening - somewhere along the line, for whatever reason, a decision to siphon resources off GW2 has been made that is indeed harming GW2. Obviously, someone at some point intends to profit from that decision, but that someone is not GW2 players. 

That's why i mentioned that it's the players that have the most vested interest in this game's wellbeing.

[Ghastly.3914]

People say there's harm, but what harm? The quality hasn't changed, the expansions just come out earlier now. I started GW2 in june 2023, made it to HoT, and then started SOTO in august. The quality of SOTO is as good as HoT. 

If people have disagree with SOTO please give examples instead of "ncsoft or anet is hurting GW2." Without examples those statements are empty.

With examples Anet can read this and say "they're right, let's look into this."