I've noticed the Devs start to reach out, but this isn't how it should be.

[sephiroth.4217]

@Madja.1369 said:

@Trise.2865 said:

@Madja.1369 said:

@"gateless gate.8406" said:OP is referring to this statement:

https://twitter.com/Rubi_/status/1167834718907203584

It's a recent trend in game development. It involves 1) doing something unpopular, 2) cherry-picking the 1% toxic comments while ignoring the 99% of feedback that is simply harsh/negative but untoxic, 3) using social media to bring attention to those 1% toxic comments.

This deflects attention away from the legitimate feedback and garners positive sympathy for the company that did the unpopular thing. Frequently, gaming news sites of a particular flavor (Kotaku, Polygon) will then publish an article or two about the incident (again focusing on the 1% toxic comments) to cement the victim narrative.

Make of it what you will.

I was kind of disgusted when I read the replies in that thread. Twitter has become such an echo chamber. Her tweet makes the team seem completely out of touch with the community. They choose to deflect any real criticism or suggestions by calling out the vast, vast minority that resorts to personal attacks. I also feel like they're unable to differentiate between criticism of the team and criticism of them as individuals. It's entirely reasonable to be negative about them as a team, but no one should of course resort to calling out the individuals.

I would say that the event was a completely failure and it's almost shameful to make people go there if they had nothing to show. Don't get me wrong, the content sounds great and I'm looking forward to playing it, but if you're going to announce and hype an event for a month, invite people to physically be there, hire a MC, have a long countdown and giveaways to create even more hype and then all you have to show for it is less than 30 minutes of talk, no Q&A, no real content to show and half of the talk is about lore then something really went wrong during planning. The big event made as believe that this would be something out of the ordinary, that the next season would be more than just a regular season, that Arenanet had finally decided to open up and talk about their plans with us, were trying to create a bigger community. Instead we get something that would have be better in a blog post.I don't think anyone was disappointed with the content that was shown - it was what we all expected after all - rather how little was shown.

Except that...

that's exactly what you two are doing

. Hypocritical, much?

What's exactly what we are doing?

Playing victim mentality I think.

• Sparkles and Rainbows.

[Knighthonor.4061]

@Glider.5792 said:

@"GreyFox.8046" said:

Why are they focusing on the "toxicity"

In their eyes, every form of criticism is "spreading toxicity".

And this mentality is what doomed Warhammer Online before it even released. Any criticism was seen as an attack and would be banned. They even went to a fan forum (Warhammer Alliance) and requested the mods there censor critics but they refused and lost the developers support.

Guild Wars 2 Guru sort of became like that as well, but the forum here been less harsh like that but with sprinkle here and there of the bad mentality.

I shared this as an historical example of how this censorship of MMO game design and decisions always backfire on the game as a whole.

[Vayne.8563]

I'm sorry are there really any people here who think there are no negative complaints on this forum? Because I find that hard to believe. Rude comments have always been censored. But there's always been plenty of criticism here.

On the other hand I've been banned multiple times for pro comments.

[style.6173]

My guess is there is a major divide within ANET. Half the company looked at the event last week and thought it was a wonderful event with the new "saga". The other half of the company knows that players were going to be disappointed and ANET could have just announced the saga in a blog post.

If you are a PvP or a WvW player, are you going to be happy with the announcement? ANET, as a future suggestion, if you are going to host a big announcement, touch on all areas on the game, not just rehash what a lot of people already knew. Changing from a "season" to a "saga" isn't worth a big event by itself.

[Zaklex.6308]

@Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

@Ashen.2907 said:

@Lincolnbeard.1735 said:

@Zynk.9015 said:Because the subreddit is brigaded by people who have had their accounts banned for violating forum guidelines so they use the only social site they can and skirt the rules there.

Well, there was a time that any kind of criticism and any post that didn't praise the game was warranted a ban.

This is false.

@TheBravery.9615 said:

@Glider.5792 said:

@"GreyFox.8046" said:

Why are they focusing on the "toxicity"

In their eyes, every form of criticism is "spreading toxicity".

TheBravery already added the proof.

That was for one specific item added into the game, and only regarding that topic...so the claim is still false. Besides, as I pointed out elsewhere there's a valid reason for them not to share any more new information...each "episode" of the Saga will either have a reveal blog post and/or trailer, if you give away all the information of upcoming content in the live stream then there's nothing left for each individual reveal!

[Erasculio.2914]

@Ashantara.8731 said:I posted a lot of criticism myself, but I believe I refrained from being toxic or throwing a tantrum.

Ah, so you think that any negative criticism against the game is both toxic and a tantrum?

It's no surprise that some people complain so much about the community.

@RyuDragnier.9476 said:It's a very toxic place, and the one place you'll find it nearly impossible to find constructive commentary

Just because you don't agree with it doesn't mean it's toxic. In fact, looking at reddit right now, there are very, very few toxic posts.

[Acheron.4731]

@"style.6173" said:My guess is there is a major divide within ANET. Half the company looked at the event last week and thought it was a wonderful event with the new "saga". The other half of the company knows that players were going to be disappointed and ANET could have just announced the saga in a blog post.

If you are a PvP or a WvW player, are you going to be happy with the announcement? ANET, as a future suggestion, if you are going to host a big announcement, touch on all areas on the game, not just rehash what a lot of people already knew. Changing from a "season" to a "saga" isn't worth a big event by itself.

I agree with this. I imagine most 'normal' employees there were probably quite hesitant to present seemingly nothing.No different than any other job where there is a clear division between management and workers or administration and those in the trenches.

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@"style.6173" said:

If you are a PvP or a WvW player, are you going to be happy with the announcement? ANET, as a future suggestion, if you are going to host a big announcement, touch on all areas on the game, not just rehash what a lot of people already knew. Changing from a "season" to a "saga" isn't worth a big event by itself.

There are plenty of casual PvE players who weren't happy either. And since the event was supposed to be specifically about LS, the outcome is even more dissapointing. At least the PvP fans didn't have any indication this event would have any big news for them.

We've been told for a year now that LS will be more expansion-like. Obviously to fill the void left from the absence of an actual expansion. Previous expansions have brought in game-changing features, gliders, mounts, elite specs, a new class, just to name a few.

Finally the time has come to pull the curtain on this new brand of expansion-like LS and what do we get? A 7 year late QoL feature (old news), 10man instanced bounties and that's all folks. Compared to the aforementioned expansion features, these don't even hold a candle.

So I'd say the negative reception is not exclusive to fans of specific gamemodes. It was from players across all gamemodes and that's why it might have seemed like an explosion of negativity during the first hours.

[DeadlySynz.3471]

@PirateSpice.8735 said:

@"RyuDragnier.9476" said:The criticism of "you overhyped this" is something we can all agree on...No, it isn't. ArenaNet didn't overhype this. The community did. Anet told us

exactly

what to expect: an announcement about Living World. What was the main thrust of the discussion about? Living World. Story. The plans for how LW content was shaking up. All of the "hype" about all the things we should have been expecting to hear came from speculation here on the forums and reddit, not from Anet. So even the calm, reasoned criticisms are built on a toxic misrepresentation of reality. If people just want to be disappointed because they hoped for more, that's fine. Sure, I hoped for more, too. But they don't get to say that Anet overhyped anything or promised more than they gave. They

gave

more than they

promised

.

They most certainly did over-hype it. Both HoT and PoF's announcements received a similar treatment, so why did LS5 which could have been summed up in a short blog post with a trailer? Maybe LS1 got similar treatment, I'm not sure, but certainly the others didn't.

We knew what they were going to announce, but the fact they hyped it up the way they did would imply they had something else up their sleeve. People have also been voicing criticism and giving constructive feedback for a long time. I'm sure there must be some toxic posts here and there but I sure have never seen them, so I'm inclined to think the amount of toxicity people claim is a lot lower than they make it out to be.

Would this have blown up if they simply just summed up what was coming in a blog post? I highly doubt it. It's the fact of what they did and presented to the community as the "near future" which for all intents and purposes, nearly all people will be done with whatever map is released 2-4 weeks after it's release. As a community, we already know and accept this, there is nothing wrong with it. I'll play the new content, as many others will, but I'll need to be in there the first 2-4 weeks if I hope to complete most of the achievements. What's striking a nerve is there was no road map given to where this game is going because most of us know (though many don't want to seem to accept it), that PvE isn't a sustainable end-game. When a WvW map like Desert Borderlands is generally disliked by the community, but sees more player action than all of the Living story maps released, that's a telling sign about the state of PvE.

[PirateSpice.8735]

@DeadlySynz.3471 said:

@PirateSpice.8735 said:

@"RyuDragnier.9476" said:The criticism of "you overhyped this" is something we can all agree on...No, it isn't. ArenaNet didn't overhype this. The community did. Anet told us

exactly

what to expect: an announcement about Living World. What was the main thrust of the discussion about? Living World. Story. The plans for how LW content was shaking up. All of the "hype" about all the things we should have been expecting to hear came from speculation here on the forums and reddit, not from Anet. So even the calm, reasoned criticisms are built on a toxic misrepresentation of reality. If people just want to be disappointed because they hoped for more, that's fine. Sure, I hoped for more, too. But they don't get to say that Anet overhyped anything or promised more than they gave. They

gave

more than they

promised

.

They most certainly did over-hype it. Both HoT and PoF's announcements received a similar treatment, so why did LS5 which could have been summed up in a short blog post with a trailer? Maybe LS1 got similar treatment, I'm not sure, but certainly the others didn't.

We knew what they were going to announce, but the fact they hyped it up the way they did would imply they had something else up their sleeve. People have also been voicing criticism and giving constructive feedback for a long time. I'm sure there must be some toxic posts here and there but I sure have never seen them, so I'm inclined to think the amount of toxicity people claim is a lot lower than they make it out to be.

Would this have blown up if they simply just summed up what was coming in a blog post? I highly doubt it. It's the fact of what they did and presented to the community as the "near future" which for all intents and purposes, nearly all people will be done with whatever map is released 2-4 weeks after it's release. As a community, we already know and accept this, there is nothing wrong with it. I'll play the new content, as many others will, but I'll need to be in there the first 2-4 weeks if I hope to complete most of the achievements. What's striking a nerve is there was no road map given to where this game is going because most of us know (though many don't want to seem to accept it), that PvE isn't a sustainable end-game. When a WvW map like Desert Borderlands is generally disliked by the community, but sees more player action than all of the Living story maps released, that's a telling sign about the state of PvE.

Really? The HoT and PoF announcements were preceded by advertising saying they would be announcing a first look at a Living World season and handing out some goodies to attendees? Sorry, but no. Just because expansions were announced at live events doesn't mean every live event has to be about the same level of content. This overhyping was community-driven, and now those same community members are overreacting because they didn't get what they imagined ArenaNet had "implied" they would give, despite ArenaNet stating explicitly what they were giving.