How would you all feel if Anet was strategically holding back Releasing/Reveal the next Expansion

[kharmin.7683]

I am not advocating a position. I am refuting yours due to the lack of substantial facts.

I agree with your statement that people who do not post are happy. However, it is more likely for dissatisfied people to complain than satisfied ones.

You again state a noticeable drop in player activity without facts to back up that premise. The only support you have is your own experience. Again, with regards to sPvP, there are other issues with that format.

I understand how you would say that the game could not survive with the current trend of content releases (and you're probably right), but neither of us have the internal financials or statistics to show one way or the other if this pattern is profitable for the shareholders. Likewise, we don't have any specific information on their road map, so we can only speculate.

I just get tired of the hyperbole that is spammed through the forums.

[XatraZaytrax.2601]

I normally believe transparency is a good and proper tact for any organization to take, but lately a vocal segment of this community has seemingly made it a mission to decry anything and everything Anet has done lately -- in the forums, in map chat, on Reddit, etc. -- as if they are being paid to ring the death-knoll on this game, and to hate everything, like actually being offended by made up Fantasy curse words. Kitten, people were hating on this latest release before it was put out. So in this climate I would be OK with Anet holding their cards close to their cest and making sure staff member honor non-disclosure agreements (assuming they exist), until they have a definitive plan and an actual product.

[Bloodstealer.5978]

I really like that big reveal trailer idea at the end of the Prologue.. the one where we get to see the trailer of the content we just all played through.. genius :)So I guess were stuck with either getting nothing new until its almost ready to be something new in order to get some merchandising airtime OR we get something that isn't new to promote nothing new.

[Ototo.3214]

Unless they outright lied in a recent interview, they said they weren't currently working on an expansion. Like at all. They said future expansions aren't off the table but none are currently in development....so yeah. I'd honestly be upset if they were secretly working on one but had lied about it in that interview.

[Astralporing.1957]

@"kharmin.7683" said:However, it is more likely for dissatisfied people to complain than satisfied ones.True, but when the ratio of satisfied and dissatisfied players on forums and reddit change substantially - like it did this time - it generally means a shift in the whole community.

[Knighthonor.4061]

@Ototo.3214 said:Unless they outright lied in a recent interview, they said they weren't currently working on an expansion. Like at all. They said future expansions aren't off the table but none are currently in development....so yeah. I'd honestly be upset if they were secretly working on one but had lied about it in that interview.

I been around the MMO genre long enough to know Developers lie that that all the time. Blizzard did it all the time, Trion did it all the time, etc. And hey Vanilla GW2 to HoT. No Expansions. LW is the future until LW2 conclusion...

[kharmin.7683]

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@"kharmin.7683" said:However, it is

more likely

for dissatisfied people to complain than satisfied ones.True, but when the ratio of satisfied and dissatisfied players on forums and reddit change substantially - like it did this time - it generally means a shift in the whole community.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that assessment. You could have a larger number of negative voices that only chose to post when they were dissatisfied. That doesn't really correlate to a general shift in the entire community.

But this argument is all academic. :) Neither of us really has any empirical evidence to support either side.

[Swagger.1459]

@Knighthonor.4061 said:This is a business first after all. So I am not taking sides on this. I could understand why a developer would hold back the release of content to time it strategically near the release of a new rival MMO.I remember WoW releasing its WoTLK expansion 2 months after Warhammer Online released, and was strategically releasing info and betas to mess up the Warhammer Online hype. Was a Smart business move.

Well GW2 has some upcoming competition, based on hype alone of course, since it we never can fully predict the success of these games afterall.

On the other side of the argument, , we 2 days away from the 2 year anniversary of Path of Fire. We haven't had new Skills, new major features, new Elite Specs, none of that good stuff that keeps the game feeling fresh in over 2 years soon. So I can totally understand why some may not want to wait longer, nor would some of these people care about Anet's business strategy on how they handle future content.

But where do you all stand on this? Asking you all the GW2 community, not the devs.

We’ve had these types of conversations thousands of times before. Obviously players like to know what’s up with the game, but Anet doesn’t talk about specific stuff until they are ready.

Everything is a mystery until it’s not a mystery... That’s how it goes around here and it doesn’t matter what the players think, because Anet isn’t changing their secretive ways.

[Fenom.9457]

Super excited for another expansion but also sad that maguuma and a desert got that level of work out into it but not the far shiverpeaks and blood legion lands. Unless they really do produce the same amount of new assets and soundtracks in icebrood

[Astralporing.1957]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:However, it is

more likely

for dissatisfied people to complain than satisfied ones.True, but when the ratio of satisfied and dissatisfied players on forums and reddit change substantially - like it did this time - it generally means a shift in the whole community.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that assessment. You could have a larger number of negative voices that only chose to post when they were dissatisfied. That doesn't really correlate to a general shift in the entire community.You see, it's not only that there were an uptick of negative voices. It's also the amount of voices speaking

against

the negativity that was way lower than it is usual for those forums. Yes, it is theoretically possible that the change of view only affected those people, but in practice it is

extremely

unlikely.

By the way, generally, only a small fraction of players ever decides to interact with forums and other media. And while it is indeed more likely for dissatisfied people to speak up than satisfied ones, they are still more likely to not speak up at all, but simply lower their engagement in the game or just leave. In MMOs, the people that speak up are those that still care.

[Iozeph.5617]

My reaction? "Thbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbt! Whaaaaat-ever." And I guess last month's announcement was a strategic build up to what could have been summed up in a blog post? Probably.

Seriously, what are they strategically holding back and against what? Camelot Unchained? There's already a lot of games on the market that do competitive modes better and which have better dedication and communication with the community from their developers. Camelot Unchained is just going to add one more to the pile.

What could they possibly spring on the dregs of what the gw2 community used to be that will possibly compare to these games? An spvp mount that nobody asked for? A winter borderland for wvw that's just as bad as the desert borderland? More elite specs that they not only won't know how to balance but won't even bother attempting to do so? Come on, then? What awesome changes are forthcoming that will somehow slow or even reverse the player exodus to these other games?

[Vayne.8563]

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:

@otto.5684 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:

@otto.5684 said:

For GW2, the player base is already on edge. The overall view of the game future and the devs is largely negative. Anet currently needs every bit of goodwill it can get.Really? I would think that your sample size would be very small when compared to the entire player base. Seems like you're posting opinion as fact.

Ya, go check out any major feedback forum, like the announcement feedback and tell me how happy the player base is.

Go to sPvP forum, constant complaining about drop in population, I wounder why.

Even market prices have continued to drop (which always happens when population shrinks).

But, ya.. keep your head in the sand and tell yourself: "this is fine." This reminds me of SWTOR. Around the end of 3.0, the devs there did the same exact thing Anet is doing now. Some white knights did the same exact thing you are doing now. 2 years later, the game became (and still is) a ghost town.

It's funny you mentioned SWTOR because there's an interesting story about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but around the time you mentioned, there were plenty of "doomposts" on the forums, claiming the game was dying and felt like it was on maintenance mode. Two years later we learn from Kotaku that around that same time, Bioware Austin seriously considered stopping SWTOR development and sending the game into maintenance mode. The justification was that they wanted to put all their focus on Anthem as the studio's premier live service. Of course, Anthem's troubled development and disastrous launch made them reconsider and the game is still being updated (although a shadow of what it was).

I'm not saying current GW2 is the same, as Anet has already committed to some content updates with this saga. Just thought it's an interesting comparison that shows blind optimism may lead to some nasty surprises. And that sometimes, the inner workings behind the scenes might match or even surpass the "doom and gloom" posts we often see in game forums.

To counterpoint this annecdote, there have been multiple times when people used this argument on this very game. They said, oh the game is dying. You introduce ascended gear and we're all leaving. We're all disatisfied. No one will be left. That was a few months after launch. You don't remember complaints when HoT came out, because I do. The complaints now are a shadow compared to those complaints. What we see here is a case of confirmation bias.

I remember a tremendous number of positive posts with high upvotes on reddit, mixed in with the negative posts. Sure there are people that are complaining, there is no denying that. But saying that this means the game is dying means it always meant that every time it was posted. There are quarters after HOT when this game made less money than it's made in the last three quarters. Three quarters in a row actually. This means the income at least is stable, not declining.

But beyond that, in the last months I've seen very positive posts about Dragonfall, very positive posts about the Skyscale. Very positive posts about Dragonbash. And I've seen very positive posts about the new content that just came out. I'm pretty happy with that, tbh.

Yes, the people who are disatisfied are loud. But that doesn't mean the people enjoying themselves are lying. And since you don't know what the numbers of those people are., let's take a look.

What percentage of this community do you think are raiders and PvPers, because I'll go out on a limb and say less than 10%. I'm pretty sure that WvW is bigger. The harder core people who post aren't all the people who raid and PvP or WvW though. Sounds to me like the biggest demographic of this game, the ones Anet seems to be focusing on, are still here and playing, giving the game a stable population. SPvP may indeed be down in players, but it might not be down in casual PvPers, only hard core guys....ie the guys that post much.

Giving me this data set of 1 time you can bare out that the negativity of the community means something doesn't mean anything. Not when you look at how many times people said it about games and it didn't happen.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

A business wouldn't hold that back considering its "our bread and butter". Saying they aren't doing it and instead actually working on one would make them liars no matter how hype it would be.

[Khisanth.2948]

There is not enough room in this thread to properly show the amount of apathy I have for it.

[Iozeph.5617]

@Khisanth.2948 said:There is not enough room in this thread to properly show the amount of apathy I have for it.

I'd say give it that old college try but, well.... Apathy.

[Dragon Priestess.9760]

I do not care, I just want reassurance. It doesn't matter to me if they are purposefully holding it back, I just want to know it's there. I just want to know that I have something to look forward to.

[AlexxxDelta.1806]

@Vayne.8563 said:

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:

@otto.5684 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:

@otto.5684 said:

For GW2, the player base is already on edge. The overall view of the game future and the devs is largely negative. Anet currently needs every bit of goodwill it can get.Really? I would think that your sample size would be very small when compared to the entire player base. Seems like you're posting opinion as fact.

Ya, go check out any major feedback forum, like the announcement feedback and tell me how happy the player base is.

Go to sPvP forum, constant complaining about drop in population, I wounder why.

Even market prices have continued to drop (which always happens when population shrinks).

But, ya.. keep your head in the sand and tell yourself: "this is fine." This reminds me of SWTOR. Around the end of 3.0, the devs there did the same exact thing Anet is doing now. Some white knights did the same exact thing you are doing now. 2 years later, the game became (and still is) a ghost town.

It's funny you mentioned SWTOR because there's an interesting story about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but around the time you mentioned, there were plenty of "doomposts" on the forums, claiming the game was dying and felt like it was on maintenance mode. Two years later we learn from Kotaku that around that same time, Bioware Austin seriously considered stopping SWTOR development and sending the game into maintenance mode. The justification was that they wanted to put all their focus on Anthem as the studio's premier live service. Of course, Anthem's troubled development and disastrous launch made them reconsider and the game is still being updated (although a shadow of what it was).

I'm not saying current GW2 is the same, as Anet has already committed to some content updates with this saga. Just thought it's an interesting comparison that shows blind optimism may lead to some nasty surprises. And that sometimes, the inner workings behind the scenes might match or even surpass the "doom and gloom" posts we often see in game forums.

To counterpoint this annecdote, there have been multiple times when people used this argument on this very game. They said, oh the game is dying. You introduce ascended gear and we're all leaving. We're all disatisfied. No one will be left. That was a few months after launch. You don't remember complaints when HoT came out, because I do. The complaints now are a shadow compared to those complaints. What we see here is a case of confirmation bias.

I remember a tremendous number of positive posts with high upvotes on reddit, mixed in with the negative posts. Sure there are people that are complaining, there is no denying that. But saying that this means the game is dying means it always meant that every time it was posted. There are quarters after HOT when this game made less money than it's made in the last three quarters. Three quarters in a row actually. This means the income at least is stable, not declining.

But beyond that, in the last months I've seen very positive posts about Dragonfall, very positive posts about the Skyscale. Very positive posts about Dragonbash. And I've seen very positive posts about the new content that just came out. I'm pretty happy with that, tbh.

Yes, the people who are disatisfied are loud. But that doesn't mean the people enjoying themselves are lying. And since you don't know what the numbers of those people are., let's take a look.

What percentage of this community do you think are raiders and PvPers, because I'll go out on a limb and say less than 10%. I'm pretty sure that WvW is bigger. The harder core people who post aren't all the people who raid and PvP or WvW though. Sounds to me like the biggest demographic of this game, the ones Anet seems to be focusing on, are still here and playing, giving the game a stable population. SPvP may indeed be down in players, but it might not be down in casual PvPers, only hard core guys....ie the guys that post much.

Giving me this data set of 1 time you can bare out that the negativity of the community means something doesn't mean anything. Not when you look at how many times people said it about games and it didn't happen.

Of course there are plenty of instances where "doomposting" is just noise. I've seen it happening even in new games(including this one before and after HoT). Although regarding the period you mentioned, I still think some of those complaints were justified and that post-HoT year affected the game permanently.

I'm just saying we have to filter and try to see if there are legitimate reasons behind it or if it's just noise. There were legit reasons for the SWTOR community to be worried back then but there were players who accused them of being toxic and negative. And since development did continue, nobody would even know they were right without the Kotaku article.

When dealing with aging MMOs like Swtor and GW2, you have to pay attention to everything because things behind the scenes tend to be volatile.

[Vayne.8563]

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:

@Vayne.8563 said:

@AlexxxDelta.1806 said:

@otto.5684 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:

@otto.5684 said:

For GW2, the player base is already on edge. The overall view of the game future and the devs is largely negative. Anet currently needs every bit of goodwill it can get.Really? I would think that your sample size would be very small when compared to the entire player base. Seems like you're posting opinion as fact.

Ya, go check out any major feedback forum, like the announcement feedback and tell me how happy the player base is.

Go to sPvP forum, constant complaining about drop in population, I wounder why.

Even market prices have continued to drop (which always happens when population shrinks).

But, ya.. keep your head in the sand and tell yourself: "this is fine." This reminds me of SWTOR. Around the end of 3.0, the devs there did the same exact thing Anet is doing now. Some white knights did the same exact thing you are doing now. 2 years later, the game became (and still is) a ghost town.

It's funny you mentioned SWTOR because there's an interesting story about it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but around the time you mentioned, there were plenty of "doomposts" on the forums, claiming the game was dying and felt like it was on maintenance mode. Two years later we learn from Kotaku that around that same time, Bioware Austin seriously considered stopping SWTOR development and sending the game into maintenance mode. The justification was that they wanted to put all their focus on Anthem as the studio's premier live service. Of course, Anthem's troubled development and disastrous launch made them reconsider and the game is still being updated (although a shadow of what it was).

I'm not saying current GW2 is the same, as Anet has already committed to some content updates with this saga. Just thought it's an interesting comparison that shows blind optimism may lead to some nasty surprises. And that sometimes, the inner workings behind the scenes might match or even surpass the "doom and gloom" posts we often see in game forums.

To counterpoint this annecdote, there have been multiple times when people used this argument on this very game. They said, oh the game is dying. You introduce ascended gear and we're all leaving. We're all disatisfied. No one will be left. That was a few months after launch. You don't remember complaints when HoT came out, because I do. The complaints now are a shadow compared to those complaints. What we see here is a case of confirmation bias.

I remember a tremendous number of positive posts with high upvotes on reddit, mixed in with the negative posts. Sure there are people that are complaining, there is no denying that. But saying that this means the game is dying means it always meant that every time it was posted. There are quarters after HOT when this game made less money than it's made in the last three quarters. Three quarters in a row actually. This means the income at least is stable, not declining.

But beyond that, in the last months I've seen very positive posts about Dragonfall, very positive posts about the Skyscale. Very positive posts about Dragonbash. And I've seen very positive posts about the new content that just came out. I'm pretty happy with that, tbh.

Yes, the people who are disatisfied are loud. But that doesn't mean the people enjoying themselves are lying. And since you don't know what the numbers of those people are., let's take a look.

What percentage of this community do you think are raiders and PvPers, because I'll go out on a limb and say less than 10%. I'm pretty sure that WvW is bigger. The harder core people who post aren't all the people who raid and PvP or WvW though. Sounds to me like the biggest demographic of this game, the ones Anet seems to be focusing on, are still here and playing, giving the game a stable population. SPvP may indeed be down in players, but it might not be down in casual PvPers, only hard core guys....ie the guys that post much.

Giving me this data set of 1 time you can bare out that the negativity of the community means something doesn't mean anything. Not when you look at how many times people said it about games and it didn't happen.

Of course there are plenty of instances where "doomposting" is just noise. I've seen it happening even in new games(including this one before and after HoT). Although regarding the period you mentioned, I still think some of those complaints were justified and that post-HoT year affected the game permanently.

I'm just saying we have to filter and try to see if there are legitimate reasons behind it or if it's just noise. There were legit reasons for the SWTOR community to be worried back then but there were players who accused them of being toxic and negative. And since development did continue, nobody would even know they were right without the Kotaku article.

When dealing with aging MMOs like Swtor and GW2, you have to pay attention to everything because things behind the scenes tend to be volatile.

I do pay attention to things. I pay closer attention than a lot of people. I paid MORE attention to the kerfluffle around HoT and raids being introduced and how not casual it was, than I'm paying attention now. Because even though I loved HoT, I knew it was too hard for most of the people in my guild who are probably more representative of the "average" player than most of the people who post here.

For one thing, a dev said recently the average player does 500% less damage than a good player. He didn't say a bad player does 500% less damage, he said an average player does. That means some people are even doing less, but on the average most people aren't raiding, and aren't min/maxing and aren't using meta builds off meta battle. I'm guessing maybe 15% of the playerbase ever gets a meta build. I could be wrong, but again, the average is pitifully low. That means most players are probably not raiders, not hard core PvPers and not hard core WvWers. The average player probably bangs around in the open world, does some stories. I pay a lot of attention to the complaints.

It's particularly because I pay attention to the complaints that I'm writing off the whole game is dying thing. The hard core game may well be dying. I just don't think will affect the bulk of the players. I think we'll just muddle along fine with our non-meta builds., and our shiny infusions. The game isn't going to collapse since we're probably the guys who spend the most on skins in the gem store, or gambling with black lion keys.

No one is saying that people complaining don't have the right to be unhappy. But when a dev left Lotro and said that only 10% of the population ever PvPed or raided, but they account for a full 50% of all forum posts, I took note of that too.

Sure there are unhappy people. The forum isn't the best place to count the happy ones though and there are plenty of people posting who are happy. They just don't have reason to repeat post. I don't post that I enjoy this last episode of the one before. I usually just upvote someone else's post.

The idea that negative is more meanginful that positive doesn't work without a whole lot more information than we have. We don't have enough info to make that judgement. But we do know there were three quarters back to back in 2016 where the game made less than the last 3 quarters. That doesn't denote a dying game. It denotes a game with a stable population. Any one aspect of that game or even multiple aspects may not be doing well.

Doesn't change anything I've said though.

[sephiroth.4217]

What upcoming competition does Anet have exactly?

Can someone elaborate please?

what does it have thats unique like gw2? a great combat system? a world v world medieval castle siege?please dont say a decent story with dragons... theres sooo many games that already offer that.

[Knighthonor.4061]

@kharmin.7683 said:

@Astralporing.1957 said:

@kharmin.7683 said:However, it is

more likely

for dissatisfied people to complain than satisfied ones.True, but when the ratio of satisfied and dissatisfied players on forums and reddit change substantially - like it did this time - it generally means a shift in the whole community.

I'm not sure that I would agree with that assessment. You could have a larger number of negative voices that only chose to post when they were dissatisfied. That doesn't really correlate to a general shift in the entire community.

But this argument is all academic. :) Neither of us really has any empirical evidence to support either side.

During the history of MMos this argument don't really hold up. Been shown time and time again that when there is forum outcry like that there usually is a big problem behind it, and not just from hardcore players.

Look at Warhammer and its forums. They went far to try to censor the complaint against the game, but what if they had listened instead? The game may still be here today.

Same with Darkfall XYZ, may still be here or been great if they had listened to people with the negative opinion.

Vanguard, Wildstar, Rift, Tera, etc etcAnd now GW2. Nobody is immune to this. The aged old "The Forum negative critics are a minority and people that like the game don't come to the forum" narrative just don't hold weight after so many failures in the genre when we heard that same exact excuse used each and every time.

[Knighthonor.4061]

@sephiroth.4217 said:What upcoming competition does Anet have exactly?

Can someone elaborate please?

what does it have thats unique like gw2? a great combat system? a world v world medieval castle siege?please dont say a decent story with dragons... theres sooo many games that already offer that.

If you don't know what they are by now, you probably won't be interested anyway.

[sephiroth.4217]

@Knighthonor.4061 said:

@sephiroth.4217 said:What upcoming competition does Anet have exactly?

Can someone elaborate please?

what does it have thats unique like gw2? a great combat system? a world v world medieval castle siege?please dont say a decent story with dragons... theres sooo many games that already offer that.

If you don't know what they are by now, you probably won't be interested anyway.

thats extremely vague...Some examples would be nice as I see nothing that compares to GW2.

Why wouldn't I be interested? I play this game don't I?

so please... list some examples that may propose some competition to Anet, I would very much like to see the trailers and proposed gameplay of these games and if they offer anything unique like GW2 does.

if these games you mentioned cant even hold a candle to GW2 combat system or offer anything unique like WvW then its not even a matter of competition. it'll be just another game like every other on the market.

please, list some so I may YouTube it. I'm literally in the market for a new game that's comparable to this one.

edit: the only game ive seen that comes close is Ashes of Creation but the combat system looks like it could use a major improvement.

[Obtena.7952]

Wouldn't have a problem with it at all. It makes zero sense to base my decision to log in today and play the game based on some speculation of what may or may not happen months from now.

[Vayne.8563]

I'd expect them to not release expansion info until it's strategically sound for them to do so.

Mentioning an expansion when other big name products are coming out is a waste of potential. You get eyes on you when you announce an expansion. When big products come out with stuff, that's the worst time to talk about an expansion. Your information gets lost in the shuffle. You find a good downtime to talk about an expansion, when there's nothing else coming out.

People in this thread are suggesting that everyone who's playing this game is already playing it, but we're always seeing new people come in. All the time. So much so that reddit has a bot to welcome them because people get tired of answering all the posts about new players. When there's nothing else going on and people are waiting for other stuff to come out, that's the window you can maximize players coming in.

[Acheron.4731]

@sephiroth.4217 said:

@Knighthonor.4061 said:

@sephiroth.4217 said:What upcoming competition does Anet have exactly?

Can someone elaborate please?

what does it have thats unique like gw2? a great combat system? a world v world medieval castle siege?please dont say a decent story with dragons... theres sooo many games that already offer that.

If you don't know what they are by now, you probably won't be interested anyway.

thats extremely vague...Some examples would be nice as I see nothing that compares to GW2.

Why wouldn't I be interested? I play this game don't I?

so please... list some examples that may propose some competition to Anet, I would very much like to see the trailers and proposed gameplay of these games and if they offer anything unique like GW2 does.

if these games you mentioned cant even hold a candle to GW2 combat system or offer anything unique like WvW then its not even a matter of competition. it'll be just another game like every other on the market.

please, list some so I may YouTube it. I'm literally in the market for a new game that's comparable to this one.

edit: the only game ive seen that comes close is Ashes of Creation but the combat system looks like it could use a major improvement.

This is coming out again under a new publisher Aug 30th