Dev Celebration - October 6, 2017

[Danikat.8537]

@TheOrlyFactor.8341 said:

@Ubi.4136 said:Yeah, I get that a lot of people use social media. BUT, why even have an official game forum is nothing ever happens on it. Everyone always posts to reddit/twitter/other and we wait for kind players to copy/paste that stuff to the OFFICIAL game forums.

If you've read the forums - specifically the negativity and vitriol - I don't blame them for going with Reddit. A lot of people here, at least from my perspective, seem to complain for the sake of complaining without providing feedback. I've been guilty of this myself in the past but I try to keep myself in check. In any event, if I were an Anet dev I'd want to host a celebration anywhere else but here.

However, I find that Reddit has the opposite problem - endless brown-nosing and butt kissing. Woe to you if you're not in agreement with whatever flavor-of-the-month opinion happens to be the in thing on there.

For those of us like myself who like GW2 but still have legitimate criticisms and try to address them in a reasonable, calm manner in hopes that the game will grow and improve, there really isn't a place for us. It's either go here where it seems like everyone complains and whines or go to the other place where it seems like everyone is a sycophant. :\

That's interesting, because I've usually heard the opposite. People say they prefer Reddit because if you're not constantly praising everything Anet does (and everything they choose not to do) you'll be banned from the official forum, so Reddit is where people go to be able to speak freely about the game while this forum is full of people who only say positive things because they don't dare step out of line.

For what it's worth my opinion is that here it's more about how you say it than what you say - plenty of people are critical of Anet, there's a couple of posters I can't remember ever saying anything positive about the game or the company - but they keep it reasonably objective - criticizing specific decisions. The people who get banned tend more towards hyperbole or demanding that whichever dev made a decision should be fired or insulting them personally (even without knowing who it was).

[TexZero.7910]

@OriOri.8724 said:2 - Comment "sorting" via voting. As more people upvote a comment, it moves to the top of the thread. As more people downvote it, it moves down. As a dev, this makes it trivial to see those questions/comments that have a higher rate of agreement within the community. If its at the top, it means more people reading the thread care about getting that question answered than any other question in the thread. With limited dev time to answer questions, this gives them the ability to answer the most sought after questions without reading through dozens and dozens of pages to figure out what was commented the most often. Also, the sorting helps in getting these answeres visible to readers as well. If these questions are important to the community, they will be voted to the top, so it will be easy to just open their comment thread and see dev answers instead of digging through dozens and dozens pages of comments on these forums to figure out what the devs said.

Regardless of which forum any one likes better, Reddit is just better suited to an AMA than this forum will ever be, and its primarily because of those 2 reasons (also the larger userbase helps a lot)

If you see this as a positive, then i have news for you. This feature is the singular reason why reddit is bad for Q&A's. It becomes a veritable cesspool of +1/-1 where your actual content ceases to matter so much as how hard you scratch the feel of the day. Meanwhile that guy who ask a legitimate question goes unseen and unanswered.

[OriOri.8724]

@TexZero.7910 said:

@OriOri.8724 said:2 - Comment "sorting" via voting. As more people upvote a comment, it moves to the top of the thread. As more people downvote it, it moves down. As a dev, this makes it trivial to see those questions/comments that have a higher rate of agreement within the community. If its at the top, it means more people reading the thread care about getting that question answered than any other question in the thread. With limited dev time to answer questions, this gives them the ability to answer the most sought after questions without reading through dozens and dozens of pages to figure out what was commented the most often. Also, the sorting helps in getting these answeres visible to readers as well. If these questions are important to the community, they will be voted to the top, so it will be easy to just open their comment thread and see dev answers instead of digging through dozens and dozens pages of comments on these forums to figure out what the devs said.

Regardless of which forum any one likes better, Reddit is just better suited to an AMA than this forum will ever be, and its primarily because of those 2 reasons (also the larger userbase helps a lot)

If you see this as a positive, then i have news for you. This feature is the singular reason why reddit is bad for Q&A's. It becomes a veritable cesspool of +1/-1 where your actual content ceases to matter so much as how hard you scratch the feel of the day. Meanwhile that guy who ask a legitimate question goes unseen and unanswered.

This is 100% false. It makes Reddit the best platform for an AMA, because it gives the person answering questions an easy way to see what the community wants answered. And if you think the devs don't go back and answer a lot of those low voted comment,s then you haven't fully read through one of their LWS3 AMAs.

Regardless of how important you think your specific question is, its in the devs best interest to use their limited time to answer the questions that the community as a whole rregards as most important. And that makes the sorting a prime feature for AMAs.

[Vavume.8065]

Yeah celebrate the dead maps you created....

[ImTasty.2163]

@holodoc.5748 said:Now this is something that has always bugged me - why Reddit? Why Reddit instead of, for example, these new shiny forums?

Because Reddit is better for a Q&A style. Reddit post can be separated so devs can respond directly to people. So if a question is asked about new weapon skins and dev can respond directly to that and follow up responses will all be condensened into a "mini thread" so you can see and respond to weapon skin comments while a different user has their own "mini thread" talking about new mounts.

In this forum a dev can be responding to a comment from page 2 on page 5 and then other people are responding to that dev comment on pages 8, 10, and 17 so the whole discussion is spread out amongst other discussions and can be difficult to keep track of.

[Ashantara.8731]

@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:I wish I understood how Reddit works better.

I, too, can't find my way around Reddit. It's a mess. Calling it a "forum" is an insult to any decent, organized forum out there. Whoever came up with such a chaotic structure should be quartered. :# So no participation on my end, either.

[TexZero.7910]

@OriOri.8724 said:

@TexZero.7910 said:

@OriOri.8724 said:2 - Comment "sorting" via voting. As more people upvote a comment, it moves to the top of the thread. As more people downvote it, it moves down. As a dev, this makes it trivial to see those questions/comments that have a higher rate of agreement within the community. If its at the top, it means more people reading the thread care about getting that question answered than any other question in the thread. With limited dev time to answer questions, this gives them the ability to answer the most sought after questions without reading through dozens and dozens of pages to figure out what was commented the most often. Also, the sorting helps in getting these answeres visible to readers as well. If these questions are important to the community, they will be voted to the top, so it will be easy to just open their comment thread and see dev answers instead of digging through dozens and dozens pages of comments on these forums to figure out what the devs said.

Regardless of which forum any one likes better, Reddit is just better suited to an AMA than this forum will ever be, and its primarily because of those 2 reasons (also the larger userbase helps a lot)

If you see this as a positive, then i have news for you. This feature is the singular reason why reddit is bad for Q&A's. It becomes a veritable cesspool of +1/-1 where your actual content ceases to matter so much as how hard you scratch the feel of the day. Meanwhile that guy who ask a legitimate question goes unseen and unanswered.

This is 100% false. It makes Reddit the best platform for an AMA, because it gives the person answering questions an easy way to see what the community wants answered. And if you think the devs don't go back and answer a lot of those low voted comment,s then you haven't fully read through one of their LWS3 AMAs.

Regardless of how important you think your specific question is, its in the devs best interest to use their limited time to answer the questions that the community as a whole rregards as most important. And that makes the sorting a prime feature for AMAs.

You see, you'd have a point if the +1/-1 didn't effect the time & placement of the post. As it stands with Reddit, the question that rise may be popular sure but that doesn't make them the most deserving of an answer. It's a Q&A not a Dear Abby monthly. A true Q&A format fields the question no matter how outrageous or unpopular in a FIFO system. That makes the entire pool of questions and the community responses valuable as opposed to whatever the flavor of the week concern is.

Additionally, everyone seems to praise Reddit for it's organization which is ironic given the same thing can be done here in these forums where you can even have specific devs in specific subforums responding to those specific concerns. It ultimately accomplishes the exact same thing.

[sorudo.9054]

so....and what about facebook?you know, the one place that makes reading a joy, reddit makes me want to ply my eyes out.

[Blaeys.3102]

My biggest issue is that I've asked the same question at the last 5 AMAs (how do guild missions fit into the game development schedule - or how/when will they fit into the newly released maps) without a peep from devs - even when that question is upvoted.

I don't think they can really be called AMAs when they cherry pick the questions they answer based solely on their own opinion of the question.

Obviously, I will try again today, but my expectations are extremely low at this point.

In fact, the last time they did actually answer a question about guild missions was during the HOT AMA, which was conducted on the official forums (where they said they were excited to see what the guild mission team could do on the new HOT maps).