Do you feel like ArenaNet is actively developing GW2 or just doing the bare minimum ?

[Gryphon.2875]

I think they're doing the best they can with the resources available.

[Zaklex.6308]

Not all of the remaining employees are developers, and I think a lot of people forget that....there's also a fairly sizable amount of support staff that have nothing to do with game development.

[kharmin.7683]

@"ugrakarma.9416" said:Is clearly on maintenance mode. but inst anything new, a old product bring money to a new product.

Not entirely sure that you understand the term "maintenance mode".

[MisterDapper.5984]

Wouldn't surprise me if side projects unrelated to gw2 were being done with this level of development. There's a reason we only see Q1 roadmap with its lackluster upcoming development and not all of 2020. sPvP/WvW balancing is being done by 1 or 2 people, which is great, but where's the rest of the 200+ employees? Doing living world content and making festivals worse? (Looking at Lunar New Year and Festival of the Four Winds specifically) What happened to Raids and Fractals? Are we seeing a new xpac? The answer is most likely there isn't any. WvW Alliances and Swiss tournaments have been in development for years. Meanwhile we see lots of content in the gemstore. For example Mythic weapons that look better than most Legendaries. Simultaneously the New Year weapons look like old reskins with a color palette changed. Don't even get me started on build loadouts and them costing an arm and a leg. Longevity isn't in mind for this game. It's about how much they can milk us for. It's like Deroir said soon we'll be back in maintenance mode.

[Poormany.4507]

I feel like they're doing something between the two options, some LW episodes seem very well done and in general positively received by the community (Icebrood Saga Prologue, A Bug in the System), while others are obviously much lower quality, bordering on bare minimum (Kourna, Episode 1 of the Saga). I really do think they can still recover, but need to do so very soon with an expac or actual expac level features while there is still some hope and hype left in the community.

[Arzurag.7506]

They are actively developing the bare minimum for GW2.In other words, they have pulled a "blizzard" and put GW2 into the same state like heroes of the storm is in since a while now.Still receiving skins and some tweaks but nothing big.

I don´t think that you can call this maintenance-mode just yet, though the future looks indeed grim.

Ability-changes/splits is not content.

[Eloc Freidon.5692]

We can not and should not judge in either direction until both Ep 2 and the Charr related content comes out to have a proper reference point for the season.

[Konrad Curze.5130]

if anyone still wonders if ANet are doing the bare minimum or not, just look at the lunar festival weapons set

nope, they arent even doing the bare minimum. this is a new low for effort

[Fueki.4753]

Yes, they are actively developing.Also yes, they are doing the bare minimum to keep the game alive while satisfying NCSoft's monetary demands.

Maybe you should think about your next poll whether you make it a "yes/no" poll, or make it an "or" poll.Usually both don't work together, this one is an exceedingly rare exception.

[maddoctor.2738]

The poll asks two questions that can have different answers..."Do you feel like ArenaNet is actively developing GW2?"The roadmap says yes, games that aren't actively developed don't get roadmaps (now they must also complete that roadmap, we'll see how Q1 2020 ends.

"or just doing the bare minimum ?"The latest weapon skins, the celestial challenge, Episode 1 being smaller in scope and quantity than the Prologue, calling rehashed festivals "new content", the lack of interesting mechanics and fights throughout the Icebrood Saga, both in story and the open world, the Strike Missions that are good as an idea but failed in execution, and many more seem to indicate that they are doing the bare minimum. But, we are in a transitional period so I give them the benefit of the doubt, by the end of Q1 2020, and with the roadmap of Q2 2020 (I hope they give us one) we'll have the clear answer to this question.

[Henry.5713]

I have seen the bare minimum with other games. Guild Wars 2 has not hit that low (yet) but I won't deny the fact that one may feel that way depending on the content you like, especially if you are looking for any even remotely competitive new (group) content.

[Dreamy Lu.3865]

If I answer yes, it's yes to what? It was not a yes/no question... I was not sure so I don't vote, but I can share how I feel.

I think they are busy with something else and aside of it, they keep ensuring the minimum necessary for GW2. I believe that the fact that no expansion pack has been released for GW2 - although it is detrimental to the game - is a sign that their efforts get invested elsewhere. Either that or they have a budget problem. I may be wrong of course, that's just how I feel about it.

[b k.1648]

@"Raknar.4735" said:PoE 2 is not a completely new game, it is a continuation of the story. They will still use the same base game, hence why you'll still be able to play PoE 1 or PoE 2 characters in the same game. Some of the visual updates are already in PoE 1, e.g. Lioneye's Watch.GGG has the possibility to reuse a lot of content every league, which increases replayability, and they are smart to do that. Ice areas and desert areas use the same tilesets, just with different coloring, they rotate tilesets and add different lighting and weather effects, making the player feel like they are in a completely new area.

Doing that is difficult in MMORPGs. Chris Wilson himself said that adding things like day/night cycles already hinder possibilities of reusing assets, features that are standard in MMORPGs.

Your mistake was comparing an ARPG with a MMORPG. Just imagine Anet adding something close to leagues: You'd have to recreate your whole character every time to play in the new league. That is not something people want that play MMORPGs, they want to play their character, not a build. GGG rebalances the game every 3 months with the new league start, having to relearn your class every time isn't fun, just ask the Mesmers around here.

A lot of the replayability in PoE comes from the possibility to create a new build based on one spell. There are hundreds of spells in PoE, balancing them is a nightmare and most of the time not possible. If you'd bring a similiar system to GW2, you'd pretty much remove what's left from WvW and PvP. There's a reason why basically no one PvPs in PoE, and why they removed Leo's daily PvP master mission with the master rework.

About the endgame in PoE: War of the Atlas with the Uber Elder endgame released December 8, 2017. Awakener came with Conquerors of the Atlas, December 13, 2019.It did take them some time to create the new Atlas system with the new endgame bosses, don't downplay it.

re-playable challenging new game play, keyword here NEW and not rehashed of the same thingThat was funny to read, since the current league Metamorph is based around rehashing bosses and their skills.

Another "comparison" point you forgot to mention is PoE's shop. While being one of the best/fairest shops in the F2P market, it heavily relies on MTX. There are already complains all around that the GW2 shop is destroying "Fashion Wars", can you imagine the outcry if there would be the same amount of MTX as there is in PoE with the same ratio of ingame skins to shop skins?

I love PoE and GGG, I think they are currently the best Gaming Company, but if you compare anything to the "best", there'll always be shortcomings. Especially if you compare games that are different at their core.

You're right that MMORPGs pose some additional challenges to quickly producing content that the likes of PoE have managed to dodge. The two big ones are that in PoE, almost everyone expects to start a new character every 3 months, and the terrain system is designed for random generation and rapid content creation.

However, there's a number of things ANet could be doing that it seems to me they're shying away from, or just don't fit their production schedule. Chris's talk visited a few of these.

• Periodic content updates that engage a breadth of players, not a small slice of them. Each of the Living Story updates, for example, don't really attempt to engage PvP, WvW, or fractal/raid players. Supposing all GW2 players are interested in every type of content they produce, this would be better as it doesn't spread the playerbase thin - but that seems unlikely, and a bigger update that offers something for everyone is more likely to create word-of-mouth interest.
• Challenge leagues don't even have to provide a huge amount of new content; for some reason people keep turning up for Diablo 3 season launches. If GW2 had a new achievement set for WvW every few months, concurrent with server relinks, this might help bring people back to see what's new without burning them out.
• GW2 map design seems to be very feature-dense. PvE maps for example have a lot of quests to implement, voice lines to record, new art assets to create, and so on. I'm not going to suggest they could get by on ARPG-style maps with nothing but monsters, random encounters and loot, but I will note that GW1 is still fondly remembered by a lot of GW2 players despite having maps that weren't far off that. Maybe there's a middle ground?

Off topic regarding PoE's endgame: 2018 involved a renovation of the Masters system finished with Betrayal League, and the following year was mainly spent on getting the PoE2 Act 1 demo up and running. It wasn't a full two years of dev work on redoing the Atlas; that started quite recently.

[Nath Forge Tempete.1645]

People can't deny that the content we get now is less sizable than what it used to be. Now saying that they are the doing the bare minimum is a bit too much. They still invest a lot of time in the game but the release might pass onto players as "that's it?". While it wasn't really the case before since we got expansions.

I play since launch (not quite as active as before I have to confess) and I can totally feel the lack of "hype" in GW2 these past months (on my side)I'm not interested to play anymore since the content they provide isn't really appealing. They probably need to release one new big stuff to make people come back again to their game ... I think.

[Zok.4956]

@Rasimir.6239 said:

@"otto.5684" said:We are now down to one LW episode every 3 monthYou might want to check your

numbers

. The Icebrood Saga releases so far have been/will be every other month (September - November - January).

Technically true.But the two Icebrood Saga episodes we already got, felt more like (especially the story), from the amount of content, as half episodes. So every two months the content amount of a half episode means every 4 (or 3-4) month the content of a full episode.

In 2019 we had two Episodes of S4 and two small episodes of S5. Even with the small epsiodes of S5 we still did only had 4 episodes in 2019, so the average is one episode every three month in 2019.But I still have hope that the next episodes will be bigger and with more content.

[GW Noob.6038]

OMG! Obviously, they are still developing content for GW2...I don't understand how anyone could answer 'no' to this question. I really don't. It may not be the type of content that the majority of players want, but it is good-quality content none the less.

[Zok.4956]

@"Trise.2865" said:Are they doing the "bare minimum"? Definitively not. Bare minimum is functionality maintenance, or worse, nothing at all. What they have offered is new chapters in an ongoing story; new episodes of a series, and that's not insignificant.

GW2 is clearly not in maintenance mode, like, for example, Guild Wars (GW1) is.

But "bare minimum"? depends what "bare minimum" means for you.

I do believe that Anet as a company is only doing the "bare minumum" that is required, so that this online-game/service is still attractive to enough whales (players that buy lots of gems with real money for the gem-shop) to secure Anets monthly revenue stream. This does of course means some content-updates etc. so the game looks like it has a future and does not feel like it is dying, abandoned. etc.

Do Anet devs only do their "bare minimum"? I do no think so. I believe most devs are passionate about their work in game development and are doing much, much more than they have to.

[Hyper Cutter.9376]

@"Makuragee.3058" said:Did you guys saw the new holiday weapons set? At this point, they dont even do the bare minimum, I'll keep an eyes for "new stuff" but I may never really log again.All the festival weapons they've been introducing are recolored versions of existing weapon sets, I'm not sure what you were expecting really.

[RaidsAreEasyAF.8652]

@"Hyper Cutter.9376" said:All the festival weapons they've been introducing are recolored versions of existing weapon sets, I'm not sure what you were expecting really.

While its true that all the festival weapons are recolored versions, i expected more than a little bit of yellow paint on an already underwhelming weapon.I mean... look at this.https://i.redd.it/hgopma584sa41.jpg

[Tenrai Senshi.2017]

Hmmm. The poll answers are a bit strange, you give a yes or no option for a question that asks us to choose between two different statements.

Aside from that, I'd say the obvious answer is that ArenaNet is certainly active in developing the game, and I'd even go as far as to say that its updates are quite substantial and quite frequent for a non-subscription based game. I also think some players underestimate how much work goes into any given task when developing a game, especially when it comes to adding entire new maps with new events, new story content, new mounts, new lines of spoken dialogue, etc, so it would be prudent to assume they're not putting in effort.

However, I think the more pertinent question would be whether or not you feel they're churning out the right type of content. Stagnation can still occur for players even if they're getting a good amount of content in a case where that content doesn't feel new or fresh, or doesn't align with their preferred play style (for example, PvP players might have a very different view of the game to open world PvE players).

[StarDroid.1038]

Discussion aside, does anyone else feels like the poll makes no sense?You have "yes" or "no" answers for a question that has a "or" in it... Basically meaning can be answer "yes/no" or "no/yes" depending to which part you answer to.I would avoid questions like that, because that kind of can ruin any data you get, because someone might not read it fully or answer "yes" while meaning "no".

[Asum.4960]

Proper content drops for me have always been Expansion features like Elite Specs, new game systems/masteries like Gliding and Mounts, sizeable multi hour chunks of story content and in general and most importantly, repeatable endgame content like Fractals and Raids, as well as substantial balance updates.

Out of all of these it seems like only a single one is even on the horizon as a one time thing in form of a big balance update, which while fantastic and long anticipated (and years overdue) doesn't make up for the lack of any new proper content to play around with the changes in or to keep people engaged in the things we have been playing over and over for years at this point.Additionally, since Anet decided to sack ArcDPS's proper Templates and had the audacity to charge 10 €/$ per build per character, the idea of doing build crafting and having a wide variety of viable builds at ones fingertips has become a lot less appealing than before, where the prospect of major rebalancing would probably have had a lot of us jumping in their seats, rather than just feeling like yet another last milking attempt.

Other than that, all we are getting is Living World, which in my opinion always has been filler content to keep people logging in and engaged with the gemstore, maintaining cashflow until the proper content like Expansions, Fractals, Raids etc. came out to keep people properly and consistently engaged with the game.

Which ofc isn't quite the traditional maintenance mode, yet, but I also don't think it's far off.While I'm sure they are out there, in my over 7 years of playing this game I've never met someone genuinely excited about LW and it was just something we took to keep us busy (for a very short time) on the way to better things.

So only getting LW with nothing else even being in development might as well, effectively, be maintenance mode for a sizeable part of the playerbase at least.

[Naxos.2503]

Small scale development is still development. As for whether or not they Can do better, I wont be a judge of that.

[otto.5684]

@Gryphon.2875 said:I think they're doing the best they can with the resources available.

That is their problem. If they decided to slash their dev team by half and produce less than half the content, why should I give them any credit? This is a stupid decision by NCSOFT management.

This is why I have not spent a dime on the game since PoF release, which is what it boils down to.

[Avster.1935]

Absolutely, everything feels like the bare minimum; lack of meaningful content, A LOT of focus on story, which only ends up being 2 - 3 hours of content, lack of any meaningful reward. Everything just feels stale - no news of raids/fractals and fixes to the myriad of issues in WvW. They are also working on an unannounced game, which makes sense as to why this game is not getting much love.

The game is definitely not in the glory days of expansions as they used to be, which as a GW1 vet, makes me feel sad. OTOH - I'm honestly ready to move on, so I hope there are other games in the future (besides the existing usual suspects) that can cater to the need of a large number of GW2 refugees lol

EDIT: I meant to vote, "No". - bah. too late now :\