ANet, its time to turn off silent mode once again.

[Alyster.9470]

Here we are again in our endless circle of "we want to communicate more!" and "radio silence" for months again.

As usual we all were baited by anet with some communication. Expansion announcement, more frequent balance patches and etc. But here we are slowly shifting from hopeful to hopeless as promises were broken once again and nothing decent has been stated to follow up the previous attempts at communicating.

So my questions are and I guess most people have the same are;

-How is the expansion going? Can we hear more about it?

-What happened to balance every 4-6 weeks? Did you mean 4-6 months?

-Whats the reason of massive lags recently, can we do anything about it?

-Allianc... Just kidding

-If you made strikes to gather more people and prepare them for raids, then why are we not getting any new raids?

-You said you want to increase difficulty with each new strike, but that has been not the case for the last 2, did you change your direction with strikes?

-How is the development of new fractal CM going? Can we expect it in 2020?

-Will there be any sort of new legendaries or are we officially done with them all?

-Any q3 roadmaps like you did for q1 and q2?

Thanks and hope we can hear a few words before you go silent for another 3 months.

[Ashantara.8731]

Add to that:

• When will EU players have their TP earnings refunded from the Rollback Issue? (Yeah yeah, I know, they are supposedly working on it. ;) )

I agree, the silence has returned, it's sad but not unexpected.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

Thanks, ArenaNet, for all you are able to do working under these difficult circumstances.
Surprised and delighted that we are still getting content in a timely manner.

It would be great to hear more about what's upcoming.

[Astralporing.1957]

@Ashantara.8731 said:Add to that:

• When will EU players have their TP earnings refunded from the Rollback Issue? (Yeah yeah, I know, they are supposedly working on it. ;) )Are they working on it? I thought they decided on the stance that they are returning only achievements and valuable items lost, and gold is not items?

I agree, the silence has returned, it's sad but not unexpected.I'd say that the silence is the norm here, so it's definitely not surprising.

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Considering they're based in Seattle, they're probably too distracted by Covid-19 and riots.

[Rogue.8235]

I'm trying to understand the clients' need for communication. Do you expect every service-based company to do this? I'm not saying it's bad; I just don't understand.

Additionally, there are significant world events going on right now that affect every individual. Some expectation that the employees of ArenaNet are human people and not development machines is warranted.

It would be good to know that everyone is safe.

[AliamRationem.5172]

@Rogue.8235 said:I'm trying to understand the clients' need for communication. Do you expect every service-based company to do this? I'm not saying it's bad; I just don't understand.

Additionally, there are significant world events going on right now that affect every individual. Some expectation that the employees of ArenaNet are human people and not development machines is warranted.

It would be good to know that everyone is safe.

This is an MMO. The goal is to retain customers for years. So, yes, communication is expected. This is also not a new development and there is nothing unreasonable about asking for someone to pop in and tell us what is going on, particularly since the rumor is they lost some more big names at the top recently. It's not a good time to say nothing. It's making players nervous about recent promises, possibly including the expansion announcement.

[Tukaram.8256]

I enjoy communication from the devs, but honestly am surprised we have been even getting content update these last few months. There is a lot going on, let's give em a break.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

Ur all not wrong but at the same time they've done this for years and u guys still support such a $hit dev company so kinda on u guys as well. I kno sucks cuz u like the game but ur supporting the devs as they run it I to the ground

[Astralporing.1957]

@Blood Red Arachnid.2493 said:Considering they're based in Seattle, they're probably too distracted by Covid-19 and riots.Considering that this level of communication is normal for this company, and has been for years, we can safely assume it has nothing to do with Covid or riots at all.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

And, they are not based in Seattle, but in Bellevue, across the lake.
No idea if any riots were/are in Bellevue. Certainly didn't read about any.

[HotDelirium.7984]

I expect due to Covid-19 their communication is even more limited than usual BUT I will say Mike Z just leaving the company without even a goodbye and allegedly we have a new Game Director but not even an intro from him. NCSoft west seems to have their fingers all up in the decisions now which gives me ACTIVISION vibes. Good luck to us all.

[avey.4201]

maybe it's covid, or the protests, but Anet us usually quiet, and servers have lag when Anet is cooking something big up, an expansion or alliances would cause both, episodes cause very little server performance impact.the lack of balance patches after a big lazy unbalanced nerf sucks though.

[Bursting.1976]

I'm excited for the new expansion and would love to hear some more news on it. But they may have had some delays of plans due to covid, or maybe they're busy working on the expansion.

[Taril.8619]

@Rogue.8235 said:I'm trying to understand the clients' need for communication. Do you expect every service-based company to do this? I'm not saying it's bad; I just don't understand.

Video games are like retail services. They're very much based on having a healthy relationship between provider and consumer. Since if things go bad, the consumer will go elsewhere.

This is not the case for all service-based companies, since some services are more difficult to simply take to another provider.

Video games are a competitive market (Even if the MMO genre is in a pretty sad state right now), there's always new games being released that are vying for peoples time and money. So it's important to ensure to generate enough goodwill to keep customers around even if you're not actively pushing out content, because that's important for sustainability, especially in times such as these where delays are created due to global situations.

@Rogue.8235 said:Additionally, there are significant world events going on right now that affect every individual. Some expectation that the employees of ArenaNet are human people and not development machines is warranted.

Ironically, their communication would be indicative of being people and not development machines. Since it means that at least someone has had a break from developing things, to put the time in to talk with the community. To allay fears of the future of the company, of the game or simply to provide people some insight into the inner workings of the developers of the game (What direction they're looking in, why they're making certain decisions, what's preventing them from making other decisions etc)

You know, just letting everyone know that the people working on the game are people and are doing what they can and are listening to players.

It makes a world of difference when companies maintain regular communication with their customers, between vastly decreased frustration and anger levels in customers who don't feel like they're being ignored as well as promoting increased spending knowing that the company is worth supporting.

For example, Digital Extremes (Warframe), Grinding Gear Games (Path of Exile) and CD Projekt Red (Witcher/Cyberpunk 2077) all maintain good communication and are rated very positively as companies (Also notable, is Yoshida-P the director for FFXIV, whom is always communicating, even across language barriers - He gets feedback translated for him to read and then has his responses translated and distributed).

Meanwhile, Bethesda, Bioware (Post being killed by EA) and Ubisoft all have awful communication (While Bethesda communicates fairly frequently... It's 99% lies and BS) and are rated very negatively as companies.

[Mikuchan.7261]

To work with what Taril.8619 said,CD Project Red announces their problems and explain that they have to delay things to make them better and how and what the causes are.(Partly) Because they have great communication, people are understanding and keep loving them.Yes, some people will whine about how something "was promised" a year ago and didn't make it in time.But you explain why it happened and what the plan is and the majority will be good with it.Even an "We are currently having internal problems that we are trying to resolve and we sadly can't talk about them right now." is better than silence. Especially if the explanation comes when it's available.It was good that ANet told us that they can't safely have voice actors do their job and that voices would come later. That is communication and resolving problems. But as explained by others earlier, there are so much more that needs to be talked about.

[zealex.9410]

Most if not all the other major live servicd titles are getting frequent updates in terms of communication and still manage to dish out content (delayed or not).

[Super Hayes.6890]

@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:Thanks, ArenaNet, for all you are able to do working under these difficult circumstances.

Surprised and delighted that we are still getting content in a timely manner.

It would be great to hear more about what's upcoming.

I second this!

[Orack.9756]

Whats the reason of massive lags recently, can we do anything about it?

I quit ESO and come here because of lag.Since rollback and even before, in many event, especialy S4/S5/PoF their is very often lag spike which is incredibly annoying.

So yeah, if no plan about this I think I'm done with MMORPG, seem like all MMORPG these day don't care about customer and just wanna milk them until the game die...

[Rihar.3465]

@"Orack.9756" said:

Whats the reason of massive lags recently, can we do anything about it?

I quit ESO and come here because of lag.Since rollback and even before, in many event, especialy S4/S5/PoF their is very often lag spike which is incredibly annoying.

So yeah, if no plan about this I think I'm done with MMORPG, seem like all MMORPG these day don't care about customer and just wanna milk them until the game die...

You don't get the idea.In our world no one cares about you, me and others. It's a pure business which makes money. So yes, naturally any business will try to milk customers as much as it's possible. At the same time business will try to balance between "heavy milking" and "keeping its reputation above certain threshold" in order not to lose customers.

As a former ESO player who moved to GW2, I'd say that ANet treats its customers much better than ZOS, and the whole game in designed, coded and implemented much and much better, which leaves a feeling of ANet team as a much more professional one. I could give you hundreds of examples where GW2 features are implemented better than ESO ones, and only a few where ESO beats GW2.

Going back to customers: you have the only strong weapon - your cash. You vote with your cash. Wanna change anything? Vote with cash. Money for business as an air for animals. You either breath or you die.

Unfortunately, human's nature doesn't work in that way, that's why business exists in overall. There always will be "whales" who buy an extremely large amount of gems/crowns/whatever, spending hundreds of dollars each month no matter what, opening dozens of loot boxed each week etc. There always be those who say "I invested so much into this game so I can't stop" - they can't assume they're ill and addicted. Because they "invested much" they will stop only then the source of their addiction will completely die.

Summing up, any company cares about customers, but only as much as it's needed to keep business alive. ANet does their job good, and like I said - much better than ZOS. I've been playing GW2 like for 3 years and it's the first time I experienced rollback problem (luckily I logged in few minutes before got disconnected). Lag spikes do happen during events, but even Branded Shatterer fight goes smoother that ESO solo world exploring.

[Taril.8619]

@"Rihar.3465" said:You don't get the idea.In our world no one cares about you, me and others. It's a pure business which makes money. So yes, naturally any business will try to milk customers as much as it's possible. At the same time business will try to balance between "heavy milking" and "keeping its reputation above certain threshold" in order not to lose customers.

In recent years, yes, this is what has become of many gaming companies. They only care about stockholders, profit margins and not customers.

Still, it's not all companies. Some still do actually care about customers and making video games that are fun.

Since, they know that if players are having fun, they're spending money and telling everyone they know about how great the game is (Meaning free marketing, leading to increased sales)

Heck it's what catapulted Blizzard to success, they were focused on making genuinely good games because they themselves were gamers at heart. It wasn't until Activision acquired them that they started to put in minimal effort and maximized monetization, eventually leading to many of the original developers leaving.

Many indie developers put more focus on making good games as opposed to milking players for all their worth (Some end up trying or selling out to the big greedy companies that force them to though) too, with some gaining success too.

But it's sadly becoming rarer, especially while awful corporations like EA, Activision and Ubisoft are trying so hard to keep pushing new anti-consumer business practices to maximize their profits, while also trying to buy out or simply bully into submission any indie developers that actually want to make something good for customers.

[Blocki.4931]

We do get follow up balance patches almost every time. They're just smaller.

[Rihar.3465]

@Taril.8619 said:

@"Rihar.3465" said:You don't get the idea.In our world

no one

cares about you, me and others. It's a pure business which makes money. So yes, naturally any business will try to milk customers as much as it's possible. At the same time business will try to balance between "heavy milking" and "keeping its reputation above certain threshold" in order not to lose customers.

In recent years, yes, this is what has become of many gaming companies. They only care about stockholders, profit margins and not customers.

Still, it's not all companies. Some still do actually care about customers and making video games that are fun.

Since, they know that if players are having fun, they're spending money and telling everyone they know about how great the game is (Meaning free marketing, leading to increased sales)

Heck it's what catapulted Blizzard to success, they were focused on making genuinely good games because they themselves were gamers at heart. It wasn't until Activision acquired them that they started to put in minimal effort and maximized monetization, eventually leading to many of the original developers leaving.

Many indie developers put more focus on making good games as opposed to milking players for all their worth (Some end up trying or selling out to the big greedy companies that force them to though) too, with some gaining success too.

But it's sadly becoming rarer, especially while awful corporations like EA, Activision and Ubisoft are trying so hard to keep pushing new anti-consumer business practices to maximize their profits, while also trying to buy out or simply bully into submission any indie developers that actually want to make something good for customers.

Agree, but the kind of companies you're talking about are young companies. You know, those histories of success when a computer was developed in dad's garage or a new type of video game was invented by 2-3 "nerds" who were spending their school summer holidays by coding on crappy laptops... These all are good and interesting stories at the beginning of them. The atmosphere of researching, doing something cutting-edge. As soon as the company grows up, get heavy investments and flood staff with managers, we get what we get: stable milking machine. While developing MMO game is difficult, time and resource consuming, it's not a rocket science. IT has quite a low responsibility level. You can DO mistakes and have no responsibility for your failures.

Actually for me it is good to see competition between companies. I even noticed that many release/event dates in GW2 cross ESO ones :DI wish ANet were better in their marketing, but usually ANet simply does quality staff while ZOS talk much, promise much and screw up each time they release anything. But both companies get what they want: money.

Until they get it - nothing will stray from a course dictating by a company.