I don’t like 4.7 either. I have a long list of complaints, just like most of you I’ve been reading the forums, and I have to say, we are a passionate bunch who truly love this game.
I will say though, I don’t think acting like an angry mob is going to do anything but shut down discourse entirely. Angry and ugly words just harden hearts and deafen ears.
I think we need to ask ourselves how do we make our point without causing the DEVS to walk away? All we are doing is egging each other on and stopping the lines of communication.
Do you even know of another game where the players have so much access to the people who write the game?
I think we need to ask calmly for the DEVS to address our concerns, one by one. We need them to explain why they are doing what they are doing. We need to understand that not every decision is made by them alone, that they serve both us, the consumers, and also their financial backers. We need to be civil in our disobedience.
Oh, and for the haters who are going to call me an a$$ kisser, trust me, I am not. I just think we need to act like the grown ups we are, and handle ourselves with a little more class.
Your thoughts?
Where exactly is this angry mob??
I’ve mostly seen people (rightfully) giving their opinion on this update and the ninja nerf.
Historically speaking:
Filing bug reports and waiting has done nothing. The only way I’ve ever seen the devs take decisive action about anything is a giant thread with hundreds of replies sitting a the top of the forums for months.
If the devs want people to calmly voice concerns, then wait patiently for resolution, then the devs should demonstrate a tendency to quickly and politely act on calm feedback. Instead they demonstrate a reluctance to act on player feedback, portraying any reaction as, “Well you guys are LUCKY, we’ve decided to COMPROMISE and…” etc.
The last two threads in memory about game issues (excluding ETs):
- Started with a longtime player making a long, passionate argument for many changes. The thread ended when Salty said “TLDR”, and transitioned to people making fun of players who make requests.
- Started with a well-respected player writing a several-page essay about data concerning drop rates. The devs responded, multiple times, with “you’re wrong, you don’t understand statistics”. Suddenly, after the players shifted to, ‘The data overwhelmingly proves the devs are liars’, the story changed to “We have found a bug”. Their fix still lied about drop rates and they insisted we were all fools, that they had done millions of tests. When the next statistics and accusations of lying dropped, they begrudgingly updated the drop rates again.
I’ve seen games where bad things didn’t cause mobs to assemble. Those weren’t games that tell passionate players their feedback is boring, or that fabricate stories about how fictional math works when a player presents actual math.
I agree that things need to be discussed civilly. But there is a saying such as, “You reap what you sow.”
I think that the community is just as upset over the devs not disclosing the gold reduction being included in the patch notes as they are about the reduction itself. The devs stated it was an oversight. Well… for those of you that were around they did the same thing after they removed gems from LT’s. only after the community outcry did they acknowledge that it was true. So it’s a “fool me once; shame on you. Fool me twice; shame on me” kind of thing.
It’s almost like they have a pattern of trying to combine several nerfs, announcing a big one as a distraction, and hoping players don’t notice all of the changes so they can slip through unannounced.
The new twist is calling it “a compromise with the publisher”.
The devs are not your friends.
Exactly this.
Don’t spit in my face and call it a rainy day.
It offends me when a game dev doesn’t just come out and plainly state a massive change. It adds insult to injury when they call that nerf an exploit. Any reasonable person understands that a live service game must rebalance the currencies in a game from time to time. (Or, they feel the need to force more monetization, whatever.) Just be honest about it.
As someone who just got shot down spectacularly by facts and accurate assessments in another thread I stand by what OP is trying to do. I think everyone here is passionate and oppionated (this is a forum after all). I believe we need a consensus response from a select few members to convey both the concerns on the forums along with the solutions for them. So many times here I see multiple members make page long posts with similar arguments but they quickly get lost and makes it hard to see what the census is here.
I would like to see Guild Tasks un-nerfed by the 16-20% they were nerfed by when there was “20-25% more Gold flowing into the economy” in light of this nerf. An extra buff on top would be appreciated as compensation for intentionally mistakenly missing this in the patch notes and patch preview information.
We are the customers. We are allowed to voice displeasure with a product that is asking us with increasing pressure to spend money on it. (I really don’t like the term ‘consumers’, it has a far different historical meaning than ‘customers’ and in times past was actually a derogatory term.)
If you continue to spend money on this game while being angry about this nerf, you are rewarding bad decisions. Don’t do it.
Tbh, if you visit these forums regularly, you will see that there are excellent posts and threads, tips, tactics, methods, teams, counters and general all round help from the community to the community.
Granted, some of the best teams remain under wraps, because of the competitive nature of guild wars, but if you have been a regular for a while, there’s some really good information. I like the teams posted, I’ve posted a few and it all adds to the fun, critique, analysis, opinion - which is all great information for players by players and long may it continue, but…
What I see is Devs taking note of some of these tips, methods, speed things and combating them with system changes to negate them, offset speed, slow down play.
Here is a classic one. Life and Death.
In reality all this does is extend games. Yes if you have stun/banish and curse on your team, you can combat it quite efficiently. I am not talking about teams, there are numerous teams that fare well against it, what I am talking about is the abilities that it has that extends the game. Win or stall conditions…
Bless/self enchant/lifesteal=lifegain/stealth/summons and ofc deathmark. The simple logic to make this weapon fairer would have been to remove the bless, but what happened was the change from 50% to 35% on the summons. It is making no difference it still feels like there is a spider after every damage to the hero and then we get a class (Slayer) that gives it a free spider spawn.
If it has made any difference it is imperceptible, the core issue is this team wins quite a lot, there is a temptation to use it because it wins, and then what it does is slow down play.
You look at the explore features all designed to slow down the player. Devs have said they are staying and yet it eradicates the fun, explore is absurdly tedious after a while.
The useless stats screen after a ranked PVP battle, a useless feature no-one asked for. We asked for proper things that help, a turn counter, a video or at worst a log of your GW defence battles. For example a simple - log would be much better than that buffer useless screen (sorry it’s useless), an exported file to analyse the output of a game. I was playing games 25+ years ago with a log to text on data from the game, *.csv, *.xls so you could check results.
Sadly, I could go on with upteen examples of positive things that have appeared on the forums and which in turn have been countered by changes to stop them. In the other thread it was eloquently brought up when we changed to upto 4x speed, changes were made against the player as a result.
There’s no benefit of the doubt anymore with it all, sadly.
Ended as in ‘closed by devs’? That thread may have been before my time on forums. I would have liked to read it, if still possible. Link? Edit: I forgot to say ‘please’. Link please?
Voq linked it. Ended as in “once the community manager mocked a player, others followed suit and nothing productive came from the feedback.” It’s not clear any dev ever read it, even in part.
Well summarised, @Slypenslyde.
I’m plan to continue to push elements of that agenda, and I think it’s sensible for others to do the same.
Salty actually gave an excellent response (as in, very useful) during today’s PQ stream. I basically asked what the feeling was about my suggestion to have a setting for the level of guidance in Explore. She said two things: 1) They’ve been so busy, they haven’t had a chance to think about it. 2) There’s a lot of work involved in implementing such a thing.
So, the second point is something of a cop-out. It comes down to how much priority is demanded by the amount of pain causes and the level of screaming (so to speak). The first point is a good one. While it may be annoying that they’re spending – arguably – too much time on new features and too little fixing older problems, having a lot to do and minimal staff is a reality. What’s good is that it’s clearly on their radar. What we need to do as a community is to keep it there – politely. And the more unified our voice is on what the problem is and which solution we prefer, the better, I think.
My suggestion: keep mentioning one specific aspect of the Explore problem, and keep referring to your preferred solution. But don’t expect it to arrive much earlier than the middle of next year.
(Realistically, I believe they may be so focussed on version 5.0 that they won’t do much GUI fixing until after it comes out – currently scheduled for mid-2020. Sadly.)
Just this. Emphasis on honest . Nothing else to add.
I’m struggling to write a post that is calm and civil. I believe it was an honest mistake, the patch notes are quite lengthy, and the game has a history of similar mistakes. But thinking about it just makes me angry. So I shall keep my mouth shut and go play a different game…