#1 - Oct. 4, 2012, 2:21 p.m.
Sup. I wanted to give you guys some quick updates and talk about a few things:
- Blog post. So I thought I’d start with this and explain some stuff real fast. When any of us writes a blog post, it’s a group effort. My name may go up on the newest post, but a lot of other designers and members of other teams gave feedback and ideas on it. Once we go back and forth and everyone (marketing, community, design, etc.) sign off on it, we still have to get it edited. This takes a while, and usually means I sit with an editor going line by line making sure that my intention is preserved through the editing process. If any of you have written dissertations or college papers for a strict professor, you know that the editing process can take a while to get correct. That’s just how it is in the real world. I don’t just slap stuff down in notepad and then get it uploaded to the GW2 or Anet web pages.
Then, another thing that takes a while is localization. I’ve been reading the threads lately, and I’ve seen some people say, “Screw it, just release it in English as soon as it’s done!”
No. That’s not fair to everyone. We want everyone to get the information at the same time, so we wait until it’s localized into all our website supported languages before we post it.
- Balance. Really, balance is pretty good. We’re very observant of the meta, we read the forums, and we’re playing the game with you. We don’t want to make knee-jerk balance decisions. And if did whatever the community wanted, what would happen to balance? How many threads are basically: “NERF X OMG!!” “Learn to play , X is fine” “Omg no, we can’t beat X at all!” “Just saying, none of the people I know even run X anymore” “Hey you guys forget X, let’s buff Y!”….then this just repeats over and over. We can’t just do exactly what players ask for in relation to balance, because different players at various skill levels view balance differently. So what we do is balance community feedback with gameplay results. We don’t want to play whack-a-mole with balance, so we don’t just nerf/buff everything as soon as someone posts about it. It would ruin the game if we did. We try to be patient, see if the meta fixes itself (because a lot of times, once you learn how to deal with something, you realize it may not be as imba as you first thought), and then make long-lasting balance changes. We don’t want to nerf X, then realize no one uses it, and buff it again, then have to nerf it again, etc. etc.
- New features. People are saying that X feature is more important than Y feature for sPvP. Others then jump in the thread and say Z is actually more important than either X or Y. The truth is – you’re all right. I think a lot of the features mentioned in these threads are important, so we’ll use our best judgment to get them out in the correct order that makes the most sense. I talk about new features in the blog, so I won’t spoil them here. Just know that my team and I are devoted to PvP and improving it, so we’re working hard to get you guys the features that GW2 PvP needs. We are not ignoring you, we’re just busy working, which is why you don’t hear from us more. If we’re on the forums posting all the time, we’re not working!
So that’s it. Just wanted to give you guys some quick notes on where we stand right now. The blog post is still incoming – it’s just working its way through localization for ALL languages.
