State of the Game Discussion with ArenaNet

#105 - Dec. 3, 2012, 4:58 p.m.

Hey all.

Just wanted to thank Grouch/Frozire and all the players for being involved in this. Sorry if some of the questions felt “soft” to you guys, but we’ll try to do more of these in the future. I thought the players asked great questions and voiced legitimate concerns. I know there are many other concerns out there, and we’ll just have to get to them in due time.

Thanks for listening, and thanks to everyone involved for getting it set up!

J

#133 - Dec. 4, 2012, 11:04 a.m.

felivear.1536:

Just a quick question if you are still monitoring this thread. Do you agree that the scoring system in hot-joins is not conducive to team play and actually causes it to be the main reason you see so many theives and mesmers? Because they are very well suited for that type of play (i.e. Kill, quick hopping between points, cap and leave).

Also, are you completely set in stone on the no solo queue option? Many people including myself do not have the time or have an odd schedule to form teams and play at set times, we want to be able to queue in tournaments with people who also want the same thing. That would by far be the most popular type of SPVP played if that was added.

Edit: are there any plans to make hot-join keep parties of at least 2 people together? With Christmas rush I plan on seeing a few new friends joining and I would like to stay on the same team in hot-join.

• Scoring: As I said in the interview, we want to make changes to this system once other key features are finished!

• Solo queue: We want to try the system I spoke of, where individuals can join and be grouped together, and then get an aggregate rating. It’s a complicated formula, but once we’re closer to releasing it, we’ll do blog posts to explain how it will work. So we will be addressing the issue you raise.

• For hot joins, we’re going to see what happens after custom arenas go live. We think hot joins will change how people view casual games.

• To the whole newb/noob thing: I did NOT mean this to be derisive. I was simply using it as a term to describe players who are new at the game. I did not mean to deride, explicitly or implicitly, player skill. Sorry that it came off that way to some of you. I simply feel very passionately about making an E sport WHILE ALSO PROTECTING our new players with the fury of a 1,000 burning suns. If we don’t protect and teach our new players, then they can’t get into the game and learn. If we don’t bring in new players, there will be no interest in the higher levels of competitions. I think that in order to have a successful E-sport, you need players who want to watch high level players playing. You also need to bring in new blood into your game to keep the game growing (think of any sport in the world….you have high school -> college – > professional).

So I didn’t mean that to be demeaning at all, sorry if it came off that way. I tried to explain what I meant by newb/casual (new players, or those who just play casually), sorry I didn’t do a better job – I’ll work on that one.

J

#141 - Dec. 4, 2012, 1:54 p.m.

FluffyDoe.7539:

I have a question here; How come Mr.Sharp was so eased on saying “we need to do a better job communicating with the players”, but he has yet to agree with the fact that having ranking/matchmaking at launch would have made the ‘state of the game’ much better than where it’s at now?

I spoke of this on Friday, but let me reiterate.

We could have had rankings, but without tournaments or a way to get teams playing against each other in an organized fashion, they would have ranked…..nothing. Just the pub play matches. That’s why we wanted to set down a framework first, then add in the custom arenas (for practicing/developing organized matches) and rankings. Having rankings without tourneys or a matchmaking system literally wouldn’t do anything…you would just have rankings based on random pub matches where teams would be anything from 1-8 players. Seems bad to me. That’s why we made that decision.

Does that make sense?

J

#151 - Dec. 4, 2012, 4:34 p.m.

As the ArenaNet point of contact for this stream, I’d like to comment on something that was mentioned earlier in this thread.

There were no pre-set questions for this stream. We did have a list of topics that we wanted to make sure to touch on, but this did not include pre-set questions. We did not specify any areas, other than PvE/WvW (for the obvious reason that this interview was geared towards sPvP), which should not be discussed.

This was not a scripted discussion by any means.

What we were hoping to do was answer questions during the live stream that were being asked in the own3D channel. However, due to connection issues, we were not able to do the live stream and therefore did not take questions from the chat.

Anyway, thank you all for taking the time to watch the video and give us feedback. It’s greatly appreciated!

-Allie