This is not good communication with players

#1 - Sept. 18, 2012, 3:50 a.m.

Hi. My name is Andry. I am not in any way an exploiter. I did Citadel of Flame, alot. My group worked hard and we invested a ton of time for what gear we got. We got on Mumble, we communicated, we used combos (25 stacks of might for all!), and above all even though it was a bit grindy, we enjoyed it. We played the dungeon precisely as it was presented to us. We didn’t zerg any encounters, we didn’t use geometry to bug out encounters, we didn’t use speed buffs. We did the dungeon as it was designed.

The reason why we did CoF instead of other explorables? Because of three very important factors, the “sweet spot” of dungeons:
1) It was challenging, but not too challenging.
2) The reward was worth the time.
3) It didn’t take too long. Most people do not want to spend more than 30 minutes in a single unit of content. CoF was less than this, so it fit perfect.

Now, you changed the dungeon. Fine. You think it’s your game, not ours. You have a vision and you want to persue it. Again, fine.

But you must absolutely communicate with us. You cannot hide things. You cannot be dishonest. No matter how many times you edit those patch notes or make comments on other threads, in your initial draft of the patch notes (which by the way came hours after the patch when they should be in our hands the very second the servers come down) there was no mention of the changes you made to CoF.

Why? I have no idea. Some people will suggest that you don’t want to confess changes that will be viewed as unpopular. Whether or not it’s true, it is certainly well within our right as paying customers to suggest so.

Here was your response:

There were certain things that could be done (and were being done) in both CM and CoF that were not intended to be possible (read: exploits), we fixed them. End of story!

And then you closed the thread. Do you have any idea how disrespectful his is? Do you understand that this is precisely the opposite attitude you want to take. You may take umbrage at me talking down to you in this way but I implore you…. please do not continue this kind of communication with your players.

We should have a discussion about where you want dungeons to be and there should be a negotiation about what we want dungeons to be, but we can’t have that conversation and we won’t have that conversation if you are going to accuse every player getting any kind of consistent reward from your dungeons an exploiter and then shutting the discussion down.

This is the stuff that turns into bad press real fast. And if you haven’t learned it already, MMO players are the most fickle and finicky game players. You have a small window to impress with your service. It doesn’t matter one bit how beautiful your world is, how compelling your combat is, or how immersive and fun your game experience is. If your communication with players is lacking, if your communication with players is hostile, if your players do not trust or even worse if they are afraid to play your game for fear of being labelled exploiter or cheater… nobody is going to play it. Edited by moderator. Caps.

AidanTaylor

#7 - Sept. 18, 2012, 4:31 a.m.

Andry.2563:
We should have a discussion about where you want dungeons to be and there should be a negotiation about what we want dungeons to be, but we can’t have that conversation and we won’t have that conversation if you are going to accuse every player getting any kind of consistent reward from your dungeons an exploiter and then shutting the discussion down.

I would have left the thread open had I seen any merit to the discussion that it started, ultimately I should have made it clearer from the get go.

As you well know by now we do not allow discussion of exploits on these forums for good reason (see this blog post Guild Wars 2 Economy) as discussion of them ends up advertising them to a larger chunk of the playerbase. We don’t want this as we would prefer never to have to ban players (see the end of that blog post) to that extent again.

You will find that there are exploits that we don’t talk about, we won’t advertise through patch notes that they have been fixed in most cases.

By all means discuss the time / reward side of running explorable dungeons and how the changes applied last night may have affected your game experience!

AidanTaylor

#10 - Sept. 18, 2012, 5:08 a.m.

Andry.2563:
Two things:
You originally gave me an infraction for this:
Moderator Notes:
Please do not make posts that contest the actions of a moderator. If you feel any action taken by a moderator was inappropriate, send an e-mail to [email protected] and the issue will be looked into.
Now you are changing it to giving me an infraction because I had two words capitalized for emphasis in a multi-paragraph post?

I will have the infraction reversed.

AidanTaylor

#11 - Sept. 18, 2012, 5:10 a.m.

Andry.2563:
This is the stuff that turns into bad press real fast. And if you haven’t learned it already, MMO players are the most fickle and finicky game players. You have a small window to impress with your service. It doesn’t matter one bit how beautiful your world is, how compelling your combat is, or how immersive and fun your game experience is. If your communication with players is lacking, if your communication with players is hostile, if your players do not trust or even worse if they are afraid to play your game for fear of being labelled exploiter or cheater… nobody is going to play it.

I’m sorry if my original response seemed to brand those that may have benefited from these as cheaters or exploiters, it was not intended to be read that way.

AidanTaylor

#48 - Sept. 18, 2012, 6:32 a.m.

Thrashard.9152:
In my experience with other MMOs and their notorious forums, its’ oftentimes the playerbase (but moreso, a handful of regular forum-goers) that ends up becoming belligerent or outright rude to any changes or have this incredible sense of “I speak for everyone, and if the devs don’t listen to me, the game is doomed!” that can cause developers themselves to not want to say anything as it will either become misconstrued or twisted around. I have not seen this not happen, no matter the game.

In a case such as this, I didn’t see the original thread regarding the fixes to the dungeons, but it almost seemed like it was another case of players not being happy that the tricks (read: exploits) were removed, and with only one person’s word against another, saying that it was always legit so why change it… if the runs that were done legit, then where is the issue? If it is a case of the rewards being too low, mention that. If the difficulty was swung too far one way or the other, say so. But don’t focus in on the fixes that were made that were used to bypass content and call it the worst change in the world.

The community is new yet, but with every new game that I have followed for the last 5 years or so, the cesspool of negativity and arguementativeness on the forums has become worse as it goes.. and I haven’t the slightest idea who to blame, or in this case, feel sorry for.

TL;DR: Give the devs some time to find their legs, and stop trying to focus on the exploit corrections as the only thing wrong with the change. Exploits have never been openly discussed, and trying to make any new game buck the trend will lead to disappointment. Going back to lurking, as I know this will simply get tossed aside, as I disagreed with someone.

This is the best course that can be taken, we have always valued our players feedback regarding all aspects of the game. There are plenty of developers, designers, artists etc reading and posting on these forums – though most will generally stick to their area of expertise, they are sat there waiting for you (all our players) to talk to them, tell them what they think is right and how they would/should change those things that niggle to be better!