Comment on Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure – Launch Story Flashback
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months agoWe probably should have known … that Gyla Delve wasn’t an exception but the new normal. I now wish GW2 could have gone gracefully into Maintenance mode during Icebrood Saga instead of becoming a Walking Dead parody.
lulztard@lemmy.wtf 11 months ago
Here is my take: remember City of Heroes? Has nothing to do with the codebase, I’d say. It’s just NCNet now, mate. Like ActiBlizz. It’s not a flesh puppt yet, took a while for Blizzard, Bioware and Co as well. But it’s not going to get better anymore.
Half a season of Living World over twelve month for almost full price. Fuck me that’s grim.
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
Do you think we would get more content, if we’d paid more? I even doubt that. They simply can’t deliver more content and give us rewards instead.
And Amnytas isn’t even a complete map. Mabye a quarter of a map cloned 4 times with rmostly recycled events which are disabled whenever the meta runs. The only unique feature of this map is its lag and FPS drop.
lulztard@lemmy.wtf 11 months ago
We don’t pay Anet, we pay NCSoft. NCSoft gives Anet a budget. NCSoft has a history of shutting down perfectly fine MMOs because they’re not profitable enough, pretty sure that’s what happened to GW2. Except that it’s not been shut down, instead it runs on like 25% of its season 4 budget or whatever. So no, we won’t get more of we pay more. And yes, the entire “mini expansion” is just recycled and repeated content ad nauseam. I can’t see the design loop of “go get glowy orbs with your skyscale” anymore, it happens 25 times per event, acrpss 90% of events.
Pretty sure that’s it.
necropola@lemmy.sdf.org 11 months ago
I do not deny that there was a significant shift from player to shareholder focus over time. GW2 started out as a game for players to enjoy (or rather what the devs would enjoy playing) and largely turned into a revenue engine for shareholders to enjoy. At least they are not triple dipping (box + subscription + cash shop) like ActivisionBlizzard with WoW, and I believe that there are still (a few) people at ArenaNet who are fighting for the players and against 100% shareholder interest.
What I meant is that there is also an issue with every system that gets bigger and bigger over time and that is increasing complexity which makes changes harder and harder. Pretty much the only way to battle this is to refactor and/or reimplement parts of the system (or the entire system) once in a while. To me it seems that this has been largely neglected over the past years, though there have been recent announcements that they are doing just that at the moment.
Anyway, how much resources you spend on things that do not immediatley create content/revenue is a management decision and this is where it comes full circle.