sobota 16. apríla 2016

OPEN LETTER TO MIKE O'BRIEN

Mr. O'Brien,

Please bear with me, my intention is not to offend you with this, even if it may look so at first glance I just want to be honest with you.

Do you still seriously believe in your policy of not talking? Do you really think that it is the best possibility of interacting (more like not interacting) with your community?

I know, this is not new. Anet has always been prety tight-lipped about their future development. Or was it only after the famous "Looking ahead" blogpost from a couple of years ago that promised precursor hunt?

Nevermind. I don't know whether you fear the community's reaction so much, or more specifically you don't handle anything negative well, I still can't comprehend how you can think of not talking as being the best option.

You're missing out on so much feedback. Your community trusts you less and less as time passes by and we get only news about suspensions and delays. And you still believe that this is the way to go?

It may be an unfair assumption but I suspect that this is the reason why we don't have a public test server. Am I right? Please don't try that spoiler argument, we can handle spoilers and not spoiling stuff.

Let's get back to the point. You need to talk to your community. You need to be open. You need to handle feedback. Stop talking about the most friendly community, when you're afraid of some bad apples. I'm sure I'm not the only one who would prefer monthly blog updates of what you're working on, what we can look forward to, what problems occur in development and so on. We would handle negative news much better then, if we knew what's really going on and what's the reason behind them.

MO, your argument is that you want to talk less and delight us with what you're shipping out. I'm sorry, but you've shipped almost NOTHING after the launch of HoT. So what do you want us to be delighted about? I can understand that you probably spent the whole end of 2015 with fixing the HoT problems and the new development started only in 2016. In my opinion, if you were frank with us and told us where your development is, the community wouldn't expect that much at start.

On Tuesday, there comes the Spring quarterly patch. You said that the works on it are almost finished. You also said that you don't want to talk promises or visions or anything that's not ready. Why the hell don't you still talk about the patch, when you said that it's ready?

Don't you think that you contradict yourself with this? How can anybody trust you after this? How can anybody be optimistic about Guild Wars 2 future when in 5 months we got barely anything, we have no idea why and what's going on and you decide to talk even less.

I have 18 characters, no MMO out there is better than GW2 for me, I spent countless hours ingame, I even enjoyed that (according to you) "big amount" of content released with HoT. And yet I log in daily only to do daily now. Not even exploration and leveling of new chars entertains me anymore.
I'm sorry, I endured all the hate and negativity, I defended Anet and GW2 a lot but now even I can't find a good reason to spend more time ingame. If I knew what to look forward to, I'd have a huge motivation to be ingame. But now I can only grind either achievements, collections, mats, map currency, etc. Probably good thing that I play mostly pve as I hear complaints about other modes but this is not to be discussed here.

About two years ago, I started doing GW2 videos. Why? For many reasons. One of them was that I was bored ingame. We didn't have much new content then but at least we knew what's coming. Now I can't make myself to record anything, to edit anything, to finish any more videos. This situation is demotivating as hell. So I started with GW2 comic, it's fun but a lot of work and to be honest it's getting more difficult with current demotivating situation when I want to spend less time ingame and thinking of GW2 just so I don't think of this everything.

Personally, I still believe in Anet (there are so many talented and awesome people) and I that you take a chance to redeem yourselves in Summer patch. Persuade us that all that waiting, delays, suspensions and no communication were for something awesome. With so much overpromising and not delivering, you have a very hard challenge ahead of you.

Switching from promising too much to not wanting to talk about anything  is not the way to go though. It's just jumping from extreme to extreme. How about finding a compromise?

Mr. O'Brien, I'm sure that we all want what's best for the game. Let's interact together and let us make the "delighting us with releases" easier - with content, open communication and constructive feedback.

I still believe in you. Please, do not prove me wrong.


Levi

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