How much faith do you have in ANET and future GW2 now?

[yefluke.3168]

Any concern over this situation,

and What ANet should do to bring the faith back?

[derd.6413]

continue business as usually.

 

ppl are just freaking out and it'll blow over eventually

[Gehenna.3625]

It's an interesting question but from a different point of view to me perhaps. It mostly depends on what's true. Right now I'm seeing more and more evidence that ArenaNet was focusing on other projects more than GW2 and that didn't pan out. Ncsoft apparently put a stop to it and told them to lay off 100 people. So perhaps with regards to GW2 this is actually what was needed to restore faith in the franchise and that means that it's just a matter of time and ArenaNet will show that re-commitment to GW2 that apparently they had lost.

 

So what they should do is confirm that a next expansion is in the works and a release window (not a date but a quarter will do) so that people see that the game is back on track again. Next to that, the next LS chapter will also be telling. The last 2 had beautiful maps but only one thing to really do there which for a lot of people means they have no reason to go there. So they are some of the best looking maps ever in this game, but I never go there anymore because I found the armor design of the requiem armor sets rather lacking and pink dragon blood weapon skins haven't tickled my fancy either. So that's a very binary approach to the value of the maps after playing through the story. LS3 maps tended to have trinkets which keep being useful every time you want to use a new build or make a new character. Skins have the risk of appealing or not and with that basically being the only reason to go back there that's very hit and miss.

 

So if we get to see new LS chapters with beautiful maps but more long term value due to a better variety of rewards, that would also tell me they're getting their focus back.

[yefluke.3168]

> @"derd.6413" said:

> continue business as usually.

>

> ppl are just freaking out and it'll blow over eventually

 

I understand the freaking out tho since it is not just 10-20 laid off.

 

[Dami.5046]

I don't think we are heading to the game's sell by date quite yet.

[kharmin.7683]

> @"derd.6413" said:

> continue business as usually.

>

Business as usual is what got them into this position in the first place. ;)

 

 

[derd.6413]

> @"kharmin.7683" said:

> > @"derd.6413" said:

> > continue business as usually.

> >

> Business as usual is what got them into this position in the first place. ;)

>

>

 

well yes, but actually no

[CJH.2879]

A company restructuring isn't anything new.... its the end result in the coming weeks and months that they will judged on. Lets see how things go. I myself have faith in ANET & that they'll deliver as they always have.

[Blocki.4931]

If anything this has INCREASED my faith in them because it means they now have GW2 as their main priority, which is about the only thing I want to see when it comes to the game.

[RedBaron.6058]

Hello all,

 

After spending thousands of hours and $$ playing GW2 I can only hope the game keeps going.

But, unfortunately, I fear the worst. This type of restructuring, suddenly implemented, will drive away new players and will make veterans look around for another game to invest their hard earned money.

 

It means that probably 2019 will see another significant decrease in GW2 revenues unless something really spetacular happens like an extraordinary expansion or any other change that can create and maintain enough hype for people to spend money again in GW2.

 

Being mainly a WvW player, I feel that GW2 have never reached anywhere near its maximum potential on this area. The funny thing is that the most hardcore GW2 players are probably WvWers...

PvE, PvP, Raids, etc, everything provides better rewards over time invested than anything you can possibly do in WvW and yet, a few thousand players spend all their free time, year over year, fighting gallantly and desperatly in the same 4 maps and still having fun even during the darkest hours before the dawn!

 

One final tragically ironic touch was that when finally WvW mounts were about to be released, the sky falled down...

 

Well, lets see what happens but to be honest I do not have much hope.

 

Best regards.

[Psycoprophet.8107]

For all we know the restructure will bring renewed focus hehe to gw2 with fresh new ideas, more content releases and more support in general. As sad as the lay offs are it may be what’s needed for the game we love to push forward and grow instead of the maintenance mode we’ve kinda grown accustomed to.

Thinking the worst is easy with all the uncertainties but definitely won’t help the game in anyway.

[TheQuickFox.3826]

I cannot be sure with the current information, but I don't expect the game to go anywhere. It is way too popular and too profitable to just pull the plug. Even when put on maintenance-only mode, it would be a very valuable asset, and I'm sure that many gaming companies would love to purchase the game from NCSOFT if they would really lay their focus on mobile and Korean MMOs. In one way or another, I expect the servers to remain online for many, many years to come. Hell, we can still play GW1 in 2019!

 

Having said that, I do think ArenaNet and the GW(2) community requires a long term direction from ArenaNet about their plans and roadmap for the game beyond Living World Season 5. Many players are playing for long-term goals like PvP/WvW ranks, mastery level and achievement ranks and want to know if their time investments are future-proof.

 

[Randulf.7614]

Communication and a roadmap. Lotro put out an excellent one last week which has got me pretty excited. And that's the game I dropped as main MMO for GW2 6+ years ago

[Naxos.2503]

Actually, Something seems discordant to me in what I've read so far : In the case of NCsoft dictating the layoffs, it's very likely as many suggested that they Simply gave Anet a funding limits, and that they asked to remove employees to go below that limit. They probably didn't say "lay off 100 employees". What worries me then, is that people rightly pointed out some of the biggest and oldest names were parts of the voluntary layoffs. I think I understand that some employees, including those with higher pay checks Chose to leave, perhaps to Limit the number of layoffs (If you lay off mostly high expense employees, you can keep a larger number of small employees). What strikes me then is that NCsoft must have given ArenaNet a Really low limit, and the number of layoffs was initially going to be Much larger if they had retained the well known faces.

 

I got a feeling they took one for the team. I've also read that Mike had been extremely depressed over the situation, probably because he did not expect so many old timers choosing to leave rather than stay, if it meant working in a super small team, at the cost of hundred-S- of layoffs.

ArenaNet strikes me as a strong family ties companies, if that was the case, there is no way the CEO took the news well. If that's true, and the volunteers did leave to avoid a larger number of lay offs among the lower pays ... I have no word to express the admiration I got for them, even if I dont know them nearly as well as other people from the old Community

 

I kind of am uncertain of what the company can do when so much creative talent leaves, especially the earliest creators, they know the game better than anyone else, losing them robs us of their talent and experience, as well as a sense of continuity within the game, I have Nothing against whoever will be put in charge in their place, I only hope they shared their knowledge well to them, so that they can uphold their quality and maintain the soul they gave to the game. I repeat that word because I Believe it, that game has a soul, it's one of the rare few games in the market today in which you can see and interact with the love developpers pour into it.

[Anzriel.1398]

Personally I still believe in ANet. They may have to reorganize and change focus but that isn't necessarily a bad thing for the game itself. I kind of got the feeling they were running GW2 itself on a skeleton crew and perhaps now they'll work on making GW2 a success while just investing a bit in R&D. They still have plenty of talented devs at the studio and probably have a reasonable amount of content already planned/laid out. I do genuinely feel sorry for the devs, but I don't -completely- blame NCSoft. Based on what I've seen/heard the biggest issue with ANet was that they lacked a vision, and invested too much in things that didn't pan out financially. 300ish devs is still probably enough for GW2 to keep going, at the very least, at the pace it has been.

[Arden.7480]

> @"yefluke.3168" said:

> Any concern over this situation,

> and What ANet should do to bring the faith back?

 

I am absolutely sure that the remaining 300 developers will amaze us many times in the future.

 

As for certain lay-offs I don't think it should ring an alarm bell, in contrary, it is a light of hope that there will be new devs coming to the Teams that can contribute something even greater than the old ones.

 

GW2 is full of talented inviduals, it's time to bring something fresh. You need to shake things off, so something new can be created - for example when volcano erupts it at first leads to something cataclysmic, but when everything calms down, the grounds once burned out now have the most perfect ground for live to be born, some tropical islands were once the terrain of devastation, and now there is life everywhere.

 

 

People go, but new will come, as the circle of life works.

[ReaverKane.7598]

Well, to be honest, mixed feelings...

It's my long held opinion that since ~2016 and in other cases, since HoT, Arena Net has been in a downward trend in terms of quality and management.

PvP and balance have been terribly mismanaged and allowed to decay incredibly.

WvW has made a resurgence due to the legendary items and a year long promise of a fix for it's most egregious problem, one that hasn't been delivered even though it's been in development for over a year.

Except for living world (and even then) the team has been working at a incredibly slow pace, when, due to the game's age, they should be faster than ever, not only because the game needs the content and the improvements to keep players engaged, but because by now the team should be working efficiently.

But in my opinion, they have been doing all but working efficiently. 6 years since the game launched and they were still "finding their pace" with content. How that wasn't a red flag at NCSoft i'll never understand, so yes, sooner or later this was bound to happen. And while i'm sorry for everyone that's now jobless, and i do know how it hurts, Arena Net needed a shake up, so in that regard, again, while it's terrible for those affected negatively, i think it could have been a boon.

But then i started looking at the Reddit aggregate of the people being laid off, and i saw some of the best devs in there (Josh Foreman, for example, built some of the most iconic content in the game imo), and one of the people i find to be responsible for the decline of a significant portion of the game wasn't.

And while i don't know the ins and outs, don't work there, at a glance it doesn't seem that NCSoft "cut the fat" out of Arena Net, and left it with a leaner more efficient team, but just increased what has been happening since 2012, it's bleeding off further talent.

Honestly, i worry that the people left aren't up to par, but then again, i don't work there, i don't know its "innards" enough to do more than speculate based on very little information.

Only thing than i can do, is what i've been doing for the past year, play it very scarcely, and wait for something to change in either direction.

[Tamur.6503]

If we want fear rather than faith, we've got lots of RL options at the moment. But fear-inspired groups are not very happy places to be, so I'm going with faith in ArenaNet... less heartburn, more cookies.

[Aeon.4583]

I do belive in arena net, but after so much suffering from current state of Fractals, i can understand why those lay-offs happened.

[Einlanzer.1627]

I'm cautiously optimistic about it, actually.

 

The reason they were in this position to begin with is due to having a stagnant and inefficient delivery model that over-emphasized the gem store and living world zones and under-emphasized everything else. See the recent controversy with the warclaw mount that nobody wanted but they saw as another way to monetize overpriced skins. This behavior is burning people out and wrecking player interest in the game. The game needs 10,000 things over a new mount - new weapon types, new dungeons, shifting rewards, attribute overhauls, trait memory, new wvw map, etc etc etc. All of these things should be getting delivered on a fairly regularly basis but we go for **years** without updates to the overhwhelming majority of the game's systems, meanwhile, balance patches are too infrequent and too small in scale often coming with a lot of misguided changes.

 

I can only assume it's because there's too much bureaucracy behind a lot of these decisions. Layoffs suck, but 300 is still a lot of people - it can provide an opportunity to restructure in a way that, hopefully, will lead to a better delivery framework. It actually probably should have happened long before now.

[perilisk.1874]

> @"Naxos.2503" said:

> Actually, Something seems discordant to me in what I've read so far : In the case of NCsoft dictating the layoffs, it's very likely as many suggested that they Simply gave Anet a funding limits, and that they asked to remove employees to go below that limit. They probably didn't say "lay off 100 employees".

 

I don't know if that's entirely true. If they're taking back publishing as part of restructuring, then they're effectively telling Arenanet to eliminate all the jobs that would be considered "publishing". I would guess that means QA, localization, marketing, and maybe website and community roles. I'm guessing that counts for a decent percentage of the job lost, though most of the people being laid off from those roles are probably not people we would know.

 

[voltaicbore.8012]

From a strictly consumer perspective, it's not too difficult to choose to believe the schtick they gave us that GW2 will not be affected. Like others have mentioned, by all accounts these layoffs are a result of Anet being forced to pivot _away_ from non-GW2 projects, so that should line up with what we've been told.

 

From a community member perspective, Gaile's departure feels like the beginning of the end. I'm not saying there's going to be a rapid decline and shutdown - it could be many many years before that happens. What I'm saying is that I always knew in the back of my mind this wouldn't be around forever, and Gaile leaving just made that "this is going to end one day" feeling very tangible.

[Naxos.2503]

> @"perilisk.1874" said:

> > @"Naxos.2503" said:

> > Actually, Something seems discordant to me in what I've read so far : In the case of NCsoft dictating the layoffs, it's very likely as many suggested that they Simply gave Anet a funding limits, and that they asked to remove employees to go below that limit. They probably didn't say "lay off 100 employees".

>

> I don't know if that's entirely true. If they're taking back publishing as part of restructuring, then they're effectively telling Arenanet to eliminate all the jobs that would be considered "publishing". I would guess that means QA, localization, marketing, and maybe website and community roles. I'm guessing that counts for a decent percentage of the job lost, though most of the people being laid off from those roles are probably not people we would know.

>

 

The thing is, developers did have a choice to leave, if it was a targeted cut, I'd think the choice would have been given only to those of that sector. There were writers and designers who were let go, and others who volunteered, it seems to be really across the board. As you say though, Nothing is certain, though I think a lot of obscurity is wanted (The less the customer knows, the less it questions, and ideally, there is no need to question at all), but most of those devs had a connection with the game which bled onto the Community, as one could attest from older Community members actually knowing each and every part those developpers participated in. I have never seen that in a Community/developper relationship before, it shows how much of an impact love and care has on a product. What makes me uncertain about the future is, will those left be able, or even willing to put in that same commitment into the game, now that NCsoft has essentially tightened the noose. Only time will tell

[Obtena.7952]

I see no reason to flip out ... GW2 is the FOCUS now; the layoffs ensure it.

[Vayne.8563]

Faith is a funny word. I don't really have faith in anything, because it implies some sort of belief without reason. I believe that Anet will continue to provide me a game I can enjoy, because I've been playing this franchise for over a decade now and I've always enjoyed it. Sometimes content comes faster, sometimes slower, but it always comes and I end up liking a fair percentage of it. I mean I don't care much about PvP and I'm not a raider, but aside from that I like most stuff in the game and most stuff that comes out suits my play style just fine.

 

I don't need faith to know that I haven't really been disappointed yet. I have experience on my side. I also have experience from other MMOs that have had layoffs and that have reorganized, and they still had updates and I still played them. The financial reports aren't showing me a dying game. They're not even really showing me a struggling game.

 

Which doesn't mean there's no bloat in the company or other projects have all worked out. Many MMOs lay off people soon after release. Guild Wars 2 didn't. That it took 6.5 years after release for a major layoff is actually not so bad. SWToR and TSW had layoffs that came much sooner. In the case of TSW, which I enjoyed and is still going on, it's was 50% of the staff. In the case of SWToR it was 33% of the staff.

 

I haven't seen or heard anything that makes me think this game won't keep going for years to come. Will everything come out at the speed I want it to? I don't really care how fast things come out, because the way I play I always have stuff to do. So yeah I'm pretty confidence I have years of playing left in this game. Ask me again in two or three years, my answer may be different.