Feedback:User/BattleSage/Player-Developer Communication

The developer to player interface system is attrocious.

I love playing Guild Wars. I have played approximately 10,000 hours between 2 accounts(over 9,700 on one of them).

I've created new builds that have altered "meta" so dramatically the game was revised. I used them in-game, shared them with others, and as word spread, they'd catch on like wildfire.

I've had a number of legendary players in my guild and my alliance.

I've PUGged teams to take the Hall of Heroes, I've been a gvg mercenary in numerous battles.

I am definitely a part of the Guild Wars game, a contributor, and in a large way.

However, save for the times devs were in my alliance, I've never gotten to talk to them directly, except by e-mail.

I find it atrocious. The player-developer interface is based almost exclusively on visiting guildwars.com, and by trolling the various fansite forums.

That makes NO SENSE.

People who like trolling forums BETTER than playing the game, they are the ones to whom the dev team listens, they are the ones that are considered the "game community". A person who's never actually played Guild Wars can have more influence on the fate of the game than I can, merely by trolling enough fansites of it.

I've worked as a professional artist, I'm accomplished enough to be in the US Library of Congress, but I've never participated in a game art contest, or even tried to. Not because I don't have the passion or the inspiration or the skill, but because I've never found out about any of these contests until after they end and the winners are announced.

I've done amazing amounts of statistical analysis and computation on many things, and have dozens of spreadsheets I've made over the years to calculate various aspects of Guild Wars itself, and yet, I've never participated in any Xunlai prediction tournaments. Why? Again, not from a lack of skill or passion, but because I'm not entirely sure how you go about doing that, what website, where, or why I'd have to look for, and what weird registration process I'd have to go through. Again, I've never really learned about these except for when I discover the new trophies will be in GToB on my weekly ritual reading of "the nerf-o-rama page", formally known as http://www.guildwars.com/support/gameupdates/default.php.

Because of this, as much of my life as I've spent playing this game since back before release, and as much as I've contributed, I'm really not part of what is defined as the "Guild Wars" community.

I can think of dozens of things that could be done, that aren't, to rectify this. There's no "grand council" or anything in-game, although there obviously could be. Other than a guild's status message, there's no way to leave information for players who aren't currently online. There isn't even a mail system.

It'd seem to me that there should be. I know there's worries with things like that about spammers and such, so it could have a "writing parchment" component, a craftable item that costs a handful of gold and resources. It'd be worth 5 parchment, 3 jars of ink, 1 feather, and 2 glittering dust, or some such combination there of. Not expensive, but not something that can be spammed infinitely either.

While I do appreciate the amount of serverload you guys have avoided by letting these things "take care of themselves", with encouragement, I do question it. I mean, honestly, I've been flooding my suggestionbox here on the wiki, as you may have noticed.

This is the first time I've really ever been able to talk to devs with any assurance it'd be read, with the exceptions of the /report command(which is hardly a resource for illuminary thought), and the /bug command(which I'm not even sure still works, as the confirmation message for it was removed years ago). I've never really done anything on the wiki before, I don't particularly want to, not that I don't love helping other players, but because it boils down to a lot of idiots politicing over the fact that EVERYTHING is either a Firefly reference or a Shakespeare reference, or both, in their opinion. The level of contrived trivialities that entails makes it seem quite pointless.

Yet, the dev team can, with a singular comment on a talk page, instantly demolish months(and even years!) of mindless bickering.

However, once again, there's really no access to anyone otherwise.

I do know that Gaile was that in some sense, but I've never seen her personally, known when or where to look for her, or felt the need to try and spam her when my friend list is already full.

I don't know if having a special battle isle location dedicated to player-dev interaction, or widespread player interaction, would be useful at-large, or even regularly feasible, but it's an idea. Or maybe an interface panel on some key we haven't used yet. I don't know.

There has to be something, though. There's no reason some kid that played a trial key once for 6 hours has more input and access than a dedicated, loyal player with enough time logged that, if this were analogous to flying an airplane, would qualify for a professional class commercial license. It really shouldn't be based upon your web-browsing abilities. Last I checked, web 2.0 wasn't a stat available for my mesmer. I can't use expertise to lower the energy cost of forum spamming, or make it seem like an interesting concept. Yet, that's the actual skills you apparently need to have anything to do with the "Community".

Kinda lame, really.