Ok... these are just my own personal Rants and Raves. These are opinions, and have nothing to do with policy, or anything else, I just wanted a space where I could just vent. If my opinions spark discussion on the Discussion page here, that's cool... just please don't flame or vandalize.
| Ursan Blessing? or Curse?
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I HATE this skill with the passion of a white hot sun going super nova. It is so overpowered, and in my opinion has totally ruined ALL of the elite areas of Guild Wars. It is also ruining some very cool, very elite players. I was a HUGE fan of the Domain of Anguish. I spent literally hundreds of hours with my my guild/alliance there, and I met some really cool, really great players of this game. Then Anet nerfed it in July, made Mallyx virtually impossible to beat with any of the normal builds or skills that had previously worked. Why they did this, I'm not really sure, as it was a popular place for elite type players, and the rewards were still economically viable (prior the whole duping thing which deserves it's own separate rant at a later date) and there was still 2 months to the launch of GW:EN. Ok, so your average Joe Ritualist wasn't very popular there, so what??? You can point to ALL sorts of places in this game that are VERY profession specific (The Deep, Urgoz's Warren just to name two), any player that deserves to play in an Elite area should be able to make it work. We even had an Assassin tank build that was showing real promise. The nerf opened up the flood gate to every Joe Schmoe who wanted to be LEET without the work or time involved. Well... this was the beginning of the end of DOA as an Elite area, and by the time GW:EN was released it was a virtual ghost town. Enter GW:EN and Ursan Blessing.... sigh.... now you can find people in DOA again, but they all just want Ursanway groups..... ugh... where is the challenge in 4 or 5 people with bear form going in for mass slaughter and being done? How is this Elite play? Plain and simple, it's not, it takes no brains, no skill, and no strategy. One of the finest players of Guild Wars I know is now so crippled by this skill that he won't even consider going anywhere in the game without it.... it's sooooo sad. Here is a nerf that can't happen soon enough for me... KILL URSAN BLESSING! Oh... I forgot.. it's a PVE only skill, and Anet doesn't really care about PVE only players... all the skill nerfs are geared at PVP... man I feel like a second class citizen sometimes....... -- Wyn 04:29, 12 December 2007 (UTC)
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| PvE vs. PvP
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| I'm sooooo tired of the PvE vs. PvP attitudes. The vandalism by a disgruntled PvP player today because of the changes to the GvG mechanics was just about enough to make me leave here. There is so much to this game, and while everyone thinks what they do is 'the best' it is not ALL. I will openly admit to not liking PvP play at all. Not just in GW, but in ANY game. I don't get any enjoyment pitting myself against people who 'live for the kill'. It says absolutely nothing about my playing ability, I consider myself a decent player, not 'the best', but certainly not 'the worst' either. I believe that ArenaNet has done a decent job of providing an all around game, that can satisfy a hard core PvE player like me, (10,000+ play hours has to say something), as well as provide a challenging if not always satisfying PvP game for those out there who want to play that way. I am just really frustrated by the attitudes of some people that insist that the game can't be both, or that their needs/wants/concerns are by far more important that those of others. As for the previously mentioned vandalism of this wiki, I think it says LOADS about the attitude of the person who did it that when he was asked to stop, his response was... I don't give a shit. This kind of disrespect for the community and for fellow players, since it's the players who have created, maintained, and run this wiki, is exactly why I don't enjoy PvP. The trash talk, the disrespect, the 'I'm better than you' attitude that prevails in PvP is just a total turn off for me. I play GW to have fun, and that doesn't include dealing with morons who think they are the be all and end all of gaming. -- Wyn 22:13, 17 August 2008 (UTC)
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| Refocus on Purpose
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| I would very much like to see a refocus on purpose within this community. The purpose of this wiki is to document the game Guild Wars. And while the community is made up of people who play and love this game (or hate it as the case may be), this isn't a social club. The community's focus should be on providing the most complete and accurate documentation of the game. I see far too many community members flitting around from one talk page to another, spending hundreds of hours creating these magnificent userpages, but not providing a single contribution towards the documentation of the game, or even taking the time to participate in the processes that determine how this wiki is run and maintained. They type thousands of characters worth of complaints to ArenaNet on what a bad job they think they are doing because their favorite skill got nerfed, or because their particular suggestion has not been implemented (well, whose has?), without typing a single character in mainspace to even correct a typo. They write walls of text about what a bad job the community selected administrators of this site are doing, yet they do nothing to change the policies those administrators are guided by, or step up to the plate to become one of those administrators themselves. There are a number of projects that have been proposed, discussed and adopted as being things that would benefit this wiki and further it in its purpose. They cover any number of areas, from technical expertise, to filling in identified holes in the documentation. Most of them are being worked on by less than 6 people each. This to me is sad. I got involved with this wiki because I love this game. I have made some wonderful friends in the time I have been here, and have earned the community's trust to do what is best for the wiki, proven by the fact I was recently granted the role of sysop. But what has to stay the most important is fulfilling the purpose of this wiki. I feel I'm doing my part... are you? -- Wyn 23:27, 1 September 2008 (UTC)
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| Personal space
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| I'm beginning to feel a distinct lack of personal space. I go to a fair amount of effort to keep my userpage interesting, and aesthetically pleasing, and I am pleased people seem to like what I do. I don't mind if people want to use my templates, that's what I created them for. I don't mind if they customize them, or want me to help them customize them. I am, however, starting to mind that they are taking my graphics (while I realize that everything here is GFDL, can't we be a little original?) and encroaching on my playtime while I'm in game. If you want my help on the wiki, ask on the wiki. If you want my help in game, ask in game. Is that so tough?
While the layout for the pages I've done for other people may be very similar, I try to make them personal with color and by doing some sort of custom graphic/logo, and I would like that same thing for my page. Currently my page is decorated for Halloween, my favorite holiday of the year, and already, my Halloween logo is being used on other pages. So much for being uniquely mine and part of my personal space. -- Wyn 13:16, 4 October 2008 (UTC)
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| Balance
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| So much of the wiki drama we've had lately has been about this illusive thing called balance. I don't get it. I've played this game for 28 months, and I don't have any problems. I guess it must be a pvp problem, and since I don't play pvp it isn't an issue in my game time. I see the same group of people crying that the balance sucks, and that the are leaving guild wars forever because of it (yet they continue to plague the wiki with their presence), but I see thousands of others who simply adjust how they play based on how skills are changed, and go forward without a large public outcry of OMG THIS SUCKS! I feel bad for those who waste so much of their playtime being upset over something they really have no control over.
I feel worse for those of us who have to continually read their rants, and worst of all for those at ArenaNet who are the targets of their attacks. My guess is that the ArenaNet staff work very hard at their jobs, and take pride in providing hundreds of thousands of players worldwide with a top quality game to play. To have some disgruntled players who believe they know better tell them over and over they suck, and are lazy and have the IQ of a chair, and should just resign so some real programmers could come in and do it correctly, has to be just the most gut wrenching thing. I know if it happened to me, I would never return to this wiki. -- Wyn 23:52, 6 November 2008 (UTC)
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| Thanksgiving
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| First let me say, this is not a rant, I just wanted to post some thoughts today as those of us in the US celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. I've had friends who live in countries that don't celebrate Thanksgiving ask me what it's all about, and the best answer I've come up with is that it is a day set aside to celebrate survival, to recognize that we have survived and give thanks to that which has made it possible. A common tradition on Thanksgiving is to make a list of the things/people you are thankful for, and while it may sound corny, traditions can be good, so here goes, my list is short.
On this Thanksgiving day, I am thankful for:
- Having a roof over my head and a warm place to sleep as the nights get colder.
- Having food to eat, when I know millions go hungry every day.
- Having friends that I can count on to be there when things are good AND when things are bad.
For those of you here and in Guild Wars that I consider friends, know that I am thankful for having you as part of my life.
-- Wyn 21:55, 27 November 2008 (UTC)
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| Questions to the GWW community
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It's been awhile since I ranted. This isn't a traditional rants, just a few questions I think some members of this community should think more about.
- Why is it when Arena Net chooses not to change something non vital to the game, so many people cry... "THEY DON'T CARE!"?
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I can tell you they DO care. The Guild Wars Live Team is dedicated to this game, and this community. They don't have unlimited resources though, so they change the things that will have the most positive impact on the widest portions of the community, and keep the little stuff as sticky notes to do IF they ever have time.
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- Why is it everyone needs to be in everyone else's business ALL THE TIME?
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If a situation doesn't involve you STAY THE FUCK OUT OF IT! I understand this is a public wiki, and everyone is able to read everything everyone posts, but if a situation is already heated, and it doesn't pertain directly to you, why make it worse? How does that benefit the community? All it does is polarize things and make it "Us vs. Them".
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- What ever happened to Assume good faith?
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Don't be so quick to judge. Don't discount the potential of someone's character or contributions based on single mistakes. There is little on the wiki that is not easily repairable, except someone's feelings.
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- When did this become a community start believing that the words of the policies were greater than the spirit of them?
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When I started here, members of the community reached out to help me understand the intentions behind our policies and told me that it was more important to think of them than the literal words. That idea seems to have changed at some point, and it makes me sad.
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| Misconceptions
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| There are a lot of misconceptions about the Feedback namespace floating around that I think need some clarification. The reason the namespace was created was to implement submission licensing that is different than the GFDL licensing of the rest of GWW. The changes mean that ArenaNet can read, comment on, change, and even implement our ideas into their game without fear of a law suit being handed to them. Ok, so it may seem like a lame reason because... come on... who is honestly going to do that? Seriously? Lots of people. The court systems are overflowing with frivolous claims by people who feel things are owed to them. It costs corporations millions of dollars a year in legal fees retaining teams of lawyers to protect them from these sorts of claims.
That is what has happened here. The community made it clear to ArenaNet that they were sincere in their wish to provide input and suggestions for improvements and changes that would make Guild Wars more fun for them, and more appealing to the player base in general. ArenaNet took those wishes to their lawyers and said "How can we make this possible, safely?" and 8 months later the lawyers came back and said... "Change the licensing terms that users submit their suggestions under to...". The question then became "How do we do that?"
Since every single time a user clicks Save page to post something here, they are agreeing to the existing submission licensing terms, we couldn't just change those terms after more than 2 years without getting every single person who has ever clicked Save page to agree to the change. I think that is something everyone can agree would be impossible. No one wanted to throw away everything that has been built here and start over, which would have been another way to change the licensing terms. In the end it was decided to create this new namespace.
So why can't we just move all the old suggestions to the new namespace? It goes back to having to get every single person that made any kind of edit to that suggestion to agree to the new submission terms. That is why only ideas that have only been edited by a single user can be copied directly over to the Feedback space. Once it's there though, collaborate to your hearts content, through discussion, and debate on the talk pages of each suggestion. Every day I see active discussions going on on userspace hosted suggestion pages. As people add their suggestions to the feedback namespace those discussions and collaborations will shift. The really cool thing is that now, ArenaNet staff will be legally able to join these discussions.
Some people are saying the new rules about posting on Developer's talk pages will cut off communication from the community. No, No, No, NO! This entire namespace is to make the communication between the development and QA teams and the community better. By directing topics to the appropriate place in the namespace, the developers will have a centralized place to look for the input they want/need at a given time, rather than have random topics come up on their talk pages and eventually get archived. Have any of you tried finding stuff in Linsey's archives from the past year since she became the lead of the Live Team? Have fun if you do. With the new system, everyone will be able to look through the suggestions by category, and sort them by subcategories. Take skills... The current Skill feedback space is disorganized and hard to maintain. With the new system, you will be able to go to skill suggestions by profession, and then by attribute, so if the dev team is looking at Elementalist, and want to see what skills the community would like to see changed, they can see all the Elementalist skill suggestions sorted by attribute. My guess is the suggestions that have the most community based discussion might get the most attention from the developer teams, so I encourage everyone who is interested to participate in the discussions about the different skills. By keeping these things off the developer pages, it will promote in depth discussion (each and every suggestion page will have a dedicated talk page) without exploding the developer's personal talk pages into unusability (like how Linsey's currently is), and will free up the staff's wiki time (which is ALL their own) to look through the various suggestions rather than read the walls of text that have accumulated on their own pages. Questions about game lore, design process, etc. will still be welcomed on developer pages.
Other people say that requiring people to register a user account will limit participation by unregistered users. Well, if you have an idea that you think is important enough that you want ArenaNet to see and consider seriously, you will register. If you wanted to post ANYTHING at all on any of the plethora of fansites you would be required to register first. Here it's only if you wish to submit a suggestion. Non registered users will still be openly able to participate in all suggestion discussions, will still be able to submit bug reports, can still ask the staff questions, can still provide immediate feedback for every update, they just can't submit a suggestion. Why? In the old suggestion space, anyone and everyone could submit any suggestion they wanted. Anyone could edit those suggestions (most of the time not even bothering with any sort of discussion regarding the changes they wanted to make), and chaos reigned. People would post a suggestion and abandon it. By making you register to submit a suggestion, the hope is that you will take more ownership of that suggestion. You will be the only one who can actually edit the suggestion itself, so hopefully discussion will happen that the owner will participate in and we will see ideas evolve based on input from the community, including the development teams.
There has been talk about bias in how the namespace was built. That a small group of people made all the decisions. Ok, I will give these statements some validity. There were primarily 4 people who in the end made 90% of the decisions on how this should run. These decisions however, were based on months of discussions that were participated in by many, and comments, ideas, and input of all kinds was asked for many times in many places from the entire community. Many archives of walls of text have been created during this entire process. People coming in at the 11th hour and taking the discussion back to stuff that had been gone over ad nauseum is more unproductive than productive, so rather than reopening a discussion, they were pointed to the past discussions and told, we've talked about this already. This was not an effort to discourage participation, if you have a pov that hasn't been covered in past discussions, or circumstances have changed significantly enough to revisit a topic, by all means, it should be presented. But quite honestly, the discussions leading up to the decisions have been pretty thorough, and in my mind, the decisions have taken most, if not all, of the arguments into consideration. Let's also face reality here. Most of the decisions on this wiki are actually made by small groups of people, the people who have the most desire to see something happen, and are willing to put in the time to make it so. The beauty of the wiki is that once a decision is made, it can be revisited in the future, and if enough convincing arguments are presented, it can be changed later.
I have hopes that in the weeks and months to come, the effort that has gone into creating this space will pay off in a renewed sense of connection between the Guild Wars community and ArenaNet. Only time will tell.
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| It's Finished
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| Well, after several weeks of building a a few more of waiting for Anet, the Feedback namespace is finally open. It's rewarding to watch the new user feedback pages being created, seemingly with little problems on the part of the users creating them, and suggestions are appearing in their respective places on Feedback:Game suggestions. I hope it continues to go well.
All of the staff talk pages have been moved over so they can safely comment on anything posted directly to them, though users abusing the developer pages with their suggestions might find themselves looking at the business end of a banhammer eventually.
I have high hopes for this project. It still remains to be seen how much developer participation we will get, but I at least will sleep well tonight, knowing that we did a good job by taking the time we did to set it up. To Satanael and Erasculio, I've already expressed my thanks and compliments for a job well done, and to the rest of you who have contributed ideas, and efforts, you have my appreciation.
There are areas of the space that promote collaborative development of an idea to keep it at the "top" of the list, while other areas simply are sortable by other variables.
I hope the community and the development teams find a way to make this work the way it's intended.
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| A response to Armond
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| A one day block for a first time block is totally appropriate. Blocks lengthen with repeat offenses. But even so, I don't see that there WAS any offense to be blocked for in the first place... a slightly heated discussion on a talk page that was primarily between two users happen all the time on GWW. The fact that it had ended long before the block was placed to supposedly end a disruption gives it a bit of a fishy smell. But I sat it out, did not proxy a sock puppet or in any other way try to circumvent my ban. With the exception of a heated statement on Pling's RfR, I have not been involved in any even slightly controversial topics until now, and I am in no way disrupting, or abusing my status as a sysop by participating in the policy page discussion. Why you consider me being treated with some "special" status is beyond me. I have asked the two bureacrats who remained after DE's resignation to come to some sort of resolution of my arb com repeatedly in the weeks since it has been opened to no avail. I believe that Tanetris has been ill, and not feeling up to dealing with it. That an IP who has a grand total of 12 contributions here, mostly of a trollish nature, feels I have been a continuous troll, and an unproductive sysop who rarely uses the tools granted me is something of a farce... even YOU have to recognize the ridiculousness of that.
The fact that this entire witch hunt has taken any enjoyment out of not only participating here but also playing Guild Wars really sucks. The fact that I can't participate in any meaningful discussions here because inevitably someone drags it into the topic also sucks. That my 39,455 contributions to GWW are seen as irrelevant says more about the state of this community than anything else I can think of. Believe me, at this point if I could remove them all I would, unfortunately that's just not possible. That number does not include the number of pages I have deleted or those I have protected with my sysop tools. Nothing I have done has been an abuse of those tools, I don't think any of the blocks I have placed were outrageously inappropriate. I believe the non abuse of sysop tools was Auron's complete and successful defense argument in his last RfR, so why should I be treated any differently? If anyone thinks that in the weeks that have passed since this all started that my anger has abated in any way, they should think again.
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