One thing im affraid of when starting a new game is communication between company and playerbase. I've never really played GW 1 so im reaching out here.

How is the atmostphere in the forums, does the developers talk to the players before applying major changes to the game? Sometimes it feels like testserver are there as just advertisement, hype and free labor. I'm really elevated by what i've seen so far from videos, blogs etc but the dissapointment i've felt from ignorent gamingcompanies in the past two decades makes me think. SWG is one example of failing communiction. After the major gamechange they lost almost there whole playerbase in matter of weeks and kept being stubborn cause they had there vision that few people shared instead of working together with their customers to make the best of it.

Really wish this game suceeds since me and millions of players out there is waiting for a savior from MMO hell. I hope that they will use us even now when in development and add things such as polls, surveys, open discussions about things they might not be sure about yet. It's such a simple thing to ask and we are all here to help.

Have they talked anything about how they will handle updates, suggestions and such?

Customer service is mostly handled by NCsoft and many people seem to complain about it. On the flip side, Anet's community managers and devs are seen as very friendly people who actual spend time playing with people in game and who really care about the community. They also post on both guru's:

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/

http://www.guildwars2guru.com/forum/

And since a short while GW1 has a support forum which is run by Anet itself:

https://forum.guildwars.com/forum

I think that ArenaNets trackrecord of how to handle its fans from GW1 is nearly flawless. If it can help you, think of their buisness model, its totally dependnt on having a healthy relation ship with the fanbase, and they have mastered that pretty well with GW1.

Last time i forget my charcater name on GW so i could not log in i emailed the CS then in less than 24H i got my charcter name and i started playing.

I went through NCSoft each time I had any problem and I never had to wait days for a response heck sometimes I got one within hours.

Originally posted by Professorn

dissapointment i've felt from ignorent gamingcompanies

No.  Just no.

Anyway, never had a problem with any of NCSoft's games that I have played that required customer support, so...I don't know.

The games run smoothly, the billing runs smoothly--that's CS.

Ranting about game design--that's forum.

E-mail support sometimes was hours sometimes was a day or two.

Not bad at all, considering.

Long story short, Anet catches up for the rotten apple NCSoft is.

I had an easier time geting access to my old GW1 account with ncsoft than I did with Blizzard and getting my old WoW account. 

No problems.

Funny thing, during the Guild Wars beta weekends before launch, I posted a bug report about how I could get inside a map in an area. 20 minutes later the game wanted to restart (the game patches on the fly in case you haven't played it) and the bug was fixed.

Understandably they didn't patch that fast after the release, but that is fast even for a beta weekend event.

I haven't seen bugs last for more than 2 days after being found before fix.

They sent me dead kittens by mail V_V

Nah, clean rep sheet here but I only played GW1 for a short while.

I've only had one support issue with NCsoft and it was addressed quickly and professionally.  I have nothing bad to say about them.

Never had an issue in GW to contact support. In some other NCSoft games I've had to use support and they have always responded within 24 hours. I've never had a problem with them.

I'd say my worst experience with a game company has been EA actually.

It was slower than most other game companies the couple of times I used them.

Anet doesn't have customer support, their stuff goes through NCSoft. I'd say I have a 90% positive experience with their support.

I had a credit card issue at one point where they gave me a bit of a run-around before they'd accept my credit card info. Some kind of fraud alert or some crap. Everything was sorted out, they apologized, but still wouldn't enable my account to purchase anything (I could still play all my games just fine throughout this process), until I canceled my subs and sent screenshots of it, and why, to one of the supervisors. My account was fixed by that night.

Aside from that one very poorly handled issue many years ago, I've always had very quick and professional responses to my support inquiries.

Only positvie exp, i had a dissconect problem in gw years back was working on it with one of their support ppl for a week always got responses within a day.

I wonder, their supprot is sperated from NC-soft right? Because they suck i don't have one positive thing to say about NCfail (my exp from aion)

I just hope they will deal with botter/spammer/gold sellers from day one, and not wait months like in Aion or years like in L2. They have quiet a good system now in Aion i think, its a long time i haven't played so i'm not sure, but it seam really good, maybe the best on the market?

I know this isn't exactly what you're asking, but someone else touched on this briefly earlier.  I think it deserves more mentioning that GW1's servers are NEVER down.  If they need to patch, they have you log out of the game and back in.  The kind of weekly several hour long maintenance that occurs with other games just doesn't happen with GW1.  They've had like one instance of schedule downtime in GW1's entire history and it was when they physically moved the servers to a new location.

As far as the customer support goes, I haven't had a problem.  I decided to try Factions again last year after having bought it in 2006.  I was on a new computer, had no discs, no key, no anything.  There's also a security question now asking you to name a character on the account, I didn't know that either.  I downloaded the client, reset the password, emailed customer support and within a day they got me a character name and I was playing again, no problem.

When I did go to buy the trilogy through their online store, I did encounter the problem gaeanprayer had, which was my account was flagged for whatever reason.  Then I ran into a little more of a snag because they only unflagged the account for 24 hours and I didn't purchase right away so when I went to buy it I still couldn't.  I emailed them again and didn't get a response the next day, so I just went ahead and bought it through Amazon.  Customer support got back to me the day after I bought it so had I just waited I'm sure I would have gotten it faster than I ended up getting it.

ArenaNet was pretty bad at the beginning when it comes to communication since they seems to favor PvP players over PvE players when it comes to game play. For a long time, PvE players have to sock the changes on skills, AIs, drops, etc. and they never even bother to consider what the community were asking them.

Before the PvP-only skills, skill balances often breaks PvE experience. While the skills in a 8v8 GvG Level20-vs-Level20 seems to be balance, they are not in a 8v8 PvE Level23andUp-vs-Level20 environment. A skill that seems to be balance in PvP is overly-OP in the hands of a Level30 Mob Boss. And a skill that seems to be balance in PvP is overly-underpowered in the hands of the players against a Level30 Mob Boss.

For a long time, this is the major frustration of many about ArenaNet. Either they are ignoring us or our message fails to reach them.

Also, for a long time, many have been frustrated about how the skills were handled. The person responsible was also arrogant when it comes to explaining the changes and the reasons behind it. Imagine telling the mojority of their player base that the $100, 000 competition is more important than actually separating the functions of skills in a PvE to PvP environment.

I have quit GW when they had that and it seems that others did too because soon after that, they introduced the the separation of PvE and PvP functions of skills. Only then I started playing again.

Another frustration in their decision was the changes on the Mob AI. While the goal was to make a smart Mob by having them scatter when hit by an AoE, the problem is that the mob groups are not widely spread out so this scattering mob will often cause an accidental pull of other mob group, often causing a party wipe. On top of this, they also changed the Henchman/Hero AI to have them run away from AoE, also often times running into other mob groups and accidentally pulling them and wiping the party.

And the drops, omg, this is one of the worst. To combat farming, which only hurts the honest players, they make it so that the drops closer to the zone entrance is crappier than those far from it. In a typical zone with 2 entances, this "far area" is very small and often with less amount of mobs. In Factions Campaign, this "far area" maybe only consists of one mob group in many zones.

The biggest issue for me is the skills and these other stuff are adaptable. The skills is a big thing because you mold your play style and strategy around it and, often times, a minor change can easily flush your time and effort down the drain.

Well, but that's history. It seems right now ArenaNet is making a lot of good decisions and the biggest thing I approved was the introduction of the Live Team for GW1.

I still play GW1 just so I can see what the Winds of Change offers. After defeating the Lich, Shiro, Abbadon, the Destroyer, and reaching Level 30 in hall of monuments...there's really nothing more for me to do in Tyria.

Originally posted by jvxmtg

ArenaNet was pretty bad at the beginning when it comes to communication since they seems to favor PvP players over PvE players when it comes to game play. For a long time, PvE players have to sock the changes on skills, AIs, drops, etc. and they never even bother to consider what the community were asking them.

Before the PvP-only skills, skill balances often breaks PvE experience. While the skills in a 8v8 GvG Level20-vs-Level20 seems to be balance, they are not in a 8v8 PvE Level23andUp-vs-Level20 environment. A skill that seems to be balance in PvP is overly-OP in the hands of a Level30 Mob Boss. And a skill that seems to be balance in PvP is overly-underpowered in the hands of the players against a Level30 Mob Boss.

For a long time, this is the major frustration of many about ArenaNet. Either they are ignoring us or our message fails to reach them.

Also, for a long time, many have been frustrated about how the skills were handled. The person responsible was also arrogant when it comes to explaining the changes and the reasons behind it. Imagine telling the mojority of their player base that the $100, 000 competition is more important than actually separating the functions of skills in a PvE to PvP environment.

I have quit GW when they had that and it seems that others did too because soon after that, they introduced the the separation of PvE and PvP functions of skills. Only then I started playing again.

Another frustration in their decision was the changes on the Mob AI. While the goal was to make a smart Mob by having them scatter when hit by an AoE, the problem is that the mob groups are not widely spread out so this scattering mob will often cause an accidental pull of other mob group, often causing a party wipe. On top of this, they also changed the Henchman/Hero AI to have them run away from AoE, also often times running into other mob groups and accidentally pulling them and wiping the party.

And the drops, omg, this is one of the worst. To combat farming, which only hurts the honest players, they make it so that the drops closer to the zone entrance is crappier than those far from it. In a typical zone with 2 entances, this "far area" is very small and often with less amount of mobs. In Factions Campaign, this "far area" maybe only consists of one mob group in many zones.

The biggest issue for me is the skills and these other stuff are adaptable. The skills is a big thing because you mold your play style and strategy around it and, often times, a minor change can easily flush your time and effort down the drain.

Well, but that's history. It seems right now ArenaNet is making a lot of good decisions and the biggest thing I approved was the introduction of the Live Team for GW1.

I still play GW1 just so I can see what the Winds of Change offers. After defeating the Lich, Shiro, Abbadon, the Destroyer, and reaching Level 30 in hall of monuments...there's really nothing more for me to do in Tyria.

1. Balancing the skills primarily for PvP was a good choice. Whatever it did in PvE, it would've been ten times worse the other way around. Compared to what imbalanced skills do in PvP, you can call those things minor inconveniences. Imbalances in PvP are absolutely devastating. I'm glad they balanced the skills with PvP in mind although the separation made their job a lot easier.

Izzy is responsible for the most balanced PvP to date and I don't think he deserves such mud throwing. Seeing how other MMOs struggle with this tells me that it cannot be easy. He did a great job with GW1 and I hope he continues to do so in GW2.

2. I had no issues with the AI. I was glad that AI avoided AOE effects. That made it slightly more advanced than the dumb AI found in other games.

3, And, the anti-farming moves did exactly what they were meant to do: discourage farming.