http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/ it doesnt look that great for a game who should be the ¨messiah¨ of the MMO world. People here on MMORPG forums, need to undestand that not everyone is in love of the game after what they saw in the beta.
Wow, so it's being beat by Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Halo 4, Borderlands 2 and Assassin's Creed 3?
You do realize that MMORPG gaming isn't a majority of the gaming market right? You also realize that those three games (GR:FS, H4, AC3) are (behind Call of Duty) the three most popular franchises on console right? You also should know that Borderlands 2 was a huge success, and is (according to IGN) one of the most anticipated console games of the year as well. You also ignore the fact that the chart you have is showing ALL pre-orders for ALL consoles. GW2 is definitely the most pre-ordered PC game by a long shot (The next PC game in line is WoW:MoP, which is 15 places behind GW2).
So let's get this right: You're saying that GW2's sales doesn't look great, yet it's the 5th most preordered game on any console in America alone.
Still Arenanet knows alot about merchandise and marketing, they lived alongside WoW for many many years and did quite fantastic, witch alot of people forget.
Also if people prepurchase they want it bad, and if they get disapointed when invited into the beta this forum would have been filled with rage posts and bad 1st impressions, witch i havent seen minus the posts about the engine not optimized and servers to crowded (stress testing).
Anet might shock the world at release in 2 ways:
Best mmo of the decade or trashcan fodder like Aion / Warhammer / SWTOR.
Originally posted by lasttime Originally posted by kanezfanOriginally posted by lasttimeOriginally posted by kanezfanPeople who pre-ordered SWTOR were pumped for that game as well but there was a ton of disappointment posts during the beta for that.Everything that Anet promised is in the game right now and it works as advertised. Basically Anet is competent and people are really happy with the game. I've ever read posts here from former haters who tried the game and changed their tune.
True but that game didn't require you to pay for the game in its entirety. Also you didn't need to pay at all to be in the beta as I tried during the one weekend anyone could try it.Yes but the reaction was terrible. The reaction for GW2 hasn't been terrible. Try harder.Because people who were going to dislike SWTOR were able to try it. To try GW2 I would have to prepurchase it. That requires me to be pretty sure I like it before even playing it.
no you can wait until there's an open beta or a free trial. a beta isn't a demo anyways, it's there for the devs to test out the game.
Originally posted by kanezfanPeople who pre-ordered SWTOR were pumped for that game as well but there was a ton of disappointment posts during the beta for that.Everything that Anet promised is in the game right now and it works as advertised. Basically Anet is competent and people are really happy with the game. I've ever read posts here from former haters who tried the game and changed their tune.
True but that game didn't require you to pay for the game in its entirety. Also you didn't need to pay at all to be in the beta as I tried during the one weekend anyone could try it.
Yes but the reaction was terrible. The reaction for GW2 hasn't been terrible. Try harder.
Because people who were going to dislike SWTOR were able to try it. To try GW2 I would have to prepurchase it. That requires me to be pretty sure I like it before even playing it.
no you can wait until there's an open beta or a free trial. a beta isn't a demo anyways, it's there for the devs to test out the game.
http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/ it doesnt look that great for a game who should be the ¨messiah¨ of the MMO world. People here on MMORPG forums, need to undestand that not everyone is in love of the game after what they saw in the beta.
I'm not to sure where people who dislike GW2 keep getting the idea that it is the messiah of games. Do you have any links or referrals to this being that? It seems the game makes some people mad or evil and not even close to something from the bible. If you don't like the game don't play. If you see a topic about it that is positive why hate on it?
For me the beta went as expected or better. I have been in quite a few and that was one of the better.
It's called the Strawman argument. You put words in the mouth of your opponents, usually re-interpreting what they said in the weakest/most flawed method, then you attack that instead of the real argument.
I, for one of many, really enjoyed the beta weekend event. Everyone in my GW1 guild loved the beta weekend event. We are all more stoked today than a few years ago when we were twiddling our thumbs and doing pretty much nothing as a group as we couldn't all find an MMO we all liked... Or even the majority of us liked... But we don't consider it the 'Jesus MMO.' Nobody has ever said it's the messiah of the industry. Only that we had a lot of fun playing together in an MMO with some potential for a change. A change that was a LONG TIME coming.
http://www.vgchartz.com/preorders/ it doesnt look that great for a game who should be the ¨messiah¨ of the MMO world. People here on MMORPG forums, need to undestand that not everyone is in love of the game after what they saw in the beta.
Messiah? Haven't we outgrown this type of language already? Besides, it's right behind Borderlands 2. As far as I'm concerned it's in good company.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy. ______________________________ "This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
OP does have a point, in saying that 99% of the feedback is positive so far.
Give it an open betaweekend (without paying full price 1st) and you'll see quite an increase in negative feedback/reviews for sure.
Exactly. Another thing that is such an important part of this game is the fact that as much as people in bwe seemed to be enjoying the game no beta will allow anyone to know whether the game is going to their cup of tea a couple months of playing. So its a bit premature to call the game amazing when one main part of an mmo is the longevity of it which can't be tested. Anyway I don't want to beat a dead horse so thanks for everyone who replied. It gave me some insight.
1) There are in fact lots of people who got into the BWEs without paying anything.
2) If the game was bad, it would have crashed and burned on the spot on the first BWE.
There may be blind fans, but there are a lot of fans who post tons of feedback to make a good game even better. The forums were flooded with threads and posts each time something went wrong (stuck at 95% anyone), but also when something was good or needed improvement.
Bottom line is: Possibly GW2 is actually a pretty decent game, believe it or not.
So you are saying that SWTOR wasn't bad? I thought "SWTOR and alike are bad" is the major reason for why GW2 was made so different from the norm.
During the SWTOR non-NDA beta and the days before the servers opened, the grand majority of posts were positive. Concerns such as 2-faction PvP, population imbalances and lack of open world PvP were met with comments such as "SWTOR is not a PvP game". Concerns about the lifeless world were met with comments like "they have all time in the world to implement such fluff; let them focus on core systems first".
If pre-purchasing fans were allowed to garantuee their spot into limited beta like GW2 is doing, the overall average impression would have been skewed more towards the positive side.
For the guy quoting the vgchartz number. Notice one thing, those are pre-ORDER numbers, as in people paid $5 in a gamestop or online somewhere to pre-order. Those are not pre-PURCHASE numbers, as in the people that paid full price already and played in the BWE and stress test. I have no idea what the pre-purchase number is, but I sure saw a ton of people running around in GW2.
OP does have a point, in saying that 99% of the feedback is positive so far.
Give it an open betaweekend (without paying full price 1st) and you'll see quite an increase in negative feedback/reviews for sure.
Exactly. Another thing that is such an important part of this game is the fact that as much as people in bwe seemed to be enjoying the game no beta will allow anyone to know whether the game is going to their cup of tea a couple months of playing. So its a bit premature to call the game amazing when one main part of an mmo is the longevity of it which can't be tested. Anyway I don't to beat a dead horse so thanks for everyone who replied. It gave me some insight.
I used to agree with the idea that it takes a couple of months to see if a game is your cup of tea.
Until I bought and paid for 3 games in a row that turned out to be very unejoyable for me and I could honestly tell withing the first few weeks that I was going to struggle to like it. Most people that quit MMOs do so before they get to the level cap. They just slip away in the night.
Is the sample sefl-selected? Yes but thin on this: If and when they do have an open beta, do you think those ravening hordes will takre the time to give proper feedback? Will they log how many seconds it takes to load into various zones? No. They will be here, flaming away into the night desparate to save the eunenlightened from gaming doom. When Anet introduced the pre-purchase they were getting committed stakeholders who now have an active interest in making this game the best it can be, not beta locusts looking for the fastest way to the level cap. Sort of like an old fashioned real world beta.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy. ______________________________ "This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
OP does have a point, in saying that 99% of the feedback is positive so far.
Give it an open betaweekend (without paying full price 1st) and you'll see quite an increase in negative feedback/reviews for sure.
Exactly. Another thing that is such an important part of this game is the fact that as much as people in bwe seemed to be enjoying the game no beta will allow anyone to know whether the game is going to their cup of tea a couple months of playing. So its a bit premature to call the game amazing when one main part of an mmo is the longevity of it which can't be tested. Anyway I don't to beat a dead horse so thanks for everyone who replied. It gave me some insight.
I used to agree with the idea that it takes a couple of months to see if a game is your cup of tea.
Until i bought and paid for 3 games in a row that turned out to be very unejoyable for me and i could honestly tell withing the first few weeks that i was going to struggle to like it. Most people that quit MMOs do so before they get to the level cap. They just slip away in the night.
Is the sample sefl-selected? Yes but thin on this: If and when they do have an open beta, do you think those ravening hordes will takre the time to give proper feedback? Will they log how many seconds it takes to load into various zones? No. They will be here, flaming away into the night desparate to save the eunenlightened from gaming doom. When Anet introduced the pre-purchase they were getting committed stakeholders who now have an active interest in making this game the best it can be, not beta locusts looking for the fastest way to the level cap. Sort of like an old fashioned real world beta.
So you mean that all SWTOR flamers were wrong and the game would have been better off if we just silenced them and stripped their access to the betas?
The only reason they can do this "brilliant" marketing is because they made sure they had a good product to show. Its not really marketing so much as quality taking care of itself.
i didn't read every comment but if this title was crap the fanboys who prepaid would be screaming 100x more then someone whose interest was casual. "omg you used the gw name and pooped out garbage and suckered us prepayers". the game would be release day poison.
OP does have a point, in saying that 99% of the feedback is positive so far.
Give it an open betaweekend (without paying full price 1st) and you'll see quite an increase in negative feedback/reviews for sure.
Exactly. Another thing that is such an important part of this game is the fact that as much as people in bwe seemed to be enjoying the game no beta will allow anyone to know whether the game is going to their cup of tea a couple months of playing. So its a bit premature to call the game amazing when one main part of an mmo is the longevity of it which can't be tested. Anyway I don't to beat a dead horse so thanks for everyone who replied. It gave me some insight.
I used to agree with the idea that it takes a couple of months to see if a game is your cup of tea.
Until i bought and paid for 3 games in a row that turned out to be very unejoyable for me and i could honestly tell withing the first few weeks that i was going to struggle to like it. Most people that quit MMOs do so before they get to the level cap. They just slip away in the night.
Is the sample sefl-selected? Yes but thin on this: If and when they do have an open beta, do you think those ravening hordes will takre the time to give proper feedback? Will they log how many seconds it takes to load into various zones? No. They will be here, flaming away into the night desparate to save the eunenlightened from gaming doom. When Anet introduced the pre-purchase they were getting committed stakeholders who now have an active interest in making this game the best it can be, not beta locusts looking for the fastest way to the level cap. Sort of like an old fashioned real world beta.
So you mean that all SWTOR flamers were wrong and the game would have been better off if we just silenced them and stripped their access to the betas?
No, what I mean is flamers make no difference. No amount of Flame or hype would have altered the course that that game is on now. People are voting with their feet after playing the product. GW2's day of judgement is coming an no amount of fanboys or hype will help the game if it is found wanting.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy. ______________________________ "This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
In the age of social media, it doesn't matter how much marketing you do, a failed product remains a failed product. Yes, you have to pre-purchase to get guarenteed access. Yes, those who pre-purchased are those who already liked what they saw of the game enough to buy it. We will be biased, however, we are biased in such a way that if we don't like what we saw during beta, you can almost be assured that everyone who had paid would make sure that everyone who had not yet purchased would know exactly what kind of crap they were about to buy. ArenaNet took one hell of a gamble on the Pre-Purchase + Beta weekend. Had it not been awesome, they could have flopped their game even before it launched. People enjoyed it, dispite the bumps that occured. And no amount of marketing will make you like something that you tried and hated.
I still see commercials for TOR and no matter how cool they look, i won't buy the game.
Wouldn't a bigger gamble be to allow anyone to beta test it with out having to spend any money?
See, you are thinking the game is all done and this is only for marketing. They are treating this as a real beta. They want to have control on how many are in at a time. If they need more, there was the beta sign up awhile ago. They can take from that.
If you dont like how they are doing things, I am sorry, the "marketting" didnt work on you.
You are not as subtle as it seems you think you are. Yes, it's brilliant marketing. They are using their own community to build excitement for the game. And as I am sure you know, rabid fans are also likely to turn on a company if one little thing doesn't go the way they wanted it. That this is not happening demonstrates that every single thing Anet has said publicly about the game is in, is working, and is fantastic.
They weren't trying to keep secrets, and that's a ludicrous thing for anyone to say, given that they released more information before the pre-order/pre-purchase phase than any other MMO I've ever followed. They didn't use sleek CGI like most companies in cutscenes that show you nothing of what the game is about. Even their concept and manifest videos were mostly in-game footage and in-game gameplay. And there have been thousands of hours of raw gameplay footage released both during conventions and all the various beta events. To imply they are lying or hiding anything, especially if compared to other companies, is either a deliberate lie or a sign you have neither followed the game nor paid attention to Anet's marketing or anyone else's.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
I agree OP I've thought about this a few times myself. It is a brilliant marketing strategy. Keep your CB load small, use fans to sell the game, reinforce their support by giving them small increments of play, and gate entry through sales. Lets face it during these stages people choose a place to stand and relatively stay there. IE: Haters hate, Fans praise.
People say TOR had haters during beta, yes, but most already felt that way before they played. The hate didn't maginify during beta it was the same all along (WOW clone). Just as those who were hardcore fans kept that position until after launch (the honeymoon period as some like to call it).
What Anet is doing would be like Bioware only letting the hardcore fans in to see the game, those who liked the idea of it enough to buy it no matter what (sight unseen).
I'm not going to say the hate would magnify if things were different. Who knows whether it would or not, but it would give those with an axe to grind a lot more informed ammunition to use, just like it did with TOR or any other open testing period. TOR had so much hate because it was more of the same. People knew what to expect from it.
GW2 on the other hand isn't more of the same it's marketed under a promise of change, therefor it doesn't have a pre-existing stigma to overcome. Hence not as much blind hate at this point.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I never even cared about GW2 til I was one of the lucky few that got into the closed beta test. Long ago, I saw a trailer for GW2 and I saw how some of the races looked. At first I thought they were kinda generic and not that great looking so that turned me off from the game and I didn't even try to look into it more. Was browsing through some random forum, saw "sign up for GW2 beta" and I tried my luck. Didn't even expect to get in but when I got a e-mail, I was happy I got in but didn't really know much about the game. I started watching some videos and was still on the fence of whether this game would be good or just another mmo, at the time I was hoping I could try out TERA cuz I was looking forward to it more and knew about it for some time plus it looked amazing. When I got to actually play GW2 though, everything changed though. I knew I was going to buy the game now and I'm glad I got a chance to try it out.
Maybe someday, just like they did for GW1, you get a chance to try-before-you-buy with a trial on GW2. I just don't like the fact that some people who were still not sure about playing it would do a pre-purchase instead of just waiting or doing a pre-order then come bitch about how it wasn't everything they wanted. Happened to one of my friends, he bought the game, he thought he would like it and actually waited for it for a while, then told me he wanted a "get to max level fast" type of game (lol) or something like that.
I've been burned out of buying/pre-ordering games that weren't as great as they turned out to be. My only suggestion is to others is to WAIT and SEE if you're going to like X game and the same applies to GW2. Try to do some research before you hand over your cash. I was lucky in my case.
Actually there's been tons of footage all over youtube even before NDA drop, and people were able to play at many conventions. Word spread from people liking the game to others that didn't get to play, who then did the research and decided for themselves that it looked like a fun game. Not to mention, the price was right.
So you're half right, it's no surprise the people in the BWE are loving it. But that's because they loved it before they started playing, to begin with.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
Im on-board with ArenaNet. I pre-purchashed the game, and will enjoy it without a monthly fee.
The Onus is squarely on ArenaNets shoulders to provide depth and breadth of massively-multiplayer content to "EARN" ones money for an expansion.
In the context of how other mainstream mmorpg's run their business, ArenaNet has more to lose if they dont deliver, since they dont have a subscription-model to lazily hide behind for funding from consumers that base their pay to a studio based on "hope" on a monthly basis.
ANet's marketing is fine, but it's mostly because they have a good product that's why they're getting hype. In reality, they let their fans generate the hype for them. Also you DON'T have to prepurchase to get into CBT. You will only do so if you want GUARANTEED access.
I actually applaud the marketing of the "failed" games because they were able to sell their product at astonishing amounts, despite the poor quality(by general consensus).
So, I agree, it is brilliant marketting that I hope NEVER catches on. If it does, this will be the one surefire way to give companies the advantage in siphoning money from the players for mediocre or downright bad content.
If Anet makes an open beta, GW2 score at this site will go above 9.0.
Just my HO....
IMHO, Anet will not offer an open beta, or if they do it won't be till right before they are ready to launch... The reason? Sheer server capacity. They had to STOP SELLING the prepurchases because it overran their capacity for the first BWE. They are currently ramping up their hardware and deploying more servers to handle all the prepurchases since they started selling them again. First BWE was 48 servers, and I would not be surprised if there were 8k-10k per server... Let's go conservative and say 4k per server... That is 200k people, and they had to stop the pre-purchases relatively quickly. If they went OB and all the people who would pre-purchase, as well as all the fence-sitters, all the haters, and all the people just looking to kill time who don't fall into any of the above categories all started playing, what kind of numbers are we talking about? How many servers would they need to handle 1 million players? 1.5? 2? The problem with Open Beta is that you can't plan for capacity until it happens... So they won't be doing one until they have all the capacity in place that they plan to have for release... And then they might do an OB as a stress test to see if they need to expand their capacity further.
Comments
Wow, so it's being beat by Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Halo 4, Borderlands 2 and Assassin's Creed 3?
You do realize that MMORPG gaming isn't a majority of the gaming market right? You also realize that those three games (GR:FS, H4, AC3) are (behind Call of Duty) the three most popular franchises on console right? You also should know that Borderlands 2 was a huge success, and is (according to IGN) one of the most anticipated console games of the year as well. You also ignore the fact that the chart you have is showing ALL pre-orders for ALL consoles. GW2 is definitely the most pre-ordered PC game by a long shot (The next PC game in line is WoW:MoP, which is 15 places behind GW2).
So let's get this right: You're saying that GW2's sales doesn't look great, yet it's the 5th most preordered game on any console in America alone.
Yeah, I don't think you have a point there.
A great mmo sells itself.
A bad mmo dont do open beta's.
Still Arenanet knows alot about merchandise and marketing, they lived alongside WoW for many many years and did quite fantastic, witch alot of people forget.
Also if people prepurchase they want it bad, and if they get disapointed when invited into the beta this forum would have been filled with rage posts and bad 1st impressions, witch i havent seen minus the posts about the engine not optimized and servers to crowded (stress testing).
Anet might shock the world at release in 2 ways:
Best mmo of the decade or trashcan fodder like Aion / Warhammer / SWTOR.
Yes but the reaction was terrible. The reaction for GW2 hasn't been terrible. Try harder.
Because people who were going to dislike SWTOR were able to try it. To try GW2 I would have to prepurchase it. That requires me to be pretty sure I like it before even playing it.
no you can wait until there's an open beta or a free trial. a beta isn't a demo anyways, it's there for the devs to test out the game.
I hope they do an open beta. THat would be nice.
OP does have a point, in saying that 99% of the feedback is positive so far.
Give it an open betaweekend (without paying full price 1st) and you'll see quite an increase in negative feedback/reviews for sure.
It's called the Strawman argument. You put words in the mouth of your opponents, usually re-interpreting what they said in the weakest/most flawed method, then you attack that instead of the real argument.
I, for one of many, really enjoyed the beta weekend event. Everyone in my GW1 guild loved the beta weekend event. We are all more stoked today than a few years ago when we were twiddling our thumbs and doing pretty much nothing as a group as we couldn't all find an MMO we all liked... Or even the majority of us liked... But we don't consider it the 'Jesus MMO.' Nobody has ever said it's the messiah of the industry. Only that we had a lot of fun playing together in an MMO with some potential for a change. A change that was a LONG TIME coming.
Messiah? Haven't we outgrown this type of language already? Besides, it's right behind Borderlands 2. As far as I'm concerned it's in good company.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
Exactly. Another thing that is such an important part of this game is the fact that as much as people in bwe seemed to be enjoying the game no beta will allow anyone to know whether the game is going to their cup of tea a couple months of playing. So its a bit premature to call the game amazing when one main part of an mmo is the longevity of it which can't be tested. Anyway I don't want to beat a dead horse so thanks for everyone who replied. It gave me some insight.
So you are saying that SWTOR wasn't bad? I thought "SWTOR and alike are bad" is the major reason for why GW2 was made so different from the norm.
During the SWTOR non-NDA beta and the days before the servers opened, the grand majority of posts were positive. Concerns such as 2-faction PvP, population imbalances and lack of open world PvP were met with comments such as "SWTOR is not a PvP game". Concerns about the lifeless world were met with comments like "they have all time in the world to implement such fluff; let them focus on core systems first".
If pre-purchasing fans were allowed to garantuee their spot into limited beta like GW2 is doing, the overall average impression would have been skewed more towards the positive side.
For the guy quoting the vgchartz number. Notice one thing, those are pre-ORDER numbers, as in people paid $5 in a gamestop or online somewhere to pre-order. Those are not pre-PURCHASE numbers, as in the people that paid full price already and played in the BWE and stress test. I have no idea what the pre-purchase number is, but I sure saw a ton of people running around in GW2.
I used to agree with the idea that it takes a couple of months to see if a game is your cup of tea.
Until I bought and paid for 3 games in a row that turned out to be very unejoyable for me and I could honestly tell withing the first few weeks that I was going to struggle to like it. Most people that quit MMOs do so before they get to the level cap. They just slip away in the night.
Is the sample sefl-selected? Yes but thin on this: If and when they do have an open beta, do you think those ravening hordes will takre the time to give proper feedback? Will they log how many seconds it takes to load into various zones? No. They will be here, flaming away into the night desparate to save the eunenlightened from gaming doom. When Anet introduced the pre-purchase they were getting committed stakeholders who now have an active interest in making this game the best it can be, not beta locusts looking for the fastest way to the level cap. Sort of like an old fashioned real world beta.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
So you mean that all SWTOR flamers were wrong and the game would have been better off if we just silenced them and stripped their access to the betas?
The only reason they can do this "brilliant" marketing is because they made sure they had a good product to show. Its not really marketing so much as quality taking care of itself.
i didn't read every comment but if this title was crap the fanboys who prepaid would be screaming 100x more then someone whose interest was casual. "omg you used the gw name and pooped out garbage and suckered us prepayers". the game would be release day poison.
No, what I mean is flamers make no difference. No amount of Flame or hype would have altered the course that that game is on now. People are voting with their feet after playing the product. GW2's day of judgement is coming an no amount of fanboys or hype will help the game if it is found wanting.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
See, you are thinking the game is all done and this is only for marketing. They are treating this as a real beta. They want to have control on how many are in at a time. If they need more, there was the beta sign up awhile ago. They can take from that.
If you dont like how they are doing things, I am sorry, the "marketting" didnt work on you.
You are not as subtle as it seems you think you are. Yes, it's brilliant marketing. They are using their own community to build excitement for the game. And as I am sure you know, rabid fans are also likely to turn on a company if one little thing doesn't go the way they wanted it. That this is not happening demonstrates that every single thing Anet has said publicly about the game is in, is working, and is fantastic.
They weren't trying to keep secrets, and that's a ludicrous thing for anyone to say, given that they released more information before the pre-order/pre-purchase phase than any other MMO I've ever followed. They didn't use sleek CGI like most companies in cutscenes that show you nothing of what the game is about. Even their concept and manifest videos were mostly in-game footage and in-game gameplay. And there have been thousands of hours of raw gameplay footage released both during conventions and all the various beta events. To imply they are lying or hiding anything, especially if compared to other companies, is either a deliberate lie or a sign you have neither followed the game nor paid attention to Anet's marketing or anyone else's.
"There are two great powers, and they've been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit."
John Parry, to his son Will; "The Subtle Knife," by Phillip Pullman
I agree OP I've thought about this a few times myself. It is a brilliant marketing strategy. Keep your CB load small, use fans to sell the game, reinforce their support by giving them small increments of play, and gate entry through sales. Lets face it during these stages people choose a place to stand and relatively stay there. IE: Haters hate, Fans praise.
People say TOR had haters during beta, yes, but most already felt that way before they played. The hate didn't maginify during beta it was the same all along (WOW clone). Just as those who were hardcore fans kept that position until after launch (the honeymoon period as some like to call it).
What Anet is doing would be like Bioware only letting the hardcore fans in to see the game, those who liked the idea of it enough to buy it no matter what (sight unseen).
I'm not going to say the hate would magnify if things were different. Who knows whether it would or not, but it would give those with an axe to grind a lot more informed ammunition to use, just like it did with TOR or any other open testing period. TOR had so much hate because it was more of the same. People knew what to expect from it.
GW2 on the other hand isn't more of the same it's marketed under a promise of change, therefor it doesn't have a pre-existing stigma to overcome. Hence not as much blind hate at this point.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I never even cared about GW2 til I was one of the lucky few that got into the closed beta test. Long ago, I saw a trailer for GW2 and I saw how some of the races looked. At first I thought they were kinda generic and not that great looking so that turned me off from the game and I didn't even try to look into it more. Was browsing through some random forum, saw "sign up for GW2 beta" and I tried my luck. Didn't even expect to get in but when I got a e-mail, I was happy I got in but didn't really know much about the game. I started watching some videos and was still on the fence of whether this game would be good or just another mmo, at the time I was hoping I could try out TERA cuz I was looking forward to it more and knew about it for some time plus it looked amazing. When I got to actually play GW2 though, everything changed though. I knew I was going to buy the game now and I'm glad I got a chance to try it out.
Maybe someday, just like they did for GW1, you get a chance to try-before-you-buy with a trial on GW2. I just don't like the fact that some people who were still not sure about playing it would do a pre-purchase instead of just waiting or doing a pre-order then come bitch about how it wasn't everything they wanted. Happened to one of my friends, he bought the game, he thought he would like it and actually waited for it for a while, then told me he wanted a "get to max level fast" type of game (lol) or something like that.
I've been burned out of buying/pre-ordering games that weren't as great as they turned out to be. My only suggestion is to others is to WAIT and SEE if you're going to like X game and the same applies to GW2. Try to do some research before you hand over your cash. I was lucky in my case.
Actually there's been tons of footage all over youtube even before NDA drop, and people were able to play at many conventions. Word spread from people liking the game to others that didn't get to play, who then did the research and decided for themselves that it looked like a fun game. Not to mention, the price was right.
So you're half right, it's no surprise the people in the BWE are loving it. But that's because they loved it before they started playing, to begin with.
"Forums aren't for intelligent discussion; they're for blow-hards with unwavering opinions."
IMHO...
If Anet makes an open beta, GW2 score at this site will go above 9.0.
Just my HO....
Im on-board with ArenaNet. I pre-purchashed the game, and will enjoy it without a monthly fee.
The Onus is squarely on ArenaNets shoulders to provide depth and breadth of massively-multiplayer content to "EARN" ones money for an expansion.
In the context of how other mainstream mmorpg's run their business, ArenaNet has more to lose if they dont deliver, since they dont have a subscription-model to lazily hide behind for funding from consumers that base their pay to a studio based on "hope" on a monthly basis.
ANet's marketing is fine, but it's mostly because they have a good product that's why they're getting hype. In reality, they let their fans generate the hype for them. Also you DON'T have to prepurchase to get into CBT. You will only do so if you want GUARANTEED access.
I actually applaud the marketing of the "failed" games because they were able to sell their product at astonishing amounts, despite the poor quality(by general consensus).
Too late... See TL2.
Pre-purchase w/ no release date offered?
IMHO, Anet will not offer an open beta, or if they do it won't be till right before they are ready to launch... The reason? Sheer server capacity. They had to STOP SELLING the prepurchases because it overran their capacity for the first BWE. They are currently ramping up their hardware and deploying more servers to handle all the prepurchases since they started selling them again. First BWE was 48 servers, and I would not be surprised if there were 8k-10k per server... Let's go conservative and say 4k per server... That is 200k people, and they had to stop the pre-purchases relatively quickly. If they went OB and all the people who would pre-purchase, as well as all the fence-sitters, all the haters, and all the people just looking to kill time who don't fall into any of the above categories all started playing, what kind of numbers are we talking about? How many servers would they need to handle 1 million players? 1.5? 2? The problem with Open Beta is that you can't plan for capacity until it happens... So they won't be doing one until they have all the capacity in place that they plan to have for release... And then they might do an OB as a stress test to see if they need to expand their capacity further.
That is my 2 cents.