Guild Wars 2 Live Game Development

[Mothhive]

Haven't seen another thread about this, so thought I'd start one.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/c...e-development/

Really liking the sound of this, especially the parts hinting at something secret coming in November. I really hope they manage to add quality content on a regular basis like they promise.

Do you guys think they'll pull it off, and what are you expecting in the next month or so?

[Lucky_]

Considering the sheer amount of stuff we've been promised and what was actually delivered and how in the game, I'm expecting absolutely nothing. If they have game designers available, they should have been fixing the events and zhaitan. If they have programmers, they should have been working out the massive amount of programming-related bugs and optimizing things. If they have people working on sPvP, where are the ladders and functional tournaments?

If you look at their list of "live teams", and you actually play GW2, you should be pissed off as a customer. Because if any of them were doing their jobs as actively and as well as mr. Johanson implies, we wouldn't be sitting more then a month into the game with no functional competitive sPvP, last boss still bugged alongside pretty much half of orr at any given time, people getting their accounts hacked left and right, ban waves from people who dare to use game mechanics that arenanet designers fail to design properly and other pearls of "greatness" of simply not delivering.

That said, they do have one team that delivered something they promised. A mac port. Nevermind it's bogged down by performance issues as it's essentially a wintel executable in a VM wrapper, it's still an actually working one. Something you can't say for other things they're supposedly still "working on". But out of eight teams stated in the blog post, one has actually delivered something.


My take on it is personified by the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Expecting anything more then nothing is foolish at this point.

[Nexrex]

Considering the sheer amount of stuff we've been promised and what was actually delivered and how in the game, I'm expecting absolutely nothing. If they have game designers available, they should have been fixing the events and zhaitan. If they have programmers, they should have been working out the massive amount of programming-related bugs and optimizing things. If they have people working on sPvP, where are the ladders and functional tournaments?

If you look at their list of "live teams", and you actually play GW2, you should be pissed off as a customer. Because if any of them were doing their jobs as actively and as well as mr. Johanson implies, we wouldn't be sitting more then a month into the game with no functional competitive sPvP, last boss still bugged alongside pretty much half of orr at any given time, people getting their accounts hacked left and right, ban waves from people who dare to use game mechanics that arenanet designers fail to design properly and other pearls of "greatness" of simply not delivering.

That said, they do have one team that delivered something they promised. A mac port. Nevermind it's bogged down by performance issues as it's essentially a wintel executable in a VM wrapper, it's still an actually working one. Something you can't say for other things they're supposedly still "working on". But out of eight teams stated in the blog post, one has actually delivered something.


My take on it is personified by the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Expecting anything more then nothing is foolish at this point.

You must be playing a completely different game than me and my friends and close ones, cause we are having a BLAST! :)=

[Abstieg]

You must be playing a completely different game than me and my friends and close ones, cause we are having a BLAST! =

Agreed. While there's lots of bugs, they do work to fix a lot and do so pretty quickly.

[Lucky_]

You must be playing a completely different game than me and my friends and close ones, cause we are having a BLAST! =

Hint for astroturfers: nowhere in the initial post or my post were we discussing how fun the game is. We were talking on topic, about their live team and game updates.
Talking about having fun in relation to shitty lack of support is like talking about how pretty the game is at this point. It's just deflecting attention from real, tangible problem into matter of taste and aesthetics to gain talking points in areas where you could argue the game works from area where the game has clearly failed.

And offtopic, if you find hammering #2 to defeat the "epic boss" or either curbstomping or getting steamrolled in sPvP due to lack of ladders "fun", who am I to argue with you. Masochists have just as much right to their definition of "fun" as I do.

[Zeek Daniels]

Considering the sheer amount of stuff we've been promised and what was actually delivered and how in the game, I'm expecting absolutely nothing. If they have game designers available, they should have been fixing the events and zhaitan. If they have programmers, they should have been working out the massive amount of programming-related bugs and optimizing things. If they have people working on sPvP, where are the ladders and functional tournaments?

If you look at their list of "live teams", and you actually play GW2, you should be pissed off as a customer. Because if any of them were doing their jobs as actively and as well as mr. Johanson implies, we wouldn't be sitting more then a month into the game with no functional competitive sPvP, last boss still bugged alongside pretty much half of orr at any given time, people getting their accounts hacked left and right, ban waves from people who dare to use game mechanics that arenanet designers fail to design properly and other pearls of "greatness" of simply not delivering.

That said, they do have one team that delivered something they promised. A mac port. Nevermind it's bogged down by performance issues as it's essentially a wintel executable in a VM wrapper, it's still an actually working one. Something you can't say for other things they're supposedly still "working on". But out of eight teams stated in the blog post, one has actually delivered something.


My take on it is personified by the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Expecting anything more then nothing is foolish at this point.

Wow thats alot of venom there give this man an antidote. Anyway some of the live teams i could care less about but as for your comments on Spvp ladders and what not, the systems were not ready for launch and since the game was buggy i can see why you wouldnt roll that out at the start. The classes have undergone tweeks here and there as they get the pvp more balanced and they have given players enough time to see what works and what doesnt. I think what they are doing pvp wise is fine in terms of delaying the actual tourneys till things are smoothed out.

As for the events i hope they release info on what they are doing.

[Lucky_]

Wow thats alot of venom there give this man an antidote. Anyway some of the live teams i could care less about but as for your comments on Spvp ladders and what not, the systems were not ready for launch and since the game was buggy i can see why you wouldnt roll that out at the start. The classes have undergone tweeks here and there as they get the pvp more balanced and they have given players enough time to see what works and what doesnt. I think what they are doing pvp wise is fine in terms of delaying the actual tourneys till things are smoothed out.

As for the events i hope they release info on what they are doing.

Please read the linked post. Then you'll find a lot of need for anti-venom yourself. This isn't about roundabout crap, this is about what was posted by someone in charge of game development. He was once again telling us how he thinks they're doing great and will be doing even better in supporting the game, listing sPvP as one of the subjects among many!

Seriously, read the linked post. He's actively implying at several points that they have one of the best "live teams" in modern MMOs. One that can't apparently fix a single broken boss in a month's time, can't even set proper reset timers for events that bug out routinely, can't add even a basic temporary ladder, or any of the other glaring problems with support in this game. And yet he has the balls to tell us how wonderfully innovative their live team composition is. Think about it for a moment: your support team has serious problems with supporting the game. Would your solution really be to hype up just how wonderfully innovative your team composition is? Arenanet leads seem to think so!

It's one thing when you release a half-baked product full of bugs, and then admit it and proceed to fix them in a timely fashion. That is blizzard's model, and while not stellar as you should test better in the first place, you at least get the results in a reasonably timely fashion, and when you don't, you at least get an apology. They don't hype over the problems, or how wonderful their support is, they just tell you they're aware of the problems and are fixing them. And problems get fixed.

What arenanet folks are doing here is instead of admitting it and telling us they're aware of the problems and are working on fixing them after essentially leaving game broken for over a month with mostly cosmetic fixes, is that they tell us how absolutely magnificent their support team is, how innovative it is, how much better structured then in other MMOs it is and so on. Johanson is practically gushing about it, just like he gushed about epic Zhaitan. And it's about as proper of a comparison as it will ever be. Because their current support is about as good as Zhaitan is a good boss fight. And no amount of hyping will make their support any better at their jobs, at least any more then hyping about great Zhaitan fight will make it an actually great fight. Because all we need to see how badly supported the game still is is just to log into the game and head to Orr. Or join a sPvP match for another curbstoming zerg experience. Or go for a dungeon run.


I'll say it one more time: read the article linked, and consider the contents of it in light of current status of the game, over a month post-release, as well as fixes that were made during this time. He's telling us how great their support is structured, apparently "different than other MMOs" (his words) with clear implication that their way is better. So ask yourself: is it really? The answer is pretty obvious to anyone who has played any AAA MMO in a last couple of years, because pretty much all of them had support worlds above what GW2 has to currently offer.

[Karizee]

Sounds like he got banned before the patch that fixed the bug that certain players were maliciously exploiting to bug the events was rolled out. Ah well, nothing lasts forever, eh Lucky? ^^

I'm very excited about the upcoming changes. Late night a few nights back I actually got a chance to chat with a dev in game
He said they are putting in 16+ hour days still and the team is really enthused about all the ideas they have.
He wouldn't spill much but did tell me pet battles are coming. Then he synch danced with me!

[Lucky_]

Sounds like he got banned before the patch that fixed the bug that certain players were maliciously exploiting to bug the events was rolled out. Ah well, nothing lasts forever, eh Lucky? ^^

I'm very excited about the upcoming changes. Late night a few nights back I actually got a chance to chat with a dev in game
He said they are putting in 16+ hour days still and the team is really enthused about all the ideas they have.
He wouldn't spill much but did tell me pet battles are coming. Then he synch danced with me!

Excuse me, did you just accuse me of exploiting without even knowing my account/character name, and then follow up by telling us how wonderful devs are because they... synced a dance with you?

My palm met my face irl.

[Fencers]

Lucky, it's just a marketing piece. What dev is going to say their live team is awful or that they don't have it all together?

They all say this type of stuff. We'll just have to see if they deliver over the next few weeks. Which I am skeptical about too. But still. No reason to get snippy over what is just an advertisement at this point.

[Bodygrinder]

Excuse me, did you just accuse me of exploiting without even knowing my account/character name, and then follow up by telling us how wonderful devs are because they... synced a dance with you?

My palm met my face irl.

I'm noticing some acute selective reading here. Try again.

Also this is good, concentrated teams with good communication on the development side will help a ton. It felt like they were spreading themselves thin while I was doing my story, I mean dealing with bugs on top of developing new content seemed crazy.

[Fencers]

Shouldn't dealing with bugs & balancing while developing new content and features on a monthly pace be like, expected?

[Bodygrinder]

Shouldn't dealing with bugs & balancing while developing new content and features on a monthly pace be like, expected?

Yes, and they are making teams based on the massive task at hand. This is good, they are being proactive about it.

Edit: My original post wasn't very detailed, I was trying to portray the idea of organization is a good thing, also I shouldn't post at 1 am >_<

[draykorinee]

To meet our goal, rather than have one small live team as is normally provided in traditional MMOs, we have formed multiple live teams focused on expanding Guild Wars 2

Is this even true? My experience is different, I guess its more PR driven attempts to claim to be different when in fact they aren't. Iirc when i played rift they had a welcome dev thread where they all had different roles and I know blizzard have different teams. Maybe I misread the post but he assumes other AAA mmos have a small live team that just wings it and does whatever feels right at the time while Anet have a much larger team all doing specialised roles, not too sure about that, ofc it is early and i may have misread that quote.
Anyways the live response team needs a sacking if they cant fix the end boss in a month.

[jtgizmo]

Shouldn't dealing with bugs & balancing while developing new content and features on a monthly pace be like, expected?

You make it sound as if they are not doing it? I think they are addressing ton of bugs as fast as possible, putting in new features and tweaks, being very responsive to community requests and such. Expectation tad high Fencer? Is it really a fail if you don't get EVERYTHING fixed straight away? I think they are making good progress.

[Chrno]

People worry to much about the bugs
We have a fun game to play and we see them working on the bugs.
We've had quite a few patches so far including class balance issue's and event/skillpoint fixes. I think they've been doing a decent job so far.

[Fencers]

You make it sound as if they are not doing it? I think they are addressing ton of bugs as fast as possible, putting in new features and tweaks, being very responsive to community requests and such. Expectation tad high Fencer? Is it really a fail if you don't get EVERYTHING fixed straight away?

Kinda not anything I suggested.

People worry to much about the bugs

Well, sometimes the bugs can be seriously hindering. Such as when my sister and I had our characters locked out for 2 days about week after the game launched.

Or just recently the mini-map and world map on my account going blank... which was going 2 days of no functional map or teleportation for any of my characters. I posted about it in the One Thread.

Or when one of the other moderators was locked out of his account. Asked for support's help. Got the run around and finally fixed it himself. Somehow.

Or being unable to even zone into my personal story for like... 2 or 3 weeks? I can't recall but the PS broke at various levels for me such that I was already level 80 for some time before I could even zone into a much lower level story step. No longer give a damn about PS.

Oh here's a good one, the bug that prevents members of the guild from zoning into the same dungeon together. Such that we have only been able to do like 4 dungeons complete. Better yet, the bug that randomly ejects a member from dungeon party and resets the whole dungeon.

Or the time I could not represent the guild I made for like a week. That was pretty okay.

Or my hubby's inability to teleport without getting stuck under the world.

Or the numerous zones some players can not 100% due to broken hearts or SPCs.

Tons of bugs. Many are still unresolved for me despite sending in like a dozen or so tickets per day. Timberline Falls and Fields of Ruin, I'm looking in your general direction.

[jtgizmo]

kinda

10 chars

[Karizee]

Anyways the live response team needs a sacking if they cant fix the end boss in a month.

What do you think should be done to live teams that never fix the end boss? ;-)

[Bodygrinder]

Is this even true? My experience is different, I guess its more PR driven attempts to claim to be different when in fact they aren't. Iirc when i played rift they had a welcome dev thread where they all had different roles and I know blizzard have different teams. Maybe I misread the post but he assumes other AAA mmos have a small live team that just wings it and does whatever feels right at the time while Anet have a much larger team all doing specialised roles, not too sure about that, ofc it is early and i may have misread that quote.
Anyways the live response team needs a sacking if they cant fix the end boss in a month.

Honestly, I can agree, they need to step it up with the story and the end boss design.