Guild Wars 2

The trick to making a good game would be to hire gamers that would play the game regularly. This would eliminate obvious bugs, exploits and general complaints. They would be in on the ground floor of why people mass quit, or just get bored.
My friend is a Video Game Programmer and over half his class had never played a game before, but that it was just a projected job market class. Also I understand that you have to hire the “money men”’s family.
Somewhere in this mess needs to be a balance between Game Play and Profits.

epf.2346:

This would eliminate obvious bugs, exploits and general complaints.

Not necessarily. Programmers aren’t freelance troubleshooters; they follow orders. They’re often aware of bugs which cause irritation for players, but their time is allocated onto specific tasks (e.g. “you’ve got three hours to fix the weapon switching bug, then you’re working on netcode optimization for the next two weeks”). Managers assign priority to bug reports (and feature requests) according to their own preferences and business strategies. For instance, they might consider it more important to attract new players (via new content) than retain old ones (with mundane fixes and balance patches). They might prefer to boost Gem Store activity by 20%, even if it means that 5% of players get annoyed and quit.

Also – how would this work, exactly? Would ANet be paying its staff to play videogames for fun on company time (note: this is different from actual playtesting, which is rarely fun at all), or would they be dictating how people spend their evenings and weekends? The former is unlikely, and the latter is probably illegal.

tl;dr forcing programmers to play the game isn’t a panacea

It’s not about forcing programmers to play but hire people who play games to program. And Yes, they should be paying staff to play video games, not testing your own product would not go over in any other market, why is it acceptable here? Sporting goods companies hire people to play with balls all day, food companies pay people to eat.
On the topic of assigned time, how would some “money man” know how long writing code takes. If it takes a day they say a week and time vampirism is born.
Also these games are made in countries without Labor Laws, so most of your points are moot.

A bunch of anet employees have been spotted playing wvw.

“I also understand you have to hire the money man’s family”

False. Not entirely sure where you got that idea from.

Playing and playtesting are two entirely different things.

Playing – you are there to play the game. To consume the content for enjoyment. This almost always yields little useful feedback because 1) fun is subjective, and 2) unless the bugs are glaringly obvious, you’re unlikely to pick up on the smaller bugs.

Playtesting and Bug Testing – you are there to test the game. This means going through everything to test that it’s working as intended (note; this process isn’t guaranteed to get rid of all bugs. The testers are still only human). ANet has playtesters, and the developers also have allotted time to test (for balance purposes). Also, everyone will have different points of contention; Bob might think Fractals need working on, Fred might think DE’s need work and Jim might think the big boss fights. There’s only so many hours in a day, and so many people working on PvE, so they can only do so much.

Also, developers don’t necessarily fix bugs. Coders create tools for developers, meaning developers might not necessarily have the skills to debug the problems.

On your comment about the money man; the money man doesn’t dictate and allocate time-frames. The Producer does. He keeps everyone on track, allocates tasks and time-frames to ensure that stuff gets done, otherwise that coder could work for weeks on fixing small bugs when there’s bigger stuff to take care of, thus nothing ever getting done.

epf.2346:

The trick to making a good game would be to hire gamers that would play the game regularly. This would eliminate obvious bugs, exploits and general complaints. They would be in on the ground floor of *why people mass quit, or just get bored. *
My friend is a Video Game Programmer and over half his class had never played a game before, but that it was just a projected job market class. Also I understand that you have to hire the “money men”’s family.
Somewhere in this mess needs to be a balance between Game Play and Profits.

Implies people are mass quitting or getting bored.

1/ A.net devs play regularly. They’re pretty aware of how the game function in the wild.
2/ Playtesting does not equate playing.
3/ My friend’s friend is in a class next to a video game class and all his classmates are failing because they play WoW 24/7. Such arguments don’t hold water.

I have no idea what your suggestion would do except siphon resources to something that already exists.

I would suggest that A-net sends e-mail surveys to different categories of accounts: active, casual, long time not logged in, etc. with different questions to ask their options on things. It will be a sort of “organized feedback” for more specific inquiries than this forum is.

Putting gamer’s in charge of how a game should work is a bad idea, for your proof in that just look through 10 pages of the suggestion forums. Now ask your self how many of the suggest are bad or mis placed. Now imagine that 20 of those suggestions the “gamer employee” said to put in went in and 3 of them are game breaking.

If you need absolute proof that gamer’s make bad developers look at what Blizzard did during the WoTLK expansion. Took about 80% of what the players suggested in the forums and put it in the game. There was a lot of balancing issues and things messed up in that whole expansion.

So your solution is to do it here? Do you see the flaw in your idea yet?

Just saying A-net has a core team of gamers testing content before it launches and to help them with balancing

Most employees in MMO’s do play the game regularly in off time, and sometimes while working. Their off-time experience can lead to finding bugs or issues that they can bring in to work the next day. If you check out NCsoft, most of the CM’s also have several characters in game that they PVP/PVE with in AION. I’m sure the same can be said for GW2. Also I think I remember a few devs saying they have favorite classes they play.

I believe Anet does have people playing the game. They secretly listen to map chat and observe the playerbase. Just because they don’t log on and shout," Hey, I’m so-and-so at ArenaNet, come surround me so you can yell about ways to fix our game", doesn’t mean they arn’t there. The only thing I would like to see Anet do is create a Lionguard jail where anyone who is being abusive in map chat be sent there after X amount of warnings and only after a certain amount of log on time can they be approached and offered a chance to exit (good ol’ ffxi days). Cleans the streets up and also produces some funny videos.

To OP:

they do. they are called testers. there are dozens of them. they do this 8 hours a day with breaks.

devs do play the game. on off hours even. its crazy. it’s like, a company of people that like MMOs and want to play in their own world, and share it with everyone, without monthly fees like the games they didn’t like.

you could almost say, they are….gamers!

Fixing broken targeting (right click) and poor camera mechanics are not nearly as glamorous as creating new content. I would expect that if things are barely servicable they will stay as is. Their philosophy is time/money is better better spent distracting people from the flaws (super adventure box) than to spend the time to fix them. You aren’t going to get articles in any gaming magazines about adding a first person view to your game, but you do for adding a 8 bit music and graphics.

Although they do not seem to play their own game ( content realeased with a lot of bugs… fail testers?), they actually do. So making a suggestion post about it is detrimental to the whole moving forward idea as the devs are wasting their time on this kitten. And of course the kitten’s mittens too.

No gamer would put slow down battle mechanics, and deliberate death scenarios in a game. As for the Employees playing, making cameos with over-powered code-built characters in WvW, isn’t what I call gaming.

epf.2346:

No gamer would put slow down battle mechanics, and deliberate death scenarios in a game. As for the Employees playing, making cameos with over-powered code-built characters in WvW, isn’t what I call gaming.

Maybe you should run a game company since you seem to know more than they do. GW2 still in the baby state, pretty obvious because they’re working on the currently existing content much more than releasing new content. If they start opening new continents and there still is a lot missing with the old continents then you can say they don’t care anymore. Right now, there is plenty to do for pve and wvw. Pvp is the only 1 lacking atm.