I don’t expect you to know this as you probably haven’t been a part of project work before.
Keep the personal insults out of the conversation. They only serve to derail topics and shutdown threads.
I raid with organized groups every week – I have raided end game hardcore progression – even have some world firsts. Outside the game, I have owned my own business for almost 10 years and am an extremely successful professional in my field who is called upon to build goal oriented teams for my clients.
I only post this to refute the silly personal attack. The point is, keep to the topic at hand and leave the personal stuff out of it.
It doesn’t matter when the wings were developed – and the size of the map is something you see for yourself ingame. Again, consider the law of conservation of energy. All effort has to come from a finite pool – and, in the case of things like voice acting, map design, writing, etc, these are one to one correlations with non raid content (voice acting a raid boss’s line is identical to voice acting an open world character’s).
It wasn’t a personal insult. It was an assumption based on most people not having experience in project work. There’s really nothing wrong in that. It’s very much a part of the topic as the complaint was that they were misrepresenting the size of their team. I disputed it.
You cannot say that the raid map is the same as any of the other HoT maps or even the core maps.
I didn’t say it was exactly the same.
I said it was roughly the same size. It was in reference to the art and environmental resources used to develop the map.
I believe their may be some tasks associated with raids that are easier to do than others. But, when you add in all of the other elements that do have one to one correlations with other content (voice work, map development, fight balancing, writing lore – which they have bragged about, etc), the idea that SIGNIFICANTLY (key word) less effort was required seems a bit silly.
There is more that is put into open world maps than instanced maps. They are not equivalent or even close for that matter. It’s not really the same size as there’s not much walkable space. If there was a map that was the size of all of Heart of Maguuma, but only consisted of a small island the size of claw island, would you consider that map to be larger than the others? There’s also very little vertical space as well.
Also, what makes you think that the raid team doesn’t develop the maps themselves? I’m pretty sure that they develop all of the raid bosses too including the balancing. That’s the vast majority of what you see. The lore is fairly small in raids compared to the living story and chances are a lot of it will be used for LS3 in some way. Voice work is contracted out so I doubt it has any impact on any other areas of the game.
I stand by what I’ve listed above, but I also respect that you feel differently.
Personally, I think they overstated how easy raids are to develop in an effort to downplay community emotions regarding the content drought, and people have latched onto that as an argument for something else entirely.
I don’t mind that they use resources to develop raids – even if it is greater than they have led people to believe (which I feel is the case). I just believe that, to justify the use of any resources that would otherwise be used elsewhere, raids need to have greater appeal than they currently do.
A bit of a harsh reply, but,
If you claim that resources are over-allocated to raids,
And then encounter evidence that the opposite is true,
Then the logical position is to recant or reform your argument.
Not double-down on a position when the evidence is against you.
Because I don’t see the counterargument being as strong as people claim.
The raids, as they stand, have a lot of character and extemporaneous design – the river of souls, the Twisted Castle, the room of statues, the little cemetery before Gorseval, etc. Compare that to just about any Fractal – or even a map like Drytop or Southsun, and they seem pretty comparable. Voice acting is probably on par with any fractal (there is even PC voice responses). Fight designs rival anything in Southsun or any story instance. There are collection events and ambient mobs scattered throughout.
I just don’t see them as somehow less than just about any comparable location in the game (instanced or open world) – with some exceptions.
Anet’s claim that they had to put less effort into them than that other content really does feel like a meagre attempt to quell complaints during the recent content drought. Once you start actually looking at what went into them (especially from an ancillary resource perspective), this seems even more likely.
What evidence would change your view? We already have the rough developer counts per team.
Would you require to know the development time towards each project? And keep in mind that they started developing raids before HOT launch.
And then consider whether you’re applying the same evidence standards towards your point of view.