Guild Wars 2

As someone who has been involved in software development and game development I am struggling to understand why a Legendary weapon takes so long to develop? Having worked with artist before I have to say If the modeling and animating of a unique weapon skin takes more than a week then I strongly question the skill of those involved in the process. So I am assuming the players unique journey to craft the weapon is where the time is being invested…. Why can’t that process be reworked into a single journey used for all legendaries with only the materials being unique to each one? I don’t know what the unique challenges are to the team for 6 people to deliver 16 unique weapon skins, but if that challenge is indeed primary in create a unique system to obtain for each one, simply unify that system to reduce development load.

I quit playing GW2 last year, but occasionally I come back to the forums to see what’s going on and noticed a lot of negative reaction to Legendaries being removed and that made me wonder why creating this is such a difficult thing for ArenaNet. It seems their best strategy for survival would be to make the few people are still playing this game happy.

Also work in the design industry here, got my fair share of experience in 3D modelling and texturing, animation, ect ect. When I heard that it was taking that long to create the legendary’s, I also seriously questioned the skill of those 6 people. God, If I told my boss I needed 4-6 months to make a weapon model with texturing and abit of animation, I’d be fired on the spot. But yeah, the coding and journey for each legendary ,I wouldn’t really know what that would involve. Seems simplifying the process into 1 path would be a better solution.

Personally I think the team of developers who were in charge of creating legendary weapons and tying them to journeys through events just hit a pretty unexpected wall: they had not enough events tied to completing collections for all the legendaries they wanted to add in the game. I mean they could easily modify the code of how events would run in order to implement the tasks tied to the collections but the problem is that it would completely destroy the events and make them unsustainable. So I guess they wanted to make sure that enough new pve events would be created to tie them to the collections of the remaining legendaries who are now on pause

I think its about resources, I don’t think its about the technical issues involved, that’s just the cover story imo.

my humble theory is that the initial set of legendries were very lucrative for anet, ppl converted RL money to gold to make them and anet made good money off them, that crowds now been milked out/moved on and ppl (in general) have become less susceptive to spending money in the cash shop. anet thought with the expansion they would re-start this process which would then make sense for them to add more legendries, except the expansion didn’t achieve what they thought it would and there are far less ppl now who would spend RL money to get gold for their legendary, so it doesn’t make financial sense for anet to invest in further legendries when they need to put those resources into something that will have a better chance of creating revenue.

hence legendries were cut.

Galbedir.9178:

But yeah, the coding and journey for each legendary ,I wouldn’t really know what that would involve.

Eh, I’ve worked on the other side of the barrier. How long does it take to script such “quests”? Not long. Really. Once you know exactly what you want and what to do, no more than a few days. One may be enough since there is no new content: all you have to do is to add some new basic NPC at some places (like JP) or to add a simple “if” statement in event scripts.

What takes time however is precisely to determine what to do. You need to find a concept. Then you need to go through the world (and / or the quest files) to see where your idea could take place. And the world is big.

And then, there’s the testing afterwards. That last part shouldn’t take “toooo” long considering those precursor journeys are mainly about grinding (and a tester can generate the farmable items he needs to continue the quest: deldrimor ingots, spritwood, etc, and he’s likely to have tools to jump through maps, trigger events, insta kill mobs, etc). But yeah, it still takes some time.

And what can take even longer is poor communication between coders, devs, and artists, or between the employees and the directors. That can really ruin both your efficiency and your enthusiasm.

What I can tell you however is that some gaming companies have really, really, really low standards when it comes to the “invisible” part of the game: the coding. I don’t think that’s the case of Anet, but what do I know after all?

Let me give you an example that hopefully everybody will understand..

There was this “quest” file in a game for a monster race. Basically, 4 monsters would race and the players could bid on one. The quest file was about 12k lines long. Now, since there are 4 monsters, there are also 4 possible ending dialogues (“Monster 1 has won”, “Monster 2 has won”, etc). Instead of replacing that very string by a variable, the guy who coded this c&p’ed the whole script 4 times, making it 12k lines long instead of 3k.

Of course, any decent coder knows how to use a simple variable (that says a lot about the guy who coded that). Now, I won’t go into details, but a good coder also knows how to use something called “pointers” (it’s a bit complicated, but it allows you to turn a variable name into a variable). Using that trick repeatedly, I was about to reduce the size of this script to less than 1k lines in a few hours. And incidentally, no one cared.

So what I’m saying is… I have no way to know what’s going on at Anet’s. But don’t assume big companies always hire competent coders.

It’s not the weapons but the whole collection/journey/lore story creation. The weapon models and their effects are likely the easiest thing to do.

It may have nothing to do with the legendary team at all but a bottleneck with some shared team at ANet that can’t handle the workload for both living story and legendary journey, a group that can’t be grown quickly. There is a reddit dev post that seems to indicate that may be contributing to the slowness without pointing fingers.

We’ll never know.

SamTheGuardian.2938:

It seems their best strategy for survival would be to make the few people are still playing this game happy.

(emphasis added)

That’s because there aren’t just “a few people” playing this game still.

The “legendary journeys” we have really aren’t that complex. I don’t know anything about coding, but assuming that it is relatively simple to do something like:

“If collection X is active, drop item Y from enemy Z.”

Then I don’t see what the problem is. The collections really contain very little more than that. Yes, there’s some cute other things they threw into some of them, but they were hardly essential enough to abandon the whole process.

Heck they could just abandon the weird gold/karma gating of making you buy the collection in the first place and just skip the first part of that for tier one.

CrashTestAuto.9108:

I don’t know anything about coding

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this is where the problem lies

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

SamTheGuardian.2938:

It seems their best strategy for survival would be to make the few people are still playing this game happy.

(emphasis added)

That’s because there aren’t just “a few people” playing this game still.

Depends on your outlook. But we know, from the Super Adventure Box fiasco, ANet can see where people are in numbers within any zone.

Given the latest announcement, I don’t think it a stretch that the current population is not in a pretty place. Even the diehards, on and off the forums, admit to playing something else now.

It’s telling, but only ANet knows the numbers for sure.

As for the reason? It’s simple: they’re spread too thin.

Beforehand, almost everyone was focused on Living World and Seasonal content and updates. The ‘expansion’ diverted resources in its attempt to get a product out fast.

And it burned more than a few in the company out just as fast.

Colin left for a reason, and even without saying why . . . it’s still a telling reason.

Thus, you now have the announcement that ANet is going to ‘refocus’ it’s efforts. That’s code for, “This is going nowhere fast. Better go back to what made us a success in the first place before everyone abandons the ship . . . employees included.”

I dont understand this either. ANet has good intentions but they’re an extremely slow company. They very rarely release new content and things are often cancelled or left in a bad state for months or years. Warriors and thieves are worse than all other professions in all game types. Dungeons were destroyed for no reason and fractals have turned into swamp-swamp-swamp-profit. Legendary weapons have been cancelled to focus on other content (yet no content has been released since HoT except 1 raid). I don’t understand what they’re doing >.<

I can actually answer this to some extent.

That team was not working on new legendaries as planned for quite some time over the past 5-6 months. They were working on fixing the collections bugs and how a lot of collections were tied to events needing to fail. The later should have never been an issue. This was a mistake Anet made before and they should have learned from it. Unfortunately there are a lot of bugs in the game that have been around since launch especially in event chains. Collections were tied to these event chains and these bugged events needed to be fixed.

I think this system would work if Anet had taken care of exsisting bugs in a timely manner, and if they learned the first time that you can’t tie collections to events that need to fail.

I don’t have a link to the post to back this up, but there was a post about why legendary weapons were being delayed in development because the team had to work out exsisting issues with all the new precursor journeys. My guess is they didn’t start putting in full development time toward the new short bow until January.

Sir Mad.1092:

Galbedir.9178:

But yeah, the coding and journey for each legendary ,I wouldn’t really know what that would involve.

Eh, I’ve worked on the other side of the barrier. How long does it take to script such “quests”? Not long. Really. Once you know exactly what you want and what to do, no more than a few days. One may be enough since there is no new content: all you have to do is to add some new basic NPC at some places (like JP) or to add a simple “if” statement in event scripts.

What I can tell you however is that some gaming companies have really, really, really low standards when it comes to the “invisible” part of the game: the coding. I don’t think that’s the case of Anet, but what do I know after all?

Hmm … random devs comments on different things seems to indicate that least some of the events have very hairy and tangled scripting.

Let me give you an example that hopefully everybody will understand..

There was this “quest” file in a game for a monster race. Basically, 4 monsters would race and the players could bid on one. The quest file was about 12k lines long. Now, since there are 4 monsters, there are also 4 possible ending dialogues (“Monster 1 has won”, “Monster 2 has won”, etc). Instead of replacing that very string by a variable, the guy who coded this c&p’ed the whole script 4 times, making it 12k lines long instead of 3k.

Well that is what can happen when you have somehow whose job requires writing code but they are not a programmer. I haven’t seen the game dev version but I’ve seen some code written by biologists. The code gets the job done but it will likely incite hate in the future.

Of course, any decent coder knows how to use a simple variable (that says a lot about the guy who coded that). Now, I won’t go into details, but a good coder also knows how to use something called “pointers” (it’s a bit complicated, but it allows you to turn a variable name into a variable). Using that trick repeatedly, I was about to reduce the size of this script to less than 1k lines in a few hours. And incidentally, no one cared.

EWWW

The other consideration people are forgetting about is that the team was likely responsible for the modifications and/or corrections of the CURRENT legendary collections as well. That being said, it’s possible that they werent working on just putting out one legendary, but essentially 24 legendaries, 23 of those are revisional changes done to events that require failures instead of successes (due to needed events requiring certain outcomes), items requiring different acquisition methods, etc. Such changes would also be to the latest legendary on a pre-release fashion.

Some really interesting things here, I’d really like Anet to give some insight into this.

You know when they announced the dissolving of the Legendary team, but not when it was dissolved. Could have been something that happened quite a while ago and they’re only telling us now.

I am pretty sure it’s just the collections.

You can trivialize software development down to just one line code changes and even if it’s really just a one line code change, those small changes can trigger effects that have resonating impact on the system as a whole. Start doing enough of those all over the system and you end up with quite a mess.

Modeling a 3D object is only part of it.
After the texture is applied along with any FX or bones (if it has any flex), they then have to scale it for each race, gender x however many base size models that will be using it per race. Then it has to be parented by how it will be held and stored. (x race/gender and their perspective base sizes).

After that part is done they have to then check it for clipping with all the different armors and outfits. Then it is weighted for the game world.

Once that is done then they move onto the animation cycles and python scripting which is probably done by a different team.

Now you have the weapon.

Next is the quest chain, its story, and objects that will be apart of the story along with spawns and triggers of the mobs and npc’s in the quest chain with their animations, sounds, or dialog/text or voice used and FX that may be used by npc or part of the quest/story.

And poor QA has to test it all.

All of that has to have code also, and put in many different files from its damage to crafting steps, non tradable, content, ect

Then there is the shuffling it to different departments that handle the different aspects.

Professional game making touches on many different crafts/trades/professions, and I’m sorry if I missed a step and left something out which I’m sure I have.

Alex.9567:

I think its about resources, I don’t think its about the technical issues involved, that’s just the cover story imo.

my humble theory is that the initial set of legendries were very lucrative for anet, ppl converted RL money to gold to make them and anet made good money off them, that crowds now been milked out/moved on and ppl (in general) have become less susceptive to spending money in the cash shop. anet thought with the expansion they would re-start this process which would then make sense for them to add more legendries, except the expansion didn’t achieve what they thought it would and there are far less ppl now who would spend RL money to get gold for their legendary, so it doesn’t make financial sense for anet to invest in further legendries when they need to put those resources into something that will have a better chance of creating revenue.

hence legendries were cut.

Players bought them outright from the tp and others bought the mats and crafted them.Anet was making a fortune from the pre hot legendries and there income took a nose dive with the new ones.The pre hot legendries brought in more gem sales than they realized i think.

To answer the OP. The people still playing this game would like even more time gating of crafting Legendaries to drive up their prices to reduce PAY to WIN. The opposite of what the company wants.
If anything in this game should be earned, it’s Legendaries.