Guild Wars 2

First the new super adventure box comes out , way too hard , gets nerfed and now the new Teq comes out and one server has completed it…once.

Would be interested in your feedback.

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

Rebound.3409:

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

Or they’ve deemed it as useless as it would be.

OP, a hard encounter doesn’t get beat on day 1 of a patch by most servers. In Guild Wars 1, DOA didn’t get beaten on day 1 by most people either. It took time to learn the fight.

Just the idea that someone is talking about a hard event that’s made to be hard and claiming there’s a problem because only one server has beaten it in a day, means that it’s not that kittene server beat it in a day.

Others will start beating it when they learn how to do it. It only requires some large guild to start organizing things and people to learn the fight.

How would it be useless?

Rebound.3409:

How would it be useless?

Because:

A) GW2 has about the same number of bugs and content tuning issues as other MMOs (WoW, for example), despite having no PTR, and certainly doesn’t have more (that’s an argument you can’t win), AND fixes them more quickly than any other MMO I’ve ever come across, which shows it isn’t needed.

and

B) GW2 pushes out content faster than other MMOs, which would not be possible if it sat on a PTR for weeks before release.

There’s no good evidence that having a PTR/PTS leads to better quality releases in MODERN MMOs (there was back in the day), because now, in 2013, devs can fix live content and push out patches in hours, whereas back when WoW started and so on, they had to plan nearly a year ahead, and an “emergency patch” was often a year something that took weeks – this is why they had the PTR.

I suspect they’d get rid of it now if it wouldn’t cause so much weeping because all the serious guilds use it to practice their boss attempts.

TLDR: PTRs/PTSes are pretty retro and don’t benefit modern games which push out content rapidly.

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

Rebound.3409:

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

It would be useless because of Anet’s production schedule which is intense. Adding in a server wouldn’t give people time to find the bugs. Also there would have to be enough people on that server to stress test the content and that won’t happen till it’s live.

See, if it was a five person dungeon that was being tested, I would agree, that a test server would work, but you got stuff happening faster here than in any other MMO I’ve ever seen. More updates, more stuff being put into the game and changed regularly.

The ONLY way Anet will have less bugs is if they slow down the pace. There’s just not enough time to add another layer of testing. It would slow down releases and again, without enough people testing, it wouldn’t help the open world at all.

And if enough people were on the test server, you’d lose those people from the main game, which requires players to be there anyway.

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

Or they’ve deemed it as useless as it would be.

How on this green earth would a PTR/PTS be useless? Having more testing is always better than not. And having it tested on the players that will play the game into the ground is a good way to go…BEFORE launching it live. GW2 claims to have a QA team, but I don’t think they do their job well at all considering all of the bugs and exploits. I always use WoW as an example, even though I do not play the game nor do I wish to, but Blizzard has had a PTR available for years. Their new content doesnt bug out and isnt as exploitable as GW2.

No, not having a PTR is either a budget reason, Arenanet feels their stuff is bugless and superior(laugh), or they just can’t be bothered with one.

A PTR would improve content at an alarming rate.

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

It would be useless because of Anet’s production schedule which is intense. Adding in a server wouldn’t give people time to find the bugs. Also there would have to be enough people on that server to stress test the content and that won’t happen till it’s live.

See, if it was a five person dungeon that was being tested, I would agree, that a test server would work, but you got stuff happening faster here than in any other MMO I’ve ever seen. More updates, more stuff being put into the game and changed regularly.

The ONLY way Anet will have less bugs is if they slow down the pace. There’s just not enough time to add another layer of testing. It would slow down releases and again, without enough people testing, it wouldn’t help the open world at all.

And if enough people were on the test server, you’d lose those people from the main game, which requires players to be there anyway.

So… what you are saying is that you believe arenanet is concerned with quantity over quality. According to your logic, they would rather haphazardly push out lots of content and forgoe proper testing.

If this mentality is indeed the case, then the two week content schedule is a a terrible idea because any company that embraces quantity over quality is terrible.

From what I have observed over the past year: Arenanet has a big problem in gauging the speed and ability in which players consume and complete content. Either it is rediculous in difficulty(or HP sponges), or we eat it like cake. They worked on GW1 for years..GW2 has been one a year already. I think they should have a good idea of the happy middle where content isnt consumed so fast, and it isnt insanely difficult.

But I agree, hard content shouldnt be beatable in a day. But people are posting bugs about tequatl like crazy.

cesmode.4257:

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

It would be useless because of Anet’s production schedule which is intense. Adding in a server wouldn’t give people time to find the bugs. Also there would have to be enough people on that server to stress test the content and that won’t happen till it’s live.

See, if it was a five person dungeon that was being tested, I would agree, that a test server would work, but you got stuff happening faster here than in any other MMO I’ve ever seen. More updates, more stuff being put into the game and changed regularly.

The ONLY way Anet will have less bugs is if they slow down the pace. There’s just not enough time to add another layer of testing. It would slow down releases and again, without enough people testing, it wouldn’t help the open world at all.

And if enough people were on the test server, you’d lose those people from the main game, which requires players to be there anyway.

So… what you are saying is that you believe arenanet is concerned with quantity over quality. According to your logic, they would rather haphazardly push out lots of content and forgoe proper testing.

No, I believe that Arena Net is releasing content too fast. That doesn’t mean they’re concerned with quantity over quality. I think they’re more concerned with keeping people logging in, which is quite a different matter.

Anet is probably looking to up and maintain concurrency figures (I actually know this to be true, whether you believe me or not). Concurrency figures are very important to Anet.

So anything that gets more people in and playing is something they see as good…but they don’t believe the releases they’re making aren’t quality releases. They’re just bug fixing them on the fly…and they do it fast. Much faster than most games fix these things.

You know, I had the same problem in Rift. They’d did updates like every single night for a very very long time.

And they had a public test server.

C) PTRs effectively leak probable updates to the game. Having this information be available to some players ahead of most others would have drastic repercussions on the trading post and economy in general.

D) because play on PTRs leads to zero character progression or loot, both the number of players that would be willing to devote their time to it, and their ability to correctly find and document bug, would be very low.

GrandmaFunk.3052:

C) PTRs effectively leak probable updates to the game. Having this information be available to some players ahead of most others would have drastic repercussions on the trading post and economy in general.

D) because play on PTRs leads to zero character progression or loot, both the number of players that would be willing to devote their time to it, and their ability to correctly find and document bug, would be very low.

Incorrect on all fronts.

I was an avid PTR tester in WoW for years.

We did not suffer an economy issues. Infact, the economy was much more healthy and people complained about prices a lot less. I cannot remember a time when people whined about prices on the auction house.

Sure, content is known before release, but it isnt a leak. It is common knowledge at that point. How is that different than Dulfy getting her hands on this stuff before release? When they announced that Tequatl is getting a remake, about two or three weeks ago, that is the time to PTR it. I would prefer a few more weeks of PTR, but again this quality over quantity mentality only works on conventional content releases, and not two week rapid fire crappy quality releases.

Any many people hopped on PTR. Im not sure the size of arenanets QA team, but I bet it is a fraction of the size of playerbase that will PTR. If they have 20 QA people, Im willing to bet that a game with 3 million players will have at least a few thousand willing to PTR.

Vayne.8563:

cesmode.4257:

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

It would be useless because of Anet’s production schedule which is intense. Adding in a server wouldn’t give people time to find the bugs. Also there would have to be enough people on that server to stress test the content and that won’t happen till it’s live.

See, if it was a five person dungeon that was being tested, I would agree, that a test server would work, but you got stuff happening faster here than in any other MMO I’ve ever seen. More updates, more stuff being put into the game and changed regularly.

The ONLY way Anet will have less bugs is if they slow down the pace. There’s just not enough time to add another layer of testing. It would slow down releases and again, without enough people testing, it wouldn’t help the open world at all.

And if enough people were on the test server, you’d lose those people from the main game, which requires players to be there anyway.

So… what you are saying is that you believe arenanet is concerned with quantity over quality. According to your logic, they would rather haphazardly push out lots of content and forgoe proper testing.

No, I believe that Arena Net is releasing content too fast. That doesn’t mean they’re concerned with quantity over quality. I think they’re more concerned with keeping people logging in, which is quite a different matter.

Anet is probably looking to up and maintain concurrency figures (I actually know this to be true, whether you believe me or not). Concurrency figures are very important to Anet.

So anything that gets more people in and playing is something they see as good…but they don’t believe the releases they’re making aren’t quality releases. They’re just bug fixing them on the fly…and they do it fast. Much faster than most games fix these things.

You know, I had the same problem in Rift. They’d did updates like every single night for a very very long time.

And they had a public test server.

So..they are then concerned with player concurrancy. What happened to “we will release it when its ready” mentality. With that quote aside I still think that concerning yourselves with player concurancy contradicts the idea of quality. “Well, we need to keep these guys busy in the game…” “But Boss, Tequatl isnt ready, we need a few more weeks”. “Sorry, you dont have it. We need to keep players logging in. Prime it for live and get it out there for Sept 17th. You have three days. We will patch it later.”

Then overflow servers ensue. Bugs are realized. Possible exploits are realized. Forums are filled with negativity and frustration. Arenanet patches in a day or two or three…

Compound this cycle over the course of months or a year..and you have a bed rep for quality.

cesmode.4257:

Vayne.8563:

cesmode.4257:

Vayne.8563:

Rebound.3409:

I still don’t see why it would be useless. Compared to making content very few like or fine tuning it based apon a general impression players have to suit their player base better. If guilds practice boss runs on PTR good for them…it’s their time spent on the same game. Anyone can practice if they want to…as long as it guarantees a better polished result custom tailored for this community

It would be useless because of Anet’s production schedule which is intense. Adding in a server wouldn’t give people time to find the bugs. Also there would have to be enough people on that server to stress test the content and that won’t happen till it’s live.

See, if it was a five person dungeon that was being tested, I would agree, that a test server would work, but you got stuff happening faster here than in any other MMO I’ve ever seen. More updates, more stuff being put into the game and changed regularly.

The ONLY way Anet will have less bugs is if they slow down the pace. There’s just not enough time to add another layer of testing. It would slow down releases and again, without enough people testing, it wouldn’t help the open world at all.

And if enough people were on the test server, you’d lose those people from the main game, which requires players to be there anyway.

So… what you are saying is that you believe arenanet is concerned with quantity over quality. According to your logic, they would rather haphazardly push out lots of content and forgoe proper testing.

No, I believe that Arena Net is releasing content too fast. That doesn’t mean they’re concerned with quantity over quality. I think they’re more concerned with keeping people logging in, which is quite a different matter.

Anet is probably looking to up and maintain concurrency figures (I actually know this to be true, whether you believe me or not). Concurrency figures are very important to Anet.

So anything that gets more people in and playing is something they see as good…but they don’t believe the releases they’re making aren’t quality releases. They’re just bug fixing them on the fly…and they do it fast. Much faster than most games fix these things.

You know, I had the same problem in Rift. They’d did updates like every single night for a very very long time.

And they had a public test server.

So..they are then concerned with player concurrancy. What happened to “we will release it when its ready” mentality. With that quote aside I still think that concerning yourselves with player concurancy contradicts the idea of quality. “Well, we need to keep these guys busy in the game…” “But Boss, Tequatl isnt ready, we need a few more weeks”. “Sorry, you dont have it. We need to keep players logging in. Prime it for live and get it out there for Sept 17th. You have three days. We will patch it later.”

Then overflow servers ensue. Bugs are realized. Possible exploits are realized. Forums are filled with negativity and frustration. Arenanet patches in a day or two or three…

Compound this cycle over the course of months or a year..and you have a bed rep for quality.

They said we’ll release the game when it’s ready, and they didn’t. They released it due to market pressures.

When it’s ready is a funny word. Ready for what? The whole idea of saying when it’s ready is to let people know that it’s not coming soon.

But they released this game probably a year early. You didn’t learn from that?

Vayne.8563:

They said we’ll release the game when it’s ready, and they didn’t. They released it due to market pressures.

When it’s ready is a funny word. Ready for what? The whole idea of saying when it’s ready is to let people know that it’s not coming soon.

But they released this game probably a year early. You didn’t learn from that?

And what game is any different? None!

Rigel.3092:

Vayne.8563:

They said we’ll release the game when it’s ready, and they didn’t. They released it due to market pressures.

When it’s ready is a funny word. Ready for what? The whole idea of saying when it’s ready is to let people know that it’s not coming soon.

But they released this game probably a year early. You didn’t learn from that?

And what game is any different? None!

Yep, I agree. No game releases without releasing when it’s profitable to release. I’d like to see anyone here invest millions or even hundreds of thousands of dollars into a project and then not wait to release it to the right moment…for business reasons. It’s not reasonable to expect it.

Anet released before MoP came out, because if MoP was a success, they were sunk if they released after and they couldn’t take the chance. At least that’s my opinion on the matter.

So again, they will release content when its profitable for them..at a fast paced schedule to keep us checking things off the achievement list…rather than spending the proper time to QA the stuff and give us quality.

Everything youre saying supports the notion that they would rather pump out piles of dung in hopes to increase player concurrancy and money, rather than giving us quality experience.

And while games release the actual title when it is profitable…that is true..but after the fact, good games test their content. Not saying GW2 is a bad game ofcourse, but it definately has a quality problem with the amount of bugs and exploits they need to scramble to patch.

They only test that Gem Store merchandise works as intended. Everything else doesn’t get tested because it doesn’t make them money.

the problem here, its no new content. i would like to play challenging content. but not an a boring drake i killed 100 times.
just a new mechanic wont solve the problem that u get bored playing the same looking stuff over and over.

on something new i would try till its down. but first its nothing new. and second u cant choose your player. u r forced to play 90% of the time on an overflow server where u cant even talk to everyone.

Just think about it though.. how many times have they had to patch the game and nerf farming spots because people exploit…the speed runs in cof early on..hopping through some walls and skipping bosses entirely. Farming the first boss in TA over and over. Letting an event playout as long as possible just to kill the mobs in Orr rather than completing… They couldnt see this coming? Seriously? If youre QA team was worth anything or actually tested, you wouldnt have these problems. Or simple bugs for events, chains that get stuck, etc..for months..maybe 9 months with every patch they were fixing event chains that got stuck. It almost seemed like they would do this as routine. If they had a PTR they might have been able to weed out some of this before it hit live and frustrated players.

Its common sense. And its a testiment to your priorities as a developer. Do you want to have the ability to sit infront of the cameras and press and say “we are doing something no one has ever done, pumping out content every 2 weeks” or do you want to say “Our game is bug free”…or at least minimal in the amount of bugs and exploits.

Jordy.1570:

the problem here, its no new content. i would like to play challenging content. but not an a boring drake i killed 100 times.
just a new mechanic wont solve the problem that u get bored playing the same looking stuff over and over.

on something new i would try till its down. but first its nothing new. and second u cant choose your player. u r forced to play 90% of the time on an overflow server where u cant even talk to everyone.

I agree with the overflow. Id rather play on my server. Not overflow.

cesmode.4257:

How on this green earth would a PTR/PTS be useless? Having more testing is always better than not.

Testing doesn’t fix bugs. Fixing bugs fixes bugs.

They have a database full of more bugs than you could possibly find in a month of PTR, that they have no time to fix.

cesmode.4257:

Do you want to have the ability to sit infront of the cameras and press and say “we are doing something no one has ever done, pumping out content every 2 weeks” or do you want to say “Our game is bug free”…or at least minimal in the amount of bugs and exploits.

No game is remotely bug-free. The idea you’re pushing here is just complete and utter nonsense.

GW2 is not “more buggy” or “more exploit-filled” than other MMOs. Particularly not when you consider the player-base size which means bugs and exploits are found more quickly.

GW2’s devs have decided that they’d rather test internally, then fix what slips through that in the live game, because that means a shorter time taken to release content, and more player satisfaction.

I mean, you can claim you’re not happy here, but are you any less happy than some WoW player who had a bug slip through the PTR and go live? Of course you aren’t. PTRs do not prevent bugs or exploits. WoW is proof of that.

You talk about “heaps of dung”, and really, what a lot of nonsense you’re spouting. The updates GW2 has have been pretty high quality, and the exploit and bug fixes are nothing you don’t see in other games, games that often take multiple months between content releases or serious gameplay patches.

EDIT – Also you are DEAD WRONG when you say “more testing is always better”, because no, you have to sweep through the data produced by the testing to find the problems.

Do you have any idea how much work that is? I don’t think you do. It’s extremely significant work, and most of what you find is one of the:

A) Whining/whinging about things which aren’t actual problems.

B) Misreporting existing features or issues as “bugs” or broken.

C) A zillion different users reporting the same bug ikittenllion different ways, with no standards, no consistency, and most of them providing no useful detail beyond “Didn’t work right” or “is broken”.

That is not particularly valuable.

@Eurhetemec…so then instead of testing content with a larger pool of testers than their small QA team and reporting bugs…we encourage the behavior of haphazardly pushing out content that will inevitability break in some fashion just because we want to look cool in front of cameras and say “We will pushout content every two weeks”.

My god man..do you read what you write? I write SQL for a living. I pull data from databases, mold them into reports so overpaid directors can read them in a pretty format. If i didn’t proofread, test, or UAT, Id be fired.

We just rolled out a new platform here. We performed UAT. We found bugs, we reported, they fixed before go-live, and all is well in the universe. Do you think that this is a worse alternative? Do you think that not having some sort of UAT or PTR is better than having the actual end-users test the stuff?

Wow. Im going to exit this thread because clearly the mentality of quantity vs quality, and not wanting to put forth proper effort to debug and test is beginning to be toxic around here. Not sure you all understand what you are saying.

cesmode.4257:

So again, they will release content when its profitable for them..at a fast paced schedule to keep us checking things off the achievement list…rather than spending the proper time to QA the stuff and give us quality.

Everything youre saying supports the notion that they would rather pump out piles of dung in hopes to increase player concurrancy and money, rather than giving us quality experience.

And while games release the actual title when it is profitable…that is true..but after the fact, good games test their content. Not saying GW2 is a bad game ofcourse, but it definately has a quality problem with the amount of bugs and exploits they need to scramble to patch.

Except that it’s not dung. YOU don’t like it. That’s the difference. There are people who do like stuff. Last I saw, people liked the Bazaar of the Four Winds. There are threads on these forums thanking Anet for the new Tquatl fight. There are threads that thanked them for SAB.

You don’t like the content, that doesn’t make the content dung.

Anet just need a QA department.

Vayne.8563:

cesmode.4257:

So again, they will release content when its profitable for them..at a fast paced schedule to keep us checking things off the achievement list…rather than spending the proper time to QA the stuff and give us quality.

Everything youre saying supports the notion that they would rather pump out piles of dung in hopes to increase player concurrancy and money, rather than giving us quality experience.

And while games release the actual title when it is profitable…that is true..but after the fact, good games test their content. Not saying GW2 is a bad game ofcourse, but it definately has a quality problem with the amount of bugs and exploits they need to scramble to patch.

Except that it’s not dung. YOU don’t like it. That’s the difference. There are people who do like stuff. Last I saw, people liked the Bazaar of the Four Winds. There are threads on these forums thanking Anet for the new Tquatl fight. There are threads that thanked them for SAB.

You don’t like the content, that doesn’t make the content dung.

A few positive threads popping up doesnt make the content good.

Holding the new teq fight or the invasions up to a traditional content release such as new zones, quests/content/missions, new skills, classes, races, new dungeons, new raids.. Theres no comparison.

You people keep saying “YOU dont like it, but others do”. Thanks for calling the kettle black. Yes, ofcourse there are people that like it. We are talking about the playerbase as a whole. These content updates are not slam dunks. (just throwing a number out there, brace yourself), 80% of the playerbase doesnt LOVE these content updates. Its more 50/50. And that IS a problem for a game that wants player concurrancy. These content updates arent getting praise from the majority of folks. Its so split down the middle… that really wont bode well for the longevity of the game if it keeps up

cesmode.4257:

@Eurhetemec…so then instead of testing content with a larger pool of testers than their small QA team and reporting bugs…we encourage the behavior of haphazardly pushing out content that will inevitability break in some fashion just because we want to look cool in front of cameras and say “We will pushout content every two weeks”.

My god man..do you read what you write? I write SQL for a living. I pull data from databases, mold them into reports so overpaid directors can read them in a pretty format. If i didn’t proofread, test, or UAT, Id be fired.

We just rolled out a new platform here. We performed UAT. We found bugs, we reported, they fixed before go-live, and all is well in the universe. Do you think that this is a worse alternative? Do you think that not having some sort of UAT or PTR is better than having the actual end-users test the stuff?

Wow. Im going to exit this thread because clearly the mentality of quantity vs quality, and not wanting to put forth proper effort to debug and test is beginning to be toxic around here. Not sure you all understand what you are saying.

I understand what I’m saying. I’m not sure you do.

You keep using the word quality. Quality of content is very different than whether they content has bugs or doesn’t have bugs. Skyrim is one of the most popular games of all time..and it was buggy as hell. Bethesda games are known for their bugs. No one says they’re low quality games. They’re high quality games that happen to be buggy.

There’s a difference between quality of content and quality of code.

When one person makes something, it’s easy to take credit/blame for everything that’s going on. When a dozen people are working on a project, it’s something else entirely. Because there are more people doing more things, sometimes at cross purposes. The more people and faster the schedule the harder it is to organize and the more likely things will interfere with each other.

It doesn’t make the quality of the content bad. It just means that the program will have some bugs. Anet identifies and fixes these bugs pretty quickly.

I think your expectations are probably unreasonable.

No, they are pretty reasonable expectations. I expect well-thought decisions to be made, executed, and the “updates” to be tested. Thats what a good company would do.

They have dynamic events where the mobs drop lots of stuff. They couldnt see a few steps down the road where people will intentionally fail the events to gain more loot? Or the TA first boss speed runs? Or glitching CoF early on? They couldnt see this coming?

Or how about when fractals were released. It was completely player gated. Chris Whiteside responded to my very own reddit post during the AMA and told me this was a mistake on their part. Me being a simple player picked this apart in 10 minutes after the launch of the update. And they spent months working on the fractal update, with a whole team of industry vets. Me, a simple player saw what a team of industry vets could not.

I expect a company worth their spit to see the big picture more so than me. They dropped the ball on that fractal update. Inexcusable to be honest because it required a patch to fix how the ‘gating’ works.

I expect quality in decision making, content and code.

cesmode.4257:

No, they are pretty reasonable expectations. I expect well-thought decisions to be made, executed, and the “updates” to be tested. Thats what a good company would do.

They have dynamic events where the mobs drop lots of stuff. They couldnt see a few steps down the road where people will intentionally fail the events to gain more loot? Or the TA first boss speed runs? Or glitching CoF early on? They couldnt see this coming?

Or how about when fractals were released. It was completely player gated. Chris Whiteside responded to my very own reddit post during the AMA and told me this was a mistake on their part. Me being a simple player picked this apart in 10 minutes after the launch of the update. And they spent months working on the fractal update, with a whole team of industry vets. Me, a simple player saw what a team of industry vets could not.

I expect a company worth their spit to see the big picture more so than me. They dropped the ball on that fractal update. Inexcusable to be honest because it required a patch to fix how the ‘gating’ works.

I expect quality in decision making, content and code.

Everyone makes mistakes and I do mean EVERYONE. Those who don’t tolerate the mistakes others make, aren’t being reasonable. Everyone should know everything, but people work on crazy schedules. People have stuff they’re thinking about that precludes thinking about other stuff.

I expect people to make mistakes, because I know they will. Anyone who thinks they won’t isn’t being reasonable.

And Chris Whiteside said he made a mistake as a political statement to appease people complaining. I’m still not sure he believes he made a mistake. That’s another issue altogether. There are many times in my professional life that I’ve said my mistake or taken responsibility for a mistake I knew wasn’t mine. Obviously there are also times I’ve made mistakes and I’ve owned up to them.

The point is, I’ve never seen ANY MMO that hasn’t had this kinds of problems quite regularly. You’d probably be right if what you’re asking for is the rule, but if you’re asking for something that very very (if any) MMO companies can/have delivered, then I’d say it’s unreasonable.

You know, my favorite baseball team lost some games. I think all the players aren’t good enough because they lost some games. They won some games too, but I’m going to focus on the games they lost. Because obviously if they were any good, they wouldn’t have made those mistakes, because I expect more of them.

It doesn’t sound any better when you look at it objectively.

First, baseball is boring.

Second: Im not calling myself a mastermind or a pre-cog, but oneismple player catching a huge design problem in 10 minutes vs a design team that had months to plan and execute….eh, I dont consider that mistake that a human can make. If you have many people making decisions and coming up with ideas, chances are someone has to have seen this coming. All of their decision makers cannot be THIS short sighted. Its a simple concept that I was able to see right off the bat. Many were involved with that decision. Either the decision makers didnt care to listen to reason, or they were all incompetant and they should hire me as an outside consultant because I do see things a few steps down the road.

Ive predicted this next one a few times before…

We are slowly getting ascended gear. We are told that its probably, most likely the last tier of gear. We also have been told that the level cap very well could be raised some day. Arenanet has two options: Scale our level 80 gear to the new level cap. Or, make us grind for a new level 90 ascended gear set. This will be a hot one on the forums and I want you to remember me calling this way in advance. I said tihs back in November when they first announced ascended gear. Once we they raise the level cap, nothing is stopping them from making us grind new gear (like any other MMO).

You will have concrete evidence of your gear grind there. It would be irrefutable.

Of course this is all speculation, but it is a reasonable conclusion to come to.

SirusDibley.3716:

First the new super adventure box comes out , way too hard , gets nerfed and now the new Teq comes out and one server has completed it…once.

Would be interested in your feedback.

The box wasn’t too hard before patch and it is a joke right now. I did the W2 several times before patch. Unfortunately I didn’t run hard mode before the patch, but I think I would be able to finish this too. Probably died more often, but who cares?
Right not the only challenge is hard mode, because you are not allowed to jump every where (until you know where it is save it becomes fairly easy)In normal mode there is no challenge anymore, because of to much QQ in the forum.

Same for Teq, yes no one killed him within the first 8 hours (?) But now some got managed to do so and more and more servers will succeed, too. Stop crying about something at the same day the patch arrives (unless it is a bug) that it is too hard and no one can do it because it is not true. I hate it, that some people think the game has to be made so easy that even my cat can play them.

I hope Anet doesnt change Teq

Rebound.3409:

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

They need to start a player test server like now and let players play the upcoming patches before they add them in and put in a new forum section for feedback on that test server and the patches they are letting players test, that way they know what mistakes they make before they make them and it will save them a lot of time.

In my opinion an easy way to do this is do free player transfers for 1 month and take the lowest populated server and let it know that it is going to be used as the test server, let the players know that they have to transfer, players that are inactive on that server get transferred automatically to a designated server and in about a month we would have a test server.

Very simple Anet. Do we players have to think of everything for you???

cesmode.4257:

First, baseball is boring.

Second: Im not calling myself a mastermind or a pre-cog, but oneismple player catching a huge design problem in 10 minutes vs a design team that had months to plan and execute….eh, I dont consider that mistake that a human can make. If you have many people making decisions and coming up with ideas, chances are someone has to have seen this coming. All of their decision makers cannot be THIS short sighted. Its a simple concept that I was able to see right off the bat. Many were involved with that decision. Either the decision makers didnt care to listen to reason, or they were all incompetant and they should hire me as an outside consultant because I do see things a few steps down the road.

Ive predicted this next one a few times before…

We are slowly getting ascended gear. We are told that its probably, most likely the last tier of gear. We also have been told that the level cap very well could be raised some day. Arenanet has two options: Scale our level 80 gear to the new level cap. Or, make us grind for a new level 90 ascended gear set. This will be a hot one on the forums and I want you to remember me calling this way in advance. I said tihs back in November when they first announced ascended gear. Once we they raise the level cap, nothing is stopping them from making us grind new gear (like any other MMO).

You will have concrete evidence of your gear grind there. It would be irrefutable.

Of course this is all speculation, but it is a reasonable conclusion to come to.

Well if they do that, they do that, and you’d be right. I’d pat you on the back and either play the game or play another MMO that does things differently. I don’t frankly see that happening, and that’s the problem.

Anet wanted to innovate more than they did, and it didn’t work. Sucks to be them. I see them as victims of the fan base more than the fan base as victims of Anet. Anet made a business decision to appease the majority. Is that what they really wanted to do? Who knows…but I doubt it.

I agree that they wanted to innovate more than they did. They really should have stuck to their guns…on everything.

Part of the problem is that prior to launch arenanet loved to get infront of cameras and tell epeople how the game is going to be..what they are going to do, what they wont do. They made bold statements, they said “We. Will. Not. Do. <insert here>”. Sure, part of this is referring to the manifesto because their statements are so bold there. So as a community, we held them to those standards, not giving them an inch of wiggleroom to play the black/white/grey game..walking a fine line as they are currently doing.

Comparing to other games, they do not make as many bold statements concerning their design direction. A game dev will say “We will have dungeons and raids at launch, raids will be difficult and reward the best gear”. Most of these other devs are not saying “Our raids will be vastly different than other MMOs because of XYZ…no more of ABC in these raids as you are accustomed to. We will do things differently and change the genre”.

So because they made bold statements and teetered off of those statements is the reason why so many of us are up in arms about EVERYTHING.

I go to a game like neverwhere where I have received everything I expected. Sure, game got bugs.. But I wasnt lied to, or rather I dont feel mislead at all.

EQN needs to watch it with their big promises. Same with Wildstar, although I have a feeling Carbine wont falter from their design path…they really dont give a crap about the casual and will make that game for the hardcore. But we’ll see.

Its when companies make bold statements and promises to us…lures us in with those..and then its not as they said it would be. Thats what gets us.

Reading most of the posts I have noticed that people are failing at one computing science logical error. I can find a bug in 1min of playing a game or using a software. Great I found the bug what do I have to do now?

Now I have to isolate the problem and fix it. How hard can that be? Well lets see a game like GW2 has about 1 billion or more lines of code some of which could be executing by thread. Which means there is a large number of possible ways for something to go wrong. Especially if it is Thread based.

As my computing science professors would say it takes minutes to find a bug, but could take months to fix it. Even my 500 lines of code would have 3-10 bugs and each attempt to fix a bug would usually produce another bug. It took a usual computing science major 5-10 passes (complete rewrites of code) to debug it 99% even then there would be 1-2 bugs that would slip through. Coding is by far not easy and the more people testing it (live has more) the more bugs can be found. Some bugs would be associated with other bugs when you don’t realize it that they are.

Some other bugs would require such a massive change that it isn’t worth the effort and possible side-effects (more bugs) to fix it.

Once you start doing programming you realize quickly that bug fixing is the hardest task.

Also,Anet has stated that the Living Story teams are the smallest development team. There are other teams that are producing larger content along with testing and patch work. These larger teams work are put in with the Living Story team’s when it is completed. So basically we don’t know how much of the work is done by the Living Story Team and how much of it is done by the other teams.

Some other bugs such as the shark SP in Sparkfly fen were too hard to fix so they changed the entire SP to stop it from constantly breaking. The wiki also contains still information that has changed. Such as some juvenile in WvW BLs could be killed or would attack you. This was an anomaly that has been fixed, but wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

Content is not supposed to be faceroll. Know what you did back in the day with games like Metal Gear Solid and Legend of Zelda? You’d try. You had to try to succeed and then if you failed, you’d need to try again and try harder next time.

I am glad to see content finally being released and not facerolled day 1. SAB is tough? Maybe you aren’t as good at jumping puzzles as you thought in GW2. Granted their platforming leaves a bit to be desired, but rather making threads about how the content needs better testing or needs nerfs, why not kitten your own abilities as a player and decide if you need to adjust to do better in the future.

This wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but at the majority of the forum-whiners as a whole.

I feel a lot of people that think pre-testing is useless is kinda like saying, it’s useless to have clinical trials on newly developed medicine, we should just put the medicine out into the public and see how it does with real people then iron and fix out the bugs from that information.

It is the responsible thing to do.

TehPwnerer.7215:

Content is not supposed to be faceroll. Know what you did back in the day with games like Metal Gear Solid and Legend of Zelda? You’d try. You had to try to succeed and then if you failed, you’d need to try again and try harder next time.

I am glad to see content finally being released and not facerolled day 1. SAB is tough? Maybe you aren’t as good at jumping puzzles as you thought in GW2. Granted their platforming leaves a bit to be desired, but rather making threads about how the content needs better testing or needs nerfs, why not kitten your own abilities as a player and decide if you need to adjust to do better in the future.

This wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but at the majority of the forum-whiners as a whole.

Teq is a massive event that requires a team effort of people who are largely uncoordinated PUG’s. It’s not a single player game where your success or failure is entirely do to your own gameplay. The same is also true for a single player/coordinated team game like the SAB. Please stop comparing the two people.

The new Tequatl is akin to a raid boss in other MMOs. It requires a level of organization, communication, and cooperation that is extremely difficult to get from 80+ random people.

The new Tequatl is a fight designed for large guild groups being overseen by multiple commanders on voice chat.

Vayne.8563:

No one says they’re low quality games.

I do. I say Bethesda games aren’t terribly high quality. They just have pretty graphics… or sometimes not even that. I firmly believe they have been losing quality as time goes on to the point where you basically can’t even lose Skyrim.

People have been crying out for harder content for months now. The new Teq fight is a response to that. If everyone had been able to do it on their first try, or even their first few tries, it would be a failure.

Equally the SAB nerf was a relatively minor change to some specific aspects. It didn’t make a huge change overall and it’s a long way from what the entitled ‘we should be able to get all the achievements just for logging on’ crowd wanted.

cesmode.4257:

First, baseball is boring.

Second: Im not calling myself a mastermind or a pre-cog, but oneismple player catching a huge design problem in 10 minutes vs a design team that had months to plan and execute….eh, I dont consider that mistake that a human can make. If you have many people making decisions and coming up with ideas, chances are someone has to have seen this coming. All of their decision makers cannot be THIS short sighted. Its a simple concept that I was able to see right off the bat. Many were involved with that decision. Either the decision makers didnt care to listen to reason, or they were all incompetant and they should hire me as an outside consultant because I do see things a few steps down the road.

Ive predicted this next one a few times before…

We are slowly getting ascended gear. We are told that its probably, most likely the last tier of gear. We also have been told that the level cap very well could be raised some day. Arenanet has two options: Scale our level 80 gear to the new level cap. Or, make us grind for a new level 90 ascended gear set. This will be a hot one on the forums and I want you to remember me calling this way in advance. I said tihs back in November when they first announced ascended gear. Once we they raise the level cap, nothing is stopping them from making us grind new gear (like any other MMO).

You will have concrete evidence of your gear grind there. It would be irrefutable.

Of course this is all speculation, but it is a reasonable conclusion to come to.

We get it your da expert inda house.. yet you have absolutely no idea of what is actually involved in testing software, let alone something as complex as an MMO.
The true test of anything that gets pushed out is when its live.. live stress testing places the code into high demand, high stress and with millions and millions of interactions going on every second that’s when something like cascading coding may emerge not when joe on his workstation is cycling a small portion of code to see if x = y then move z ……

A PTR has uses but its not the be all and end all of software testing in fact in 10years of playing MMO’s and using test servers pretty much every single one still rolls content out bugs and exploits even after months of PTR release.
Simple fact is by its very nature an MMO is a beast to tame.. everything added after release has the potential to cause issues elsewhere in the coding and like any other MMO out there always does… show me one that doesn’t – and don’t tell me WoW doesn’t cos although I’ve never played that bag of tosh even I remember all the outcry when servers went down for a whole day for maintenance, and 8 hours every week for this that etc… wow has been hacked over and over and still is… but its still a success in the MMO world all the same.
I hate bugs and exploits and GW2 certainly tests my patience at times but even MMO’s like Wow, DDO, EQ etc etc that have ben around the block many times still push out content that has bugs in it.. some you notice some you don’t and some you learn to ignore.

So please quit the “ANET QA is rubbish blah blah blah”.. no one forces you to log in and if you can do better go do something about it.

As it happens if anyone really, genuinely thinks they could do a better job you’ve got the opportunity to prove it. Anet are currently advertising for a QA Team Lead, QA Tester and QA Software Engineer: http://www.arena.net/

here are some issues i’ve gathered from the last 4 patches. note that these were not the only bugs, just some of the more obvious that should have been spotted when they tested their feature even once.

in the september 17th patch, this bug was introduced and quickly hotfixed:
-Fixed a bug that allowed the Iron Hide buff to persist after a player stopped using a flame ram.

in the september 3rd patch, a couple of bugs regarding SAB achievements were introduced and quickly hotfixed:
-Fixed a bug that prevented players from completing the Bachelor of Baubles achievement. (among others)

in the august 20th patch, this bug was introduced and quickly hotfixed:
-Fixed an issue whereby some mini-pets could enter combat.

in the august 6th patch, this bug was introduced and quickly hotfixed:
-Runes of Perplexity now correctly apply confusion to the enemy target instead of the player.

Rebound.3409:

They are testing on us obviously.

A PTR system is way above their income apparently.

That would be the Agile thing to do.

Vayne.8563:

Or they’ve deemed it as useless as it would be.

The industry of much more successful games than GW2 have proven a public test server IS the way to go.

cesmode.4257:

I agree that they wanted to innovate more than they did. They really should have stuck to their guns…on everything.

Part of the problem is that prior to launch arenanet loved to get infront of cameras and tell epeople how the game is going to be..what they are going to do, what they wont do. They made bold statements, they said “We. Will. Not. Do. <insert here>”. Sure, part of this is referring to the manifesto because their statements are so bold there. So as a community, we held them to those standards, not giving them an inch of wiggleroom to play the black/white/grey game..walking a fine line as they are currently doing.

Comparing to other games, they do not make as many bold statements concerning their design direction. A game dev will say “We will have dungeons and raids at launch, raids will be difficult and reward the best gear”. Most of these other devs are not saying “Our raids will be vastly different than other MMOs because of XYZ…no more of ABC in these raids as you are accustomed to. We will do things differently and change the genre”.

So because they made bold statements and teetered off of those statements is the reason why so many of us are up in arms about EVERYTHING.

I go to a game like neverwhere where I have received everything I expected. Sure, game got bugs.. But I wasnt lied to, or rather I dont feel mislead at all.

EQN needs to watch it with their big promises. Same with Wildstar, although I have a feeling Carbine wont falter from their design path…they really dont give a crap about the casual and will make that game for the hardcore. But we’ll see.

Its when companies make bold statements and promises to us…lures us in with those..and then its not as they said it would be. Thats what gets us.

Other games made big and bold promises too. Some of them, like Rift, were clever and created a video where fans made the comments and they published them…absolving them of saying stuff…but it was still their promo video…and in my mind, they went against what they said.

They said open world stuff would be front and center and it was more just an additional gimmick to make leveling better, so you could get to raiding. And I was disappointed.

You say other companies haven’t made these bold statements, but I’m not sure that I’d agree. I’m not sure how closely you watched what other devs said about their game.

TSW said there would be no levels. Well, sure, they took away the NUMBERS, but still had experience points and skill points and skills unlocking at different levels. Saying there will be no levels in our game is a bold statement. It was one of the major selling points of that game. But to me, there were still levels, and the company was wrong.

I have yet to see a company that has lived up 100% to every single thing they’ve ever said.

I PTS would be ideal but I don’t think it is necessary with the content they currently put out, they are basically small content mini-games. If they put out several dungeons or new modes in PvP, I hope to got they test that thoroughly.