Expected vs Actual Combat Mechanics

Expected vs Actual Combat Mechanics

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Shockwave.1230

Shockwave.1230

I’m frequently having my expectations let down when I am told by descriptions what a rune, sigil, skill, or trait’s behavior is only to find that is not true.

I think it’s rediculous that this game has released over 10 months ago, and there are dozens of discrepencies that exist. On top of that numerous discrepencies have existed since launch…

Just looks through the different sigils, runes, skills, and traits on the wiki. It’s incredibly disheartening that more care is not invested into how skill behavior is communicated to the community.

I believe ArenaNet has higher standards than what they are showing. I would hope more attention is being paid to this. There doesn’t need to be a hugh patch to fix these, simply pushing out a few description updates to match the actual behavior or vise-versa every week would have lead to most of these discrepencies being gone.

Where is the Quality?
I believe ANet cares more about their users than to have their game lying to players, in some cases for over 10 months.

Sylvari Elementalist – Mystree Duskbloom (Lv 80)
Norn Guardian – Aurora Lustyr (Lv 80)
Mia A Shadows Glow – Human Thief (Lv 80)

Expected vs Actual Combat Mechanics

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Esplen.3940

Esplen.3940

You realize spending money on having people fix those descriptions is more effort than it’s worth. There will always be a way to perceive something in a different light. Look at how they finally managed to do WvW Rewards because everyone had a different opinion on how they worked and most people STILL didn’t understand after 2 fixes to the descriptions.

Expected vs Actual Combat Mechanics

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Im Mudbone.1437

Im Mudbone.1437

In my humblest of opinions, my belief is that ANET is focusing on pumping out bi-weekly temporary content rather than full attention on fixing bugs and other discrepancies to the current game with background work on a full expansion by orders from NCsoft.

Blackgate Megaserver – [LaZy] Imperium of LaZy Nation
Mud Bone – Sylvari Ranger

Expected vs Actual Combat Mechanics

in Guild Wars 2 Discussion

Posted by: Shockwave.1230

Shockwave.1230

You realize spending money on having people fix those descriptions is more effort than it’s worth. There will always be a way to perceive something in a different light. Look at how they finally managed to do WvW Rewards because everyone had a different opinion on how they worked and most people STILL didn’t understand after 2 fixes to the descriptions.

I understand that the higher level expectations are broken at, the more impact it has on trust with your users. Summary descriptions are pretty high level. When Mike O’Brien made his big reddit post months back acknowledging that they had significantly broken away from major tenets of the original Guild Wars and tried to spin that to be a positive thing, it caused me to cut myself off from the game completely for almost 6 months, because I stopped trusting that ANet could provide an expierence I would enjoy. The more open and truthful communication is the more trust that exists between two parties.

I also understand that they clearly don’t have adequate testing, because so many of these issues have made it into production, and the earlier a bug is discovered the less it costs to fix.

I understand how much effort it takes to update text content. It’s literally the least amount of effort it takes to fix a bug. You branch off the source code, update the text, make sure your diff tool only finds a change to line of code you’ve updated then merge the code back into the parent branch. This would literally take a minute to do when you know what the text should say and copy/paste it in. It also requires no regression testing other than making sure the text is updated. If the functionality is updated instead, from a testing perspective regression is still minimal.

It’s going to take 3 people 10 minutes time each on the incredibly high end (more likely 5 minutes each) to 1) specify whether the description or functionality needs updated, 2) to update the description in the code, then 3) test it in the next build. That’s a grand total of 30 minutes between 3 people per bug on the high end specifically for bugs related to numeric differences between descriptions and functionality.

I don’t believe for a minute that’s too much time for ANet to have better communications between their product and their users. The little things add up. And if it is too much time, that’s their own fault for putting themselves behind, and it’s their responsibility to get caught back up if they care about the quality of their product.

The community obviously cares, just look at the wiki.

Sylvari Elementalist – Mystree Duskbloom (Lv 80)
Norn Guardian – Aurora Lustyr (Lv 80)
Mia A Shadows Glow – Human Thief (Lv 80)