Guild Wars 2

Knote.2904:

psy.5437:

God Of Fissures.8627:

More evidence that Quality Assurance at ArenaNet is nonexistent.

Perhaps you should lend them your massive knowledge about QA and how best they can optimise their company for testing for large scale deployment under tight time frames. I am sure you have a wealth of experience and wisdom gathered whilst festering in your armchair.

Public Test Servers, then people test for free.

I’ve been in games with PTS’s that weren’t particularly less or more buggy than Guild Wars 2. The problem with PTS is two fold.

First, you get no surprise about anything at all ever, which sucks for some people, and more importantly it takes people out of the game.

And you know, a lot of people don’t even use the public test servers, because it means they’re not making progress on their main character.

And if people DID use the public test server, it would just take them out of the world, so that there are less players in the zones where they’re needed. Remember this game is designed to have lots of people in an area doing stuff. If the public test server never reached that number (and I have no reason to think it would), then this stuff still wouldn’t be tested with the masses and would still break.

I was on the Rift PTS and it was a joke. So PTS isn’t necessarily the answer and it isn’t necessarily going to help…it would probably help a little…but not enough to warrant creating one.

Vayne.8563:

Knote.2904:

psy.5437:

God Of Fissures.8627:

More evidence that Quality Assurance at ArenaNet is nonexistent.

Perhaps you should lend them your massive knowledge about QA and how best they can optimise their company for testing for large scale deployment under tight time frames. I am sure you have a wealth of experience and wisdom gathered whilst festering in your armchair.

Public Test Servers, then people test for free.

I’ve been in games with PTS’s that weren’t particularly less or more buggy than Guild Wars 2. The problem with PTS is two fold.

First, you get no surprise about anything at all ever, which sucks for some people, and more importantly it takes people out of the game.

And you know, a lot of people don’t even use the public test servers, because it means they’re not making progress on their main character.

And if people DID use the public test server, it would just take them out of the world, so that there are less players in the zones where they’re needed. Remember this game is designed to have lots of people in an area doing stuff. If the public test server never reached that number (and I have no reason to think it would), then this stuff still wouldn’t be tested with the masses and would still break.

I was on the Rift PTS and it was a joke. So PTS isn’t necessarily the answer and it isn’t necessarily going to help…it would probably help a little…but not enough to warrant creating one.

There’s people that do a ton of testing to help with balance in Rift’s PTS, on top of bug finding.

I hate those pics because it’s hard for someone to see when you come up on someone using it but come on, people aid for the look, you shouldn’t take it back.

A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed…

I just want one it seems they have these ginormous gaps between the times they sell the thing and I always seem to miss them! Please put it back in the store at least for a day or something! Oh yeah.

Can anyone tell me if they are account bound?

Vayne.8563:

Knote.2904:

psy.5437:

God Of Fissures.8627:

More evidence that Quality Assurance at ArenaNet is nonexistent.

Perhaps you should lend them your massive knowledge about QA and how best they can optimise their company for testing for large scale deployment under tight time frames. I am sure you have a wealth of experience and wisdom gathered whilst festering in your armchair.

Public Test Servers, then people test for free.

I’ve been in games with PTS’s that weren’t particularly less or more buggy than Guild Wars 2. The problem with PTS is two fold.

First, you get no surprise about anything at all ever, which sucks for some people, and more importantly it takes people out of the game.

And you know, a lot of people don’t even use the public test servers, because it means they’re not making progress on their main character.

And if people DID use the public test server, it would just take them out of the world, so that there are less players in the zones where they’re needed. Remember this game is designed to have lots of people in an area doing stuff. If the public test server never reached that number (and I have no reason to think it would), then this stuff still wouldn’t be tested with the masses and would still break.

I was on the Rift PTS and it was a joke. So PTS isn’t necessarily the answer and it isn’t necessarily going to help…it would probably help a little…but not enough to warrant creating one.

It is pretty surprising how little PTSes seem to help, in practice. In WoW I can’t even begin to count the number of times some sort of horrible and serious (not mild and aesthetic) bug has been discovered, and the devs have either ignored all the reports of it, and simply let it go live, or acknowledged the bug and just said they’d deal with it later – to the point of actually having entire specs not be viable for multiple weeks (Feral Druids got hit with this a number of times).

Further, balance-wise, WoW and others with PTSes showed that just because a lot of players found and reported a balance problem, doesn’t mean anything would actually change, because the devs generally want to see it go live before acting.

Frankly, GW2 is less buggy and more quickly fixes bugs and wonkiness than most games with PTS/PTRs, which is very interesting. I kind of wonder how they do – historically ArenaNet have been much, much better at metrics and internal testing and deploying stuff in an agile way than people like Blizzard, and much more interested in them, too, so I suppose this is an extension of that.

Part of the problem with a PTS and Guild Wars 2 is the turn around time. This stuff is getting released so close to when it’s made, there’s no real time to let players get it and test it. Guild Wars 2 would have to slow down the pace and I don’t think Anet is willing to do that.

Even back in the beginning, I was talking to a dev in game about Arah story mode and he told me that the moving platform technology, used for the fight on the ship, only came in a week before launch. While the game was launching he was working kitten the Zhaitan fight. There was simply no time.

The whole thing is possibly a management issue. I think the progress of events should be slowed down so Q&A has more time with each update. I think it’s coming to fast and furious now.

I don’t see how a test server could help that.

Wow, I think a lot of people over reacted to this. Especially jumping to the conclusion that it’s obviously a deliberate and malicious change to prepare for selling the original pick to people who already bought it. Did it really seem so unlikely that it could be a bug?

Personally I much prefer the new animation and if there’s a new pick that has it I really hope there’s some way to swap the two which isn’t just buying the new one and having a useless pick sitting in my inventory. But even I wouldn’t want them to change the animation on the existing pick because I know some people bought it for that reason.

If they’re going to keep bringing out new infinite gathering tools I think the best solution would be to let you buy a default tool, which has no special animation, and then buy ‘skins’ for it that add different animations so you can pick the one(s) you want, or just keep it blank. And people who already have a tool should get it converted to the base tool + skin automatically.

And here I was thinking people bought it because of the unlimited uses, not the colours it makes… o.O

Phew, I was dissapointed when I seen this. Glad this was an error.

Noone buys a ferrari only to later have its engine ninja’d and replaced with a civics :S

AndrewMcLeod.3857:

Sorry about that- it was accidentally broken when we were working on some other things. We should have this fixed soon.

This happens all the time!

Scrotbag.9715:

And here I was thinking people bought it because of the unlimited uses, not the colours it makes… o.O

As far as I’ve seen most people actually bought it for the animation and considered the unlimited uses only a way of keeping the animation.

It takes a very long time to break even on the cost of the unlimited tools so they’re not really that great for saving money. I bought them because since hitting level 80 my main character has been hoping between maps a lot and I expect to keep doing that pretty much as long as I’m playing this game. I got really irritated with keeping almost a full bag of spare tools and trying to work out which ones to use on which nodes, but I also didn’t want to keep using high-end tools on lower tier nodes. For me the real money cost of buying one set of tools was preferable.

But most people do seem to consider the animation the real selling point.

Thedenofsin.7340:

Then one day I was pickin’ at some food,
And up from the ground came a bubbling’ crude…
Oil, that is…black gold….Texas tea

Well the first thing you know old Jed’s a millionaire
Consortium said, Jed move away from there
Said Southsun Cove is the place you oughta be
So they loaded up the cart and moved in with Karka Queen
(Bloodstone Bricks, Dragonite, Empyreal Stars)

That means cursed shore will be invaded soon, I’ve found so much oil reserves there.
Poor risen…

The player responses in this thread disgust me. This is clearly a bug, and people even pointed out what caused it, yet responses like “I demand a refund” and “Anet loves screwing players over, they just want more money” continue.

I personally hate those picks, i find the animation greatly annoying so I dont want it, but im glad its only a bug for the people who like it. Maybe I’ll get the bone pick if its true and if its not annoying

Stage 1: Incandescent rage about a minor visual change. Insults are thrown, refunds demanded by people who apparently bought the pick for the tiny animation alone. Irrational speculation that ANet have done it “out of spite”.

Stage 2: A dev explains, politely, that it’s merely a mistake, and will be rectified.

Stage 3: Some people thank the dev and move on with their lives. Others, robbed of their rage, scream that “quality assurance is nonexistant”.

…I wonder why gamers get a name for petulance and rage sometimes.