Buggy patches, it happens all the time in the MMO industry but shall we look at two recent examples?
The Secret World, now this game took some daring steps just like Guild Wars 2 proposed to do. A modern day setting when everyone else does Fantasy, with a few stepping into Sci-fi, more daringly they did away with the class system so beloved of the MMO genre.
But The Secret World scrimped on its Quality Assurance, progress crippling bugs were present at launch, hot fix and patch after patch all claimed to fix these bugs, but they kept slipping past and remaining bugged. People gave them the benefit of the doubt, after all they were clearly working towards their monthly content patch. Which arrived, failed to fix the broken content and introduced fun new content, which was also broken.
So players put the game on the back burner, and people working for The Secret World, lost their jobs, a lot of people.
The Old Republic, Bioware the king of single player RPGs and Star Wars one of the biggest, most spendiest, cash splashiest Fan-chises in the world, can’t possibly fail right? Well it did, one year on and its free to play. But how did they do manage it? The content wasn’t that bugged compared to The Secret World, but it lacked in many Quality of Life additions, that people take as standard for an MMO these days.
For example it had an end game based on grinding previous content for gear purchasing tokens, it didn’t have a LFG system, (well actually it had one that was fit for task, no way of saying roll and what you were looking for) it only finally announced one, after it had already been announced it was going free to play.
Another ‘crime’ they committed was an almost total ignorance of their player base. Concerns were raised, bugs were pointed out, suggestions made and they were all piled into merged threads and then ignored. When they finally started listening to what people wanted or expected from their game it was too late, they’d had a huge number of job layoffs and the game was announced as going free to play.
But what has this to do with Guild Wars 2 you ask?
Well actually quite a lot, we will start with communication.
A lot of people are feeling their concerns are being ignored, take for example the undocumented by Arenanet nerf to drop rates outside of the FOTM dungeon. Multiple people have brought up their concern and alarm at the drop rate reduction across the game, however everything has been moved to one thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Change-in-loot-parameters-or-a-bug-Merged
This type of moves has been used by the SWTOR devs in their original ‘untouchable’ phase of mind. Now during the AMA Reddit thread a dev finally acknowledged that people have concerns and then… nothing, we’ve had a patch that didn’t fix whatever they changed in the previous patch. Which can be taken two ways, either the nerf to drop rates is a delibret change on the part of Arenanet, or that their programming and QA standards are substandard and they don’t actually know what they changed to break drop rates.
But what does a nerfed drop rate mean to us? Well if you start a new character it becomes increasingly hard to keep said character geared as you level from 1-80. You get less green items dropping meaning you can’t keep yourself geared up with ‘good’ gear, you get less blue items dropping once again meaning less gear to straight out equip, but also a lack of rare materials with which to craft levelling gear. A lack of vendor trash also impacts you, preventing you from buying levelling gear from the Market, though that source continues to rise in cost the longer the drop drought continues.
So you finally reach level 80 and it is time to gear up, but where do you get your gear from? Well you can get it from Karma vendors in Orr, but due to poor QA these vendors may not be available as the events that cause them to spawn are bugged. Assuming you are then lucky enough to want the gear from a vendor that does spawn, well you are faced with a lack of Karma, previously introduced DR and event reward reductions having impacted your 1-80 levelling, leaving you with much less karma to spend than a pre-nerf level 80.
So where do you go for your gear at level 80 since Karma is out of the window? Well you could go and run multiple dungeons and get a full set of armour and weapons that way, it won’t get you accessories but you’ll be mostly geared up… except once again poorly done QA strikes again, not all paths work in the dungeons each path that doesn’t work increases the amount of real life days you have to grind the dungeon by a third. Even ones they claim to have patched, may not work.