Guild Wars 2

Okay, so let me preface this by saying that I don’t know much about the intricacies of developing and maintaining an MMO but is the amount of content/updates that we’ve received post HoT considered normal?

As far as I understand Anet employs around 300 employees. ~70 of them are currently working on another expansion. That leaves 230 working on the current game. Let’s say for some ridiculous reason about 130 are working on non-development things, marketing, research, accounting…etc… That leaves 100 employees working on actual game content.

We know that 6 employees or so work on raid content and they released 3 wings. We knew ~6 or so employees were working on HoT legendaries before that was pretty much cancelled (“postponed indefinitely”…whatever you want to call it).

So, my question is what the hell are all the other employees doing? Is this normal, should we really expect more content, or do we as a player-base expect too much?

I’m a bit confused because with HoT we were promised these things:

All new elite specs: We got them but there were changes pre-HoT that were mentioned in the last phase of testing that were never made. Some classes only had 1 patch of testing before HoT released. We had a ton of communication up until HoT and then all the class forums got utterly silent again. And many of the changes just never saw the light of day…

Legendary Weapons: We were promised an entirely new set way before HoT. Then after a lot of waiting they told us they were scrapping it and redoing from scratch. Then HoT was announced and we were promised the new set with HoT. So we were going to get 19, then they changed it to 16 (no more underwater weapons). Then it would be released in small batches until all 16 were out…then just 3…then they announced they were scrapping new legendaries because it was too much work, so we end up with 4 and with no more in sight.

My question there is, if only 6 people were focused on the new legendaries, why did you need to pull them for LS stuff? Could you really not pull any of the other 294 employees? You had to pull from one of the smallest teams?

Legendary Fractal Backpiece: This was another major selling point of HoT and we had to wait 3 months to finish the collection then another bunch of months to finally finish the backpiece, after you decided to scrap leaderboards for fractals – which no one really wanted in the first place.

New Fractals: Fractals became the new 5 man content…you revamped the rewards slightly, the tiers and some fractals…no new maps with HoT…we finally just got one.

New PvP Maps: We got 1 new mode and more recently another map.

WvW: New maps, revamps and many other changes were promised. They hit very slowly and many of the changes up until the more recent time were not what the majority of the playerbase were asking for.

LS3: Was promised to hit sometime after HoT and it was just FINALLY released. How could you have such a huge content drought for a NEW expansion?

So, ultimately I want to know what the hell is going on at Anet? Please, someone enlighten me because I do really like the game, there are just many changes that I don’t get and so many empty promises from Anet.

My biggest concern is that they are working on ANOTHER expansion when the current one isn’t even fully finished or fleshed out. How can you be working on something like that when you cannot even properly maintain your current game?

If I am completely wrong here, then please tell me to go fly a kite but I just don’t get it, so once again someone throw me a bone here.

Thanks for reading.

In a large software company, you have people who don’t actually write software:

• Human Resources, internal IT, legal, marketing+public relations, accounting, security, etc — none of these people help with content, but are essential to the health of the company.
• Writers, content managers, managers of external resources (e.g. actors), etc — these are all instrumental to content, but don’t create mechanics or instances.
• Artists, art designers, reward system management (including the economy, nodes, etc) — all of these people are instrumental to making the content fun and good looking, but again, they don’t create mechanics or instances.
• Quality management, code & configuration management, and development management — these people all make sure that stuff works (you think GW2 has bugs? it would be far worse if these folks weren’t as good at their jobs as they are).

Some of these people are going to be shared by the expansion and the live game; a lot won’t be. (For example, the HR team is obviously the same, but the artists are probably split.)

Some projects take ages to turn from concept to execution and some projects run into implementation issues. It’s likely, for example, that adding 16 legendaries and the associated collections, scavenger events & items — it’s likely that looked simple to produce (and, well, it probably was simple to initiate), but its actual inclusion in the game ended up being much, much more difficult than anyone expected. That includes those of us (not me) who wanted a non-RNG way to get our precursors: no one thought about just how much QA etc that would require, for just a few measly skins.

So I’ve matched the big wall of text by the OP with another wall of text — what’s the point?

It really doesn’t matter how many people are working at ANet. What matters is how they were allocated. It looks to me (from the outside, without any insider information) that ANet decided in 2014-5 to throw all its efforts to HoT and gambled the game on the idea that they knew what would make us happy, after having seen what drew us in for LS1 and LS2.

And they guessed grievously wrong.

Since then, they’ve started re-prioritizing and that doesn’t offer quick results. It takes time for people to close one project and get up to speed on the next; it takes time for any project to get off the ground.

The good news is that they seem to have learned from mistakes — they aren’t throwing everyone at Expac #2, they took people off stuff to “fix” HoT issues (both bugs and core mechanics), and they are working on new stuff. They are promising less and delivering more.

And here’s my even shorter point of view:

I do not care what’s going on at ANet. I’m sympathetic, but in the end, I’m not playing this game because I think Mike O’Brien is a cool dude or I’m a fan of John Smith’s economics or whatever. I play the game because I’m having fun.

I had fun with GW2 and its free content. I got bored with the content drought, but I pre-purchased HoT on the strength of ANet’s previous record and I don’t regret it (gliding + autolooting: worth the price for me). I’ll likely pre-pay for Expac #2 because I expect to have fun with it, too.
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tl;dr content drought is awful — I might stop playing for a while if it gets bad again, but I’ll buy the next GW2 offering because ANet keeps providing stuff that I find fun to do.

The way I see it is that raids were made so efficiently was because they were working in their own little silo… they are making a new game type and keeping it behind it’s own loading screen so there’s less potential for it to accidentally break other parts of the game. They only need the code to cope with 10 players instead of 100s. They can take heavily from existing assets… no need to make new rocks/trees/bandits. Hence less programming and QA resources required.

I think Anet’s mistake was under-estimating their ability to add to their own code, hence why many things that had to interact with existing content was either buggy or delayed.

Whatever you think of Colin’s or Mike’s performance, I think the shake-up was required because as humans, we can easily be blinkered by our opinions and past experience, and only a fresh set of eyes can see new solutions. You have to admit, they have upped their game in the last 2 patches