Guild Wars 2

Back when I started programing – you know, way back in the punch-card days – we had a rule of thumb for “clean” results. Make a change. Test it. When satisfied everything works properly, then make another change.

I submit to you we need to have smaller patches. These giant “Mega-Pack” additions and changes to the game also come with seemingly infinite new bugs. Headaches for everyone, not just the players.

No need for months of pre-release hype that gets thrown back in your face when the inevitable bugs come out of the woodwork from every direction at once. Nobody likes having a long laundry list of bugs that need to be triaged, because everybody’s bug is the most important one.

Do one thing. Do it right. Test it. Then move on to the next thing. Smaller patches, more often. No fanfare.

EDIT: I said smaller patches in the title. Perhaps it should read “smaller changes” to be more accurate. A patch denotes some kind of fix, and GW2 has called their biggest releases “Feature Patches”. But mostly they are ADDING stuff, not fixing stuff.

Any time they make a change they should test it before making another change. And making dozens of BIG changes all at once results in more hundreds of bugs. Am I the only one who sees this? We’re all living it right now.

Even smaller? Even more often?

Not every patch is a whole feature pack.

I suggest larger patches more often. I wonder what their 300+ employes are doing all day

flyingcats.6194:

Even smaller? Even more often?

Not every patch is a whole feature pack.

You’re thinking of the “new builds” I presume. Notice how often we get those after a major change? How long we get them? Those are not the changes I’m talking about. Those are the attempts to fix all the bugs they’ve set in motion by introducing too many variables at once with their big changes.

And that is the POINT here. If you change a whole lot of stuff at once, you don’t know where to begin to troubleshoot. The less you change, the easier it is to find out where the problem lies should bugs occur. It’s simple, sound logic that often gets ignored in these days of multitasking.

It’s obvious most of their resources are devoted to churning out low quality LS content, and leaving WVW/PVP/balancing to rot. As they have.

LS was the worst thing that ever happened to this game.

scerevisiae.1972:

It’s obvious most of their resources are devoted to churning out low quality LS content, and leaving WVW/PVP/balancing to rot. As they have.

LS was the worst thing that ever happened to this game.

That’s your opinion.

Anyway, I recall that there have been frequent hotfixes and patches done last week since the Feature Patch came. That’s a start, right?

It’s probably an issue of transaction costs (time, red tape, hierarchy, and decision making) . They probably find that decision making and bureaucratic hurdles are better overcome in bulk than numerous times quickly unless it is to fix something so high in priority that it justifies the transaction costs.

oh and isn’t LS team only about 20 people? vent frustrations elsewhere.

Malkavian.4516:

scerevisiae.1972:

It’s obvious most of their resources are devoted to churning out low quality LS content, and leaving WVW/PVP/balancing to rot. As they have.

LS was the worst thing that ever happened to this game.

That’s your opinion.

Anyway, I recall that there have been frequent hotfixes and patches done last week since the Feature Patch came. That’s a start, right?

It doesn’t count when the hotfixes and patches are for stuff the feature patch broke.