Guild Wars 2

Galtrix.7369:

A public test server would easily fix some of those bugs.

Could easily fix some of those bugs. Don’t kid yourself, there’s no guarantees in this business other than “there will be bugs” (starring Daniel Day Lewis). But I don’t think it’s worth the headache and/or bellyaching of putting one together which plays separate from the main game servers, if only for a couple reasons.

- No guarantee players on the PTR would not simply document bugs for their own use once things go live and NOT report them to ANet. In short, to manufacture bug abuse.

- A fragment of the players finding it ludicrous time and money is spent on the upkeep of the PTR where by its nature nothing is left permanently with regards to characters. (Any one I ever participated in has the paraphrased rule “we reserve the right to delete all character data at any time” . . .)

- Complaints about how taking part in the PTR doesn’t benefit actual live server play. Because there are people who would complain if they gave out free Gems with every login with no strings attached.

- The PTR would probably not be able to participate in researching bugs related to, say, WvWvW and/or other things where two different servers might be involved.

And lastly . . .

- I don’t know if it would be an efficient and effective use of company resources, given the distinct impression they already are pulled pretty tight as it is.

I don’t feel that people are standing up for the game enough. I mean for £40 ($60) how could you have not said ‘Money well spent’ cause i tell you i have spent well over a month game-time and you can play for just as long without paying a penny more than the cost of the game. Best £40 I’ve ever spent.

Zrix.5987:

I don’t feel that people are standing up for the game enough. I mean for £40 ($60) how could you have not said ‘Money well spent’ cause i tell you i have spent well over a month game-time and you can play for just as long without paying a penny more than the cost of the game. Best £40 I’ve ever spent.

I’m looking at it this way . . .

If the servers vanish right now, I’ll be satisfied with the time I did have. If the game goes to complete crap in the next month, I’ll also be satisfied with what I did get out of it and walk away quietly.

I’ve had worse games for more

Galtrix.7369:

Vayne.8563:

bri.2359:

Vayne.8563:

I’ve never seen this level of content from any MMO before. Are there a couple of bugs? Sure. But early bugs were certainly worse than later ones, showing improvement. I haven’t really found many bugs at all in the newest content.

At any rate, I’ll applaud anything that I’m enjoying…why shouldn’t I?

I guess you were too busy applauding to notice Anet had to do 4 ‘fixes’ to the current content: 2 on 23 July (same day as content release), 1 on 24 July ,1 on 26 July.
This tells me the content was not properly tested before release,

Vayne, I doubt you wouldn’t notice a bug if it bit you on your kitten .

I’ve reported many bugs. I’ve beta and even alpha tested games. You don’t know anything about me, and what you’ve assumed is very likely untrue.

Vayne, everyone in this forum knows your reputation for ignoring the bad things about this game. Bugs is one of those things. I remember a post I brought up stating that there were way too many bugs in each new patch and that it needed to be fixed within a decent amount of time, or at least tested beforehand.

What you probably don’t realize is that you defended the bugs in this game by trying to tell me my post was wrong. I said that there were at least twice as many bugs in GW2 as in other mmos and you tried to bash me when I said that. I’ve played mmos for my entire life, and I think I know when there are bugs that are preventing me from enjoying the game.

No offense, but you lost all credibility you had when you defended Anet’s mediocre job at testing the new patches or at least fixing them in a decent amount of time. We still have bugs from the early stages of the game that should’ve been fixed months ago, so no, it is not “showing improvement”. Even the new patches are glitchy, laggy, and sometimes just plain don’t work. Sanctum Sprint stopped working for me after the 50th run of it. It just stopped giving me rewards and stopped telling me I got in first place.

Early bugs are certainly not worse than later bugs. That’s for sure. I spent 100 gold on a scepter only to not get either the gold or the scepter. I contacted Anet and they said that nothing could be done, so I lost my money and my scepter. You really believe that’s not a bad bug?

There are not “a couple of bugs”. There have to be billions of bugs in this game that Anet just doesn’t want to test for or fix. A public test server would easily fix some of those bugs.

You’ve lost all credibility for not being objective.

I’ve said, and said all along, this game has released early. You want to see bugs. Try Warhammer or AoC at launch. The only gets that launched with less bugs launched with smaller worlds, like Rift, which launched with a ridiculously tiny world and a very small amount of content. 11 small zones, instead of 25 large ones, 500 quests instead of 1500 dynamic events. Edit: And Rift STILL had a major security bug at launch that costs 10’s of thousands of people their accounts, due to hacking.

You really think Warhammer, AoC and even SWToR didn’t have bugs out the kitten Well I guess you’ve lost all credibility.

And if you played WoW at launch, a game that was down completely almost as often as it was up, you’d have known better.

Have you tried Vanguard. That game was buggier than hell.

How about Skyrim (or any Bethesda game). Those aren’t even MMOs. Have you ever looked at the buglists?

We all know this game launched early. We know this because of the number of bugs. We also know that MMOs are most expensive games to produce and take the longest time. Do you know WHY so many MMOs launch with bugs. Because financially they can’t afford another year in development. It really is that simple.

I never defended bugs…I’ve only defended realistic expectations.

They may not have gotten 1 million likes but they really didn’t advertise this much, if at all. If it weren’t for this thread I wouldn’t have known about it. I don’t think a single one of my guildies know about it either.

Vayne.8563:

You’ve lost all credibility for not being objective.

Pot, meet kettle…

Tolmos.8395:

Vayne.8563:

You’ve lost all credibility for not being objective.

Pot, meet kettle…

The problem is, none of you can seem properly objective anymore due to all the sniping between people. Sure, at least one of you might actually be trying to be objective, but it doesn’t come off that way half the time. And I know I’m not even properly objective half the time, since I actually like playing the game; this disqualifies me from talking about it objectively, you see. You’re supposed to HATE the game to be objective.

By the way, I’m taking that kettle for some tea tonight, and the pot for some chili. Sorry to inconvenience you.

Galtrix.7369:

What you probably don’t realize is that you defended the bugs in this game by trying to tell me my post was wrong. I said that there were at least twice as many bugs in GW2 as in other mmos and you tried to bash me when I said that. I’ve played mmos for my entire life, and I think I know when there are bugs that are preventing me from enjoying the game.

If you say that GW2 has twice as many bugs as other mmos then you are a terrible liar saying that you’ve playing mmos for your entire life. You lose all credibility and you make it appear like you haven’t played ANY other mmo in your entire life, making GW2 your very first mmo.

They don’t deserve 1 mil likes.

Reading this thread is a goldmine. If some of you like arguing so much, why not become lawyers? Oh right. You can’t sit behind a computer and type your rebuttals in a court room

Balkanwarrior.5132:

Reading this thread is a goldmine. If some of you like arguing so much, why not become lawyers? Oh right. You can’t sit behind a computer and type your rebuttals in a court room

Having retired from public life, it’s probably too late for me to go to law school…however, if you’re offering to sponsor me, I might give it a go.

Tolmos.8395:

Vayne.8563:

You’ve lost all credibility for not being objective.

Pot, meet kettle…

In case you missed it (and clearly you did) this is precisely what the person I was responding to was saying to me. Everyone knows that I …

Well, you know…when people say stuff like that I parrot it back, pretty much always. Because I’m making an ironic point.

Sorry you missed that bit.

I’m not on facebook… I like GW2, but I can’t like it if you know what I mean.

Balkanwarrior.5132:

Reading this thread is a goldmine. If some of you like arguing so much, why not become lawyers? Oh right. You can’t sit behind a computer and type your rebuttals in a court room

I don’t want to be a lawyer, mostly because they don’t get to make the arguments they want, they have to make arguments they are paid to make. They also have an insane amount of education (not just college but study time for cases) which means I would have even less personal time than I did when I was an engineering student . . .

But this veered off topic so let’s just try to salvage it:

I like GW2 but hate Facebook.

Zrix.5987:

I don’t feel that people are standing up for the game enough. I mean for £40 ($60) how could you have not said ‘Money well spent’ cause i tell you i have spent well over a month game-time and you can play for just as long without paying a penny more than the cost of the game. Best £40 I’ve ever spent.

This times five. Even threw in some extra on gems. Only game contesting hours spent on GW2 is CivV. Most any other seems like a waste of money by this criteria (though some othe criteria comes in play too). And MMOs….especially sub ones….complete waste of money, no matter what criteria you use, and ive played them since 2002.

On topic, Facebook has lost its steam, or to put it more blunt, people use it for more convenient stuff than liking random stuff.

Arenanet should know that FB is not what it use to be, people have left it in droves to other social media sites. They limited themselves by only counting FB.

Why would you rank a game with Facebook?

And inb4 someone says ANet did it, Just to be fair, just about every business in he world has a Facebook page. So I don’t think that’s a reason when it’s practically a norm in society and customer interaction.

Lots of talk about the manifesto.. personally I feel that the game did hold up to what I was expecting based on it so far, with more or less success. Some comments on it (taking the transcript from the wikipedia page):

“The look of Guild Wars 2 is stylized. We’re going for a painterly, illustrated aesthetic. Everything in our world feels handcrafted and artisanal. We treat our environments as if they are characters themselves.”

Like everything related to art, your mileage may vary, but I do think they did succeed in this part.

“In most games, you go out, and you have really fun tasks, occasionally, that you get to do, and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff. ‘I swung a sword. I swung a sword again. Hey! I swung it again.’ That’s great. We just don’t want players to grind in Guild Wars 2. No one enjoys that. No one finds it fun. We want to change the way that people view combat.”

This is one sore point lots of people bring anytime the manifesto is mentioned, but personally I do think they did have some success in this part. Yes, there is grind, and yes, for some things (AKA Legendary) it can be a huge one, but the key part, I think is that they didn’t want a “boring grind to get to the fun stuff” and I think they did make it in that regard, to a point, at least.

In other online games I’ve played, for example, I had to grind regular dungeons and couldn’t even think of going to hard mode dungeons until I was fully geared there, then I had to grind the hard dungeons until I was fully geared before I could even consider doing a raid, then grind that raid for gear to get to the next tier and so on. When I got to 80 I had enough money to get myself a full rare quality gear set (maybe even with some exotics), and I wasn’t excluded from doing ANY content in the game, that’s the big deal, I didn’t have to grind in order to be able to do anything (well, today you need some ascended gear to get access to high level fractals, but you’re not excluded from doing fractals in the first place). Of course, there are lots of goals that do require heavy grinding (getting a full dungeon set, getting a legendary, getting enough agony resist), but it doesn’t exclude from any of the content in the game for not doing it.

(divided in 2 parts because it ended up too long)

“As a structure, the MMO has lost the ability to make the player feel like a hero. Everybody around you is doing the same thing you are doing. The boss you just killed respawns ten minutes later. It doesn’t care that I’m there.”

This one is the least succesful one for them, I think, but they’re working on it with the living story, IMHO, but it’s not easy to do on an online world where you have hunreds of thousands of people expecting to be the “one big hero”.

“You’ll get quest text that tells you ’I’m being attacked by these horrible things,’ and it’s not actually happening. In the game world, these horrible centaurs are standing around in a field, and you get a quest step that says ‘Go kill ten centaurs.’ We don’t think that’s OK. You see what’s happening. You see centaurs running to the trading post, knocking the walls down, burning and killing the merchants.”

This one they succeed so far, IMHO.

“We do not want to build the same MMO everyone else is building, and in Guild Wars 2, it’s your world. It’s your story. You affect things around you in a very permanent way.”

Some success with dynamic events, but working with the living story. In the dynamic events it works to a point, you save a village, it stays saved and people recognize you helped. Of course, it’ll probably be attacked again 10 or 15 minutes later (or much sooner in some areas), but it’s the nature of the beast, you can’t have the village saved forever in the open world or you’ll end up with a game where everything is done in a couple of days and nothing left to do for the rest of the gamers, at least in the standard themepark style MMOs, which is what GW2 is akittens core.

“Cause and effect: A single decision made by a player cascades out in a chain of events.”

Lots of events do chain depending on success or failure, sometimes it’s just a “ok, we fail, retreat” and you have to start over again, other times different events play out, this seems to be working so far for me.

“You’re meeting new people whom you will then see again. You’re rescuing a village that will stay rescued, who then remember you. The most important thing in any game should be the player. We have built a game for them.”

This is (IMHO) what the living story has been so far. Yes, I rescue a village in a dynamic events and it’ll still be rescued only for 10 or 5 minutes, but, for example, I helped Braham save cragstead some months ago, I went there today, the village is saved, everyone remember me as one who helped saving it, and I could talk to Braham there. We’ve met several characters in the living story that I’ve been meeting again (Kiel, Kasmeer, and so on).

So, IMHO, yes, some points in the manifesto were exagerated (that marketing speak for you), but personally I don’t see it as just “a bunch of lies” as some people take it, but of course, it’s my opinion and everyone has its own..

I like to think of all of this as a vote against facebook .

locoman.1974:

“As a structure, the MMO has lost the ability to make the player feel like a hero. Everybody around you is doing the same thing you are doing. The boss you just killed respawns ten minutes later. It doesn’t care that I’m there.”

This one is the least succesful one for them, I think, but they’re working on it with the living story, IMHO, but it’s not easy to do on an online world where you have hunreds of thousands of people expecting to be the “one big hero”.

“You’ll get quest text that tells you ’I’m being attacked by these horrible things,’ and it’s not actually happening. In the game world, these horrible centaurs are standing around in a field, and you get a quest step that says ‘Go kill ten centaurs.’ We don’t think that’s OK. You see what’s happening. You see centaurs running to the trading post, knocking the walls down, burning and killing the merchants.”

This one they succeed so far, IMHO.

“We do not want to build the same MMO everyone else is building, and in Guild Wars 2, it’s your world. It’s your story. You affect things around you in a very permanent way.”

Some success with dynamic events, but working with the living story. In the dynamic events it works to a point, you save a village, it stays saved and people recognize you helped. Of course, it’ll probably be attacked again 10 or 15 minutes later (or much sooner in some areas), but it’s the nature of the beast, you can’t have the village saved forever in the open world or you’ll end up with a game where everything is done in a couple of days and nothing left to do for the rest of the gamers, at least in the standard themepark style MMOs, which is what GW2 is akittens core.

“Cause and effect: A single decision made by a player cascades out in a chain of events.”

Lots of events do chain depending on success or failure, sometimes it’s just a “ok, we fail, retreat” and you have to start over again, other times different events play out, this seems to be working so far for me.

“You’re meeting new people whom you will then see again. You’re rescuing a village that will stay rescued, who then remember you. The most important thing in any game should be the player. We have built a game for them.”

This is (IMHO) what the living story has been so far. Yes, I rescue a village in a dynamic events and it’ll still be rescued only for 10 or 5 minutes, but, for example, I helped Braham save cragstead some months ago, I went there today, the village is saved, everyone remember me as one who helped saving it, and I could talk to Braham there. We’ve met several characters in the living story that I’ve been meeting again (Kiel, Kasmeer, and so on).

So, IMHO, yes, some points in the manifesto were exagerated (that marketing speak for you), but personally I don’t see it as just “a bunch of lies” as some people take it, but of course, it’s my opinion and everyone has its own..

Keep in mind that after the manifesto was first released, there were some questions about it, and Anet released a statement saying that due to editing it was a bit confusing and that Ree was talking about the personal story while Colin was talking about dynamic events.

When you watch it with that in mind it actually makes more sense.