Guild Wars 2

I don’t know about other folks, but my experience with teh interwebs is that one can almost immediately discount the opinions of people who present their subjective beliefs as if they were incontrovertible facts. To me, absolute certainty implies a failure to consider one’s blind spots and completely fails to account for my post-positivist proclivities. So, what follows is primarily opinion, salted with examples.

This isn’t a credential, but I have spent a few years around software development and have some observations about observations…

I find it doubtful that the folks who assert that some thing within the game would be easy to implement by relying on a fallacious premise or three have actually had a tour of the GW2 architecture. Maybe some of these ideas would be easy to integrate within the game, but most of us aren’t in a position to know. Software applications haven’t reached the state of being infinitely configurable imagination engines – every design decision results in some sort of “law” of operation – which in effect becomes part of the environmental canon. My experience is that people tend to hand-wave the really difficult bits and attach too much significance to the easy things. Some people who have worked in software development tend to see technical problems through the lens of that one program they wrote “back in the day”, which can have the effect of causing someone to look an issue through a filter which may not provide a truthy view of what is actually going on.

Sometimes, when interviewing developers, we should ask a question like:

“How would you go about designing a bathroom for a disabled person?”

Unfortunately, this regularly elicits a response that is basically “a wide doorway and low counters” or some variation – which is the wrong answer from my perspective. This indicates things to me about self-appointed IT experts and their opinions… but, to be fair, I don’t presume that others shouldn’t have a similar perception of my opinions.

Another example of this would be the questions surrounding the data storage architecture and how that may influence the ease of reporting related to who was where and what they might have been doing at some specific time. Despite the fact that hardware is relatively cheap, it isn’t actually free. At certain points when adding hardware, additional supporting software licensing is generally required. This means that a system designer has to balance costs associated with provisioning the storage architecture and the cost of processing for every data-centric transaction. If I had to guess, I would say that the larger cost is probably time-related in terms of an effect on gameplay QoS as a result of balancing the size and quantity of the database transactions. In the end, we may decide that some data is more important than other data and design our systems accordingly.

I assume that the GW2 architecture allows for monitoring of the number of characters in a specific region at any given time – logically, you’d need something in place so that the system would know when to spool up an overflow instance. My guess is that chat logs are probably stored for a enough time that complaints related to poor behavior can be investigated. Some significant amount of character state data is probably necessary – but do we need to know about DEs that weren’t completed after the fact? How will the system determine whether someone logged out intentionally versus someone who was inadvertently DC’d? Remember, there’s an overhead cost for every data element that we choose to store and in some cases, we can’t determine player intent from character state information. And ultimately, we can only report on data that we have chosen to collect.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume that every interesting bit of data is in fact being stored within the system. Our next question relates to what sort of bias did we reflect when we designed our databases? Did we optimize for efficient transactions (OLTP) or did we optimize for efficient reporting (OLAP)? I’m betting that if we’re designing an MMO, we bias heavily towards OLTP. That doesn’t mean that we can’t report on our data, but complex insights and nuggets related to player statefulness may not just wash up on the beach.

Again, not a credential, but I played GW1 – slogging through Post-Searing Ascalon and Kryta, Cantha, Elona, and the Shiverpeaks. My experience with ArenaNet as a software company is that they really care about what they’re doing. My guess is that their tech team was coding their little fingers to the bone up to and through the Lost Shores event. At the moment, they may be sifting through all sorts of data trying to figure out what can and should be done for the folks who tried to participate but couldn’t.

and the rest…

I think the Lost Shores weekend getaway to Klendathu could and should have been better. But, there were some epic moments, I enjoyed it and was happy with the rewards (no big money, no whammies, no precursors) for participating. The most disappointing thing to me has been the reaction of the people who seem to think that somebody’s good fortune from the RNG tilt-a-whirl somehow diminishes the rest of us.

One of the nice things about the game is that it appears that the economy was intended to be abundance oriented, rather than arbitrarily resource constrained. I’d love to get a fabulous drop that solves all of my in-game financial needs… but I’m satisfied that the possibility that it could happen exists.

I worry that GW2 will be pulled in the direction of some mystical candy-land where carebears and rainbow unicorns fire consolation prizes out of their sparkly, glitter-encrusted cloacae into the laps of the self-entitled masses. Or perhaps worse, a game where the possibility of a gee-whiz drop is eliminated in order to ensure that the only people who end up with nice gear are part of the “deemed worthy, cool kids” crowd.