Guild Wars 2

I know everyone is all busy polishing and tweaking things for Heart of Thorns, but I think Anet could greatly improve its overall player satisfaction, as well as avoiding the bad rep- that has already started spreading- as a company that does not address problems that are already present in their ‘finished’ product, and have been for quite some time.

Snowden Drifts comes to mind as a zone that needs some first aid. Twice in the past several weeks, I had to do the ‘Snowden Drifts Event Completer’ daily, which is extremely annoying, considering there are not many events in the zone to begin with, and at least two of them are nearly ALWAYS bugged and will not progress- Quaggan emissary escort and Ramsey escort. I’ve gotten used to just passing those by, as I’ve been playing for a while and have only seen each of them in working order ONCE, but it never fails that at least a handful of people are not aware of these bugs and will end up wasting time trying to figure out what’s going on. And that’s just not cool, considering that a lot of people have work or school and a very limited timeframe to get their dailies done.

Of course, Snowden Drifts is not the only zone that needs a touch-up, just the one that stands out most prominently to me, as it is often the subject of event completion dailies.

As I said, I know the teams are probably all working their rears off getting ready for Heart of Thorns, but if a little bit of time could be spared to eradicating some of these existing bugs, I think all of us would feel much more confident about the quality of the expansion.

Just my thirteen cents…

My guess is that the fix for these events is not as easy as one might think. It may not be a simple matter of fixing event X, then moving on to fix event Y, and then event Z.

The bugged events all seem to be escort events. Izzy bugs out during the escort to Mel and crash survivors bug out during the escort to Meddler’s (both Cursed Shore). Malchor bugs out during the escort to Dwayna (Malchor’s Leap). Dobbs bugs out during the escort through the Rankor Ruins (Timberline Falls). Fire Elemental pre bugs out during the golem escort (Metrica). The meta event chain for the Branded Devourer Queen bugs out during the escort of Sentinel Whiptail or one of the later escort events in the chain (Iron Marches). Offhand, I can’t think of a buggy event in any zone that isn’t an escort event that stalls out or fails to start, and most (maybe all) of them have been buggy since the original beta.

This suggests to me that there is some very deep, fundamental flaw in something that is common to all escort events. The amount of work to find and fix such a fundamental flaw may be enormous, striking at the very heart of the code controlling dynamic events. The fix might amount to tearing down the entire game and rebuilding part of the foundation, which would present the risk of introducing new bugs that would be just as pervasive as the escort bug. The cure could be worse than the disease.