Guild Wars 2

Greetings, Community!

I did the Tarir meta immediately after patching today, and once the event finished I was awarded seven exalted keys. And I thought to myself, “the patch notes didn’t say anything about this!”. This was basically the straw that broke the camels’ back.
After having played Guild Wars 2 for over 2.5 years, and downloaded hundreds of patches with probably a total thousand or more undocumented changes following them. I want to know what’s up.

So I decided to get out there, see how much is really missed in the patch notes.
I made a post on Reddit, asking people to tell me what changes they had found that weren’t in the patch notes.
It can be found here.

Currently the list contains at least 25 items that are so major they would’ve been mentioned in the patch notes of any other game.

Take for example the changes to the Dreamer, Kudzu and Flameseeker Prophecies. Why wasn’t this in the patch notes? I understand this change if your reasoning is: “we like players finding out things like this for themselves, as it creates discussion in the community.”

There are plenty of inexcusable changes however, just to mention a few:

• You now get exalted keys from completing the Tarir defense event.
• Exalted chests have a small chance to give keys back.
• The guaranteed egg from Chak Gerent.
• The Superior Rune of the Revenant recipe being discover-able for armor crafting professions.

There is absolutely no reason any of these should not be listed in the patch notes!
Is your thought that “oh surely no one will notice this tiny change”, “players will figure this out on their own” or “players will appreciate these reward buffs and not ask questions.”

Well, you’re wrong. I’m not alone when I say: if the rewards from Auric Basin were improved, I would like to know by how much! Let’s put it this way: If a change is large enough to be noticed by at least one player, it should be in the patch notes!

I think it’s time you revised your process of creating these patch notes. I imagine the way you do it now is having poor Rubi running around the office, the day before, asking every single member of the team what they’ve done for the patch. So maybe the fact that Steal now requires a target was missed because Karl was out for the day. (Unless it’s a bug, which I really, really hope it is).

I hope you’ll take my feedback into consideration, seeing as getting patch notes done right is more important than you seem to believe. Of course I understand that your game (and team) is massive, and I don’t expect you to remember every single little detail, but this is seriously not good enough. This set of patch notes wasn’t a one-off, this is a trend that I’d like to see rectified.

Best regards,
A player that would like to see fewer undocumented changes in the next patch, aka Lia.

It was stated before that not all changes make it in the notes because the departments don’t always report all the changes that made it into the build. It’s as simple as that.

Every single game I play (some by bigger companies than ANet) have undocumented changes in their patch notes.

As I said, I don’t expect every tiny change to be put in the notes, however I’m really not happy that Anet keeps pulling these ninja changes without a word in the patch notes. Some of these things are pretty big changes and the community should be told about them. I’m getting pretty annoyed with the: “let’s only let them know about half the stuff we’re changing” policy that we’ve had for this game pretty much since launch.

Cryosia.3761:

As I said, I don’t expect every tiny change to be put in the notes, however I’m really not happy that Anet keeps pulling these ninja changes without a word in the patch notes. Some of these things are pretty big changes and the community should be told about them. I’m getting pretty annoyed with the: “let’s only let them know about half the stuff we’re changing” policy that we’ve had for this game pretty much since launch.

Speaking of a ninja change, they made it so Steal requires a target now. Meaning no more out of combat Thrill of the Crime and Bountiful Theft. So no more Might, Fury, Swiftness, and Vigor for the party when you can’t target something. That’s a pretty gigantic change. Not a good one mind you, but a major one that should have been listed.

You can be unhappy about it all you want, but fact of the matter is, the departments work separately from each other and don’t always communicate what made it into the current live build for the patch. Small or big change doesn’t matter.

There’s not conspiracy about “lets not tell them this.” It’s simply a matter of miscommunication or lack of any communication at all.

Does it suck at times? sure. Is there things they could do to improve it, of course, but there is always room for improvement. The community will figure it out as they do in every other game that is around that has updates on a regular basis.

Paradox.1380:

You can be unhappy about it all you want, but fact of the matter is, the departments work separately from each other and don’t always communicate what made it into the current live build for the patch. Small or big change doesn’t matter.

There’s not conspiracy about “lets not tell them this.” It’s simply a matter of miscommunication or lack of any communication at all.

Does it suck at times? sure. Is there things they could do to improve it, of course, but there is always room for improvement. The community will figure it out as they do in every other game that is around that has updates on a regular basis.

Yes it sucks, yes I am unhappy about it. But I do not understand your eagerness to defend the status quo when there is an obvious room for some significant improvement.

If what you’re saying is true, then there’s an even bigger underlying issue here. Now that I think of it, it’s becoming more apparent that there is a severe lack of communication internally at ANet. Especially now in regards to the Mystic Forge Stone “incident”.

Some of the changes (especially in this patch) are so impactful they should absolutely be in the patch notes, a prime example being the Steal change. Imagine a player reading the patch notes, then jumping straight into his first tPvP match of the season, and then loosing the game because of this change to steal, do you understand how that causes outrage?

Saying that it’s up to the community to fill out the blanks in every single patch is such a cop-out, and is definitely not the way it should be. ANet could save themselves a lot of outrage if only they had better patch notes, and maybe this is a good place for them to start fixing the poor communication in-between teams?

Not sure how you know it’s guaranteed, but it does talk about the chance for Chak Eggs from the Chak Gerent:

Fighting the chak gerent in Tangled Depths now has a chance to give chak eggs even if the event fails.

Just in case you missed it.

The official Wiki usually lists the undocumented changes, as well.

i’m not sure if there was a question in your posting OP so i have a question for you .

what if they delayed all updates for an extra week ?

ya know , so each department has a couple days to get all their changes documented . then , hand them off to a proof reader / editor , that can take a couple days to make some of the technical stuff easier to swallow . who can then hand it of the the webmaster for web page updating .

would that be better for ya ?

Anet’s Patch-note policy isn’t much better than their overall communication policy. I’m surprised we get patch notes at all.

i work at a software company. this is just how it is…

as a project manager, i am lucky to know half of the stuff development sneaks into each build. knowing things is an important part of my job, and it’s a constant battle between departments.

Paradox.1380:

It was stated before that not all changes make it in the notes because the departments don’t always report all the changes that made it into the build. It’s as simple as that.

Every single game I play (some by bigger companies than ANet) have undocumented changes in their patch notes.

Why should anyone be ok with this though? It’s sloppy.

It’s one thing to miss one or two changes. It’s another to miss a veritable laundry list of them. Part of the pull of MMO communities is the virtual world that we take part in. If we need to go read a complaint thread on the forums and then follow a link to reddit to see half the updates for a patch (a list that only exists because of sheer community dedication), that hurts our ability to stay on top of what the virtual world is.

Furthermore, missing patch notes can hurt the pull of the game in general, to log in. I’m sometimes excited to log in after reading patch notes because of some change that looks interesting. For example, had the Tarir Key thing been in the notes, I might have logged in today with excitement to look at the difference for myself. Instead, I read the notes and saw mostly bug fixes.

That hurts them more than it hurts me.

zcearo.1897:

i’m not sure if there was a question in your posting OP so i have a question for you .

what if they delayed all updates for an extra week ?

ya know , so each department has a couple days to get all their changes documented . then , hand them off to a proof reader / editor , that can take a couple days to make some of the technical stuff easier to swallow . who can then hand it of the the webmaster for web page updating .

would that be better for ya ?

Why would that be necessary? The list of things that changed should also be the list of things that need testing. The list of changes should already exist somewhere otherwise how do you make sure all changes have been tested? If that is not being done then it is an even bigger problem than missing patch notes. Oh and you missed a step “get it translated into other languages”.

as i said before this is common in the software industry.

everyone is rushing and busy. departments are generally understaffed.

internal systems are not customer facing. the list of things that need testing or changed probably exist somewhere but would require someone to translate them into appropriate customer facing documentation.

it sucks but when people are busy, documentation in the first thing to get cut.

I miss the GW1 Arenanet that would release intricately detailed blog posts covering every aspect of why they changed a skill, its implications in certain builds, reasons for splitting or not splitting between PvE and PvP (hah!) and what players could expect in the future.

Makai.3429:

I miss the GW1 Arenanet that would release intricately detailed blog posts covering every aspect of why they changed a skill, its implications in certain builds, reasons for splitting or not splitting between PvE and PvP (hah!) and what players could expect in the future.

what is this fantasy company you speak of

Soa Cirri.6012:

Makai.3429:

I miss the GW1 Arenanet that would release intricately detailed blog posts covering every aspect of why they changed a skill, its implications in certain builds, reasons for splitting or not splitting between PvE and PvP (hah!) and what players could expect in the future.

what is this fantasy company you speak of

http://grindinggear.com/

zcearo.1897:

i’m not sure if there was a question in your posting OP so i have a question for you .

what if they delayed all updates for an extra week ?

ya know , so each department has a couple days to get all their changes documented . then , hand them off to a proof reader / editor , that can take a couple days to make some of the technical stuff easier to swallow . who can then hand it of the the webmaster for web page updating .

would that be better for ya ?

I’ve read some interesting hyperboles on this forum, but this is a new one. It should not take them a week. Look at all the stuff in the patch notes. Were talking about a dozen or two lines added, maybe. If it takes a week to add that, those patch notes took months to put together (not the patch, the notes themselves).

I would also love to see all the changes listed in the notes, including bug fixes.

There are many times when I come here to post to suggest that people are over-dramatizing something, based on their own personal preferences. This is not one of those times: ANet has always been terrible with patch notes.

The worst thing about it is that they forget to post fixed or UI improvements that people have been long requesting, while remembering to post things that hardly anyone cares about.

I know from personal experience that it can be terribly difficult to put together comprehensive and accurate patch notes, even when there’s only one person coding; it’s a nightmare when there are dozens or hundreds. I really wish ANet would hire someone to make sure there’s better congruence between what folks are asking for, what the devs actually work on, and what ends up in the live game.

tl;dr ANet has always done a poor job of patch notes and my guess is they need someone whose nearly full-time job is to change the internal processes that lead to actual-vs-reported changes. Once the system is changed, maybe that person can be retasked.