Guild Wars 2

I’ve been waiting since the game came out for this planned app to come out, but it seems like everyone has completely forgotten about it. I haven’t heard anything regarding the topic for at least two months. Is this going to be released in the near future? Any progress updates?

All I want is to be able to hustle on the TP from my phone…

Same way as guesting and most of the city activities, cut out from release and delayed to an undisclosed date that might never come.

About a month before launch ANet more or less stated that they weren’t going to develop THE app, but rather release a kit for the general public to develop apps instead. I don’t believe they’ve released the kits yet though, I haven’t heard anything since early august/late july. I can’t seem to cite my source atm though, so I could be mistaken.

I saw an interview from the team developing the app from about 2 months ago and it seemed like everything was on track for them to release the app soon… I can’t find the interview anywhere on Google now though.

They probably dealing with debugging and they have a lot of work cut out for them atm

To OP: It’s quite apparent at this point they talking about a lot of features during development that they simply did not have the time to wrap up and get the game to market in a reasonable time frame. ArenaNet’s perspective seems to be that since MMORPGs continue to evolve long after launch this is acceptable practice.

My perspective is that they struggled to get even the core game features finished by launch. Most dynamic events were broken in the level 50-80 zones the first week of release. To say they shipped very aggressively is an understatement, they shipped the game in a great big mess. To their credit, they have fixed most of the critical problems although I do have a real problem with a company removing features to deal with hacks instead of properly patching the security hole allowing the hack (e.g. they removed orbs from WvW to deal with hacking, instead of actually dealing with the hackable code).

The GW2 website pales in comparison to what NCSoft’s last major western release (AION) offered in its first week. Mobile app is not coming anytime soon. Mobile API is not coming anytime soon. When devs are pressed with these questions in interviews they retreat and say things like we have a few bugs to work out that are priority which is of course true, but telling the public your game is in flames doesn’t buy you a whole lot.

You certainly get an interesting view into that kind of approach here. specially these bits talking about activities:

John Stumme

These are getting built into the game itself, they will be there at launch. They are not something that we will tack on later, they are part of the cities.

Eric Flannum

So when we talk about activities, like when we talk about the bar brawl, or the shooting gallery, because they are actually in the game you can go in and experience them right now. And so there is actually very little chance that most things we talk about are not going to make it into the game just because we run out of time or anything like that. Because, as I said, we tend not to talk about things unless we’re very, very certain that we can do them. Certain as in they are in already.

Makes you wonder what they’re not telling us when we hear about things like security flaws with the authenticators and hacks in WvW.

Oh there is plenty they aren’t telling us and for good reason…. If you go back through all the interviews conducted and find features mentioned in those interview I would estimate about 25-30% of those things were left out of the product that launched end of August. Of the features they did ship at release several were broken.

It’s very easy to qualify in retrospect that the game shipped too soon.

Moving past that (because it’s no good to horde up negative feelings about it) the on-going issue is that you have this level of expectation from the community that these things would be showing up sooner than later.

Going a bit OT:
Games that are still selling well don’t do free invite a friend weekends. This is a business strategy to help drive product sells. Keep in mind ArenaNet’s business model is around micro-transactions combined with new account sells. They do need people to continue playing the game and buying gems with cash to keep the ship moving forward. I take this move on their part as an indicator that sales are not where they would like them to be. I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but those who could care about gw2 knew about it long before it was released thanks to the outstanding work of ArenaNet’s marketing department (not being sarcastic, they did an amazing job). Many players at this point feel burned by a combination of false promises (e.g. features that did not ship), poor response to exploits, critical bugs that took fixes to patch and play mechanics that were simply poorly designed (see sPvP discussion on how badly the professions are really balanced when it comes to competitive play).

If you had a group of people building a game without a concrete plan, using say a iterative process where things changes all the time this is exactly the kind of mess of a product you would ship. It’s sad because the game is beautiful, it does play like nothing else, but it’s also very broken in many ways.

I have over four hundred hours in this game. I love it, but I stand by everything I’ve said here. If they want to infract me for it nothing I can do, the ship that is GW2 has large holes in it’s hull and she’s sinking very, very slowly…. My fingers are crossed that this large November patch is going to finally get the game to where it should have been at launch. I also very much hope time hasn’t run it for the public opinion vote.

I’d love to see an API that exposes WvWvW data (particularly objective ownership). I’ve been playing about with Android to put together an app that updates and notifies based on ownership changes (as well as scores and whatnot), but without an API, it’s kind of useless.