Guild Wars 2

You forgot something important… Look at the Bolded / Underlined Text… What happened to the #1 Live development feature priority for the game… After HoT launched… This post is a dev quite from the WvW forums… You know, the 3rd game mode of GW2…

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

Hi, I’m posting today the transcript of the statement that John Corpening, game director for World vs. World, made last week at the beginning of the World vs. World Desert Borderlands Invitational. Enjoy!

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Hello, my name is John Corpening. I’m the game director for World vs. World in Guild Wars 2.

World vs. World as it is today is an amazing experience where hundreds of players are constantly engaged in epic battles for control of towers, keeps, castles and more…

…

Another area we want to improve is how players are recognized and rewarded for their contributions to their team. Whether you defend, scout, run havoc, zerg bust, roam, conquer or win team fights you should be fairly compensated from the game and not rely on the hope that your team may kick you back some gold at the end of the night for you to feel rewarded for the valuable effort you put into the success of your world.

…

After Adopt-A-Dev we spent some time discussing and debating the results. Even though a good portion of the team was already dedicated to working on World vs. World content and features for Heart of Thorns, we assigned people to start tackling these problems and more.

… we look forward to sharing those plans with you. As work on Heart of Thorns wraps up, we’ll be treating resolving the remaining core areas in WvW as our #1 live development feature priority for the game to ensure we deliver on making World vs. World not just the great experience it is today *- but the incredible experience we know it can be. As this effort ramps up you will be hearing more from us about the work in progress.

An example of this work in progress is the recent change to how world populations are determined. Going forward worlds will be marked as full or not based on actual World vs. World participation rather than accounting for every player in the game.
…

Thank You.

Just found this from an interview with Colin at MMORPG.com

“That being said, I’d also add one of the goals of Heart of Thorns was to address every major game system to ensure they had all the core components we need for the future of the game. Our goal was to ensure we didn’t really need to tweak any major game system again after this expansion and our focus could be entirely on adding new content, and building on top of – rather than expanding outward systemically. WvW is the one major feature I’d say we didn’t end up accomplishing this goal, the project is so large it didn’t end up fitting into the scope of the expansion and we still have work to do to address core fundamental issues like population balance, rewards, scoring, night capping, etc. As always we don’t discuss features in development until they are far enough along to share meaningful details, so for now we’ll just say WvW is the final big game system on our radar – and we’ve had a lot of great conversations with our players about what they’d love to see from epic large scale PvP combat.” ~Colin Johanson

Different teams can have different “#1” priorities, depending on what the team is slated to do. I’m guessing that some are tasked with wvw as their primary goal, some others are tasked with balance, others still are tasked with an assortment of bugs, etc etc. Not that they can’t overlap of course…

WvW is a massively complex game mode. It is really easy to develop for PvE, more difficult to develop for small PvP. Extremely hard to develop for something like WvW especially on a live game.

Priorities change, it happens. An MMO is an incredibly complex program, and they have a limited amount of people and resources. And just because WvW is going to be their #1 for a while does not mean they are abandoning everything, or even anything. In a couple months, their priority could shift again.

I don’t understand what the OP is trying to say. Are you not happy about this announcement or are you looking forward to it?

Chaba.5410:

I don’t understand what the OP is trying to say. Are you not happy about this announcement or are you looking forward to it?

I am unhappy with the fact that WvW was left out of the Blog… We were told the reason WvW wasn’t being prioritized was because of HoT expansion… after HoT launches their #1 priority was to finally address the poor rewards that WvW offers. 5 minutes in sPvP can produce more rewards… It upsets me to know that it still isn’t even on the radar, as it was a footnote under combat visibility for the blog.

Just trying to remind the Devs that WvW is dying rapidly in lower tiers, and it is not going to get better until the poor rewards get addressed.

Now that they have the new event participation concept, where if you do not participate actively you do not get the rewards. We need incentive to defend, better line of sight when shooting down from walls, etc… A player on the ground can shoot up and hit someone on a wall before they are even able to get them in LoS. These kinds of things…

@Chaba. Basically, WvW is broken. Has been broken for years. Is so broken it can’t be properly fixed. It gets a fresh coat of paint every once in a while, but the stains on the carpet won’t come clean, the ceiling is leaking, and the rotary phone on the desk is covered in dust and cobwebs.

Hokay…

WvW was mentioned at least twice in the blog post and then it was talked about again in the interview. So I didn’t know what I was supposed to take away from the OP’s post.

Terrible news considering their vision of WvW is 180 degrees away from WvW players’ vision of the game mode.

Looking at how they improved dungeons, fractals and ascended crafting… Not sure i want them to improve WvW.