Guild Wars 2

Bugs, they’re inevitable. No matter what you do, some will always slip through the cracks.

In the world of programming, its pretty common knowledge that the faster you go, and the less time you have to test, the more likely there will be conflicts (bugs).

This happens all the time in the game industry where deadlines need to be reached and so developers rush to finish the game. It’s common practice to have a giant patch go out shortly after the release of the game to fix those pesky problems that couldn’t be sorted out prior to launch.

Guild Wars 2 is no different. It launched a year ago with some pretty consistent bugs. Some, were minor annoyances, and some, as many of you know, are still a major issue. To be fair, over the last year ANet has been slowly addressing these bugs, and really solidifying the core game.

Then came the Living Story.

Now, imagine for a moment you wanted to run to the store to get milk before it closed. I throw you my car keys, and you rush out to start it up. Turns out, I forgot to inflate the tires. You run back in and tell me know there is a problem. I stare at you while you explain the issue, but you’re not quite sure whether I’ve acknowledged it or not.

You go back out and try to find a solution. You look around the shop for a pump, or spare tires, or something. A few moments later I walk in and say, “My mistake it wasn’t my intention to leave the tires empty.”

You look at the clock and realize that no matter what you do, the store will close long before you get there.

Guild Wars 2 has become like this. Every few weeks we are given a long list of tasks that each of us must find time to accomplish. For many of us, the frequency of the updates, and the amount of time required to participate is already putting a lot of strain on us.

When you add a game breaking bug into the mix, the entire thing breaks down. No amount of playing can rectify this. The players, are now stuck in a position where the clock is ticking, and are at the mercy of whether or not ANet decides to fix the issue.

Every day new post pop up with detailed reasons as to why the Living Story isn’t working, and in my opinion, this is just another reason. ANet does not have the resources to bug fix fast enough.

In the end, if the speed at which you’re releasing content means that the frequency of the bugs are bound to increase, and you insist on only allowing that buggy content to be available for a limited time, then something needs to change. You either need to have a team dedicated to addressing, and fixing issues ASAP, you need to slow down the development/testing schedule, or you need to allow the content to be around longer to give players an opportunity to complete it, after it is fixed.

I want to like these updates. I want to play them, but you’re burning me out. The pace at which you’re running leaves little room for error, and if something isn’t addressed right away, it can mean the difference between experiencing your content, and finding something else to do.

Please…slow down before you’ve created a bigger problem than a few bugs.

Do you really think that the events are created in two weeks?

No matter how much you test something there will always be stuff that slips through (or don’t even happen on the test-servers for that matter).

Lord,

Try reading the first sentence of my post. Ok, done?

Good, now try the rest.

I’m usually the biggest apologist when it comes to shipping software with bugs. No matter how hard you test your software, there is always something that will only be a problem in conjunction with a customer’s specific setup, or an unfortunate data combination.

But many of the bugs that we’ve seen in the last few weeks were avoidable and make me question whether even one person tried a thing even once. (Such as casting a debuff and it debuffs the player instead of the enemy. How can something like that slip through?)

The majority though are sloppy oversights, such as not removing support tokens from the drop tables, implementing account wallet without any regard of secondary use of tokens (such as fractal relics in MF, dungeon tokens in crafting), continually forgetting to restrict food/potion/skill buffs before/during mini-games, etc. etc. – I could go on.

Then some of these oversights would be very easy fixes, such as replacing one string (remember how several Southsun events counted defeated enemies down instead of up due to mislabelling? Also: current torchbearer daily?), or deleting a duplicate NPC from a map; but they’re not given high enough priority to be addressed, even though I’m convinced the fix would take only minutes out of a developer’s day.

And what really does bother me the most is that sometimes there is a definite bug, and it is getting addressed, but some players are still out of luck: those who didn’t get the crab toss achievements a few months back when the achievements randomly just stopped working mid-event still can’t get them, and weren’t compensated in any way (that I am aware of) despite ANet (as rare as it is) openly acknowledging that the achievements were 100% broken.

So yes, software will always ship with bugs, we all know that (and people who work in IT know it a little better than most) but there is a lot going on here that is not okay regardless.