WvW Development

WvW Development

in WvW

Posted by: FearedbytheGods.8617

FearedbytheGods.8617

Initially i was typing this in reply to speculating on the number of devs working on WvW. I found myself speculating as a whole on WvW development and turned up the following ideas so decided to give it its own post. In the end I wasn’t so much making a point but speculating on the ‘inner workings’ of ANet that made for interesting reading if nothing else.

How much development time does WvW get?

ANet’s focus on the Living Story gives and takes devs from work that’s required.
EotM for example, was a main focus for a time so it would have gotten the attention from A LOT of people at ANet. Resources have been placed into the China launch which has little impact on current WvW.

In Sacrx’ NDA leak he stated it was only a few guys on the ‘core’ WvW team and that everything had to go through the PvP team. If something were to go into WvW the PvP team would have to ok it first. Sacrx was later removed from the alpha test phase.

When Allie was posting she would always talk about PvP numbers in the context of WvW/PvP being the same, despite being completely different which highlights that the overlap is still there.

So all things considered this is what makes sense to me:
For example, things like Commander tag, AP in WvW etc that we have been asking for nearly 2 years now haven’t been handled because it’s not a prority (obviously) for ANet as a whole. That the handful of WvW guys are still having to work through the PvP team and the PvP element obvious cares nothing for commander tag or AP in WvW because it has nothing to do with PvP. The few WvW guys prob get pulled away to work on other projects as they are needed (LS, China release) where bigger elements get ANet attention or it swings the complete opposite and the few guys on the WvW team are stuck in a kind of maintenance mode.

So the few WvW guys get pulled from one project to the next and then (possibly?) vetoed by PvP for mid-term changes because the overarching principle of WvW is that ‘it was just supposed to be casual’ and was never incorporated in ANets business structure like PvE was or the esports that PvP was supposed to become.

WvW will probably go through ‘cycles’ of attention, most recently with Season 2/mist forge weapons due to a soon to be released mmo. So I’m not expecting anything significant to happen for WvW till well after season 2 finishes, the WvW team is currently in maintenance mode.

TLDR: Speculation on WvW development, take it or leave it.

WvW Development

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Posted by: buckeyecro.9614

buckeyecro.9614

Last summer I read somewhere on these forums in about June 2013 that there’s about 6 ‘dedicated’ WvW developers and the thread had a post that listed several of their names by an Anet Developer, and several also replied to the thread and said hi.

So let’s assume the Developers are Full Time Employees of Anet and work 40 hours per week, which equals 240 man hours per week (6×40) assuming the team’s numbers have not changed.

Realistically about 30-40 of those hours would be non actual programming/design time with the game’s code/designs. So the team collectively devotes about 200 hours of dedicated time working directly on the game. Programming is a grueling task and the general development cycle takes hundreds of hours to complete with entire teams of people working on a program. I can imagine that WvsW probably has hundreds of thousands lines of code. With the entire game having millions of lines of code. Maybe about 5 million as its more complex than WoW which according to Brendan Sinclair, has 5.5 million lines of code in http://www.gamespot.com/articles/blizzard-outlines-massive-effort-behind-world-of-warcraft/1100-6228615/.

Sanctum of Rall NA Engineer Commander

Guild Wars 2 needs a Public Beta Environment

WvW Development

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Posted by: Ahmrill.7512

Ahmrill.7512

WvW is simply not given enough priority and resources. I don’t expect any major WvW content or upgrades for years. We’ll see a few tweaks but what we currently have in GW2 is probably going to be it.

A lot of dedicated WvW players have already bailed. Sad not seeing many friends left in the game, but I’ll see them in CU at least!

Ahmrill
Proud member of [NORD] Nordvegr Guild
Jade Quarry