Quotes from the Chris Whiteside thread in the general GW2 discussion thread on “CDI – Process Evolution”:
Cactus: “Any chance we can get some meaningful feedback from the first WvW CDI thread before we move on to another one?”
Chris Whiteside (from six days ago): “Regarding your question Cactus I will ask DC to do a summary of valuable points garnered from the discussion. He is however away for the holiday so we should be patient in that regard in terms of a reply.”
Reality: We now have an active CDI thread going on commander tags with zero summary, or feedback of any sort, on what ANet considers to be the key actionable items from the original WvW population balance CDI.
sigh …
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
We did know the commander functionality was going to be discussed.
I do hope the world population part is revisited soon though. That is the single biggest issue with WvW.
Yes … certainly we knew that the commander tag system was going to be the next item discussed, and it was within that context that I directly asked Chris Whiteside if we’d be getting any real feedback on population balance (by ANet’s admission the number one concern expressed by the WvW player base) before we moved on to another topic. I never asked for a timeline for any fixes … only a summary of what ANet considered to be the directions to follow as a result of the population balance CDI. Clearly we aren’t going to get that, which makes all of this just seem like a smokescreen.
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
I don’t see a problem here. This is what’s commonly known as “pipelining” in the computer business, where you start work on a second job well before the first one is completely done (the idea being: if you put something in one end of a pipe then wait for it to come out the other end before putting anything else in, then if the pipe is long it will be mostly empty most of the time.)
When you have large teams, with individual team members specializing in small parts, this is just how things need to be done if you don’t want to have a lot of team members sitting idle most of the time.
I don’t see a problem here. This is what’s commonly known as “pipelining” in the computer business, where you start work on a second job well before the first one is completely done.
When you have large teams, with individual team members specializing in small parts, this is just how things need to be done if you don’t want to have a lot of team members sitting idle most of the time.
-ken
Except that we were promised a summary before moving on. As I said, I wasn’t asking for or expecting a flow chart of future fixes … just feedback on what ANet felt were the directions they would take based upon player feedback.
Besides, WvW does NOT have a large team with individual team members specializing in small parts. They have a small team with a handful of devs, and the lead dev is now fully involved in the commander CDI. I know what pipelining is, and this is not it.
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
Feedback about what direction they are taking requires them to have already decided what direction that will be. The act of deciding requires them to review a design proposal and approve it. That’s a task that takes time.
But before they can approve the design proposal, then need to communicate it to everyone involved in the approval process, so they have time to review it. This includes people outside of the WvW team because the changes might impact the underlying infrastructure, basic game engine mechanics, UI design, translation, etc. Communicating the proposal is another task that takes time.
But before you can communicate the proposal you need to decide what the proposal should include and write it up. That’s another task. Unless your proposal is approved on your first try, it will often be based on a previous one that was rejected. The time to prepare and discuss all the previous ones can’t be ignored either. You see where I’m going with this?
It may be the fact that they haven’t a game plan yet. Really outside of forced relocation (never going to happen) there is no way to balance wvw population cross servers. That’s why most suggestions leaned on changing the scoring system to make being on a stacked server less important and hopefully from there spreading people out to avoid ques and mega zergs and such.
Feedback about what direction they are taking requires them to have already decided what direction that will be. The act of deciding requires them to review a design proposal and approve it. That’s a task that takes time.
But before they can approve the design proposal, then need to communicate it to everyone involved in the approval process, so they have time to review it. This includes people outside of the WvW team because the changes might impact the underlying infrastructure, basic game engine mechanics, UI design, translation, etc. Communicating the proposal is another task that takes time.
But before you can communicate the proposal you need to decide what the proposal should include and write it up. That’s another task. Unless your proposal is approved on your first try, it will often be based on a previous one that was rejected. The time to prepare and discuss all the previous ones can’t be ignored either. You see where I’m going with this?
-ken
What I see is that you’re missing the point. We had a WvW Population Balance CDI with 23 pages of comments from the player base without a single response from ANet identifying what they thought was worth any sort of followup. There is NOTHING “collaborative” about that. I’m not asking for the action plan … I’m asking for their summary of the player feedback as they saw it, and whether any of it fits their own view of what would make WvW better. That doesn’t require ANY of the things you describe. It only requires summarizing the thread feedback and comparing it to the supposed vision for the game.
As far as I’m concerned, roughly 1,130 user comments ended up in a black hole in spite of assurances to the contrary.
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
It may be the fact that they haven’t a game plan yet. Really outside of forced relocation (never going to happen) there is no way to balance wvw population cross servers. That’s why most suggestions leaned on changing the scoring system to make being on a stacked server less important and hopefully from there spreading people out to avoid ques and mega zergs and such.
Even if they don’t have a game plan (which I am almost positive they don’t) they should have been able to summarize the key points they thought they received from the player comments. And that is what Chris said we’d get by now.
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
As far as I’m concerned, roughly 1,130 user comments ended up in a black hole in spite of assurances to the contrary.
OK, point taken. I think the concern here is that if Arenanet posts a summary (specifically which items they want to pursue) it will be taken by the user community as a commitment to eventually deliver. So they don’t want to say they want to pursue something until they have at least a basic idea of its feasibility (which is the thing that takes most of the time).
It is, after all, “collaborative development”, not “collaborative blue-skying”. Perhaps the best tactic for now is to give them the benefit of the doubt during the commander / squad discussion, but if they have’t posted any feedback about population by the time the next topic comes up, opt out of this process as a waste of time.
If nothing else, I think ArenaNet should certainly take the existence of this thread as notice that they need to be as prompt with their feedback about our feedback as possible.
It may be the fact that they haven’t a game plan yet. Really outside of forced relocation (never going to happen) there is no way to balance wvw population cross servers. That’s why most suggestions leaned on changing the scoring system to make being on a stacked server less important and hopefully from there spreading people out to avoid ques and mega zergs and such.
Even if they don’t have a game plan (which I am almost positive they don’t) they should have been able to summarize the key points they thought they received from the player comments. And that is what Chris said we’d get by now.
I think even just a summary at this point has to be worded very carefully and is most likely the delay. The whole topic is a land mind and has to be treaded very carefully.
I don’t see a problem here. This is what’s commonly known as “pipelining” in the computer business, where you start work on a second job well before the first one is completely done.
When you have large teams, with individual team members specializing in small parts, this is just how things need to be done if you don’t want to have a lot of team members sitting idle most of the time.
-ken
Except that we were promised a summary before moving on.
…
This is a great example as to why any sort of reply needs to be thought of carefully. I am only using the quotes you provided, but nowhere in there did I see any sort of promise being made. The community often has a tendency to read too far into developer responses and make too many assumptions based on what was written.
I don’t see a problem here. This is what’s commonly known as “pipelining” in the computer business, where you start work on a second job well before the first one is completely done.
When you have large teams, with individual team members specializing in small parts, this is just how things need to be done if you don’t want to have a lot of team members sitting idle most of the time.
-ken
Except that we were promised a summary before moving on.
…
This is a great example as to why any sort of reply needs to be thought of carefully. I am only using the quotes you provided, but nowhere in there did I see any sort of promise being made. The community often has a tendency to read too far into developer responses and make too many assumptions based on what was written.
Well, in that binary world you apparently live in, I could either take Chris’ reply to me to mean that we could expect some sort of summary before the commander CDI went full-blown live, or I could expect nothing in particular to come from the population imbalance CDI in any definable time frame. Given that CDI stands for “Collaborative” Development Initiative, which would you have interpreted his directly-quoted reply to mean??
D/D Thief who prefers mobility to stealth … so yeah, I die a lot
Stormbluff Isle [AoD]
