Guild Wars 2

The latest hotfix didn’t fix a bunch of bugs and actually turned one bug into a “feature” to avoid “confusion.”

It’s amazing how many people in map chat reacted to the hotfix’s patch notes by saying ArenaNet merely “claims” they fixed some problems. No one believes the developers are competent anymore.

These recent “fixes” and the achievements themselves are in really bad form; very disappointed.

Do Anet patch on weekends or is this another 2-3 day wait?

Arkard.3970:

Still not seeing anyone who thinks this ISNT the buggiest set of releases yet.

sign me up…

worst “epic ending” in history

Yeah, it is pretty much a total fiasco.

The only thing epic in this final of the LS is the sheer amount of bugs.

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

your right..
I dont know how to program a mmo
i leave to that to the professionals.
they failed

Arkholeon.7163:

i think we should ask for a salary or in-game better reward for doing their job :O

You should know there’s no guarantee that QA people get treated any better than players, assuming this is just slaps in the face for the lulz. There’s plenty of stories floating around about just simple abuse of QA staff some companies feel free to visit on them . . . not to mention even some places treat it like unpaid internships.

Just curious, how many bugs have there been with Cash Shop items?

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

This is the lamest of all excuses on the planet. Along with “Meh, Meh, why don’t you make your own mmo?”

That’s like taking a car back to the manufacturers because the brakes don’t work and being told “Don’t you know how hard it is to make brakes work? Go make your own brakes!”

Boneheart.3561:

PhansyPanda.7215:

CC Danicia.1394:

Hello all,

Please remember to be respectful towards our staff while giving your feedback. You can be critcal and offer your opinions & suggestions, but we ask that you keep the rude & insulting comments out of your feedback. Thank you.

Please remember to be respectful of your customers when releasing content. Please ensure that it is absent of game braking bugs and adequately tested. It is acceptable to release challenging content that requires coordination but not when it is present with game breaking bugs. I consider this to be rude and insulting to me as a paying customer.

Leave.

They will, in droves, if this kind of stuff keeps up.

On that same token, if they don’t want to the do the job, door swings both ways.

Look, we all get that these are human beings involved in all of this, and mistakes happen, but a little honesty and transparency goes a long way. You treat me like a mushroom, well, I’m gonna be unhappy, to say the least. If I take my time to send in well detailed bug reports and tickets, and get copy/paste responses, literally ignoring questions that I’m asking 4 times, I’m going to realize that you’re not interested in me as a customer or the issue I came to you about. Indeed, it’ll sink in alright. It will be remembered when the next bug occurs and I wonder if I should submit a report and play QA or if I should not give myself the headache,.

Long story short, people will leave. Like they did with UO, with Shadowbane, with Everquest, with WoW, with SWTOR, with Rift, with LOtRO. There is always something to leavefor. Game companies need to keep in mind that most gamers are dedicated people, and they’ll stand by a game they feel passionately about. Personally, I’ve not been feeling a whole lot of sincere apologies for messed up content and ridiculous ticket responses -my husband and I have both gotten the same canned responses, almost word for word., and all we can do is be boggled.

I think it is too late to be complaining about the bugs and etc. A lot of people have already got the meta and have moved on.

I truly wish ANet has the courage to come out on the forums and publicly say that they rushed the content, they didn’t intend it to be played the way it was designed at first and then they changed it without giving it enough thoughts, the lack of communication on the fights to the players, the bugged bosses and loot, was all their mistake…

I said this before and will say it again: Don’t try to change the way we play. We play the way we want and if the content forces us otherwise, the #1 the community might grow apart from each other, #2 The player base might get tired of the game’s limitation to change the way they want to play versus the way the developer want the player to play.

I participated in every living story until today, and this was truly a shameful ending to all that effort that the developers/designers/writers/etc put through.

And as something to make up to the community, they should give 800 gems to every player in the game….even the AFK ones…..

They should abandon the idea of LS. This whole LS “thing” is a misunderstanding from start to end. Bugs, low quality content and even worse “story” than in Personal Story. They’ve already ruined their own game. People will eventually leave. Actually I’m really looking forward to it – maybe then they’ll understand how bad their decisions are.

Thaia.5146:

They should abandon the idea of LS. This whole LS “thing” is a misunderstanding from start to end. Bugs, low quality content and even worse “story” than in Personal Story. They’ve already ruined their own game. People will eventually leave. Actually I’m really looking forward to it – maybe then they’ll understand how bad their decisions are.

Nope. They’ll never admit mistakes let alone understand them.

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

I don’t know how things work in your country, but in mine we’re not required to be experts on a given subject before we’re allowed to voice our opinions on it. And you’re kitten ed right we’re entitled. We paid for this game. That entitles us, in every literal sense of the word, to criticize the game.

Escape from Lion’s Arch was good indeed, i really enjoyed the mapchat for a chance, everyone coorperating, shouting out, you name it, it was there..
Maybe the helping citizens escape could have some more indications on the minimap..
Some arrows and numbers to indicate escape routes and maybe indicating where groups of citizens where hiding..

The patch that came after was a horrid mess when it came to bug’s and broken things, yet there were pretty quick responses that resolved some of the issues.
Even though there were some moments and bug’s that made me facepalm (no skip button on the stomp cutscene & hologram overflow), in general it was a pretty well put together event when it came to event triggers and the first step to making conditions have worth and seperate the zerg.

The loot scale was better, 6 gearboxes is a very reasonable reward for the Knights event, but that reward made the hologram chest pale in comparison and people quickly realized it’s easier and more profitable to go back to champ farming when the Knights were down..

Why not have the Hologram event chests drop a claimticket for one of the Special Skins? 10 claim tickets gets you the Special Skin
Maybe add some gearboxes for every hologram downed.. (Red=molten chest, Blue=Clockwork chest, Green=Toxic chest or something)

The event was easy to read, people immediately knew what to do and discovered the best way to do things pretty quick, so the learning curve was pretty well done..

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

Hard or not, it is their job and they should do it properly.
Personally, I don’t care much about bugs, but I had to quote you.

darkace.8925:

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

I don’t know how things work in your country, but in mine we’re not required to be experts on a given subject before we’re allowed to voice our opinions on it. And you’re kitten ed right we’re entitled. We paid for this game. That entitles us, in every literal sense of the word, to criticize the game.

It does, you’re quite correct. However, it does mean there’s legitimate and insightful criticisms mixed in with “it sucks because it sucks”. One has to be careful when reading things to try to discern something useful.

To ANet – Can you please slow the timetable for releases down to every 3-4 weeks and use extra time to do a final testing pass before you release? Also, it’s getting clear some things are not getting caught in your internal test setup . . . it probably needs to be tallied just what slipped through and get its own patch soon.

Just saying.

i’ll tell you this right now:

no content at all will be bug free in any game***

things happens, it’s hard to see how/know ~ bugs pop up when there are a ton of people trying to do the event. a lot of the time bugs pop up unexpectedly, so stay calm, tell them about the bugs that pop up, and wait for a fix.

Paul.4081:

Just curious, how many bugs have there been with Cash Shop items?

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

This is the lamest of all excuses on the planet. Along with “Meh, Meh, why don’t you make your own mmo?”

That’s like taking a car back to the manufacturers because the brakes don’t work and being told “Don’t you know how hard it is to make brakes work? Go make your own brakes!”

Because apparently Anet is responsible for creating life saving equipment. NOT.

GW2 is a game, get over it and stop being so melodramatic.

Levelord.5746:

Paul.4081:

Just curious, how many bugs have there been with Cash Shop items?

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

This is the lamest of all excuses on the planet. Along with “Meh, Meh, why don’t you make your own mmo?”

That’s like taking a car back to the manufacturers because the brakes don’t work and being told “Don’t you know how hard it is to make brakes work? Go make your own brakes!”

Because apparently Anet is responsible for creating life saving equipment. NOT.

GW2 is a game, get over it and stop being so melodramatic.

Many already got over it, and more will. I for one am not entirely sure how players leaving will help this game though…

The 50 at each boss and buffing toughness was a really bad decision.
Also, people were complaining about zerging and we get more zerging.

ZERG WARS 2: the buggy edition

Klonex.4562:

i’ll tell you this right now:

no content at all will be bug free in any game***

things happens, it’s hard to see how/know ~ bugs pop up when there are a ton of people trying to do the event. a lot of the time bugs pop up unexpectedly, so stay calm, tell them about the bugs that pop up, and wait for a fix.

it’s not just a fix, the way they think of reward it’s about work like in real life. Why someone has to work both in real life and in a game instead of having good time? Bugs can be reported and fixed but last updates are far more then this

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

Its difficult to do a lot of things, which is why we pay people to do them. When the output is unsatisfactory, we give feedback for what will keep us interested in playing. Whether or not that feedback is constructive or not is another issue.

Some things I like about this patch:
New items
New events
New enemies
Story elements being tied together

Of these things, I have access to about about 1/2 a new event in the form of Knights and 1/2 of the new enemies(again knights). The rest are just events that were introduced last time. This brings me to things I don’t like about this patch:

Event timers train-wreck each other.
New enemies are (now) pretty boring
Can’t get new items
There aren’t many new items.

This event as a whole has a lot of cool concepts that you can’t really see because they aren’t coordinated with each other. One person is shouting to take Cannoneer, another wants to do Miasma, some people are getting ready for Knights 20 minutes ahead of time, and the rest do defend/drive off events because they are easy to get to. Its not uncommon for all of these to fail (including defend/drive off) because each person is trying to get a different Achieve. Tags kind of help. But not a lot.

All of the actually new items(2) in this patch are part of the Scarlet fight(which is a really fun fight by the way), which you need to do the Knights to get to (which is really boring). To top it off, only a few classes can actually use these new items.

I’m going to stress here that its not that there’s ANY content I can’t access that bothers me, but that MOST of the new content is inaccessable. And because I got to do that content while the event was “bugged” I can say that that’s the coolest part of the new content. THAT is what bothers me.

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

Next time you discover that half of the eggs you bought are addled, do NOT go back to the market and ask for a refund. That would be silly. Lay better ones.

While I’ll agree that much of this content has been buggy — I DO appreciate that Anet has attempted to take steps to break up the zerg train that this event was becoming.

From my point they kitten it up right at the final LS story of the scarlet arc badly. What should have been memorable in a good way turned completely opposite.

I still can’t get the “no more tricks, scarlet” anything i do….and i stayed away from every laser shot possible, evaded the trace they leave behind and never got downed once, several times. Will try the AFK trick now because that’s how this achiev is ment to be made apparently.

The 6 minute achiev is almost impossible if not bugged out somehow. All ppl i know who got this achiev…bugged it out somehow…because they got it after killing the first golem (regardless of color).

I am personally (dunno about others) terribly disappointed in how ANet delivered the last and probably most important update of this arc. They did fix a good portion of the bugs..but those shouldn’t have come out of the testing stage in the first place! A terrible week past out of 2.

Klonex.4562:

i’ll tell you this right now:

no content at all will be bug free in any game***

things happens, it’s hard to see how/know ~ bugs pop up when there are a ton of people trying to do the event. a lot of the time bugs pop up unexpectedly, so stay calm, tell them about the bugs that pop up, and wait for a fix.

this is all fine and dandy when it comes to permacontent but this whole 2 week thing has been a fiasco since it started. you cannot honestly say that things will get fixed completely simply because its a business and if its too buggy they are not going to spend much extra time when on their end they see it as “ok well we spent enough time and effort on this but we have the next update to work on and this is temporary so lets not waste anymore time on it since it will be gone in a week” and it is precisely this pattern of quality that subdues players joy for a game and they leave or at the least stop running the content

This^ is just an excuse to either let content untested properly out or just give them a motive to continue delivering bugged content…and i am not talking about low level bugs..i am talking about straight out game-breaking core-feature bugs. There’s bugs….and there’s broken content…there’s a difference

Klonex.4562:

i’ll tell you this right now:

no content at all will be bug free in any game***

things happens, it’s hard to see how/know ~ bugs pop up when there are a ton of people trying to do the event. a lot of the time bugs pop up unexpectedly, so stay calm, tell them about the bugs that pop up, and wait for a fix.

I find this to be an excuse to wave off developer failures. Yes, bugs happen. However, the existence of bugs should not validate the existence of bugs. Just because bugs happen does not mean that you can overlook bugs happening.

Developers should do their best to minimize bugs through high quality work. Quality assurance should do their best to squash bugs through high quality work. Whoever is doing the developing or assurance on the now-ended living story needs to really examine how they approach their work.

In fact, I believe we’re coming to the point where Anet needs to seriously ask itself what its mission is. At this point, the only thing not bugged in these releases is the gem store. There’s a reason for that. Anet has shifted from quality gameplay experiences to sell those gems for more money.

It’s sad to watch the studio that made Guild Wars 1 become enslaved to the Nexon way of gaming.

I dunno, I’m not a hardcore loot/achievement grinder, so I haven’t come across the plethora of bugs you guys have mentioned. And while I do get disconnects on occasion, it’s not really the end of the world for me. : /

As Sourde and Darkace mentioned earlier, I think a monthly update would work fine. Gives devs more breathing room and gives players extra time to access content. It’s a win-win.

To me, it’s bad enough that that every living story release comes along with event stopping bugs.

However, more and more players I know are not only getting tired of the bugs, but also that each hotfix seems to punitively punish the players for outsmarting the devs and QA. Like the knights for example, devs obviously did not anticipate the players ganging up on 1 knight at a time. It’s not like there is no precedence for this. For training purposes, people ganged up on 1 head of the triple headed wurm. Clear warning signs to player behavior there not heeded.

And with achievements being buggy at the same time, people don’t feel that the game is equal to everyone(let’s not talk RNG please).

I think the real consolation is that new players will never have to experience the living story. There is no way to replay all the living story content, and may I add fortunately.

I’m not sure the lack of a cut scene skip button or the missing of a couple of non-essential chests really count as game-breaking.

Heraldusluminare.2946:

I’m not sure the lack of a cut scene skip button or the missing of a couple of non-essential chests really count as game-breaking.

You must have not played during the first 3 days of this release. On the first day, you couldn’t even reach Scarlet. On the second day, the knights stopped giving loot at all, and lots of servers had problems with an invulnerable Scarlet.

Levelord.5746:

Wow, talk about a thread filled with massive entitled whiners. You guys have no idea how hard it is to program a game, let alone an MMO.

People would tolerate a couple bugs at launch or patch day. But we’re talking about multiple patches in a row that are fundamentally broken. That’s the first time I’ve seen that kind of terrible quality in any MMO, from WOW to Rift to SWTOR to Guild Wars 2. (SWTOR might come close with its first endgame raid, but major bugs weren’t prevalent outside of that content.)

Besides, ArenaNet promised this content would be polished. Would you consider these past few patches polished?

Klonex.4562:

i’ll tell you this right now:

no content at all will be bug free in any game***

things happens, it’s hard to see how/know ~ bugs pop up when there are a ton of people trying to do the event. a lot of the time bugs pop up unexpectedly, so stay calm, tell them about the bugs that pop up, and wait for a fix.

That is true, glitches can happen, games release without being properly tested, bugs that are hard to find, etc.

First of all, if a game releases with this many bugs, I would be a fool to spend money in that game or even buy the next release.

Second of all, we are not talking about some small game developer company that release their first game. This is ArenaNet with a massive MMO at hand. The expectations are different than other game companies like EA, etc….

Third and last, This game is almost 1.5 years old, the content should be already polished and QA’ed to the full before release. If this happened at release, it would be totally fine, but the game has aged and the devs should know their game by now.

I think it’s important to step back and gain a little perspective here.

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.

I’ve been studying game design with the hopes of someday making it into the industry and even with my limited knowledge of how these projects come together it never ceases to amaze me that they can produce this amount of work in such a short amount of time, bugs or not.

Keep in mind with each new content release all departments have 20 working days from start to finish. The departments being; Concept Design, Level Design, Writers, Sound Design / VO, 3D modeling/Texture Design, Environmental Lighting & Design, Scripting/Code programmers, UI/UX Department, QA Testing, Balance Department, and I’m sure more I’m forgetting. A small team organizing all these departments to release this amount of original content with this many moving parts in 20 days (even if 20% needs bug fixes and fine tuning for the first few days after release) should be appreciated.

I’m not saying there haven’t been naive missteps along the way or that these won’t continue, but these are to be expected when pioneering such a high risk / high reward philosophy to adding new content to an MMO. This ‘Living World’ approach being such a unique development style ArenaNet is learning and fine tuning all elements of this workflow while simultaneously supporting content that is already live.

Also to be kept in mind the entire staff of ArenaNet are far more motivated to please their customer base and to make this game the best it can be than anyone simply playing the game or posting on the forums. It’s not only their labor of love but their livelihood which motivates them to work as hard as they do at this impressive pace.

Wasbunny.6531:

I think it’s important to step back and gain a little perspective here.

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.

I’ve been studying game design with the hopes of someday making it into the industry and even with my limited knowledge of how these projects come together it never ceases to amaze me that they can produce this amount of work in such a short amount of time, bugs or not.

Keep in mind with each new content release all departments have 20 working days from start to finish. The departments being; Concept Design, Level Design, Writers, Sound Design / VO, 3D modeling/Texture Design, Environmental Lighting & Design, Scripting/Code programmers, UI/UX Department, QA Testing, Balance Department, and I’m sure more I’m forgetting. A small team organizing all these departments to release this amount of original content with this many moving parts in 20 days (even if 20% needs bug fixes and fine tuning for the first few days after release) should be appreciated.

I’m not saying there haven’t been naive missteps along the way or that these won’t continue, but these are to be expected when pioneering such a high risk / high reward philosophy to adding new content to an MMO. This ‘Living World’ approach being such a unique development style ArenaNet is learning and fine tuning all elements of this workflow while simultaneously supporting content that is already live.

Also to be kept in mind the entire staff of ArenaNet are far more motivated to please their customer base and to make this game the best it can be than anyone simply playing the game or posting on the forums. It’s not only their labor of love but their livelihood which motivates them to work as hard as they do at this impressive pace.

So you give an excuse for ANets faulty decision to set a development cycle shorter than they need to produce quality content?

They should have realized after some of their LS releases that they just fail in producing quality content in time. The only reasonable thing would have been to lengthen the cycles.

But no, people defend crappy, buggy content because of a stupid decision made 15 monthes ago. Where is the logic behind that?

Paul.4081:

Thaia.5146:

They should abandon the idea of LS. This whole LS “thing” is a misunderstanding from start to end. Bugs, low quality content and even worse “story” than in Personal Story. They’ve already ruined their own game. People will eventually leave. Actually I’m really looking forward to it – maybe then they’ll understand how bad their decisions are.

Nope. They’ll never admit mistakes let alone understand them.

LOL Paul that is so, so true haha I love your comment

Kaiyanwan.8521:

Wasbunny.6531:

I think it’s important to step back and gain a little perspective here.

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.

I’ve been studying game design with the hopes of someday making it into the industry and even with my limited knowledge of how these projects come together it never ceases to amaze me that they can produce this amount of work in such a short amount of time, bugs or not.

Keep in mind with each new content release all departments have 20 working days from start to finish. The departments being; Concept Design, Level Design, Writers, Sound Design / VO, 3D modeling/Texture Design, Environmental Lighting & Design, Scripting/Code programmers, UI/UX Department, QA Testing, Balance Department, and I’m sure more I’m forgetting. A small team organizing all these departments to release this amount of original content with this many moving parts in 20 days (even if 20% needs bug fixes and fine tuning for the first few days after release) should be appreciated.

I’m not saying there haven’t been naive missteps along the way or that these won’t continue, but these are to be expected when pioneering such a high risk / high reward philosophy to adding new content to an MMO. This ‘Living World’ approach being such a unique development style ArenaNet is learning and fine tuning all elements of this workflow while simultaneously supporting content that is already live.

Also to be kept in mind the entire staff of ArenaNet are far more motivated to please their customer base and to make this game the best it can be than anyone simply playing the game or posting on the forums. It’s not only their labor of love but their livelihood which motivates them to work as hard as they do at this impressive pace.

So you give an excuse for ANets faulty decision to set a development cycle shorter than they need to produce quality content?

They should have realized after some of their LS releases that they just fail in producing quality content in time. The only reasonable thing would have been to lengthen the cycles.

But no, people defend crappy, buggy content because of a stupid decision made 15 monthes ago. Where is the logic behind that?

Yea it would be great that arenanet give us 900 gems because they insulted us by giving us buged content like we are pre alpha testers for their releases

Biohazard.7523:

Yea it would be great that arenanet give us 900 gems because they insulted us by giving us buged content like we are pre alpha testers for their releases

Oh yeah they insulted you…. The kid is sad, give him a cookie.

Seriously mate, there are different problems, calm your kittens.

I’m still having fun.

Wasbunny.6531:

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.

If this were any other patch, I’d be more inclined to agree. It’s not. This is their grand finale and climax to their story. If there was any time to pull out all the stops and make sure it was near perfect, it was this update.

Lopez.7369:

-snip-

Besides, ArenaNet promised this content would be polished. Would you consider these past few patches polished?

I guess I have to agree this isn’t one of ANet’s most polished updates, but considering we’re already getting free new content and generally speedy bug fixes, and ANet’s been putting in a lot of effort for its player base, I thought there’d be less outrage and more understanding.

Heraldusluminare.2946:

Lopez.7369:

-snip-

Besides, ArenaNet promised this content would be polished. Would you consider these past few patches polished?

I guess I have to agree this isn’t one of ANet’s most polished updates, but considering we’re already getting free new content and generally speedy bug fixes, and ANet’s been putting in a lot of effort for its player base, I thought there’d be less outrage and more understanding.

Seriously? Every new patch brings more bugs, and you expected ‘understanding’? Did you mean that we would now understand that Anet only releases bugged content?

Heraldusluminare.2946:

Lopez.7369:

-snip-

Besides, ArenaNet promised this content would be polished. Would you consider these past few patches polished?

I guess I have to agree this isn’t one of ANet’s most polished updates, but considering we’re already getting free new content and generally speedy bug fixes, and ANet’s been putting in a lot of effort for its player base, I thought there’d be less outrage and more understanding.

There’d be less outrage if it wasn’t:

- A more usual occurrence than “once in a while”. It does happen often enough an update has serious issues going on or something breaks after an update which needs fixing due to it being immediately important. Again, if they expand their release timeline to a slower schedule this may improve.

- Broken this time in a important way. Not unlike other broken times when achievements failed to count properly or LS events failed to update/start properly, this one is more central about an important part being broken. This was broken on the level of Lost Shores’ “Canach is not responding properly to prompts and the phase is over in 12 hours” problem. Sure, you can play some of the content but progression is halted due to things like the Knights resetting health or otherwise not working properly.

“It’s just a game, get over it” isn’t the issue here. What is the issue is there were some serious troubles which snuck through in the last two LS releases which either were frustrating (Citizen rescue not resetting properly, yet apparently still counting properly) or crash-stop-halt (Knights resetting health preventing access to Breachmaker).

It is just a game, sure. But people don’t like to have their fun time hurt by things like this. They’re good to argue and complain about it (they should). They shouldn’t blow it out of perspective as to being worthy of hanging people from lampposts in Divinity’s Reach.

Heraldusluminare.2946:

I guess I have to agree this isn’t one of ANet’s most polished updates, but considering we’re already getting free new content and generally speedy bug fixes, and ANet’s been putting in a lot of effort for its player base, I thought there’d be less outrage and more understanding.

I think it’s problematic to view it as simply free content. A lot of people buy gem store items with the understanding that it supports the game and enables the content. A lot of people bought the box with the understanding that it would be a constantly updated MMO.

It’s also worth pointing out that it’s not “free” in the sense that it should allow ArenaNet to get away with leaving bugs in the game. It would be one thing if ArenaNet made all the living story content with a depleted revenue stream, but that’s not what’s happening. The gem store is supposed to — and does — make up for the absence of revenue that would come through a subscription fee. So ArenaNet is consistently failing to produce polished content despite getting AAA-level revenue.

There’s also the fact ArenaNet needs the game to remain populated to survive. No one would keep playing and pay for gem store items if Guild Wars 2 died. Under this understanding, players who stick around are to ArenaNet’s financial benefit.

But do you think the necessary playerbase is going to put up with consistently buggy content when so many options now exist in the MMORPG and gaming markets? Probably not. So if you truly care about Guild Wars 2, you probably shouldn’t tolerate these kind of bugs.

Wasbunny.6531:

I think it’s important to step back and gain a little perspective here.

ArenaNet is attempting something completely new to MMO’s by implementing multifaceted content to be released every two weeks by individual teams who are given an average of one month from start to finish to create. This is incredibly ambitious even for a large AAA game company.
appreciated.

(edited for space)

Yes living world is ambitious, and really really cool.

As a game design major though, you should appreciate how actually poor the Knights fight is now. The positional aspect of the dive/vacuum is cool, and the buff grabbing has potential to be interesting. But the damage-sponge scaling combined with preventing half of the potential damage specializations from fighting the boss makes the fight kind of terrible.

Damage sponge is important for a little bit of intimidation, but overkill makes a fight a boring grind. Forcing players into a certain spec removes a lot of depth and makes players feel like they are not in control of their character.

These two aspects were absolutely fine when you could zerg knights, because the speed at which you took them down meant you needed to keep on your toes for the buff swap. Now condition specced characters are forced to use almost no abilities and do pitiful damage the entire fight against the boss until condition crash finally hits. On my server, that’s two minutes before the boss despawns.

There are ALWAYS, ALWAYS bugs that don’t appear until the masses get the content.

The fact they patched two major bugs on the first day (Attunement bug, hologram not splitting bug) is great.

zerosouls.4750:

While I’ll agree that much of this content has been buggy — I DO appreciate that Anet has attempted to take steps to break up the zerg train that this event was becoming.

Zerg isn’t always bad. Zergs are something of a party. You just kind of go with the flow. Hologram Prime isn’t a Zerg fight though. You can’t just mindlessly dps her down and if you die, you can’t walk back.

Loot from knights was fitting for a zerg-fight, and a zerg-fight is a fine opener to get everyone psyched for the more interesting fight that comes after.

Pipra.7580:

I’ve been frustrated, at times, by the recent bugs too. However, I have to give ANet a pass as ‘Escape from Lion’s Arch’ was some of the most fun content I’ve played in an MMO (and that’s going back more than a decade).

Unfortunately not for me. Until now, story was pretty much clear. Or, patches contained at least some story. Story behind this update is “they invaded, we defend”, or “we invaded, they defend”. Fine. However, rewards and fights in these updates are laughable. Especially these knights. Pure DPS check. Screw that!

I love this game, but this is going in wrong direction.