Guild Wars 2

I would rather not say what mmo or who i was interviewing for etc.

But i was hired to interview a few main dev’s for a popular mmo a few years back.
A question i asked every one of them (that was edited out) was “do you have a character you play in game and what level is it?” The person who was in charge of class balance highest character was not even 1/2th as high as you could get in the game (the game had been out for about 2 years). It was a level i could get in a weekend… (through hardcore playing but still) non a single one of them had a character that was very high, and all admitted they rarely actually play the game due to “not enough time with work and family life”. It was from that i realized that all their changes were based on what their Quality (QA) department told them…and then they would make changes based upon that feedback.

Unfortunatly, what they put first to change or fix, often did not meet the desires of their community who are not QA’s and play frequently and are thus more likely to get bored or notice annoying things a lot sooner. Also, i learned while these guys were very polite and charming people, they were not as passionate about video games anymore…atleast not the way their community was…it was a job now, which left them a bit detached.

Not saying arenanet is this way. But i would not suggest all devs are super gamers or have some amazing game degree that makes them able to understand things faster. They are simply idea people and/or problem solvers, nothing more nothing less.

irakai.6891:

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Technically speaking even without multi-kit builds being viable there is more than enough room for 5 to 7 builds out there. When it comes to build diversity, what I see is something akin to one set back and two steps forward. I don’t like that 100 Nades is effectively gone, but I do see the rationality for it. To compensate they fill the patch up with tons of buffs (more then any other profession from my standpoint) and hopefully make a few more builds viable and competitive. This hopefully makes more net builds viable. It won’t always be the case nor is it necessarily the case now, but it shows me at least that the devs are on the right path.

I know Scope is still broken and Acidic Elxirs is still terrible. There are bugs and terrible, terrible traits among all the classes. It’s not just the Engineer. It really just comes down to manpower and although ANet isn’t exactly small, they aren’t some massively large company yet either. Given the success of GW2 perhaps that will change, but as it stands a little bit of rationality brings us to only a couple of changes per patch. Which is reasonable to me.

Given we don’t know what their intent is, but perhaps multi-kit builds aren’t truly designed to be competitively viable. Is there anything wrong with that? It’s impossible to make every build variant truly viable and there will always be relatively speaking better builds then others. This to a gaming community means all the builds below that are completely out of the picture. They said their goal is five to seven builds, which is completely reasonable to me and seems to be something they are striving for.

It does come down a difference in perception or perspective. What I see are a bunch of assumptions about what you think ANet is doing behind the scenes, which only serves to fuel your own pessimism. Now there is nothing wrong with your opinions on the changes (as everyone has a right ot their own opinion) and there is nothing wrong inherently with pessimism, but when it’s fueled by exaggerations and evidence that does not exist then it starts to become dangerous. Then the discussions on forums become silly and serve no real purpose. When the arguments become “Hey ANet play our class more!” instead of "So I think the problem with our class is we lack survival, many of our less used kits still need boosts, and I really think this Scope trait should be fixed. Here is why…. " then we aren’t providing anything for the devs. The reason I think you feel detachment is because it’s a position that forces you to detach yourself. Else bias would leak in subconsciously. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing for a dev to have as a quality because of that. That’s why detailed discussion on forums instead of blame calling is really, really good for devs to read.

I know you like the game. I love the game too. I can see it in your passion and desire to fix the game. Sometimes though, you have to temper your emotions and make rational arguments. Both of us are inherently biased and we need to recognize that. We’ve had some fantastic discussion on things and while we may not agree on everything I know we both love the Engineer class and love GW2.