Guild Wars 2

But its just that, he only ‘plays’ a ranger (cough PR cough) and actually isn’t on the balance team or anything and has no say in the balances that get put out and he even has said this himself. It’s nice he’s chatting with us and all, but if I want someone to talk that agrees that rangers needs to be fixed and nothing more then I’ll just talk to 90% of the other people in the ranger forums.

It’s purely PR and nothing else, as soon as they see a dev responding they fall in love with him , but people need to understand politics and that the fact remains, kitten hasn’t been done to the class REGARDLESS of the countless dev posts made by both Jon and Robert. So you can love him because he gives you a post reply every other day, but what comes of it , and what HAS come of it? Nothing.

Ryan.8367:

But its just that, he only ‘plays’ a ranger (cough PR cough) and actually isn’t on the balance team or anything and has no say in the balances that get put out and he even has said this himself. It’s nice he’s chatting with us and all, but if I want someone to talk that agrees that rangers needs to be fixed and nothing more then I’ll just talk to 90% of the other people in the ranger forums.

It’s purely PR and nothing else, as soon as they see a dev responding they fall in love with him , but people need to understand politics and that the fact remains, kitten hasn’t been done to the class REGARDLESS of the countless dev posts made by both Jon and Robert. So you can love him because he gives you a post reply every other day, but what comes of it , and what HAS come of it? Nothing.

Don’t shoot the messenger.

To us, this is just a game; to him, it’s the man’s livelihood. You can’t expect someone to start kitten up with his coworkers no matter how dim witted their actions might seem since he has to face and work with them on a daily basis.

I think he came and answered us in good faith. We can’t really ask for more as it’s really out of his hands.

I believe he showed that they have been looking into solutions for the problem as he came to us with a list of their current ideas.

I was a bit disheartened by the fact that the community had to spot for them that the HoM pets’ stats didn’t match up with their non-HoM counterparts. Stat discrepancies should be trivial to identify.

Overall, with the slow pace of fixes and the weird bugs that come from fixes, my view of their quality control/assurance is diminished. For example, Mesmer clones having no weapons after last patch. There were few Mesmer changes and none of them appear to be related to Mesmer clones, but something they changed broke that. Same for the Mesmer spear hitbox.

Sebrent.3625:

I was a bit disheartened by the fact that the community had to spot for them that the HoM pets’ stats didn’t match up with their non-HoM counterparts. Stat discrepancies should be trivial to identify.

If you read the posts he made replying to the HoM pet stat discrepancy, you’d see that they were already fixed in the version he was checking, meaning that the stat discrepancies WERE known, but not high on the priority list (since it took seven months to get to). They just weren’t known by him at the time.

Also, don’t be too hard on the QA team. If pushing out an actual fix causes a graphical error (clones not having weapons) then that’s a choice made by somebody else, not QA. With a program this complex, there’s bound to be a lot of, “We can fix this, but it’ll cause this,” happening.

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

Sebrent.3625:

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

The QA team doesn’t fix anything, they simply report bugs. It’s up to the development team to fix the bugs. But, since new bugs are usually given a lower priority than old bugs (unless they’re critical/blocker level), this means that minor bugs that occur as a result of fixing higher priority bugs get to stay for a while until they get fixed.

I’m not even going to bother explaining the difference between maintaining a functional web-site (albeit a very large one) and an application in terms of what minor changes can break. But, rest assured, somebody made the call that the bugs introduced were minor enough that they were worth it for whatever changes were made. And that somebody was not one of the QA team.

Sebrent.3625:

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

That isn’t really the most appropriate analogy, you can’t compare videogame development with website development. Of all the MMOs I’ve played, I’d say GW2 is one of the most bug-free at launch, and probably has the best class balance as well, if only because skill factors so highly into GW2 combat mechanics.

Aridia.3042:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lHxugvam5M

Anet is basically Dean. The community is Lex.

Best reply in the entire thread.

I’d argue that it sounds like this could also apply to Robert Hrouda as Lex and the balance team as Dean (regarding Robert’s reply in the thread called “Robert Hrouda on pets in dungeons”)

As I’ve said before – I am not on the balance team… at best I can present things and harp on issues and constantly bring them up to keep them in focus, and to remind the people on the team and who make the decisions in the end that it is an issue that needs to get resolved. I’m a dungeon content designer who plays ranger at a high level, and that is why I am in the meetings, to be a representative for that sect (for lack of a better word).

This thread and my presence really isn’t damage control, otherwise I would have failed pretty hard at it in business terms. Making a visible list of issues to bring up with devs and allowing non-devs to see it isn’t exactly good damage control since it can set up high expectations, and the only reason this thread has reached the size it has (I feel) Is because I am posting in it; drawing even more attention that the topic would have garnered otherwise. So if anything my coming here has served only to shine a brighter light on the improvements needed to the ranger/pet/player dynamic (trademark).

Sebrent.3625:

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

That’s really not correct at all.

Your analogy is bad as well, really that’s just a badly informed ANet bash.

Daemon.4295:

Sebrent.3625:

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

That isn’t really the most appropriate analogy, you can’t compare videogame development with website development. Of all the MMOs I’ve played, I’d say GW2 is one of the most bug-free at launch, and probably has the best class balance as well, if only because skill factors so highly into GW2 combat mechanics.

actually you can compare the two, in fact in many ways programming a site with as much traffic, functionality, and dollars riding on every bug is actually more complex than programing a self contained videogame. It really does depend on the product we are talking about here, programming for mysplashpage.com is fairly simple, but so is programing for my bouncingballgame.exe

anyhow, they arent going to be perfect, nothing is perfect, and programming regardless of how its used will generally involve bugs. How fast they are identified and repaired, and how often they pop up is probably on the skill of the devs involved. (and QA for finding them)

I didn’t say anything about QA fixing. It is their job to check if current fixes correct known bugs and to check for additional issues/bugs.

Programming is programming. You have your desired functionality and then there are issues/bugs that you try to avoid and/or deal with. Websites are not simply HTML/CSS. They are not just Javascript/PHP/etc. There are backends coded in any number of languages, including C, C++, Java, etc. I know for a fact that a good bit of Amazon’s backend stuff is coded in Java (I authored some of it … if you’ve used their cloud [AWS] or a Kindle, you may have used some of my code).

I just find it amazing that something as obvious as Mesmer clones not having weapons wasn’t picked up before the patch went live. That’s a blatantly obvious thing.

I found it amazing that the Mesmer spears no longer hit.

I’m still amazed that my target and I can be on an open field and I will (seemingly randomly) receive “obstructed” for some of my shots with my Ranger shortbow.

Perhaps it isn’t the QA isn’t finding them and it’s the devs introducing bugs more quickly than they can fix them.

Either way, I’m not impressed with the code quality given that you have what I and many other programmers would assume should be largely (if not completely) unrelated aspects being broken by changing one of them. Seriously, look back at the last patch for Mesmer changes and tell me what their is related to the spear’s hitbox or the Mesmer clones having weapons.

Sebrent.3625:

I didn’t say anything about QA fixing. It is their job to check if current fixes correct known bugs and to check for additional issues/bugs.

Programming is programming. You have your desired functionality and then there are issues/bugs that you try to avoid and/or deal with. Websites are not simply HTML/CSS. They are not just Javascript/PHP/etc. There are backends coded in any number of languages, including C, C++, Java, etc. I know for a fact that a good bit of Amazon’s backend stuff is coded in Java (I authored some of it … if you’ve used their cloud [AWS] or a Kindle, you may have used some of my code).

I just find it amazing that something as obvious as Mesmer clones not having weapons wasn’t picked up before the patch went live. That’s a blatantly obvious thing.

I found it amazing that the Mesmer spears no longer hit.

I’m still amazed that my target and I can be on an open field and I will (seemingly randomly) receive “obstructed” for some of my shots with my Ranger shortbow.

Perhaps it isn’t the QA isn’t finding them and it’s the devs introducing bugs more quickly than they can fix them.

Either way, I’m not impressed with the code quality given that you have what I and many other programmers would assume should be largely (if not completely) unrelated aspects being broken by changing one of them. Seriously, look back at the last patch for Mesmer changes and tell me what their is related to the spear’s hitbox or the Mesmer clones having weapons.

It is true there seems to be a problem with seperation of concerns, if in fact unrelated bits of code are effected by every change that occurs. While its pretty understandable this would happen sometimes, with extremely large code, and many different people putting hands on it, it seems to happen fairly often.

The other issue, is monthly updates, i really dont know if this is a good update structure for bug fixes. Generally i assumed bug fixes should go in as soon as they are working. I can see some advantages to testing, however, at the same time there are many disadvantages to introducing many changes at once, making it harder to track down what is causing errors, and at exactly what point errors occur. Also as far as QA, its needed, but it really is just phase one. Unless they can create a QA environment which is roughly equivalent to live (which it seems is not possible) there will always be the bugs they didnt see. I know pts is essentially a spoiler for the game, but if this leads to a better ability to test and QA things, it is probably worth the loss

Sebrent.3625:

snip

Congrats on working for Amazon.

I also work as a programmer (much smaller site and a stand-alone application), and have a very good understanding of how a site like Amazon would be set up (one of the projects I had to do was to make a simple emulation of the functionality of Amazon, so I know how complicated it can be). Does that claim make my point of view have any more credence than it did before? I didn’t think so.

Without actually seeing the code, there is no way to determine what is related to what in there. There could have been a minor typo in the code of a patch that nobody caught which caused the spear to no longer hit, or the illusions to lose their weapons. These will both be fixed at some point. as they aren’t game breaking (well, the spear is pretty horrible, but you have the trident, which I find much more useful anyway [/personal opinion]).

The obstructed problem is a known issue, has been given a partial fix and is not nearly as big of a problem as you are making it out to be (unless it’s any stationary environmental object [AC burrow, I’m looking at you], for whatever reason). They know it’s a problem and are trying to fix it.

Be as outraged as you want, but please keep in mind they are a relatively small development team. There’s only so much that they can be working on at any given time and there’s a whole game full of things that need looking at.

Oh my god! Stop reviving this thread, it’s 4 months old.

If they:

• delete ranger class
• not balancing our problems
• stealing the ability to use Greatsword, sword, axe
• nerfing it even more
  We will STOP playing.

RoyalPredator.9163:

We will STOP playing.

No, I won’t.

U mad bro?

AlexRD.7914:

Oh my god! Stop reviving this thread, it’s 4 months old.

It doesn’t matter how old the thread is if some of the issues presented are still current. Would you rather we opened a new thread every month to continue on the same issue just because the present thread got old?

It’s March 21st. The next patch is March 26th. I think people can keep their pants on for another 5 days.

I for one am quite curious to see what changes we will have received. They had mentioned in the state of the game that they increased maul damage and lowered some cooldowns on the greatsword. The former is nice, the latter is interesting.

Heck, how knows, maybe we’ll finally be pleasantly surprised.

RoyalPredator.9163:

If they:

• delete ranger class
• not balancing our problems
• stealing the ability to use Greatsword, sword, axe
• nerfing it even more
  We will STOP playing.

Nah, but this is already why I rerolled, lol.

To be honest though, even if they do buff rangers, I don’t know how often I’ll play mine since I’ve found that the Mesmer class is incredibly fun to play (once you get past the first 40 levels or so).

Sebrent.3625:

~snip ~

It is their job to check if current fixes correct known bugs and to check for additional issues/bugs.

~snip~

I just find it amazing that something as obvious as Mesmer clones not having weapons wasn’t picked up before the patch went live. That’s a blatantly obvious thing.

It’s not that simple. The disappearance of the weapons might be a cause of a chain reaction. The QA might have done their job based on the job order and they approved it. They did the job, but if the bug happens because of the chain of events, usually a lot pops out on live servers, then there’s no way they could’ve predict that.

I found it amazing that the Mesmer spears no longer hit.

I’m still amazed that my target and I can be on an open field and I will (seemingly randomly) receive “obstructed” for some of my shots with my Ranger shortbow.

Perhaps it isn’t the QA isn’t finding them and it’s the devs introducing bugs more quickly than they can fix them.

That is more probable that these other bugs are products of a domino effect after fixing a known bug.

Either way, I’m not impressed with the code quality given that you have what I and many other programmers would assume should be largely (if not completely) unrelated aspects being broken by changing one of them. Seriously, look back at the last patch for Mesmer changes and tell me what their is related to the spear’s hitbox or the Mesmer clones having weapons.

Well it can happen if the code is issuing a query for the weapons and weapon skins and the weapons and weapon skin for the Mesmer depend on this query. So if the query bust, you get the bug, often time, it’s just a simple of misspelling the name or calling the wrong ID. The big change that relates with weapons and skins is the TP item preview.

JonPeters.5630:

Poof! Someone called and I am here. We made some ranger changes this patch, but had to go back on them because of risk factor. There are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements. I would Literally tell you but I think it would be considered a bit of a spoiler so you will have to be patient.

Haven’t played gw2 in a few months, looking forward to it.

Cheers.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

JonPeters.5630:

Poof! Someone called and I am here. We made some ranger changes this patch, but had to go back on them because of risk factor. There are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements. I would Literally tell you but I think it would be considered a bit of a spoiler so you will have to be patient.

Haven’t played gw2 in a few months, looking forward to it.

Cheers.

LOL enjoy.

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

JonPeters.5630:

Poof! Someone called and I am here. We made some ranger changes this patch, but had to go back on them because of risk factor. There are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements. I would Literally tell you but I think it would be considered a bit of a spoiler so you will have to be patient.

Haven’t played gw2 in a few months, looking forward to it.

Cheers.

let this thread DIE!

it was 4 months ago he said that….nothing has changed lol

5, even says it on the first post lol, but yeah, nothing has changed.

Sorry, didn’t notice the date. Well if they’ve been working on rangers for 6 months i’m sure there is a class overhaul due any day now?

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Sorry, didn’t notice the date. Well if they’ve been working on rangers for 6 months i’m sure there is a class overhaul due any day now?

You would be correct in assuming that,
However it is most likely not the case

Huh, weird. Perhaps they’ve been working on necros and engineers first, I remember them being the weakest as well in pve.

I haven’t checked their forums though.

Dahkeus.8243:

Nah, but this is already why I rerolled, lol.

To be honest though, even if they do buff rangers, I don’t know how often I’ll play mine since I’ve found that the Mesmer class is incredibly fun to play (once you get past the first 40 levels or so).

Yesterday, 9(!!!!) of my friends left the game because of the nerfs.
I’m still here and fighting against their own stupidity.

They have been working on with their ignoring skills when it comes to rangers. Seems to be working as intended!

RoyalPredator.9163:

Yesterday, 9(!!!!) of my friends left the game because of the nerfs.
I’m still here and fighting against their own stupidity.

2 options:

a) they all were rangers – so, friend rangers is pretty much, so it was a lie all rerolled after previous patches.

b) they player other classes – in this case they were lost already. Everyone who played GW1 will confirm that, it’s neverendning circle of nerfing and buffing.

Robert always said he is just a messenger… he is not to blame…
and if I would be him, I sure wouldnt post in this forum again after the balancing team did this… piece of art…

Daemon.4295:

Sebrent.3625:

That’s part of what a QA team does. They look at changes to make sure they fix what was intended and not break other things.

Simply as an analogy, if Amazon’s QA team let as much get through as ArenaNet’s, customers would be griping left and right about being overcharged, receiving the wrong items, etc. simply because the site was made “more flashy” or new items were added to the site.

That isn’t really the most appropriate analogy, you can’t compare videogame development with website development. Of all the MMOs I’ve played, I’d say GW2 is one of the most bug-free at launch, and probably has the best class balance as well, if only because skill factors so highly into GW2 combat mechanics.

Don’t assume a website is just HTML. When a lot of major websites have own backend and not just using a basic LAMP server setup. I attend a seminar once where a rep from salesforce.com was talking about backend and they have around 30 million lines of code for the products the supply.

OMG stop reviving this thread!
Its 4 MONTHS old

It’s actually older than that and things that was mentioned in the first post still haven’t been done. The topic shall stay and live on till the day we have gotten our fixes!

I agree with FrouFrou, if they want guild wars to be taken seriously and compete with the other mmo’s on the market, they need to step up and actually do something. WE ALL know that rangers are one of the classes that needs to be changed to be on pair with the other classes. Reason to take a ranger over a warrior/guardian/thief/mesmer in dungeons?`NONE! This is my favourite class and i havent played it for 3 months because Rangers cant do what my warrior, guardian can do in dungeons.

RoyalPredator.9163:

Dahkeus.8243:

Nah, but this is already why I rerolled, lol.

To be honest though, even if they do buff rangers, I don’t know how often I’ll play mine since I’ve found that the Mesmer class is incredibly fun to play (once you get past the first 40 levels or so).

Yesterday, 9(!!!!) of my friends left the game because of the nerfs.
I’m still here and fighting against their own stupidity.

Wow. What classes did they play? Warrior? Ranger?

hey when r they going too fix abilities to cast barrage and traps ? i cant been like this for 3 weeks now???

miss sin alot.4730:

hey when r they going too fix abilities to cast barrage and traps ? i cant been like this for 3 weeks now???

You resurrected this awful thread to post that? Is this an april fool’s joke?

Cletus Van Damme.2795:

Sorry, didn’t notice the date. Well if they’ve been working on rangers for 6 months i’m sure there is a class overhaul due any day now?

One could think so but no. Sadly big budget doesn’t always come with good quality or competence.

I will Not Subject Myself Anymore to the Delusions, Lies and Manipulations toward any “Ranger update”
.
Sadly, many of you are still caught up in the Web.

Burnfall.9573:

I will Not Subject Myself Anymore to the Delusions, Lies and Manipulations toward any “Ranger update”
.
Sadly, many of you are still caught up in the Web.

Just stop. Those caught in the web are having fun and not whining about tiny tiny differences. I so need to block you.

The Ranger needs updates, fixes and overall attention in several areas. This has been needed for a very long time..

As fun as it may be to some, it pains me that content like Super Adventure Box takes precedence over fixing a class/class updates. It just shows me that Anet could care less about the Ranger class and its issues… Or that it’s very very low on the list of priorities. sigh Which is odd, because class mechanics is core to the gameplay of a game. Super Mario isn’t.

But Yamato, SAB was made by a small portion of the development team, and that same portion is apparently the same group making all the holiday events year round.

RyuDragnier.9476:

But Yamato, SAB was made by a small portion of the development team, and that same portion is apparently the same group making all the holiday events year round.

Well I guess it’s not a ‘resources’ issue then is it. Since they must have ample resources to give the Ranger class the attention it needs. So it must simply be they don’t feel class mechanics is a core element of their game and priority is given to other things, like SAB. Oh well.

I’m not a shill, just a huge fan with too much time to burn. I’m a player, message me in game sometime and let’s play SAB together or something. But yeah, just like Terkov said, I spend a lot of time here trying to help people learn about this profession. I’m one of, what, three or four people in my guild that runs primarily ranger. I want more people to play it and it’s pretty disappointing to see this thread at the top of the page over and over and over again. For months. Over and over. This thread has been resurrected so many times. And there’s no discussion, no point. The devs left a log time ago and the discussion quickly devolved. Everyone knows about these problems, it’s all people have talked about with this profession. "Rangers getting improvements" was the number 1 post on r/guildwars2 yesterday because it was an april fools joke.

As this discussion has run its course, the thread is now locked.