Guardian Sword skill 3
This bug has been posted allready, and after a couple of weeks it still hasn’t been fixed.
I realize a lot of people don’t know about IT bugfixing process, and it leads to misunderstandings about dev “not caring about bugs” or “stealth fixing” things. I know that’s not what is being said here, this is just “on a related note” 
It is normal not to know it (not anyone is an IT worker after all), but if one is interested, here is how most companies manage bugs:
1) someone notice the bug and makes it known to the debugging team (as you did) ;
2) the bug is added to a “TODO” list (called a “bug tracker”), with a rating of priority and estimated difficulty to fix ;
3) the list is sorted first by criticality of bugs, then by complexity ;
4) the debugging team pick the bugs on top of the list to fix them, then process to the bottom ;
5) when a bug is fixed, it is marked as “done” on the tracker, and the dev pick the next bug on the list ;
So it means a bug might takes anything from a few hours to years to fix, because other bugs just have the priority and the resource to fix the bugs are limited. It doesn’t mean they don’t care, nor that they have forgotten, which is pretty much impossible. A bug tracker can’t forget anything, and the devs don’t work on bug by memory.
Now, for the update notes, they are generated according to the tracker log. Every bug marked as “corrected” since the last patch will be included in the patchnote. So, a “stealth updates”is mainly due either to:
- a dev not correctly marking a bug as fixed (or at a wrong date) in the tracker. They are human and can make mistakes ;
- more commonly, a fix on a part of code correcting another as a side effect. The dev then can’t mark a bug as fixed if he doesn’t know he just fixed it.
Very, very rarely will a dev voluntarily omit a correction from a patch note. It would mean he is denying the recognition of his own work, and would makes some people think the “fix” was unintended, generating false bug report that clog up the system.
I can’t affirm ANet do things exactly like that (I’m not working for them, obviously :p ), but I would be really, really surprised if they where far from it (it is standard in the field).
Hope it helps 