I know, it’s a complex thing building an MMO. I work in a production environment in an IT department, and I can’t begin to imagine what’s wrong at ANet.
Let’s take a subject dear to my heart – Focus as a Necro. It has two abilities, Reaper’s Touch and Spinal Shivers. They’re bread and butter abilities for the necro. I’d expect that somewhere these abilities are stored in some sort of Oracle DB so the program knows what to values to load into the build at compile time.
Assigned to these abilities must be the damage, extra logic (such as bouncing), range etc. and then I presume a bit of logic to determine what happens when various traits are selected.
There is a trait in the Spite line which reduces the cooldown by 20% and increases the range of Focus abilities. Except it doesn’t. When selected, the trait extends the range and reduces the cooldown of Spinal Shivers, but reduces the cast time of Reaper’s Touch. That’s in PvE – in PvP, it reduces the cast time and reduces the cooldown of Reaper’s Touch.
What’s more, selecting this trait prevents the bonus damage done when a boon is stripped by the use of Spinal Shivers or Chill of Death.
Chill of Death is related – it’s another trait in Spite which applies Spinal Shivers to an opponent when you strike them and they’re under 25% health – except it doesn’t! It triggers at 15%.
I’m baffled. How does this get screwed up so badly? More to the point, how is it not fixed quickly? If I, or anyone I’ve ever worked with in my career, was building a system which was to be altered regularly I’d hold the values in an external DB and that would allow my colleagues and I to edit them at will.
I’ve seen peculiar claims on this forum – there are only 2 games designers assigned to balance (well, sure, but they have QA and dev support, right? So they should be able to change simple values like this easily), that it’s too complex/time consumning to test (silly, really silly)… but what’s really going on?
Are these values hard coded or something insane? Are they unaware of the nature and extent of bugs? We had a bug tracker thread stickied at the top of the necro forums some time ago but gee, it’s been 6 months and we’re still getting new bugs and very few old ones are getting fixed!