Guild Wars 2

Hello all,
Some days back I’ve posted about the PAX event. That we tried to put questions on the guild wars 2 facebook page in order to get some new info about the Mac client. However I seem te be the only one who did that.
No matter though, it was ignored anyway (or overlooked ofcourse since there were A LOT of questions on there).
However since MattVisual was invited to the PAX event too and wanted some viewer question, I’ve asked him to ask it for us and he did!
Matt, if you are ever reading this I thank you so much for asking this question!

http://youtu.be/p9vBRszgPlA?t=2m18s (my username is farayman3)
Here is the result of the interview. It isn’t good news that comes out of it but it is some news for sure!

“We know there are a lot of Mac users out there, we care about them, we pay attention to what’s going on with them a lot” and yet “We haven’t done a ton to it” and there “Hasn’t been a big focus or something we’re putting a lot of energy into.” Yeah, forget you too ANet!!! Extremely disappointing. Definitely not supporting this company any further until they start supporting us.

That was rather disappointing.

^— It’s sort of ONLY tiny studios that release both OSX and Windows clients – the reason for which being that if they don’t they have an even smaller market than their already small market.
Very few major studios produce games for release on both windows and OSX. Notable exceptions being racing games and recently SimCity (which was a disaster on both clients and EA is just not a good company so yeah…)

I would say I’m disappointed by this news, but it’s not really news to me. The OSX client works for the majority of users, and works well. Most of the issues that are experienced can be fixed with the deletion of a folder and the performance is not altogether that much lower than the windows version – provided you actually have a decent mac, but you need a decent PC to play the game anyway because it just really isn’t very well optimised.

My disappointment was mostly caused by actually hearing it! But, I guess that’s what most of us were looking for, the closure.

It does work relatively well considering, but it’s sad when you see the issues that many of the iMac peeps are facing with no resolve in light.

Although, I’d rather be on Mac than pc anyway considering how much worse and varied their problems are.

I’m still a little sad to have our feelings confirmed finally.

It is indeed dissapointing, but what gets me most is that we had to get this news this way. And not trough a nice official post on these forums…

Agree.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

^— It’s sort of ONLY tiny studios that release both OSX and Windows clients – the reason for which being that if they don’t they have an even smaller market than their already small market.
Very few major studios produce games for release on both windows and OSX. Notable exceptions being racing games and recently SimCity (which was a disaster on both clients and EA is just not a good company so yeah…)

I would say I’m disappointed by this news, but it’s not really news to me. The OSX client works for the majority of users, and works well. Most of the issues that are experienced can be fixed with the deletion of a folder and the performance is not altogether that much lower than the windows version – provided you actually have a decent mac, but you need a decent PC to play the game anyway because it just really isn’t very well optimised.

Actually, whether or not a company goes both ways is a lot more rooted in the choice of engine- then the market share. Take blizzard for example, all of there games are available on mac, linux, and windows at launch, because they built the engine in such a way that it can port natively with relative ease. This is also why indie developers can peg all systems more, we choose our engines most of the time, and we choose ones with the best porting ability. The problem with GW2 is that the engine is archaic, it still uses the GW1 engine. Though heavily modified to increase graphical possibilities, it is still GW1 engine, this means like GW1, it does not support mac natively.

This is also what makes the game lag so much in WvW while other games can handle these encounters of large size very well, the engine is simply stronger- the architecture is more stable. Culling was something in place to help alleviate the stress of an old engine, now it’s gone and mac players got a huge hit from it.

Thing is, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a native client anytime soon- unless word from the hills suggest that Gw2, is getting a new, beefier engine which was designed to port to most computer systems from the go.

Don’t get me wrong OpenGL does take more effort to learn, and use- for example it doesn’t have a built in audio support- Companies like blizzard usually will write a windows version in directs anyways- because that is more native to windows then OpenGL.

In the end off all of this, the ultimate reason we don’t have a Mac native client, is that Arenanet team is too lazy or busy to do anything regarding Mac, unless we can make it worth there time- or someone in there decides to take pity on us, and actively work to make our experiance better.

When I spoke to a dev a couple weeks ago- they were working on stuff for mid-september, so they must really be working deadline to deadline. So I like to think they are simply stretched too thin.

Their overall treatment and general lack of communication to us and to even their own moderators/employees on these issues probably comes down to money i.e. mac players don’t buy enough gems with real cash to be considered to even be worth the time. At least that is how I generally interpret their action/lack thereof.

Considering the last few patches and all the issues it has introduced for some hardware combinations and “nothing” official has been done just speaks volume.

At least we have some kind of closure here though basically it’s bootcamp or bust at this point.

Disastro.4086:

Their overall treatment and general lack of communication to us and to even their own moderators/employees on these issues probably comes down to money i.e. mac players don’t buy enough gems with real cash to be considered to even be worth the time..

A few months ago there was a bug that would not allow mac users to buy gems. It was addressed immediately and fixed in a couple of days. It is the only bug I have ever seen openly addressed and in turn fixed in a very short time. So they must want some of our money.

Luis, this needs to be made into a sticky so that it does not fall into the depths of the Mac forums, never to be seen again….. lol. In all seriousness though, it’s the only “official” update we’ve ever had so it probably should be a sticky.

JustTrogdor.7892:

Disastro.4086:

Their overall treatment and general lack of communication to us and to even their own moderators/employees on these issues probably comes down to money i.e. mac players don’t buy enough gems with real cash to be considered to even be worth the time..

A few months ago there was a bug that would not allow mac users to buy gems. It was addressed immediately and fixed in a couple of days. It is the only bug I have ever seen openly addressed and in turn fixed in a very short time. So they must want some of our money.

Yup, gem store purchase bug, immediate patch. Laser-hawks…what 6 months? Culling crashes will probably never go away. Glad they finally said something, insulted they basically hid the information and are keeping this farce of a “beta” going. Money grab, pure and simple. Call this a “hobby client”. Really, just be honest with your customers.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

^— It’s sort of ONLY tiny studios that release both OSX and Windows clients – the reason for which being that if they don’t they have an even smaller market than their already small market.
Very few major studios produce games for release on both windows and OSX. Notable exceptions being racing games and recently SimCity (which was a disaster on both clients and EA is just not a good company so yeah…)

Well, its a bit more tricky actually. Games made by tiny studios do not have the same performance constraints, so they can get away with a simpler engine. Plus, if you develop a game from the scratch, its fairly easy to build it in a way that is more cross-platform. The issue with GW2 is that (as many have pointed out), its using a patched archaic DirectX engine. This would be quite non-trivial to port to OpenGL – and then you have to maintain the two versions of the engine at the same time. The biggest issue with OpenGL (and the main reason why it has declined in popularity over the last few years) is lack of development tools and clear standards. Its a bit messy, unpredictable, there was no debugging capability, no clear documentation, no SDK – and the ARB (who is the organisation responsible for the API) missed a lot of opportunities in the past. OS X offers some pretty decent OpenGL debugging tools for developers, but its still far from what Microsoft has. And anyway, even if they do a native port, there is no guaranty that it will be actually faster then the Cider version. The main problem are the sucky OS X graphics drivers… the situation has improved somehow with Mavericks (my rMBP runs GW2 at 40+ FPS at medium settings and 1680×1050, which is ok for me – although there is some occasional stutter), but the Windows version still has 20%+ higher performance.

Now, Blizzard can do a native port because a) they have MUCH more resources, and b) their engine is less sophisticated. To do a good Mac port A-net would probably have to redevelop their engine in a cross-platform friendly way, which they can’t really afford right now.

Well, this is terribly disappointing. I second the call to sticky this so it doesn’t get lost as the only official information we’ve received regarding the Mac player base.

Very unhappy with this. But also not unexpected.

I feel then it would be more transparent to call this client a makeshift or hobby client, rather than a ‘Beta’ client.

Beta seems to imply it is something that will get past this stage into an improved final release. Well, as we can see, that is not the case, at least not in the near-future.

I’ve already given up on the client. I would love to be able to play it on mac os, but in bootcamp I get consistently 30 fps more on even higher settings.

It’s kinda obvious they aren’t paying attention to the mac client much when a frequent crash-to-desktop bug persist for 6 month.

Don’t get me wrong, I prefer this over trying to rig up a WINE install myself (and then maintaining it). But they need to make it apparent that they’re basically only doing that for us so no one expects anything with near the polish we expect from Mac apps.

Aigisthos.3059:

“Definitely not supporting this company any further until they start supporting us.

On the contrary, I believe they would start supporting us if we show we support them by buying stuff from the Gem Store, and they may realise that the Mac Beta people are a larger chunk of the whole community and would lose a lot if they lose us. If we don’t support them, what have they got to lose?

penelopehannibal.8947:

Aigisthos.3059:

“Definitely not supporting this company any further until they start supporting us.

On the contrary, I believe they would start supporting us if we show we support them by buying stuff from the Gem Store, and they may realise that the Mac Beta people are a larger chunk of the whole community and would lose a lot if they lose us. If we don’t support them, what have they got to lose?

This has already been disproven. Were you playing earlier this year when the Mac client had a bug that caused the Trading Post to stop working? As soon as it was discovered the devs were instantly on the forums to help us and the problem was fixed as fast as they could. Once it was fixed, they were gone. Why would they do that? Because we ARE spending lots of money on the Trading Post and having that cash flow stop was ultimately hurting them.

Having the user base spend so much money on the Trading Post gives the devs a false sense of security that we are happy enough with the game as is to be dumping our money into it that they don’t really see fixing this client as a worthwile investment. The product is already working in their eyes since we are throwing money at them.

Not sure if you saw my other post but Game Informer wrote up a great article this month dealing with this very issue. The conclusion they came up with is that it is wrong and unprofessional for a developer to release a game in “beta” form if the cash shop is open for business. We vote with our dollar and they’re listening. Right now, we’re telling them that they’re doing a great job. You want to see them fix this client? Then we all need to stop and show them that we are not happy with the current state of the game.

I run a dual boot system with mac and windows, the only reason I’m booting Windows is to play GW2, I buy gems, but I’d rather not have to use windows because the mac client still isn’t out of beta…

Here is a link to the “when is a beta not a beta” article. We’re NOT a beta. And they need to STOP pretending we are one. We’re a permanently bugged out release.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2013/09/09/opinion-when-a-beta-isn-t-a-beta.aspx

^— The key word in that article being the gigantic one right up the top “Opinion”.
It also doesn’t apply because it isn’t the GAME that is in beta, it is the OSX software. Software beta = different to game beta (a comment saying games are software will not be appreciated

I have no idea what you are attempting to say. The client isn’t in beta because they admitted they are not putting any active work in it. One usually would assume that a beta exists to test bugs and fix them. Neither is occurring at any appreciable rate. Laser-hawk bug existed for how many months before a fix? They admitted that the mac client is getting basically zero developer time at PAX. Heck, their official line used to be they don’t officially support the client while it is in beta until it became apparent that the client was never going to leave “beta”.

Do you call this a beta because it is as buggy as one? So if that is your argument, that is exactly what the GameInformer piece is talking about. Slapping a beta label on something and selling it to customers while dodging complaints of bugs by pointing to the beta label should not be acceptable behavior. Yet, that is what we’re seeing. Trying to discredit the article by attacking the author (calling it an opinion) is hardly impressive. Attack the argument. Do you think beta should just mean “the software is buggy” rather than “the software is buggy and we’re taking in feedback from testers to actively fix the bugs”? Note, I don’t think we’re the testers, they’ve made that abundantly clear (and usually public betas you don’t really expect to get great bug reports from the general public). But again, we’ve seen bugs last months and have very little feedback. How can we assume there is any active development when 1) we see very little and 2) they admitted there is very little. I’d like to know your position other than attempting to be cute with definitions.

Haha, I just noticed that the official sticky mac updates’ last post is from october 2012. :P 1 year anniversary of no progression coming up! (yes I know a few minor tweaks have been done but still)

So the official word is “it was more of an afterthought anyway, we figured cider would work for most people and we don’t have a dedicated mac team anyway so just take what you get” And to be honest, since it is a cider port, there isn’t anything they can do anyway – the game is in the wrapper and that’s it. For me the game works for now, I’m just waiting for it to break.