I really don’t understand how we could have so little done to the game with such a large team. Anet has been very quiet about their plans, which makes me think we are going to see(hopefully soon) a blog post that will blow us away. Maybe they have 100 people working on a project that’s been going on since before release.
300 employees doesn’t equal 300 devs, though. There’s a Q&A department which just tests stuff. There people who answer phones. There’s people who do admin stuff. There’s marketing people. And of course artists and programmers. The programmers would be spread out. I seriously doubt the guys working on SPvP work on WvW and neither probably works on PvE.
So yeah, a lot of people, but it’s not surprising that progress is made incrimentally.
I do understand that, but it still seems like things are happening slowly. I’m mainly looking at you living story.
Trion is said to have about 200 employees, have you checked their patch notes on rift? They are also maintaining more than one mmo. They were recently hit with layoffs, so we will have to see how that affects them.
I played Rift for a while when it launched. Several months in fact. Let me tell you about how Rift works.
Rift, when I was there, made ZILLIONS of changes all the time. Multiple times a week. Do you have any idea how many times I logged and had to respec because they completely changed my skill and skill tree. At one point it was twice, three times a week.
They try stuff that doesn’t work and then they make more changes that don’t work and they finally may make a couple of changes that do work, but they’re not going free to play because the world is full of people playing that game.
Rift has some of the worst updates I’ve ever seen for a game. They had to do a full apology for their first big world event. As bad as the karka event was, the Rift world event was far worse.
Rift makes a lot of changes, and that’s part of the problem. They were new to the MMO space and they were trying to find their way. And in making all those changes, there was never any chance of balancing anything.
Slow, steady change is the very best way to update an MMO.
I remember that first event.
The reason there was a big stink over it, was because they also made that event weekend Free to Play but didn’t give login priority to paying members.
This resulted in people who were paying missing the event completely while the free to play people enjoyed it.
Rift was very much praised (on my server and forums) for the fast updates and balance changes…yeah there were some people yelling STOP FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY STOP!….
But the majority of the players liked how fast out of control builds, bugs and exploits were addressed.
In my opinion Rift fell short in the end game, I remember capping my level and going “What now?” followed by a resounding “nothing”…the pvp matches were all vs premades with no separate queue and the raids were just a little boring.
The Rifts themselves turned out to be a gimmick (Like some people call DE’s in GW2) and quickly lost their attraction in the later game.
But Rift like GW2 also did a lot of good things, its just in that situation the bad strongly outweighed the good.
They had to wait a whole month from 1 huge patch to another.