One thing that absolutely amazes me is how much the ArenaNet devs are communicating on the quagmire that is the Guild Wars 2 beta forums. For those with beta access here are the forums as account credentials are required to view the forums. Much of it was just reinforcing constructive feedback, but many times a developer went out of their way to discuss the issues. A sampling of some of the responses are below:
In one thread entitled Cliche, Cheesy Script & Boring Story, Bobby Stein writing team lead responds to some criticism mostly aimed at the starting norn personal story:
We can certainly examine the norn content and learn from our mistakes, whether or not we have the time and resources to make radical changes before ship. Changing the flow of a story involves almost every department in the studio, from design and writing to programming, art and animation. Simple dialogue edits and re-recording VO impacts cinematic conversations, so we can sometimes justify going back into the booth to change story elements but it’s more difficult to overhaul plot, and it also means more work for the animators.
He later responds that they listen to all feedback, even painful feedback because it can’t be ignored.
Jon Peters, skill balancing pro, discusses the disparity between the confusion condition in PvE and PvP, especially with regard to the mesmer’s confusion shatter:
This is the one shatter that is still looking for a home. We have experimented with other ideas but none of them have stuck, thus far. I think part of the problem is confusion where in PvP the attack rate make confusion very powerful, but creature attack rate in PvE renders it almost useless. This is one case where we will absolutely split the balance between PvE and PvP to help mitigate this problem. We are also still looking at alternatives for that shatter to do something different so suggestions welcome.
Even something small like the amount of hostile fauna in World vs. World gets a response from Mike Ferguson:
Yeah, a lot of the objective areas of the home maps are infested with too many furry annoyances (and feathery ones too). I’ll deal with them before we ship.
Finally for those interested in the ship date for Guild Wars 2, Mark Katzbach has the answer:
As we have stated previously, Guild Wars 2 will be released when it’s ready.
If you have access to the Guild Wars 2 forums, they can be a gold mine for developer interaction. I hope that ArenaNet is not only going to have it be a community forum, but getting and receiving direct developer feedback would make the forums amazing. If you were playing Guild Wars 2 this past weekend be sure to leave feedback soon; the bug and tech forums have already been closed. I am not sure if these beta forums will remain open until the next event.
–Ravious
I hope they respond the concerns about the overflow situation. All in all that seems to be the only ‘critical’ issue with game when you observe a lot of different opinions about the weekend.
Everything else is shades of critique. They are doing a great job so far, but I would love to see their thoughts on that one… working as intended? or needs adjustment?
They have. It will be changed to allow groups to stay together.
Cool, if they continue to address issues with the same pace they are now, we could be in for a really special launch.
I think what took me by surprize most is, I wasn’t expecting beta. I was expecting marketing beta, meaning Gold edition minus a few small tweaks.
This caused a bit of wtf moments early on for me, that never really left my conciousness all weekend. Next beta weekend I will go in with more of a junior developer hat on, instead of a critical reviewer hat.
as game-breaker TV put it — would you rather be separated from your friends watching a queue counter… or separated from your friends playing the game? ;p
Neither. I’d like to go to the instance / overflow with my friends and play immediately.
Sometimes a tool is used as a solution to a problem, but presents additional problems and that’s the case with the overflow instancing they’re using here. I understand very well the technical limitations and I don’t find the current solution to be acceptable.
They need to solve this by keeping groups together. Period. No excuses.
Hell, if Funcom can solve this exact scenario with Age of Conan, so can ArenaNet.
Pity the forum software they use is probably the worst they could find. Even that crappy IP.Board setup that GW2 Guru was moved to (at the behest of Curse, I gather, since logins there are now through them…) is better than the official forums.
(though I guess they would be wary of using the much-superior vBulletin if they saw the problems for City of Heroes’ boards have because of the efforts made to make sure only people with game accounts can have board accounts…)
The success rate of my group staying together when zoning increased after I took note of a developer post about the issue and a sometimes-functioning workaround. So I really appreciated that bit of confirmation. That was easily the most annoying issue my friends and I encountered.
Unfortunately I didn’t see developer acknowledgement of a serious issue about guilds. After a disconnect on Saturday, guild membership in two guilds was stripped from my account. Friends said I was still on both guild rosters. But they didn’t appear in my guild tab.