ANet's shitty development team

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Sirion
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ANet's shitty development team

Postby Sirion » Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:32 pm

We made the improvements we had time to test. There are still more ranger improvements but when our time is limited we have to focus on things we know we can fix. Signets and shouts are still on the docket, and I suspect some of each of these will get some love in the next time around. As you can see a lot changed in this build for every profession and we have to test these changes as well.
I do still believe ranger is the profession in most need of improvement after this patch and we will continue to make those improvements. If we could fix everything at one time we would, but the reality is there are a limited # of hours to make changes.
I see a lot of talk about ranger weapons, but I don’t think that is the real problem. I think sword and longbow are both good weapons, which is why the changes take longer. The problems are deeper, in pets ability to hit moving targets, trait lines with not enough viable choices and skills that are often too specialized to really compliment the weapon builds. These aren’t things we can change overnight. The change to Greatsword block was in fact a very difficult change, but we made it because we knew it was the right thing to do.
There are >500 skills in this game, 480 traits, and 2 designers working on this. Even then often we are bottle necked by other issues. I’m not going to say we are not working on these things, nor can I say there are things we could have changed but just ran out of time on, but this was a patch that contained ranger improvements and it will not be the last one that does so. Maybe you want more than honesty but that is what I currently have to offer.



That quote is from Jon Peters. I don't main a ranger, so it doesn't bother me too much that they aren't going to be viable for another month or so. The problem that I'm having right now is that the class development is being taken care of by 2 developers, and they are clearly uninformed as to the nature of the game and what needs to be taken care of.

It's great that some abilities got nerfed in pvp but not in pve, but Jon Peters basically came out and said "Hey rangers, we know you guys have a bunch of shitty utilities and traits and that your weapon skills suck, and we're totally going to buff you this upcoming patch," and then they do the absolute opposite, and nerf all the traps, and do nothing to any weapon other than the Greatsword, which got minor buffs....

To me that doesn't really instill any type of hope that the development team knows what the fuck is going on with their own game. This comes on the back of what can constitute the beginnings of a gear treadmill and a lack of any foreseeable improvements to the huge issues in WvW (small maps, lack of map diversity and number, culling issues remain unfixed, the matching logarithm sucks, and badges still have better drop rates from guards than players because guards can't alt-f4 before they are fully downed). I'm quickly becoming disenchanted with the GW2 franchise. Very quickly.
DAoC > WoW
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Twystyd
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Postby Twystyd » Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:09 am

I am trying my hardest to reserve judgment but I swear the culling is even worse after patch. I don't even see allies half of the time now. To me the culling issue is game breaking and before the go changing someones 2-skill by 2/10's of a second one direction or another, add any more holiday gathering nodes or even put another post on the forums they need to have every mouth breathing mother fucker in the building making sure we can see each other and enemies on our monitors. That broke shit is ridiculous. Almost Failcom terrible.
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Sirion
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Postby Sirion » Fri Nov 16, 2012 9:40 am

I absolutely agree. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I don't understand why they don't just let this new content sit for a month and fix the shit that's broken first. Games like WoW lost my subscription because content didn't release fast enough, games like GW2 have historically lost my subscription because I can't be assed with playing a buggy ass game. The most ridiculous part about this? They could have backloaded instead of frontloaded the content updates, worked on fixing the bugs and broken classes and people would have realized that the company prioritizes the customers' gaming experience over their own creative impetuses.

Right now I feel like I'm playing a game created by (fine) artists not game developers. They don't give a shit if you're having fun, they just want to make what they want to make and come hell or high water that's exactly what you're getting.

A game isn't healthy simply because they produce a lot of content for it. A game is healthy because the developers know what to fix when and work on figuring out how to address those concerns first. I would have been much happier with a culling fix and class equivalency for the first 3 months of the game than I would have with a Halloween event that lasted for all of 5 days but represented a significant resource dump, and a 'content patch' that expands a world that 99% of the playerbase probably hasn't even fully explored as is.

The only reason this shit is going on is because people already got their hands on Legendary weapons, and ANet doesn't want them to quit since they 'beat the game' already. Newsflash guys, getting armor out of a dungeon ain't gonna take weeks if these people that have a legendary want to put in the same time they've already had to in order to get that legendary.
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Postby Zeratulx » Fri Nov 16, 2012 10:07 am

Well, they nerfed the Mesmer, Illusions require LOS, that is perfectly fine with me and warranted. What the real problem is the ninja nerfs and the newly created broken shit from this patch. The iZerker now does A THIRD of the damage it used it, sometimes it will MISS its attack all together while it's right next to the fucking target! The below is taken from the official forums:

Heres my observations so far.
Illusion pathfinding is borked.
They still regularly get stuck on hills, minor obstructions and occasionally just run in the opposite direction of their target.
Illusions attacking out of range and not connecting with anything.
Sword clones are particularly prone to this, as are iSwordsmen. Illusions often shatter out of range and don’t damage their target.
Clones still use Beta versions of skills.
Trident clones still stack confusion for example.
Illusion summoning is still buggy and unreliable.
They still flat out fail in conditions where they should normally work, Illusionary leap still fails on stationary targets at point blank range.
Phantasm specific summoning issues.
With the new behaviour introduced in the patch, Phantasm skills often miss, or otherwise fail in conditions in which they should work. The iWarden has had this behaviour for some time and was often overlooked because of how unreliable summoning it was, now ALL Phantasms act like this. In addition to the regular illusionary summoning bugs, they also enjoy projectile based bugs as well.
iZerker damage and ability to hit target has been kittened.
iZerkers appear to do roughly a third of their original damage per hit, in addition they are connecting with their attacks considerably more unreliably, often outright missing and doing nothing.
Illusionary Warden does not move between attacks.
Not entirely sure if this is intended or not, sometimes it half does sometimes it doesnt. There hasn’t been any official word either way so I have no idea. Personally I think it should though, its attack and summoning cooldown are huge and its attack is far from fast or hard to dodge.
Condition removal skills are still bugged
Arcane Thievery is still buggy and rarely works. Despite it being ‘fixed’ I’ve noticed it still being blocked by Aegis. Null Field still randomly doesn’t remove conditions and boons. Mender’s Purity still often doesn’t work. I don’t know about Shattered Conditions because the only Grandmaster trait that isn’t garbage is Illusionary Persona.
Phantasm buffs still broken.
Phantasmal Fury overwrites Phantasmal Healing, neither of which refresh properly on any Phantasm bar the Duellist.
Sharper Image bleeding still fails on Illusion death.
Bleeding caused by this trait causes zero damage when the illusion dies, given how quickly this happens in most situations, this is a rather prevalent problem.
The underwater version of Mimic lasts half as long as it does on land.
Pretty self explanatory, the window for absorption and reflection is half the time it is land with the same cooldown, very much hampering an already often ignored skill.
Absorbed attack still causes full effects with Mimic(?)
Not entirely sure if this is intended or not, but full damage and effects are taken on the first attack, preventing it from defending against pulls dazes and stuns which will interrupt the skill and cause the full cooldown to take effect.
Deception doesn’t break targeting.
Deception, the second downed skill does not break targeting and will almost never work as a result.
Illusion of Drowning has generally unlimited range.
Illusion of Drowning can be used out of range and most of the time will work at almost any distance so long as you have something targeted.
Temporal Curtain vertical range prevents it from reflecting projectiles.
Many Arching projectiles bypass it right now, slight elevation changes in terrain can also cause it to fail.
Temporal Curtain’s Swiftness buff does not stack with others.
Pretty self explanatory.
Distortion will sometimes fail to do anything.
Damage and various CC will often still occur during Distortion, from both the Shatter and Blurred Frenzy.
Blink and other porting skill still hilariously broken.
You can still port through walls, the floor and out of the map in general. Additionally, porting over the top of objects still has a habit of failing.
Blink occasionally doesn’t break stun.
Blink will often cause you to port, but not break stun. This happens more often than not with knockdowns.
Mirror Blade often fails.
Mirror Blade will often fail to activate at closer ranges and act as if it has been interrupted.
Illusionary Wave will fail at close range.
This skill will very rarely work at close range.
There are a few more, but there is already a tread for it.
I would like to ad one more thing though.
Mind Stab (Greatsword) is an awful skill.
Roots the Mesmer, does poor damge and has awful range. Id like to see it get an extra 10 seconds or so on the cooldown, revert to its old animation and becoming a launch.
Yes. a launch.
Because that would be pretty dang awesome to see in a WvW Zerg.
DAOC - WoW - AoC - WAR - Aion - Rift - GW - SW:TOR - GW2

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Postby Twystyd » Fri Nov 16, 2012 12:56 pm

They nerfed warrior shouts to a 5 target max. I understand the logic on that nerf though sense AoE (not siege) can only hit 5 targets and it was causing everyone to survival stack on each other and portal bomb around the map.

I found this Dev post interesting about culling -
We are working on a fix (a collection of fixes, really) for culling and character loading issues. The fixes require significant changes to a number of game systems and thus require time to implement. We’re not yet ready to discuss a release date for the current set of fixes, but we’re working hard to improve the experience as quickly as we can.

Now for the long version:

We currently use server-side report culling to limit the number of characters that any given game client is aware of. By limiting the number of characters that we report to any given client we also limit the bandwidth used (by the server and the client) and avoid situations where the client is overwhelmed by the number of characters that need to be processed and rendered. While this system has some obvious advantages, and it works well in PvE, the large battles that are the signature of WvW tend to highlight the deficiencies of this approach.

There are also some client-side issues which have contributed to the perception of how our culling system works. Once a character is reported to a given client there’s a non-zero amount of time required to load and initially display the assets associated with that character. Extra load time varies depending on how beefy the client machine is (those with more memory, faster CPUs, more CPU cores, and faster drives experience shorter load times). One of our engine programmers recently completed an optimization pass on the character loading process and so we should be seeing improvements to that part of the issue very soon. Even so, the bulk of the issue remains with the server-side culling as it doesn’t matter how fast your client can load and draw a character if it hasn’t even been told that character should exist yet.

As you may have heard we already have a fix for the server-side culling implemented for sPvP. Because sPvP has dramatically less players we were able deploy our fix immediately without worrying about downstream side effects. WvW, however, operates at a much larger scale than sPvP and so we have a number of additional hurdles to clear before we can turn on the server-side fix. In order to address the culling issue we need to ensure that clients, including min-spec clients, are able to handle rendering and processing many more characters. We also need to ensure that the bandwidth needed by any given client remains reasonable and falls within our min-spec for connectivity. The WvW team is working to address both the bandwidth and the client performance issues even now. The changes that we’re making are complex and have a large impact on the way the game engine works. Because of the level of complexity involved, and the core systems that are impacted, these fixes take time to implement correctly. As such, I can’t give you a date when we’ll be done.

At the end of the day our goal is to dramatically improve the experience of large battles in WvW and provide a substantial increase to the number of players that can be seen by any given client.
Although detractors decry (MMA) as a brutal, bloody form of human cockfighting, aficionados know it is a brutal, bloody, totally fucking awesome form of human cockfighting. -The Onion



I don't know the question, but sex is definitely the answer. -Woody Allen


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