Regarding the April 9 Game Update

Isn't it funny how when people disagree with something anet does they start yelling like they own the company?

no they start yelling like they even have a clue what their talking about.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmQRSGwB6VQ

"Everyone who I beat, just isn't as good as me. Anybody who kills me is cheating."

yeah that too.

I mean come on how dare you not have time to update the skills.... /endsarcasm

Large updates like the one later this month takes a LARGE amount of man-hours, And a lot of people don't understand that.

A'Net is so evil how dare you constantly lie to us!

On a serious note it's good to know you guys are taking your time with it and not rushing out a shit update.

Props.

Hmm i just have a question when does anet decide that a skill needs nerfing for example Shadow Form?

It's because they care and they don't want to see the game that they enjoy being destroyed (even further).

How hard can it be to nerf "Jesus Beam" and skills like that? Seriously, one guy can do it in a flash, then the programmer implement in a matter of seconds. Now, if anyone is going to tell me that it's hard he obviously never programmed a game in his life.

BTW, it's about time necros get to see some action in GvG (and other forms of PvP as well), don't nerf them.

Haha, don't bullshit us. There is no testing going on, you just are too lazy to get off your asses and modify some values in the database. Even though you have the correct answers to approaching a balanced game right in front of you, none of you even try to come close to achieving it.

You don't test your skills. See: all game balance after Factions, Signet of Ghostly Might, Cultist's Fervor, Shadow Walk, Xinrae's Weapon and the 300 other things you have managed to screw up time and again. It's sad how your customers are your alpha testers. Point and simple: I'm sure you just don't care.

Come on, what's the worst that could happen? You introduce a new bug? It's not like the rest of the game isn't just one big bug.

You can apologize all you want, but don't spew bullshit like this.

No skill updates at all. Ugh. Thanks for making sure this big update is *cough*thoroughly tested*cough*.

seriously i guess we're never going to get a preview of what is going to be in the april update.... what's the point of doing a preview the same month it comes out... doesn't really keep us excited does it? well done on "being more open with us and making us feel like we're connected to what you're doing..." I feel frustrated and that time and time again, you guys said you were going to release a preview or information on what the update is ABOUT soon soon... but all i hear is "we're busy we're busy"... you put all this hype into this update being great and huge... what should our expectations be if we don't even know what things might be implemented....? and now we have no skill updates, the day just before the thursday update is supposed to come out... thanks for the late notice.. my rage fest is finished.

No, they've never said the update was going to be huge, or great. They said they were working on some things. They haven't really hyped it either, that's people like you reading way too much into it, and hyping it yourselves.

No balance update...


Instead the resources get used for something I really couldn't care about.
(I could create another 4 mules and I only have the standard 8 slots...)


I'm dissapointed.

lawl....wow...ok....no skill updates?....ur not touching spawning power?
OK THEN!!

Back to WoW!

mmm, i cant wait to get easter eggs

well i'd rather you guys spend more time on it, than just try and rush through.


Best of luck

I recall a news article in July of 2006. The Schaumburg Flyers (minor league) allowed Fans to pick everything about the second half of the team's season, from lineups, to base assignments, etc.

The news articles leading up to it thought it was the best thing since sliced bread (mostly.) After all, Fans get so passionate about the game. And many think themselves an armchair game designer... Ahem, minor league baseball coach. What could go wrong?

While much of what happened escapes me now, almost three years later, the points that did stick with me are when they had the Pitcher moved to a base, the short stop (?) catching, and the coach practically in tears while fans were pissed both at each other (the system was voting, much like a reality show, as that was the intent) and the players for losing ("How could you fools blow it? I designed you so wonderfully!")

Moral of the story. The Mob is not always right. We are players, they are designers for a reason. If it should be different, it would be. Update your resumes and get searching!

Again, thank you to the folks at ANet for continuing to work on a game for me to which they've not received any additional income since Eye of the North.

actually if you read regina and lindsey's journal pages, they talk about the excitement that is going around the office for the update and saying to us that they are putting in so much work and both think we will like it. have you checked out the wiki talk pages for both of them? I see it on discussion topics regarding the April update.

This is, however, tempered by Linsey pointing out that she gets excited about it because, well, it's a big part of her life and she has a lot invested in it, and reminding us that this means that just because she gets excited about it doesn't mean it's actually going to be the best thing that happened to the game.

If the \quote "big update" \endquote is actually something decisive, then skill balances would probably occupy less of a priority than that, and I wouldn't mind this.

Unfortunately, for the past year, skill balances and new builds to try are about the only thing that has made me open GW again. So hopefully the \quote "big update" \endquote will have a similar effect.

People talk about balance mostly when they think about tweaking the game a certain way. But there’s a very important definition of balance that refers to something else.

Balance works with resources as well as it does with tweaking things around. The decision to dedicate 100% of resources purely to a single task has to be about the least efficient way to do something for a human being. Obstacles can pop up at any point obstructing the path to an inflexible goal. When these obstacles come up, the decision to go for 100% makes something out to be a pure gamble.

Creativity and inspiration are very important concepts when it comes to utilizing human talent. These two things are fickle and unpredictable; these are very difficult things to micromanage. Human beings are not robots; robots are able to stay on one task all of the time. A person has far less control over when the mind wanders and becomes more productive on a different task than was intended. The decision to spend no time at all on something over the course of a month ends up denying a person from a whole month’s chance of finding a possible source of inspiration. To mention things like high stress and huge workload; inspiration is capable of defeating stress. To neglect a source of inspiration is to increase the odds that stress makes a workload less manageable.

I hope A-Net will reconsider this all or nothing approach to decision making. As far as no changes at all go: Two is twice as good as one. Eleven is only 10% better than ten. You can’t multiply the number zero by anything in order to get an increase in the number. As you further increase effort to produce another thing, you no longer get the same percentage increase in payoff. Small gestures add up. Grand gestures create a heightened expectation and serve as a dangerous contrast with small gestures. Make too many grand gestures, and spoil the enjoyment of the smaller ones.

When people talk about fixing problems, my solution is almost always the same: balance them and balance yourself. All or nothing is not balanced; it’s highs and lows and instability. People are going to notice a zero on this month’s skill balance sheet, because people remember the lows as potently as they remember the highs.

True... I agree with this.

When you look forward to this huge/large/great/imba/whatever update. Don't expect too much, then the dissapointment won't be too great.

Wow. Hi broken meta for another month kthx. Disappointment after disappointment.

I love how people whine when ArenaNet needs more time testing their updates. As Regina said, one updated value can result in unpredictable changes somewhere else in the game. Change the way one skill works, and you've altered all monsters in the PvE area of the game that use that skill. Change another skill - oops, now an originally and intentionally un-soloable area is now exploited by a new solo build. The whiners in this forum are so shortsighted. Especially when their complaint is:

"Why can't you just change the value in the skills database, it's so easy!"

It's because that change could have adverse effects on areas of the game you aren't even aware of. So, the pompous peanut gallery and wannabe game directors should probably think things through before making snap judgments about a project they know NOTHING about. Just because you play the game, doesn't mean you know what is going on under the hood folks.

It's possible, though, that something similar is the reason why. The human mind can also become excited about a particular task, increasing productivity on that task and decreasing it when forced to work on others that seem to be drudgework in comparison.

I suspect they have still been considering balance updates, they just haven't got them ready and aren't willing to force themselves to do so, possibly spending time that would be more efficiently spent working on what they want to work on.

well im quite disappointed. i could really care less about the tonic (very annoying for the most part, targetted at small kids if you ask me). as for storage and stuff, if you have that much stuff in storage its from a couple reasons, 1. skills are so broken that you can get more stuff before you figure what youre gonna do with the old stuff, 2. you keep too much junk that you never use, so no need to hang onto it. now with keeping skills how they are (roj with no scatter so v spear farming is dropping huge numbers of items into the market). this is the reason people need more storage. fix the skills and the rest will fix itself. i play mostly pvp so this will be another fail month of endurance spammers, lingering spam and pnh.

^^ this

i wish my necro wasn't better at being a rit :-(

Glad to see a proactive effort to inform us.

I have to agree here. The people who complain and say stuff like it's so easy to balance a skill and it only takes changing one value in a database...it just makes me want to facepalm because that opinion is so ignorant and just plain incorrect.

Balancing a game is difficult work. Making one single change will have a knock-on effect on so many other things, some of which can be predicted, some of which may not be noticed until later, and most of which the average person will never even realize.

If anything necro needs to be nerfed just as bad the jesus beam if not more, the amount of minions they can make and control in AB is insane. But then again it's fun to cut them down and watch the minions go wild and attack everything in sight.

more storage? yeah whatever
with all the accounts we have to exploit the xth
everyone has over 9000 mules
to store bat wings, wolf fangs, fungal wallows etc

Chthon is fine with this. In fact, Chthon would be fine with going regularly 2 months or even longer between skill updates if it meant more testing went into them.

Though Chthon would really like to see the AI bug for RoJ fixed sooner rather than later.

I don't mind waiting since WoW keeps me busy. Take yer time anet, don't need a update full of bugs anyway.
Although it really would be nice for it rits to get some love eventually :c

The big patch this month was set up as a deadline; by nature such things are inflexible. People don’t put out optimal work around deadlines. Deadlines force production, whether it is good production or not. Deadlines work best when structured away from thinking work. If you want to know something that thrives around deadlines, I would point you to look at the work of insects. Insects do not think about too much, nor do they face thinking problems that they don't deal with as a collective; they serve the colony. They follow the same fixed activity schedules to keep the colony surviving; these are activities that can be automated.

The way a thinking problem works is that when you first approach it, you do not already have the capabilities to solve it (this is highly unlike work that gets automated). If you try to approach the problem head on by thinking about it, guess what… you can’t do it because you don’t have the method of thinking to solve it. So the way to approach the problem is to learn a new method of thinking.

So if you want to talk about optimal methods for problem solving: you structure already learned activities around deadlines, because some types of people thrive around the structure of having things already planned out. But you do not structure thinking and learning based problem solving around deadlines. You get the solution to such things when you learn it. That is why you have to be learning and thinking 24/7. Time lost not learning can never be made up.

But the information that you are not including: the skill balance changes they did last month were relatively well received; considering there are plenty of threads indicating people have long-standing issues against things that has been done previously. You don’t win people over in a day. I would have called it momentum to build off of. I hope that momentum wasn’t lost by forced execution of another task.

Skill balances can wait, but I can't wait for this major upgrade. Finally maybe an armor storage that I have been waiting for?

Keep up the good work Regina & friends!

Edit: On a side note, will you guys stop complaining and bitching? Seriously, grow up and if you don't like the game, well just stop playing and complaining. I understand your disappointment sometimes but enough is enough!

Don't believe the hype.

Agreed, while I'm in no rush to hear about it myself, I'm very interested if/when I can organize my HoM how I want to.

Another day mate, another day.

And how would you know they are too lazy to do the balancing? Yes, they have the tools to balance, but not the time. Why? Because the storage update is getting a little bit more annoying it seems. I talked to Linsey a couple days ago and she didn't even like hearing about the April update preview notification.

Again, how do you know? And who the hell do you think you are to insult the people who made the game for you. You dislike Anet and GW that much? Go play another game! YOU should stop bullshitting on the forums.

They get excited not because it's going to be a good or big update. They get excited because it's their job. They should be excited. If you have someone who's not excited doing a job, it will be half-assed.



Seriously people, if you're going to complain about upcoming updates, complain about them after they come out. That way, you have something to complain about that won't become null and void.

In fact, don't complain, just have your fingers and tongue cut off for us so we don't have to listen.

The problem is that ANet’s reasoning is that they believe everybody cares about both the April PvE update and the PvP balance. That couldn’t be further from the truth. As a PvPer, I could care less about the April PvE update as it basically doesn’t affect me at all. The skill balance is what makes each month different and interesting and a lack of that severely detracts from my experience playing the game. However, PvErs could care less about the PvP update because it rarely affects them, and for some reason the prospect of more storage seems oddly attractive. One group of people doesn’t care about the other; ANet has assured that through their policies the last few years.

The pleas about ‘time’ are absolutely ridiculous as well, and despite criticisms from people who don’t know how skill balance works, I agree with most of what Protoss said. Tinkering with numbers on skills such as lingering, pnh, blood necro skills, mirror of ice, etc. do not take a lot of thought nor does it “affect other areas of the game, sometimes in unexpected ways.” Make it a PvP-only update and get over it. That’s why the division was created in the first place. Moreover, that there will be no skill balance at all this month only means one thing – you haven’t spent any time on it at all. If it was being slightly delayed because of the April PvE update, that would be reasonable. Waiting because skill changes also need to be fully tested adds a delay but does not cancel it. A cancellation occurs because you haven’t even started testing it – which leads back to the problem in the first paragraph.

This also particularly bothers me, although I can’t say its unexpected: “we risked releasing either the skill balance or the April update itself without the level of polish, consideration, and testing that it should have. “ As a PvP player, what do you think I would have rather had: a polished skill balance or a polished April PvE update? That’s not a very difficult question. As a company, with your limited resources you say you are forced to make a decision between the two and, although I think both could have easily been done, that you expect me to support your decision is ludicrous.

famous quote :P
"it will be ready when it is ready"

one thing for sure, Anet cannot use the "we don't have enough people working on Live Team" excuse since someone else listed a whole bunch of names earlier somewhere.

When will you be releasing Sorrow's Furnace? I remember reading about that years ago and seeing nothing.

Cool, thanks for the news! Would rather have a good update with new features other than an update with nerfs and complainers.

I guess the end has just started.

I would rather see another fail skill 'balance' then more storage.