Why haven't anet done more BMP stuff.

1) Your salary expectations for the gaming industry are HILARIOUSLY off.

2) I'm working from the assumption of ten to twelve people over six to eight months, plus a hefty buffer for various taxes etc.

Maybe you are right. However, counting in benefits, $150k to $200k per year per engineer is quite typical for the software company that I work for, which produces games too.

I played it a few weeks ago to get a Mursaat spear and shield for my Paragon. Before then however, I don't think I played it since it first came out.

Looking at the Nightfall production DVD that came in the collector edition, I have a hard time imagining those people making $200k.

If they made $60k I'd be impressed.

Wow. And the cost of living in Bellevue, Washington where ANet resides, is not cheap either.

I think our fresh graduates make more than that if you count in benefits.

As a rule of thumb you usually take the salary and multiply by 2 for what it actually costs the company in terms of benefits, office space, payroll taxes, etc.

But yeah, game developers pretty much earn jack shit and work ridiculous hours, you have to really love games and not care about money to be in that industry. If I didn't care about money I would totally do it, but working for a large company is just too lucrative. And yeah, Bellevue is really quite expensive.

Daesu, it's not typical for any company. You are talking about the top 10% of engineers who make that much and they are Director level and above. What you have are rumors. The average salary for an engineer is about $65k (and there are many different types of engineers so it will vary according to the specific engineer of course, I'm speaking overall).

And yes, yes I realize I contributed to the thread derailment.

If that is true, it is really surprising to me, being in this line for more than 10 years. It could also be the cost of living factor too. In Texas that maybe ok. But in Bellevue WA, that sounds like a fresh grad engineer pay. In New York City, that would be hilariously low even for a fresh grad engineer.

The big 3 software companies hiring in the Bellevue area (Microsoft, Google, Amazon) pay about $80K starting salary to someone straight out of college. However, big companies can afford that, and small companies generally not.

That sounds about right for a fresh grad, but for a lead or manager, it is usually 6 figures. I was thinking that these would raise the average salary of software engineers in Bellevue Washington to a higher level (we are also counting in benefits), I didn't know that the other companies there pay so much lower. I guess it is a hard time for the economy anyway.

A full team of 10 people working for six months, to put together a few small missions?

Good heavens, it's a pity their developer tools are so very limited and hard to use. Imagine if they'd used the Gamebryo engine (for those of you who are unaware, that's the engine Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 use, notable for its incredibly good mod tool, the ESCS/GECK) - with 10 people working fulltime at it, they could be putting out dozens of BMPs.

Sure, you can chuck out stuff like that, but that is not going to work well. They are trying that with live team and it is failing miserably - remember skills that crash you when you equip em? That is gonna happen with Zahr, the pointy haired boss at wheel.

Funny mentioned GECK. Anchorage, which is equivalent of BMP both in size and content took exactly that, about 60 peoplemonths. GECK/Gamebryo is pretty terrible in anything else than building areas.

There is more to those areas than basic geometry. Custom assets, Scripting, Custom skills ... hell, each BMP weapon took at least day to model. Two days if you add concepting. Three days with QA.

I just asked in my alliance who did BMP missions. NO ONE! Some have BMP but even did not bother with doing one of them. I wonder why ANET does not work on stuff similar to BMP...

Which is kinda surprising because full run thought mission with bonus nets 8k gold and four cool looking weapons. Plus useful weapon you get just for accepting mission.

Maybe they do not know about it?

And considering that they are much better designed than most other missions...

And the fun of being Master Togo, Turai Ossa, Gwen, and Saul D'Alessio in their respective environment and stories ... priceless

Screw those goodie-gooddoers hero types, I wanna see how Lich retrieved Ruriks body and made him undead!

You're playng the wrong game! Gogo prototype (well it's more a Shiro meets the Lich ...)

Actually, it's 20 people at least needed to make new explorable areas - from concept art to quest dialogues and programming - so Linsey has stated and explained.

Then those people are missing out.

I'd personally love more BMPs, it allows the player to get lore without needing the character to be there, which I think is great, personally. But why they haven't? Not worth the time spent, and/or not enough people to surrender from GW2 development.

That is only in Discovery mode which is only the first time when you completed the discoveries. Most people should have already done those when they first got the BMP.

Subsequent runs only net you 500g and a customized weapon which sucks big time compared the same amount of time dedicated to farming. Why would I play BMP again after Discovery mode has ended? For all the work that they have done for the BMP, its replay value is extremely low.

I got mine for free. I wouldn't buy an addon that takes more time for less gain. ANet doesn't know how to equalize time-based rewards across different parts of the game, and they are stingy with their rewards for their BMP, so it is not attractive as a pricing item.

Furthermore, I consider the BMP generally alittle more difficult than your average mission in NM because you have to solo, you have a fixed build, no cons, and no party members or heroes to back you up. But at least going through NM missions again to get the bonus would work towards a title. There are also no monster drops in BMP, which normal missions have. Summary: BMP missions have less reward, more time needed, and higher difficulty. Which is a shame because it does have interesting content.

I also loved it but it seems we are the minority... Actually I also do not notice people using weapons from BMP. I really think it was not so popular as Anet hope it would.

I hear ya, I just played it to get the weapons I wanted and that was it. Did not really care about the stories it provided or anything like that.

Why make more BMP stuff when hardly anyone has used the current BMP storys.

I have it unlocked, but I have never been through it or ever plan to.

Can you tell us why?

Well, by its nature it was a one time deal. Maybe you went through the missions four or five times to get all the bonuses.

But they were well done missions. Good pacing, nice art direction, and some more insight into the Guild Wars world.

Here would be an interesting poll: How many people who completed the BMP vs people who completed Sorrow's Furnace? I am ashamed to say I've never completed Sorrow's Furnace (although I did do enough to get my Moa Chick).

No, the BMP is not farmable, so it doesn't have the long term effect that Sorrow's Furnace did, but I don't think anyone does Sorrow's Furnace anymore as well.

(The main difference, of course, being that Sorrow's Furnace was free).


PS: I do use the Charr Sword and Tengu sword regularly, and often get asked where I got it. Which I'm not sure is good or bad for ArenaNet.

And that is the problem. You pay $10 for what, 2 hours of fun and forget about it forever? Unlike a regular campaign where there is at least more replay value.

I wouldn't say they are well designed. Yes nice art, but the missions are too difficult and takes too much time for a mere 500g and customized weapon. A well designed mission should have better replay value.

I would vote for SF. SF has more replay value and better rewards. It is more fun, and you can play a full team, muck around with builds and so on.

And why shouldn't it be? SF is farmable.

And why should free places be farmable and places that cost money be not? If that is the case, then I shouldn't be buying anything because they are just not worth my limited time to play with all my real life responsibilities. I could better use my time to farm.

Too difficult? Really? I thought they were perfect. Easy enough to win just about every time, but hard enough that one or two wrong moves can kill you. A simultaneous feeling of ease and hovering on the brink of death which makes them fun to play. I like all the missions, but only do them occasionally if I need a new weapon to make a certain build work.

There are the "advanced" objectives to get more weapons, have to do them one day .

The BMP was free for me, it was an offer for those who bought EotN from the online store.

I'm fond of my Mursaat Staff and use it most of the time, it's died blue which gives it a unique "jade" feeling and looks "magic" with its incomplete shape.

If you compare it with an average NM mission, it is difficult. I have completed all of them and made all the discoveries.

I didnt have that feeling that 1 or 2 wrong moves can kill me when I am playing most NM missions.

And that is the problem, they should give more reward for skill-based missions like that but instead they give more reward to grind and time-based activities which makes the game feels boring after awhile.

GW time-based rewards are so much greater than their skill-based rewards that most people dont even bother with the skill-based missions. They just grind and farm and get bored, then leave.

500g is what I should get for completing NM missions again and again. Not for missions that, whenever I enter, I get a feeling that 1 or 2 wrong moves can kill me. Rewards should be compatible to the difficulty. It be silly to get 1k reward from NM and 500g for HM for instance. Who would play in HM then? Everyone would just farm NM if that were to be the case.

This just isn't true. What you don't seem to realize is that popularizing skill-based rewards turns them into time-based rewards. So if an intelligent player develops a novel reward system via skill, that player doesn't scream it out to everyone.

You don't see me holding open forum discussions on rollerbeetle racing tactics, dungeon speed clearing techniques or dungeon running, do you?

You didn't see me spilling the beans on UWSC a year ago, did you? (I'm still more than a little irritated with that idiot that we booted from our group.)

You can gain advantages in PvE via skill, but only if you have the sense to keep your mouth shut about those advantages. Spilling the beans only leads to nerfs or massive reductions in reward value.

Most of the areas you mentioned don't take much skill really. The areas are not difficult, especially so if you just copy somebody's uber build that is already designed to exploit that specific area. You can use cons, you can get your party members to back you up if you make a mistake, etc.

BMP missions are different. You can go through all of them many times but each time you redo them, you still have to be careful or you can still fail easily.

Make me.

Would you keep your mouth shut if you knew that there is a leak in your apartment buildings gas pipe?

I dont think so.

If you see somethgin is broken if you see something isnt right you go out and do whatever it takes to get it fixed. If not you gonna hurt whatever part of the game it will eventually get out withb a BIGGER boom than you ever thought.

Imagine the Hidden DoA outpost if it was discovered much muhc later imagine how much inocent players would be banned thern -_-.. see thinking isnt that hard right.

Selfish attitudes will bite you back more and more and more .

Now that:

a) people have had years to work on the projects
b) foolish people have published how-to guides in search of fleeting e-glory
c) people can get things done fast enough to make consumables cost-effective

you are correct. This was not always the case, however. Skilled players were exploiting the Underworld to reach the end chest in under thirty minutes well over a year ago. Skilled players could complete DoA very early on, but unskilled players could not. Skilled players were knocking out the dungeons with better rewards in under half an hour while bad players were taking three times that length of time...and the list goes on.

You can scream out to the world about every imba thing you find, but you're only hurting yourself by doing that. You're misattributing the cause of not having the things you want in this game. It's not because you don't have enough time on your hands. That's only one way of getting rich. The other way is to come up with innovative ways to do things in a hurry. People will pay you to do hard or time consuming stuff in a hurry for them, and some of those services even get you nice drops from time to time.

No. That can actually hurt me.

If I develop a method of doing something REALLY fast, profit off it and keep it secret, I win and do not destroy the GW economy in the process. It's when I start telling everyone else about it that it becomes a problem.

For instance, Hard Mode Urgoz solo farming (not my idea, btw) was fine until the rest of you showed up a month later after someone spilled it on Guru. I was farming up an ungodly number of Zodiac items, using Wild Blow to screen out ones with good mods without IDing them, and selling the ones with bad mods unid'd. The (then thriving) market for unid'd Zodiac items was not impacted, because I was simply unable to generate enough new items to impact supply meaningfully.

The only exception to this is something along the lines of duping, which makes it possible for even a single player to bring an economy to its knees. The problem here is that the player can duplicate items used as currency at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than players could legitimately create those items. This distorts the supply and makes a hash out of things.

Now, if the originator of the HM Urgoz farm had been smart enough to keep his mouth shut, it never would have been possible for someone that heard about it from a friend of a friend of a friend to spill the beans on Guru, claim the credit, wreck the per-hour value of the farm and draw the ire of ANet's nerf hammer to the farm.

If you see something that isn't right, the correct play is to abuse it until ANet does something about it. Complaining about it won't draw the attention of the support staff. PROVING that something is unarguably not right is the way to go. Not only do you profit, but you also ensure that ANet agrees with your assessment that there is a problem and does something in a hurry.

It's worth noting that this attitude has led to a lot of gold capes, including [rawr]'s capes this month. Izzy's vaunted new tiebreaker system distorts GvG pretty badly. Now [rawr] has proved this beyond any doubt.

I have no sympathy. I was offered the opportunity to go there. I did not take that opportunity, because I knew that it would lead to bans. If you're going to take advantage of opportunities, you have to know where the line is and not cross it.

The BMP was great, I love the weapon/shield skins, I actually mostly use these on my characters and heroes. The backstory was fun and more personal also; it was a lot more involving than, say, the Prophecies missions. I was reminded of the movies 300 and Kill Bill by two of the stories. The difficulty level felt just right. So, it cost as much as a movie, or a few beers, big deal.

Agreed on the replay value thing, but disagree on the quoted. The BMP missions are MUCH easier than NM missions. You might be solo'ing, and you might not be able to use cons (really? I mean, really? You complain about no cons?), BUT, you have a balanced build, allied NPCs which are just as good as Henchmen (but they auto rez! So better!) except for in Gwen's mission which is all about stealth anyways, and you have overfaukingpowered skills such as Dragon Empire Rage and Spectral effin Agony (honestly, with the VAST amount of people saying they want to be Mursaats so they could use Spectral Agony, why don't people enjoy playing Saul?).

I think it is people like you who inspire crappy storylines in games.

Must be a spoiled brat... Why get something if you'll never use it?

They were, they also introduced a brand new kind of mission: One with no fighting (unless you count destroying a pillar). At all. I kind of hope for a mission in GW2 that is 100% stealth and avoidance of fighting.

Again, too difficult? I really can't believe you call some of the four easiest missions in the game too difficult.

I think you missed the memo where Anet tries to keep farming and grinding to a minimum (of course, this is technically impossible to truly do).

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL LLLLLLLLLL
The BMP missions are harder than UW and some dungeons. XDXDXD You sir, just made my day.

He's not golden, that is why.

He has some gold-ish color on him.

So what? In other missions, you can use owerpowered PvE skills. And Spectral Agony is nothing compared to Ursan. What makes you think your typical mission is harder? No matter how you think about it, a typical mission is a whole freaking lot easier, especially with other people helping out rather than having to rely on AI that you can't control and can't set their skill bars. At least with henchmen, you can still flag them. Auto rez would not help you if you die in BMP. You fail the mission the end, while in normal missions, if you make a mistake and die, others can still res you up.

As for cons, the fact that overpowered cons make most missions easy is already proof that BMP missions need more skills than even many HM missions. Cons just dumb everything down to retard level.

Even without cons, the HM missions are easy enough with overpowered discordway, don't even talk about NM missions. In BMP missions, it is more skill based than simply copy-pasting somebody's build. Unless you are saying Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V takes skill.

Oh really? So the grinding has stopped? We must be playing different games then.

Yes they are. I can clear UW in less than 15 mins. Saul's mission alone takes much longer than that.

Doesn't matter, with power creep, wiki, pvx, cons, discordway, pve skills, etc. Any retard can tell that it takes less skill to complete most normal missions than BMP missions.

So they have difficulty. But they are not "hard" - and there are most certainly many missions in NM (without the use of many overpowered skill or use of cons) that are harder.

Every build is balanced so that, if you have half a mind, you can keep yourself alive. AI also is made for this. In Togo's mission, for example, the enemies always go after Tengu first, and only if all Tengu are dead, then they attack you. Most of the time, unless you just plain suck which is next to impossible, all the enemies will be dead before they start attacking you.

As for the "you can use owerpowered PvE skills" - The point? Only a select few are overpowered, and you are still limited to just three. They are also dependent of something (title rep). Same with cons - the game wasn't designs to be easy through and through. People QQ and Anet listened - a bad choice. However, that is not my point. My point is that the same as above: The builds are made and balanced for the mission, there is no reason why the build shouldn't work.

How is this proof? I fail to see your argument. The game is not meant to be easy. So you get areas where you cannot use cons, so what? And the second to last sentence in the second paragraph is how the whole freaking game should be and was originally intended to be. That is: more skill based than simply copy-pasting somebody's build. Just because people put builds on PvX doesn't mean the game was intended to use them. How long was the game out until finally Anet made the template system? Sure, it made it easier for those who upload builds from online, however, how do we know it was meant for that and not saving your own builds which you make for different areas (and I don't mean farming builds).

Did you not read the end of that sentence? The part in parentheses? It is impossible to keep grind out. But Anet has tried to keep it to a minimal (in the past they have deviated from "no grind" with the extra games, but with the title update, and if you focus on the non-grind titles while getting the reputation points, it's not that much of a grind). And for farming, which is pure grind, until they realized people like grind (which I will never understand), they stopped obliterating farms (example of an obliterated farm: Desert Griffins).

I was taking out the idea of UWSC, which you don't. Why did I take it out? Because the area was not made for it to be cleared so easily. The only reason why UWSC has been kept is because Anet (as Linsey has said) is unsure of how to prevent the UWSC via SF while still keeping SF viable for non-farming things.

You argue like this was intended by Anet. Guess what, wrong. Both of the early wikis (that is, wikia and PvX) were not made by Anet. Cons, god knows why they introduced those, probably because of QQ'ers at DoA and HM *rolls eyes*. Same goes with PvE skills. Discordway and those other PvX builds are player made. Just because players cannot make an "easy mode" from player made things (read: "cookie-cutter" builds), does not mean everything should be naturally easy mode.

If I were Anet, I'd nerf all those "easy mode" builds, nerf the consets down immensely (or put a similar restriction as summoning stones), and nerf PvE skills. I'd also work for removing the unofficial wiki and PvX wiki (unofficial mainly because the official does everything the unofficial does with a better playerbase, and is worked on by Anet as well - but also due to personal biasedness which is caused by me hating the format of the wikias *not just GWwikia* and the obscured theories put as facts in the articles and how god-awfully wrong the lore articles are) /endwikiarant.

You cannot deal damage while SF is active. All enemies within earshot are cured of all hexes and conditions while SF is active. We're done. You can still run with it. You can hold aggro with it, but you can't kill with it, and whatever your team tries to kill with will cause scatter. The end.

Amen.

Censoring the Internet? Even the Chinese government can't do that worth a damn.

I dont play about with words, the BMP missions are simply harder than MOST NM missions.

And that is why we dont need all of them to be as overpowered to have an overpowered skill bar.

Face it, even with low title track they are still overpowered.

What you think the game is meant to be has nothing to do with this argument so dont try to derail this argument.

No they have not. They have been adding more and more grind into the game ever since Factions.

Who cares a damn if it was intended by ANet or not? People still exploit it everyday and UWSC is still easy today, so my point still stands.

But you are not Anet, so the changes you proposed have no significance to the game or even to this argument. And my point still stands that BMP missions are still harder than most NM missions in the game today.