New Designer, Updates, PvP, XTH, and more! courtesy of Linsey Murdock

Update from Linsey Murdock
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/User:...urdock/Journal

August 28th, 2009

Live Team has been pretty quiet for the last few months, so we’ve built up a sizable list of things we want to talk about with the community. This is going to be a long one, but bear with me; I'll be discussing some important topics in detail. We’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s get started!

Welcome Robert Gee
First off, I am delighted to announce that we have filled the open design position on the Live Team! Robert Gee comes to us from Big Huge Games and the Guildhall at SMU. He is a big Guild Wars fan, having played since the first BWE's. He rivals even me when it comes to game play hours and general Guild Wars knowledge.

In addition to his deep understanding of the game, Robert brings his programming skills and a fresh new perspective to the team. Izzy is convinced that Robert is actually a robot from the future that is perfectly programmed to infiltrate our defenses. Unless (or until? dun dun dun) this proves to be true, I'll stick to just being wicked excited to have a partner in crime another designer to bounce ideas around with. I hope you all give Robert a warm welcome to the wiki once he gets his page up and running.

The Anniversary Update – lessons learned
Back in January we talked a bit about our hopes for the year. Now, eight months later, I want to let you know how it's going so far. The Anniversary Update was a huge success, but it was clear to us that we had bitten off more than we could chew. Once the update went Live, we stepped back a bit to regroup, assess our process, and seek another designer. This took some time away from development, but it was important, and we learned a lot from the experience.

Here’s the biggest takeaway: we just don't have the manpower to produce maintenance builds, skill balance updates, festival builds, and large content updates all at the same time.

That was a pretty big revelation for us. It meant some big changes were needed. We started working on streamlining our update process with the hope that extra work now meant less work later. We began working on automating the base functionality of holiday festivals, weekend events, the monthly tonic changeover, and the monthly tournament map rotation. All of these things have previously been done manually every time and required rigorous testing to make sure no numbers were off and no files were missing. You’d be surprised at how much work each festival needs every time it runs even when we aren't adding new content to it. Automating these systems will free up time for other projects, reduce the number of maintenance builds, remove the need to do a build to start holiday festivals, and simplify the upkeep of GW for its caretakers. It's an exciting project for us because of the effect it will have on our day-to-day work.

Maintenance and Content Updates – new process, new schedule
We’re going to slow things down by switching to a longer development cycle for each skill balance. We'll be shooting for a skill balance every other month instead of every month.

Skill balance updates take a surprising amount of development time, but because much of this is necessary to the process, simply cutting back on how much time we devote to them isn't a good option. It takes a lot of research to properly craft a skill balance update. A lot. We read the forums, read the wiki, review the meta, watch in observer mode, discuss skill balance with players, and most importantly, play the game ourselves. It could easily be someone's entire full-time job or the work of a whole team of dedicated balancers. Trying to do a skill balance every month, along with everything else, rushes the process more than we'd like, and it doesn’t give us enough time to truly polish each update before it goes Live.

The switch to a bimonthly schedule allows us to maintain the quality of our work, and—this is important—it allows us to gather community feedback about the skill balance updates before they go Live.

To do this, we’ll try to post the update notes/dev update for each skill balance about a month before the update actually goes Live and ask you for your feedback. The Test Krewe will be able to try out some of the changes discussed by the community in the testing environment and report their findings. This process will give the community the opportunity to give us feedback and identify problems before the final changes are made. We'll take your feedback, make adjustments where necessary, and release a revised set of update notes/dev update when the build goes Live. Our hope is that by taking some extra time to polish and get feedback from the community, our skill balances will be better tuned to smooth out any issues without creating new ones.

At first, we thought that releasing larger yet more infrequent content updates would allow us to tackle the bigger projects that didn't seem possible on a faster-paced schedule. We’ve found that our schedule is still as fast paced as ever. That doesn't stop us from taking on bigger projects; we just aren't releasing the updates as quickly or as often. So we’re going to ease off that kind of schedule in favor of something a little more fluid. We will still prioritize our projects with a content update in mind, but they will be generally smaller in scope than the Anniversary Update, and we won't be afraid to do them in close succession should it be warranted. For instance, we would like to release a content update in the next month and a half, but we'd also like to add new content to Halloween and/or Wintersday.

Xunlai Tournament House Update
We now have an accurate list of XTH winners from the May monthly predictions and are in the planning stages to distribute those points. We’ll need to deploy some new code to upgrade the system, which requires a bit of delicate timing. Part of this deployment must occur through a build, but some of it will happen automatically on the servers. During this time, if anyone speaks to Kun Shao, it could disrupt the system and garble up the list.
To address the issue, we’ll be doing this in three stages: first, a Live build to remove Kun Shao from outposts to prevent him from interfering; then, a second build to deploy the upgraded code and distribute the points; and finally, a third build to reintroduce Kun Shao so that you may redeem those points. As a thank you for all your patience, we’ll be giving everyone on the distribution list a free bump to the next-highest reward bracket.

At this point you may be saying, "Cool, thanks for the extra points, Linsey, but when will the XTH come back online so I can make my predictions?"
Well, that’s still up in the air. We believe that the bug which caused errors in the distribution of points has been identified and fixed, so we’re now preparing to move into the testing phase. We’ll be simulating the Live environment internally and putting the system through rigorous stress testing to see if the fix took. If it did, then yay happy fun time, the XTH will go back up, and hopefully we'll never have to touch it again.

However… (You knew there would be a "however," didn’t you?) Should it fail the stress tests, it would mean the fix didn’t take because the bug goes deeper than we hope, and that would be Very Bad. If that is the case, we will be faced with a high probability that this bug is not something we can fix. Nor can we redeploy the Xunlai Tournament House with this database bug outstanding. So, let’s all keep our fingers crossed, and I'll keep you updated on how the testing is going once it gets underway.

The PvP Love Update
Meanwhile, work continues on our second content update for the year. Right now, we have a list of over a dozen projects that we'd like to put into this build, though I expect this list to shrink considerably as we get closer to lockdown.

Here are some of the projects on our list:

• The Henchmen Project - Restrict heroes from PvP and replace them with an array of new henchmen using skill bars that have been chosen from builds submitted by the community. We’re also looking at the PvE henchmen and revising their builds as needed.
• PvP Skins - Reduce the TRP cost of PvP skin upgrades, make them purchasable with Zcoins, and (fingers crossed) fix the graphical glitch that prevents us from releasing the Eye of the North skins.
• GvG Tiebreaker - We've been watching and discussing the Mind Blast ele build for some time now. We could just nerf Mind Blast to get rid of it, but the Ranger or Paragon alternatives would then step into its place and nothing will actually be fixed. The tiebreaker mechanic is the heart of this problem. We’ll continue to work on adjustments to the tiebreaker so that these solo-plinkers won't be so powerful.
• New Schedule for Automated Tournaments - The current schedule's automation isn't finely tuned to provide tournaments during the peak hours of both Europe and North America. It also doesn't really provide an opportunity for the two continents to face each other in a tournament outside of the Monthly. Happily, the new schedule will be more accommodating to both player bases.
• Bug Fixes for Fort Aspenwood and Jade Quarry - We’ve identified a number of AI bugs in both formats—it's just a matter of getting the time for Joe to dig into them and see what can be done to fix them.
• The Hall of Heroes - We have worked on a new Hall of Heroes map that is tailored to its three rotating objectives. This map still needs to be tested for bugs as well as play balance, so we’ll probably wait until the Test Krewe is in place to conduct this testing before releasing it.
• Syncing Random - Our server programmer has been investigating how to fix this age-old problem of organized teams appearing in Random Arena, and we’re hoping to have the results in time for this build.

(TA + HB)^Sealed = WIN!
This is a pretty big one, so we really wanted to warn everyone of this in advance. The plan is to remove both the Hero Battles and Team Arena PvP formats and replace them with a 4v4 Sealed Deck format.

Let's talk a bit about the reasons for this. We recognize that the Hero Battles format has reached a state of acute distress. It has always been a niche format with a player base comparable to that of the Ascalon Academy, despite its tournament support. This is largely due to flaws in the core mechanics of the format, compounded by years without skill balances to keep it in check.

Under these circumstances, we’ve seen this player base react in extreme ways to show us the flaws of the format. We’ve seen a metagame in which rolling dice or playing rock-paper-scissors has determined the outcome of a match. The final round of the Monthly Tournament was purposefully thrown month after month to send us a message.

After the Anniversary Update, we decided to take on the problems of Hero Battles for the next content update. Many different options were discussed, but unless we were talking about making major changes to the format, every option seemed like mere band-aids that wouldn’t truly fix the core issue. As a small team, it's not healthy or wise for us to invest our limited time in projects which just create more work for no substantive effect. With that in mind, we focused our attention on ways to change the format and generated a bunch of ideas for this. A simple truth emerged: to fix Hero Battles, we would need to virtually redesign the entire format.

We’d be spending a huge amount of time creating a new format to replace Hero Battles, with no guarantee that it would actually fix anything or have a player base to support the new format. That just doesn't sound awesome to me. People who frequent my wiki talk know I am uncomfortable with the idea of adding any new formats which could further fracture the community. If we’re going to invest a lot of time into designing a new format, I want it to be self-sustaining (going back to that whole "not creating more work" thing) and sure to have a player base.

This is where Sealed Deck came in. We’ve wanted to work the Sealed Deck format that was developed for past PAX tournaments into the game, knowing that a lot of players have been playing it on their own for some time now.
Now set that stuff aside for a moment and let's talk about Team Arena real quick.

Team Arena is another format that has sorely needed some love and attention. Unlike Hero Battles, Team Arena was once very popular, but a competitive atmosphere and a degenerate metagame have caused the player base to dwindle a great deal. We'd like to give the format more support, but we don't have the bandwidth to take on more balance maintenance. Now with Sealed on the table, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to give Team Arena some lovin' and remove its degenerate meta in the process.
Here’s the plan we came up with:

• The Hero Battles Ladder will freeze and there will be no more matches in the format.
• The maps used in Hero Battles will be modified and reused, including the outpost.
• Gaining points in the Commander title will no longer be possible. You’ll still be able to display it, and it will count in the Hall of Monuments and towards the Kind of a Big Deal title track.
• Random Arena will stop promoting to Team Arena after 10 wins.
• Team Arena will be renamed and repurposed to support the new Sealed Deck format.
• Sealed Deck will be implemented with new UI and revised rules aimed at making pick-up group formation a little easier to offset the limited nature of the format.
• There will be a new title for this new format. This title will be the counterpart of the Commander title; either will satisfy a single requirement towards the Hall of Monuments and the Kind of a Big Deal title track, but not both at once. It’s a one-or-the-other kind of thing.
• We hope to have customizable Sealed Deck UI so that players can refine the rule set for scrimmages or player-run tournaments, but this isn’t expected to be done for the initial release of the format.
• If the new format is successful, we’ll consider investing the development time to build a ladder and tournament system for it.

While we’re sad to see Hero Battles and Team Arena fade away, we feel that this plan has a lot of win/win and will ultimately be good for the health of the game. We get to replace two formats that suffer from complicated issues and dwindling player bases with one new format that we already know is fun, popular, and will be easier to support and maintain. Not only that, but because of the random nature of Sealed Deck, it’s a format that has a lot of longevity built into it. A project like this is exactly the kind of thing that Live Team should put resources into, one which eliminates outstanding issues while providing content to increase the game’s longevity.

At this point, you may be wondering just when all this will be happening.
We are going to wait until after September's Monthly Tournament to make these changes. We want the Hero Battles community to get one last full season now that they know it will be shut down. There will still be time to get those last few points for the next rank of Commander, climb the ladder before it is frozen, and shoot for being the last person to ever win a Hero Battles tournament.

A New Approach
I know this is a lot of information to take in, and it comes in a package that is sort of unusual in the game industry. At the beginning of the year, we spoke about wanting to be more open about what we’re working on and set this as a high priority in the months that followed. We had a lot of plans for how to accomplish this, but as they say, "The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray.”

We’ve decided to try a slightly different approach, starting with this post. As you can see, we are relaxing our stance on talking about projects that are in progress and projects that are just getting going. We’ve launched Facebook and Twitter pages to give you quick updates on what we are up to. Taking a less formal approach like this will work easier with our fast-paced schedule and will hopefully increase the flow of information to you.

This degree of transparency is unusual for large game companies, being more common to smaller studios and indie projects. We’ll be sharing information and offering insights into the development process that the public normally doesn’t have access to for AAA games. This kind of stuff goes on behind the scenes anyway; we’re just pulling the curtain back to show you the process. To make this new approach successful, our community needs to meet us halfway. We all have to be on the same side here.

So, in return for this openness, we expect you, our community, to be understanding when projects that we have discussed may be canceled or changed, or a project or build is delayed. We want you to have ambitious expectations for us, but to understand that there are always limitations. Everyone has to deal with finite resources, competing priorities, and unexpected complications, and we’re no different. By embracing this reality, we can work together to bridge the gap between development and community for the betterment of the game.

I’m looking forward to chatting about my work openly, but as always please keep in mind that there will be lulls in activity from time to time.

Looking Forward
My hope for the rest of the year is that Live Team will field many of the key outstanding issues that have piled up by the end of 2009, and start 2010 fresh with new challenges and goals. I’m looking forward to the future of Tyria and developing content that helps it continue to grow. That's the fun stuff!
We expect people to have a lot of questions about everything I’ve talked about, so we'll keep our lines of communication open and do our best to answer them. Live Team will be at PAX this year and will have Q&A sessions at the ArenaNet booth on Saturday @1pm and Sunday @Noon. I'm sure most of us will also be hanging out at the booth periodically throughout the course of the convention as well. We’ll see you there!

<3 Linsey

All I can say is good riddance Hero Battles.
Sealed Deck is something I have been hoping for in the game for ages so I am thrilled.

This is exactly what I wanted. I am so happy now. Actual info on whats going on and being kept up with what they are trying to do. Thank you so much Anet. I'm also excited if they keep their promise of discussing skill updates before they happen to get feedback. Yay great day!

Great! Can't wait to see what they add to Halloween. Thanks Linsey.

Sealed deck. Do want.

From that read, they have been very busy, hopefully everything goes as hoped and i can't wait to see what they do for Halloween and/or Wintersday too.

Sealed Deck sounds fun and might actually get me to PvP.

First part is telling us we'll basically see even less updates.
Im surprised they are saying that events and such weren't already automated rollouts on the backend.

Publishing update notes in advance and getting feedback before the changes go live, I highly approve of that change. Combined with the Test Krewe which I also advocated will hopefully lead to better updates going live.

Remove TA and HB? I can understand HB, that was always a shit format, I would have kept TA and ditched RA.
Sealed deck i have no interest in but im sure others would enjoy.

Alright, so sealed deck is pretty sick, not gonna lie.

<3 Linsey. She tells us things.

And to be honest, that's all great news to me.

Sealed deck in-game, awesome.
Revamped TA, awesome.
New HA map, potentially awesome
but...
Hero Battles LOL. That's the best of all.

cool stuff.

RIP kahmu, melonni and anton
razah, tahlkora and dunkoro
and pyre, jin and margrid

WWWWWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOTTTTTT SEALED DECK !!! Omgz

Been dreaming of it since the it was hinted by one of the devs back in winter 2005/06.

Removal of HB is also nothing bad for me, never liked PvP that's so heavily based on AI. But strange stuff with making a title impossible to get anymore.
Now must read it all carefully to further comment on.

EDIT: XTH coming back is as SAD news as Sealed Deck is AWESOME

*Points at Blizzard*

No.

So after 10 wins in RA you go for 11, 12 etc or does the fun end after 10 and you get sent back to RA outpost? Shame that TA will get removed.

Best update that I can remember, and most promising message from a developer than I can remember.

Long live Linsey.

sometimes, the little things are all we need. it can be as little as a developer saying "this is what we're working on, here's what we've done so far, and this is what we hope to accomplish."

this is definitely a step in the right direction. the only bad thing about it, is that i want to be in the Test Krewe even more now.

Dw guys, just got my R1 Commander so I can safely say I can put HB behind me. Roll out the update now <_<.

Good ?

TA and HB are changed for something that arenanet dont know if will works good, there will be less updates, 1,5 monts late of "4 month big updates", and with this post i will supposs that no new minipets, no new skins of weapons/armor for pve or new zones.


.....sigh.....no GW until GW2

Presumably this will mark a return to the old-style, all PvP arenas unlocked by default - unless there's another way of qualifying for HA in the offing.

Yes but with no HB monthlies, it means potentially 50% less XTH rewards. Well i say that but could anyone accurately predict those results

It does sound like the XTH wont be back though.

Sounds good. I'll be incredibly excited to try out Sealed Deck.

I've moderately enjoyed Hero Battles casually over the course of the last few months, but even in that time frame I've seen stagnation. Build Wars, a term I hate to use, is really the ultimate descriptor of HB.

pretty sure that news about the xth is just letting us down slowly and it is not coming back... and thats just fine.

TA and HB are broken and generally hated formats. Sealed deck has been a popular suggestion for many years, and it currently played in homebrew tournments etc.

Slower updates in order to ensure that they aren't rushed, so we won't see updates with only 1-2 skills changed (unless that is all that is required). Also allowing us to give feedback on proposed changes is incredibly helpful, as it can help avoid the R/A problem we have now.

You underestimate how hard it is to make new content, and test for bugs etc. I'd like new stuff, but I also would like some old stuff to get fixed before adding new things in the game that can cause problems. Who knows, maybe in the future when things are a bit more sorted we can get some content updates.

You fit right under what Linsey said here:

what the hell is sealed deck...

Lindsey im kind of afraid to ask, but does this mean we wont be getting a skill update soon?like next week or something?


Welcome Robert I like some of the BIG HUGE games i seen, it's cool to think maybe you worked on one i like and now you'll be working for GW

Hurray!Go die in a corner and never be thought about again HB!!

I also thought content updates were done manually,Im happy to wear its being automated.

I never tried Xunlai tournament so I have nothing to say about it bad or good.

Eveything you said about PVP love is great, love that the henchies will be getting new skillbars and I also love that heroes will be BANNED :P,I hope that the community will be asked for more bars later on if it seems we need new/more.

W0000000000000000000t, I love sealed deck and this is great news, give me any bad news you want because you will have to try hard to disappoint me.

TA has indeed been kind of deserted, mostly you would get the RA upgraders or a Guild with not enough players on playing there.

This is a nice thing you guys are doing Lyndsey and I understand that some of the ideas you guys have and will have might be dumped later on for whatever reason after you have told us about it,will cause us to be disappointed but we will try to be understanding.Now i hope you don't mind me hoping that sealed deck does not get dumped

Great news on the Sealed Deck
Happy I may finally get my MAY Welfare check (^^)
Unhappy that I may not get any more Welfare checks (x x)
Thanks for the telling us though.

Don't worry, I had to look up the specifics as well. I've heard of it way back when and "Card Game" came to mind.

I have never QQ'd about Guild Wars or ANET that I can remember, but that was just one big wall of suck in my opinion. But, props for at least telling us.

I think ANET is taking the wrong approach. They're further cutting back resources that will be going into Guild Wars, when it is now that they need to make a last push to pull new players in and keep the existing ones interested until GW2 is released.

TA/HB: Okay, fine by me. I'd never really played much of either.

XTH: Also fine, don't care. Can get keys by PvP-ing if I really need them, but playing the game normally gets me the stuff I want \o_O/

Updates: Hell, I'll be lynched here, but I'd take a delay in the update for quests and such at Halloween *___* >_>

I'm optimistic.

That is really saying something.

Just how is adding a new designer cutting back on resources? And expanding the testing process to actually include the community with the Test Krewe and advance update notes?

I personally think you have it all backwards....

About time we got Sealed Deck.

lolbye HB and TA, you were both so shitty.

We get . . .
-Skill updates will now take twice as long to be implemented.

-News that likely the XTH will be yanked (regardless of how you feel about XTH, it is content that will be disappearing)

-News that their original update schedule was optomistic and they'll try to squeeze out a small update here and there

-News that their resources have mostly been devoted to automating more stuff. "Yes, so they can then focus on giving us more content!" you say. No. So they can move more resources to working on GW2.

-News that HB and TA are going away (see note about XTH above)

---

The only really positive part about the whole thing was the sealed deck format being introduced, but if they're just throwing their hands up and giving up on HB and TA what will they do if the new format starts having serious problems? They're working on the new HA map too, which I'm sure is a plus to the 47 people still playing HA.

* Gaining points in the Commander title will no longer be possible. You’ll still be able to display it, and it will count in the Hall of Monuments and towards the Kind of a Big Deal title track.

* There will be a new title for this new format. This title will be the counterpart of the Commander title; either will satisfy a single requirement towards the Hall of Monuments and the Kind of a Big Deal title track, but not both at once. It’s a one-or-the-other kind of thing.

can someone explain the logic of both these statments. Does this mean because i already have hero battle titles i cant get this so called new title? because since i have the HA title which i can no longer get points for because their is no HA which is fine by me but because i do infact have the HA title i cant gain whatever the other thing will be to replace HA and TA o_O

Actually the first part of this statement is the correct one

i am glad i will finally get my points and i will be very sad if they take it away forever. i'm sorry but i loath pvp and i suck at it. this was the only way i can get my zkeys. i could buy them but to many times i see peeps selling them for wayyy more then they are worth. i cant wait to see the new stuff to halloween/xmas. and what pray tell will pve universe get?

I dont like this and dont have al lot of expectations.

If Xunlai is removed, I hope Z-title be changed to account for the huge decrease in Zkey availability? And with less keys, prices will go up, and you still have the same < 1% chance to a good item when a key is used...

Pretty much great stuff all around. I am actually surprised that the events, etc. weren't more automated to begin with, but glad it is being done now. Hopefully much of the great things Linsey is fixing will be noticed by the GW2 team.

I've never played HB, and I miss the good ol' days of TA. I think it is a great decision to do Sealed Deck. Can't wait to see how it works.

Xunlai Tournament House Update
Please don't waste anymore time on this . There are so many other more important things that could be worked upon.

PvP Skins
Awesome news. I am really hoping for the EOTN skins to be released.

GvG Tiebreaker
I am really looking forward to seeing what ideas come up for this. Along with the mindblast ele build, please address the Ranger/Assassin build that is running rampant in PvP.

Hall of Heroes Map
Wish a new map was released for GvG instead, but I'm sure the HAers will appreciate it.

Removal of TA
Will be sad to see this removed but I think it's for the best. What will happen to the current Glad point system? Will glad points only be obtainable through RA?


Overall I'm fairly optimistic about the news and anxious for some PvP updates.