Regina Journal Update - 30 September 2009

End of Month, Beginning of Autumn - 30 September 2009

Hola! I thought I'd talk about what's been going on in Live Team land since my last general update to this blog at the beginning of this month.

H1N1 Outbreak

As most people probably know, ArenaNet was hit with the H1N1 virus (I resisted writing “Tvirus” just now, FYI) following PAX, as well as run of the mill after-convention colds/flu (popularly known as “con crud”). Several people in the company had to stay home for at least a week till they got better. Unfortunately, we saw at least one person go to the emergency room for H1N1-related problems. H1N1 had a big impact on the Live Team in the first half of the month, with Linsey, Robert, and Joe coming down with symptoms. At one point during her illness, Linsey actually came into work, but was physically unable to work for more than an hour or two before getting fatigued, so she went right back home for rest and recuperation. Others had very bad colds/flu symptoms, and because of pre-cautions being taken in the company, many people, including me, stayed home to reduce the chance of infecting others at work. The missed work due to illness, of course, impacted workflow. Quite a miserable set of days for all concerned. :-(

Visit From Our GMs

We recently hosted the heads of our Austin and Brighton GM teams here at the studio for a week, and it was great to have them here so they could get an idea of our workflow, processes, and synch up on any support-related discussions.

Community Team Activities

After PAX, I've been working with Martin on a lot of future planning work for Guild Wars 2, in terms of community department structure and staffing. This has involved a lot of research on both our parts, as well as conference calls, meetings, calculations, projections, and so forth. You probably won't see the results of those plans until just before Guild Wars 2 launches, and unfortunately I can’t talk about any of those plans right now. We’re definitely working on exciting things, though!

We’ve also been working on going through the Test Krewe submissions. More on that below.

Of course, we’re doing our regular thing, like keeping an eye on various forums and the usual spots for any issues to report to different departments here.

Chinese Traditional - Community Localization Project

This project is a small-scale beta project. At the moment our Chinese community is helping us to update outdated skills and skill descriptions only. There are no plans to do this for other languages at this time. If you speak traditional Chinese, and you'd like to help out, you can take a look at the project information here.

Henchman Skill Bar Judging

Over the past couple of weeks, Robert and Linsey have been looking at the Henchman Skill Bar contest submissions and deciding which of the bars you submitted should go into the game. The Henchman Skill Bar contest took up more time than we predicted, due to the overwhelming response of the community (more than 30 000 submissions!). We view this initiative a success, despite the fact that it's taken a little longer for the team to select winning skill bars than if they had come up with those bars themselves. The in-game submission tool was something that Mike worked on and it's something that we may find use for in the future. Robert has been taking point on this project, and has been coming in on the weekends for that. The process for vetting builds has been interesting. There’s been a lot of discussion in the Live Team room between Linsey and Robert about pros and cons of certain skills in certain builds, what those builds are most appropriate for, and the like. We’ve had a few laughs about some of the builds submitted, and there’ve been some really great submissions as well. There are some interesting stats aggregated from the submissions, but I’m not sure we’ll have the time to actually compile and publish those. I talked to Robert about what interesting findings he saw, and he said that it looks like we received more bars for Monks and Warriors than other Professions. Also, a surprising number of submissions contained no Elite skill in the bar. If we do have any more interesting facts, I’ll try and grab Robert when he’s not ridiculously busy to give me a few more tidbits.

Test Krewe Submission Reviews

The Live Team continues to review Test Krewe applications. The initial review passes weeded out applications that provided invalid information, and right now we're focusing on carefully reviewing the remaining submissions, giving each one due consideration, and making a short list of folks that we think will be quality volunteers, based on their applications. We have tried to reduce the impact of this time-consuming process on the Live Team by having community shoulder the administrative work, with the assistance of a couple of our awesome QA fellows. The time taken to review those submissions is significant, even with taking out the invalid submissions. A few thousand people applied to the Test Krewe! We’re working on a FAQ to address some common questions in the community about the Test Krewe. If you have any suggestions for that, please let us know!

Future Game Updates

Linsey hoped, by discussing the projects on the list openly in her recent journal post, that this would help give you all an idea of what we would like to tackle in the future. Another hope was that it would address concerns about what is going on behind the scenes. Progress is being made on some of those projects. Much of that progress involves getting items on a schedule and prioritized. There’ve been meetings about Sealed play lately for example, however the main priority in the last couple of weeks has been Henchman Skill Bar Contest. A lot of the planning is going on behind the scenes involves meeting with other departments, so that Live Team plans coordinate well with other departments’ plans, such as the marketing dept and their schedule/calendar.

Halloween

Other things the Live Team is working on include a game update later this month. As Linsey mentioned, she would like to add a bit of new content to the Halloween event. Mike has been meeting with other departments to discuss how much support they have time to give us for this. For example, if there’s any new text or art involved, we need to get the help of a writer or artist, all of whom are working heads-down on Guild Wars 2.

XTH

A current challenge right now is getting significant amount of developer time for the extensive internal stress testing we talked about late last month. Unfortunately, I have no new information about Xunlai Tournament House at this time.

Twitter

You may have noticed that Linsey is using our official Guild Wars Twitter account to hopefully help make players feel involved in her daily work life as a designer. When we discussed getting her involved in Twitter, we agreed that it would give her more flexibility to write short, informal updates via Twitter, than long, drawn out blog posts on her journal. I'm not sure if you know this, but many of Linsey's journal posts, particularly the detailed ones like the one she posted in August, go through several edit passes with a writer. Her August 28 blog post took several days to write, get edited, and so forth. The process is time-consuming, and it takes time away from her design work. So we've been trying to use Twitter as a means for her to show you what's going on in the Guild Wars Live Team, even if we can't actually go into detail about them. If you have any feedback for us, feel free to send an @ reply via Twitter or contact us via the usual channels. :-)

Community News

Just a reminder, but if you’re hosting an in-game event, want to let people know about an article or blog post you wrote, or want to show off a web site or some art, you can submit your info for publication on Community News on the official web site!

To do this, please send the following information to community (at) arena net:
Event name/title
Organizing guild, alliance, and/or player
Location of the event
Date, time, time zone (time zone is really important! :-))
Event description/details (no more than roughly 175 words)
Link to your event web page (wiki page, web page, forum post, blog post, etc.)

To help us in spotting your message more quickly and to organize our inboxes, please title your email with the subject: "[Community News] Title of Your Event".

Misc.

As always, the last quarter of the year is busy for Guild Wars. We have the Halloween and Wintersday events, which are significant projects in and of themselves, however as you already know, the GW2 teaser trailer and the GW2 artbook were not the last you will see of GW2 this year…

In other news, a lot of people in the company are playing Aion, to varying degrees of fanaticism. Some people are absolute leveling fiends, and they’re already in their mid-20s. Kind of impressive. I’m taking it easy and leisurely leveling a couple of characters on different servers. :-)

This week, Martin is in Reykjavik for EVE Fan Fest. Did you know he’s an EVE Online player? I guess he just loves math and spread sheets. :-P

Well, this post is already pretty long, so I'll leave it at that. Have a great day!

On GWW

Yikes, 1 went to the emergancy room over swine flu D:

Not really any new information, more or less just a recap of stuff we already knew.

Either way, thanks for the update Regina (and Razon)

I skimmed, but...

POSSIBLE NEW HALLOWEEN CONTENT! Yay!

nothing new here, and no etas on any content updates.
by the sounds of it they are further behind.
for a team with such limited resources they sure have wasted alot of time on the henchmen skillbar contest.

issues that require swift ingame action are being left to fester.

I just quoted some parts that I am not in favour of.
The GW team seems to be overloaded with things to do, and then you don't go around and add more thing to their plate.
They should REALLY focus on certain priorities - balance in PvP and new content (And the content shouldn't be just seasonal!) in PvE.
Looking over 30k bars when some of them don't even include elites IS a waste of time.

Edit:
Reduced the quote.

And it seems I am slower then slowerpoke! :S

bout time someone posted this... i guess everyone was busy with rr. i am assuming this means another rr day or two?

this is my biggest lol in the update:

The only new Halloween content I'm looking for is new skillbars in Costume Brawl, properly functioning masks, and a new set of hats. New CB disguises and a new map would be a bonus.

Why would you waste your time writing this paragraph informing the public of the condition of the Anet team? For all we care, we paid you (ANET) so therefore you are obligated to serve us under any conditions. We could care less about the H1N1 virus, tough luck. Hire new people... Remember, your new franchise, GW2, depends on what you're doing with GW1. If you lose people's interest, then you know the outcome. Stop trying to come up with new stories to delay the updates.

I guess the guy above me said sarcasm.

kinda disappointing. no wonder nothing new happens in gw, after all anet are grinding their way through aion.

advice: forget about all those festivities, test krewe and skillbar thingy. give us thoughtful balance updates, sealed deck and some other new content (ha map) and you'll stop self-owning.

They gave me swine through the computer!

And yeah, I sure hope Lucky Charm is being sarcastic...

Test Krewe is going to reduce the workload significantly down the road, it's worth the time investment now. Half the recent balance disasters could be averted if they had people actually play with the dartboard buffs. It wouldn't take a genius to come up with R/As, just some people actually testing skills instead of theorycrafting how to make GWs honorable. Also any new content in the pipeline will need to get the bugs ironed out.

Wow , all i can say to this rant is wow =/

If your not being sarcastic then this is biggest load of crap i have ever heard.

Anyhow, regarding the halloween event i sure hope there are some cool builds for costume brawl. (thats all i ever do in the event apart from the hats)
Perhaps instead of having famous GW NPC's to play as we can wear halloween costumes depending on proffession

this could have been solved much easier. just invite like 30 people to an internal testing team, who are gw-wide known for good knowledge of the game and valueable feedback for the live team. ~20 people may agree and there you've got your decent beta testers. this - however - was already said countless times before.

I hope people like you will lose interest in GW2 and hopefully leave GW1 as well. That would make my day for sure. I would even likely see the next update delayed by half a year to see this happen.

at OP. Thank you for the information.

*cries* (tears of joy)

Thanks for the update.

I wonder if there is a way to sort out and/or delete build submissions which don't contain an elite. Might help with the enormous task of going through 30k submissions...

And I hope everyone gets over the swine flu!

What a way to squeeze more time of not doing anything pretend to be sick. I want to see medical receipts. If you had a virus like Swine Flu then everyone of you should have doctors reports and return to work slips. It's too easy to call a cough some kind of flu. I bet they stayed at home and played video games just like all of you do when you pretend to be sick.

Because no one plays hookie now and then?

Flu or no flu, back to work Anet, can't wait to see what's next.

Thanks for the update - but could you ellaborate on wether the features being worked on and still on scheduale for a release this month still include :

PvP Reward Weapon Skins/Armor:

As you have announced that your are indeed reworking this system by adding EOTN skins along with an overhaul reducing the cost accross the board - This prevents people from spending or converting there reward points untill we know for sure what this will entail (You will understand no-one will want to buy weapon skins to see the price drop in half a week later).


PvP Tiebreaker:

For those playing gvg atm this is top priority - This update was addressed as a 'PvP Love Update' but the lack of information regarding anything pvp related in your statement is worrying to say the least (henchmen ? - who cares).

Sealed Deck Format:

I can see you addressed it briefly in your statement - But could you provide anymore information regarding it ie: is it on sceduale for a release this month (you have openly said this was the last HB final ever so I pressume the new format will be added before next mat)


I appreciate the status update but you havent really mentioned anything regarding the above factors - which is all the PvP crowd will care about. This months update is the 'PvP Love update' and im just hoping you havent put everything on the back-burner again to appease the PvE crowd.

Way to be a prick.

You know these are professional people, right? Not 16 year olds?

That was funny.


Good joke but it's an old one.


Hilarious!


All in all a good update that cracked me up. 8/10 for humor.

Wait... someone with a potentially deadly disease came to work? Is she or her boss the crazy one? I thought the medical advice was to stay home and not spread it.

Now is the swine flu going to ravage all of ANet?

Coming to work when contageous is not professional.

Yeah, wow if a guy thinks that "conga" has no contribution to the game.

At the end of the day, A.Net is providing a service.
Had their employees not been ill, chances are that the service would be better.
So when a guy only seeks the best possible service, instead of looking at the service provider with infatuation in one's eyes - then the service provider failed.
It sucks that they were ill, but this is business. And people get pissed when one fails to deliver.


I see them as perfectly valid opinions.

BLASPHEMY!

12chars

Although it seems some people seem to have a tough job understanding this, it is the sad but hard truth. The only thing that's worth caring for by the players is whether the skill and game updates get delayed or not. Regarding the swine-flu outbreak, tough luck indeed. Since I don't know any of the people from Arenanet personally, I have no reason to sympathize. I think this should be the case for the majority of the players. Whether or not you consider swine-flu a valid reason (excuse?) for the lack of info on when the PvP Love update and skill update (SF) are going to happen, is an entirely different matter. For me, it's a severe enough reason for them to get away with it.

On the subject of the Henchmen skill contest, I already pointed out the time-strain it would put on the Live Team's resources here: http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...php?t=10398594. "The fact that it's taken a little longer for the team to select winning skill bars than if they had come up with those bars themselves" is probably the biggest understatement of the year, with Robert being "so ridiculously busy". In my opinion, it would have been far more efficient to either just remove heroes and henchmen from GvG and HA, or let Anet come up with them. Either way, it would probably have saved you lots and lots of time, which could have then given back to the community in the form of other update content. A contest like this just isn't efficient at all.

In terms of Future updates, it seems all Regina is saying is that they're still in the planning phase. This basically suggests that they haven't done anything yet except for setting their priorities at the HSC, which is a bad move in my opinion. They should just XTH (yes, that's used as a verb, and you can guess the meaning of it) the whole Henchman Skill Bar Contest.

And seriously, when a Journal post like this one requires several days to just get processed, it is a good indication that the company structure is way too bureaucratized.

Since this is probably the last Journal update we're getting from the Live Team before Halloween, I just have some real quick albeit incredibly important advice for Regina: Please, don't forget to check the posted starting and ending time schedules. Everyone can guess why.

Meridon

P.S. Skill/PvP Love update infos pl0x?

It IS actually true, numerous sources have been saying that swine flu has broken out.

It does that that we can expect problems from it, and there is nothing they can do about it except rest up and try to get better.

wtf?

cough is potentially deadly, small wounds are potentially deadly, being bald is potentially deadly... do you go to work / school with these things right?

this "swine flue" is just as disasterous as the normal flu and nothing special

these things are very much hyped up by the media this is why their name is media sickness :P

+vaccines are ready and being distributed in these days (at least in my country)

I'm not questioning the vadility of their illness claims, I'm questioning the validity of them using it a reason for more delay, not to mention no hard new info being posted on future updates.

That's BS, and I think you know it. Are you really criticizing Regina for being open? Do you think the news would have gone down better if they had simply said 'it's running late' without a reason? Do you not think Linsey would like to be able to justify WHY things have slipped behind schedule, before all the finger pointing begins?

If it doesn't matter to you that ArenaNet was hit pretty hard by illness after PAX then feel free to gloss over that paragraph. To many others it's nice to have the insight, and to understand why things might be delayed.

Journal Update? this was all just a rehash of what we already knew anyway why waste the time in churning out the same info over and over.
I hope your playing Aion on your own time cause if not i can see why things are taking ages to do in GW.
PS Sorry most of you got piggy flu I do hope you are all getting better.

I never thought I'd say this, but the Live Team are trying to do too much at once. With the 'swine flu outbreak' and all the focus on this stupid henchman contest, as well as new Halloween content, I fear that the things that matter - skill balances, Test Krewe, Sealed Deck - are being left in the dirt.

Is this a problem when they are just sharing info?
No.
Is this a problem when they are using this as an excuse to justify being late?
Yes. Well, at least to some.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

No, I'm not criticizing her for being open. I'm saying I don't feel any special empathy for them suffering from swine flu, and neither should most of the other players be. I pointed out that I'm accepting the swine-flu statement as a reason, however I did indicate that it could also be considered an excuse, just as easily.

Also, it's pretty hard to gloss over a paragraph when I've just read it. I never said their swine-flu didn't matter to me, because it does. It does matter to me, because ultimately it will probably end up affecting the delivery times of the game updates, which is what I care about. In the end, I think they didn't have to spend an entire paragraph on it, since we already knew they had swine-flu, especially since Regina just pointed out how much time it takes to post a Journal update like this. I can imagine the amount of work on it increases exponentially with every paragraph added.

No new info on XTH.
Sealed Deck, Test Krewe and Henchie contests taking up a lot of manhours.
Possible new content for Halloween!
More on GW2 this year!

Seems they have a lot going on at the same time; however, what I didn't like reading was that they have a lot going on at the same time and yet, still choose to play Aion, attend EVE fest, Twitter posts taking up days, etc.

Priorities, people!!!

gw is not their lives, it is their job. they are free to do whatever they wish on their free time. however, 2009 has been full of delays for whatever reasons they might be, and i do hope they get their act together.

What I see here are some of you people are a bunch of ungrateful bastards. You complain when you say no one keeps you up to date with what is going on and when they do, all you do is complain about what they have to say.

^well i don't know bout the rest of you, but all i've learned from this update is that anet has caught the swine flu and are spending time playing aion. perhaps they should write about what they ate for lunch today.