so what ever happened to

Originally Posted by fenix

Wait....

People still think ANet care?

Wow.

Originally Posted by fenix

Wait....

People still think ANet care?

Wow.

Originally Posted by Zinger314

If I said this a year ago I would have been suspended from Guru. Oh how times have changed.

EDIT: lol fenix is dum, edit instead of reply

Originally Posted by a-kyle

what ever happened to anets promise of every 4 months of releasing new content? like the last thing i remeber is that stupid storage update, like talk about being almost a year over due

Originally Posted by Linsey

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.

Originally Posted by fenix

Don't think I was a mod then

All I'm saying is that ANet surely don't care about GW based on their track record recently. That is to say, if they DO care, it's simply that they're horrible. So not caring seems....nicer.