Update on lags and festival by Regina

Straight from her wiki page:

Great more wintersdays-- more lag days awesome!!

Yay extra presents!

Cant stay logged on to Guild/Friends list. Seems like most in the Guild cant either.

Looks like Grenth wins this year. Extra snow days!

The moment I heard no one in Kamadan got hats, I figured Wintersday wasn't going to end anytime soon.

http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/s...&postcount=344

I didn't get hats in either city except for the accounts I had logged into the first event (before I left town). This seems to be a common thread. I was traveling when the update hit. We'll see if it's fixed.

Thanks for the effort.

Just give us mini polar bears :P

I second that

By repeating the event, does it mean the whole 2 weeks or just the finale?

Probably just the Finale, although it would be nice to max Vanguard on a couple more toons with the SD quest hehe

Meh, festivals can be a strain on the system, but ANet's always been fair about giving everyone a chance to participate to the best of their abilities. I got all my stuff, and I think there was plenty of time for most people, but I'm not going to complain about them running another finale day.

I wasn't bug afflicted but i think Anet is an example to follow about players support and fair.
Good job and Happy new year!

Well, I guess a bad year of development might as well end on a bad note.

Good luck in 2010 Anet....we all know you need it.

Or you can see this level of support during the holidays (i.e., vacation of most people) as not only a positive reaction, given the usual tension floating around these problems, but also working beyond the call of duty.

Most players play the game for fun and then enjoy the festive period, as they should, while these guys (all of them, from Regina and Gaile to the Anet/NCsoft devs, including many people in between) are working hard to solve issues in the background.

The hat problem was fixed during the first day of the new year via a new build in a matter of hours. Then Regina issued 2 notes with 3 updates in short succession.

It would be fine if they weren't trying to sneakily cut amount of servers all the time. This is what you get when the game's infrastructure literally doesn't exist to do these events.

Fril, it's the pattern of behavior that people are upset about.

In the last six months you have: the end of XTH despite promises it would return, missed commitments regarding balance changes, the R/A update, the henchman contest fiasco where employee communications about the judging didn't match reality, the delayed startup of the Test Krewe (and the public availability of their personal data), account thefts, ever-increasing latency and now this.

It's not that this issue was a big deal. It's that players' patience for error is exhausted.

So, this is reason enough to start derailing threads to voice this feeling, despite threads being opened for venting them?

In passing the last promise was the one to test one last fix to see whether XTH could stay, with Linsey clearly saying (see August 28th journal entry) that if the fix doesn't take, XTH is not returning

Delayed based on what start date exactly?

I don't believe it is, many people are still playing despite the lag, dc, no hat, no balance, etc. Guru gathers only the voice of the dissatisfied (and it's its purpose ofc) which will then claim that they represent the community (many people invoke the "I feel that way and so do my friends" card). I don't believe they do, they are part of it and they're entitled to voicing their opinions, and Anet listens.

Fril, I'm not trying to derail the thread. I'm trying to explain something to you. You don't seem to understand why people are blowing off steam about a minor issue. What I'm telling you is that they're doing so because they're upset about lots of other things already.

When people lose their temper, the incident that prompts it probably was not solely responsible. It generally results from accumulated frustrations. Players are frustrated with ANet about a lot things that happened prior to not being able to get a hat.

The frustration boils over here because being getting a hat is a very, very basic expectation. The dev team has gotten this right many times in the past. Experience suggests that this is like kicking an extra point - easy to get consistently right. There's no excuse for screwing up when you know the task and how to get it done already.

As for the specific points you challenge:

If ANet had been on top of the Test Krewe, we'd have seen a nerf to Shadow Form in 2009 as promised. Letting them sit for a month without communication or organization after naming them is just terrible project management.

There was clear communication prior to that Linsey announcement that XTH would be back for certain. The dev team then let the issue sit for a while and reneged on the promise.

People play despite the lag, d/cs, and such because they don't have an alternative. It's play despite them or not play at all. We know it's possible for the game to function better; we've observed it.

I'm not making the claim that I represent the community. I'm simply stating that the vitriol you observe results from a clear pattern of behavior on the part of ANet in the last year. Different people are mad about different things, but there's enough of a laundry list of fail that a lot of people are upset with the devs. And rightfully so.

someone suggested the hat thing was on purpose.. they throw a bug in the game to keep people bitching about the game- keep them around a bit longer.. then when they re-do the hats they will bang up something else keep the cycle going until gw2

hey I'm just repeating what I'd heard.. like the skill nerf, who knows what's next.. keep you guessing XD

Martin, I was talking about you but rather about the person I originally quoted. I won't make any more comments (despite wanting to) as it'd turn this into more flamewar.

This has hardly degenerated into a flamewar, although other posters could easily take it there. If you're concerned about outsiders making it ugly, feel free to PM what you have to say.

It's called Cause and Effect, Fril. If Anet doesn't change their child's [or Guild Wars'] socks after three days [or three months], it'll start to stink.

Guild Wars 2 is tens of months away from us, so the most prominent decision they could possibly make is give GW1 a nice face lift and maybe some tummy-tucks here & there. Hell! Throw in some Botox even, and make this game look as good as possible! If only Anet's GW rep's could animate themselves enough to take a serious look into Guru, search for ideas and implement into PvP/E to beef the game up while refraining from too much weakening of skills that it creates a blatent disinterest in gaming.

Source pl0x.

It was an expression that it is going to be a while until GW2 comes out, and the best thing to do is to keep it looking interesting for players. I see no GW2 release date nor it's beta so it's easy to infer that the game is still under development.

So when they rerun the finale, we're going to need shards for one or the other team to win? Are shards going to keep dropping or do we need to save some until the redux?

Hey, more chances for Snowball domination runs and mini polar bears, and for those who didn't get a chance at the hats (which I actually like this year), another opportunity to get some.
They had a problem, they fixed the problem, and they're going out of their way to give players another chance to get hats. I'm happy.