How big is the Guild Wars 2 Development team and how well are they doing?

Just a question cause I'm entirely not sure but as of right now, I feel that the team is rather small considering the amount of content that is put out.

Compared to free to play developers like Warframe, who seem to have daily hotfixes and changes, Anet doesn't seem like they have enough hands on deck to fix bugs as they appear or make small changes to the game. From the patch notes I've seen, the updates seem very few and far in between. Even then, the changes in each update seem very meh with the occasional class balances.

Seems to me like that all the team effort seems to be going towards LS episodes and maps. It's very rarely that I see very obvious changes to the game, let alone changes suggested by the community. (i.e. UI updates or class reworks) Sometimes I wonder if they even plan to implement or change anything at all especially with a lack of a type of a roadmap for the community.

If someone could enlighten me that'd be great.

Arena Net has over 400 employees. The exact division between, say, the game developers or customer in game support isn't entirely know. I don't recall ever seeing the credits for Path of Fire.

GW2's income has gone up and down over the years, however after Path of Fire their earnings have stabilized and stayed comparatively high, likely do to mount skins.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ArenaNet

Patches/Releases are usually every 2 weeks; some small, some large. Sans hot-fixes within a few (2-4) days after a release, bug-fixes are only released with a content update due to bandwidth (as stated many times by the Devs).Developers usually work in teams; some on Living World, some on Systems, some on Marketing, Customer Support, Programming, etc., etc.You can find a list of some Devs in the Wiki on the 'ArenaNet' page.

ArenaNet is doing well enough to release free content to us, the playerbase, often.

@"mortrialus.3062" said:Arena Net has over 400 employees. The exact division between, say, the game developers or customer in game support isn't entirely know. I don't recall ever seeing the credits for Path of Fire.

GW2's income has gone up and down over the years, however after Path of Fire their earnings have stabilized and stayed comparatively high, likely do to mount skins.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/ArenaNet

That aside, we also don't know how many of the actual game developers are working on GW2. It's not entirely unthinkable that they are also working on something else in the meantime. The revenue can't hold forever so they will need to look at the future at some point.

The game is over 6 years old, if they were still doing daily hot fixes at this point I'd very concerned about their development process and why the previous hot fixes didn't solve the problems.

They often do hot fixes and extra patches on release day to solve major bugs and ones which are easy to fix. Other bug fixes come out along with the bi-weekly updates, to save having to constantly download new stuff (not a problem for everyone but some people do have limited downloads). Some bugs do stick around for a while, but I assume that's because they're harder to fix or considered lower priority or they'd be included in the other fixes.

They are busy developing new chairs to sit on.

Id guess 5'8" on average, and probably mostly recovered from the new year celebrations.

I only opened this thread in hopes of seeing a dev post complaining of some minor physical ailment or daily inconvenience suffered. So disappointing . . .

@"Tazdingo.7213" said:Seems to me like that all the team effort seems to be going towards LS episodes and maps. It's very rarely that I see very obvious changes to the game, let alone changes suggested by the community. (i.e. UI updates or class reworks) Sometimes I wonder if they even plan to implement or change anything at all especially with a lack of a type of a roadmap for the community.

If I'm not mistaken, there are 3 living world teams releasing episodes in rotation. Contrary to popular belief, living world episodes don't take 2-3 months to make, but way longer. It's because they have 3 separate teams that they are able to release them every 2-3 months.

Another big part of the company (probably the majority of developers) is usually working on expansion content. This takes even longer to finish, for obvious reasons, it's much larger in scope and it contains entirely new mechanics, lots of new maps that are larger than episode maps, elite specs, and so on.

Then we have the smaller development teams for specific content types, the WVW team, the PVP team, the systems team (balance), the instanced content team (Raids/fractals) and the technical teams (Audio, Music, Engine, Graphics)

Finally we have the team responsible for the creation of assets for the gem store. Mount skins, weapon skins, outfits are in this category. Judging by how often we get these, this "team" must be rather large, if not the second largest (after the expansion) team.

I'm happy to sit back and enjoy their hard work, that's well enough for me.

I would not offer Warframe as an example of a good job with error correction. For years they can not solve the problem with the migration of the host, not to mention the mass of other problems. No wonder there is a humorous definition of "Bugoframe")

Well now you can play Warframe on Discord if that tells you anything.

Arenat the studio was around 400ppl like a year back.

Also daily hotfixes in warframe? Damn they have so much time fixing bugs but they cant give vauban a rework.