If you were a WvW developer for a year, in what order would you solve problems?

[subversiontwo.7501]

@DeceiverX.8361 said:

@subversiontwo.7501 said:

@DeceiverX.8361 said:Y'all are giving yourselves way too much credit lol. I doubt anyone here's a game dev or has such experience.I'd do the following:

• Begin learning the system
• Have a lot of meetings
• Probably get into a heated debate with someone on the Systems team about the direction of the combat and class design.
• Possibly get fired due to some choice words regarding the above discussion
• Maybe be able to change consumables to only work from the provisioner's ones because T7 food is OP after figuring out how the engine works on a superficial level and with the time taken to get the changes through test and QA.
• Be finished with my year of trying to learn how the engine works and fail to manage convincing any project leads anything, and accomplish next to nothing in the end.I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but ...

I think you'd be amazed by how many people from the gaming industry actually play games, both as a hobby next to their job and as apart of their job.

I guess that the growth of the industry has saturated the field a bit and brought in a bit more variation of personalities but back in the day at least the MMO side of things used to be very inbred, so to speak.

Also, the industry do tend to hire from the playerbase. The case of Cmc is hardly abnormal. So, having good ideas as a young player could lead you somewhere, possibly in the future even if it is rare and even more uncommon in this day and age.

Still, you obviously don't have to work in the gaming industry to post in this thread :3 . Personally, I find it a bit refreshing that at least some people take themselves a bit more seriously for once on these forums, so they are all not about whiny shitposts.

I don't follow the point of your post. Yes, consumers of a product often go to become developers of said products, because consumers of products are almost always a superset of the developers of one such thing. There are more people who's flown on an airplane than aerospace engineers in the world. Hiring from people passionate about the product is usually good practice because you don't have to do

as much

company-specific knowledge transfer, which is generally expensive and requires a lot of oversight in order to maintain the standards that previously existed. It's why companies usually reach out to top players for QA jobs instead of development ones; they know the bugs and nuances already and only need to learn how to write reports. A developer needs to know the ins and outs of the game engine and good game design, which is in its own right a field of study. They don't often have the skills to create which depending on the quality of the studio, usually requires a minimum of a four-year degree at a pretty prestigious university or known skillset that's desired. You can't take a businessman and expect him to build an airplane because he's experienced flying a lot in his business career. it just doesn't work that way.

I have a software engineering degree and a background in MMO administration and think the subject of game design is a very cool space to explore on little more than a casual, thought-experiment-and-cursory level, which is why I make suggestions in detail quite often, but know very little about pragmatic game development or creating complex and optimized netcode (as it's not a space I explore or have explored in my studies or career) nor do I have familiarity with game engines and actually creating working product outside the space of some very simple mods in the Creation Kit for Skyrim. I'm surely more qualified than 99% of the GW2 population, but that still does not make me qualified to fulfill a position, the same way a casual DIY'er who's fixed his home up a few times is less qualified to be an HVAC technician by trade and work on enterprise-level/massive buildings than the guy who say, is HVAC certified with a project-management background.

The point of my post was to inject some humor and ground people a bit. Pretending like people would accomplish so much with such little time is a pretty massive slight to those who actually do the complex work of actually implementing it all. One developer isn't going to change a ton, especially when you consider that WvW devs don't have a lot of decision-making power, especially in regards to classes and core gameplay elements, which are really some of the biggest gripes people have with the format.

Had the question been changed to "What would you do if you were the lead designer of GW2 for a year?" I probably would not have made my post at all, because having guaranteed decision-making power over others game-wide and doesn't really insult the people with the technical know-how by trivializing their jobs.

Like before when I revisted the thread, I was really unsure if I should be responding to your post but perhaps because of the complete opposite reason this time. Most people tend to take threads here too casually and just put out whatever oppinion currently held whereas you seem to read a bunch of things into both the OP and the responses that just isn't there and takes a good reach to misinterprete the intentions of. That makes it very hard to respond to you in a manner that is constructive and doesn't come off as nitpicking.

My initial response to you was meant about as lighthearted as whatever you intended with the comment. For example, my first guild in GW2 had at least 10 game developers in it so game developers do play games and like talking about them. It was simply meant as a little eye-wink to your comment that people here were unlikely to be developers. Of course most people posting in a forum thread are not likely to be developers and nore do they have to be. The idea that they could be however is not as far-fetched as your attempt at a humorous shut-down would suggest. I think it was a tasteful way of suggesting to you that you shouldn't slam people for talking.

That brings us to the discussion you are providing. I think you are forgetting where you are. Context is important. You are saying that former players are fit for QA and that something like that requires them to analyze and report. No one is suggesting they would do anything else in this thread. No one is even suggesting that they would do that. This is a game discussion forum and whatever framing and wishes were listed in the OP was simply meant to shape the discussion a little bit. The only thing people should do is discuss the game in this game discussion forum, hopefully with a little more effort than listing stuff that they would want.

That ties into my last bit. I am sorry for making a title that offended you so gravely by suggesting that people could imagine that they were developers and giving it the suggested time frame of a year. I simply assumed that people would have the presence of mind to infer that it meant "What would you do if you had the ability to directly impact the prioritization of design stretches over a foreseeable future". That just wouldn't have made a very good thread title on a discussion forum (and should it require some non-offensive reality to it I guess it would exclude anyone who does not have managment access to back-office systems and the mandate to assemble teams). It is a good thing that it isn't a requirement to make forum posts or objectively insulting to industry professionals in any way shape or form, that would be very lonely.

Meet the chief security forensics guy for Rockstar games.