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How many people are on the GW2 dev team atm?


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As explained, I doubt you can get your answer this way.

First of all, scope isn't equal to amount of dev time. The size of the map, but also the richness and the amount of unique objects matter a lot. Trees like in ascalon are all the same and a matter of cut and paste. While in HoT the Forrest was designed more complex.

Second, the process of development is unknown. We do not know when work on the expansion started (or will start) and when it will be finished. Half the team compared to HoT can be working on it for a lot more time.

Last of all is efficiency. A bigger team doesn't always mean a more productive team. If a single decision about the placement of a single idle NPC requires 5 team meetings, while a single employee could make the decision alone and move on.

We can estimate how many devs there are but how many are devoted to the next x-pac is not public information and will never be.

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As well as the points raised above it also depends on how you define developers. In one sense everyone working for a game studio is a developer because their work contibutes to the development of games. At the other extreme it can be a specific job title and lots of other people who work on games are not developers because they're writers, concept artists, project managers, 3D moddlers, programmers, accountants etc. but it would be a huge mistake to say the game would be better or completed faster if you got rid of all those people and hired more developers instead because all those other things also need to be done and require different skills and knowledge to do.

The important thing is whether they have enough people and/or time for each task, but there's more than one way to do that right. Adding more people might mean it goes faster, or it might take longer because then you've got to devote time to keeping everyone updated, coordinating work and agreeing decisions. Or more time can allow fewer people to do the same amount of work by doing one thing after the other. We don't have (and cannot get) anywhere near enough info about how Anet works to draw the kind of conclusions you're looking for. We don't know what the target release date is, or if there's any room to change that. We don't know if they'll allow overtime (and if so which departments and how much) or outsourcing some work to 3rd parties. We don't know when they started working on the next expansion. We don't know how many people are working on other things for GW2, or other games entirely (we do know they're working on at least one other game, but it hasn't been announced yet). Without all that and probably a lot of other details the number of people currently employed by the company is meaningless.

And on top of all that it doesn't really matter because even if we think they're doing it wrong there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. All we as players can do is wait to see what they're releasing and offer feedback on what we see, then (most importantly) decide if the finished product is something we want to buy or not.

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I would honestly not know. In the past the informed players knew the names of at least the core team of developers, and there was even sort of a fanbase of certain developers. That was in gw 1 days and earlier gw 2 days. Everything is much more closed off and secretive now. Not only arenanet, other developers also. There used to be more a family of developers at well known studios, but everything has changed on the corporate side, and developers seem to not stick as long compared to the past.

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@GW Noob.6038 said:...and how many were on the team working on HoT? Trying to get an idea about the scope of the next expansion and what it might include.

That's not how a developement cycle works, at all.Sometimes a couple of devs can do a better work of 30 devs, because they're more organized and focussed on the tasks they have to complete.

So, having an information of the number of devs working on the expansion won't help anyone to understand if it will have more or less content than the previous ones.

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@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Here's some information on how many Devs were working on Path of Fire:https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/

We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both.

If that's any help to you, OP.

Yes, that is helpful...thank you!

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@Inculpatus cedo.9234 said:A quick Google search results in 261 to 281 employees.I think there were about ~250 at launch for Heart of Thorns, but I'm not sure how long HoT was worked on, nor what the number of employees were during those months/years.

Remember, that most of the work for HoT was achieved at the cost of big content delays during last part of S2, over half a year of content drought between the end of LS2 and HoT launch, and nearly 9 months content drought after HoT launch. They simply weren't able to work on more than one big project at that time. It was only for PoF that they achieved that (and threw it away when they started siphining off lot of devs to other projects as soon as PoF was finished, at the cost of completely dismantling the expac team).

We do know that the PoF team was around 70 devs, but that's not the whole number, as devs from other teams could also pitch in when necessary.

Consider also, that all points out to Anet not having an expac team until at least the end of 2019, and potentially even up to maybe a month at best before they made the announcement. So, where would they get 70 devs on that short notice? Because i am quite sure that it wasn't a good year to start hiring, and pulling them off other projects would by necessity end up having a massive impact on S5 quality.

Edit: and employees are not devs. The Anet from the time the team sizes quoted by @Inculpatus cedo.9234 were given had around twice than number of employees. We need to assume that in that whole number, in addition to devs, there are likely people from management, marketing, support, or even normal office workers and security staff. People that have no real impact whatsoever on actual developer work.

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@"Inculpatus cedo.9234" said:Not twice that number of employees. There were around 400 employees at that time; there are around 280 now.

When i mentioned "twice the number" i meant compared to the devs. There were 220 devs, and around 400 employees. I know that 400 is a bit lower than twice the 220, but still close enough.Notice, that we can't really use that to estimate the current dev numbers, as the non-dev departments are not going to scale as nicely.

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