High Technical Quality and Reliability of GW2 Game Systems

[Zok.4956]

Hi,

GW2 is an old game. There are a lot of things that I take/took for granted. But after I test/play other games, I realize that in some part the way how GW2 does things is still light years ahead of other games, even new games that are released in the last weeks/months..

Example: Handling of game updates.  Updates of GW2 are quite smoothless. Most of the time. For years. When you are playing, you get a game message and (if in PvE) you have an hour or so before you were kicked out. So you can finish a story step etc before you log out and before your client loaded the update. But you can also log out and load the update immediately. This means that the servers have to process different game versions at the same time.  There is no need for downtimes for game updates. The only time you have to wait is the time your client needs for downloading the update.

Other games: When other game do updates and server maintanance you often can not play for several hours because the servers are down.

Example: Waiting time in queues.  When you want to play PvE you can start right away in GW2. There are no server queues. You do not have to wait for several hours during prime time before you are able to play. Even back in the days, before multiservers, a server was never full. Only a specific map could be full and then you were placed automatically on an overflow-map. So you could start to play in PvE without having to wait. As it is now. Only in WvW where overflow maps and multiservers do not make much sense, there can be queues. But for this The Edge of the Mists maps were created as a fun way of temporary waiting and overflow maps for the WvW game mode.

Other games:  A server/world has a max capacity of online players. So it is not unusual to have to wait for several hours before you can go online. As a temporary solution more and more new servers/worlds are created at launch and later (when server population vanishes) servers are deleted and players are moved to other servers (with sometimes negative impact).

Sure, GW2 has/had technical issues over the years. Some of them I critized myself. But overall, some systems/technical things are still a lot of better than in other games that are released recently. As I write this my waiting queue number in one of this "other" games moved from around 15000 to 2000. after waiting several hours.

[Danikat.8537]

The updates really caught me by surprise when I started another MMO. For a few years I wasn't playing MMOs at all, then I got into GW1 and later GW2, then another MMO after that. In that time it became pretty universal that websites and other services would be updated in the same way as GW2, only going offline rarely for major upgrades. I just assumed MMOs had gone the same way and took it for granted that the game never went offline.

It was a nasty surprise to learn that not only did my new MMO go offline every week or two for maintenance and had longer down-time for updates but that other players kept assuring me this was normal and all MMOs did it.

I really don't understand why other MMOs haven't adopted the same process, because it is really nice to never have to worry about whether I'm going to be allowed to log in when I have time to play.

[Dawdler.8521]

2 hours ago, Zok.4956 said:

Example: Handling of game updates.  Updates of GW2 are quite smoothless. Most of the time. For years. When you are playing, you get a game message and (if in PvE) you have an hour or so before you were kicked out.

Oh you get that in WvW too. 

Except the warning is that you have about 3 minutes before you are kicked from the instance and then it 100% of the time kicks you 15 seconds later completely ignoring its own warning.

Thanks Susan.

[Jukhy.2431]

Well said.

In case you missed it, here's a post with some insight how these things work behind the scenes: https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/news/inside-arenanet-live-game-outage-analysis/

Edited February 13, 2022 by Jukhy.2431