What would you choose to work on if you would be the boss of anet?

[roederich.2716]

Anet gave us lately a small insight of what is to come early q1 next year.

Interesting things are currently worked on like alliances, DX11, Ingame Browser Changes, EoD.

If you was THE BOSS of the company and you would need to chose one thing to focus on next what would you decide for?

Edited December 16, 2022 by roederich.2716

[Danikat.8537]

They've already told us they're working on new Living World updates, WvW alliances, finishing the DX11 implementation and changing the in-game browser (which runs things like the Trading Post and gem store) and they've said they're already planning the next expansion.

[Khalgir.3862]

Can we please get an update for sPvP and WvW? They have been abandoned by the developers, and I think lots of player would be happy to see at least some kind of new thing.

 

P.S.: sPvP is completely dead

[roederich.2716]

1 hour ago, Danikat.8537 said:

They've already told us they're working on new Living World updates, WvW alliances, finishing the DX11 implementation and changing the in-game browser (which runs things like the Trading Post and gem store) and they've said they're already planning the next expansion.

I know that but what would be YOUR choice of priority if YOU had to pick one as boss of the company?

[Freya.9075]

My choice would be to reinstate whoever is the “boss” currently as I’m personally quite happy with how things are. But that’s just my opinion 🤷🏼‍♀️ I can see how some people are not happy about certain things for whatever reason. No boss would be able to please all the players 

[HnRkLnXqZ.1870]

For entertainment only, do not take this too seriously:
I would assign a small group to the discontinued-content stack. Run a full analysis and see which one is worth continuing, which one should be removed and which one only needs a little polish. Rank them in a list with estimated resource costs (time & workers).

In a second step, the regular developers of that team can work through the list, beginning with the ones with the lowest required effort. Their leader is tasked to look out for the top 10 most promising features, which would require several weeks to rework/adjustments. Make a presentation-sheet, explaining the purpose of these features, why they were discontinued and when - who ordered it. Explaining the possibilities of reviving those features. 

The sheet is forwarded to ANet partners (e. g. streamers and communities of influence), they shall pick their top 5 of the list. Once the data is collected, there will be an internal discussion for the top 3 from those 5 picks. With the leader of the team present again, who advises which tasks are most likely to succeed in terms of difficulty and exploit-risk.

Then we make an announcement, community can decide what we do. We have three old features that look promising and now it is their turn to vote, which one shall it be? We run the vote per paid account. This will not work, due to the army of multi-account farmers. So in the end, we roll a dice. Fake some statistics that show an astonishing majority voting for that option we found by rolling the dice. 
-
Where would I make a cut to acquire this new team-resources? Support would probably the worst decision we can make. Balancing is currently at work and slowly getting into the system. Removing people there would also be a mistake. I would actually cut a few resources from expansion development.

At first, I would distribute them to the LW development, to speed this project up. So we have something to launch, when the things begin to cool down. But you cannot just stack additional workers into a project and expect it to work. So I would only put in a few of the free workers and let the rest form up the new team, starting to make the analyzing and listings. Once the LW is in a state where it is mostly polishing and bug-fixing, I would remove the additional workers and send them to the new team as well.
-
During the whole public-event about the new community decided content, the team-operations would be paused. Their work-force is channeled into the expansion-development. Community management will be busy and I will ask them to squeeze as much time as possible out of it. 

Once the event is over, we give the community a chance to comment on the process - another 1-2 weeks where literally nothing happens. As long as no leaker within our ranks talks about the dice-thingy, it will be mostly positive. ANet finally listening to the community, active participation and dialogue. The usual stuff, but necessary to build up a good reputation.

To squeeze even more development time out of the event, we publicly thank the community for the participation and launch a 2 week long celebration event. One of the old 1-week-bonus events (e. g. Worlboss rush). before we finally assign our small team of developers to return to their project and work on the returning big discontinued feature, we give a full presentation of the planned content and what we want to change. Then we leave another 1-2 weeks for the community to react to that. So basically +3-4 weeks where we can work on the expansion with maximum resources.

In the last week however, I would remove the team again and put them into the LW group. To prepare the launch of the new episode. Then we announce the launch of the LW episode shortly after the next annual festival. Once the resources are free, they can go back to expansion development. And when the LW finally launches, they can start working on that big project. 

If the plan worked out, this should have given us plenty of extra time & resources for the expansion-development and boosted our reputation among the community significantly. The other teams remain untouched and continue to operate as usual. Which means there will be plenty of content to be released in-between or after the big event. This helps filling time we need to work on the 2nd episode of the LW and the expansion obviously. 

Edited December 16, 2022 by HnRkLnXqZ.1870

[CrashTestAuto.9108]

I would focus on replayable content, with an eye to improve the experience for most player types, including (and in order):

 

1) Solo strikes, NM and CM.  Generally difficult and rewarding solo content being the top priority.

2) Guilds.  Make the halls more useful, and add more missions/upgrades.

3) Fractals.  I think these are in a good place, but it would be good to emphasise that this is still a core element of endgame by adding 3 more (not Sunqua style).

4) Raid wing 8.

5) HoT and PoF strikes.

 

I think solo content should be priority because (1) it's probably the least resource intensive, requiring no new assets, and a lot of the mechanics are already in game and (2) it would give a lot of people something they'd enjoy without the hassle of grouping and (3) it would provide practice opportunities and act as a soft "DPS indicator" that would alert people to their builds being undertuned.

 

Guilds come second because I think the social aspect of the game is one of its strongest selling points, but it's being heavily underutilised.  Random grouping to stack on the same boss you've killed every week for the last six months and then saying "ty" and leaving doesn't really hit the mark for me as social gameplay.

[Gorani.7205]

Can't say anything about PvP, because I rarely play matches, but WvW needs some attention!
- nothing new added to WvW since PoF; this covers maps, variants of game play option; strategic or tactical options with player agency
- Alliances (betas), the current project: they don't look like they can solve the population balance across servers and they might be a big Dev hours sink with little impact to make the WvW experience better
- reward updates are planned after the Alliances, which means WvW suffer from the most unrewarding and inconsistent reward system in all GW2 game types; there could be short term resolutions to improve rewards for everyone in WvW and a lot of community suggestions for the Devs that aren't discussed on the forums by ANet ... we might not even know if they are recognised by Devs, because that is a communicative wasteland of the forums or whatever platform.

[Biziut.3594]

Playable sktitt.

[Westenev.5289]

I suspect I'd work on gemstore ideas, promise wvw updates and organise the next expansion. Whatever keeps the lights on.

[Fueki.4753]

First an foremost, I'd try to get rid of some of the particle bloat that's passively tied to characters.

Soldier's Focus and Signet of Rage deserve to lose their effect.

Virtuoso's floating unnecessity would get varying options to not be shown as well.

Soulbeast's green cloud would phase out after 3-4 seconds.

Revenants would not have their Legends shown on their hands when their weapons are stowed.

I'd also want to implement client-side options that hide your own and other players' Legendary trinket effects, backpacks and particle vomit coming off armour pieces, weapons and Outfits.

[Debesyla.7102]

Player housing.

Anet could make so much cash from selling housing plots (types of instance) and various furniture, etc. for gems - just like in ESO. So much money in this!

(And there is also a big portion of players that would like this. And the technology is already there. It all only lacks some game mechanics of connecting the collections/crafting to the rest of the game + 3D modelling...)

[cyberzombie.7348]

Investing into a larger engineering/QA team for more frequent bug fixes would be my first pri. There's still random areas both in PvE and WvW where projectiles get randomly obstructed. Desert borderland still has bugs that you barely have to search for to see them. 

Second to that would be to optimize weapon tracking. Too many low-velocity projectiles tend to miss at a distance, which defeats the purpose of them if they're only reliable at point blank. 

Though the biggest hurdle would be finding  more developers/engineers experienced in pre-2010s Havok engine (graphical and physics).

Edited December 16, 2022 by cyberzombie.7348

[Kozumi.5816]

I'd clean house then go find some local DnD nerds as the new game design team, 20+ year veterans coders as my dev team, and doujin artists as my art team.

I am not saying bad things about Anet employees.

I am not saying anyone should be fired.

I am simply saying what I'd do if I was in charge. 

Edited December 17, 2022 by Kozumi.5816

[Solvar.7953]

The problem of these theoretical questions is they don't say what constraints or.

Realistically, if I was boss of Anet, I'd figure out the best way to make more money, as that is my job.  Adding new things that doesn't make any money but takes resources is not a good business model.  So the simple answer to that is paid expansions.

But as a player, that isn't really the content I want (I don't want to be paying $50 every 6 months for something new)

But if you have unlimited money, then you do everything - fix the engine, fix old maps, make new content, add resources to pvp & wvw, etc.

I do think at a broad level Anet needs to look at old content and how to keep it alive/active.  I've been replaying through LWS4, and even on some days where a given map is in the daily rotation, it can still be quite dead and hard to find enough people for certain events.  As more and more maps get added, this just gets worse and worse.

 

[ugrakarma.9416]

i will focus on ruin festival foods.

[b k.1648]

Realistically, no boss is going to pick just one of these as a focus. That's not how game studios work.

[Jordan Stone.6395]

Its speculation time! Here’s the link to the page: https://www.arena.net/en/careers

 

I choose all of the above, I think everything they do with Guild Wars 2 impacts whatever this unannounced project is in UE.

There is 20+ job postings at ArenaNet right now, and they vary with important details. I’ve noticed atleast half if not more are for working with Unreal Engine 4+. Originally, when someone had mentioned them looking for employees that could work with Unreal Engine 4+ I thought it might have something to do with boosting the cinematics or something along those lines as they were not hiring more people. Then when I had seen they were looking for more UE trained individuals I thought, I could see them feeling the need to diversify the games they are putting out, it’s a smart choice why have your eggs all in one basket? However, you usually don’t do that by releasing another game of the same type of genre, (MMORPG) even if it’s set in a different fantasy. I delved into these postings a bit more and noticed something else that caught my eye,


“Mentoring and teaching are activities that you take pleasure in as part of your day-to-day endeavors. You enjoy evangelizing best practices based on your experience with Unreal and respectfully guiding and mentoring teammates to fish at your level with the engine.”

“As an experienced Unreal developer, you will share your knowledge with both veteran and junior teammates to guide them in learning best practices, gotchas, tips and tricks with the Unreal Engine. You will be a resource to them for questions, architectural advice, and general help where needed.”


Ok, sounds like they are hiring people on that work exclusively with Unreal Engine mentor and teach the rest of the staff that works with the current game engine. But they could be pulling people from one project to another right? Then I found these.

 

"Leave your mark on big ideas for an established online fantasy IP by joining a well-funded project in pre-production."

"Online role-playing games are due for a major evolution. Here at ArenaNet, we are marching into the future toward the best and most exciting possibilities. Our mission is unchanged. Innovate. Work smarter. Defy industry standards. Enrich the lives of our players."

"Our studio is built on foundations of excellence with a focus on community. We constantly innovate, unlocking the true potential of online role-playing with game-changing titles like Guild Wars 2 and beyond. The status quo isn't good enough for our dedicated worldwide community of players which is why we question the de facto industry conventions and demand more from ourselves as developers."

I also have one more quote posted towards the bottom.

 

I watched a video not long ago where they said, “there are two MMORPG games that have managed to escape the downwards trajectory which are OSRS & FFXIV. They also brought up that even though Guild Wars 2 use to be on a downwards trajectory it’s now been on a steady incline since before EOD, and now we have another announcement from the ArenaNet team how much player population has been increasing in the last year alone. I don’t really see them pushing another MMORPG out that doesn’t have to do with the Guild Wars Franchise especially when Guild Wars 2 is at its greatest height besides close to launch. Well, then what the hell are they making in Unreal Engine that has to do with MMORPGS and why?

With that being said there is are alot of major planned released MMORPG’s coming out in the next several years such as: Ashes of Creation and the League of Legends MMORPG, as well as plenty of others. The competition is thickening, and even though GW2 tends to be a MMORPG that does kind of fall in it's own category. (Horizontal Progression) Players will be drawn off by other new release enticing games which is fine. It's good to try other games out, but if GW2 lags to far behind some of it's competitors on certain aspects it doesn't really give people much of a reason to always come back.. and it's not just GW2. Many of the games are at a disadvantage right now compared to some of the games coming out, feature rich as they might be. So if I were the boss, and recent earnings allowed me to make a move on increasing the tech to the highest possible level available right now, that would be my #1 long-term goal. It would be an undertaking would take years so in the meantime while they gathered a full team and started laying out the foundation on that "announced project" and the new team started helping team members spruce up on some C++ and Unreal Engine techniques,  I would be looking at putting as much in the game to attract as many people to it and really getting as much communication out of the player base as I could while trying to either refine, or expand on, or create systems so that when the unannounced project comes out it would have an already well thought out systems that have been tested.

I can only really think of two ideas that these job postings a couple paragraphs are alluding to: (Also, sorry for the fact I didn't really just get to the point)

One, Guild Wars 3 is in preproduction.

Secondly, I could see ArenaNet taking a card from WOWs Classic launch and putting a bit of a spin on it, and launching a Guild Wars 2 remastered version with Unreal Engine 5. The majority of people are going to look at this option and think why waste the time? However, if they had the chance to bring all aspects in the game to a modern level, and rebuild the majority of the game around the things that worked well for the game and implement new systems that could give us the experience we've always been hoping it could turn into? Using UE could allow them to lay down an even stonger foundation for the game in several different ways that would allow the game to set it self up for a future that most of us thought wouldn't even be possible. And although the areas might be similar and the plot line would be still be a familiar one it would still feel like a new experience, with the level their storytelling has gotten to you could expect a much more flushed out narrative, and a much more flushed out world across Tyria and the expansions. That would be the nice part of doing a remastered version is the majority of the game theory crafting is all there, the story plot is roughly laid out you and due to the fact the Elder Dragon saga is finished you have a beginning and an end now and you can choose to now focus on the narrative in between and really focus on refining it, and that honestly goes for all the features within the game.  They have the knowlege of what to avoid now, and what some things they should be considering when putting the entire world together. It would still take some time, and I think it would be released like WOW classic where it's always several expansions behind, or they could put more focus into the remastered version and it'll take over and honestly with the API systems you could probably take your account worth and apply it over to the new version giving you a head start or hell just go fresh servers it'll probably draw even more people in towards the game.

Final thoughts on either options is basically this; UE5 allows for far faster development time due first-class USD support it allows UE to read a USD file from anywhere on disk without a time-consuming full import, and write back changes to it as it overrides; reloading the USD payload instantly updates changes made by other users upstream. Which increases production, allows ArenaNet to pull from a bigger pool of talent by hiring remotely for certain jobs while keep the costs down for that talent. It'll brace either a new GW MMORPG or a remake for the foreseeable future (technology wise), and really allow them to push the game to new heights in all aspects as I feel as if this game is already pushing the engine pretty hard. I'll be sad if they can't make their megastructure servers work with the Unreal Engine 5 but it's honestly not a big enough reason to delay a massive update like this. But who knows maybe I'm wrong maybe they are not slowly starting production towards a new GW MMORPG or a remake. But regardless, there is a couple things within these posts that really have me wanting to speculate on, and who better to discuss it with some true fans in the forums. I'm gonna try to post this next topic soon and put my thoughts out on the subject and just get some conversation going about how the fans would really like to see this subject handled overall, who knows maybe ArenaNet will take some of our conversations and add em' in. But before I go here is the subject I'll be speculating on with whoever wants to put their two cents in. 🙂

 

Combat Designer (Unannounced Project)

Bellevue, WA or Remote

Who We Are at ArenaNet

Online role-playing games are due for a major evolution. Here at ArenaNet, we are marching into the future toward the best and most exciting possibilities. Our mission is unchanged. Innovate. Work smarter. Defy industry standards. Enrich the lives of our players.

What You’ll Do as a Combat Designer

We have a bold vision for a next-generation MMORPG combat system. We love our studio’s tradition of blending of action and strategic RPG elements into “Skill-Deck” style combat systems. Now we’re making it even better. The Combat Designer designer’s role is to build on the innovations we’ve made so far—and then take it further. Mainly, you’ll expand our library of player weapons and combat abilities. We are looking for a candidate who would confidently:

• Collaborate very closely with the Lead Combat designer and contributors from other disciplines.
• Expand and utilize their knowledge of Action-RPG battle engines from all around the industry.
• Design weapons and skills that reward players for strategic play, cooperation, and investing time into their character.
• Work directly in the Unreal engine, getting their hands dirty in animation timelines, camera systems, visual effects, and more.
• Rapidly iterate through regular playtests while closely monitoring feedback from internal and external playtesters.
• Make multi-platform design considerations with respect to the advantages and challenges of each one.

Edited December 17, 2022 by Jordan Stone.6395

[Cronospere.8143]

A complete overhaul over the heropanel. Especially the achievement part. 

When there is a new story you are scrolling for ages to go to the right achievement page. 

I really wish the will redo this. 

[McWelp.1723]

AFK farm bots would have very bad day suddenly if i were the Big Guy(tm)

That is pretty much the only thing that annoys me at the moment.

[Bladestrom.6425]

housing and 12 v 12 / 10 v 10 / epic battleground.:

 

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Alliance_Battles

 

lliance Battles are 12 versus 12 (3 parties of 4) PvP battles that determine control of the Kurzick-Luxon border in Cantha. Kurzicks wear their traditional blue color and appear as blue dots on the map while Luxons wear their traditional red color and appear as red dots on the map.

Edited December 17, 2022 by vesica tempestas.1563

[Kozumi.5816]

3 hours ago, vesica tempestas.1563 said:

housing and 12 v 12 / 10 v 10 / epic battleground.:

 

https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Alliance_Battles

 

lliance Battles are 12 versus 12 (3 parties of 4) PvP battles that determine control of the Kurzick-Luxon border in Cantha. Kurzicks wear their traditional blue color and appear as blue dots on the map while Luxons wear their traditional red color and appear as red dots on the map.

This game desperately needs a good pvp mode, WvW and Spvp are both two extremes and awful.

[Bladestrom.6425]

wvw and pvp is great fun, and many many people have spent a lot of time in there having a blast, so its certainly not awful.  Game does need a middle ground though where its not big zergs but not arena, which is where a form of 10+  per team battleground  with curated sets like sPVP comes in.

[Super Hayes.6890]

They can modify my account to make all drops exotic or higher 😀

[b k.1648]

14 hours ago, Jordan Stone.6395 said:

Its speculation time! Here’s the link to the page: https://www.arena.net/en/careers

 

I choose all of the above, I think everything they do with Guild Wars 2 impacts whatever this unannounced project is in UE.

There is 20+ job postings at ArenaNet right now, and they vary with important details. I’ve noticed atleast half if not more are for working with Unreal Engine 4+. Originally, when someone had mentioned them looking for employees that could work with Unreal Engine 4+ I thought it might have something to do with boosting the cinematics or something along those lines as they were not hiring more people. Then when I had seen they were looking for more UE trained individuals I thought, I could see them feeling the need to diversify the games they are putting out, it’s a smart choice why have your eggs all in one basket? However, you usually don’t do that by releasing another game of the same type of genre, (MMORPG) even if it’s set in a different fantasy. I delved into these postings a bit more and noticed something else that caught my eye,

[truncated for brevity]

I don't know how viable porting the entire GW2 project to UE5 would be, and it may not actually work better for them than improving the engine they've already got (after all, UE still gets regular upgrades at least 25 years later).
My suspicion is they're doing a separate game that functions a bit differently, as GW1 did.