7 years Anniversary - Core Events still bugged

[Maria Murtor.7253]

I'm playing another character through the game - and I don't feel like celebrating. "Ogre Wars" in Fields of Ruin still can get stalled. The arena in "Help Paenula train troops" in Plains of Ashford runs out of enemys. And don't get me even startet with "Destroy the Harathi Trebuchets in Gendarran Fields - I don't even remember seeing this event working one single time. I'm very sure people (myself included) have reported bugs like these many times and still there is no fix. And I'm also sure, that I will encounter something else not working as intended while playing my latest character.

As a fan for many, many, many hours this makes me angy, no, this pisses me off . There's no excuse that content from the core game, and even worse, from low level and highly populated areas can get bugged like this. It's a testimony of poverty to celebrate the ame while the core game is in a state like this.

Ogre Wars: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ogre_WarsHelp Paenula train troops: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Paenula_train_troopsDestroy the Harathi Trebuchets: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Destroy_the_Harathi_trebuchets

[Ayrilana.1396]

It’s because the game is on maintenance mode except for the most recent release.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Ayrilana.1396" said:It’s because the game is on maintenance mode except for the most recent release.

That's not really true, as evidenced by yesterday's patch which made updates to fractals that have been long requested (even if they were largely of the "be careful what you wish for" type of changes). There's also the QoL changes to salvaging and loot, and so on.

It's typical for software companies and especially gaming companies to focus on the new, because that's what interests more people, more often. Since there's limited staff, there's only so many things that they can do. Maybe the should spend a greater fraction of that budget on bug fixes (or maybe less); I don't feel qualified to judge. I can only offer my opinion about what I'd prefer.

---

Ogre Wars: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ogre_WarsThere have been a number of fixes to that particular chain of events over the years and, short of scrapping the entire thing and replacing it with something else, it's hard to see what else they could do. It doesn't break as often and the maps reset more often than they used to, so it's far less of an issue today than it used to be. I realize that's cold comfort if you need the event for some reason.

Help Paenula train troops: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Paenula_train_troopsI sincerely hope that ANet would take 5 minutes to evaluate and comment on this one. I had the impression that they deliberately disabled it due to some farming exploit, but... that's speculation. As far as I know, ANet has yet to offer a reason.I'm honestly OK if it never runs again. If so, they should just say, "hey this thing broke or was exploitable and we have no current plans to fix it."

Destroy the Harathi Trebuchets: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Destroy_the_Harathi_trebuchetsI don't remember ever finding this one bugged. Then again, I'm not in the area all that often, so even my anecdotal "data" is weak.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

tl;dr I accept that ANet cannot (and likely should not) fix everything. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that they can communicate that better. And because they can, I also think they should.

If I managed at ANet, despite them being too busy for words, I'd assign someone a two week project of identifying all the bugged events and event chains (with our help, of course) and evaluating them as to whether they are good (or bad) candidates for bug fixes. I'd ask for three priority levels, something like...

• Will be fixed: these are bugged in a way that is evidently easy-enough to resolve, based on the quick inspection, i.e. low-hanging fruit.
• Should be fixed: these are important in some way or seem likely to be simple enough to fix, if only there's enough time.
• Won't be fixed: these aren't that important or evidently require massive efforts to fix or overhaul. Bad effort:reward ratio.

And then update the community, for example by editing the wiki's bug note comment with that official evaluation (one of the wiki editors can even put together a template to show it's an official comment). Or even just provide a blog post with the list and leave it to the wiki community to update.

[Dante.1763]

@"Illconceived Was Na.9781" said:tl;dr I accept that ANet cannot (and likely should not) fix everything. Nevertheless, I feel strongly that they can communicate that better. And because they can, I also think they should.

If I managed at ANet, despite them being too busy for words, I'd assign someone a two week project of identifying all the bugged events and event chains (with our help, of course) and evaluating them as to whether they are good (or bad) candidates for bug fixes. I'd ask for three priority levels, something like...

• Will be fixed: these are bugged in a way that is evident from the quick inspection, i.e. low-hanging fruit.
• Should be fixed: these are important in some way or seem to be simple enough to fix, if only there's enough time.
• Won't be fixed: these aren't that important or are evidently require massive efforts to fix or overhaul. Bad effort:reward ratio.

And then update the community, for example by editing the wiki's bug note comment with that official evaluation (one of the wiki editors can even put together a template to show it's an official comment). Or even just provide a blog post with the list and leave it to the wiki community to update.

Any of the those events that end up in the "Wont be fixed" category should have any items, or achievements attached to them either moved to other bosses/events or that requirement gotten rid of i think. If it happened of course.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@"Dante.1763" said:Any of the those events that end up in the "Wont be fixed" category should have any items, or achievements attached to them either moved to other bosses/events or that requirement gotten rid of i think. If it happened of course.

Good point.I'd argue that such events belong in "should be fixed." Things with collection-required unlocks/items don't get moved to "won't fix" unless ANet first provides an alternative source.

[Andy.5981]

You can add this one to the list. Constantly bugged in Metrica Province. Repeatedly bug reported.https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defend_Yerkk_while_he_isolates_skritt_for_his_IQ_experiment

[Raknar.4735]

Yeah, there sadly is a lot of bugged events in core-Tyria. I've only ever seen the Iron Marches meta event complete once, most of the times it is stuck. The flame shaman in Iron Marches also doesn't always work due to phase bugs (Killing the fire elementals doesn't activate his next phase sometimes).

Players not visiting core maps due to not being rewarding more often than not, aside from a few select world bosses, also plays a huge role into where Anet puts their focus on, as fixing the old world will barely have any RoI. So instead they focus on new maps and mostly ignore fixing old stuff.

[Rasimir.6239]

It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

[Stalkingwolf.6035]

@Rasimir.6239 said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

Thats not the probleme here. bugs get found and reported by players but anet does not fix them. Why? i think because they have not the man power to fix them.

[Blocki.4931]

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@Rasimir.6239 said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

Thats not the probleme here. bugs get found and reported by players but anet does not fix them. Why? i think because they have not the man power to fix them.

That's not really how it goes. You can know where something occurs, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to find out why. Since those events are core content, they likely exist for such a long time it simply isn't worth getting a dev to look into what might take a few hours just to fix a bug that may or may not be extremely rare. So yes, some things just aren't worth fixing.

[Rasimir.6239]

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@"Rasimir.6239" said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

Thats not the probleme here. bugs get found and reported by players but anet does not fix them. Why? i think because they have not the man power to fix them.That's like saying "I've got a belly ache. Why doesn't my doctor fix it?". Witnessing buggy behaviour is a long way away from locating the piece of code that's responsible for said behaviour (like the piece of food or virus or allergic reaction or physical damage or whatever else might be responsible for your belly ache), and that again is a long way away from being able to fix it (like finding just the right medicine, physical treatment or voodoo spell to cure your belly ache). And just like a human body, a piece of software has so many interconnected bits that it's just as easy to break it in two other, seemingly unconnected ways while fixing that one bug.

[Inculpatus cedo.9234]

The Devs have stated that some bugs just can't be reliably reproduced (so they can find a 'fix'), that some bugs' fixes will break more things than they will fix, and that some bugs just have yet to make it up the priority list. Yes, even after nearly 7 years.

[Holgarf.6581]

@"Maria Murtor.7253" said:I'm playing another character through the game - and I don't feel like celebrating. "Ogre Wars" in Fields of Ruin still can get stalled. The arena in "Help Paenula train troops" in Plains of Ashford runs out of enemys. And don't get me even startet with "Destroy the Harathi Trebuchets in Gendarran Fields - I don't even remember seeing this event working one single time. I'm very sure people (myself included) have reported bugs like these many times and still there is no fix. And I'm also sure, that I will encounter something else not working as intended while playing my latest character.

As a fan for many, many, many hours this makes me angy, no, this pisses me off . There's no excuse that content from the core game, and even worse, from low level and highly populated areas can get bugged like this. It's a testimony of poverty to celebrate the ame while the core game is in a state like this.

Ogre Wars: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ogre_WarsHelp Paenula train troops: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help_Paenula_train_troopsDestroy the Harathi Trebuchets: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Destroy_the_Harathi_trebuchets

It annoys me as well dude. Also there is a broken quest in Straits of Devastation underwater area whereby enemy waves get stuck in walls and prevent access to an area required to reach a waypoint and thus preventing progress for map completion.

I can't think of every core game bug off the top of my head but there are so many and as far as I can see, the one-man patch team can't handle them all. Even silly stuff like the invisible laser hitting Tequatl hasn't been visible to me since I started playing years ago and using many different GPUs in 2 different computers, various versions of Windows and a plethora of drivers. It's insane.

We're also lacking a huge amount of quality of life improvements, such as colourblind support, different mouse cursors and colours so we can see through the clustering mess of on screen effects and frame rate caps other than 30 60 or unlimited.

Also, dungeons have been dead for years and as a result I can't get dungeon armour or weapons without great difficult and a ton of waiting or begging for help from guildies.

[Maria Murtor.7253]

@"Rasimir.6239" said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens.

Making new Outfits or the Warclaw (ony few people asked for) takes more resouces, I guess. Both makes money, someone maybe says, but rotten content in the core game is no good advertising for people who might be interested in the game. A good machine must get checked from time to time. A constantly changing game is no exception.

As I said before: Guild Wars 2 is celebrating it's 7th anniversary. We are speaking of a long time now. There were plenty of opportunities to clean the mess up. To let people report bugs like these and don't respond to them is like GameFreak telling the Fans of Pokémon with there latest games: "We know, but we give a crap." Removing bugged content might be a poor decision, but still better as keep playing suffer in annoyance.

[Goettel.4389]

Limited dev time. Way she goes.With 10+ alts, I can't say any of the bugs really bothered me. Bug? Move on, there's plenty to do.

[hugo.4705]

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Stop_the_flow_of_Inquest_data_to_thwart_their_operation event give you a buff https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lab_Alpha-12_Blackout to open chest scattered around Rata Primus.Those chests, since the release are BUGGED not giving any loot, as a consequence, players leave the champion data security officier ALIVE because they DON'T CARE.

Sorry if it's little off-topic since sandswept isles is a LS map but the bug is now here for a long time.

[Illconceived Was Na.9781]

@Holgarf.6581 said:Also, dungeons have been dead for years and as a result I can't get dungeon armour or weapons without great difficult and a ton of waiting or begging for help from guildies.

This simply isn't so. Dungeons aren't dead; they just compete with newer, fresher content. If you aren't getting help from your current guild, find another one that has more people who do enjoy dungeons. Or start your own groups. Whenever I've opened an LFG/more for any dungeon, it fills quickly, so most people would have been unlikely to notice it.

[Holgarf.6581]

@Illconceived Was Na.9781 said:

@Holgarf.6581 said:Also, dungeons have been dead for years and as a result I can't get dungeon armour or weapons without great difficult and a ton of waiting or begging for help from guildies.

This simply isn't so. Dungeons aren't dead; they just compete with newer, fresher content. If you aren't getting help from your current guild, find another one that has more people who do enjoy dungeons. Or start your own groups. Whenever I've opened an LFG/more for any dungeon, it fills quickly, so most people would have been unlikely to notice it.

Christ, this old chestnut. Open your eyes please and stop defending every shortfall this game has.

Dungeons are, relatively speaking, dead. Waiting for LFG; ages. During peak times even; ages (or even then there may be one group who disbands after one track). Guildies have done these things before and while they're happy to help, why on earth should they have to repeatedly do dungeons with me taking away their time to play the game and do the things they want to? I can maybe do one or two, but I can't expect them to use up all their free time. As for finding another guild, to combat something so desolate I have go hunting for people who do specifically those things? If that was a common part of guilds, dungeons wouldn't be as barren as they are. Start my own groups; see above. Yes, well I'm glad you're very lucky in that dungeons fill quickly for you and you can do them all day long without waiting. Compared to much else of the game, again relatively speaking, dungeons are (99%) dead. Your opinion is your own and I respect that, but it belies the obvious truth that it is very empty nearly all of the time, meanwhile mine is by observation and experience.

If reward changes occurred or there was something more meaningful (besides tokens) given, then perhaps Dungeons would be more common. I'd suggest brining back Monthly challenges/rewards and having 5 dungeons per month being added as an incentive... that doesn't seem so excessive, does it?

[whoeverxwins.1279]

Another issue is the game IS 7 years old. Employees change, code changes, probably plenty of spaghetti code mess, especially in the older parts of the game. It could be a case of, "Well, if we fix that, how many other things will it break?" Unfortunately, it happens in plenty of games. Annoying? Yes.

[Vayne.8563]

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@"Rasimir.6239" said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

Thats not the probleme here. bugs get found and reported by players but anet does not fix them. Why? i think because they have not the man power to fix them.

You're drawing a lot of conclusions here. Do you know how many quests Guild Wars 1 had at launch? 203

Guild Wars 2 had over 1500 events at launch. That's because you need roughly five times the number of events that you do for a quest hub system. There are always more zones coming out which means more events coming out.

Many events are fixed and end up breaking again later on due to spaghetti code. Some changes affect events that no one expects.

But this idea that Anet never fixes any old events as implied by the original post on wrong. Many events have been fixed over time, some keep breaking. The amount of value it costs to put someone endlessly on a single event or even multiple events, trying to find out why something happens is prohibitively expensive. Keeping in mind the number of events in the game continues to grow.

Obviously current content is going to be the first content focused on but if you look back at patch notes, you'll see many examples of older content be fixed and adjusted. People only pay attention to that's not done, not what is done.

Furthermore, not every bug fix even ends up in the patch notes. For a long time I used to follow the known issue tracker, I don't think it's been updated recently, but this will give you some idea of what's being worked on or not worked on:

https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/231272908-Known-Issue-Tracker

[Gop.8713]

I would love to see anet spend more time perfecting what they have and ensuring that new things aren't broken on release, but I think it's player expectation of the pace of new releases that creates the problem. There's no way for me to know for certain but it seems like a significant majority of players would rather have 'new' content frequently -- even if it is a little imperfect -- rather than have old content repaired or new content released bug-free . . .

[Rasimir.6239]

@"Holgarf.6581" said:If reward changes occurred or there was something more meaningful (besides tokens) given, then perhaps Dungeons would be more common. I'd suggest brining back Monthly challenges/rewards and having 5 dungeons per month being added as an incentive... that doesn't seem so excessive, does it?Thing is, if you know what you're doing, dungeons are still good profit. The mix of token and gold rewards, loot drops, and achievement rewards (dungeon frequenter) makes for a very decent gold per hour. The major "problem" isn't the rewards, it's that many of the more recent players never bothered to learn this game's dungeons, and unlike open world farms, you won't get carried easily.

5 dungeons per month would end up with people only running CoF p1 or SE p1 or whatever dungeon is considered "easy" by the general public at that point in time. It wouldn't change a thing for any of the other dungeons. The way to go really is to learn them yourself and find friends that enjoy running them. I rarely have a problem finding people to play dungeons with if I feel like it, but then a considerable part of my friends list is used up by people I got to know through the old dungeon forum years ago ;) .

[Khisanth.2948]

@Rasimir.6239 said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

That might be the case but a lot of broken events fall under either 'X enemies or things needs to be killed or destroyed but one somehow goes missing' or 'X needs to be killed or destroyed but is nowhere to be found'. They also continue to pop up in new content as well which means they will probably continue to show up in future content as well. Seems like something worth fixing ... as in getting to the root of the problem as not patching holes as they appear.

One major flaw I see with the way ANet handles things is that they don't seem to bother with fixes unless there is a way to reproduce the bug. On its own this is actually perfectly fine sicne without a way to reproduce you can never be sure your fixes are actually fixes anyway but sometimes there are bugs that you have to trawl through the code to figure out what is going on and if you are always waiting for a way to reproduce the bug then those will never get fixed. There doesn't seem to be anything in place to escalate things. The other major problem is that things only have a short time window to get fixed after they are released. Anything found later or not fixed within that window has little to no chance of ever getting fixed.

[Hashberry.4510]

@Blocki.4931 said:

@Stalkingwolf.6035 said:

@Rasimir.6239 said:It might also be a case of bugs so obscure that tracking and fixing them takes an unproportionate amount of resources. Software can be complex to the point that stuff like that happens. Compared to the amount of events in this game it seems to me to be a very small subset of events that keep breaking, while I remember a lot of others fixed over the years. Would be interested to hear from a developer that tried to analyze the events in question, but then again I'm not even sure if explaining to us why they can't track those specific problems would really be a good use of their time.

Thats not the probleme here. bugs get found and reported by players but anet does not fix them. Why? i think because they have not the man power to fix them.

That's not really how it goes. You can know where something occurs, but that doesn't mean it's going to be easy to find out why. Since those events are core content, they likely exist for such a long time it simply isn't worth getting a dev to look into what might take a few hours just to fix a bug that may or may not be extremely rare. So yes, some things just aren't worth fixing.

This line of thinking has infected industry all over. Software engineering has gotten away with it for so long people just accept it everywhere.