Sunyavadin.7962

Guild Wars 3: Bug riddled asset flip extraction shooter that runs like kitten.

Exactly. Even if it is greenlit, and that's a big if, we're looking at a period of hiring to bring on the necessary staff, many years of development in which all sorts of things can happen to the industry, but at the moment its existence is not even as concrete as that.

Indeed, and NCSoft and Arenanet are pretty clearly consistent on it. Both are clear that Arenanet have proposed a possible GW3, but NCsoft have not greenlit it as of yet.

Imagine if Anet had an obvious parody spoof GW3 announcement all planned to drop next week, like the commando class, and then this happens in a shareholder meeting and the internet blows up XD

In the MassivelyOP article on it, there's a clarification/correction box at the bottom linking to a Business Post Korea piece citing a formal statement made by NCSoft after the meeting, which I quoted. Essentially, after the comment made in the meeting raised questions, NCSoft issued a clarification that GW3 is not yet in active development, the proposal for the project is undergoing review.. Generally that means it exists as a handful of pieces of of concept art and a whole bunch of financial projections aimed at getting the parent company to give Anet the money for it. So, we have NCSoft saying after the meeting: “The Guild Wars 3 project is in the review stage and the start of development has not been finalized.” And Arenanet when asked by MMORPG.com for comment, stating: "As an active game studio we are always doing internal exploratory work for possible future titles we’d want to create, however we have nothing to confirm right now." Pretty clear from those two statements together that Anet have made proposals for a GW3 (No surprise, such proposals have been on the table for years, in one form or another) but NCSoft have yet to greenlight those proposals.

I mean, the NCSoft statement that the project is under review and has not been given final approval was pretty clear. I expect Anet wouldn't make any comment unless NCSoft went ahead and told them they could have the money for it.

There's literally nothing to really talk about here. This kind of throwaway statement is fairly common in these kinds of investor meetings. He said a thing to get a Korean investor asking about Nepotism in hires off his back, by justifying that Arenanet has a major IP nobody in Korea has heard of which does well in the US and Europe, and that plans have been knocking around since 2017 to maybe do another sequel. NCSoft clarified this much after the meeting. There's a proposal on the table to potentially do a GW3, but it's not been approved. And probably won't until they think it's suitably profitable for the necessary investment. "[in] a quote from NCsoft issued after the meeting; NCsoft says, “The Guild Wars 3 project is in the review stage and the start of development has not been finalized.”

It's definitely annoying on the standalone single consumable gobblers other than the combined gleam of sentience which actually has a selection of items to purchase. Double clicking half a dozen times is a lot easier than double clicking to open a window, moving the mouse to the single purchasable item, clicking it, moving the mouse to the quantity button, holding it to maximise, then moving to the purchase button and clicking it, and then moving it to the close button and closing the window. A better solution would have been to have all gobblers use one single store menu shared between them, and when you open one, populate the available purchases based upon which gobblers you own on your account via a simple api check. That way we could buy everything from one window and actually benefit from convenience instead of a bunch of additional precision clicking.

Indeed. As that massivelyop article clarifies, there are no concrete finalised plans yet to make a GW3 : "[in] a quote from NCsoft issued after the meeting; NCsoft says, “The Guild Wars 3 project is in the review stage and the start of development has not been finalized.”

Given that the proposal for making GW3 has been on the table and being reviewed in one form or another since 2017, and wvw restructuring has been in the works since 2018, I expect that in the unlikely event it were to be approved, and begin development in the next year, GW3 would show up sometime around 2029, while the wvw restructuring might only take another 8 betas, so could be with us as soon as 2027, neatly giving us a full set of war machine weapons in the process 😛

Super interesting to learn the underlying roots of this. I like it when the devs give a detailed insight into the workings like that. You'd think it'd be wild to think a bug went unnoticed like this for a decade to the point where they had to actually manually recreate it by hand when they updated the item, but actually I've literally seen this before in another MMO I used to work for, where one bug in a piece of legacy code had been untouched for a decade since the game's launch and the current dev team at the time found the bug and fixed it, only to learn that that in the meantime over the multiple dev team turnovers since the game's launch, that piece of code had ended up called by a bunch of unrelated stuff, and suddenly mechanics from three whole expansions were breaking because of the "fix".

This is why I wonder if the switch in how it applies the boosts has messed with some of the internal logic of how it's randomised.

If they had ten years of feedback saying "how about suggestions A, B, C, and D for item X" and they eventually gave us a patch which updated item X to have features C and D because those features were in line with the design philosophy of subsequent items Y and Z in the same category, then they had reasons, however good or bad those reasons might be, for not making the other changes. We the players only get to know those reasons if the devs choose to tell us. That's just how it works, the devs have an idea of how they want things to work, and they make changes in line with that philosophy, sometimes in line with the feedback and sometimes not. When there's a suggestion that's come up a bunch of times and they don't change things in line with it, but change it instead in other ways, then it's a pretty clear indicator they don't want that change. "Working as intended" is one of the heaviest pieces of design inertia, particularly when accompanied by a policy of "If it ain't broke".

As I said, it took a decade of people asking for QOL changes to it, making all sorts of suggestions which ranged from simply removing the timeout between clicks as far as removing the randomness, and after that decade of feedback, we got what we literally just got. That indicates how far they were willing to go at this point in changing it from its original functionality. Bringing it in line with the other ones which work this way and don't have an arbitrary limit between clicks (and possibly breaking some of the logic in doing so, so we shall see where that goes) but not fundamentally changing it to be similar to items with a discrete set of choices. If they were currently in a spot where they were willing to go along with those years of the same suggestions, they'd have made that change this patch. They didn't.

I'm pretty sure this is the most of a compromise position we can expect from Anet on it for a foreseeable while, or they'd have taken it further with this very change. The ability to buy it in bulk without the long timeout, but retaining the randomisation, and not being able to select a buff deliberately. The only way I see them changing that is if the bug it's currently experiencing proves insurmountable any other way.