Lost Shores Event Fixes and Clarification

IF Arenanet had some decent testers, everything wouldn't be broken all the time......

I gotta say...their solution to all this seems rather messy.

Here's a question: everyone in my overflow server "failed" to pushback the karkas, even though the samples.were given and their morale really low. It just decided to kick off the end cutscene and leave us in bewilderment. We got gold reward for a "failed" DE even though we we close to winning.

So was that normal? Was that an other bug?

I logged in yesterday to do the events/quests. Logged off after 30mins of running around and finding out, that every single step was bugged. Won't log in again for anything related to the event.

And I ask myself: why on EARTH is the entrance to the Fractals in LA? LA is constantly overcrowded now, impossible to get a group on your "own" server and it's just annoying to enter LA, "your home city" just to see french, english, german, spanish, polish speaking people cluttering the chat. I don't have a problem with other languages, but there is a reason why I chose a german server.
Solution to all this would be the obvious: place the entrance in another zone for gods sake (I hope this will happen later on...).

Missing The Boat

I just found out there was a quest chain that started by talking to Miyani, who then lets you talk to Zommoros, and that starts a sequence of events described here on Dulfy.net.

I talked to Miyani at length on Friday after the first event, thoroughly checked every conversation option because I had never used the Mystic forge before (and wanted to make sure I didn't blow it), and NEVER saw the option that started this quest chain.

Now it's no longer available. Ever again. Forever. Lucky me.

I am proud Drinker of the GW2 Kool-Aid and a True Believer in the MMO Manifesto. I want ArenaNet to make truckloads of money on this game, am happy to pitch in my share of the dough, have pitched in plenty already and want to play GW2 for at least the next ten years.

But this weekend exemplifies the continuous pattern of overreaching ambition followed by spectacular failure which is fast becoming a hallmark of ArenaNet's track record. That this was also a "free weekend", where potential players have had a chance to experience how confusing and bug-addled this new content is, only adds insult to injury.

Absent some sort of stunning turnaround in ArenaNet's abysmal quality assurance performance, they really, really need to reconsider the dubious strategy of placing new content under our noses, only to snatch it away before we can enjoy it, and never let us have a shot at it again.

It's outrageous and disappointing on a grand scale. I love the game, and love the people, but ArenaNet seriously needs to get their act together and put a stop to these embarrassing and highly visible epic failures.

I really dont get how things get so buggy at every patch. Does anet even test patches? We seem to find the bugs pretty fast. If they are testing they stink at it.

They dont have the capacity to get such high pressured load on the servers and events. The playerbase has it, though. And there is the problem: they cannot reliably test an event´s and it´s corresponding zone´s stability because they simply don´t have enough manpower to reach the maximum of allowed players in that zone.

The sollution would be to just set the maximum allowed value of players to 1/50 of what it is now. More overflow servers are needed. Go figure, do these events even make some fun with all the lag and not appearing players / enemies everywhere? At least not for me.

TheBandicoot, on 18 November 2012 - 02:58 PM, said:

Then they need to learn the meaning of the following three letters : PTR

TheBandicoot, on 18 November 2012 - 02:58 PM, said:

They have to have it! In software development you usually don't perform load tests with humans but just clients that execute scripts (perhaps with random parts) because you usually don't have enough humans to perform it. That's a common thing to do and I'm pretty sure ANet does it too.

TheBandicoot, on 18 November 2012 - 02:58 PM, said:

That wouldn't help, as many of the problems with a fully-loaded instance are infrastructural rather than scaling.  Cutting the maximum capacity doesn't simulate real-world problems because in a low-capped test environment the underlying hardware and logic aren't being taxed like they would be in real-world gameplay so comparable symptoms would never occur like they would in a fully-loaded live environment.

The actual solution (if ANet doesn't have the internal QA chops needed to emulate this internally) is to post up the newest updates and patches to a beta server and allow players to test the content in a live environment.  This does come with its own set of problems and ANet is notoriously tight-lipped about updates so I imagine they'd hate to "spoil the surprise".  Sill, a far worse surprise is the continued bugginess of these events and the public ill-will they're generating.  ArenaNet can do better.

What i meant by cutting down the size of the capacity is reaching a visually playable event. There is no point in taking part in an event where you cant even see what is happening because of overwhelming glow effects and players / enemies don´t being rendered. I have lost count to the amount of deaths i was dying out of nowhere just to see some karka veteran finishin its faceroll, thus killing everyone in its way because nobody could actually dodge it... because nobody has seen it. Hardware-wise problems of the servers are another topic.