All the issues in the game, they fix the one that benefits players

[awryan]

Current known issues list.
(Not all the bugs are listed mind you, just the ones they feel like listing.)

So in the past week, devs decide to fix instead. The ability to complete certain campaign tasks in training battles. Mainly the ones where you have to find certain troops. Like Psion this week. Which requires at least 15 World Event battles to find this week. Or (if you’re super lucky) 5 explore battles. Others will say you can find them in casual PvP by just hitting refresh until you get lucky. But if I wanted to play a slot machine game then I wouldn’t be playing Gems of War.

Best part is, “the fix” actually occurred over the weekend and actually broke training battles.

I understand that training battles were never intented as a way to complete campaign tasks. But as I’m on week 5-6 of waiting to hear from support about my tickets. And I look at this list of known issues. Some of them have been on it for over a year. Clearly you have better things to do than to fix “issues” that were never reported on the forums in the form bug reports. Never were reported as a known issue on the devs official just. And the devs probably only found out about it because at least a few players thirst for their attention over the benefit to the community at large. And that’s unfortunate.

[HounganAtLarge]

“We can’t easily fix 3 weapons, because it’s complicated, and we want to do them all at once”
.
Nerfs Skeleton Key

[Jonathan]

@awryan

Best part is, “the fix” actually occurred over the weekend and actually broke training battles.

The weekend timing is interesting.

I agree that the kicker is that it didn’t matter that the fix was rushed or imperfect for the training battle issue, but when it comes to more player-centric issues, we often hear, “We can’t just _____, that could mess with/break some other part of the game, we want to make sure we do it right”.

And sure, it was good that they fixed the thing their fix broke reasonably quickly, but it would be hard to believe it wasn’t at least partially motivated by a desire to save face rather than simply because “training battles don’t work anymore and that’s bad” (i.e. If that had been the only thing that happened in a non-GW week, randomly/completely unrelated to another bug, how long do we think it would have taken to be fixed, priority-wise? Maybe a week rather than a couple of days?).

Whether or not it’s true, I definitely think it adds to the perception that they can get things done and fix things when they want to, but only if it’s important to them – which yeah, could mean that a lot of player concerns aren’t. Eugh .

@HounganAtLarge

“We can’t easily fix 3 weapons, because it’s complicated, and we want to do them all at once”
.
Nerfs Skeleton Key

Salty did respond to this particular part, but I do agree that it feels like they could fix those weapons pretty easily if they wanted to.

@Saltypatra

I can confirm that it is much more difficult to change weapon affixes and trees than it is to change mana cost or make alterations to amount of gems spawned, percentage chances, etc.

[awryan]

@Jonathan

Salty did respond to this particular part, but I do agree that it feels like they could fix those weapons pretty easily if they wanted to.

I vehemently disagree.
Training battles were coded in house by developers that most likely still work for IP+2.
The weapons affixes were shopped out most likely. So either a new contract needs to be drawn up. Or someone unfamiliar with the code would need to go in and tinker with it. And that’s where the time comes from. Taking over someone’s project takes a lot longer than someone going back to a project they already started. And those affixes (for whatever reason) can easily crash the game when not coded correctly.

Spell changes and Mana adjustments…whole different story. That’s part of the base game and can be adjusted on the fly. Correct.

[Aragorn1]

I’m one of those people up until lately that has played the games for years, but wouldn’t complain in the forums because I would see hundreds of comments about stuff that never changed. I grow closer to leaving the gamez so I guess now I feel I owe it to other players who sit silent to discuss issues.
I quit playing Destiny after logging thousands of hours(addict) because Bungie would every few months of complaints would put out their heartfelt state of the game where they always said “We are listening and we promise to do better”. Well, they never did and I quit cold turkey and never went back. I feel like Destiny, GoW has moved more towards microtransactions rather than dealing with bugs, bad game design and just outright unfair practices towards the players.
Developers will always fix exploits before bugs and they always say we did it for the benefit of the games integrity and the playerbase. Changing game code may be difficult and break other things, but that’s part of the job when you decide to make and maintain a game.

[RiverSong]

@awryan

Training battles were coded in house by developers that most likely still work for IP+2.
The weapons affixes were shopped out most likely.

Most likely, most likely. Got any actual evidence? If not, your premises collapse and your argument is blatantly specious, rather than just laughable.

[ChunkyMono]

I never learned to code, so I don’t know how easy or difficult it is. I am certain it is more difficult in Australian, as some days 50% of the time all coding is difficult, and other days it is always difficult 50% of the time. And of course the days when 50% of coding is difficult to change.

And I get that EoE may intentionally transform the first troop into a Toad for Balance Issues.

And I’ll even concede that having 4 Doomskull converting Doom weapons that don’t muff a 4 match and 2 that potentially do is just standard operating procedure.

But “vehemently disagree”? I believe the correct phrase is “strenuously object.”

[awryan]

@RiverSong

Most likely, most likely. Got any actual evidence? If not, your premises collapse and your argument is blatantly specious, rather than just laughable.

You have zero evidence otherwise.
I made it clear in my phrasing that it was a theory. So you’re saying “no your theory is wrong, provide evidence!” Ummm provide evidence that it’s wrong instead. 🤷

Just because you don’t want something to be true. Doesn’t mean it’s not true.

Does anyone have a better justification as you why it’s taken years for weapon affixes to be changed?

[awryan]

@ChunkyMono

I never learned to code, so I don’t know how easy or difficult it is. I am certain it is more difficult in Australian, as some days 50% of the time all coding is difficult, and other days it is always difficult 50% of the time. And of course the days when 50% of coding is difficult to change.

And I get that EoE may intentionally transform the first troop into a Toad for Balance Issues.

And I’ll even concede that having 4 Doomskull converting Doom weapons that don’t muff a 4 match and 2 that potentially do is just standard operating procedure.

But “vehemently disagree”? I believe the correct phrase is “strenuously object.”

You didn’t mention the words “orc” or “horde” in your comment. Did you get hacked?

[Fourdottwoone]

@awryan

Does anyone have a better justification as you why it’s taken years for weapon affixes to be changed?

They don’t see any profit in doing so. They even gave an official statement in that regard, their priorities are working on new features, not fixing old design issues, no matter how little effort that would take. If you need another example, each Siegebreaker troop was supposed to belong to a unique tribe, several of them also received Knight on top due to someone fumbling the templates. It would be have been easy to correct in all those years, it just doesn’t conform with their “dump things out on the front lawn and move on” product strategy.

[awryan]

@Fourdottwoone

They don’t see any profit in doing so. They even gave an official statement in that regard, their priorities are working on new features, not fixing old design issues, no matter how little effort that would take. If you need another example, each Siegebreaker troop was supposed to belong to a unique tribe, several of them also received Knight on top due to someone fumbling the templates. It would be have been easy to correct in all those years, it just doesn’t conform with their “dump things out on the front lawn and move on” product strategy.

That supports my theory. Doesn’t disprove it.
Balance changes aren’t that expensive. If they were then the Christmas changes wouldn’t of occured.
Unless… however… The balance changes require more coding than usual or an outside company to do it. Such as… the weapon artifacts issue. 🤷

[Tabu]

505 Games head of free-to-play CEO of DR Studios Clive Robert told GamesBeat. “Bringing this level of talent in-house means we can better support our community and players and offer significantly better and ongoing experiences.”

A quote after the purchase of IP2.

How can you be more full of … ?

Support the community? Better experiences?

[Fourdottwoone]

@awryan

Balance changes aren’t that expensive. If they were then the Christmas changes wouldn’t of occured.

Or maybe they just wanted to nerf gold income from Skeleton Key, because that affects their profit, and added in some other changes to make it less apparent? Just to throw in a remotely plausible theory equally difficult to disprove.

@awryan

Unless… however… The balance changes require more coding than usual or an outside company to do it. Such as… the weapon artifacts issue.

What about getting death threats from someone who wants those weapons to stay the same? I keep hearing those are a major factor in how their company is run.

On a less snarky level, that weapon balance change doesn’t require any coding at all, it’s just a configuration file that says which weapon has which affix at which upgrade level. They can exchange the affix for a different existing one, they’ve even done so in the past, just like troop changes. They may need to account for redundant storage, e.g. in case they copied the global affix progression details in some way into individual account progress. That would be a home game though, not something an outside company is involved in.

I could probably come up with some other remotely plausible technical reasons in regards to what might be keeping them. I’ll rather believe the official explanation they’ve given though, that they see working exclusively on new features as a better way to earn money. It just feels so much more likely to be correct.

[Snooj]

@Fourdottwoone

it’s just a configuration file

The amount of times I see hardcoded things that should be in a config file… (Not speaking about the game here, just programming in general)

[Fourdottwoone]

@Snooj

The amount of times I see hardcoded things that should be in a config file…

The parts I’ve seen actually look quite organized. There’s a few very exotic data formats I personally wouldn’t have put into a JSON file, still good considering they probably have multiple persons working on it.

[awryan]

@Fourdottwoone

Or maybe

@awryan

Training battles were coded in house by developers that most likely still work for IP+2.
The weapons affixes were shopped out most likely. So either a new contract needs to be drawn up. Or someone unfamiliar with the code would need to go in and tinker with it. And that’s where the time comes from. Taking over someone’s project takes a lot longer than someone going back to a project they already started. And those affixes (for whatever reason) can easily crash the game when not coded correctly.

🤷

For christs sake… Even the devs inactions are up for debate now. To be fair I guess I started it. But really I was just trying to gemsplain to @Jonathan why the artifacts haven’t been addressed yet. Not really to spend multiple posts defending my position as to why I believe they haven’t been addressed yet.

I guess the OP of the devs fixing an issue that favored the players wasn’t a sexy enough talking point. Let’s discuss Weapon Affixes instead. Because there’s not 100 threads like that already that exist.

[Fourdottwoone]

@awryan

I guess the OP of the devs fixing an issue that favored the players wasn’t a sexy enough talking point.

Quite the contrary, I believe it is. Most prominently it shows that issues that affect profit, like skip fees missed out on due to easier than intended to complete tasks, can get fixed in less than a few years. I don’t quite agree with your conclusion, for me as a developer a bug is a bug that should be fixed, no matter who profits from it. I rather find it unfortunate that IP2 apparently doesn’t treat all bugs equal, even those that hurt the community as much as the well documented incorrect Guild Wars scoring issue get ignored.

[awryan]

@Fourdottwoone

. I don’t quite agree with your conclusion, for me as a developer a bug is a bug that should be fixed, no matter who profits from it.

I never said it didn’t need to get fixed. It shouldn’t of been a priority during an active campaign. Specially right before the last week of the campaign if players invested money not knowing it was a bug and thought they could progress in the campaign with the training battle aid. Yeah it says it couldn’t be done in training battles. But it also says I can earn glory in challenge battles. (and I can’t.)

@awryan

I understand that training battles were never intented as a way to complete campaign tasks. But as I’m on week 5-6 of waiting to hear from support about my tickets. And I look at this list of known issues. Some of them have been on it for over a year. Clearly you have better things to do than to fix “issues” that were never reported on the forums in the form bug reports. Never were reported as a known issue on the devs official just. And the devs probably only found out about it because at least a few players thirst for their attention over the benefit to the community at large. And that’s unfortunate.

What I actually said. ↑

I’m very much aware that the change was driven by profit. They want people to grind out the battles. Or use Gems to skip them. And training battles was an easy work around. What’s difficult to stomach… More and more. Is to continuously hear how profitable they actually are. See all the issues they just don’t feel like getting to. (or can’t profit enough from fixing).
But expect us to pay more and more and more and more and more. For a less and less and less and less and less quality of a product.
It’s the asinine logic at it’s core that breaks my brain.

I appreciate the willingness to come back to the OP. But at I think about the logic with this bug fix. And silver tasks this week. And the blaming the AI for picking the campaign tasks.

The devs literally outsourced campaign tasks to it’s own AI because they didn’t want to bother with something that literally people spend money on.

Yet y’all act like it’s obsurd to think that weapon affixes were contracted out.

I know for a fact that Mobile notifications are outsourced. Does that help at all? I’m not gonna bother hunting down “evidence” you can take my word for it or not. I just know for a fact that a dev has told me an outside company handles them.

[Fourdottwoone]

@awryan

Yet y’all act like it’s obsurd to think that weapon affixes were contracted out.

I don’t think anybody disagrees that development of the functionality might have been outsourced, it’s quite likely. What people are trying to explain is that it doesn’t matter when it gets to changing what weapons do.

In less technical terms, think of some snacks shelf in some store. The store owner can put any snacks in that shelf, in any order. The store owner won’t try to produce any snacks, just use the ones obtained from suppliers. If some snacks become less popular they get replaced with a different brand.

Now think of the snacks shelf as a weapon, the snacks as weapon affixes. IP2 can easily change which affixes a weapon contains, in any order. This doesn’t require coding effort, it’s just configuration, like moving snacks around on a shelf. They wouldn’t, and possibly couldn’t, change what each existing affix does, that’s the part that’s coded. However, the community isn’t asking for code changes, we just want the Watery snack in the Doomed Blade shelf replaced with some other existing snack in the storage area that tastes less like ass.

Sorry for the technical discourse, I just thought it important to explain.

[ChunkyMono]

When I first read the title of the thread, “all the issues in the game they fix the one that benefits players”, I thought “well, wouldn’t you want them to fix an issue to benefit the players?” Don’t blame me, I’m an Orc, under an Enchantment spell from an Elf who infiltrated our Horde.

And as I read further, I was further confused, as it was more of an exploit than an issue. Not as evil as the global mail exploit, but certainly something that could be exploited. And isn’t the OP creator always complaining about cheaters (correctly, I hate hackers, modders, and cheaters as well). So, that just struck me as odd.

And then when the topic creator came up with reasons for not fixing other issues with the game, my fragile mind was just completely wiped.

Forgive me, I’ll go back to being an Ahole on days that end in y, un pendejo on days that end in o or s, und ein scheissekopf in days that end in g. I’m an Orc, it’s my nature.

For the Horde