Oh the good days of GOW, I miss that. 
4 Likes
I didn’t realize i was that old in gow, but i totally remember that xD woohoooo!
The old artwork was so nice, I wish they would bring some of it back as cosmetics options. 
2 Likes
My guess is that’s the same as several other aging things that stuck around: the foundations of both PvP modes are very old and potentially not even written by this team. It’s easier to build a new thing from scratch than to separate them.
Personally that aspect of this game’s always bugged me. The way I write code, I never let two things be that tightly coupled. Even if I think they’re going to behave differently, I do that by making the shared parts interchangeable modules so when I do find out one has to be a little different (it’s always when, not if), I can work on a new module to swap in and don’t even have to worry about if I’m altering the other thing.
GoW’s problems look like the kind of thing I like to help junior devs learn to avoid: overuse of code reuse with lack of focus on modular design. If I had to diagram what I’d bet the PvP code looks like, I’d draw one single rectangle labeled “PvP”. The concept of “casual” and “ranked” are probably just the same part of one large, tightly-coupled system. If I drew a diagram of how I might want PvP to be designed, you’d see two connected digraphs with 10-15 separate modules. Casual and Ranked might use the same digraph now, but nothing in a well-written system would prevent me from picking something like, say, “matchmaking” and having them separated between the two.
This isn’t new thinking. I’ve read texts from the 70s that talked about this kind of design. It’s just not how people write code when they’re in a hurry. Worse, a lot of people believe it takes longer to write code this way. Half a century of empirical evidence suggests you can divide your time one of two ways in software:
- Spend 3-5x more effort writing code so it is easier to maintain.
- Finish fast and spend 10-15x more effort maintaining what is released.
By analogy: it’s like the difference between spending 2 weeks on a good roof repair or committing to spending 5 minutes every hour every day emptying a bucket from the leak. You lose 14 days to the roof repair. You lose 30 days to emptying the bucket. But 90% of dev teams will die defending that the bucket is the only thing they have time for.
11 Likes
How’s the situation after the 4.9 update?
As a high end player (level 1600+), pvp is utterly pointless as far as obtaining resources. I can easily get twice the trophies and gold from explore per hour. It’s still a fun game mode and I’m glad it’s there, pet gnomes are needed as well.
2 Likes
I dont know if I am only recently just noticing or if the devs are just putting In less and less effort but it is alarming to me how often the devs outright lie to us.
6 Likes
The best thing about pvp is that you can build a defence team to emulate a defence team you are facing in wars. Then build an attack to beat it. Other than that the only saving grace is the occasional pet gnomes.