(MMO) Yeah, Nobody's Perfect

Years of World of Warcraft taught me to expect a certain amount of chaos after any major patch. When systems change, something tends to break and will need fixing. Sometimes there are simple issues with numbers that need to be retweaked for balance, other times it's something more serious. Whatever the specifics, I've learned to try to sit back and wait for the dust to settle before getting too worked up about changes.

Arenanet has avoided a lot of that with their (mostly) biweekly patches. Of course, content adjustments seem less prone to major mishaps than system adjustments. There have been some issues here and there, with requirements, rewards, and scaling of events being tuned over the course of several days. I haven't seen anything too serious, though.

Yesterday, they put out what I would consider their first major system/mechanic-related patch for Guild Wars 2. And yeah, some things broke. I personally saw daily/monthly achievements reset a couple times over and typed things into chat which never appeared. I heard of a few other bits of possible flakiness in the evening, as well. But this isn't really a surprise. Bugs will be fixed.

What remains in question is whether they'll back off any of the intended changes, and time will tell on that. I generally like the new wardrobe system, but I know at least one person who was less than thrilled upon seeing what it actually means. I still have concerns about the trait unlocks because the ones I've looked at involve high-level events that haven't been terribly popular (but will be for a week or two, at least), but 3 gold for the top-tier traits as an alternative to the events isn't too bad.

All-in-all, we'll just wait and see.

Comments

  1. tashiroApril 16, 2014 at 8:23 AM

    The wardrobe system as a whole I'm 90% pleased with. I just think that you should not be charged multiple times for swapping between specific looks - pay once per additional look, and leave it at that for that particular piece of armour. The town clothes issue however, is major, and I hope they really look at scrambling to fix that. That was not a good move.

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  2. marinredwolfApril 16, 2014 at 8:43 AM

    The way I see it, the main aspects of the wardrobe system have only changed (and were only meant to change) in that you now have a list of usable skins instead of needing the items "physically" on hand. Before, you had to pay to overlay appearance. Now, you have to pay to overlay appearance. I think that's fully by design and they still want to "monetize" appearance changes. It does, however, negatively impact people who saved multiple sets of gear with customized appearances, because that's harder to do now. The town clothes... I'm really unclear on what exactly the situation is there because I almost never used them. Edit: Well, having looked at some forum posts, I think I have a slightly better grasp on the town clothes issue. It sounds like their conversation was wildly inconsistent, with some items becoming "normal" new skins and some items even becoming whole appearance-changing tonics. And maybe some in between. That seems bizarre to me. There must have been some reason for it, but from an outsider perspective it's hard to see why they didn't just change each piece to a slot skin. I guess some things they might not have wanted to carry over into combat, maybe, but it does sound like that aspect was messily handled.

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  3. tashiroApril 16, 2014 at 11:25 AM

    Well, originally, it was simply 'armour' with no value. You had no weapons or skills with it, unless you used a toy for brawl. Now, however, you don't even get that - you have a potion which produces a generic set of town clothes that you can't dye. And yes, you grasp it perfectly, from what I see.

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  4. marinredwolfApril 16, 2014 at 12:19 PM

    Conversion, not conversation. >.> But anyway... Yeah, I can see the issue, and I see a lot of complaints about it. Impact on me is minimal, but it's baffling. I really wonder if that was due to a decision or a technical limitation (and what that could have been). Out of curiosity, do the potions allow you to fight while under the outfit effect? I seem to recall some (the transformation tonics) usually don't.

    ReplyDelete
  5. tashiroApril 16, 2014 at 3:38 PM

    I don't know, actually.

    ReplyDelete

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