So I want to preface this by saying I’m not just here to moan and I want this game to succeed.
With that said, I’m growing increasingly concerned about New World and the devs with each passing update.
It seems to me that with every update, despite having a PTR, there are several serious bugs that inevitably require another full patch (not even hotfixes) and another maintenance or two to sort out. Now, I have been playing MMO’s for nearly 20 years so I’m no stranger to bugs and I understand the limitations of testing, but this is on another level entirely in terms of the scale of the bugs and the consistency of the problem, leading to people generally asking about what has been broken instead of what has been fixed whenever a new patch comes out.
The other issue is all the server maintenance delays. Forgetting the fact that Arenanet worked out how to do updates without any downtime in 2005, it seems as though nearly every maintenance ends up being delayed and it’s so consistent that it brings up questions about what keeps going wrong and why it keeps happening to consistently. Are they just really bad at planning how long it’ll need to take or do their servers keep giving them issues that they don’t expect?
I get the sense that the devs are working really hard on this, so I don’t think this is an issue of laziness and in fact I’m more concerned about devs crunching and working all hours to fix problems every single time, which worries me because it sounds like they aren’t being given the time or tools to do the work in their normal hours and have it go well.
Is the engine just really difficult to work with? Are there issues with management providing devs the right tools to do their jobs? Is the network infrastructure so outdated that it’s really difficult to carry out maintenance and they are forced to do so whenever they want to patch anything? Given it’s Amazon and this game is relatively new, outdated servers and engines that don’t really work very well shouldn’t be an issue, so what’s the issue?
Devs, I’m rooting for you with every update and it pains me to see this happen every single time.
