Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker

I didn’t plan to write something like this but due to an overwhelming response from friends around the industry and folks from this great community it has become clear to me proper closure requires a real goodbye. Today is my last day at ArenaNet, so here goes nothing…

Eleven years ago ArenaNet took a chance on me. The company’s very first ever game: Guild Wars (Prophecies) needed a game designer to build the bulk of the quests with just a few months left till ship. The offer came on a Friday and required I fly to Seattle from Virginia and be there by Monday morning to start working. On a recommendation from my friend Lewis who was a coder at ArenaNet - I quit my job and jumped on that plane. I flew with what clothes I could bring in a few suitcases and a sleeping bag. I rented an apartment I didn’t have time to furnish and with my sleeping bag as a bed, I set to work banging out the quests. One of the first quests I got to work on involved a little girl named Gwen who need...

It's really great to see people offering help and being friendly. Thank you!

We're working on it. It won't be there for the second wing on Tuesday, but we're doing our best to try to get it out in the next feature update. Thanks for your patience!

That's awesome. Thank you for helping the community!

Congratulations! And Slothasor is ready :)

While as game director I didn't set communication policy, I am really excited to see the things happening like this AMA. It'll be a great advantage having Mo in this role as he can both set policy, and game direct simultaneously.

That Colin guy very much was on every Gw1 game, he told me so! Awesome memories, Gw1 and Gw2 both :)

Thanks very much! You'll have to put up with me for one more week, but it has been an absolute pleasure being a part of this wild ride for eleven years.

T-T-T-TRIPLE KILL

That's not in the plans for now, but I do intend to use the tracker in the future as a way to help the devs gather more information. I'm still thinking about the best way to do that, but I'm leaning towards a new entry for the status column like "Need More Info." Then I could link that status to a specific forum thread for that bug.

To build on what GM_Awesomeness said:

The biggest changes for QA have been around making sure that QA is positioned to work with customer support teams and the development teams directly, so they can identify risks, and raise those concerns earlier in the development process.

QA Engineering has also taken a step in that direction, spreading most of our team out into development teams to work more closely with designers and programmers as they're building content. We've also invested heavily in building tools (like content unit testing, bots, automation, etc) to support those teams.

Yes

For test automation, we built endpoints into the game client so we can interact with different aspects of the game. We have internal commands we can send to the game server to put ourselves in specific server states, and a verbose set of observable and control endpoints for different client states.

The back-end for the game is basically a cloud of clouds of services. The server teams write unit/component/integration tests for common regressions and high risk areas, but QAE focuses on testing the whole system rather than diving deep into component testing for individual APIs.

I think the music team is doing a good job with what they have now:). Maclaine, Lena and Stan all work together and of course with all the live players they use are able to keep up with what we need.

QA Engineering (QAE) started up after launch, so our strategy was focused around covering the breadth of the game's systems. Now that we have thousands of tests, we've been focusing on automating high risk areas, keeping automation results reliable, catching up with new content changes, proactively automating new features, etc.

We use Tableau and JIRA for analytics and bug tracking. The rest of our tools (test execution, harnesses, instrumentation, reporting) were built in-house. If you're looking for more info, I gave a talk about our test automation tools at GDC last year.

QAE has been "agile" since we started. We made some early mistakes trying partial implementations of SCRUM, but we switched to Kanban a long while back and it just worked for us. I'd say we are better off for having made those mistakes, and learning from them, because the team is still invested in our process.

We have a lot of environments internally. Most dedicated content teams have t...

Right now, for the purposes of matchmaking, MMR is currently used when searching for players to be on your team (unless you're in a pre-made group, of course). We do not plan on making any changes to matchmaking until after Season 2 has ended.

How players move between maps in PvP is different than in the rest of the game and because of that it there are technical limitations on our ability to have players queue from outside the Mists. If we can find a solution to the technical challenges around this we would love to be able to do this but it is a very difficult problem given how the code between these systems work.

QA at launch was a very large group (something like 60ish people) in-house, but since then we moved to a leaner model with more testing being done as the content is developed. QAE started up after launch and we are a little more than a hand full of developers now.

Before launch we used Fogbugz, we switched to DevSuite after launch, and recently transitioned to JIRA after the HoT release.

Hank the Honey Badger of DOOM!

Or did you mean from the devs?

She is indeed!