<\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nGuild Wars 2 continues to impress. Having said, that, there are some really annoying problems with the game that are keeping me from enjoying it to the fullest. I don’t want you to go running off and buy the game, only to have you blame me for not giving you a proper heads-up. Some of these problems are serious, some are minor, some are situational. This is not a comprehensive list, it’s just what I’ve run into.<\/p>\n
Fair warning: One of these complaints might not be entirely genuine. It is left as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one. <\/p>\n
 <\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\nEDIT: As of this morning, the trading post is working for me. Looks like this one is solved, or very close. That was an abrupt fix after so much dysfuntion, but I’m glad it’s been sorted. Original hand-wringing follows:<\/strong><\/p>\n The in-game auction house has been broken since launch. First it’s down. Then it’s up, but the search doesn’t work. Then up again for 15% of the population. Then it seems to work, but it eats money without delivering the product. <\/p>\n This wouldn’t be a problem, but they didn’t give players any sort of direct-trade interface. The only way to trade items is to mail them, which is vulnerable to people simply running off without paying \/ delivering. Basically, there’s no safe way for strangers to trade.<\/p>\n They have designed a game that is balanced around the idea of public trade, and now that it’s launched there isn’t any. All of this is painful if you’re trying to do any kind of crafting, since crafting consumes more materials than you will acquire during the normal course of play. Also, it’s probably strangling the economy, since you’re supposed to be able to sell the rare items you find but can’t use. Bank space is limited, so there’s only so many you can stockpile. This means a lot of valuable magic stuff is just getting dumped on the in-game vendors for basically nothing. <\/p>\n What’s really worrisome is just how little progress we’re seeing. They usually only enable the trading post for 15% of the population for testing purposes. Likely a lot of those randomly-chosen 15% don’t even know it’s available to them. Also, a trade system where a random 15% of the population can trade with each other using a system that might vanish at any moment is not terribly useful, meaning even among the portion of the 15% who know about it, a lot of them won’t waste time with it. We’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the population, here. And yet, it’s still painfully slow and unresponsive. <\/p>\n There’s a multiplicative effect that happens in systems like this, where doubling the population will result in more than double the traffic. Conversely, halving the population will reduce the traffic by more than half. What I’m getting at is that during these testing times, the system is probably experiencing less than one-twentieth of the traffic it needs to handle. If it’s slow under these conditions, how is it ever going to handle the full load?<\/p>\n The original Guild Wars didn’t have an auction house, so this is likely ArenaNet’s first attempt at solving this particular problem. My fear is that their design was fundamentally flawed and simply can’t perform at the required scale. It’s possible this isn’t just “launch day troubles”, but a serious engineering problem that might send them back to the drawing board.<\/p>\n This is all conjecture on my part, mind you. Still, over a week of downtime and brokenness leads me to believe this is more than just “launch day problems” or a few bugs. <\/p>\n |
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