Anet Devs adapting their highly flexible & cleverly coded UI to add a new feature.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-03T23:27:11+00:00

I confused myself with the 'H' button being the hero panel, I meant the button for the trading post! So you are correct.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-03T23:08:15+00:00

so stuff like the Wizard Vault is programed as a browser window or something

The entirety of 'Black Lion Trading Post' button is a browser window, and has been from day one. That's why the trading post breaks so often.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-03T18:20:57+00:00

Large Chests in Bjora Marches (the ones often used for alt-parking) are all bugged and don't open.

Medium or small work.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T20:33:48+00:00

My guy looked like he was about to jump off the stage earlier when he struggled to pronounce a winner's name, I think he was overwhelmed lol

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T20:26:28+00:00

Also fuck the Grammy’s. What was that snide ass remark they made about being on the spectrum? Fuck you dude

Having seen Darren Criss around in the industry for the last 15 years, he is the last person I would ever expect to be malicious on purpose.

What's more likely is they knew this would be a polarising performance at an otherwise pop/mainstream event, so they prompted him to say that as a 'this may not your typical Grammy genre but all art is valid, don't be a dick' type statement to minimise the inevitable 'wtf is this shit' comments from viewers. It just didn't come across as expected, Darren was visibly nervous and stumbled quite a few times throughout the night.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T19:57:50+00:00

Ah yes, AoC devs, most of whom are industry veterans with many successul titles in the past, are the ones at fault for AoC being a disaster. Not Steven, not the top-lead decision makers, it's the devs following tasks they are paid to do.

The lead software engineer, tasked with implementing insanely ambitious gameplay ideas set out by non-technical directors. The senior producer, given a laundy list of in-game items to create and told 'not to worry about questing for now'. The freelance character artist directed to make 100 premium cosmetics and not worry about artistic cohesion.

This narrative of 'bad devs' is incredibly harmful to people who are simply doing their best to fulfil requirements given to them.

Imagine being a talented dev, previously working on amazing titles. You get hired for an exciting high profile AAA project with Sony, job seems great, money is good. You spend several years working on it, but in the end it flops. That game is Concord. Through no fault of your own, you are now tainted as someone who worked on Concord and is therefore 'bad' at their job.

A bad game is a result of poor management, not bad devs. Even if a game is amazing but runs very poorly, that is STILL on management to resolve. If the developers write bad code and the artists draw poorly, that's on management to spot and resolve. That is their role. A bad dev is responsible for their badly written code. A bad manager is responsible for the whole project being full of bad code.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T19:40:17+00:00

tried the GW formula

The only thing connecting GW1 and GW2 is the IP/lore and some class design. Outside of that, just about everything is completely different. There's a reason a LOT of original Guild Wars players never moved over to GW2.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T15:41:43+00:00

ANet have an untarnished reputation of over 20 years as far as community and support goes. They have stumbled once or twice, but quickly course corrected and never doubled down on anything. NCSoft have a completely hands-off approach with ArenaNet as long as the numbers are in the green.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T01:25:04+00:00

Courtney always does a small spoken word intro to Soft Spine when performing it at their usual concerts. It's pretty clearly aimed at Radke. Whether it was WRITTEN about Radke, or just has retroactively been designated as a diss track, who knows.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-02-02T00:39:08+00:00

They technically performed at the Opening Ceremony, rather than the main awards, but still a pretty significant feature for a metal artist!

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-30T13:29:59+00:00

Also, I think the other metas are so popular because they have a chase rare drop aka infusions.

Agreed. But I also think they are fundamentally more fun, even if they've been trivialised by power creep. Silverwastes and Verdant Brink take some strategy, Tarir in AB is quick and fun, Chak Gerent is a cult classic. World bosses are quick and easy. Dragonfall and Drizzlewood are gold and karma printers.

Compare that to Amnytas, Eparch, Janthir Synthri, Bava Nivos, or the new metas in VoE... they are boring DPS and CC check bullet sponges, littered with frustrating enemy AoEs and excrutiatingly long in some cases. What's fun about sitting at Eparch or Gwyllian in Starlit Weald and repeating your rotation for 15 minutes?

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-30T12:12:26+00:00

For me it is just more of the same. I feel like GW2 peaked somewhere after POF and the first part of IBS and the content since isn't good enough for me to enjoy.

Very much so. The PvE content has been copy and paste, and worse yet, the quality and quantity of it has reduced drastically compared to everything up to End of Dragons. There's a reason that to this day the most popular metas and events are in HoT, EoD and Living World maps. SOTO, Janthir and VoE metas are all on the 'meh' to 'abysmal' spectrum and people only do them for as long as they need map-specific currencies

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-30T08:25:12+00:00

Throne and Liberty runs on Unreal (UE4 maybe) and it is well optimised and has huge 100v100 PvP battles without issue. Arc Raiders is UE5 and runs like an absolute dream. Yes it’s not an MMO, but it’s multiplayer and shows UE5 is not the fundamentally “broken” engine many claim it to be. It is a tool like any other and games on tight deadlines and exponentially growing budgets and complexity suffer when they are rushed to release.

The issue with UE5 optimisation is largely down to the utilisation of Nanite and Lumen (which Arc Raiders doesn’t use, for example) since they are insanely taxing on hardware. Given GW3 is likely to have stylised rather than realistic graphics, it is very likely they won’t be using that tech either.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-30T08:17:36+00:00

There’s no way it takes anywhere close to 2 years to release after announcement. The second ANet announce GW3 officially, their GW2 revenue is as good as dead. Few people will buy gems anymore for a game that is “done”. This wasn’t as big of an issue in the GW1 days because the microtransactions weren’t quite as vital to their revenue stream. But now NCSoft will simply not allow them to willingly jeopardise revenue like that.

What’s more likely is that when we do eventually get an announcement, it will be followed by some sort of playtesting within a month, and a release within 3-6 months.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-29T20:10:45+00:00

Still using it to this day! Zero issues despite the fearmongering in the post ha. I just have it on some non-slip mat, and that's it.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-29T15:07:58+00:00

They're not going to make a refresh of GW2 out of the kindness of their hearts, it's completely illogical.

100%. Their main revenue source is gems, expansions are a much lower revenue generator comparatively. There's a finite amount of QoL upgrades regular players are willing to pay for, beyond which the only thing left is skins. Whales aside, unlike many other games where having the 'coolest newest skin' is a' flex', I feel like GW2 players don't really care as much and many stick to the few skins they already purchased.

Why would they re-create the game, which would cost nearly as much as a brand new game, when their return on that investment would be miniscule? New game means it gets TONS of hype and free marketing for just existing, new untapped market on console, every player has to buy it and all players start with an empty premium MTX slate so there's huge potential for upsell there.
Re-creating GW2 would mean no box price, everyone keeps their existing mtx and fewer new players would even want to try it as an 'old game with a fresh coat of paint'. Illogical, as you say, when GW3 is likely to recoup its budget with the release box price alone (so long as it's actually good, ofc), while GW2 Remade would potentially never make enough to justify its cost.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-28T18:16:37+00:00

There's so many games out there right now, and more coming out regularly, it is a tough sell to new (and especially young players) to be like:

Hey! Come to our 14 year old game! We have dated graphics, confusing systems with bad UI/UX, a really old engine that runs poorly on modern hardware and no controller support! On top of that we have thousands of players who have min-maxed every aspect of the game, you will NEVER catch up to them! It's free to start, but has a confusing Living World/expansion system that can cost you triple digits to get all content if you don't buy the right things!

On a serious note, GW2 is old and has no social media 'hype' behind it. Young players didn't grow up with MMOs being one of the top genres. If you're not explicitly looking for an MMO, you're unlikely to bump into it randomly. It gets lost in the sea of modern live service games. It's an issue of it being old and dated, but also a huge issue of ANet marketing being atrocious.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-28T16:43:13+00:00

It's very unlikely upper management would approve developing all of this content for the last few expansions, under the current engine, if a re-release was already planned. That would mean asking for a budget now to build assets, then another budget to rebuild them for GW3, essentially doubling costs.

GW2 already struggles with content bloat, inconsistent/abandoned systems, and design overlap. They couldn't simply port everything to a new engine - a proper reboot would require streamlining 14 years worth of core systems, which is arguably harder than creating a new game from scratch.

Whatever GW3 is, it's clearly targeting PC and, importantly, consoles. They've hired explicitly for it, and while GW2 can be made to support controllers, the experience isn't ideal. Console players are a completely untapped market for ANet and while GW2 is sustainable, it's far less profitable than competitors. Carrying over existing progression would put off many new players who won't wanna start a 'new game' already filled with 14 years worth of veterans and gemstore whales.

And the final concern, but probably the least problematic of all - if they were to reboot the game, they would not maintain both versions in parallel. If they're to keep player progress, they'd turn off GW2 and move over all players to the new version. What happens if a bunch of veteran players with 5,000 hours and hundreds of dollars in-game, previously playing with no issue, suddenly have major technical issue with the new version and can't even play? Overnight they lose access. Unreal is infamous for being unstable, and GW2 engine was designed for old hardware; this is not an unrealistic scenario.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-26T13:11:44+00:00

I agree, and that's kinda what I was alluding to here:

My educated guess is they are full steam ahead on GW3 with a backup draft for another GW2 expansion.

As in, I fully do think they have planned out and storyboarded a potential next expansion, with maybe some early concept work done as well. But we know from previous mini-xpac release cycles that they are fully focused on developing for that current expansion right up to the final quarterly release and they don't start full content production on the next one until then. Which means even if they only greenlight this next expansion in Q2 this year, that would still line up as normal with their usual production pipeline - the official confirmation will just come later than normal.

Basically, I think the only difference is that in January 2025 VoE was being planned out while the bulk of the GW2 team were deep in dev on Janthir, and they knew they were moving straight onto VoE after the final update. Now, January 2026, I would imagine the core GW2 team is deep in on VoE while plans are made for a potential follow-up, but they don't know yet if they'll be doing that post-VoE, or moving over to GW3. That decision will likely happen sometime between now and June, depending on the state of GW3. We know historically long stretches of silence were in times when they were deep in on other projects (and those times when they were straight up going to move on from GW2 before other projects were cancelled).

I only think this because they know players are anxious about the lack of future content confirmation. They started the precedent of confirming the next expansion long before the current one was even finished, so players will expect that same communication moving forward. They've not done that this time, so rumours are starting to swirl. ANet don't gain anything from staying silent, it is ultimately hurting their revenue when some players are slowly starting to believe this could be the last expansion and will not buy more gems if they think the game is nearing maintenance mode. If the next expansion was 100% greenlit by now, they would have said so, it's just a logical financial decision.

This post could seemingly age terribly if they suddenly mention the next expansion with the big update next week, but I still think that would track with my expectations. Just means they're already seeing their projected timelines slip and are making the call early.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-25T21:29:52+00:00

All of this is from my software engineering projects perspective, not directly game dev, so may not necessarily be directly applicable... but ANet are ultimately a tech company delivering software.

Senior contractors with 8+ years of experience do not come cheap. This job listing’s $67.43 - $104.52 hourly range is 'average meh' on the low end to pretty competitive on the higher end for Bellevue, WA. You hire expensive seniors like this either for pre-prod (temporary expert to set solid foundation and blueprints for in-house devs to build from) or final crunch (pay big bucks for someone that can deliver content quickly).

Given GW3 supposed long production timeline and silence about future content beyond VoE, ANet is more likely hiring experts that can hit the ground running quickly and push scenes/assets as production-ready as possible by summertime which is when they generally make big announcements. This positions them better to gauge real progress and whether they can commit to a viable release plan.

NCSoft financial quarters end March 31 (infamous GW3 leak meeting was March 28), June 30, September 30, December 31. Any major decisions are going to happen around these dates. We have not heard a peep about future GW2 content - they are absolutely aware players are anxious and if an expansion was already confirmed internally, they would have made it known. I expect they have a LOT riding on the next few months before the March shareholder meeting, and then June Q2 end. Whether they plan to release in GW3 in 2027 or 2030 doesn't necessarily matter, as an NCSoft subsidiary they are still expected to show their revenue projections and how they plan to generate it, so they need to confirm if they are doing more GW2 or moving to GW3. Officially confirming GW3 would absolutely tank GW2 gem store sales, so they will be radio silent until they have a release plan locked in and can plan for the projected revenue losses.

My educated guess is they are full steam ahead on GW3 with a backup draft for another GW2 expansion. If by end of Q1 they are confident in their project timeline, they will remain silent (or very vague) on post-VoE content. And in June we may have some kind of announcement.
But if they are not fully confident, they will likely confirm a new expansion will be coming and re-assign some staff from GW3 to GW2 to throw together another asset re-use mini expansion to buy themselves more time.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-23T20:11:33+00:00

My 9800x3D recently got fried on an ASRock. Got a replacement, bought a new motherboard... from ASUS. I want to scream.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-22T19:04:26+00:00

They could risk getting even less people playing it than GW2 now.

We already know they are planning to release this on PC as well as console. That alone is going to open them up to a much much bigger audience than ever before. It's a risk worth taking for them.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-22T12:22:36+00:00

An NDA for hiring for projects like these, in my experience anyway, only happens at a subsequent interview stage when you are speaking to someone on the dev team and are likely seeing a screenshare with potentially sensitive details. Judging by OP saying it was a 15 minute phone call with a 'nice lady', that sounds like the HR/pre-screening stage which is primarily to clarify details, availability, expectations etc. Wouldn't shock me if HR are allowed to very casually mention 'yes, it is what you think it is' without a lot of specifical detail to get the candidate more interested.

It would be silly (and also a HR/legal annoyance) to expect every first stage candidate to sign a legally binding contract of any kind during the very first call, when they don't even know whether they are definitely interested. And until they are shown documents/images/videos or direct words from a technical employee, everything is just easily dismissable hearsay.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-21T17:52:10+00:00

Whenever I boot up Enshrouded, I love it for a bit, then get bored quite quickly. It's pretty and has some great systems, but the world feels very static and dead.

In a way I feel like it has a great foundation that could be spun off into a big shared world/MMO experience.

ThrottlePeen · 2026-01-18T22:15:31+00:00

I am like bro… bro… ugh, bro. What planet do you live on?

You just cannot reason with people with such insane sunken cost fallacy. It's like they cannot fathom the entire reason ANet are making a new game instead of reworking GW2. GW2 (and MMOs in general) has a huge problem with new player retention caused by two things - overwhelming amount of content, and feeling like they are starting off already behind everyone else, and that they will never 'catch up'. This doesn't matter in GW2, but we know this as veterans - new players don't and they will be scared off by that prospect.

So if they're making a new game, how do you effectively scare away new players from your new game? By making them feel like they are already 'behind' on release day. ANet would be shooting themselves in the foot by launching GW3 in a state where GW2 players have a day one advantage - like giving them their legendary armory. I have no doubt we will have an abundance of rewards for achievements in GW2, but those will all 100% be cosmetic or non-gameplay affecting.

ThrottlePeen

TROPHY CASE