Guild Chat - Episode 50
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Guild Chat - Episode 50
- Title
- PvP updates
- Host
- Rubi Bayer
- Guests
- Grant Gertz
Benjamin Phongluangtham
Cal Cohen
Ray Patrick - Date
- June 23, 2017
- Official video
- YouTube
The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 50th episode of Guild Chat aired on June 23, 2017. Join host Rubi Bayer and her developer guests Benjamin Phongluangtham, Ray Patrick, Grant Gertz and Cal Cohen for this week’s Guild Chat, where they’ll discuss this week’s PvP update!
Transcription[edit]
hi everybody happy Friday and welcome to guild chat where we're talking about this week's PvP updates on Guild Wars 2 I'm your host Ruby and let me get it started to introduce you to our deaf guests our first two dub guests for the week Ben you're sitting closest so I'll pick on you first I'm Ben I'm the game designer for PvP awesome I'm grant I am the producer for PvP arrow vs. world awesome thank you guys I'll start by letting you guys know that we are going to try to take some questions if you have questions during the show just throw them in to chat a couple people behind the scenes will be passing them on to us and if we have time we will try to get those answered so let's go ahead and just start with automated tournaments since you guys worked on those they didn't quite go as planned but you had contingencies in play in place and those did go as planned so I'll let you guys address those yeah so we had things in place so that if there were issues with tournaments like we encountered on Tuesday that it would be only affecting the actual tournaments so when we ran the issues regular PvP you still ran fine the rest of the game Duran fine so those went off as anticipated in case we had issues obviously we tried to address the issues as quickly as possible when we got it our first term it up about a day later but yeah we had we had plans a place to make sure that we could limit the impact of any issues yeah that's that's helpful because it could have had a domino effect just from what I was hearing talking to you guys could have had a domino effect taken down all of PvP and it's really really nice that you guys planned for that and made sure that didn't happen yeah luckily they're pretty separated from the rest of the PvP so yeah thank you very very much we did we had an interesting Tuesday hey do you guys want to talk a little bit about the crash issues that we were into um yeah we had what I mean the guys later will explain it more technical detail yeah we have two more guys coming it was basically some some issues with somebody dropping a match and then like while there while the rosters were getting transferred or something like that a rail we all get I keys the server programmer to build more but but yeah and because of that kind of caught as a cascade fail like you'll see a screenshot later of us within our empty match like just like a lot of players experience so we had we had some issues in the morning as well weren't necessarily from work we did but just other things that happened in the game whenever you have a new release so we were working on getting those addressed and then as soon as we got those cleaned up we're going to went into our first tournament before Sunday we had since cleaned up the first issues we knew wasn't related to that and we could focus on just the tournament section of why those didn't go off as planned and kind of helped us limit where we needed a troubleshooting bug fix yeah you guys were you guys were super busy on Tuesday it's been a busy week yeah it is I saw a lot of you on Tuesday yeah I was running around we had a couple things that we're hoping to to celebrate with the first hermit and had to put those on hold till day to bury uh everything worked out alright so yeah awesome um let's see let's talk about some more fun stuff like the end of match mechanic yeah there's been actually been a lot of questions about it why we did it um a lot of the reason we did it was just we wanted kind of a better end to a match like right now people used to just run around and keep fighting or take points and we wanted something that kind of a little bit of a celebration um and a little bit of boasting to go happen at the end we're something we just thought was fun but we're going to continue to look at them and see how we can improve them we might be able to do stuff in the future like this is very maybe but like we could give different emotes and stuff that people could do at the end of the matches it's just a it's a wave it creates more tools that we can use to give players some different happy news to celebrate so for people who haven't seen it yet do you guys want to spoil a little bit yes what it is what happens is at the end of the match the winning team gets moved to some pedestals and then they get a bunch of options to dance or shoot fireworks off and people can leave we know that people that doesn't necessarily want to stick around the mattress that stuff so we didn't change the functionality for leaving the match you can leave instantaneously and there's still the scoreboard thing that actually covers up the players for the most part you get to see you get to close that to be able to see people dancing around but yeah we just wanted something that was a little bit more interesting than just letting the match go until the map was closed yeah so if it's not your thing you can still bail yeah you can bail any tool absolutely yeah and the statues in there you were telling me they went through multiple iterations you're thinking of the top team statues yeah thank you so we did have some a few bug iterations on the end of match pedestals though we've we tried to have tried to catch some dance emotes where it would float you off we found one that you have to run the dance for like two and a half minutes and how slowly work is way off so yeah I didn't realize the loop changed after that long time and the person slowly moves off the yeah everything just moves you a tiny bit yep so if you leave it for long enough it builds uh-huh and eventually they're just like way over here yeah we also had to like increase the collision on there because it's not all the player races actually moved the same way during the dances and stuff like that so at one point like the the Norn was doing a weird dip and then coming back up because his center point moves in a different way than the rest of races do so yeah we just had the collision moved out but there was a lot of weird like visual things luckily most of them were fairly simple fixes we didn't have to spend a lot of time I mean it was kind of a everything we had to did was just pretty simple didn't require any new code to do this whole thing for the most part nice so yeah which is all all done through scripting but as for the statues themselves we shipped live with I think the third iteration of statue textures the very first one which I think you can actually see in the blog post was using the box of fun petrify and then we found a different texture that we weren't overly pleased with so we asked a little bit help and got a few modifications made yeah luckily the effects team was really helpful and jumping on it once we looked at it it was literally like two weeks ago maybe that I'm like I don't think we can ship with this it just looks weird so I went like borrowed some effects time off books to actually get somebody to to punch it up a little bit they made it look a lot better what didn't you love they had this weird rim lighting on it was yeah Edward glow and the color of the actual armor bled through a little bit that was weird it was just a combination of things just didn't feel right so just it was just a little bit of love made a lot of difference with nice all the gems are doing that for us for James James hid awesome schemes alright so were these the ones where we were talking I think there was a reddit thread where I was like okay so what if we go in there naked yeah that was these are those statues the ones that you get for becoming first place in the monthly tournament oh yeah look what we did think about about what players might try to do and I know there actually are some top players that play naked sometimes so yeah we wanted to keep that into account so you just get put basic armor if you go into it and we've tried to point this out but as a fact for those of you that think you have any shot at creating a statue of your own it won't take your outfits it won't take back items if I'm glad items as well if it's back items love it so if you've got an awesome outfit but your armor looks like garbage it's going to easier to that before going into the match village giving yourself good armor Rd that outfit if you want to cool statue alright if you guys been looking like what's the weirdest thing you've seen so far oh well have you gotten to see anything really good we I don't we've played around with a whole lot of different varieties um there's some amazing armor combination app hell yeah there are some strange though I mean people can with I would be interested to see people put some crazy armor on there as long as it's not naked so I think it'll be pretty interesting the combinations people people do we did want it to be as customizable as possible because it should show your personality through and your giant nerd mustache yeah what it was like the first thing I saw everybody saying is giant nor mustache so thank you for not taking that away along with the back pieces and the ability to be naked on the statue okay awesome alright so beyond that you guys hid a lot of stuff around the PvP Lobby - yeah some of the stuff we did the llama farm I know llamas are kind of are like themed pet um so we decided to put a little farm over there yeah so yeah we were just looking for stuff after we got that all the basic functionally moved over we were just looking at an adding flavor so llama farm adding the llama achievement adding a jump puzzle things for do for things for people to do we we migrated the rubble pile from the old as well where everybody enjoyed standing on and dancing on and some reason congregating around it's got its own island it should be a nice ray of light on it just make sure that the rubble pile never gets forgotten yeah and then we wanted to add another thing for people to do between matches so we added the free-for-all arena that's in there okay I want to talk about the free-for-all arena in a second but I want to back up to the llama farm and ask who did the NPC's dialogue I was me rude I thought it is not an insult I'm complimenting that it's I mean I think it's a little fun to poke a little find it every once in a while I mean you're not wrong I know that's why I did it I could actually like hear laughter over in the corner of the room right now I'm looking at one of the questions we got here regarding um how your legendary armor look I actually haven't done it with a generic just like anyway well it does it because it going to be am yeah that's a good quick I would imagine it's going to be the non-combat version but probably have to go in and actually try and that's a good question but my gut says it would be the non-combat version cows giving me a thumbs up over the corner so I think that's going on right okay probably Peter okay there actually is a good question now I'm very curious so somebody needs to get in there and find out for us we'll head out so check it out yeah alright so free-for-all arena yeah that was basically I don't even know who came up with the idea or we were just thinking of things we could possibly in the arena yeah cuz you know people have been asking a while for you know some way to do dual zone 1 zone while we didn't want to necessarily put in a whole new system functionality of you know right-click duel or anything like that we want to give you enough can you do still like go fight trial builds just yeah something to spend your time while you're waiting on a cue or you're in the middle of a tournament or all that just you know go have fun try it was a whole pile to stand out what more do you want people have actually played it a lot more than I thought they would I thought it would die down pretty fast but I was in there like I went out because I want to see if make sure the term is started last night around 11 so I jumped in there and there were still a decent sized people down there I jump in there every once a while for a quick fight and let people get that I killed me and get there killed of achievement so sweet I don't let them but they I'm like you're gonna get killed the station jumping for that title it's also been nice to see people like you know sitting in the stands just kind of passing time I mean I think the other day well we're monitoring one of the tournament's tours before devs just kind of sitting in the upper terrace just hanging out yeah interact it's fun to just watch people to like in the background fight many people might start gambling honor or something I don't know like people can do whatever they want there now they will yeah everybody catch that alright I have a couple of player questions just that we've seen thrown around um to the--to cues yes so when we were thinking about what we wanted to put into this this update we there were a lot of to be two tournaments going on that our player run and things of that nature and they were using a belief faux fires middle point to do their there to V twos so we felt like just giving them a map that if they still wanted to go and run their own 2v2 tournaments it was something that's more built from the ground up to support a 2v2 style combat and so that's much you can stay in customer you knows for right now a lot of players that if they want to continue running and organizing their own to be two matches they just have a better play space to do that and give us an opportunity to add some additional features to the customer it is like adding rounds and that basically deathmatch style game game mode to the customer Rena which they didn't have those options before even on a deaths match style map okay um I'm gonna hit you with this and I'm sorry rewards yes or do I need to elaborate or no so yeah we know we're always gonna be looking at the rewards to see like are they relevant and are they valid so we think for the most part the monthly rewards are in a pretty good spot there's actually something I'm working on that I don't want to mention right now because it's not done yet but I'm hoping I can get in there for the first monthly but 99% sure I'm going to get in there but I don't want to promise it because things change and then for the dailies where we're evaluating the the amount of stuff we're giving out we were a little conservative because we were a little concerned about farming which is always a concern especially in a tournament where there could be one team that just dominates all the time it always gets the top reward so but that being said I think we can we are going to evaluate it and and we'll keep and keep the publicans we're always watching feedback on reddit forums we've been on a lot of twitch streams getting feedback from players they're just listening to conversations trying to get as much information as we can and do our due diligence on the back end of making sure that the suggestions are feasible and realistic yeah you guys are you guys are paying attention yeah all that you did mention that there's you mentioned that there's something you're working on you don't want to say quite yet so you guys are you guys aren't done you're not just okay we're VP update we're out yeah I mean I think especially for the monthlies like they're never going to be completely done because I'd like to swap them out every once in a while but obviously like you never know what can happen or what resources I'm gonna have available to me to add that stuff in the future but I would like to to swap some stuff out as we get access to new things and with the team's got a pretty good list of items of additional functionality we would like to add a lot of my determines so we're going to continue to plug away at those and chew through that list as we've got you know bandwidth and the ability with nothing else coming along and there's nothing that distracts us and it's some other new shiny for PvP but right now our focus is is automated tournaments and continuing to build those out awesome alright so keep playing and keep talking to us about you guys all right I know you guys are super busy and we have two more PvP devs waiting in the wings so we will let you get back to work and we'll be right back in a few minutes stay with us his beard is a legendary weapon [Music] Essaouira are actually polite to him he always get what he wants for the mystic for - quaddle waits for him to show up the norm sing songs about the songs that he saw the pale tree grew just to give him shade [Music] the Asura have a college which studies him [Music] Dalia's earn to avoid wasting his time his shadow is level Edie tea Ryoga world completion with he was born [Music] he is the most interesting nor interior [Music] you and welcome back we're going to continue talking about the PvP update I'll let these two guys introduce themselves and talk about what they worked on for this update yeah I'm ray Patrick I'm a server programmer and I wrote the automated tournament server thank you I'm Cal Cohen I do QA related things for pupae and wah wah so it's been a really exciting week so far maybe Woodside a great way to put it a little too exciting a little bit too exciting yeah ok well why don't we start talking about that and how everything can look great until it's pushed live and then oh hey look at all the new problems and how I broke it 70,000 ways before that yeah tournaments looked great and testing I mean we ran into issues than we figured before release but then we just ran to some really unfortunate timings with the some things that were having to kind of uh yeah it's like that you know Robert Burns poem best laid plans of mice and men often go astray right I mean that's exactly we had tournaments like grade and testing and then I'd say when when they opened within like a minute or two we had 30 teams sign up immediately that it was just incredible though even that was that was awesome that was exciting yeah it was super exciting to see that and you know and Europe was even more there was tons of people just pouring in and we we definitely know we need to expand the tournament capacity because people were just just going in but but one of the things is that when all that happens you know that's a hard thing for us to test in studio and so um various issues that some issues happen right yeah I knew we were we're I mean it yeah it's okay say nothing it yeah I mean and I was actually interested what we were talking and how much testing you guys were doing and you did so much that you broke it in such a weird ways because you've broken all that you broke it in all the regular ways and then you kept going and I wanted to have you talk about that 17 but because yeah you just got into such real ways of breaking it that is impressed this was a pretty bizarre issue where for the most part I was usually running like I can run like 10 clients on my computer before it starts freaking out and slowing down so I would usually have like 10 clients in the tournament it's all running fine I think one morning my computer was running a little bit slower so I'm like oh I can only run seven clients as sign up for the tournament kick it off and then I see two teams get a buy which is not right because only one should get it by deciding right there should be three buys I guess I don't even know seven bracket but they're only two buys and then one guy that didn't even get a match at all and I was like this this is not right so first I needed to do it again because make sure it's yeah immediately repo maybe something weird happened but uh it definitely happened again so my god I run 16 tournament it's fine a team tournament it's fine ray what happened observer my place I just roll over which seemed it was a common occurrence like the last few weeks every morning I just pull over to raise desk and he knows something's on back like what oh no it's something else no um yeah that was just that just a bug in in the code that populates the the tree there's a really a game a binary tree that gets populated with matches and that was I forgot an else statement totally seven teams yeah weird thing it was it was odd any what happened in any case where you were one off the next power of T I think so and also the way it was trying to populate it it did yeah it was a one-off bug and then they also populated the buys correctly and then anyway it was gonna happen look like 15 teams to a team I just got sorry welcome we're an 7 teams at some point yeah found that one really good you found it and then actually after you fix that I had a little simulator thing that I I ran it up to hundreds and hundreds of teams to make sure that that bug didn't exist anymore so yes you spoke but unfortunately we still can't catch yeah everything even with a really good simulation yeah yeah because that doesn't simulate people coming and going houses to the limit live in surprise yeah so by the way if you did get stuck think Ray because he got you he's the one who got you out of the matches I am the guy that unsticks people that was actually ridiculous because he has to click a link for every player that's stuck so he had like a thousand tabs open in his browser it's like all right you're fixed your fix your fix weekly click click click is doing for like 10 minutes every three everyone up now per person Adam yeah name not every person remembers every person yeah so the first tournament we had both regions were actually full which was awesome yeah yeah filled up in like 10 minutes yeah filled up really fast yeah yeah it filled up really fast and then him and then we have we had that issue I mean the issue really was that we had a people were when the term started there were some there were some teams that hadn't fully confirmed and so then the the code had a bug in it where it would take those teams and go ahead and even though there weren't people in those teams it would populate them in the in a in the bracket and so then that's what happened to you guys when you started playing you had this like you're in a map with one only themselves yeah yes we can get snow buddy we got an ArenaNet team together to play tournament because it's fun we had a really tough match in the first round as you can see enemy team scored five points on us which is kind of embarrassing how did that happen before good work guys good work well I tried really hard to find a spot on the map where you could take fall damage and it's do it over and over and over and I managed to die before the tournament before the match ended so they scored five points yeah we did redeem ourselves the next day as soon as tournaments for working at arena team got together and we made top four of the tournament which is pretty exciting gradual ations and coming back from that other we learned a lot from the other match I think we really did a lot of practice after the fact we realized we're not really playing as well as we should yeah you know nobody scored five points so yeah yes so yeah that that that unfortunately you know he they were in it and they were I saw that they were in a match with just themselves and no other side I'm like okay that's a bug but maybe we'll be okay for you know but unfortunately after about 10 minutes when because there are other people that have this issue happen to when those match is completed in there's an invalid game result that happened because of that and that crash the server and so then the server went into a crash loop so we had to bring it down at that point which was a bummer yeah that's it's disappointing yeah but but we you know I sit up real late that night fix the bug you know we got it going the next day yeah and that was good and I actually should probably clarify that I'm really happy about the enthusiasm of all the people signing up I wasn't happy about things breaking yeah yeah yeah all these people from Europe signed up but then it broke woohoo so I'm very happy the whole tournaments in both regions and something blows up yeah yeah yeah I feel like we burned some capital there a little bit player capital but you know everything is running pretty well now yeah I mean really to another issue yesterday a lot of work this week and it's it's like you said it's been a very exciting week yeah definitely yeah yeah unfortunately had another similar really unfortunate timing window yesterday where yeah just we're ending right as the server restarted and managed to drop some of the cameras yeah we had a hotfix yesterday it just the timing was unbelievable just right when the tournament was starting and there was an issue with its technical but there was an issue where the terminan tournament installed essentially so we had to restart it it's like and they such a crazy small timing windows we tested something almost exactly the same with this and we have cover yeah we have code to handle when the bit win the game build changes and and we ask definitely servers the in its design so we could restart our servers all the time but we I think we still have smoking shoe there that's that's one of the great things about that design where you can restart the server yeah all the time and you I mean it was only one match worth of time lost right yeah that's right yeah yeah one match and yeah we and we decided to start a new tournament about 30 minutes later 40 minutes later so it's unfortunate but well and that's just the craziness of a live environment everyone smiled things that's like you said you tested for that and it's still that there was that tiny little chance that those two things would collide yeah didn't hit that magical time they did and of course they did yeah there was that that probably won't happen the chance is like what point oh yeah we don't try to think think it probably won't help it was more of we tested the exact case it didn't hit the problem we didn't think there was a problem Kal's like trying it you know locally on our dev ranch and it's so you know it's still okay so there's a there's a life is like that you know there's always something something new now you were saying that we were talking a couple times about how the match is filled up really really quickly you were saying we want to expand yeah we do yeah right now we could support a hundred teams um and being you know Dallas or in in North America and Europe separately we want to expand that and I'm not going to say how high we can go because that's work I'm currently working on yeah but we definitely we can go higher and we will go higher awesome yeah so not sure how high though yeah don't make things up yeah not gonna make things I just support the entire playerbase yeah why not just yeah yeah you know Cal yeah let's tell a story about testing 2v2 matches that's how I get safe there's a lot of great wait see what happens when you do what I tell you about - there's a lot of great QA stories from this because we were working on so many things at the same time yeah - V - being one of them interns being other ones so we were running to V to map as a tournament because it was a really useful way to kind of test multiple things at the same time and there was this weird case that happened I guess I'll explain the 2v2 map a little bit because this is mechanic that when the game times out timer spires it'll start creating this deathly fog ghost thing I don't really know what we call it but essentially it's name is any official name replica those things that it was you it's just an area that pulses damage so it will force people to die and end the match and we tested it in you know custom Rena's and everything was good so we were running it as a tournament and I was actually really excited about this tournament test tournament we had some alphas in there I was going super try hard because I want to win uh I was playing like Berserker warrior playing his dragon hunter it's really kind of unfortunate matchup but I thought like this to win I fell behind pretty badly I was like down Oh to in a best-of-five the cals by far the absolute best player on the team don't say that I'm sorry do you like it somebody well I mean shame on life is never a show like I'm like super focused mode got my fur was running with like my workout playlist that I sometimes used for PvP matches and won the next two games so we're going into fifth set but at the end of the fourth round we went to that overtime period and the fog was there and I still won because I killed the guy and they died of the fog but then when the round reset in tournaments the fog didn't go away I don't really know why we wait to figure it out so did Ray do it it wasn't real fault if that got Ben's fall over there so we both got resented a base and the fog was just killing us and so essentially came down to a coin flip and I lost and I got really upset because oh no what did he do he was just really upset I was gonna ham it up a little bit for it through my headset on the ground good work Ben good work yeah we found a bug that way I called Ben out no amazing yeah yeah you lost - yeah it's kind of unfortunate but everything something that we didn't really expect to happen again it only happened in tournament matches with this TV - map so so you found a bug and you got a good story good story fixed up I think it's a pretty good value overall yeah I'm sorry you lost yeah I don't I could just win the coin flip then fine and you wouldn't have a good story nice alright um do you guys have any questions she wouldn't answer Wow I don't know if we can see anything yeah none of that really applicable really like an answer the courrier thing go for it so we updated courtyard in this patch to just kind of gave it a secondary objective to fight over that's a kind of summary to be to wear something we're trying out in custom rayna's and there's no real plans to put that into a queue right now yeah the question was is courtyard and the new map going to be in some sort of playlist for matchmaking oh and the new map okay so that is the 2v2 map which grant touched on earlier where that's not really on our plans for right now trying out customers right now see how it goes okay also a question about spectating at tournament matches that is something we're looking into you guys have you guys have to plan for that yeah we're looking in we're looking into that no promises on that but that it's gonna be awesome it would be really awesome yeah okay speaking of you guys also I know are super super busy and probably want to lie down so I definitely need to lie down yeah I need to take a nice long weekend that's what I need to do all right I know I appreciate you guys giving us a little bit of your time today and I know you have also like the other two guys a ton of work to do so can you say one thing you could say all the things you want I just wanna say the PvP team and the competitive teams in general is just an awesome team we really really are you guys are put in the work the people went bad and just the people are really great and I'm a server programmer so I'm sort of embedded in that team but I get to sit with all these people and they're just awesome they're hilarious fun to talk to and we also should shout out to Evan Evan who did the B Y for the tournament was this really sweet looking Eli you definitely can I'm just trying not to take up too much of your time say all the things you want oh thank you doesn't have a reason no pressure but yeah no print what I'm sorry here like taco thing no it's fun also it's been actually I really enjoy the code I wrote for this it's been just professionally and personally a really great experience because I'm just I'm proud of it yeah there were bugs but you know I promise I'm pretty sure these aren't the first bugs that have ever happened in the history of gaming exactly I guess I can check that you get a fax icon that you have been other ones yes not the first bug that I've written as well so very first bug you've ever written in river yeah no it is not definitely it was yeah but it's I think it's a good system I think people are gonna like it I want ray back on somebody make a note all right thank you guys so much and thank you very much for your hard work thank you room in the middle of an insane week alright thank you just did good work thank you and thank you guys for playing PvP this week we'll see you next time