@WinterSnowblind said:

@Funkydupe: It doesn't stray too far from the typical MMO formula but makes a lot of changes for the better (in my opinion) and puts a big focus on skill, rather than grinding/time spent playing/level and gear. The whole player ego thing takes a huge kick to the crotch, which will upset some, since you can't really hang around just showing off how "l33t" you are. The position based combat, dynamic events, lack of a dedicated healer class and real co-operative quests are the big things though.

I felt the first game was more or less designed for people who hate WoW and this is pretty much the same deal, but on a much bigger scale.

That's not entirely correct. There's definitely 'Prestige' gear for PvE and PvP achievements, it's just that prestige gear won't be statistically superior, since all gear is normalized for each lvl. So it's not like vanilla WoW was, when wearing Naxxramas Tier 3 gear meant that you ARE A GOD, in comparison to other non-tier 3 players.

@Funkydupe: IMO, the key difference in GW2's design is the focus on boundry-free cooperation. Making grouping not a matter of an invite, but of gameplay action (no mob tagging, loot generated for each player, area and dynamic quests instantly shared and open to everyone, participation always pays etc.) - just jump in and help out anybody, it'll always work out in your favor. Of course the 'dedicated healer free' combat is a big departure from the classic MMO group dynamic, and it remains to be seen if the world at large will embrace it. At least for PvP, it's flipping brilliant. Very high TTK (time to kill), little healing power - making player combat the kind of war of attrition that allows for skill to overcome the odds, without making tactical group play meaningless, nor stretching out combat absurdly, like healers tend to do in classic holy trinity MMORPGs. Group play is less apparent for sure, and it will take some getting used to.

@General Sentiment of GW2 being too Unfinished: As for game itself. It's plenty polished as it is. Dunno if it's just my longtime experience with the genre, but 90% of what I've played worked as intended and was awesome to boot - I don't know what people expect from the genre. People talking about 'ability delay' are talking about peak hour lag due to high traffic. Every online game has that. It's been perfectly responsive during off hours. Did you have lag in Diablo 3 during open beta? Gamebreakingly so? Sure you did. Does that mean that Diablo 3 is in big trouble because of it? That its core gameplay is defunct? Nope. Latency issues are serverside hardware issues and general networking issues. Around the launch of every major online game, be it a FPS, MMORPG or whatever - there's going to be latency-related problems, because it just doesn't pay to invest in hardware matching the traffic spike at launch.

Performance-wise, it ran fine for me, and I'm sitting at a 2 year old PC, playing a build of the game that's neither using my GPU, nor my CPU properly. The game's using a modified GW1 engine, which is known to be very performant and efficient. It'll run more than fine on a broad array of machines - once it's optimized - I'm sure.

As for the class specifics. I've only played 3 out of 8 classes thus far, and there's definitely room for improvement. It's just that that's expected. Do I think the Mesmer will continue to play the way he does? Nope! I think clones and phantasms will no longer despawn once an enemy dies, because in the big picture of things, it doesn't make any sense, and it detracts from the functionality and fun of the class. Do I think it'd be the end of the world if the game launches with the Mesmer's class mechanic still being as it was in the past BWE? Nope. It's perfectly fine for a MMO to be 'unfinished', because that's what an MMO needs to be anyways.

Online games are living breathing entities, and NOT some timeless unchanging creature of perfection. That's the wrong expectation to have. If ArenaNet is truely done with 'content creation' for launch, and all they currently do is hunting down and stomping out bugs, as well as putting their PvE and PvP balance to the test and tare it as best they can for release - they can launch anytime they want. That'll be soon enough.

@Seppli: Unfortunately, my friends and I alone (four of us) submitted probably around 100 bug reports total about broken events, abilities not working correctly, getting stuck in a wall, and so on (we were all grouping together, as well, so we were always in the same area). The game's polished, but there's still a TON to fix.

As for optimization, I'm running on a two year old PC that was top of the line two years ago, and couldn't even get above 35 FPS on the lowest settings possible, and that was with no one on screen. WvW battles were often a slideshow. I'm not the only one too- there's a 400 post thread in the GW2 forums about people having top end systems (GTX 680s, Sandybridges, etc) that can't even get 30 FPS with the lowest settings with the newest drivers available.

The network issues need to be better hidden as well. Unfortunately, the game is going to experience that high spike latency issue at launch, and that needs to be mitigated as much as possible. The Diablo 3 beta, for me, was perfectly fine- and I played it in the first hours it was open, online with a bunch of friends; GW2 wasn't close to that. I'm not sure how they'd accomplish this, or even if they should focus on it for now; they have bigger bugs to fry.

As much as I'd like for it to come out soon (I still enjoyed the hell out of it in it's unfinished state), that won't cut it for the general public anymore. People have already felt disappointed in TOR, so they're already going to come in with skepticism. The game NEEDS to be the best it can be before it launches to maximize critical success and public appeal.

@Seppli said:

Snip

The prestige grinds really need to be looked at imo, as it stands currently a prestige gear set from a dungeon takes 145 clears of explorable, which is insane. GW1 had its fare share of obnoxious and pointless grinds, but they really need to look at gating prestige rewards behind challenging content instead of massive repetition. Obviously, this is just a tuning issue though.

I'd echo the performance concerns mentioned above, and say it just needs to be refined overall really. An upside I suppose is that they shut down the beta forums to go over everyones feedback.

The next BWE will be a measuring stick imo to see what systems have been changed / iterated on.

@Dark_Lord_Spam said:

@Seppli said:

I guess class-specific tutorial quests could alleviate that. Then again, MMOs iterate and iterate, and what's true now now might not be true tomorrow, so tutorial quests kinda don't make much sense - and after proper release, there's ample time to learn the ins and outs of any profession anyways...

They really do need to revamp the game's tutorials. I would say that's my biggest problem at this point. That someone like me, who has read essentially everything about this game so far, can forget entirely about a couple of basic gameplay systems during the BWE does not bode well for newcomers. It also doubles as a kind of "shut the fuck up" to people who start playing and don't immediately see anything different from a typical MMO.

I agree 100%. My time in the BWE was simply mass confusion. Great ideas abound in GW2, but they need to ease us into this new way of thinking about things. Hopefully, they stripped out a good chunk of tutorial stuff like they do in most Beta events.

On a side note, All of the Dynamic events I participated in during the BWE were "running to the guy with the red title and killing him". I hope I'm wrong about this, but it seems if you are not in the exact right place at the right time all context is lost.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Seppli: Unfortunately, my friends and I alone (four of us) submitted probably around 100 bug reports total about broken events, abilities not working correctly, getting stuck in a wall, and so on (we were all grouping together, as well, so we were always in the same area). The game's polished, but there's still a TON to fix.

I could play WoW right now and file 100 bug reports on stuff that's 'not quite right' soon after. I don't quite get the standard applied here. Getting stuck? Expected. Some wierd fail in a quest making it unsolvable? Expected. Abilties not quite doing what they should? Expected. I've seen much worse in games out for years, than I've seen in the past GW2 beta weekend. I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's highly functional already, and not far away from being perfectly fine for release. Just dress the streaker pussycat placeholder bartender lady and we're golden.

By now, everybody who takes an interest knows that the BWE build was not yet optimized. I've read plenty of times, that optimization happens at the very end of the development cycle. ArenaNet did expressly say that the BWE build was not optimized. It's okay to be concerned, but really, if it's not yet optimized, it's not yet optimized, it's not yet optimized. That's all there is to say on that topic. People are reading way too much into the relatively low performance during the past BWE. It's not yet optimized, so it doesn't matter if you've got the best, newest, most powerful hardware in the world - in fact, it might be to your detriment.

As far as I see it, it's going to be like turning on a lightswitch. Enable multicore CPU support. Enable GPU acceleration. WAM BAM! Performant client. It's certainly more complicated than that, but that's gist of it. Optimization will happen. How much of a difference it will make remains to be seen, but calling out a game on its performance, despite it being upfront about being unoptimized - well, it's wrong, because it isn't an issue yet. It actually ran quite amazingly for being unoptimized. At least for some (like me).

It's a question of standards. Measuring this past GW2 BWE at my standard for MMORPG betas, it's been pretty amazing. I did not get that 'unfinished' vibe, some seem to have suffered from. I've seen an MMO in Beta, a fun MMO with no basic problems and the need for optimization and polish. Certainy nothing dramatic.

Darn, I wanted this game during the summer.

@Adamsons said:

@Seppli said:

Snip

The prestige grinds really need to be looked at imo, as it stands currently a prestige gear set from a dungeon takes 145 clears of explorable, which is insane. GW1 had its fare share of obnoxious and pointless grinds, but they really need to look at gating prestige rewards behind challenging content instead of massive repetition. Obviously, this is just a tuning issue though.

I'd echo the performance concerns mentioned above, and say it just needs to be refined overall really. An upside I suppose is that they shut down the beta forums to go over everyones feedback.

The next BWE will be a measuring stick imo to see what systems have been changed / iterated on.

This was the norm in GW1 too though. You needed to farm some content hundreds of times before you could get the super elite armours. I was content with my $60k armour. Even that took a ridiculous amount of grind for my tastes, but it was manageable.

Dungeons should definitely be about difficulty and not how many times you clear them though. Make them near impossible to beat (but only once, or even a handful of times, but not more). Beating something 145 times is not fun lol.

@UssjTrunks: There was only one set that really took any effort to get, which was the obsidian armour. All the rest required simple the materials which can be easily obtained. Except the Vabbian armour. Add that to the hard to get pile as well.

@Seppli: I don't know what MMOs you've played, but encountering broken quests, getting stuck in areas, and abilities not functioning as intended over 100 times in about 10-20 hours of play isn't really acceptable. Saying "it's close enough" won't really cut it with the general public now, especially after TOR.

As far as optimization goes, it's not that it's using only one core (it used all of mine, I still had 8-30 FPS on low), and it's not as simple as "enabling GPU acceleration." Having the GPU perform optimally requires careful inspection of the engine's method of vector/point calculation for each part of the graphical pipeline, as well as making sure that those parts of the engine are synchronized with whatever work the CPU does graphically. Even then, it's very easy to rely on some low-level GPU call that isn't consistent across some cards, resulting in painful debugging processes. Optimization isn't automatically done by the OS or some driver, it has to be meticulously planned out. The reason I doubt they haven't really focused on it yet is that they're likely still changing a lot of the backend calls in the executable, and premature optimization is often not only a waste of time, but can actually make the program run slower.

End of June would be enough time to get bored of Diablo 3, I would be fine with that.

But that's very optimistic, as fun as the beta was, it was not 1-2 months from release, they have a lot of work to do.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Seppli: I don't know what MMOs you've played, but encountering broken quests, getting stuck in areas, and abilities not functioning as intended over 100 times in about 10-20 hours of play isn't really acceptable. Saying "it's close enough" won't really cut it with the general public now, especially after TOR.

As far as optimization goes, it's not that it's using only one core (it used all of mine, I still had 8-30 FPS on low), and it's not as simple as "enabling GPU acceleration." Having the GPU perform optimally requires careful inspection of the engine's method of vector/point calculation for each part of the graphical pipeline, as well as making sure that those parts of the engine are synchronized with whatever work the CPU does graphically. Even then, it's very easy to rely on some low-level GPU call that isn't consistent across some cards, resulting in painful debugging processes. Optimization isn't automatically done by the OS or some driver, it has to be meticulously planned out. The reason I doubt they haven't really focused on it yet is that they're likely still changing a lot of the backend calls in the executable, and premature optimization is often not only a waste of time, but can actually make the program run slower.

Hence I say it's premature to be jammering about performance, when the client is not yet optimized. Obviously.

I simply did not encounter or perceive as much 'broken' things as you guys have. I had some friendly/enemy NPCs not doing what they should be doing and some skills that lacked polish, some quests that could have been clearer, some latency-related issues, as well as common bugs that never will be entirely eradicated from games of this scale - I encountered nothing outright broken core gameplay-wise. Rough - at times, but that's the extent of it.

What was broken were mostly backend things, like overflow servers splitting up groups, trading post servers having a coronary, login-servers unable to keep up. I don't see how it's a big problem to fix most of these issues within the next couple of months. A late Summer, early Fall release seems perfectly reasonable and realistic to me.

Don't get your TOR comment - as far as I'm concerned, it never felt as round as Guild Wars 2 already does.

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/statuses/199968015398346752

Still an open ball game.

@Seppli said:

By now, everybody who takes an interest knows that the BWE build was not yet optimized. I've read plenty of times, that optimization happens at the very end of the development cycle. ArenaNet did expressly say that the BWE build was not optimized. It's okay to be concerned, but really, if it's not yet optimized, it's not yet optimized, it's not yet optimized. That's all there is to say on that topic. People are reading way too much into the relatively low performance during the past BWE. It's not yet optimized, so it doesn't matter if you've got the best, newest, most powerful hardware in the world - in fact, it might be to your detriment.

As far as I see it, it's going to be like turning on a lightswitch. Enable multicore CPU support. Enable GPU acceleration. WAM BAM! Performant client. It's certainly more complicated than that, but that's gist of it. Optimization will happen. How much of a difference it will make remains to be seen, but calling out a game on its performance, despite it being upfront about being unoptimized - well, it's wrong, because it isn't an issue yet. It actually ran quite amazingly for being unoptimized. At least for some (like me).

Yes.

@Maystack: It always has been. GameStop (and plenty of other retailers, I guess) is perfectly content to push that release date on their website back a couple months at a time to suck as many pre-orders as they can out of people who like hard numbers.

@Seppli: What I meant by the TOR comment is that a lot of people probably thought TOR was going to be the "new big MMO" or something similar, tried it, and discovered something that was, well... not great, meaning they're most likely not even considering touching another MMO. Sure, GW2 is already looking better, but it's going to have to be in tip-top shape to draw those people back into an MMO.

Jeff might not be the best example, but his description of his short time with GW2 is kind of the thing I'm describing here. Jeff played the shit out of TOR, said he found it was sort of boring, and probably didn't want to play another MMO again for a while. While he might not have been interested in GW2 for other reasons, I can't help but feel that if GW2 had been in a better state- more optimized, better tutorials and so on- that it might have grabbed him.

And maybe you didn't really encounter as many broken things as I did, which is entirely plausible. Things seemed to break kind of randomly in the BWE.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Seppli: What I meant by the TOR comment is that a lot of people probably thought TOR was going to be the "new big MMO" or something similar, tried it, and discovered something that was, well... not great, meaning they're most likely not even considering touching another MMO. Sure, GW2 is already looking better, but it's going to have to be in tip-top shape to draw those people back into an MMO.

Jeff might not be the best example, but his description of his short time with GW2 is kind of the thing I'm describing here. Jeff played the shit out of TOR, said he found it was sort of boring, and probably didn't want to play another MMO again for a while. While he might not have been interested in GW2 for other reasons, I can't help but feel that if GW2 had been in a better state- more optimized, better tutorials and so on- that it might have grabbed him.

And maybe you didn't really encounter as many broken things as I did, which is entirely plausible. Things seemed to break kind of randomly in the BWE.

I have no doubt they'll fix all this before release. The game right now has a lot of technical issues. I didn't run into any optimization issues myself (the game ran surprisingly smoothly on my low end machine), but I did notice A LOT of bugs in PvE. Nothing game breaking though, which is why I can't see it taking more than 2-3 months to fix.

I think the appeal of this game will be the fact that it's the first legitimate MMO ever released without a subscription fee or a P2W model. That alone will attract a lot of new players to the genre who could not have otherwise been able to afford to pay subs or lacked the free time to make a sub worthwhile. That's pretty much the reason I'm here (and the fact that I played GW1, but that game attracted me for those reasons as well). I think it will succeed just based on those merits.

@UssjTrunks: Paying a subscription fee certainly doesn't mean you'll get a quality experience. Most MMOs tend to end up as F2P games eventually, and when they do it is always seen as a sign of fail or defeat.

They've taken their $60-$80-$150 cut from how many people?  200,000?  500,000?
You simply don't start selling the full game unless you're close to shipping the full game.  Anything later than July would make ArenaNet a bunch of scumbags.

@Floppypants: You can pre-purchase Blops 2 for a November release? How is GW2 different, except knowing MMO's announce a release date closer to release?

@Floppypants: If anything, it's to make sure that people aren't just paying for the beta access. The higher the entry requirement, the more likely you'll get early adopters who know they want the game on release and are committed to improving the final product (i.e. not demo-hounds).

@Floppypants:

I have been a PC gamer for years, and every time i purchase a game i know there are NO refunds on PC games (especially for physical copies). I was also thinking of Blops 2 on Steam.

You pre-purchased a game knowing full well that there is no release day announced, with no promise of such a thing anytime soon. All you were promised was Beta's and a 3-day head-start, and apparently that was enough to suck you in.

Tardy delivery of Guild Wars 2 isn't an excuse to demand anything, it just makes bad press for Arenanet. You also have three choices of purchase on release, pre-order, and pre-purchase. No one is forcing you to pre-purchase, if you feel bad paying upfront a ways ahead of release you can just pre-order, or wait for release.

@Floppypants said:

Just the other month I bought a physical copy of ME3 from GameStop purely for their stupid, exclusive preorder bonus, redeemed the code, then returned the game.

That's not a very good example of consumer relations, seeing as how some sucker is going to pay full price for that copy of Mass Effect only to find it doesn't include the DLC he was promised.

@Dark_Lord_Spam: If I had to open the box to get the code, I wouldn't have been able to return the game. The N7 Warfare Gear preorder bonus code was printed on the receipt. If GameStop did turn around my copy of the game to someone who also preordered, they'd get a fresh code printed on their receipt.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Seppli: What I meant by the TOR comment is that a lot of people probably thought TOR was going to be the "new big MMO" or something similar, tried it, and discovered something that was, well... not great, meaning they're most likely not even considering touching another MMO. Sure, GW2 is already looking better, but it's going to have to be in tip-top shape to draw those people back into an MMO.

Jeff might not be the best example, but his description of his short time with GW2 is kind of the thing I'm describing here. Jeff played the shit out of TOR, said he found it was sort of boring, and probably didn't want to play another MMO again for a while. While he might not have been interested in GW2 for other reasons, I can't help but feel that if GW2 had been in a better state- more optimized, better tutorials and so on- that it might have grabbed him.

And maybe you didn't really encounter as many broken things as I did, which is entirely plausible. Things seemed to break kind of randomly in the BWE.

I have no doubt they'll fix all this before release. The game right now has a lot of technical issues. I didn't run into any optimization issues myself (the game ran surprisingly smoothly on my low end machine), but I did notice A LOT of bugs in PvE. Nothing game breaking though, which is why I can't see it taking more than 2-3 months to fix.

I think the appeal of this game will be the fact that it's the first legitimate MMO ever released without a subscription fee or a P2W model. That alone will attract a lot of new players to the genre who could not have otherwise been able to afford to pay subs or lacked the free time to make a sub worthwhile. That's pretty much the reason I'm here (and the fact that I played GW1, but that game attracted me for those reasons as well). I think it will succeed just based on those merits.

I'm kinda wondering where the 6/26 date came from because it seems like Jeff knows something we don't.

Of course they would say they haven't announced a release date officially, but why would Jeff even post here if all he had to go on was the gamestop date? He's not the type to follow Gamestop's usual release date listings blindly, as he said in his post.

#e3mysteries

I went into it knowing full well that we were far away from release, and that it was going to be a real beta weekend, but man. I had lots of fun with the Elementalist, but I was getting my ass handed to me everytime I tried to take on more than 2-3 enemies with my Charr warrior. I was kiting and dodging, and healing and dying, often. Also, I stopped playing my Ranger after lvl 3, because the pets were completely useless.

So yeah, I hope they take their sweet time to fix this stuff.

@Benny: I had that suspicion this morning. ANet themselves have said to not pay attention to retailer's release dates. For Jeff to back up the June date, there might be something other than the gamestop date he's going off. I thought he might have learnt something from one of those pre-e3 judge shows, but ANet usually skip e3.

@Maystack: I just included the e3 mysteries bit because it seems to have become a thing. I don't believe they're at E3 or anything.

Or do I? #e3mysteries.

But I definitely think Jeff's heard it elsewhere.

@Skogen said:

It really comes down to people forgetting what the word "beta" use to mean, and what it means now.

This.

Also, it's fine with me. Way too many fucking games to play right now.

Cool Bro Story:

I chatted with one of the leads and a coder on this game in the BF3 press queue at Gamescom 2011. They were really friendly, so I hope this game does well, even though I have no personal interest in it.

This summer seems like a realistic window

@Floppypants said:

@Dark_Lord_Spam: If I had to open the box to get the code, I wouldn't have been able to return the game. The N7 Warfare Gear preorder bonus code was printed on the receipt. If GameStop did turn around my copy of the game to someone who also preordered, they'd get a fresh code printed on their receipt.

Oh. Duh. Didn't see the "pre-order" part.

@Benny said:

I'm kinda wondering where the 6/26 date came from because it seems like Jeff knows something we don't.

Of course they would say they haven't announced a release date officially, but why would Jeff even post here if all he had to go on was the gamestop date? He's not the type to follow Gamestop's usual release date listings blindly, as he said in his post.

#e3mysteries

Jeff Gerstmann: Inside Operator: The Movie: Origins

@Dark_Lord_Spam:

yeah i dont' believe it'll be ready for summer time.  Probably in the fall release window.

I'm starting to believe this late June release rumour more and more for several reasons

• I don't think ANet would take pre-purchases if they were more than a few months from release
• They've already had three (or is it two) beta events, and so have probably ironed out most of the problems
• Jeff came in here to back up the 26/6 date, and I suspect he has more of a reason to believe that than GameStop

If the last stress test is anything to go by, there'll be another BWE next weekend (18th - 20th), and then another one a few weeks later (8th - 10th). Then it'll be released fully on the 26th.

#e3mysterysolved

@Beaudacious: I spent a fair bit of time on the forums. Most of it is just typical MMO whiners (try logging into the SWTOR/WoW forums--games are released, and the forums are even worse).

The major issues that I saw were: melee being at a slight disadvantage, Mesmer's confusion condition being severely underpowered, and Engineer's kits not supplementing proper weapon variety and swapping. For a game without a release date, this is pretty damn good. All three issues can be solved via simple number tweaks for release, with more inventive solutions post-release to fix them permanently.

I'm holding out for August/September release. They'll want to get out before the holiday rush--hopefully toward the summer while people are bored out of their goddamn mind. Also wouldn't be a bad idea to get out beforeMists of Pandaria. As irrelevant as Guild Wars 2 makes WoW, you can't underestimate pull of a WoW expansion. What you want is people to dabble enough into Guild Wars 2 to garner a solid communal presence, then have them flock to Mists and realize how dated most of the systems are and cancel their subscriptions even faster than the post-Cataclysm exodus.

Speaking of Jeff and the 6/26 date, anyone else notice on the most recent bombcast when they were talking about MMOs, Jeff offhandedly remark "and we have Guild Wars 2 coming in June". I thought it was interesting considering the post he made on this thread.

#e3mysteries

I think Jeff is probably making an assumption based on information available to all of us and possibly (?) industry experience. He doesn't know anything we don't. Also, everyone knows that the game is releasing in July on my birthday.

#mysterydebunked

I find it hilarious you guys are putting any stock into what Jeff said. Arenanet itself probably doesn't have a 100% firm date right now, let alone Jeff.

A single issue could push an MMO back this is why they're usually announced close to release. If Jeff knew, other outlets would know as well, and such information would of already leaked. Release date information is not trickled out to press, they find out the same day we find out( or maybe a couple of days before).

Any talk of probably summer is speculation, just as fall and winter . No one knows, Arenanet has a good idea, but that is it.

@Beaudacious: I have five Brad Bucks that say June 26th.

I don't think it'll be later than August/September, honestly. The game I played seemed pretty polished, and ran well. All of the major features were in the game, and its just coming down to tweaking, adding a couple of voice-overs, and a little further testing on class balance. If I were to bet, I'd say June/July. I think if it slips any further, people will lose confidence in ArenaNet, and interest in the game.

@Beaudacious said:

I find it hilarious you guys are putting any stock into what Jeff said. Arenanet itself probably doesn't have a 100% firm date right now, let alone Jeff.

A single issue could push an MMO back this is why they're usually announced close to release. If Jeff knew, other outlets would know as well, and such information would of already leaked. Release date information is not trickled out to press, they find out the same day we find out( or maybe a couple of days before).

Any talk of probably summer is speculation, just as fall and winter . No one knows, Arenanet has a good idea, but that is it.

The stress test is coming this weekend. The game releases soon.

Late July IMHO. The hype train is reaching it's speed limit, they can't let it die down.

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Beaudacious said:

I find it hilarious you guys are putting any stock into what Jeff said. Arenanet itself probably doesn't have a 100% firm date right now, let alone Jeff.

A single issue could push an MMO back this is why they're usually announced close to release. If Jeff knew, other outlets would know as well, and such information would of already leaked. Release date information is not trickled out to press, they find out the same day we find out( or maybe a couple of days before).

Any talk of probably summer is speculation, just as fall and winter . No one knows, Arenanet has a good idea, but that is it.

The stress test is coming this weekend. The game releases soon.

The stress test is a 7hour event to improve the stability of the servers for the next beta weekend. You can't base speculation of the release date on it.

But I do agree that June-July is looking possible, if not probable. That would leave room for 1 more beta weekend event, maybe even 2 before release. Depending on how those events go, I'm sure Anet is prepared to postpone the release if they feel the need to fix things.

When is the next scheduled beta weekend?

@Funkydupe said:

When is the next scheduled beta weekend?

7 hour stress test on monday starting at 11AM PDT.

@Giefcookie said:

@SeriouslyNow said:

@Beaudacious said:

I find it hilarious you guys are putting any stock into what Jeff said. Arenanet itself probably doesn't have a 100% firm date right now, let alone Jeff.

A single issue could push an MMO back this is why they're usually announced close to release. If Jeff knew, other outlets would know as well, and such information would of already leaked. Release date information is not trickled out to press, they find out the same day we find out( or maybe a couple of days before).

Any talk of probably summer is speculation, just as fall and winter . No one knows, Arenanet has a good idea, but that is it.

The stress test is coming this weekend. The game releases soon.

The stress test is a 7hour event to improve the stability of the servers for the next beta weekend. You can't base speculation of the release date on it.

But I do agree that June-July is looking possible, if not probable. That would leave room for 1 more beta weekend event, maybe even 2 before release. Depending on how those events go, I'm sure Anet is prepared to postpone the release if they feel the need to fix things.

But they DO need to fix things. I just can't see how they can get all that optimization and those bug fixes/balancing out the door in two months.

I could maybe, MAYBE see end of July/early August, but late June just seems impossible to me.

@isnipeyoudie said:

@Giefcookie said:

The stress test is a 7hour event to improve the stability of the servers for the next beta weekend. You can't base speculation of the release date on it.

But I do agree that June-July is looking possible, if not probable. That would leave room for 1 more beta weekend event, maybe even 2 before release. Depending on how those events go, I'm sure Anet is prepared to postpone the release if they feel the need to fix things.

But they DO need to fix things. I just can't see how they can get all that optimization and those bug fixes/balancing out the door in two months.

I could maybe, MAYBE see end of July/early August, but late June just seems impossible to me.

If they can stabilize the servers and optimize the game to run at above 30fps, its more than ready to be released. Hopefully the last beta event gave them enough data to do some bugfixing.

I'm not entirely sure what the large amount of deep problems OP was talking about were, but the beta did have some problems. July/Sep release day seems perfectly reasonable to me. Thats enough time for 2-4 more beta weekends and long enough to polish the game.