User:Misery/The List

This is a list of significant coding and design errors ArenaNet has made within the Guild Wars engine and game that has in the past or still causes them major headaches. It is intended to be instructive and is not all inclusive. I will add to it as I see fit/can be bothered.

Applies to situation as at September 2nd 2009.

Lack of z-axis
Causes ridiculous issues on maps with crossing paths such as Bull's Striking someone on the level below you and body blocking on Relic Runs. Could have been avoided completely with restricted map design, but this option was not taken.

Attribute scaling
The numbers on every skill are set by two integers, the value at zero attribute level and the value at fifteen attribute level. This can only be done in a linear manner. This means that break points, the most important concept when selecting attributes cannot be set exactly where they need to be. For example, this means it is impossible to scale Backbreaker in such a way that the 4 second KD is only available at attribute rank 13 without making 1 second or 5 second knockdowns easily attainable. It cripples balance.

Amulet of Protection
Instead of preventing any additional damage once the cap had been reached, this was programmed to heal up additional damage after the fact. This allowed the Spoil Victor/Cyclone Axe exploit to function and I believe a clean spike on the Guild Lord from full health is still possible. Removing Cyclone Axe was a dirty hack to fix the problem.

Random arenas queue
Instead of inserting players into the queue at random as the name of the arena would imply, players are inserted into the queue in the order they hit "Enter Mission". Even after the fix of September 1st 2009, this is still apparently the case.

Canceling attack skills
For some reason it was decided that while skill activation can be canceled, attack skills cannot be canceled by pressing the escape key. This made things such as cancel weapon swapping for Backbreaker assassins very easy and made it impossible to fake out interrupts with attack skills, impossible to prevent the effects of Ineptitude or Clumsiness if they land during skill activation and makes qstepping during attack skill chains ridiculously easy. I assume this was to prevent accidental attack skill cancellation by moving during an attack skill chain. Despite this, there is still a convoluted way to cancel an attack skill, but it requires a high degree of premeditation. If you open your inventory and drag your weapon from the equipped slot to an empty inventory slot in the middle of the activation the activation will fizzle, costing you energy or adrenaline. I do not believe recharge will be triggered, but I haven't done this in a long time.

Life stealing and degeneration are not considered "damage"
I assume the bypassing of prot was intentional. I assume the ability to bypass the invulnerability of Cyndr the Mountain Heart and The Great Destroyer was not intentional. It also means that degeneration, the one of the biggest sources of damage for a ranger on the split, does not count for the current tie-break condition.

Hard coding of unnecessary variables
Backbreaker was stuck at a 4 second KD with no attribute investment for a long time due to the fact that ArenaNet staff claimed that knockdown durations had been hard-coded. It has also been claimed for other problems that they could not be addressed due to hard-coding.

/report requiring players to be in the same district
This makes avoiding reports trivially easy. Few people are motivated enough to take screen shots and submit a ticket every time they see someone advertising selling accounts or in-game gold.

The ability to message people while appear offline
I just think it's silly that you can message and harass people while they have no opportunity to respond. It also allows for accidental messaging of people while appearing offline and hoping for a response, which is impossible without a secondary means of contact. Messaging someone while appearing offline should either return an error message or open a two-directional communication channel.

Inconsistent skill wording
Compare the skill wording of Mark of Insecurity to Air of Disenchantment. The functionality is vastly different.