Guild Wars 2

Eldvin Monastery brew of the month

DaxSpa7

I am back after a near 2 month break and I wonder if next January I will be able to get the brew I have missed or I am screwed up :p. Thank you!

AnetNate

BobMosses

You’ll be able to get it next January

This is accurate. If you miss June, as an example, you’ll be able to get it the next time the month is June and you visit a major city.

Post requesting adding a new Raid category to the LFG

ArenaColin

Love the short term problem solving – wish it was easier for us to to do a quick short term fix. (sadly nothing with LFG is easy or quick)

I did want to quickly point out the team is aware of the recent discussions around things that aren’t working (or missing) from LFG and have it included in the list of “resolving outstanding issues” that is our goal for the spring update in April.

Not entirely sure what will actually make it yet LFG wise since it’s all in development – we’ll give more details once we’re sure.

Posts talking about sPvP

ANet Josua Davis

Kupper

The biggest thing for me is that the end of ESLmeans the return of Ranked PvP.

Just to be clear – the timing of the start of PvP League Season 2 has nothing to do with Pro League. For the most part we plan our in-game seasons first and then figure out how we can plug in Pro League on top of it.

ANet Joshua Davis

Kupper

Thanks! For us non ESL’ers having ranked/season back is a welcomed sight.

Indeed! More details on PvP League Season 2 are coming this week – the team is pretty excited to talk about the changes.

ANet Joshua Davis

Dristig

I guess that’s my question. I thought Pro League was connected to the in game Season in some way but if it was that should mean it uses the meta from that season.

In an ideal world the Season Finals would take place on the same patch as the regular season, but due to time constraints between seasons, it’s not really a feasible option (though it may happen naturally at some point). As a general rule, we’re not going to hold balance patches back because of Pro League. The in-game experience for everyone as a whole comes first.

ANet Joshua Davis

TheWizland

But muh e-sports [kitten]!! /s
Seriously though, glad to see you communicating on this matter.

My pleasure. The “espahtz [kitten]” on reddit as you mentioned is a strange phenom. I do hope that it’s used mostly in a sarcastic sense and isn’t taken seriously by folks. The notion that we’re focusing development resources entirely on Pro League is unfounded, and it certainly isn’t detracting from any of our other projects. Personally, I think competitive play is really cool – it has great potential for us to build brand awareness around the Guild Wars franchise. I’m excited that I get to be involved with it as much as I do (you might understand this more if you know my community background, but that’s mostly ancient history).

Anyways, thanks for the support. Hope to see you this Saturday!

The Dune Soarer problem

5 days ago
ANet mattp
So, I would like to let you all know that we’ve been looking a lot at Dune Soarer. With the first reports I thought it may have been bugged, or on a big variable spawn time, but it wasn’t, it was just a very long respawn (cough 6 hours cough). I can’t just change the respawn time on it as it is tied to a lot of other content that I would uncomfortable risking breaking. What we are doing, is using this as an example for “best practices” for future tie-ins, and won’t be using it, or events like it for legendary collectibles in the future. Additionally, we’ve been working on figuring out some alternate sources for this particular collectible. The issue with that is that the theme of the item is very specifically tied to the Dune Soarer, so it may require a re-write of the item
__________________________________________
Today
ANet mattp
Oh, yes, I do have an update. Turns out I was a bit off. The spawn conditions were some random time in a 6 hour window every 12 hours. Good news though, there are some changes coming to that… SOON!
___________________________________________

ANet mattp

Varorson

Youch… so two spawns a day, with a 6 hour window each spawn…

I presume this is for all rare bosses in Dry Top? I’ll add that to the wiki in a bit, until the change comes.

Correct. And, with my usual caveat of “if I didn’t mess something up,” “Soon” equals the next release.

February 24th

ANet mattp

My changes went out, I just didn’t get the notes in early enough to be part of the main patch notes. They should get posted soon.

The summary is that we moved the “rare bosses” in dry top to a cycle where one of them spawns during each dust storm, in a set cycle.

(Reference post: link to the Dulfy thread on reddit)

Guild Chat Livestream Notes: February 19th

Can we have our old fireball and aura effects back?

ArenaColin

Just wanted to quickly pass along we asked the skills team to hold off on making any more FX changes until a system was in place to allow people to toggle them on/off as a selection. They’ve been continuing to work on the project of making combat less visually noisy, while also ensuring there will be options for players to pick from.

More info on this with the spring update but I did want to say you’ll see the old FX restored soon along with some visibility options for those who want to use them.

Search bar on the LFG

ArenaNetBG

agent2013

LFG Now has a search bar http://i.imgur.com/4NaxlLq.png

Hey guys! Looks like LFG Search snuck out a little earlier than we were planning. This is a part of our work to update the LFG tool. We’re looking into the issues that are being reported.

Fluff post. Chit chatting about recording dialog for the Heart of Thorns

ANet Rubi

[Responding to posts about Felicia Day and recording the voice of Zojja]
If you’re interested in a little behind-the-scenes info on this, I was the one who wrote (with a ton of help from the rest of the team) these interviews and conducted them down in Burbank.

It was a huge three-week VO recording session, and there was so much to do that we had two different recording studios going simultaneously most of the time. I spent my entire trip racing back and forth between the two of them with the camera crew, trying to get as much footage as possible in the 2 days I was there.

Felicia was there to record VO work, but was so pressed for time that she had to come in, do her work, and go. Her session was also happening while I was at the other studio, so I didn’t even get to say hi.

Upside: Everyone I did get to talk to was incredibly nice, way beyond professional courtesy. They’re all genuinely great people.

Thread discussing credit/payment for editing gw2Wiki

ANET Stephane

Hey there, it’s a pure coincidence that you mention it here (it may have been mentioned before) as we discussed this 2 days ago and decided to include a short Wiki segment on the next Community Showcase Live! Thanks for your feedback

That being said, the topic of “getting credit” is one I (as ArenaNet’s Wiki Liaison) have been discussing with editors over the years (and also redditors on various wiki threads more recently). There’s a core part of the Guild Wars wiki philosophy that revolves around the passion and dedication of editors being an important reward, it’s like being credited by the community itself.

The two forms (community, studio) are not mutually exclusive. For example, two weeks ago, the Guild Chat episode featured one wiki article (see the summary blog post )

You can’t choose HoT stat comps on PvP Legendary backpiece

ANet McKenna

This isn’t intended and we will be adding the new HoT stats.

(Fluff post)

Guild Wars 2 second expansion story leak

ANet Ben
Now it isn’t going to be a surprise! I hope you are proud of yourself.

Did they remove the last hidden chest in the raid?

ANet CrystalRAID

BestADCurryNA

I can’t see or loot the chest anymore, which is suppost to be at the cookstation ,others in my raid dosn’t see it aswell, is there a bug since last patch?

Sounds like a bug. I’ll forward this over to our QA to investigate.

(Reference post: Links for February 26th Guild Chat Lifestream notes)

Link to Dulfy’s thread on reddit.

Link to Forum thread

Salvation Pass coming March 8

ANet CrystalRAID

Mind101

Does anyone know if you have to have beaten Sabetha to be able to go there? My guild is still struggling with her, and if killing her is a prerequisite we might not be able to get started on wing 2 along with other people.

You will be able to go directly into Salvation Pass without having completed Spirit Vale.

ANet CrystalRAID

boredlol

Have devs ever commented on Gorseval’s ridiculous movement bugs?

No. But Jason did some work with one of our programmers to tighten up his behaviour. He should feel a lot better on 3/8!

ANet CrystalRAID

Lovefully-kun

Is it true there is no title with this wing?

There is a title, but its acquisition will be different from The Eternal.

Hacker in Ranked Arena

ANetCSLead

squallmaster

(Snip)
My friend and I were queuing and our match started off well enough until we encountered this guy who blinked from home base to Quarry and capped it instantly. To add onto that, no one could stomp or resurrect him and he definitely was not lagging. The hacker, in which case we believe is a bot, stands in the middle of the point >_>

As the team with the bot on it, we kind of just let the other team win so well, what a waste. The other team could have potentially lost too if we let his actions go and continued playing

edit: le sent a report to exploits@arenanet i’ll leave this here for awareness for other pvpers.
(Snip)

Handled. =D

Bug. Can’t see squad icons if your account is set as invisible

kagron

Scrappernerd

On another computer, they appear just fine, but not on the other. Any idea what might be causing this?

Are you invisible? Weird bug but if you’re invisible, they dont show.

GM Awesomeness

cr032

Wow, thanks, that fixed it for me.
I was having a similar issue and even contacted support. While they acknowledged this was a known issue, it’s odd they did not mention that being invisible was the problem.

That’s cause we didn’t know until you clever people figured it out! If anyone else has this issue and it isn’t fixed by switching to “Online,” please reply here to let me know. Thanks guys!

This was posted in the Bugs forum as a stickied thread, as well as on Reddit.

GM Awesomeness
Found a bug and want to know if we’re working on fixing it? Check out our Known Issue Tracker! It’s updated several times a week with all the major problems we’re currently working on.

We also have a new article on Bug Reports, which outlines how to make your bug reports as useful as possible so we can get bugs fixed faster.

Known Issue Tracker
____________________________________________________________________

Bug where minis are hidden on full maps then not retoggled to be looked into

GM Awesomeness

andrempdias

Thank you for the transparency! Any idea if the bug where minis get hidden when the map is crowded and don’t get re-enabled afterwards is seeing a fix anytime soon? I suppose it’s not a major bug but as a mini collector it sucks to keep toggling them on :p

This is one of a couple “missing minis” situations I’ve heard about. I’ll add those to my investigation list. Thanks!

Tarir event failure bug

GM Awesomeness

mossarian

The bug where a map will sucessfully complete a meta, but still get the failure message and failure rewards

Ew. I’ll look into that tomorrow, thanks for the heads up!

GM Awesomeness

free to post anything you feel should be on this list but isn’t. Reports I plan to look into tomorrow:

• Dungeon/Fractal bugs
• Hearts & Minds
• The Great Oouo Event Chain
• Juggernaut effects for scrapper
• Tribal armor
• Line of Sight issues (Blaze Breaker and potentially others)
• Hunter’s Ward not showing up for enemy players
• Mini display being turned off

Continuation of above thread.

GM Awesomeness

Energyslam

How about fairly unknown gamebreaking/exploitable bugs? I’d imagine Arena net would want a relatively unknown bug they know about, but can’t fix yet, be common knowledge.

From the text on the Tracker:
“This list isn’t meant to cover every single bug in the game. For the sake of keeping things concise, we’re intentionally leaving out anything that could be used as an exploit and minor issues unlikely to impact most players.”

GM Awesomeness

deadpixelzzz

Please add “stuck in place after using movement abilities” to the list. It’s so annoying and happens few times a day…

Done! Meant to do that before I posted the announcement, but I guess I got too excited >.>

GM Awsomeness

kitamoo

Well, it’s a good start. Still quite a few bugs that are missing from the list that I know I’ve sent in game reports about.
Does it require a certain amount of reports to make it to the list?

I totally agree that the list is missing a lot of things. Inclusion on the list is not based solely on the number of reports – to be honest it’s mostly a matter of it coming on my radar. There are several ways that can happen:

• Lots of in-game reports
• Customer Support tickets
• Posts in the official bug forums (I try to keep up on these but sometimes miss things)
• Reddit posts (same as the forums)
• Me painstakingly combing through our bug database

As it says at the top the tracker, two types of bugs are also intentionally not included:
1. Very minor stuff (like small display issues or super-edge-case stuff that will likely never be seen by anyone)
2. Anything that could be exploited.

GM Awesomeness

shinitakunai

broken feature if you use the spanish language, it says to contact that Zendesk owner account O,o

Zendesk is kind of finicky with languages – all the different language versions have their own URL, so you have to have your language set to the URL you’re on or you get that error (we’re working on fixing this in the coming months, but it’ll be a while). The Spanish version is here.

Due to the time it takes for our localization partners to translate the text, non-English versions of the tracker may be slightly out of date.

Continuation of above thread

GM Awesomeness

Gallopoki

How is Bauxite Alchemicals not on this list. It’s been broken for so god kitten long and it’s completely stopping the first section of the dusk collection. Sometimes they’re stuck in the wall, sometimes it says to revive them when they’re all clearly alive. Just let me get the bloody trophy

Send in a ticket and we can make that happen.
Regarding Bauxite – I had it on the list previously and thought it had been fixed. I’ll dig into it some more tomorrow, and thanks for letting me know there are still problems! This one is my nemesis – I’ve been fighting it since the week HoT launched and I spent an afternoon there trying to finish the first Dusk collection

GM Awesomeness

terminalMontage

Nothing listed for fixing Juggernaut effects so you can see them on Scrapper skills.. I guess it’s not considered an issue and will never be fixed.

Just because something isn’t on the list doesn’t mean we don’t think it’s an issue or aren’t working on fixing it (see my comments here for how stuff ends up on the list and why something might not be there).

In the case of the Juggernaut effects, I’ll definitely look into that for you tomorrow. While it is only a display issue, Legendaries should be freakin Legendary no matter what spec you’re playing.

Continuation of above thread
________________________

GM Awesomeness

SwimmingSwimming

Either it’s the worst RNG ever or the lumber synthesiser in our hall at Lost Precipice (not sure about if it does it in gilded hollow too) still gives the incorrect output in relation to upgrades and never drops ancient wood logs.

Already reported it but seems to be something like this

• The Hard Wood Logs upgrade (Lumber Synthesizer 3) adds nothing
• The Elder Wood Logs upgrade (Lumber Synthesizer 4) adds Hard Wood Logs (and requires Hard Wood Planks to build, which is inconsistent with the requirements of the other node upgrades)
• The Ancient Wood Logs upgrade (Lumber Synthesizer 5) adds Elder Wood Logs.

This is indeed a known issue, I’ll get it added to the tracker in today’s batch. Thanks!

(Reference post: Link for March 4th Guild Chat Lifestream notes)

Dulfy’s Reddit post: Guild Chat Livestream Notes. Storytelling in Raids

Adding as reference: link to video for Guild Chat Livestream Notes

YouTube video link

Flesh, you’re gonna have a huge task sorting out the AMA when it’s done. But I believe in you!

I’m Mike O’Brien, here with GW2 dev team. AMA!

Mike OBrien

I’m here today to answer some questions and to share some news.

The news is that I’m taking over as the game director of Guild Wars 2 for a while. Colin will be leaving us. Colin is a personal friend, leaving on good terms, and I wish him all the best.

Game direction is a big job. I have a lot of talented people helping me in the role, and we’re all here to answer questions today. Steven Waller continues to direct Living World and Raids. Stephen Clarke-Willson, another long-term veteran of the company, will be directing WvW. John Corpening and Hugh Norfolk are here to talk about PvP. We have Crystal Reid, Paul Ella, and Jon Olson here to talk about Raids, Nellie Hughes representing Living World, Sean Hughes representing Fractals, Shuai Liu and Tyler Bearce representing WvW. We’ve got Leah Hoyer here to talk Narrative, James Ackley here to talk Audio, Steve Thompson here to talk Cinematics, Roy Cronacher here to talk Creatures, Ester Sauter and Lance Hitchkitten representing QA and QA engineering, John Smith representing Megaservers, and more devs joining us as we continue!

I’m excited to be back in this role. I’ll say up front that I do eventually have to hire to replace myself. Believe it or not, running a company is a lot of work too. But in the meantime I get to lay down the path I believe in. One thing I believe is that a game director represents the players. So I think it’s only natural that my first official act as game director is to hang out and talk shop with the players. And that’s what we’ll do today.

To kick it off, I’ll give some updates on what we’re working on and how we’re going about it.

We recently started PvP season two and we’re about to launch the next raid wing. After that we’re packaging up and preparing our next big quarterly update for April. The April update is about reducing grind, clearing away some tedium, getting quickly to the fun, and improving rewards. We’ve always said that Guild Wars should be about having fun rather than preparing to have fun, and this will be a back-to-our-roots kind of update. After the April update, we’ll start live beta-tests of improvements to WvW. Our goal is to be very incremental and visible with the changes we’re making there, so that players are involved every step of the way. Further on, we’ll launch the next raid wing in May or June, then Living World and the next quarterly update.

You’ve seen in past years that we went through times when the whole company worked on one thing. In 2013, the year we shipped 21 Living World updates, pretty much the whole company was working on Living World. In 2015, we were all working on the expansion. Going forward we’re putting ourselves in a more sustainable mode where live and expansion don’t compete with each other.

We have about 120 devs working on the live game, 70 devs on Expac2, and 30 devs on core teams that support both. Within these groups we have cross-discipline teams with focused missions. For example on Live we have the PvP team, the WvW team, the Fractals team, the Raids team, the Living World team, the Legendaries team, and a couple others. The teams are charged with carrying a feature from inception and design through completion. When they finish, we typically package work from multiple teams into a single release, then we hand it off to release teams for final voice integration, localization, QA, and release management.

The final thing you should know is that we’re working hard to avoid having a default assumption that “this thing will ship on this date,” or even, “this thing will ship,” and instead we’re proactively deciding to ship things when they’re done and polished and we’ve played them and love them. So if you ask us for a list of things that will ship in April, we’ll probably be coy because we think it’s nice for you to have presents to unwrap on release day, but more than that, the truth is we don’t even know. We’re working on a lot of potentially great improvements for April, all themed in the direction of less grind and more rewards, and they won’t all make the cut, but any reasonable subset will make a great release.

And with that, let’s get to the AMA! It’s a big game and there’s a lot to talk about. I’ll be here for about three hours this afternoon, with other developers coming through for shorter periods.

Here is a link to Gaile’s forum post about this thread for anyone who wishes to post their thoughts on it on this forum

Continuation of above thread

ANet JohnCorpening

Vivec13

Why wasn’t the Hall of Heroes (HoH/Tomb of Primeval Kings) ever implemented into GW2? And will it be in the future?

Halls and Tombs were a huge part of GW1. While we loved those modes in GW1 we wanted to try something different for GW2. In GW2 we have Unranked Arenas as a fun place for all players to enjoy PvP. Ranked Arena for seasons of high competition. The Pro Leagues for the top players to compete for prizes and our in-game progression path for the Pro Leagues, the Guild Challenger League. In addition, there are Custom Arenas for scrimmages, casual play and practice. Guild Wars 2 PvP takes a new and different approach to PvP and overall is much more successful for it.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

wrecksomething

The later maps seemed worst to me for solo play. Early on organized groups were regularly wiping and I figured giving players time to settle in would fix things. Now any time I try to head to those maps they’re desolate, none of the objectives are completed, and I guess I’m supposed to look for map-hopping and organized groups for them.

It’s a real bummer since I’d hoped that kind of content would find a home in the new raid zones. Maybe I just don’t know enough about what times to log in or something, but right now I feel like there’s no HoT content I can play and that’s a pity since I barely scratched the surface.

Yes. You shouldn’t have to take part in multi-hour-long zergs. There’s a lot of content in HoT and we’re trying to make it rewarding to play in a variety of play styles.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

Juniterio

Are you planning to add more laid-back maps that aren’t event driven? You know, ones that you can just walk around on killing mobs and maybe progressing in some way and get + – as good rewards as on event driven maps? I feel too much pressure on the maps you’ve added lately.

I think you’re asking whether maybe with HoT we’re moving the game away from exploration-driven maps toward very event-focused. The reality is when we make maps we try to make them great for free-form exploration and also great for groups. With HoT the game currently seems to be pushing you pretty hard to do the just group event content, but that’s not our intention.

Continuation of above thread

Anet-TylerB

dynamicstability

Hi there! Can you give us any info to what you plan to do with WvW? Specifically any info involving increasing rewards, server reworks, or PPT adjustments?
Thanks for this info today!

I can’t really go into the ‘whens’, but here’s what I can tell you. At a high level we plan to address core WvW issues such as population imbalance, scoring issues, and rewards. Of those, the first updates you’ll see will be related to population balance and rewards. As always, as we get closer to releasing an update we’ll be publishing a blog post including more details.

ANet Erik

morroIan

Has Arenanet taken the dissatisfaction of players with the PvP season 2 matchmaking under advisement and looking to revise it for season 3?

We are definitely aware that there are some frustrating match-ups being made during this Season’s initial kick off period and we are actively working to improve this for Season 3.

ANet CrystalRAID

bigwigx

Raiding, generally speaking, is a game type that appeals to a small subset of people. I think Guild Wars 2 is at its best when it appeals to large crowds, the majority of players. Why is so much effort being put in to raids?

While it seems like there is a lot of effort going into raids, the teams are actually a lot smaller than something like a Living World release. For example, with Salvation Pass, we had only about 5-6 people working on it full time for 4 months. A few others assisted with their time for a week here, or a month there, plus additional people helped when it came time for reviews. And many of those full time people work on 2 raid releases simultaneously (Bobby worked on the scripts at the same time for both releases).

ArenaColin

Juniterio

;-; Are you at least going to keep playing the game?

Absolutely! I am a huge Guild Wars fan, I’ve got to see so many things in development for the future that I can’t wait to see how they turn out. I love this game, I love this team and I love this community. Guild Wars will be with me anywhere I go.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith

Anosep

Semi-related/followup: I assume you’ve got data about what percentage of active players ever enter a raid or beat a raid boss. You probably can’t give us numbers, but do you have a sense of how it compares to other games? Is it lower or higher than you want it to be?

Raid in MMOs are high-end content designed for the more hardcore player. However, from an analytics standpoint, the participation is higher than other games we’ve seen. This is likely due to the nature of our progression system in GW2.

ANet Hugh

Intigo

When can we expect the sPvP Leaderboard to return? And will it be not terrible this time?

The old iteration of the leaderboard will not be returning, but we do have the Legendary Division Leaderboard which highlights our top Ranked Arena players as well as the Guild Challenger League which highlights our top guild teams.

ANet AndrewM

Infantryzone

Is this going to address the huge disparity in difficulty/cost gearing out some builds over others?

There are some improvements in obtaining the new HoT gear in April, though I don’t believe they will completely resolve this issue. This is one of my main goals for Living World Season 3 rewards.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

Mireles

Hello Mike,
Its sad to hear Colin go but am excited that to see what direction you will take the game.
The game has seen two very different methods one in 2013 where all that was done was incremental living story updates. In 2015 we saw a long wait and an expansion that dropped, what could have been viewed as a bulk incremental updates.
I guess my real basic questions is…
How in the future will content primarily be delivered?
What method of delivery translated into the most success for the company?
Will we ever see the world evolve again like we saw in Season 1 where things that happened effected the landscape and the lore of the land?

Hi Mireles. You’re right that in 2013 we were really focused on Living World, and then we decided to do split and do both. We decided to do both because there are big, fundamental improvements that you just can’t do when you’re only shipping Living World.

There are a couple things we’re focusing on going forward. First of all, sustainability. We don’t want to shift back and forth, so we need to make sure Expac2 doesn’t need us to pull down Live devs and vice-versa. Second, quality. When we’re shipping every two weeks, we just have to ship. But going forward it’s much more important for us to be proud of everything we ship, and for you to be proud of everything we ship, than to hit a specific cadence.

ANet PaulaElla

The Story Journal was created as a way to provide story content to players in a way that they could control the pace at which they choose to play. We’re definitely looking to continue with that.

Continuation of above thread

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith

Dystopiq

Are dungeons going to be truly left behind forever? Will they ever be revisited.
I know this horse has been beaten to a pulp but since the directors have changed maybe the direction has changed too. Also thanks for all the hard work Colin! Good luck!

We’re continuing to focus on Fractals as our primary focus for 5-man content. However, given the reaction, we are taking a second look at the current dungeon rewards.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith

EagleDelta1

What about improving loot table drops from monsters (less blue and green and more rare and exotic) and increasing token rewards at the end?

Blues and green still play a very important role in the economy, reducing or removing them would have some fairly negative impacts on the standard player.

ANet JohnCorpening

writermacox

Let’s talk armor. One of the devs mentioned a few weeks ago they’d look into the missing assets (Tribal armor is the most notorious, but Apostle armor also comes to mind). Has anything definitive come up to bring back the old PvP skins?

We are definitely working on bringing these sets back into the game.

ANet JohnCorpening

sveng9

Did Gw2 thought about some Betting for the PvP esports games? (with gold for example) to promote the scene a bit.

We know that this has been successful in other games and it’s something that comes up occasionally in brainstorming sessions but at the moment we don’t have any plans for a system like this.

Continuation of the above thread

ANet Tivac

rediche

Wow, this was unexpected. So I bet my questions are hush hush answers, but might as well try.

1. Extended Experience. Is it still on the table?
2. What’s an estimated timeframe for Expac releases? Are you counting for one every year, every two years etc?
3. Any information about a character rendering API from the web devs?
   These are farfetched, but I’m really curious about these things.

Oh yea, and I’m gonna miss Colin and his amazing smile. Even though he steals our precursors.

Extended Experience never really existed in the form promoted in that blog post and the team working on it was restructured to focus on other things. I don’t expect us to ship anything like what the blog post promised, it’s not a good use of our time.

Character rendering is still a “that would be awesome” sort of long-term goal. There are a TON of more-attainable API goals in front of it though.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

We decided a long time ago that it would be far better to have the community own the extended experience than for us to do it internally. Since then it’s been all about the APIs.

Sorry, I’m not going to predict a release date for Expac2. When it’s done.

I’ll see if I can get Pat and the web team to join us to talk APIs.

ANet Sean

Kagron

Whats the deal with the fractal backpiece? Is it going to be the April update (hopefully)?

I can’t promise a certain date, but we’ve de-linked the backpack from Fractal Leaderboards so we can release it sooner rather than later.

ANetColin

Malchior

Colin, are you at liberty to say yet where you may be going?
To Mike, grats on being back in a design role! I look forward to where and how you guide the future of Guild Wars 2!

An opportunity came up that allows me to see my family far more, support my wife on a project she is tackling after years of her supporting me, and a chance to cut my commute down to zero from an epic commute I have today. For now I’d rather let this discussion be about the future of Gw2 and leave my own future to that!

Continuation of above thread

ANet Sean

Arisalis

Do you plan on adding more fractals or dungeons for those that enjoy the 5 man content but don’t have the time to raid? I see you guys are hitting the ground running with raids and that’s great I just hope that casual dungeon/fractals don’t get left too stale. It’s been over 2 years since we have had any new fractals.

Absolutely! We’re working on some new Fractals right now, as a matter of fact. We’re also looking into making improvements to Fractals as a game mode, so stay tuned!

ANet Sean

Echo Tracer

What about instabilities? One of the big problems of the Fractal rework with HoT is that it didn’t really change much. Instabilities are recycled for 10 levels and stacked rather than there being particularly interesting ones

That’s one of the things we’re working on

ANet Sean

boottspurr

RYTLOCK’S UNDERWORLD ADVENTURES?!

We seriously considered it, but I’m not sure we can do it justice. Such content would be quite story heavy, which doesn’t lend itself very well to something that we want players to replay over and over again.

ANet CrystalRAID

nabrok

We will eventually be able to get legendary armor through raids … are there any plans for alternate methods of acquisition for legendary armor?

Perhaps something more similar to how the weapons are acquired?

We designed the rewards for raids around the acquisition of Legendary Armor. It’s similar to how players are working towards their legendary backpiece in Fractals or the new Legendary Weapons that are largely something acquired in the open world.

ANet CrystalRAID

the cthaeh speaks

Externally it seems like Raids have taken priority over smaller group content. Is that the case internally? Do you feel that Raids have been successful so far in terms of player turnout?

Raids had always planned for 3 wings to encompass the first raid. So we had some stuff and ideas in progress before we ever shipped the first release. While it seems like it’s the priority, that is definitely not the case. We just got a head start is all.

Continuation of above thread

ANet CrystalRAID

ApolyonBS

My guild has problems to get 10 people together and we can’t raid. Any plans to have 5 man version of the raid?

Not at this time.

ANet Sean

We want Fractals to be the content that fills this game space. They’re not quite there yet, but we’re working on making them less of an Hit point slog and more mechanically interesting, especially at higher scales.

ANet LeahLorer

erich hanussen

We’ve lost a big smile today :/ I wish you the best, Maestro :’)
And for the Lore/Narrative team, will we ever explore the nature of magic and Tyria itself beyond elder dragons? The Mists, Lord Odran, The Antikythera, The Six Gods, The Hall of Heroes and the rift, The Spirits of the Wild… There are lots of mysteries out there yet to be explored, and we are aproaching them rather slowly :/

I won’t give away any spoilers on future content. What I can say is that the team loves weaving long established lore into our new story, and we’re excited about a lot of ways that we will be doing that in upcoming releases. And yes, magic in Tyria is broader than dragons.

ANet maclaine

Konwrath

What is the hardest part of developing the soundtrack for Guild Wars 2?

The hardest part of writing any music for the game is making sure it matches the intent of the rest of the team, from the artists to the writers to the designers. Since we started recording the soundtrack live, the schedule for when it needs to be done is backed up significantly, often before the areas in the game it’s written for are finished. In order to make sure we all end up in the same place at the end, this requires pretty close communication with the other teams, as well as some imagination of how the final areas will be.

The other difficult part is making sure it feels “Guild Wars-y”, for lack of a better term. There is room to grow and expand what that means, but I’m always very aware of the legacy of Jeremy Soule and what he means to the world of Guild Wars. My intention is always to make sure the new music fits side by side with his while also reflecting what I, Lena, and Stan feel at the time we’re writing, and if it goes off in a new or different direction, that there is solid reasoning behind it.

ANet Sean

Alcohol Intolerant

Questions about fractals, answers below

hide spoiler

I play a lot of fractals. (Over 40k relics and counting) They were my main content to play before the expansion, and now they hold no interest for me. So I guess this is directed at /u/Anet_Sean. (Questions at the end if you want to skip straight to the questions.)
Ascended drop rates are definitely down. And with higher level fractals requiring mostly or full ascended, this is a serious detriment to the system. Before, if you ran a few times a day for a few weeks, you would almost surely be ready to run higher tier ones by then. And if you had to craft gear, it would only be one or two pieces. Fractals now are locked behind a gear wall, a time wall (many groups will only do “swamps of the mist” because it saves time), and are just generally boring. At least when repeating dungeons it took you a good few hours to do all the paths. Now you simply do 3 swamps or a twin for each daily and it’s over in 45 minutes. I found the rng of fractals to be one of the main reasons this content was repeatable. I also find that fractals are a more hostile place now than before, because no one will teach pugs in a 10 minute one-and-done. They might actually have tried in a 30-45 minute run.
Are there any plans to re-add the rng aspect?
Are there any plans to increase the ascended drop rate?
Are dipoles supposed to be nearly unobtainable?
Has the drop rate for shards/vials/globs also gone down as people suggest, or is that just because of the whole “swamps of the mist” nonsense?
What are your views on the “swamps of the mist meta”?
Is Mossman married?
Edit:
Can we please not have fractal leaderboards. With the current system a leaderboard would be cumbersome and frankly quite try-hard. Fulfilling old promises on defunct content.

Are there any plans to re-add the rng aspect?
Do you mean the 4 random islands thing? No, not currently. While I do absolutely see the appeal of that (Personally, it was my favorite thing about Fractals pre-HoT), we want to make Fractals more accessible to new players and make sure it’s something that is easy to just pick up and play. Unfortunately that old structure was a significant barrier to that, which is why it was changed.
Are there any plans to increase the ascended drop rate?
Yes!
Are dipoles supposed to be nearly unobtainable?
No!
Has the drop rate for shards/vials/globs also gone down as people suggest, or is that just because of the whole “swamps of the mist” nonsense?
That’s due to Swamps of the Mists. Shards/vials/globs are random drops from mobs, and Swamp/Duo really don’t have that many mobs to kill.
What are your views on the “swamps of the mist meta”?
Ugh. I don’t like it at all. I really want to add more incentives to play a wider variety of different Fractals, though I do know there are some people who do enjoy it so we don’t want to nerf Swamp/Duo directly.
Is Mossman married?
Why don’t you ask him and find out
Can we please not have fractal leaderboards. With the current system a leaderboard would be cumbersome and frankly quite try-hard. Fulfilling old promises on defunct content.
So yeah, development on this has been suspended. The more we worked on Fractal Leaderboards the more we realized it just wouldn’t work with Fractals as they are right now.
We did come up with something else entirely that we really do like as an alternative, but that would take a lot of development work and we just have too many problems with Fractals in their current state before we can devote those kind of resources to a project like that.

Continuation of above thread

ANet ester

Testing guild wars, like any MMO, takes a lot of different strategies. We do a combination of direct feature testing, halo testing around new content and then ad-hoc testing both around new content and in general. I work on the manual side of things, Lance can speak to the automation, but we have general in house commands and things a bit more specific to the feature we’re working on. For example, when I was testing the reward coordinator I had commands to progress the map, move my personal progress and reset the map.

As far as project management methodology, I work very closely with the producers, designers and engineers on my teams to make the best product possible. The circumstances can change depending on the situation, but I have a voice throughout the process from beginning to end. It’s different every day, for example today I am checking things off of a list for a feature you’ll all get to see in our big content update helping the engineer make sure all of the bugs and notes from different sources are accounted for, Monday I may be assisting another team in a play test and we have a release on Tuesday so I’ll probably be sitting in Lion’s Arch listening to players talk about the patch. As far as crazy bugs, I’m going to let Dara share hers, I spend most of my time on the programming side of things and it’s not as interesting!

ANet Rubi

Kemichar

How much do you play your game? (each and every one of you replying in this AMA xD)
Any encouraging words for a last year college student wanting to apply for a design (or dev) position somewhere down the line?

A lot. I have two accounts that I log into daily–a public/work one and a private one–and I get some active playtime in on at least one of those every day.

ANet Rubi

Kemichar

How do you split the time between two accounts (that shouldn’t interact I presume)? Is the work one only for testing (and similar) purposes or do you play it for fun?
You are basically living two virtual lives, aren’t you? Two sets of friends, two sets of guilds. I won’t tell.

Haha. It’s not quite that much of a double life! I have my public-facing account that has my real name attached to it. I definitely play it for fun, but if I’m on that account I consider myself “at work” and am prepared to stop my gameplay at any time to answer a whisper from someone who has a question, needs help, or just wants to chat.

My other account, my private one, doesn’t have my name attached to it at all. A handful of people, mostly my GW friends who were around way before I was here at ArenaNet, know it’s “me”. That account lets me play “not at work”. Does that make sense?
Now you know the dark secret of my virtual double life.

Continuation of above thread

ANet DrStephenCW

Zoren

Big question for the wvw team, would you guys consider moving back to Friday resets? Works a lot better for all of us wvwers, and gives meaning to Friday and early saturday. Currently the major part of the weekend is wasted, as the week is already decided then, moving it back to Friday would help a lot.

This is a conversation we’re going to need to have with y’all. We moved to Saturday because sometimes we do a build on Fridays and just about the time we wanted to activate the build was during the reset time. So we thought it would be better if there was no conflict in the timing of those things. Since people love Friday, but we might do a build on Friday, we need to talk about exactly what time of day would be good for the community, and then adjust based on that.

ANet mattp

Sunaris

Mike, why were there so few new armor sets added to HoT? Why did the new raids offer no new armor skins, and when can we expect some actual new ones to help our fashion addiction?

Not Mike, but I do have some answers to this:
Armor sets are one of (if not actually) the most time expensive things we make for GW2. Each set has an incredible amount of detail and customization, and then has to be fit to very disparate rigs. That’s a big part of why we did the number we did for HoT.

That being said, there are plans for more reward armor sets in the future. And while raids doesn’t have armor skins yet, it will be the way players obtain legendary armor.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

You two answered it for me. It does in fact take about ten times the dev effort to make an armor set as to make an outfit.

ANet DrStephenCW

devils toy

All I keep hearing is the reward system for WvW is being worked on. WvW’ers don’t care about rewards!!!. Yes, it would be nice to get cool shiny things every now and then but that is not why we play. I have logged almost 6k hours in GW2 and I would say 90% of that has been in WvW knowing I was more than likely not going to get anything worth anything for rewards from playing yet I still did it. I am part of a very large guild and most of the members could probably say the same thing. Rewards are not going to revive WvW. First and foremost the new borderland maps need to be reverted back to the Alpine maps until something more playable is developed.

Previously we were working on a mega update to WvW which would incorporate every fix we ever wanted to make. One risk, besides the fact it turned out to be too big for us, is that concerns like yours would get lost in the big update. So we’re switching to a cadence of smaller updates where we can get feedback on each thing as it ships. As it is, some people do want meaningful rewards; but my main point is that we’ll switch to a mode where we can have those conversations, experiment, and iterate, and nobody is stuck waiting for a huge update.

ANet DrStephenCW

Mundogame

I have many questions, but this is one:
We have a posibility in Guild Wars 2, to make a Public Test Server?
-This can help to make a better testing of bugs.
-Can help to fansites to see future content near ship them.
-Can help players to add feedback to improve things.
We saw this in past titles same City of Heroes, and in my opinion can be good for Guild Wars 2.

We’ve experimented with public test servers and there are two problems for us:
1) much of our stuff is story driven, and not suitable for a public test server; and
2) the results from play patterns don’t match what we see later on live.

Instead, we developed a system we used for HoT where we can beta test characters and maps on the Live servers with a cute little personal sandbox that surrounds beta characters. We will be exploring using that tech more so we can do public-test-server-like things but in the live game, so we get real useful results back. Also nobody needs to download another 25 gigabytes for a test server. And you can take your current live character into the test world almost instantly.

ANet mattp

RoeiRDT

New legendary weapons?

Going to attempt to answer what I can here. As mentioned in the original post, we won’t be saying when things will be coming out. What I can say is that we are working towards completing the entire set of 16 HoT legendary weapons (sorry underwater). Of the 13 left, they are all in various stages of concept, modeling and design, but the two that are furthest along in development are the Short Bow and the Mace.
I’ll be happy to answer more questions, so by all means.

ANet mattp

Kolz

(Snip)
Can you tell us if you guys view the current state of amalgamated gemstones in hot legendaries as a problem?

We do think there is a problem with amalgamated gemstones, but it’s somewhat complicated and we’re still looking at the best way to address it.

Continuation of above thread

ANet Sean

XaeiIsareth

Anything about a reward system that incentivises people to do the longer, more challenging fractals in the works? The 2016 blog mentioned it but from what I got was that, at the time there weren’t any ideas.

Yes!! We want to incentivize players to play all of our Fractals, not just the shortest/easiest ones. We have several ideas on how to tackle this, starting with changing how the Daily Achievements work.

ANet Sean

alethorn

Why not random again like in old good days?

Because while that was great when you had an hour or two to sink into Fractals, there are a some players who only have 15 minutes here and there to play(busy parents being one example). We want to make sure Fractals are accessible to everyone.

ANet Sean

Varoson

Why not randomized individual fractal? Rather than four randomized fractals – it’s just one randomized fractal?

Because then you just end up with people ‘re-rolling’ Fractals by entering and leaving over and over until they get something they like. It’s not a good player experience.

Reference post: link to an AMA summary thread on reddit

Missed the AMA? Here’s a summary

Edit: added reference link to Dulfy: AMA summary

Post about mining Guild Hall synthesizers

darapotocska

tamasan

Is this expected behavior?
If you have access to both GH and LP, you’re able to mine both sets of nodes only if the guilds have different levels of the Synthesis Output upgrade. If they’re the same level, you can only mine one set of nodes.

Yeah, this is the expected behavior. Although there are two maps, the upgrades the maps reference are the same information. Each synthesizer upgrade has its own node information.

If you have Ore Synthesizer 1 in one guild, and Ore Synthesizer 1 in another guild – you would only be able to gather from one of them because the upgrade is the “same.” Whereas, if you have a guild with Ore Synthesizer 1 and a guild with Ore Synthesizer 2 – you would be able to gather from both of them because the upgrades are different.

Answers to HoT lore/story questions

barefootmatthew

Varorson

(Snipped)

lore/story questions

hide spoiler

• Why does Canach wield the Shield of the Moon? Like Sohothin and the Fiery Dragon Sword or the Sanguinary Blade/Corrupted Sword, while it is a skin usable by players, in lore it’s a unique item – created by Ysvelta with mesmer magic for Tiachren. Without backstory for why Tiachren’s shield is now in Canach’s hands, it’s a bit odd.
  Addendum to above: Does Canach wielding the Shield of the Moon mean that, in canon lore, Tiachern did not fall to Nightmare – because if he does then the shield itself is changed – or does this mean that the shield’s appearance can change based on the wielder?
• Why never have the three Mordrem Guard commanders guaranteed to interact with the player during the story? Adryn shows up for defending Jaka Itzel in The Jungle Provides, but you can easily miss him by going on the offensive with Tizlak, and Diarmid and Hareth don’t show up in story instances at all (though Diarmid does show up in the open world Verdant Brink at least).
• Why isn’t Marjory, who swore vengeance to kill Mordremoth, not an option to take with during Hearts and Minds?
• Why is Scruffy’s death so dramatic? Since his introduction in January 2014, Scruffy barely said a word – and what words he did say was interaction greetings only. He never showed sentience before this moment either – always being Taimi’s legs, battle armor, or that one time it was programmed to follow the PC. Scruffy isn’t O-Tron (currently called Hero-Tron), who seems to be the only sentient golem in GW2 – so why the drama?
• What was the thought behind killing Faolain and Eir off so quickly in the HoT story?

answers

hide spoiler

• Canach’s Shield – you can blame me for this. This is not the Shield of the Moon, but it is the same design. He originally wielded a standard mercenary’s shield, but when he became a more central part of the story for Heart of Thorns, I wanted to give him a shield that pulled more from his sylvari heritage – with the backstory simply being that it is not Tiachren’s shield but was made in the same design, probably by the same smith. It might be a fair criticism that I chose too unique a look for his shield, but since the shield design shows up in more than just story it seemed like it would be a fair use of this skin to give Canach a distinctive sylvari style shield.
• Mordrem Commanders showing up in story – it actually was the plan to have them show up, one per map in the missions leading up to Dragon’s Stand, but Diarmid and Hareth were both trimmed from the story for scoping and pacing reasons.
• Marjory did initially factor into the final fight but we made the decision to cull the number of choices down in that scenario to picking 2 out of 3 – it was a tough call, but we were already struggling with keeping that final instance within scope and the three characters we settled on felt like the best options for facing Mordremoth, and Marjory does play an important role in protecting you while inside the nightmare.
• Scruffy’s death is dramatic not to give Scruffy the spotlight, but to give Taimi a satisfying emotional arc which started in the previous Living World season. To be clear, he is not in fact displaying sentience when he stops in the cinematic – the pause was meant to represent him processing conflicting orders; does he follow the orders Taimi’s just given, or does he follow his standing orders to safeguard her life? But just because he’s not sentient doesn’t mean Taimi hasn’t formed an emotional bond with him; many of us become attached to inanimate objects that are useful to us (cars, boats, favorite chairs, etc.) and because of Taimi’s disability and Scruffy’s ability to not only protect her but to give her mobility, she cares about him enough to have an emotional moment of “letting go”. I don’t know if the fact that I was in a car accident last year which totaled my Saturn (I’d had it for 10+ years to that point) played a role in my feedback in meetings where we were discussing this moment, but it probably influenced the process a bit.
• Faolain – Well, when Faolain is taken by the Vinetooth in “Prisoners of the Dragon”, she’s not killed – she’s transformed and she doesn’t die until nearly the end. But I know that what you’re asking is more about why we chose to transform her at this point, and the honest answer is that we wanted to establish here just how twisted the Mordrem were, that even someone who was a demonstrably evil character before, could be made even more monstrous by Mordremoth. One thing that I can say that is maybe a regret is that we had more plans to showcase Faolain and the other Nightmare Court in this mission as you made your way through the prison camp, but we kept running up against the problem of keeping the instances flowing and not getting bogged down by constant dialogs and interruptions. The unfortunate part of our new system wherein dialog and exposition happen “on the run” is that you aren’t really required to stop and listen and really absorb what we are communicating about the story. It’s something that we are aware was a bit out of balance in Heart of Thorns, and we’re always looking for ways to improve our in-game story telling.
• Eir – For the longest time, this moment actually took place in the very first mission and we moved it back to the end of Act One because we really felt like doing it there would have been much too soon. A moment like this is always going to carry with it a LOT of weight and the team debated this moment, and the implementation of it, for quite a long time. In the end we liked that it happened at the end of Verdant Brink because it let us have a moment of mourning at what was already a natural “rest” phase as you transitioned into a new map, and it helped us establish the stakes of not finding the rest of our friends.

Posts about new fractals in the AMA

ANet Sean

Juniterio

Okies! Any insight on their current development state? Please? C:

Early prototype.

ANet Sean

Juniterio

Thanks! What are your main goals when making those and how different are they going to be from the other 5 man content we know from GW2? I’m just being morbidly curious, sorry. Can’t help it!

For our next Fractal, we really wanted to make something which appealed directly to veteran Fractals players. We’ve kept you guys waiting long enough for new content, so we wanted to make something special!

ANet Sean

Juniterio

That sounds awesome. I really want to go back to other areas of the game. Due to swamptals, weird rewards in the open world, wvw being broken and having no intrest in PvP I have nothing else to do than raids. I used to love fractals but they feel very stale right now. I’m really looking forward to playing on new islands. Btw, you said ‘fractal’. So will there be only one coming with the next release?

We’re planning on releasing new Fractals one at a time, yes

ANet Sean

Juniterio

Oh. But I remember hearing that those will be only introduced during quarterly updates. Does that mean one fractal / 3 months? Will they at least be longer than those we know so far?

It’s hard to say at this point in time. The team is relatively new, so we’re still getting a feel for how much work we can get done in a quarter. We also want to make sure we avoid the Aetherpath dillema, where nobody plays the new content because it’s too long.

ANet Sean

Juniterio

What makes you think it was the lenght of that dungeon that caused the lack of intrest? It always seemed to me that people I played dungeons with loved it but the rewards were just not good enough. That’s what I feel, too.

If Aetherblade was profitable, I’d play it. C: Really. You wouldn’t even have to add achievements (even though they are awesome). But you just can’t give the same reward for a quick and long dungeon. Making them both equally long doesn’t love the problem at all (and it sounds like it’s what you want to do with fractals). Long content is fun and keeps people more immersed and engaged in what they’re doing. Sure, short content is important as simply not everyone can commit more than 20 minutes daily, but we already have plenty of that stuff in game.

All very good points. We’re currently looking into improving the rewards for longer Fractals that are already live, so if that successfully gets more players doing those, we can certainly reconsider making longer Fractals.

Post about raid LFG

ANet Steven

RazahIsBack

Still waiting for a proper LFG system for raids so I can start doing them… any year now.

We’re working on it. It won’t be there for the second wing on Tuesday, but we’re doing our best to try to get it out in the next feature update. Thanks for your patience!

LFG bug fix tomorrow

ArenaNetBG

DontPromoteIgnorance

Ever since the patch that added the search function it has been bugged in some form or another. (Snip)

This should be fixed with tomorrow’s patch. That’s the hope anyway.

source

ANet DrStephenCW

Kyrela

What are the chances of a graphics engine update? As in, are we likely to see the game running under a later version of DirectX (12 being the newest), or maybe switching to a different graphics API (e.g. Vulkan)? (Snip)

When we shipped the game originally we used a third-party shell to ‘host’ the Windows version. While this got the product out the door on Mac there are some things we haven’t been able to do to make it a true Mac application. We are actively experimenting with getting native code that runs directly on the Mac with OpenGL etc. I don’t know how long it will take to make it “real” but I can say that this week we finally got it compiling, linking, and starting up on a Mac before it crashes at the login screen.

ANet DrStephenCW

Pigoz

That’s amazing news! I have two questions:
1) Out of curiosity, are you using a togl library like Valve’s vogl?
2) Are you investigating to use CVDisplayLink for driving the rendering thread? I maintain the OS X parts of an open source video player and we used DisplayLink with great success for exact frame timing. Though it’s probably less important on video games where you want to render at 60fps anyway.

I’m really super excited, I can’t wait to get my hands on this.

1) No, we’re using a native opengl renderer that was already written prior to this for other purposes.
2) Nope. We don’t want to sync to vblank unless you enable vsync in graphics options, so a CVDisplayLink wouldn’t really buy us anything other than maintaining more platform specific code than necessary. If you do enable vsync it’s much simpler to use other techniques, such as changing the swap interval, which would not require us to use an entirely different code path.

Will the new raid wing increase or share the magnetite shard cap?

CrystalRAID

Same currency, and the cap has not been increased.

Chat bubble bug

ANet ester

PurpleBanananana

Chat bubbles above your head aren’t working for me and another guild mate when they were before the patch.

We know about this and are looking into it.

Raid vendor: don’t buy the 2nd medium helm box

CrystalRAID

YONAKA KR

They added a second helm instead of a coat and it costs 400 magnetite instead of the 175 at the raid vendor.
http://imgur.com/6kFke2m

We’ve sent this over to Andy to look at for a fix.

Fractal backpiece/Leaderboards

ANet Sean

Kagron

Whats the deal with the fractal backpiece? Is it going to be the April update (hopefully)?

I can’t promise A certain date, but we’ve de-linked the backpack from Fractal Leaderboards so we can release it sooner rather than later.

ANet Sean

RealHarny

Hey Sean, thank you, that’s nice news. I have a question, why so late after releasing HoT?

We spent several months after HoT trying to get Fractal Leaderboards out, which was tied to the backpiece. Once we realized we couldn’t ship Leaderboards in a reasonable timeframe, we changed course and started working on unlinking the backpiece from Leaderboards.

ANet Sean

btballenger

What made you realize it was going to be unreasonable at this point? Leaderboards have been on the table since before the Fractured release in 2013, right?

Active development on Leaderboards didn’t start until prior to HoT. Once we tested a working prototype in-game, we realized it didn’t do what we wanted it to do, so we held off releasing it with HoT to continue development and make it better.

We initially though we would get it out pretty quickly. December 15th and January 26th were discussed as possible ship dates. However, as those ship windows came and went, we still weren’t happy with what we had. The design was changed, reworked, and added to.

At this point we were looking at a July release, but even that wasn’t guaranteed. We knew we couldn’t go 8 months or more without an update to Fractals, so the decision was made to shelve it and work on other things.

Leaving Salvation Pass at Final Boss bugs future respawning

CrystalRAID

Ponticello5368

If you leave the raid instance after getting to the final boss, you will always respawn at the second ‘boss’ area instead of the third. Extremely annoying especially when you need to swap classes, DC, or need to buy food etc.

Also happens right from the beginning if you enter the instance after the pre-event has been completed.

We’re trying to get a fix for this asap.

Fluff post: chatting with the folks on reddit

Slothasor guide (go to reddit thread to see the guide)

ANet Cameron

For those who want something to copy-paste to groups, for easy strategizing:
In order of priority:
1. Don’t pet the sloth too hard.
2. Don’t pet the slublings too hard.
3. Don’t pet the sloth too softly, this tickles him and he reacts violently.
4. Don’t pet the slublings too softly, this angers them.
5. You know what, just don’t pet the slublings, they are spoiled.
6. Don’t Die.
7. Don’t do the thing wrong.
8. Specifically, Do the thing.

If you follow my steps to success I guarantee your tears will fill our chalices… er… you’ll get phat lootz!

(For real, this is awesome! Love seeing you guys working together to make these strategies! Also: pretty pictures.)