Guild Wars 2

Computer talk

ANet DrStephenCW

Monkeibusiness

Are there any plans of optimizing the game? I know that I will never get multicore support, but with a 8 core with 4.7ghz per core I should get more than 17fps in HoT maps, right?

Yes, you should. Because I get way more than that on my AMD 4 core machine and all four cores are in use. I can’t diagnose your machine, but I would suggest checking the following: turn off hyperthreading (it cuts cache size in half); make sure your power settings are on “high”; make sure your CPU is cooled, because most clock themselves down when overheating

ANet DrStephenCW

Monkeibusiness

“I can’t diagnose your machine”
Of course not. Giving you more info here, feel free to do with it whatever.

AMD-fx 9590 @ 4,7ghz. Normally underclocked and undervolted, but for gw2 testing I turned it to std settings. Water cooling, temp in idle is 30°C, in gw it goes up to 63°C (!) max, same under prime95 torture test. Obviously no hyperthreading to turn off, because AMD.

AMD Radeon R9 390
8 GB of RAM
Power supply is fine, everything runs stable during torture tests.
System freshly set up, no other programs running in the background, all drivers up to date.

I’m just weirded out that gw2 puts such a huge strain on my system. Ofc the CPU clocks itself down when it hits 70°C, but seriously gw2 shouldn’t have the same effect on my cpu as a freaking torture test. Especially when there’s a lot of players, fps just drops massively. “I like my fps, all 2 of them” is a common joke in HoT maps when doing HP runs.

What helps is turning off shadows, and setting the players shown to medium. Then I get around 35 fps in HoT maps with no one around, 20fps with players shown. But come on, this system is supposed to handle the newest AAA games, and it does so fine. But it can’t handle an MMO a couple of years old for some reason. Must be the poor optimization for AMD CPUs.

Oh, and by the way: Lion’s Arch is even worse than HoT maps.

Assuming you have Windows 7 or later, run resmon.exe, run Gw2, click on Gw2 in resmon, and then click on the CPU tab.

When lots of players are on screen the main processing load is compositing everyone’s very different look.

I agree with moriz0 we’re not great at cache coherence; partly it was a coding style decision made a long time ago which does in fact keep our code a lot easier to maintain; and partly it is the nature of the game where nearly everything on screen is hand-crafted (i.e., mostly unique and not instanced).

I’m very interested in how your machine handles 8 cores as shown in the resmon graph; we run with 4 at the office. There could be a contention issue that only shows up with 8 cores, which would be super interesting, and give me an excuse to order an 8 core machine!
Thanks-

ANet DrStephenCW

Monkeibusiness

Will do in a couple of days. Very happy to get that request / help from you guys.

Sweet! Thanks! I should point out that the resmon cpu tab is the percentage of all cores in use, so in your case 100% would mean 8 cores firing, 50% would mean either 4 cores firing or 8 cores at 50%. You can see actual core usage by downloading SysInternal’s Process Explorer and telling it to show individual cores.

continuation

QrkoThorquist.8126
Well, I had some fps issues with the lastest update as well and they only happen when I enter HoT maps (I have 40-60 fps everywhere else, enter GH or any HoT map and boom down to 14-17 and it stays that way unless I reboot my computer and after that I’m getting normal fps everywhere, lol). For more info and my specs you can check ticket #2123325 if it would provide some more samples

ANet DrStephenCWStudio Tech Director
This sounds like some kind of DRAM thrashing with your video card; something is not freeing up memory. Rebooting fixes that.

QrkoThorquist.8126
Well, it wasn’t the case before the patch. Also, rebooting helps ONLY after I start GW2 for the first time (i.e. clean start gives me the problem, rebooting solves it), so I have to start my computer twice in order to play GW2. What’s more it’s also worthy to note that I do not have any problems with any other games. Just GW2 after the patch that started 2nd PvP season.

ANet DrStephenCWStudio Tech Director
Is this still broken? We had some goofy lighting bug that snuck out but is now fixed in a more recent patch.

QrkoThorquist.8126
Sadly, it didn’t help. Also, like I said my problem started way before the lighting bug and for now the only workaround for me is to start the computer, start the game, reboot and start the game again.

ANet DrStephenCWStudio Tech Director
That is super-wonky. Does your computer have two graphics cards? There was a Windows 10 patch that came out the same time as one of our patches (since we both patch on Tuesdays) and my laptop that has two graphics chips fails to finish loading a level; it’s not a vendor-specific problem; it happens to a colleague of mine here too who has a laptop from a different vendor. The fix is to hit ctrl-alt-del and then escape; that somehow unblocks the transition from the low-power GPU to the high-power GPU. Also, since that Windows 10 release, some of the textures in-game are the empty default texture.

BTW, try setting the texture res really low as an experiment. If you have bad DRAM in your video card then this makes the odds that the game will trip over it much lower. If this “fixes” the problem then it could be you have some bad DRAM in your video card that is only exercised in some circumstances.

Will the inverted Longbow and Shortbow preview ever be fixed

GM Awesomeness

We have a potential fix for this being tested as of yesterday.

(Reference post: Links to Colin Johanson’s Reddit Thank You and the forum’s Goodbye threads)

Thank You!

The Farewell Colin Johanson Thread

(Reference post: link to today’s Guild Chat Livestream notes)

Dulfy’s notes: Storytelling in Raid Wing 2

Armor and emotes

Regina B

GimmeSylvari

Hi ! Will there ever be any official armor design contests? Like the guild emblem creation, but for a full armor set ?

Also, seeing that the animators do such a great job in GW2, why can’t we get more emotes ? (Could even be a gemstore thing, as long as it’s not a book thingie that we have to take everywhere, but something that unlocks new emote commands instead ?)

Armor is one of the most expensive things in the game to create. Armor is complicated and needs to be created with many considerations in mind, and these considerations may not be easily apparent or describable to fan armor designers. It isn’t a bad idea to run a contest like this, but it’s many orders more involved than other types of contests, which may be a better use of our limited development and marketing resources. We always have to weigh the pros and cons of any type of contest based on our marketing goals.

Resources and priority comes up with animation and emotes as well. Yes, we can technically create new emotes, but they need to be prioritized over other needs. Do new player emotes take priority over animation for creatures in (as an example) the next raid? If game directors believe that this is a good use of our limited resources, then then this would be prioritized and resources would be allocated accordingly. It would be awesome to have new player-character emotes, but we don’t have unlimited animators, and they may have other other priorities that supersede the desire for new emotes.

Discussion about the cost of Precursor crafting

(4 months ago)

ANet LinseyMurdock

empiron

I posted this question to LinseyMurdock right when she made that comment. I got a few up votes, i’m sure she must have read it because she was active on that thread for a few days after, but they’ve been extremely busy and I understand why she might have forgot to reply. No worries. If you believe that they are working as intended (and i’m sure they are) maybe you could answer this for me:

She said they tried to set base prices by weapon type. Thats great, and it seems to have worked because two handed weapons from what people have crafted all cost about 600g-650g. However, why did they time gate this differently? Dawn requires 90 deldrimor (90 days!) , colossus 45 deldrimor (45 days), while Legend requires 37 spirit wood (37 days). Those are some crazy differences especially for artificial gating. If this is some epic journey, then why do I have to drag it out for THREE MONTHS simply due to daily limits? IF they wanted to keep the price similar, they could have balanced it by increasing other non-timegated materials instead

P.S. I don’t want to hear that “They were never meant to be cheaper” statement. We’ve seen that enough. It could have cost the same from my perspective, I still would be glad to have a non-RNG way. But at least keep the time gates the same?! I hope Linsey can shed some light on this, i’m sure there is a good reason that i’m missing.

I used the standard material cost for a weapon of that type as the base and then adjusted the numbers based on the overall cost of the weapon. The costs I used were not based on crafting it yourself, but rather on the cost of purchasing them from the trading post which is historically more expensive than crafting them yourself. Thus I did not factor them as a hard time gate, because they aren’t since you can bypass the time game by purchasing from the trading post if you want it faster.

(Today)

ANet LinseyMurdock

Evel Shard

This decision will come back to bite you eventually. What you’ve done is essentially price fixing. The requirements for various precursors should have been similar, including Rage, and Carcharias.

What happens if there is an expansion for the underwater dragon? In a normal market, the price of the underwater precursors would go up substantially, but due to your price fixing, they will remain at around 50g or so.

I don’t think it is unreasonable for us to say “this is what we would like these precursors to cost for players to get” and take steps to ensure that. This isn’t free market capitalism, this is a game and as the developers, it is up to us to define the experience.

The problem of Yanonka: the Rat Wrangler

ANet darapotocska

TehOwn

Many players may struggle because they don’t understand the mechanics but that’s not the primary issue. The main problem is that even once you find Yanonka, anyone else triggering a suspicious rat can make her teleport across the entire map.

Just now, four guilds (including mine) were hunting Yanonka, only for her to teleport around the map four times. Quickly sharing in map chat where she’d appeared and waypointing all over the place just to secure a kill is no fun. Can we get this fixed fast or disabled in the meantime?

A little hint for mechanics that several people miss:
The rats hit you (and knockdown) if you hit them. Use single-target attacks on Yanonka!

Hey friends! We have been aware of this issue and have been investigating a solution for it. (I cannot offer an eta for a fix). For now, I suggest abandoning the mission and restarting it for different targets (unless you do your guild missions at an odd hour and don’t have others on the map with you). Good luck! /salute.

Storytelling in Raid Wing 2

ANet BobbyStein

It actually depends on the encounter. Some fights like the Vale Guardian have almost no VO (except when you beat it and if you walk up to a busted pylon, find the footprints, etc.), whereas others (like Sabetha, Gorseval, Prison Camp, etc.) have a bunch of loreful and contextual VO lines during and after the fight that add to the story. You can get a lot of info about the story by exploring a cleared instance and finding all the interactive bits, but you’ll only hear boss callouts and post-event scenes if you play the raid.

TL;DR: You have to fight the bosses and inspect the lore items to get the complete story but exploring a cleared instance probably gives you about 75% of the information, minus the “throughline” reveals that happen through gameplay VO.

AI used in HoT and its potential future

Dystopiq

For those of you unaware, Dave Mark, an AI programmer had been hired as an AI consultant by ArenaNet to work on HoT. Fast forward to now and an interesting blog was posted by him regarding his work on Everquest Next. In the post there’s an interesting paragraph.

On Everquest Next and AI driven mmos
In fact, after leaving the project (something I did not want to do), I ended up going straight to ArenaNet (thanks to my dear friend Mike Lewis) and spent a year implementing much of the same architecture and design. Some of it was used in the Heart of Thorns expansion to GuildWars 2 — the rest was prototyped up for possible use in future ArenaNet titles. (Much of the reason that some things were not used is that they were too much of a departure from the established gameplay of the GuildWars 2 franchise.)

I don’t know about you guys but I would like to see more of that implemented in GW2. Giving GW2 a more dynamic world would be something I would love to experience and I’m sure others would too.

ArenaJon

The raids team uses the new AI almost, if not, exclusively. It’s being used more and more now that we’re getting a better feel for working with it.

(Reference link to GDC lecture: Building a better Centaur)

Guild Wars 2 at GDC 2016

ANet Regina_B Content Marketing Lead

smitske

I saw the one they did on AI last year which was really interesting, some nice things could be seen and we really see it pay off in HOT. This one seems to be about their process on HOT, but in all fairness from where I stand as a customer it seems that process really wasnt that much to brag about IMO.

I’m going to be blunt and reiterate that the consumer is not the intended audience for this panel. The average consumer probably wouldn’t find this sort of deep dive into MMO game production incredibly interesting. All the consumer sees is the results of the process, rather than the process itself. So I think your perspective is totally understandable!

Those who are interested in game development, whether they want to work in the industry or whether they are currently working in the industry, would probably find it more interesting and potentially useful.

Sonya and Amy gave a dry run of their presentation for me and a few other folks last week. While I have worked in the game industry for nearly a decade, I’m not a producer so I did learn a few things. I found their talk pretty interesting, especially the examples they gave to help illustrate some of their points.

In general, I really enjoy going to GDC when I get the chance because I get to attend talks and learn new things that are outside my own field.

ANet Regina_B Content Marketing Lead

Bruno BRS

so will this be available right after GDC, or will this be one of those panels that take almost a year to free up for those without a couple thousand dollars to spare?

I’m not sure, nor am I sure about whether complanies have much of a say in terms of what talks end up in the GDC Vault for free or exclusively for conference pass holders. I can look into it, though it might take a little while because GDC is currently in progress and so the people that can answer the question may not be available until the conference is over.

Reference link to site: Session Scheduler

Raid bosses have the coolest music you rarely hear

ANet exackley

Lightguardianjack

So each of the Raid bosses actually have their own music themes and they actually sound quite cool:

Vale Guardian: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dRde3xunw0
Sabatha: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFpeLh8098U
Matthias Gabrel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V94sLUExNcs

Only one problem, they will only play on your first pull and never again so you’ll probably actually miss them when your actually Raiding. I would really appreciate it if they played more often…

Thanks for listening:). I’ll make sure to pass this on to Maclaine. Great catch, that wasn’t the intention, but now that we’ve looked in to it, yep, only played the first time. Bug submitted, thanks.

ANet maclain

Hey, cool! I’m just seeing this now, so I don’t know if anyone else in here will notice it, but thanks for listening. The plan is to have new music for each raid boss, and there are six tracks so far, with some new ones coming in the next raids release. I’ll look into getting them up on Soundcloud, as well as seeing if we can get them to play more often.
Thanks again!

jkTyrant

Mwhaha my private messaging powers worked xD

(Comment: the post about “private messaging powers” is about how that forum allows the posters there to specifically get the attention of any forum poster, including ANet staff, by name by typing a code with the forum name. (It looks like this. :Paging /u/maclaine) This sends a message to their account on that forum and they can choose to respond. It’s how Chris Cleary got a direct request to respond to the above thread, Ban out of the blue, and was able to go there directly and fix the problem).

PvP and reporting players

ANetCSLead

aRestless

Do we have actual confirmation that GMs do add dishonor as punishment? I know that they could and that it would affect matchmaking the way you describe it, but do they actually do it?

At this time we don’t. We uncovered a bug in which some user’s entire PvP record could be deleted if certain criteria were in place. We do plan to start using the tool very soon™ .

Discussing gw2 wiki and how it broke

ANet Stephane

RedGlow82

Weird way of applying updates. Don’t they have a staging and/or test server where to check if the updates work or not? It seems like these are pretty easy problems to check.
BTW, thanks for all the hard work with the wiki :-)

Our staging environment does not mirror exactly the live environment, for practical and resource reasons. Some of the errors that were on live yesterday could not have been caught during the tests and we’re going to look into ways to improve our testing on these updates.

ANet Stephane

We’re aware of the 503 errors on the wikis and are continuing to investigate. What is specific in the situation we’re managing is that the content is very complicated, as we have dynamic elements (e.g. DPL and Semantic MediaWiki code) in addition to things like Templates and other wiki aspects (e.g. extensions), not to mention that the GW1 wiki has a lot of historical information.

Season 2 of the ESL Pro Leagues begins March 21st

ANet JoshuaDavis Grouch

kitamoo

Wait, who are Gems N Tonic? Did a team change their name again?

Formerly Best Team North Africa [BTNA].

ANet JoshuaDavis Grouch

AdulaAdula

Ugh, another season of nerves visual effects and ignored content incoming then… #esports

Hi!
Wanted to clear up a few things →
First, the fx changes were not made due to Pro League – visibility in combat is a game-wide issue that we’re looking at. For more deets on how we plan to address it, ’check out this post.

Second, Pro League and our content updates have nothing to do with each other. I think folks are under the impression that there’s a giant esports team at ArenaNet that’s sucking up all the resources, but I can assure you that’s not the case. I’d take a picture of the ArenaNet team responsible for managing Pro League, but it would be a little weird to take a selfie at my desk.
Hope that helps!

Comment about Pro Leagues and costs

ANet Joshua Davis Grouch

neys7s

Once and for all people, the budget used on these prizes, events, all that concerns esports, even casters, is budget for marketing, if you allocate this budget elsewhere, it will still be for marketing but for some ads, be it online, tv, billboards, whatever else you can think of(an ad on tv costs a lot of money, you can check online for time and channel depending your country, so basically you have to pay multiple channels), then you can all remember the taxi cringe ad so.. then there are also multiple sponsors giving money for esports, still i doubt this money will be allocated to devs teams and content because that’s not how things work, and specially that ROI on these esports events is good, and you can’t argue about it, you don’t have all the data nor a master in marketing. EDIT: that’s what Colin said, I can’t find the source, but that’s the idea.

More or less accurate! I have marketing budget to work with, not developer headcount. It’s likely that in place of Pro League we’d be running more banner ads on gaming websites – the kind of ads that you probably never see because you’re using the internet in 2016 and use an ad-blocker. :P

Pro League is a pretty cool endeavor – definitely atypical for the genre, but we’re sort of an unconventional company – and it’s an added bonus that we can talk to a whole new group of gamers (non-MMO players) while also providing regular tournament content for our existing users.

Apparently Twitch crashed about the same time that Guild Chat was supposed to be on today. Here’s a link to the video for those who want to watch it. If Dulfy puts up the notes later I’ll post a link to it.

All the guild hall NPCs are showing blank pages

ANet darapotocska

Like a few others have said, you’re not alone. We’re currently investigating this issue and trying to figure out a fix.

The ongoing conversation can be watched here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Guild-Hall-Treasury-1
=( I’m sorry many of you are dealing with this, and thank you for your patience while we try to pinpoint and fix it.

Storytelling in Raids

Sirrush

This character will have a huge important in the future storywise.

I mean all he said was “will be involved” but if you want to blow it up then yeah go ahead I guess.

Kylden_Ar

So, another story thread they will start, forget about, and never visit again?

ANet BobbyStein

Nope. See my previous comment. (It’ll make sense in wing 3.)

Paelmoon

Like Malyck?

ANet BobbyStein

That comment is not lost on me. Bear in mind that my involvement with HoT was minimal, but I did partake in many discussions about scoping and such in the early phases of the project. There simply wasn’t the time or resources to do that story justice. And while it’s hard for a team to make that call, it’s a very real part of game development. You can’t do everything all the time because it’s just impossible.

Clarification: This doesn’t mean that we’ll never address it, only that there was a scoping reason as to why it wasn’t included in HoT.

Comment: this one I debated putting here as the Dev didn’t have anything new to say.
However it makes the point to remember that when someone posts that they were banned and says that they are completely innocent, that it’s best not to jump to conclusions like some of the people on the Reddit thread did who immediately assumed he was lying and made personal remarks/attacks.

Ban out of the blue

ANet ChrisCleary

These were bad bans, unbanned both of your accounts and added some gems as well. My apologies, this was a failure on multiple levels of our staff here, the ban should never have happened or stuck after appeals. Sorry.

Extreme lag in SEA

GMGus

So if you want to figure out exactly where the extra latency is coming from, I recommend the following.

First, when you’re having latency on your server, grab the IP of the server by typing /ip in chat. This will give you the IP of the server you are currently connected to, and which in theory your connection is having problems routing to.

Second, download a program like WinMTR or Pingplotter, run it, input that IP you got in the step above and then let the program run for a bit (20 minutes maybe?). These programs will show you network stats for every hop between you and the server, and should show you exactly where the packet loss is starting. Once you’ve got that data you can make the decision to either call your ISP or try out a VPN service that will route you around the bad hop.

Let me know if you have any questions about any of this. =)

(From 11 months ago)

Dyeing weapons

jpetrie

I can’t give you specifics or anything (they’d be very tedious to compute even if I still had access to the code), but GW2’s codebase is very much an evolution of the codebase used for GW1. We did not start over, or anything crazy, but nor did we use the GW1 code unchanged.

Huge chunks of gameplay code were added, removed, or refactored so heavily as to be effectively-new (even things you might think would be the same, like inventory). The core rendering and networking capabilities had some significant reworking to support new features, but a lot of the fundamentals remained the same. The very low-level stuff, such as the classes we use to manage collections of data, do math, sort things… those didn’t change much and some files might even be identical to the ones in GW1, except maybe for some copyright or header date changes.

Essentially if you view the code as a vertical stack of functionality, with very-game-specific gameplay code at the top and generic data structure/algorithm stuff at the bottom, the closer something is to the top the more likely it experienced significant tweaking at some point during GW2’s development.

To address the specific topic of this thread (dying stuff)… what I recall (so I might be wrong) is that the decision to dye armor but not weapons was a design one (in the sense we chose to do it, not that there were insurmountable technical issues), and made pretty early. We wanted a much richer dye system for GW2 than we had in GW1. This would require some changes to the way that the source art was authored, which increased the complexity (and thus time) of doing so. That additional complexity pays off best for armor, which is more visible on-screen than weapons generally are, and so (I think) it was decided that we wouldn’t bother authoring dye support into the weapon art. Eventually this decision would have led to code changes or optimization relying on that assumption, and we arrive at where we are today.

As with all things, it could be made possible to dye weapons with sufficient code and art resources sunk into it. But it would be a nontrivial undertaking (and probably a non-trivial patch download!) to re-author all the existing source art with appropriate metadata for dye channels.

(Please keep in mind that all of this is from memory from a long time ago, so I may be forgetting/misremembering/et cetera some things.)

Engie bomb kit is broken

Towelcat

It seems to depend on the terrain, but bomb skills 2, 3, 5, and the toolbelt can fall through the ground and land on lower terrain, while the 1 and 4 skills are either unaffected or can explode ABOVE your head (sometimes below the ground as well though).

ANet Chun

We’re investigating this right now!

Slothazor movement is broken

NiBlack

It seems after today patch Slothazor became acting more like Gorseval pre movement fix – taking weird sidesteps for god know what reasons. (we had few times that he just went away from person who he was supposedly fixated on.).

CrystalRAID

We’re looking into this.

Threatened with ban because of Digital River

ANet Dornsinger

Let me trawl this thread for a few, and then I’ll do my best to give you guys information on this matter – as much as I can without compromising our own fraud protection processes.

Okay, without knowing the ticket number, I assume this was “2138670” ? Which seems resolved at this time and it appears the user has been helped.

Here is the thing: We cannot see all the data that is being passed along (see my previously written comment about ‘pitching’). Banks NEED to keep some stuff in the dark, that is how they work to protect everyone involved from payment fraud.

Please believe me: That’s not just frustrating for the user. So often do I review a payment issue and think: WHY can this bank not tell me what happens?! WHY am I only being told “Payment refused”?! …well, that reason is I am an office monkey wearing a hoodie working for games, not an office monkey wearing a suit working at a bank.

Anyone who actually works in banking would be better asked on the details, but what I can tell you from what we work with is this: Payment Fraud is a profitable business for some people on this planet. Banks are working hard to both protect you as the customer and us as the vendor from this fraud. Banks may block your payment or even automatically charge it back of the online payment was deemed fraud by them. The details and profiled for this safeguarding isn’t publicly shared and there are few details we can discuss even if we know them.

What IS good, if that was your ticket, is that you contacted us back and told us that DR may be in error. That helps us hunt down more data and we can try to help or fix things.
As a general thought: Please do keep in mind that “charge-backs” always fall under “Fraud” and chances for us to help in those cases are vanishingly small. In order for us to be compliant with the rules credit card providers have, we have little choice but to end the relationship with a customer who issues charge-backs.

ANet Dornsinger

Anwn

Is there any chance you had an issue with Digital River on another platform? They handle a lot of stuff and if you have had problems with them through another company, they can hold it against you with Anet.

A point very much worth mentioning. It’s true that out payment processor works on a lot of projects and they will compare your information to other projects. If you credit card has issues charge backs with them before, for example, they will refuse that credit card. In some cases, they will refuse to accept your payments, fully. That is on their back end, however, and we are not privy to that information – it’s your bank info after all.

ANet Dornsinger

Howliq

You should ask them to provide more info on the chargebacks and get it checked with your bank as well. After that if there were really chargebacks, you should show willingness to cooperate with settling your debt (usually transferring money to a corporate bank account, if they do this sort of thing).

Source: I work at a large website’s payment processor company, and we handle cases like this the way I described above.

We used to be able to do this, however, the way we work with Digital River no pay back at all is possible. That is why it is vital that ‘tips’ such as “You didn’t like what you bought for your gems? Just charge it back!” are not followed – they also make my ears bleed each time I hear it. And internal hemorrhaging isn’t fun.

Things the user can do:

• Ensure they do not issue charge-backs. If you need to talk about your payment with someone, PLEASE reach out to us first. We WILL try to help you and we WILL try to find means of solving your concerns, but if we are not involved in that discussion till facts are presented, DR will do what we pay them for and guard us from possible fraud.
• Use a payment method that secures your payment. PayPal, for example, works for both the seller and the buyer. They will be a buffer for your payments.
• If your financial situation isn’t steady (for whichever reason (I know my pocket money / allowance never was steady for example~), consider buying Gems Cards. Heck, if you keep your eyes peeled, your local retailer may even have sales going on.

ANet Dornsinger

Snowflare182

For every story like this, there’s plenty of people that have no problem whatsoever buying gems – i’ve never had any issues or any bans since launch so far, and neither (as far as i’m aware) have about 95% of the people in the 2 500-person guilds i’m in.

You are correct. It’s a perception issue. Users WILL NOT make threads for “Yay, I just bought 1600 gems again ankitten ow going to spend them!” – topics like that would be more than silly, right?

People buy gems normally and without problems every day. I have bought way more gems for my two play accounts than I openly want to admit, Using VISA, AmEx and PayPal. Never had an issue. The issues come (and become perceived as wide-spread), when failed payments or payment issues are discussed. One person posts, five others will remember they had issues. If you did a quick poll of “me too’s” who bought gems normally, the thread would fully derails and the issue would quickly show itself to be a non-issue.

ANet Dornsinger

LadyVerene

I would suggest you contact your bank, look over your statements, and see if there’d been any refused payments or chargebacks done. I’d also respond to your ticket with the info from what happened last time and ask for more details – what chargebacks? When did they happen? For how much? And compare this against the info you’ve gotten from your bank.

In general: YES, please do. But something to keep in mind is this: In some cases, sadly, these things won’t hit your bank statement.

A lot happens between banks in the background, and not everything is showing as booked or processed.

If you ‘buy’ something, a lot of communication starts between your bank, possibly payment processors and the other bank. Just like any bit of online data, there are pitching processes, there are checks, there are profiles and data needs to be squeezed in all the right places. It can happen, that the payment fails during any of these statges OR is even recalled during these stages by one bank or refuted by the other. In such cases, the end-user may not even see the problem.

This is something you can often see with users of “PaySafeCard”. The pitching, if it fails, will still show to the user that they no longer have the expected funds on their card – because PSC takes it away from the card during the pitching processes. It can then take 12-72 hours for that money to be returned to the card and on our side we only see “no payment received” – but not why.

ANet Dornsinger

I wish willful fraud was a non-issue or even a small percentage.

Gold Sellers get their gold from two sources mainly. Hacked Accounts… and bank fraud. We’d love to not have to trouble ourselves with this. We could spend money and manpower elsewhere in the customer service team. Sadly, that is not the case.

ANet Dornsinger

howellq

You know I wonder, reversing chargebacks is possible, however it takes time. It basically re-does the original transaction. It’s rare but sometimes banks do this if a customer asks. Does this fix the issue, or is there no fix at all?

It is my understanding that this isn’t possible in the system as it is set up. This is why we check with DR when a player contacts us about their account closure. Sadly, these investigations always do take time. You’ll have seen users report that “then they let me hang for two weeks”. In that time, we work with the customer service team at DR for you to find out what’s going on and what can be done. It’s slow, and I wish I could claim otherwise, but that’s the truth of the matter. I’m not here to tell anyone stories.

ANet Dornsinger

howellq

I’ve been playing for the entire life of GW2 and buy gems on pretty much a monthly basis, but stories like this make me very nervous that if my card ever gets skimmed (heaven forbid) and the bank accidentally reverses a gem purchase when they cancel the card that I’ll be out my account or out my ability to purchase gems ever again. I know it’s silly but I value my account a lot and according to what the OP reported about your policy, this would appear to be a bannable situation? It scares me.

Don’t feel silly for caring about your account. We’re gamers, we all put our love and passion into the games. I am painfully proud of owning a certain MMOs game accounts with veteran status of 15+years. I fully get it.

If you saw my comment int his thread, if you are worried, there are other ways for you as a buyer. GemCards, so long as you don’t buy them from shady dealers (gold sellers etc) are fine, I’ve never seen a PayPal issue unless the user handed in a PayPal dispute and forced the closure, never had problems with any of my other cards, either. Also, if you contact us, like the OP did, we can work with you.

However, please also understand I cannot go into all details, because a lot of willful fraud is being done by gold sellers who’d love to know the ins and outs. #ThisIsWhyWeCantHaveNiceThings

Computer Support issues this morning

GM Gus

Just a quick heads up for anyone submitting a ticket this morning. The main tool we use for handling tickets is having some issues. You should still be able to submit tickets normally, but you might see some additional delays in getting a response.

https://twitter.com/ZendeskOps/status/712667643266859008

Is ANet making a mistake by not supporting both parts of the franchise

ANet LinseyMurdoch

Varorson (Konig Des Todes.2086)

Ever since the content drought that began after the release of the Bonus Mission Pack (think it was 2 years of absolutely nothing beyond balance and bug fixing – and people complain about a mere 8 months that has huge feature balances (specialization/LA change) or raids released in the middle), I’ve thought it silly on ArenaNet’s part to not work on both game simultaneously. I still think so.

It is a shame that they cut Beyond, because even that alone would keep the game flowing with a lot of players. I know dozens of folks who would gladly return to gw1 if they had something new to do, and dozen others who would play more often if there were others to play with.

It took us about a year and a half to start up GW:Beyond after the BMP, but we released Zaishen Quests, the menagerie, and Nicholas the Traveler well before that.

ANet LinseyMurdoc

maketyriagreatagain

There were plans for future guild wars beyond chapters so we’re not really talking about a new direction, and GW:Beyond was the best content I’ve ever played in Gw1 both in terms of gameplay and story, I’d give a kidney to see at least one more installment.

Thank you for the compliment and don’t forget Andrew Gray and Joe Kimmes who are both still here as well! Of the original GW Live Team, most of us are still here.

It would be really hard to pull those folks back together though. We have all become heavily entrenched in GW2 development, not to mention how long it has been since anyone except Joe has worked on GW1 (Joe did all the 10th Anniversary stuff). It’s been over 5 years since I touched any of those files.

After wrapping up my work on Legendary Journey, I became the Live Lead Designer, once again leading Live content development for Tyria and Andrew is one of my team leads working on Living World. The last time we worked together was on War in Kryta, what I consider the very first LW style content development that Anet produced. It’s both exciting and surreal to be back to this kind of work with Andrew on my team. I hope you’ll feel the same way about the stuff we are working on now!

I will always have a very special place in my heart for GW1. I was a super fan with over 2k hours in the game when I got my job here. I even went back just last year to finish my vanquishing and get a couple more points for my HoM. I occasionally daydream about spawning stuff in GW1 again, but I just don’t see it being a good use of our resources to spin up a new GW1 Live Team. But it is genuinely heartwarming to see how much love there is still out there for that wonderful game.

Pan’s Labyrinth Tree in Auric Basin

ANet barefootmathew

Justin is awesome to work with for sure (I co-scripted some of the “Fawcett’s Bounty” content along with Matt Wuerffel, though both of them deserve almost all of the credit for how awesome that is), as are so many of our amazing environment artists!

Also, I’ll share a little tidbit that not a lot of people know – the “Triforge” pendant is actually two references in one – there’s the Zelda connection as you mentioned, but when Pat, Jeff and Mo first started the studio, “Triforge” was the name that they were thinking about using before settling on Arenanet. There’s another reference to this piece of early Arenanet history in Brisbane Wildlands – the Triforge Point point/waypoint/heart in Vandal’s Claim, which features a trio of allies coming together to face down the Sinister Triad (a cheeky reference to Anet’s own challenge to take on the “Holy Trinity” of MMO design philosophy).

Captain’s Airship bugs

GM Awesomeness

Arcade 1980

Hello everyone, I’m more most by know have realized that the Captain’s Airship pass will give you an error that the content is currently not available.

The other bug that surfaced from mid weeks update causes the game think you are still on the ship if you decided to glide off the ship. Going into the Mists and back or exiting the game and coming back will not fix it. You would have to map to LA or another map and come back, to fix the issue.

I wonder if ANet is trying to fix the bug and is the reason you can get on the airship at the moment

We are indeed fixing it, and the 2nd bug is why the item had to be disabled.

The good news is the most recent hotfix should fix the 2nd bug. The item will be re-enabled in the next couple of hours, once most people have updated to the new build.

EU reset broken?

AnetChrisB
I’m pretty late in replying to this thread, but WvW in EU is back and on the new reset time (18:00 UTC Fridays): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Friday-Match-Resets-Starting-March-25th/6054909

When we change WvW’s reset time in NA this evening, progress updates will be added here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Friday-Match-Resets-Starting-March-25th/6054910

There was a mini-“perfect storm” of events that combined in a particular, unexpected way that prevented WvW from starting up its maps until the new build was available.

I assure you we’re responsible for far fewer conspiracies than we’re credited for.

6 people, 5 months, one Legendary

ANet Merryrli

Fingerlights

How do 6 people, working full time jobs, create a single item / “quest” in 5 months? how does this warrant employment?

Quick Edit: For everyone arguing that this takes time to create the “quest” part of it, and therefore it makes sense these take (10 times) significantly longer to make than a gem-store item – please remember, Heart of Thorns was made in roughly 9 months, and 16 (number might be slightly off) of these “quests” were created, so no, they don’t take 5 months, to make one. ESPECIALLY when the concept, design, and base code are completely made already.

There is only 2 ways this really happened,
1) most of the legs are 99.99% complete, and therefore pulling the team off them in the last .01% is idiotic, or.
2) the team got next – to – nothing done, for undisclosed reasons – incompetence, unforeseen issues, being slack etc etc etc, which points to poor management.
Either scenario – IS NOT GOOD.

EDIT2: People are asking were I pulled “9 months” from it was on the back burner (at very best) until 2015 – source “In 2015 our focus predominantly shifted away from live updates and toward our first expansion.” https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/state-of-the-game-update-q1-2016/

I do not want to create any trouble, but the 6 people is not 6 people just in that.
Design of the quest is really closer to 3(right now). Then you have to add helpers for QA, UI(holy cow, I can’t recall the number of Icons we have done for them) and management. And on top, any asset they do need has to get time from somewhere else(UI, environment, props, QA, etc)

I do not want to start any trouble, but their pure quest design takes a tons of time. Heck, I can pull 100 icons in a week for them if wanted(reusing old or plain free time put into it), but ask me to go check on live if every quest works, if everything matches up to the idea of time needed, plus how the road of the legendary work and I can tell you I would not even know how long that itself takes.

Design takes a lot of time, it is not just some joe thinking of it and implementing it randomly. It takes a lot of time. (Add meetings that come up due to other things going around)

I am sad this decision was taken, as I love hearing the ideas designers have for each weapon, not just the item, but what they want to make as a road. At the end, I would love for more player to enjoy the items and the road, and it can’t really be done without making other player feel cheated.

So, lots of variables here, just do not blame the people working directly on it. Trust me, they are doing their best.

ANet Merryeli

Blackops606

Has Anet considered getting outside QA help for things like testing events on the live servers to make sure they work for upcoming legendary quests? As a bored player, I wouldn’t mind repeating events or trying to help you guys along with development in any way I can. If my help means more content for the game, sign me up or let’s at least chat about possibilities.

We have QA in and out.

I wish we could get more people to QA, I used to be a QA at another company, and I know how valuable it is. But I can check who is in charge of that, maybe someone could come talk a bit more about it. I am really not familiar with the whole process.

ANet Merryeli

Lootballs

Design of the quest is really closer to 3(right now)
So what are the other 3 members of the team doing, and more importantly why is it not this? The quest/journey is the defining part of the S2 legendaries that make them different from the S1(?) set (because the precursors can not be obtained in other ways). Even still though, 3 people working for 6 months should have turned up more than just 1 legendary – especially when we were told it takes 1 month per legendary from start to finish with QA.

I do not want to start any trouble, but their pure quest design takes a tons of time. Heck, I can pull 100 icons in a week for them if wanted(reusing old or plain free time put into it), but ask me to go check on live if every quest works…[I don’t know] how long that itself takes.
Why was such a time expensive and resource intensive system for precursor crafting established then? We had ascended crafting introduced and the whole thing could have been integrated into that system, and instead of a massive collection there could have been a simple 4 tiered crafting recipe (one for each tier of the precursor and legendary) built into this. No UI changes, no drastic overhaul, no unneeded effort. Instead 2 NPCs were added, multiple collections per legendary were made and unique dialog had to be added to tell me to craft 100 Staff Shafts – all of which needed QA. Use the systems you already have before being eager. Events should have been handled differently, with events that are ‘required’ for a precursor dropping an item (weather you’ve started the collection or not) worth 2s instead of a blue/green which is then used in the crafting. Again, a whole lot less to QA test instead of an instant consume item attached to these events. The whole system is a convoluted mess that shouldn’t exist – why do you need pull 100 icons a week when a system in the game (crafting – the clue is right there) could have been used instead of multiple NPCs and new UI.

Design takes a lot of time, it is not just some joe thinking of it and implementing it randomly. It takes a lot of time. (Add meetings that come up due to other things going around)
Then before releasing HoT the key design for each of the promised legendaries should have been finalized and awaiting a “quest” and not advertised as part of the expansion if there was any doubt they weren’t going to be shipped.

1- Even if a team is call something, that doesn’t mean that 100% of the times goes directly to what they are doing. As I said, lots of other things are going, like team meetings, training, hiring, etc. 6 months is not the right ways of putting it as that includes the design documentation for the whole system and then the implementation of such a system inside other systems that are already in game. It is not just the weapons itself per say.

2- This is something I can’t answer.

3- I think there was not going to be a doubt about shipping them, and that is why we announced it. And in part is why we usually do not say anything about future releases, cause sometimes things change and we end like this(which isn’t good for anyone.)

ANet Merryeli

Hipster Hulk

“Heck, I can pull 100 icons in a week for them if wanted”

Assuming 7 hours per day, 5 days per week that means 35 minutes to make one 30 × 30 pixel icon.

Meetings would have to be consider too. Generally, I can do some in 15 mins(sets with small changes), others do take a good 30.

But I can make a little detail on where that time goes, as it is not just the paint the icon.
It includes looking for reference, sketching, asking the designers the needs they have, making sure it is not similar to another item, getting it into the game, ask designer if they like it, apply changes if needed, technical difficulties.

When I started, the goal I had(per lead) was 40 icons per week, takes a bit to be able to push them fast.

Economy: gathering vs investment style of play

ANet IsaiahCartwright

The main issue with investment style as you mention it is it promotes the rich get richer which is the biggest thing you fight with an MMO economy. Farming ends up being a bit equalizer but most of the time you end up using time gating. And yes you need gold sinks imagine if everyone in the US had a printing press and could print x amount of money per hour that’s how MMO economies work you have to create items that people find while farming that they sell to other players and you have to make gold sinks.

For making GW2 economy my goal was to create strong resistance and support for everything (gold, mats, ect) by this I mean if something gets too high in price it becomes worth farming if something gets too low in price it then converts to something worth while. This worked for the most part in hind site I wish we made fewer materials as we made a lot and the support and resist system gets harder the more things you have. As for investment we discussed it a whole bunch but we find its a pretty hard core way to interact with a game I still think there I room for it

Anet IsaiahCartwright

Iume

Thank you for the insight Isaiah.

Regarding the rich getting richer for Investment-style economies: I feel surprised. If the resource production rate is limited to time (that makes it time-gated, right?) and then how does one rich player get richer than a poorer player? Basically, I mean in the example I gave in the OP, there is an investment in Caledon Forest. It provides X logs per hour. The same is done for a poor player. How does the rich player getting richer faster than the poorer player? A rich player could invest sooner to improve their investment’s production just like guildhalls currently do, but isn’t that effect spread out and its impact reduced?

It would seem that the “rich” players in Farming-style are rich because they own more time to play than the “poor” players who own less time to play, and it seems that playing more = more money so rich still get richer.

Am I missing something fundamental? Am I understanding resistance correctly (resistant to price changes)?

On a side note: how does the RNG factor in resource production, e.g., cloth, leather, gems, basically anything you cannot directly harvest, fit into this idea of graph of strong resistance and support? I get the feeling that this would be very resistant, but too hard to farm. Or do you feel that there should be some sort of target % of drops that is calculated to manage its availability vs. the size of the player base and demand?

It’s more a messaging issue try explaining investment to someone in quick and simple terms vs do something and get a reward. The better messaged something is the more people get to enjoy it. I’m sure you can make an economy work with a heavy investment model but it would probably need to be core to the game, we end up getting similar effect with daily gated rewards or login rewards.

The main thing your missing in a farming model is rich people paying poor people who farm is a super healthy due to the fact it doesn’t interduce more wealth (in most cases it reduces it due to tp frees) so it requires less gold sinks and most gold sinks hit poor people WAY harder then rich. In an investment based growth you have a net gain so you must interduce gold sinks to counter the gain.

Overall RNG on a macro level has little effect it mostly changes the min to min gameplay. In GW2 the hardest hit is actually due to the multiplicative impact of loot sharing really makes it hard to put drop changes on things that feel good and don’t become worthless. This leads to a “trash” heavy drop system where most of what you get is fodder.

edit: I missed the point on cloth vs wood: this was just an example of us making poor resistances which is why we tried to correct that with map bonuses you’ll notice it’s full of poor resistance mats.

Anet IsaiahCartwright

Iume

Fascinating. I can see what you mean about investment’s message when it’s non-core. I just tried to imagine some strategy games w/ investment and the level of comprehension and skill needed vs. hack-and-slash’s get loot styles.

When you say rich, do you mean in-game rich or people who are rich IRL and convert said wealth to in-game wealth? I think I’m going to need to mock up a spreadsheet showing change in time as farming and investment models produce goods for crafting/upgrades because I’m getting a little confused.

I was meaning in game rich, wealth disparity is a big thing in a market economy as it makes things feel unobtainable by a lot of people so it’s something you end up fighting a lot. Investments with no limits would let people with tons of money make a ton so as you’ve said you would need limits.

ANet IsaiahCartwright

Iume

Does that mean an investment system can work for a MMORPG but not if combined with an in-game currency-buying capability?

I think it can work I’ve always wanted to add a “bond” system as I think it would be fun for people who don’t want to trade the market but it would take some serious modeling

ANet IsaiahCartwright

DesseP

I would get such a huge kick out of this. Do it!

One of these weekends I’ll get the urge to do some math and I’ll do it John smith and I have nerded out on it a few times.

ANet IsaiahCartwright

rabbitcoast

Last I checked this was a game. What happened to being rewarded for playing the kitten game? Most of the endgame rewards have nothing to do with actually playing GW2.

Don’t throw stones too quickly some people find farming fun some hate it some like to play the market or investments just different ways to play. Alao prestige is a whole topic into itself

Upcoming changes in Spring Quarterly Update

Anet_Ben

Charrikayu

Swamp is eternal.

When you try and kill Swamp it only grows more powerful.

Challenge accepted.

ANet Ben

platinummyr

Anyone gotten an answer as to whether this also affects the elite-fractal achievements as well?

It doesn’t

ANet Ben

Zadah

I seriously hope it’s not getting removed. Revamped is fine, but please do not remove any of them. I know you didn’t say remove. But I am scared.

We aren’t removing any fractals.

Click here to go to previous posts on this thread:

Continuation of above posts: Reddit thread: Computer talk.

maizirinid
Having 4 cores in use does not mean they are fully utilised. Your operating system is the one who manages the threads for all the applications and services, and generally speaking threads would be pre-empted on a certain time interval – or upon an interrupt – without the guarantee of it being back on the same core. So a long running single-threaded application does not necessarily run on only the same core it was started on, but possibly sequentially on different cores.

Lu5ck
Yes. of course but that doesn’t explain how they are getting CPU usage of 4 cores on average while both of my machines not able to.
Thought it had something to do with graphical setting, so I set max but I never be able to reproduce their results of CPU usage reaching that level. (My i7 is max by default) I did manage to reproduce 4 cores during loading but does loading even counts? @@
Is your system running gw2 on 4 cores or 2 cores?_

ANet DrStephen CWStudio Tech Director
I admit I’m not exactly following what you two are talking about. There is a certain amount of work, primarily related to animating characters on screen, that needs to be done per frame. That is the main consumer of time in your extra cores. Once all the animation is done, your cores will have free time, as the rendering process is blocked on larger, single threaded tasks, primarily related to talking to Direct3D. Slower machines will actually use more CPU as a percentage (in your extra cores), as it takes longer to do the work; faster machines with more cores will finish more quickly.
I hope this makes sense.

Legendary crafting. Bug fixing

ANet mattp

Xandra

So, I know this is a long shot, seeing as legendary weapon progress has been halted. But I’m working on some Tier 1 collections that have stalled events and are not completable.
Flameseeker Proph 1 – Oouo event is stalled on every map I visit (Agents Barwick and Marielli just stand there and die to grawl. No event is active or becomes active.)
Sunrise 1 – the Zinder Slope event to free Skritt is stalled (the NPC doesn’t seem to exist on the map, despite other NPCs saying the event is active)
Thanks!

even though development has been halted on future legendary weapons, we are still keeping an eye and trying to fix bugs as we become aware of them, so I appreciate the report. I’ll forward this along to QA to make sure it gets tracked properly.

Flameseeker – we put in a fix for this, but it seems to have not fully fixed it, and we are already tracking the further issues that have popped up (those NPCs have surprisingly complex scripting)

Sunrise – this one is news to me, so I’ll make sure we try to figure it out.
edit: as a reminder, please try to report things like this via in-game bug reporting. That helps us a lot in tracking issues.

(Fluff)

Video: Ribbons on my Legendary are bugged out and GROWING

ANetCameron

This is quite possibly my favorite bug that I’ve ever seen. Can we call this a feature instead? Pretty pink flowing ribbons, yes please.

ANet ChrisCleary

I see your ribbons and raise you flowers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thEea3B3Iv0

Sab weapon collection not unlocking

ANET_Faerla
We’re aware and we are working on it. Thanks for the heads up

Sab collection: the King Toad bugged

ANET_Blonk
We’re aware of the issue, and are working on a solution. No current ETA for a fix but keep an eye on our patches (shouldnt be too long)

cLam_gw2
Wow that was fast. Tyvm. I’m happy to hear that I don’t have to collect the skins twice.

ANET_Blonk
:) We aim to help as much as we can. Luckily for you I was doing one of my routine reddit checks in between surfing the main forums.

Click here to go to previous posts on this thread:

Continuation of above posts: Reddit: Computer talk

ANet DrStephen CWStudio Tech Director

Ahkaskar

I’m curious what you were talking about with your post further up where you mentioned disabling hyperthreading on an AMD system. Hyperthreading isn’t something AMD uses, so I assume you meant something else?

Legitimately wondering if there’s something I can do to bump performance a bit. It’s not bad at the moment but could always be better if I’m getting sub 60 fps in some areas.

ANetJohan sent me this link with a good description of where the CPU time is allocated in the client: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3ajnso/bad_optimalization_in_gw2/csdnn3n

PvP and Dev teams

ANet Josh Davis

Hi Frands,

I haven’t had much time to spend on the forums as of late and as a result I’ve unfortunately been mostly mum on these types of threads. Since many of you are fresh faces and didn’t visit the forums back when I used to frequent more often, I’ll reintroduce myself (in tl;dr format), and after that we’ll get down into the nitty gritty.

I’ve been at ArenaNet for a little under 3 years. Prior to that, I was a PvP fan just like yourselves. I ran multiple GW2 PvP-specific podcasts, hosted GW2Guru’s State of the Game (wow, that’s old), managed some of the earliest tournaments such as Curse’s Masters of the Mists, and casted dozens of other events (including the first ESL tournament and the 2013 Pax Invitational). Little known fact – in the early days I even played on Team Paradigm NA with Phantaram as well as a number of other teams. I was offered a job at ArenaNet in 2013, and after moving around to a few different teams I ended up on the marketing team as a Brand Manager. My time isn’t dedicated entirely to the PvP (I work with a number of other dev teams), but I am for all intents and purposes the “commissioner” of Pro League and most other events that we’ve run in the past.
Ok, now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s address the OP’s question ? “200k on pros, why?”

Competitive play is something we’ve always been a fan of at ArenaNet – you could say that it’s a part of the company’s DNA, and it’s something we’re committed to supporting just like any other part of our game. The PvP team has been working hard to take PvP from where it was at launch to where it is today (seriously, think about it) and the marketing team has been keen on supporting them. Together we grew the active player-base for PvP by 135% last year – and that’s pretty awesome. After all, things like matchmaking quality and queue times gets better the more people that you have. It’s more or less my job to try to figure out how to replicate that growth as much as possible, and after looking at all the options available for the marketing team, we decided to go down an admittedly riskier path and dedicate some of our budget towards the Pro League initiative. I’ll add that most of Pro League’s costs were funded out of our paid media budget which fuels the advertising banners you’ve probably seen displayed on a variety of websites (or maybe you don’t, because it’s 2016 and you use ad-blockers, which is why initiatives like this are so important!).

There’s certainly a unique opportunity for growth here. We get to talk about our game in new interesting ways with an entirely new group of gamers – some of which may never had been interested in playing MMOs previously. It’s not often that you get to do that.
I think the main takeaway is that Pro League in no way takes away from development for any other aspects of the game (but I can understand how that assumption could be made), but the upside here is that when any part of the game grows – the entire game benefits. We’re not trying to make GW2 into a PvP MMO – it’s just one of the many facets of the game that we all love and want to see be even more successful.

Anyways, I’ll keep an eye on the thread for questions over the next few days, so feel free to AMA!
aka Grouch

ANet Josh Davis

RE: DotaCoach -> that’s a pretty slick website – thanks for sending it over. I’ve seen some initiatives like this run on our forums in the past. I’ll mull it over and see if there’s something a bit more structured we could do.

RE: Balance -> Contrary to popular belief, the PvP team (or wvw, fractals, raids, etc) doesn’t actually handle profession balance. There’s an entirely separate team dedicated to handling balance for all core areas of the game (appropriately named the Balance team). The PvP team (and the other aforementioned teams and more) gives regular feedback on balance issues, but the balance team is ultimately in charge of maintaining the design vision across the game.

For reference, the PvP team is focused on infrastructure -> PvP Leagues and maps, for example.

Re: visibility -> agreed!
Edit: heading home for the evening. Will check back tomorrow.

Guild Chat: Episode 37. Super Adventure Chat

Reference post:
Link to Guild Chat Livestream notes. Super Adventure Chat

Link to video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PLRQWkcDiCI

Anet. Please let me buy from Moto in bulk

Anet ChrisCleary
https://media.giphy.com/media/bn0zlGb4LOyo8/giphy.gif

Please make Proof of Heroics account bound

ToxicRaven
Please make this currency Account Bound so that we can purchase Hero Points for our alternate characters. Everyone in hardcore WvW is required to have their Elite Specs, rendering this currency borderline useless to almost everyone.

This simple adjustment will indefinitely aid ever declining WvW community. Please Anet!
This is the currency: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Proof_of_Heroics
This is the Hero Point scrolls I wish to use on my alts: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Notarized_Scroll_of_Maguuma_Heroics .

ANet TylerB
Ok

Varoson (Konig Des Todes.2086)
I like how everyone’s taking your “okay” to mean “it’ll be done” when it has a wide variety of possible meanings.

Anet TylerB
Dear Varorson, it’ll be done.

Archomeda
Are these tokens also becoming a part of the wallet?

Anet TylerB
Yes. Though, for any Proofs you already own, you’ll need to right-click the stack and select ‘Consume All’ to deposit them into your wallet.

Marwim
Okay, cool. Is the live beta test (rewards and population) still coming this month after april big update? We still didnt get any info about changes we will test.

Anet TylerB
The live beta test for rewards and population is coming this month as part of the big April update.

Stuck bug

txxt
MID AIR IMMOBILIZE (will never get fixed.)

GM Awesomeness
Could you give a little more info on this? Are there specific skills it happens on or conditions that trigger it? Is it happening while gliding, jumping, using leap skills, all of the above?

txxtz
This has been a bug for over 2 years now. There have been countless threads on the official forums about it and it’s even listed as a bug on the wiki under “immobilize.” It is still not listed on the issue tracker which is why i was initially hesitant to reply.
P.S ur my favourite dev @GM Awesomeness <3 you truly are awesome dude. mucho respecto

GMAwesomeness
D’awww, thanks!
Re: this bug: Could it be a variant of this one? “Characters become stuck when dodging or using certain skills”
Do you actually get the “immobilized” debuff, or do you just get stuck in the air?

txxtz
hi, it’s been about a week since i’ve had a reply regarding this known bug. just following up on the matter to make sure this conversation hasn’t been lost in reddit limbo forever. i understand you’re busy and look forward to a reply on the status of this bug. thank u sir have a lovely day.

GM Awesomeness
Nope, not forgotten! There’s been some work done related to the “stuck bug” I mentioned before that I was hoping might help with this one (it’s possible they have similar underlying causes). Have you seen this issue lately?

(Discussion of live beta test for WvW)

Anet TylerB
The live beta test for rewards and population is coming this month as part of the big April update.

frvwfr2
I wonder when we’ll get info on what that actually means.

Anet TylerB
The new answer is that you’ll find out the specifics of the WvW live beta as part of the release notes, rather than a blog in advance.

Lksaar
Will you push the beta during a matchup (normal tuesday Patchday) or when a new matchup starts (Friday)?

Anet TylerB
Both. Rewards beta will be playable on release day, Population beta will start with the reset on Friday.

ANet Devs in game afk

kimolol
I did fractals with 3 of my guildies, we did LFG to find a pug and ended up with an ANet person joining our party. It felt sorta awkward, kind of like playing with almost a celebrity or someone of importance, but we ended up fooling around in the chat and making him talk, was quite fun, so they do really play the game.

And yes, I told him to bring Tybalt back, but he didn’t give a response.

ANET_Blonk
Hehe. We love jumping in and having fun just like everyone else. Everything on my live account has been obtained through hard work (i.e. no god powers)

As far as suggestions and questions about future content, I know that I personally do not like to respond to things like those aside from “I dont comment on speculation on the live game” because I want the focus to be about the fun experience while I’m there, and not my day-to-day job. Plus, talking about that stuff outside of official communication is like walking on egg shells, so its best to just avoid it.

Kagron
So do you have the Eternal title for instance? If you do, did you obtain it with pugs or other Arenanet employees?

I always see you guys with that title and I’m curious if you guys pug raids. I think it’d be really cool to join a group with a dev in it. Especially on day one and they could give really vague hints and tease players.

ANET_Blonk
We have a small group of us that raid together. I think they utilize a few randoms to fill up into a pug, but for the most part I think they just roll together.
Totally! On typical release days there are a bunch of us who come out into the NA servers (sorry EU! Some of us try to get there too but it doesnt always happen).

Continuation of: Please make proof of Heroics account bound

(Click title to go to previous post)

Archomeda
Are these tokens also becoming a part of the wallet?

Anet-TylerB
Yes. Though, for any Proofs you already own, you’ll need to right-click the stack and select ‘Consume All’ to deposit them into your wallet.

PewPewUDeaded
i accidentally collected a bunch of scrolls on a character I 100%‘ed the map with before realizing it was soulbound. They’re useless and would those possibly be changed to not be soulbound? or did I just stupid too hard

Anet-TylerB
Consuming excess scrolls should refund their purchase price.

Policy for gemstore purchases has a 24 hour window

KyrgyzManas
Tried to get a refund for my recently purchased shared inventory slot and that was the support’s answer. I know it wasn’t a 24h window not too long ago as I already did get some refunds…apparently anet has a new policy on that. Thaught I might share this information with you.

GMGus
Hey, this seems off. Can I get your ticket number?
Edit: I found it on my own. (I’m a super sleuth)

I do feel like this needs some clarification, so I’ll just put the info here so everyone can understand out decision a little bit better. The request we responded to was for the gem difference between the normal price of an item and the sale price. We do sometimes refund the difference like this, but only if the original purchase was pretty recent (~24 hours is a guideline in these specific cases, but not a hard limit, we don’t usually have hard limits on things).

In this case, the original purchase was about a month prior to the sale, which is well outside of our guidelines. I definitely stand by the decision that the agent made, though I wish they would have explained it a little bit better in their response to the ticket. I’m totally happy to discuss any concerns about this that anyone has. =)

A part of Guild Wars 1 in Gilded Hollow

sqibleman
First post so sorry in advanced if anything gets broken.

While building a Super Cloud Stairway in the guild hall, I started noticing all the extra layers there are as you go up, and I noticed a few places that seemed to be pretty detailed for somewhere you’re not normally supposed to be, and then I saw this tree that for some reason gave me some deja vu, so after some looking I think Gilded Hollow has the remains of the GW1 outpost Ventari’s Refuge on one of the upper layers

I took some screenshots and was going to compare them to GW1 but realized I’d have to redownload the game, so if anyone wants to go in and compare. http://imgur.com/a/I63Wk
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Ventari's_Refuge_

Anet Gaile Gray
I loved Ventari, and I really like your observations, squibleman! Like 8drawr, I think that anything that ties us to our shared GW history is really lovely — hits me right in the feels.

Thank you ANet for polishing the Black Citadel

ANet JustinF

Glad you liked it! As Charrikayu pointed out, this work was to get it into gliding shape – lots of invisible walls, low res props without collision, etc that needed fixing. I had some extra time so I did polish up, rework the newly accessible areas a bit – esp the Smelter, above/below the Gladium Canton (plus some added scaffolding outside you can get to), and around The Bane.

Lots of pretty epic new spots for screenshots to

Thanks for still doing this, much appreciated!

Will the Moto vendor remain after the festival?

ANet Blonk

Moto will be remaining as a festival vendor post-SAB

Twitter: Ranger sword 1. No longer on lockdown

https://mobile.twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/720960002379407360