Guild Wars 2

Hidden llama in Cliffside

Kantoku83
Found the poor guy all alone in a cave after falling to my death (well I had the singularity so the fall didn’t kill me). Say hi to Arnold!
I really love these hidden things they put in for us to find.

ANet Ben
I am suddenly reminded of middle school. They used to call me Benedict Arnold too :P

ANet Joshua_Davis (Grouch)
Ben, is that you?

Anet_Ben
…maybe…

Try /dance.

WvW poll: May 6th

ANET_McKenna
Hello Everyone!
The new WvW Poll is up: https://feedback.guildwars2.com
This time the topic is Reward Tracks! Keep in mind we plan to add more reward tracks in the future and this poll is specifically to determine if the team needs to spend more time making larger changes, or if the feature can leave beta and only needs small or no changes to be made to it.

MithranArkanere
They could introduce WvW Reward track potions in the daily chests.

ANET_McKenna
These will be added once they are out of beta

deepdragon
I’m not sure how to answer the question. It’s a little weirdly put. I’m of the mind that reward tracks function properly and it should be out of beta, however it could use some fine tuning to decrease the amount of time required to complete it. Which option should I pick for that? I don’t want to put yes, and have it be permanently stuck at this rate. I don’t want to put no, because I think it should be out of beta.

ANET_McKenna
Fine tuning can still happen if yes is voted. No is if you don’t like the reward track system and/or want it changed dramatically.

TerminalMontage
Voted yes! I look forward to seeing more reward tracks (crossing my fingers for Stalwart Armor to come back in one?)

ANET_McKenna
We are planning to add a reward track for Stalwart Armor.

Random data: Aerodrome raiders

RandommUser
So earlier today I got a bit bored and decided to gather little bit of info on the Mercenaries who are basically NPC raiders Anet programmed to do some idle stuff in the Aerodrome, using TP, repairing, getting healed and buying raid (Snip-statistics)

Charrikayu
They’re members of a group that Raids or works on Raids internally at Anet. Crystal Reid’s character is there, for example.

LordRumpo
Crystal’s character is the human with white hair, arah armor and a twilight, as seen in this video.
Edit: And I’m guessing the barefoot mesmer with eternity is Barefoot Matthew Medina.

ANET_Faerla
Which one do you think is the most ruggedly handsome and good looking? Is it the Asura with Nevermore? That one is my favorite and is easily the best looking, bravest, and clearly most commanding of them all.

RandommUser
The revenant has best looks though weapon choice are not the best.

ANET_Faerla
Ugh. I hope no one tells him that. I’ll never hear the end of it.

Post about Car Crashed and Vermillion

Argi’s breathtaking interview after a game of Pro-League

ANet Joshua_Davis (Grouch)

Here’s some context.

tl;dr – After being on the recieving end of an unfavorable admin ruling, a member of Vermillion secretly played for Car Crashed against TCG in Week 4 – a severe violation of the league’s rules, resulting in the banning of one of their players from Pro League. I understand why Argi’s head is where it is, but I certainly have no sympathy for teams that get caught cheating and then play the victim card. Sometimes life doesn’t go your way. You can try to move past it or you can dwell on it and make things worse for yourself. I think they’ve made their decision.

Alkore
As far as I know frosty cheated on his own so don’t point out the whole team.

ANet Joshua_Davis (Grouch)
Fair, I’ll edit my phrasing.

Current plans for WvW scoring overhaul

spcwarmachine
Question for Tyler if he sees this

“Points for Kill The amount of score earned from PPK will be increased, so that it contributes more to the overall score. As a rough number, PPK may increase to 3-5 points, rather than 1, with diminishing returns on killing players who have been alive for less than 5 minutes."

Will the outnumbered buff play a factor into this scoring system?

Anet-TylerB
Possibly, we’ll talk about it. Adding additional effects to Outnumbered risks degenerate changes to behavior (yelling at players to leave the map so a group can maintain the outnumbered buff), but this might be a safe thing to add.

HAPPY_WAVE
“Adding additional effects to Outnumbered risks degenerate changes to behavior (yelling at players to leave the map so a group can maintain the outnumbered buff)”

Doesn’t action level do the same thing? (Snip)

Anet-TylerB
First, I said Action Level would be controversial, and so we may not even add it. Second, assuming we do end up adding Action Level, it will be setup to be much harder to manipulate than the Outnumbered/Outmanned buff.

NEM3S1S
Since no one else is mentioning this, Power of the Mists buff is based on War Score. Now War Score is going to be reset every two hours. Is PotM going to be reworked as well, or is this the end of PotM as we know it?

Anet-TylerB
It’d be the end of Power of the Mists buff. Most players don’t really notice the buff. Nor do they play WvW specifically for the buff, so it hasn’t served as an effective motivator for winning matches. It also tends to reward PvE players more than WvW players. Removing the buff should help our case for further improving WvW rewards.

Scibe recipe overhaul now documented-all 91 changes

(Go to the Reddit thread to see the complete list of changes)

ANet darapotocska
As it is also missed frequently: We also made it so the basic decorations are sold by Cullen (Master Scribe) the moment you own the Workshop. All the basic decorations sold by Cullen will be 50 silver each.

The three tiers of Basic Decoration upgrades from the Market were changed from unlocking access to several decorations per unlock, to instead unlocking a discount for those groups of decorations per tier (24 silver for each decoration). Note: This discount is not currently recognized by Cullen and is a Douglas Bird special, so mind where you make your purchases!

Thanks for compiling the list and happy scribing! =D

WvW poll: what would happen if the poll doesn’t reach 75%?

manumotate
Hello all, recently i was looking at the poll and it seems like we might not reach 75%. So i’m genuinely curious as to what might happen if it doesn’t get to that line?
edit: https://feedback.guildwars2.com/en/results

Anet-TylerB
We’ll remove the ’Don’t Count My Vote’ votes when we tally the final result. If this poll still failed to reach 75% ‘Yes’ votes, then we’d hold another poll to determine what players want changed about the Reward Tracks or Participation features in order to change their mind. We’d then de-prioritize scoring improvements to continue working Reward Tracks. Once we’d implemented whatever the community-voted feature(s) happened to be, we’d re-run this poll again.

< 75% ‘Yes’ – We would leave Reward Tracks on, run an additional poll to diagnose why players voted ‘No’, prioritize work on whatever feature won the additional poll, release the new reward track feature, then run this poll again to see if the community is now happy enough with reward tracks for them to exit beta or if they want us to continue working on them.

Fizzee
“We’d then de-prioritize scoring improvements to continue working Reward Tracks.”

Nooooooo
Reward tracks just need tweaking on what they reward to better suit WvW. But scoring needs changing ASAP. If you will de-prioritise scoring changes then kitten rewards imho.

Anet-TylerB
While not always true, we can generally only focus on working on one feature at a time. So whenever the community votes that a beta feature is not ready to leave beta until more work is done on it, that work is going to be a higher priority than new feature work.

Blackops606
My question is, how far are you guys willing to push reward track gain/participation? I noticed you guys thought a little bit more was necessary and bumped it up to +575 but do you still plan to further the rewards even more? (snip)

Anet-TylerB
I don’t expect we’ll want to buff the base reward rate again. Though once the feature exits beta we plan to improve ways to boost it: daily reward track potions, bonus to participation gain while outmanned, etc. The current base rate is actually really similar to PvP Reward Tracks, they just have more ways to boost their gains.

Continuation of thread above: Current plans for WvW scoring overhaul

Ravval
Do you have any ETA on these changes? Also, are there plans to bring regular WvW tournaments once scoring is fixed?

Anet-TylerB
It’ll likely take a number of months to complete all the scoring changes, though we plan to release incremental progress in the form of live betas. The timeline also depends on if the community maintains that scoring is a priority, and they don’t vote for us to shift focus to another feature, like World Linking or Reward Tracks.

No additional WvW Tournaments are currently planned. While they were good for the game in the short term, in the long term they’ve proved to be unhealthy. This means we’ll want to repurpose WvW Tournament Tickets, possibly just as a general match reward, so that players can continue to earn the unique WvW weapon skins.

Lore: Would Sylvari eat bird poop?

LucidSeraph
No seriously bear with me here

Nitrogen, phosphate, and calcium are essential for plant growth. Guano has been for centuries as fertilizer because it has a VERY high concentration of these minerals.

Though Sylvari are weird hybrid magic plant people, they clearly eat food… but with that said, they probably still have many of the same nutritional needs as plants. What “tastes good” to us is often influenced by what provides us the most energy — humans love sugary things because our ancestors loved them some fruit, which are high energy (the problem is that now we can get a lot of sugary, high energy things that lack the same nutrients) (whoops).

So basically, if these things are super nutritive / energy providing for plants, would a Sylvari then find bird poop to be SUPER DELICIOUS?

inquiring, terrible minds, man.

ANet PeterFries
(cancels all upcoming PvE content to thoroughly explore this intriguing lore concept for next two years)

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
While Guano has been worked as fertilizer, if you make the assumption that Sylvari developed in a relatively similar way to the other sentient humanoids, than they’re likely close enough to be prone to the downside humans have developed. That means viral and parasitic infections primarily. While it’s possible they’re different enough to be immune to many problems, it’s much more likely that they’re similar enough biologically to have developed a strong built-in desire not to associate themselves with that behavior.

This does require the assumption that the parasites and viruses developed specifically for this environment, which I think is a fair assumption (almost axiomatic).

New WvW feedback poll

eggpie
from the looks of it I think they’re just asking the community to schedule their to-do list by importance, rather than make us choose only one.

ANET_McKenna
^ Basically this. We plan to do everything listed, this is just to help us set priorities of what order you would like to see them.

Plobmaster
Wait how do you vote when i visit the link it sends me to a results page and there is nothing i can select?

ANET_McKenna
f2p accounts cannot vote. This is to prevent players from making multiple free accounts just to vote.

Lord_of_the_OJ
So what happened to the work that has been done in the past 1.5 years? It looks like these things are being worked on right now.

ANET_McKenna
I’ll quote what Tyler posted in another thread:
“The frequently referenced ‘1 year of development’ refers to our efforts to restructure the WvW backend to actually be flexible enough to support these types of player facing features that we are working on now.”

(Chit chatting)

Dear ANet, and the players

casual_gen
I wonder if the guys at Anet know what a great game they have made and how its helped so many people…just my 2 cents.

ANet_Rubi
I’ve been with ArenaNet for a little over four years now, and to this day one of the absolute highlights of my career was at a meetup we had during PAX Prime a few years ago.

It was pretty late in the evening and I was wiped out–a lot of us had been working flat out since early that afternoon on event setup and prep. I was headed to get something to drink when someone tapped me on the shoulder.

It was a woman who saw that I was ArenaNet staff and wanted to tell her story. She’d had major surgery and been bedridden for several months. It was really difficult for her, but GW2 and her friends in game meant everything to her while she couldn’t get out and about in the real world.

She just wanted to let someone with ANet know how much Tyria did for her while she was sick, and give them a hug.

Yes, I cried. And passed that story on to the rest of the team. It’s people and stories like that that make it wonderful.

ANet_Rubi
Oh. And my second-favorite in-person encounter happened at Eurogamer a few years ago. We had lots of demo stations and I was working the floor in between livestream sessions. I noticed an elderly lady hovering at the edge of the demo floor, sort of hesitantly eyeing the stations, so I headed over to offer my help.

I asked her if she wanted to check the game out and told her that as soon as a demo station opened up I’d be happy to guide her through getting started. She leveled this look at me and said “Honey, I have nine level 80s.”

I want to be her when I grow up.

Archomeda
Another case of that you shouldn’t judge someone based on how he or she looks

ANet_Rubi
I mean to be fair my job at that point was to go talk to people who looked like they were searching for an available demo station.

Looking for an OST track

markotza
I’m looking for a specific OST track from HoT, the battle one that mostly plays during Chak Gerent battle. It’s intense and I love it.

The track starts playing at the 7 minute mark of this gameplay video

Anet Kuraine
I’m pretty sure this piece was written by Stan LePard! He did a lot of great hype-building combat music for HoT.

Sorry, the one linked in the OP was def by Stan at least. I’m not certain which one plays during Chak Gerent!

NateXNate
Any news about a FLAC release of the HoT Soundtrack?

ANet maclaine
I just asked our marketing guy about it again. We’ll see what he says, but given the way it’s gone in the past, I can’t guarantee there will be another option outside of Amazon/iTunes/vinyl.

ANet maclaine
OK, thanks to /u/ArenaKeenan, we’ve figured out what track it is. Unfortunately (or maybe forunately), it hasn’t been ripped and uploaded anywhere yet. This made me think that it would be worth putting all the combat stuff on Soundcloud, so I’m going to talk to the community folks about that. Including Raids-specific music, we have about two dozen combat tracks.

64 bit client: FAQ | getting addons working again and more

RandommUser
Since the 64-bit client is now officially in use I thought I would re-post some of the info and fixes we gathered in the beta client thread and some new info along with it.
How does it work? — [FAQ]
How to run 32-client — [Thread]
Make sure you are using Nvidia GPU instead of integrated graphics
Fixing x-FX programs
SweetFX ^{1 2}
Reshade ¹
GemFX ¹ (also for 2 previous)
If you have any problems or new information leave them in the comments.

(Comment: go to Reddit thread for links)

Awilixy
I’ve got a bit of a strange question: Does anyone know how I can continue to use the 32-bit exe directly without having to go through a shortcut? Whenever the 32-bit version is started, it updates to the 64-bit version.

The reason I ask is because I want to continue using this: https://github.com/jmquigs/ModelMod
It’s similarish to TexMod (which was super popular in GW1).

ANet DrStephenCW Studio Tech Director
Yes, you need a shortcut with the -32 command line parameter, if you want to use the 32-bit version. The shortcut has nothing else to do with the automatic upgrade to 64-bit; it’s the client .exe that patches and launches the 64-bit version. “-32” (I think I have that right!) will update the 32-bit client and relaunch it instead.

Talking about WvW population and glicko

boot2skull
Have any announcements been made regarding WvW server pairing balance adjustments? Pairing has helped immensely, but we’ve been matched a couple times against two servers that we’ve frequently faced in the past, however they have an obvious wvw population advantage over us now.

Anet-TylerB
The current plan is to change world links once every quarter. It takes 4-6 matches (weeks) for Glicko to place the newly linked worlds in their correct tiers, so changing links faster than once a quarter would mean almost perpetual inaccurate matchups.

Anet-TylerB
World populations are much more balanced now, across the board, than prior to World Linking. Of course there are still imbalances, which matchup tiers (and our in-progress scoring changes) help allieviate, but it’s very unlikely we’ll ever achieve a point where the population of every world are perfectly balanced.

Doas_X
What is to stop a linked server effectively getting twice a normal server population once the bandwagoning occurs?

Anet-TylerB
For the purposes of transferring, worlds that are linked (both the host and guest) have halved population caps. This is why so many worlds are marked as FULL now. So if you were to completely fill both the host and the guest world of a given pairing (which we haven’t seen happen yet), it is possible to have a higher than normal population, but it’s won’t ever be anywhere close to double the population.

Doas_X
If an non-linked server loses a bunch of people, how long does it take for that server to change status from “Full” to something lower?

Anet-TylerB
We adjust server population status once a week. So it wouldn’t drop immediately, but it would drop within a week.

morroIan
Another point, how can you get an accurate glicko rating when you aren’t measuring glicko for the lower ranked server anyway?

Anet-TylerB
That’s why we reset glicko deviation and volatility when we link worlds. So the newly linked worlds can shuffle into appropriate tiers more quickly.

Lore question. What are the Sclerites?

tiikerikani.5906
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sclerite
A sclerite (Greek. skleros, meaning “hard”) is a hardened body part. In various branches of biology the term is applied to various structures, but not as a rule to vertebrate anatomical features such as bones and teeth. Instead it refers most commonly to the hardened parts of arthropod exoskeletons and the internal spicules of invertebrates such as certain sponges and soft corals.

So, Karka shells.

evenstar139
And thus the sclerite weapons were born.

ANet PeterFries
Actually, it happened the other way around—I got to name the cool, Lovecraftian eye-and-crustacean weapon concepts that Tomas had come with for that release and based on those themes, I arrived at the same terminology…

Hearts and Minds still buggy

ANet Kuraine
Hi all! First off I wanted to apologize for the frustration the fight’s caused when it bugs out to a degree that it’s just more of a slog than what it should be: fun, challenging, rewarding.

One of the things about the encounters in Hearts & Minds is that they have a ton of moving parts in how they function, which means a lot of edge cases can get blown up. Doesn’t excuse the bugs at all, but it’s something that I have been actively working on fixing.

Unfortunately, the changes I’ve made still haven’t fixed the root cause of a lot of the most major issues: the way the encounters reset isn’t ideal, and can cause problems that escalate with each reset. Therefore, I’m currently going into the fights as a whole and making some pretty major changes to how the resets function, and adding a lot of extra checks to make sure that the issues that happen now are no longer possible.

No ETA yet, but I’ll be sure to get patch notes in there to let you all know when it’s been fixed. Sorry again for the frustration, and thanks for your patience.

Narrative design and character creation at momocon 2016

tluv09
I just want to know how one gets on board as a storyteller for a game. That sounds like a nice gig, minus the writer’s blocks.

ANet PeterFries
It helps to have a background in creative writing, particularly screenwriting. Editing skills come in handy.

The narrative team took a chance on me to fill an opening here after I’d worked 6 years on the Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2 environment art team building maps. I had recent writing samples, college creative writing study, and did well enough on their tests.
There’s lots of “writers room” story beat planning meetings, but our day-to-day work turns out to be technical and detail-oriented. If you want to try building branching, conditional game narrative, Twine is a good free tool to experiment with it.

Writing for an expansive, live online RPG is obviously enormously complicated and our team is just one part of a sprawling, ongoing production, working alongside other disciplines to try to create an immersive and interesting experience that can be seen from all different perspectives.

We’ve been gradually getting to do more of the actual design setup—I’ve learned in the past few years how to spawn and script NPCs in our proprietary tools, so that I’m not just putting words in their mouths but telling them how to behave and react to each other (like the Consortium characters hanging around their new headquarters in the rebuilt Lion’s Arch, or the Seraph reacting to the crash scene in Dry Top).

Some of us have come from novel and short story publishing, and some from the entertainment industry. Game writing in the 2010s feels a lot to me like game art did in the 1990s—formerly almost an afterthought, it’s just starting to be taken seriously as an artform.

TL;DR: It is a fun gig, and I’m very lucky.

Sorrows
So when you were working with the environment art team, did you imagine different scenerios happening in different sections of the maps? Were maps designed more around the story/area or the details of the story around the maps that they were happening in? I feel like you could go off on a ton of tangents while designing a map just imaging what all is/can/will happen in a small section of a large map.

Especially within GW2, with overall meta ideas in a map (for instance Nightmare Court + Bandits + Inquest in Brisban banding together) and how you design objects/structures to fit that. Was the general map layout influenced by that idea, or the kind of clash of Kryta and Maguuma/Tarnished Coast environments that lead to that idea of the three working together? I imagine it’s a lot of both in different areas of the map.

ANet PeterFries
Heh, I worked on one of the iterations of the Brisban map, and it is/was a lot of both. There’s a lot of freedom for our map artists to incorporate their own ideas and build out interesting and fun areas to explore, though they also have to conform other areas to specific design requests.

I’m probably one of the few at the studio to have taken a test to join two different teams, and I was told back in 2005 that I won the environment art team over by pitching the story I’d made up in my head for the test map I created in my first time using the in-house map tool: “This is the crude stone hut where a reclusive monk lives, who’s worn a path through the woods walking back and forth to fetch water from this spring…” etc.
Our art team constantly comes up with really great examples of environmental storytelling.

Encountered a suicidal player in LA map chat

megaloman1ac
yesterday in LA there was someone who seemed like they were going to kill themselves and obviously LA map chat being trash most people just ignored it or said something rude/not serious but i whispered the person to make sure they were okay etc and they said they said (graphic) they had already cut their arm and leg and were “at peace” with dying so I panicked and emailed support (even though support did literally kitten all) and now i’m not sure what to do they havent been online since yesterday and theres no “report this person because theyre suicidal” button. I know it could very easily be a troll but thats not something you risk ignoring when a persons life is in danger.

ANet Dornsinger
(even though support did literally kitten all)
Well… I just checked and there is no ticket in the system as of right now that speaks of a suicide threat. That would explain the non-reaction – because we cannot react to what we do not know.
HOW did you reach out? Did you in fact submit a ticket to us via https://help.guildwars2.com/anonymous_requests/new ? Because in-game you can only report a bug or report a player for verbal abuse or similar, and those reports are not followed up on by the team. If you DID send a ticket, please PM me your ticket number, because it lacked the words “suicide” and “harm” and I was unable to find it.

I’m often the one who ends up with these reports, we do have a process for it, but as other redditors said, please keep two things in mind: 1) Suicide is a personal choice. If a person is at the low that they wish to end their life, they will actively or by inaction find a way. Further, if a person DOES take their life, do not feel responsible. Believe me, suicidal thoughts are irrational but very real to the person burdened by them. Explaining them however is near impossible to a healthy mind. 2) Suicide and the mental conditions that spawn these thoughts are a mental illness and need professional help. Just like a broken leg: Yeah, you can sort of fix it yourself and it’ll most likely heal okay enough, but you might also make matters worse if you tinker with it. If you encounter it in the real world, get professional help. If you encounter it in GW2, send us a ticket and we will do what we can to do the same.

megaloman1ac
sent you a PM with the number, thank you for the advice.

ANet Dornsinger
Thank you! That ticket was already addressed by us, but I do so you didn’t get a reply, sorry about that. I think what fell through the cracks here is that we may not ever discuss with you what actions we’re taking if another person is involved, so all we could tell you is “Thank you’re we are looking into it” – I’ll be happy to update your ticket as such.

ANetCSLead
I’m the soul who failed you. I looked at the ticket and dealt with the issue – which in my brain qualified as “DONE!” and I closed it without letting you know. Many apologies for that.

For public record; I get all of these reports within minutes of submission. While I’m not trained to help in these situations; I do know who to contact in order to get someone help should they need it.

staler
Having gone through the system ONCE in the past. What’s the turn around on this? Are all your GMs trained for this? Is there some kind of system in place that red-flags these for immediate attention?

ANet Dornsinger
Nope, we are not licensed counselors, which is why our job is to get the person the help from people who a) can reach them in person and b) are qualified professionals. This goes back to my analogy about broken legs and trying to fix them without a professional.

While talking CAN help a suicidal person, we do not know their situation or their current actual state. Us talking to them could potentially aggravate the situation, so we do not. That may sound cold, but it is actually what professionals will always advise – if you google “how to get a suicidal person help”, the top hit from suicide.org actually points out to not handle the matter on your own.

Observational
Who is to say I am not exactly the person you are describing, but I refuse to burden other people with my negativity.

Who is to say I wasn’t exactly like said person in map chat a few years ago? You might think I know very little or my perspective is skewed, but it doesn’t change my opinion. People that want to die, don’t talk about it. They kill themselves.

ANet Anatoli_Ingram Blog Guy™ 2 points 4 hours ago
This is why suicide attempts are often referred to as a “cry for help.”

If a person is suicidal and reaches out for human contact, it’s good that they’re seeking attention. They may not have the tools or the words to express how bad things are in any other way. They may feel like they’re burdening other people so much with their “negativity” that it only comes out when the dam is ready to burst—when they’re finally at a point when they’re seriously considering harming themselves.

I’m asking you, as one person who’s been there to another, to please think carefully before perpetuating the idea that an openly suicidal individual is burdening others, attention-seeking, or faking. That stuff sticks with someone who already feels like so much of a burden to other people that they think the world would be better off without them. It may prevent them from getting help, under the belief that the only way they’ll be taken seriously is if they make a serious attempt.

Observational
I’m trying to save people the heartache and trouble of being played by an emotional black mailer like I used to be.

I did say take my advice with a grain of salt, but hey if people want to close their eyes and sugar coat things by all means go right ahead. I don’t.

ANet Anatoli_Ingram Blog Guy™
I’m sorry you had that experience.

Even people who are legitimately suicidal can come to a point where venting suicidal feelings is the only coping mechanism they have (it makes them feel better to have it off their chest for a little while, even if spilling their negative feelings every time they have them doesn’t actually help and might even reinforce them). There are definitely people who will say things like, “If you leave/stop talking to me/can’t handle being my personal therapist anymore, I’ll kill myself”—and that’s never okay, even if they think they’re being honest. There’s a big difference between asking for help and holding someone else responsible for maintaining an individual’s mental health, and not everyone realizes that.

That said, there’s also a big difference between sugarcoating things and recognizing that blanket statements like, “People that want to die, don’t talk about it. They kill themselves” are not accurate and can be harmful. I’m making this comment because I almost didn’t get help, because I was ashamed to be thought of as an emotional burden, and because people with severe depression are prone to all-or-nothing thinking. I understand you need to take steps to protect yourself emotionally—I’m commenting with a different perspective in the hope that it might prevent someone from thinking, “Either I’m healthy enough to manage without saying anything, or I’m so broken that I need to just do it,” and internalizing the idea that they shouldn’t reach out.

smitske
So does anyone actually look at those in game reports or are they just placebos to make it look that you actually take in game harrassment seriously? Which is the feeling I get from you saying the following: Because in-game you can only report a bug or report a player for verbal abuse or similar, and those reports are not followed up on by the team.

ANet Dornsinger
Heh, no, that’s not what I said. I said you guys will not get a follow-up. It does not mean we do not investigate your report.

Here’s what happens: You submit this report by right-clicking the chat or the player. This doesn’t just say “This guy did something bad”; it also send the team chat logs and similar data. We have a dedicated team that, 24/7, monitors these reports. And we get a lot of them. As such, for efficiency, we don’t give you a call-back. You reported, we work on it as appropriate.

But here’s the thing: Just because someone said “kitten you” to you in PvP does not mean they will be terminated immediately. And just because we actioned someone does not mean they will never be seen again, either. If you feel offended, you should always block that person after you submit your report to us. Else they might taunt you into snapping back and then YOU get in trouble. Report, move on. Life’s too short to get upset over some dude running his mouth in an online game.

Anet Dornsinger
This is a myth. The system does not work based on strikes, we do look at each report. However, we also take situation context into consideration. If someone in game turns to me and says: “YOUR MOM!” and I report them… my team will look at it and go: “Well, Dornsinger’s mom what?” and close the report. We will discard things that don’T break the rules, and if someone is playing a game of verbal “I’m not touching youuuu~”, chances are we might not action them.

New WvW poll. World linking

Anet-TylerB
Hey guys, sorry about the lack of messaging. As many of you have already guessed, the poll did indeed go live a few days earlier than we had planned. There’s a surprising amount of people involved in making polls and poll-related messaging happen. In any case, we’ll make sure that messaging goes out early next week, and leave the poll open longer than usual, to give players plenty of time to vote on this important topic.

Fizzee
Are you going to be reviewing the results separately for EU vs NA? This is a big deal as NA and EU have different linking systems.
ie. In EU some worlds are getting screwed over by not having a cheap-to-transfer-to guest server.

Anet-TylerB
I’m sure that we would at least look at the responses for NA/EU, just to see if there was an appreciable difference, but generally speaking it’s not in our best interest to have a feature available in one region, but not in another. It puts us in an awkward position when it comes to prioritizing work.

For example: If NA had world linking and EU did not, NA players might want additional improvements to world linking, but EU players would not. So in that case, should we perpetually deprioritize world linking improvements, because it wouldn’t apply to half of our players? Or should we prioritize that work even though it’d be completely irrelevant to one of our major regions? At that point public polling starts becoming less and less useful.

Malevolent_Fruit
Is it possible to to do this one a little differently than yes/no? A spectrum-based poll (strongly agree, agree, etc) might be better, looking at the thread.

My thoughts: World linking overall is good, but is by no means a guaranteed fix for the population imbalances – just means people switch to linked server. Results so far seem okay (on NA) but I’m not really convinced that in 6 months or a year we won’t be clamoring for more population balancing because it got out of hand.

Also as the smaller server in the pair (GoM) I wish that my server was listed somewhere or had some representation – I’m not a part of the big server and don’t feel like it, but everywhere a server name is needed the bigger one (SoS) is listed. So my server doesn’t really exist anymore.

Anet-TylerB
There are very few (if any) features in the game that couldn’t be improved with additional resources invested in them. However, that then becomes a question of priorities. Do we improve Feature A, Feature B or Feature C first? Or perhaps we should prioritize building an entirely new feature instead?

So the first thing we need to ask is: “Is World Linking a positive improvement to the game and worth keeping around?”

If it is, then the next time we ask players to determine which feature work we prioritize, additional World Linking improvements can be one of the options. But it’s important to ask that question in a poll where it’s clear what the tradeoffs to that choice are. For instance: Players may want improvements to World Linking, but perhaps not at the expense of delaying improvements to Scoring.

Something needs to be done about the current anti cheating system

(Reply to a long post by the OP about how he hacked, made thousands of gold and wasn’t caught)

ANet ChrisCleary
While your tone is overly negative in your post, your story is actually one that I am all too familiar with. This may seem odd to say, but I don’t mind reading it.

Not every system is perfect. It wasn’t the detection that failed here, and because you shared your story with us, I was able to figure out what did. Stories like this reflect back on to our own processes in ways that players may never know, so I’ll share a little insight.

I’ll start off by commenting on people being wrongfully actioned. While not every system is flawless, ours is fairly forgiving when it comes to flagging players. That being said, normally when it comes to players actually being wrongly actioned it is because of human error and not error in detection. Eventually a person needs to review and perform the action. We’ve been doing our best to cut mistakes but every now and then we do make one.

The only case where I can think of where detection has failed us was about 3 years ago when a fluke teleport in a jumping puzzle caused a number of players to get flagged and banned. We fixed that within hours and players were back in. It should have never happened, but it did.

As far as you not getting banned, well, you were flagged. You didn’t evade detection. Your account was in a list of about 300 others that were to be actioned sometime in early April. You should have been actioned, but for some reason you fell through the cracks.

That brings me back to my original point, I don’t mind reading these stories. While we are doing our absolute best to handle players that can’t play fair, this means that it wasn’t a problem with our detection, but that we had a slip-up in our process to handle what our detection found.

Now I go to fix that process so this doesn’t happen again.

Edit: 3AM grammar is 3AM grammar

Scribing: Guild Ballista

MorbidEel
Has anyone managed to use scribe to make one of these?
I don’t see this on my recipe list despite my guild having the unlock and according to https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/recipes/search?output=42003 there is no recipe that outputs guild ballista blueprints.

ANet darapotocska
Hey friends! I did some investigation this morning and found that the recipe is looking for the wrong guild upgrade, keeping it from being crafted when expected. Currently the recipe thinks it shouldn’t appear in a guild player’s recipe list until their guild has unlocked the War Room upgrade “Scribing: Packed Dolyaks”, rather than once their guild had unlocked the War Room upgrade: “Scribing: Guild Ballista”. I’ve passed this bug along to the team so they can begin to look at fixing it! Thank you for your reports!

Last week I was temp banned

(Very long post by OP: snipped)

mattyharr
(Snip)
On Tuesday 10th May my account received a 168 hour temporary ban. Extremely confused I contacted support and their response was that I received this for ‘using third party programs to unlock map points’. This left me even more confused because playing on and off since launch I have never used any third party programs at all for Guild Wars 2. (Snip)

ANet GMGus
To respond directly to OP, as we stated on Wednesday in your ticket 2209580, the account was detected unlocking points faster than is possible by playing the game normally. After careful review, we determined that this was only possible through the use of a third party program (specifically one for teleporting).

The account will be back 05/24/2016 19:42 GMT.

As a side note: overlays like Overwolf absolutely cannot cause this. Overwolf has apps that tap into our APIs that do some cool things in our game. It does not help you teleport.

Anet GMGus
Teleport to friend items were not used. We don’t include unlocks from Notarized Scrolls of Heroics.

Not from Reddit, from these very forums, but people interested in the lore of magic use in Tyria may want to check https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/lore/Is-there-a-way-to-contact-Ree-Soesbee/first#post6171371 for one dev’s opinions on how people learn magic and how magic figures into even “nonmagical” professions.

Server linking is great but the server cap is poorly implemented

Anet ChrisB
Some information behind the current server population cap behavior:

Many may already know this bit, but for anyone else who doesn’t: world population is determined by activity level in WvW (Edge of the Mists and Obsidian Sanctum don’t count). If World A has many-times the number of players on it as World B, but World A does’t play WvW at all and World B plays tons of WvW, A will have the lowest population, and B will have a very high one.

/u/piInverse, to your point on increasing world population levels, and especially some becoming full “This is not caused by the additional players bought about by the server link, but from returning players and a lower population cap on the host servers."

This is only partly true. We’ve also had a substantial increase in global WvW participation since reward tracks, world linking, and the return of the Alpine borderlands. On top of that, we use a fairly long historical tail on WvW activity level for world population purposes. Intent being to prevent worlds from artificially lowering their cap with just a couple weeks of intentional inactivity. One flipside of that being that even if global WvW population levels dropped next week, if they were still higher than pre-<aforementioned factors>, population levels would still go up as a new, higher week replaces an older, lower one in the window of time being used.

World linking problem: linking, say, a T8 NA world with a T1 NA world and doing nothing with population caps will make it very easy to pile onto an already-healthy world. So something needs to be done with population caps.

There are two opposing goals we can aim for.

• Short-term prevention of bandwagoning. To do this, we’d need to make it more difficult to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.
• Long-term health of worlds with less WvW activity. To do this, we’d need to make it easier to join a world that’s already low enough in WvW population to merit being linked in the first place.

As for what modifications we’ve put in place for population levels to not allow world linking to break the meaning and purpose of population entirely, we’re currently trying a compromise between going completely toward either the long-term or short-term health goals for world populations.

• Unlinked worlds have the highest population cap.
• Linked worlds have significantly lower population caps.

Some things we’re considering to help discourage bandwagoning:

• Increasing the cost to transfer to lower-population worlds (since they’re now often going to be linked to high-pop worlds). For example, possibly 800 gems instead of 500.
• Having merge hosts always considered Full, and their guest(s) all sharing the population their host would otherwise have.
• Locking out transfers for a period of time after world links become active.

Anet-TylerB
We are also considering adjusting links more than once a quarter. There are some pros and cons to this, but assuming World Linking wins the current poll, we could poll on adjusting the re-link rate.

Pros:

• More variety in allies and opponents.
• Players are less likely to bandwagon.
• World populations become more stable.

Cons:

• Matchmaking becomes less accurate. There’d be more unfair matches.
• The WvW World Rank leaderboard becomes less meaningful.
• Additional administrative work for worlds coordinating voice-chat/forum access with their changing allies.
• Players may start to avoid socializing and forming bonds with their cross-world allies, since they are likely to change often.
• My team(WvW) spends more of our time analyzing population and match data, to determine new links, leaving less time for other types of WvW work.
• It becomes harder to remember which worlds are currently linked, and know when the next relink is supposed to happen.

Ravval
I was wondering, what other solutions you guys have/had in store to fix population balance and why did you choose world linking?

Anet-TylerB
We had/have another, much more elaborate, solution to world population imbalance. However, we decided to table it (perhaps indefinitely) in favor of World Linking for three primary reasons:

1. Time – We felt we needed to improve the world population situation as soon as possible. Any solution that was likely to take 6+ months was off the table.
2. Acceptance – Our two ‘quick’ solutions were World Linking and World Merging. We went with World Linking because we felt players would be more likely to approve it, due to it better preserving the identity of all original worlds, and being more flexible than a more traditional World Merging solution.
3. Complexity – World Linking and World Merging are both fairly easy to understand solutions. This ties back to points 1 and two, but a complex solution would have taken longer to implement, and have been harder to get players to understand and accept.

Continuation of above thread: Server linking is great but the server cap is poorly implemented

etiolatezed
Do all worlds need to be linked? Does Blackgate need linking? Honestly, Blackgate’s population situation is its own entire problem.

Would it help population balance if certain t1 servers went unlinked and some of the other servers get a third link?

Anet-TylerB
Maybe, though it’s not quite that simple, for a few reasons.

First let’s look at Tier 1. At the time we defined links, the top 4 NA worlds were:

1. Yak’s Bend
2. Blackgate
3. Jade Quarry
4. Tarnished Coast

Notice that Blackgate was not the highest ranking world, and due to transfer bandwagoning Tarnished Coast was rising fast out of T2. Would it have been fair to leave YB, BG and JQ unlinked, but then link TC? Had we done so, we’d just be seeing a different world (or set of worlds) dominating T1 right now.

Next let’s consider the fact that there are 24 worlds in NA. Linking T1 allowed us to match the top 12 with the bottom 12, giving every world a partner. Had we decided not to link T1, then we would have been left with the top 9 and the bottom 12. This no longer links evenly, unless we give one tier a third partner, or leave yet another tier partnerless (most likely T2.)

Then there’s the question of how much we should link worlds based just on their tier or leaderboard rank, versus weighting it more based on actual population, coverage, or compatability. Leaderboard rank is the most understandable, and, at least on the surface, the most fair. However, as many of you have pointed out, occasionally a world’s current leaderboard rank is not representative of the world’s current population situation (usually as a result of mass transfers.)

Finally, whatever solution we decided for NA, we still needed to devise a unique solution for EU.

Anyway, probably the next most reasonable option, other than what we actually did, would be to leave NA T1&2 unlinked and then link T3+T8, T4+T7 and T5+T6. At the time we believed players (especially on T1 & T2) would view this as less fair, but now that players have actually experienced it, perhaps this is the way to go the next time we re-link worlds (assuming World Linking wins the vote.)

AnetChrisB
This is also something we might do. Especially in EU due to the difficulty of balancing linked worlds with language restrictions. World linking is pretty flexible, such that there could be any number of worlds linked together, all mixed with unlinked worlds as opponents.

I felt very confident. ANet felt very confident

Yillena
… and in the end, I was right. Shocking.

But lets start from the beginning.
Out of the blue, last week, I couldnt log in anymore. I checked my eMails and found out, that I had gotten a temp ban – aka suspension. First, I thought it was because of something I wrote in PvP. It can get rough there, and it wouldnt have been the first time.
Then I read the cause of the suspension: Violation: Unapproved Third Party Software, which quite honestly just shocked me.

So I wrote back and wanted to get some more details. The answer was quite clear: “You were actioned for teleporting around for map completion.”

Huh? Teleporting around? For map completion? On a 99% of the time PvP account?
But the GM tried to be reassuring and also wrote: “Your account is only blocked until…” Which kinda made me mad, because… ITS A PVP ACCOUNT. PVP SEASON STARTED kittenMIT ;D

So, I tried to explain it. Tried to find out what could have gotten wrong, and I remembered having used 5 Teleport to Friends Stones in TD to unlock waypoints fast.

As an answer I got: “We are very confident in our detection methods.” Soso. Also: “You were found in Tangled Depths and managed to unlock 10 different map points in 108 seconds. These points consist of , Renowned Hearts, Points of Interest, Vistas, and Hero Points.” And, confusingly: “Other than points of interest, none of the other unlocks are instantaneous and actually takes time making this many points in 10 seconds physically impossible.”

So first its 108 seconds, then its 10 seconds? Well, nevermind. Tried again to explain that:
a) my account doesnt have 10 of the mentioned map points even unlocked in TD and
b) the unlocks I got in TD were via Teleport to Friends Stones.

Lets just say, tone got rougher, on both sides. I asked if he was trolling me, GM told me: “The point is still valid and you collected 10 different points within 108 seconds.”

Ahhh… so its 108 seconds, not 10.

I tried my best to curb my anger and be as nice as possible, which quite honestly, isnt my strong suit to begin with.

At which point I got the last response, being: “The ban on your account has been verified and will uphold. Any farther correspondence may be met without response.”

Suspension – or temp ban – was over today. I logged into my account, opened map, checked TD and…….. The only character that has even anything in TD unlocked, only has 5 Waypoints (which according to that list dont count anyway) and 2 POI. Pretty much as I remembered it.

Dear Mr Cleary, one question. How could this ban have been revisited and upheld?
Ticket: 2209562

Video of me logging in all my characters and showing map is still being uploaded, gonna post link when done. https://youtu.be/-NP3__CYo_g video

Ive heard of quite a handful of bans for “using teleport hack for map exploration” since last tuesday. Definitely more than usual, a lot of players confused about how this could have happened.

/edit: I should have included this before, and I feel bad about forgetting it. As I pointed out that there’s no renown hearts in TD, GM told me that of course he knows that, it just was a list of things that generally count towards it.

ANet GMGus
Hey, I’m gonna take a look at this, both the ticket and the suspension. This sounds pretty bad honestly. If there is one thing I want to make sure of when we’re doing suspensions is that there are zero false positives. Our appeals process is intended to be a rigorous examination of account blocks/suspensions. If that isn’t happening, that’s a problem. I’ll get you an update shortly.

Yillena
Thank you. Whatever update would be really nice, even if it results in me looking stupid because only the reason given for that temp ban was wrong.

Also, there’s something that made me really really really mad. It was when GM wrote: “Its only a week”

First off, it sounded a lot like “dont make such a fuss about nothing”, I felt belittled.
Secondly, a week in gw2 means 7 days of missed daily timegated stuff. That hurts A LOT. Its actually why I really hate all the daily timegated stuff. I know its why its there. To keep players logging in daily. But… you could achieve the same thing by making it a weekly timegate. Not being able to log in daily (for whatever reason) shouldnt punish you so much as it does these days in gw2.

Sorry, had to write this, couldnt resist

ANet GMGus
I have an update for you. We messed up. I’m sorry this happened. Your account should not have been blocked, and even more importantly, when it was blocked in error we should have caught it in the appeal process and let you back in immediately. Steps will be taken on our end to correct this and I’ll update your ticket with some additional info.

Support sent the wrong item. Do Assassin Tokens exist ingame?

deathsnakes
http://imgur.com/K9E7D24
Chat Code: [&AhkFAAAA]

that_shaman
Decoding the chat-link:
That’s item number 5, so it’s ancient (probably planned for something but never used). It also uses one of the first icons in the dat file (60984)

Another related item:
Code Description
[&AgECAAAA]

sarielv
Now comes the question…. how the hell do you mistake item 5 for item 73034?

Furious_Sonar
You get paid in peanuts and yelled at to solve faster?

For every 50 tickets you solve you get 1 restroom break too. Then back to the mines.

This answer by me here is final and I will not reconsider it. I am right!

ANet Dornsinger
You’re in fact wrong. We do not get bathroom breaks. The ball-chain does not reach that far. It’s sad, really, but at least we now got pillows to snooze at our desks with…

I can see how it happened, the GM tried to refund five of an item and instead send item five. This can happen – should not, but as with all mistakes, might.

DoctorZhil
ARENANET DEVELOPERS CONFIRM HARSH WORKPLACE ENVIRONMENT, NO BATHROOM BREAKS, LEADS TO MISTAKES IN PRACTICE, MORE AT 11.

ANet Dornsinger
Na, the mistakes are more likely to be due to sugar rush / sugar crash – I blame GM Awesomeness who brought in muffins today.

Continuation of above thread: I felt very confident. ANet felt very confident.

Cesa37
Do you know if it was a specific error in this case only, or is there a more systematic problem? Could the same have happened in that other case a few days ago?

ANet GMGus
There were some specific errors in this case that led to this particular suspension, but what really failed quite badly was our appeals process. I’ve been digging into why that happened and we’ve been getting our team additional training and clarifying processes for them so that they understand their role as advocates for the player (rather than the game police).

As for the other account/thread, the data is clear. We actually did quite a bit of investigation for that account to make sure that the data it generated wasn’t possible without “assistance” because we wanted to be 100% sure before we went to Reddit to respond to someone very publicly about their account’s suspension.

Support handed my account to someone else

ANet Dornsinger
“The support replied 6 minutes after that, and just gave my account away. No questions asked.”

That sounds as if the hacker may have been able to provide us with very solid information. If they filled out the contact form with data they were able to harvest from your email, the GM who worked on the ticket would not necessarily have asked for more.

Did you submit a ticket? Can you ping me your ticket number, or your display name so I can try to look for what happened?

sambtys
Sorry but no.
3 times I asked support to reset my Authentication and in those 3 times they resetted without any questions.
Here: http://imgur.com/a/uKcEs
PS: Although I appreciate the help, seeing this post made me feel a bit unsafe.

ANet Dornsinger
Well, let’ds look at those. The one from 2013, well, that’s not in the new system that we’ve had for a dfew years, so I cannot check the details.

“My phone broke” Verified by the information provided in your ticket. Please also note you used the webform to contact us, which sends us more information than just e-mailing us.

201466 Send with EVEN MORE Information through the support form. If we had asked you any of our regular standard questions, you’d have been in your full rights to yell at the GM handling your ticket that they did a lousy job of reading the information you have already submitted via the submission form.

The two tickets I can see have not been mishandled by the team. I am not sure what we could possibly do in cases such as yours to do better, especially as we have countless users who no longer possess a serial code, play a month every half year and do not have an intense bond to their characters / don’t care what they named them and thus forgot and so forth. We only ask for more information if it isn’t provided to us via the web form. And we need to be able to count on you, the user, to keep your email and personal information safe – this is where I point to Mike’s blog post again. We will do what we can to keep you safe, but unless we start to take your biometrics and have you fly out to the office to compare them for a password reset, there won’t be 100% :\

If you have ideas what else we should have done, for example, in your third ticket, where you had fulled filled out the login ticket segment – I am all ears.

Presac
Are the gm always supposed to ask for the cd-key when doing an authenticator reset? It feels pretty inconsistent whether they ask or not. The GM I where in contact with removed it without further info than what is sent under “Technical Issues” in support.

ANet Dornsinger
No, they are not, we start with other data and metrics. Asking for the serial is not a definitive – especially because you might be surprised how few people keep their serials. (I still have some serial keys from Ultima Online, but I, too, have lost the creation serials sometime in the last 17-odd years… it can happen even to the most passionate of gamers).

We’re trying to balance the line between keeping your account safe and preventing the rightful owner to regain access to their account. I have had two cases myself last week where it is likely the owner contacted us, but because of the data they were (or were not) able to provide us, we could not return the account to them. And those are not fun for us or the owner.

(PSA: Please don’t put ‘fake information’ into your account details. If you worry that we come to your house to sing Happy Birthday embarrassingly loud while throwing cake at you, I promise, we won’t.)

ANet Dornsinger
And if you have your key, that’s awesome, if not, then we will ask for more info. Just make sure you keep your personal information on the website / on your account is up to date, because else we might run into the problem of not being able to confirm you as owner… “Lazy” isn’t the issue here, is it “do we have enough information” – if Hackers get into your email (see my link in the thread to Mike’s bog from 2012), chances are they will know enough. By the way: Several email providers have SMS authenticators. Hackers from around the globe can’t get into your stuff if you lock them out that way. If they hit GW2, it’s bad, if they manage to get into your bank or apple account or similar more sensitive areas, then you’ll be in real trouble. Don’t reuse passwords, and keep your email safe!

Fancy_Wren
Never ever use the same password as you use on your email account. RIP.

ANet Dornsinger
Oh, gosh, this, so much this. Hackers rarely actually HACK these days. When GW2 launched, Mike posted a very detailed blog about why hackers these days are more “harvesters of data” and “traders of information” than actual hackers. It’s still a good read: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/mike-obrien-on-account-security/

ANet Dornsinger
Fun fact: If you ever bought a GemCard – keep that card. The code on the GemCard, after its use, will link to your account. If we have NOTHING else and start to get desperate or have to dig deep to verify you as an owner: Those could help. They aren’t a golden ticket, but they could get you closer to your account.

WvW poll: If “Simultaneous Borderlands” wins the poll ANet is more likely to work on a third Borderlands map

Anet-TylerB
Just to clarify. The Simultaneous Borderlands is a system that better supports a third map, than the rotation strategy. So an additional map would be more likely in that respect. However, our development priorities are still community driven. We wouldn’t start building another WvW map unless it was put to a vote, and won.

Anet-TylerB
There’s already a large amount of asymmetry with the layout of Eternal Battlegrounds, our most popular map. So now we are asking the whole WvW community to decide which concept is more important to them: maintaining perfectly symmetrical borderlands map balance, or having additional map variety.

These new current events are borderline toxic

Ramontique
I don’t know what made Anet change their minds but up until now it has always been Anets philosophy that players don’t compete for items. With these new events however this has changed: you’re competing with 20+ other people for items that randomly appear on the ground.. the Inquest is not your enemy but other players are. This is VERY toxic in my opinion Anet and I don’t want to see stuff like this in the future (at least not in the open world).

anet_mattp
hey all, thought I’d respond to this thread (because it is currently the highest ranked of the few on the topic). The way this is playing out is certainly not intended, and we’re working on some changes to it right now. Not really sure yet when any changes will get out (the NPC’s are pretty dependent on the way it currently works), but hopefully we can have something soon.

(Fluff) Chatting and joking with the people on Reddit.

I really appreciate ANet’s recent communication

annexi
Some days it’s time for positive feedback – Recently the devs have been even more active than usual – in the subreddit, the game and involvment with the community and I love it!

So thank you for that – HoT had it’s hickups but I feel we are off to a great direction and I can’t wait for season 3! <3

casual_gen
Pro tip. The nicer and friendlier we are while remaining critical and constructive the more inclined they will be to talk to us because believe it or not(spoiler alert)….they are actually people (dramatic music).

ANet GaileGray
That about sums it up. We love interacting with the community, and we thrive on (value, use!) feedback and input. I think the key is “constructive.” Not necessarily “positive” because certainly there’s merit in feedback about something that’s broken, something that could be changed for the better, and that sort of thing. So that whole constructive element is what makes conversations, ideas, suggestions, even complaints, a win/win for everyone!

PtituturI
Nooooooo way ! I always thought they were robots !! :O I’m disappointed now…

ANet GaileGray
That’s super nice of you to notice and comment on. Thanks!
I am looking forward to Season 3, too! I am trying not to know too much, but what I have heard has me intrigued.

ANet Anatoli_IngramBlog Guy™
NONE OF US ARE ROBOTS. I LOVE HAVING SKIN.

moriz0
are you here to show us your extensive collection of skin?

ANet Anatoli_IngramBlog Guy™
I HAVE MANY HUMAN SKIN

Silveress_Golden
You are the person who writes up teh blog posts?
My only grievance I havent had my biweekly blog fix, I am going into withdrawal.
Help me get my fix and I shall not reveal your darkest blogging secret roboto font

ANet Anatoli_IngramBlog Guy™
I write some of the blog posts (among various other things). Most of the super fun blogs are written by the devs, though—I just make sure they get safely into your hands. When I have more to send on to the internets, I’ll put them there posthaste!

Silveress_Golden
It is late and I just stared at your name for too long and I saw Tilion_Anagram.
heads to bed

ANet Anatoli_IngramBlog Guy™
That’s actually a pretty sweet handle, kitten .

(Talking about why some things are fixed before others)

Game update notes

Hierofantus
Fixing some flute and not the living story… /facepalm

Something that is affecting ingame progression should always take priority. You don’t fix a dent on your car if the front window is broken. Do I really need to explain this to you or are you just another one of anets fanboys? I prize them when they do good and I will bash them for doing something wrong and this is seriously wrong since I’ve already done this trash stroyline. You know why I have to do it again? Because anet can’t fix the tool in options which disables the storyline from showing up. But wait, the flute is more important, right?

ANet_Rubi
I can help with this–I get that it’s frustrating to see an issue fixed when the one that’s affecting your gameplay isn’t yet.

Different teams work on different things. When the flute bug was getting fixed, for example, the whole studio didn’t bring work to a halt to go work on that as a group. That was just an audio issue, so someone (maybe two someones, I’m not 100% certain) on the audio team fixed it while the other 300+ people in the office kept working on their own stuff.

The flute fix didn’t come at the sacrifice of anything else. The audio team wouldn’t be poking around in living story anyway, unless there was an audio problem that needed fixing.

Hope that helps some, really.

No mixed borderland in WvW. Quorum missed

DanteStrauss
Seriously, Anet-TylerB care to help us out here? I’m seriously confused as to how pleasing 30% beats the rest (70%) and WHY are the 75% markers set on these polls…

Anet-TylerB
Honestly, we had a difficult time deciding if this poll should be decided by a simple majority, rather than a super majority. When we first decided to start polling, the team decided that whenever we are making a major change to the existing game, that change should require 75% of the community to agree to it. We wanted to avoid anything close to a 51/49 split. Mixed Borderlands definitely falls under the category of a major change to the existing game. However, what made the decision harder, was that polling only started relatively recently. Had this poll existed 6 months ago, before we ever started rotating borderlands, it likely would have been decided by a simple majority instead.
This poll, along with almost every poll we have put up to date, has required a 75% majority. Interestingly, there wasn’t really any outrage to this requirement until now, the first time the 75% lost.

Anet-TylerB
The results turned out more mixed than we think will be good for the future health of the game. For that reason we are going to run a “Remove Desert Borderlands?” poll first and then run a variation of this poll again. The updated poll will be reworded for clarification due to large amounts of feedback that many of the ‘No’ votes were cast with a misunderstanding of what they meant.

Why are Guild Wars 2 servers never down for patches?

TremblesWithBeer
Games like diablo 3, World of warcraft, the division…etc always take down their servers for maintenance and updating patches but guild wars 2 can allow us to update patches without ever shutting down their servers. Why is gw2 different and why can’t other games implement a similar updating protocol for patches?

FuryOfBalthazar
by ArenaNet as far as I remember. Here’s a GDC video presentation on it with chapters. Pretty interesting stuff.

gaspara112
Why is simple. Because they don’t have to

The how is the trickier and more interesting question. They almost certainly do it through allowing the users to upgrade (which gives them the message and count down). Then they keep currently running servers running with the old software and spin up new servers for the new version. As people are slowly forced to change servers (and thus made to upgrade) the old servers populations die out and they are eventually reclaimed and more of the upgraded servers are created as needed. The part that makes this more interesting an tricky is the cross server features such as friends lists and some forms of chat. My guess is these systems are not altered very often because of the difficulty of seamless upgrades.

Chances are microservice sytle architcture is whats under the covers making it possible.

ANet DrStephen CWStudio Tech Director
Yup. Microservices (original architecture was designed around 2001) before they were called microservices. We also do behind the scenes updates that don’t even require the client to patch.

Ark_Tane
2001 really does put you ahead of the curve! The Dreamer to Netflix’s unicorn. I’d love to hear more about your server architecture, loved the GDC talk from a few years back (2012? I don’t have flash so can’t check its the right one), but guess stuff has changed since then; more regular spinning up and down of VMs at least.

ANet DrStephen CWStudio Tech Director
No VMs. We tried them once for about 12 hours on Guild Wars 1 Live and they add an extra layer of scheduling uncertainty that was … unpleasant. Bare metal FTW!

iforgotagain42
They repurposed the load balancing idea implemented by CCP for Eve Online.
The original CCP idea is that when a big fight is coming, they point everyone in that system over to a custom high end server able to better handle the thousands of players a single large eve fight can have. The fight happens seamlessly on the big server, then when its all over they move it back to the regular one.
ANet took this idea and used it for patches. When a patch is coming, they load the new version to a server, and when it goes live, as people log on they get logged into the new server, and people left on the old one are informed they will need to restart the game and patch, which then loads the new server. This frees the old server up for downtime.

ANet DrStephen CWStudio Tech Director
There is actually no such thing as a “server”. All of the services and systems are intermixed on a big pile of blades in a datacenter. The entire concept of a “server” is virtualized by our software.

PvP Easter eggs with free camera spectator mode

Kicker8203
http://imgur.com/a/Mmtui

ANet Joshua_Davis Grouch
First: Jon Sharp and Allie Murdock
Second: Evan Lesh
Third: Darrin, map designer
Fourth: Chuck, animator
Fifth: This one cracks me up, but I’m pretty sure it’s Brian Cautrell. He was a producer for PvP for a while a few years back, but then he left so we created the “Cautrell the Traitor” NPC in the Heart of the Mists to remember him by.

Internally the raid team is lauded and praised

ANet LinseyMurdock
I’m very proud of my designers working on Raids! Them and all the artists, programmers, QA, and other support staff working on Raids have been killing it, for sure. We just wrapped Raid 3 and have not shut down the team. I’m stupid excited about the stuff they are working on next. It gets me all goose-bumpy whenever we talk about it.

To be fair, I am very proud of my designers working on Living World as well, but y’all probably don’t think they exist, so I’ll mention it again after we release Episode 1 of Season 3 :p

EDIT: Just to clarify, I take absolutely zero credit for the work the raids teams have been doing. My position on there is purely attempting to clear road blocks and fight fires so that my designers can be free to do their thing. They don’t need me telling them how to be awesome just because I have an extra word in my official title.

Garokson
“We just wrapped Raid 3 and have not shut down the team”
Sounds like shutting down the teams is standard procedure :x

ANet LinseyMurdock
Not exactly. Some teams form and stay together for a long time. Some teams only form for a feature project and disband to form other teams when that feature is complete. I was just trying to indicate that this isn’t one of those feature teams.

Paelmoon
Makes you wonder why the Fractal team can’t put out new fractals regularly, seeing as how the raid team of 5 is it (?), can put out raids regularly – which are much bigger and more complicated.
I see in that interview they even said they created entirely brand new assets and content for them, so its not just reuisng stuff.
How many are in the Fractal team? Not less than 5 surely? But they can’t put out ANYTHING for goodness knows how long?
I’m glad someone at company is doing thier job well, because in most other areas they are failing very badly.

Anet_Ben
I’ll try to shed some light. As /u/Anet_Sean mentioned in the AMA three months ago, we were working on “Fractal Leaderboards” which ended up becoming much more than leaderboards. However, after getting pretty far in the process we realized that players did not want “Leaderboards”, they wanted new fractals and fixes for the myriad of issues that fractals had. As a result, we decided to indefinitely suspend fractal leaderboards to fix the core issues in fractals and create new content. Since late January we have been working to improve fractals as a game mode while also creating new fractals. The current fractals team is quite new, and were unfamiliar with the core systems, so some time had to be spent learning the systems so that we could properly improve upon them. Now, the fractals team is ramping up and each month feels more productive than the last!

Anet_Ben
There wasn’t a full time team dedicated to Fractals before this team was assembled, and we inherited leaderboards from previous owners. The new team that formed was pretty passionate about fractals and decided that fixing existing issues and building new content was more important than leaderboards.

Anet_Ben
Yes you can expect a new fractal in 2016, as well as new revamps and other changes! IMO the team is doing great now as far as productivity goes, even for how small it is. Once all of the core systems are fixed we will also be able to devote even more time to content.

ANet GaileGrayCommunications Manager
Hey guys,
I know there have been some questions about raids lately, generally about how they fit into the grand scheme of things. Bobby Stein was kind enough to post tonight to get you the skinny on how things fit together. Find his post here. Thanks for reading.

Raid lore discussion. The White Mantle

chlorydax
Okay, so obviously there are points that are pretty obvious.
Like, White Mantle confirmed is… yeah.

I wanted to talk about it in terms of subtlety, or even in delivery. For instance, many races speak about this situation like “Huh, that’s interesting, I guess.” Meanwhile, you can tell just by their voices that humans are out for blood. That’s really interesting to me.
Beyond that, I’m hoping some people have picked up on more subtle clues that may shed some light on the upcoming events or something.

What was really cool for you? What theories do you have? Let’s discuss.

jarkortheburninator
With Xera at least, it’s obvious WHY she’s so powerful and can do all these things, because she’s been beefed up no-end by Bloodstones and unstable magic….which is also a good plot point as to why people want to help Lazarus. If he can promise you ‘ultimate power’ then there’s good reason for some members to find that appealing. Same thing with Matthias – as an Ele main there were moments where I was going “I wish my ele could do all this!”

Scarlet on the other hand still doesn’t really have an explanation as to why she was so smart and resourceful. You can make guesses that Mordremoth tapped into something and made her extremely intelligent but because we had no idea at the time, she just came across as ’I’m smart and resourceful because I am.’

I think the reason that the raid lore was just filler lore was because of its nature, though. They could have ended Wing 3 with a Lazarus reveal but at the same time there’s lore/writing reasons as to why that’s a bad idea. If true site is required to see Mursaat, then we shouldn’t be able to see him. If we can see him and he’s awake, why didn’t he just kill us all with a flick of his wrist since we can’t protect ourselves against their agony? Personally, I think he IS in the stasis chamber but we just can’t see him.

I’m giving Bobby his dues here, I think the raid lore was handled pretty well. It’s enough of a hint to know where the story is going and when/if Lazarus is revived we know how it’s been happening but it’s not so full blown that those that can’t participate in it are missing out on huge plot moments. The team also did a pretty good job of balancing those that want story and those that just want to kill bosses. It’s a difficult balance, but I think the team did a good job of it. There are some unanswered questions still, sure, but that’s hopefully the meat of what we’ll find in future Living Story/Expansion content.
Personally, I’ll be happy if future raids handle side-stories to overarching big plot points. It’s enough juicy lore for me to get my teeth stuck into it without it being a huge lore shock that upsets those that can’t/won’t participate.

ANet BobbyStein
Thanks for the kind words. It’s tough trying to maintain that balance. We’re trying to give just enough contextual information while leaving room for speculation and future stories. It’ll be interesting to hear what people think as the year progresses and the raids can be dissected alongside other content.

Raids do have their place in telling story, but it’s a bit different from what you’d find elsewhere in the game. We’ll continue to evolve based on the lessons we learn with each release, and from what people say on forums, etc.

Thanks, everyone, for your constructive feedback. It motivates and inspires us to do better.

whiteaden
irc the white mantle is used as a boogeyman story told to human children, it has been 250 years since they were seen… I would assume that a human PC would have grown up with these stories, and only have a cursory knowledge of Saul being the leader of these evil beings…

ANet BobbyStein
Correct. In the Unknown Parents chain in the human Personal Story the White Mantle are portrayed as enemies of the queen. A human character in modern Tyria would not have a positive view of the organization, and would likely not know enough about their history to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Fluff posts. Bantering with the Reddit posters

What happened to E?

Xiosmes
Just wondering since I have been replaying some of Living Story Chapters and he popped up somehow in my mind.
I think last time we heard from him was at “Disturbance in Brisban Wildlands” chapter in the Living World Season 2 which was long before the expansion.
I wonder if we will ever hear from him again or did Anet just decided to drop him off the table. Even the Wiki doesnt say much about him.

ANet PeterFries
Would you like to know the terrible secret behind E…?

ANet BobbyStein
That you killed E off-screen? You’re a terrible person, Fries.

Oh, wait. That was someone else. Never mind.

Gragx
Nah. Just tell us in game that there’s no time for that, as you did with Rytlock

ANet PeterFries
Rytlock is very busy

ANet PeterFries
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnpILIIo9ek

Guildwars1996
Did you kill E like you killed the poor wee Quaggans

Anet PeterFries
E is still lurking about.

Shongaqu_RON
oh man Mr. Isgarren and his terrible secret in the wizard tower is that his first name is Eustace and he is so embarrassed by it that he goes by E.

ANet PeterFries
Trivia: Isgarren is the son of Wasgarren, and his son is Wilbigarren

Living World Season 2?

kazerniel
I have a free account, I’m interested in playing the Living World Season 2, and worried about missing out on it for good with the impending arrival of Season 3. I haven’t finished the personal story with any of my characters yet, so ideally I’d wait with playing S2 until I finish those, as I read in the wiki that LV happens after the personal story and can contain spoilers.
My questions: Can I still buy S2? If I buy it, but don’t play it immediately, can I play it later (eg. after S3 comes out)? Is there any kind of time constraint on it?
Thanks!

kal777
For the record, the in-game recap is…not super extensive. There’s a few exhaustive summaries of LS1 floating around, and I’d recommend tracking them down, because that’ll make a lot of the character reasonings make sense.

ANet BobbyStein
Yeah, the S1 recap was designed to recap the Scarlet/Mordremoth story only, since that ties in directly with Season 2. It doesn’t go into all the character arcs or the specifics of every release.

Hobokun
Any word on when LS1 might be coming back?

ANet BobbyStein
I don’t have an update on that, other than to say it’s not something we’re working on right now.

Aloscount
That begs another question… is it still on the table?

ANet BobbyStein
That’s not something I can answer, as it’s a decision that’s ultimately made by someone else.

Varorson Konig Des Todes.2086
Should you be able to answer /u/Hobokin’s question on LS1’s potential return…
Any word on if/when the recap might be expanded to recap each story arc (including Lost Shore)?

ANet BobbyStein
We have no plans to extend the recap

kazerniel
Thanks! Do you think it would go on a sale? As I heard they completely removed S1 (except for a recap), so wouldn’t they remove S2 too when S3 is introduced? (That’s why I’m a bit anxious to get it while it’s still available.)

ANet BobbyStein
Season 2 isn’t going away. If you buy it now (or later) it’s permanently available on your account, and you can replay the episodes as many times as you like. You can also bring party members into your story instances even if they don’t own the episodes, but they will miss out on achievements and rewards.

Wiki update request

ANET_Stephane
Hey there, I noticed your comment about “the people who have previously updated the wiki are either too busy, too lazy, or update on a schedule” and wanted to let you know that wiki editors are exactly like you: people with lives, a limited amount of time and the willingness to spend some of them for the benefit of the Guild Wars 2 community. None of them are lazy and all of them are busy.

At this point there are 54,102 articles on the wiki. A lot of them are very structured, interlinked and categorized. But no one is “responsible” for the totality of that content, so there’s no way that it’s going to be complete or even 100% consistent without actual editors doing the work, on their own free time.

And the wiki editors are amazing, they work hard to make sure that the quality of the wiki is very high. But there’s only “a few” (at the moment about 200) of them to do a lot of changes about content that is regularly updated in the game. Some of the work of presenting and formatting the articles are also time-consuming. For example these beautiful white-background screenshots you see on the armor articles have been created by a couple of German editors I worked with and they’ve spent a huge amount of time on them. Then someone on the English wiki had to save all those screenshots, upload them to the English wiki and add them to the relevant page.

If you found the information, feel free to add it to the wiki. You don’t even need to edit articles yourself, there’s a “Leave article feedback” link on the top of the article and you can leave a comment for wiki editors to see the information you found and then take care of updating articles.

Hope this explanation helps!

ANET_Stephane
Hey there, have you considered adding the article yourself? You don’t need to put a lot of work into this. It doesn’t need to be very complete and there’s even a way to add a mention that an article is a “stub” (meaning incomplete). And all this additional work may even be done by other, more experienced editors once you’ve started it.
However if you’re interested in knowing more about editing the wiki, there’s a very convenient page for it here: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Help:Contents

ANET_Stephane
Some editors also look at the Recent Changes list and go through all the edits to see where they can help. The community of wiki editors is amazing and could always use a few more people with the willingness to help

Is it just me or are t6 leather prices insane

iDemmel
/wiki Hardened Leather Section
“External Links” on the right will answer your question.
/u/ProbablyJohnSmith: the price of all the other materials have long stabilized. Don’t you think that this one needs some tweaking?

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
The current trend is more troublesome than the raw price, but yes, it needs to be looked into.

rabbitcoast
“Please do something fast”

lol if you think smith is going to do anything besides make a few over-reactionary changes once every 12-18 months.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
Nobody ever notices the hundreds of stabilizing changes

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
It’s important that low level individuals earn real value while leveling. It’s still the case that a level 80 far out earns any low level when collecting wealth, but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get anything while leveling up.

BastiatCF
(Snip)
I would be very interested to know how much of the T4 materials are created by opening “Bag of gear”s (only available to level 80s I believe) on a lvl 52s. My guess would be its is a substantial percentage if not a large majority, though I could be wrong.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
In the last 24 hours only 6.87% of T4 mats came from containers.

BastiaCF
wow thanks for the response, do you mean directly from containers or from salvaged gear that came from containers?

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
Directly from containers, salvaging was 35.66% Gathering winning at just under 42%

Discussing if the Personal Story could be made replayable

Hoojiwat
Would be nice to be able to replay PS Missions like you can with LS2 or HoT!

Varorson Konig Des Todes.2086
I recall Bobby mentioning in the past that they attempted such but it constantly caused bugs.

IIRC, some of the bugs included wrong – or multiple – order mentors showing up during story steps, or having an incorrect follow up when completing one, dialogue reflecting choices you didn’t make, etc.

So in order to fix all that, they’d probably have to remake the personal story from the ground up.

ANet BobbyStein
Correct. As cool as it would be for the PS to function like LW stories, it’s just too huge an undertaking.

SomePoros
How about the option to reset the full personal story?

ANet BobbyStein
We looked into that while working on the PS Restoration project and discovered that it’s not a viable option due to the way things were built.

Support is working on a way to undelete characters

zakmandoo
I deleted a few characters a while back with some important items on them from the gemstore /facepalm. After some research on this sub, I learned that Anet will not un-delete characters for any reason, but I decided to submit a support ticket anyway, to see if they could at least restore the items to my account. Well, GREAT NEWS! Apparently they now un-delete characters (I didn’t even have to give a reason!). The GM that helped me said it was “kind of a new thing.” It took a few days, but they restored four of my old characters, and got my items back! I’m stoked! Massive shoutout to the great support team at Anet!
TL;DR Anet will now undelete your characters. It can take a few days though

ANet Dornsinger
Hi guys!
OP is correct, it’s a new thing, it’s very much on trial right now – and we cannot promise everyone a character restoration yet.
Much like all refunds and restorations, these are on case-by-case basis, we need to check a lot of stuff (Is there a free character slot? Was the character name taken? What’s the account history?) and in some cases it may not actually work. New toys, might break and all that.
In some cases it might actually be better to try and ping us with an explanation of what precisely happened. The other day I had a user delete a character with an infinite mining tool, I simply replaced the tool for them, as that was much quicker a solution.
So, if you need help, give us as much info as you can, we’ll see what we can do to help.

human female idle animation

RiceBaker100
My guess? People complained that they were sexist.

ANet barefootmatthew
LOL That’s rich. No they most definitely weren’t removed for being sexist. They were removed because every time we went into a review of serious story content and you’re supposed to be having really weighty conversations about Tyria-shaking, monumental decisions you and your team were making…oops, is this boring? Why am I yawning, and kicking the ground like I’d rather be ANYWHERE else? It happened so often that the only real way to address that feedback was to pull them out, because unfortunately our tools don’t provide us designers with a way to throttle back only specific animations.

ANet fix your LFG suppression system

ANetChrisCleary
I’m fairly positive we haven’t revisited throttling on LFG since I set the thresholds back before it was launched. Those thresholds seemed to work just fine in the situation where we did not have raids or multiple fractal party hopping.
While this post gives a few examples of where throttling is having a negative impact on your ability to socially interact, I would be very appreciative of a listing or summary of situations where suppression has been overly a negative experience.
Just to be clear, I am talking about suppression, and not issues that may be perceived as “bugs” with LFG.

xAtri
Hopping Squad LFG listings (Trying to join multiple taxis in a short duration to find a non-full map).
Hopping Fractal LFG listings.
Re-listing LFGs (Squad and Party) right after someone leaves causes the description to be blank
Having the same title of the lfg when listing causes you to get supressed. this can be temporarily worked around by changing the order of the phrases (LFG tempest KC vs LFG KC tempest) and alternating between the two, but it’s still annoying.
Having to re-list the lfg when there’s only you in the party and people just join and leave is also annoying as it causes the same title issue as before as well as listing it again.

ANetChrisCleary
Hopping listings should cause a trigger. This should happen for both squads and groups. I understand the desire to find a non full map and taxing in, but there are many malicious uses of group and party hopping that require this trigger threshold to not be super relaxed. LFG was never designed to be used for quick group creation/disbands for taxing. I can look into relaxing this a bit, but it’s unlikely that joining many groups and leaving in bursts will be something we would be comfortable in relaxing heavily.
Changing the title of a listing is essentially creating a new listing. I’ll look into this, but if I remember correctly throttling kicks in fairly quickly depending on how often you list and only decreases over time (it’s not static).
What do you mean by “Having the same title of the lfg when listing causes you to get suppressed.” Are you saying that updating the listing with the same listing text causes suppression? That seems like a bug caused by the client pushing an update when one should never have been pushed.
Having the title become blank seems like a bug.
I can have QA look into these bugs and get them added to the known issue tracker.

Paelmoon
Why does a LFG listing drop off when a group drops to one person? And that one person is the person who posted the listing?

ANetChrisCleary
I can answer that for you.
There is no such thing as a 1 player group (this isn’t the case for squads). Essentially when someone leaves a group of 2, it disbands the group, and thus removes the listing for LFG which has become a listing for a group that no longer exists and LFG assumes it disbanded.
Does this also happen when you form a squad and list that instead of just a party?

Anyone know how ANet decides which items are depositable materials?

ANet LinseyMurdock
It very much has to do with space not clutter (although that did factor in a small way, pre-search bar). We are technically limited in how much we can put in there, so I try to stay pretty conservative in what I will consider eligible. My general rule of thumb is that the item must be used in crafting recipes, not be a component (something made of multiple other things, though refining is an exception), and it not be a niche item or have a very narrow use (like doubloons). There are a couple of factors that have led there to be items in material storage that don’t follow these guidelines, such as, but not limited to: People that aren’t ME and who were not trained on our standards BY ME have added items to material storage that shipped before I found out about it. Once an item has been added to material storage, it cannot be removed EVER. Like, for reals, EVER, unless you want to delete players items on Live. Which is why Xunlai Electrum continues to linger at the moment. I was TOLD that we would be doing the rest of the disciplines to 500 fast enough to make adding XE to storage for initial launch worth it (adding it at launch before it was used meant that I could organize it with the rest in a more sensible way since we can’t reorder storage either).

Players have, in the past, lobbied us to add items to storage and we agreed with the argument enough to add it. So if you guys want to make a strong case for any specific material, I’m willing to listen and explain if the answer is no. You might not like my reason, but at least I’ll have one.

That last one’s interesting for a point at the end of the first paragraph … it indicates plans to get “the rest of the disciplines to 500.” Obviously it didn’t happen “fast enough” but, hey, it could be coming! Perhaps your descriptive link could include “might get JC and Chef to 500,” unless that would be too hyped.

Hey OP! Thanks for the thread. I don’t browse Reddit at all, so this is a great help keeping up with the Devs.

Raids and Living Story 3

Would completing raid stories offer any value to LS3

ANetBobbyStein
TL;DR – Play them in whatever order you like. You’ll be fine.
Long version – I consider the raids a prologue, too. If you play them, you’ll have some additional context for episode 1. But if you play episode 1 without completing the raids you’ll be provided with enough background information there to get you caught up.
Personally, I recommend doing both if you can. But I don’t think you need to play the raids first. About the only thing I think you’ll miss, story-wise, is the suspense and/or speculation from the ending of wing 3 through the end of episode 1. And maybe some of the themes that carry into episode 1, but again, you’ll get everything you need to know in there, in my opinion.
Mechanically, though, you’ll find a lot of really cool encounters inside the raids, as well as some enemy designs that inspired some of the season 3 content.