Guild Wars 2

Interview with GW2 Story Lead Matthew Medina

ANet barefootmatthew

CrownedCaribou

Thanks for this, but I wish they had gotten more into it than just asking things he likes. It would have been interesting to know more about his process of storytelling and world building.

Yeah, our story teams are smaller, more tight-knit groups of devs…a combination of narrative designers and gameplay designers are the core of the teams that implement story. But you pretty well described how we work – lots of meetings and discussions that focus on character and plotting at the front, then we prototype/rough in the major beats and fill out details as we go. Story in particular goes through a LOT of iteration.

ANet barefootmatthew

burningheavy

kitten man, make the story longer. The instances themselves were good but you didnt touch on the different parts of the story for long enough. Make it long man. Like if we had JUST gotten the bits with the exalted but a kitten ton more detail idve been happy. But we got loose ends with rata novus and the itzel and nuhoc were not well developed. More detail man.

It’s easy for people not in the trenches to think that “higher ups” dictate things from on high, but that’s just not been the case at Arenanet. While yes, there are always certain constraints that we have to work within, the team is as involved in those decisions as anyone at the top. I honestly can say that we made the best story that we could given the team and the resources that we had. It’s easy to look back on it now and say “we should have done this” and “we could have done that”, but at the end of the day we had to believe in what we shipped, or we wouldn’t have shipped it – that is the bottom line. I can say that we’ve read all the feedback, both positive and negative, about the decisions that we made as a team, and we’re committed to continuing to improve our story-telling the more that we do.

I’m super proud of my team and we hope to prove to you that we have what it takes to knock it out of the park. :-)

ANet barefootmatthew

Diogo
The community’s number one complaint about HoT’s story was how the second half felt rushed. If you guys at Anet ever bump into the same problems again, my hope is that you focus at one or two less sub plots in order to have more time to flesh out and properly pace the second half of the story.

A good ending is really important to satisfy us players, because its our lasting impression of the story (unless we replay it). Sometimes it’s better to have a stronger second half than a stronger first half for this reason, IMO.

Without getting into specifics, yes this is definitely on our radar to improve in the next expansion.

ANet barefootmatthew

StormyTDragon
I thought Ree Soesbee was the story lead. What happened to her?

Ree is still here as one of our narrative designers. :-)

ANet barefootmatthew

DietCorky
Depends on whether you’re a dog person or a cat person tbh.

Dog. I love cats, but they have tried to murder me on multiple occasions, so the bloom is off that rose.

Anet barefootmatthew

Elope
Is he serious about the barefoot thing lol

As serious as one can be about something that’s not all that important in the grand scheme of things :-P

ANet barefootmatthew

Wolphoenix
What does that mean exactly? Like, just indoors, or do you walk outside barefoot as well? What if it’s raining?

I’m barefoot everywhere for the most part. I have thin sandals for trips where some type of footwear is needed, but you’d be surprised how little that is. Going barefoot in the rain is a pleasant experience in my opinion…I just do as Douglas Adams wisely advised, and keep a towel at hand. :-)

ANet barefootmatthew

MakubeC
I want to know more about this barefoot thing. Any panflets?

I can do one better: www.barefootalliance.org

ANet barefootmatthew

LucidSeraph
It is illegal to drive cars barefoot in the US
TBH it’s with good reason — I had to do it once in an emergency (long story) and the pedals seriously tore up my feet. My right foot ended up with a big fat gash in the side and I couldn’t walk on it for like, a week.

It’s actually not illegal in any of the US states – our organization has letters from their respective DMV’s which state that driving barefoot is permissible. I’m seriously surprised that your experience of gas pedals was so harsh…are you driving Mad Max’s car?!

Continuation of above thread

ANet barefootmatthew

Novuake.2691
So Matthew, why was the HoT story pacing and general depth utter garbage?
Edit: to be clear this is a serious question i would like answered and not just me being an kitten about it.
I could motivate the statement with analysis of the story if you so wish.

Maybe you shouldn’t have been an kitten about it? Really, I’m happy to engage with people with enough self control to not lead off with an insult.

ANet barefootmatthew

Novuake.2691
Is it insult though, considering that the story was very obviously rushed?
I mean let me ask you this, are you haopy with the pacing of the story? With the matter of fact way we progress through it? With the lack of any kind of emotion besides on the surface and what we are “supposed” to feel? With the failure to use the abundance of lore and background available?

And really are you willing to discuss these things? Because we never see this supposed willingness.
This isn’t the first time it has been mentioned that story was lacking, nothing was said then.

I don’t mean to offend you personally or any of the story team, but a customer calling out a shoddy job shouldn’t cause insult, it should cause introspection.

However I do feel bad for the slight caused, my apologies. I am not very good at preserving the feelings of others.

I appreciate the clarification. And the honesty, so let me be honest back. From a player’s POV, I definitely prefer games that take their time to develop a rich world and story and I personally strive to deliver that as much as possible in the content I’m responsible for.

Heart of Thorns however, was a very peculiar case for us in that the story’s pacing from the get go just never felt right to us whenever we stopped the action to go into the deeper lore behind everything. When your game’s story begins with a tragedy of epic proportions and there’s a need to maintain the time pressure of the drama we’re working within, any stops along the way felt artificial to us during development. We did have plans to delve more below the surface with some areas, but because of the concerns we had with maintaining the narrative momentum, we opted instead to let those tales be told outside of the instances and through open world exploration (the “story” of Guild Wars 2 is not just about the chapters you see in the journal, or at least, it’s supposed to be) so that the story would be more focused on finding and rescuing your allies. Clearly, that decision was not popular with some of our players, and we’re taking that feedback as a learning experience. I guess the way I have come to think about it looking back is that I think we approached HoT story more like a “summer blockbuster” than a 13 episode run of your favorite TV show – which was a departure for us and quite possibly too far outside the comfort zone of many of our players who are invested in the GW2 story.

Looked at through that lens when answering the question “Was I happy with the pacing?” I would say that yes, with some notable exceptions, I was happy because we met the goals we set for ourselves and delivered a “blockbuster” ending – of course it wasn’t perfect, and there are always things I can look back at and say we could have done better, but I would disagree that there was a lack of any kind of emotion (and I realize that’s my subjective opinion, but it’s my honest opinion).

The exceptions where I might have done things differently with would have been: 1. It would have helped for us to have re-framed or spent more time on the discovery of Mordremoth’s weakness and 2. I would have wanted to go back and add non-VO text conversations on the PC’s allies throughout the story so that we could have given more optional background information or additional context that was lost by us choosing such a deliberate pace.

Again, thanks for the follow-up post. No hard feelings here, and we just may share a fundamental difference of opinion which is fine. We know we can’t please everyone, but we try our best to be responsive to feedback, even if/when we disagree with it. Your critique is valid, as it your opinion – that isn’t the insult. It’s in how you phrased your words that carries the sting of contempt, but we’ve since had a rational discourse so I accept your apology and offer my hand in respect. :-)

ANet barefootmatthew

smitske
And nothing about the elephant in the room? The complete oversight of previous lore (coughMALYCKS TREEcough). It really bugs me you just tossed out the legacy lore in lieu of some rushed and unfinished lore, that while it was the perfect opportunity to use it.

Malyck was not an oversight. He was in early drafts of the story, and was removed because his story created numerous problems for us both in terms of pacing and narrative. I can’t go into the reasons why without divulging details that would spoil any future use of the character, but suffice to say there were legitimate reasons we pulled him from the story of HoT. I realize that without giving you all a full explanation, that’s a wholly unsatisfying answer for those fans who really wanted to learn more about him. Sorry I can’t offer more than this yet.

Everyone should bookmark this page. Its super handy. +10 for the effort.

Why can’t I review my last PvP match performance

Yoshya
…..aaaalso not OP, but something I would really appreciate is a damage recap that I could pull up right after I die in pvp, showing me the sources of damage (abilities, profession, and numbers) from the last ~10 seconds or so that caused me to die. They have this in a game I play called Smite, if you’re familiar.

ArenaNetEvanL
This exists. Press the glowing exclamation mark on your downed health bar after you’re defeated

Teaser: Skyhammer overhaul

Teaser Facebook link
http://i.imgur.com/TXMyiuL.jpg

Kaligos.7285
If Anet makes Skyhammer a competitive map, I’m gonna swallow a broom whole.

ANet_Erik
Channeling your inner Herzog, I see? I’mma hold you to that.

About pacing and approach, in stories

ANet barefootmatthew

Teanjel
It’s been really interesting reading all you had to say, Matthew, thanks. I’ve got a bit broader question than a lot of the others (and maybe it’s just going to get lost in the pile…oh well, late to the thread as usual!).

As someone who dreams of someday making a living writing stories of some kind, I was wondering how that works in the gaming industry. Writing npc dialogue or the stories behind quests and events sounds like great fun! How does one manage to get a job like that?

I’m not a writer myself, so I may not be the best person to advise you, but writing for games is a much different skill than writing in traditional media. For one, you are often writing for a main character that is a bit of an enigma (our “commander” can be 1 of 5 races, 2 genders, from 1 of 3 orders…and so on, and so on"). Even with games where the main character is known, you have to write numerous branching paths to a goal and all the permutations a narrative can take, unlike a novel or a screenplay where there’s only ever one outcome. But as a content designer, I might not have the greatest grasp of what it takes to get into narrative design and/or writing for games.

My best advice is to try and track down game writers whose work you admire and see if they’re available to ask these questions of, or if not it’s possible that they’ve written blogs or articles on the subject. For example, I know David Gaider, one of the senior writers formerly of Bioware, wrote a great series of articles I still refer to called “On Narrative Design” for his personal blog. It’s definitely a challenging field to get into, but I wish you luck finding the answers to your questions. :-)

TMW you realize the person you are attacking on the point is a GM and you just cheated to get there #InstantRegret

http://m.imgur.com/Tj2pgSr

Just a flesh wound.3589:

TMW you realize the person you are attacking on the point is a GM and you just cheated to get there #InstantRegret

http://m.imgur.com/Tj2pgSr

ROFL

Spring quarterly update

WvW

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet
Hi RangerHere. Starting with this release, the WvW team is switching over to live development, shipping frequently, beta-testing on the live servers, and asking the community to prioritize development. The WvW team will be at the forefront of this. If it goes well for WvW, we’ll consider it for PvP too. I bring this up because development of build templates would happen on one of those two teams. So I expect that you, collectively, will be in control of when that becomes a priority.

ANet TylerB

Lksaargets
Hello,
I wanted to ask if you’re gonna release the wvw server pairings before the reset hits. I guess most server would prefer to be able to communicate and set something up for reset.

I also want to ask if you’re going to keep national server (I’m playing on the lowest german server) at the moment. I do enjoy the community, but we’re facing the problem of not being able to get a real nightshift.
Thanks.

We will not be releasing the world pairings in advance. This is to reduce the amount of ‘gaming the system’ and transferring worlds before the worlds are even linked. As to your other question, Language/National worlds will only be paired with other worlds of the same language. Worlds that are paired will have lower population caps and not every world in EU will have a partner

ANet TylerB

Aggidoll
In the future if this beta is successful and sticks around will the linked servers continuously rotate to accommodate shifts in populations and to discourage groups from stacking servers?

Yes, we’ll likely rotate worlds periodically, maybe once per quarter. In the short term this is a manual process, so we’d prefer to do this as few times as necessary, but in the long-term we’ll likely want this to be an automated process.

Question about boonstripping in WvW, the portable provisioner and -100% damage reduction meta

ANet-TylerB
Boon Stripping: Maybe. I’ll bring it up with the balance team again. Last time I spoke with them about this, they raised concerns that boon strips become too weak relative to boon application, if you can easily cover your important boons with less important boons.
Superior Siege on Portable Provisioner: Yeah, we should probably add this.
-100% Damage Reduction Meta: PM me details and we’ll address it, if it’s not already something that’s been fixed internally.

ANet TylerB

Ravval
WvW questions:
Do you think that world linking will be enough to fix population in WvW? Players will still be able to transfer now to the “server alliances” and stack these alliances. Will be there any new system for transfer to prevent stacking and manipulating matchups like it was especially on NA side.
How many servers can be linked to the one alliance? How will you link EU servers, where you have 1 spanish server,5 french, 7 german?
How often will you change link between worlds?
Stability change is a good step to fix “pirate ship meta”, but i still think it wont be enough, power creep in wvw is still ridiculous. Are you planning to make further changes to dmg in wvw if needed?
Reward track progression can be earned in eotm also, i am pretty sure people will prefer to go eotm for easy reward track rewards, than go try normal WvW and help your world. Any changes to eotm?
More changes coming soon tm?
I think this is very good begining to bring back WvW to the old glorious days. Good job and keep it going.

World Linking is not a complete fix for population imbalances. That said, we felt it was still a necessary measure in lieu of a more in-depth population management system.
We can link many worlds together, though in this Beta worlds will only have a single partner (if they are linked at all). Many high ranking worlds in EU will not be linked with another world.
At most we’d re-link worlds every 3 months. Though the exact timing hasn’t been officially defined, in part because we wanted to get community feedback on World Linking first.
Yes, we plan to continue balancing for WvW, splitting skill damage between modes if necessary. This will likely be gradual though, tackling a few outlier skills at a time.
This is something we’ve already accounted for, as a result EotM earns reward track points at a somewhat slower rate

Continuation of above thread

Cyrstalline ore, new content, LFG, cloth/leather nodes, DPS test labs
____________________________
Crystalline ore

ANet mikezadorojny

CaesarBritannicus
I didn’t notice any changes to the acquisition of crystalline ore in the patch. Is Anet currently happy with the status of crystalline ore as a currency in Dragon Stand and especially the Guild Hall vendors (minis, weapons and armor)? I was surprised that the patch didn’t include ways to earn crystalline ore and outside dragon stand and the HoT story rewards (though I haven’t seen the new dailies yet).
All said, however, it is a great patch. Look forward to diving in tonight

While we didn’t directly change the drop rate of crystalline ore in Dragon’s Stand, we did greatly increase the number of Noxious Pods that spawn, and increased the rate at which players can get access to the Machetes that open them. As with everything related to the economy it is something that we will continue to monitor and make adjustments if necessary.

New content

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

Shimasaki
Hello,
Thanks for the update today; it was actually well and above what I expected. I’m just curious, is the plan to deliver more content in the next quarterly update (outside of another raid wing, if that’s where it falls) or will that all be left for Living World Season 3

Hi Shimasaki. Thanks!
For this update, as I wrote in my blog post, we paused all new development for a while so we could rework all these parts of the existing game.
For next quarter, our focus will be on new content. There will be more Living World, less rework of existing features. Maybe we’ll bundle Living World and the quarterly update. To be determined.

LFG

ArenaNetBGBranden.1473

Jellorage
Good work on the LFG changes, can you add a tab for guild recruitment? I’d love to see a reduction in map spam.

Thanks! We are happy to have it out. We had talked about adding a guild tab using squads at one point, however the interface really doesn’t lend itself well for that use case.

Cloth/Leather nodes

ANet AndrewM

GrayWynters
will we ever see cloth and leather be farmable in a way similar to wood and ore?

We don’t have any plans to add cloth or leather gathering nodes like wood and ore have. However, we have been looking at ways to provide a direct method of acquiring these materials, like the changes we made to map reward tracks a while back. We’re watching the markets for these materials and are working to make sure they don’t get too out of whack.

DPS lab

ANet Faerla

maxlepeh
DPS Test Lab is better than I could imagine! Do you plan to invest more time to it? How about adjusting toughness of boss to simulate comparison of power, hybrid and condi builds like “VG vs Gorse”? And as mentioned before buffs for pets, someone hitting you to proc traits?

We’ve got a lot of things we’ve identified as potential updates for the Test Lab.
There are some high toughness/condi immune mobs available for testing in the Lab, though. Give it a look!
As for on hit procs, that’s a good idea. I’m curious though… If you have a commander book, there are some additional options available to you in the instance. One of those options is the ability to toggle pulsing AoE damage. Do those proc on hit traits and things?
We focused primarily on offense this time around, so we’ll be sure to evaluate the test lab for defense in the future.

Continuation of above thread

PvP and Balance

IsaiahCartwright

Malika-the-twisted
Dear, Balance Team
Why was it necessary to completely destroy the Condition Necromancer in the PVE setting for the PvP people to be happy? This patch was almost good for me, but the change to Deathly Chill was a major turn off. Seeing as I will now be running Dhuumfire a previously, thought dead trait and dropping the Elite Reaper Specialization completely.
This so called ‘balance’ has managed to practically kill all passion I have for this profession and replaced it with the spite I felt for it before Heart of Thorns.
Sincerely,
a REALLY peeved Necromancer, former Reaper.

Some of this change wasn’t just PvP the fact multiple necromancers using deathly chill stomped on each others damage was something we wanted to fix, but I do understand it was a large power change to that trait and like all of the balance changes we’ll keep an eye on how everything pans out.

ANet irenio

Dedryk
Hi
Thanks for the update and the great game!
Just a question about PvE/PvP skill balance. Given today you gutted the engineer’s slick shoes skill, was this a purely PvP decision that has had the unintended consequence of removing a large part of the engineer’s functionality, or is the PvE nerf also fully intended/required for balance?
I guess this then turns into a larger question about the way the skills are balanced between the various game modes. How do you do this? Are you willing to keep skills that can only be used in one of the game modes? Do you ever discuss splitting them internally?
Thanks!

Hey Dedryk! The decision re: Slick Shoes was one that stemmed from PvP and PvE (raids and breakbars in particular).
With breakbars present this skill was capable of doing 10 other players worth of CC damage and circumventing challenging (and rewarding) boss mechanics.
In PvP the skill was bypassing the intended CC counter of stability. We want stability to matter and it’s judicious and intelligent use should be rewarded. One skill stripping unlimited amounts of stability AND CCing you afterwards feels bad, man.
We do discuss splitting skills on occasion; this wasn’t one of those occasions.

ANet irenio

Dedryk
Thanks for answering! Your reasons make sense, just sad to have lost our little niche in raids.
Is there plans to balance out the niches other classes have? (I’m thinking druids/chronos/revs/PS Warr). I love my engineer and am sad I don’t get to play it as much as I would like.
Also, as I have got you here, is the complexity of the rotation in comparison to alternative classes an active design choice since the inception of engineer, or has it developed this way organically.

Niches are often good things which create variety and help define professions from one another; we like niches that create interplay. When a mechanic actually removes interplay (and counterplay) then they’re less awesome. Engineer has some fun interplay already with the sheer versatility and the ability to access every combo field type in the game; this is not to say it can’t have more.
With regards to complexity, a good chunk was deliberate and a lot was organic that was consciously kept in because it was awesome.

Continuation of above thread

PvP and Balance

ANet Erik

lucker
Hey! Thanks for the patch. My question is how open are you to changing rhe class meta during pre-season due to player response? And another one: have you figured something out for PvPers to ease their pain of not having Ranked between seasons?

So this Off-Season we’d love for players to check out all of the various map changes that we released with today’s update and give us their feedback (and for the changes we made to Spirit Watch and Skyhammer in particular, which are available in a “beta” state in Unranked Arena right now). We also want to use this time period to allow the PvP meta to settle as a result of today’s balance changes, so that by the time that Season 3 does begin, players will be ready to jump right in and feel confident/comfortable with their skills and the Ranked map roster.

ANet Erik

Novuake
Hi MO. Decent patch today.
I have one concern however as a PvP main players.
There hasn’t been much clarity as to how the balance patches will be handled during and before ranked seasons. From what I gather there wil be no balance changes in season unless they need drastic adjusment, all changes will be before season.
Correct?
If so does this mean that today’s balance patch is what we can expect till season end?
TLDR. What exactly is the planned and expected balance change frequency?

That’s essentially correct, yes. We don’t wish to touch the balance meta much, if at all, once a season has officially started unless there is a really glaring balance issue with a particular profession. So today’s balance patch will make up the vast majority of balance changes prior to Season 3’s start. But again, this doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to make any additional changes between now and the start of Season 3 (or even during the season, again, in the case of any major lingering problems), but this balance update will make up the majority of balance changes prior to Season 3.

Hey Flesh while we appreciate you translating from reddit for us, I think given the 19th AMA and how busy it is maybe take a break from this one as it could get messy here and hard to follow. No offense but a lot of people just gloss over walls of text. After all Dulfy and other sources will have a condensed version at some point. Just an idea. You deserve a break.

Continuation of above thread

Fractals

ANetCameron

Highw4ys
Why does AR exist? Are there any plans on removing it so FotM appeal to a wider audience?

Ben, Sean and Myself just had a discussion about this. I think the best way we can describe AR is that it acts as a personal progression system for players as they journey through the fractal scales. By requiring a certain amount of AR, players have a tangible, quantifiable goal they can work towards when looking to ascend to higher scales.
Sean: We don’t have any plans to remove it, but we do want to streamline the acquisition of Ascended and Infusions to make gearing up more straightforward and palatable.

ANet Sean

Le_Vagabond
Fractals that are not swamp swamp swamp. I never thought this day would come, and it’s much appreciated
I hope you didn’t sneakily slash the ascended boxes droprate at the same time, though !

Nope, we actually want to make it easier to get Ascended gear from Fractals

ANet Sean

psc0111
Hi! I am a big fan of the fractal changes that were added into the game. The question I wanted to ask was regarding the drops of ascended chests from fractal dailies. In the old version, fractal champion chests dropped ascended armor chests at around 1/8 (or so some people concluded). I was wondering if the new chests for tier 3 or 4 were generally a higher or lower drop rate of ascended chests than the old champion fractal chests. Thanks!

Glad you like the changes!
Ascended drops were actually increased significantly in the 26-50 range, and while they’re slightly lower in the 51-75 range, the addition of the 76-100 tier means the overall chance of getting Ascended from your dailies is a lot better!
This is assuming you’re doing all 3 of the daily islands, of course. If you only do one island you will have fewer chances to get Ascended than pre-patch.

ANet Sean

frostychanel
I also got an ascended earring from doing them! Any other special surprises there?
Also, sorry to be blunt, but what’s been happening with ascended drops in fractals? Seems like from patch to patch they’re either really nice or completely missing.

…maaaaaybe
As for Ascended, there was a bug released with HoT which caused the drop rate to plummet. We fixed that and brought it back to pre-HoT levels, but felt that still wasn’t good enough, so we updated them again with this patch.

ANet Sean

tim
first of all, thanks for the awesome fractal update!
then i wanted to ask why there seems to be different drop rates for different armor pieces chests. in my bank, i have 9 or 10 shoulder chests, while i haven’t seen a single helmet or coat chest drop. is that intended ? makes kinda hard to gear up alts without crafting.

It’s… pseudo-intended? We do want the pieces with less stats(gloves/boots/shoulders) to be more common than the ones with the most stats(coats/leggings), but when I was updating the drop rates for this patch I noticed the rates were skewed further than they should be. As a result I brought them closer together.
I also added Damask/Elonian L./Deldrimor S. to the daily chests, so even if you don’t get exactly the piece you need that should make it easier to craft the missing pieces.

ANet Ben Rivald

danidanitta
With fractals getting some love recently, do you guys ever plan on making the tonic easier to obtain? I recently saw a guild get it and while I’m really happy for them I can’t help but feel slightly jealous because I want to turn into a kitty golem at all times too.

We are looking into moving further away from pure RNG as a reward system, and it’s possible that tonics could play a part in that.

Continuation of above thread

Shared Inventory Slots

ANet RyanD

jmdbcool
Thank you for this amazing patch! The free shared inventory slot is a wonderful surprise!
Can we get some options for how shared slots appear in inventory? I always have bags hidden, and shared slots break the nice 10-column / 20-slot layout. For example: http://i.imgur.com/xxmbi84.jpg

We can arrange the rest of our bags in any order, but when it comes to shared slots, we’re stuck. =( This issue was discussed when shared slots first came out; hopefully it gets more traction now that it affects all HoT players.

Allowing for moving the shared slots around like a bag is a decent amount of work. It’s not out of the realm of possibility, and something we should look at especially if we increase the cap on shared slots much more in the future.
The suggestion in that thread for keeping the shared slots and main inventory separate, even in “Hide Bags” mode is something that may be a reasonable compromise that can be done on a shorter timeframe. No guarantees on if or when, but I’ll take a look when I have some down time.

ANet RyanD

evenstarauror
As AWESOME as it is that we get a free shared slot (I don’t want to complain about free stuff) the fact that we can’t move this out of it is REALLY frustrating. Why not? Definitely discourages me from holding onto it to test out multiple classes.

Moving it was prevented for a few reasons.
We wanted to encourage players to use it, so that it doesn’t end up as another “too awesome to use” item that sits around in your bank forever.
We also found that a common scenario of using it was to create multiple characters and delete them when deciding to try a different class instead. This created a very likely scenario that many people would also accidentally delete the level boost item that was in their character’s inventory.
The restriction of keeping it in a shared slot accomplished both these goals that we had, and was simple to implement.

Anet LinkHughes

matzimazing
If I don’t want to use the lv80 booster now, can I put it in my bank and have access to the free shared slot? I have a set of 80s already, but I’d love to be able to reroll in the future if a new race is added.

Hi matzimazing! The level-80 boost item can’t be moved out of the shared inventory slot until it’s been used. One of the things we were looking at when we designed the boost was making sure that it was easy to find and wasn’t possible to accidentally lose; that’s where the idea for delivering it in a shared inventory slot came from. The good news is that you can consume the boost with a character that’s already max level and receive the package of rewards that it grants to free up the shared inventory slot. While they’re not as convenient to use, Tomes of Knowledge can always be used to level up any further alts.

Continuation of above thread

Raids. DPS testing area

Anet Faerla

Xdeadzx
More directed towards the raid team, what finally changed design wise to give us a DPS golem? After so long of obscurity, why now?

With the introduction of raiding, we re-approached the topic in an effort to provide tools that individuals and groups can use to become more deeply engaged in our PvE. The Aerodrome provided us the moment to build that tool. It was more a matter of opportunity and timing than it was design-philosophy shift.

PaulElla
Q. Is there any way we can get food buffs and wrench buffs added to the list of customizations in the DPS testing area? They could go away when leaving the area.
A. The issue here was one of scope and the hundreds of food items in the game currently. We wanted to focus on giving you the best experience we could in the time available and so food / utilities was moved to the backlog. We will continue to review the backlog to see where this would best fit and ensure we have bandwidth to accommodate it properly.

Q. If possible to share, what is the intention for raids beyond wing 3? Should we expect more things this year or will the next raid wing only come with expansion #2?
A. Sorry – at this time I cannot comment on the next raid wings. Spoilers!

Q. Are any changes planned to make Bandit Trio less random and more exciting?
A. Have you tried it without using the environmental buffs? (oil, bees, Wargs). We even gave it an achievement!

ANet PaulaElla

RisingDusk
No problem on the backlog; I understand software development triage is a real thing! Hopefully those can be added at some point, though, as that’s really among the last things needed to get a perfect representation of one’s personal DPS! (Super amazing implementation, by the way; everyone loves it so far!)
I’ve done the achievement without the environmental effects, but the issue is that there’s no reward motivation to do it more than once.
Is there any plan for this “hard mode” to give enhanced rewards in the future to ameliorate that?
Also, the Tres Banditos (particularly Narella) have very uncontrollable aggro. Sometimes Narella will shoot phantasms and allow the raid group to freely attack her, and then some other times she’ll shoot anyone in melee and really drop the hammer! Are there any plans to make her in particular a little more controllable, or is the uncontrollable chaos intended in the encounter?

We are actively discussing an alternative mode for raids (easy / hard), but we have not finished our investigations or finalized any decisions.
I will ask the designer to look into Narella’s behavior and see if anything seems out of line.

(I spoke to the designer – he said the chaos is ans intended part of the fight mechanics and you should ‘burn’ her down as fast as possible!)

Continuation of above thread

Mac computers. CI. CD

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet

danidanitta
Due to the small work around most of us mac players had to use earlier to get in the game after the patch, could you give us any news on the progress of the mac client you mentioned briefly in the previous AMA?
I understand it’s not top priority but any news on it is appreciated.

Just so you know, I’m primarily a Mac user too. I’m going to celebrate with you on the day that playing GW2 on my Mac is as enjoyable as playing it on my PC. But it’s a big project.

Anet lancehit

lundjames
Do you guys have a CI team and are unit tests part of your definition of Done?
(Curious, not being sarcastic.)

We do have dedicated engineers working on build/CI. We also have some developer regression suites. Most of the traditional CI concepts are not DoD for our development teams due to workflow/legacy reasons

Anet lancehit

EagleDelta1
Do you think the MMO/Gaming world will ever start to apply Continuous Deployment tools and methods to their workflows or is gaming just simply not well suited for CD/Automation?

There were several talks about CI/CD pipelines (from mobile/PC studios) at GDC ’16, and Riot gave an excellent talk about their Docker/Kubernetes-esque pipeline for League. It is happening, just veryslowly.

Continuation of above thread

WvW participation points. WvW transfers/population

ANet TylerB

fishlock
Hello. Do you think the max 550 participation “points” you get in wvw every tick is reasonable or will you increase it.

We were attempting to achieve rough parity with the rate that players can earn Reward Track progress in PvP. Once we are happy with WvW Reward Tracks and the feature leaves ‘beta’, we’ll make a couple other changes like adding WvW Reward potions to the WvW daily chests.

ANet TylerB

UncausedRyan
My Question for you is about the World V World Participation points. I don’t believe I saw anything about the points decaying over time.

Participation points begin decaying after 10minutes of no participation gain.

ANet TylerB

mage of void
Does WvW participation stay if you change maps before the next tick?

Yes.

ANet TylerB

CuddlesFort
Given the WvW changes, any chance of server transfers being available for a reduced fee for a short time? I know I’m excited to WvW with my guild, but we’re all over the place since we’ve just been PvE for so long.

Unlikely. The World Linking feature is a step towards achieving more balanced world populations, whereas cheap/free world transfers always end up upsetting population balance.

Continuation of above thread

2 gold for dailies

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
We felt we had some room for increasing player income without risking major problems. That said, we’ll keep a close eye on the progression over time, there are lots of options for fixing imbalances if they’re needed.

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet
Of course we’re also adding gold back to dungeons today, with the new repeatable achievement. But I’ll directly tackle your question. Most wealth in the game is generated by people who are very proficient at generating wealth. They can bid a lot for what they want, because they have a lot of gold, and that process drives inflation. Meanwhile the broader player base is just getting by. So we keep a close eye on how much gold can be generated from extreme farming, but at the same time try to provide a decent income to normal players.

Continuation of above thread

Pricing of Legendaries

Anet_Sean

GamingVyce
Why is the Ad Infinitum legendary back piece SO EXPENSIVE?
It has stats euqal to 1/2 a 1-handed weapon, or 1/4 the stats of a 2-handed… Also, we already know that the entire 6-piece legendary armor set is supposed to be the cost of one weapon.
So why is a single accessory slot around the cost of a legendary weapon?

Legendaries aren’t priced for their stats, since they’re really more of a prestige item than anything else. That’s why it’s cost is akin to the cost of a legendary weapon.

All Legendaries are supposed to be in the same price range. The intent was that a weapon, a backpiece, or a set of armor would all cost a similar amount. You can’t get just a single piece of legendary armor, so saying it’s cheaper is a bit of a misnomer.

I think the big mistake here was that we let players start working on the precursor before the final legendary recipe was revealed, and for that I apologize. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is much we can do about that other than try to be better in the future.

Continuation of above thread

Guild Hall decorations

ANet_Alina

Presac
Is it intentional we can’t by more than one decoration for tokens in the guild hall? For example, if I have 100 Fancy Furniture Coins in my inventory, I can still only choose to by one at a time. It just won’t let me raise the number. Says 1 is max.

The real answer to this would be very long and tech heavy. Short answer is that decorations are very different from normal items and don’t support being purchased in bulk at this time.

Continuation of above thread

Gaile’s frog

GaileGray

Sxi139
(Snip)
Since Gaile is answering some questions this may be a silly question and not relevant to the update but does Gaile Gray have her frog in GW2 yet?
https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/The_Frog

When folks ask me about The Frog, I explain that he’s in Tyria of olden days, but he’s actively working on time travel and hopes to make the hop to today’s Tyria sometime in the future. What I don’t often share is my worry that he’s engaged in this project with a some asura-dly sketchy “inventors” who seem to regularly increase the “cost of research” to complete the project. It remains to be seen if time travel will ever be a thing, but if they can build asura gates… I’m hoping!

Continuation of above thread

Revenant

Anet_RoyCronacher

Golden_Truth
Is revenant going to get the polish it deserves? (Snip)

I can add a bit of info here but tagging /u/anet_karlmclain in case he has anything to add.
sword scaling – known issue on our radar. it’s a tech issue of firing skills in different ways in the back end. The damage will have to be looked at and adjusted once this is fixed.
sword 2 targets – this is a known issue that needs some new tech to resolve but we know about it and it’s on our radar to fix.
jalis hammers – on just inclines? it shouldn’t end unless you run out of energy, turn it off or the projectiles hit walls. The projectiles should be hovering above the ground so they should follow the terrain of inclines.
uw legends – we know right now there aren’t many options. The work has to be weighed against other things we are working on but we’d like to eventually make more legends useable underwater.

Anet_KarlMcLain
The sword issues are something we’ve been actively investigating and working on. Please be aware that the base damage will be adjusted (reduced) when this tech comes online. Unyielding Anguish is definitely something we’ll look to fix as well!

Where are the Revenant skins that were in beta?

ANet mikezadorojny
Good question! Those of us here for the AMA are not quite sure. Some additional investigation is required…

Cost of amalgamated gemstones

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith

rune2004
Any thoughts on Amalgamated Gemstones? They’re basically another precursor’s cost worth of gold for the new legendaries. It really seems excessive. Making all sigils and runes count for crafting them could go a long way in helping the price come back down. And would add value to the green/exotic sigils and runes that everyone vendors (rare runes and sigils have TP value because they can be rolled in the forge for a chance at valuable runes and sigils). None of the old legendaries have anything like this gold gate besides the precursor, which the new ones need still of course. Even after the change with this update that helped, they’re still around 2.5g a piece.

We don’t make changes back to back because that leads to shocks (unknown things happening). Give these changes some time and we’ll re-examine.

Comment on Infusion upgrades

ANet Sean
We know infusions have systemic issues, and we have a plan to resolve them.
Unfortunately an issue with the code prevented us from implementing the planned changes this update; we discovered that when we changed the rules for infusions, any now ‘invalid’ infusions you had equipped simply got disappeared. Poof. Gone. As you can see, that would have been a really bad thing to subject players to.

We’re working on a code fix that will let us change how infusions work, while not destroying player’s hard-earned items. Once that’s done we will be able to make the infusion system a lot better.

Continuation of above thread

ANet Sean

chpoit
I assume you guys use a database to store the various items, wouldn’t it be possible to change the 5stat/5AR to 5stat/7AR in there since those are really expensive, or would that break a lot of things/require maintenance? or is it simply something you don’t want to do and want to have a way to upgrade them?

If we made that change now we would be painting ourselves into a corner regarding future design space. So, we decided to wait until we get the code fixed up and can make the infusion system we actually want to have.

Reference post: link to Dulfy’s summary of the Spring Quarterly AMA

Dulfy: Guild Wars 2 Spring Quarterly Update

Discussing the Archdiviner hammer bug and how it was figured out

Anet_Ben

GrayWynters
it’s a great fractal and I really enjoyed playing it today.
that said, the bug where the archdiviner doesn’t drop his hammer in the fight still occurs, and we had to reset (the fight, not the fractal) in order to fix it.

Gah! That bug has been hell to track down, mainly because we are still unable to consistantly reproduce it. I made a change that I was hoping would fix it, but it appears not. I will have to explore this further.
Edit: Did he not drop it at all, or did he drop it and then when players tried to pick it up it went away?

ANet Ben

Kbar100
The bug where the Archdiviner does not drop the hammer during the last boss phase can be easily reproduced.
When you think that the Archdiviner is about to drop the hammer at the 75-50-25% phases, spam your ‘f’ or your interact key as fast as you can to pick it up. Your character will attempt to pick it up, but then the hammer will disappear.
Many people think that the hammer simply just didn’t drop, but it drops for a split second.
I’ve done this quite a few times because I like to pick up the hammer during the boss fight. So basically just spam the interact key right before the boss phases, and the hammer will disappear.

I was under the impression that it happened when two players were trying to pick it up at once, but your comment makes me think it could be related to picking it up as it’s dropping as well. I will change my tactics! Thanks

EDIT: WE HAVE POSITIVE REPRO! Fixing it is going to be 1000x easier now. Thanks everyone!

Once something is consistently reproducible, it becomes MUCH easier to fix. I spent a lot of time on this bug because I was attempting to reproduce it the wrong way, and had the complete wrong idea about what was causing it. After /u/Kbar100 swooped in with repro steps, the cause of the bug became clear. It’s not always this easy though… Sometimes you can reproduce a bug, but you can’t fix it simply because the solution is incredibly complex, or there just isn’t a good solution with the systems we have.

Suggestion: WvW outnumbered buff should increase Reward Track gain

ANET_McKenna
So we have talked about this, but we worry that people will “game” it. It could cause people to become more hostile with each other as well, with people telling others to stop playing just so they could get those sweet loots faster.

Getting a Greatsaw Greatsword weapon from the Mystic Forge

So I found this….

phoes117
I was throwing some stuff on the forge earlier and i found this item here http://imgur.com/jVreeM8 . It’s not the skin, it’s the item. Do you guys know something about it?
EDIT: Screenshot from the forge http://imgur.com/QKrZOMP
EDIT2: I didn’t use any particulare recipe to get it, it was just 4 random lvl 80 rare shields
EDIT 3: http://imgur.com/a/NRGhl here you can see that i can mail it, unlock the skin and trade it.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
I’ll check in on this one on tomorrow.

The price of Mystic coins

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
That recent spike is setting off my spidy senses. I’m gonna calling Chris Cleary

Besides that yes, we’re looking into coins in the post patch review.

ANet ChrisCleary
https://youtu.be/_JNGI1dI-e8
You really should have better mystic coin vault combination John!

(I’ll look into the data sometime this week, but the recent spike looks more like someone is trying to corner the market :P)

Chuka and Chumpawat collection bugged: Entry 7

Drummermean
Entry 7 is bugged, the deer isn’t interactable, everyone is on the cliff, and nobody can bypass it.

ANET_Blonk
Hi there, we’re aware of the issue and are looking into it.
Edit: Question: Which “Entry” in the Hunter’s Journal are you on? (i.e. which entry is to be collected next?) We’ve had people get past this part so I’m trying to track down what happened with you all.

Drummermean
Hello /u/ANET Blonk, it’s entry number 7. The deer is lying there. When I go to the deer on the cliff, I get an event where the two legendary tigers should appear, but they don’t (can see the event to top right of screen).
To the north of my location, an event spawns, when I go there, it just loops around to get to the cliff again. Some people have managed to get through this.
People are also struggling to get the event to spawn on the Hunter’s Bane part of the collection. Thanks.

ANet_Alina
Have everyone leave the event area for 30 seconds and come back, that should reset it.

RuBiK79
Will this also work for the bugged entry 13? How big of a radius is “leave the event area”?

ANET_Blonk
Leaving the event radius = Keep going until you don’t see the event UI in the right-side of your screen anymore.

Continuation of thread above : click here to go to that post

So I found this

Reports of getting a Greatsaw Greatsword from the mystic forge

ANet_AndrewM
This is part of some updates that I’ve been working on with the mystic forge, though we had not intended it to go out with last weeks build, as some parts of the change still need some work.

I didn’t put this in the update notes since it wasn’t meant to go live yet, but since it apparently went through, we added the Bloodbound weapons, Shadow of the Mad King weapons, and some weapons with no way to get them anymore like Scarlet’s Kiss to the mystic forge as possible rewards for combining rare weapons.

Please don’t forget silver doubloons

Gravelcaster
I am currently trying to make the legendary hammer Juggernaut and it’s taking a toll on my hands mystic forging 250 silver doubloons. There are few alternatives to getting them, and with all the focus on Mystic Coins and Amalgamated Gem Prices, I just want to draw attention to the Silver Doubloon issues which has not been dealt with for over 2 years. Thanks.

ANet ProbablyJohnSmith
Silver Doubloons are good.

Fractal bug causing crashes

lelo1248
If someone from your party, who has the highest fractal unlocked, changes the scale and leaves, while the rest of the team doesnt have the scale unlocked yet, trying to change the scale will cause your game to crash.

ANet Ben
Thanks for letting us know! We’ve got a fix for this queued up for our next release. Until then just try to avoid this crash if you can, though I know that is easier said than done. :/

Destroyer Scythe confirmed to drop from forge

ANet ChrisCleary
I’ll tackle this one quickly. I’m 99% sure this isn’t actually true. The only version of this item that ever existed was a PVP skin reward, and those don’t exist anymore. It’s dangerous to take API item discovery as someone getting a new one, let alone claiming it comes from the forge.
Edit: I’m talking about the Destroyer Scythe

Competitive ruling: Car Crashed and Vermillion

Josh Davis.6015:

Car Crashed fielded an ineligible player during their April 18, 2016 Pro League matches against The Civilized Gentlemen. According to our logs, the person playing as “Sam” was not the owner of the account, but was instead “Frostball”, a member of Vermillion. This violates rules set forth in the ESL Guild Wars 2 Pro League Rulebook as well as the Guild Wars 2 User Agreement. Frostball and all Car Crashed members that played on April 18 will be banned from ArenaNet-sponsored competitive events effective today through the end of the 2016 season, at which point each individual’s eligibility will be revisited. (Snip)

manny2494
How does ANet find out that another person was using one of the team member’s accounts?

Anet Joshua_Davis (Grouch)
I can’t get into the specifics, unfortunately.
That said, planning a scheme such as this entirely through in-game chat is generally not advised.

Players make thousands of gold on insider information?

YouDead-MeSmile
I don’t know about devs but I know their testers sell information from time to time.

ANet laurenk_GW2
If any of my full time paid testers (not raid alpha testers, etc) are selling information I’d want to know about it.

If you live in the Seattle/Bellevue/Kirkland area you can apply to be an entry level QA tester. This is a 40h/week job and is pretty non-glamorous but can be really fun if you keep yourself out of a salt mines mindset in regards to repetitive tasks. Unlike other outsource companies in this area, our testers are not on 12 month contracts and do not have to take breaks in employment, they also qualify for health and PTO.

We pull the majority of our internal full time QA employees from our test outsourcer, we simply just do not have enough space internally to house our black box team. You need about 3 years of QA experience, preferably with increasing responsibility in your role, to qualify for our internal full time positions.

And you’d be right to be scared to sell info! You can get traced really easily!

Fribbtastic
If there is access to the content prior to release then all testers or players who have access there have a high chance to use these information to acquire a big profit from the economy (we saw that multiple times over the last few years). Sure the testers need to test the state of the new content or we will get more bugs like we already got with every release but I wouldn’t know how to prevent testers to tell their friends to stock up on a items (like they did with ascended gear T5 mats) and sell them when the prices rises. But I don’t think ArenaNet can do anything about information sharing by talking to friends who “misuse” these information.

ANet laurenk_GW2
The full time QA Testers are expressly forbidden from profiting off insider trading knowledge.
The alpha raid testers, etc are not part of my org.

the WvW poll

Reddit thread on: vote on what ANet does next for WvW

ANET_McKenna
Feel free to post HERE with suggestions.

DanteStrauss
You know, I REALLY appreciate this is an actual poll (not something like the alpine vs. desert BLs, cough cough)…

But, can we PLEASE have something in-game that can inform players that this is going on?

ANet-TylerB
Later polls will have in-game notifications (late May.) We were able to get the Web content up the fastest, and decided to begin polling now, even if the in-game notification wasn’t quite ready yet

rediche
Any possibility for you looking into visibility of commander tags for colorblind people with the QoL at some point? This would mean the world to a lot of us who barely see the tags already.

ANET_Duncan
Both options are open for suggestions from the community! So feel free to add to the discussion in the poll thread here . If QOL improvements win this poll, it will be up to the community to decide what we prioritize in a follow-up poll.

The other thing to keep in mind is that even if an option doesn’t “win” the poll now, the option isn’t gone forever. It can totally come back as an option in the future, especially if its something that is mentioned frequently in the community!

ANet TylerB
No player facing features for the ‘WvW overhaul’ were started until after HoT shipped. 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.

MystleMyself
Tyler, are there any plans on expanding/improving/adding to the WvW ranks? Is this going to be the horizontal progression version of WvW? (Snip)

Anet-TylerB
It’s on our radar, but it’s currently a fairly low priority for us.

Continuation of the above thread: Players make thousands of gold on insider information?

RomoSSJ5
Would it be fair to do a backlog checkup on your testers as to what they acquire in game prior any major release? Specifically huge amount of items that are about to hit sky high prices.

ANetlaurenk_GW2
We can see the associated name with all accounts, so yeah we do look. We don’t audit daily but when we see trends we do look into what is going on and who those people are.

S_Wood
Maybe this is my chance to get my dream job as an employee at a game dev studio.
What about zero formal QA experience, but incredibly enthusiastic?

ANet laurenk_GW2
For GW2 QA, I generally like to see you have 1-2 years of QA experience at another company plus being a current GW2 player with at least one level 80. The reasoning behind this is QA isn’t just “playing the game” or “they know the game”. QA, for as low as it is usually in the respect pipeline of game development, is a major skill. Being good at playing the game or knowing a lot about the game won’t make you a good tester.

Most entry level QA jobs won’t require experience, however for GW2 there is a massive amount of information you need to learn about how to break apart the game into smaller components and then how to test it. Internal terminology for maps is different than player facing, and you need to remember hundreds of GM commands and how they might potentially negatively impact the testing you need to do. Being a tester requires you not to just say “Ogre Wars stalled” but remember everything you did for the last 30 minutes to an hour or more that might be out of the ordinary to make the event chain stall.

That said – I have hired really enthusiastic candidates with zero testing experience. The interview is really a lot about how you think and why, and if you can be logical and methodical and a quick study you generally have a good shot at being a good tester. We just hired someone full time that had zero QA experience, was incredibly enthusiastic and spent about a year as a tester before we brought him internal and then converted him to full time.

Geikamir
Are there ever possibilities for remote positions? I live in east Wa. but would love to do that job.

ANet laurenk_GW2
We do not have paid remote testing positions, however we do have an alpha program for volunteer feedback testing. If you PM me I will do some asking on if we are recruiting or if that program is open to new applicants.

Zackh
You will not want to be a tester. Believe me. You will not want to be a tester.

ANet laurenk_GW2
Playtesting (providing feedback) is super fun! Running test passes can be the 7th circle of hell…

You need to trick your mind into something else, otherwise focusing on how much this is awful and how much you hate your lead for this assignment will bring you down. Most testers develop some pretty severe gallows humor.

In all fairness, we try to automate repetitive things. We can’t automate UI or anything visual so that’s still on us.

We used to have to check, for achievements, that they can’t be earned twice. So that’s basically get every achievement in the game, twice. Just to see if it awards the achievement again. QAE automated that for us just before HOT launch and it saved literally days of time.

Continuation of above thread

djdanlib
Have you been aware of, or acted upon, any testers violating the insider trading rules?

ANet laurenk_GW2
We have not had an incident that required action.

Continuation of above thread

LucidSeraph
Woah wait, your QA is actual, for real full time employees? (Snip)

ANetlaurenk_GW2
You can look at our open positions here: https://www.arena.net/
Our internal QA team is full time ArenaNet employees. Our external testers are full time non-contract employees of their outsource company. We don’t often have a lot of openings for our tester level positions unless we are in a major ramp up time for something like HOT.
Also I don’t much care if you have a college degree or not. I mean it is nice but I mostly want to see if you are not an axe murderer, can write a complete sentence with good grammar and can use spellcheck, and can you actually do your job without me having to get involved every day.

trypz
Have you done other software testing before? I am wondering how much different games testing is compared to Finance Systems testing or Logistics Systems testing.

ANetlaurenk_GW2
I personally have not. I have done localization and QA for some mobile software apps not related to games, however I sourced and hired these teams instead of doing the testing myself. We do testing on our websites and billing for GW2 and these are a lot less intensive and don’t require a lot of adhoc testing or additional test passes beyond 1-2 passes and a regression pass.
The biggest difference between game testing and other software is for games we give you a huge sandbox and allow the user to do just about anything in pretty much any order. Most other applications have specific things you can do, and often you can’t do them out of order.

Comment: the next quote is advice on how to get a job at ANet as a QA tester. I’ve put it in a spoiler form so those that are not interested can bypass it.

Merus
I don’t know if your third party contractor is as good as you seem to think. (about halfway down)
Also well worth a read for everyone else, in case you were wondering why QA seemed to take a big dip a while back, and also if you think that the games industry might be a fun place to work.

laurenk_GW2
We outsourced because we no longer wanted to take breaks in contract employment, it was causing a drain on our department. We also didn’t have enough space. Yes we could have gone with the India solution or the cattle call show up at 8am and see if you have a job solution where I would have no idea if the people testing GW2 had been trained to test GW2. There are many options in the industry and I am happy with the one I have. Could it be better in many ways in regards to how testers are treated and feel? Absolutely.

I don’t deny that QA testing is the low rung on the totem pole, the pay is bad and the hours are also bad. I hated working 80 hour weeks when I did them. I didn’t like being called in on a weekend when I hadn’t had a day off in over a month. I currently don’t enjoy being on call every night and weekend but this is my job.

A lot of people think it’s QA’s fault when the game takes a dip or there’s a bug. QA has little to say in the development process. QA doesn’t write code or implement content. If a bug is written that doesn’t mean it gets fixed. If a feature is late it might not get tested as much. If a feature is so broken it is constantly being fixed and iterated on that introduces more and more risk. If a date changes QA just has to roll with it. I try not to take the blame QA approach and I’d hope others can refrain as well. I’ve asked some terrible things of our test team in the interests of the release being as good as possible for the players and I will defend my testers to my last breath.

Zaybiel
Hypothetical question. Let’s say I was a tester and had 2 zodiac skins I was keeping with the intent to sell later to make money. What would have been expected of me in regard to those 2 skins upon learning that they were going to drop from black lion chests?

ANetlaurenk_GW2
If you are playing the market with the intent to make 1000s or 10000s of gold that would be frowned on. It would be a case by case basis, but it wouldn’t hurt for you to ask your lead what could get you into trouble. Usually asking absolves all guilt.

ANET_Blonk
What Lauren said. Also, there are multitudes of logs. It’s pretty easy to tell how and when someone is storing something for later and if its for a nefarious purpose by checking the timestamps.

Posts about switching WvW maps

AnetChrisB
The WvW maps can only be switched with a significant game update. Dynamically changing which map data, “parchment” for the world map, etc. is used was never a part of the original intent of various areas of code involved (as far as I know / can tell).

It would be very nice to have that ability someday; to change maps with a WvW round’s end instead of a build. Implementing that is almost certainly very involved. Until then, changing maps involves a lot of manual work and has to happen in sync with a game update.

Currently that also includes ending the running match (updating Glicko) and beginning a new one.

Diax8
(Snip) I am hopeful that you will be able to switch maps at reset instead of on a Tuesday, as it is probably the best solution.

AnetChrisB
We’re much more likely to— but I’m not promising this— work on the ability to change maps without ending the week’s round early than we are to work on changing maps dynamically at reset without a game build. “Just” maintaining matchup and score is still technically problematic, but much less work.

Keeping matchup and score: a couple of us can fairly easily see what and where would need to change. Likely has a few gotchas we’ll have to watch out for.

Changing maps without a game build: lots of work going against some old code and tools.

Taeis
Why did the match ups change mid week? Was there a major issue with the previous match-ups? Are tiers even relevant anymore or is the rest of this beta going to be a random jumble of match-ups?

AnetChrisB
There’s a tech limitation right now such that changing maps also requires us to end the running match (updating Glicko), and begin a new one. This is something we’d like to fix in the future.

Container/chest opening simulator

Blackops606
I’ve always wanted to just sit on your guys private server and open a big chest like the one at Tequatl and record what I get. I would then compare that to the actual code written for the loot table and drop rates and see how it compares and how lucky I got. I’m just weird I guess but I love that thrill.

ANet LinseyMurdock
We actually do that as part of the process of making rewards! We have a simulator that will let you input the amount of openings you want to simulate and then it gives you the results. So I could say I want to open it once, 10 times, 100 times, 1 million times and then compare those results with the probabilities we set up and get a better picture of how often a player might actually get something or how many they will get after open a stack of bags or a weeks worth of chest openings, etc. It’s a handy tool and a lot nicer than opening them all manually.

Magic energy has been surging around the Ley Lines

zidzabre
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-May-3-
2016
“Magic energy has been surging around the ley lines.”
-wat? o.o
EDIT: By killing mobs you can get a “Unidentified Lodestone” i got mine in Snowden Drifts.
EDIT 2: Seems to be related to Dragon Minions.
EDIT 3: There are 3 events to complete after Lodestone.
EDIT 4: There are 4 achivements so far, maybe a 5th.

Artharia
New event popped up. Link!
edit: After it second event popped up to defeat big ley line something… edit2: For a moment someone from Arenanet popped up… Strange [EU]
More!
Snowden!
Ew… More Branded stuff
Arenanet! Is that a… Watchwork?
Rolling rolling rolling…..

ANET_Blonk
Hey you found me! :P

ANet GaileGray
I am glad you guys are sharing. We, of course, have no idea what’s going on, but it’s good to have these first person accounts!

Traheaerne’s cats in Caer Aval were put there in memorium for cats who passed away during developement of gw2

Tumblr post: Traheaerne’s cats

ANet GaileGray
My pet is named George in honor of my little guy who was with us during development of GW and passed away 8 years ago. One of my kitties now, a Siamese named Franklin, is in Stage 4 kidney disease and won’t be with us too much longer, so I’m keenly aware of the loss of a beloved companion. I’m really happy that we have Maddy, and Harley, and Leo in the game with us — it’s a very sweet thing.

(Discussion on WTFast)

This telianet seems to be causing latency issues

ANetGMGus
Some strange ideas floating around in this thread, so I’d like to try clearing some things up.

Let’s start here, you’re connecting from the Philippines. What this means is that your data has to travel a long way to our servers. The 200 millisecond increase is almost certainly your data travelling on a single giant cable under the pacific ocean. This type of increase isn’t unusual, and it isn’t anyone being cheap or being a kitten, it is simply the approximate time it takes for data to travel through a cable under an ocean (or through a satellite, but I doubt that is the case here).

Think of the 210.213.130.166 hop as being the end of the cable sitting in the Philippines and the 80.239.161.97 hop as being the end of the cable sitting in Los Angeles. The ~187ms increase is literally just the time it took to go from PH to LA and back.

That said, some services might be able to get your ping a little bit lower by sending your data on a slightly different route across the pacific, but because there are a limited number of routes the benefit might be minimal. Sadly, you’ll always have a big drop somewhere coming across the Pacific (or any super long trans-oceanic data cable)

You also might find this interesting just in general: http://www.submarinecablemap.com/

PantherCaroso
Thanks for the input.
Though I did try this WTFast program, and while it didn’t make my ping faster, it did “revert” my connection as though I never had problems.

ANetGMGus
If you are finding some benefit from using WTFast or another similar service, awesome, some people do, some don’t, it just depends on exactly what the issue is and if they can get you a better route to our servers or bypass possible bad hops.

adozu
(Snip)
regardless from where the guy plays from telia has been dropping gw2 packets on peak hours for years and you guys should probably be aware of it.

ANetGMGus
I didn’t intend to say there is never an ISP or tier 1 network issue, just that in certain cases like this one, it can be perfectly explained by the distance and route being taken.

Evangeder
I thought that WTFast grants you a ban.. at least from what i heard about in this subreddit..

ANetGMGus
Something like WTFast shouldn’t be a problem from that side of things, and we won’t ever ban people for using it.

Evangeder
(Snip)
Previously i readed a lot of bot/goldseller banwaves that also involve banning legit playing people using WTFast. So i was a bit worried and discouraged my mate from trying it.

ANetGMGus
It is possible that happened in the past mistakenly. We have more sophisticated methods for catching gold sellers now, so you guys shouldn’t worry about that stuff anymore. Even when it did happen in the past, it was a false positive and we’d let them back in as soon as we caught it. We never want to block someone because they tried to get a better ping to our servers. =)

Guild Wars 2 beta login screen: HoT version

Video

Waldir_B
Get your fill of nostalgia with a touch of modern!
I know that many people loved the original beta login screen as much as I did and I wanted to give my take to what it would look like if it had the Heart of Thorns treatment, after a few hours of editing this is what I came up with, hopefully some of you can enjoy it! And who knows, maybe someone at Anet will see it and let us choose log in screens :O #TheDream.

ANet ChrisCleary
My eyes are still recovering from disconnecting during the beta to the login screen.

In all seriousness, we moved away from the login screen for a number of reasons, but mostly because of what we can do (easily) with a launcher that we can’t do with a login screen.

This is very cool, thanks for sharing!! This is very similar (but 100x better) to a concept I made almost a year ago and ended up being used by Points of Interest for a short while.

Keyrings

Mike-OBrien-ArenaNet
It’s a cool suggestion. But, sorry, we’re not working on a key ring. We’ve got a full plate with other development, and as I said above, my priority is for us to do a great job on the things we’re already tackling.

Battle Master missing from Borderland Citadel and Border areas

ANET_McKenna
Heroics notary doesn’t spawn at citadel currently. Both the heroics notary and the Battle Master will be fixed.