Guild Wars 2

We should be able to use the glider in central tyria.
Maybe Anet could make this possible to players who have 100% map completion as an incentive for doing so.

This will destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles

Jumping puzzles maybe. Vistas it won’t as it is needed for map completion.

I doubt arenanet has the ressources to implement this in a meaningful way. I would love to see it too.

Maybe adding gliding to things such as fractals or instances would work on a limited basis. That would barely scratch the itch though.

I would absolutely love for this to happen in some capacity. Gliding is tremendously fun and it does a really good job of opening up the world.

The big issue would be that Gliding would almost certainly allow players to reach locations we were never intended to reach, opening the door to significant exploits. That’s why I’m not going to hold my breath on this change, as awesome as it would be: Anet would have to invest a lot of development time tracking down trouble spots and fixing them, and it would likely turn out to be a never-ending project.

Skady.5916:

This will destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles

The Vista issue wouldn’t come into play all that often since most Vistas are at or near the highest points around, making it difficult to glide to them. They could also solve this as a “problem” by, as already suggested, requiring 100% Central Tyrian map completion before allowing the use of Gliders in Central Tyria.

Gliding would potentially trivialize some portions of jumping puzzles, though. Anet could selectively exclude those from Gliding, though. Slap a “Buffeting Winds” debuff on all players inside jumping puzzles and call it good.

The problem is that central tyria is full of smoke and mirriors. Invisible walls and half made terrain abound!

This wouldn’t affect vistas in any impactful way. And as for JP; most JP are vertical ascents. The few this would affect are just that, few. And not to mention quite a few people jus Mesmer cheese them anyway. Which is still possible to do at any time. Honestly, trying to use gliding on some JP might make it more difficult for you.

The best excuse to not have gliding would definitely be the numerous invisible walls and areas that you can’t go but it looks like you can. Like Azure said.

I think I’m time it will happen but there’s some cleaning up in tyria that they need to so first.

I’ve stated this in other Gliders-in-Tyria threads, and I’ll say it again here.

I’d love to see several updrafts south of Wizard’s Fief leading up to Wizard’s Isle.

Yes Jumping Puzzles would be a real problem. I can think of one off the top of my head that you could glide from the start all the way to the finish in a matter of seconds.
i.e. Behem Gauntlet,

And a few others that you could bypass most of the difficult jumps using gliding.
i.e. Pig Iron Quarry, Weyandt’s Revenge, The Collapsed Observatory, Fawcett’s Bounty, Tribulation Caverns and Tribulation Rift Scaffolding to name a few.

Blaine Tog’s Buffeting Winds suggestion above would take care of that though.

Then you have the issue as Azure Prowler noted. The central Tyria maps were built without having to worry about players accessing parts of the map from above. In the past as long as the problem of a player leaving the map was blocked by covering the x,y axis with ANet only having to worry about the z axis from a slightly higher then the body block box level, they were fine.

So basically it would require them to completely redo almost every core map in the game. Just seems like a ton of work with with no return on investment for ANet other than players going “oooo” as they glide to a previously unavailable spots.

Now all that said, would I like gliding in central Tyria? You bet ya.

While I would really love to glide anywhere I’m pretty sure Anet probably tested this internally and discussed this at length. My guess is that they want to keep gliding to the expansion so that folks with the expansion have no meaningful advantage in open world PvE in central Tyria over people without the expansion.

Plus you’d be able to break out of the central Tyria maps even more easily! People have already used these things to break out of the HoT maps, can you imagine what would happen in maps that weren’t designed to have gliders?

The only exceptions I can think of would be cities (where it’s hard to have any sort of advantage at all), and Dry Top/Silverwastes maybe.

Vistas it wouldn’t effect much, and the 100% map completion would fix the few (none that I can think of, but there could be one or two) that could be trivialized by gliding. The jumping puzzle problem could be solved by adding some sort of downdraft condition to the puzzle that doesn’t allow the gliders to open, although for most jumping puzzles it wouldn’t matter much either (except it would make making a mistake less deadly in some cases).

As far as exiting the map, HOT already has a solution of a sort implemented. Twice I’ve hit the edge of the map, gliding where I normally wouldn’t have been able to get to. There’s a warning that if you don’t return you will die and then if you ignore it you do die. The same system could be brought to the rest of Tyria to prevent map breaking, honestly I’m surprised it hasn’t already. Most maps extend some ways past the borders you can see already, using the neighboring terrain without any npcs or enemies. I doubt it would really break much at all, and the worst exploits would be possible map breaking which isn’t a big deal. This isn’t a game where you can node or kill steal, and I honestly don’t know what exploits would be possible that wouldn’t have been revealed in the HOT maps.

But then we’d lose the fun of being in central Tyria…running off the edge of a cliff, pressing the space bar, and wondering why the glider isn’t deploying, maybe have time for a /facepalm and then go splat at the bottom. C’mon…you know you’ve done it already!!

AnClar.1304:

But then we’d lose the fun of being in central Tyria…running off the edge of a cliff, pressing the space bar, and wondering why the glider isn’t deploying, maybe have time for a /facepalm and then go splat at the bottom. C’mon…you know you’ve done it already!!

Haven’t yet!

Gliding would be fun to have, but I’m not holding my breath for it. I already run into a lot of pointless invisiwalls when I explore, and I doubt ANet is going to invest in retooling maps to make it work.

Skady.5916:

This will destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles

Not true. Vistas and JPs require going UP. You can only go down with Gliding. Since there are no Updrafts or Ley-lines in central Tyria(and Arenanet does not have to add them), Gliding would not help you much in going UP. Perhaps it could save you from a bad jump and smashing your face on the ground, or perhaps it could get you back to a midway spot rather than restarting completely, but Gliding is by no means getting you UP there.

Besides, Mesmer portals already exist as checkpoints. Moreover, Mesmer portals can already “destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles” completely.

Vistas – Solvable by requiring 100% world completion.

Jumping puzzles – Make JP work like guild missions where the player “switches on” the JP and while it is active for them they can’t use their gliders. Not a whole lot of coding goes into that. All it needs is a JP trigger that activates at the beginning and makes this happen.

Tyria Invisible walls…yeah this is an issue and probably why this is implemented the way it is. It’s a lot of ground to cover and fix.

I would love to see this change too, but the last point is really why we haven’t seen it happen and most like why we won’t see it happen.

Turtle Dragon.9241:

Skady.5916:

This will destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles

Not true. Vistas and JPs require going UP. You can only go down with Gliding. Since there are no Updrafts or Ley-lines in central Tyria(and Arenanet does not have to add them), Gliding would not help you much in going UP. Perhaps it could save you from a bad jump and smashing your face on the ground, or perhaps it could get you back to a midway spot rather than restarting completely, but Gliding is by no means getting you UP there.

Besides, Mesmer portals already exist as checkpoints. Moreover, Mesmer portals can already “destroy the purpose of vistas and jumping puzzles” completely.

Turtle: Respectfully, this is just NOT true. Granted many JP’ do require you to go up however, MANY have you go down too. Someone posted earlier a list of examples of JP’s that actually require you to go down A LOT.

The one that I can think of is Griffonrook Run(the one you are supposed to carry the bomb but you don’t have to, to complete). In fact this one requires you to jump down for nearly the entire puzzle. I have not looked at the distance but I think you could glide from the first jump all the way to the bottom of the hill at the end.

Guys. It will break the map. Break it. Expose gaps and floating structures without foundations and two dimensional facades you thought were actual buildings. Thread after thread on this … it can’t happen unless they literally rebuild the maps from the start. They don’t have thousands of extra employees they can toss at this.

So your choice is either get new content, new maps, new events — or wait a year or two with nothing happening while they convert the old maps into identical new ones that have one new function. Remember how much people hated the content drought of the past nine months? I think ANet has more business acumen than to devote every erg of effort to such a small change.

I love gliding, I want to do it everywhere. But it’s not happening in central Tyria without something as big as WoW’s Cataclysm expansion.

Donari.5237:

Guys. It will break the map. Break it. Expose gaps and floating structures without foundations and two dimensional facades you thought were actual buildings. Thread after thread on this … it can’t happen unless they literally rebuild the maps from the start. They don’t have thousands of extra employees they can toss at this.

I honestly don’t think this is true because gliding will never take you higher than you can already go and will only ever take you on a diagonal down. The places where they’ve used two dimensional structures or haven’t finished entirely are usually places out of reach from gliding too, because if you can look down on them you would see the broken structure. And those things are pretty rare to begin with, consigned mostly to incredibly high peaks and the edges of maps where they are again too high to get to, even by gliding.

Tyria is actually quite flat and spread out so your ability to get to those places that you were never supposed to go is limited. Like the buildings on the wall of Divinity’s Reach, gliding won’t make it any easier to get there. Even jumping off mountains in the Shiverpeaks wouldn’t really be a problem; I can’t think of a settlement that you would be able to get to by gliding you wouldn’t also be able to get to another way. Rata Sum is about the only place where I could foresee a problem with this. But I think it’s exaggerating the problem to say it would break the maps. If I could get above a settlement and look down on it by walking the developers already had to make that a full three dimensional building with collision data and everything (with the possible exception of Rata Sum).