Guild Wars 2

Jomg.9061:

Tala.7638:

Jomg.9061:

It’s really boring to never see a true answers about siege weapon despawing, or do you guys at Anet dont even know how it works ?

MikeFerguson.8921:

Sure, I’ll spill dome details!

DonRobeez.3560:

- How does siege despawning work?

Unbuilt siege sites that are placed by players will go away if someone does not bring supply to them within 10 minutes. Anyone that adds supply to a site should reset that timer.

Completed siege weapons will despawn if they haven’t been manned for 30 minutes.

Why do we have to do this? Each weapon takes up some small amount of resources on the server because we register a few pieces of data for each weapon in the field. One thing we absolutely cannot do is remove the timer entirely or else we have a situation where someone can put down a ton of weapons that could potentially be around forever (or until matches reset) and it would start to cause bad things to happen to the server. We also use some placement restrictions to help prevent there being too many siege weapons on the field, I’ll explain those more in the next question.

It’s admittedly not an ideal system but it is something we are required to do to keep the game running as smoothly as possible. We’d like to make it more obvious that the weapons have some sort of despawn timer since it is a completely hidden mechanic, but we don’t have a way to expose that timer to players yet.

Fergy answered.

If you played a bit of WvW you would know that it doesn’t work like that most of the time.

True that …

etrigan.4213:

Hey Mike/ArenaNet,

Can you go in to how Dolyak points work? It seems a random 1-4 points per Dolyak kill/delivery.

Is it truly random or is it decided by something we are not seeing on the backend?

I’m fairly sure that you gain more points the closer the Dolyak is to its destination when it’s killed. Let’s see what they say.

Dolyak give more point when they are far from they’re spawn camp.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Account bound blueprints

We tried changing blueprints to being account bound and it completely broke the pack up skill when holding the blueprint so we can’t do that either unfortunately.

I have a suggestion for a programming workaround. If the blueprint needs to be soulbound so that the skill can work properly you can obiously not touch the item itself.

But you could include an item which would work like a loot bag and would contain a soulbound blueprint, but itself would be an account bound item. Let’s call this item a “blueprint map-case”. You would hand out the blueprint in these map-cases and if you want to use a siege weapon you would first use the map case and than the blueprint.

For example I would want to build an arrow cart. So I would pick up the “Arrow cart blueprint map-case” stack from my bank, would open one of the cases and would recieve my soulbound blueprint and than use it to build the cart.

I know this is a bit convoluted but is more comfortable than having to remember which one of your character has a certain blueprint or not. And it should definitly work in your engine.

Another thing you could also add a mystic forge reciepe which would transform a “Catapult blueprint”, “Spool of Wool Thread”, “Bolt of Wool” and a “Cured Thin Leather Square” or something like this to a “Catapult blueprint map-case”. So we can transform these items back an forth between acount bound and soulbound.

Just my two cents on this topic.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Attic.1562:

Thanks for posting Mike. Would you mind answering another question while you’re at it?

-Is dropping siege blueprints for other characters to pick up an intended function? It seems very bizarre.

It is indeed intended (and bizarre). We would actually prefer to just make the blueprints tradeable, but there are a couple of funky code interactions that happen to make that impossible for us currently. It’s something we’d like to address at some point, but it’s not very high on the priority list currently.

Being a coder myself, I’d love to hear details about this one. At the moment I can’t imagine a single scenario where this would prove to take longer than a 1-minute fix.

Jomg.9061:

Tala.7638:

Jomg.9061:

It’s really boring to never see a true answers about siege weapon despawing, or do you guys at Anet dont even know how it works ?

MikeFerguson.8921:

Sure, I’ll spill dome details!

DonRobeez.3560:

- How does siege despawning work?

Unbuilt siege sites that are placed by players will go away if someone does not bring supply to them within 10 minutes. Anyone that adds supply to a site should reset that timer.

Completed siege weapons will despawn if they haven’t been manned for 30 minutes.

Why do we have to do this? Each weapon takes up some small amount of resources on the server because we register a few pieces of data for each weapon in the field. One thing we absolutely cannot do is remove the timer entirely or else we have a situation where someone can put down a ton of weapons that could potentially be around forever (or until matches reset) and it would start to cause bad things to happen to the server. We also use some placement restrictions to help prevent there being too many siege weapons on the field, I’ll explain those more in the next question.

It’s admittedly not an ideal system but it is something we are required to do to keep the game running as smoothly as possible. We’d like to make it more obvious that the weapons have some sort of despawn timer since it is a completely hidden mechanic, but we don’t have a way to expose that timer to players yet.

Fergy answered.

If you played a bit of WvW you would know that it doesn’t work like that most of the time.

You asked if Anet would give any direct answers. I posted they did. I misread your original post, TRUE, answers. I play a ton of WvW3 and have plenty of experience the awkwardness of seige despawn rates. That was the point of my post. That is the answer. I dnt think they will spend anymore time on it.

Kerithlan.1659:

etrigan.4213:

Hey Mike/ArenaNet,

Can you go in to how Dolyak points work? It seems a random 1-4 points per Dolyak kill/delivery.

Is it truly random or is it decided by something we are not seeing on the backend?

I’m fairly sure that you gain more points the closer the Dolyak is to its destination when it’s killed. Let’s see what they say.

This is most likely the case – I don’t think Dolyaks give any points if they haven’t even left the camp

Are projectile destroying skills actually intended to destroy siege projectiles? Or is this a case of creative use of game mechanics you guys didn’t quite expect.

Also what has been the most surprising placement you’ve seen for a treb that actually worked?

Crazy, this is the first time I’ve seen some legitimate answers given. Thank you Mike and Habib.

How does the quaggon nodes in Borderland maps affect the lightning strikes? I have noticed that lightning strikes hit things at the inner of East/West/Garrison with greater frequency than outer and it depends on the nodes in those directions. Also, how often do the strikes happen and how is the temple of storms involved in this?

Kudos for answering a lot of question/concerns people had. Really a nice move!

Now, if you only had the time to do the same for some of the profession questions in the respective subforums… *voice trails off
Nah, no complaining here.
As an engineer (nudge nudge), I’m used to answer my own questions, for example, “How to Recognise Different Types of Trees From Quite a Long Way Away”.

Any chance we might get a chance to the slightly awkward badges system we have right now? Moving the bags to the feet of the player is nice and all, but it doesn’t help much in a thick battle, and I’m sure most of the players actively engaged in wvw have had their share of lost bags. AFAIK, there once was an answer among the lines of “we don’t have the tech for that now”, but I can’t really see how this should prove to be unsolvable…

As a suggestion: Couldn’t we just get rewards based on a slightly modified monthly tracker? You know, the one that says “players killed in wvw” – just add an npc that hands out as many bags as the counter says and resets it back to zero.

Waypoints are currently the most powerful upgrade in the game but there are a few issues.

They are only inactive when the defense quest is active, are you guys planning on disabling them slightly longer than the defense quest to allow attackers to keep the defenders from spawning there just as the defense quest lapses?

For example under the current system I can count down on voip the defense quest and spawn in everyone right as it hits zero and before attackers can reflag the keep.

MikeFerguson.8921:

Kill/Deaths ratio is something we would like to avoid having. We don’t want people changing the way they play because they would rather protect their KDR instead of helping their allies in the game. We want people playing and fighting, not worrying about deaths impacting their stats.

THANK YOU!!!!!

People obsessively trying to maintain their K/D ratio was probably the most aggravating thing about PvP in Age of Conan. I played SOOOO many PvP matches where the other team would see our guild tag and immediately drop rather than fight us, and a few matches where some of my own team would drop when they saw the server’s top PvP guild’s tag on the other team. K/D is the worst.

etrigan.4213:

Hey Mike/ArenaNet,

Can you go in to how Dolyak points work? It scoring a random 1-4 points per Dolyak kill/delivery.

Is it truly random or is it decided by something we are not seeing on the backend?

Oh yeah I forgot about this. I’d love an explanation on what provides points outside of the scoring tick intervals and how much.

- How many players can one map contain?

As many as we can fit without causing too much stress on the servers. We can’t be more specific than that, but I can assure everyone that the cap is definitely split equally between all three worlds.

in regards to server limitations does this apply to ranger pets?
do they count as 1 towards the limit?

One question the burns me is off peak PvDoor in our hard fought WvW’s. Is there a possiblility that once “X” server reach a low percentage of players compared to their foes that guards could be made to spawn and use the seiges available in towers and keeps?

It is very disheartening when we put heart, soul, blood, and gold into the day only to go to bed and see that our enemy has killed our doors and eaten free points all night to work past us. I realize that every server has different “strong” times but when you have a well matched threesome that completely unbalances at night people don’t like to come back. If it were made even a little more challenging than killing doors then you might see the servers balance a little more.

Habib Loew.6239:

Tala.7638:

You asked if Anet would give any direct answers. I posted they did. I misread your original post, TRUE, answers. I play a ton of WvW3 and have plenty of experience the awkwardness of seige despawn rates. That was the point of my post. That is the answer. I dnt think they will spend anymore time on it.

As Mike said, we’re aware that there’s an issue and we’re looking into it but we don’t have a solid repro in our test/dev environment which makes it much more difficult to debug. That said, we do have some ideas about how we might proceed so we at least have some ideas to try out and test. One thing I’d like to see, for example, is a visible indicator of how much time is left before the siege despawns. That will make it easier for everyone to know the state of the siege and it should help us eliminate some false positives from the bug reports (siege got destroyed/used when the reporting playing wasn’t looking, etc.) which should, in turn, help us hone in on the specific bug that’s happening. And while we’re in there adding a timer we’ll also spend some time robustifying (it’s a word!) the system. There’s no timeline on these changes yet but we are working on it.

HOORAY!

Habib Loew.6239:

Stuff about loot.

Just a note: Why do Badges and “Loot” have to be done the same way? Rather than having a -chance- to get Badges from Drops/JPs, why not make it a certainty based on Kills and completed JPs? Keep “Loot” as it is, just separate Badges of Honor from the equation as THAT is more often what people are upset at missing.

probably same reason, because BoH is an item your creating issues if someones inventory is full when they attain a badge. Though I’m sure some of us wouldn’t mind the consequence.

Ideally BoH should be a currency like Karma, Coin, and Gems and not take up inventory space at all. And be account level like Gems. If it was like that then they could award the BoH on kill without worrying about edge cases, but it probably takes far more time to develop a system like that.

Habib Loew.6239:

wintermute.4096:

Any chance we might get a chance to the slightly awkward badges system we have right now? Moving the bags to the feet of the player is nice and all, but it doesn’t help much in a thick battle, and I’m sure most of the players actively engaged in wvw have had their share of lost bags. AFAIK, there once was an answer among the lines of “we don’t have the tech for that now”, but I can’t really see how this should prove to be unsolvable…

As a suggestion: Couldn’t we just get rewards based on a slightly modified monthly tracker? You know, the one that says “players killed in wvw” – just add an npc that hands out as many bags as the counter says and resets it back to zero.

In the beginning players killed NPCs and found loot on the NPC corpses. That setup is nice because it makes sense (gruesome sense, but still sense). If you kill a dude where is his stuff? In his pockets of course (see also: The Hobbit). If the corpse decayed then a bag was left behind so players would have one last chance to pick it up (it doesn’t hurt that rendering a bag is cheaper than rendering a high-poly character model.

Then WvW was born and players started killing players. At first we left the loot on the corpses as before but then a thousand player voices rang out and said “WTF man? I can’t jump down off this wall to get my loot because there’s like a hojillion enemy guys down there waiting to plant me like a tulip bulb!” or “WTF man? I can’t get up on top of that wall to get my loot because the whole point of a castle is that people can’t do that stuff!” We heard those pleas and, after some internal arguments (er, design discussions) we decided that realism could go suck it because getting loot is awesome.

So why did we put the bags at your feet rather than just dumping the items into your inventory? Part of the answer is that it was the smallest possible change that could work (programmers like stuff like that). We already had the bag spawning system so we could just reuse it. Another part of the answer is that picking up loot can be a bit like unwrapping a present and we didn’t want to ruin the unwrapping for everybody. Finally, if we just start putting loot into player inventory then we need to deal with a bunch of edge cases and at the time we had more pressing issues to work on. For example, when your inventory fills up items you receive go into inventory overflow and your character becomes encumbered. That makes you move really slowly and that didn’t seem like a nice thing to do to people in the middle of a fight. There were some others that I don’t recall off the top of my head, but suffice it to say there were some thorny design questions about the best way to handle it.

We have tossed around some ideas for ways to improve the system but it’s relatively low priority so nobody is actively working on it right now.

Can you at least make the bags stand out more? They can be pretty hard to see in the heat of battle. Can they be like glowing red or something instead of small tan bags? That should be SUPER easy to implement.

Draygo.9473:

probably same reason, because BoH is an item your creating issues if someones inventory is full when they attain a badge. Though I’m sure some of us wouldn’t mind the consequence.

Ideally BoH should be a currency like Karma, Coin, and Gems and not take up inventory space at all. And be account level like Gems. If it was like that then they could award the BoH on kill without worrying about edge cases, but it probably takes far more time to develop a system like that.

Apologies, my bad for not stating it very well…but that was kinda what I was meaning. They should be something that you never have to have “Stacks” of…it’s a currency, should be treated like one.

They stand out enough if you hold down ctrl (or is it alt) as it displays the nameplate of all visable interactive items in yellow txt.

Habib Loew.6239:

So why did we put the bags at your feet rather than just dumping the items into your inventory? Part of the answer is that it was the smallest possible change that could work (programmers like stuff like that). We already had the bag spawning system so we could just reuse it. Another part of the answer is that picking up loot can be a bit like unwrapping a present and we didn’t want to ruin the unwrapping for everybody. Finally, if we just start putting loot into player inventory then we need to deal with a bunch of edge cases and at the time we had more pressing issues to work on. For example, when your inventory fills up items you receive go into inventory overflow and your character becomes encumbered.

We have tossed around some ideas for ways to improve the system but it’s relatively low priority so nobody is actively working on it right now.

You could always auto put a WVW Bag (aka a modified Miner’s Bag or other such loot bag) into the players inventory. They could/should stack to 250 and can then be opened at leisure. Thus only needing lets say four slots of inv space for a 1000 loot bags to be stored for a long war session.

This provides auto-loot without losing the “like unwrapping a present” feeling.

For extreme cases keep the loot bag on the floor system you have at present as backup for a filled inventory.

If there is a problem of loot level for killing low level players in the wvw then have WVW8 Bag for 80’s, WVW7 Bag for 70-79 and so on. Thus requiring a few more open spots in inventory but at present you need a ton of space and a fast as lightning ‘F’ key anyway, so 7 or 8 slots open instead of 30+ to me seems like a good compromise.

I gots a question that i know is on ALOT of peoples mind.

Culling…when is it going to be fixed and can we PLEASE have the option to set culling distance/amount ourselves, we know what our own rigs can handle, let us decide on the amount of culling we need.

I know its also about server load but iirc in one of the more recent Anet posts, we were told that u were increasing ur server’s bandwidth…so..Culling option ..please ..please please pleasse

would be pretty cool to get rid of bodies by burning them. for forced respawn, if the enemy want it too and if no one noticed them their team can res them.

Draygo.9473:

They stand out enough if you hold down ctrl (or is it alt) as it displays the nameplate of all visable interactive items in yellow txt.

Some players, like myself, use a VOIP program while in WvW; my PTT button is usually Ctrl; so you could see my issue with holding down control in the middle of WvW.

I would rather have the ability to toggle the labels for interactive items off and on so that way I would see ‘Bag of Loot’ on the other side of the fight and work my way towards it rather than standing around looking for it.

Dynnen.6405:

I was going to wait to ask this until after the Feb update. However I was wondering if there will be any changes going into forced respawn after being stomped for…30 seconds (something like that)

Habib Loew.6239:

We haven’t settled all the details yet but we’re working on a forced respawn timer. It’s a good thing that your allies can revive you but I think the game will be better off without corpse scouts, etc.

Might I suggest that dead players in WvW be forced to view the World Map? That way, they could see ally dots to know if they have a chance of being revived (and watch those dots turn to other skulls if the situation was dire), but would be unable to survey the surrounding area and give enemy troop numbers, etc.

MikeFerguson.8921:

DonRobeez.3560:

- How many players can one map contain?

As many as we can fit without causing too much stress on the servers. We can’t be more specific than that, but I can assure everyone that the cap is definitely split equally between all three worlds.

I understand and respect all the reasons you cannot share the exact numbers but I am very curious if those caps are as dynamic (and changeable on the fly) as the world population limits? Or are the WvW map population numbers only changed by hard patches? Have you been tweaking the WvW caps based on performance since launch and are they currently set lower or higher now than when the game began and lower or higher than your original target? I believe with the current culling issues and less intense interest in WvW the map population caps should be kept low but I am wondering how things will be on full servers come February when everyone and their uncle comes bouncing back to check out the changes. Maybe being in Hawaii for 2 weeks in Feb means I wont be missing much after all if we are headed back into queue city.

And speaking of world population caps, as a numbers junkie, I would love to know anything about where those caps are currently sitting and have been that you are allowed to share. Again, thinking ahead to the coming patches and distant future when transfers are closed down, I am very interested in seeing more of those types of graphs showing server population dynamics over time. The shifts in world dominance on the WvW ladder has been very fascinating to watch and I am quite envious of you guys and your real time glob tracking abilities. You must learn some incredible details that way which I am sure is keeping some joyous interns very busy trying to make sense out of.

Thank you both Mike and Habib for taking the extra time to provide a lot of interesting details. I know a lot of questions are ones you’ve seen over and over again and may have thought have been clearly answered before but it rarely hurts to repeat yourself and your fans love hearing from you. Very excited to see what you guys have in store of us next!

I wonder why not make the badges something like a currency, so at least players wouldn’t miss badges if they forget/aren’t able to find their loot.

So the moment you kill an enemy you get +1 or +2 to your PvP-badge-currency. You still find a bag of loot at your feet of course

Habib Loew.6239:

Zepher.7803:

- How many players can one map contain?

As many as we can fit without causing too much stress on the servers. We can’t be more specific than that, but I can assure everyone that the cap is definitely split equally between all three worlds.

in regards to server limitations does this apply to ranger pets?
do they count as 1 towards the limit?

Nope our map limits only take into account actual players. That said, when we were picking population limits we took into account the fact that some players would have pets/minions/etc.

Only quoting since its in reference of player limit, but I was wondering is there a plan to possibly move the jumping maps to their own separate zone? I understand the point of them, and respect the rewards you can get from doing them as well. But you see when theres 15-25 people from your server that simply do nothing but camp it, and refuse to actually help your server while theres people waiting in a queue that will it has a negative impact on us. I also understand they’re allowed to play how they want, I didnt pay for their game so i’m not going to say “Get out of the JP and help us” like others do. But when it comes down to defending towers against a 40 man zerg while 25 people are in the JP it leaves some people with a salty attitude. I thought WvW was there for the pvp and overall chess game, not filling our map with people camping a chest that only rewards x amount of badges/siege in a 24 hour period.

Maybe a dev could answer this… I always wondered if there are plans for WvW ever getting some big events like in PVE. Dragon-sized stuff like one taking over Stonemist… could that ever happen?

To my understanding, there are world boss events that spawn in the borderlands, but I’m not sure when they happen, how often, or what triggers them.

This is so valuable to the community, thank you.

TurtleofPower.5641:

Maybe a dev could answer this… I always wondered if there are plans for WvW ever getting some big events like in PVE. Dragon-sized stuff like one taking over Stonemist… could that ever happen?

I would prefer keeping PVE off of major points in wvw.
quaggans and such is fine, but the last thing my guild and I want is to be defending stonemist from 2 servers, just to have some dragon break the walls and then have to fight that off while fighting 2 servers. As epic as it sounds, its not where it belongs. Not to mention the rendering and super lag issues, you wont be able to use any skills, because other servers will go to kill it as well.

I think a dragon event would draw PvE players in AND be interesting for WvW players. Say for instance, if the dragon belonged to whoever kept SMC for x number of hours, and it dropped rares or exotics…

Hmmm? A contested factioned creature that promotes WvW

Habib, I appreciate your time to answer so many questions.

The one I’m most concerned with is the loot bag in WvW since I have lost so many bags because of it.

The present thing, while it makes sense, it doesn’t translate well to WvW in the majority of cases with it’s current implementation. When you are fighting multiple enemies (so like, 95% of the time) you are just spamming F to get bags before you die/they despawn/you move on/you just don’t see them. That feels nothing like opening a present because you don’t even have time to see what you got most of the time. Having the bags stack in your inventory (by 250) like others have mentioned gives WAY more of the ‘opening a present’ feeling.

Not only the present thing, but it also addresses the concern about space better. Up to 250 bags would only take up 1 space instead of 250+ spaces according to what rewards you get. [Well actually, now that I write that down I think I come to realize something: What if you guys WANT us have all of our bags taken up instead of having a bunch of empty space…. Hmmm.]

The only issue having the bags stack in your inventory doesn’t solve is the already written code for bags to fall at your feet. What I’m curious about is, wouldn’t having something just pop into your inventory be much LESS server demanding? The game would have no additional images to render and wouldn’t have to keep track of where the bag is laying or where you were when the other player died.

It seems like a better solution is every single aspect except the one that involves cramped bag space (and according to what the end goal is with that, it’s much better in that regard too).

…Why not have the Dragon Event be at Reset?…Have the Dragon “Control” Stonemist with NPC “Dragon” defenders. Free for all to wrest control from the Dragons.(The “how” to take control away could be awesome on it’s own.)

On the topic of loot bags, have you considered making them spawn directly underneath the player, and coding it so that running over the loot bag runs the function of looting the bag? Essentially creating the illusion of everything autolooting directly into your inventory.

It may not work 100% if you have a high MS, but the concept should work fine for most players.

since its not a “fixed/static/constant” map player limit possible imbalance:
wvw server map performence very good(20vs20vs20) caps @ 120vs120vs120
→ 100 from world1 join,40 from world2,30 from world3(120vs60vs50)
→ but now the performance drops(sm fight etc) and the map player limit is lowered to 80
→so world1 has 40 “bonus” players over the map cap(80vs80vs80cap but 120vs60vs50 on the map)

Second possible map player limit imbalance:
if a player logs off/disco/ports of the map in some cases he is not removed from the player count for the limit(player count leak).

Habib, you have to admit that the situation in the picture below is pretty annoying. As such I really hope you guys can implement something better.

Please sir can I has more gold?

Currently it seems like things cost a ridiculous amount of money compared to what you get for playing in wvw. Sure if you do a crazy karma train and do supply camps and kill npc events you can make good gold/hour but I don’t play wvw for farming I play it for playing the game. I’d like to see an increase in drops from events to compensate for the fact that in wvw, unlike pve, we can spend an hour+ trying to take something with no compensation for even failing and in the end you’ve spent a gold in siege and earned nothing.

Dearest Anet gameplay programmer; would you consider buffing thieves a good way to balance out wvw? And would you in any way consider engineers so op. they deserve a nerf? Thank you so much for the time spent answering :-D

Has there ever been an official reason given for why enemies appear as ‘Server-name Invader’? Does this reflect a deliberate gameplay design decision, or a technical constraint?