Guild Wars 2

Your constructive feedback has been really awesome so far and I trust will continue to be. I understand your concerns with not enough being communicated and I’m looking into getting more information out on some of the more solid changes we have.

Your constructive feedback has been really awesome so far and I trust will continue to be. I understand your concerns with not enough being communicated and I’m looking into getting more information out on some of the more solid changes we have.

Really amazing. I had to do a double take it’s so realistic!

That is really fantastic! Love it!

That’s great, correllis! Thanks for posting it here!

Hi all,
We appreciate the reports, and apologize for the inconvenience caused by this issue. We’re working on getting a fix out as soon as possible.

Azurem.9468:

But in the screenshot he posted, it’s LOWER. His account time is 32 hours and he’s played that one character for 33 hours. That doesn’t make any sense.

Ah, lol, I can’t read. That’s super weird; I’ll try asking around.

Tanis.5134:

A) Confirmation that the tile service will support the desert borderlands. This means that I can rely on the coordinates in the objectives endpoint to place the markers on the maps from the tile service. Yay for not hardcoding and manually finding coordinates!

The tile service will be updated to have the desert borderlands. We’re going to regenerate all the map tiles (finally) once HoT ships. The desert borderlands currently replaces the classic borderlands so it’ll be a bit wonky.

Tanis.5134:

B) The objectives endpoint to start showing desert borderlands information prior to 10/23, a map of the desert borderlands, and some way of seeing where each marker is supposed to go on the map. All three components are critical because we don’t know the IDs of any of the desert objectives, so thus even if we had a map we would have no idea which objectives on the map line up with which objectives from the API.

The new objectives might start showing up the day before, but since the data for them is read from the .dat file (and it isn’t currently in the .dat file) we have to wait until that data gets pushed out to the live environment. I wrote a quick thing with leaflet that grabs all the objectives and plops ’em on the map to verify that the coordinate location fix going out with HoT works, so everything should be fine once we release (famous last words, I know).

I wish the timeline was less all-at-once but that’s just the way of it.

UnknownFreak.2805:

Seems server deaths and kills not working propertly on EU matchups (2-x)
says 0 for all servers on both kills and deaths
bug or will it be enabled on next reset for EU?

Can’t really fix it before HoT unfortunately. Definitely aware of it though.

There are two components I can mention right now, the rest you’ll have to wait until the 23rd to see:

Gyros should be a good bit more snappy when it comes to staying near you and are also going to experience some additional survivability.

Rocket Charge will have the leap play at start rather than finish (like other leaps) and isn’t going to be so erratic once you’ve closed to your target.

There’ve been some changes to Druid staff, glyphs, traits and Celestial avatar skills.

One change I can mention is that Ancestral Grace will now end as soon as you reach your destination rather than having to wait out the animation. We weren’t able to do this before with point-based movement, but an awesome programmer threw together a way for us to script it in.

As Belzebu calls out: You’ll have to check out the rest of the changes on the 23rd!

We’ve got a fix coming for this with the 23rd.

We’ve isolated the issue and it’ll be fixed with the release on the 23rd.

We have flushed potentially corrupt assets. Please try again.

I apologize for the inconvenience this undoubtedly caused.

One other thing: the Story Journal display bug should be fixed with the release of Heart of Thorns. It wasn’t caused by (or directly related to) the Personal Story restoration effort, but was impacting some players who were actively doing the content. Thanks for your patience, and for bringing it to our attention.

Kirkkis.8270:

I know this is really late but I just want to say thank you for listening to players in this particular matter. … Thank you Arena, for listening to players that appreciate and value this immersive solo experience.

Thanks for the kind words. It means a lot to us.

I just want to express my gratitude to everyone who contributed their thoughts, opinions, and ideas regarding the Personal Story changes. The response was overwhelming, and it was one of the reasons why we focused not on simply putting things backs the way they were, but on improving the overall experience where possible. It showed us that there are lots of people playing our game who care about the story. Thanks for speaking up.

The next patch will contain adjustments to arrow cart line of sight calculations to address this problem. Due to feedback the new calculation will give advantage to defenders by being forgiving when the arrow cart is being fired from higher ground to lower ground.

Shevek.2691:

Renarde.3251:

John Smith.4610:

Dungeons will stop drop things as well as they will still have some gold, they will just have much less gold.

Dungeons will stop dropping things as well as having a reduced gold output? Is that a typo or are they really being nerfed that hard?

Going by the rest of that statement and the following add-on, I’d say that it’s just a typo.

Yes typo, sorry.

Renarde.3251:

John Smith.4610:

Dungeons will stop drop things as well as they will still have some gold, they will just have much less gold.

Dungeons will stop dropping things as well as having a reduced gold output? Is that a typo or are they really being nerfed that hard?

Sorry typo, I’ve edited.

Donari.5237:

Averath.6283:

What incentives will players have to run dungeons after these changes go live? The entire game is based around doing what gets you to your goal fastest, and as of right now gold is the end-all-beat-all. If dungeons do not bring players to this goal, what incentive is there to play them??

Hmm … for fun? That’s why I and my friends run them. We pull everything, kill it, banter on Mumble, do as many paths of whatever we feel like and then we stop when we’re tired. It’s certainly not a huge gold source for me and I still have fun doing it.

Question to John Smith, though: Other than tokens, will anything drop in dungeons at all? Tonight’s casual fun run in CoE got my bags choked with things (usually I never see the Inventory is Full message on my dungeon/fractal alt), and I salvaged them for a lot of mats and sold off a few copper of minor runes and the like. Will we now be ending dungeon runs with bags as clear as when we entered?

Dungeons will still drop things as well as they will still have some gold, they will just have much less gold.

Edit meant to say still and said stop, sorry.

Renarde.3251:

John, would you be able to answer if the dungeon rewards are just being brought in line with other content (namely future content), or if it’s going further than that? Also, was there any discussion about the rate of dungeon token earnings with this change?

Edit for clarity: You’ve said the dungeon token rate is staying the same, was there any discussion about increasing the amount of tokens you get per run to go along with the gold reduction?

I’m not prepared to answer the first one. I don’t believe we ever discussed changing the tokens from dungeons.

Swagger.1459:

Howdy John! Any plans to reduce the amount of bolts of silk required for crafting spools of silk weaving thread?

Nope

phys.7689:

John Smith.4610:

Ashen.2907:

John Smith.4610:

Q.
why are you nerfing the income of players who prefer your old content over your new content? I for one don’t care much for raids but really enjoy dungeons..

A.
We don’t intend to nerf income, just shift where most players derive their income. You won’t be forced into raids in order to earn value though.

Players who enjoy playing dungeons will have either lower income or will have to play content they do not enjoy as much in order to maintain their existing level of income.

The only way you can accurately claim that you did not intend to nerf their income is to state that you intended to reduce their enjoyment of the game instead.

Edit for clarification: I did not mean you personally, but rather the collective of those who made the decision.

This is called false dilemma. I think you should probably restate this.

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?

do you see players seeking to earn main methods being through open world and tp trading

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?
The intention is not entirely to reduce liquid gold earning, we’ll be using up the slack we generate in other locations

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

do you see players seeking to earn main methods being through open world and tp trading
I don’t understand this one

Ashen.2907:

John Smith.4610:

Q.
why are you nerfing the income of players who prefer your old content over your new content? I for one don’t care much for raids but really enjoy dungeons..

A.
We don’t intend to nerf income, just shift where most players derive their income. You won’t be forced into raids in order to earn value though.

Players who enjoy playing dungeons will have either lower income or will have to play content they do not enjoy as much in order to maintain their existing level of income.

The only way you can accurately claim that you did not intend to nerf their income is to state that you intended to reduce their enjoyment of the game instead.

Edit for clarification: I did not mean you personally, but rather the collective of those who made the decision.

This is called false dilemma. I think you should probably restate this.

Q.
So John,
As someone with 1250 material banking that has been sitting on materials both rare and selling off overflows of common should I be worried that my savings over years are going to decrease in value?

A.
The idea is for that not to happen, that’s why we’ve had to make a lot of these less popular changes. Because some of our changes drastically changed how much was input vs output, we had to compensate in order to keep materials valuable.

Q.
So It seemed like in the blog post that you are trying to put more power in the hand of the buyers. Can you elaborate on that?
Would it be unreasonable to take this as this is a move against market manipulation by giving players more means to directly obtain materials that otherwise relied on RNG? Making things like the supply of lodestones and fine materials harder to control.

A.
The decision is higher level than that. We aren’t attacking anyone, we’re just adding the option to put some certainty in your rewards. This also adds resistance to items becoming too scarce and too valuable. If item X were to become super popular because of a LW release or something similar, players have the option to farm more item X rather than the option to attempt to compete with prices that have risen too far.

Q.
The way to prevent speculation is to remove all mystery from it, not to add more mystery. If you say “this item will be X% more rare,” or “this item will be needed in these recipes” then everyone is on the same page about what they will need.
Speculation thrives on vague “some items will be more needed, some items less” type responses.

A.
That’s a fair point, but remember this is “American Time” in English only with no warning. Releases are well known when they will happen and people have time to prepare and figure things out, if I were to release that information here it would seriously give an advantage to Americans.

Q.
How do you feel about the state of gem exchange? Are you involved in monitoring the exchange, and considering the long term effect of things like sales?

A.
I was part of the original team that created the exchange, I helped write the algorithms it runs on. I think it’s a really cool system and functions nicely. We do spend time looking for the long-run and deciding where we want it to be and how our actions are going to impact that in the future.

Q.
Do you foresee something similar to guild wars 1, where materials like ectos become part of the traded economy with less gold being generated? How would you react if that trend started to develop?

A.
If gold was supplanted by some other trading item it would mean I seriously messed up somewhere. I hope to never see that happen, I plan for gold to always be valuable.

Q.
Do you feel that WvW needs a boost to its gold gain to match the other gamemodes?

A.
I don’t currently feel that way, but it’s another one of the things we’ll be watching after launch to see how everything settles.

Q.
How about mats? If you plan to correct salvage outputs and at the same time introduce mats map rewards in PvE to compensate/balance it further, will WvW have similar mechanism to help out players that play only that mode?
Thank you for your response and please, forgive me any language mistakes.

A.
WvW is getting new drops to help facilitate their income, they’re part of the new legendary journeys.

Q.
why are you nerfing the income of players who prefer your old content over your new content? I for one don’t care much for raids but really enjoy dungeons..

A.
We don’t intend to nerf income, just shift where most players derive their income. You won’t be forced into raids in order to earn value though.

Q.
What about dungeon tokens? As it stands, you need ~170 dungeon runs to get the complete armor/weapon skin set. Will they be nerfed as well?

A.
No, they’ll be the same as before.

Q.
Do you feel charge lodestones are overly in demand/undersupplied compared to other lodestones? Or is it a goal that charged lodestones be the most expensive ones?

A.
It was originally the goal that charged be more valuable, but that is one of the markets we’re watching because we aren’t sure we want that to always be true.

(follow-up to previous question and answer)
Q.
Design talking, does that even makes sense? Makes a specific item, that is part of a larger same-tier item be more valuable than another?
The t6 Blood is acceptable, because it is a player-driven economy because of meta stats, but charged lodestones is not a player-driven economy problem, it seens to be a design issue, since charged lodestones are far more recquired for prestige itens than the other itens on its tier.
Mind explain why it was a design choice first of all? I don’t understand where is the consistency in there.

A.
There are two schools of thought, many designers agree with you that items within a tier should be similarly priced. For me, I don’t agree with that, I believe that items within a tier should have representative functionality of that tier, but their prices can vary to make the variation inside the tier more interesting. I could easily see an argument for the other way being valid though.

Q.
Greetings, John! In the blog you mentioned there are a couple broken markets. Can you shed some light on which markets you consider broken and why?

A.
I can’t until after release for fear of making those markets go insane with speculation (moreso than they probably already are).

Q.
While I understand shifting the gold income from dungeons more towards fractals, I wonder, what will happen to stuff like Aetherpath. This is (in my eyes at least) a beautiful designed dungeon. The rewards already felt…. well… unrewarding, but with the upcoming changes, i fear noone is going to do that specivic path.
Also, were there plans about splitting the lost income of a party when they are doing them solo or duo (at some point, being discussed, on the table… you get me )
Also, congratulations on the legendaries, they have style!

A. To be honest, the details of content like that are more of a Colin question. Splitting rewards for missing members is tricky business, you definitely don’t want to rewards to become competitive between players, that’s why we don’t share gathering nodes or don’t have mob claiming, it’s not the spirit of what we do.

Q.
Are your efforts more aimed toward bringing down the value of over inflated items such as certain cloths or things like charged lodestones or is the goal to bring up under-utilized and over supplied materials like thick leather sections? or both?
I guess in short. Which one would you be manipulating more? supply or demand?

A.
there is a mix of both, but we swing more towards the latter than the former.

I recently answered some questions on the new blog post and new economy changes. I’m reposting some of the questions and answers here as well.

Aro.8275:

Are there any tags one should add to youtube vids to show something can be used as well? Anything I make regarding GW2 can be used by you guys ‘cus well you’re the source anyway ^.^

Soooo… if art also encompasses videos I just made a little something that pertains to Halloween: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPsvMqECLUM
Also in the third link of my sig with most of my other random stuff.

Aro — here’s what I’m told. You can post it on YouTube and then post on our Tumblr page and simply embed the YouTube link, being sure to use the “GW2 Fan Submission” tag.

Thanks for asking a question that I’m sure others have wondered about, as well. Looking forward to your submission(s)!

Bugabuga.9721:

Does api endpoint always go to the same datacenter? Eu/na type of thing? Also was the character moved from one server to another recently?

Depends on the endpoint. For the account/character stuff, it sends a request to whichever datacenter your account is currently in. For the items and stuff it just uses the local datacenter (the API uses geoDNS).

Maja.6372:

I think there is something wrong ingame not api related
on my f2p account I get this odd /age output
I have only one char on that accout

That’s different though; the account time accrues when you’re on the character select screen, so that should be higher than the sum of all characters. My understanding was that the character created date shouldn’t change — the server transfer makes the most sense to me as a likely culprit (since one of our time formats stores the time as an integer minutes value).

6. What about the higher tier upgrades (Treasure Trove, Deep Cave) that were unlocked before HoT? & But if you currently own the maximum sized guild bank, you would be able to keep all that space, right?

If your guild had Guild Stash, Treasure Trove and/or Deep Cave before HoT, your guild will still have access to them after HoT. They will still be accessible from the Guild Bankers.

7. Would the members that didn’t purchase HoT lose the access to those?

If a member of the guild does not have HoT, they can still access the guild bank.

Your guild bank access and contents are secure. You can bank on it. =p

Freyah.8912:

Do we have to submit them on the Tumbler page or is posting creations on the forums enough?

Posting on the forums is great! If you could flag it in the subject line with something about Halloween, I’ll be able to see it a little better. Thanks!

As I posted in the GW2 Discussion forum, we’re having an in-game event on October 30th, and we’re offering the chance to win prizes through a giveaway hosted here on the forums. We’re promoting on Twitter, as we are collecting the here on the forums.

Please feel free to post your shots in this thread. We’ll select random winners from all who submit (one shot per forum member, please!) and announce the winners here and through Twitter by November 10th.

I think we could do a thread in the Community Creations Sub-Forums — not a bad idea at all! I’ll speak with the team about whether we can extend the contest to the forums, as well as Twitter. There are always legal things to consider, so I need to be sure that we’re all in the proper place, but I think that could be fun.

I’ll so make that thread now.

Thanks for the idea!

On October 30, various ArenaNet team members will be stopping by Lion’s Arch to visit with players. The majority of these planned dev visits will take place between 3:00 and 5:00 PM Pacific time, but don’t be surprised if you see ArenaNet reps popping into LA throughout the day.

If you catch a member of the Anet Team in the game on October 30, snap a screenshot and share it in the thread in our Community Creation Sub-Forum. If you also post on Twitter, use the #GW2Halloween hashtag and include @GuildWars2 in your tweet. We may retweet your Halloween screenshots! And… you may win a prize!

We will doing a Miniature Egg giveaway through a random selection of shots on the forums. One entry per person. Winners will be contacted by November 10th.

MithranArkanere.8957:

The only thing I wonder is if it’ll be like a chat log, allowing access to previous lines for a period of time (e.g.: previous lines up to an hour, a certain amount of lines or a certain amount of bytes), or it’s just listen to lines as they come.

You’d hypothetically be able to set up your own chat logger; we probably won’t provide it since our chat backend does not keep that data internally (it shunts all that to the logs for archival/analytics).

vana.5467:

the new kill/death counter is an awesome functionality,but the data stream seems to be inconsistent. While some of the data is added to the API value continuously, a big part of it seems to be gathered only every 4 hours. Is this the intended behavior or a bug?

That feature works by listing to the event log of the WvW coordination server — there’s a lot of places where there could be a bug. It should be noted that the event log system is best-effort: during periods of high load messages might be dropped. It’s entirely possible that we’re just losing a lot of messages.

vana.5467:

Edit: After looking more carefully at the map-wise breakdown of the kill counter, I’m fairly certain the calculation of the total kill/death count is bugged. For some of the values, the sum of the values for each map does not match the total.

At present, the total tier 1 blue deaths listed are 50% higher than the combined deaths from all the maps.

The sums probably won’t match up — you’ll have more deaths than kills due to NPCs killing players. 50% seems a bit high though, something’s probably wrong somewhere.

Sorry for the issues with this, won’t be able to fix them until some time after launch.

That’s super weird; I can’t think of any reason why it would have changed.

Your issue may be related to a Story Journal bug.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Personal-Story-Skipped-every-mission-in-Orr/first

This particular fix should go live on 10/23 with the launch of Heart of Thorns.

4. Is the extra, temporary guild bank space created after the diff chapters(servers) of your guild were merged still there?

If a guild still has their additional slots from when the Guild mergers occurred, those slots will continue to exist until the item in the slot is moved/removed. Once the item is removed, the slot will no longer be accessible.

5. How big is this new “Guild Stash” for players without a guild hall

The guild stash will continue to provide 50 slots to the guild that purchases it.

The commendation currency will still be a reward for missions. =D

Link’s blog post talks about the consumables we are pulling, which can be found here: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/rethinking-guilds/

A commendation vendor will be present in the Guild Initiative Office that offers many of the goods it offers currently. And there will be upgrades that bring in new vendors that offer goods in exchange for commendations that you can obtain once your guild claims a guild hall and starts to restore buildings.

Edit: It is Influence that will no longer be obtainable but can be held until it is all spent, and Merits which are going away entirely.

Hail! Are you all Faren well today? =D To answer the guild bank questions:

1. Is there any risk of losing what is in the Guild Bank on release day?

There is no risk to the contents of guild banks. And Guild Bankers will continue to be out in the world for your banking needs.

2. If I create a new guild after HoT, will I be able to build a guild bank or will that system be abandoned?

Any guild that does not have a guild bank before HoT will have the ability to get the “Guild Stash” without the need for a guild hall. The npc proprietor: Grimur Oddursson within the Guild Initiative Office in Lion’s Arch will enable a guild to obtain the upgrade in exchange for gold and favor (obtained from Missions).

3. What if you don’t buy HoT? Will your ability to get a guild bank be gone?

Players without HoT will still have access to the Guild Initiative Office where they can purchase the Guild Stash.

Have a great weekend, friends. And thank you for the questions!

Just a couple of points: This thread was localized in all four languages, as the blog post and the event page will be. So you can rest assured our community is being kept aware every step of the way on this information.

The linked event page is not this year’s event page, and the schedules cited are not necessary accurate for this year. So please wait for the new page so you can see how we’re doing things — and what we’re doing.

Also, team members will be hopping around both the NA and EU servers, so we’ll do our best to engage on a global basis.

I’m really looking forward to this and hope to see you there!

Here’s a couple other updates that had been in the works and are now in testing.

• Vault: Reduced aftercast by 80ms. Added a 500ms evade at the start of the ability.
• Distracting Daggers: Projectiles from this ability are now counted as 100% projectile finishers.
• Impairing Daggers: Projectiles from this ability are now counted as 100% projectile finishers.
• Weakening Strikes: This trait now grants 10% damage reduction when being struck by a weakened foe, in addition to weakening foes on critical hit.

Hi all,
Here’s a list of new stuff we’ve got going as we draw closer to launch. Traps are gaining a functionality and are branching out just a tad bit, granting boons to the guardian when the trap is triggered.
We’ve also been evaluating a secondary ability for Spear of Justice, which will pull all tethered enemies toward you, should you desire. In testing with the interaction of Radiance’s Justice refresh mechanic, we felt like this would blow out in quite a few scenarios. Thus, the cooldown of this secondary is separate from Justice itself, allowing for adjustments more freely. Renewed Focus does recharge this ability.

• New skill: Hunter’s Verdict
• Hunter’s Verdict: Pull all tethered enemies to you, breaking the tether. This ability’s cooldown (40s) is separate to that of Justice.
• Procession of Blades: Increased damage per attack by roughly 20%. This trap now grants Fury for 8 seconds when triggered.
• Fragments of Faith: Fixed this trap striking multiple times. Base damage has been reduced by 40% and is no longer unblockable. This ability is now instant and breaks stuns, as well as granting 3 stacks of stability for 5 seconds when triggered. note: The design of this trap is moving back toward its defensive nature and has much more functionality than before, thus the reduction in overall damage.
• Test of Faith: This ability is now instant and grants protection for 6 seconds when triggered. Additionally, it now strikes enemies for 66% of its full damage when it triggers.
• Light’s Judgment: This trap now grants Swiftness for 10 seconds when triggered. Reduced cooldown from 45 seconds to 30.
• Purification: This trap now grants regeneration for 10 seconds when triggered.
• Dragon’s Maw: This trap now grants 10 stacks of might for 8 seconds when triggered.
• Pure of Sight: This trait now grants bonus damage of 7% from 0-600 range, 13% beyond 600 range.

Once again, thanks for the constructive feedback through the beta weekends.

Cheers,
-Karl

We have an update today on the Enhanced UI that you might find of interest. While it pertains to both Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns, we placed the original thread in the Heart of Thorns Sub-Forum. Find it here.

Thanks for all your feedback and help testing the work-in-progress Enhanced Squad UI during Beta Weekend 3! While we encountered some issues during the beta test, it was great to see it up and running by the end of the weekend so we could get your input. And there was a lot of great feedback! As a result, we’ve decided to hold off on releasing the first version of the new UI until a few weeks after the launch of Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns™. This will give us a little more time to properly address the issues that were encountered as well as add some needed polish.

We expect this first version to be a great enhancement to squads, including introducing the “commanderless squad” that provides basic squad functionality for a group of 10 players that doesn’t have a member who purchased a Commander Compendium. And for those who are already commanders, you’ll get additional functionality. But this first release won’t include everything we’d like to provide. For example, we’re going to follow up in a later release by adding markers for marking locations in the world and creatures/characters. We’re also looking into adding additional features like displaying boon and condition information in the UI.

As we get closer to future releases, we’ll be sure to provide information on the new functionality we’re adding. We think the Enhanced Squad UI is going to be a great addition to the Guild Wars 2 experience.

Thanks again for your help in making it the best it can be!

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Tanis.5134:

Has anyone had any luck using the coordinates in /v2/wvw/objectives? I can’t quite get markers to line up on a map created with the tile service.

I’m actually not sure how the game client places markers — my impression is that the sector centroid is used for the label placement, not marker placement. I need to dig up how the markers are placed; I’m not certain that they’re data-driven.

Found and fixed the issue. Github PR. It should go out with HoT release.