Guild Wars 2

I so so SO love this. I’m having a fan girl…er… fan woman moment here. Maclaine Diemer is awesome

Kirschsahne.2081:

Awweeeeeeeesome………………. i want new pets…..

A-Net i love you and i am one of the bitter Vets left behind a long time.

You guys made the absolutely right decisions….. kudos

We love you, too. Never leave again.

Praise Melandru!

Zargoon.9835:

So I usually attribute complaints about match making to just general whining about team mates, but it looks like there were some legitimate problems here.

My question is, how do we know when we are getting unlucky with match making versus when there is a real problem? I guess what I’m asking is…. how do we give realistic feedback that’s meaningful on this issue, as opposed to complaining about the MMR system each time we get a bad team? Seems tricky.

I think what has been happening is the only effective way. We have a lot of data we can look at, but without players having gut feelings and ideas of things that could be wrong, we have no idea where to focus our efforts.

BooHud.2681:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Irenio and Rubi are talking about the Druid on Twitch NOW!!!

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And it sounds Sweet! I can’t WAIT to try this!

/Happy Dance

I know. As a lifelong Ranger, I’m stoked!

So fun to win one of our ticket winners already. Hope y’all have a chance to stop by!

Irenio and Rubi are talking about the Druid on Twitch NOW!!!

So excited to be debuting our Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns trailer at TwitchCon. It’s coming up in about 13 minutes. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts?

~happy dance~

Soft-launched this yesterday and nothing blew up. Basically /v2/wvw/objectives is an actually working replacement for /v1/wvw/objective_names.json — it provides a bulk-expandable endpoint for WvW objective data. It also provides some additional fields that the v1 endpoint doesn’t, notably the label coordinates, sector_id and such.

• /v2/wvw/objectives
• Github PR

It’s really important to note that due to backend changes objectives ids will going forward no longer be integers — they’ll be strings. This will be reflected in /v2/wvw/matches (and likely /v1/wvw/match_details.json) which I’m trying to get out before HoT ships. Check (and comment on!) the /v2/wvw/matches Github PR if you’ve got some time before we ship it!

Hopefully coming next week are /v2/achievements and /v2/achievements/daily (the bits for account achievements aren’t on live yet so it’ll just be dailies for a while).

Lemmie know if you’ve got feedback/questions about /v2/wvw/objectives

Hvaran.6327:

this changes coming pre hot or with hot?

As soon as we can

Achievements should start coming out next week-ish. Only have support for daily achievements until some more backend support lands, but we’ll probably have per-achievement account progress of some form around next month.

Guilds aren’t coming out until post-HoT. I don’t have enough test cases for the code and I suspect it’s bitrotted a bit.

Leaderboards... I’m not sure why we haven’t exposed this data programmatically. It should be fairly straightforward to do.

Minis and WvW Rank are pretty straightforward; I just need to find the time to implement the backend support for ’em. Probably post-HoT as well.

Mewling Kittens.7965:

Noob question… what’s MMR?

It stands for Match Making Rating. We use the Glicko 2 algorithm to assign a number to each player that represents skill level in order to match similarly-skilled players together.

Details here:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/PvP_Matchmaking_Algorithm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glicko_rating_system

Nike.2631:

Which gives you closer challenges and best player suffers only a tiny handicap. Whereas the current array give you~

10 vs 9 (favors A)
4 vs 8 (hugely favors
3 vs 7 (hugely favors
2 vs 6 (hugely favors
1 vs 5 (hugely favors

I don’t see how you can expect anything but a blowout in that environment.

This was caused by a bug, not intentionally; we didn’t want it to happen this way :P

Amante.8109:

Is the fix to this bug going to be immediate or will we have to wait a while?

Next release will have the updates.

SkiTz.4590:

How on earth does an obvious bug like that go unfixed for such a LONG PERIOD OF TIME…..

It’s not an obvious bug at all. It changes entirely depending on what roster sizes and player MMRs are in the match. The 10 players are already very similar in MMR before splitting them onto teams, and the ‘best’ player is different every match so its not like one particular set of players was always being affected by this bug. Players still have ~50% win rates. It’s very hard to track down ‘gut feelings’ about matchmaking :P

Luckily we have some powerful tools now to get better global data about how matchmaking is performing that helped lead to the discovery.

The way it is intended to work is the next biggest roster gets put onto the smallest team so far, or the next highest MMR roster gets put onto the team with the lowest total MMR.

I’ve just posted something relating to this original post. The bugged behavior worked as such (assuming solo queue only):

Players ranked by MMR: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
Team1: 10, 4, 3, 2, 1
Team2: 9, 8, 7, 6, 5

I want to thank everyone who has given us great feedback on our matchmaking. We’ve been crunching the numbers, deep diving on the data, and running simulations to help identity the root cause of the reported issues. This has led to some discoveries, and I’m happy to say we’re making two changes to matchmaking that should help improve match quality.

First, we’re disabling some code that was attempting to account for outliers on teams when updating MMR. The goal was to prevent adjusting a player’s MMR too much if they were much more or much less skilled than the rest of their team. Unfortunately this was causing players with low, inaccurate MMR to never properly rise back to their true position. It was effectively creating ‘Glicko-Hell’. After the fix, players in this situation should return to their correct MMR range.

Second, we’ve found a very sneaky bug in the way we distribute players across the two teams. The goal of the system is to ping-pong back and forth between red and blue team to evenly distribute player skill. In reality, the bug caused the highest rated player between the two teams to usually be teamed with mostly lower skilled players. For matches with high skill spread, this could result in one player feeling like they were matched with a surprisingly low-skilled team. This was hard to notice because matchmaking was always picking ten similarly skilled players to start with, so the problem only really presents in the high and low MMR brackets where there are fewer players to choose from.

Both of these issues will be fixed in an upcoming release. Thank you all for the continued feedback; it has helped tremendously while identifying these types of issues.

To the question regarding dash being able to remove immobilize:
Yes, the dodge ability will continue to remove immobilize. It was originally in the design to behave this way, but didn’t have a way to enable it being that you couldn’t actually initiate a dodge while you were immobilized. We now have the tech to make it work cleanly and would like to test it all out in the next beta.

-Karl

Saiyan.1704:

That’s typically the problem with the current MMR. Matchmaking isn’t giving enough credit to Player A because MMR is mainly based on the Glicko system – a system based on wins and losses. Player A is actually reducing the score gap but Glicko doesn’t look at that.

Glicko does support score-ratios, but in our tests we found it causes MMR to move so glacially slow that you end up having more bad matches because your MMR can’t keep up with your true skill level. This is due to the fact that most losing teams still get around 300 points.

We could have a configurable range to rescale the win ratio to help mitigate this (per game mode, unfortunately). We would have to run simulations first, though, because making any changes that affect glicko can be very dangerous.

Sorry gang, I checked internally and this isn’t something ArenaNet is interested in offering at this time.

Hey all,

Since the Scrapper reveal I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Druid development.

In my off-work hours I’ve been watching the forums and wanted to reply to some of your concerns and discuss some design intent.

• The hammer is intended to have good damage output and heavy proactive and reactive survivability options. Good damage does not mean best damage. No weapon or skillset should be the top of everything. Since the livestream recorded video I have made a few modifications to the damage numbers of the Hammer autoattack combo, Electro-Whirl and Shock Shield, increasing the autoattack damage, decreasing the Electro-Whirl damage and smoothing the damage distribution of Shock Shield while adding an additional strike.

• As many of you spotted, some of the Medic Gyro’s numbers were undertuned on the recorded gameplay from the livestream. The personal initial heal had already been bumped up a chunk to provide a more competitive option prior to the livestream itself, but we were unable to get the updated build in time. The initial heal is currently around 4.5k.

• Bulwark Gyro has a decent pool of health and low defense. If you and several allies are taking heavy AoE then it is going to die quickly; that is the situation where it should die quickly. This is a skill that has the potential to be very strong. I’ll be watching feedback closely, but I am holding off on any changes for now until you’ve have had the chance to play with it.

• Function Gyro requires a target. It appears at the target’s location when summoned so long as you have line of sight to create more gameplay options (across gaps or around obstacles). This summon happens nearly instantly so that you can be more reactive in resurrection situations and proactive in stomping situations. I am reviewing the recharge and duration currently.

That’s all for now!

Bug Fix:

• Fixed a server crash.

It’s not. Anything we built like that would lose all your settings after each patch at the moment like Evon Gnashblade mode. Each option also increases the development/testing time exponentially and it’s not something we’re able to support with our current workload.

The decision on those sorts of questions is out of our hands, and the decision on that is no.

Sorry, we’ll do the best we can within the constraints we’re under.

Auto-focus was a workaround for some technical limitations that we believe are fixed, so yes, we should be able to remove it sometime here.

Re: Dash update!
The original reason we had removed the extra distance on Dash was that we lacked the tech. Since that post, it’s been resolved. Thus, the distance of Dash is back, with a fervor. Now you’ll travel a full 450, up from the 360 previous (~300 base dodge), while moving at a faster-than-running speed. Swiftness duration increased to 10 seconds, up from the 8 we talked about originally.
This thing’s about solid movement, so we’re going to push it in that direction for this BWE. Please check it out and let us know how you feel about it. The animation’s going to remain as your character’s run for now.
We are aware that this new distance will cause some de-sync in synergy with Shadow Refuge, but feel that the open-field movement capability for daredevil needs to take precedence over this abliity. note: You can still dodge from edge-to-edge and remain inside the field, but it’s pretty tricky.

Oh yeah, I should mention that the auto-targeting stuff has been fixed. We were testing out some new tech with it, but have since pulled that as it wouldn’t allow your character to auto-turn toward your target if they’re behind you. Tech did its job too well.

odanu.3409:

I think I’ve figured it out. On the third console, after defeating the mobs, when it says “discuss with your friends” DO NOT ATTEMPT TO TALK TO THEM. They will start talking amongst themselves. Just to be safe, I didn’t even move when they were talking, and it let me right on through. I think if you attempt to talk to them, it bugs the conversation, so the text is misleading. It should say “listen to your friends discuss the situation”.

I’ll take this information (along with raenen’s post) and include it in the bug and/or internal documentation we’ve got on this.

Nike.2631:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Clarification: Professions have their own MMR tracked, but it is not currently used in matchmaking because players can switch professions after a match is made.

So a loophole is disabling a powerful tool to generate good matches?

I’d, uh, kinda close the loophole…

The problem with doing this is that players can no longer switch to a more effective profession once they see the enemy team’s roster which happens quite often.

A raid boss having defiance doesn’t mean soft-CC won’t be valuable in a raid encounter.

Fade.5904:

So does this mean Dash will still use the Warrior GS animation but now shorter?
Cant imagine this will look anything but clunky and juddery which is a shame since thief dodge looks so nice usually.
Cant you just make it a shadowstep for the old distance? One that’s instant but add 3/4 sec evade during and after?
A shadowstep would fit better with some existing thief sets and not be as likely to launch you off cliffs..

Dash, right now, is no longer the greatsword charge and will just run you in whichever direction you desire, while evading. As indicated, it’s in flux!

As for a shadowstep dodge: It’s not really in-theme for the daredevil, being a more of a physical-moving type of specialization. We’ve definitely talked about it internally. Here’s some of the collective thoughts on it:
Theory-wise, if we were to implement Shadowstep in lieu of dodge, you more than likely wouldn’t get any evade frames attached to it, being as it’s instant movement… Unless there’s a cast time to it. Typically with dodge-roll design, you’re only allowed to evade so long as you don’t have control. Example: stand in place and evade while ‘charging’ your shadowstep, or begin a dodge and get a few evade frames, then again when you land at the spot. In addition, there’s many areas in the game where you’d want to move the distance (I.E. standing on top of a rock), but simply couldn’t move at all because there’s no valid path and the shadowstep would fail.

Clarification: Professions have their own MMR tracked, but it is not currently used in matchmaking because players can switch professions after a match is made.

How to use API keys:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:API_key

Matchmaking is always trying to make 50/50 matches. There is no active streak-prevention built into matchmaking other than the fact that your MMR adjusts each game. Since you’ve been playing so much, your MMR is ‘certain’ and changes slowly. It has certainly adjusted over the course of the weekend, though.

I suggest watching your game history via a site like http://gw2efficiency.com/account/pvp that uses our new PvP API. This way you know exactly what streaks you’re on.

Edit: Both your streaks were when you played Engineer, which has a lower profession MMR than your account and other professions. Looks like you win more often on Thief

I will say: We’re still tuning Dash a bit and testing it internally. Thanks for your feedback and initial thoughts on it.

Additions to the initial notes:

Puncture Shot: Increased damage by 10%.
True Shot: Increased damage by 25% (instead of the 12% increase we had indicated) note: The overall damage potential of the ability wasn’t quite up to where we wanted to test it at, so here we are!
Wings of Resolve: Increased leap distance to 800, up from 600. note: This has been in discussion for a bit. Now’s a good time to check it out, being as there’s a lot of conversation on it here already.

-Karl

Edit because typos do happen.

A short update:
We’ve been working heavily on the dodge abilities, making them react the same way that your normal dodge occurs. There have been a lot of long hours, but we managed to get this functionality in for the next beta.

• The ‘Bound’ dodge animation is shorter and more appropriate for a dodge.
• Dash – The extra distance has been removed for now as well. Dash now breaks immobilize in addition to its other effects. For now, the animation is just going to run you in the direction you’re dodging.
• Impaling Lotus – The jump has been removed, as it caused issues that couldn’t be remedied. I’ll update if other things happen.

Other things:

• re: Shalien. I haven’t got this in the next beta, but the plan is to drastically reduce the cast time of Channeled Vigor. (3/4 to 1 second or so)
• Idle/running animations while wielding a staff are not planned to change at this time. There are, however, a couple of animations being worked on as development continues.

-Karl

Hooray for Pat!

We’ll get this sorted for you, Shadowblade, and for others who may come across this issue.

Your MMR is still volatile since you haven’t played many matches. The more you play, the better matchmaking will become for you. Also remember that ranked and unranked have separate MMRs so if you decide to jump into Ranked when you hit 20, you will have a similar experience until you adjust for that new pool of players.

Lonewolf Kai.3682:

So, what stats did you end up going with?

Not sure yet, still deciding, I have sword, shield, warhorn, and pistol right now.

Easier to fix than expected, these should be good now. Fixes may take a few minutes to show up.

Should be fixed, may take a few minutes to show up.

Gaaroth.2567:

Sondergaard.8469:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Soooooo…. I wanted to throw out an idea I had about a new GM trait for retribution to place it and see what you all think. The trait would be more dwarf stance focused since we don’t have a dwarf stance specific trait.

• It would give you some way to proc Rite of the Great Dwarf like at some percent health trigger or something and then make Rite of the Great Dwarf (both proc and the skill) have reduced condition damage taken as well while allies have the buff.

Let me know what you think.

Personally I’m not a fan of any of the % health cast ability traits. If I want to cast a skill it’s on my hotbar and I can push the button myself. These often lack any degree of excitement for me when I see them in the trait line. I would much rather see something that gives % bonuses to toughness for the dwarf line than auto proc skill stuff…

This view likely comes from how I handle traits as a whole. I want passive bonuses, that improve my overall potential strength, but I look for the always on traits as opposed to the long cooldown proc skill traits.

My exact thought, the proposal is super good, but i always like more active gameplay.
I have to say that when i run similar traits i always keep track of the proc and play them in my favor. Example elix s on engi if i’m low hp i still go in for the stomp saving my active skill cuz i know i’ll proc the passive ;-)

Well the active part of it would be that RotGD would be upgraded naturally with the trait so that you can actively push it whenever you want for the benefit. The added proc would be a benefit if you didn’t necessarily want to take dwarf stance with the trait.

On skill use as a trigger for it I think would be weird because it would force a recharge when you maybe don’t want to use it, like engaging in a fight before damage is happening where as a % health trigger would help ensure you are under pressure when it goes off.

Otaur.9268:

Roy Cronacher.1576:

Nice video man.

Please fix this before release…. https://youtu.be/xPRKaMTJDSA?t=4m20s At 4:21 Revenant uses Shiro utility to teleport through walls… He using his 8th ability or his F key 2 times. One teleports him to the wall, second teleports him up into the clocktower without any visible path… Is this supposed to work this way cause “walking through the mist” ???

Could you imagine doing this into WvW keeps / towers??

It has the same functionality as other shadowstep skills such as Signet of Infiltration on thief.

There has been a lot of discussion on this point so I’d like to explain a bit about the decision to change the Illusionary Avenger’s attack type and how we ended up with the attack that we’re showing in BWE3.

The main feedback we got from BWE2 was that the effects applied by this phantasm were unreliable and hard to control. We wanted to make a more reliable way to apply alacrity and slow that players could respond to which is why we ended up with the AoE attack.

We had tried other ideas but the important aspect of the one we chose is that it keeps the delivery method consistent. We considered many of the versions suggested in the feedback threads such as the one where he throws the shield but applies alacrity around himself, but realized that this basically amounted to two different delivery methods in one skill. While this kind of behavior is okay for player skills we felt that it was too complex for a phantasm attack. This attack already has different effects based on if it hits an ally or an enemy so it was important to us to keep the attack on the Avenger easy to understand for both allies and enemies. This is why the PBAoE version was selected.

Kamui.3150:

Hey Robert, one thing I was curious about was Sundering Leap, mainly that it seems to be a bit strong when compared to another skill, namely On My Mark. SL is a Leap finisher, damage, 10 Vuln for 6s, 6s Cripple, gives you 5 Adrenaline, and has a 25s CD (with no CD trait, but that’s totally fine, Rage skills have low CD by default) and all that’s in a decent AoE. Meanwhile OMM is a Shout with a 30s base CD (24s traited) that puts 10 Vuln on one target at 1200 Range for 10s, and that’s it. Is this something that could potentially cause OMM to be buffed (More Vuln and/or AoE effect?), would SL get nerfed, or working as intended? Mainly figuring that there’s no reason I’d take OMM while SL was an option to put on my bar.

This is a fair concern. With the previous round of testing we felt that Sundering Leap wasn’t offering enough for a skill that put you into the middle of a fight so we buffed it accordingly. It’s always possible that we went too far though and I’m looking forward to seeing how it plays in the next BWE. I think OMM still has a place in some builds though. The fact that its a shout gives it a place in builds running Vigorous Shouts. Additionally unlike Sundering Leap it’s also unblockable and instant so you can use in in the middle of other attacks without interrupting your flow.

Please let me know how you feel about this skill after the next BWE!

Hey all,

The Reflexive Hammers trait in retribution is going to be changed after BWE3, before launch. Right now since it uses projectiles that hover around you, they currently don’t work underwater and I think it no longer really fits the line as that is more about damage, plus it muddies the FXs around the character when the actual hammers are around you.

Soooooo…. I wanted to throw out an idea I had about a new GM trait for retribution to place it and see what you all think. The trait would be more dwarf stance focused since we don’t have a dwarf stance specific trait.

• It would give you some way to proc Rite of the Great Dwarf like at some percent health trigger or something and then make Rite of the Great Dwarf (both proc and the skill) have reduced condition damage taken as well while allies have the buff.

Let me know what you think.

Nice catch, not sure where those bits wandered off too. We’re investigating.

The scroll position changing may or may not be fixable, there’s a not-particularly-interesting-but-deeply-technical reason why that is happening. We’ve mitigated it as much as we could in the short term in order to prioritize getting the TP UI fast again. We’ll swing back around and take another stab at it now that the bulk of the optimization work is sorted.