Guild Wars 2

Thank you for your patience while we addressed this issue. The content has been re-enabled.

04/18/2017 – April 18th Release Notes
Living World

• Fixed an issue with the “Into the Labyrinth” instance that was preventing friendly NPCs from assisting in combat.

General

• The Active Guild Member achievement, which can no longer be earned after the retirement of Influence as a guild currency, has been moved from the General ? Community category into the Historical ? Retired Achievements category.
• Unique text has been created for skill and trait tooltips, specific to their game mode.
• An option called Disable Player Item Chatter has been added to the Sound Options tab. Enabling this option will disable all chatter voice-over from player items such as the Replica Job-o-Tron Backpack, tron-themed salvaging tools, and tron-themed gathering tools.
• Ruins of Orr—Karst Plains: Crusader Feintscar now correctly has a female voice.

Raids
Bastion of the Penitent

• Fixed a bug in which players in the Samarog encounter were sometimes impaled when there were no nearby spears.
• Fixed a bug in which Samarog waited too long to recall spears if transitioned at the wrong time.
• Fixed a bug that prevented Rigom and Guldhem from spawning if Samarog was transitioned while using Brutalize on a player.
• Demonic Tears will no longer consume Aegis when hit while the challenge mote is active.
• Players can no longer use Continuum Shift to exit Deimos’s realm during the final phase.
• In the Deimos encounter, the player targeted by Soul Feast can no longer be selected by the Eye of Janthir to enter the demon realm.
• In the Deimos encounter, jumping will no longer prevent Soul Feast from spawning.

Structured Player vs. Player

• Default builds have been adjusted.

BLACK LION TRADING COMPANY GEM STORE
New Items and Promotions

• A new Primordus Dye Kit containing six exclusive colors is now available in the Special category of the Gem Store for 125 gems.
• The Crystalline Dragon Wings Backpack Glider Combo has returned for a limited time and is located in the Style category of the Gem Store for 700 gems.
• For a limited time, Chaos weapon skins have returned to the Black Lion Weapons Specialist for 5 Black Lion Claim Tickets. Black Lion Chest Keys are available in the Special category of the Gem Store for 125 gems each.

Improvements

• Six new exclusive hair colors and six new exclusive hair-accessory dyes have been added and are available in Total Makeover Kits and Self-Style Hair Kits, found in the Services category of the Gem Store.
• For a limited time, Living World Season 2 miniatures and Forest and Jungle miniatures are available when using Black Lion Miniature Claim Tickets.
  • Living World Season 2 miniatures: Mini Rox, Mini Braham Eirsson, Miniature Belinda Delaqua, Mini Marjory Delaqua, Mini Caithe, Mini Faolain, Mini Lord Faren, Mini Kasmeer Meade, Mini Logan Thackeray, and Mini Eir Stegalkin
  • Forest and Jungle miniatures: Mini Forest Spider, Mini Jungle Stalker, Mini Wasp, Mini Swamp Spider, Mini Mosquito, Mini Eelob Poisonfang, Mini Lynx, Mini Forest Grub, Mini Sylvan Pup, and Mini Mossheart

An exploit has been noted involving the use of the Frost Gun (consumable item) in combination with certain traits. We have temporarily disabled the Frost Gun while we address the exploit, and will let you know when the item has been re-enabled.

Apolo.5942:

Ramoth.9064:

I think they arent unlocked if you dont have HOT. Either that or theres a tab that sells non hot stat trinkets. Theres something about that on wiki i think

Have hot, there is only 1 tab.

If you have HoT, we hide the Central Tyrian vendor to prevent people from buying the wrong item.

I just checked the Mist Talisman and it definitely has the HoT stats as options.

Just to be thorough, may I get a second confirmation that this thread is indeed beyond its shelf life, that it should be unsticked and allowed to fade? Sublimatio was the OP and I trust their judgment, but I swear I saw someone from Noob in DR the other day, so I wanted to check out of respect for all they have contributed in helping others.

Thank you.

I think some of you made a good point. The title of that thread about undesired forum topics didn’t have a very clear title. I just swapped it out to “Inappropriate Forum Topics.” Think that works?

If you believe we need a completely separate thread to call out what defines a match-up thread, I can make one. I rather admire Chinchilla’s one-liner on that topic as a definition. I’m hoping to not have a lot of “housekeeping” threads, so am hopeful the one will work.

I don’t recall if it’s documented anywhere (pre-coffee reply), but the cache time is 5-10 minutes (nested caches).

Had to come into the office (can’t VPN into a BSOD’d machine, apparently) but it should be fixed now.

Just wanted to say that this is an interesting suggestion! The team is interested in feedback on this idea and will continue watching this thread. However, just because we are following this thread doesn’t guarantee we will add it as a feature.

Like others have mentioned in this thread, we don’t think this would be a healthy feature for WvW. Many players will not participate in WvW if they don’t see a commander tag, and we try to avoid adding features that can be used to exclude players.

Below are the world adjustments for April 14th 2017. Current is the new manual adjustment for the match making rating. Previous lists the manual adjustments that were in place prior to today’s changes. These are not additive, but rather updated values.

NA:

• Tarnished Coast
Current: -25
Previous: -25

EU
• Baruch Bay
Current: +50
Previous: +50

• Gandara
Current: +50
Previous: 0

• Jade Sea
Current: -50
Previous: 0

We’ve identified an exploit with the Super Adventure Box o’ Fun that allowed players to obtain an immunity to all negative effects and conditions. Some players were abusing the exploit to gain an unfair advantage over others. Due to the impact of this issue, we have decided to temporarily disable the ability for players to summon a Super Adventure Box o’ Fun and have actioned the players who abused this exploit. We will re-enable the item as soon as the exploit has been resolved.

@ixter.3582, please try again. Let me know if know if you are still having difficulties.

Thanks!

Seems reasonable. I’m pretty sure the previous festivals won’t have any data — prior to SAB, festivals weren’t automatic and needed a game build to turn on/off. SAB is the first one with structured data that the API can expose. Tracking issue.

Daddicus.6128:

Chris and Gaile, it does look like it’s up again.

Yep, from all we’re seeing just now, things are good. The team will continue to monitor and we all should be able to game on!

We have identified the problem and things should be recovering.

aandiarie.7195:

If they can’t figure out what’s wrong then can they just roll it back?

That is very, very, very seldom necessary. But don’t worry. The team is keenly aware of this situation, and top people are working on it!

We’re looking into this, will update when I have info.

atheria.2837:

When WvW “tiers” are respected again, if ever, by Anet and the manual glicko additions and subtractions stop, then this type of posting will be few and very far between compared to now.

So, keeping to the topic of this thread, and not the side comments being expressed, you’re essentially saying, “We will post reasonably about other players and servers/worlds once the devs [do XX or YY]?”

The topic — again — is player-to-player conversations. With that in mind, whatever parameters you set for improved forum member behavior towards one another cannot be fulfilled by ArenaNet but only by forum members themselves.

anduriell.6280:

Aeolus.3615:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Gaile starts a thread reminding people that trashtalking is against the rules and to try to stick to the topic.

The thread quickly devolves into people trashtalking ANet’s communication policy and trying to discuss whether WvW is abandoned or supported, whether there’s too much moderation or not enough dev communication, and, of course, discussions about condition damage.

And people wonder why the devs are reluctant to offer the occasional quick comment.

We try to compensate the lack of build variety on the forum?

Nah, Gaile started a thread politely telling off the costumers about why they complain so much.
Such costumers defensively are trying to explain her why the complains.

Perfectly normal here.

PS: the people that whine about the complains look even worse than the complains itselves.

No. My post was about player-to-player communication. That it nearly instantly devolved into a broader topic is not surprising, given the past. But let’s be clear: I am not “complaining” about player complaints. I am asking players to be kind to one another, and stop insulting one another with comments like those I mentioned in my initial post. (Which are actual quotes, in the top section.)

WvW combat should happen in the game. It should not take place on the forums in rude posts that insult other players, individually or as a group. This isn’t an opportunity to talk about skill balance – the WvW team does not handle that. This is not a chance to discuss (complain about, argue for) communications from the studio. This is about asking players to not engage in rude commentary towards others.

And that is what this post was and should be about.

The kills are implemented via watching event logs from the map instance servers. Our event logging infrastructure had an outage earlier today (hardware failure), so the kill counts stopped being updated.

I don’t believe there’s a way to recover the lost data, unfortunately.

GrahamW.5397:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Haematic.4913:

Chaba.5410:

Sorry Gaile, it isn’t about in-game rivalries. It’s about frustration with Anet who has a more direct hand in match-making now through manual glicko adjustments and server linking choices without taking the time to understand the community trends going on with those teams.

http://imgur.com/nqzK9io

Yep, and I’ve already replaced the post and spoken to the moderator who removed it. If that satisfies you, you can delete the image-bearing post yourself, or delete the first post and leave the second you made. Whatever works for you.

That’s good that you corrected the mistake, but i feel like this only further points out that there are issues in communication between players and anet. When a well written post that has no reason to be removed is taken down and the person infracted, it only serves to exasperate already angry people even more. Its hard for players to talk about issues when they are rooted in things which you have effectively “banned” us from talking about matchups, server pop, relinkings, ect as most of the posts are removed or closed , a lot of the time with good reason i will admit but even when we’re having majority good discussion they are often closed with simple reasons like no matchup threads given.

You say you’re open to communication with us but how are we supposed to communicate when we make a thread about a topic pertaining to the current situation in wvw and it gets locked because someone at anet deems it a matchup thread or a , my world link sucks thread ect.

Questions about moderation can be addressed to Forums@Arena.Net. That’s not a brush-off, that’s the best way to discuss something.

In my view — and I’ve looked with care — the threads that are being removed or locked are indeed argument threads. They’re often combative, negative, or rude. Often all three things. I don’t see the moderators “deeming” something as being a match-up thread, but accurately assessing that it is one. (If the term “match-up” is used in a generic sense.) Again, if there’s a genuine question, you can e-mail and we’ll review it.

Haematic.4913:

Chaba.5410:

Sorry Gaile, it isn’t about in-game rivalries. It’s about frustration with Anet who has a more direct hand in match-making now through manual glicko adjustments and server linking choices without taking the time to understand the community trends going on with those teams.

http://imgur.com/nqzK9io

Yep, and I’ve already replaced the post and spoken to the moderator who removed it. If that satisfies you, you can delete the image-bearing post yourself, or delete the first post and leave the second you made. Whatever works for you.

Namer.9750:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Vermillion.4061:

Most of the players in WvW are just upset that nothing has really happened in months and we feel like we’ve been ignored.

We just want to see what is actually going on behind the scenes with WvW, maybe given some DevBlog update style stuff since you’ve been mostly silent on what is changing and being worked on.

Different companies communicate in different ways and sometimes the process evolves over the years. Mike O’Brien explained how we choose to communicate in this forum post a few years ago. What he said was, “We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”

I understand that some players would prefer a different manner of communication. I wanted to share the comments above to show that silence does not point to inaction or neglect or indifference.

The topic of conversation doesn’t matter. Nobody’s asking to talk about future developments.

What people here want is actual communication. Look at how many ANet devs often make cheeky oneliner comments on Reddit. It fosters a sense of cooperation there, and people on Reddit know that the Devs are listening even if no Dev ever actually talks about future releases.

We need that here. We need the active presence of a few different devs, so that people know they’re being listened to. So far, regardless of what you may say about WvW not being abandoned and Devs are listening, it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it here.

In an ideal world, a dev could post without making disclosures, could joke without being lambasted, could participate without expectations of meaty information or forward-looking disclosures. But when someone does share information and still ends up on the toasty end of a marshmallow fork, I’m not sure if that’s possible.

I’d love it if it was, but have seen so many “verbal downvotes” for non-disclosure interaction. I’ll discuss — we’ll see. Thanks for the suggestions.

Vermillion.4061:

Most of the players in WvW are just upset that nothing has really happened in months and we feel like we’ve been ignored.

We just want to see what is actually going on behind the scenes with WvW, maybe given some DevBlog update style stuff since you’ve been mostly silent on what is changing and being worked on.

Different companies communicate in different ways and sometimes the process evolves over the years. Mike O’Brien explained how we choose to communicate in this forum post a few years ago. What he said was, “We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.”

I understand that some players would prefer a different manner of communication. I wanted to share the comments above to show that silence does not point to inaction or neglect or indifference.

Sarika.3756:

The sad part is that there is a specific set of forum posters who are most likely to derail a thread from something constructive into match-up. They often add jabs at whichever server they don’t particularly like, and that stirs the pot. Maybe it’s not just the threads that need a time out, but some of the posters most likely to derail things down the match-up rabbit hole?

I believe we should avoiding removing threads when at all possible. Instead, we should surgically remove posts when required. If we remove the derailing comments, and the off-topic, “You’re talking about A, but I’m going to turn this into a complaint about B” we can retain more of the good conversations that happen here. I will share that objective with the moderators and we’ll see if we can exercise as light a hand as possible.

Namer.9750:

I believe that a lot of these threads and posts are an outburst against what the majority see as an utter neglect of the game mode. Whether this statement is objectively true or not doesn’t matter, perceptions do.

I understand. I do appreciate that while we know we’re working on things, and know what we’re working on, the players do not. Our policy is not to give a future-looking accounting of works in progress but to analzye, gather input from players (through a variety of means including frequent reading of the forums), develop, and release.

Most players have been around long enough, or know the company well enough, to understand how we work, but it’s undoubtedly true that the desire for more info can drive people to posting unwisely. Nobody likes to have their post removed, and we all benefit from a better forum climate. So I’m hoping a few comments in aid of “prudent posting practices” will not go amiss.

Aury.1367:

Maybe thats because people feel like anet has canceled the whole WvW-support. I saw I got aggressive and salty the last months. No reason to act like this in PvE. But WvW is just depressing.

I am sorry if players feel that way. I see it in posts, sure. But I believe we’ve made it clear that the game mode has not been abandoned. That was confirmed quite recently when a dev made some comments about upcoming changes. Unfortunately, the thread devolved into dev bashing, and the OP asked that we remove it.

I feel that while things may not be perfect, they are not as dire as some forum members paint them. Continuously dwelling on the negative isn’t necessary or productive and it doesn’t represent the true nature of the game mode.

Lately, we’ve noticed a a growing number of posts like this:

• I hear [this world] is dead
• I don’t like the links between [this world] and [that world]
• Why does [XX world] get an better link than mine?
• I hear [this world] pays groups to join

If this keeps up, at some point we’ll start seeing:

• I don’t like the cut of [that world’s] gib
• Neener, neener, we won and you all suck
• Everybody on [that world] has stinky feet

If I’m joking with the last bit, I’m joking with a raised eyebrow, and you guys know I’m at least partially right about what we might expect if folks don’t use a little more reason before posting.

We’ve explained why we have a conservative stance on match-up and world-related threads here but to say it again: they usually don’t serve any purpose and they often turn nasty.

WvW is a competitive setting, and we don’t expect everyone to link arms and skip down the Yellow Brick Road together. On the other hand, we need to keep this sub-forum on an even keel. To that end, please think before posting, and consider if what you’re writing is of value, or if you’re mistakenly taking an in-game rivalry outside the game into a forum designed for more reasonable discussions.

Thanks.

This is now fixed. I apologize again for the outage!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Render-and-Tile-images-service-error/first#post6551903

We have the new cert but ran into some issues getting it installed tonight. Everybody’s pretty beat so it’ll go in as soon as we can tomorrow.

Sorry, this got missed in our checklists of places to updated certs. We’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.

NEW DATE!!!

Due to an art project that Josh is working on, we’re going to reschedule CSL for next week:

Wednesday, April 19th — Noon Pacific time.

See you then!

Created a tracking issue for this, but it’s can of worms. The cats/nodes/SAB/etc are a bit simpler since they’re totally disconnected systems, whereas a world boss endpoint would want the event data, the spawn timers, etc. Which isn’t infeasible, it’s just more work to thread everything through the needle.

The team is taking a look at this now. Thanks for the report. I’ll follow up on the tickets, as well, to ensure we don’t have a procedural error.

A kind forum member noted that I had not provided a link to our twitch channel. Here it is: Guild Wars 2 Twitch Channel Link

Or unembedded, it’s here: https://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

DusK.3849:

Very fitting guest choice.

I know, Josh is awesome!

It’s been awhile since I did a Friday afternoon live deploy, but I just turned on /v2/characters/:id/sab which dumps the data. It requires the characters and progression permissions. I’ll add some examples to the github repo on Monday, but in the meanwhile here are the possible unlock values.

(also songs might be broken).

EDIT: deployed a fix for the songs.

I felt that I should pitch in on the multiple issues across this thread.

First off:
Thanks everyone for raising your concern about this issue, and I want to assure everyone that we do investigate player reports for every issue. Sometimes these investigations can take some time, and we may choose to action in bulk rather than individually.

Second:
Harassment of any type is NOT OK. If you believe someone is not playing fair, please use the report feature. It not only helps us track the issue, but also helps us identify possible hotspot issues. Even though the OP has been now been actioned multiple times for using 3rd party tools, there are better ways to handle this.

Here are the best ways to report another player:
In-Game Player Reporting / Email exploits@arena.net / Customer Support Ticket

Third:
Today we took action against a number of accounts that were involved in running 3rd party tools to automate gameplay. These “bots” create an unfair game experience for everyone and can cause a toxic atmosphere both in-game and out (as we see in this thread). We will continue to do our best to keep the game fair for everyone.

Hello, Weo weo. It’s really nice of you to ask about this. We are fine with you posting such a request here. It seems a really logical place to ask, right?

While I personally suggest that in-game currency is the better choice than direct (real world money) payment, we generally have no problem at all with commissions.

Below are the world adjustments for April 7th 2017. Current is the new manual adjustment for the match making rating. Previous lists the manual adjustments that were in place prior to today’s changes. These are not additive, but rather updated values.

NA:
• Jade Quarry
Current: 0
Previous: +20

• Maguuma
Current: 0
Previous: -50

• Tarnished Coast
Current: -25
Previous: -100

EU
• Baruch Bay
Current: +50
Previous: +50

• Piken
Current: 0
Previous: -100

Not only do we promote streamers (thanks for pointing that out, cyn) but we have a Partner Program that includes a number of content streamers.

Key is to read the two legal documents about the use of our IP, to make sure whatever is created conforms to copyrights and so forth. They’re a little formal, but they contain a lot of very helpful information!

Hope this info helps!

Tshakaar.6429:

While you’re at it Lawton, if you can confirm if it is or not in relation with: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/63d0nw/log_in_problems_when_using_shortcuts/

I honestly have no idea. The UI layer doesn’t have any responsibility whatsoever. I tried repro’ing it locally (assuming they’re using ‘-email xyz -password xyz -nopatchui’) with the live client but couldn’t get it to crash.

It’ll definitely crash when there’s an unfetched patch since ‘-nopatchui’ skips part of the patching process, but it’s been that way for years.

The API doesn’t currently expose any online/offline status.

Adding an online count to the guild endpoint seems totally reasonable though; I went ahead and opened a tracking issue for this.

There’s an open issue for this; the idea was brought up too late for me to get an implementation through the release process before SAB ends this year.

Definitely on the table though, the data seemed pretty straightforward to extract when I looked at it.

In the next release, we are going to be raising the prices of the Forgeman Mantle, Forgeman Raiment, and Forgeman Leggings so that they are consistent with the remainder of the dungeon armor prices.

mtpelion.4562:

Continue to report them. ArenaNet does bans in waves, so you will not see immediate results, but it will eventually be addressed.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Always report them, if you suspect they are botting or otherwise breaking the rules. You won’t get direct responses to reports made in-game, but they are read (especially if one particular account has multiple reports against it). They also won’t do a patch or make an announcement when a ban wave is done. So, just keep reporting and encourage others to do so.

Bingo the above. The in-game report system does result in reports that are read by the team. However, you are also welcome to submit a ticket to the CS team, if you’d like to do so. Please include the date and time you witness the bots (saying “every day” isn’t particularly helpful ). Give your server/world name and your region. And then carefully spell the exact name of the accounts you believe are cheating.

I will follow up with CS to see if there is any other advice I can give you on this subject. I do want you to know that we all appreciate reports that help us clean up botters!

Hey Miyafuji,

I enjoyed the videos, and hope you’ll keep making them. I also like your advice! It’s a game, and trying new things has no risk and a lot of potential for new kinds of fun!

What I was referring to is in this example.