Guild Wars 2

What’s your current objective? You need to go inside the farmhouse and down to the basement to enter the bandit caves, which is where the enemies are located.

Keep posting questions, folks. We’ll try to answer as many as possible on stream Friday.

Can you double check your Windows settings for your sound device? This sounds like it might be set to “5 speaker surround” on a 2-speaker system (or headphones), which can cause some of the sounds to try and play on non-existent speakers.

ptitminou.6489:

If you want smaller groups, why did you make a fight like Tequatl? Why are smaller groups punished in WvW, its much harder to take down a keep with 20 people than 60 given the supply one can carry…

My point wasn’t that we don’t want large fights we love large fights but we want a mix of large and small fights, different tactics and tools for players to use to approach any battle or situation. I think the commander tool could help solve these problems in all situations.

Summary of Day 1 of discussion:

1) There are a lot of people that would like to see more colors and/or more shapes for the commander icons.

2) People are arguing for commanders to be able to hide their tags from everyone and only have them be visible to select groups.

3) Improved supplyinfo command.

4) No chat suppression.

5) Account bound.

6) A change to the way the icon is acquired.

That doesn’t hit everything, but it hits some of the most commonly requested stuff. In addition there has been a discussion about if it is more important to redo the whole system or provide some small quality of life improvements first.

I wanted to provide some insight into what might be required for some of the types of changes that are being requested, so everyone has a clearer understanding when thinking about them.

Any change that requires significant UI, especially any new UI functionality, is a long term change. Not only does it take time to design the UI and settle on it’s appearance, it takes time to build the functionality. That is why any full on rework of the squad system will be a large project. It is important to us that when we introduce new UI elements we have fully fleshed out their place in the rest of the game UI.

With that out of the way, I have some more questions.
1) What is an acceptable amount of chat suppression for a commander? It’s important to realize that if the system remains as it currently does, with 100g for a tag, no chat suppression would mean that people can spend 100g to spam you with whatever they feel like. That’s not an acceptable solution. I think there are other things we could do, like provide a commander only channel that has no suppression but that people have to opt in to.

2) How would it feel to have a system that gradually unlocked more commander abilities and icons, but that required dedication to WvW? Let’s say we added a commander line to the ability panel and you unlocked it with WvW ability points. What is the right starting price for that? 100 points? more? If that happens, does it make sense for the system to remain character based? Would requiring commanders to spend their WXP in this way limit them to the point that they didn’t want to do it? What if you still acquired the current tag by spending 100g, but you upgraded to new shapes via the WXP system?

I think game modes were cut from the blog because we’ve already mentioned that we are working on new ones. I’m sure there are a few threads as well.

risenlord.2035:

I really dont like they way you guys pick and choose your quotes. You picked out the positive things you liked in my post with addressing the core of my concerns.

I pick out the things I can actually answer with at least some bit of authority. I’m not a designer and I’m not working on rewards so I cannot answer every post or every part of a post.

I’m also limited to only talking about things we agree we are ready to talk about.

risenlord.2035:

Upcoming changes to the reward system is an excellent idea. Gold in place of glory another excellent idea. Your implementation of the new system though doesn’t seem right to me.

We haven’t released any details about the new reward system. The rewards going in December 10th are more of a way of rewarding players for the glory they have earned before we retire it.

We have talked about various ways to handle retiring glory, and we’re still open to those discussions.

Admiral Zombie.8624:

A lot of people are misunderstanding what is happening. People who have earned their rank emotes and finishers will get to keep them as they are.

If I understand what people are saying, and I may be wrong, many people are treating ranks as more of a lifetime achievement. That is certainly something to consider in regards to the future reward system replacing them.

jojoba.7093:

Using the ladder system as a factor of tourney queues is definitely a great idea! However the diminishing restriction over time feels rather not flexible, how about say, an option to whether or not the player is willing to risk queueing with someone with a rather lower level on the ladder and MMR.

I know several people would like an option to wait forever for a good match, but I think it would be best to design the system around the more typical use case. If there is still a need for it then we can certainly revisit the topic.

jojoba.7093:

Ready buttons do seem to be the most efficient solution to afkers and I’m sure you guys have never overlooked this solution (having talked to josh before in game regarding this issue) and its definitely long overdue so i assume there are some troubles in implementing this?

I don’t think it’s really an matter of trouble but of time. We’re prioritizing our time toward the new infrastructure rather than the existing. This is also easier to implement with the new servers than it would be to add to the old.

Thanks for all the responses : )

I’ve always felt the commander system had a lot of room to grow mainly it does a good job of giving people something to follow but that’s about it. I used to do a lot of commanding and I found splitting a group of 20-40 up into smaller groups to be very difficult and we just ended up using parties and voice but I’ve noticed the lack of tools to do this drives a lot of gameplay to follow the commander. I know in PvE and in WvW we’ve been trying to make the content force a little more splitting as the game becomes a lot more fun when there are a bunch of smaller fights then one big one.

I know there are a lot of suggestions about a whole commander system with points, ranks, ect.. and I think that could be neat but one of our big goals is deep systems and as few of them as possible, as having a lot of small shallow systems all over the game can make it hard to maintain and keep up to date. Some examples are we could just roll the whole commander system into the Guild System and make new ranks and abilities part of guild upgrades. Another way to simplify this would be turn commander into WvW abilities and have a few lines that focus on commanding/following. (Granted this approch does make things more messy for PvE commanders). Just a few examples of how to design in a more simplistic way by folding this into another system, and some of the discussions and debates we have internally every time we go to improve/update a system.

One of my fav quotes on simplistic design
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” -Albert Einstein

Sea.5732:

sorry i am not the brightest person, more need it bluntly said =P so basically ranks will be removed after X amount of months? a ladder would go for what like 6 months?

just be nice to have a rough idea to know if can pull off another 10 ranks before there removed.

Why? Would you like us to hold off releasing these changes so you have more time?

I can’t give you a time frame because things are still being decided based on your feedback.

Proven.2854:

Honestly, this wouldn’t even be a problem if we had skins a bunch more skins that were exclusive to each PvP and PvE. Instead of having two paths to the same thing and people grinding their way through the path of least resistance, you’d instead have people using their special armor or weapon as a trophy for conquering a certain objective in a certain mode. Same issue with WvW and the fact that it needs something exclusive to it other than the Invader set.

The recent issue with the Flamekissed gem armor comes to mind.

If you want exclusive PvP gear then please, please, please, post that in the rewards discussion.

- Cough -
- Cough -

cymerdown.4103:

They could keep the changes to the reward system, but just not remove ranks and their finishers. Just have it as this little side progression thing, but not have it display anywhere except on your PvP menu and maybe keep the progress bar on the bottom. This way, you still get the cool new rewards, and yes glory is now gone, but rank points and the rank finishers will remain.

The finishers are not going away. You will likely have until the first ladder season to earn them. After that they can’t be earned, but you will continue to have them. If all you want is additional finishers to work toward, be sure to mention that in the rewards discussion.

Updated Reward System
With gear unification we will also introduce a system that allows players to set goals for rewards in PvP and work towards them. We are not ready to discuss this system in detail yet, as it is still being developed, but more information will come as we get closer to being able to release this system.

Once this new system is in place, glory will be retired as a currency, and gold will be the standard currency across the game. All existing glory vendors will be removed at this time. We will give advance warning when this is coming so you can spend all of your existing glory before that happens.

That’s the part you should keep in mind.

Well, now that the news is out I guess I can spoil this one tidbit regarding matchmaking. In addition to your MMR, we will also be using your ladder tier when determining who you play against, so as you travel up the ladder the odds of being matched with new players is reduced. This filtering becomes less strict as you wait in the queue, so people can still find matches during low concurrency.

I’ll be working with Josh and the others to get a blog post out and start a discussion about matchmaking in the near-ish future, and we will likely talk about the 4v5 issue at the same time.

What do you guys thing we should do in the meantime while we continue to work on the new server infrastructure, matchmaking, ladders, etc.?

A lot of awesome ideas here.

Here are some questions I’ve been wondering about.

How often do people actually join squads and use the features that are there? (4 different way point markers, /supplyinfo). What would make you join squads more?

How much is spies a problem with commander system?

Should the commander icon be shown above the commanders head to the commander?

Should we allow a WvW upgrade to see enemy commanders (not on the map just on screen) ?

Dahkeus.8243:

Josh Davis.6015:

Way to go, Jon…making me look bad!

Aww, don’t be such a grouch! Oh wait…

As for the new heals, I’m sure this will be good for some classes, but on my thief, I feel like I already have some of the best heals in the game. It’s going to be tough to add something that will appeal to me more than Withdraw or Hide in Shadows.

P.s. I’d rather see more Elites added than either heals or utilities.

Oh the new thief heal is going to mix some things up for sure!!!

Hey josh. I wrote my post before I saw yours.

Pixels.6532:

Regarding ranks, why does one have to exclude the other? Why can’t the current rank system remain and new emotes and titles be added for people who work their way up through the ladder.

Maybe you can’t go into much detail yet, but how would the ladder system and titles/emotes work?

It’s not just ladder tiers/divisions replacing ranks. The future reward blog will likely cover things for people that are more interested in long term investment type rewards.

Chaith.8256:

Ryan.9387:

Darnis.4056:

Hi Jon!
I’ll have to agree with 5G;
It’s hilarious to talk about Clutter when minionmancers/spiritrangers/Phantasms mesmers see play. PETTING ZOO META!

It would not be clutter if you could only see the endurance bar of one guy that you have targeted. Still I would much rather see Casting bars; or both.

Could just watch and internalize the evade bar.

" He dodged, he dodged again, no more endurance. SPIKE NOW"

The problem with this is the fact that Energy Sigils exist, endurance levels are very transient and no, it’s not reliable information to count dodges or see the endurance bar atm until that’s changed.

Yeah this sums up a lot of what I was saying. The more we learn the more we can improve this aspect of the game. It is something we are very aware of but it won’t be solved overnight.

I’m not sure how you interpreted my saying clutter is currently ok? There are clearly clutter issues and the point I was making was that this is a place where we would potentially introduce more clutter. Given all of the clutter plus all the added lack of fidelity we would get into knowing an enemies endurance the information gained bang for the technical, UI and design buck is absolutely not worth it. The same could be said about our current effect clutter, but that problem a) already exists b) is harder to solve c) is being worked on and d) doesn’t excuse us making other similar mistakes.

Jon

I think it’s safe to assume there will be additions to each of those areas at some point.

As this isn’t a matchup thread, it is now closed.

If you feel that players have behaved in a manner that goes against the Guild Wars 2 Rules of Conduct, please contact Customer Support on the matter.

Creating a thread to bash on a server because you believe they may have behaved “dishonestly” is not the appropriate way to report violations of this type and only serves to breed further animosity between players.

Donari.5237:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/List-Of-Things-We-Want-In-Gemstore/first

We’re closing this thread; please continue posting on the thread listed above.

Miflett.3472:

Do not like the finisher changes as I like my achievement not being time gated, but that’s a personal thing, I admit.

Please focus future achievement structure on permanent achievement; comparing stickers for how many days you showed up is nice and all, but please keep these things open. Achievement in my mind is not time gated. Once again, personal opinion.

Although ladder rewards will be time gated, PvP will also likely have other rewards that are not time gated as well rewards relevant to living story and holiday events. It depends on what you guys would like to see.

Incurafy.6329:

Bad:

• Rank removal
• PvE skins in PvP
• Skillpoints required for new skills. I only have one level 80, the rest of my characters are level 2 PvP only characters, I am NOT going to be forced to PvE just to get new skills in PvP!

Good:

• Everything else.

I’m optimistic about this but I am completely diappoonted in the above.

• Ranks are being removed in favor of ladder divisions and tiers.
• It’s not just PvE gear in PvP, you’ll be able to take the gear you earn out of PvP. Do you want PvP specific gear rewards? Mention it in that discussion.
• The Tome of Knowledge will award skill points instead levels when you reach max level.

Citizens,

This Friday, December 6th, at 2pm PST (22:00 GMT), we’ll be airing the first episode of “Ready Up”, the PvP team’s new bi-weekly livestream that focuses on just about everything PvP.

In the first episode, we’ll be talking about the following things:

• John Corpening (PvP Team Coordinator) will joining me for a Q&A on today’s blog-post that details our development plans going through the end of this year and into the next. Feel free to respond below with any questions you might have on the recent blog post and we’ll try to answer as much as we can!
• Hugh Norfolk (PvP Game Designer) will be showing off the first wave of PvP reward changes going in with the December 10th update.
• Karl McLain (Skill and Balance Coordinator) and Roy Cronacher (Skills Designer) will be previewing eight brand new never-before-seen healing skills, available in PvP, WvW, and PvE!

For future episodes, we’ll be using Ready Up to preview upcoming changes, recap tournaments, get feedback on things in development, and much much more!

You can find the stream at http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2

We look forward to reading your questions, and we’ll see you Friday!

Edit: Here’s a link to the vod: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgbxrtCvJLk&feature=c4-overview&list=UUP_FgMqOxp_VsM0UfrL-DxA

Hey,

I wanted to let you guys know we are aware of this issue, and it will be fixed in an upcoming patch. Sorry for the inconvenience!

If you wish to appeal your name change, please take it up with Customer Support directly.

Because this thread is off topic for the PvP forum, it is now closed.

Hello Tyria,

Today we released a blog post covering our road map for PvP rewards. At a high level, these are our long term plans that will take us a good way into next year. Some of the phases have already been put into place and some are coming next week.

If you haven’t done so yet, please take a look at the blog post:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/player-vs-player-rewards-roadmap/

Knowing what our high level plans are, what we would love to hear from you is what you would like to see from rewards in PvP?

Here are the general CDI ground rules:
1: This initiative is all about discussion.
2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.
3: Anger and emotion will have less impact than intelligent discussion.
4: Together we will share and evolve design philosophies which will impact how we develop the game moving forward.
5: Aggression and disrespect to a fellow community member or developer will not be tolerated, and in the extreme could lead to the shutting down of the initiative.
6: The teams primary focus is work toward the development of GW2 and therefore posting of discussion and commentary may not be as frequent as you like. Please do understand that the initiative is taken very seriously by us all and that we will be reading the discussions and joining in as often as it is possible to do so.

Thanks,
John

Okay, so before we get too far into this discussion, here is something else to think about:
Would you rather see us make some number of small improvements in the short term and larger changes long term or just tear the whole thing down and start from scratch?

To be a bit more specific, we could probably do something like multicolor markers without too much work, although it is not a given, but that would likely be the extent of things for a long period of time.

Nike.2631:

Could you describe what the Dev’s feel the Commander System does well now?

(That should reduce the amount of barking up the wrong tree )

I can, and it will be brief.

The commander system provides recognizable guidance in WvW and in PvE for players to follow on the map.

It has other functions that are useful but are opaque to most players of GW2.

I’d say there is significant room for improvements of functionality as well as the possibility that a completely overhauled system would better serve the needs of the WvW community and the PvE community.

I have no idea how that response came to be sent. It’s strange on several different levels. I’m going to follow up to make sure our communications are clearer in the future.

I don’t think that the removal of use of town clothes in World-vs.-World combat should be an issue, but maybe that’s just me.

rodadams.5963:

Are we allowed to talk about how the Commander system impacts with PvE as well?

Absolutely.

Chris

I think at this point it would be good to make sure that everyone reading this thread has read this post about the Flamekissed Armor and the changes that are coming.

As background: Players expressed significant concerns about the appearance of the Flamekissed armor. Their concerns were reviewed and found to be fair and justified. As a result, the devs decided to make a change to the armor set even knowing that some percentage of players would prefer that a change not be made. This is similar to any sort of change. For example, with each game balance, some players think a skill is just fine and others believe it to be overpowered. In the end, the devs make a decision based on what is best for the game, as they have done here.

Ultimately, the armor will look different than it does now. It will look sufficiently different from the Tier 3 Cultural Armor to allow each of those sets their unique place in the game world. And those who do not like the new armor will be able to retrieve their gems.

While we fully understand that not everyone will be fully satisfied with the decisions that have been made, we’re not able to offer each player a separate and personally-selected option. It’s not “I’ll keep it” and “I’ll take the new set” and “I want my gems back.” We can do some of that, but not all.

You can contact Customer Support now, or wait to see how you feel about the new armor design, as you desire.

Well, seeing as how this thread isn’t breeding any constructive comments whatsoever, I’m going to go ahead and lock it. Feel free to open up a new thread for conversation once we have something to talk about.

-Josh

Greetings all!

For the second round of the Collaborative Development Initiative, let’s discuss the functionality of the commander system in World vs. World. We’d like to know more about what the system should be doing and how we could do those things.

Rules
1: This initiative is all about discussion.
2: We will not be disclosing information pertaining to what is currently in development.
3: Anger and emotion will have less impact than intelligent discussion.
4: Together we will share and evolve design philosophies which will impact how we develop the game moving forward.
5: Aggression and disrespect to a fellow community member or developer will not be tolerated, and in the extreme could lead to the shutting down of the initiative.
6: The teams primary focus is work toward the development of GW2 and therefore posting of discussion and commentary may not be as frequent as you like. Please do understand that the initiative is taken very seriously by us all and that we will be reading the discussions and joining in as often as it is possible to do so.

In addition to the general rules above, a couple of notes about this particular topic:
1: Try to keep in mind the scarcity of resources available to work on any given thing. It’s important to not be bounded by that, but also to keep in mind that a complete overhaul of the system is much more complicated than smaller fixes.
2: Please provide specific examples of how you currently use the system, if you have them. And how you would like it to better serve your needs.
3: As with anything WvW related, remember that one of the foremost concerns we have is making sure that any system can’t be abused to create a negative play experience.

Looking forward to this! The last one went really well – Supcutie and Reevzy too strong.

We should probably wait to start this discussion until after the blog.

-Josh

Patience, young Padawans.

Thanks for your feedback. Chris did a nice job summarizing steps going forward so I will leave it at that.

The blog post on rewards is coming out today so once that is up we can start up a new topic to discuss rewards in PvP.

John

I’m on vacation. I think it is today but don’t know when. Be patient.

In a attempt to make this discussion a bit less hostile because I’m not sure what is so contentious here I’ll chime in a bit with some of the game design reasoning for what we show.

1) Having a bunch of hidden stuff is generally bad. Being able to keep track of hidden stuff doesn’t really improve the skill cap of the game in a good way. It just creates a bunch of confusion for most players and a bunch of not fun management for those that can deal with it. I would rather their skill was being used in more controllable areas of the game that place skillful and fun demands on those players.

2) There is a cutoff for what we can show both from a UI standpoint and from a technical standpoint and from a design standpoint.

• UI: We want a glance at an enemy to provide the most important information possible and not be full of clutter. You can see first hand (skill effects) how clutter can detract from a game and this was one area where I think we succeeded in keeping clutter down. If we show endurance, what else do we want to show and how slippery is that slope.
• Technically: We want to limit the amount of information that your computer needs to have in order to play the game. This means that players with lower bandwidth can still play the game without requiring the server to relay too much information to them. The argument that I have more bandwidth and want to turn it is not going to work here because we build an environment and establish the minimum requirements to enter that environment and then it is our job to make sure not to design things that take away from the equitable nature of the game.
• Design: Once you start considering these two elements design comes in and has to make judgement calls about what is important. We have to weigh all UI clutter and other screen clutter, not just health only vs health + endurance. We have to weigh all technical limitations not just the cost of sending endurance to each client but what things are necessary so that we can save up for showing things that absolutely are necessary. Now for endurance in particular we take into account things like how static something is. Health is pretty slow moving, relatively speaking to computer cycles and network packets sent. Endurance on the other hand is very transient. It can go from full to empty to full again in a few seconds based on differing factors that have already been mentioned in this thread. For example you might see someone at low endurance so you fire a spell knowing they can’t dodge, but before you finish casting they could weapon swap, refill half way and have a dodge available. This is going to cause players to make decisions based on it that are in actually lacking the full information that they need to really make that decision anyway.

Hopefully that gives you guys some insight into how stuff like this works. For endurance in particular these different factors led us to not report it and leave it off of the UI because we decided to make that trade off in order to make other design decisions. This stuff cascades very quickly and is a large part of the complexity that is the game design of a game as large as Guild Wars 2.

Jon

It’s not a bug, just a poorly phrased objective. You need to kill all of the centaurs to complete the “Create diversions by detonating some of the powder” objective.

Marjory’s Helper Dee is still in the Thunder Ridge Camp and Sergeant Walters, inside the Tower of Nightmares, has also started trading spores.

AcFiBu.9624:

So when the ranks become account bound. Say my total rank is 400. does that mean I have 400 points to put into each character, or does it mean I have 400 points to split between all my characters.

It means that you have 400 points for each character and can spend them however you want on each.