Guild Wars 2

Just wanted to pop in and say that Ben Arnold (who built the new bloomhunger) and I have been keeping an eye on this thread since we released the updated Swamp. While I can’t promise anything, I can say we agree that the fight could use a bit more tuning to bring in line with the difficulty level we’d like to achieve while still being a fun experience for new and veteran players alike.

When we have more information to share, you’ll be the first to know. For now, know that your thoughts are not falling on deaf ears.

SPESHAL.9106:

The first obvious issue is matching premades with solo players.

Making leagues solo/duo queue is something we’ve discussed. We’re open to doing a beta of it, but we’d likely put it to a poll and have the community decide. We probably wouldn’t run a premade-only arena at the same time as there’s not enough 5-mans actively q’ing during a season to make the queue times reasonable.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a server crash.
• Fixed an issue that caused visual oddities with the Anniversary Mail Carrier.

elainom, Gaberen, you both should be unstuck now.

Thanks Reggado. You are unstuck now.

Thanks!

Dylox you should be unstuck now.

Ysabet, please try again. You were definitely stuck in a pvp match (but should be cleared now).

You should be good to go now Weasel Chops.

Cynz.9437:

Oh Grouch, can you guys help us with those with coming changes while you are at it? They just pile up and pile up and pile up

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed a bug that caused the Legendary Defenders at the blue base to be on the incorrect team.
• Fixed a bug in which Air Keep shrines in the Desert borderlands were sometimes on the incorrect team. The shrines should now appear on the correct team or correct themselves when someone from the correct team uses them.

*08/23/16 – Late Notes *
Fractals of the Mists:

Mistlock Observatory

• Added a new High-Level Infusion Alterations tab to INFUZ-5959 for breaking down and exchanging +16 Agony Infusions and higher.

World vs. World:

• Fixed a bug in which walls would sometimes not appear and were missing collision.
• The repair hammer beta has ended.
  • Repair hammers may no longer be purchased from the tricks and traps vendor.
  • Repair hammers are now junk items that can be sold.

Warrior:

• Plant Standard: Fixed a bug that prevented this skill from functioning correctly.

It should work for you now Dirame.8521.

Thanks!

Zui.9245:

Josh, although you’re attempting to create the most “balanced” teams possible, it just isn’t working very well. Perhaps this is due to low population, but my idea of a balanced game is one where my MMR is similar to that of everyone on my team, and similar to that of everyone on the other team. Another possibility is highly distorted MMRs from S2/S3 matchmaking style.

However, what I’m seeing is there are rather extreme skill variances. These extreme skill variances are not fun, and don’t lead to very balanced matches, even if 50/50 win/loss is being achieved as a byproduct of the matchmaking. There are way too many matches that are blowouts.

And the events that take place in the matches are often baffling, to say the least. I’ve had a match where the other team triocapped (? – they capped their home, and the other 2 players were nearish there and not doing anything else, so ???) their home and sent 2 mid; I capped our home, and by the time I was halfway to mid (on Legacy, as a Thief) our 4 players at mid were all dead. These kinds of matches, where you need to anticipate the mode of failure from your team being extremely clueless or otherwise bad at PvP in order to win, are unfortunately the majority of all matches I’ve played thus far in the season. And the flipside of this is, you also have to try and find the bad players on the other team and figure out how to exploit them in order to win, as well.

I’d really like to be playing against people of similar skill level to me, and with people of similar skill level to me. Creating balanced teams with such wide skill gaps simply isn’t fun, and it’s also not really helping me improve as a player in any meaningful sense.

Perhaps an MMR reset is in order? Perhaps expanding the player pool will help with this? I don’t know. But if the matchmaking system’s goal is just to create “balanced” games like it currently is doing, without regard to wide skill gaps, I fear that nothing will change. And if nothing changes, you’re going to bleed more competent players who simply cannot enjoy the current style of matches that are being produced.

MMR being adversely affected by S2/S3 style matchmaking is something we’ve been discussing – we’re evaluating a few different options to address it.

As for your other points, take a look at my recent post history – I’ve been discussing some of the problem areas we’re looking to hit in various threads.

Y’all should be freed now. Please let me know if this is not the case.

Thanks!

You should be unstuck now Dofty.9814.

Thanks!

I’ve freed everyone in this thread up to this post.

Thanks!

I’ve freed everyone in this thread (up to this post). I’ll check other threads. Please post here if you are still stuck.

Thanks!

I’m freeing people right now. Stand by….

This is not released content and is not intended. It will be addressed.

Bug Fix

• Fixed a server crash.

We’ve been talking about personal score a bit. I’m personally of the opinion that it isn’t representative of a player’s effort in a given match, and it also can be incredibly misleading and potentially lead to bad gameplay habits (5-capping home).

If you were to redesign personal score, what would you do? Does it track different types of stats? Would you want your personal stats displayed to other players?

Mel.8495:

more skill based? I think it is too hard to reach legendary
can you sell a legendary division booster in the gem store? I would pay 8000 gems for it

Not everyone belongs in legendary – it should be hard to get into.

As for the second question – no.

Hi there,

First, here’s the a recent post on the topic:

Gaile Gray.6029:

With the start of Season 4, we’ll be returning to Season 1’s style of matchmaking which focuses on creating the most balanced teams from the players queueing within your pip range. This change may widen the skill range of players in each division, but we feel that increased match quality is worth the trade-off of reduced prestige for this season. During Season 2 and 3 we added two league features that greatly impacted your ability to climb: start-of-season division placement based on previous season performance and win/lose streak pips, and both of these features will remain enabled for Season 4.

Season 4 matchmaking is already using MMR to create the most balanced teams possible. Teams are no longer “stacked” as they were in Season 2 and 3.

The problem (that we’re solving for S5) is that we’re currently searching for players close to your division to match you against. This means that the pool of players that we can pull from to create a match is much smaller than if we were using the entire pool of players. A player may have a high-enough MMR to put them in the top 100, but if they’re in Sapphire they’re only going to get matched with players that are in or around Sapphire. Season 5 will use the entire pool of players for creating matches – this should help the system create more balanced matches and improve queue times.

As for the “forced 50/50”, there’s nothing on the backend that forces a certain win-rate. This is a byproduct of your MMR settling.

There is indeed a reason. That reason being… it’s a bug. I’ll get that fixed.

We’ve disabled an NPC that was causing this map crash, so it should be fixed for now. Sorry about the inconvenience!

The trading post is back up. All services are now restored.

Anyone experiencing an error trying to access the game or trading post, give it a few minutes for timeouts to clear, and contact us if there’s still a problem.

Thank you all for your patience today!

Mo

A few threads have been created giving input on the roll-back that took place yesterday. I have merged them into this thread.

I want to let you know that nearly all reversals and replacements have been made. The CS Team did this in a matter of hours, and given the nature of this situation, that’s pretty impressive! If you have questions about your account, please submit a ticket or update your ticket. However, do check your account before doing so because the vast majority of players have been taken care of and are good to go.

Thanks.

I have to say your positive comments and support have been wonderful. I mean, this is Mo’s thread, but I’m going to jump in and say “thanks” for that.

Pro Tip: If you’ve been sitting at the log-in screen, you may continue to get the “Can’t log in” message even though the game is accessible. Close the game completely and start over. Success!

See you in the game!

The log-in servers are offline, but I think the space time continuum is ok.

We’ll share more info as we have it.

In order to correct the issue that occurred earlier today, we need to take the forum log-in system offline for a short while to allow continued work on the issue and prepare for the roll-back. You will be able to read the forums while log-in is unavailable.

Our immediate focus, besides scoring, was to bring the Desert Borderlands map back, in the mixed borderland setup, that the community recently voted for.

Now that both maps are available to players, at all times, we can begin deciding if we want bloodlust to become a feature in Desert.

We didn’t want to release Desert and scoring at the same time because we wanted to reduce the risk of something going wrong.

That being said, we are still testing how the scoring changes will impact performance and it is still our top priority.

We have a change that is going in (probably not today, but tomorrow, since we are trying to solve the soulbound issue) that should fix shrines if they end up in a state where they work for the wrong team.

This is an update to the situation where soulbound items have been incorrectly soulbound to the wrong characters. After further investigation we’ve determined that there is damage to almost all character records that were played this morning, not just to those who transferred soulbound items to or from a bank. To repair the damage, we will have to roll back the state of the game and characters to prior to this morning’s release.

No one wants to lose a play session’s progress. We apologize for this. I’m sure you’ll also have questions about exactly what a rollback means to you. The general answer is that everything about the game state, including things like trading post transactions, will be restored to how it was prior to this morning’s release. The only unusual case will be that if you purchased the game or purchased gems this morning, you’ll still get your purchase.

The process of rolling back and then validating everything to bring the game back up will take hours. We’ll keep you updated. There will be a period of time when these forums will be unavailable, but we’ll post updates through other channels.

Mo

We have brought down the servers for an unscheduled maintenance. We will notify you when the maintenance is over.

We apologize for the inconvenience. The team is working on this bug.

We definitely are working on this. Another similar post here. We’ll close this one and try to keep the conversation focused in the one thread.

Thanks for your patience as we get this resolved!

The team is actively working on this issue. Thanks for the reports and the extra details. We’ll get this bug smooshed as soon as possible!

Wargameur.6950:

Come on guys stop beeing all salty after we got a dev answer.

Josh, I suppose you won’t give us an answer about what are the change. But can you at least give us the areas ? Is it a change about the MMR, pips system, leagues, seasons ?

It’s too early to give concrete details. First we need to finish up development and then run through our internal “it is ready to ship?” process.

In short, we agree with a lot of what has been discussed on these forums. Leagues need to do better in the prestige department, and the pip system can’t really support that. If you’re in legendary, for example, you should truly be in the highest percentiles in terms of player skill. Leagues also need to feel more rewarding, especially once you’ve landed in your correct division. In the current system, the rate at which you earn rewards slows down significantly as your climb becomes more difficult in the later divisions – but you should still be rewarded for playing in your correct division, even if you can’t progress any further.

Another area of focus for the team is improving match quality. I can’t go into detail here (it will be better explained once we can talk about the entire scope of changes), but I wanted to let you know it’s a priority.

-Grouch

08/23/2016 – August 23 Release Notes
New Activity: Basket Brawl
Citizens of Tyria! The Captain’s Council is happy to announce Tyria’s newest and greatest sport, basket brawl! The council has sponsored a public court for all to use for the next two weeks. Speak to Morris Podaulff, our first appointed commissioner of basket brawl, in the Grand Piazza to try it today!
World Polish

• Cursed Shore
  • Fixed a bug that caused the corrupted statues of the gods to fire at the wrong times and display the wrong effects.
• Straits of Devastation
  • Fixed a bug that caused the content guide to direct players to an unexplored map sector when all map sectors were already explored.
  • Fixed a bug that caused the corrupted statues of the gods to fire at the wrong times and display the wrong effects.
• Tangled Depths
  • Moved the locations where some chak sappers appear to keep them out of the walls in the chak tunnels.

General

• Flame Legion Effigy: Fixed a bug that cause this creature’s portrait to cover its target information.
• Dragon’s Stand: Fixed a bug that caused the zone name to be displayed twice on the map.
• Fixed a bug that prevented hungry cats from meowing at players.
• Tremors are coming from the north.

Raids

• Stronghold of the Faithful
  • Keep Construct
    • Added a ring effect to the death explosion of projections to help clarify their radii.
    • Fixate applied by projections now has a longer duration and will resolve itself better to prevent target swapping. Stealth and similar effects, as well as being downed, will continue to remove Fixate.
    • Fixate applied by projections now lasts 5 minutes, up from 90 seconds.
  • Xera
    • Removed erroneous collision on the center tower that caused players to get stuck inside if they missed the ley line.
    • Players will have their gliders disengaged if they somehow manage to jettison their way into the stratosphere.

Structured Player vs. Player
General

• Updated the Wall of Champions.
• Updated the Revenge of the Capricorn map layout.
  • In the red and blue bases, removed the house in the center to increase visibility while in spawn.
  • In the red and blue bases, adjusted the respawn radius and location to be consistent on both sides.
  • Added a wall to block visibility in the blue base’s side exit, making it consistent with the red base’s side exit.
  • On the path from the blue base to the bazaar, removed the beached ship and replaced it with a ramp.
  • On the path from the red base to center of the map, removed the wall drop-off and replaced it with a ramp.
  • At the center point, made the jump to get up to the ledge more consistent for both sides.
• Players can leave matches during the 15-second team party phase if they do not opt in to joining a party.

World vs. World
General

• There are now mixed borderlands!
  • The red borderlands are now always the Desert borderlands, and the green and blue borderlands are now always the Alpine borderlands.
• Added green and orange commander tags.
• Fixed a bug in which guild golem blueprints would not refund players the blueprint correctly.
• Shortened the leash range on WvW keep lords.

Desert

• Added a new hay bale to the southeast side of the Desert borderlands.

The following changes have been made to the Desert borderlands since it was last in the game. These changes have appeared in previous release notes.

• Camps: Reduced the number of base guards from 4 to 3.
• Camps: Base guards are now a combination of both scouts and guards.
• Camps: Guards have been moved inside the capture circle.
• Southeast Camp: Fixed a bug in which the guards weren’t sharing hate properly.
• North Camp: The capture point’s size has been increased, and it is now rectangular.
• Fixed a bug with the teleporter on the dunes above the Fire Keep.
• Fixed a bug with automatic blessing at the east Earth Shrine.
• Fixed a bug with a jump pad on the north side of the Air Keep.
• Fixed a bug with a floating mortar in the Air Keep.
• Changed the jump platforms at the Air Keep so that they launch players similarly to how jump mushrooms work in the jungle maps.
  • Removed some of the jump platforms since the new jump platforms launch players farther.

BLACK LION TRADING COMPANY GEM STORE
New Items and Promotions

• For a limited time only, the Peacock Scepter is available in the Style category of the Gem Store for 600 gems.
• A new Mini Garm is available in the Toys category of the Gem Store for 350 gems.
• A new Bloodstone weapon set is available from Black Lion Weapons Specialists for the limited-time price of 1 complete Black Lion Claim Ticket from a Black Lion Chest. Keys are available in the Special category of the Gem Store for 125 gems each.

You’ll still be able to get the wings, even with the considerable league changes coming with Season 5.

misterman.1530:

therapite.3645:

DGraves.3720:

“Except Quebec.”

Why me?

DGraves, here’s an external article about why Quebec is always excluded from these things.

http://contests.about.com/od/sweepstakes101/f/VoidinQuebec.htm

Sorry no one loves you there </3

As a Canadian, I would add to that: the company would also need to translate everything into french (all promotional materials, documentation that goes with the prize, everything).

Exactly. We’re not delighted with the restriction, at all, and we’d love to include Quebec, but it’s not practical to do so with the laws/restrictions in that province.

Where are you that you’re not being logged out? I tried it in WvW and got kicked, and the engineer just tried it in open game

Thanks for the report! We’re looking into it.

No ETA on when a fix will arrive just yet.

We do know about this and have a bug assigned to an engineer to look at the issue.

Just reproed this with German text, you guys are awesome and tons of help! That narrowed everything down dramatically.

Did anyone get this crash who has never switched their account to German?

I just tried and it didn’t happen, which means it’s not something obvious, that would be too easy. Can you and anyone you talk to please put notes into the crash pop up? All of the information you can give is useful.

I’ll follow up on the crash tomorrow morning. The ‘only sometimes’ crashes are the worst but we take all of them seriously.

Update:

• I’ve sent out some of the responses tonight, but will need to do more early next week.
• Ticket requests submitted on the forums are answered on the forums. (The e-mail address was requested for potential verification purposes, but we will not be e-mailing forum folks.) Please check your PMs and that’s where you will see if you have been part of the random drawing.
• Those who contacted me via the guilds e-mail address will receive a response through e-mail. If I sent you questions, you’re not confirmed, so please answer the question(s) and I’ll be able to let you know your guild’s status when I hear back.
• Guilds — If you can respond to say you received my mail even if it doesn’t have questions, that would be great, too
• Please note that we have received many requests, and we’re capped at a specific number. (Don’t want to have a fist fight over the last nacho chip, right? ) If you or someone in your group cannot attend, please let me know so we can invite someone else.
• Because we may have a few last-minute spaces, you may want to check your forum PMs the night before the party, just in case something opened up.
• The party is not on PAX property, and you do not need a PAX ticket to attend the party.
• Thank you for understanding that we can’t include everyone, as much as we love you all!

Torwne.1325:

Someone please! GO to this event and stand by the restroom. Everytime a Dev tries to go in stop them and ask if they would like to exit to Dragon Stand.

And that is positively evil. But a little clever, too.