Guild Wars 2

Tanner Blackfeather.6509:

I just got bumped straight from “Forging the Pact” to “The Battle of Fort Trinity”.
Suspecting this has to do with joining others story instances.

Hard to tell without knowing more details. PM me if you want to provide them.

It’s not been cut. I was out last week at Emerald City Comicon, and this week we’re taking a break while I prepare the 4/22 post-spring-update show.

You guys make a good point. Doing him in isn’t an option. But seriously, a swift kick in the pants? I’ll volunteer!

Nope.

As a short explanation, the data path looks roughly like this:

[map instance server] ? [database] → [API account/character cache] → [API frontend]

When you’re logged in and on a map, the map instance server you’re connected to has authoritative control over your character data. It only writes it back to the database when certain events occur. The database is read by an API backend component that can parse the account/character data; it’s cached by this component for ~5 minutes so that API requests can’t negatively affect game systems. Finally, the API frontend makes a request to the API backend whenever someone wants the data.

To get the data immediately, the API components would have to talk directly to the map instance servers — we don’t do this because the API is intentionally decoupled from all the game systems so that the API can independently catch fire and burn down without affecting anything else. (additionally, this is one of the main reasons why the API will ever only be read-only, for the most part).

I’m making some sweeping generalizations here, but that’s the rough explanation.

Hoping to turn that on a couple of days after the next patch.

This game also has a global TP, not a server based TP. As far as I know, there isn’t another game TP that’s within an order of magnitude of scale of this one.

The short answer is “5 minutes” for anything reading account/character data.

Hi all,

Two weeks ago I posted that we were starting integration and final testing for the Spring Quarterly Update. It’s been two busy weeks. The quarterly update is through QA and looking good. We’re going to announce the release date tomorrow.

As we prep for release, you’ll notice that we’re not doing the series of advance blog posts that we had done for some prior releases. Hopefully that’s not too surprising; I’ve written a few times since taking this role that I think our job is to delight you with what we ship, not with talk and promises.

With everything prepped now, let’s have some fun together and see some hints of what’s coming, and then we’ll see you in the game on release day.

Mo

darkwarrior — just want to say I had exactly the same feeling about that episode. I was ticked that I had to let Phlunt get away with his greedy, selfish nonsense, and I — like Taimi (whom I love) — wanted to instead give him a swift kick in the pants.

Today’s show was the first we’ve pre-recorded. We wanted to try this out because pre-recording allows Lizzie and me to be in Twitch chat with the viewers, talking about the art and having fun with our players. Let us know what you think about the format. While we’re not presenting the content in real-time, we really enjoyed the live-ness of the interaction!

Next Show: Wednesday, May 18 — Noon Pacific time.

Aidan Savage.2078:

John Smith.4610:

Ensign.2189:

Putting a time limit on orders is irrelevant and if anything would only make markets less fluid. This is inconvenient and distortionary with no upside as I can see it.

In game market tools? I could take it or leave it. Things like average price over the past 24 hours would be a useful tool, but pulling full graphic price histories are better served by 3rd party sites – that’s not always needed, and would be a big strain on the server to pull regularly whenever anyone looks at an item. There’s an important trade-off between being informative and keeping your UI parsimonious, and I don’t have a strong opinion on the state of the in-game UI in that regard.

Ensign: making me type less since 2013

You should post more so we dont think you’re a reanimated corpse quietly mucking around in databases

This is not the place for your weird prejudices against Reanimated Americans.

The load sceeen makes sense. Players are connected before the game is actually playable, but we can tell the difference. I’ll check tomorrow.

Ensign.2189:

Putting a time limit on orders is irrelevant and if anything would only make markets less fluid. This is inconvenient and distortionary with no upside as I can see it.

In game market tools? I could take it or leave it. Things like average price over the past 24 hours would be a useful tool, but pulling full graphic price histories are better served by 3rd party sites – that’s not always needed, and would be a big strain on the server to pull regularly whenever anyone looks at an item. There’s an important trade-off between being informative and keeping your UI parsimonious, and I don’t have a strong opinion on the state of the in-game UI in that regard.

Ensign: making me type less since 2013

I reduced the number of guards to be consistent with EB and ABL.

EB & ABL camps start with 1 Supervisor, 2 Scouts and 1 Guard
DBL camps started with 1 Supervisor and 4 Guards

Just deployed the fix. For the interested, the global sums were including kills/deaths from Obsidian Sanctum, which isn’t listed in the maps array (also OS doesn’t count towards PPK when PPK is enabled).

Sorry about that

Khristophoros.7194:

John Smith.4610:

This isn’t flood control or anti-bot, it’s a technical limitation. If we could reduce it we would.

I’ve said this elsewhere before, but I don’t remember where.

I suggest improving/clarifying the error message so people don’t get the impression that they’ve tripped bot detection.

This is good feedback.

They really shouldn’t — the map totals are computed on the API frontend as the sum of all the maps. The per-map kills/deaths are the authoritative values. I’m gonna track down why this is happening and have it fixed sometime this week. Here’s a tracking issue.

Lycan.8327:

Hi guys, I’m not sure if I am missing something but since starting on API development in a nodeJs app recently, I’ve not been able to manage getting images to work. I would love it if someone could please point me to resources that show/explain how images are retrieved and how to display them?

What images in particular are you looking to retrieve? Most v2 endpoints that have icons/images have the fully qualified URL. For the v1 endpoints that return icon_file_id and icon_file_signature, the URL can be constructed via “https://render.guildwars2.com/file/$icon_file_signature/$icon_file_id.png”.

Lycan.8327:

also is there currently (or future plans) to be able to display our character image in some form on the site?

There are plans but it’s more of a personal wish upon a star at this point. I basically need to integrate a software renderer into the game engine, then lift only the parts responsible for rendering into a server. I’m not really a server programmer nor do I know anything about graphics programming, so it’s like a six-month project for me that I don’t know when I’ll have time for.

It would be amazing though.

EphemeralWallaby.7643:

Tl;dr intentional mechanics that allow pet kills to give experience and loot =/= permission to afk farm.

This is absolutely correct.

If your pets are doing the killing and your mastery is doing the looting; you’re okay as far as GMs are concerned. This does not mean design can’t/won’t/should/shouldn’t update the system as it works today.

This isn’t flood control or anti-bot, it’s a technical limitation. If we could reduce it we would.

I’ve said this elsewhere before, but I don’t remember where.

insanemaniac.2456:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Players must be disconnected for 2 minutes (total) for it to register as an abandon.

does “at character select” count towards this time? not disconnected, not in game, definitely ruining a match.

Anything outside of the match instance counts as disconnect time.

Players must be disconnected for 2 minutes (total) for it to register as an abandon.

In all seriousness though, thanks for bringing this up. I’d been meaning to fix this for a while, but it fell off my radar in light of higher priority issues.

Good news: This is now fixed.
Bad news?: This is fixed in the build where we disable Desert BL and bring back Alpine BL

• DBL Camps: Reduced the number of base guards from 4 to 3.
• DBL Camps: Base guards are now a combination of both Scout and Guard NPCs.
• DBL Camps: Guards have been moved inside the capture circle.

Hi Argi,

The matter at hand is between your team and ESL, and as such should be routed through their communication channels. These forums are not frequented by ESL.

That said, I am looking into the situation personally and look forward to getting to the bottom of this.

The API backend doesn’t talk to a relational database — it talks to a backend server which basically serializes bits of the .dat file to XML/JSON. The canonical approach is to dump the data into a relational format and feed it to a fulltext index; the nature of our backend architecture currently makes this fairly difficult technically.

I think there are some third-party services which provide such an API, though I can’t recall which ones.

Eimhac.5894:

If you could map Chat/Combatlog-information inside this mumble mem-file. We would be able to build stuff like “better” combat announcements, in combat time tracker for raids or even a dps calculation.

The MumbleLink format is unsuitable for chat logs. The format is fairly rigid and really only meant for data that can be read/written semi-atomically (e.g., camera position and such). Adding more fields to the exposed data runs into both space and synchronization issues (dirty reads are already a thing that applications have to work around).

Hail friends,

I wanted to let you know that a fix for this was identified and once we’ve verified the fix is solid, it will be released. Thanks!

Here’s a link to that discussion, Emyrina: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/hot/How-is-guild-harvesting-tracked

This issue crept up again last night, but as of about 7:00 AM this morning (Pacific time, Saturday) it has been resolved. The Server Team is keeping a close eye on this situation. Thanks for your patience and information!

Masakari — could you please check again? SMS should be enabled and operating properly. I’d really appreciate your confirmation on that, if you would be so kind.

Thanks.

I am super happy to see people so excited about the mist champions. I can’t promise that any of the suggestion will make it into the game, but I have written down all of the suggestions.

We wanted to let you know that we are aware that a few players are experiencing log-in issues. The Error Code involved is 4:1022:8061:393 and players in both North America and Europe have reported this issue.

This matter is under investigation and will be addressed as quickly as possible.

Edit: I change “some” to “a few” because it appears a very small number are impacted. The focus on fixing this remains a priority, however.

We only recently uncovered what was causing this, and are working on a fix. The issue occurs when attacking any wide breakable gadget (wall/gate) that is positioned on a diagonal. The volume in which a hit is detected ends up being larger than is intended.

Alright, it’s about time I commented on this.

As of now we don’t have a problem with players doing this. While the late join is unintended, if players want to pay for this service, that’s fine. It does trivialize the skins some, but this isn’t any different than the skins from purchasing a raid run or a dungeon run (which we also are ok with). As long as the transaction is completed and players are getting what they paid for, fine.

However, that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to fix this. A fix is in the works right now, and that fix may happen before SAB closes or be there for the next time the festival opens.

This is allowed behavior; as it was designed to function that way.

Some of our community organizers have shown interest in running it – and I’d certainly like to see it happen again this summer. The reward boxes from the event need to be reworked a bit before ToL4, mostly to adjust for a new single-day format.

Melanion.4892:

I was directed to this thread for information about the changes to the desert borderlands. I am not finding much information. Idk why I was directed here…

I think you were referred here because of these statements and a link to a thread that may be of interest to you, as well:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Two weeks ago we polled the WvW community about Desert versus Alpine borderlands. The majority of players asked us to bring Alpine back. We’ll do that. It actually takes quite a bit of time to dust off old content and bring it up to the current game state, so it won’t happen in time for the quarterly release. Instead we’ll launch the quarterly update with improvements to Desert, use that as an opportunity to get the community’s feedback on those changes, then we’ll swap to Alpine when it’s ready. Changing borderlands maps like this will disrupt matches in progress, but we think that making changes on live servers, where everyone can test, is worth the cost.

I wanted to give this early heads-up about these areas. You already know quite a bit more about the things we’re working on for the April Quarterly Update, but I’ll stop here for now. I think our jobs are to delight you with what we ship, not with big talk or big promises. So hang tight. Release day will be here soon enough.

That is really useful information, thank you! I’ll give it a shot with potatoes though I"m sure it’s not that simple. If your friend could get me information, or at least be ok with giving me his character name, that would be helpful in tracking down what is going on.

thanks!

Currently we are tracking a bug on live that allows players who do not have the Gliding Mastery to glide while in Guild Halls. Naturally, that’s not an intended feature of the game, and a fix that will correct it will go live with our next update. Until then we hope that everyone who does not currently have gliding enjoys the experience for the time being.

Bug Fix:

• Fixed a bug that caused graphical issues with the Super Adventure Glider.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Endless Soul.5178:

Gaile Gray.6029:

….the bloomin’ glider….

Flower-shaped-fried-onion-dish glider confirmed!

Aye, right. Because that is going to happen.

Although… hmmm… food-related gliders? Who doesn’t want to soar over Tangled Depths in a glider shaped like a pulled pork sandwich or a platter of eggs benedict? ~lol~

Or maybe a condiment glider.

A glider shaped like a packet of salt.

Ok, I snorted.

Endless Soul.5178:

Gaile Gray.6029:

….the bloomin’ glider….

Flower-shaped-fried-onion-dish glider confirmed!

Aye, right. Because that is going to happen.

Although… hmmm… food-related gliders? Who doesn’t want to soar over Tangled Depths in a glider shaped like a pulled pork sandwich or a platter of eggs benedict? ~lol~

I was in that very map last night, and as lightly and quickly as I tapped the jump bar, my glider did deploy. I got a message about this — may in fact have been from the OP in this thread — and I suggested a discussion here on the forums.

Our situation may be our keyboards, where they can’t distinguish a quick tap from a holding tap. But I can confirm that for some of us, at least, the bloomin’ glider can result in our untimely deaths!

Thanks, got the info I need. The dupe events in-game are an artifact of the guild inventory bits using the same system as old-style upgrades. I’m not really sure if that can be fixed.

Those events returned by the API are being created on the game server with a zero’d user id which is why they’re not being correctly emitted. I’ll raise the issue with someone who’s knowledgeable about that; I’m not sure if/when it’ll be fixed though.

Sorry to bump an old thread but we have an open bug on this. Is it still happening? If so what are you mailing? We’re having trouble reproducing the issue.

thanks!

No.

We aren’t changing anything regarding the layout of the map.

Yes.

That said, we’ll be increasing the cooldowns on all tactics by 5-10 minutes. Also, once the scribing costs come down, as part of the april build, we can start looking at rebalancing their actual effects as well.