Guild Wars 2

Sariel V.7024:

Do you know how recently that was changed?

I believe the SSL cipher suite was changed for the Dallas datacenter on Jan 22nd; I think the old cipher suite is still in use in the Frankfurt datacenter temporarily (but might be wrong about that).

Grymlocke.1067:

Really?
People have issues with disconnections and crashes usually only after arena-net does patches and the first thing you point to is hardware?

No. I point to hardware issues when someone else stated that disconnects are seldom related to hardware. My cases prove that such a statement is not accurate, and I wanted to share in case it was helpful to others.

This has been coming up a lot recently, so I’ll post the rules all at once:

Red player 1 disconnects for 2 minutes and gets dishonor.
Red player 1 gets a desertion and loses pips no matter what the outcome of the match is.

If red team wins:
Red player 2-5 get a victory and pips.

If red team loses:
Red player 2-5 get a forfeit and do not lose pips. This still shows as a defeat in the UI.
Except:
Any red players (2-5) in the same party as red player 1 get a defeat and still loses pips. This prevents players from disconnecting to save their friends from losing pips.

The reason people still lost pips when teammates disconnected during the end of season 1 was because of a bug in desertion detection. This should not be the case for season 2 and will work as described above.

direx.8207:

@ Gaile Gray – However by that logic if lots of people are saying something on the forums or in game and we don’t see it in the patch notes is it reasonable to assume it’s not being listened to? Because that’s what it feels like much of the time. And since there’s no way to tell without dev comments what’s being payed attention to people tend to assume they’re not being listened to unless told otherwise, and then when patch notes hits and doesn’t list a change to what they were talking about it confirms they’re being ignored instead of perhaps something just not being ready to release yet.

No, it’s not reasonable to make that assumption. If changes are not made, that is in no way an indication that (1) the devs are unaware of a situation or (2) they are willfully choosing to ignore reasonable and practicable feedback.

The fact that something is not changed could be related to the fact that the suggestion is not reasonable, is not practical, or or cannot be achieved in a specific timeframe but may (or will) happen in the future.

Random examples:

• Not Reasonable: I say “Give Ranger pets +1000 to their skills!” Ok, clearly that’s just not reasonable.
• Not Possible: Someone says “Give everyone access to limitless inventory space.” This is technologically impossible. Or, someone suggests, “Give everyone who bought your base game in 2012 every expansion pack for free, forever.” That completely ignores the costs of development over the years and the general costs of keeping the lights on.
• Not in This Timeframe: Someone says “Make changes to ZYX!” Well, as you know, changes happen all the time, and the fact they didn’t happen in January doesn’t mean they are dead in the water, simply that more time is needed to develop them.

As I said, those were off-the-cuff examples, but the main point is that feedback given is not an order placed, but an idea shared. Whether it comes to pass is dependent on many factors, as I’m sure you can appreciate.

Ellwynd.7480:

Getting feedback in posts like this is very much appreciated, it shows that you are listening, and are very much open to feedback. I really hope you do threads like this in the profession forums before the next balance change.

That sounds like a really solid idea to me! I’ll ask the balance team members if that would be helpful, or if they would prefer a single balance thread.

Thanks for the idea!

Andraus.3874:

My feedback is about how feedback actually works.

It’s great you guys ask for feedback. I really do appreciate that. However if you hang out in the forums long enough you start to feel that the feedback isn’t going anywhere. This needs to be more of an ongoing and reciprocal conversation. Out of our feedback I would expect a post addressed to the player base saying " We heard you on the following points, we will be looking into them as resources allow. [followed by a list of points]." Then perhaps later or with the same post: “Points 3,7,12, and 15 are going to be a higher priority for us. Points 5,8, and 9 may not be something that is possible. Again this information is tentative and subject to change.”

I understand the player base takes things literally so you have to be carful what you say. But it feels like we have all these threads about good feedback and very little comes out of them. I’m not sure what this disconnect is but it has become apparent to anyone that frequents the forums.

If you read this I genuinely thank you for your time and thank you for making a great game. I hope we can work together to keep it that way.

I understand your thoughts, and perhaps we will be able to do that for some topics in the future; I agree it would be great! But what’s important to note is that we all — as forum members — have a certain level of visibility into our how feedback is handled simply by our participation here on the forums and our involvement in the game.

Here’s what I mean: I’ve seen the request for “gliding in central Tyria” hundreds of times on the forums. I’ve heard it in the game a hundred times, too! So when I see it come to the game, as a player and a forum member I know that ArenaNet listened to player/forum member feedback. I don’t need someone to come and tell me that, I can actually see it in the update notes and in the game.

So while I’m not discounting — believe me, I would be absolutely the last person to discount the potential or the value of further communication; trust me on that! — I like to think of an old expression that my granny said, “The proof is in the pudding.” In this case, take that odd expression to mean that we, as players and forum members, can see through actual game development that the feedback that we give is being read, reviewed, analyzed, and often implemented!

Again I do love communication, and I positively adore when devs post, or when they ask me to post on their or their team’s behalf. But I’m also aware that communication comes through many forms, including that demonstration through actual game changes. And because of that, I like the idea of productive threads like this, which you should know will be shared with every single member of the ArenaNet team as highly-suggested reading.

Anyway, I hope that makes sense. It’s just a personal opinion, but I like to think it has a certain logic.

I’m able to successfully request from the Frankfurt datacenter, but I’m seeing errors in the logs, so something’s afoot. Looking into it some more.

EDIT: Looks to have been caused by some internal service restarts; not sure why it took so long to come back up though.

Turns out there was a mis-configuration in the Frankfurt data center! Got the relevant parties involved and they’re going to have it fixed at some point. Thanks for the report, sorry about that! (this only affects guildwars.com and isn’t related to the OP).

Asuaka.1528:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Update:

The item in question has been distributed to the impacted players, and all should now be well with the Primordial Legend achievement.

If you have individual questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Support.

Thanks for your patience!

I did not receive the item. When I reached legend I got the achievement + title but the January 26th patch removed the achievement (and the 6AP it awarded). I still have the title unlocked, but the achievement and AP are missing. Did you already send out the item to everyone or are you still in the process of sending them?

I was informed that all impacted players received the item. Please contact CS so that they can help you.

The downtime history is an interesting idea; might be beneficial to set that up.

Everything looks up from here though, and there hasn’t been a deploy in ~20 hours. Usually when there’s a hotfix parts (most) of the API goes down as the backend servers patch and restart, but since there hasn’t been one recently I’m not sure why you’d be seeing this now.

Update:

The item in question has been distributed to the impacted players, and all should now be well with the Primordial Legend achievement.

If you have individual questions, please don’t hesitate to contact Customer Support.

Thanks for your patience!

This counts as a forfeit and not a loss, though it is lumped together with defeats for the statistics UI.

Soul.9280:

Evan, the last night of League play, I saw lots of people swapping classes during the 90 seconds wait period before the match started, and I was playing in the Legendary division against many of the top players. And I did see a surprising number of people who queued as thief or warrior and then switched to something meta.

I fully expect higher-skilled players to swap more, but that is a much smaller portion of the player-base.

An important question i: Would all high-skilled players be OK with profession locking if we could ensure no stacking?

It is correct that allowing profession swapping works against matchmaking. While I don’t have hard metrics readily available, my gut tells me a relatively small percentage of the player base does this. I don’t think it would be worth while to rip out the profession scoring entirely, though we did lower its effectiveness in relation to other scoring factors.

Locking professions upon queuing gets us a couple things: Profession stacking can be completely controlled via the matchmaker, and we can start using profession MMR again which should make much more accurate matches than just using account-wide MMR.

I’m not sure how/why the missing recipes aren’t appearing. By my reading, they should have been put in the whitelist queue if they’ve been used (and I have a hard time believing they haven’t been used). Made a new github issue for this and I’m going to spend some time today rooting around in the log files to try to figure out what’s going on.

Hey all!

The removal of the ability to purchase 5 Fractal Encryption Keys at a time is a bug; it was not incorporated as an intended design change. This is not something we will address with a hotfix related to the January 26th build, but the issue will be corrected with our next release. We apologize for the inconvenience.

AFAIK the config change was made at the load balancer level, so it should affect all ArenaNet sites, including guildwars.com.

If you’re having TLS handshake errors, I highly suggest updating (or changing) your browser and seeing if that fixes the issue.

sookya.8625:

I think that the division/points of a player will not be added in /pvp/stats with this update? (or i missread/overseen some posts at github PR, I’m not that familiar with the PullRequest-Feature on Github sorry.)

That’s correct, the current division/pips of a player will not be added to /v2/pvp/stats until later (the backend support for that won’t land until the next game release). I’m hoping to get the rating_type and /v2/pvp/seasons endpoint out sometime next week.

There have been a lot of good suggestions for glider designs. Let’s use this one thread to gather them all together so the designers, programmers, and artists can see all the ideas coming in!

We’ve seen a lot of great suggestions come in lately about gliders. Whether you have ideas on a new design or a different skin suggestion, or even functionality feedback, we’d like to read your ideas.

Please feel free to post your thoughts about gliders in this thread, and I’ll include it in my next report to the devs.

(I should note that I’ve twice tried to merge some great suggestion threads into a core thread, but the process has failed. So please forgive me if your thread was lost, and do post again so we can share the ideas with the team.)

Thanks a bunch!

Galandil.9641:

Evan Lesh.3295:

The change wouldn’t have actually made class stacking better unfortunately. What was fixed was it breaking other matchmaking rules.

Can you elaborate on this point?

Before and now we get these same class-stacking results, so exactly what was changed and why?

Sure! To get in the right mindset, it helps to understand the goal of the matchmaker a bit. When comparing two rosters, we first assume they are a perfect match with a score of ‘0’. We then reduce this score for things like how far apart the ratings are, difference in party sizes, etc. This way we can decide if one roster is a better choice than another when filling up teams because one roster will have a higher score.

Before and after the change, we reduce the score of a roster if it contains profession duplicates over the desired(configurable) maximum for a team. However before the change, we were also increasing the score of a roster if it had professions that were not yet on the team. They were both trying to accomplishing the same goal.

The are three problems with the second part; the piece we removed. First, increasing the score of a roster effectively cancels out some of the negative scoring we added for other parameters. For example, a roster could have a poor rating match, but ‘oh well, they have unique professions!’ Second, the score was erroneously given to the first roster added to a team, so each profession was guaranteed to be considered unique and result in a score increase. Thirdly, the matchmaker has no choice in picking unique professions when dealing with large premades, but their rosters were still getting huge score increases because most of the time it had 5 unique professions. All combined, this meant premade rosters were getting a score increase that cancelled out most if not all negative aspects of the match up.

After this change we’ve seen the win rates of larger premades drop a noticeable amount. Now that rating differences aren’t being lost in scoring due to profession bonuses, we can see that the party rating boost was too high (which we’ve now lowered).

I’d like to say that this change was a direct result of a screenshot posted to the forums. While investigating the details of the match, I saw that a premade had a wildly abnormal score in relation to the other rosters. So thank you for the feedback!

I’ve cleared everyone so far in this thread.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Thank you for your report, we are working on a fix!

Hey all – I’m investigating. Stay tuned …

Thank you for your report, we’re looking into it!

I think we changed our TLS configuration to not use deprecated cipher suites. The certificate is unchanged, but we no longer support RC4 ciphers or MD5/SHA1 digests. That might be the issue, but I’ve no idea why that’d be a validatorexception and not something like “no suitable cipher suite” or just “handshake failure”.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed an issue in the “Defeat the Marmox Packleader and his Pack” hero challenge that prevented the Veteran Marmox Packleader from spawning.
• Squads can no longer be used in PvP matches and activities.
• Fixed a bug preventing certain party sizes from advertising in LFG.
• Fixed a collision issue that was blocking access to the Stronghold of Ebonhawke vista in Fields of Ruin.

Ranger:

• Healing Spring: Fixed an issue that prevented this skill from triggering after the trap was placed.

Thief:

• Guarded Initiation: Fixed a bug that caused this trait to grant bonus vitality.

Guardian:

• Wings of Resolve: Fixed a bug that caused this ability to be affected by movement modifiers while underwater, or when paired with the Soaring Devastation trait.

OP:

• Did you happen to take a screenshot or write down any error messages you saw?
• Did your client completely crash, or did you just get booted back to the character select screen?
• If your client did crash (rather than just disconnecting/going to character select), can you please PM me with your crash log? Instructions on getting the log are here.

Everyone else: if you get DCed or crash during the Shatter, it would be super helpful for us if you could take a screenshot of whatever error/crash message you get. If you get a crash message, you get bonus points for sending me your crash log in a PM. Thanks!

The change wouldn’t have actually made class stacking better unfortunately. What was fixed was it breaking other matchmaking rules.

Hi there,
We’re aware that this is an issue and are looking into it. It is, in fact, a bug that the new legendaries do not count towards the “Legendary Collector” achievement. Sorry for the inconvenience!

This is great info, and I like the variety of areas covered.

Thanks so much for the help so far, and I hope others will keep it coming!

Here’s the proposed endpoint changes for the rating_type (ladder type? not sure what the optimal name is) and some other misc. stuff. Will probably turn it on next week, let me know if you’ve got any feedback before then!

Every week I prepare a forum report for management. For while many of us read the forums every day, a once-a-week report is helpful to the various teams as a sort of overview of what’s happened recently and as they consider what might be a focus in the future.

I’d like to ask for some help with this week’s report, because the January 26th build was huge, and it had a lot of components that touched on nearly every part of the game. Because it did, feedback could appear in any of our sub-forums instead of in an overview thread.

So could you share (or re-share) your top reactions to the build in this thread? If you’re posted elsewhere and simply want to repost in this thread, that’s fine. But if you’ve posted a long set of comments and could give the Cliff Notes here — maybe a one-liner for each of your top several thoughts? — that would be marvelous!

I’m asking for your appraisal of the quarterly build: likes, dislikes, etc. I’d like to not veer off into debates about what wasn’t included, or suggestions about what should be coming, but a snapshot, or “This was the dinner, what’s your restaurant review of the meal?”

Thanks so much to those of you who choose to post!

Also keep in mind that players who have not played in unranked for the duration of season 1 will have more volatile ratings. This will result in some volatility at the beginning of the season break.

Computer hardware definitely can influence disconnections. I speak from experience. I was a beta tester for StarCraft (the original) and I experienced frequent — i.e., every few minutes — disconnections. After replacing a couple of obvious components, the issue of overheating continued. I partially resolved it by opening the box and blowing a fan at the machine. Interestingly, though, the culprit was not my mother board or my video card — it was a near-death’s-door power supply. Once I replaced that, things settled and I was back in business.

And while I was not experiencing a lot of disconnections in relation to GW2, I will say that I had a few, and was noting increased slowdown in GW2 during boss fights. After investigation we learned my machine — while above min spec — was pretty obviously lacking in the RAM department. Pulled the RAM, added improved components, and things are going along swimmingly now.

This is a followup to the matchmaking changes in the recent patch where we fixed a problem regarding parties getting an unintended ‘slack’ in their matchmaking parameters. Previously, parties were getting matched against a wider range of opponents. Now that parties are getting much more accurate opponents, we can see that our rating boost for pre-mades is too high and the smaller roster sizes are winning too often. We are lowering the party rating boost a small amount to account for this.

Thanks for the continued feedback on matchmaking. Your posts lead directly to investigating gaps in our data which in turn lead to improvements of the system.

Thank you all for the report, we’re looking into it!

Hey,

Can we get some Character names from you guys? I don’t need account names, just the name of one character from your account.
It would help us track down more information on this issue.

Thank you in advance!

sookya.8625:

do you have any ETA for the ladder type? Would be super awesome to realize some ideas I have in my mind..

Hmm, looks like ladder type is actually available from the backend I’m talking to. I’ll look into exposing that early next month (as well as some other things). Can’t make any guarentees on per-game pip changes, though exposing the current season standings is on the todo list.

Nabrok.9023:

The same could be accomplished with a “successful_yaks” field. For towers/keeps/castles this would be the number that arrived, and for camps it would be the number that reached their destination.

IIRC it’s stored as a number representing how much supply has been committed towards the upgrade (e.g., by workers carrying supply around) — I think the only difference is that yaks arriving now is what’s contributing the supply. It’s been awhile since I looked through that, so it might have changed since, but might as well expose that if we’re exposing current upgrades, I think.

Can you post some more details about the crash? Is it our standard “please report to ArenaNet”? If so, please post (as an attachment) the text found via the “show details” button.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Riku.4821:

I think the shatterer needs buffs. I beat him with pugs first try and had like 5 minutes left. But so far I enjoyed what I’ve seen, gliding and lunar year.

Please read this dev post to better understand your experience.

Gaile, I’ve sent in bug reports on this already, but the jump pads around mount maelstrom are currently seriously borked. Every time you jump on them, they prompt you to “train the basic gliding mastery” in order to use them.

Have you posted this somewhere here on the forums? May I have that link? I’d like to point to a thread when I pass this along. Thanks.

Hey, I suggest putting in a support ticket, there are a number of things that might be going on and I’d like to take a look for you. If you’ve already got a ticket in, just whisper me your ticket #. =)

reapex.8546:

Evan Lesh.3295:

Forfeits are reenabled. Losing a game in which a teammate received dishonor will result in a forfeit. Players partied with the dishonorable player receive a desertion on loss, but they will not get dishonor.

Could you or anyone explain this part to me? It sounds like, if we’re in a match with a player that gets dishonor “during the match” and we lose…that player will get “desertion” but they will not get dishonor. I know dishonor stops people from entering a match but what does “desertion” do to the player?

In this case the desertion flag just means you’ll get a defeat on your record instead of a forfeit which prevents league progression loss. This prevents party members from disconnecting to save their friends from losing points.

Hi there,
Unfortunately this is a system limitation with repeatable achievements. In order to show progress on your achievement, we pop a notification up for every Dragon Ball win. However the Achievement Points can only be awarded on the last “tier” of the 10-tier achievement. This means that on tiers 1-9, you’ll only see “+O Achievement Points” but on Tier 10 you’ll see “+10 Achievement Points”. Then, when you get that last win you will obtain the 10 AP as intended.

Hope this helps!

Hi there everyone!
We’ve been taking a look at what you’ve been bringing up in this thread, and have confirmed that these items are obtainable.

However! There’s some miscommunication about the “Jade Maw’s Eye Lens” and using it. You do not need to use the lens right as you get hit by the attack. When you use the lens you will get a buff with a 15m duration on your character that will allow you to collect the items you need. So, use it right before you go to fight the monsters you need to fight and you should be just fine (provided that you get hit by the attacks mentioned in the hints).

Furthermore, during our investigation we found a teeny little visual bug. Currently, the buff icon for the collection buff doesn’t appear on your buff bar (we’re working towards addressing this). This is only a visual bug, none of the items are blocked from being obtained.

Tl;DR: Use the item (Double-click or Right-click>Use both work) just before you start fighting, then get hit with the attack to Collect these items.

Sorry for the trouble, I hope this helps!

Riku.4821:

I think the shatterer needs buffs. I beat him with pugs first try and had like 5 minutes left. But so far I enjoyed what I’ve seen, gliding and lunar year.

Please read this dev post to better understand your experience.

Bug Fixes:

General

• Fixed a client crash.
• When each player in a raid enters combat, their boon prioritization will be locked in based on the composition of the subgroup they are currently in. That prioritization will not change until the player has left combat, even if their subgroup composition changes while they are in combat.
• Added messaging for swapping squads in the Enhanced Squad UI.
• Fixed the Shatterer’s defiance bar text.

Skills and Traits:

• Necromancer:
  • Wells: Fixed an issue that caused these abilities to go on full recharge when interrupted.

• Dragonhunter:
  • Wings of Resolve: This ability is no longer able to be activated in midair.

• Warrior:
  • Wild Blow: Fixed an issue that caused Wild Blow to not remove all weakness.

• Thief:
  • Flanking Strikes: Fixed a bug that caused this trait to not have a reduced cooldown when paired with Trickster.
  • Staff Autoattack—Staff Strike, Staff Bash, Punishing Strikes: Increased the damage by 36%, 15%, and 33% respectively.

• Ranger:
  • Moment of Clarity: The effectiveness of this trait has been reduced from 100% stun and daze durations to 50% stun and daze durations.

• Druid:
  • Ancestral Grace: This ability is no longer able to be used in midair.

• Elementalist:
  • Ride the Lightning: This ability is no longer able to be used in midair.

• Engineer:
  • Static Shot: Fixed a bug that prevented the correct number of confusion stacks from displaying when the Chemical Rounds trait was equipped.

• Guardian:
  • Shield of Courage: Added text to the effect description to indicate the active block.
  • Smite Conditions: Fixed an issue that was causing this skill to remove only 1 condition instead of 2.

Hey,

So I mentioned it in the blog and a couple press interviews, but just to reiterate it here, it was never our intention to make succeeding The Shatterer event exceptionally difficult. We want players coordinating with only map chat, with strangers, to be able to complete the event. That said, some of the achievements, like the “Smash the Dragon” one (complete The Shatterer event without him ever taking off IE break him every time his break bar activates) will take more coordination. It is harder to break him than it is to kill him. It is kitten harder to break him every time than it is to kill him.

Also, keep in mind that you guys are playing it the day it comes out, with upwards of 100 players. Maps are consistently full, which makes me super happy to see, but is not going to be the reality of the fight in 6 months or 2 years down the road. Yes, the event, mobs and breakbars all scale, but there are some things that are just going to be inherently easier with a massive army of players. The biggest one being, you guys are going to be able to spread out and kill the pulsating crystals with greater ease than a group of, say, 25 players, even though the breakbars and health of those crystals scale. Same with keeping Adds down, or just general DPS.

I was in the map with the first kill, and there was ~9 min left on the timer when he died. What wasn’t as obvious was the Shatterer was also less than 30 seconds away from entering a second Pulsating Crystal Node phase when he was killed, which would have added a good chunk of health back to it and stretched the fight out longer. The DPS vs Crystal healing Cooldown time is a big element of the fight. Out DPSing the healing, and CCing the crystals down quickly gives more player control over the length and difficulty of the fight than, say, just adding a ton of health on the boss. The fact we killed it before the second crystal phase started was a testament to the group. The fact that we CCed the crystals so quickly the one time they did show up was, again, a testament to the group. Yes, the sheer size of that group certainly helped, and I can pretty much guarantee that will be more challenging with, say, 30 players instead of 125, but we earned that victory! Don’t sell yourselves short on that.

This is great! Love the images AND music!