Guild Wars 2

Allisa Wonderland.8192:

Do we have to reach the Legendary division (at some point) to create the legendary backpiece?

Will the new season reset mean that crossing the first three divisions will count for the achievement requirement of Ascencion III, if I and II were completed during the previous season?

If Ascencion II is at 1/2 (Sapphire now), will advancement through Amber next season make it 2/2?

I’m still confused as to why you’re offering a PvE item in a PvP game type other than possibly to encourage non-PvP people like myself to partake..

These are all good questions.

1. No, you do not have to reach Legendary division to complete the Ascension backpiece. Although doing so will speed up your ability to complete it significantly.

2. Your achievements for Year of the Ascension will not reset at the end of each season, but they will only be available until the achievement collection is removed roughly a year after it became available.

3. Yes, if you are currently stuck in a division and can’t climb out (say Sapphire for Season 1) and your progress in Year of the Ascension II is 1/2, then moving from Amber to Emerald in Season 2 will progress this achievement to 2/2 and complete it.

Azaruil.3406:

Are the devs aware of the ranger longbow range bug? Range is supposed to be 1500 and that is what the line underneath your skills will show, but longbow shots will hit their targets beyond that point. Looks like 1800 when I tested it with guildies in spvp.

This bug has been around for a while too, figured it would get fixed but it hasn’t been yet. Possibly a bug from when base range was 1200 and the trait added 300. Wouldn’t be surprised if the added 300 range was somehow accidentally left hidden with the grandmaster longbow trait.

Almost all ranged skills have an overage, this is because projectiles like arrows and bullets don’t just “stop”.

If you were previously a Play For Free account, this is the expected behavior.

She did what?

I just wanted to let you know that this IS being worked on. We don’t have a fix yet, but we’re working on it.

We are planning on having a solution for this that should come out with the second raid wing. I would recommend saving any extra miniatures that you get until then.

We are working on this and will let you know when we’re close to a fix. We’ll contact you directly if we need your help gathering more data. Thanks!

Proheals has been with me for years but in an effort to separate my personal social presence and that of work I’ve moved into a new GM Name. You’ll now see me running around as GM Delicious Intent. My reddit postings will soon come from a new account.

I have a few alts; but the display name is below if you want to say hello. =)

Hello,

I think I need to clarify something about the forum specialists: It’s perfectly fine for our forum specialists to share what they are sending to the team and to actively gather specific or general input from forum members in advance of creating their reports. This has happened in the past and there’s no NDA or any policy that prevents them from giving an update, even posting their entire report. After all, we choose the specialists because of their areas of expertise and we trust their judgment.

The only downside that I can see is if a specialist were to post and then someone developed a “timer” mentality about the content, such as, “Hey, the FS told you about this XX time ago, and you haven’t done anything!”

The reports are great, and the teams appreciate the input. The input is your input, and it has been acted upon many times. I think that there’s proof of the value of your input even today with the PvP thread that went up this morning. However, like all input, the suggestions, reports, and feedback we receive must be prioritized by the dev team.

The fact that an issue exists or that it has been highlighted to the team — even the fact that XX percentage of players feel YY is the most important need of the day — does not necessarily mean that it will be or even can be set as the highest priority by the development team.

As far as flagging FSP member posts, that’s not technologically possible. You are free to visit the profile page of any FSP member (click their name in any thread and you’ll end up on a page like this one). At that time, the first option is to view see all posts by that forum specialist and clicking that line should aid you in seeing posts.

Since this was about CDI’s and the topic seems to have shifted a few times, and because the original questions were answered, I’m going to close this thread. Thanks for your understanding.

Here are answers to questions about the Wintersday Festival:

• Is the entire Wintersday Presence Collection accessible all year, or only the Festive Imbiber?
  • The Winter’s Presence collection will be available all year. Anything in the Collections category will always be available, but certain parts of it may no longer be collectible.

• Will the candy cane achievement be given similar treatment to Festive Imbiber? It’s not required for the shoulders, but it’s still one that is on a similar progression scale as Festive Imbiber.
  • Candy cane achievement will not stay available. It is not needed for anything else (except the meta). Progress will be saved and will be able to be finished next Wintersday.

• Will FI and the candy cane achievement progress the Wintersday meta after Jan 12? This is mainly a curiosity thing, am interested to know if the meta achieve will be locked after Jan 12 is over, even though anyone that really wants the meta won’t need it.
  • No, the meta will not be able to be completed after the end of this Wintersday. The purpose of the meta is to reward a title for active participation in the event.

• Will FI and the candy cane achievement’s progress carry to next Wintersday, similar to the Grawnk ones did from last year?
  • Yes!

I hope that’s helpful info, and here’s a PSA:

Wintersday ends on Tuesday, January 12th.

Galandil.9641:

Eolirin.1830:

If that’s the case, then the achievement text needs to be changed, because it straight up says ‘in one season’.

That’s the case, devs stated so. In the end, one needs only to reach Ruby twice and Sapphire twice to get the precursor during all the 4 seasons this year.

So, yes, the backpack is pretty much grindable and that’s it, the League system was thought out exactly with that idea in mind (that’s why the “not-losing-pips-every-rank” system is on up until you hit Ruby).

Hey there, folks! My name is Erik and I’m the newest member of the PvP design team.

I think that there’s still a bit of confusion out there about progress regarding the PvP legendary backpack and so I just wanted to pop in and clarify once again that you DO NOT need to complete all of the legendary backpack achievements in a single season in order to acquire the backpack itself. I think the achievement text that Eolirin is referring to is for the “Primordial Legend” achievement, which, while it does require completing in a single season to finish, is not linked to your Ascension progress in any way. Some players who climb to higher divisions faster than other players will naturally be able to finish their legendary backpacks sooner, but again, the achievements for the backpack can be worked on over the entire year’s lifespan of the Ascension achievement category and do not need to be finished in a single PvP league season. Hope that clarifies some things!

Ameepa.6793:

Thanks for the answer.

Is there any chances for the cap to rise? 1000 is very low cap considering the huge size of the halls. Ours still feels almost empty at cap and we don’t even have the lvl 40 exploration yet.

1000 would be fine for a hall 1/10 of current size.

I did not write this code so I unfortunately do not have a definite answer to this, but I think this number is based on a technical constraint.

Xanthia.7209:

I do want to discuss that there is discrepancy between what is being stated as the actual intended cap for decorations. Two say it is 2000. One says it is 1000. They are both recent statements that were made by official employees of Anet. I am just pointing out the conflicting statement and hoping someone here (an employee with the codes in front of them) can recheck and confirm what it is. I am pretty sure that is a reasonable request.

I checked the code before I posted my original reply.

There is a known issue where the achievements for Arah path 2 and path 3 are reversed.

This has not been forgotten.

brz.1509:

Congrats! In general I’m really excited about these changes and I hope it’ll lessen the need for a separate solo Q (the thing I really want). That said…

Gaile Gray.6029:

While we’ll be using divisions to match you against your immediate opponents, we’ll still use your MMR to place you on teams with similarly skilled players (from your division point range) to help ensure that you’re not forced to play with individuals that are of a much higher or lower skill than you.

If match prediction is based on division/pip count within a division, this is going to create situations where low MMR players end up with extraordinarily long loss streaks based on the fact that the bad players in a match will end up on one team. This is especially true at the start of each division and it’ll be exacerbated in times of low player population.

This can be mitigated if match prediction uses MMR to prevent low MMR players from losing pips when facing a much better team. From the sounds of the above descriptions match prediction may be using division + pip counts instead, which would be a mistake.

You bring up very good points. And the answer is two-fold:

Low MMR players losing more often is the same high MMR players winning more often. This will help the ladder better represent skill.

Because of how matchmaking is changing, the prediction can now use MMR instead of ladder position. This will create a more accurate prediction, and is actually required for players to distribute properly over the season.

Esonver.8470:

So do I get to keep my Legendary badge for the next season?

Badges stay until the next season starts. So enjoy your badge during the current season and the time between seasons, but once the new season starts all badges will be reset.

Another note: We’re making some changes to allow high division players to get matches faster to help combat the long queue times.

Krysard.1364:

Gaile Gray.6029:

While we’ll be using divisions to match you against your immediate opponents, we’ll still use your MMR to place you on teams with similarly skilled players (from your division point range) to help ensure that you’re not forced to play with individuals that are of a much higher or lower skill than you.

So this means you will be matched with and against same division players, but your teammates will have your same mmr?

Yep.

Galandil.9641:

SlayerSixx.5763:

This is all good and well, but what’s stopping a diamond tier group of friends from having one dude make an amber account? I’ll assume that you’re also changing the pip rewards then, making it so that it doesn’t matter if there’s a tier 1 amber with a clean MMR on the winning team.

Someone please clarify.

This is exactly the same thing that I was thinking while reading that paragraph.

If the pips loss/win depends on the higher div player of a team, than this change is good. If not, it will still not prevent some kind of abuse.

Match prediction is also based on the highest division player in the party.

This issue is being tracked.

Doon.2364:

That’s an excellent point. Gaile, will the pip rewards be same regardless of player’s division so that they don’t exploit the system with smurf accounts?

Pip rewards are based on team performance. The only reason the amber would get different points from a legendary is because the amber doesn’t have backwards progress. The amber won’t get more points because they’re beating legendary players because that is control by match prediction.

At this point, any remaining discussing about this issue will take place between the account holders and our Customer Support Team.

We will close this thread.

Edit to add: Each account holder is responsible for submitting his/her appeal to Customer Support, for outlining the full details of the situation, and for working with CS to allow them to come to the proper resolution, whatever that may be. Like each account action, each resolution is made on a case-by-case basis.

The incident mentioned in the original post has been more than thoroughly discussed in the GW2 Discussion Forum. This topic, and the accusations contained within it, is inappropriate. The basis of the OP is inaccurate. Clearly, we are taking action on those who cheat, bot, and exploit our game. Obviously we are not “covering up” such incidents, or the situation as a whole. Any anecdotal “I saw this” stories should be relayed to Customer Support through a ticket, or sent to Exploits@Arena.Net.

This discussion is closed.

Edit: punctuation

I’ve been working out a few bugs for the legendary collections, and just wanted to let you all know how things stand. Assuming everything goes as scheduled, when Wintersday turns off (1/12) the following things will be in:

• Dwarven Spell Trap: if you have collected all of the magics, but it hasn’t “charged” you can double-click it to charge it
• Temple of Dwayna: there are 2 collectibles for capturing the temple of Dwayna, Malchor’s Notes (Bolt I) and Malchor’s Demise (Twilight I). Defending the temple will also grant these items.
• Magnification Lens: Defending the “Gates of Arah” will also grant this collectible
• Any collectible where you need to charge something at a place of power will now give priority to that over charging quartz. This wasn’t really a blocker, but it was pretty annoying.

Here are some things that I’m working on, but didn’t feel comfortable with my changes until I can get someone else to look at them. It has been a few years since I worked on events, so in the spirit of not messing up other people’s work, I’d like to get another set of eyes. There is a chance that can happen soon, and if so we could see these as soon as 1/12, otherwise it will take a little longer:

• Branded Siege Devourer: it will take me much longer to untangle this event chain and figure out why it is stalling, but what I’d like to do in the mean time is add the drop to the Giant Branded Devourer in Fields of Ruin. Unfortunately, as I was getting that worked out I noticed that event only starts on another event failing. I’m reworking the chain slightly, but I need someone else to double-check and make sure I’m not breaking something else.
• Hope IV: Risen Crystalline Phial: what I’m trying to do is make the wraith spawn more reliably, and without having to stall the event for a long time. Again, I just need a second set of eyes to make sure I’m not introducing new bugs.

Here are a couple of player questions with answers:

Can you please look at the Dune Soarer? This mob is a rare spawn in Dry Top, and its drop is required for the Kraitkin I collection. I have camped there for a long time (2h+) on multiple occasions next to its spawn point and have yet to encounter it a single time.
I looked into this! It does spawn every time, but not always in the same location. That being the case I’m not going to muck around with it at this time. If this continues to be a problem, or there is more to it I’ll take another look, but at least for the 1/12 release nothing will change.

Although I appreciate you looking into this. What about the numerous other instances in the game which have the same problem? Such as breaking the (almost never appearing) crystal prisons of the Shatterer.
Well, certain things take very little time to figure out and fix (like this issue) and I can squeeze it in between other things I’m working on. The Lyssa temple stuff is an example of a thing that will take me a considerable amount more time to fix, so I can’t just fit it in. The shatterer stuff is a further wrinkle, because anything I do could conflict or interfere with something that someone else is working on, but the crystal thing is getting fixed. I just can’t say for certain when the fix will be out.

Since there has been a lot of chatter about account actions lately, I’ll go ahead and answer some common questions that have popped up.

Why 6 months, why not Permanent?
This would imply that some accounts are not being permanently banned, and that’s not true.

When looking at what action is given to an account, the intent of the behavior is taken into account, and will it likely be continued if the player were to return. There is very sound data to support that players that know they will be able to get their accounts back are significantly less likely to resort to the same behavior quickly (aka buying a new account and botting/cheating on that).

The main goal with performing an action on anyone’s account (that isn’t directly related to RMT) is to correct that behavior, not remove the player. If a player returns after any suspension and continues to break the rules, there is a good chance that they will no longer have that chance to come back again with that account.

When the intention of the behavior that breaks our rules is entirely malicious towards our playerbase or our game, we won’t be granting any sort of chance to return.

Does this mean that if someone botted they get to keep everything?
Absolutely not, in most cases we are attempting to remove what we can before the player returns. However, there are just going to be some things we can’t remove.

While it is very true that there is a possibility that that player gained an advantage for a short period of time that they were able to break the rules, a 6 month suspension carries with it a significant enough penalty to offset that

How about previous actions before this was implemented, are they going to be treated the same?
That entirely depends on the action in question. At the time of previous account actions, the actions taken on accounts were deemed appropriate for the offense, which means they will stand.

A good example of this in action would be this:
Currently many states (in the US) consider any theft over $500 to be a felony. Back in 1916, a theft was considered a felony at ~$20.

The game is much different than it was 3 years ago (which might as well be 100 years for a MMO).

If you have any questions about a specific account action, you can feel free to open a ticket with Customer Support.

What do you mean the last year? 6 Month bans haven’t started until the end of last year.
We have been using suspensions for RMT Gold buying for over a year now. Data shows that these suspensions are very effective and are performing the desired effect of stopping repeat buyers from purchasing.

Forfeits (not losing pips when teammates desert) are currently disabled while we fix the dishonor false positives. There will be more info on this later.

The Ace.9105:

Snip

I’m not entirely following some of what you said, but I will say some things back to see if it helps:

Solo players each have a Glicko rating and a ladder position. Both are updated at the end of a match based on the results and values of the other team. The Glicko algorithm does not care about fair matches, it merely takes results of matches and updates ratings according the the outcome. As for Glicko vs Elo, they perform the exact same function for our purposes, but Glicko is more accurate.

Aside from this, we have our matchmaker. This is not part of the actual Glicko algorithm, but instead uses Glicko ratings along with ladder position and other metrics in a way that attempts to make fair matches. The way it does this can be seen on the wiki. While each team average is attempted to be balanced, we still don’t want the spread on each team to be large either.

The last part is the prediction. This is not actually part of matchmaking, but is part of our ladder formula. It is a very simplified approximation, meant for players to understand, that we use after the matchmaker has created a match with the most similar players it could find.

As for what changes would most improve leagues, you’ll have to wait for more info on that.

Edit: Snip, moving to the new, more appropriate thread.

The maximum number of decorations is 1000.

To clarify, the player isn’t actually amber. It’s a UI bug. We do not make matches of players more than +/- 15 to 30 points away (depending on wait time).

I am fixing the UI bug right now.

Checked the logs and that player had relatively close ladder points, but the UI won’t show correctly if they NEVER connected to the match.

There is a known issue where doing path 1 gives credit for path 3, and vice versa.

Melanion.4892:

It’s possible that they were in a party with one of the diamonds, then left the party via the chat command in order to not be told that he was abusing the mmr.

The scoreboard brackets avoid this as it pulls from the PvP roster made from the party, not the party itself.

That’s… interesting. Can you PM me an unedited screenshot so I can lookup the match?

Nuka — first, you should post inquiries of this sort in the Players Helping Players forum, as it’s not really a discussion or GW2. Secondly, please do not “bump” posts.

Thanks.

Awesome details, Lishtenbird, thank you.

This is the kind of thing that will help solve this perplexing bug.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Randulf.7614:

It’s def a nice staff, but it just doesn’t go with anything I’m wearing don’t y’know ;D

Nevermore is the sort of weapon that almost requires you to change whatever you have to fit it, not the other way around

I like the way you think.

P.S. I think Nevermore is awesome!

I checked with QA and they still are investigating this issue. It’s difficult to ascertain which elements are causing it to happen, but it’s under research. I’m sorry that we’re unable to give any sort of timeframe for a fix but wanted you to know the status.

Check your ticket, I’ve put a response in there for you.

Teddiebear.1573:

This leaves the two branches with quite high coupling. Are there any upgrades like that or any plans to add this?

So, I just tossed together an upgrade tree visualization thing with vis.js: warning may crash browser (source). Probably want to open it with Chrome because Firefox is choking on it a bit for me.

The per-vendor trees basically start at each of the “Restoration 1” upgrades; from the visualization it doesn’t seem like there’s any coupling at all between the trees. They’re all currently self-contained, though it’s technologically possible for a new upgrade to have cross-tree prerequisites. I don’t work on the game so I have no idea what our future plans are, this is just idle speculation.

Anyway, I’m not very knowledgeable about the upgrade tree; you’re better off having a gander at the data yourself.

Teddiebear.1573:

On another note though, are there any way to traverse the tree downwards, or do I have to find the first upgrade, then loop through every upgrade and see if the one I found is a requirement? Otherwise just keeping an internal list and adding to that every time a new upgrade is available?

IMO the easiest way is to just fetch all upgrades with the first request (via ?ids=all), then delinearize the objects into either a tree or an edge table. vis.js wants an edge table, so that’s what I’ve done in the example. But yeah, you basically have to do it yourself (sorry).

Also as an aside, vis.js is much more awesome than I expected it’d be.

Magic 8 Ball says…

Tuesday should be a great day.

Seriously, there’s a fix going out that should remedy this.

I’m deeply humbled. What a marvelous job you did bringing this story to life! Bravo!!

This crash appears to be driver related. You may want to try updating or rolling back your Nvidia graphics drivers.

Holox.3528:

It must not be hardcoded. We are able to check the prerequisites of each upgrade and compare them with the IDs of the “vendor upgrades”.

Right, but determining which upgrade vendors are player-accessible is an exceptionally difficult problem — without pulling in a whole bunch of dependencies (e.g., large parts of the game logic) the implementation would just be a whitelist of “these vendors are player-accessible, look at their upgrade lists to determine which vendor sells which upgrades”.

Bug Fix:

• Chronomancer—Continuum Shift: Fixed an issue that caused the rift to activate for only the minimum duration.

Qugi.2653:

Use to be suggestion forum but Anet close it. They say it was too hard for dev to find suggestion in topic they have interest in. That forum also move really fast too.

That’s right, the Suggestions Forum was hard to parse. Having individual suggestions in the appropriate forum — a suggestion about Warrior balance in the Warrior forum, for instance — makes it easier to gather the input.

Ayrilana.1396:

Perhaps the forum experts could act as a bridge and resolve that issue if they’re not already doing that. Or someone can maintain a running catalog of sorts for all suggestions.

Both my team (EN (2), FR, DE and ES) and our Forum Specialists do gather and share suggestions with the developers, yep.

DiogoSilva.7089:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Well, we do get those daily log-in rewards.

For free, while hired labours would have to be unlocked at a price. Knowing Anet and their past practices, players would probably spend more money on the hired labour than they would on getting that money back (this is already the case for infinite gathering tools and even for instance nodes), so my counter-argument to your initial point still stands: It would be mostly a convenience feature, a nice QoL thing to have, not an economy-breaking one.

I understand, Diogo, and thanks for the extra info. BTW, I just purchased the instance nodes — couldn’t resist after seeing someone’s fully-spiffed-out personal instance. And I knew I was going to be going there daily after getting the Wintersday Gift Tree, which I had to have — it’s just lovely!

I know it’ll take me a long while to get the money back from my investment, but it does make going out there extra fun now.

This thread is heading in a bad direction. We’ll do a little cleanup and lock it to prevent further mud slinging.