I always get this odd feeling when I’ve been friends with some one for a long while and think they’re male or female b/c they play those characters, only to find out they’re the opposite gender. It makes me think, oh gosh, have i said the wrong thing to them at some point. Then it creates this weird feeling as it’s shifted your perception of them. It’s just an uncomfortable feeling i get having talked to someone for a long while thinking they’re female, only to find out later they’re male, especially if you’ve discussed female related things. When you meet new ppl, it puts you on edge a little and a bit uneasy having to ask them what gender they are all the time. And when u don’t know the gender, it makes you be more cautious about what you’re saying.
I think it would be nice if everyone played a gender they’re actually are IRL as it removes that confusion, but I understand why ppl do it. This is not me being uncomfortable with my gender, it just removes doubts and makes things more clear as to who you are talking to.
I’ve had some people confused by this occasionally. If I was concerned that they might think I’m a different gender than what I am in reality, I’d probably be doing exactly that. But it doesn’t matter to me what gender others think I am, and I’m not offended if they make a mistake.
It sounds like Evon was looking for an excuse to smash some teeth to me.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
Playing a character of the opposite sex doesn’t bother me at all. My grasp of gender is tenuous enough to begin with, and it happens that I usually find female characters more interesting than male. So 23 of 27 ended up being female. Similarly, I find charr to be thematically more interesting (by far) than any of the other races in this game, so 26 of 27 ended up being charr rather than human.
Nothing against male humans, I just find them a bit boring.
Ironically, I don’t find this to be any sort of penalty at all. Any content where you can realistically die 7 times without playing like an absolute muppet is inherently poorly balanced.
There have been encounters like that recently, e.g. Caudecus in LS3e4 before it was fixed. But I got around that by playing the whole thing without armour and zombie rushing it. It wasn’t harder, just farcical.
There was a line that’s specific to female charr as well.
‘Do me proud, sister!’
‘You restored our right to fight for ourselves. I will honor your sacrifice!’
Thematically this is looking like quite an interesting class (and specialization) now. There’s a lot to fix in gameplay though, particularly the abysmal sustainability. You could leave the heal slot empty and you’d barely notice the difference.
Apologies, it was Coherent UI I was thinking of. Lavasoft doesn’t appear to be related.
I think that’s the BLTC browser. Are you running any particularly restrictive firewall/antivirus by any chance?
Yeah, I’d cut them some slack as they just announced the expansion so they’ve got a lot of tickets to work through, and your purchase was just before the weekend.
If there’s something you might actually miss out on because your gems are a few days late, let them know now, and with any luck they’ll be able to work something out for you.
(I wouldn’t be in a hurry to trade gems in for gold because the rate is not going to be in your favour when so many players are getting gems right now. Definitely wait a few weeks if that’s what you’re looking to do!)
It’s running in the background, but for whatever reason hasn’t finished loading. Perhaps try heading to https://account.arena.net/content and see if you can download a new client? I highly recommend the 64-bit version, which wasn’t available at release.
[Edit: If it’s still running and you need to restart it, you can end the task from Task Manager, which you can access via Ctrl-Alt-Del. But it sounds like the client just isn’t working for you, so hopefully a new one might fix it.]
That’s going to be a question for your ISP. That’s probably the last hop that can be geo-located, I’d guess.
You’ll need to wait for Support to get back to you. Most likely a system along the way flagged your purchase as fraudulent for some reason, but they’re not going to be able to discuss your payment problems on the forum as that risks your account security and privacy.
Perhaps try clearing cookies/cache? Disable some of the plugins and adblockers, add exceptions for this page (you’ve got quite a few there)? Try incognito mode, or a different browser?
It’s possible that the issue is bandwidth rather than your browser, but it seems most likely the page is being blocked from loading correctly.
That’s not entirely surprising. It’s pretty common for support departments to deal with an influx of thousands of tickets when a new release becomes available, and it’s also possible they’re prioritising certain kinds of tickets. I’d normally recommend one ticket per issue so they can resolve the easy bits more quickly.
I haven’t actually played many other RvR games. I haven’t got that far in ESO and I suspect I’ll only play the story there.
There are three I have played to some extent though.
- Aion. Because forts only went vulnerable at specific times of the day, you always had a good contest for them. The actual combat was a hot mess, but I’ve wished GW2 could host GvGs over forts like that for years.
- Planetside 2. I only played for a few weeks before something else got my attention, but that was an interesting system. I have never particularly enjoyed that kind of FPS with the exception of aerial combat, but the territory system was well-implemented and fun to play. It really doesn’t have anything to offer GW2 that isn’t being done already though.
- Mechwarrior 4. This is an odd one, because the game itself didn’t support it, but the player community actually created several galactic map systems where player-run factions would challenge each other for territory. You’d be limited in what assets you could bring to the fight by how many you could produce, so you had to be careful what you put where. Bringing a larger assault force made it easier to win by attrition, but also risked ruining the planet’s industry, and left you open to attack elsewhere. And once you’d committed to a fight, there were no reinforcements – you won with what you had, retreated, or lost the lot.
That was almost a strategy game, played by proxy of a vehicular FPS. It was also by far the best implementation of RvR I’ve played, purely because of its handling of territory.
The real funny thing about all of the “this is taken from WoW” claims thats all over the MMO community… nearly every “innovative new feature” in WoW was taken from other games.
Features people associate with WoW that were not originally introduced by WoW.
Dungeon Finder
Armor Skinning (Transmogrification)
Mounts
Flight Paths/Fast Travel Networks
Raids
Tank/Healer/DPS
Challenge Mode
Faction based PvP
Built-in Voice Chat
Server-wide Chat
Auction House
Guild Perks
& MOREAll of those originated on other MMOs that were either older than WoW or just never got enough of a following to really get anywhere… a few of those features even came from successful newer MMOs. And many of those MMOs borrowed the feature from entirely different genres of games even.
The tank/healer/dps trinity goes all the way back to D&D in the 70’s. I’m not even going to look into mounts.
I am concerned that this collusion between Bill and Ben is going to result in encounters with flowerpots.
They have done a fantastic job with those hairstyles and faces, and that’s coming from a player who does not and will never play a human.
If charr manage to get a single new face that I can tolerate, I’ll be over the moon.
Three things:
- It’s been said already but I’ll say it again. As a charr, swearing a blood oath to the Shining Blade is ridiculous.
- Very interesting to see hexes make a comeback, and I’m curious what the extent of that will be.
- In combat, Livia spends as much time dead in GW2 as she used to in GW1.
We’re kinda in the same boat though I’m in the SEA region. But it’s the same old reasoning as to why servers in our regions wouldn’t happen not just in this MMO but in others as well: The number of potential players does not justify the effort and cost needed to implement the servers.
Kinda sad really but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I don’t even expect many future MMOs to have servers in either or both regions.
Replying to an old post, but since the thread is still going -
SEA is a slightly different situation, in that the number of potential players in the region is huge. Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines together would have nearly a billion people, and the number who play online games is steadily growing.
It absolutely would make sense to factor them into plans for future expansion for any company, but that also has to be weighed against whether or not the game is growing in that region. The company I work with is doing well in that region. GW2 may not be.
Unfortunately, despite the geography, the connection between Australia and Singapore is … not great. It’s actually not uncommon to get a better ping to Houston even if it’s three times as far away.
The only part of the new Lion’s Arch that I don’t particularly like is the part where most players spend all their time. The Mediterranean-style terraces to the south and west of the main plaza are great; I just wish they comprised the trading and crafting district as well so it could actually feel like a city there.
Good to hear. Love my Thief.
That was pure joy haha, thanks for that.
Also, playing this game in 4k and max settings, this is the most beautiful game I have ever seen.I’m really starting to enjoy myself, reading through all your comments has really helped me realize how much fun this adventure is going to be.
Thanks again everyone.
I’m having a blast.
Good luck with the Thief! I’ve always found them to be really hard to play well, but maybe if I’d tried to play one closer to when I started the game, I wouldn’t be playing it like an idiot today.
The one piece of vertical progression was adding Ascended gear. No new tiers have been added in the last 4 years though, and it seems pretty unlikely any more ever will be.
Sort of. There are different tiers of gear, of which Ascended and Legendary tiers share the highest stats (the difference between the two is you can swap stats at will on Legendary).
The highest level has always been 80 and always will be, though.
Ignoring that the scoring system has made a hash of server ratings, total warscore in lopsided matches featuring a T1 and T4 server is far closer than it ever would have been pre-linkings.
Removing linkings at this point would be a mistake because you’d bring back the lopsided matches in T2, T3 and T4, particularly with 1-up 1-down in place. The coincident population drop also turns into a vicious cycle – when players don’t see other people to play with, they stop playing themselves. Spreading population thinner thus accelerates the decline of WvW.
I always turned them off in GW1 because they were ugly and ruined the character’s armour aesthetics.
You get 5 min when you destroy a wall and when you are at t6 participation you have at least 5 more min before you drop under t3.
How long do you need to kill a tower lord?Could’ve been southwest desert tower, that one’s a pita to kill if you don’t poop out stab everywhere.
Takes me 3 minutes on a character with 0 stability.
For the next wvw event week I think it would be interesting if every character in wvw had one life. You die in wvw on that character and you’re locked out of WvW for the rest of the week on that toon.
It would make for an interesting week.
That’s a different game…
I’d love that idea actually, but Sarika is right, that’s not going to work for a week-long match. It might work for a different map on a shorter timer, something like EotM.
- Personal story sidequests. Still so many loose ends from the early personal story that could be explored further. Weekly missions for the order you joined would be a good start too.
- Weapon skill choices. It’d be nice if you could swap between similar attacks that cater to different builds.
- Additional WvW game modes that cater specifically to guilds and small organised groups.
- Universal reduction in power damage, condition damage and CC in WvW. The skill has disappeared from the mode because too many abilities can not be countered.
- Minidungeons to make a return.
- Front footprints for charr. It seems a bit ephemeral but there’s a lot of sand in Elona and it’s probably going to drive me mad seeing missing footprints for two years.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
It’s really hard to play other RPGs at the moment without feeling a lack of control over the character. The skill system and metagame balance aren’t perfect in GW2, but the basics of combat are pretty close.
Relatively deep lore base.
Fluid combat system.
Diverse PvE gameplay (hopefully we’ll get that for WvW and PvP one day).
Lots of customization options for characters.
Charr.
Excellent art direction.
It’s like no-one noticed that you get more loot based off timers than you do from bags.
May as well stay dead, you’re getting 100% of the pips and reward tracks for 0% of the effort, and you don’t have to try to run back to where you were in less than 3 minutes only to watch your rubbish commander wipe the zerg again.
A WvW leaderboard, for both guilds and individual players would be an extremely useful tool, since server balance could be based on this (also time spent by these players & guilds, contribution into overall skirmish score, and so on, specifics could be discussed if and when Anet decides to consider implementing it, but KDR could be a start)…
…There is no way to determine the skill level based on any stats currently in use. KDR could come closer than any other, but certainly isn’t an accurate measurement, both kill & death numbers depends just as much or even more on your team and the teams you were fighting against, as your own skill. A list to be used when balancing servers could still be useful, including one for guilds too.
Truncated for brevity, but I agree with the entire post.
I’m adding a demonstration of my thoughts on what these leaderboards could look like. With the new rewards system, it’d make sense to give ticket rewards to the top places for the week in some of them, depending on the difficulty of achieving them.
The examples here are what I’d consider to be useful statistics to try to achieve. It’s not a complete list – I may have missed some activities, whether because I forgot them, or I don’t rate them as particularly skilful, or perhaps because I don’t see any way to track them that isn’t open to exploitation.
They would be tracked per-week, per-server. The point is to record the top contributors to their server in their own ways.
Offense
For contributions during assault events against enemy holdings.
- Enemy players killed
- Enemy siege pieces destroyed/disabled (only counted if they fired during the event timer)
- Enemy holdings captured while outnumbered (fewer unique participants from the attacking server than the defending server)
Defense
For contributions during defense events.
- Enemy players killed
- Enemy siege pieces destroyed/disabled
- Defense events successful while outnumbered by either opposing server
Warfare
For contributions to PPK.
- Total enemy players killed
- Unique enemy players killed (each enemy player only counts once no matter how many times you kill them)
- Total kills minus total deaths
Havoc
For contributions against the odds, with 5 or fewer participating allies.
- Enemy holdings captured while outnumbered at least 2-to-1
- Successful allied defense events while outnumbered at least 4-to-1 (perhaps 2-to-1 for camps)
- Unique enemy players killed while outnumbered at least 2-to-1
Roaming
For contributions to individual glory.
- Unique enemy players defeated with no allied assistance
- Unique enemy players defeated at 3v1 or worse odds
- Solo keep lord kills
- Solo SM lord kills (good luck getting your name on that list, but if you do I think a few tickets are warranted)
(edited by Ben K.6238)
Not really gaining more than 10 a week, but I’m already way over 2k so it doesn’t matter much.
If you removed the PvE aspects, there’d be no lords or guards. Hooray for karma trains.
Just learn to play, you can beat that lord easily with 3 players.
I am talking about new players. For example, the players joined the game after HOT release. They have no chance gaining any tournament ticket and experiencing a WvW tournament. Is it fair? Nope.
They’ll also never have the chance to die of smallpox. Proper tragedy that is.
Normally I’d submit a crash report, but when the whole OS crashes that’s not an option. Not entirely clear what caused this either – whether it was a GW2 glitch or something wrong with the system. I haven’t had this occur before for any reason on this computer.
I’d been running around the PvP lobby for around 15 minutes. On one circuit, having run most of the way from Portal to Lion’s Arch waypoint to PvP Lobby Waypoint, Windows threw a page fault error (in NTFS.sys I believe) and restarted.
I’ve attached a DxDiag in case this is useful.
Attachments:
… the existing reveiling male armor (which are almost all heavy armor) are quite frankly inappropriate on female Charr and Asura…
Why?
What differences in functionality would there be between a “rebirth” kit, just buying a new character slot, and re-rolling an existing character slot?
Are those differences large enough to be worth Anet dedicating resources that could otherwise be spent elsewhere?
Keeping the name, creation date and inventory, but otherwise resetting everything on the character and its personal story.
This service should not be available outside the BLTC because it would otherwise be used for key farming.
I have my doubts that the resources required to do this would be all that significant, specifically because the game already does something very similar when you delete the character. This option should just require keeping two variables and a few arrays.
There are much, much easier (and cheaper) ways to farm forge fodder than that. There really is no sensible reason to block those from the mystic forge anymore.
The only real problem with outnumbered is that it is disincentives play during peak hours, since it is more rewarding to play when your server’s coverage is low.
I don’t see why that’s a problem. That sounds quite helpful actually.
The main change I’ve noticed because of the outnumbered buff is that you don’t get maps that are completely dead anymore. I am seeing quite a bit of abuse as well, but idling in spawn means you either end up really bored or actually going AFK and losing participation. I know someone who does this, and I’m getting more pips than he does because he’s finding it challenging to strike the right balance of useless tosser.
1 up 1 down is live!
If you care at all about this mode you will give it your FULL support!
This is the real wvsw update we have waited years for (not me tho, i WOULDN’T wait years lol). The pip thing….the beta pairings…those all fail in comparison to this change.Anet literally threatened to install the glicko back if you don’t behave. So plz behave and give it ur full support. There will likely be some horrid weeks at the start, but that is just the leftover gunk from the glicko being burned out of the system. Look to the future and stay supportive.
Dunno why they would make it live NOW…we are getting new pairing on friday no? And they literally said that when new pairings are made the glicko will reaffirm who is vs who and 1up1down won’t matter till after the fact…..but whatever!
Well, I’m glad someone’s happy about it. I couldn’t give two hoots, it won’t make WvW more fun.
You say it feels like a job, and you want to add more tickets that you can earn per week so it feels even more like a job?
Yes and let’s not go too far with how “socially progressive” ArenaNet is. They have only “not straight” FEMALE characters. Which can easily be argued as intended for straight male as well. The absolute lack of gay male characters is extremely telling about the level of open mindedness and intelectual prowess of ArenaNet.
And no, the 2 gay sylvari in one of the sylvari origin stories do not matter, especially comparing to how many lesbians in centric story relevant spots we got and they certainly do not matter after ArenaNet’s retcon of sylvari lore which makes them little more than eunucs.
The “female is sexy har har drool” and the male “needs to wear a burqa” is a common trope amongst homophobic developers or simply ignorant ones. Where does ArenaNet fall exactly is not really clear.
Funnily enough this is why I decided to stop using real cash for the game a year or so ago. At launch the trope was almost not there and I thought “yay a smart not homophobic developer finally”. Then, as outfits start pouring in, it became more and more visible. Good for them.
I think you’re reading way too much into this. The fact that they haven’t included a starring gay couple yet is not proof that they’re opposed to doing so, and considering some of the male light armour skins (e.g. the Feathered set) are far from traditional conservative garb, I don’t see the evidence of stereotyping male roles in the costume design either.
1. Correction of class balance and reducing the availability or effectiveness of condition stacks and CC.
At this point, there are too many situations in WvW where there simply is no effective counterplay, particularly in small-scale fights. This could make even a great game mode awful because it ruins the combat at the core of the gameplay, so it’s the highest priority of all.
2. Create roles for guilds that make them necessary to the success of a server.
Rather than an incidental outcome of server organisation that mainly contributes utility. This would most likely mean supporting GvGs as part of the match.
3. Slow down the karma train and make maintaining territory progressively more difficult the more you control.
Towers and forts should require considerable investment to capture, and you should have to rebuild them after you capture them.
(edited by Ben K.6238)
Because there’s more than a few maps I like, I won’t double up the lists even though I’d normally include some on both.
Aesthetic top 5:
Desert Borderlands – I love the vastness and diversity of landscapes here.
Ember Bay – the desolation of volcanic landscapes appeals to me, even if the basalt lattices are unrealistic
Auric Basin – particularly happy about the implementation of the Falls
Timberline Falls
Mount Maelstrom
Gameplay top 5:
Silverwastes – although underpopulated nowadays, it’s one of the few PvE maps where you can meaningfully take and hold land, and unlike Dragon’s Stand it’s less linear and you aren’t wasting your time if you’re on the “wrong” map
Dry Top – I enjoy all the nooks and crannies, and it’s not as easy to get lost as Tangled Depths. Lots of map knowledge needed to get T6.
Blazeridge Steppes – one of the few hinterlands where you can go in almost any direction for as long as you want up to the map boundary, so it’s great to wander around
Lake Doric – lots of completely different things to do, and the inclusion of villages makes the map much more alive than the other LS episodes so far
Eternal Battlegrounds – the only WvW map that’s really been designed in such a way that the three sides are roughly equal, making it easy to compete but very hard to dominate.
1. Verdant Brink – the vertical scale of the map makes no sense. Trees are far too big, chasms are far too deep, and it looks like a platformer after the naturalistic environment of the Silverwastes.
What I would have done differently – focus on density, as far as the engine will allow, instead of size to bring the Maguuma alive. The crashed Pact airships could have been landmarks instead.
2. Alpine Borderlands – the strategic positioning of towers and forts is illogical, the landscape is dull and there are huge portions of the map with no gameplay value. You don’t even get a map completion chest for going to them anymore.
What could fix it – try to capture the aesthetic of Timberline Falls, which did a fantastic job with an alpine environment, and position towers to control the passes. Let go of symmetric layout, and allow players to recruit centaurs/skritt to assist them, patrol passes, or disrupt enemy activities. Probably bring back the quaggans, too.
3. Bloodstone Fen – quite small and visually disconnected from its GW1 spirit.
What I would have done differently – fractured the bloodstone instead of blown it up into floating pieces in the air as an excuse to have a vertically-oriented map, and I would have hidden it in an anomaly-populated jungle with rows of trees blasted to the ground around the bloodstone itself. One of the best parts of Bloodstone Fen in GW1 was the trek through the jungle to find it.
4. Bitterfrost Frontier – beautiful landscape, but gimmicky to play through and not much fun to explore.
What I would have liked to see – drop most of the collections, and instead add a couple (not-so?) mini-dungeons to bring back the delving spirit of Eye of the North from GW1. Battledepths could have been a hit.
5. Cursed Shore – ugly, and a bit anti-climactic for a Pact invasion. Feels more like an exploratory mission rather than taking back Orr.
What could fix it – replicating Dragon’s Stand. A defined front line, a few charr tanks, and the ability to cleanse the land you conquer, visually changing it as you proceed. Add in a cleared instance that you can return to via NPC dialogue, similar to Agent Zrii in Dragon’s Stand (but instead present to give you a way to “keep” the cleansed state of Orr).
It’s a bit broken the way it’s been implemented, but if you’re expecting better rewards for joining a bandwagon, you know where the door is.
I’m so used to kicking commanders who try to invite me that I haven’t noticed this problem.
Those kinds of fights are rare and quite avoidable if you don’t want to participate in them.
I think the role of EotM should probably be reconsidered, but the core problems with the game mode have yet to be corrected so the fact is the current queues won’t last for that long. WvW will be dead again in a month or so.