Guild Wars 2

Hello there,

1. There’s is actually no possible way ever to solve this. I’ll do my best to explain. For the audio script portion of the data, the chunk of data which holds all the music notes, and all the state-management of the instruments for things like octave switching, this data is entirely client-side. It only ever updates when it gets instructions from the server to do so. Those instructions come from pressing buttons on your skillbar and equipping/unequipping the instrument item. So if there’s no client-to-server interaction when it comes to an audio script that is loaded, and all the server is doing is sending state-based instructions down to the client-side audio scripts, there is in fact no persistent data being saved between maps. So if someone loads into a map after you have previously equipped your instrument and switched away from the default loaded octave, then they’re going to load in with the default parameters of your instrument. The workaround for this is for you to unequip and re-equip the instrument and that’ll update everyone who is presently in the map to a synchronous state (with exception to user-define drum loops on the Frame Drum, this issue implies that there is no way to persistently save that data between any map transitions).

2. I tried reproducing this issue multiple times on our development builds and couldn’t get the bug to manifest whatsoever. Not sure what would cause that, using emotes doesn’t seem to reset the audio script in any way. Are you sure that’s all you had to do to get it to revert to the default? In any case if that ever happens, the simple workaround is to just unequip and re-equip and all will be made right again.

I’ll look into this. Thanks for letting us know.

Seeing as there hasn’t been an update to this thread post-hotfix, I’m hopeful that at least the majority of the gripes with the recent changes to instruments have been dealt with. That said, I haven’t been able to test instruments to the degree that you folks use them. I don’t know what songs you’re playing. What I do know is that you ought to be able to play all the songs now that you could before. So if any problems arise that weren’t doing so before the game updates this week, post to the game bugs forums exactly how you reproduce your issues. If I can’t replicate your exact problem, then I can’t know for certain whether or not any subsequent fixes I make to instrument systems will solve it.

Eidolonemesis.5640:

Khyan.7039:

Did you read Cody Crichton’s answer? I guess not. He said the issue will be fixed since the octave change has bad ping.

Of course we read Cody Crichton’s post, but did you?

Cody Crichton said, and I quote, “There’s a bug that got introduced which causes the octave switch to take effect +100ms later than it is supposed to in the audio script.” end of quote

That has absolutely nothing to do with 100ms worth of ping, but everything to do with unique numeric timer values within the game code gone wrong tied to the instruments that messed up the octave switch buttons due to the recent patch changes that likely caused an unintended chain reaction.

This fix that I mentioned will, in a subsequent patch, clear up all the problems you’re complaining about with octave switching, yes, including chords. As for note cooldowns, that’s out of my control. I’ll pass your note along. Thanks for all your patience!

Khyan.7039:

The instrument changes is awful.

WIth the flut, if you use a note, you can’t use the same note anymore, even after changing octave. So all is going wrong with music. I still like the fact that the animation doesn’t disapear anymore during long song.

I found and fixed the bug causing problems specific to the flute instrument, now awaiting regression testing before the fix makes its way to you.

There’s a bug that got introduced which causes the octave switch to take effect 100ms later than it is supposed to in the audio script. This has been fixed in our development branch and is almost ready to undergo further testing before it’ll be ready to go live. Sorry for the pain the bug is causing, but it should be better sometime very soon.

Seems to me like you’re mostly after music playing more often than not and that the silence between tracks is bumming you out. In the sound options panel [F11] there’s a slider toward the bottom called Music Interval. Crank this bad boy all the way to the left and you’ll have less silence in between musical tracks. Is that helpful at all?

If that’s no good and you’d just like more options for music in areas of the game, custom playlists might be your savior. Check out this page here for a run-down on how to set it up:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Customized_soundtrack

If you’ve got the GW2 soundtrack files, you can change up the game’s score to a certain extent. Fill the cities up with your favorite tunes if that’s your thing.

Cheers!

Occasionally it doesn’t play the muzzle flash visual. This would cause the side-effect of it not playing its audio as audio for effects, such as the muzzle flash, is paired with the visuals. Thanks for the report.

Thanks for the report! Found the thing that was causing the problem. Fix will be out as soon as the release schedule allows.

Whoa Will, yep that sounds really annoying. Thanks for posting about it, and for linking a sound file which made looking up the specific cause relatively easy. Positing the very exact area of a map that you’re in can also make things pretty quick for us to track down too.

So this is a bug that was exposed by a recent change to the audio engine. Good news is that all the particular instances of this type of bug can (and have) been fixed internally through content redesign (doesn’t need any further engine rework). These fixes should be out to you in the next major content release. Sorry for the disturbance to the peace!

While “that audio bug” is pretty vague, I can assure you that this particular audio bug has been fixed and will be finding its way to you in an upcoming release, or I’ll eat my headphones.

Hey Tiny Doom, thanks for bringing this up.

With the inclusion of on-demand gliding as a game mechanic alongside the diving goggles mechanic and given the fact that there are quite a few other ways in which the player can fall, knowing well that they will survive or take no damage, these falling gutturals were removed from all characters as they make no sense and serve only to make your character sound weak-willed at best. We doubt they’ll be making a return ever.

Out of curiosity, if it’s not set there already, try setting the Sound Quality slider in the Sound Options panel to the farthest right (Highest Quality) and report back if the problem happens any more or less frequently.

Hey everyone, thanks for the flood of reports. If you happen to notice anymore wonkiness, keep ‘em coming. For a future release, I’ll be preparing a rework of as many erroneous sound implementations that Keenan and I can get our hands on. Cheers!

Or, in other words, had I not just skimmed over the bottom, more recent comments, I should just say weolgwang and timmyf have already troubleshot the issue just fine. Good job spreading the word about these technical problems!

claudekennilol.9251:

It’s ridiculous. I literally can’t hear the person if they’re standing right in front of me. I have to turn the camera to be able to hear them.

This is a classic symptom of having your audio device set to surround sound at the operating system level when you either don’t have surround sound speakers or the center speaker of your surround system is malfunctioning. Check your hardware and/or OS audio settings and see if that doesn’t straighten things out for ya?

Thanks for the bug report, Goliath. I was able to find the bug and fix it straight away. Look forward to hearing the glorious of gutturals of both male and female centaurs in a forthcoming release. And good ear, they indeed use the same source as jotun.

Thanks for the report. This has been fixed internally and will be released sometime in the future.

Hamfast.8719:

Could someone PLEASE tell me what I’m looking/listening for in this video? I still don’t notice anything out of the ordinary.

At the 50-second mark of the video that the OP linked, the player successfully reproduces the bug after which point all the vocal sfx of the asura character are pitched up by ~25%.

Ameno.6813:

The last patch (or couple of patches) fixed one of the coolest, and yet, harmless bugs in GW2. Why does important stuff go years without patches and things like this get ruined?

Bug demonstrated below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFWUkNkvdyI

RIP chipmunk-voiced Asura.

Uh, this bug might’ve gotten fixed incidentally when some improvements were made to audio scripts that address an issue related to the size of character models and their relative pitch.

The audio department makes updates like this one to ensure consistency across the board. The fixup wasn’t made because we see you having fun with a particular bug and then decide to destroy said fun with fun-killing laser beams. We probably didn’t even know this particular bug existed—just thought that it could theoretically exist or had potential to manifest under certain circumstances, and this seems like one of them.

Also, the bugs that the audio department can fix possibly might not be the same bugs that you think are “important stuff that goes years without patching.” But in either case, you should open specific threads about the bugs that are bothering you and those bug fixes will be handled according to their priority.

Could you be more specific?

Providing things like the story chapter, the quest name, the quest step, the content of the cinematic, etc., will allow someone internal to investigate and document the issue at some point.

Hello instrument fans. I’m here to chime in on what it means to perform instruments given Customer Service’s stance which Gaile was kind enough to investigate and share in this thread.

First, I’m aware that many players feel very strongly that we should either be for or against allowing players to use automation to play their instruments. Personally, I think that instruments are simply for making music, for entertainment. Some people will gravitate toward live performance, and some will gravitate toward automation, and these are both options for personal preference. The desired end result is that players are given an opportunity to have fun, whether it’s with the process of making music or with listening to others make music, or both.

While it may go without saying, I’ll say it anyway: Players who have the dedication, the skill, and the patience to be able to perform songs manually given the constraints of the instrument system, they are to be commended for their efforts—especially when it comes to performing manually as a group/ensemble. I personally don’t think the system is as easy or intuitive as it could be, and those who make it look easy, they’re real champs who deserve copious amounts of praise.

For some, the barrier between having an instrument and making music is overly daunting, and there are other methods out there to simply play a song. I think it’s generally a good thing to have more music in Tyria for people—performers and listeners alike—to enjoy, by whichever means is most desirable to the performer.

Feel free to join the discussion with your thoughts, I’m sure you’ve got ‘em!

Out of curiosity, what does your OS level volume mixer say for the Gw2 application?

For Win 7, for example, right-click the speaker icon in the taskbar in the lower-right corner, then select “Open Volume Mixer.” Does it look something like the attached picture?

Also, have you ensured that your playback device at the OS level is configured for stereo?

In the same menu that “Open Volume Mixer” lives, select “Playback Devices” and check your active device and ensure that it’s not configured for surround sound if you’re expecting stereo.

First, try upping your Dialog Volume slider in the Sound Options panel.

If that’s no good, then my next thought is that something is wonky with how your audio device is configured at the operating system level such that some of the output signal is getting routed to speakers that may not exist. If it turns out that may be the case, and you use Windows, it can be investigated by doing the following

1. Right-clicking the speaker on the notification area of the task-bar
2. Selecting ‘Playback Devices’
3. Highlight the primary device you’re trying to use
4. Hitting the configure button to open the configuration wizard
5. Follow the appropriate steps to ensure that the device is set in accordance with the actual speaker configuration you’re using

Let us know if you have or haven’t found a solution, ok?

Glad I could help!

I’m fairly certain that this issue will be entirely fixed in an upcoming release. Please report back if this is still happening after our next game update.

This a problem caused by having a playback device configured for surround sound at the device driver level when your hardware device is only stereo. What happens in this scenario is that audio is being directed toward a ‘center’ speaker that doesn’t physically exist and so you lose the sounds that happen directly on your character or right in front of them.

Configuring your device drivers to output 2.1 stereo should solve the problem.

A most gracious thanks go to the Ninja Nurse Rescue Squad on Kodash for adopting me into their ranks. They’ll make a decent skirmisher out of me yet!

A possibility that comes to mind is that perhaps your primary audio playback device at the OS level somehow got set to a surround sound option when you do not have surround sound speaker arrangement. When this happens, some sounds get routed to a “center” speaker channel, and if you do not have a center speaker then sounds essentially get mixed into a non-existent speaker and will cut out.

Check your audio playback devices and make adjustments if necessary, then please do report back to this thread if you’re still having trouble with NPC dialogue. Good luck!

Turtlebear.9136:

I would like to ask how come sometimes the lute “chords” are different? Despite pressing the same key, it would play different strums. I’ve tested this and noticed that there can be 3 different strums (or maybe more) from pressing the same note.

While each key represents a specific chord notation, different structures/performances of that chord notation can play on any given key for a variety of reasons:

1. The inversion of the chord changes depending on what the previous chord inversion was. This is done automatically in order to ensure the most natural-sounding voice leading, so you don’t have to think about it. Chord inversions included: Root position, first inversion and third inversion.

2. There are also variations. Think of them as several different takes of the given chord. (Take one, take two, take three). This is to allow extra diversity of the sound of a chord, to prevent repetitiveness.

3. For each chord type that is played, there is also an upstrum and downstrum version.

Turtlebear.9136:

I also don’t quite understand how we are suppose to duet with other players on a locked 120bpm tempo? Unless you’re specifically playing songs that are 120bpm only…

That’s right, if you and another performer (lute or drum) get together and play to the global tempo, you can jam out in sync at 120 bpm. But if you want to play songs outside of 120bpm and don’t care about tempo drift then you can always unlock your tempo and play that way. The options are yours!

Enabling the tempo lock on your lute quantizes all of your lute chords to a global 120bpm tempo. This allows you to not only play in-time with yourself, but also to play in time with other tempo-locked lute players’ chords as well as people playing the Musical Frame Drum.

Unlocking your tempo allows you to play your chords freely, outside of the global tempo, similarly to how the individual lute notes are played.

Hey everyone.

We made a fix to the endless-combat-music bug that was plaguing just about everyone who got into heavy combat a few months back. But that doesn’t mean that our fix was entirely comprehensive! It seems like some of you are still hitting this, or something like it. The design of the system is to ensure that combat music goes away once the intensity of your combat begins to wind down and doesn’t come back until you get into the thick of it again.

As it is now, this is not a very easy bug to reproduce. Please take a moment and list out your reproduction steps so that we can look into it and do what we can to solve what problems we find.

This actually isn’t an audio bug so much as it is a game bug with an audio side-effect. For best results, this thread should be moved to the game bugs forum so that a content designer or a gameplay programmer may have a shot at fixing it.

Thanks for the report!

Actually, asuran males and females have distinct and gender-appropriate sound sets. Unable to reproduce any way in which the two could get mixed up. Are you able to provide some steps to reproduce your issue?

It sounds like you know precisely what the deal is with it! Thanks for the bug report. We’ll add fixing this minor bug to a backlog task.

Sorry for the confusion in the User Interface. It is and has been misleading, but Guild Wars 2 has no support for Spanish as an audio language, only as text. There are no current plans to add Spanish as an audio language either, and fixing the misleading UI isn’t a simple matter.

French and German are audio languages, however, so changing to those languages and restarting the game client should prompt for downloading the missing language files.

Hey Queen,

Just to reply about the Scarlet hologram battle, each of the phases of the battle and every single action that the boss makes is accompanied by a fittingly loud sound that should be quite audible over the din of the players battling around her, and in fact they should dwarf the player sounds by quite a lot. I’m wondering why you’re having trouble hearing the boss sounds.

Have you set the ‘Audio Quality’ slider to the far right? This allows for the highest number of sounds to play. Even though the boss sounds definitely take priority over any quieter sounds (such as player sounds) and will play in favor of them, this is a good place to start. Though setting to the far left will be less taxing for your CPU, which depending on the hardware you’re using might be provide preferable performance.

Also try to ensure that the audio volume sliders in the audio panel are not set too far to the left in the ‘Effects Volume’ category.

Other than that, there may be other things to troubleshoot in order to hear the appropriate sounds. Check back if any of my suggestions don’t allow you to hear the boss’s sounds in the Scarlet Hologram boss fight, which is one of the loudest encounters we have in the game, right along with Tequatl, the Great Jungle Wurm and the Marionette.

Let’s be clear, I am only talking about slight polish to sound effects, and not about the gameplay of the encounter whatsoever. I can’t, nor would I want to change anything about the tactics or strategies that players would use when fighting the boss.

Thanks for the feedback!

While the sounds of player combat is likely loud during these encounters, as designers we try to take this into account when mixing our boss battles.

Scarlet’s prime hologram does have an audio-visual tell for when it is going to do its close AOE attack (sounds like a laser beam charging up), which I know I could definitely hear during the fight, but that particular sound for the tell is not extremely intense or anything. Similarly, the Assault Knights have an audio-visual tell for the AOE pull as well (it launches up with a huge blast out of its jetpack).

As for Giganticus Lupicus, it’s been a long time since that boss has been given any attention design-wise, and it’s on a list of bosses I have saved somewhere, a to-do list of bosses to spruce up, so I would say that one is a known-issue.

Imperios.2543:

I shall also note that bosses also need to speak as well so that they would have actual personalities. I mean, no Toxic or Molten Alliance member has so much as a name!

This is actually feedback for the Living World writing/design teams. There’s nothing that the audio department can actually do to address this. Please head on over to the Living World subforums and offer some suggestion feedback when you have a moment.

Hello Mad Queen,

Not all attacks made by bosses need to be audibly telegraphed ahead of time in order for players to know they need to react to them. For instance, bosses can use instant skills and there is no telling when they may fire. Another example is the case where there is nothing visually to tie the sound to since something has to sensibly make the sound, it can’t be placed in arbitrarily just before a boss uses any of its skills.

However, bosses sometimes have a strong visual tell for their attack (such as a warmup of some kind). We agree with you, that often these types of attacks need audio tells to coincide with them—and in so many cases they do already have one.

Which boss were you fighting that didn’t have a clearly audible tell for a warmup-type attack? Unless your report is made specific, there is very little chance of audio-tell bugs getting a fix.

These problems are caused by a bug, but there is a very simple workaround. See this thread for more details:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/ALL-voices-GONE/

Thank you for the screenshot which describes that you are not playing the game using English text, which is information that is relevant to the nature of the bug. The problem is that having your voice set to use the same language as your text (which does not exist, we do not currently support Spanish VO at all—even though the UI would suggest otherwise), then the game is now defaulting to not playing any voice at all instead of defaulting to English VO.

As a workaround in the interim, please set your audio language to use English (or French or German if you prefer), restart the game client, and you will get VO back.

Thanks for reporting.

See this these original threads:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mariner-Horn-Sound-Error/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/audio/Marriner-s-Horn-Sound-has-changed/

Thanks for the report. Found and fixed little bug that occurred in the merging of some collective data, effectively causing the attack sounds to frequently cut out. So far it appears that only the horn was affected by this.

Thank you for collecting this feedback, eleshazar, however this feedback really belongs on another forum as the audio department generally has no involvement with addressing issues regarding which lines play or how often they play, merely with the quality of the voice files that play, and how voice sounds compared to the rest of the audio mix.

This is not true for non-voiced sound effects, however, as the audio department generally has total control over all aspects of these.

Volume of entire categories of audio, whether it is voiced dialogue or sound effects, is definitely within our realm. We’re always looking into improving the mix, so definitely leave that sort of feedback for us here!

Thanks!

Dialogue cues are content design implementation (game design) with an audible side effect, and as such this is out of the purview of the audio department.

The general Guild Wars 2 Discussion sub forum is definitely a better place to leave this type of feedback.

As always, thanks for listening and for caring!

How about the Fractal cinematic, are you able to hear sound with that one?

It can be found by entering the Fractals of the Mists map from a portal Lion’s Arch, and it should play the video for you. If you’ve already seen it before, you can view it again from the hub just on the other side of the portal by speaking to one of the nearby NPCs.