Guild Wars 2

I really don’t think the problem with developer interaction is a lack of interaction. Guild Wars 2 actually has quite a lot of interaction, there are a lot of interviews, threre are blog posts, there are the CDI threads. Most games that I have played dont have anywhere near this level of interaction. It is more the quality of the interaction. All of the interaction has to have this caveat that specifics can not be addressed. Almost every interaction almost always comes down to “We are looking at this, we want to address this, but we have nothing to say at this time.”

This interview with guildmag was absolutely shameful. Why agree to an interview if you know you cannot say anything?

I am not saying I have an answer to address this, but this is what is frustrating.

You obviously want to have a lot of interaction with the community but you cant have it both ways. If you want interaction you have to be willing to discuss things in a real way and you have to accept that sometimes you are going to say or suggest things that don’t work out.

Like yeah you mentioned precursor crafting and then you never actually implemented it and people are skewering you for it, but if you would discuss why it hasn’t been implemented people might be a lot more receptive.

Most of the changes to every class I really understand. They are fixing things that have been broken or under powered, and weakening things that are too strong and making things a bit more logical overall.

I get boosting the adrenal gain, I don’t get taking 5s off the boons.

It seem almost arbitrary, like they said, “Well we boosted the passive, so we need to nerf the active.” without any really rhyme or reason to nerfing the active.

I just cant see any reason for it. What does taking 5s off the boons really do? What imbalance does it address? If it did create any imbalance that needed adressing certainly 25s boons aren’t going to be very much less imbalanced than 30s boons.

IDK to me it just seems like a change without any reason behind it.

The reason that some people see Longbow as powerful is because longbow is countered very different from other professions.

On any other class, the answer to taking massive burst is run away from them vs. a ranger the answer to taking massive burst is to charge them.

The only place that a warrior built for longbow would be even marginally acceptable is WvW and that is just because a 9 sec gigantic fire field that also does AoE burn is pretty powerful when placed correctly.

However even that is pretty questionable considering their are many other sources of fire fields and not any other sources for Earthshaker.

Your more or less on the right track. Even in the best of circumstances you are going to to ~10-15% less damage than with Axe/X but it does have a few advantages.

With axe interrupting your auto attack is really bad. With sword its not a problem at all. This lets you Impale/Rip or Final Thrust with impunity.

FIY final thrust is only a DPS gain under 50% and Imaple/Rip is a DPS gain always, but it is made better if you do some auto attacks in between to get the torment stack up.

Little update:

The two maps have separate ticks.
There are people from all three servers on both maps.
Not yet clear which map actually is counting towards the total or if both are.

I qued for like 45 min finally get in and I end up in my own personal little borderland. I am not in with my guild, I am IDK where, there is like no one here.

I see my girlfriend who is in the right “Overflow” on the map as a party member but we are not physically in the same map.

What gives?

EDIT: I am on Far Shiverpeaks, other servers are Piken Square and Gandara

ICEing.9237:

Warrior will be boring now basically. Enjoy staying with axe and mace 100% of the time

In some sense yah, but in other senses not as much.

Highest personal DPS will be 30/30/0/10/0 probably. However this is perhaps not the best overall build.

A 20/30/0/20/0 build gives you empower allies, and sacrifices about 10% DPS or a bit more to do that. However this brings some more interesting dynamics to the warrior as you dont need to keep Adrenaline up anymore so you can Eviscerate on cool down which is kinda fun and allows for some interesting dynamics.

There are also some other builds that could now become while not the best DPS, at least competitive that sound kinda fun to me, for example a 10/30/0/0/30 type eviscerate build or something like that.

I dont know, I think the current meta is kinda stale, im not saying 1.5 years into the new meta it wont also be stale but a little bit of change is good.

Flissy.4093:

Not true at all. The Assassin mix is so minorly better than full Berserker atm that even just the slightest nerf to critical damage would make Power > Precision. But it’s not even the slighest nerf, I believe it’s been calculated to be about 25-30%.

If you are talking personal DPS sure you are absolutely correct.

However if we are talking with Banner of STR and 25 stack of might precision is still more DPS right up until about 98-99% crit chance.

Basically, power you can makeup from buffs, precision is not as easy to make up. The difference is pretty negligible sure, but it still holds true.

Some mix of berserker/assasins depending on buffs/food is still going to be best.

The basics are not changing, it’s just that you will not be able to get crit damage quite as high as before other than that nothing will change.

You are still going to want 100% crit chance when buffed and you are still likely to need a bit of extra precision from somewhere to get there.

Right now the highest DPS a warrior can do is pure Axe/Mace no GS. But that dont really matter. Post patch the best pure DPS build is going to be Axe/Mace with no switch 30/30/0/x/x.

This means 2 things that are good for you:

1) No fast hands – so weapon swapping not really advantageous in any regard
2) Switching to anything 2 handed will be a huge DPS loss as you will have both Dual Weilding, and the new attack speed trait. Switching to a GS would be… well stupid.

So no worries, just do you axe thing and keep your longbow.

Now that this whole crit damage nerf thing is out of the bag

Can we get a ferocity stacking sigil?

I feel like this would be a good way to give people the option to get more of that crit damage but in order to do so, you have to give up blood lust or perception.

Armor class doesn’t matter. It’s all about traits, skills and lifepool.

The difference between a light armor class and heavy armor class is about 400 armor. Or in other words about a 12-15% damage reduction.

The difference between a full zerk Ele and a Full zerk warrior is about 6000-7000 life. So if an ele gets hit for 1k they lose about 7% of their total life pool. Same damage for a warrior it gets reduced to about 870 because of heavy armor and would take about 3-4% of a warrior’s total life pool. Same damage to a full zerker guardian would take about 6% of total life pool.

So what I am saying is that on Armor and Health alone and Ele can take just as much abuse as a guardian. However guardians have a lot more surviveability built into their skills and traits. Elementalists do not.

Point is armor is not why a guardian or warrior outsurvive an ele.

TL;DR

But from the quick overview, I just don’t think you could be more wrong.

Very early on you state that experienced players can escape almost all damage by dodging.

Than you suggest solutions to this by changing gear. However this doesn’t accomplish anything because the root problem, that damage can be mitigated easily with any gear, persists.

This cannot be addressed via gear, or traits, it will either take a a fundamental change to the dodge mechanic, or fundamental changes to almost all PvE encounters.

I understand that people like to buy RNG stuff like the new dye packs, I have been known to put a gem or two into RNG boxes. However I really think Anet needs to be a bit more clear on what exactly we are buying before we buy it.

What drops are possible?
Are some drops more common than others?
If it is a dye pack maybe even some preview feature for new dyes? So we dont end up spending money on colors we don’t want.

Even with things like a Lotto drawing, it is in theory possible to get a pretty good idea of your chances of winning. I just think we should know in advance what we are putting money into.

I see no reason for a Necro to cleave.

Necros have plenty of AoE skills, and are more then competitive compared to other classes in every area of the game except dungeons.

Well to some extent balance is an issue here.

With 2000 condition damage which is pretty difficult to get 25 Stacks of bleed comes out to around 3500 DPS. Lets say you also apply burning and poison and your up to around 4500 DPS.

Now even if you are on something like a warrior /w sword which hits reasonably hard, you wont get more than ~2-3k more DPS from your attacks with having to go so heavily into condi damage. So a full condition damage spec is netting you 6500-7500 DPS at 25 stacks.

Then take into acount that it can take 20 seconds to get a 25 stack, and most boss fights last just a min or so and we can just say that if you aim to do DPS, conditions are at best 20-30% less effective than direct damage no matter how you slice it.

In PvE it can be very very useful.

Ranger’s who cover a fire field using healing spring in PvE ESPECIALLY in dungeons irritate me to no end.

Use troll ungent, or Water spirit or anything else or even nothing at all.

I just think they need to add more skills that reveal thieves.

There are a few already such as Sick Em, but if each class had a method for applying this that did not impinge on their build I think it would greatly improve the mechanics of fighting thieves.

I would probably like to see priority something along the lines of:

1) Preferred Field if available – set by the player for each skill
2) Own field
3) Last laid field

So if you want to really get into it, you can configure on a per skill basis which field is prefferred. If that field is not available, OR the preffered field is not set, it would use your own field if you have one down. Than it would prioritize the last laid field.

I think this would be good for all, it would be good for people who want to really customize, it would be good for people who want to use their own fields, and it would make it predictable for those that don’t care to put much effort into it.

The problem is simple, it is not complicated, it does not take pages to explain. It can be summed up in once sentance.

In PvE if you learn to dodge, you can survive any encounter in the entire game regardless of gear and/or traits.

So if you dont need toughness, or vitality, or healing to survive they instantly become useless stats and you are left with only berserker.

I honestly have trouble envisioning how this could be fixed in any productive manner without breaking another portion of the game.

Dodge mechanic and universal heal make gear irrelevant. I can put on whatever gear I want, and whatever traits I want and I can still survive bosses by knowing which heal skill to bring and when to dodge. So if gear does not matter for surviveability than why not go DPS? However if you change the dodge or heal mechanics you are going to break things in WvW and PvP.

OK so I’ve now put some 700 hours into this game, and I really enjoy this game. However It leaves me with an overwhelming feeling of disappointment and frustration. I should really love this game. Conceptually a lot of the things in it I really like and agree with.

“Breaking The Trinity” has manifested itself as everyone is a DPS.

Dungeons are probably the weakest PvE point of the game. They come off as an afterthought, 65% of the bosses are just damage sponges, and with a halfway decent group all of the dungeons are quite easy.

Dynamic events were brilliant when I was leveling, but disappear as rewarding events soon after 80.

Living Story sounds really cool, but the manifestation has been rapid releases of lackluster, temporary content.

WvWvW is an awesome concept but again the implementation has been rocky. The prevalence of the Zerg and the technical problems have made it fun and promising but much less than it could have been.

Lets not talk about PvP…. (or the lack there of)

I feel like this first year has been a beta. However now instead of fixing the issues for the real release they have to apply band-aids to things that should have been done correctly in the first place. I just get a sense this game was launched about 2-3 years before it was ready because of money. Its best attribute is its unfulfilled ideas and possible future potential.

I really like the birthday booster however other then that this birthday gift was rather ill conceived. Any way you look at it, it just doesn’t make any sense.

And to those who say “be grateful stop wining” get real, if you do something once and its good that means you are expected to do it at least as well or better in the future. Period end of story. If you don’t think that’s true then you’ve never had a job.

Anyway the real reason to me that it doesn’t make any sense at all is because of the mini and the leveling scroll.

First of all, because the mini is account bound how does it make sense for every character to get it?

Secondly as you get more and more characters you will get more and more leveling scrolls. This is also quite silly logic because the more characters you have the less need you have for the insta lvl 20 scrolls.

I appreciate receiving a gift, I just think that the contents of this gift were rather puzzling as if not a whole lot of thought went into it.

Mazzy, my point is that having alpha testers 100 of them, 1000 of them 10,000 of them is just never going to work. It has been proven in academic research that more testers is not necessarily equivalent to better test coverage. It reaches a point where more testers in fact lead to less effective testing.

I dont want to become a tester at all, I spend my entire work day testing or designing and developing tools for testing. Its the last thing I want to to do in a game I play after work.

However I am curious why despite a good amount of evidence attesting to the fact that manual testing is rather ineffective by modern standards, even basic test automation has not worked its way into game testing.

Mattidore.3482:

only problem is that eviscerate is nigh on impossible to land.

A skill that can take 50% off near any class in the game need to be hard to land.
This is the problem with balancing the warrior. Only way to counter the kind of damage that is possible is with CC and kiting.

That makes playing a warrior very frustrating. However at the same time if we were given better mobility it would very quickly become overpowered.

What are you all on about. I am a warrior main and even I must admit that single class that needs fixes/balancing the LEAST at this moment is the warrior.

In PvE, they are the best DPS class available bar none.

In WvW, like it or not the current meta is medium to large zergs. In this setting the warrior again is among the better classes.

In PvP yes they need some work but not as much as you might think. They have high DPS which means the only way to counter them is to not get hit by them. I agree getting kited is frustrating however at what expense do we want balance in PvP? Do we want more mobility but less damage, I dont think I do.

As to the actual topic of this thread healing sig is far from useless.
It just needs traits and healing power to help it along. The traits for signets and healing power are not very popular among warriors at this time.

And who says every skills should be good for every build?

I think this is a bit to complex of a thing to really discuss in depth here without more typing then I am willing to do.

But suffice it to say that the tools capable of this so far have been very limited in scope. However the theories behind them do scale. We have done several case studies on large computer systems with good success. However as I said before it has to be built into your design and development process for it to work.

goldenwing.8473:

We were using automated software testing 30 years ago. Not a new concept or implementation. People also threw random numbers at mathematical functions like floating point multipliers (even though Intel sorta slipped on that… once.) Those automated tests today still require human guidance. In the end, the testing is only as good as the people who think up the test cases, even if the testing is expanded by automatic software.

Yes, automated testing (regression) can cover basics.

-Implication obvious.

You seem to be talking about more primitive stuff such as random walk, monkey testing, fuzzing ect.

That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about automated test design. Where some sort of model or parameters are provides and tests are intelligently designed by an algorithm to cover a set of parameters.

And yes human guidance is required, but less humans, less money and all in less time.

The human merely sets the paramters for the test. That could be a behvioral model, that could be a fault tree, that could a value tree. It could be any number of things.

And maybe “industrial” is the wrong would. I mean on the high end and more towards the safety critical arena. Cars, Planes, Trains, Shipping, ect. ect. Even then we are perhaps 5-10 years off from seeing completely autonomous testing systems.

However I would not even advocate that level of automation for software, but that does not mean that the theories, principles and tools developed for the safety critical industrial sector cannot save money and man hours in the software industry. There are at least a few examples I know of where advanced test automation procedures have been worked into rapid release cycle consumer software with great success.

Kain Francois.4328:

One class revision for example was months in the making, with over a hundred people called at once, every week to test it!

For game balance, or for testing weather or not changes are fun, this is all fine. However for the type of testing being discussed here, IE new stuff not being broken, new stuff not breaking stuff that was working before, releasing new stuff devoid of major bugs ect.

That’s just never going to work.

goldenwing.8473:

Developers (especially MMOs) never have the level of rigorous testing required, either due to time or bodies (all a matter of economics).

Hehe, this is why I have a job, testing is better left to the computers. At least at a basic level. Obviously a computer cant tell you if it having fun or not, but human testing is just inefficient, inaccurate, and slow.

The industrial sector is moving rapidly towards completely autonomous testing. IE a system that automatically designs test cases, executes them and if a test fails it will automatically generate a change request.

For some reason though even very critical computer systems are still really sort of in the dark ages of testing where they are run through expensive and inefficient “testing mills”. Even very basic test automation procedures when incorporated into development practices reduces the time, money and number of people required to do testing, all the while creating better coverage.

nethykins.7986:

To me…your situation felt like it was simply bad management.

It is and it isn’t, most industries refuse to adopt good testing practices until they are forced to. In this instance the small chance that a bug costs $$$ is not worth the certain $$$ that delaying release would cost.

I work in a highly specialized field of test automation. We develop tools that we sell to client mostly in telecom and embedded systems.

An MMO is really just a series of embedded systems but even though It would save them money and give them a better product, until an industry is forced… usually people stick with what they know even when it is expensive and ineffective.

I dont think it has to do with smarts, I think it has more to do with the fact that its always been done one way and even if that way is outdated and has been improved significantly people wont give it up until they are forced.

Safety critical systems gave up the sort of testing that is done on rapid release cycle projects decades ago. Because of accidents and deaths and the bad press that comes with that. Because of that they are spending less money and manpower on testing all while tester to a much much higher standard.

I love the cinematics, and the first boss encounter is pretty awesome. I would have hope for a bit longer of a dungeon perhaps 2 paths?

I dont want to get to theoretical on you But…

Yes, no system can be tested completely. In any type of test you have to come up with a balance between time to execute the tests and level of coverage. The other thing is that you dont test to catch bugs, you test to ensure the system meets its specification. So testing is not designed to remove all bugs, it is designed to ensure that the bugs are hard enough to trigger that you meet your requirements.

That said in order to test a system you have to go through the process of formalizing the system. This means breaking down each element into a stimulation and an expected response. When you do this you will find that you can break even very complex systems with millions of parts into much simpler representations . You are essentially abstracting a series of things into a stimulation or response. That stimulation could involve tens, hundreds or thousands of other things in the background. However you are abstracting it at a much higher level.

In doing so you can catch a great many obvious bugs really quickly, and you can also do rapid regression testing to ensure that you don’t break anything. That was previously working. You can also incorporate automated stress testing, as well as fuzzing to get really decent test coverage in a very limited time scale.

I would also be the first to admit that is really not something that anyone could implement after the fact, it has to be built into your development process. I just wish more companies realized that their is both cost and quality benefit to doing this.

So saving money, and having a better product doesnt matter? That matters to every industry.

I would argue that well executed test automation saves money in the long term. Although stat up costs are prohibitive for rapid release cycles like gaming firms.

So it seems as if quite a lot of the time Anet releases new patches it requires 1-2 extra patches to get it all sort of working correctly. Im wondering exactly how they test.

Little Background: I work in the development of model based test automation solutions, mostly utilized in telecom and safety critical systems (cars, planes and trains) . There is a lot of great testing technology available and im just curious why more companies like Anet do not adopt more advanced testing procedures.

I had finished a skill challenge was left with low health and poison ticking. As I was running from land into water I went down. When I went down, I was on land but somehow the process of going down put me into water. The result was all my skills were locked, no land or water skills. So I could not rez up even though nothing was attacking me.

BrknSoul.6047:

Shael.4703:

Is it allowed? Programming macros on your keyboard? Gaming publishers tend to ban people for that, I’m not sure with GW2, was there an official statement yet about macros set in gaming keyboards?

Usually it’s fine, so long as you don’t use the Delay features of those devices.

For example, Binding a G-Key to Ctrl+Alt+1 would be fine, but having a G-Key press 1, wait two seconds, press 2, wait another two seconds and press 1 again would not be OK.

This is not true. Unless Arenanet has changed their stance.

In the past Arenanet reps have said they will not comment on which macros are OK and which are not. They said that players should feel free to use their keyboards as they see fit however that any method that allows the game to be played without a user having to control the character could be construed as botting and could result in a ban.

Which macros rise to the level of botting and which don’t they have never said specifically.

By maybe I should be more clear by charstirng I mean a random selection of ASCII values which includes letters, numbers and symbols.

A high quality mouse is great, all the buttons…. IDK bout that seems a bit overkill.

I have seen quite a few topics across the forums that are along these lines:
“How did I get hacked I used a unique email/password?”

So I figured I would write a quick guide to not getting hacked.
This guide will be split into 3 parts:

1)Password Management
2)Username Management
3)Malware Security

Password Management

The first step is learning how to make a strong password and the strongest possible passwords are always going to be random char-strings, however a good password is also easy to remember. Here is the strategy I use.

1. Come up with a fairly long easy to remember sentence.
For this example we will use this : “I like to eat green bananas every Thursday at 9 AM.”

2. Take the first letter of every word like this: “IltegbeTa9A.”
Now so long as you can remember that sort of ridiculous but fairly simple sentence you can remember your password. And as you can see the password would appear random to just about anyone. Try to pick sentences that have a proper name and and at least one number in them to get some capitals and numbers. Also exchanging the words to and too with the letter 2 can get you an extra number.

Don’t be afraid to write this sentence down either, MMO hackers aren’t going to get inside you house and even if they did how would they know what it means?

Also change your password every so often even if you have no reason to assume its been compromised. For something extremely sensitive once per month is advisable, for something like this once every 3-6 months is probably fine.

Username Management

Getting an email just for a game is a bit of hassle but their are a few ways of making it less so.

Many services (including Gmail) offer free mail forwarding. I you set up an account and set mail forwarding to you current email all emails sent to this new private account will be immediately forwarded to your current email address.

The strategy described here which I wont go over again is also a very effective way of obtaining an alternate email without hassle, although this is not quite as secure as separate account.

Malware Security

There are two kinds of anti malware software and you should optimally have both.

One is the active kind, this is the running in the background variety that actively scans things as they arrive to your computer.

Microsoft Security Essentials, AVG Free Edition, Avast! ect. ect. are free examples of this form of anti malware. My personal preference is Microsoft Security Essentials because it has no paid version and as such doesn’t hassle you to give it money.

The other form of anti malware is the scan only type. This does not actively protect you but scans only when you ask it too.

I hope this does not come off as advertising or product endorsement but…
For the love of god, get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. This software is amazingly capable of finding things that even the best active anti-virus misses. It is not only adept at finding the issues but it is among the best at removing issues once found completely. The free edition is not as good as the paid version but its close enough.
Run this at least weekly, probably daily.

Cliffnotes Version:

Passwords – Think up a sentence and make your password by taking the first letter form each word. Change your password regularly.

Email – Get an alternate email someway somehow.

Malware – Get Malwarebytes Anti-Malware, and some form of active protection as well. Scan weekly.

Follow these simple guidelines and you will significantly reduce your chances of getting hacked.

Good Luck Everyone

Personally Id love to see the ability to sell karma items back within say 1 hour of buying them or something like that.

Just got in game… and nothing is gone. Hmm maybe this is just login errors? Timing out and telling me incorrect password? IDK weird tho

haha you want to wait 5 days on the phone for someone to respond?

So I played all last night but when I tried to log into the forum just now, my password would not work. I reset it and changed it and now I am in and all seems normal. I have not looked in game… but the weirdest part to me is that I have received no emails from Arenanet in the meantime.

I do have email authentication on, so for someone to even log in outside of one of my two approved locations I should receive an email.

Is it at all possible a third party changed my password without me getting an email about it?

They should change the name of this forum to the “Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories” forum seriously.

A while back hackers released a list of 400,000+ passwords taken from a popular blogging site. The most popular password was “54321” the second most popular “12345” the third most popular (and my personal favorite) was “password”….

Nearly half of the passwords were only numbers or only letters, of those that were mixed the most common practice was a series of letters followed by a a number. Most of these numbers were either XX or 19XX with XX being a 2 digit number greater then 70 meaning a year since 1970. More then 70% of passwords contained no spaces and were 8 characters or less, and more then 90% contained no symbols (I.E. #,%,&,?) and were 10 characters or less. Trends like these make brute force attacks very simple and effective.

IPs from all over the world are used because A) There are hackers all over the world and because it isn’t all that hard to make it look like you are in any country in the world when in fact you aren’t.

Games like this are common targets because their is money to be made and their are no consequences for doing it. Hack a bank… you could got to jailf or decades. Hack an MMO no one gives a crap… So in many ways you should treat MMO account safety more seriously then almost any other account you have because it is the most likely to be tested.

I have done some investigations on how to perhaps make the UI more customizeable and it looks very hard to do on our own without help from arenanet.

It appears that the GW2 UI is done in HTML and then uses the something called Awesomium (awesomium(dot)com) to interface that with the native code running GW2.

That means 2 things, 1, the UI may not be rendered by open GL, meaning texmod modding might not be possible. It may be possible to use the Awesomium API directly to inject your own UI elements into GW2…. but that sounds like something that would get you the ban hammer.