Guild Wars 2

Why experience the imprisonment of a god, or a massive experiment gone wrong, when you can experience the rebirth of Elona at the hands of a true hero? Vote for someone with centuries of experience and proven leadership abilities!

#VotePalawaJoko

I’m enjoying this chapter of the living story, but I’ve noticed that there are a lot of achievements for players who leech group events. This is very detrimental to cooperation, and I hope this isn’t a sign of a new direction for achievements. As a commander who is trying to help everyone succeed, these are all very frustrating.

• Bigger, But Not Faster – Successfully dodge every assault knight’s Extraction attack.
  • Players looking to get this achievement won’t join the fight until the last 10% so that they don’t have to dodge much.
• No More Tricks, Scarlet – Defeat Scarlet’s Prime Hologram without being hit by lasers or their lingering scorch marks.
  • Players just stand off to the side and leech this whole fight to get this achievement.
• In Tune – While fighting Scarlet’s Prime Hologram, never hit a hologram without the respective attunement.
  • Players hit the main hologram a few times and then leech the rest of the match because they don’t want to accidentally hit any holograms with the wrong attunement.
• Keep Your Distance – Defeat the Aetherblade Admiral without being hit by her teleport attack.
  • Players hit the Aetherblade Admiral enough to get credit and then stay out of range to get the achievement
• Light Show – Kill the Aether Cannoneer without being hit by the Aetherblade Megalaser
  • Coordinating against this boss involves kiting him into the megalaser. Players show up just for the achievement, and run away from the megalaser, preventing the cannoneer from getting hit by it. Most of those players also refuse to stop using projectiles while he is reflecting, so they constantly down the few players who are actually trying to kite the cannoneer. This results in the only players not getting the achievement are the few who actually caused the event to succeed.

…you accidentally refer to WvW as “real life” while playing PvE. (The other day I said that the arrow carts in The Silverwastes work “just like the ones in real life”.)

…someone refers to Los Angeles as “LA” and you think they’re talking about Lion’s Arch.

…most of what you know about cooking involves a discovery panel.

…you’re convinced that Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy must be a Sylvari.

…during a background check, the interviewer asks if there are any other names you’ve ever gone by, and you provide your main character’s name.

BobbyStein.2315:

We’re exploring some ideas for the future

I suggest easing up on the achievements and rewards to focus on content. Achievements to encourage participation in LS are great, but achievements that encourage farming or grinding LS are time consuming and stressful to those of us who have busy schedules but don’t want to miss any temporary achievements.

Good LS achievements:

• Tell a story
  • Flame and Frost: Hero’s Aid
  • Dragon Bash: Case Closed
  • Bazaar of the Four Winds: Strangers From The Sky
• Lead the player to content
  • Halloween: It’s a Mad King’s World, Attend the Party, Mad King’s Clock Tower
  • Wintersday: Toypocalypse Canceled, Become the Bells, Gift Bringer
  • Secret of Southsun: Southsun Sightseer, Southsun Volunteer Fieldwork, Crab Toss Participant, Crab Toss Champion, Canach Trapper, Subdirector NULL Demolitionist, Contractually Obligated
  • Dragon Bash: Dragon Ball Devotee
  • Sky Pirates: Equipment Failure, ‘Cornered, Caught, Collared’
  • Bazaar of the Four Winds: Ascent to Zephyr Sanctum, Sanctum Sprinter, Pickup Completionist
  • Ellen Kiel: Aspect Arena Frequenter
  • Evon Gnashblade: Survival Survivor

Bad LS achievements:

• Require grinding^
  • Wintersday: Cold-Weather Friend
  • Flame and Frost: Refugee Volunteer, The Gathering Storm
  • Secret of Southsun: Crabgrabber
  • Dragon Bash: Color The Sky, Paper Dragon, So Lifelike, Burn Down The Dragons, Dragon Ball Boss
  • Sky Pirates: Ascalon/Kryta/Maguuma/Shiverpeaks Aetherblades
  • Ellen Kiel: Homeland Supporter
  • Evon Gnashblade: Homeland Supporter
• Don’t provide anything unique
  • Ellen Kiel: Dungeon Runner, Maw Mulcher, Homeland Supporter, Kiel Every Day
  • Evon Gnashblade: Dungeon Runner, Maw Mulcher, Homeland Supporter, Gnash All the Blades

^ Note that all of the grinding achievements (except Homeland Supporter) do lead players to content, which is good, but they require excessive repetition, which is bad.

The dragons consume magic. By defeating the elder dragons, the world’s magic will be able to flow unimpeded. Then, if Scarlet were able to unite the five bloodstones, she would gain control of all magic in the world, and become more powerful than the gods.

But there’s a catch. She would need the blood from a member of the royal lineage of King Doric in order to harness the power of the bloodstones. Only one human with Doric’s blood remains alive: Queen Jennah.

I think I just figured out why Scarlet wants to kidnap Jennah.

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

…

I disagree with making guilds occupy parts of the same district. That would cause so many problems of guilds arguing over who gets what space. Larger guilds would argue that they deserve the best spots. Smaller guilds would argue that all guilds should have equal rights. Almost every guild would probably want the same spot, and only one could have it, leaving almost everyone in the game to be disappointed. There would be a limited amount of space, yet theoretically unlimited guilds. It would just be a huge mess.

Each guild should be able to have their own little place that they can customize and manage however they like, without other guilds being able to ruin that for them.

The next living story chapter is called “Twilight Assault”. The trailer showed Aetherblades, steam creatures, and nightmare husks (and Caithe). It seems obvious that Scarlet is involved, and Faolain probably is too.

Most people are assuming that we’re just going to go fight Scarlet in a new locale, or maybe that Twilight Arbor is getting an overhaul, but here’s what I’m hoping for…

Scarlet intends to conquer the Nightmare Court, so she attacks Twilight Arbor with the intent to kill their leader, Faolain. Players join the battle, caught between two evil armies, and are forced to join with either Scarlet or Faolain to crush the other. Then, whichever path is completed by more groups determines living story events down the road.

Thoughts?

If it’s the intended behavior that some minipets work in water and some don’t, could you guys either mention that on the minis that don’t work in water, or possibly use the little “no water” icon that land-only skills have? (Optimally they would all have swimming animations, but I doubt that will happen.)

Arcadio.6875:

-A button on the guild tab that says “Go to Guild Hall” when you are out in the world and “Leave Guild Hall” when you are in it. Works well for WvW and PvP.

That’s exactly how it worked in GW1, and it was great. I agree that that would be the optimal implementation for GW2.

Celwina.2598:

Blizzard never does this. Just saying.

Blizzard never introduces bugs in their updates? That’s a good one.

Quaggan Storm!

Like Sharknado, but cuter.

RedStar.4218:

Hey look at the bright side ! You can always theorize on which one of Kass or Marjory is going to propose to the other or which body part will Braham injure next !

I’m still theorizing when they’re going to include Braham’s love of ham in the game.

Gaile Gray.6029:

You guys make a good point. Doing him in isn’t an option. But seriously, a swift kick in the pants? I’ll volunteer!

When he said that he wouldn’t go to the summit without Taimi relinquishing her device to him, I wanted the option to tell him that we would just find someone more important on the council instead. Hit him right in his asuran ego.

It would be nice to be able to hop in and out of guild halls to use merchants, banks, crafting, trading post, etc. I currently use my home borderland in WvW for that, but there are the obvious problems of occasional queues, having no guild bank sometimes, and having downtime during reset.

Having some sort of way for dedicated guild members to leave their mark in the guild hall would be cool too.

You see the secret ending that reveals that Zommoros is actually the spirit of Koss, and that the Krytan government is being puppeteered by a gang of breakdancing dolyaks.

There’s probably already at least one thread about this, but I’m creating a new one since the I can’t find any because the forums search function still doesn’t work.

Players occasionally dodge roll in the opposite direction of where they are trying to dodge to. This was introduced around the time of Sky Pirates of Tyria and still hasn’t been fixed.

Yesterday my character died because he dodged into the burning oil attacks in the ascalon fractal. Last week my character died because he dodged off the edge in Skyhammer. The week before that my character died because he dodged back into range of an immobilize skill while running from a group of enemies in WvW. All of those dodges were in the opposite direction of how I pressed the keys. Most of my mis-directed dodges aren’t fatal, but they’re all frustrating. I really hope this gets fixed soon.

In case this info helps fix this: I have double-tap to dodge turned off, and always dodge with the V key.

The simple solution is to make any weapon skill usage cause reveal rather than only ones that hit. This would prevent the Smoke Screen / Cluster Bomb combo from granting unlimited stealth without destroying the stealth mechanic itself.

skullmount.1758:

ahhh, there’s still Ebonhawke…

Which is connected to Divinity’s Reach by a poorly guarded asura gate. :P

I’ve seen many players have the same problem since launch, and players are still encountering this every day. They post on the forums asking for help, and have been answered countless times by other players and Arenanet employees. So let’s fix this problem.

“I didn’t receive my gem store purchase”

“My friend sent me something but I never got it”

The answer is always that the player has reached the 10 letter maximum in their mailbox and just needs to delete something. Here’s a typical case from yesterday:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Not-receiving-purchases-from-the-Gem-Store/first

Arenanet limits us to 10 letters (either from players or the gem store) so we don’t hog their server space. That’s fine, but players want to be able to store more letters. So let’s solve all of these problems at once. Without a ton of development effort.

Let’s add an option to archive mail. This option would simply be a button at the bottom of the mailbox window. Archived mail would be stored locally on the user’s computer and would not count towards the 10 letter maximum. Letters holding items cannot be archived, and archived letters can neither be reported nor unarchived. These limitations are because players would be able to modify archived letters, as they are stored locally on the player’s computer.

This gives players the ability to store as much mail as they want, and it saves Arenanet server space. But this alone won’t solve the first problem I described. If players don’t know their mail limitations, they still won’t get new mail when their mailbox fills up.

That’s why this change should be accompanied by a new setting in the options menu, defaulted to “on”, that automatically archives mail with no attached items 24 hours after it is read. This will prevent most players from ever running out of room for new mail.

This change would require very minimal UI changes (one standard button on the mail screen, one checkbox option in the options menu, and a small new icon to show that a piece of mail is archived), a new hint to describe archiving mail, and a simple local storage system that can be implemented similarly to templates in GW1.

Players get “unlimited” mailbox space, Arenanet doesn’t have to store as much user data, forum users don’t have to keep telling people to delete old mail to make room for new mail, and the developers don’t even have to break a sweat.

In the first Guild Wars, editing a guild message was simple and convenient. We just clicked ‘Edit’, modified the message however we wanted, and clicked ‘Done’. If guild members wanted to copy part of the guild message they could just select it and use ctrl-c to copy.

In Guild Wars 2, when we click ‘Edit’ we get a blank message box to work with. We can’t make minor changes or additions to the guild message without rewriting the entire thing. This is extremely frustrating if we realize that there is a typo or we want to add something. There are also many ways to accidentally close the edit window, losing all of your changes. Guild members can’t copy things that are in the guild information such as URLs or VOIP information.

I haven’t said anything before because I thought there was no way that such a poorly designed guild message system was permanent, especially after the one in GW was so convenient. Instead I gave up on using guild messages months ago (after avidly updating and maintaining them in GW).

So I ask that guild messages please preserve the existing message when we click, make the edit window more stable so it doesn’t close if we switch windows, and allow guild members to select the text in the guild message so it can be copied.

I just bought gems to support Anet, and used them to get a new character slot (among other things) during the second anniversary sale. I don’t want to create a new character anymore, because of the new system. I also should have bought less gems, other changes deserve my support, but not this one.

epborden.7492:

Because of the actions of several members of different guilds caught hacking, our realm has taken it upon itself to create new rules as to how we report hackers. Guild members have both individually, and as whole groups hacked. It has been with such flamboyant disregard for being caught that we are now reporting every member of a guild should it have members that have been caught. So many different members are hacking that we just don’t know who is innocent and who is not, and because of that we have no choice but to report every member of a guild.

If you are a member, commander, or creator of a guild and hold your guild in high regard please find members that hack and take action against them soon so your whole guild is not penalized for the actions of a few. Hacking has become so rampant in WvW that many realms are now reporting any member of a guild should any member of that guild be caught hacking. This can lead to YOU being falsely reported and possibly BANNED from playing Guild Wars 2.

1. Falsely reporting players for botting/hacking will result in your own account being suspended.

2. Being falsely reported will not result in your account being banned.

Here’s my theory:

Rytlock completes the rite of ascension, with the help of Turai Ossa, in order to speak to the human gods. They grant him the status of Envoy so that he can lead the souls of the Ascalonians to the underworld, but this comes at a great cost. Seeing the human gods causes Rytlock to go blind, and his new position as Envoy means that he can never fully return to Tyria.

Fortus.6175:

Allie Murdock.8152:

Alright, I wasn’t going to post here

Hmm, interesting, so you guys read stuff even if you dont reply? Now thats interesting information…

They’ve literally said that hundreds of times.

I understand Arenanet’s technical limitations and reason for two datacenters, but that just makes me wonder how it all worked so perfectly in the original Guild Wars.

I hope they put it (and other Dragon Bash songs) on https://soundcloud.com/arenanet/

Yes, Anet has paid posters, they’re called employees, and their names show up with a big red thing on the left.

Seriously though, Anet makes great decisions all the time (in addition to some bad decisions), and the 1% of players who aren’t happy with them take to the forums to bash them, while the other 99% happily enjoy the changes. The forums show a much, much higher distribution of negative feedback than is represented in the total player base.

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

We want you to know that we’re working kitten fixing bugs in the New Player Experience system. We’re also using this opportunity to make a few changes to its design to take into account the feedback we’ve been reading. We’re aiming to deploy the fixes early next week.

You’re fixing kittens? Should you let a veterinarian handle that?

On a serious note, thanks for keeping us informed.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

I am going to look into the cost of a guild calendar.

I love this idea. My guild’s 7th birthday is next Tuesday and we’re having trouble communicating the schedule (most players don’t read the guild message unless you tell them to).

I agree with the OP.

PS Sometimes I wish these forums were pay-to-whine. Anet would make so much money.

Why not simply convert town clothes into armor skins and keep the costume pieces separate? That way everyone can continue to mix-and-match, and there is no need to introduce the confusion and frustration of town clothes tonics.

They should replace Shatterer, Tequatl, and Claw of Jormag’s boss music with “Bash the Dragon” during the event. That would be enough incentive for me.

A sort of 2v2v2 could be interesting among servers. That way you wouldn’t only get different opponents, but different allies. The system could then pair complementary rank servers together, which should reduce the urge for people to abandon low ranked servers.

The difficulty of the “Not So Secret” jumping puzzle was great, but I would strongly recommend doing two things differently in the future:

1. Make it more forgiving. Obsidian Sanctum is great because it is split into sections, and falling in any of those sections won’t kill you (that’s what enemy players are for) and you don’t have to go all the way back to the start. Goemm’s Lab is great because it provides checkpoints in a way that makes sense (buggy implementation, but it has the right idea). The problem with “Not So Secret” is that it is extremely unforgiving. There are no checkpoints, essentially any fall will kill you, and there is no waypoint nearby. This is enough to frustrate most players, but it’s enough to make solo players feel like the situation is hopeless.

A waypoint below the airship would be nice, checkpoints would be great, friendly NPCs that could res players who fall to their deaths would work well too. In its current state, the optimum way to complete this puzzle, even for those of us who want to do it ourselves, is to hope that there is a mesmer to portal you to the end. That should not be the case.

2. Less repetitive fighting. After I’ve died for the tenth time, having to fight the same enemies for the tenth time is just a pain. It’s even worse when I try running past them and they hit me in the air, putting me “in combat” and making me fall to my death. Killing a boss or a group of enemies to move on to the next section is fine, just don’t make us fight them again and again.

Fewer enemies would be nice, easier-to-avoid enemies would be better, but an interaction to avoid enemies would be best. If we’re in a field, let us hit a nearby bee hive with a rock and have the bees chase away the enemies. If we’re in an inquest lab, let us trip an alarm that sends the enemies rushing into a different room. If we’re sneaking down a dark corridor, let us pick up a cudgel that can stun enemies that we hit from behind. Just don’t drop enemies in a puzzle with no purpose but to annoy players who want nothing more than to get back to jumping or solving the puzzle.

Ensign.2189:

I think it’s important to point out that the main functions for a vast majority of players – clicking on an item in inventory to sell, or searching for an item to buy – are vastly, vastly improved.

Running around this evening, whenever I wanted to sell something I found the experience on the TP was excellent – right click on the item, pull up the TP, and all the relevant buy and sell information is right there, on one screen, that I don’t have to leave to transact. It was excellent.

That’s actually the change that has bothered me the most so far. The main number that I’m concerned with (the listing value) is now small and pushed up into the corner. The sell buttons are shorter now, making them harder to click when I’m hastily trying to sell things. Having two “close window” buttons also threw me off, because most of the time I just clicked the close one, which just closed the pop-over and not the window.

These are all minor issues that I’m sure I can get used to, but they could be better.

GW2 isn’t supposed to be about grinding or farming, so this change is a positive step to help move away from that.

This warning was just added to all in-game mail that was not sent by the game, gem store, or GW2 team:

Warning: This message was sent by another player. It was not sent by the Guild Wars 2 Team.

Two concerns about this new warning:

1. This warning seems overly alarming, and may unintentionally scare players (especially new players) who haven’t seen it before. I suggest removing "Warning: " from the beginning of the text (but keep the little yellow triangle).
2. The messages I received from Seth Chadwick also have this warning, despite that he is a part of the GW2 team. If this message had originally accompanied the “Adopt-A-Dev” messages he sent me, I might have thought it was someone trying to trick me.

Permadeath.

Enough said.

Sassy.1697:

We need a Key Ring…

We need unified and simplified systems.

Not just for keys.
I think everyone is aware of the current flaws.

Sure your suggestion is valid but the problem doesn’t have to exist to begin with.
Bad/Unhealthy systems have to be fixed at their core.
No more band aid tactics.

Agreed.

Adding a ‘Keys’ tab to the wallet would be optimal.
(And if the wallet is going to have tabs, it would make sense to separate dungeon tokens into their own tab to keep things organized.)

I’ve seen some really OP ranger builds in WvW and sPvP recently (rangers consistently soloing entire groups of other players), which isn’t exactly what I’d call “useless”.

There are plenty of bad traits and skills that should be adjusted. They were just adjusted to improve balance and it’s going to continue. Please give the devs feedback here. Tell them why skill X sucks, or why trait Y is terrible. But, please do so in a logical and constructive way, because all of this whining, conspiracy theories, and nonsensical hyperbolies will get you nowhere, and drowns out any constructive feedback that might actually improve the game.

Silicato.4603:

Braham, on the contrary, I don´t like him. He looks to me like the eternal secondary, behind of the real protagonists.

Which is perfect. We don’t want another Kormir or Trahearne taking the spotlight from the players.

It’s so much better now that it’s not farmable.

Pitillidi.3917:

I think you’re right, they should make it to where a commander tag is not visible in wvw unless they have completed all of the following.
25k kills reasonable, except zerg kills don’t count. Anyone tagged by more than 5 people does not count towards your 25k kills.
500 gold spent on upgrades has to be gold earned in wvw, not pve or bought with gems.
2500 keep defenses and captures, they should all be captures or defenses of smc.
How many do you still have to complete?

Sometimes I wish there was a -1 button.

tl;dr Perma-stealth thieves are annoying.

Michael Henninger.7451:

ArenaNet agrees that communication is key. We’re diving into the forums a lot more than in the past with more freedom to candidly discuss our thought process. I can say that, for me, I’ve already had something brought to my attention today that I hadn’t realized was an issue.

Thanks to everyone that is constructively involved!

I’ve noticed that you guys are all over the forums since the feature patch hit. That plus the Adopt-A-Dev event is creating a great level of communication.

Once ladders are implemented, ranks will be retired. To honor the effort that players have put into the rank system, existing players will be able to keep all unlocked rank finishers and will earn a special title based on your rank to show that you were there from the start. Variants of existing rank finishers will move to the ladder system and will be used to show your current standings on the ladder from season to season. The original finishers will not be earnable again.

I have mixed feelings about the changes, but this change is the one that infuriates me. This is essentially giving exploiters permanent rewards and making them unattainable to legitimate players.

Why should players who exploited Skyhammer get to keep their cool finishers while those of us who have been playing legitimately since the beginning never get the chance to obtain them?

Please change glory boosters into a consumable that directly gives glory, similar to a Chalice of Glory but something like 100-200 glory each would be much more appropriate than simply removing them.

GabGar.4962:

First of all, I have 12 chars at 80, I love to play different classes because I get bored quickly just playing one, I have 6 of them with several ascended items (weapons, accesories)
I prepared for this update with so much anticipation, had materials to level 2 armor crafting professions to 500. But suddenly I check the cost of the recipes and is 5 laurels + 3 gold for EACH piece of armor, this is too much Anet…

For those with several characters, for those who invest in experimenting with different builds have to wait 30 days for EACH set of armor is just excesive, Anet you are punishing the players who invest more hours in your game, by forcing to wait natural days to get laurels to buy the recipes.

This is enough reason to think about leaving the game.

I understand your point, but you’re skipping past a lot of things to make it.

• Ascended gear is meant to be a long term goal, not something you should have instantly on all characters when they hit 80 (like exotic)
• You don’t need ascended armor. It will quickly become relevant in WvW because your enemies will start acquiring it, and it could be helpful in fractals, but you’ve survived perfectly fine so far without it.
• You only need 30 laurels for each set of armor if there’s absolutely no overlap between the the types of armor that you’re purchasing.
• You act as if we all have to start from 0 laurels with this release. If you’re truly dedicated, like you say, you’ve already acquired hundreds of laurels from dailies, monthlies, and achievement rewards. I bought three characters worth of ascended trinkets, an Endless Mystery Cat Tonic, Goedulf, Chauncey von Snuffles III, all 8 crafting starter boxes, a handful of infusions, a few ascended weapon recipes, a taste of liquid world experience for each daily “big spender”, and I still have 60-something left over.

A dedicated player would never think about leaving the game over something this minor.

1. Proper objective names

2. “Contested” boolean for each objective in match details

3. Status of upgrades for each objective in match details

4. Add mercenary camp statuses to match details

5. “Outmanned” list for each map in match details that lists which servers are outmanned on that map (empty list if none)

The patch a few minutes ago was a bunch of bug fixes and this:

Adjusted selling within the Trading Post so that the default is set to match the highest buyer instead of the lowest seller.

Why??? Can we at least get an option to change this. Now listing an item, which is the most frequent action on the TP for most players, requires extra mouse movement and an extra click.