Guild Wars 2

There seem to be a few threads going on in various forums about CC. I will just say that I think the design of CCs in general is deeply flawed. At their conceptual core, they are designed for PvE going all the way back to D&D. But video game designers have not made any well-reasoned efforts to adapt them into action combat, let alone PvP. From 1980s RPGs to GW2, I am still finding it the case that everything you really want to CC is immune to it, and everything that is vulnerable to CC just melts to regular attacks. So CC has no purpose in PvE, fair enough. But meanwhile their only real function in PvP is to cheese other players. Is that really a needed function? Why not just take them out of the game entirely? I’ve never seen players from another genre say “You know what would make this game better, is if players could just be stopped from doing anything.” If Anet’s going to redesign them for a skill split they might as well just redesign them period.

Further, I am not a fan of hidden mechanics and the breakbar system is effectively that. A CC skill has a very specific description of what it does, but it doesn’t do any of it when you’re fighting any kind of boss. If the breakbar system is going to remain as is, then it is long overdue for breakbar-related facts to be added to the description of every CC skill. Players should be able to tell at a glance not only which of their skills will do breakbar damage but also how effective they are at it. It is a glaring omission for something that has become vital to basic gameplay.

TheGrimm.5624:

kharmin.7683:

I would like to think that we got the bulk of it with the demo weekend?

I am hoping this is so but at $15 per GB overage rates would prefer to see if we can get any guidance.

Most carriers have an option to buy an extra allotment of data for the month at a more reasonable cost. Around me the ISPs offer unlimited data for the month for $30 (for context, base service charge is $50 with 1TB data cap). If you have no other option it’s a lot better than paying overage fees if your data cap is really tight.

Dawdler.8521:

Wouldnt suprise me the slightest if this is pre-order + 6 months down the line… then they make a single GW2+HoT+PoF pack for normal full cost.

6 months is not terribly unreasonable for a discount. I am more concerned that we will see HoT bundled in as soon as pre-purchase is over. It’s not unprecedented as this is basically the same kind of time frame that we had for HoT pre-purchase and then suddenly F2P. Did Anet really learn from the last experience? Now I’m not so sure.

I’m on board for PoF but I’ll have to mull over pre-purchasing with HoT.

They definitely backpedaled on the statement they made after HoT, no question. But either way you’d be paying $50 for a full package, and now have an option to buy separately. I don’t think there would be a situation where you pay $30 and get both. So it’s “close enough” to satisfy the original expectation and a better deal for those who already have HoT.

That said, if they were planning to do this all along then I’d have preferred that they announce it earlier like during the HoT sales. I would have picked up HoT back then if I had known they would split the price for the next expansion.

I’m more concerned that there doesn’t seem to be a “recommended” spec. While I understand that “good” is subjective, I think Anet can at least give a recommendation based on a stock performance profile such as “1080p@60fps, medium detail” for a more realistic baseline that would help us to evaluate whether we should plan for upgrading or not, and if so, what hardware we should be looking at for optimal cost/performance.

Well OP you are absolutely correct, pugging this is virtually impossible. I will now state the obvious solution and suggest that you join a guild that runs this event.

You have a lot of red flags in your post. The short answer is that GW2 is unlikely to be the cause of your problems and that you have faulty hardware. Also Mbps is not the same as MB/s. Your max download speeds are reasonable based on the claimed speed of your connection. Anet has been slow this week because of the updates.

Akivaluke.7346:

Has the DDoS attacks been stopped?

Apparently not. It continues to happen daily around the PDT prime time hours. Consider this post a bump.

There’s no reason to disbelieve that there are bots. They’ve been in GW1 for years. These days you can’t even get pickup games started without botters helping to fill up the slots, Balthazar bless them.

That said, there is a community of people who refer to Asura as sharks because of their teeth. The name alone does not indicate membership in a botnet.

Just use it. It’s possible you might not like the profession at 80, but you won’t know that until you get there and the same will be true for any other profession. People have 20/20 hindsight and don’t remember that they had to take a risk no matter what.

I wonder if it has to do with the suspensions for match manipulation.

Terrorsquad.2349:

IPv6 isn’t really a thing in providers their NAT’ing, just so people know here.

What’s not real about it? If you have an IPv6 address then it’s there and it’s yours. An ISP might be using a NAT for IPv4 but that has everything to do with the cost of IPv4 and has nothing to do with IPv6.

Rauderi.8706:

Tonics definitely don’t belong in material storage, but I’m sure more than a few people would be ecstatic if toys and tonics had their own accessibility tab.

Toys and EL tonics should really be managed the same way as minis where you can either keep the item and use it, or consume it and permanently unlock it. It doesn’t make sense to expect people to keep so much inventory for cosmetics.

Hi Ben, do you mean that there will be more AT events added or will there still be 3 per day?

Anet has finally succeeded in making every daily mode so bad I’m actually going to play WvW again.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Why would you want ANet to work on something in which they have no expertise,

Oh… was there something in which Anet has expertise? Are they expert at programming web browsers? Because they have that integrated in the game.

when there are already several VoIP solutions out there, several of which are free to players. In particular, you can create discord channels on the fly.

Yes, there are many voip solutions out there, including middleware that requires only programming the interface, as most other games with integrated voice do. Do you think all those other games were designed by speech codec experts?

Further, given how hard it is to get WvW regulars to join VoIP, what makes you think that PUG mobs would be inclined to make use of an in-game chat for the particular scenario you envision?

Because they won’t have to go out of their way to use a third party program. Which is the whole point.

There’s no question in-game voice chat would get a lot of use. The issue is whether it’s a good use of ANet’s time to work on it.

As opposed to the time spent programming home instance cats that do nothing, I think integrated voice would be extremely good use of Anet’s time.

Ardid.7203:

I haven’t revised lately, but I know I have had as many as 8 bouncy chests there.

The queue used to be bigger but that was years ago.

Getting disconnects here. I would guess it’s a DOS attack, but could just be a server failure somewhere.

If your assumptions about Anet’s studiousness were true, the API servers wouldn’t have gone down. They also had the server logs there, but didn’t respond to what the data was telling them until it was too late. I am extending the discussion to the TP, both to ensure that it is on their radar as you are merely assuming, and otherwise to make it a matter of public record should they choose to ignore it.

Also, I’m not the only person to have reported this issue, as per Wanze’s comment in the API thread:

Trading Post performance has gone way down for me in recent weeks and months to a point that it sometimes takes a couple of seconds for an item info screen to load. Not sure, if this is somehow related, as the game is laggy in general.

TLDR your assumptions are demonstrably false.

For some weeks now the TP has been experiencing a lot of timeouts similar to what one would see during a denial of service attack. Many requests either don’t go through or are heavily delayed, causing issues within the UI as an older request overwrites another. This happens around the clock, no matter how busy the actual game is.

It so happens that I have been working on leveling crafting lately, and I’ve observed behavior that has been reported before but which for me has been difficult to confirm. Now, however, bot activity has become fairly blatant and overt. If you look at low-volume crafting components you will see sell listings where the lowest price has a stock of 1-3 items. No matter whether you buy 1 or 3, these items are instantaneously restocked. As in, between the time that you place the order and the resulting refresh of the listings, they will still be there as though you never bought them.

To accomplish this level of speed, it seems to me that A. a bot is certainly necessary, and B. it is using a query rate on the order of 10ms. Presumably per item that the bot is watching. So my concerns and questions are:

Is Anet aware of these use patterns? And if so, do they actually represent a factor in the current QoS issues that the TP is experiencing? And lastly, if they are a problem, is there a solution in the works?

(I will also point out that the API servers, though supposedly unrelated to the live TP, also experienced stability issues recently due to a spike in usage and had to be brought back with query limits.)

Temple event chains only reset if the recurring defense event fails.

They are separate but that’s not the issue. The SAB daily category is locked. I have a paid vanilla account and cannot access them.

That’s why I gave the average. The ideal would be half that.

To clarify a possible point of confusion in some of the above posts, 1 item is not equal to 1 transaction. A transaction where somebody buys or sells 1 item is the same as if they bought 250 in a stack. If you’re a bulk trader, your average load (based on naive mathematics) across 1 million individual items will be about 8000 transactions.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Going to be down until Monday at least

Key phrase being “at least”. It’s Monday now but as of this writing in PDT it’s roughly 6 AM. Give the man a chance to work.

Does this have any relation to the recent issues with the in-game TP where requests seem to stall and have to be repeated? That has been happening for some weeks now.

I have completed the WvW guild mission requiring completion of the Obsidian Sanctum JP. It clears and gives guild credit correctly. However neither I nor one of my other guildmates received the personal chest reward.

Anyone else experiencing this or have an explanation why we did not qualify?

Looks like a months old bug that was supposedly being worked on. Any update on when the fix is going live?
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/wuv/Obsidian-Sanctum-Mission/first#post6240695

Can the people not getting a chest verify whether they got one last year? Might be that they did not reset eligibility in this release.

I’ve noticed that some dueling arenas are able to keep the match from starting indefinitely even though the settings indicate that the match should start (1 player minimum, everybody checks ready, etc.)

How do they accomplish this?

Gaile, what will be the end date for this festival?

Malediktus.3740:

Yes, these forums are a disgrace for Anet, I wonder why they dont replace the forum software already

Oh but they have, they use reddit. :^)

shiven.1892:

I got the daily chest from playing crab toss today. However, I played crab toss 3 times today and my achievement “Crab Toss Regular” is stuck at 10/12 and not progressing.

I’m still not getting participation chests, but I checked my Crab Toss Regular progress and mine is also stuck. I filed an in-game report so hopefully this will get looked at.

The last two times I have played Crab Toss (today and the last time it was AP daily) I won and received no Splendid Chest or anything. Were these removed at some point? Can someone else state whether they recently got a regular Chest reward for participating?

So lately there have been some reversals of obviously bad changes to the game.

I’m wondering if restoring access to the unique low-level crafting recipes is going to happen at some point (given how easy this should be, maybe it’s just fallen off the radar) or if Anet still believes that this somehow impacts new players negatively.

The reason why glicko (doing its job properly) is causing stagnation is because there simply aren’t enough entities being rated, and therefore different entities of similar performance are always going to be found right next to each other in the ratings. Ratings-based competition was never intended to work with such a small number of teams. There’s a reason why real world sports leagues don’t use ratings. And conversely, online video games aren’t real world sports, there’s no reason to limit competition to 24 teams. You ideally want thousands of rated entities, so that the rating system can have a healthy spread. Maybe thousands in this game isn’t practical for technical reasons, but certainly we can have a lot more than 24.

But there’s a conflicting issue. We want a more consistent WvW experience to all players (so fewer matchups with even population spread), but at the same time we want more matchup variety (so more matchups with population imbalance). The cause underlying both issues is in using “worlds” to delineate teams. Worlds, by definition, are arbitrary assignments of players to teams, without regard to their desires to compete or even to participate. This is patently absurd. Anet implemented WvW in this manner primarily for one big reason, and that reason has recently left the company. Now’s your chance to set things right. Please don’t waste any more time trying to balance one fundamental flaw against another. It’s well past time to fix WvW, by converting it to a GvG/Alliance system, as players had always expected and wanted from the game.

Mainly it’s because of the crafting requirement. The 1-500 progression has too many steps where you’re forced to put in valuable mats just to spam worthless items. I really dislike systems where you are forced to buy progression in this way. The same could be achieved with an NPC who will take x amount of gold to level you up. At least that way it doesn’t take up your time as well. It’s such an unrewarding experience. My only maxed discipline is Chef, which happens to be the only one that didn’t feel like it was forcing me to buy xp.

Anyone who’s been playing for a while can afford one of the cheaper precursors if they just want to make a legendary. But I’m not pursuing that until I see improvements to the crafting system.

The game seems to think it’s always one festival or another and keeps displaying this message and putting up decorations out of season. At least, it is doing this in LA. Haven’t confirmed in the other towns.

Could you please take the confirmation off of the envelope purchases? You really want us to make 16 extra clicks?

If nothing else, please have her offer an option for “16 Envelopes” so we can buy them all at once with a single confirmation.

I think they should fix the handful of soulbinding issues that are real issues, such as the specific example alluded to in the OP. I don’t see how this makes a case for removing soulbinding entirely. It’s a major change with a high likelihood of unforeseen consequences. Which is bad news if only because of Anet’s track record for handling of such things.

Another thing to consider is that the tendency for account binding was largely a consequence of the difficulty to obtain Ascended gear. Now if Anet wanted to try introducing new systems that made acquisition somewhat easier but produced soulbound gear as a tradeoff… I think having options is a good thing.

In the meantime, you may want to look into getting a GW2 API app. The API can report this kind of information. I use the API to check the inventory on all my mule characters, for example. Very convenient.

The live team has been cleaning up the festival automation code. That’s what maintenance mode means. Of course they can also change other things as they see fit, under the limited resources they have to work with now. All it means is that there is no expectation for regular or significant updates. (And nonetheless they added a new event with a new set of skins some months ago for the 10th anniversary.)

Since the hat-related NPCs are supposed to remain for a full week after the festival, it’s feasible for Anet to address this problem before the scheduled end date, assuming they get back from holiday shortly. Otherwise, unfortunately, the people who haven’t done it yet this year will be out of luck, but we can probably expect the fix to come in for next season.

The crafting system (with the exception of Chef) has been in poor shape since launch, and aside from forcing people through it for ascended gear, nothing has fundamentally changed to address how unrewarding and unfun it is to get through it. In particular, the way that progression is structured with respect to a limited selection of recipes.

The basic progression pattern for most crafts goes like this:

Sub-tier 1 – new materials and blue gear
Sub-tier 2 – still blue gear, additional prefixes
Sub-tier 3 – green and yellow gear
(repeat for next tier)

Blue and green gear is usually worthless, making sub-tiers 1 and 2 nothing more than a gold dump (1 is somewhat mitigated by being able to refine your way through some of it). Meanwhile, there are more than enough rare recipes available in sub-tier 3 that most of them aren’t needed for progression. As a simple solution, why not redistribute the rare items into the other sub-tiers? Example:

Sub-tier 1 – new materials and prefixes, hand and leg armor of all rarities
Sub-tier 2 – chest and foot armor
Sub-tier 3 – head and shoulder armor

Similarly for weapon crafters, the selection of weapon types would vary at each tier (ensuring a balanced mix of main-hand, off-hand, two-handed and aquatic types), rather than the selection of rarity or prefixes. This allows for viable crafting at each sub-tier. Another thing that could be done (along with redistribution of recipes) is the removal of blue item recipes, which currently enable people to unlock skins and then put the item back on the TP, which devalues the green items as well since they share the skin. The green items could be viable, but not with the blue items around.

Well, that’s for a simple fix. I’m sure the system could be more robust if Anet were willing to put the work into it, but if that isn’t on the table then at least give us some improvements that are easy to implement.

I would also like to see an official response (couldn’t find one) regarding whether/which of the repeatable achievements are supposed to count for the meta and whether/which of the previous year’s achievements are supposed to count again if we already did them. There has been a lot of conflicting information and confusion and I for one can’t tell if this involves bugs. I’m pretty sure some people are also confusing the one-time achievements with the repeatable for the same event and are misreporting information. I have completed a repeatable but it did not count for the meta.

In any case, according to my own progress it would appear that, if none of the repeatables count, then there is only one skippable achievement this year, and that would mean that you would have to do at least one of the mass-consumption achievements (candy canes or drinks). Is this intended?

With respect to the Q&A in this thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Order-of-ids-returned-v2-commerce-listings/first#post4445386

My understanding according to the above is that a specific page should consistently return the same set (if not order) of values. But this was not my experience between the HoT launch and now.

It seems that “missing” items, once discovered, are inserted into the paging sequence in an order other than discovery (presumably ID sort). As there were quite a few “unknown” items at launch, and I believe many hundreds of items in total, it was necessary to re-check those pages for new items. I’m not sure if the possibility of missing items was taken into consideration during the previous thread’s discussion, or whether the way HoT items were handled is something new or unintended, or if it’s a problem with my code.

The collection requirements are apparently tied to festival achievements. So what happens if you don’t finish them by the end of this season? Will Anet make the same achievements available again next year, or ever?

I just don’t know if I want to commit to finishing it by the end of this season, and if it can’t be continued then I don’t want to waste the gold to unlock it.

If it’s not too late to add some input: The way the permission system currently works feels more like we are managing read permissions on database tables, which might make sense to us as developers but not for the privacy and security of users. I don’t think that segmentation of data based on in-game topics of interest makes a useful analogy for real-world escalations of trust.

The biggest issue with regard to privacy is personally identifying information. As far as the API is concerned, the big items here are the account and character names, which can be used to harass or track the player in-game or here on the forums, and all of which are exposed with very basic permissions. The account name isn’t really useful for the API itself but is exposed in virtually every key. Equally puzzling is that (mutable) character names are returned as the unique ID rather than a permanent and anonymous handle.

As for security, the API is thus far read-only and does not itself present any attack vector so it seems almost irrelevant whether they can view minutiae about the user’s data once they’ve already been given a key with basic permissions and with it, the biggest hints for employing some other attack vector, e.g. social engineering, if that’s what they were after.

As it currently stands I think you only need 2 permission sets: one for identifying information (i.e. account and character names, assuming the UID issue is addressed) and one for non-identifying information (everything else). I don’t really see any other significant gaps in trust or risk between a user and a third party they want to give a key to, though the bigger issue remains that there currently isn’t a meaningful separation in this regard.

If the app further exposes individual information to the public, and the user has some specific qualms about that, it should also be the app’s responsibility to provide finer privacy controls to the user, and that provision is something the user should take into consideration when deciding how much they want to trust the app.

Bump for still no fix and still no response.

I would like to request that the “smart autotarget” feature, where it only autotargets if you are reasonably oriented toward a potential target, be implemented into the normal camera mode.

Separately, it would also be nice if you could set autotargeting to only pick up on hostiles and never on neutrals.

So, now that Halloween is over, it seems that it took the achievement categories with it. In my Historical tab there should be 2 for Shadow of the Mad King (the original, and the most recent Halloween), and 2 Blood and Madness (for 2013-2014). But, there is now 0 Shadow of the Mad King, and only 1 Blood and Madness.

This doesn’t seem to have impacted my achievement score, but I would like to have the visibility of these categories restored.

Found the problem on my end, nothing to see here!