Guild Wars 2

Xzaander.4123

Do you mean, I’ve been using myself as the reference point for developing my own scientific knowledge base, instead of choosing the more permanent fixtures of the universe that real scientists have been using for centuries?

Exactly! Now if you don’t mind, I have to leave here before I make myself insane from having to pretend the twenty first century has more than a handful of modern humans living within it.

Drugs are for idiots. Does that answer your real question?

PookieDaWombat.6209

We get it. You have a sad. Go play something else then. Those of us that are looking forward to playing on our alts with our WXP points pooled are going to have a blast.

Or did you somehow think that your navel gazing was shared by the rest of us or even new players coming to the game still?

I don’t get where you see I’m sad in writing that, but I’m sure you it makes you feel better to dismiss reality, like your other cohorts who also responded. You might want to know that ‘sadness logic’ ceases to ever look like what I wrote; instead it looks more like something very abrupt and often to chase someone else away immediately. A sad person talking provides almost no conversation starters or anything for someone else to latch on to.

On the other hand, if you want to see what deep sadness logic looks like, you could look at the work of Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill or some poet who was found to be living through depression (these are really grief, but close enough). Whatever improves your perception and gets you to realize someone is not feeling the same things you are.

But if you are ‘really’ still interested in how I feel towards the game, it’s a common feeling MMO players get, and it partially resembles an ‘anhedonic’ state (towards this game instead of everything). It’s where you see a change you wanted a long time ago (because you had 8 characters), you try to continue your old goal of developing new RvR strategies and tactics, but then you don’t get any enjoyment being in a game turned this shallow. You just sort of look at it and think, I’m glad I studied project managment stuff, because good management is about seeing what’s ahead and doing things at appropriate times.

For some reason, being around the game makes hitting the books extraordinarily fun. There’s this whole comparison thing between the levels of fun of both activities. It’s like when you play an MMO, studying becomes something attractive and forbidden.

Still think I’m sad. No… lost in yourself again…. who likes cute animals!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cSgr19R3Mg

Prysin.8542:

Better late then never. Show some gratitude.

For all unneeded things, better never than late. To a formerly living or functioning thing, good things received late are valueless.

There is a threshold when late becomes too late, and never becomes the more appropriate time. A late lunch can spoil dinner if received too closely in scheduling. Such is the way lateness can afflict things that run in cycles.

When dealing with contagion, lateness allows it to spread. Too late allows it to be disposed of safely. It’s better to be both early and qualified though.

The appropriate idiom that holds true under more circumstances is: It’s better to be late than too late. Also, better never than too late.

Do you know when ‘too late’ is or was?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impression_formation

There are first impressions; and then there are ‘last impressions’. When operating within the status of last impressions, the influences of reformative action are vastly reduced. In rarer circumstances, a ‘final impression’ state may even exist to denote the point when something can change and no longer influence the impression. Any and all attempted change is then seen only as conforming to the impression; which is also the point any method of ‘telling’ (and not showing) would completely fail to re-impress.

Impressions are also believed to be a function of complex math; ‘integration’ if you need something to call it. And they are reversed by an inverse process involving ‘differentiation’ from the previous integrated impression. The important thing to note about these types of equations is that they are continuous functions defined at separate ‘unit measurements’. So to change an already formed impression, it usually requires it to be done around the same number of measurements. But as I hinted at earlier, with the stuff about first and last impressions, the unit measurements are spaced further apart nearing the end of the equation than they are nearing the beginning. Hence, poor impressions are easier to make and harder to break.

And so, none of this ‘late’ or ‘never’ or ‘too late’ conversation really matters in this situation as much as the simpler question: Are moves like this going to instill enough trust to withstand the rapid confidence depletion that’s already been occurring? Isn’t it more effective to curb the current ‘trust depletion functions’ than it is to try to offset them with separate small ‘trust generating ones’?

Invictus.1503:

You were the type of kid who got a sucker and instead of saying thank you said, “I’d rather have a candy bar,” weren’t you :P

Lollipops wreck dental work, and generally wouldn’t be the preferred gift for most females I’ve met.

For people who have trouble picking out gifts, I’ve heard cash is usually more appreciated.

Another down-state ‘combat enhancement’ thread. I always love these. Now’s the chance to spew something totally idiotic. I’ve been working a whole 15 minutes on this one. There’s still time to rush it out before some uncompetitive MMO that almost no one plans to stick with comes out, or to test out a potential long-running strategy as an April Fools joke:

They should add a number 5 skill to down state for every class called “flipover”. PvP-only so PvErs can complain about all the attention this side of the meadow gets.

Here’s a link that describes something that I didn’t check to see whether it even matches what I’m describing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipover

Continuing on. So what happens is that when your opponent starts to stomp you, you activate ‘flipover’, and it interrupts the stomp, rallies you, and puts that opponent in down state. Now, you have a chance to try to stomp them, while they have a chance to activate their feeble downstate skills to try to kill you or even, they could try to activate ‘flipover’ against you when you stomp. Who needs cooldowns, just have it use endurance.

Now here’s the ‘biggest’ part of the idea… the quality assurance team could just not test this. They could just put it on live servers unsure of whether or not it even requires downstate or an opponent trying to stomp you to activate. It could just work all the time. Instant fight winning KO. Usable at view distance max range. And we can just all play an entirely different game than anything we all bought. FPS sounds fun, right? Dress ourselves up like dolls while enjoying an engine that was obviously designed for chat. Read heroine centric stories and listen to innane girl talk that we can’t skip through. Gurld Wars fever is going to rock China!

Since I don’t have infinite time I’m only going to take a stab at one small part of this. I’m going to leave my opinion out on the rest because I don’t want to go back and research everything I forgot about.

Naetell.3815:

Scarlet would be classified as a mad scientist kind of character played straight.

As a ‘mad scientist’ pursues conventional studies, cracks in the personality start to show that discourage others from continuing to train him/her. The mad scientist is left to research and operate in seclusion, the only place where one could fully embrace both the brimming insanity and evil. Usually, the strongest techniques of this person are those that have been learned from rudimentary practice and discovery (on self or former close associates). The mad scientist is the type of person who would infect another [and himself], and hold the cure as a means to gain work from assistants. Such is the difficulty of this person in making and keeping alliances. This stereotype is close to looking like the hyper-rational gone unethical (what most Asura are), where brutality scores highly for it’s efficiency; but the insanity portion often overtakes the rational and adds a sadomasochistically inefficient tint to the personality. Often, there is a former teacher or student who detects the remnants of the original person within what is now an otherwise unknowable adversary; and the mad scientist is treatable/beatable by appeals to the underlying personality.

The most well known mad scientist is Jekyl/Hide, and what amounts to being a story about alchoholism metaphor (drinking the serum); but which is commonly misinterpreted as a fictional variant disorder of multiple personalities. Melded within the story of the mad scientist is usually a description of some type of workaholic-substance abuser who does things to extremes and loses his/her humanity to achieve a goal. The chemical-induced insanity is vastly different from a naturally occuring or grief-provoked insanity; the substance abuser loses it’s humanity to a much greater degree because they end up wrecking parts of the brain that deal with emotion and pain regulation.

Correction: I made a mistake due to not having lived for hundreds of years, and now I should clarify how I misinterpreted towards the modern era. The theme of Mad Scientists is that they engage in ‘alchemical pursuits’, which may or may not include substance abuse or other extreme measures to prolong life, achieve invulnerability, etc.

I don’t know about what you said [and was now deleted] Cassocaster. People could have kept adding on fancy skill animations like the one you posted, until this entire thread was cluttered with an illegible mass of them. Each post and animation screenshot is meant to be like a letter drawn in high school calligraphy class; crafted specifically to overshadow the next one; as it demonstrates the evolution of skill development coming from beginners.

Or someone could have posted them playing the sports stadium Vuvuzela thing that they bought from the Cape Lion Politics Corporation. That might have drowned out the near defening silence.

When you realize it, there are plenty of places things can go when you have a living community to interact with. I don’t see why you’d blame yourself for a wrong subject matter choice. They actually say that death is indicated by cessation of brain processes. That you can still prod a corpse and have things come out related to the discharge of bodily fluids, gasses, or even the movement of insect larva: moaning, groaning, twitches etc. But none of that is really responsive to communicating with a fellow living being: it’s almost like the deceased one has run entirely out of thoughts and what it does just comes automatically.

For the Logan/Jenna thing, mind magicks are brutal and screwed up things to ever be dealing with in this genre. It could create a clone that you interract with long enough for you to forget what the real thing was like. It can get in your dreams and give you a vision of someone being harmed, or the real sensations of you being tortured. It could pretend to be Balthazar aiding you. There’s more to the control than you are seeing when a bunch of pretty butterflies and purple beams of light fly around; just like burning in the game really is a painful type of burning. When someone is under mind attack, it is targetting their own specific psychological weaknesses. [Does Logan see a Tyria burning all around him, under new leadership, as a realistic glimpse of the future?] Mental attack that is strong enough to register as physical pain (and bring down a life bar) is also ridiculously powerful.

As far as political power relationships go, they are extremely messed up; not the fairy tales you heard about as a kid, even if they looked like that on the outside. Logan’s married to civic duty; and that’s an unrequited, abusive relationship; that puts him in positions for worse to happen.

Jett.6489:

I think I read that St. Augustine said something along the lines of “Give me a child until he is five years old, and anyone can have him after that, and he won’t go wrong.”

I look at theology as a generalism and not specificism, and also not to a major degree, because I want to generate practical solutions instead of philosophizing all day. Theology can be as broad or narrow a field as you make it. You could study the theology of one book, one religion, or one era. Things get rewritten, the original language gets changed to be specific to issues people are facing in a specific era, and no one truly knows the full context of what one line or portion was supposed to be about. That’s why I don’t typically waste my time discussing these things on the internet: one gets ‘philosophically trolled’, it’s always a huge conversation to join.

St. Augustine could say you’re quoting him out of context… making him look quite prideful in his assertion which references the duty of protecting and teaching young children, and the concepts of contact and exposure to good teaching (rather than to evil or insanity). There are implicit assumptions that the most powerful demons don’t come to overtly tempt children; that only a corrupted human can be evil enough to persistently do that. The child can be prepared for his future confrontations with demons, but needs to be protected from the dangers of the non-spiritual word. Christianity defines humans as having mortal sin that corrupts, and numerous flaws, but I don’t want one of those endless discussions that could happen about single passages that’ve been rewritten over and over again to try to find the ‘right’ meaning.

Evil and insanity are entirely different things though, even though ‘modernists’ improperly lump them together. They’ve both been discussed across the many stories of multiple cultures, and they’re even documented by people as their ‘science’. Evil is a perpetrator and insane is a victim. Originally, these things were viewed as possession by demonic or ethereal types. Retelling fables can only do so much, without hearing the accounts of people who were formerly part of cults, survived torture, struggled against command hallucinations and delusions, and fought in wars. One man only has his own lesson on evil; whether he learns it or ignores.

There are proper “evil tempts” stories where they go into detail how ‘enemies’ use the existing weaknesses of the vessel they intend to take over or have serve them. Scarlet is rushed and undetailed. Biblically, there is the well-known story of human Jesus and Satan in the desert. Commercially, you could play through the beginning of the mage story of Dragon Age involving the fade. There are also ‘reverse’ stories like “Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins”, where the person must trick the adversary (demonstrating wisdom). I can’t point out the most applicable one for every person to understand the concepts. I could even reference hard science and people might still chose to see evil actions, evil, and insanity as the same thing. Don’t pretend this is about a mere child being taken hostage, dealing with things that no one else on the planet is coping with, and having to respond with what’s ‘relatively the righter thing to do’. The stories about men struggling through horrible circumstance placed on them are more effective than the ones where a person is doing nothing and committing no error because there’e no challenge put upon them. That’s why people show more mercy and lesser judgement towards the child, or the person under extrme duress, hoping it was a one-off and they can be retaught.

That’s probably enough for writing content for adults for the time being. PM stuff to deal with about it.

You don’t need to go point for point on the Scarlet stuff I said. That was just a lore rewriting exercise to try to address the things you were mentioning and tie up the Scarlet story thematically, [somewhat] more realistically, and in a more adult way. I expect the epilogue to be something designed for teenagers or something else. I was only saying those things to show how the story and characters could have come across by mixing different details. Disagreement is fine.

Jett.6489

Hmm, aren’t all Sylvari begotten by the Pale Tree? I’m pretty sure they are all brothers and sisters, and whether they are lovin’ on each other, or not, it would seem as if they are asexual from a reproductive standpoint. I could be wrong on this.

Now, you’ve seen minimal complaints about Logan? lol You should join the groups and the mapchat on my server. He’s the most belittled “hero” I’ve ever seen. NO guy thinks he’s anything other than a pantywaste. And, ladies, if you had a guy like that, you’d dump him within a week as you lost respect for him. Disagree if you’d like, but there’s zero way you could respect that guy. And women don’t stay with a guy they don’t respect.

I know about plants (Pale Tree) being hermaphrodites (one gender) in real life, and the Sylvarri seem to fit the metaphor of being the tree ‘leaves’; firstborne could be ‘branches’ even. They take on a similar shape to a humanoid race for practical (political and social) reasons. Relationships where people get together to have offspring are different from those forged primarily around sex, companionship, or friendship. Some people seek the other half that completes the whole; while others seek the twin. There are different definitions of interpersonal love styles for humans: erotic, ludic, storgic, pragmatic, manic, and agapic. And I actually think the Sylvarri experience a communnal type of ‘love for all’ that is taught to them by observing Pale Tree (I can’t think of an appropriate word). They learn other love styles by watching other races.

I’ll make up a coherent version of Logan like I did Scarlet. It’s subtle and probably depends on which personal story playthrough you did, because I did a few. There’s actually two versions of Logan you see:

The weak Logan everyone despises is when he’s under the mesmer manipulation of Jenna. Jenna has growing insecurities and isolation from being queen, and she controls him for both the protection and the company. This is a reflection of what one woman ‘wants’. Not a man free to act; not a man fulfilling what he thinks she needs. Except he kind of is, because he is permitting her do this to him.

The second Logan, when she releases him from control, is when he’s allowed to be himself… sort of. He’s been traumatized by the constant mental controlling and almost looks to do things that would prevent it from happening in the future. But he juggles the fact that he still has a duty to queen and country, and accepts these things as fulfilling part of that duty. He knew Jenna before, and maybe he no longer trusts her entirely, but he understands a bit about why she controls him because he absolutely believes in being bound to duty. The relationship is seriously strained, as are his relationships with his comrades from her controlling (Destiny’s Edge), so he puts police work and patrols as a priority in fulfilling his duty.

Logan’s strength, if you didn’t see any of it before, is in how he deals with a bad lot of obligations and a serious lack of independence; and it’s at a younger age than most people would be accustomed to. It’s hard to see the strength of an overburdened person, until you realize the load they are carrying (while complaining minimally about it, mostly to justify to Rytlock). Along with the obvious implications that Jenna dominates Logan, Rytlock easily putting him down is a further part of his weak appearance; especially when you realize Rytlock is just a teenage boy. Logan probably could do more about that, rather than just to take it out on criminal scum.

miriya.8496:

we’ve already pulled the misandry card — and as you know, misandry is totally real and super devastating to the butts of many dudebros and Nice Guys out there.

Maybe you should study mythology and theology some time instead of just politics. I didn’t just draw the misandry card. I drew four of them. Show your royal flush and you win.

Normal people who get multiple of the hardest degrees imaginable have a complex problem in mind they need to solve. With the amazing brain she was supposed to have, she disregards all warning about the dangers of the eternal alchemy machine. Why? Because of where they came from.

As anyone who’s deeply studied evil and insanity concepts before can indicate, a person cannot be changed drastically from their original self to become an entirely different person. If Scarlet was ever a good person underneath, she never could have become this. When she goes over the edge, all the flaws and sins that used to exist in the original person become amplified. She just fakes the ‘good-girl-underneath’ role so well, even in her diaries. She tricks all the gullible alliance brutes into joining her side (to protect her), and then she throws them into slaughter. Amidst the new reality she’s creating, both sides become ‘brutes’. Then she’s so energetically giddy while she’s absolutely losing the key parts of her living forces. Because: all those cannon fodder dumb males. She’s even butchering Sylvarri so it’s not just a racial thing.

And she pulls out Jenna’s fembots near the end. Ummm. How about using your previously living army to manufacture more structural coverage and defenses on your robots? They’d be more brutally effective, and any genuine sadist would love that result. Nope, can’t do. They’d look too masculine covering up those curves. Must manipulate the instinct of chivalry to make men look evil.

The only coherency here is that she’s an obvious female supremacist, disregarding reason and sense even though she has them, to show to the world that females are superior to males. I expect that the dragon that helped delude her would also be something else; a young female shadow archetype, the little sister dragon.

Substance E.4852:

Ah, but if the dragons kill everyone, who is left to buy BLC’s? Plus he’d probably just turned into an ice or crystal zombie in the end anyway.

What tells you he’s the type to believe that’s the outcome of a crooked ‘soul-selling’ deal? He probably thinks he’s outsmarting a weakened and previously sleeping foe.

Corrupt beings cannot comprehend the magnitude of planet-forging power they are dealing with when they seek to betray a greater being: especially when they are used to working as a team, and they are only dealing with a single being.

Nage.1520:

But….but….what about the true hero of the story.

We love you Evon!

Evon is extremely weak for a Charr. He’s dependent on others to run his schemes, and the workers he employs make him have to do things himself (which he then fails at). He spends all his time trying to exploit the weak economically because most types could just run him through.

He’s exactly the type of being you’d expect to run away to go serve an evil Dragon. Dragon’s manipulate these types by bribing them with power, which was the original goal of why they wanted money in the first place.

The banning concept is the future of PvP and will be a part of future esport as well, centuries from the present. Remember to come back here, laugh at, defrock, and poke the rotting corpse of everyone who disagreed with you.

Devs will always screw up balancing; even alien ones (pls nerf 6-legged invertebrate, wingless flight, camouflage, mind flay, and telekinesis); and games will always have cheese strategies that particular species are best at (we will still have cheese in the future, it gets better with age). When I first thought of this (centuries ago my time, years ago in yours), I figured that for a game like this it could only be limited to the utility or healing skills; class ban, weapon ban, trait ban, and elite ban are too much. Even so, it would require reworking of the current state of the game; banning Mist Form can cripple an elementalist, but you could also waste bans on classes like thief (Shadow Refuge, Shadow Step) and not see them go away unless your opponents did as well. I almost forgot about all this after first contact and the gaming revolution of 2123 (when an alien connected to humanity by joining a multiplayer game). It’s all coming back now…

PS: Society of the future is now structured entirely around guilds, and these guilds compete against each other for supremacy. However, “Guild Wars” is no longer around because it’s trademark is still held by a company that vanished long ago without a trace. Oddly enough, the company that held the intellectual property (that no one remembers the name of anymore) didn’t have any form of actual “Guild Battles” in it’s final game; nor did any company that even made the things you call MMOs (called Global Interaction Simulators, necessary because some species are fatal to have physical exposure to despite not intending to harm anything). Guild battles were actually something that had to be modded in by the gaming community.

Superimpose a small bullseye on the modified-to-be-larger capture circles. Give standing outside of the bullsye a slower rate of point capture and decap. This creates a scoring distinction between ‘holding a point’ and ‘still fighting over it’. You can use AoE and knockback to clear out the bullseye, but not the outer circle if someone navigates the circumference. I can’t give exact numbers as I’m not intimate with all AoE skill ranges and the nuances of the format.

This is less drastic than just widening the circle and retains some of the original nuances of fighting over position. Because the circle is being made larger and easier to stand within, it becomes necessary to dilute the point scoring. However, this doesn’t entirely solve the format’s basic problem: that capturing an area to put points on the board does not equate strategically to securing it.

Just so you also know, giving more points for kills promotes burst damage and zerging strategies; and these things already do have a relation to bunkering/decapping; i.e. “I’ll handle this task solo so you guys can work together on something else”. A more typical solution, going along these lines of making kills more beneficial, usually scores points for assists on kills, to punish people for failing at basic strategy (losing 1v2, 1v3, etc), and to reward people extra for basic teamwork.

The so-called ‘shaving philosophy’. Shave a little off with no regards to where hair grows, how fast it grows, and whether or not a hair growth really seems appropriate in that location. And then mysteriously forget to shave for a few months, while using hair growth therapies in other months; while not checking whether those things fit the philosophy. For the time being, there is now a beard on the neck, scraped off skin on the cheeks, and gouged eyes from shaving eyelashes. Nose and ear hair has grown out of control because it can’t be gotten to by shaving. Hair on the head, which likely should have been clipped or trimmed, was shaved as well; which gives the outward appearance of a dying patient, instead of the combat depth and potential the game once had.

The point of this analogy being: you have plenty of different tools available to attempt a certain task, and not just an appealing sounding one that you make out to be your central tenet. (The razor should at least be paired with a mirror. And then some scissors and a comb.)

People might certainly have thought of this [one-size-fits-all] strategy as being “safe” or “conservative”, but ultimately, the current approach is nothing close to those things. Jokes aside about conservatives not cutting beards, and detailed analysis aside about whether that’s what those people really are (long beard and hair on men is seen in Japan as being a part of radical communist politics). Some people might even be irrationally telling themselves “The slow and steady approach has now been tried and proven to fail; it’s time for randomness and extreme measures”. But that would only be because they were never ‘shaving’ types of people in the first place; they always felt more comfortable being black-or-white and waiting for any chance to promote an opposite ideology. They were just looking for a moment to rationalize and justify it.

By the way, analysis in beta should have pointed out that “dodge” is at the center of the game’s defensive ‘core’, and that more tweaking needed to be done to meld strategy and action together around it. GW2 doesn’t have it’s primary defensive stat itemized aside from things that provide vigor. And “crowd control break” comes in second as a necessary defense; a position cemented by the ridiculous immobilize duration stacking buff and maps with cliffs, which don’t look anything like a shave. For that matter, Skyhammer doesn’t look like a shave either; it looks like a map where even more complex mechanics are added on to confuse players who don’t have a basic understanding of the game, and a map where veteran players know a sneaky pull or pushback is coming but have too many angles to worry about things coming from.

As an addendum, since this is not addressed to everybody, the main reason I even came to this overhyped game is because I know a F2P variant is the only type of video game that can hit e-sport potential. This game only fails because the people wanting it to succeed are outnumbered, and the company making it wants F2P to look terrible so people feel like subscription games and Pay2Win are the only solutions left in town. Make your own decisions about whether you want an environment where you can grow through niche competition designed to be fairer to you, or whether you just want to compete as yet another ‘industry entertainer’ and commercial for fancy graphics and time-occupying grinds.

Airstram.2715:

People in this game are amazing, it should be their day jobs, they really keep the game alive. Sure skill lag, wvw ques get annoying, but usually I have never waited over an hour for a que, In the mean time, I dye myself pink or orange, fight off some monsters , kill some bosses, or use the LFG to find a group.

Besides the “there”/“your” mistake in this chestfelt affection letter to an inanimate object, I couldn’t help but notice you had a list of things that you do while in the WvW queue.

Airstram.2715:

kill some bosses

Just a quick semantics question. What you are refering to as “bosses”?

BlackDevil.9268:

Lol you’re funny. 1 post of full kitten. that took you a while i bet

Do people really know, emotes usually don’t match the microexpressions that appear on your face amidst a real conversation? That face you just made… if you hold it there long enough, the drool will start to pool up and drip down over your bottom lip. It’s more effective to breathe out the nostrils and using the diaphragm than it is to draw air up through the back of the mouth, unless there is something lacking about the air or process in which you are able to breathe.

My previous post took 500ish hours. I’m just going to say that. I could not have completed it without every minute that I had previously spent playing Ele and then some. I might be overestimating because I counted AFK/loading screen, doing story, dynamic events, gear farming, building forts, running yaks, watching a little Ele WvW streaming, etc. But I’m still just going to say 500 hours anyway. I could probably throw in how long it took me to learn touch typing, or how long it took me to learn English and how to write. But I’m not going to count those because I would have done them anyway had GW2 never existed.

Speaking of ‘awkward’… What is counting social interaction in terms of time expenditure? What is committing thousands of hours towards doing the exact same repetitive things with minimal internalized knowledge of what you’ve been doing? What is not realizing the person you are talking to is not on the same ‘spectrum’ of characteristics as you are?

Suddenly this conversation really has grown more awkward… because it’s no longer about playing Elementalist, but it’s about an ingroup’s stereotypes and projections.

SabreWalrus.8647:

Master Fuhon, that may be the most socially awkward response I’ve seen, lmao. Still, I’m sure he appreciates the constructive criticism

When you realize that any internet conversation is with people who won’t be joining in visibly, you come to stop altering your communication style to fit only those present; because there’s no need to fit in perfectly with a bunch of people you might never run into again or whom won’t understand you anyway. And it is somewhat ‘awkward’ to talk to invisible people when others aren’t aware they are actually in the room, but you get used to it when you have higher social awareness about the situation.

By the way, the wink comment was just me pointing out how sarcasm isn’t indicated in the real world by a wink. Please stop flirting…

Pryda.8257

After playing 3K+ hours, switching manually weapons in bags is really annoying. I remember when one year ago Anet said they were about to implement “templates” to switch weapons and traits out of combat.

You know the story tho.

Yea, I tried to be reasonable with my situational requests to swap. Using micro in the specific situations to win a fight is not a matter of ‘3K+ hours is too much’.

What I said was: “You can switch to X/D to ride the lightning when you fall behind your group, or after choosing to Swiftness the trailers. You can swap to X/F to swirling winds to block what would be a disadvantageous engage for your team, stay out of combat, and swap back to staff.”

By no means did I find these unreasonable, but I believe the discipline can get lost from the lack of competition.

Arrak.4092:

^Dude, I don’t even think he meant that remark totally serious.

Of course he did. I even quoted the wink of seduction. Don’t people wink at you on the street because they think you are amazing?

Banzie.5248:

best ele EU

Chem’s definitely not a bad Elementalist given the number of things he does right. But definitely not “best Ele EU” given what I know was out there months ago (playing NA side). I’m pretty sure ‘the best’ has mastery of switching between all the weapon sets and staying effective with all of them; which involves defending, skirmish, and dueling. But the demonstrated capcity to play Ele in such a limited manner should be enough of a demonstration of how strong the team’s melee/combo finishers are. This 250k is a testament to zerg cordination and leadership; not individual skill and expertise. Grats to ‘Red Guard’ for the lasting demonstration of your WvW open-field dominance. (Shame on you everyone else…)

I have a minimum spec PC and get slide-show or computer lockup in zergs. I can’t melee well because micro was never my thing, and the stutter causes me to miss close range skillshots. I used to watch streams to see what this game was really like for mostly everyone else. I’ve watched his stream many times before (got bored because of the excessive salvaging), and that’s why I’m going to be critical of it now on this day of ‘completion’:

Besides multi-weapon proficiency, I don’t see inventory swapping. You can switch to X/D to ride the lightning when you fall behind your group, or after choosing to Swiftness the trailers. You can swap to X/F to swirling winds to block what would be a disadvantageous engage for your team, stay out of combat, and swap back to staff. Ele staff positioning requires you to stand in a location that gives you more vision on where to place fields. It took Chem months to move away from the middle of the zerg towards the periphery, and to utilize more advanced staff Ele tactics like getting enemies to waste important cooldowns. By positioning on the periphery, you can also try to draw AoE attacks onto yourself that would have been more effective used against your frontline ball. You have immunity cooldowns to save yourself when you are focus fired, and you can retreat back into your team ball after you use them. When you have an enemy zerg on the run, you could race ahead and mass snare them for the incoming pain train.

I watched Second Law in a high profile GvG, and Chem was barely using skills; just waiting for an opportunity to cast fields; and his team won anyway. His chill and water fields were timely but it was like he was micro’ed entirely on when to use everything. I know Ele is a bit of a combo field bot, but you have to do more than just that. Water 1, Air 1, Air 3, Earth 3, Burning Retreat went underused. Evasive Arcana dodges aren’t clutch; the earth dodge doesn’t blast and the water dodge doesn’t support teammates. Doesn’t time Eruptions to go off in fields. Doesn’t cover conditions with burning and doesn’t upkeep Soothing Mist. Isn’t making the most of Elemental Attunement timing to give teammates boons. Tornado wasn’t used in combo fields. Fiery Great Sword isn’t used to advance scout. Didn’t know how strong Glyph of Storms could be pre-player cap nerf.

In general, Chem has had tons of time to play around with specs and gear options that he didn’t utilize. But it’s entirely up to him, on whether he wants to retire after ‘beating the game’, or to spend more time in remedial class where he won’t learn anything because of how far ahead his guild advanced beyond the rest.

Current GW2 Game Direction:
1. Specific phrases and underlying intentions of current PR
2. Specific phrases and underlying intentions of current PR
3. Specific phrases and underlying intentions of current PR

Silent Avenger.6928:

So, basically what I want to do is make a macro to do emotes in game so that it saves me from typing them out during roleplaying. So the macro would do these keystrokes:

Enter -> / -> w -> a -> v -> e -> (space) -> @ -> Enter

Waving is supposed to convey a warm sense of recognition. An insincere /wave is to be taken as an insult, that you don’t really like the person but feel obligated towards acknowledging them.

It seems like you are using your macros to gain an ‘in-character’ advantage, to miscommunicate warmth to a fellow roleplayers; while in reality you are demonstrating indifference and laziness. This could secure you a huge advantage while roleplaying a shady betraying type of personality, because other people could perceive you as genuinely eager to see them based on how fast your character initiates the wave. They won’t see it coming when you /knifeintheback them.

Unfair roleplaying advantage and complete scumbag move. Banworthy IMO.

You can do stuff with more than 5v5 in a competitive game. Usually, when you have over a certain number of people, you have to make sure that they are doing something relatively passive, and that doesn’t have a major impact on the match. In sports, there is an object (i.e. ball) that most of the spectator audience chooses to focus on, even though many important things happen away from it. When someone has the ball, it’s only realistically going to end up in a limited number of places and with a few people specifically defending near it. The designers of a sport don’t just say “let’s get rid of everything that isn’t in the primary field of view”, because both extraneous players and extraneous environment size have roles that can become dynamic at different points in a contest.

In hockey or soccer, they have a goalie who basically hangs back and waits for something to happen around him. When someone gets within range of scoring, one team’s goalie is quickly thrust into being one of the central characters in the entire competition.

In football, you have offensive and defensive line. Football is balanced for these two to be locked into a stalemate for a few seconds. It becomes evident to the viewer whenever someone has broken the stalemate because they end up influencing or stopping the play before it’s allowed to develop. The front lines in football play a major role in making the other players look exciting at their roles.

Sports also allow for substitution of specialists to come in at various parts in the game. Penalty kicks and field goals, specifically. Other things like track & field and gymnastics are a series of free-for-all events where most of the team is competiting in an entirely different activity. And people can choose which favorite parts they want to watch.

But as for successful video games, a game like a MOBA is actually balanced around 1-3 man groups, and the full team fight is usually completely imbalanced so that one side can blow up the other. But it’s a huge map where grouping together carries it’s own consequence. During the downtime where fights aren’t happening, everyone is basically farming or planning. There is so much AI in MOBAS (creeps, minions, turrets) that you have to recognize that there’s way more than just a 5v5 going on. The AI actually provides an impediment to players being able to do what they plan on doing, because you get body blocked or your attack selection hugs his turret.

And yes, I am playing on the wording of your title “more than 5v5 doesn’t work”. Everything that does work is ‘more than just a 5v5’ (clarifying that this is about team games).

The reason why the monday morning quarterback analogy is usually so effective is because football takes a combination of inborn physical attributes, conditioning and injury avoidance luck, years of practice learning the sport, and everything gets faster and more painful as you progress your way up to the professional level. Quarterback is not a position that even a remotely motivated person could take over quickly enough for it to be worth the effort and risk of changing professions.

Likewise, if you’re going to dare people to ‘take over’ someone’s job, you should first make sure that it’s something extremely difficult or dangerous, and that it takes years of advanced training, near impossible to earn internships, and unique abilities that most of the population have been proven not to have. If it’s something along the lines of a low-skilled laborer or other entry level job, you definitely shouldn’t hand the janitor’s broom over to someone else and demand they show you a better way of cleaning. Instead, you probably want to be a bit more appreciative that your job hasn’t been outsourced to the global marketplace, because of how little unique training it requires anyone to do aside from knowing a specific language.

CuteLilKittenHugz.2064

…sooooooo, if you thought it was hyperbole, why did you express disgust over my assumed inability to distinguish my wife from a video game? wait wait wait – oh I get it, you can NOT be serious. clever.

‘Assumed inability’ you say? Maybe you shouldn’t be holding an open invitation to your own private tennis matches.

Needless to say, many games are pretty easy to put aside, because they remain far from being the type of thing that could meet people’s higher priority needs.

Knote.2904:

You can’t be serious.

I stand corrected. I must have walked in on a John McEnroe meme instead of another hyperbole thread. Carry on serving lobs to each other so you can keep your rally going.

CuteLilKittenHugz.2064:

After a quick self-diagnosis it dawned in me – why do I get so upset about a video game? …because I LOVE this game!

I’m going to hope that this is just another poor example of totally overblown hyperbole, and that this really doesn’t need to become a discussion about why it’s completely inappropriate and unhealthy to love an electronic game [after a year, and often, even longer than several years]. For the time being, I’m also going to ignore that sickening comparison of feeling held towards a game with feelings held for a spouse; considering spouses are people who can return affections, enhance each other’s lifestyle, and sacrifice for each other when needed; while a game like this blindly tries to distribute ‘entertainment’ to a whole mass of people while giving benefits to it’s creators, which is a dual motive of selfishness on both sides.

But if you actually believe that a person should/could love a game, then I will suggest you read some literature about “behavioral addiction” and how it only induces shallow feelings of attraction towards objects, and not the deeper feelings that we are only capable of holding towards living beings [or higher principles]. It’s offensive enough that you’ve already tried to convince people that what they are experiencing resembles “love”, when you have not even bothered to become aware of what others are experiencing.

At least one person managing this game has a conflict of interest that has been leading them to suppress the organic growth that this game could have otherwise been capable of. It would be wise to not always scapegoat the underlings, because the intentions of management will also come through them.

Outdated theorycraft is also something that results in a lack of growth within any modern industry. It’s pretty easy to recognize the trademark of amateur and outdated psychological theory that has been influencing the design direction that the game has taken over it’s course. The community is obviously experiencing a syndrome of dopamine dysregulation, and such is a phase that can’t be ‘grown’ past with the extreme operant conditioning that’s being done. This is no “skinner box”; it’s an ill-educated, corporate devised one. Those who aren’t ethics-bound clinicians have no authority to prescribe [dopamine stimulation]. Just as, most of this community has no capacity to self-modulate, especially, without being aware that there is a dosing regimen in place.

I can only give a personal recommendation to uninstall or ignore new content for the time being, to mitigate the self-harm done by the current practice of ‘living story’. You’ve already been subjected to an unwarranted high dosage by Queen’s Jubilee and Clockwork Chaos, and there’s no indication of this issue being rectified. This has been an industry trend. It may even be for the best; that this corporation ceases to grow in the given state. Some growth requires an evolution or metamorphosis, and not a continuation of prior trajectory.

First we add the system; then we defend the system being there with references to things that could have only happened after the system was added. That’s because the strongest argument for further developing a system only begins to exist in a place where it’s been predominantly implemented to the detriment of a contradictory system.

Signed,
Your Authority on Logical Authoritativeness
Sir Cular Refrence

Remember, the most important thing to do after you make a mistake is to keep piling on in the same direction. When you can’t beat the things life throws at you, create your own problems and define what your solutions to them need to be, so that you can continue to win. Eventually, your self-esteem will just push you through any obstacle that you put in your own way, and you’ll be miles removed from the location where the other problems existed.

Going ‘glass condition cannon’ has always been a losing situation in balanced games. You’re built to win the longer duel, but because it’s PvE, you look to trade off your biggest strength for gains where you need them. I’ve always treated that type of build like it’s AoE, and you have to pull more foes at the same time to make it synergize. If I can’t DoT up multiple foes and outlast them, then it’s a bad PvE design and I wouldn’t play it in PvE; because it certainly doesn’t carry it’s weight on bosses unless it debuffs them.

But ascended damage “gear” causes things to scale (i.e. power creep) a bit faster than most people realize. There are some traits that add +% scaling to offensive abilities. And there are other traits that add boosts where they don’t exist innately (proc on crit, Thief Mug) and that force opponents to require a certain amount of counter-building to deal with. Scaling in a particular place might allow you to win fights you previously would have lost, because you gained within a type of scaling that was already strong from your class design and skills: burst damage, high toughness with healing, high survival with condition damage, etc.

Personally, as I scale better on my defensive support spec, it allows my glass-cannon teammates to get more DPS time if I’m still the primary focus target (because of their dodging or PvE aggro mechanics). When I’m running a glass cannon, I usually try to reach a certain threshold of passive defense that allows me to survive until my active skills come back off cooldown. And from leveling several characters, I also feel like dual weapon combinations would scale better than one handers (given that the two sets have similar functions) because of the extra passive sigil type (5%/10% at night).

As of right now, it’s harder to find broken defensive multipliers than it is offensive ones. It’s kind of funny to play something like an elementalist with stacked toughness, and see when things give up after hitting you because they would have to blow too many cooldowns on you in a team fight. Or a burst guardian, who punishes people for expecting him to be unkillable. But things like this will also be competitively phased out in the long run as people come to anticipate them, and they won’t be worth the effort in gearing optimally for either.

The scaling is actually broken in multiple places.

A lion is considered an exotic pet. Ghost lion is the ascended tier counterpart. Enjoy your ghost lion statue!

Divinity.8041

GW2 is a sinking ship, that totally could have been saved.

First Mate: Captain, there’s a polar bear riding an iceberg ahead! This ship has 3.5 million people aboard!

Captain: Full speed ahead and ram it! That bear has gone mad! Only a monster would command an iceberg into a ship full of people!

Strange to see the comments about trying to keep the 3 formats (PvE, PvP, WvW) together. The other two formats are clearly acting in obvious dysfunction with the PvP side of the game and making sure people never get the time to set foot in PvP; as if that wasn’t already obvious with the separate Glory reward system that is only minimally allowed to help someone’s PvE progression. It looks to me like higher-ups are creating internal competition between design teams and encouraging them to polarize their own fanbases so that it looks like they have done a ‘better job’…

And with the most recent patch, the lead PvE designer has cemented the decision to require people grind out multiple ascended weapon and gear sets per character (or get a legendary). PvErs also have the constant Living Story busy work being added to ‘help’ grind out achievement busy work. And the lead WvW designer has already gone totally off the deep end, and continues to actively divorce WvW from it’s PvP roots. Catering towards already stacked servers, 10000 rank grind per character, as well as the aforementioned Ascended gear requirement. And since it is still (or could have been) a PvP format, the multiple gear/weapon sets are required due to the distinct differences between roaming, zerging, and defending dolyaks/bases; and that’s ignoring how popular dueling and GvG have become as side interests along with all the trait/rune/sigil combinations to test out. The option to explore the game is being designed out.

But between those two, theres plenty of sigils, runes, AI objectives, and broken consumable buffs that make the WvW game play less and less like PvP. WvW is more PvE than ever with the current rush to trade bases so that the Ascended grind can be finished with. The PvP side has to admit to itself, it’s going to lose if it tries to totally do it’s own thing, because it would isolate the game’s stars from the game’s players. WvW can’t carry the game’s marketing because top WvW guilds were never really that good; and everyone else they went up against was just months behind.

PvP absolutely hasn’t kept pace with the disturbing and chaotic re-envisioning of the game being done by the other designers; not that anyone really can, as evidenced by the constant complaints… Ok, so you added Skyhammer, ignored feedback about it, and now it foreshadows (to the skilled parts of the community) where this game is actually going (towards mini-games and not sport). With every addition to the PvE game, it becomes painfully obvious that the resources to fix major problems exist, but they intentionally won’t be used to support any healthy growth of this game.

I know some people are looking at the OP and thinking, aren’t conspiracy theories against forum TOS and shouldn’t this thread have been deleted? However, typical rational thinking like that would be wrong, because all of this talk about people getting paid to be negative and bring things down is true; except for the part about salaries being pittance.

I’m sure by now you are familiar with other major competitor titles on the market. Looking at my forum name, you can clearly see that I am ‘Master’ Fuhon, a title that is only bestowed upon to Jedi masters of the force in the Star Wars universe. We’ve been very successful in our mission to establish subtle dominion over the minds of developers, which is why I feel confident in disclosing this information at this time. But you should have also noticed, I’m not the only one going by the Master title on the forums, so we have a bigger presence here than you realized. I am currently employed by the makers of Star Wars products to post of the forums of competitive universes, and in general, to warp the in-game skill, quest, and trait-lines towards being more like George Lucas brilliant vision of a fantasy world. Burst ele (Force Kill), Fresh Air (moar lightning), telekinesis to control rocks, etc. In game, you would see that I play an Elementalist, which you can clearly see the “Force Lightning” inspirations of the air attunement line and the scepter 1 skill. But we have also purposely held Eles out of the current sPvP meta because to Republic citizens like yourself: the Force and Jedi don’t exist. So carry on with your business, citizen.

And if you take a look at the rest of the forums, you will see a bunch of other names from other video games. General Discussion spy Vayne.8563, from League of Legends, has been very successful in luring away your players. Every time Vayne posts, at least 10 people give up on the forums and quit Guild Wars 2. I’m sure that after I mention this, you will start to see the many others that are around, not so cleverly hiding among the rest. But just in this thread alone: Conan.8046 is from Age of Conan, butch.9136 is the nickname of the Butcher from Diablo, Fenrir.3609 is from Yu-Gi-Oh!, Xom.9264 is the stock name for Exxon Mobile (who’s involvement in tanking this game I cannot mention further for my own safety, but you already know it exists because all global conspiracies have to include Big Oil).

So if you’ve ever wondered why the last dozen or so WoW killers have flopped, it’s because MMO budgets are more based on bringing down good gameplay mechanics than they are in generating them. Expert marketing agents are brought in to make sure that games that have the potential to hit user numbers in the 10 millions end up getting stuck around 500k of the most incompetent users. And this is all too big for you to stop, unless you find the one true weakness to the entire plan, which is

[This post has been edited by a moderator]

-How MMO gaming is headed in an entirely opposite direction that won’t ever come to benefit living beings
-Corporations that buy out smaller competitors so they can sabotage them
-Bait and switch and other retail scams
-Attempts to get 13 to 18 year olds addicted to games and gambling
-Propaganda spreading and censorship
-Professionals who aren’t professional because they don’t learn or develop a work ethic
-Communities that promote exploitation, gang harassment, and/or substance abuse
-Conversations about things with people who never bother to learn
-Selfish players who care nothing about anything outside of their buble
-No talents who increase their own exposure even though people are harmed by it
-Urgent warnings that get ignored or discarded, creating a future where people complain endlessly about what they didn’t see coming

There was just a double murder in my state; charged against a guy who had a prior restraining order against him for putting a knife to his victim’s throat; and who had a prior murder indictment that was dropped because a key witnesses didn’t show. Real world psychopaths actually minimally bluff, posture, and self-aggrandize publicly before they act, because they know word of mouth will build them up afterwards. No one seems to take real death threats serious anymore because of those ‘crying wolf’ for attention and personal brand-marketing.

Using the internet, despite what people say about anonymity, is much safer than working in many public service sector positions, and way safer than winning at competition (like a sport) against people of a sub-culture that prizes owning a record of notoriety. One day you’re out playing, and some pick-up starts losing; then starts cheating and playing dirty and still loses; so he starts an argument and then says he’s go bring a knife/group of people. 1 in 4 brought what they claimed when saying this, but they might have just wanted people to run, because everyone got away safely. Or, you’ve seen someone get angry with everyone, and pick up a long metal object or broken bottle that was on the ground nearby, but you doubted he was going to do anything serious because it was broad daylight with multiple witnesses. A typical ‘personal threat’ is made in an environment where there is no evidence that can be utilized by the legal system. As long as you aren’t the last witness remaining; as long as you aren’t in the middle of an impersonal crime spree; you aren’t in high danger.

If you click the second link within the article, it doesn’t actually give any examples of threats of intent. “Die in a fire”, “kill yourself”, “you should have been aborted”… these are scumbag things to say [and people have said them to me and people I know before] but they don’t represent an intent of bodily harm, just harassment. I also noticed that this developer makes a product that simulates violences and revolves a game around using it as a means of winning… The game itself is filled with double-speak language: players threaten to kill and shoot each other all the time, but it doesn’t actually mean much; until a person comes along sensationalising it as a grave threat by over-personalizing and framing comments out of context. Even if these were to actually consitute threats, game developers are still on the ‘sheltered’ side of life; especially that of being a public figure, or of being someone who’s actually talented at something and has to deal with envious rivals. Threats of stalking and attack online (mostly used to intimidate females, although I’ve gotten some wierd ones myself) look way more serious than someone being commanded to die. One time, I caught a guy making up a story about knowing a cancer victim personally (didn’t even know the type of cancer), and he said that I deserved to get a fatal form of cancer. Does that count as a threat now? Because I don’t treat someone’s poorly-expressed fantasies as intent.

First world problems… where people detached from violence make hyperbole about the ironic circumstances they actually live in. Shouldn’t developers have felt sorry that their player base already had to cope with this stuff and develop a means of brushing it off almost daily while they were wracking in the money? For those who receive serious threats, they can just “contact customer support” and hope the automated response team solves everything; meanwhile, developers now go to authorities and the media to boost their ‘streed cred’ like rap superstars, while still having the power to track down/document threats and issue impersonal group punishment.

I WvW instead of sPvP, but I’ve found it really strange how I see Elementalist played in the format, which is why I’m commenting here.

From my experience, the class is now only good at ganging up on people and forcing uneven team fights (3v2, 4v3). Wherever you see a fair fight, your job is to sneak up [as unexpected as is possible doing this in plain sight] and burst a vulnerable target while throwing around some spot heals and condition removals on your offensive carrying class. Sure, my Thief is better at sneaking up on people (1v1, 2v1, 2v2) and destroying them out of stealth, but Thieves blow up fast when they find themselves caught in an AoE pile of Engineer and Necro garbage spam. Thieves also lack the team support to win difficult endurance fights. My Thief just map roams due to not having the sustain to stay on a congested spot.

But whenever I see a stream, I often see Elementalists sitting on a point solo and allowing some better 1v1 class to come to them and totally wreck them. I’ve even seen a few [laughably] stay on a point and think they could hold off 2 people, which is exactly what I use my 80 Guardian for, on top of having amazing leaps and pushbacks for protecting teammates. It’s so strange to see playstyle like this on a class that requires high mobility (i.e. leaving point) to survive. People should be thinking about whether they are really occupying someone properly by dying in 5 seconds, and whether they are being smart about using the base rez to return from far point. I could really only suggest doing something like that if people in sPvP were foolish enough to chase you miles away from objectives like they do in WvW.

So basically, what I’m saying is that the class is weak in every situation that reliably matters in a close 5v5 capture points format (given the more recent nerfs/buffs); and that’s why I just run/protect WvW Dolyaks on mine while I level up and practice better specialization on other class 80s. Inventory swapping is magnitudes more necessary on Elementalist than any other. If you want to be a jack-of-all-trades right: dual-main or tri-main like all the professional gamers do. I’ve studied to be a jack-of-all-trades (polymath) in real life, and this is an intentionally flawed design, due to how overpowered poly-expertise would be in an RPG. Hence, why I recommend having multiple mains. Alternately, any flavor-of-the-months you reroll are putting pressure on those classes to get needed tweaks.

I can’t imagine anyone calling an Elementalist a solo main right now. I can only see people playing nothing but Guardian, nothing but Engineer, and having success with it. ‘Jack-of-all-trades’ really doesn’t mean good at everything; it means good against everything. Ele is really something you just pull out when you are certain your opponent will overspec against you. For the moment, I’m playing Thief to try to enhance my Elementalist combat approach and aggressiveness strategy, up until I can make a more final decision about what my new primary main will become.

Kirchhoff.5876:

I’m not saying this game is in a successful road to being an e-sport, because even when you know the game and play it, it is hard to keep track on what’s going on, the game is really a pain in the kitten to watch, and e-sports are all about watching games, if you don’t have people watching you have no sport. you can see that in guild wars 2 sometimes shout casters don’t even know what the hell is going on, and that’s not their fault (btw they are doing really good explaining everything) it’s the game that is too messy & the let’s AoE all the things play style is doing no good.

Okay so I misunderstood. I should probably brush up on my ele profession so that I become more fluid with my understanding of sPvP and e-sports generation.

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http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchhoff's_circuit_laws
:)

Kirchhoff.5876:

We can say that the game is perfectly balanced right now why ? all teams are playing the same comp (NA PaX Qualifiers) and if everyone plays the same comp their fight is balanced.

Let me get this straight what you are saying.

In regards to bunkering…
At any capture point node on an sPvP map, the sum of characters flowing into that node should be equal to the sum of characters flowing out of that node; or The vector sum of movement in any battle of combatants at a node should be zero due to proper class balance.

and your second postulate about bunker-bursting damage dealers is…
The potential differences between the class that is the source of an attack and the class that is the resistor of that attack, when summed together, should be zero; thereby signaling balanced skill levels.

So, with these two guidelines being adhered to because everyone is playing the exact same classes and builds, combat mechanics are hereby flowing properly within circuit competition, resulting in successful e-sports generation?

Since I remembered clicking the Spire (and still do), but I received the Short Bow, I’ll give an explantion of why I originally thought the mistake was on my end. I stayed in Lion’s Arch chat for 20+ minutes and no one reported the same bug. I scanned the forums, and I only saw a single report by someone else who was also in doubt. I’m a bit sleep deprived at the moment, which I’ve come to know affects my attention but not necessarily my mid-to-long-term memory. Under sleep deprivation, I have previously misread individual words in a similar manner to a dyslexic, but in every case prior I have noticed shortly afterwards, that misread words would have to be similar lengths to each other. (I rule this out now because Spire looks nothing like Short Bow, even with a rearrangement of letters). The optical sensor on my mouse is also failing and sometimes it drifts across the screen without being moved (although I remember seeing the item I selected darkened). That was a possible explanation, except I clicked near the middle of the item text, and my mouse have never drifted that far in the instant of a click.

It was going to take me considerable time to rule out anything that could have gone wrong on my side, but it seemed better to report a possible bug sooner, rather than later. I mentioned an anecdote about only looking at the Recurve, which I expected was the Short Bow. Somehow, that caused me to not see Short Bow on the list. I previewed multiple items on that list, and for me to miss that Short Bow was even on it, made it seem reasonable that my attention was not as focused as I thought it was. Even though it’s a logical error to dismiss my own data because of what could turn out to be an unrelated mistake, that type of attention-span issue is going to take me months to review and either confirm or deny. It would be easier for me to rely on data given by others.

I had to mention the Short Bow story because, even though it shows my doubt, there was a remote possibilty of a bugged second list that didn’t show all items.

There’s a lot of unneccessary comments being added by people with no insight on the situation, whereas I’m already sure every instance of “no complaint” is enough to suffice that nothing has gone wrong to the majority. As far as commentary goes, the average MMO player is going to be the kind of person who ‘deserves’ a pat on the back for getting anything right, while they provide some kind of rudimentary combination of occam’s razor (simpleton explanation suffices) and psychological projection/transference (i.e. here’s what happened based on my life experience) for why someone else has gotten it wrong. Ultimately, that kind of ‘expertise’ is not going to generate good results when you apply it as a methodology to other problems, unless you have an amazing reserve of life experience.

But for regular people, it would help to know that the success and failure incidence of every task and microtask can be plotted along a statistical curve. The most common of these plots is what everyone knows to be a “normal distribution” or “bell curve”. And while normal distribution doesn’t perfectly apply to every system that can be designed, it does give hints about where data points should exist. In order to generate more failures, you will also be generating incidences of people who admittedly had trouble with the task.

It should be striking that there are absolutely zero reports of any kind of difficulty using the interface. I myselft can’t even report trouble navigating the menus, despite the fact I got a Short Bow instead of a Spire. The buttons are big, and when you select your intended weapon, the GUI highlights it. But what this shows is that the graph is neither a bell, nor an inverted bell (‘well’ curve); and given non-normal sampling, it requires you to gain specific understanding of the outliers rather than dismissing them outrigth.

This also brings to mind the concept of Ascended items, since some people might think it’s a similar issue. There’s a good reason why Ascended items are the most commonly reported ‘mistake’. Anyone playing this game has been trained to associate triple-stat combinations on gear with prefixes and suffixes. Ascended items have arbitrary names, which means you have to click the pop-up and read information to find out which one you want. Ascended items have the Unique trait, which defies the previous convention of allowing 2 equipped at the same time. They have Offensive, Defensive, or Omni/Utility infusion slots. And a few of the items have 4 stats distributed across them. While I haven’t purchased a wrong Ascended item, I can recognize that the purchase was more difficult to navigate; so it would fit within a far more normal distribution of data than Zenith weapon mistakes would.

An ascended item is also more clearly “miss-selected” instead of “misclicked”. The mistake in choice is made prior, and then followed through upon successfully. In the case of Zenith weapons, a few have different names than previous convention, so it might appear to be reasonable that someone didn’t understand which was the Avenger and which was the Blade. But ultimately, if you believe the mistake is being made on the players end, you have to have an explanation to support that a person misread two words in the instant they clicked the mouse.

Other common mistakes are on processes that people have automated, rather than something people would have ‘raised guard’ not to mess up. For instance, I was once thinking of buying a Basic Salvaging Kit on one character, and I remembered I didn’t have a Master’s Salvaging Kit. Combining the two thoughts together in as quickly as I can think, I purchased a Fine Salvaging Kit (they also both have prices that end in 88). Indecision does result in mistakes of compromise, but when you read the explanations, people were all decided on what weapons they chose. Another element of this mistake is being distracted to the limits on your own capacity to hold multiple attentions.

Another possible incident of this bug, by original poster in this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Anyone-else-had-problems-with-Zenith

Seems to have gotten trolled pretty hard by people who have absolutely no experience dealing with this bug (or with outlier cases in general). Overall, the group shaming is likely going to discourage some individuals from reporting this.

I had intended to get a Spire (Staff) but I got a Shortbow.

5th post down in the following thread, user Doggie.3184 claims he picked Shortbow and got the Staff.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/bazaar/Achievement-chest-rewards-WARNING/first

Since you put this in bug reports, I have to wonder whether you have a similar situation to mine or whether you are certain you picked wrong:

Before picking my Zenith weapon skin, I browsed what several of the weapons looked like in the preview window. I distinctly remember looking at the Recurve Bow and realizing it didn’t fit the look of my Bow using characters. I definitely didn’t preview the Shortbow at all (coming from GW1, I expected Recurve to be an alternate name for Shortbow).

I remember clicking the Spire and clicking some kind of “accept” prompt, but I was given a Shortbow instead. I’m second guessing my memory a bit since this this outcome happened, wondering if I was really that careless; although the Shortbow wasn’t near the Spire on my list. I don’t really remember how the interface looked. After the fact, I remember there being a small grey box with an arrow, but I didn’t click that.

If anyone else experiences this, then at least the reports will add up to figuring out what happened. I also know that people in chat were linking Spires, so they didn’t seem to get this bug. The only other thing I can think of is that my selection didn’t register and I was just randomly assigned a weapon.

I hate to spoil the surprise for Tarnished Coast, but the Gary Busey you have leading you is a total fraud. However, when you consider facts about the composition that makes up your feeble role-playing server, it shouldn’t be that surprising to have it revealed to you that you have phonies among your ranks…

You will now lose to a non-roleplaying server at your supposed specialty of what you call “roleplaying”.

The unofficial non-roleplaying server for Guild Wars 2 was ‘officially’ the Eternal Grove server, which was later annexed to be under the military protection of Fort Aspenwood. A moat was built around this fort to accommodate the all-seeing transfers from Isle of Janthir. This is why you will often see people talking about our Janthir transfers. But the original alliance with the Eternal Grove and it’s spiritual forces still exists as well and is a territory of Fort Aspenwood. FA still retains the most hardcore non-roleplaying community in the game.

Fort Aspenwood is so adamant about not playing as roles, that we do not really roleplay when we roleplay. Instead, what we do is use a very specific science that allows us to incorporate different personas into one being so that we do not need to pretend we are other people when we need to role-play them. We utilize our connections to the ancestors of the nearby Eternal Grove through a great ritual of tree singing and immortality conversion. Once a soul is committed to a specific Forver Tree, it becomes part of any interconnected Juggernaut.

Warning the following image is extremely graphic and depicts envy-inducing genitalia:
http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/File:Juggernaut.jpg

Becoming other things was a most serious business on Eternal Grove. Celebrities and famous people are all committed to leave behind everything so that their souls can become parts of the Forever Trees in the Grove. No exceptions, we have not lost collecting a soul we wanted to claim. You are only free to have F-list celebs and reality tv ‘stars’ because they dilute the strong constitution of what we already have. We already have committments from Tyrian-famous politicians, Skritt Romney and Grawl Ryan. Any initial rejects of the Kurzick juggernaut selection process are forced to do something menial and degrading, until they qualify for the selection process. Molebama and Troll Biden will wrap up their current servitude as president and vice-president before qualifying within our mass conglomeration of ancestral souls.

You see, even among sides that fundamentally disagree on things in the world of flesh; they all choose the side that gives them immortality and huge genitalia post life. It really isn’t a sacrifice at all to dedicate yourself to the Grove.

Welcome to the Drop Zone, where you are now Undersiege by a tall forest-dwelling Predator 2 of nightmare. The real Gary Busey is now feeding Fort Aspenwood words of wisdom in his unique form of Buseyisms; so that the evil forces led by this inferior clone and the deviants of Tarnished Boast can be defeated. His soul already has a contract with the Eternal Grove. The real Gary Busey can be seen in the following video that shows how the real Gary Busey talks, which is not anything like your conjured-up conversations: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amIh-Jovulw

TARNISHED COAST
T otally A verage R oleplaying N oob I nstigators S tinking H ugely E very D ay C rying O nly A bout S illy T hings

PORTAL
P eople O verloading R endering T hrough A lteration of L ocation

DOLYAK
D imwitted O bjective L ugging Y ields A round K eeps

TREE
T erminal R esidence of E ternal E xcellence

There you have the demonstrative proof that Gary Busey is actually working for us. You TC people are only roleplaying a roleyplaying roleplayer of Gary Busey. While a man of his qualifications is certainly fit to rule as king over easily-manipulated Tarnished Boasters; he merely occupies a villanous non-leading role in any of our feature films. And because immortality is so long, and because the burden of massive front-dangling appendages is so straining on the back; Kurzicks provide lots of premium sitdown entertainment in the ever-life, along with magnificent theatre architecture to consume it in.

You are a funny guy Kerithlan. Needing a militia to tackle a lone herald of unpleasant truths. Breaking the fourth wall to make a conversation encompass an entire world audience that can’t be present. Grandstanding to an imaginary supportive majority. The ‘illogical’ talk was in reference to skupuz6940. Do I really need to hear from more of Tarnished Coast’s fabled summoned minion RPers here? Maybe a concious being somewhere can contribute more than just an echo.

9:32 in the video, the tower lord finishes off the last ranged Thieves Guild mob. He turns to target a remaining player, and fires a blank shot that causes no health loss on anything; because it hit a low profile geometry obstruction. Then it proceeds to stand there unable to attack anything. Some sort of algorithm causes it to inch forward until it eventually clears the obstruction. Due to the way Professor Sensei executed the pull, the Champ was supposed to inch forward right into another geometry obstruction (corner) that would prevent it from clearing the original one.

If my snap judgements of you guys weren’t hitting a mark with any accuracy, why would you be trying to do it to me? Who repeats methods that they internally know and argue are failing? Did you know that you are throwing media created stereotypes at me and hoping they stick? Have you ever tried to trace whether those stereotype puzzle pieces could fit together and make a consistent person or world, or did you just accept them outright as being true? Performing and pretending isn’t my livelihood; you could be better at it if you intended to make it yours.

The silent majority saw this bicycle wreck coming a mile away. Should moderators care enough to infract and censor, even when everyone knows that boast threads are a kind of inevitable forum excrement? No one even has time to waste performing a failed cognitive intervention on people who choose not to see right/wrong as a necessary component of the video game envionment. How many times has stuff about exploits been clarified officially and the same “we never knew” response was given? Steadfast denial is not proper procedure for the experience of an in-game bug, and yet it has become a genre convention for dealing with them.

The rest, to Gekido: in that first premise you make some assumptions about ‘insanity’. That word is not really a technical term, but a heap where people place everything they deny can be an aspect of humanity. Mental competence is one of the most common things people like to overrate about themselves, and insanity comes to take on alot of qualities of other’s perceived inferiority. Under other definitions, things like skydiving or running a marathon qualifies as insanity because of the unneccessary heightened risk. A formal definition should have a stricter requirement on the difference between normal and abnormal experience. It is ‘insane’ that criminals hold it over law enforcement “you can’t catch me”, but the system has so many loopholes that make this possible.

Second premise you make has some assumptions about a moderator’s job description. Accurate job descriptions are given internally, and are rarely publicized to people who could make doing that job impossible. Because then that job would be made impossible. Overall, you make an assumption here that swift action takes presedence over any kind of due process and developed reasonin, which indicates you are too familiar with television legal systems which wrap things up in under an hour. I can throw an accusation or two around quickly, but these guys will keep bluffing because they know they can’t be convicted officially.

But when you conclude near the end ‘well played, brb rerolling thief’, I realized that you had drawn the same reluctant conclusion of many others to not anticipate changes. The problem is that if the exploit can’t be officially traced, it can’t be officially labeled and corrected. Which is exactly what the cohorts who’ve been posting in this thread hoped to happen.

These are all answers to things that have been said in this thread. I am putting them here to demonstrate facts about the deviation from the original topic after I pressed the conversation towards being about exploits visible in this video. These are tangents of the topic, that otherwise could seem non-related, but have instead become central themes of player deception.

To simply call me “closed-minded”, is literally, one of the poorest insults you could construct about me. Advanced education doesn’t get into a closed mind. In an open mind, it becomes a roomate and disposes of the garbage for you. That is what is being done here with nearly everything you people say. My mind is unlocked, overflowing, and constantly reorganizing. This is no permanent home for garbage.

If you want to make this a discussion about ‘reality’, then you should be aware that “those who live in video game houses shouldn’t throw feeble electronic stones at avatars”. I am committing this as an intentional logical fallacy on top of the old cliche. This doesn’t win any argument by itself; but it should give you a hint about how much expertise gets held back from being used against you an average run-in of this sort. I can not-so-humbly say, you know nothing about reality and far less about it than me. In your version of reality, your mistakes are unconcious and not belonging to you. You have been projecting them upon me and I have been aware of it.

The word “illogical” is a perjorative term used to indicate that the user [of the term] lacks the competence to diagnose what was done in a specific logical chain. In actuallity, everything has a logical pattern to it that can be followed. Everything. Where things vary are on the concepts of empathy and rationality; two things you guys aren’t particularly good at. But, the more unqualified you are to comprehend logic, the more ‘errors in logic’ you will imagine existing out in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequential_logic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinational_logic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_logic_
www.logic-that-hasnt-been-perfected-enough-to-formalize.com
etc…

The foundation of science is in discovering the commonalities of logical patterns that make up the universe. The foundation of the study of logic (in philosophy) is about informalities that are commonly perceived in arguments as not being related to solving the argument. Fallacies are examples of informal logic, which makes them a “means to an end” rather than “ends of themselves”. That is how I try to use them. That is, evidently, not how the bulk of you try to use them and there is a more serious problem with your own logic(s) not conforming to literacy standards. The number of fallacies you have committed as sole premises of arguments is staggering; which is again, another reason why I can’t allow you to claim any victory.

To summarize where the rest of this thread is going, because many of you have already lost on the original topic of exploits used in that video: You guys have been a textbook example of one-goes-in, another-one-follows. Is there anyone else?

You made the video Chewbacca. There was obviously a pro-cheating agenda behind producing and publicizing a propaganda piece like this. So why is everything you say steering the conversation towards something else; when we could be openly discussing the benefits of living in a world of naturalistic right?

Why are we now playing friendly server meet-and-greet, when you posted this video to mock people and hold it over them. Where are the balls you just had when you straight-up, no-exploiting, skillfully-legit showed that zerg who was boss by manipulating mechanics? Am I dealing with that person, or am just I dealing with someone who gets stumped by the dual-function flexibility of Signet of Shadows? (What kind of person gets to 80 on a glass cannon without knowing the power of AoE blind, anyway?)

I stated that my specific appearance into this thread was designed to be beaten in a very specific way. I had to say it because you didn’t come across to me as a particularly adept game player. A really easy game was designed for you to be able to win; if you could just follow the simple pattern of establishing credibility that any normal person would be able to follow. I’ve told you about how the solution was honesty related. Do you walk the straight path to get the cookie, or do try to walk into the electic fence again? It’s unfortunate, but it looks like we are bringing out more losers than winners right now.

This has become about your flawed need to achieve via exploitation; instead of reporting it in a way that it would become more beneficial to everyone. It’s pretty clear that you have the answers and choose not to be forthcoming with any of them. You two are among the most qualified to submit the bug/exploit report about triggering the AI to go numb. We’re just waiting on you now, but apparently you haven’t had enough fill of the ‘rewards’ of exploiting…

People who learn to cheat AI have a decision to make about whether they want to emulate the behavior, or whether they truly comprehend the consequences of it proliferating. Decisions like that are made very early on, which is why developed dark and light side jedi powers look so different from each other. Someone who chooses to do it in one place, will be doing it in the other places they go to out of habit. They will also hang around with others who have this similarity in common, so that together they can breed further exploitation.

In the meantime, I can think up more questions for you to dodge answering: What other ongoing schemes are you covering up? Have you been doing stuff like this in dungeons; or is it more about mass human injury than it is about positive rewards? Do you have a history of cheating that spans other games? Are you even cheating people on the time frame of which you claim to be ‘working’?