Guild Wars 2

Yep, absolute stroke of genius. I was puzzled for a couple minutes, thinking if there was something wrong with my audio setup…

I have some complaints about the event, even if I’d give it an overall positive feedback.

Events during phase 1. The bugs spoiled the fun of some of the investigation mission. I couldn’t complete the event even if I followed the forum guidelines. Anyway, rewards for those missions weren’t particularly interesting so I gave up.

Missed all the cutscenes and all the “one-time” events during phase 1 and 2, so I won’t comment about them.

Phase 3: liked the event. It took nearly 3 hours on the overflow server where I ended up to, luckily with some guildmates but not all. Mind, that was fun because we were all in TS and so we could share the experience, but the “full overflow” prevented to group together 15 guildmates that ended on 3 different overflow servers. My main complaints about this was mainly the exaggerate lag I suffered during the event. I don’t care about the fact that I was steamrolled multiple times by veteran karkas, that their venom spit killed me instantly most of the times. I don’t care that I looted the final chest in my underpants (with all my armor completely broken). My greatest complaint is that the whole lag affair spoiled really much of the fun. I had trouble moving, I had trouble seeing mobs coming at me, I was injured and killed sometimes by unseen enemies, I tried to spam my aoes in the dark, so that I could tag some monster, gaining experience and some loot.

I do not own a nuclear furnace for a computer (I play on a notebook) and experienced in PvE even more lag than I usually experience during large zerg in WvW. Yes, that wasn’t fun.

About the rewards, one of my guildmates dropped a precursor, I dropped 2 exotics and 2 rares. I partly agree with some of the complaints that the RNG lottery could have been smoothed a bit.

In the end, if ANet plans more events like these, I say “good”, but please, try to split people around the map and not cluster hundreds of them together.
Unless this was necessary to understand better how to tune zerg performance, in this case, hope the event helped.

More than that, can we have restart not during EU prime time?
Our server is not night capping, we had two restarts and we were twice in the middle of a winning inc in WvW…
Thanks for spoiling my WvW evening…

Same problem here.
Happens with – for example – with links from search results where opening a link like the following results in a similar screenshot.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/Night-Capping-and-YOU/page/22#post428654

My 2 cents on this (some may already have been suggested, sorry for the duplicate)

- map: indicate asura gates and zone gates and on hover tell which zone they connect to.
- map: hovering over zones pops up a tooltip with levels, personal progress (%) and/or x/y for every item (renown hearts, waypoints, pois, skill challenges, vistas).
- achievements: some depend on a counter that can reset. These should show in the tooltip the current status, ex. monthly achievement with exp: beside the progress bar there’s a couple of numbers like 23456/25000 exp, I’d like to know my current progress since my last death and not maximum achieved.
- inventory: deposit collectible, compact, show/hide bags should be 3 different buttons (menu is cumbersome)
- chat: allow linking of renown hearts, vistas, skill points.
- chat: custom channel [es. lfg, language channels]. A nice addition would be a full system of custom channels.
- guild window: remember selected/shown columns in roster. Every time I relog those get reset.
- guild window: hide/show offline in main pane (should be hide offline by default here) and roster pane.
- guild window: add column for overall influence gained for every character.
- add stick/follow (in WvW would be very useful), bindable to a key (default = alt+f)
- bank: when double-clicking to deposit an item, auto-stack with existing.
- inventory: add split in context menu of item stacks.
- BLTC: no way to go back “home” to the top traded items.
- personal stories: when an NPC starts a conversation video, don’t play the “hello” voice.
- crafting: add crafting queues when crafting of an item is in progress, convert the craft/craft all button to queue/queue all
- crafting: once a recipe is known, allow craft the complete part from raw materials, i.e. queue all the recipe hierarchy.
- crafting: if a component of a recipe is obtainable via another recipe, double clicking on a component should auto-navigate to the other recipe.
- traits: add another swappable trait set (es. for WvW). I know resetting traits has a cost, but please, for the same cost, allow us to have two different trait set (not only major that can be swapped on the fly, but distribution along the lines) so that we may not need to go to the trainer to reset. Maybe allow buying (for gems) more trait sets (in excess of the base 2).
- WvW: add global “server” channel, readable to all people on the server across all maps including WvW maps, so the three borderlands+eternal battleground may summon and balance people. Maybe allow write access only to commanders.
- target buff/debuff icons: align them left under the target health bar, when condition come and go very quickly such as in WvW battles/Instance bosses, it’s really difficult to hover the mouse for long enough so that the tooltip shows, and then conditions are removed and the tooltip disappears.

About Teams/Squads in WvW
As far as I can tell, in WvW team is “only one team across entire map”. So map chat and team chat overlap and sometime seems confusing. Team functionality should be expanded. I am ok with the “squad” functionality (but we should have the option to buy it “as a guild” and pass it among players of the same guild – yes, someone may steal it, nice!).
At the moment, I don’t understand the “team” functionality. It doesn’t apparently offer any feature save from a duplicate chat channel. It’s OK in Keg Brawl where the “team” is local to a map and doesn’t include all people in the map, but in WvW there doesn’t seem to be such apparent thing.
My 2 cents on how to improve it.
Generate N “free squads” in each map, and give to the “WvW instructor” an UI that shows all free (and commander) squads on map. Allow joining to one of such squads from that UI panel so that one can join directly when entering into a map. Grant a random player (ideally, the first that join) the role of “Lieutenant”. The role can be willingly transferred to another player? Your choice. Of course show the lieutenant on map with a smaller/different icon.
When a lieutenant leaves the squad or the map, remove his title/role/icon/… and pass it randomly (or to the eldest) remaining member.
Each free squad should have a maximum of 25 players (just to make it smaller than Commander’s) and there should be enough free squads so that each player can belong to one.
Change Team chat so that it’s readable by all but writable only by commanders and lieutenants.

Same here, firefox (latest).
Probably typed wrong password.
Yesterday I had to login three times before I could log in, this evening just once.

I can confirm that preventing Traherne’s death may help in completing the quest.

Tried this quest sunday evening, died oh so many times, reached the researches inside the cave and only Traherne would follow me, while the others would stand joyfully watching the stalagmites in the cave.

Tried it last night, managed to avoid Traherne’s death (I don’t know but it seemed to me that some mobs hit less hard than first night, but I could be wrong), reached the second researcher group with all people happily alive and could complete the mission.

Personal opinion: the mission rocks, but is “surprisingly” long, at least compared to the previous in the storyline. The first part in the Concordia encampment is a bit tedious especially because you have to go up and down the stairs many times.

Nonetheless it’s one of the most fun and challenging storyline mission I found until now and the final battle is terrific.

I add my experience to this thread, even if I’m not experiencing overall low fps, but a framerate drop and associated issues that can get quite annoying in some situations, especially WvW.
I even did a small video just to document what’s happening (watch in HD and enlarge the video so you can read the FPS number).
In the video I start with the best performance settings, minus the “subsample” resolution, and you can see I get 28fps in Queensdale.
Then I switch to “best appearance” and adjust some settings (shadows, shaders, …) getting 20fps around the same landscape.

My specs, just for the information. It’s a laptop and I know it’s a mid-low machine (but I played Skyrim on high details with 50fps…):
CPU: i7@2.7GHz
RAM: 4GB@1333MHz
GPU: ATI HD6630M 1GB
Resolution played: 1366×768
I already tried to put another 2GB in the machine with no perceivable changes.
The CPU/GPU/Mem graph during a GW2 session is in this picture (the last part is when I alt-tabbed to the monitor to take the screenshot). As you see, neither CPU nor GPU were hogged, so I suspect a less than optimal usage of the available resources.

As you can see framerates drop seem independent of the video settings I use.
I have observed mainly that I get these drops when:

• I pan the camera too fast
• There are many people around me with many particle effect (during the spider queen event for example)

Nonetheless I even get some framerate drop also for no particular reason (see video at 0:32, 1:24, 1:50, …)

Point is that the real issue is people popping out of nowhere. You’ll see at 0:39 a player suddenly appearing beside me. This was PvE and it is not a problem, but this happened many times with enemy players in WvW. And I’ve been killed by “god-knows-what” a certain number of times. Mind: WvW mobs are always visible and do not happen to pop out of nowhere, only players both friends and enemies. And in those situations, I don’t even see a floating nametag that could smell danger, neither I can tab-target them.
This, as you may understand, is quite frustrating and annoying.

I’d like to see this issue fixed, I can accept a lower graphic quality, but I really would like to enjoy WvW without these issues that really spoil the fun.

I did some more observation and found that most of these framerate drop could depend by the “field of view”. Last night I was in the snowy part of lornar pass, I was still using mid-quality setting and I had… 80fps! I did an event with some other people and did not feel this framerate drop. Probably because in that part of the map, my field of view is very limited. Then I changed map and for example in Caledon Forest, near the event with the “failed experiments” I had about 40fps.

My personal feeling is that the landscape distance rendered may be a factor that impact heavily on this isssue.
My suggestion is then either reducing the distance rendered when the number of particle effects and/or players moving around the player are over a certain threshold. I don’t mind if the view during a combat is less than stunning, my attention would be on what’s happening around me and not on the beautiful landscape…

Thanks @ Mike for the information.
Anyway I’d like to add my experience. I’m one that currently isn’t weighting much on W3 queues, as long as i can play only during the evening and for not so long so I generally don’t queue for W3 because I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting.

It would be useless for me queueing at 21.30 then entering at 23.30 and leaving at midnight when I usually go to bed.

And GW2’s W3 was one of the main selling point for me. I’m enjoying its PvE and i’ll be trying some sPvP, but W3 is high on my want list.

So, my personal suggestions (i second most things already said) about this issue.

First, allow us to see queue lengths (and maybe average time – it will be inaccurate, but at least introduce it, so we may understand in which map we could get in quicker). We could at least try to balance a bit the different queues. This is probably the “easiest” and quickest thing to do.

Regarding population, i feel your current numbers are underestimating the real number of people interested in W3. I think you will have to add some more servers (you just announced that GW2 reached 2M sales, good for you, but do you think that these people won’t queue for W3?).

Regarding Guild transfer, a couple ideas here:

• tell us which servers are underpopulated by giving some statistics (avg. queue time and avg. W3 population)
• incentive the transfer to those server giving something both for players and for guilds (and remember there are alliances of hundreds of players out there).

As incentive, it can be a transfer of all or part of the guild influence and upgrades, or increase the speed of upgrades on the new server for a limited periodo of time (but increase it really much, such as 50x on first day, 10x on subsequent 2, 5x on subsequent 3, 2x on subsequent 5 and then back to normal).

Regarding people flocking to winning worlds, this is inevitable, but I would’t block transfers neither selection as home world for the new players that will come.

And regarding the overflow tecnology, that’s something that should stay out of W3.

I have a dell Vostro 3550 with the following spec and the game works well (40fps) on medium details, with some lagspikes in crowded areas.

i7 @ 2.7GHz
4GB ram
ATI Radeon HD6600M 1GB
win7 64 bit