Guild Wars 2

As someone with limited play time – I’ve basically given up on FOTM. I’ve had so many runs aborted due to people getting DC’d that it’s just not worth the investment of time.

The thing that really sucks is that I see a lot of people still chugging away at it, and the levels people are asking for just keep going up. I guess others have more fortitude for the DC problem than I do (or more free time) but the end result is the same – FOTM was already not a great thing for less hardcore players, and issues like this one are just making this issue worse.

Of course people are skipping mobs. That part of the content isn’t fun after you’ve done it a bunch of times. The fact that people want to skip something should be a warning sign about the quality of the content or rewards, no?

May I humbly recommend that something be done to make the trash mobs worthwhile/interesting? Or, reduce the number of trash mobs?

Then, a) people would enjoy the dungeons even more and b) you wouldn’t have to spend as much time trying to debug/spot fix scripts.

I don’t understand how you could possibly have released it in this state. What is your QA / release management process? When a developer marks something “done” do you just commit it and ship it?

+1 for bag of coins as a good name, it would be less annoying. Bag of “gold” is clearly a joke (and not a funny one).

The actual Dev posts in the Dev tracker get buried under the countless uninteresting “answered, so closing it” type posts.

Other games (like CoH…sigh) split up the dev tracker into a dev tracker and a community tracker. This way, actual dev posts go into the dev tracker. Community rep posts go into the community tracker. So, you can still easily see both, but if you are only interested in actual developer posts, you can get right to them.

It’s hilarious that we get a sticky recommending we go and use a 3rd-party site to find a group. It points out two things:

- FOTM difficulty locking is not good. Suggestion: Either make it like exp dungeons (difficulty is settable to the highest attained difficulty in the group) or like a range (if you are within -10 of someone, you can join them). Or even better: reset people’s difficulty rating on some ongoing basis. Once a month maybe?
- This should be taken as another official admission by ArenaNet that the game is highly deficient on tools to help form parties. Can we please get an ETA on a real group finder tool in game? Would really appreciate it.

I can’t believe this still isn’t fixed. It should be a top priority issue.

Yeah, it’s moronic.

Of course, Fractals have made it worse due to the incomprehensible decision to make the level saving mechanism “fracture” the community.

I have to say, the way the weekend unfolded just reinforced my feelings on this one.

I love, love, love that you guys want to do monthly content pushes; my first MMO love, Asheron’s Call, had a deep commitment to ongoing expansion of content that keeps it endeared to me to this day.

But you’ve got to get your quality house in order, first, WRT the existing content and systems. Then you really need to scale whatever quality process you have to properly testing the monthly content, cause that’s clearly not working now. I hope you are building some client traffic test harnesses because many of the bugs in the weekend event (several of which, all software orgs I’ve worked on would have triaged as “release blockers”) would’ve been obvious if so.

Continents.4013:

Is there any chance that we can call this weekend a “stress test” event and then have the updated one next weekend?

+1

Unplayable event is unplayable. Please run this through next weekend, or run it again next weekend.

I know you guys say you have multiple teams for balance, bugs, etc. But there are so many problems with the game as it is – and seeing the really disappointing state of the quality of the Lost Shores stuff, I beg you. Pause the new content team. Put everyone on bugs and balance. I’ll keep playing, I promise, just show me you care about the quality of the game.

Releasing a bunch of busted stuff when you already have a bunch of busted stuff does not look good. I can’t imagine anyone who comes in this weekend via the refer-a-friend having a positive experience given how pissed people are in chat, etc. This is not helping.

I also have this query. Was very surprised to see they even removed the chest.

I will spend money again, but only a very small amount now that I know how “rare” rare Black Lion Chest drops are.

For the record, I spent the money and it was mine and I blame nobody for that. But the skins were way, way too rare in drop rates for gambling to get them to be worth it.

Worth trying – but note that for mine, I kept trying and indeed was unable to get back in until I received the apologetic response to my ticket.

JFYI to others, my issue was finally resolved last night with support admitting my account termination was wrongful. This is all rather frustrating and has put a damper on my enthusiasm for the game, but hopefully the Halloween event will help that.

Pertinent to others: be patient, it looks like their review process works, though it could be faster (and it would be nice to not have situations that need to be reviewed in the first place

EDIT: My issue was finally resolved overnight with support admitting my account termination was indeed wrongful. As I have my account back, no need to follow up on the below, though I do suggest a review of the process and tools used to initiate account terminations in the first place.

Ticket: 121018-002035

Summary: I opened 121018-002035 on Thursday. It’s now been 3 days since my access was removed due to no violation of the terms on my part (either it’s an error by support or some hackery).

Can you please help get this resolved? I’ve missed several guild events I was looking forward to, and looks like I’m going to be missing some of the Halloween event as well. Really frustrating.

It’s been almost three days since I submitted my dispute ticket. Advice to others who get wrongly perma-banned, make a few days of other plans. At this point I’m considering options and alternatives. This has been my second NCSoft game, and they are two for two on supporting studios to make good games, and then risking tossing it out the window with spotty handling of the customer (City of Heroes was my other NC game).

Thanks Gaile. Don’t get me wrong, the event looks awesome and I hope I’ll get to play. But given my situation it does feel a little bit like getting kicked whilst down.

As a side note, I would note some irony/amusement in that they are sending these ads to both valid/open accounts and to customers who they have banned (either wrongfully or rightfully).

Hi Gaile,

Thanks again for your presence in the forums. It’s great to see. RE: your day/24 hours comment – I submitted a ticket over a day ago, no resolution yet.

That said, I actually am not so focused on the back-end support times (though I’d like my account restored – I missed guild dungeon night already, and wanted to run with another friend of mine tonight). More of my disappointment is with the decision making around banning.

I’ve played countless MMOs for years, and have never even gotten a warning or suspension. And out of nowhere I get a permaban with no warning or explanation here. I know by the terms I’m not due an explanation, but given what I have invested in the game (time, original purchase, and gem store) it leaves a bad taste in my mouth and inclines me to warn others away from the game despite the enjoyable nature of the playtime itself.

I think you really should encourage they do (another?) in-depth review of the process and tools involved in banning decisions. There is clearly something wrong with it, both from my own personal experience, and also anecdotal – it’s sort of amazing how many people are complaining about being banned. They can’t all be innocent, sure, but I doubt we’re all guilty (‘cause I’m not, right? :P)

I applaud the dedication towards getting rid of bots/gold sellers by ANet (though let’s not pretend it’s altruistic, given the gemstore/RMTs) but this is clearly a flawed and/or too draconian process.

Thanks Tigerbite. Fingers crossed. I’ve been playing MMOs since Asheron’s Call and never even gotten a temp ban, so I’m kind of stunned!

Thanks for your attention Gaile – I suspect it’s not related. I was logged in earlier this morning after “dinner” (night shift fun…) for about 30m. I got auto logged off (distracted by a phone call) and encountered the disheartening login message when I tried to get back in.

Yeah, I was just wrongfully terminated for helping gold selling. I submitted a support ticket…hopefully they realize the error.

This is really frustrating and disappointing given whenever I get a gold seller email I IMMEDIATELY report it for gold selling. Whenever I see someone in chat doing it, I IMMEDIATELY report them. Same for botting. I planned to play GW2 for the long term…I’ve even bought gems from the store (added two character slots).

I think you guys need to find a better way of detecting/managing gold selling. This makes me extremely leery of spending another dime in the gemstore given you are banning for doing nothing wrong.

Hope it gets resolved soon. Will post back to the thread if it does so others know.

My main is a thief, about to hit 80.

What is a casually serious guild?

- The guild recognizes and respects RL commitments. I’m mid-30’s, have kids, and manage a large software dev team across multiple timezones. Sometimes I will disappear for long periods, though I will try to give warning in our guild forums so you know I haven’t ditched ya.

- When we are playing we are serious about getting things done, whether it is a dungeon, an sPvP session, some WvWvW, whatever. As my free time is limited, I don’t want to have people /ragequiting or drama’ing all over our dungeon run.

- Have fun even when losing. We’ll lose some matches, and get rolled in WvW sometimes, but personally, I like to laugh and wreak some havoc while I do it. Would like a guild of like minded folk.

- Has vent/TS, but doesn’t require it. This is important to me as, while I’ve chosen GW2 as my MMO home for the indefinite future (cause it’s awesome, right?), my job requires me to talk with people most of the day (I’m dreaded “middle management”). One of my big de-stressers is to be able to play without having to talk or listen to others and just enjoy environmental sounds/game sound effects, so I honestly don’t tend to get into vent when I’m in a guild.

That said, I will use voice for critical occasions. For example, if we put together an sPvP team to compete in ranked tournaments, you can count on me. The rest of the time I am a big text chat user and forum-goer.

I realize the last one may be a problem in this day and age, but hopefully there’s some great guilds out there that understand.

Any takers?

So I joined a CM Exp group tonight, and after a couple of minutes I was booted. I PM’d the lead to ask why and he said they want 80’s. (I’m 59).

He then had to spend several minutes recruiting in /map for his 5th. I pointed out he should clarify that he only wanted 50’s, and it started a flame war.

One “special” individual said that Exp mode is endgame and for 80’s only. He didn’t seem to understand that made no sense since the Exp modes on most of the dungeons are, uh, a bit lower than 80.

Is it hard? Well, yeah. So what? I’ve done exp mode in CM with groups of 50’s, we died some, but got through.

So what the heck is going on? Is this silly elitist thing a trend, or did I just get unlucky with a group of idiots?

I have an Asus GTX 660 ti. Runs the game at 1920×1080 full settings like a champ.

Update to anyone curious.

I upgraded my rig to the one shown above (with the exception that I went to 16GB of RAM instead of 8 – not really needed, but there was a sale, so why not?)

The performance increase is, simply, amazing. I am playing the game on max settings (except Native Sampling instead of Super Sampling) at 1920×1080. In normal gameplay I’m getting around 95-105 fps. In WvWvW it’s around 50-105 depending on what’s onscreen.

The only significant disappoint I have is that I am noticing the major limitation of ANet’s engine a LOT more now since I’m playing more WvW: the invisible enemy problem. I will think there are just a couple of enemies, charge them, and suddenly an army appears. So, yeah, that sucks.

Otherwise, game is really fun now.

(Edit note: nothing is OC’d yet.)

Kristof Kulcsar.4571:

I have exactly the same build you are about to upgrade, I WvW fps can go as low as 25-30 in really heavy situations.

Woah, wait. Are you saying you have the exact same build I have NOW, or the one I am looking at?

If now: Can you mention any tweaks and what you are overclocking things to? I’d be fine to have 25-30fps in heavy situations in WvW. I’m not close to it now, even at min graphics settings, tweaking all my NVidia control panel settings for perf, and some mild OC’ing.

I’m thinking of upgrading my current machine. I can play the game fine in most places, but I really want to play in WvW and frankly it’s an god awful experience.

I currently have:
GPU: Asus GTX 660 Ti
MB: ASUS RAMPAGE FORMULA 775 X48 RT
CPU: INTEL C2D E8400 3G 775 45N R
MEM: 4GB

I am considering upgrading MB/CPU/MEM to:
MB: ASUS P8Z77-V LGA 1155 Intel Z77
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core
MEM: 8GB
GPU: Keep it. (come on, it’s brand new

My question is: does anyone with a similar setup play WvW extensively? I know there is some network lag (for example, skill use lag) but I am literally feeling ill from the slide show playing at absolute min settings. If I do this upgrade I’d like to know it’s going to be worthwhile.