Guild Wars 2

Catching botting is Anet’s responsibility. Frankly, it should be easy for them to find the majority just by checking the logs. The pro botters will have heavy active usage and won’t follow a pattern which is typical of a normal player.

Any halfway decent database analyst would be able to shortlist the top 80% of the most likely botting accounts. There really shouldn’t be a need for players to do Anets work and in the process report legit players.

Fishbait.6723:

Next time someone kittenes to you, tell them they should be thanking you, your guild or whoever paid as it`s us WvWers that give the PvErs all those free buffs they`re making use of

You are assuming that us PvE players don’t WvW as well. Not true. It also doesn’t hold much water if your server happens to be in last place.

Kairnabel.1542:

I hope nobody comes all in and says I will regret the decision because all I want to do is kill my time, but that’ll be on 25th and that’s two weeks left for that. Reason I make this post is if I could get some guides on what to do when I start my adventure and what profession fulfills my expectations.

I want to be a tanky support profession to heal in PvP and be able to take some hits before someone comes to help and I’ve been searching the wiki and the first one it came up was the Guardian. If Guardian’s the one, what weapon/off hand choice do I need to use to fulfill these two roles (or one of those two).

Also, I’ve been looking at the wiki and saw every profession had something called “Traits”. When I see it it looks like you get certain bonuses for choosing that trait and my question is if you can pick two traits at once and if it’s recommended if you can.

Last, but not least, my last question is the race. As many MMO’s I’ve played I see races have racial traits which enhance your gameplay like Charr Engineer, but my case is which race goes perfect with Guardian?

I hope somebody helpful gets to read this and assist me, and thank you all for your attention.

I suggest you search YouTube and look at some videos of gameplay. It will give a you a much better feel for the game than written guides.

Be careful to differentiate between the sPvP videos and the PvE videos as the gameplay and experience is very different and most likely you will be doing mostly PvE to start.

Commander titles should NOT show up in PvE. If you have it on you are showing off or just being annoying. The ONLY exception is if the commander is running an event for everyone on the map. But I have yet to see one do that in PvE.

In WvW I do understand the importance. That is where it should be used.

That being said, I just ignore them in PvE but I can understand others being annoyed enough to send rude whispers.

mulch.2586:

Ya know, they wouldn’t even have to tell you it was “underflow.” I guess that term just doesn’t sound good to me. The zones could just be listed as “Queensdale 1, Queensdale 2, etc.” The venerable Age of Conan, which was even buggier than GW2, managed multiple instances of zones.

How about “Party Server”. But yeah it should be easy to implement if they just decided to do it. Just tweak the overflow server code.

Xavori.3768:

Go to PvP and fight a good thief and tell me you still want first-person

This game has way too much movement in combat for first person to work. There are even AI mobs that actively try to run to flank you let alone that whole PvP problem.

I suspect motion sickness would also be a problem in places like Orr where your toon can start getting tossed around like a rag doll by all the mobs chain pulling.

Thats why I said level the playing field in PvP. A special FPS version where everyone has the same FOV. And this will only work if they increase FOV to as near 110% (about the same as human RL vision) Think 3 monitor Eyefinity or the upcoming Ocular Rift VR headset.

But as many have said why not just give people the OPTION of zooming in a bit more so it becomes FPS FOV.

You should be careful that you aren’t encouraging the misreporting of legit players who have developed a farming route. You should verify for sure they are bots before reporting. This idea encourages flippant reporting simply because someone teleports in to mine.

I find it very disconcerting that you are encouraging people to make a decision within a couple of seconds on who to report.

I would be very much more angry at being banned or have my DR pushed to max than having a few botters around.

Adine.2184:

Just go to the Lowland Burns waypoint in blazridge or Splintered Coast waypoint in Sparkfly at the right time and you’ll see plenty of people in lower level zones lol

There are usually a few places which have players at certain times. NorthEast area for Harathi Hinterlands for example is not bad because of the chest the DE event gives. But everything in between is deserted.

But the point is that the entire world should feel somewhat populated. It just needs dynamic server zone balancing. Of all the MMOs out there GW2 is most suited for this mechanic since we have a cross server economy and the built-in ability to flow from one server to the next depending on load.

Krosslite.1950:

They have already stated that there will be some mega patches in Jan Feb.

They have also said they will monitor DEs and change them due to population and how it affects the world.

I would say there are some changes in the wind but since I am not an Anet employee all I can say is cross your fingers for these mega patches to include DE changes

What I think they are thinking of doing with DEs is to give a little more incentive for high levels to come back and do them. OR have the NPCs more active.

The problem with that is that, the fun in doing DEs is having a balanced group, not a couple of level 30s and fifty level 80% with Legendary gear zerging the event for some special reward. While the newbie level 30s stand around going WTF, how come they are so strong and have such amazing looking armor and weapons.

I would wager that across all the servers at any time there are enough players in ANY low level zone to form a nice random group for the DE. They simply need to enable underflow server merging.

I get the feeling they are either being pressured by the company that owns Anet who have the old grind philosophy of making money. Or the Anet is really losing sight of what made the game amazing at launch.

It has so much content at lower levels which I could play over and over again but the zones are deserted. 80% of the fun is playing with a huge group of random strangers and friends which GW2’s mechanics encourages. Now I’m lucky to find one or 2 other players when wandering around.

This is going to kill the beauty of the experience for new players, which means they will leave and tell their friends not to bother. A vicious cycle.

A no brainer, I have no idea why they don’t do it ASAP.

VOLKON.1290:

Per CC Eva:

“Connor, when you see a server FULL means that it is full from people actually playing there at the moment, independently of where did they create their accounts. For example, if a player creates an account in Vizunah Square and then moves to Baruch Bay, then all the characters of this player will go to Baruch Bay and he will be counted among the total amount of players of Baruch.”

The other post that’s less clear… from the same time period.

I don’t believe she is quoting the full story. There have to be modifiers. Do you really think that a server that can only handle 500 players in WvW can be physically FULL? No, they look at the stats and want to make sure that the queue times don’t get ridiculous so when the ACTIVELY LOGGED IN population hits a certain point they escalate the rating to prevent to many new players joining. It is like airline overbooking.

I have been able to join “FULL” servers by simply waiting for offpeak times.

Fix content. Specifically, create mechanic to allow deserted zones to fill up with players.

HERO.2057:

6 servers Very High, 18 servers Full… and oceans of empty space, with no one in it.

How is this possible?

Poor zone population management design, that’s how. My guess is that when WvW or some other popular zone becomes heavily overcrowded and queues start to manifest, the server automatically starts to move up the High>Full list irrespective of how deserted other areas are. That is why we get kicked into overflow in LA and yet can’t see any players in a level 30 zone at the exact same time.

@Star Ace I agree with you especially regarding the current generation of FPS. But much of the dislike you have is based on poor FOV that almost all games have.

If say GW2 could give a 110% FOV from FPV or a short way behind, instead of having to zoom out so that you are simply controlling a little char on the screen. The experience would be much different. PvP vs PvE is also an issue. In PvP there is currently an big advantage to having a 3rd person zoomed out view. Put everyone on the same level playing field and a whole new style of gameplay will emerge. ie: PvP FPS view matches.

ASB.4295:

Uhm, do you have any idea… ANY idea how much work they have to put into creating free content every three months for players to devour, while at the same time working on their real expansions?

Guesting, like Guild Halls, are a pretty large game feature and I wouldn’t be surprised if they pushed it back to release them as part of their first real expansion.

I think you aren’t grateful enough for all the free entertainment they provide you with. You know what would enable them to work faster? More people. Man hours are expensive. You can help them pay the bills by using them Gem Shop. You get cool stuff, and the features you want faster, while they can keep working on the game you love.

Not interested in new content, they should fix the population imbalance first. That is the game breaker.

By imbalance I mean too many in some zones and too few in others. Guesting and Underflow Server systems would solve that and it would not be that hard. The code is already mostly in place. They just need to modify the code for overflow servers and guesting in personal storylines, dungeons, etc.

And we PAID for the game. It was NOT free.

Raf.1078:

Joining a friendly, active Guild would go a long way to alleviating a lot of these problems.

Oh, wait…thats right, you like to solo.

Except when you don’t and its the games fault?

Yah, right…. I’m in a friendly active guild where almost everyone and their alts is level 80. So what to do when leveling my alt? If I’m lucky I’ll get someone willing to help with a skill quest but even so it isn’t the fun big group experience which DEs are meant to be.

Exterminans.9723:

What we need is “inverse overflow”. Put servers together for underfilled areas. The distinction between realms is the real problem. There are more than just enough players to get at least one full instance of EVERY area of the world. But currently they spread across over 50 different servers.

yep, also referred to as underflow servers. I’ve been suggesting this over and over but no official squeak that Anet is even considering it.

It should be an easy coding fix since they can simply use the code they developed for overflow and just change the parameters.

LemurTron.9261:

lol those are horrible reasons offered by Arenanet.

Some people find first person view more immersive (I would argue how could it not be the most immersive?) and thus have ‘more of a bond.. more of an attachment to your character’ as a result of that immersive feeling..

simple as that

Agreed, the holy grail of MMOs is full immersion.. Where you actually feel like you are in the game (ala Matrix). Everything else is a substitute for lack of available technology.

I don’t think it will happen because of the small field of view angle in first person view.

Even with the recent FOV change, you can only get a good view of the surroundings by zooming out quite a bit.

Hopefully, someone at Anet has noticed that the next generation of video games is going towards full immersion 110% FOV in first person view and the ability to move view simply by turning your head. Instead of sliding your mouse around.

And it is not that far away, either, just a few months.
http://www.oculusvr.com/

CureForLiving.5360:

Have you tried moving to one of the fuller servers? Perhaps joining a guild?

This doesn’t really work because the definition of a full server appears to be the number of accounts on that server with somekind of realtime load modifier.

Also, while Guildies will often help for a particular skill quest, it isn’t usually practical or fun for them to join in while leveling an alt. Often everyone is already level 80 and doing Orr, WvW or dungeons.

I really enjoyed how full of life GW2 was in the first few weeks. Even with bugs and lack of TP it was more fun than the deserted DEs now.

Anyone coming in to the game later is getting a less amazing experience IMHO.

I have mentioned a solution several times in suggestions. Create underflow servers where underpopulated zones are temporarily merged. They could probably use the same code they use to teleport people to overflow servers but make the flag underpopulation and give players and option to join the underflow server.

I do hope Anet considers this as it would bring life backinto the lower level zones without requiring massive gameplay redesign.

Good question. The logical explanation would be they would all disappear – buy and sell orders. Also,what about temporary bans vs perma bans, temp bans without item confiscation? Lots of variables.

In practice though us players don’t know if it really happens, since it is pretty impossible to test.

An official tested response would be nice.

Matthew Porter.2873:

Eating the summoned roast pig allows you to gain back costume brawler health.

Ok thats nice to know but what if there is no costume brawl in progress? It sounds like the cook ability is only useful if you have a “cook” buddy who wants to sit on the sidelines watching the brawl you create. (I’m assuming you can’t switch back and forth between outfits without losing your brawler stats)

As I indicated before, the ability value as I see it needs to be bumped up to match Gem price. Also, make it more obvious what eating the pig does.

The mystic forge is a mechanism which has so much potential and is so poorly implemented.

It has to potential to help get rid of the excess supply of many items thus raising their prices in the TP and making them viable.

But most players are cost concious, not dumb gamblers. When you put stuff in the forge a couple of times and get nothing, or something less than1/10th value of what you put in, the incentive to use it is gone almost permanently.

It really should also allow you to put practically anything in and give a result that is at least in the ballpark of the value of the items going in, with a small chance of getting something great. All of a sudden you will see the forge being used way more and cheap items like butter and candy corn being bought to use in the forge. It would be an amazing oversupplied item sink.

Obviously, there should be risk reward, meaning if you put a rarer item in, the probability of getting something really good goes up.

I don’t think that should be very hard to program when the result is random, just do a database lookup of average prices and throw out something that is in the same price range less a certain % to make up for the great items that will occassionally popup.

SolidRock.6281:

So I just got the Cook’s outfit and it’s awesome! But, the Roast Pig skill which summons a nice, plump, roasting pig doesn’t seem to do anything… You can interact with it as it says ‘eat’ but nothing really happens, but the eat animation. Would be cool if it did something like Mad King’s Feast and Witch’s Cauldron.

Agreed. I saw someone roasting a pig the other day and it gave me an option to interact. I kept pressing F and nothing seemed to happen at all.

Then I put on my witch outfit and was able to start a brawl. BIG difference.

Anyway, OP you might want to post this in suggestions. If someone is paying big bucks for an outfit it should have some fun ability.

NoOneShotU.3479:

Looking at the sell orders for decent gold weapon:

3 players list 2 at 13.34
3 players list 5 at 13.35
1 player list 1 at 13.40
1 player list 1 at 13.49
1 player list 34 at 13.50
2 players list 4 at 16.60
3 players list 3 at 16.65
et

a 3s undercut for over 25% of the value. Unless he’s encouraging people to buy these and try to rip them for ectos or wants someone to buy them to speculate on, why would someone think that the market would move his items that much faster if he undercut 3s?

(Buy orders are at about 9s if it matters)

Two possibilities.
1) He had a large quantity he wanted to move long term (without babysitting his stock) and calculated the likely selling price based on long term trends.
2) He is setting a minimum buy price ceiling.

In either case I doubt he is a moron. Some people have the inventory and gold to stay in the market long term while small bit players flip here and there and QQ when their latest gamble fails.

Why? There is already incentive to stay because of Guild loyalties and restrictions on how often transfers can be made.

Putting any added reward simply makes server balancing more difficult.

Azaziel.3608:

Cinder.4865:

Er, what, exactly, are you suggesting? Walking around and talking to NPCs are both already doable. As for opening shops, that reminds me of another thread that asked for what, essentially, boiled down to Ragnarok Online’s market stalls, and that’s a, well… a terrible idea.

People AFK, there’s nothing to be done about it. It’s one of the many things one just needs to accept and move on from.

I think what he’s trying to say is that when someone is detected as afk the game somehow takes control over that character and starts walking around town and talking to npcs, like to add more realism and not just seeing someone standing still in the middle of the city doing nothing.

No I don’t think that is what he is saying, but if it is absolutely not.

You go AFK to get a drink come back and your chracter is somewhere else???

A badly worded suggestion by OP since he doesn’t make sense. He MAY be suggesting that AFK player could set up shop like in some games. But obviously that wont happen.

Costume brawl is a fun event that you can start with friends or strangers anywhere. In a world which is getting very deserted except in a few concentrated areas, a little bit of action is nice.

Besides it gets boring fast so most brawls don’t last long. Just move away for a while if it bothers you so much. Do you want to spoil everybodys fun everywhere in the entire GW2 world just because YOU don’t like it in that specific location you are at?

Yes except this will be dynamic and optional. Basically the reverse of the already in place overflow server system.

A great idea, and I think most of the mechanics to implement this are already in place.

No, I disagree. The costume brawl is a novelty and I have seen interest in it diminish dramatically.

As a person who used real cash to buy a Witch outfit I don’t want to see the ability of starting a brawl be nerfed. Besides most of the time no one even bothers to brawl when I try to start one. There is basically no reward to speak of.

If you are talking about LA that will be going away after Halloween. So no need to QQ about that.

At least on my server I rarely see brawling anywhere except in LA.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

The problem is, the entire server on most servers is in LA, at the mystic forge. Or in a dungeon. Or doing a holiday. Or offline.

Merging servers wouldn’t solve that problem, the game is simply going to choke and die in areas that don’t have new stuff, because we did it all already. Unless the rewards get good, and people actually care, there’s nothing you can do about the empty zones.

he means be able to join an underflow server in a specific zone where the population is too low. The reverse of an overflow server. He doesn’t mean merge the entire server and all the zones.

I think it is a good idea.

I never played GW1 so I’m not going to use that comparison.

The issue is that excessive deflation is as damaging as excessive inflation.

Casual crafting essentially has no value. So is harvesting most low level nodes. When 95%+ of the drops & crafted items listed on the TP are at vendor price there is a problem. It has shifted gameplay and user experience from what I think the designers intended.

Managing any economy is tough I will grant that, but perhaps the tweaks should come in a little bit faster. Small so they aren’t so noticeable and allow pro Traders to easily speculate/manipulate. For example a few % point increase or decrease in drop rates here and there, more recipies that use up cheap mats to make something really valuable.

In a way they tried some of that by making you use 100s of candy corns to craft something, but what you ended up crafting after wasting all those mats isn’t valuable and has similar stats to something you can craft more easily.

Cappy.2786:

All the high/full servers are lying about their status

No they are not. It is just that all the players are spread out and concentrated in a few popular areas. WvW, PvP, Dungeons and Halloween events.

This means that many of the low level areas are deserted. It is the problem we saw in headstart in reverse. Imagine when the game first started, you went to a level 80 zone as level 2, you would find it deserted, while all the newbie zones were so full you were always being kicked into overflow.

What they need is an underflow server.

Soloing by not formally grouping was I think what they meant. People naturally want to help because there is no more killstealing xp sharing etc.

There are already too many people who say Orr is no challenge. Afterall it is endgame. It should not be as easy as the lower levels.

There is no default keybind but yeah like Awesome said, you can assign one. I use “alt T”

It is an MMO. If you want to play solo ALL the time get a single player game.

That being said, a lot of areas are underpopulated so unless you have a buddy or guildie willing to join you, you are on your own. That is really what needs to be fixed.

I remember in the early days when you could go anywhere and there would be players around. Not any more.

Radene.3194:

The community around here can be rather pungent at times. The amount of people who come here and do nothing but spew bile at others, insult them and generally act with callous disregard for civil discussion is donwright galling.

I don’t think forum bans would cut it, since people persistently keep misbehaving (I will not name and blame, but there are at least half a dozen names that consistently pop up with rather shameful comments with no discussion value). When people persistently act that way towards other members of the community, IMNSHO they should be punished with a 24-72 hour ban from playing the game itself.

If that makes them miss an unique event, well, they’ll learn to act more civilly next time.

Lol, you haven’t been to many forums if you think this forum is bad. It is if anything overmoderated.

I don’t really see anyone saying anything that bad, a healthy debate and if it gets out of hand the thread is deleted, merged or the offenders infracted.

Seriously this forum is very civil compared to most MMOs. To ban the infractors in-game is WAY overreacting.

A hairstyle makeover kit has already been announced for the Gem shop. They are just working out the bugs.

Mesmers are good in sPvP but weak in PvE. Try a fewclasses, you can also just level to 2 and go to the Mists and try out a level 80 version in the training area against golems and practice bosses.

I agree, the original intent I think was to keep inflation low and Gold farmers in check, but there is now massive deflation. I thought about crafting a Halloween Amulet until I noticed the TP price was less than 1/20th the cost of crafting it. LOL.

At least they made some things account bound and not soulbound.

@morph yep the funny thing is that in their desire to keep inflation in check, Anet actually created such a huge money sink that almost everything but the most valuable have dropped in price and most are at vendor price. Massive deinflation.

Uh, ok. When you buy gems be sure to dump them all into keys because the chance of getting something great from the BL Chests is amazingly high. /sarcasm

Warrior or Ranger.

Ranger is easier on solo PvE with less key strokes but pretty weak in terms of speed of kill compared to Warrior. eg. Ranger – send in pet, autoattack with shortbow. If you build right you can often kill the mob before the pet loses aggro and it comes after you.

The build and choice of weapons also makes a big difference. Get the best gear for your level and don’t forget to eat food and fill your upgrade slots.

All the other classes are very much more skill dependent (don’t know about Guardian haven’t played one).

I find that my Ranger gets DR a lot, probably because of all the ranger bots. One tip is to move around to different zones as soon as you see your drop rates go down. The more you stay in one place the sooner you get flagged.

I followed a pro farmer around for a bit once and it was amazing, he went on a route that hit all the ores, killed mobs really fast (optimized build I guess) and was constantly moving. Not something I could replicate without some planning, but I guess thats how they do it.

10G per 30hrs thats 33 silver per hour or about 50C per minute. I find it hard to believe you are getting that bad a return if you are hard core grind farming. Just killing trash mob you can get more than 50C+ in lousy drops per minute.

I think if you spend a fair amount of down time that affects things. Also, I would double check the value of salvaging. The mats have dropped in price so you may make more by vendoring the whites.

But 20-30G per day I think that may be with dungeons as well as trading on TP.

Other than WvW where you are dying more than you are making loot, I don’t see the problem.

General waypointing at high level is a bit pricey and a cut in that would be in order, but compared to games where you lose hours of XP for dying, the way it works in GW2 is great.

Unless you are really bad at playing you generally make more than enough to cover repair costs and waypoint cost in PvE. One tip, get decent gear and move around. And don’t play a glass cannon build if you can’t handle dying. Grouping or at least hanging around with other players killing similar mob also makes ahuge difference. Plus they usually rez you unless there is a wipeout.

Buying new gear is essential to creating demand in the economy. As it is all gear except the best is at vendor price in the TP so I think it is silly to say getting new gear is a problem.

So I think the system of gear leveling is fine. It makes it necessary to upgrade. Anyway what kind of player wants to spend all his/her time in one zone? Not the majority.

+100 yes please. It would bring life back to the game for new players and alt leveling.

Some areas are full like LA others are deserted. It comes and goes. So the dynamic server merging or certain zones ie: underflow server would work very well without creating bad press.

They created a system for an overflow server so it should not be that hard to create an OPTIONAL underflow server join. I for one would click on the join button if I was in a deserted area facing a Champion alone. I actually tried soloing one of the champions a few hours ago… Not a good idea.