Guild Wars 2

I like having room to roam around on the map, unlike HoT where the player is often channeled into narrow areas, forcing interaction with mobs.

With the large map, there could be pockets of difficult areas/mobs added so it is not quite so empty and bland. This will give challenges to people who want it, while allowing the player to bypass these areas when they are not interested.

The raptor feels great.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

NitricRose.1863:

The trout are vicious….

I was typing up a response of how I wasn’t sure how Trout would spawn in a desert either, since they like colder temperatures, then went off on a tangent of how it could be cold spring water coming up from below or melt water from the mountains nearby, and the optimal temperature range for trout growth, spawning and activity is between 10–20?C…

But is that even a body of freshwater?

With (rather large) hermit crabs and barracudas and tuna, probably not.
Like the other non-realities, I guess it will have to be blamed on magical mutations.

Regarding mount skins.

I would suggest that any mount skin keeps the raptor (springer, skimmer, etc.) identifiable as a raptor and does not change its basic form too much.

- Multi-channel dyeable skin.
- Other saurian models (T-Rex, etc.)
- Other accoutrements (saddles, armor, decorations), dyeable.

The trout are vicious….

After using the in-game options / support tool, the game locks up soon afterwards. I get the standard windows “looking for a solution” dialog and the game exits.

Don’t know if my bug reports made it through today, so I am reporting it here also.

Kudos on the teaser video.
For once a teaser video held my interest, was enjoyable and I consider it quite well done.

Danikat.8537:

Well you have to remember not all of that is profit.

[…] and that skritt who’s sorting the warehouse. […]

If they’ve got skritt sorting the warehouse, they’re losing money.
Entire warehouses full of shinies…hmm…

Now I have an idea for a raid. A real raid. On the warehouse. Full of shinies.

1. Balance.
2. Many more dynamic events and dynamic event chains.
The early zones feel much more alive when there are a lot of these going on.
The zones with meta events feel more contrived and mechanical.
(This is HazyDazy’s #2).
3. Map design. One of the issues with the HoT zones is that while travelling through them, there are a lot of narrow areas and chokepoints, and combined with the (more) difficult monsters, makes it difficult to get around.
4. No account bound stuff (I hate this junk, what am I supposed to do with it?).
5. More map design. I assume the maps will be multi-level again . You can add two more levels, underwater and deep water to increase the amount of content. The other poster reminded me of biomes — the HoT maps don’t feel like biomes — there’s very little difference between top and bottom — it’s all mordrem. It would be far more interesting if the biomes were actually different and not necessarily tied to the story line. I feel it would also be better if I could stay and play on one level (so each level within the map would have much more content).

What’s with the pedanticism?

Julischka Bean.7491:

[…]
This evening my world crumbled.

I was trying to get to the Demon’s Maw Vista, slipping and sliding, and trying over and over again….when it happened.

Two girls, girl characters at least, glided over the part which was giving me problems.

It was as easy as peach pie for them.

I did finally make it…but after seeing how easily these girls glided over the hard part, I did not feel very happy about it…it was a hollow victory.
[…]

This does not seem hollow to me. You have succeeded without using the glider crutch. Think instead on your perseverance, how they have missed the challenge, the exultation of finally beating the JP.

I was recently working on an alternate character and using the glider to bypass a large portion of a mini-jp. Yes, it is faster, but it seems anti-climactic, especially as I have done it the hard way.

I’m an occasional/casual player. I’ve only had about 3 longish sessions in the last month. Saw the dragon’s stand meta-event sequence for the first time the other day.

I don’t consider HoT too difficult.

I don’t use “meta” builds, came up with my own. I had to redo my warrior’s build quite a bit to be able to survive HoT at all (and the upcoming balance patch apparently will increase warrior survivability, thanks). The other classes were not so much of a problem. I would probably agree that it is less melee and more ranged work — this could be balanced out better.

My characters die, not too often. The elementalist dies more often than other classes.

I can almost solo the ‘hearts and minds’ story line — if I could see the vents and updrafts better, I think I’ll be able to finish it.

Some of the expectations of players here I find odd. There are hundreds of hero points available in PvE. I only had to get 3-4 hero points in HoT to achieve the elite specialization. The rest I’ll get over time for map completion. I guess I don’t understand some player’s purpose/style in playing.

I think that for any RPG if you have a ranger with pet (or any other character) and stand in the middle of a PvE mob and don’t die, then the PvE game is not balanced right.

The biggest problem with casual no party, no guild play is I get stuck in depopulated megaserver maps a lot.

Hakuryuu.8634:

They’re incapable of limiting the glider to expansion areas if gliding was client-side. When you try to glide, request is sent to the server and the server will decide if you’re allowed or not.

They could still have a ‘glider-allowed’ flag for the map on the client side, and at the same time send an asynchronous confirmation request to the server. Anyone who creates a hack to ignore the glider-allowed flag would soon crash as soon as the server response came back.

Znake.9762:

NitricRose.1863:

Was working fine for a long time and then my computer crashed hard.
Windows 10 will no longer boot. No ideas why.
Boots linux fine (gw2 linux port?).
Now I’ve got a long messy process of rebuilding my system. Bleah.

I’m going to pass on testing this any further. This kind of bad luck I don’t need.

Tbh, this sounds more like you just happened to be playing GW2 when that happened instead of GW2 being the reason why it happened. What I mean is that, to me, it sounds like it could have happened with any other game or program using those resources.

Oh, I agree. Mostly coincidental and bad luck.

Was working fine for a long time and then my computer crashed hard.
Windows 10 will no longer boot. No ideas why.
Boots linux fine (gw2 linux port?).
Now I’ve got a long messy process of rebuilding my system. Bleah.

I’m going to pass on testing this any further. This kind of bad luck I don’t need.

Yes, the launcher is a disaster.
I get nervous now every time they patch — will I be able to get past the “playable” pointer? So far I’ve been ok.

The in-game background-and-alert downloader works, and I was able to update all the zones and get into HoT finally. I still have two zones to download.
The problem will be all those other files that don’t belong to a zone. I don’t know how I’ll be able to download them.

I don’t think the background-idle downloader is working.
I’m going to try the background-on-demand downloader and see if it is able to fetch anything.

Right now, I am picking a map zone, waypoint there. The games asks if I want to download the updates. I say yes, and have it alert me. When it is done, I choose another zone.

This is functioning fairly well. Of course, it’s only going to get me the updates for the original zones. Don’t know how I’m going to get the HoT zones downloaded. Deborah’s method probably — stop and start the launcher over and over.

You’ve got to feel sorry for people with metered connections. Due to this broken launcher, I think I’m going to have to download 30gb just to get 3.5gb of data.

gama.5983:

i cant even sit in the game to slowly download anymore

My only suggestion would be to play normally if you can….make a revenant or work on map completion or farm map bonuses while waiting for it to download stuff.

It’s not very pleasant — the background download isn’t capped and it slows things down and sometimes my game pauses, but it will probably get there eventually.

No, you’re not the only one. Finally last night it got past the “playable” marker. GW2 support has been worthless — they don’t bother to read what I’m saying.

I’ve been watching their downloader with wireshark and it’s horribly inefficient. It keeps re-downloading the same files over and over again.

I have a very slow, lousy connection, but I don’t have any trouble downloading stuff. I’m a programmer and I don’t recall seeing anything this poorly done in a long time.

Running the launcher with the -image option seems to start downloading assets at a different point. I should be able to get more of the game downloaded, but what will happen when it reaches the problem asset again?

The latest patch did not fix the problem.
The download is still stuck on this asset: /program/101/1/0/1213614/compressed

This is the asset file that is causing problems.

23 3.864408000 192.168.4.32 174.35.6.105 HTTP 292 GET /program/101/1/0/1213614/compressed HTTP/1.1

I’m running wireshark on the connection and it’s showing about a 7% packet loss.
Trying a normal sort of download and I have about a 0.9% packet loss.

This does not explain why the downloader is not able to process the downloaded files.

I tried the frankfurt, paris and korea CDN servers, but that does not seem to make a difference.

I’m hoping that when they release another patch that this will resolve itself.

I’m having the exact same problem. Support says I have 100% packet loss, but if that were the case, how would the downloader be downloading anything, and there is a lot of network traffic.

I’m not getting any connection error messages and the download speed is ok.

I’ve only tried a couple of asset servers. I’m going to see if I can locate one that’s further away.

Name Dirty Silver Beach [DSB]
Server Eredon Terrace
Focus mostly PvE and WvW
Size Extremely Small
Time US Pacific

Good for casual players or anyone who wants to build up their own group of players for WvW or PvP or Dungeons or Raids or whatever.

PorceleinEve.2973:

[…] What about a new player with green gear or yellow. They don’t count? […]

A player going into HoT is not new. They have generally played enough PvE or WvW to get to level 80 and have excellent rare or exotic gear. Even without doing any crafting, it would be rather unusual for a player to make it to level 80 and not have found exotic gear replacements.

PorceleinEve.2973:

[…] I’m calling for HoT to remain consistent with the rest of the game’s experience. That means that the content should be fairly easy if you’re full on ascended and with legendary weapons. […]

According to: http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/31wbip/ascended_vs_exotic_gear_comparison_spreedsheet ascended gear can give up to a 12.5% increase over exotics. That’s assuming all weapons, trinkets and gear are ascended. Which not everyone has. That would be a huge time investment.

Your assumption that ascended gear gives a huge advantage is false. It’s fairly minimal. Yes, it would be nice to have that small percentage. I don’t have it.

PorceleinEve.2973:

[…]you sir, should apply for a developer position. you’ve got this.

i suggest they also develop a system where they can send small charges of electricity through your mouse and keyboard. and when you die or get hit, you take a small electric shock, you know to help you improve.[…]

and

PorceleinEve.2973:

Cause you’re full of bad ideas and can’t stand the criticism that follows when you post?

You might want to cancel the ad hominem and supply constructive criticism instead of bashing people.

I think everyone understands your position, however your attitude and lack of a cogent argument are working against you.

Despite your advocacy for a walk in the park, if you read the various threads, a large majority of the people like the challenge and the level, excepting some of the monsters (snipers and smokescales) and in places the monster density seems a bit high (perhaps the smokescales should not be so social).

I also suspect that the GW2 team had the respawn timer low on purpose to give the large population of beta testers something to fight.

I suspect it is a reward for participating in the beta. I stuck it in my bank.

Now, I wasn’t expecting to see the old Lion’s Arch again….

It showed up in the personal story.
Saw the old bank again.
:)

I guess it can still be reused for ghost stories and flashbacks.

PorceleinEve.2973:

Well, you’re a pro, and we’re noobs. Obviously. And not only that, but our skill ceiling is far far lower than yours. I’m peaked already and I die horribly to dead mobs. Yes, i ’m THAT bad.

It is a casual game, I can play it. And no, not all casuals are hardcore now. I joined years ago as casual, and casual i’ve remained. I guess we’re not deserving of anet’s affections and our money are no good? If that’s the case they should really do the honorable thing and let us know about it. I don’t want to blow 100 euros for a game that doesn’t want or value me as a customer. Honesty is the best approach i feel.

I’m no pro. I tried an elementalist and that was distinctly challenging with the new monsters. But between dodges, interrupts, blocks and reflections it’s quite possible to learn how to deal with them. I may need to redo my characters a little bit to give me more of those, but that’s fine.

It forces you to think and use your skills instead of just creating yet another boring power/precision dps character.

I love the new variety and mechanics. It’s so much nicer to get pocket raptors instead of some new big armor big damage monster. Excellent work GW2 team. Leave it as is.

Status window? Score? I never saw these. I have no idea whether I even made bronze. The UI at the end showed the top-3 players, that was it.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Not sure where this info came from on it taking the same amount of time as getting from levels 1-80 -> but simply put it’s incorrect.

Also creating a lot of different mastery tracks, more than just 39, would be nice. Make enough so that there is a good amount of variety and too many for one player to get them all.

There’s a lot of different associations masteries can have: skills, npcs, monsters, zones, areas, weapons, story lines, events, etc., etc.

Your website has:

font-family: “CronosPro”,“Courier New”,“Georgia”,serif;

You have a modern san-serif font (cronos pro), a fixed width font (courier new), a serif font (georgia), then a generic serif font.

I find this selection extremely odd. You are mixing sans-serif, fixed width and serif fonts all together. Viewing the forums in courier new is quite an experience.

Perhaps something like:

font-family: CronosPro,“Droid Sans”,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;

would be better.

Well, apparently the lag issues and disconnects are a routing problem.
It appears that I am getting routed through Frankfurt (I’m in the SF bay area).
This isn’t the first time Level3 has mucked up the game.

8 ae-4-90.edge6.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.154.202]
9 ae-4-90.edge6.Frankfurt1.Level3.net [4.69.154.202]
10 * 195.16.161.58
11 * 206-127-157-86.ncsoft.com [206.127.157.86]
12 206-127-158-1.ncsoft.com [206.127.158.1]

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

If the HOSTS file fix works for you, it wasn’t an ANet issue — it was something going on with your local ISP or at least DNS service. (It’s supposed to automatically figure out the numerical address for a URL.)

For those still having trouble, create a support ticket so you get individual attention. There are people that check that queue 24/7, versus the forums which are checked less frequently.

Good luck.

No, it’s not a local problem. It’s a problem with the CDN service that Anet is using. As I could connect to the Chicago CDN endpoint with no issues, yet San Jose CDN and Seattle CDN were non-responsive.

And first line support is a disaster. I included “gw2.exe -diag” output in my question, and they responded by asking for it.

Well, none of their content delivery networks are working for me.
Neither of these work for me.
174.35.56.xxx points at seattle
174.35.6.xxx points at san jose

Here we go…
174.35.57.xxx points at chicago and seems to be working. I’m getting full bandwidth

sirian.4981:

Did the focus group actually test these changes out? Or was the focus group polled and Anet assumed this is the content they would enjoy based on polls?

This sort of thing is often farmed out to a third-party testing/polling company. Arena net may actually have no idea who was polled (other than the focus group is interested in gaming). Yes, the responses from the pollees can be believed to some extent, but I’m suspecting the focus group was the entirely wrong audience.

The question that needs answering, is when arena net did the player testing for the new player experience, what audience was targeted?

What should have been done, is to determine what types of players spend money on guild wars 2, and a test audience of that type of player selected for new player testing.

Just guessing, but going by the reaction to the rather extreme dumbing-down of guild wars 2 NPE, the wrong audience was tested.

I have to agree with another comment — guild wars 2 lost a lot of its “character”. If the new player doesn’t experience the real guild wars 2, and instead just gets yet another mmorpg, how can the new player differentiate between guild wars 2 and the rest of the crowd?

Obviously some of the changes are ok — weapon skills per level instead of use — many players just aren’t used to the new model, and any change can be upsetting.

Some of the other changes — no map completion stats when the zone map is displayed — are simply bizarre.

All of the items I have crafted in the past should have their skins unlocked.

@VOLKON mentions the statues from the hall of monuments. That was more of a personal memorial.

How about utilizing the changing world abilities of gw2 and have player-built and maintained statues/monuments in the various cities. These would be limited to a selection of pre-defined statues, plinths, plaques and cosmetic skins. The player would have to get a title which the statue represents, then the resources to build the statue in the first place (using a combination of three of PvE, WvW, crafting, PvP, dungeon). And perform a dynamic event to get it accepted by the city founders. And the statue has to be maintained, otherwise it falls into disrepair and gets replaced by another player’s statue.

Guild halls could be done in a similar fashion, but I don’t know how to prevent the biggest guild getting the best spots. The guild hall should reflect ability rather than sheer size. Guild titles perhaps: highest average crafting score, highest average achievement score, average WvW rank, etc.

Progressive titles as were mentioned in a prior post. WvW has ranks, let them have the associated progressive titles also: WvW rabbit, WvW assaulter, etc.

Vertical progression. I keep gaining XP, but I don’t know what level I’m at. Why not put the character at its real level. Outside of a city, the character level would always be down-levelled to level 80. Might have to upgrade the database to handle more than 255 levels (not my character, but others) :-). Progressive titles could be added for this also.

Competitive titles that you have to work at to keep. e.g. Biggest gain in WvW XP in a month. Each month the title is reassigned. Keep track how many times in a row it is earned. If the player keeps it 10 times in row, they get a permanent title. (I suspect the competitive people will love this).

I think I personally like horizontal progression better, but there should be a balance between the two, and horizontal progressors can also progress vertically through progressive titles (I did manage ‘Legendary Skill Collector’ in gw1).

Eredon Terrace server: Timberline Falls: The quest “Help the priory’s excavation of the ruins.” has no golems, no risen.

The DE “Protect krewe leader Dobbs as the krewe clears the excavation site” is active but stuck. There are no undead attacking him. I don’t know that this is related other than it also doesn’t have any risen.

Galtrix.7369:

[…] I expected hordes of undead to rise from the ground underneath a certain area and begin attacking nearby villages. I expected a dragon to land in Divinity’s Reach and begin killing everyone in sight. I expected a tear in the space-time continuum that brings abaddon back from the past and puts him directly in LA. That is Living World, or at least what my expectations and many other player’s were.

I know where you’re coming from here. Unfortunately I think the personal story is too intermingled with the current set of zones. There’s too much investment in the dragon/undead storyline so it’s too difficult for them to make major changes.

This is why I think new zones would be good. It would be nice to see a zone grow from an unpopulated empty area into something more. Maybe someday this will happen.

The game engine will also need a major rewrite in order to support permanent content changes (instead of just cycling through at a set location). This is a very difficult task.
The game engine also needs changes in order to support an army moving into and populating an area. Monster locations are still too static. And doing these things while keeping game server performance reasonable is not so easy.

Main Article

In light of a couple of recent threads I noticed, one of in which some users showed their complete lack of consideration for anyone else, and another where the user was complaining about the game direction not following his expectations within his time frame, I think that the game devs need to remember that there are a lot of people who just quietly enjoy the game and we do appreciate their efforts.

Not all of the content works for me, as I have my likes and dislikes and there’s certain directions I’d like to see the game grow in, but I’ll live with what the GW2 team does.

It also seems to me to be incredibly difficult to address PvE, WvW, PvP, dungeon fanatics and jumping puzzle fans all at once.

After getting the three aspects:
a) They all go away when my character dies and I have to go back and get them all.
b) They all go away in combat and I have to go back and get them all.
I’m one of those players who isn’t particularly good at jumping puzzles, so a) and b) and the high cost of waypoints makes this extremely frustrating. Just getting past the wind aspect can take me several tries, dying each time.
c) The slot 6-0 spells cannot be changed while transformed.

Lightning aspect:
d) I placed the target circle, but the lightning didn’t take me that far (and then (a) above). If it’s out of range, it should not have a green target circle.

UnseeN.4928:

You guys want a automatic toggle, whenever the game get’s “heavier” to turn itself down?

That does not work. Simply because everyone has different hardware.
Some run 5ghz CPUs with TriSLI titans.
Others play on a dual core Pentium 4 with a 8800gts.

You’re gonna have to stick with the manual settings change which isn’t a big deal as it’s literally like 5 clicks.

I’m aware that some graphics settings can’t be changed on the fly, as they would take too long to reset. I’m just hoping that there are a few that can be changed.

Unfortunately, It’s a lot more than 5 clicks. I would have to write down all my graphics settings for PvE and WvW and refer to that for switching. Also when I get into a large fight in PvE, I don’t have time to switch settings.

Linguistically Inept.6583:

an optional setting ‘template’ that the game automatically switches to when in wvw; i honestly do not see how that would be a problem

Or how about an optional graphics ‘template’ that I can switch to manually.
(Menu->graphics->select template->close). At least that will help with WvW.

Gnat.9405:

As long as it was a setting that can be toggled (auto calibrate gfx on/off) I’m for it. Otherwise, players that can handle the load would have to readjust it back to high every time they went into WvW.

I would just have the low-limit settings default to the current graphics settings. Only if the user specifically requests a lower graphic settings would they be used.

I also, would like to see more permanent changes.

Please don’t be afraid to replace current content. Make new dynamic events, remove old dynamic events, replace whole areas when new critters move in (and the old resident critters can come back later and push the new out). Replace renown hearts with new ones.

I guess you can’t kill off the undead and dragons as that would ruin the personal story.

But you can create story lines that carry over to the next release by the same team. A continuing saga would be nice. Also have the teams be aware of what the other teams are working on. At times, you may be able to create some synergy and have different living story lines interact.

The only other thing I noticed was that the Pale Reavers & co. seemed to do a much better job at defending when we waited for the objective to pop up.

Jeffrey Vaughn.1793:

Hrm, looking at the game script… Timing shouldn’t matter, you can’t interact with mines until the “Clear the mines” objective becomes active, at that point you need to clear all 12 mines to complete the objective.

I could interact with the mines before the ‘Clear the mines’ objective popped up. So there’s some sort of problem there.

Yes, waiting for a minute or two works. I think if the mines are cleared too quickly the script is not moving on to the next step. We made sure to wait 2+ minutes.

Chrisco.5732:

I had the same thing doing it with a friend, the only way we got it to work was wait for a min or two BEFORE clearing the mines. I think we were doing it too quick and it messed up.

Hope that helps =)

Thanks we’ll try this.
And yes, we did clear all the mines. Held down the ctrl-key and no other mines show.