Guild Wars 2

A Mac client is probably not going to happen. As far as I know the team working on resolving the wrapper bugs for running the Window’s client on Mac was a skeleton crew about 2 years ago, and I am sure once the development on HoTS started they shifted their resources to that.

They may get the wrapper somewhat stable again, but it will hardly ever be a Mac client. It was awesome when Anet advertised it to Mac users. I played with the Mac client awhile ago and it worked pretty well, but maintaining it is probably very difficult for their current dev team.

Not really jumping puzzles. Just requires you to jump. I personally like it.

Iconik.8712:

They disappeared after the fight with the dragon. No where to be seen. Plus, Canache was goading Anise when he said “…perhaps you aren’t as young as….” and then she interrupted him.

Something is definitely going on with Anise. I suspected her during the investigation and now this only solidifies something. I mean, Canache IS sylvari, and they’ve been at the crux of all the Tyrian drama the past two LS.

What do you think?

I agree. Something is definitely going on with Anise. I am guessing there is more truth to those rumors than we were led to believe — maybe Anise has been using her skills to manipulate things behind the scenes.. She is pretty skilled with her illusions :P

digiowl.9620:

Meh. Both the leyline hub fight and the end fight felt like a case of ANet telling me to get screwed for not running a DPS build.

Well, to be fair, if you are not running a damage-focused build, then you are likely better suited for a support role, which requires a damage-focused build to help you out! So group with a DPS build

FlamingFoxx.1305:

veylun.5476:

It’s December 2nd 2013 and I just bought it. It still has the ‘Beta’ tag on it and I’m hoping it doesn’t last long. I’m kind of shocked that they are charging so much, even with the November discount, for something that they still class as ‘Beta’. It should be under €10 or free if it’s still in beta in my opinion…

The client is free. The money you paid is for the right to have an ACCOUNT. The price of an account has to be the same across all platforms because if it wasn’t that would be ridiculous. You purchased something knowing that it is in beta for the system you are using, it’s a buyer beware situation. They could turn around and say that they are discontinuing the beta and you would have absolutely no grounds for a refund (although I imagine they would give you one anyway just because they aren’t bad people).

I have to agree and disagree with you.

Yes the money is the access to the account, but ArenaNet’s advertising (see https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/announcing-guild-wars-2-for-mac-beta/) hinted at a finalized Mac client. If people who use primarily Mac OS bought the game based on this advertising, then it is fair to expect ArenaNet to follow through with finalizing a Mac client for the game, and if they decided not to follow through with this, then they should offer refunds with account terminations of course.

Hey I am really interested in your results for this.

Is the game playable? What about using the Mac OS client rather than bootcamp? I am looking to buy a rMBP 2013 13" Haswell, probably with about the same specs you have… but I really want to know if I can play Guildwars 2 with a decent FPS for fractals etc.

I have noticed this as well. I thought it was by design and just started ignoring the veterans.

I would assume that is a bug. I have no idea how arena nets code works, but it would seem to be that there is a node id that is being shared accidentally there, causing the server to mark both nodes as mined when you mine one. Just a supposition, however.

While I am not that familair with the clients authentication handshake, maybe it has to do with some restricted ports (do you have windows firewall enabled? Maybe a software firewall that is overly strict?)

Heh, I have a feeling someone got destroyed by a mesmer while he was targeting his clones.

In order for a mesmer to do comparable damage to other glass cannon builds, they are REQUIRED to have their clones out.. this increases their ramp-up time as compared to other classes. They aren’t able to deal other classes burst damage and THEN get the bonus from clones, that would be silly.

They get some utility from their clones, since it is a nice way to spread damage and the clones can be shattered to apply effects, which drops their damage output considerably while they ramp-up to 3 clones again. EDIT Remember: mesmers can’t swap between different sets of abilities like elems, or shadow step like thieves, or (list continues)… their version of that ability has to do with… illusions!

Compared to an elem that can switch between four elemental attunements with different utility from each different element, and can deal significantly more burst damage, I think mesmers are far from overpowered.

Make sure you aren’t targetting the clones down, it is a novice mistake that I have seen many people do when I am playing my mesmer or elementalist. On my thief I walk through mesmers like they weren’t even there.

^^^ and if you are ever targeting phantasms/clones while the mesmer is in your LoS, you are doing it wrong. Mesmers wear light armor, and have significantly lower burst damage while ramping up … I have had smart elems RtL right out of my LoS .. wait for my clones to pop then come back and deal major burst damage to me…

I can easily post.. “elementalists have too much mobility!!! they shouldnt be able to blah blah blah” — but I don’t.. because elems have their own weaknesses… and I also love RtLing as an elementalist

To be honest the ideas of a ‘daily’ is pretty out-dated and a bit too grindy for me. I would love to get mystic coins, but given that I work 80-hours+ a week as a research assistant make it near impossible for me to do anything outside of ~30 minutes/hour a day while taking a dinner break.

Sure sometimes I get to play more during the weekend, but those days are very few.

I don’t know why some people are bringing in a real life comparison. Maybe to some people games are their lives (re-evaluate your life position maybe?) but I play games as a break. I am slowly… very slowly.. working towards some rarer items in the game, but im not 16 years old anymore, so I can’t play for extended periods of time.

Anyways, would love for there to be an achievement-based reward system that doesn’t advocate daily play requirements

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

….

but dont expect most developers to want to support linux, there are to many problems with the OS that make support a nightmare that most developers do not want to deal with that.

you could encourage linux developers to come up with and use a stable driver api/abi, and hardware abstraction layer, because as linux stands now, every kernal patch update breaks drivers…

BSD is a better *nix based OS, but is less popular then noobuntu….

Linux is great for appliance systems, its great for servers, and its a fun toy to play with on desktop, but its not “ready for prime” as a desktop from any realistic point of view….

even people who love linux admit that it sucks http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sh-cnaJoGCw&feature=player_embedded watch that it will help you understand why linux is not taking over the market from windows and OSX…

dependancy hell sucks….if only linux dev’s could take a que from bsd and osx(based on bsd) to fix these issues.

Ugh this is so full of inaccuracies it hurts me to read. Linux is a kernel. Those who understand well the distro they are using and their package manager for their have very little issues. The problem is people running Linux and not wanting to learn their distro, and wanting things to be handed to them. Linux requires knowledge to use. It has freedom to do EXACTLY what the user tells it to do, without hand holding. This is a double edged sword.

And while BSD is definitely more stable, changes/packages take forever to be marked as stable. It definitely makes for a more stable OS, but unless you want to use packages that are outdated or have a team of developers getting paid to handle development (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_) don’t bother with it.

And I have had NO driver issues, save some problems with proprietary closed-source drivers which I remember Linus addressing quite firmly:
http://www.businessinsider.com/youve-got-to-watch-thi-video-of-linux-torvalds-flipping-off-nvidia-2012-6

The main reason for lack of mainstream games in the lack of market share. As a developer I love programming for Linux. The driver model is more sane, the APIs are better defined, and abstraction layers are still evolving… Yes X could use some work, but what X solves isn’t an easy problem to solve any better. The problem is there are a lot more desktop gamer Windows and Mac users than Linux users, so why would you devote resources to developing a game for it for minimal ROI? Luckily steam is working towards help solve that problem.

Jazhara Knightmage.4389:

the fact is, anet has no hack detection client side, no macro detection.

….

in short, many people playing this game are using macros and anet has no clue who they are…..your not gonna get in trouble for that unless your bragging about it in game or on the forums.

Just because you can do something and get away with it does not make it acceptable with respect the the ToS you agree with to play the game! And while the rumors are that they do not have any detection client side yet, that doesn’t mean they aren’t going to add something in the future to detect at least obvious methods which can be used to automate the game (not going to mention those here!)

It’s that exact mentality that botters use – and because, as you mentioned, it is very easy to do things such as macroing and scripting and get away it with, it would seem to me they would outlaw without question, ANY software which interfaces with their game. Because honestly, why would they devote resources to investigating what does and does not constitute a violation of their ToS? It would be easier to just be able to firmly lay the ban hammer without question.

Also, there are some interesting papers published on Bot detection that don’t really require client side detection methods, see:

Philippe Golle , Nicolas Ducheneaut, Preventing bots from playing online games, Computers in Entertainment (CIE), v.3 n.3, July 2005 [doi>10.1145/1077246.1077255]

Ruck Thawonmas, Yokittenaka Kashifuji, and Kuan-Ta Chen. 2008. Detection of MMORPG bots based on behavior analysis. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE ’08). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 91-94. DOI=10.1145/1501750.1501770 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1501750.1501770

7. OFFICIAL SERVICE

The Game(s) is designed for official play only as offered through the Service by NC Interactive at the Web Site and not through any other means. You further agree not to access, create or provide any other means through which Game(s) may be played by others, as through server emulators. You agree not to use any hardware or software, including but not limited to third party tools, or any other method of support which may in any way influence or advantage your use of the Service which is not authorized by NC Interactive, including but not limited to the use of ‘bots’ and/or any other method by which the Service may be played automatically without human input. You acknowledge that you do not have the right to create, publish, distribute, create derivative works from or use any software programs, utilities, applications, emulators or tools derived from or created for the Game(s), except that you may use the Software to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement. You may not take any action which imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our infrastructure. You may not sell or auction any Game(s) accounts, characters, items, coin or copyrighted material, nor may you assist others in doing so. NC Interactive may from time to time in its sole discretion implement various forms of filtering, blocking or monitoring of IP addresses or proxies used to use, play or access the Game(s) or the Service, including without limitation blocking or filtering measures that restrict your ability to use, play or access the Game(s) or Service outside of the territories in which NC Interactive makes the Game(s) or Service available.

Looking at the user agreement, I see no problem except:

You acknowledge that you do not have the right to create, publish, distribute, create derivative works from or use any software programs, utilities, applications, emulators or tools derived from or created for the Game(s), except that you may use the Software to the extent expressly permitted by this Agreement

As long as you are not automating anything. I mean, you are essentially looking at creating a home-brew joystick input driver. Although I would be careful, because there is a fine line between creating an input device and making a button programmable to do X, Y, Z which could be a problem. But you are creating a program for use with the game, which does not look to be allowed. But I would get an official ArenaNet rep statement.

I would like to point out that mid-range priced hardware can easily handle this game at a moderate resolution without any need for overclocking. EDIT although I definitely would look into a hyper-threading enabled CPU.

Suggesting overclocking to a potential novice could just lead to problems down the road. Although these days it is easier, all it takes is someone who is ignorant about a setting in their BIOS to lead to stability/POST issues, and just cause more problems than getting a minimal performance boost is worth. Especially if they have a motherboard which isn’t made for ‘easy mode’ overclocking.

Those exorbitant clock rates will not benefit a game very much. You will get more by improving memory bandwidth. Note that you are probably running a higher clock with a fixed divider and tighter timings, improving your FPS performance.

Note that chip developers have abandoned the push for high clock rates since there is a minimal performance gain per watt. For load times the overall sustained throughput between disk and memory is more important for managing texture buffers and ushering data into memory as the game swaps out needed resources.

@methal: Don’t listen to the OC enthusiasts; unless you enjoy overclocking and stress testing your box to find stability issues when you play with timings and cross your fingers that you landed a component from a lucky bin.

You can cut back on memory. I am not sure what DIMMs you are looking at, but there are some cheap memory vendors that are binned from the same chips as OCZ and other OC enthusiast brands, they just won’t be as well tested. Also make sure your SSD isn’t an Intel SSD, those are a tad overpriced for the performance you get (albeit the MTBF is rated higher than some other vendors)

Don’t go cheap on the video card though, but a current mid-range should be fine.

Hey Enzo,

There currently is no official supported Linux client. However, as you probably know there is a windows library hooks for Linux libsprovided by Wine. You can find more information here:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2_on_Wine

There is also http://www.playonlinux.com/ which is based on Wine and may be easier to setup for a specific application.

But of course its not perfect: http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=26558 and with a Bronze/Silver rating, don’t expect much.

In terms of performance, check out some youtube videos of people playing.

Any issues you run into this method won’t be supported by ArenaNets team, and you are likely to run into a lot of issues. I wish there was an Linux client! Thats the only reason I keep windows around, and with the fail that is W8, I really want to jump ship.

CABS.1386:

most of the ppl crying are glass cannon ^^ just learn to stay alive, roll , use defensive skills etc.

This.

Seriously, being able to respawn during a fight was the I forgive you of the game. People die in dungeons mostly because they screw up! Yes, its easy to screw up, especially if you are not paying attention. Not being able to respawn means you need to think of your strategy, skills and teamwork better… you may need to lead the boss away or kite him long enough to get a downed player up!

Anyways, I welcome the change… it also makes me realize the consequence of my own actions during a fight.. like not dodging correctly when lieutenant dan raises his right arm in AC… which I do so often.

Not sure why MF gear is such an issue. There are still people running dungeons with relatively low-level blues equipped.

I have a full set of exotics with MF set — sure its not the optimal build for damage output, but why do I have to have an optimal build anyways? This isn’t WoW. There is no item level stat-checks which represents capability of a player.

Some people don’t care as much about loot, and want to see their big numbers.. Others like to get loot, with reduced numbers. I have never had any problem in any dungeon I have ran, despite my MF gear.

I see no problem. Except that drop rates are still too low

I do agree with reworking the system tho. Having a better reward for teamwork would be awesome.

I could imagine this being an interesting feature with player housing, if such a thing is ever implemented.

I was wondering if you could implement costumes as a collectibles tab

I want to buy (like many of my friends) more costume items, but we lack inventory/bank space to store them!

It would be great to have a wardrobe feature we can use And more people would likely spend money on your collectible costume items, which is a good ROI for the time to implement.

Thanks!