Guild Wars 2

I have also been receiving this error as of 30 August 2016; I have never had such intermittent connectivity with the game as I do currently. It seems to only effect Guild Wars 2, as I can still browse the internet fine, even while the game insists I’m not connected.

I investigated several recommended options (for example, https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/38813526-Common-Error-Codes), but none of these have had any effect improving this issue.

Update 04 September 2016
On 03 September 2016 my service provider announced that for the past several days they had been experiencing network wide issues, which culminated in a network-wide restart that day. Since then I have been able to play without issue, and so conclude this to be resolved in my case.

Josh Davis.6015:

We’ve been talking about personal score a bit. I’m personally of the opinion that it isn’t representative of a player’s effort in a given match, and it also can be incredibly misleading and potentially lead to bad gameplay habits (5-capping home).

If you were to redesign personal score, what would you do? Does it track different types of stats? Would you want your personal stats displayed to other players?

What I see wrong with the current system is a lack of practical metrics for evaluating effectiveness during the match. Structured PvP is a team event, and the personal scores that currently exist do not support team-play; exactly as you describe, for a novice, they can be misguiding and encourage poor playing habits that can actually be detrimental to a team’s success.

Explicit singular value metrics, such the number of kills made, and/or the total damage done over the course of a match, are not immediately informative numbers by themselves. One player may be in a position to finish off a lot of enemies while not themselves ever participating in the majority of the actual fight(s). While another player could rack up a huge amount of meaningless damage against an opponent that successfully heals through it (or mitigates it otherwise), never seriously posing a threat to his/her enemies. However, a metric that combines these numbers can provide highly useful information that players could use at a glance to know where they might improve.

For example, the number of kills you contributed to weighted by amount of damage you personally did (as a fraction of that opponent’s total health plus the healing they received during that fight), divided by the total number of kills (on both sides), yields a number between 0 and 1 (or 0-% and 100-%, if you like) that directly measures how much real damage you contributed to each kill. Players whose damage is effective and concise will always score higher than players that spam damaging abilities that are easily healed through and never contribute to kills.

The corollary of this, is to also measure a players effective healing: The ratio of actual healing (including self-healing) done, divided by the total amount of healing they’ve done over the course of a match. In this way, a player that is consistently over-healing themselves and their team will always score lower (toward 0) versus a player that is consistently providing real and effective support to their team.

Another useful metric a player would want to know is the effectiveness of their interrupts: How many interrupts did I successfully land as a fraction of the total number of interrupts I cast. A score of 0 would mean every interrupt I cast either missed, failed to hit, or was cast at an ineffective time (against an uninterruptible instant attack, for example). Whereas a score of 1 would indicate that each and every interrupt I cast successfully landed and interrupted an opponent’s cast. The corollary of this too is worth knowing: the fraction of interrupts I avoided versus the number used against me.

Up-time would also be another effective metric: the duration of the match a player spends in a downed state, or waiting to re-spawn, versus the total duration of the match allows a player to quickly understand their own survivability, and that sometimes disengaging from a fight is much more effective than mindlessly running to one’s death.

Finally, to address the example you provided, of multiple players waiting to cap a single node, those such systems of awarding points to players directly for merely being present, could likely be dispensed with altogether as they do not promote team-play. Minimally, awarding all of the players still alive, that were also present at the time the node started capping, should receive the points. At least, in this way, the system becomes explicit in conveying the fact that what one team member does effects the whole team, and vice versa.

It is very simple to extend these kinds of metrics to award players points at the end of a match to seamless replace the current system. All of these numbers could, individually or in an ensemble way, be multiplied by some “perfect score” (2,000 points, for example) that each player would then be awarded at the matches end. Ultimately, by basing metrics around a unity-scale (from 0 to 1, or 0-% to 100-%), and framing the statistics in the context of the team’s contributions as well, players can be provided with much more effective metrics about how they are preforming individually, and relative to other players in the match, as well as whether or not the actions they are taking are truly supporting their team’s success on the battlefield.

Question: What makes Celestial stats so great in sPvP, yet relatively lackluster in PvE and WvW. I’ll grant that I am quite inexperienced as a necromancer.

Thanks in advance!

With the addition of staves to our weapon set and physical skills to our utilities, not to mention the art that was previewed, I think a fitting name for the elite specialization would simply be “Martial Arts” or “Martial Artist”.