Guild Wars 2

Korgov.7645:

Out of rebalancing world populations

I don’t think you’ve thought that through properly.

Not sure what Anet can even do about rebalancing Worlds, when it is the players’ (and guilds’) choice where to move, and if to move. See also recent overtake of Vabbi (a bottom tier server) by a bunch of people, hiking it all the way up to compete with Far Shiverpeaks (a top-ish tier server), and then leaving it behind once they got bored.

As long as people can choose their server, and WvW remains server based instead of some other kind of grouping, this is not possible to control whatsoever from Anet’s side.

There are so many annoying cliffs in ABL and DBL I don’t even. So glad gliding is coming.

Territories look cool, feels like the map will be like Risk or something, and it’s something I never knew I was missing Ability reset is also a long missing feature.

But I have a hard time figuring out my feeling about the people in /wuv/. I mean seriously:

Players: waaaaaaaaa you’re letting WvW die and you’re horrible
<Anet changes the slightest thing>
Players: waaaaaaaaa you’re killing WvW why did you change that thing
<Anet thinks about testing a larger change and is open to reverting it if it flops>
Players: waaaaaaaaa you’re forcing a litter of kittens nobody asked and you’re killing WvW

Also players: WvW is dead, Anet pls do something about it

Seriously, y’all are never happy whether anything is done or when it isn’t.

Since Draconis Mons lighting and nVidia 10xx cards came up, I’d be curious if anyone else sees these (see attachment).

This is the only area that ever triggers this from my card, and only in the lower right corner of the GW2 window, but it doesn’t show on GW2 generated screenshots (only if I take the screenie with Windows itself).

Bonus: my minimap is usually there in the corner, mostly obscuring this flickering checkerboard, but not completely. The minimap is not in any way distorted (save for the semi-transparent parts where the checkerboard shows through). It becomes a lot more apparent if I move the minimap to the other corner. Especially well visible in the recording spot near Webby Mother.

There we go.

If you are in relative date mode (“blah blah ago”), the tooltip will display eg. “September 09, 2012 16:35” on that linked post’s first comment. However it will display 18:35 normally — so I suspect the tooltip displays UTC, disregarding my timezone settings. It will also display a tooltip immediately after refresh, and the tooltip will remain to contain the same format regardless of clicks.

If you are in absolute date mode, the tooltip will not come up unless you click on the timestamp to change display mode, and will not contain the year. It will however be in local time.

Okay, even better: it sometimes displays the year, but not consistently and I have no idea when it does. After taking a look at the German forums (where the long date format even includes the day of the week), and coming back, now I get a tooltip that has 2017 in it, on this post.

On https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/creations/Charr-headshot/first which has recently been commented on, all of them lack year information entirely.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You can change which format used by clicking on the time stamp display (time passed or date). You can get the year of the post by mousing over the time stamp display (when using date format). If the year doesn’t show up, just refresh the page.

Good luck.

Even that is buggy, actually

• When you load a post, there will be no tooltip. So refreshing actually breaks it.
• If you click on it (no matter how many times), the tooltip will contain the long format for the date, which in English is sadly “Mon Dth, HH24:MI”, without the year part anywhere.

Ayrilana.1396:

Likely won’t happen as they really can’t make changes to the forums.

It’s very much possible to know exactly when a post was made through very quick and easy math.

There’s no math involved with actual timestamp display, but there’s missing information then.

When you’re not logged in, it will say eg. “4 years ago”, when you are, it will display a more precise date, but omit the year, so you can never really know what eg. a September 9th is… Would be super nice to see the year in the long date format.

Here are the logged out and logged in screenshots:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

FWIW, the more detail on how to reproduce it you can supply, the better. You are not likely to hear any direct response here — forums are read-mostly for anet — but they do follow them, and if they can follow your instructions and reproduce the issue it is much more likely to get fixed.

Yeah, I wish I knew which setting level triggers it (if for nothing else than to avoid it). I don’t have infinite many boxes to test around though.

So there’s a certain graphics setting level that makes the renderer go nuts and apply a strange square box around some lighting effects, and I don’t know which of the graphics settings trigger it, but it’s been this way for years. And then I change the setting, forget about it, happen to change it back and then it’s back — I suspect it’s Shaders Medium, but not sure! Changing any of the settings without reloading the map didn’t result in the effect getting fixed.

Anyway, screenshot attached.

So it comes out especially with [Petrified] (actually the wiki page on that effect has a screenshot showing the effect bug), but I’ve seen a square glow around my character at some point without it too.

Any input from the devs about this? Couldn’t find a related bug topic with the Search.

I have finally recreated (mostly anyway) my HoT-beta-era Revenant and since she’s human, I started playing the human storyline again. I definitely didn’t remember being told in the starting cinematics that the character leaves DR to look outside and be of help and that’s how they found Shaemoor in such dire state (then again, my first character was pretty long ago…) — so dunno, maybe they did change the text at some point to make it clear why you’re in Shaemoor outrunning centaurs?

I arrived to the game at the end of LS1 and messed around more or less aimlessly (and concentrated on exploring Queensdale and Kessex to its fullest) until LS1 finished and I managed to completely miss the destruction of Lion’s Arch. Once I started doing story in more earnest (and with my newer charr character then), I felt the same kind of “what the hell are we on about” feeling as the OP does. And all I did was arrive to the game two years too late.

I did grok the racial things, but not so much the story NPCs. In fact, I have no idea about the Marjory-Kasmeer-Taimi-Rox-Braham crew still, other than being, now, comfortable with them that I am supposed to know them. They just appear out of nowhere. (Didn’t help that I first entered the Dead End when it was in Aftermath mode, and I had not the slightest idea of what they were on about)

It didn’t help that the Personal Story transports you back two years, this isn’t well emphasised, and for most of my time in the game (until LA got rebuilt), it showed the later destroyed LA instead of the pristine pre-Scarlet one that it should have shown. It was chronologically confusing, even more than now. But now you have to deal with T plus nearly 4 years of stuff in the Current Events, whereas the PS still happens back in 1325 without adequately transporting you back there. Or I don’t think it does, anyway. I mean, I just created this character in 1329 (or whatever), This is my story, and then we do things four years ago. Sweet.

And I’m a lore freak. I talk to everyone green, I read every little yellow item, I spent an hour in the library instance looking around when in LS2 we did that thing for Ogden. It still took so long for things to fall into place, simply because I hadn’t been here from the start.

There’s a good bunch of achievements (especially lately) that deal with the collection of a set of items, which, of course, take up a ton of backpack space. I’m thinking about the Cin collection or the hidden letters one, but there’s a bunch of other, unique items, that become useless (or so we think!) after finishing the collection. Sometimes the items turn into a finished item (which then you discard because that one thing is still taking some space — looking at you, Bloodstone Fen books (well, okay, they mostly turn into the finished item, but that’s another issue entirely)), sometimes nothing happens and all you can do is destroy them one by one.

I don’t really like to destroy unique items, but they take up an awful lot of space. They’re things I’ve collected, spent various amounts of effort on acquiring them. They are part of my character’s or my account’s history.

Can’t we get a bookshelf for the books we’ve collected, into our home instance? Or a chest of strange loot that is read-only box of things (i.e. not usable as actual storage, like the bank is) that holds onto our story mementos?

I think it would be cool, anyway!

It’s back again, the last 15 or so minutes.

Xbon.9086:

one action = 1 key press
one keypress != /laugh that is 6 keypresses. the Only exception in the entire game is the allowance of automation of music. they have not on a case by case basis allowed any other macros or script automation.

Nota bene the official explanation does not forbid multiple keystrokes but multiple actions. They say “one key to one function” — if it was one key per one key-in-the-game, macros wouldn’t make a single bit of sense (tbqh they don’t particularly make much sense to me otherwise either, as you can’t have multiple functions per macro, and most functions simply have a possible keybinding in the game itself)

Oh, there is a bug forum, could a moderator please move this over there? Thank you

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros this post attempts to explain it.

In particular the following quote:

—8<—
1. This means that if you program a macro, it must require one keystroke per action. You may not program a single key to perform multiple functions.
2. For example, if you Press A and it results in the casting of a single skill, you’re ok. If you Press A and it casts multiple spells, you’re not ok.
3. You cannot program a macro to perform the same or multiple actions on more than one account at a time.
4. You cannot program an “auto-clicker” macro that, for instance, opens chests while you play elsewhere.
—>8—

My personal interpretation is the following:

• Opening one item is one action
• Opening multiple instances of the same item is multiple actions
• It is very explicitly forbidden to do multiple actions with a single keystroke
• It is very explicitly forbidden to open a stack of bags with a single keystroke

• An emote is questionable: to enter the command, multiple letters need to be written, but the end result is a single action, that is that the character will perform one from a limited set of movements.
• I would say having a single key that results in “/dance” being executed (or “/age”, or any other single command for that matter) conforms with the one action rule and does not generally give advantage to you.
• There are instances where the emotes are used in the game, including the Langmar Estate guild puzzle, and it is questionable whether using the macro would make you better than your normally typing friends.
• There’s nothing in cities however where emotes could give you unfair advantage.

In one of the recent updates, the window seems to have changed in the way it sorts contacts. There are multiple issues altogether (some longer ongoing), and I couldn’t find a topic with the word “contact” in the search on the forum, so here goes.

• The old default sort was, in SQL terms, ORDER BY online DESC, added_at DESC — that is, online first, offline last, ordered by the time you’d known each other with the other player, descending. This is a good sort, or at the very least one is fairly used to it by now, anyway. I’d love to have this back!
• The new default sort is online first, but the secondary ordering seems to be instead the person’s online time (logged_in_at ASC). Also useful, but with a fat online list it’s easy to lose people in there, because they’re in a completely different order every time.
• Sorting by name is either online first, name DESC, or online last, name ASC. I don’t find that useful at all, online people should remain first in both cases.
• Location does the same, but at least the online first one sorts location ascending. Currently the only sorting that does the sensible thing.
• Achievement sort sorts only by achievement points, and disregards online state, mixing online and offline people together.
• But… clicking the online column sorts them up by online status while keeping achievement sort intact, so that can be fixed manually. This is good, but as all the other columns already sort by that, it’s a somewhat useless feature in general.
• There’s a set of arrows on the right side of the Name column that light up when clicked but do nothing.
• It is impossible to get the default sort back, due to the stable nature of the online status sorting.
• The window does not remember its sorting order after closing (then again, none of the windows remember anything, so I’m not exactly surprised — there’s a good amount of windows I’d find really convenient if they remembered their last state, the contacts window and the achievements filter & page in particular)
• The scroll bar seems to be outside of the window, I think this one is brand new?

Hopefully most of these aren’t hard to fix :)

Nothing makes me happier than seeing Alpine fans get salty because of the mere existence of Desert. You people have TWO Alpine maps to go to, yet topics like these pop up.

/facepalm

Paulytnz.7619:

Oh I thought up another QOL thing I just posted on another thread:

Placeholders on our UI on both ours and our target’s for Boons/Conds. Sometimes you want to read the description but by the time you hover your mouse over it the list shuffles along as other Boons/Conds are added or removed. This can be so annoying at times and can feel like you are playing a game of musical chairs.

I think this change would be very helpful especially for new players and vets as well if/when any new conds/boons enter the game or just trying to refresh our memory on some of the less seen conds/boons.

This actually reminds me how much tooltips can be annoying at times, maybe the tooltips should get a little delay in appearing? Seems especially bothersome when crafting or mystic forging.

Here’s another one: make the Endless Common Clothing Tonic an outfit, now that we don’t actually have any decent town clothes anymore. Carrying the tonic around is just cumbersome and probably one of the reasons why nobody wears town clothes anymore (the other reason might be that it replaces your skill bar and as such interferes with other things like the dancing guide). Same for other clothing tonics. And please give back the dyeing ability to them while you’re at it…

Here’s another one that bothers me a lot:

• Gathering loot does not behave the same as chest loot, and it really should.

If you interact with a chest, given certain settings you get a window with Unclaimed Loot in it. You then can press interact again to take it all. This is not possible with gathering nodes, you have to go there and click them one by one (this is doubly annoying with the buggy Unbound Magic items in bloodstone crystal gathering nodes which make the list not scroll properly).

Skekzyz.1458:

4. A way to press one button once to clear the screen of ALL windows/menus – this has been sorely missing since launch.

This seems to exist already. The default key is [Ctrl+Shift+H], which I have modified to the [.] key because it’s far enough from the hot parts of my keyboard. One key and one key only

My beef with it is that the character in front of you gets an outline that cannot be turned off even with the no UI setting.

Now with gliding available in Central Tyria, there are a few places where that is extremely annoying. Also, it seems to have a state (rather than merely “press Jump again while in air to deploy”) which happens to be really hard to guess while you are not in the air.

This brings me to two little UI elements:

• Glider state (useful while doing jumping puzzles)
• Walk/Run state (useful for roleplay people)

I haven’t found anything like these, so maybe they could be added somehow? Is there anything else that’s stateful but generally invisible like that?

Or similarly, if you’ve participated in an event, then get disconnected, reconnect to the same exact map only to see it finished (*cough*Ley-Line Anomaly*cough*) and you get nothing for having poked at the darn thing for ten minutes.

Yeah, it’d be nice.

Psh, it’s not impossible to do And HP is very much accessible.

I have neglected the Mordrem Problems achievement and returned to it recently, and with no information on the wiki, nor any entries on the forums with the achievement name in it, I feel I need to consider this a bug.

I have done the event where the 10 charr workers get entwined up on the hill in the Granite Front (north of Viper’s Run waypoint) about a dozen times. Vaguely remember doing it a few times without realising it’s part of the event set before I started neglecting the Iron Marches a good while ago. Still, that one event out of the five required for the achievement remains unchecked.

There seems to be nothing indicating nearby that anything else needs to be done before engaging in rescue.

Daemonne.5018:

Although, I do like Alpine more. Maybe because that’s where I started and have fond memories.

You know, maybe that’s really the reason why I’m biased the other way :D

Dawdler.8521:

If you cant tell the difference then you fail to see one the most important reasons WvW works as a gamemode, if not the most. WvW at its core isnt fighting – thats just a sideeffect of capturing objectives. But in order to feed this desire to capture objectives, keeping the gears of war turning – and thus get fights – they need to be under constant threat.

EB design do that to near perfection with towers very close to keeps.
Alpine design do that about as good with towers a bit further away.
Desert design dont do that at all with towers far beyond treb range.

I guess the reason why I don’t see it is because people just don’t do these anymore. See also ThomasC’s reply just above you.

But thank you, that explains a lot about Desert. And I’ve seen trebuchets deployed in the others, but not so much used. I guess there’s a reason why Vabbi is in the bottommost tier and whatnot :P

Johje Holan.4607:

…

Thank you, exactly this. Siege, taking objectives, avoiding solo combat (and yes, I get enough of that in PvE or (if I played that) PvP, depending on the enemy).

Nothing to do with the “karma train” (I’m new enough never to have knowingly encountered one that advertised itself as such), I have karma to my ears anyway.

Deniara Devious.3948:

What time you play WvWvW usually?

I have time only in the evenings, so yeah, prime time.
I’m not willing to spend money on moving to another server as it’s primarily blind luck what I end finding there.

Deniara Devious.3948:

Speaking of Alpine vs Desert BL:
- the time to travel from earth keep inner to fire keep inner is significantly higher than time to travel from Garrison inner to Bay inner. Most WvWvWers hate to spent lots of time traveling (e.g. after death) than actual fighting, it also makes it difficult to move your troops or mobile scouts in time to stop enemy from capturing objective

That is because the map is wider. That’s pretty much the only size issue I see with DBL, that due to the Oasis it’s wider than ABL. On the other hand, ABL citadel is pretty much unnavigable southwards (or takes quite a bit of exploration to find the sweet spots on the ledges which I haven’t yet) which is why I never touch home BL these days, because it takes a huge detour to get anywhere from there.

Desert had the barricades removed in the end (which were super annoying) and it made things a lot easier. I’m all for improvement and making people’s lives easier

Deniara Devious.3948:

- towers serve no purpose on DBL

I’m curious what purpose they serve on ABL that they don’t on DBL, because I didn’t notice much of a difference so far.

Deniara Devious.3948:

- DBL has too many environmental hazards (wind to blow you, tons of places to fall to your death) and additional gimmick mechanism (fire blasting turrets, shrines).

Falling to death is given in many places in ABL as well (for the most part, north), but I’ll admit it’s fewer than on DBL.

Shrines feel similar to the Ruins to me and are mostly just extra fluff in a different presentation, and to me both count as don’t-really-care additions that can be taken when one has the time for them and get a buff going…

I might be in the minority here but I liked that somewhat different approaches were needed to take the different towers (tbh, not that different), and the keeps (much more so) — required some organisation and effort. It was a challenge for the groups. the Fire Keep was on my hate list of things to do, but definitely not in the sense of “I really wish nobody had ever come up with this and nobody should have to play this fortress again”. More like “well, this is hard and the Keep Lord is a jerk, but at least this doesn’t fail as often as new Shatty”. I find EB and ABL somewhat bland in this regard (though I guess the Stonemist Keep lord is still quite fun to beat up).

Deniara Devious.3948:

- towers and keeps have very varied levels of difficulty to solo, where as in Alpine all the keep lords are exactly the same and all tower lords & guards are the same. I would argue that earth keep is much easier to solo capture than air keep.

I consider that a plus (and eh, towers and keeps are typical group effort stuff anyway)
(but wait, soloing Rampart, you mean? That does sound pretty cool, I’d have loved to see that!)

Deniara Devious.3948:

I never want to see Desert Borderland back again in WvWvW and I am sure having it for 3 months would kill this game. I wish it would be remade into a pve map. The Alpine borderland also needs changes. The NW (Skritt) and NE (centaur) areas are underused. The ruins of power are just a copy & pasted ugly spvp conquest map. Please bring back the lake + center island (but make the center island a bit bigger with an objective to capture and hold ).

And that’s why I voted 1+2 or 2+1 or whichever. Keeping just one map for 3 months grinds the gears of the players, having one BL different means you still get to choose to never see one of them ever again (and colour rotations can fix that you get to start from any and all corner of each, eventually).

There’s a room for improvement everywhere. Of all the topics where people spoke up about Desert, nobody praised the Oasis (I think it’s pretty cool, but I haven’t seen anyone go for it in my short experience), maybe it could go and that’d solve a bunch of size problems for example.

(Edit: exorcised a kitten)

Jim Hunter.6821:

It sounds like what you enjoyed was the karma train, and you assume just because there isn’t a tag on every map there is no activity. Go out and try to cap stuff and see how quickly you find activity. Of course it looks dead if you are just sitting in spawn holding on to your 15 supply.
Pro tip, you can buy your own siege and build it, you don’t need a tag to do it

You assume something I don’t do. I have in fact run around, and recently mostly seen the jumble of people and onlookers, and some random runners who weren’t the onlooker kind and we ended up fighting (and knowing my PvP skills, I ended up dying).

But that’s it. No cap blobs. Might just be my luck.

Jim Hunter.6821:

It really kills me that you are actually running into enemy players and not picking a fight…. .

In these cases they aren’t picking a fight either.

And since I’m a crappy PvPer, I avoid one on ones to begin with because I simply know I stand exactly zero chance. There’s a reason I don’t go to PvP arena, and this is it. Blob vs. blob? Sure, fine game, I can help out and even get XP and loot out of it, and some good adrenaline rush sometimes!

Marko.2906:

First of all, there are open tags in debbi, just dont follow the yellow tags.
Maybe you should consider joining the community Guild (DC) and a wvw Guild.

Thanks, haven’t seen the yellow tags lately (to avoid them). We’ll see about the guild thing.

When I finally started playing WvW it was on Desert, there were sometimes fewer, sometimes more people around, but it was possible to form groups, go around, and sack all them towers and keeps, you know, do WvW siege stuff. From what I had read about WvW earlier, it was supposedly about that.

Later we (Vabbi) got mushed together with Desolation, and we had an immense amount of fun with somewhat more organised runs, both on Eternal Battlefields and Desert.

Then came the return of Alpine, and this somehow stopped very soon after that.

All of a sudden the groups started telling others not to follow them because it was a closed guild raid. Enemy zergs became also such, trying to find the other guild to have some massive GvG fights. Not much actual WvW is happening. For a short while there were queues on all maps… now there is only a queue on EB (typically a massive one, like 60 people), and GvG swarms on otherwise unfilled Borderlands.

Others not participating in this usually just go there to have their daily fix. You find an otherworld person standing next to a camp, wave at them, point at a guard, they nod yes, you bow and poke at your five guards for daily, maybe take the camp so they can retake it 5 minutes later.

There’s a charming fun in this… but at the same time this isn’t what I liked in WvW in the admittedly short time of that game mode. (And here’s the explanation: when I started I knew basically no friend’s home world, chose Vabbi because it was the least full — as such, I never ended up WvW-ing because I don’t know anyone from Vabbi).

Some really vocal people here seem to hate Desert for various reasons:

• because it’s too much of a PvE map (but how? other than daily I never wanted to kill a single animal because it’s simply not the point — and to be quite honest, you can kill Environment creatures on Alpine and EB as well, so don’t tell me Desert is PvE),
• they hate it because there’s no action on it (my experience seems to be the contrary, but I do see that currently we have more population — I would at least partially chalk that up to HoT being very hot at the time, and not so much anymore),
• and even blame the lack of action on the size of it (Alpine is narrower, but not really much smaller, the size feel of Desert comes from the north start point not being in Rampart)…

but I miss the Desert times, if not for the map, but because actual WvW happened on it. I have 15 supply in my pocket and haven’t had an opportunity to use any of it in a month, because WvW doesn’t happen now.

Some vocal people in-game tell me that if I’m not in WvW for the PvP I should go back to PvE. I say if I wanted to PvP I’d go PvP. But I get it, this is Epic Size PvP. I understand that people like that. I understand that people want to poke each other in massive 50 people flocks. I’m not much into it and in fact I’m horrible at PvP, but I understand. What I don’t understand is why people don’t want to play WvW anymore though.

What changed?

What made the WvW aspect of WvW unappealing? Is it maybe that Alpine is not actually so fit for that? Is it just that the Alpine loving population that came back after it was “finally” added back to the game, is not into WvW at all? What can be done to make people want to play siege WvW again? Am I alone in missing that aspect of the game?

For those of you who don’t like Desert because it’s too large and think it needs more WPs, Alpine isn’t exactly pleasant to run to the other corner if the action happens to be there, either. And DBL actually had waypoints on it, unlike ABL. The only reason ABL feels smaller (other than being narrower by a good amount) is that the Citadel is way south, almost as if the Rampart were the starting point of the home team in DBL. Put the home team into a fortress in the location of the The Something camp up north, and you’ll see just how far the southern towers are.

I’m one of those weirdos who likes the Desert BL much more than the Alpine one. As such, I voted for the simultaneous, preferring Desert.

But I think having three different BLs would be the best (but a third one has not been introduced yet) — and they could switch places every few weeks so people have a chance to be home or invader on either of those.

Although come to think of it it’s quite nice to have a uniform experience across the Mists, being able to be in different starting positions on the same map. So that’s a dilemma. The quarterly rotation idea sounds way too slow to me anyway, Alpine lovers will have to endure 3 months of Desert, Desert lovers 3 months of Alpine… not sure if people will be too happy waiting for their favourite map to come back.

I like the WvW reward track so far, but I think some fine-tuning might be good — I side with those who want to make it reward idle players less, though care should be taken that it doesn’t penalise people who have to run across the entire Borderlands to get back to the action hotspot.