Guild Wars 2

Siege Turtles are looking for one new member for our raid group! We’re a medium sized guild formed back in GW1 with a friendly and tight knit community. We do fractals, raids, and sPvP mostly. We don’t require rep.

We are currently working our way through the fights – have cleared VG and Sloth so far. We are a friendly group, and have a mixture of people who have cleared the later fights and some who have not, but all of our group have participated in VG and Sloth kills. Ideally, we are looking for someone who is about at our level – someone who has raided before and gotten a few kills, but there is no need to have full cleared. If you are more experienced, you will need to be willing to bear with us as we learn the new fights. We are looking for the following qualities in a raider:

Schedule: We currently are raiding from 8PM – 9PM EST on Monday, and 9-10PM EST on Wednesday. We also do a more casual run where we clear easier/already done bosses on Monday’s after the first hour, but no one is required to attend that. We require that our main raid group make the majority of our scheduled raids. Reliability is a big sticking point – if you no show frequently or without prior notice, you’ll be replaced. We’ll rearrange schedules as needed to fit our groups needs, but for now, we need someone who can commit to showing up on both Monday and Wednesday.

Attitude: We’re a friendly, tight knit group, and want someone who fits with us. Everyone in our group is a decent player and are willing to take advice and improve, but no mean or demeaning criticism.

Classes: We strongly prefer candidates who can multiclass, and you need to be able to bring one of the following: chrono, druid, or tempest.

Like mentioned earlier, we’re looking for someone who already has the basic mechanical skill with their class and meta gear to complete raids, but you do not need to have experience with all of the fights.

If you are interested in joining us, you can message me here or in game at Rev.1453.

Siege Turtles is a medium sized guild with roots in GW1, and we are looking for 2-3 new members to fill out a raid team! Raids are currently scheduled for Wednesdays at 9:00 EST.
Our current raid group is made up of a mixture of experienced and semi-experienced raiders, capable of downing the easier bosses, and clears VG weekly. We are looking to start a more serious group with the goal of clearing more(starting with Sloth), but need a few new members to establish our group. Most of the group have limited experience with some of the harder bosses, but we aren’t starting from scratch.
The ideal candidate:
-Some experience raiding, but as we are largely new to the fights we’ll be doing, you need to be okay with a learning process. While we expect to progress over time, we likely won’t be downing the new bosses consistently for the first several weeks. We will consider players new to raids that have other experience playing GW2 at high levels.
-Ability and willingness to bring appropriately geared(ascended weapons and trinkets minimum) meta classes. Strong preference for at least 2 class options. Druid and chrono are an added bonus but not required.
-Be able to take and give criticism, and improve play. We expect you to be able to improve your rotation and strategy as we go when needed, and also have patience as other members do the same.
If you are interested, you can contact Rev here, or in game at Rev.1453.

Population imbalances are certainly the biggest issue facing WvW today, but I don’t really like most of the solutions posted so far. Many people seem to favor some sort of messing with the population cap to artificially enforce population parity, but there’s major downsides to this approach. The primary problem is that this approach requires a lowering of the cap, in some manner or other. The first problem with this is that it makes it even more miserable to be on a high population server, as it’ll only exacerbate queue length issues. Second, WvW is just plain more fun on well populated maps(unless your thing is really 1v1’s, but that’s not really what the game mode is designed around). At this point, any solution that results in WvW being LESS accessible for significant numbers of people should probably not be the long-term strategy for improving the game.

A better, but still flawed, approach I see mentioned a lot is that PPT should be scaled according to population. This doesn’t suffer from accessibility issues, but it is going to be hard to avoid some toxic meta-strategies. In particular, it could easily create cases where joining in on your team’s side actually is a net negative for your team, since now accomplishing the same thing but with less people becomes more profitable to your team. I know WvW communities can already have issues with tension between the hard core and newer players, derisively termed “rally fodder”. I don’t really look forward to having commander’s yelling at PUGs to get off the map, since they’re trying to suppress the other side’s PPT through low population.

I think there’s another method that hasn’t been discussed much, but has already been implemented on a small scale somewhat successfully: “comeback” mechanics. This class of solution would involve some kind of advantage that could be given out to badly losing teams to create a rubber-band effect, making it harder to keep pulling ahead and easier to catch up. The main benefit I see with this strategy is that you can divorce it completely from current population totals on a map by basing it on cumulative score instead.

The easiest, most boring implementation of this could be a stat-boost that losing teams get once they’re losing sufficiently. Much more interesting, I think, would be expanding on the idea of the Siegerazer event. Just to throw out a few possible expansions that shouldn’t be too hard: If a server is losing by 50k+ to a server that takes one of the towers flanking Garrison, allow Siegerazer to start for that tower regardless of the rest of the map state. Losing by 100k+? Have a larger version of Siegerazer event that helps retake Garrison should it fall. 150k+? Have that event start on that enemy borderlands, targeting the keep on your third of the map. 200k+? Have Seigerazer stay and help you defend if you take it.

The benefits of this are pretty clear to me: First, it doesn’t make the game inaccessible to anyone artificially. Second, it’s easily scalable/tweakable for balance. Third, the most competitive times of the week(thus least needing balance help) are right after reset, which is conveniently also when large point differentials haven’t accrued. The least balanced part of the week is Wed/Thurs, when unbalanced matchups lead to low morale, which only worsens the problem. This type of solution would mostly be applicable during this time period, and would serve to give the losing servers a fun reason to play, while giving winning servers someone to fight. Lastly, as we’ve seen with the Siegerazer event, the “victim” server still has an opportunity to fight back and win, it’s just a more balanced fight.

This won’t please everybody. Many of the hardcore advocate for eliminating PvE aspects of WvW, not adding more. However, I don’t think making WvW strictly PvP is the way to go with the game mode. WvW should use PvP elements to keep the fights always fresh and interesting, while using the “PvE” elements like castles and camps to make it feel more epic and adding scale that is otherwise technologically impossible.

aeneq.1760:

Rev.1453:

… Alternatively, you could use it to write something that checks the prices of all the items in your inventory.

No this isn’t possible, you can only access Trading Post information and not character info unless you data mine the application itself which is most likely against the TOS. I should also point out that selling things using methods such as you describe is not possible.

And btw gw2spidy doesnt access memory, the session key can be retrieved using a the anet account authentication (which is a http protocol), this key allows you to access all the information visible on the gw2spidy site. Also the character id itself is available externally and doesnt require data mining the application.

Yeah I didn’t want to talk specifically about how to get the data, as I’m not sure if that would be frowned upon. Regardless, what you’re talking about doing almost certainly violates the letter of the law with respect to parts (ii) and (iv) below:

[You agree to not…] Use, obtain or provide data related to operation of the Game, including but not limited to:

(i) software that reads areas of computer memory or storage devices related to the Game;
(ii) software that intercepts or otherwise collects data from or through the Game;
(iii) software that redirects communications from any Software or Service; or
(iv) software not provided by NCsoft which creates or maintains any communication to the Software or Service, including but not limited to any software that emulates the Software or any part thereof as well as any server that emulates the Service or any part thereof;

I do think that checking your inventory requires you to move farther into the wrong, instead of residing in a grey area, but I’m about as sure as I could be that you could obtain a buy/sell order history in the same way as you get prices, which would be without “mining the game client”. And while selling things is not actually possible using merely the http protocol, buy orders are(I haven’t done this myself, of course, but the gw2spidy API itself attests that it can be done, if you don’t believe me). I would be shocked if sending buy orders from outside the game would not result in a ban, but it’s why I can see them being very cautious with allowing people to access character IDs.

Hmm that’s a good point, so I’ll do that. I do think they need to make clarifications, since it’s patently obvious to anyone who looks into it that the rule against accessing memory is violated by gw2spidy, and they don’t seem to care.

Yeah that’s what I’m trying to do here, but I also don’t want to be posting things which may or may not be considered exploitative on the forum. I’ll put this out as a specific request, since what I’m posting is publicly available in the gw2spidy API readme, which Anet seems okay with.

Just as you can get a session key by looking into the game data for that session, you can also get a character ID that identifies the character that’s logged in. Using this information, it would be pretty easy to write something that sends a request for a character’s buy and sell history. Alternatively, you could use it to write something that checks the prices of all the items in your inventory. Those types of things.

As you say, the TOS isn’t there to beat up on people, and I don’t think either of those two possible functions would give you an unfair advantage or hurt the game. On the other hand, I can also think of other things you could, in theory, do using this sort of data, and I think some of those things would clearly negatively impact the game in general or specific players, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Anet wanted to regulate this. That’s why I’d like better general guidance as to what is and isn’t appropriate.

I’m not sure if this is the right place to post this, but it’s definitely related to the markets so I’m starting here.

If you read the TOS, it is not acceptable to access or read the memory on your system that is being used by the game. This rule, however, is selectively enforced. The obvious example, which I think is acceptable to discuss publicly, is that setups like gw2spidy grab a session key from game data sent to and from a logged in account, and use it to request buy and sell order data from the TP from outside the game. It would not function without the ability to do this. Apparently, this is all explicitly condoned by Anet.

It would be really nice if we could get further clarification as to what is and is not acceptable. Is the exception to the TOS solely for getting and using a session key in order to check prices? What about using a session key for other purposes? Are other pieces of data which could be gathered in a similar fashion, especially character-specific stuff like a character id, forbidden? For example, using other data acquired in a simila method to getting a session key, it is probably possible to pull a character’s buy and sell history, which would be a nice feature to have. Would this be okay or not?

I definitely understand why there’s a general rule against accessing this type of data, since it would be necessary for some program that actually takes actions from outside the game, which I’m sure is mostly what the rule is meant to protect against. But apparently it’s okay to use the information to just request information from the game? Since it would be awesome if more tools along the lines of gw2spidy got developed, it would be very nice if we could get some further clarification about what is or is not against the TOS.

Confirming that Klakka does not appear at the point indicated on the map today. Haven’t checked on any other days.