Guild Wars 2

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Hey everyone,

I wanted to address the idea of moving world linking to monthly instead of every 2 months, since it is being brought up more and more frequently.

Yea it has definitely been brought up a lot.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

The team isn’t opposed to this idea; we actually think it would be beneficial to move to monthly because it would allow us to iterate faster on how we are calculating which worlds should be linked. However, the main reason for not doing this right now is the matchmaking algorithm, Glicko. Each time we shuffle worlds via world linking it takes about 4 weeks’ worth of matches before Glicko begins to reliably match make those new worlds into balanced matches. If we did world linking monthly, Glicko would not be able to create balanced matchups.

I agree, that glicko is a terrible system when you rapidly change matchup since there is no easy way to combine server scores to create a new score, and in addition it does not account for rapid player movement between servers (which happens regardless of whether you link or not, but…)

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Our next priority poll is going to be asking if players would rather have us work on adding rewards to skirmishes (and possibly other feedback items being collected from this thread) or replace Glicko matchmaking with a 1-up 1-down system (wherein the winner moves up a tier and the loser moves down a tier.) The 1-up 1-down system should work better with monthly linkings than Glicko, so we are most likely going to hold off on 1 month linkings until that system is in.

I think that reworking how you make matchups is something that is definitely a good priority, since the glicko system essentially means that right now, we have 4 weeks of matchups don’t make sense. For servers who are on the bad end of this deal it means they can’t necessarily play wvw very well because they are continuously stomped until the winning server can finally balance out of that matchup.

This suggestion system sounds like it would move faster, and give obvious and visible changes to who is/will be ranked against who which I really think could work out well. The actual impact of such a change is really hard to determine though.

McKenna Berdrow.2759:

Another possibility we could pursue is 1 month linkings, but use the Glicko offset system to guarantee the matches. Alternatively, we could manually change Glicko ratings to what we believe they should be for each world. Either option would force worlds to start out closer to being in the correct tier and thus give better matches faster. These options are contentious, so even if everyone on the forums seemed to like this idea it would be something we would poll on.

These both seem like patch-work solutions to the problem of glicko rating. I don’t think that the glicko adjustments will work very well especially on a faster pace.

Match making is incredibly hard, but I think that currently it’s really problematic because so many matches can end up being really bad for a lot of players.

Thanks for clarifying your teams thoughts on this matter, and I really appreciate how much effort and thought has gone into a lot of these changes over the past month.

My raid group noticed yesterday after the patch that the Wargs which chase after glenna in the escort mission of Stronghold of the Faithful have weird teleporting issues which makes it much harder to predict exactly where the warg really is. The warg coming from the front of the escort appears to teleport when it goes around some of the corners, and at one point its icon shows way at the end of the escort where it spawns, and then it teleports right back almost on top of glenna, which makes the event very frustrating. This did not happen before the recent Out of the Shadows update.

apharma, the watch work portal device is single use. The white mantle portal is not.

Based on the content of the post, I assume this specifically refers only to Core Fractal Hero and Casual Fractal Hero, but not Elite Fractal Veteran, and Elite Fractal Master.

Any chance we can get a confirmation on that?

I finished the Hearts and Minds story instance on a character who had chosen the agent’s pack as a reward in a previous mission, but I was not rewarded with the dragonvine whispers strap collection item.

I have the agent’s pack soulbind on the character, and it was in the inventory. I finished hearts and minds on the 2nd character and did not receive the collection item or have it become automatically unlocked.

I have finished the instance on one character and did correctly receive the item for the scholar’s pack collection, so it did work before.

I am afraid somehow it is now stuck on trying to give me the one I already have which is why I do not correctly receive the collection unlock.

I was working on the scholar’s pack achievement which rewards an exotic tier “Scholar’s Pack” backpack with selectable stats. However, the item is soulbound to the person opening which not obvious that this would be the case. I expected it to be account bound and then soulbound on equip like most other exotics. The mistward armor used to be like this so I suspect this is just an oversight.

Would it be possible to extend the character API to include how many hero points the character currently has? I’d like to be able ot use this to track at a glance how many characters I may need to go run hero points for before heart of thorns, and currently can only find this information by looking in game.

Based on reading a few other threads, it appears the current UI is not really what we will have in the final result of the expansion, but I hope the points I made here are taken into account to make use of the squads much easier.

I am not 100% sure this is the right sub-forum, but it is a bug/usability issue that I wanted to highlight.

I got a chance to try out the raid in the beta last night, and discovered that the Squad UI was very annoying to use.

Once I created a squad, I was no longer able to invite people to my “squad/party”. If I change to a raid squad, which switched to the new UI, the “invite” failed consistently with “the other player is already in a guild or party”. I no longer have an obvious party.

The only successful way to get someone into the squad was if I found their player character in the same map as me and right clicked their name and said invite to squad. There is no chat command that I know of which works, and there is no way to invite to squad from a whisper (even if they are friends!)

This makes it incredibly difficult to get all our friends together, since we can’t guaruantee we end up in the same map instance. We can’t even taxi people because we’re now in a squad and can’t invite them from a different map instance!!

I suspect some of these issues will be resolved and were created just because of the beta test and not being the true live environment.

However, it should be setup so that we can easily invite people from different maps much more effectively, via whispers as well as some sort of /invite or /squadinvite, or the regular party invite options. If squads are suppsoed to replace parties, then the invite option there should work as expected! If they are not then a separate way should be created to ease the interface issues.

I met some of my best friends through your amazing game! Thanks for continuing to develop an awesome game for a great community.

It would be nice if the client were 64bit capable so that it could address the needed space, and let the OS have it address more space. Obviously not always a trivial change, as many assumptions about type sizes have probably been made…

They could have easily added a check that went “oh hey we’re about to drop this portal for someone. check if they are already in beta. Oh they are.. ok don’t make it appear”

The problem is that while we understand statsiticallly that it does not matter how many someone else gets the psychology of it is bad. They could fix all the psychological bits by that one simple check.

Obviously it doesn’t actually matter but the perception of the thing is almost as important as the reality.

laokoko.7403:

I have no idea why people keep mention reflect.

Even 5 completely new peoplel can range and kill lupi with no problem without reflect.

I don’t know why people keep thinking they should stand infront and melee(auto attack) him to death.

It’s kind of like molten duo. Sure it’s nice that there is someone with reflect and some “players that like to auto attack in melee range and do nothing else” can kill the boss. But it’s not like you really need to do that if you aren’t “too terrible”.

5 very new people will have a serious challenge with lupi. However, yes they can range and can successfully defeat him. I know this because I was a group of 5 very new people once, and it took us forever. But we never felt like we couldn’t win, only that our choices had been wrong so we kept trying, that is good design.

Combo fields are great. They allow more skillful thinking and allow players to work together to provide more synergy and power than alone.

However, their biggest draw back is that you really have to coordinate your fields or else one necromancer who places down a miss-timed poison field or dark field can destroy extremly powerful combos like blasting a fire field.

I am suggesting a change to how combo fields work that would allow for skillful play without feeling pressured about using your skills. We want everyone to feel like they can contribute and help.

First:

1) skill finishers would be changed so that they combo with every type of field they land in. Ie: if you overlap a waterfield and a poison field, you get both the water effect and the poison effect.

2) you don’t get multiple fields of the same type, ever. Ie: if a combo finisher hits two fields of the same type (whether htey overlapped or not!) it does not trigger twice

3) some sort of rebalancing on fields so that all fields are a bit more inline, and so that the power gain from getting all the effects isn’t lost

These changes would help promote a much more interesting use of fields and skills. There is still skillful play, because you want to use your fields and finishers at the right time. However, you no longer fear unskilled players dropping fields on top of your well timed fields. This way, all players can benefit and help without the pressure that they might screw up someone else’s stacking.

I think these changes would benefit the game greatly, and prevent a lot of whining about how most of necromancer’s wells and other such things are bad for pve because they break the fire/blast combos, and so on.

I also think these changes can be easily balanced so that they don’t end up providing too much gain via being able to double or triple combo.

The solution I heard was to set your self invisible and then back online again in the friends list.

My guess is that it is also not a trivial thing to fix

I’m sure many people have posted about this in the past, but I hope to bring it to attention again.

The Ogre Wars event chain in Fire Heart Rise has several areas where it is possible for the event chain to literally halt progress forever until that server shard resets. This makes its unique item drop “Sam” the rabbit accessory essentially impossible to obtain.

At least some form of “reset” would be useful to add to the event so that it automatically gives up and resets if it times out, or something along those lines. Currently the event chain can get NPCs stuck, or dead while out of event and running to the next event spawn.

It is really annoying to be attempting to perform the chain and then have it stuck. Since the map is not very popular, you can’t even find alternate shards to try the event on, since the reduction of per-server map instances, and no longer having the API to check event progress.

This has essentially made it impossible to attempt earning the accessory required for “Treasure Hunter” collection.

Having the same issue. Gets stuck at “initializing” forever.

Success! At least for dyes, we now have a preview for dyes in the dye system!

I obviously don’t know if this post triggered the development, but either way, thanks Arena Net!

I’d prefer no swapping during opening either, because queues are supposed to take class mmr into account. However, mid game is the crucial one here that is important.

The idea of adding respawn timmer when you come in would be amazing actually. That would add an additional 15 seconds time to when you could get back in and would definitely deter a lot of swaps.

character swapping shouldn’t be allowed. players who do this should get literally zero credit in rated games. For the join now, there should be an option to prevent someone from coming back as an option in the arena controls.

Make the standard enemy models work in unranked. It’s a purely personal choice, and it should be allowed for these games as they have MMR, and having varying models can be a hinderance to enjoyable play.

Currently, the preview window is separate from the main character wardrobe and dye system. This results in a less-than-suitable approximation of the control we get in the dye and wardrobe system.

This is a suggestion to merge the preview functionality so that we can preview dyes and properly set channels for the previewed dyes and skins before we decide whether to purchase a dye.

Currently, the preview window does not provide adequate channel support so dying is not able to accurately preview the dye in the setup. This makes it difficult to really determine if I want a dye or not, as I can’t dye each armor piece with the previewed dyes and only must accept the dye applying to all amor pieces in the same channel.

It seems like the features of the dye/wardrobe window could be expanded into the preview window so that proper previewing could be achieved.

What maps are availble in ranked vs unranked arena? I thought that not all maps are available in ranked, but I’m unsure which ones?

This (and differing MMR) are the only differences between ranked and unranked, correct?

I have participated in several Tequatl kills, where I got credit for defending the mega laser event. I have not gotten this achievment for “firing” the mega laser. Is there any way currently in game that can unlock this achievment or is it simply out dated? I have the entire Tequatl meta achievment, so it’s obvious I have participated and helped in each of the defense events..

Wildmane.8906:

I’m having trouble getting the Supply hint under WvW got everything else.
Any tips on how to get it? I have repaired walls so far and build siege engines in Eternal Battlegrounds.

I am stuck with this hint as well as the “Score” hint. I have no idea what triggers the pop-up.

I tried on a brand new character, standing by supply for a few minutes. I tried grabbing supply, and then standing near various buildings. I tried talking to the tutor. I tried everything I could think of, and nothing appeared. I am fairly certain the hint appeared before.. but the system only counts it if you “click” the hint, and I originally used “x” to close them which does not work.

The only ones I remember having issues were the laurels and the mailbox, both of which I have.

I have every hint for each class, and all the skill hints and such. I just can’t get these last two wvw hints to appear

I am having trouble as I am now at 80/83 with 3 hints missing.

2 of these hints include the WvW supply hint and the WvW score hint. I have done many hours of WvW on old (and a new!) character. The hints still completely refuse to appear. I have tried standing near supply with 0 supply for a bit, and i have also tried capturing scoring and non scoring points. Nothing makes these hints appear.

Does anyone know how to get them to appear?

1. Ranger.

This class is undesirable on all parts of the game.

2. Elementalist

This class is supposed to be the prototypical glass cannon, but in the end it just doesn’t really live up to this. Super squishy, and outside of ice bows, essentially isn’t really used much.

3. Not really sure, but mesmer has a lot of bugs that should be fixed.

I can’t get the WvW supply and score hints to appear. I’ve stood next to supply, on a new character, it won’t show up. I’ve even taken some supply on a (different) new character, and stood by places i could use supply. In the same way I can’t get the score hint either.

I also can’t get Laurel hint even though I’ve obtained many laurels. I believe that on a different character I’ve had the hints pop up and ignored them.