Guild Wars 2

I confirm that this is still an issue. I can reproduce it as well, and to prevent it happen I made an autohotkey script that prevents the mouse from leaving the game screen:

https://www.wombaz.de/uploads/2016/07/gw2-helper.ahk

Works with windowed mode as well, by the way.
Doesn’t modify or inject anything into the game process, so it’s safe to use as far as the TOS about 3rd party tools go.

@Nick, you don’t understand that I simply express my dislike of the fractal. This has nothing to do with my ability to understand or not understand mechanics. If we would casually meet on a lfg for 100, you would most certainly not detect any lack of understanding in comparison to the other team members, and we would probably have a good run if the other team members have the same understanding than me. It’s only… well, that fractal is simply not fun. It’s not in the line of the other fractals. It’s a skill game, it’s not Guild Wars 2 RPG.

I really appreciate, Benjamin, that you try to explain the design of that boss fight, but that doesn’t make me like that fight. It’s strange that a developer has to step in to explain how to use the mechanics.

I respect your work, and the countless hours you spent, but I as the consumer must be able to say that I really dislike that fractal on many levels.
I already said the combat is overloaded with mechanics. It’s convoluted.

The fractal as a whole does not have a soul. It does not fit an RPG. It’s just 3 bare boss fights pasted together. The first in the standard “S” size round arena, the second in the “XL” sqare arena, and the third in the “S” square arena. You apparently did not have many assets availabe, so you just did the arenas as floating platforms in the void connected by jumps and portals. The story is cramped. Arkk and Dessa as alibi motivation for the fractal is not convincing. The 3 bosses have nothing in common. Just 3 random jerks we want dead. I don’t know why we fight them. It’s just an arcade-game-like environment, where you push in a coin and are put in a fight. It’s just a skill game, no RPG. It could happen on bare blank textures and would be no different emotionally.

Please try to design something more fitting the beautiful open world and story we have everywhere else. I, for my part, really don’t like a SAB-like mod on stereoids in the fractals.

Until now, I thought there is enough backstory in the GW universe that can be used in the fractals. Why don’t you use that backstory and design fights that are not only bare boss fights but also tell something about Tyria? That chaos and shifting dimension thing, that enables the use of every hilarious combat mechanic that is constrained in every real fantasy world, is not convincing and not entertaining.

In all games up to and including the start of Guild Wars 1, I always created male characters. Of course, I am male. I didn’t think about it; in my characters I saw myself playing that game.
One day, I ranted about my ugly male elementalist in GW1 (in GW1 character models were fixed and not customizable), and in Teamspeak one fellow asked: “why did you not create a female character, if the male model doesn’t please you?”

That question took me by surprise, and I thought and I pondered, and I did not find any answer apart from “That guy is right. Why on earth did I go along with that ugly male model, when I can have the most sexiest character model of GW1?” (the female elementalist model in GW1 was indeed the most sexiest character model)

I was not able to bring myself to remake my established old main character, but from then on I chose the gender of new characters from the visual appearance. I stopped creating my virtual self for the game, I started to create characters I intended to play in that game. In GW2, I think I have about 50% male and 50% female characters, and also a mix of all races. Creating every character as male human would be too flat and too boring in the end.

With this kind of attitude against prospective raid players, you will not get any.

It’s the raid mechanics that is at fault here. With the current mechanics, there is no enabling possible that happens within the game and provides fun. I acknowledge that for some players it is fun to fail one or two dozen times before finally killing a boss one time, failing again the next dozen tries. And repeat that for every raid boss. The players that have fun with that are probably already into the raids and tell everyone “l2p”.

But I am not one of these players who see fun in failed attempts. I want to succeed something, not fail something. Because of that, I stopped trying to get into raids. I succeeded with vg, gorse and escort so far, resulting in 46 LI, so don’t say I didn’t try. I didn’t complain at length, I simply took action and stopped it weeks ago.

You also fail to see that for the current state of the raids, you must have 10 players for trainings, and that you must spend about half of your time waiting for the group to fill or get ready. For every 10 minutes of boss fight, you wait 10 minutes for the group to fill and get ready. Not counting the time required being part of organized training runs with a fixed team. This is not efficient use of my precious play time. It’s a waste of my free time.

AlphaWolvesGamer.5790:

- Mini-Moa cross- expansion miniquest gives you 2 points.
- M.O.X. and Animal Companions give you another 5 points.
- Eternal Protector and Eternal Guardian gives 9 Points.
- Collecting Kurzick, Vabbian, and Obsidian Armor gives 5 points.
- Collecting 1 Destroyer, Tormented, and Opressor gives 4 points.

What’s the best/fastest/least boring way to unlock the remainder 5 for a group of people looking to complete this asap?

Estimates for someone who plays about 4 hours a day:
Protector/Guardian: 1-2 months (includes getting into the game)
Playing EOTN to unlock the monuments: 1 week
Moa: 1 evening for the moa itself and 1 evening for the prerequisite quest line in sorrow’s furnace. That quest line also yields one statue at the honor monument.
Animal companions: 3 evenings
Armors: depends on your wealth/sponsors. Kurzick: 1 month; Vabbi: 2-3 months, Obsididan: 6 months (this is like a legendary in GW2). If you have sponsors, a fraction of that time.
Weapons: Destroyer: 1 evening. Opressor: 1 evening. Tormented: with sponsor 1 evening, without sponsor: 2-3 weeks or never. Once every year, and just this week until Sept 1st, there is the Wayfarer’s Reverie quest chain active, where you can ge one tormented weapon per account as quest reward.

If you don’t really want to play GW1 but see it only as skin source and grind goal to unlock the skins, then don’t do it. It’s a game meant to be played. Usually, the veteran players took a few years to complete their HOM. Don’t expect to fill it within a few days.

Leo Schrodingers Cat.2497:

Mostly by offering a bonus incentive or buff for allowing new raiders into the group.

I see what you want to achieve, but this is the wrong way. I don’t want to get carried through a raid. This is humiliating and not fun.

I want to enable myself or be enabled by the game to be the equal of my party members. Neither is possible at this time.
Enabling myself means research and study of guides and videos, which is not fun, because it is not playing Guild Wars 2. Find training groups and practicing with them is also not fun, because it mostly consists of waiting for the group filling up and see the loading screen after a futile attempt. This has zero entertainment value.
Being enabled by the game is completely nonexistant.

As far as I remember, there is a small arrow on the ground pointing from Arkk in the direction where the next red ball will be launched, so you can get out of the way soon enough. It appears on the ground 0.5-1s before the red ball is launched.

In case, you don’t know what it means to experience game induced motion sickness.

Remember your worst hangover. Remember how you crawled out of bad and wished you were dead. Motion sickness feels worse.

Remember your last boozy session and 2 hours of sleep before getting up and back to work. The whole day is spoiled while you move like a zombie and feel your head will explode. Motion sickness is just like this. The rest of the day/evening is spoiled. You only want to go to bed. And it’s not that it vanishes after you cease playing. It lingers. It lingers for the rest of the day like a curse. It makes it impossible to enjoy anything for the rest of the day. And you cannot do anything about it! It just happens. You are totally helpless.

By enforcing a 100% representation with technical means, you take away any freedom of choice of your guild members. You also show distrust with your guild members. If they want to be part of the guild, they will contribute voluntarily and represent voluntarily.

Forbidding people to look into chats of multiple guilds – I feel drama here. But it’s the personal choice of every player with whom he wants to communicate. It is not the right of a guild leader to forbid players to communicate with someone else.

In our guild we give complete freedom. If someone joins, he may represent us or not. We ask that he does if he participates in guild activity, but it’s always his choice. The player is more important than the guild. The most important thing is that he has fun. We woo him, but if he has more fun in another guild, he is always free to play with and represent that other guild. If he never again represents us and plays in the context of our guild, we usually kick him. He already left us weeks ago by choosing to exclusively play with that other guild. That’s fine, he found his place. No need to force players into one guild only and try to bond him. No need to forbid players to look beyond his own nose. It does no good to the player.

You can set a 100% representation policy as rule in your guild, but enforcing this with technical means does no good. If someone chooses to represent a guild 100%, he does this voluntarily and proudly. If you enforce with technical restriction, you take away this pride.

You say you heard Arenanet will ignore the motion sickness issue with mounts? This is very disheartening, because that means that PoF is not playable. Mounts are the major element in it, and no mounts mean no PoF. This would also explain the lack of acknowledgement or response of Arenanet in this thread, because if there is something bad to tell, it’s better to remain silent from the dev side. They answer only if there is something good to tell.

It’s definitely possible to get 50 points and GWAMM playing solo with a minimum amount of interaction with other players, but it is a stretch. GWAMM is only about titles, 50 points is more stuff. If you do it only for the GW2 achievements and without fun, it is pure grind and a waste of time.

If you love playing GW1 and have plenty of time, speaking of perhaps 1-2 years, then it is fun and you do it almost effortlessly.

The biggest problem is probably to get into the game and understand the game mechanics. If you don’t know how to build your hero team and if you are not able to give them skills and equipment, it’s going to be very hard. There are a few especially difficult missions and dungeons where you might despair – and get through effortlessly if you know how to do it. But there isn’t anybody left in the game who can explain it. Youtube can, but it’s tedious to find the right walkthrough.
Then there is money. You need lots of ingame gold. You need knowledge of the best ingame money provider mechanics. If you know them, you don’t need to farm gold – only trophys and consumables for the consumable titles.
In essence, you need to gather the knowledge of how to achieve your goals with the minimum amount of time. How to do things “right”. You may be lucky and find out about all this via wiki and youtube, but it’s also possible that you get lost.

(written by someone who brought main and mule GW1 accounts to 50 points and made 5 or 6 characters with GWAMM within 5 years 2007-2012)

It’s somewhat difficult to enter a running and almost finished discussion… but here are my points.

For me, dps meters are god sent. Especially arcdps with its ability to estimate dps from all other players in my group.

I use it to compare myself to the other party members. As damage dealer, I feel the challenge to get to the top of the dps list. If someone else enters the group that makes more damage than me, challenge accepted – I try to get better.
One day, we filled a guild group with someone from lfg. Someone commented privately that the guest is acting strange, but I was able to tell him: “well, he may act strange, but at the last boss he dealt more damage than any of us”.

With dps meter, I am able to see in most cases why some encounter is difficult at times and dead easy at the next run. I am able to see if it is myself or someone else who makes this difference. If the problem is myself, I know I have to improve. This is something nobody else is able to tell me. The game isn’t able to tell.

If other people use dps meters for finding causes to kick other players, I don’t care. I don’t use it for this. For me it is an invaluable tool for estimating myself and strictly myself.

Don’t forget your role. You and I are the customer. We use the game. Arenanet is the designer, they design and produce the game.

The customer comments on the design, and the designer acts accordingly, which results in a change or no change. The customer cannot be involved in production, because he cannot be involved in the workflow in an efficient manner.
If the designer defines a name, this name stands. There is much more criteria behind a name than just the sound or feel of the name.

In my opinion, the german translation team does a superb job. The whole game is translated very carefully, and feedback about typos or translation flaws is monitored and incorporated in the game in a very timely manner. Many translations are not simply translations of the words, they faithfully keep the meaning behind the words as well. Unfortunately, some puns are not translatable, but that’s not the fault of the translation team.
But it’s clear that if an important name is set in that late state of production, it cannot be changed any more. It’s already on too many media aside from the actual game.

Astralporing.1957:

That’s an average reaction time, by the way. Outliers can sometimes be off by over 50% in either side.
And it starts dropping somewhere after 25 yrs, at the average rate of around 1% per year. If you weren’t that good at start, by the year 50 you can run into near second of reaction time.

(the web-based tests show usually around .28-30, because people with bad reaction times don’t usually try them at all, this is a known bias)

My dislike is not caused by reaction time. Actually, my best reaction time according to https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime is 248 ms.

It’s more about having to react to too many different things at the same time, and if you fail one of these things, you fail all.

And that the combat is scripted in a way that you have a very narrow path you have to follow to not fail. There is a predetermined master solution in the script for how this boss has to be defeated, and if you do it slightly different, you fail. And if you do use the master solution, you will succeed effortlessly. The challenge is not the boss, the challenge presented to you is to reverse-engineer the master solution that’s coded into the script.
The script and its predetermined path is so narrow, you could probably write a bot for each of these boss encounters. There is no randomness, no variation in combat tactics, it’s simply do the scripted or fail.

I do every other T4 fractal, mentioned nightmare only because it was the latest bigger addition. No cm, because these are in fact over the top for me, but I did never complain about them, because they clearly have a different target audience than me. I don’t feel I miss a thing by not playing these. Well, the cat is something I miss, but I can live without this cat.
Plain T4 Observatory, on the other hand, does not quite fit into the line of existing T4 fractals, in my opinion.

It seems to me that Arenanet tries to invent new combat mechanics, here as well as in PoF, and not all of these are entertaining. Some feel invented, artificial, not natural. This route started with the raids, and I think this is the cause why Observatory was criticized as being too much raid-like. Remember, it’s only about defeating/killing some creature after all. Don’t overdo this.

I understand it is important to add more mechanics to get diversity, but please not all of them at once in the same fight (I exaggerate, but I hope it is clear what I mean).

I now did each tier once, no cm, and I must say it is ok how it works now. The difficulty level is now ok with regard to the tier level.

In T3 and T4, I would say Viirasta is more difficult than Arkk. With my guild team, in our first 100, we wiped about 4 times at Viirasta before we got sufficient knowledge of the mechanics to not wipe, while we wiped only once at Arkk, and that was very close.

Would do 100 again, but it’s not really fun.

It’s not my favorite fractal, and will not become my favorite. If it’s daily, I will probably skip fractals altogether and will do other things. It has a mechanics overflow. Feels too scripted. I feel I am being scripted. Nightmare T4, on the other hand, became a welcomed addition to my repertoire.

Was very pleased about the calm and non-hostile starting area. Story beginning looks promising. Didn’t like the difficulty of the minigame for the mastery point – didn’t
complete it. The raptor was nice, I started exploring the area until about 15-30 minutes later, where I felt major motion sickness with a bad migraine. Had to quit playing, so bad. Did not see more of the area and of the new game mechaniscs, and did not return for the remaining time of the beta because of that.

I get sick with the raptor (wrote about it), and regarding Bobblehead or other mounts:

• Bobblehead makes me sick very soon. Not able to use this even for a minute.
• gliding in GW2 never resulted in any motion sickness
• in Elder Scrolls Oblivion you were able to ride a horse. Not the slightest problem for me. As far as I remember, they appeared slower because of their size. They did have not so sophisticated animations, as well. Ok, this is a game as old as GW1. As far as I remember, they had immediate reaction to movement keys, including strafe, resulting in not natural animation. Turning the camera made the horse rotate on the spot, like a wooden horse. Not possible for a real horse, but no motion sickness, because the camera didn’t sway and didn’t felt sluggish. I prefer no motion sickness above natural moving animations.
• a constant source of irritation in GW2 aside from mounts is still the camera movement. If something makes the camera suddenly zoom in, this is causing dizziness for me. For example at Tequatl, the middle event – defend the mega laser. If you approach the mega laser, the camera suddenly zooms in. During the event, you are able to zoom out again, but it always zooms back in subject to your movement around the laser. This is not only a nuisance, it causes dizziness as well. Not migraine like the raptor, but uneasiness nonetheless.

BurningHeavy.7268:

Unfortunately I think you are a tiny minority. The overwhelming majority is LOVING how the mounts feel, and I’m in that camp. Maybe, with time, you’ll get used to it.

I love the mounts, too. Everything. Their movement is beautiful. But… it makes me sick riding on them. The beauty is meaningless, if you cannot enjoy the game with it. Regarding your last sentence: you don’t know what we are talking about. You are no part of this discussion.
By the way, it is no small problem and no tiny minority. This thread is the largest feedback thread for the PoF demo that exists, and it doesn’t contain a lengthy dialogue between only two people, it contains many reports of many different players instead. This is saying something completely different. It is substantial. If you lose 10% or 20% of a 5-year-old playerbase just because of motion sickness in the new expansion, this is a no-go. The game didn’t contain stuff that cause motion sickness until now except for the utmost sensitive people, it must stay this way. By all means.

Is there a possibility to check the other mounts as well for motion sickness symptoms? As far as I see it from the trailers, each mount has different motion characteristics. If you fix the raptor only, the other mounts may still be causing motion sickness.

It feels organic, and it looks very real, and all the raptor animations are very beautiful, but it makes my real life brain hurt and explode. A game must not cause this. This is a price I cannot pay.

Lady Lozza, yes, mouse dpi is very important, but I mentioned its impact in my post. Mouse dpi directly affects rotation speed, and rotation speed is what you can configure in GW2. I already adjusted that according to my needs.

I assume, the core problem (for me) is the delay between moving the mouse and the visual reaction of the game to this movement. The delay, not the intensity. The intensity is not unimportant, though, it must be consistent throughout the game. It must be the same when my character is running on his feet or riding on the raptor.

I became a migraine-like headache very quickly about 15-30 minutes after start using the raptor. I had to stop playing.

After seeing this thread, I tried to figure out, what exactly is causing it. I think, it is something like this:

1. The raptor has the problem that it isn’t possible to strafe left or right. It can only go forward. I press right or left, but the raptor doesn’t move to the right or to the left. I press and press, and this thing doesn’t move where I expect it should move. It feels very sluggish this way and not doing what my hands tell the game. Running on feet is not the same keyboard+mouse flow than running with the raptor.

2. Worse: it isn’t possible to instantly change direction and turn around. The raptor runs in a circle. It turns at some minimal turn radius. But my brain wants to turn the same way as with my ordinary charater. I move the mouse, move move move (my hand and my brain cramps in that moment), but it isn’t moving enough. I cannot help it. I push the mouse over the edge of the mouse pad, but it isn’t moving as I want/my brain expect it. Changing the direction during running isn’t instant as well.

In general: the raptor performs a soft animation to enter a new direction with a small delay. This makes the movement feel very very sluggish and not connected to the mouse movement. Instant migraine. Absolutely bad. We had this delay for every camera rotation at game release: bad. It’s a pity, because the raptor has a so beautiful and graceful movement with this, but what can I say?

3. The third one is mounting the mount. The sudden upwards, slightly backwards leap. This isn’t good to my brain. It’s not as bad as the points above, but it adds up.

My brain must absolutely control the direction of any camera rotation and running direction. The camera must rotate with a certain velocity and move into the direction my brain expects where it would move. I tuned the rotation speed option very careful.

I press the right mouse button and move the mouse to rotate the camera. I configured A and D to strafe left and strafe right. Rotating with the keyboard makes me feel bad, because this feels like a sudden uncontrolled rotation. My brain only tolerates rotating with right mouse button+mouse move. Using strafe left/right doesn’t rotate, so it’s my choice of going a bit to the right or to the left.

The tuning of the rotation speed is very important. Too slow or to fast makes me get migraine. It is connected with the movement. While running and rotating the camera, the change in the running direction must correspond to what my brain expects. If it doesn’t, I get migraine. To adjust the direction change, I often and automatically use a small bit of strafe left or strafe right to correct the position, so the overall rotation angle is correct.

I tried setting motion blur to minimum, but it felt not better. It made no difference at all, neither maximum nor minimum.

I played with an Asura.
Gliding never caused any problem.

The raptor made me the same migraine feeling I got at game release, where it was caused by:

• jumpiness of the camera [very bad] (got better with “disable camera shake” and “collision sensivity”)
• mouse movement sluggish [very bad] (got better with better PC, but also with some game updates)
• camera rotation lagged behind mouse [very very bad: almost instant migraine] (got better with the update that reduced the camera rotation delay)
• camera rotation too fast/slow (adjusted camera corresponding camera setting)
• low frame rate (tuned fps to 50-60 with new computer)
• too narrow field of vision [bad] (got better with the update to manually tune fov)

After all that tuning and all the updates, the game ran perfectly. No migraine any more.

The raptor brings it all back. It’s a worse feeling than at game release.

It’s really difficult to explain what thing in the game is causing migraine/headache. If you developers try to work on this problem, I would be happy to test everything you try and dedicate time for giving feedback, because if the behavior stays this way, it would prevent me from playing, essentially force me to abandon the game.

The strange thing is, I played Guild Wars 1, and Guild Wars 1 had a very strong camera rotation delay, and your character was way more often immobilized due to the game mechanic. But I never felt any motion sickness or migraine with Guild Wars 1. Not the slightest.

I ’d like a variation of the litter suggestion mentioned before:

A bunch of skritt carrying a wooden pallet on their shoulders, upon where my Asura stands on. They can jump with the pallet, they can swim with the pallet (skritt head below the water line of course), and if they should teleport to somewhere, some shiny thing appears at the destination, the whole group is struck in awe, disappears, and reappears at the shiny.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

According to the recent Dev interviews, I think most of the players’ concerns will be alleviated. The Devs seemed to really try to address the feedback since HoT.

Could you link to these interviews?

In the past, I searched but never found any direct dev answer to the mastery system feedback. Because of that, I decided to postpone any future expansion purchase until after that expansion’s release with sufficient player feedback – I will not buy any expansion with a mastery system implementation similar to that in HoT. I don’t see the mastery system itself as a show-stopper, I mean the grind and the mode of aquisition of the mastery points.
I would be happy to pre-purchase to get the pre-purchase additions, but with the current state of information that’s not possible.

Well, I happen to work in Frankfurt, and in fact in this very moment I am within the city limits of Frankfurt, but unfortunately no Balthazar did show up yesterday. No local media mentioned the incident as well.

It’s more likely that a crowd of skritt secretly entered the data center, stole the shiny machines and wrecked the rest. When the operators were made aware of some system failure, all was gone already.

Yes, I confirm this. But it is not a consistent behavior. 5 minutes speed is awful, 5 minutes later the speed is ok, and 5 minutes later it is awful again.

You continue to look at irrelevant parts of the request. Look at the bars. The top request (the request to open the thread) takes 1.968 seconds, which redirects to the post I last read in that thread, and that request takes 4.661 seconds. Together about 6 seconds to wait for the contents of the thread. The forum web server needs 2 requests with 6 seconds to produce the thread contents.
Network transfer time and time for everything else is negligible.

As staff Tempest, I dumped air specialization and used water instead, so on water attunement you get a strong health regeneration. That was enough healing to have the time to bring Self Doubt down to about 20%, then kite under water attunement and wait for everything to reload until I got the 25 stacks of the debuff. Finishing the last 20% at this stage was the easiest part of the fight. I think I never went under 75% life and finished the fight with almost 100% life.

My first run simply as full berserk with the usual staff meta build, as I play usually, didn’t work out. Even with the most careful usage of cc skills – not enough healing/dodge in the long run. Using water specialization was the changer.

It always says “Buy now” for Guild Wars 1 in GW2 account management. Even for linked accounts. At least for me, when I checked months ago, until this very moment, where I checked again.

But since all of my HoM skins and titles are active in GW2 all time since I linked my accounts in 2012, I consider this a graphical glitch and not a real problem.

You have to open a specific thread with postings in it. This takes many seconds. Just opening the forum overview or thread overview is always fast. Opening a thread not. It looks like this:

The german forum got back has its previous speed.

It’s still way slower than the english one, though. Opening a thread in the german forum takes about 5 seconds. Here it is about 1 second.

The OP (one year ago!) had the problem that he bought Trilogy, which includes the 3 base campaigns: Prophecies, Factions and Nightfall. Trilogy does not include the expansion Eye of the North, but Eye of the North contains the Hall of Monuments that is required to link the accounts and collect the achievements that are transferred to GW2.

So check that you have EOTN with the Hall of Monuments on your GW1 account. If you do and still cannot link your account, then you have a different issue than the OP. Create a new thread or better, contact support.

A wiki article nobody understands besides a software developer. Anybody else will ask: “a race condition – cool, where can I place my bet?”

And, to be honest, I described no race condition. I described an event-driven real-time process that fails, because it isn’t able to fulfill its real-time constraint in the available time.

Yesterday evening, after finishing the instance, I walked back into the house and through this collection and was able to get them all without any problem. I did the instance solo.

You must note that there are scrolls mixed in between, which give popups with text but don’t count for the Bartholos collection. Sometimes, for example at the table, you perhaps have to click on the book in front of you to change the focus, otherwise you may perhaps interact with the wrong item.

I wanted to wait for feedback until I played Shattered Observatory more often, but I found myself not wanting to replay it. It’s now a week ago, and I’ve still done it only once. Exploring the area on 25 for the first time till the first boss was really fun, but actually doing it up to the end was a mixed experience.

The mid boss was fair. The final boss was a stretch. I don’t like it. I will probably skip daily fractals when that fractal is in the dailies. If I play dailies, I play T4 fractals. Of course I am not able to play Shattered Observatory on T4 yet, but even on 25 it is a stretch.

It has a artificial boss mechanic and scripting that is as tight as in the raids. One step outside the envisioned and scripted path, and you’re out. For example, you cannot direct the explosions in the final fight good enough. They stick at the border and too often explode just a bit too much to the right or to the left and just don’t hit the reactors.
That’s not fun. You are not fighting a boss by doing damage, you are desperately trying to make the scripting do what’s scripted. I want to kill enemies, I don’t want to perform some sort of rain dance in front of the boss and be instantly downed if I miss a step.

I really like the other fractals. The last two new fractals (Swamp and Nightmare) are on the edge of being too mechanical and scripted, but in the end they are ok. Shattered Observatory is not.

No change for the german forum. In the Firefox web console, timing looks like this:

The problem with the special action (key) is, that when you first encounter a new action, you don’t know what will happen if you use it. You try to find and move the tiny mouse over it, while in fight, and try to read the popup with the description.

Half way through the reading, you die. Then the special action vanished, and you were not able to figure out what it does. Then you retry the fight, and the same thing may happen again before you fully understand what the key will do.

That’s not a good method to teach players new action key actions. It produces frustration, because you die and lose the fight while you simply try to read a description.

It’s the same with all these tiny buff and debuff signs on my and my enemy’s bar, especially with the special buffs that are added just for that special fight you never encountered before. Constantly adding and expiring the signs, never able to hold the mouse over it long enough to fully read the popups.

If you use an adblocker to block google analytics, you block doubleclick as well (“colateral damage”), because ga loads doubleclick, but the forum slowdown continues to happen. It’s exactly the same. It is the forum server itself, not any 3rd party server that has the issue.

stephanie wise.7841:

Billfreist you are saying it is because the map stay open to long does it do a graphical bottleneck on the processor(cpu bound)?

I’m not BillFreist, but any software developer has an idea what may happen here. The skill lags you see are not connected to any graphical issue on your client. The skill lags are completely produced on the server.

The map on the server is implemented as a long checklist of things to do. Whenever a player moves or initiates an action, this is added to the checklist, and on the next pass through the checklist, it is actually processed by the server program. After that, the action may be removed from the checklist, or kept, or it spawns other actions – just according to the definition of that action.

There are also permanent actions on the checklist that are processed over and over again. For example the updrafts at the Dwayna Reliquary – they are turned on or off with some trigger, and this is processed over and over again with that checklist.

The checklist is processed in a fixed interval, perhaps once every second. Every second the map state is processed and the state for the next second is generated. That next second, the map state is processed again and the next to next state is generated. And so on.

Now, if the checklist grows so big that the server CPU cannot process all items within the time frame of the interval (1 second, or whatever it may be), you get a backlog. The next run through the checklist has to do 2 seconds instead of 1. In this case, you experience a lag of 1 second, because the server was not able to generate the map state for the previous second.

Siren’s Landing seems to have a problem with the items on that checklist: there seems to be more items being put on the checklist than put off in the long run. Some event, some map specialty, whatever it is, puts items on that checklist that are not all put off later. And at the moment the CPU of the server is not able to process all items, we players begin to experience lags. If players leave, the item list shrinks and the lags go away for a short time, but if some event stars and players use skills, the item list grows again and you get lags again.

It’s probably a rough description of the issue and much guesswork about the actual server design, but you may get the idea.

I made a thread about that yesterday:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/over-1-minute-loading-time-for-german-forum

But unfortunately, nothing has been done about that yet, not even acknowledged. It seems that since the devs and community managers only visit the english forum, the other languages are not relevant any more to keep in good shape.

Posting and editing here is a bit slow, but nothing compared to the minute-long loading time for even reading in the german forum.

If I open or refresh threads in the german GW2 forum, I encounter extremely long loading times over one minute. It does happen when you click on a thread to read the posts. It started to happen since about yesterday or the day before yesterday.
The english forum is fine. Happens only for the german forum.

Example:
https://forum-de.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Kritik-Ticket-Bearbeitungszeit-Statement-ANET

The Windows 10 Creators Update doesn’t interfere with GW2 at all. In fact, no Windows 10 update ever interfered with it. After any Windows update, check this:

• make sure you are running the most recent graphics driver
• make sure you deactivate programs and tools that inject code into games like Sweetfx, Overwolf, MSI Afterburner, Rivatuner, Arcdps and any other GW2 dps meter. Switch them back on one after one and only after you checked for the most recent version.

The second topic is important, because for new Windows versions, the DLLs from Windows get changed and the injecting programs that rely on fixed DLL code addresses may jump into wrong entry points. All these code injecting programs may have to be updated whenever a Windows DLL, graphics driver DLL or game executable gets changed. You see this with arcdps: you have to update arcdps every other GW2 update or it stops functioning, makes GW2 crash or perform badly.

All email providers handle name variations like that from Illconceived differently. Spaces cannot be part of the name in most cases.

Usually, you need to create different email addresses, like myacc@example.org, myacc2@example.org, myacc3@example.org.
To consolidate mail for them, most providers provide mail forwarding.

I have 2 GW2 accounts and use distinct email addresses for both, and I use these only for login to GW2. For nothing else. I configured at the mail provider to forward mail for these accounts to my main general-purpose mail account, and in my email client at home I only connect to that account.

This way only Arenanet knows these addresses, and hacks of websites I visit could not reveal them to account thieves. And I only have to monitor my main email account I use for years.

I admit it might be confusing for some people to handle more than 1 email account.

The “living and breathing” world that was advertised at game release didn’t last long, as others pointed out. It wasn’t successful and probably can never be successful as concept, because the pace of the developers creating content wasn’t compatible with the pace players consume content.

If you provide short-lived one-time content, the players feel forced to play that content while it is available. But they might not always be ready to play it during that time, and this causes dissatisfaction. A player might currently have no time to play at all, or he wants to play other stuff first, or he doesn’t have a character available that is fit to play the new stuff. Whatever it is, there are many more reasons.

If I look in retrospect, I was not ready to play some of the LS1 instances. I didn’t have a proper build, equipment, and understanding of game mechanics. I was a really bad player, and my guild friends as well. Since at least the Nightmare Tower, the instanced content became too difficult for us. But I had to play this story now, because next week it would be gone. I wasn’t given time to postpone it and learn and develop my playing skills instead. This caused frustration and lead me to abandon some of the LS1 story and made me not play the game at all for some time.

In comparison to that, a game with slowly growing static content is always there for the players to play as a whole, at exactly the pace the player chooses to play it.

This is what we have now, and it is much adaptable for the players, and for the flow of new players as well. It is open for new players, while the LS1-world style isn’t appealing for new players. It’s confusing at best. With that LS1 concept, I always wondered why Arenanet didn’t seem to cater for new players – all they did was trying to keep the current players in the game, but acquiring new ones to keep the playerbase fresh doesn’t seem a marketing or development goal.

Since this was always a problem for me, never implemented in GW2, I made a keyboard remap for Autohotkey some time ago to ignore the left Windows key.

Install Autohotkey, copy the following text into notepad and save as “gw2nowin.ahk” and double click it from Explorer. Can be put into Windows autostart, because remap is only active while GW2 is running and the foreground app. Works for 32-bit and 64-bit GW2.

#Warn
#SingleInstance, Force
#NoEnv

GroupAdd prog, ahk_exe gw2.exe
GroupAdd prog, ahk_exe Gw2-64.exe

#IfWinActive ahk_group prog

; ignore left Windows key
LWin::return

I always thought, the point of an MMO is playing content together with other players. Playing together is the point. Playing solo and getting help from somebody else with guide or walkthrough is not playing together, this is done for ages since the very first computer game decades ago. This does not make a game an MMO. Highscores to compare players as well: available since ages.

I assume, players play MMOs because of group content. Not because of solo content, otherwise they’d choose a solo game, because solo games provide better solo content than an MMO. So my conclusion is, solo content that can solely be played solo and never in a group is misplaced in an MMO. It’s not something players choose to play an MMO for.

Let me tell you this: I am older. I have a computer since 1986 where I just had my last year in high school. I never played computer or console games for the next 15 years, because they were ugly, slow, tedious, difficult, dumb, or simply not entertaining. They steal your time, giving back nothing.

The first game that showed me that games can be fun was an RPG called Morrowind in 2001. This was nothing like the bland and simple games available earlier. It was as fun to play as a book to read. In 2007, I was invited to GW1. Playing in the same game as other people was terrific. Playing this stuff since then.

And now we got that solo content back that is the same 30 years ago. Stuff I chose to not play back then. Nice new skins, but still the same game. Stuff that made me not play computer games at all for 15 years. Stuff that now comes back like a nemesis I hoped to never see again. This in GW2 is so bad on so many levels.

Additional hint: there are USB foot switches and foot pedals you can use in addition to mouse and keyboard. These provide 2-4 additional keys that can be pressed independently from the mouse. Look an Amazon.

Edit: these pedal keys usually can be configured to press any key available on a keyboard, so they are really universal.

Interesting that Canach’s voice actor is considered very good, not only his lines. I assume this is a combination of the the script itself and instructions how to speak the lines, because the praise span at least two languages: english and german. I don’t know how the english Canach sounds, but the german one (which I am hearing) is top. According to this thread, the english one is also considered top. So either both languages got an equally outstanding speaker, or it’s not only the speaker but also the script itself.

I assume it’s mainly the instructions how to speak the lines. The speakers are professionals who were selected/casted for their roles, so we can consider all of them “good”. In my opinion, the characters sound exactly how they are intended to sound from the developer’s point of view.
If they are considered not so good by the players, it’s probably because the character is rather uninteresting – not the voice actor who speaks it.