Guild Wars 2

I was under the impressions that the various lumber cores, feldspar cores, and pristine feathers were supposed to have slots in material storage under Scribing materials.

Was that not the case, or were they left out by accident? Are there plans to include them in the near future?

Are duplicate Sworn Zaishen Helm Skins supposed to turn into something else the way duplicate Elemental Sword skins were supposed to turn into BL keys last cycle?

ArthurDent.9538:

TBecause of the soft mmr reset…

I consider the soft reset pretty much an admission on the part of the devs that the “rank” ratings in this game are meaningless. If our MMR at the end of last season actually reflected our skill, then why do we need new placement matches? The game would already now how good we are.

Whether your MMR goes up or down over the season may reflect how good you are, but the all the initial assignment measures is how lucky you got with your team assignments during the placement matches.

Tiefsee.3647:

Sounds great! Do you have already all ideas you need or should we give inspiration for possible achiefments on each map?

Also pleas make an achiefment “won even when there where 300 points difference at any time of the game” in each map! As motivation! – and once a player get those ‘turn around’ achiefments in each map, the player get’s a title ‘never gonna give you up’

This would be a terrible idea, as it would encourage people to tank the first part of the match in hopes of getting the achievement.

Liewec.2896:

we just want 3 points.
and thats pretty much what skyhammer is now.

You mean YOU just want 3 points. Because I don’t remember electing you PVP community spokesperson.

I certainly enjoy different twists to the game and am bored to tears with the “just 3 points” maps.

Wolfric.9380:

If a side takes a 200+ lead it wins. Otherwise it´s the usual 500 point goal.

I’ve had matches where I was 200 up and lost and matches where I was 200 behind and won. That’s not an insurmountable lead.

One change I would make to coliseum: make the central control point much bigger.

You have this huge central platform with a teeny tiny control point in the middle, so you often end up with a huge battle raging all over the platform that doesn’t effect the control point at all Would be interesting if you had to control that whole platform to get that control point instead of just one spot on it.

I like the new Skyhammer map.

There’s a big chunk of the PVP community that doesn’t want to ever have to learn any new game styles and thus will hate on anything that’s not Foefire-Forrest-Khylo simply because it’s not Foefire-Forrest-Khylo.

kin korn karn.9023:

Just team up with 4 others who need it too.

“Just”

Hugh Norfolk.2798:

I double checked and Capricorn should appear even though it is no longer pinned in unranked.

So Capricorn shows up 1 out of five times and you have a 1 in 10 chance of it getting picked.

So you only have to queue 50 times to get into a Capricorn game.

THATS REASONABLE!

I’m six wins from finishing the achievements and despite having two weeks left, I don’t think I’ll be able to finish. Between the map only rarely being available in the rotation, and then only have a 1 in 10 chance of it getting picked, and then having to win it with an unranked group, I’ll have to play hundreds of matches to get those 6 wins.

WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?

You could have not time gated the achievements.

You could have given us earlier warnings of that time gate.

You could have delayed Coliseum two weeks until the season ends.

You could have left both as beta maps available every time.

You could have added Capricorn to the ranked rotation

You could let us do it in a custom map so I can use some of those tokens you keep giving me

There were so many options available. Why did you pick the one that maximizes the inconvenience to the players?

Yes, please change it to male. If the only option is male, or ridiculous fake boobs, then male is the better choice.

Although, it would be better if there were distinct male/female versions of charr armor, but female in a way that would make sense for a charr female.

Laraley.7695:

I’m not sure what gw2 is trying to create, but with every pvp season it gets worse and worse.

To be honest, it’s what happens when people without a statistics background take a cookie-cutter statistics algorithm they don’t fully understand and try to apply it in a way that seems superficially similar to its intended use, but which actually violates a number of its assumptions.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

btw average players can get together, form a casual team, then go stomp newer players and rise back up from the ashes of defeat to be victorious!

You’re right and this may be the only way out of the vicious circle. But should you have to be on a premade to compete in ranked play?

That’s the thing, it won’t actually balance out ever. Once you’re segregated into that “low MMR pool”, you’ll always be in the “low MMR pool”. You may eventually migrate out of Amber into Emerald, but only at the rate the rest of those bad players are migrating out, so you’ll still be stuck playing with them in Emerald.

The fundamental problem is they’re using MMR backwards. It’s purpose is to rate two teams to see if they should compete and then update the ratings after the match based on the result of that competition.

It’s not meant to be used to form those teams to begin with. Since you don’t compete against the rest of your team, there’s no “competition” to meaningfully update the rankings at the match.

There were several errors with the way the MMR algorithm is being applied this pvp season:
1. All new players were brought in at average MMR, making it impossible for the algorithm to distinguish players who were actually average from ones that are below average, but new.
2. MMR is used to determine your teammates, but not your opponents. This actually reverses the purpose of MMR. Rather than finding you opponents of the same skill level it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You have low MMR, so you get stuck on bad teams, so you lose and your MMR drops further.

These two decisions together have resulted in a significant group of the average players getting stuck in vicious circle.

At the beginning of the season, they got stuck with a bunch of new players and lost (because there is no way to demonstrate your ability apart from your team). After that first game, all the new players and the average players stuck with them dropped a chunk of MMR, while all the average players stuck with experienced players gained a chunk.

In the second game, the average players that dropped are even more likely to get stuck with new players, so they lose again and drop another chunk. After a couple of games, they’re now doomed to always be with a bunch of new players, unable to ever demonstrate competence because they have no way of ever qualifying to play with better teammates.

I think they were the copper reward chests for two guild pvp teams I was on.

When I logged in today, there were two bonus chests waiting for me (along with the normal daily reward chest). When I clicked them, they flew up toward the menu buttons in the upper left corner like normal, but then when I looked in my inventory, there was nothing new there.

Does anyone know what was going on?

Also, it used to be that the giant karka that show up when the crab lives too long would leave once it finally died. Now they stay forever, making the game nearly impossible by the end of the five minutes because you’re getting rolled over every couple of seconds.

The turrets are staff in the “the group of people who work for me” sense.

Djinn.9245:

Imagine this attitude at a party. “We know that everyone is going to want a champagne toast at this New Years party, but we have intentionally gated the champagne behind long boring lines and tests of skill that many of you can’t accomplish because you have been drinking. That’s OK though because the champagne toast is purely optional. Its not like it is necessary or anything…”

What really makes the JP requriment bizarre is how out of sync with the rest of the requirements it is. Bell Choir doesn’t require you to complete all six songs perfectly to get credit. Snowball Mayhem doesn’t require you to win the match 500-0 to get credit. Toypocalpse doesn’t require you to save all five dolyaks for the whole 10 waves to get credit. They recognize some people are good and some aren’t, and give people progress for barely winning or getting partially complete, so that even if they are mediocre, they will get there eventually, just not as quickly as people good at it.

The JP is “you’re either completely perfect or you get no credit at all”. You have to get through the entire course and any minor slip up you’re back to square one. The fact the event is so binary, with no space between total success and total failure, makes it completely out of character for the nature of the game.

When the Mad King’s Clock Tower and Winter Wonderland jumping puzzle first came out three years ago, there were a lot of people who felt that they were unreasonably difficult, particularly for events only available for a short period every year.

At the time, ArenaNet admitted they have been intentionally designed to be unreasonably difficult, but that this was okay because they were purely optional content that was not necessary to complete the holiday events.

Fast forward to 2015, and suddenly the big collection for this year’s Wintersday cannot be completed without doing the jumping puzzle multiple times.

I am extremely unhappy about this.

satomz.1764:

Having my hours of working towards 50/50 and GWAMM called undeserving, even if erroneously, really made me rethink about playing GW in general. I mean, these are all just pixels and data…

The physical world is hardly more permanent. When you die, all those trips you took, all the conversations you had, the books you read, etc. will vanish. Within a hundred years of your death, for 99.9999% of people no one will remember they existed and everything they did in their life will be gone. For all intents and purposes it will be like you never actually existed at all.

Going into the HoM on GW1 and then logging back into GW2 caused them all to come back for me.

I legitimately had both GWAMM and Champion of the Gods. All of my GW1 titles, rewards, and 500 AP just vanished.

“I just did what I do best. I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few utility slots and a couple of trait lines. Hmmm? You know… You know what I’ve noticed? Nobody panics when things go “according to plan.” Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a thief can perma-stealth, or a truckload of warriors can stack 25 might on their entire party, nobody panics, because it’s all “part of the plan”. But when I say that one little old ranger will stack swiftness, well then everyone loses their minds!"

Zatoichi.1049:

I don’t think you understand the word “themed.” Did you play gw1? GW2 is a continuation of the very medieval themed gw1, with the early immergence of magi-tech. you just listed the most prominent asuran tech. Only airships were a joined effort of the human and asuran. Most of the technogies the asuran have is kept to themselves and intend on doing so for now. With the exception of the very crude war-themed technology of the charr, and the stuff the the pact have recently created, the other 90% of the world is your typical fantasy medieval world, kings, queens, knights, vikings, pirates, medieval villages, farmers, weapons, castles, blacksmiths, armorsmiths, etc .

While the Asura are more individually brilliant, the Charr are actually the better engineers according to lore, because they Asura lack the ability to work together to and to refine their designs into practical applications that can be produced and maintained on a large scale.

The charr invented the internal combustion engine (see the “Sea of Sorrow” novel) and the tanks, subs, and helicopters the Pact uses were invented by charr.

It may be due to the fact that the salvage mission requires access to bouncy mushrooms and gliders, so a lot of people who were in the event chain up until that point left when that step starts.

The event scaling on the “Airship Salvage” link of the Ordnance Group event chain needs to be adjusted. Last night I ended up doing this event with 2 other people and it took us more than 20 minutes to finish this event.

This seems way too long for one event; the amount of salvage required should scale up or down based on how many people are actually participating.

I was under the impression that if veteran players pre-purchased Heart of Thorns Ultimate, they would get two additional character slots, one for buying the ultimate package and one for pre-purchasing as a veteran player.

I only got one additional slot. Why is this?

Okay, after further experimentation, I still can get XP by killing creatures, but not by using things like writs of experience, which I don’t understand.

Vayne.8563:

It’ll change as soon as HoT comes out anyway.

That could be months from now! I can’t last that long! It’s like water torture!

But can Anet pleeeeeeaaaaasssssseeee make the XP bar on level 80 characters 100% full? The fact my main toon’s bar is permanently almost but not quite full is going to drive me insane.

Okay, this is the sort of context I meant. I was out doing the “defend the hunters” mission when the wyvern attack started, and by the time I got back to the village to fight the fire, it seemed like it was just a random wyvern attack with no indication the Hylek were behind it.

If that’s what the story is supposed to be, the Hylek sermons ought to make it more clear they Hylek are offering a “convert or die” deal so that it’s obvious why you’re trying to stop them even if you weren’t there at the beginning.

KrisHighwind.6213:

From what I remember Anet saying in their blog post about the Itzel and Nuoch is that the red Hylek that are trying to convert your new froggy friends by forcing it upon them.

If the Hylek were using force and we were defending the Itzel, the Pact’s actions would make sense, but all I saw in the game is Hylek TALKING to the Itzel about their sun god.

While the Itzel event change was a lot of fun from a gameplay perspective, I found the story rather disturbing, to the point I actually had to give up part way through because I couldn’t really stomach continuing.

So basically there’s another tribe of Hylek trying to convince the Itzel to change to a new religion. Now maybe there’s some context which would explain why this is apparently causing the Pact to have a royal freak out, but it certainly isn’t being presented in the game. In the game we’re running around launching unprovoked attacks of people merely for talking about the “wrong” religion, culminating in us desecrating a church and assassinating a religious figure in the middle of their worship services like The Pact’s suddenly turned into the Tyrian version of ISIL.

So… what’s up with that?

I’m sure HoT will have great new music of it’s own, but I’d like some continuity too. I’d love if “Fear Not This Night” became something like “A Call to Arms” from that other game; each expansion has it’s own theme, but they also keep bringing back or referencing what has become a theme for the entire series.

Is the song going to reappear in any form in the expansion? Because it’s one of my favorite musical pieces from the original game.

My concern is that the elite specializations end up so powerful that you’re basically forced to play them whether you like them or not.

Psnacky.7936:

“Old skill points in excess of those earned by leveling and skill challenges will be converted into crafting materials for the Mystic Forge. Items and activities that were previously repeatable sources of skill points will now also provide that same crafting material.”

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/specializations-part-two-reward-tracks-and-elite-specializations/

Yeah I saw the quote, and while I’m sure those words mean something to someone with the proper contextual background, they didn’t really answer the question for me.

How will the purchase of mystic forge materials be handled in HoT once skill points are no longer a thing?

I’m changing to a new e-mail address. How do I get my account moved to the new address?

Dave Mark has hinted the NPC AI is being replaced with a utility based system:

Building a Better Centaur: AI at Massive Scale

This would suggest that not only are they not switching to a trinity based system, they’re moving even further away from one. The traditional MMO concept of aggro is an artifact of the NPCs being simple reflex agents. As a mechanic, runs counter to the entire point of a utility based system as it is based on the players being able to force the NPC into doing what is best for them rather than the NPC doing what is best for the NPC.

Zaxares.5419:

Besides, all of Turai’s lines in this episode are word-for-word repeats of what he said back in the original GW1 missions. Couldn’t they just have recycled the same voice files?

That would probably require paying additional royalties to the original voice actor, and is more expensive than using someone already in the current game.

Aeolus.3615:

Caithe is glint reincarnation.

Caithe and Glint have met each other.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

What’s your theory of what Rytlock is doing in the Mists?

Saving money by preventing Steve Blum from saying anything.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If Caithe isn’t immediately executed for this series of crimes upon capture then I probably will not continue playing this story.

Don’t forget that Emissary Vorpp also has some crimes to answer for.

ainekitten.9517:

I like this theory. My first thought was that maybe Caithe stole the egg for Faolain. After all, Scarlet did say she knew a deep dark secret of Caithe’s, which we never got to find out. Something made me think maybe she has already succumbed to the Nightmare Court.

Scarlet also said the secret was something that neither the Pale Tree nor Faolain knew. If the secret is that Caithe was working for Faolain all along, I think Faolain would know it.

When a player has just invested half an hour into completing an instance, that’s a terrible excuse for robbing them of the story payoff at the end.

Congratulations, your party just beat the big boss. Only you have to do it again, because you got downed during the fight and missed all the NPC dialogue because you can’t hear what they’re saying while you’re being revived.