Guild Wars 2

It’s really frustrating that there seems to be no safeguarding in place for players crashing. I crashed during the final burn phase of the Dragon’s Stand event, and when I logged in I ended up in a server populated only by people who’d just crashed out of the event.

It’s a really cool event, but it’s a terrible capstone to spend an hour and a half on an event only to get no reward at all due to a technical problem.

Game has been unplayable for me since July, playing on American servers from Denmark. I tried to do a diagnostics traceroute, but all the report says is “No resources.” I’ve done a manual traceroute, and it seems the entirety of my latency comes from a Telia connection in Sweden.

================ = Tracing network paths (about 10 mins) ================

• pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 64.25.39.1 <--*

Tracing route to 64.25.33-1.ncsoft.com [64.25.39.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
0 No resources.
‘pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 64.25.39.1’ exit code 1*—> pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 206.127.158.1 <--*

Tracing route to 206-127-158-1.ncsoft.com [206.127.158.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
0 No resources.
‘pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 206.127.158.1’ exit code 1*—> pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 91.194.204.163 <--*

Tracing route to 91.194.204.163 over a maximum of 30 hops

0 No resources.
‘pathping -w 500 -q 50 -4 91.194.204.163’ exit code 1

Short version: A mechanism which ends the match in a Deathmatch game if one team has a clear advantage and awards victory to the team before the timer runs down or either team reaches 500 points.

Longer version: Whenever I play unranked PvP I always dread seeing Courtyard on the voting wheel, because I know it will always play out the same way: both teams will circle around for a bit and eventually engage in a 5v5 skirmish, and whichever team wins this skirmish wins the match. Then the match continues until the losing team has died another three times.

I’ve only played on Courtyard maybe 15 times, but I’ve found that the following held true for every single match:
-The first team to reach 100 points ended up winning
-The final score was always at least 200 points apart

I didn’t enjoy those matches after the initial skirmish, regardless of whether I was winning or losing, since even if the teams are fairly even, the losing team is going to be outnumbered for the rest of the match, as teammates die and have to respawn.

Now, I’m sure that close calls happen, and I do not have broader statistics on hand, but I checked the Bad Matchup thread and specifically excludes reports based on huge score gaps if those came from Courtyard matches. I think it’s a fair claim that most Deathmatch games simply go on for longer than they need to.

I would personally enjoy unranked sPvP more if Deathmatch games ended at 250 points or there was a mechanism to end the match early when one team clearly dominates, and I don’t think such a mechanism would detract from anyone else’s enjoyment.

I personally do not care about any minor plot inconsistencies or retcons of GW1 lore. It’s a game I played over five years ago, which had a lot of minute plot details, and I’m sure you could make it contradict itself as much as GW2 if you really wanted to make the effort.

Reunion of the Pact was great. The camp seemed alive and organic, and the marching tune really helped. Caithe’s recon squad had good chemistry between Caithe and Canach (less so between the PC and Canach, especially as someone who missed the update where Canach was captured), but the final combat sequence didn’t really convey that you were supposed to stay by the base of the ledge. I ended up just running all the way back to the mission beginning, and I know others just climbed down the cliffs.

Hidden Arcana was just magical. I spent quite some time just marveling at the Priory basement and reading all the books. Ogden was coyly telling me to touch the hourglass and I thought it was just going to be a cutscene to wrap up what was my favorite Living Story chapter. Glint’s Lair absolutely blindsided me. Huge kudos to the art team for that and the library, and kudos to the direction for the way it was set up. Only issues were with the gameplay: only the instance owner could read the books, you’d have to sit through a lot of dead space when doing achievement/skin runs, and the boss fights had a lot of downtime as well.

Having a separate achievement instance of the last mission was really great and I hope it gets expanded on in later installments. I’d be thrilled to see the option to choose between an achievement/completion version and a story version of a given mission, where the former cuts out a lot of downtime and cutscenes. I adored Hidden Arcana, but I had to complete it five times for achievements/Carapace skins, and having to watch all the cutscenes and wait for Marge and Kas to walk somewhere over and over kind of killed the magic for me. Yes yes, I didn’t have to do any of that, but the reward for doing so was really, really shiny, and I am only human after all.

The references to class and race are great and do a lot to help with immersion. Taking a sylvari through the living story stands in pretty sharp contrast to the personal story, where the Pale Tree didn’t recognize you and your accomplishments were retconned to be Trahearne’s. Incidentally, is there any hope of seeing the player characters’ voice actors again? I realize it involves bringing in ten VAs to do the work of one, but I really miss my sassy mushroom voiced by Jennifer Hale.