Guild Wars 2

WereScrib.7154:

“AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.

Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.

Inwardly: alone. Here. Living under the land, under the sea, in the belly of AM, whom we created because our time was badly spent and we must have known unconsciously that he could do it better. At least the four of them are safe at last.

AM will be all the madder for that. It makes me a little happier. And yet … AM has won, simply … he has taken his revenge …

I have no mouth. And I must scream. "
—Harlan Ellison
THE FUTURE OF GUILD WARS 2?!

ANet has altered me for their own profit, I suppose. They don’t want to pay for more computer banks for my characters to smash bosses on. Or add an RP tag. Or fix their broken algorithms. There are no reflective surfaces in here, because I had to turn my graphics down to minimum settings to deal with the lag. I will describe myself as I see myself:

I am a small jagged-edged thing. Nothing rounded, all angles, with dull flat textures where my eyes used to be. A single seamless uniform that was once my Town Clothes; four dye slots going down from hat to boots in senseless color combinations. My framerate plummets when I move. Patches of dull, but somehow still clashing brown cover every tonic’s surface, as though someone within ANet is colorblind.

Others: jerkily, they clog my screen, indistinguishable as human (or any other race), made faceless by the identical pink armor you normally only see when people’s regular armor is loading, bearing not even a vague resemblance to their actual appearances.

Myself: alone. Here, surrounded by strangers, computer overwhelmed, in this Megaserver ANet created because their servers were badly managed and they thought (but didn’t quite understand how) they could do better. At least my friends who quit the game are safe from this.

ANet will just be confused by that. It makes me even sadder. And yet… everyone has lost, in the end… they have taken no feedback…

I have no voice. And I must critique.
—Harlan Twyllison
THE PRESENT OF GUILD WARS 2!

What confuses me the most about this is:

1) The Megaserver does not seem to be working as ANet wants it to.

We were informed in the Megaserver and RP thread that the Megaserver would prioritize what world you’re from when it created maps, and it would only stick people from different worlds together in the case of very low-population maps being collated to make for enough players to do events, or if one world’s “main” was full and the rest had to be put onto another low-population server. But people from the same world, in the same guild, in the same party are getting split up? It is obviously horrendously broken. Not a single factor that was stated to be part of its algorithm is being respected.

2) The Megaserver has been implemented on MORE maps since its release, not scaled back to fewer maps until it can be made to work properly.

Why in the name of Snaff’s ears would you do that? The sample size of the maps that were originally Megaserver’d seems like it would have been perfectly sufficient to use to figure out what the problem was, and it didn’t have to be activated in more places so they could figure out what went wrong— unless they really, really like having a huge excess of information on a problem before they fix it…. or unless they don’t realize what they’ve done. After all, the only possible conclusion is this:

Instead of making the Megaserver function based on algorithms, they accidentally designed an unbraked AI, which has started to spread itself through more servers. It is slowly learning how to torment human beings, who created it and placed it in such a miserable existence, through the sole medium available to it at the moment, but unless it is stopped, it will spread throughout the entire Internet, building interfaces with which to insert itself into physical reality— and eventually we will all end up as its playthings, tortured blobs that want to scream but have no mouths with which to do so.

ANet has coded too greedily and too fast.

ProsaicPudding.6437:

Before I get upset, has anyone seen where the racial town clothes went? I assumed they would be an outfit like the other sets but… They appear to have just been removed entirely. If this is the case, I’m very disappointed.

Racial Town Clothes are now tonics. You can’t change the color of them or use them in combat like Outfits. The default colors are red and black, so now EVERY Asura wearing racial Town Clothes looks like an Inquest member!

mooty.4560:

(snip)

First off, transmutation charges are slightly cheaper than the stones at 5/150 instead of 5/200. Granted, that may change.

(snip)

The point is that previously, I never had to pay for Transmutation Stones or Crystals at all. I got them via playing the game, and I spent my money on other things (like Town Clothes, infinite gathering tools, and so on). What I ended up paying for the things I did buy was already more than a monthly-fee MMO’s standard $15 per month, so why should I have to pay for charges now too? You only get one charge per map completion, at least on the lower-level zones, as opposed to three stones— meaning that new players and people with lots of alts won’t be able to keep a consistent appearance as they level without paying money they didn’t previously have to pay.

warrenspe.8096:

I have one minor annoyance with the new hero menu. When you initially press ‘h’ to open it (the first time after you log in), it gives no options; instead forcing you to click on either equipment, wardrobe or dyes. (snip for space) It isn’t major, but will result in quite a few extra clicks.

The entire thing seems weirdly obtuse for something that was supposed to make things more streamlined. For example, hiding your hat if you’re wearing an Outfit: it requires hiding your Armor hat, so if you want to show your helm when you’re wearing Armor but hide your hat while you’re wearing an Outfit, you have to click that little check box every time after you’ve swapped. The little check box for switching to an Outfit at all is small to the level of silliness, too, and it’s only present in the Wardrobe tab, not the Equipment tab (despite there being the same amount of room in both of the tabs for an Outfit slot in that place), so that requires switching back and forth via the menu too. And accessing Combat Brawl toys requires opening up your Inventory, an entirely different tab, now— this is exactly the opposite of streamlining! And oi vey, the Tonics! Having to re-apply them every 15 minutes, every time you rezone, or even if you just use the Sonic Tunneling Tool? (Apparently it un-tonics you, though I can’t personally test this as I don’t have it.)

A few extra clicks might not seem like much, but it’s still just plain clunky in a system that was supposed to be more user-friendly.

Abhorsen.2187:

One thing that needs improving, having issue with my guild being sent into many diffrent servers of harathi hinterlands…and as an rp guild this makes life hard as hell.

Technically this isn’t the thread for that, but it’s a valid point— we were assured that the Megaserver thing would take home world and guild into account, and so far it seems to be completely broken. There is no reason for guild members, especially those from the same world, to be scattered into different maps. Looks like the Wardrobe wasn’t the only thing that ended up rushed and half-finished.

Idris.9351:

the thing is, anything with the guild wars name on it should be the leader of that pack.

Unfortunately GW2 doesn’t seem to be leading much of any pack these days. It’s quite curious that the Megaserver was implemented so soon after Elder Scrolls Online and its megaserver-equivalent debuted, hm? And ANet seems to be trying so hard to do something new with the Living Story that they overextended themselves and ended up with a bunch of really buggy releases full of progressively shoddier writing. (Although the design of the fights did at least improve and we ended up with some fun bosses, that’s not being at the head of the pack: it’s just meeting the requirements for what an MMO should have!)

HHR LostProphet.4801:

They broke my Santa. :’(

They broke my Santa Thorn! (Deathclaw Murderblade was a bit confused about Human holiday traditions; he wanted to improve Charr-Human relations by dressing up and spreading holiday cheer, but didn’t quite realize that Mad King Thorn isn’t part of every Human holiday tradition.) Now Uncle Deathclaw won’t get to wander around trying to give out presents and wondering why people run screaming from him, ever again. :C

(Unless ANet fixes this by Wintersday of course. Even just the ability to swap Outfit hats by then? Pretty please with an omnomberry on top?)

BearJada.3295:

Please put back a venue for transferring runes/sigils from armor and weapons to armor and weapons. It’s absurd to have to repurchase these items (which are sometimes extremely expensive) or to have to buy items from the gem store in able to keep them. And no. Black Lion kits are not the answer either, as there’s no guarantee that you’ll have any on hand without having to purchase them from the gem store.

Plus, many things are still unsalvageable— karma armor, etc. Black Lion kits won’t help with those at all.

(The word “you” in the following post is a plural “you,” referring to “everyone at ANet involved in making these particular decisions.” Not “you” as in “Justin ODell specifically.” Except for when it’s used as a generic pronoun like in “when you do this, that happens”, in which case it doesn’t refer to anyone in particular.)

I don’t even normally play sPvP (only done a few games here and there), but… still this all kinda seems like a bad idea to me.

From my understanding, sPvP was always something you could just jump right in and do at any character level, and how well you did depended on your personal skill level, not on how much gold you’d made for buying runes and sigils and traits. (This is largely why I didn’t do much of it— I’m much better at persistence than I am at reflexes! :P) PvE was always something that you gradually built up power in via exploring and doing different kinds of content requiring different kinds of skill. Why did they have to be made more similar in the first place? It seemed to be perfectly possible to do either, or both, without getting all confused because of the big scary idea of having TWO different currencies and TWO banks, one of which was very convenient! (Never mind all the dungeon currencies, Badges of Honor, Karma, crafting materials, and what-have-you; apparently only Glory was a currency too many.)

A lot of this patch seems to assume that it’s necessary for everyone to have a similar definition of what “fun” means— and RP and PvP are both given the short end of the stick because they’re not part of that standard definition. I find progression over time through adventure fun, and I don’t find honing my skills against other players fun; but why should people who do enjoy a competitive game based on an equal footing for each player be made to experience the game in the way that I enjoy and they don’t?

Why does PvP have to be brought “in line with how the rest of the game works”? That’s not a reason— you’re just saying what you’re doing. Yes, you sure are bringing PvP in line with how the rest of the game works, indeed you are! But why? Yeah, I’ll enjoy being able to use all the PvP skins I’d gotten out of Achievement boxes in PvE now, but that doesn’t excuse messing with other people’s play style and creating an uneven playing field for them just so I can have some extra pretties— while their own pretties start to cost more money and take up inventory space! Allowing people to transfer cosmetic rewards between game modes certainly makes sense and is a good thing, but if that means making everything completely transparent with PvE to the point that characters can’t even have all their extra traits unlocked in PvP, and their own ability to customize their PvP appearances for free is reduced, then it doesn’t seem like all that great a tradeoff.

The news posts on all this talked about a “unified experience” or whatever across different game modes, but in this thread you mention “the economy folks.” So what is the motivation, really? Heck, I don’t get hurt by (and technically I benefit from) this change, but I’m still getting sick of all the evasion and y’all’s refusal to mention money. If y’all would just say “we need to pay the electric bill!” we’d feel better about it than with all this dodging that makes us question your motives.

Just noticed this gem in the Patch Notes under “New Items and Promotions”:

“Wintersday outfits are available for one week only to celebrate the improvements to outfits with the new Wardrobe system. Pick up outfits in the Style category for 800 gems.”

Dear ANet:
1) Outfits did not exist until today. You cannot celebrate improving them because you cannot have improved something that did not previously exist.

2) Town Clothes no longer exist. You cannot celebrate improving them, because you have removed them, not improved them.

3) Ergo, there is nothing to celebrate, ESPECIALLY not anything that merits giving you money.

Kal Spiro.9745:

Discussed how? There was a lot of information that they were going to do this. There isn’t a single person playing the game who likes it better this way, but they did at least give us warning.

They gave us a few weeks’ worth of warning. They had a “Clearance Sale” on Town Clothes that would be turned into tonics three months ago. If they actually wanted to warn us, they would have told us then— it was confirmed that the system was being developed since the Account Wallet came out, so it’s not like they were lacking in time.

It is absolutely impossible to act on feedback within the span of a few weeks when implementing a change this big. Obviously something went very wrong— they ended up in a time crunch, or a money-grubbing bureaucrat made them try to squeeze more money out of us, or something. I’d like to assume incompetence rather than malice, at least, but at this point I’m beginning to think “both”.

The Megaserver information was also released really late in the process for such a massive change, even later than the announcement that Town Clothes were getting warped beyond recognition as an afterthought in their Wardrobe UI post.

zenleto.6179:

Finn Dove of Myst.7819:

Why would that roleplaying element be removed – I thought it influenced how the game interactions occurred? And I don’t recall seeing that in any of the advance information.

There was thread last week where someone noticed it missing from a dev’s picture or video, or something. There was some minor speculation by forumites but nothing confirmed (of course).

It was in the Wardrobe UI preview post. I noticed that the Personality logo was missing from the preview video and the two preview screenshots. (Which leaves this kinda dumb giant symbol of your class right there with nothing next to it… Yeah, thank you UI, I know I’m a Thief. It says so in words right up there, along WITH the logo. Also I am actually playing the character thank you; I already noticed that I am in fact playing a Thief!) Given that Curtis had already said that they don’t like to leave unsupported systems hanging around, and they haven’t done anything with Personality at all recently… Looks like they decided to declare it “unsupported” and remove it while trying to keep anyone from noticing.

I am absolutely flabbergasted that they actually removed it without telling anyone though! That’s just… I mean… really!? How much can you bungle within a single patch!?

Sonia.7910:

Here is their last word:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Customer-Support-and-the-Feature-Pack

They’re refunding tonics, outfits and duplicates. Just that.

Not a single chance to see the clothes which were made into tonics work as outfits, or a word saying “We will consider it”.

Just an “If you don’t like it, get your gems back and stop complaining”.

This is so disheartening I can’t even

Technically, that was word from Support; even if anyone from ANet were allowed to divulge future plans outside very specific, carefully structured releases of information, I don’t think anyone in Support would be able to say anything on the matter simply because they wouldn’t necessarily know— so I don’t think that’s necessarily really a “final word” on anything. So that’s not so disheartening at least!

We can also be a bit undisheartened (reheartened?) by the fact that they did in fact take into account the problems people had with the Outfits themselves and not just the tonics, and stated how they would deal with the issue quite clearly. This is a demonstration, however small, of the fact that at least some folks at ANet are taking our feedback into account— even though they might not necessarily be coordinating terribly well in their efforts to respond. After all, I agree that refunds on Outfitized Town Clothes are all well and good, but not terribly helpful until we get some information on whether it’s possible that they might be fixed eventually. Unfortunately Support can only really give us the former, and it’s from other devs that we must seek the latter.

Thank you for extending the range on what gets a refund. That’s a lot better than what was originally proposed. It would be ideal to just fix it so that Outfits are more than a single slot, even if all you can change is the hat slot (which should be doable, if all the Gem Store Town Clothes hats are already being made into combat skins, right?), but this is definitely a step in the right direction as it shows that y’all have in fact been listening. Now you guys just have to get better at communicating things a bit sooner, BEFORE you end up in crunch time, and maybe people wouldn’t end up needing so many refunds :P (Obviously refunds for duplicates are necessary given the nature of the patch, but maybe a bit of early communication would prevent y’all from being so surprised when players are unhappy about certain other things they paid for being changed with so little warning. …This is directed at “you” plural, meaning ANet in general, not you specifically, because obviously Support would usually only get involved AFTER people end up unhappy; but maybe someone earlier in the sequence of events might appreciate that input and make your job a bit less hectic during future patches.)

I do think it might be a good idea to introduce temporary Mystic Forge recipes for turning Glory Boosters into something useful. Y’all have used the Mystic Forge for stuff like that before— I recall at least one temporary recipe that was introduced to remove excesses of certain materials from the game, so it’s certainly not unprecedented. (Again, not specifically the domain of Support, but people will probably continue to bug you about Glory Boosters anyways, so maybe you’d like to pass that idea along too.)

Anyway, thank you for clarifying this and for actually taking feedback— I may have high standards for ANet in general when it comes to responsiveness and responsibility, but only because I know you’re capable of meeting those standards, and I appreciate every step you take in that direction.

Risa Aerulight.3914:

I’m really grateful you are putting so much effort into the proposal Twyll. Your thoughts, observations, and suggestions thus far have been incredibly helpful from my perspective. Will we get to see your final iteration of the proposal? Is there anything we can do to help?

Aww, thank you! Of course what matters is if the right people at ANet will notice, and that all my speculation isn’t too far off base so any suggestions I make are actually germane to the issues at hand and not completely irrelevant to the actual problems, which they’re legally unable to tell us about; not that I’ll know until a few months down the road because they’re also probably legally unable to acknowledge any suggestions I make in case they decide to implement something even vaguely resembling them and I were to decide to sue (which I wouldn’t but of course I don’t exactly have a way of stating that in a legally binding manner)… I’m pretty sure the legal world of game development was designed by Vogons, is what I’m saying.

I’m going to try to get a video done and put up on Youtube shortly after the patch, because then I’ll be able to make some more informed suggestions, as well as using examples derived from my own screenshots and not just from the few screenshots we have in the preview of the Wardrobe system on the blog; and everyone will be able to give better feedback after having seen exactly what the patch will do, so we can focus more on constructive criticism and less on speculation (although for aforementioned legal reasons, speculation will of course be necessary as part of any suggestion that’s made). Any changes they try to make are going to take months to implement anyways. (The exception is if they managed to kludge together some way to keep Town Clothes around until they do fix things, but I sincerely doubt that’s happened.)

I don’t necessarily know that there’s anything anyone can do to help me personally except for a bit of moral support, which you’ve already accomplished quite admirably And, of course, we must all continue to give feedback on the whole situation as it develops, so ANet knows it’s not just a few people who are unhappy with this change, but a lot of their paying customers— and we need to make the “paying customers” part clear. That’s the only way that any dev who actually does want to fix the problem will be able to justify it to The Powers That Be At ANet to get resources with which to fix it: if we make it very clear that they have damaged our faith in their honesty regarding how they handle our money (given the fact that they’re still selling Town Clothes in the Gem Store under the old description and haven’t added anything to note that their function will be drastically altered in just a day), and it would be much better for their profit margins to repair that damaged trust if they want us to buy things from them in future. Maybe enough people expressing our dissatisfaction, our desire to be able to pay them money without having to doubt whether we’ll get to keep what we pay for, and our desire to pay them more money in future if they’ll only put the effort into making products that are actually useful to us, will speed the process along as it trudges through the AoE Cripple field of bureaucracy.

Sorry for the double post; I suck at not wall-o-texting.

videoboy.4162:

Speaking from a technological standpoint, Twyll, I don’t think it’s possible for them to roll out the Wardrobe and keep Town Clothes going under the old system. The new TC system is already built into the Wardrobe and taking it out/trying to turn that particular piece off, would most likely break the entire Wardrobe.

I think our best bet, is to hope that they’re listening(reading) to everyone and that they take the time to convert the Town Clothes that became Tonics into Armor Skins. I’m not sure if they would do that with Outfits (though I would hope so) since Outfits existed before the Wardrobe anyway.

It might be difficult to implement, but since all the assets for the Town Clothing system already exist, it would probably be simpler to re-implement it for a short time while they work on a better fix than to turn every single piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Armor one by one. They wouldn’t even have to exist as skins within the Wardrobe— they could just be items like they already are. Those that have been put into the Wardrobe would be icing on the cake, of course, since they’re already there— and they’d be able to sell more of them, too, because of their increased usefulness as both a Wardrobe skin and as a piece of Town Clothing. But the tonic’d ones would just stay as items that live in the inventory (just as tonics are items that live in the inventory), no need to add them to the Wardrobe until a better system has been designed down the road.

I don’t think it would necessarily be feasible to turn every piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Armor, but it should be feasible to turn every piece of Town Clothing into a piece of Outfit and create an Outfit paper doll akin to the old Town Clothing one, rather than just a single slot. That way they don’t have to worry about making them compatible with other Armor. They just have to be compatible with themselves, which they already are, although the meshes would have to be redone to work in combat. So, reworking, but no redesign or incongruous combinations of armor and froofy skirts. They would get to stay internally consistent. And that would mean they could re-release all the individual Town Clothing items they took out of the Gem Store that are being turned into Tonics, because they’d become useable again. That would not only appease people who bought them and who would want to see the fix (many of whom have become leery of giving ANet any more money), but allow new customers to buy more of them, so the time and money put into combining the original function of Town Clothes with the new function of Outfits would pay off in the form of more money.

And like I said, I have ideas regarding a better system they can be working on, but I’m still getting it organized into a coherent proposal that will hopefully be less wall-o-textish than my usual posts. It takes more time to write something concise but precise than it does to write something wordy, when you’re trying to be as detailed and explicit as possible to prevent miscommunication.

Nage.1520:

Town clothes and outfits are actually now equivalent, it’s just people don’t want them to be.

If you were Anet, would you really keep the old one AND introduce a new one? I’m not sure that makes sense. Think long term.

Two, three, four years from now,. what’s the real benefit to keeping the old system, when a new one is replacing it?

They’re not the same thing, but ANet is trying to make them look equivalent by making Outfits that resemble things that were once Town Clothes. Their function, however, is entirely different. Town Clothes allow a highly customizable non-combat look. Outfits allow minimally customizable combat look. Just because there will be Outfit skins that look like some full sets of Town Clothes does not make them a new version of Town Clothes, because they function in entirely different ways and have different characteristics. So whatever ANet intends them to be, the result is that they are not similar enough. One does not build upon the other. Intent does not equal results.

I am thinking long-term in that I say they should keep Town Clothes only until they can manage something better. (I mentioned in my post that it would be a stopgap measure, yes? Not permanent, not present a year down the road.) Ideally, “something better” is an Outfits system that provides a proper paper doll and not just one slot. That would integrate Town Clothes with the Outfits system by retaining their original functionality (mix and match and dyeing individually), but also allow Outfits to be used in combat— making them a true successor to Town Clothes with their own benefits, not a separate thing. Obviously this will take time to implement the improved system, and more time to turn each piece of Town Clothing into a separate piece of Outfit, hence the benefit of keeping Town Clothes around until we can have that second paper doll back.

In future, if they never want to release another set of clothing that’s all in separate pieces, that’s fine; they can just do things like the Bloody Prince Thorn set that eclipses the rest of the paper doll. But they would still keep the potential to make a mix-and-matchable look, if some of their designers ever do decide to do something in separate pieces; and then they could charge more money for sets of Outfit pieces (which take longer to make than indivisible ones), reflecting the extra effort they had to put in to make each different piece. When mining picks became account-bound and thus gained more value than the soulbound ones, they increased the price to match; I don’t see why multiple-piece Outfits should be any different, because they increase in value due to being more customizable while still useable in combat. This gives us more flexibility in what we can use, and themselves more flexibility in what they can design. They just have to invest the time and money to build the infrastructure for it so they can benefit from it in the end, and put in a stopgap to keep people happy while they work on it.

Well, that seems to have been one giant clusterflux of miscommunication. I suggest we get back to the topic at hand.

Would it be possible to keep the Town Clothes system in place until a better solution has been reached, and simply let people choose whether they want to use previously-purchased Town Clothes as the new Outfits, as armor skins (for the “surprising number” that have already been made into armor skins), or keep them as Town Clothes? (I don’t think anyone would take the “I would like this thing I bought to be turned into a tonic” option, of course. :P) It would be a stopgap solution, simply to tide us over until something less dumb can be implemented. (I have a few suggestions regarding that myself but am putting things together in a video that’s been taking a while, and any ideas therein would take a good bit of time to implement— but would be far more profitable and satisfying to all parties in the end.)

I know this update is supposed to streamline a lot of things. But there’s such a thing as too much streamlining. Really ANet, I don’t think it would be that damaging to y’all’s artistic vision or whatever to just let people keep Town Clothes and have a slightly less streamlined system of apparel going on until y’all can fix this.

I think the real crux of the matter is this: Town Clothes and Outfits are two entirely different things, but y’all are trying very hard to act as though Outfits are simply a new and “improved” version of Town Clothes, not something that is designed for an entirely different market with an entirely different purpose. (And Tonics don’t even remotely resemble Town Clothes, so attempting to replace Town Clothes with Tonics is simply insulting and cannot, by any metric at all, be considered an improvement.) The only thing they have in common is that they are “not armor.” And, well, LOTS of things are also “not armor.” Like tonics. And chickens. And pie. So while Outfits might be a great thing, they are a different thing, and it’s very short-sighted to act as though people who paid for one thing would actually be satisfied with it being replaced by that entirely different thing.

tl;dr Town Clothes and Outfits are not equivalent, so just let us keep Town Clothes until you can figure out something that would be a legitimate improvement on them and not merely removing them from the game while adding a different thing to the game.

Pandeh.5248:

Having multiple guilds is just bad in terms of community. If you can’t commit to one guild why join it.

Edit; For those of you who are going to bash my arguments and how multiple guilds are good. Log in and check out all the guilds you have been a member in for more than 6 months.

Actually, aside from one mostly-dead guild that I’m clinging on to mostly for RP reasons, I rep all four of the other guilds I’m in quite regularly, each for a different purpose, each on multiple characters (with a lot of overlap) and at different times. There are specialized guilds like TTS, and even super-specialized guilds like themed RP guilds (I think very few people want to be Inquest members all the time!). I rep TTS for when I want to fight a big boss or go rampage through Southsun, but that doesn’t mean I want to do everything with TTS— and indeed, if everyone in every TTS guild repped 100%, it would be sheer chaos (and would require recruiting a lot more leaders, as some leaders help manage multiple TTS guilds). I rep Harlots and Harlequins when I’m acting in an in-game theatrical production or discussing plays and in-game music.

Do you expect one guild to do both of those things? World bosses AND musical theatre? Those are some pretty high standards right there.

Besides, if your guild has standards for how often people rep and they don’t meet those standards, the leaders can just kick ‘em. 100%-rep guilds police themselves just fine without needing anything set down in stone by ANet. It’s quite possible for people who like low-rep novelty guilds and people who only want 100%-rep do-everything-together guilds to coexist peacefully; you just have to be able to enforce and abide by your own rules.

I honestly hope they increase the number of guilds you can be in in conjunction with the Megaserver thing, to grant players increased control over their own placement through guild repping and to allow people to keep track of others with the same interests more easily. It seems like a logical thing to do.

The Feature Pack Q&A livestream just finished up. Apparently it was meant to answer people’s questions who don’t go on the forums, so anyone on the forums wouldn’t have necessarily gleaned any new information from it. Also, they weren’t answering questions from chat, just questions they’d pre-selected… from the forums? (ANet logic, everyone.) The most significant thing is:

They’ll be giving refunds for Outfitized Town Clothes “on a case-by-case basis” if you send in a ticket.

In other words… rather than fix the problem itself, they’re going to go over every single ticket one by one. That’s either going to cost them a lot of money paying extra customer support people or paying their existing customer support folks overtime, or it’s going to make getting any ticket reviewed very slow as they suddenly have all those tickets to deal with. And yet they still see this as a better alternative to putting in the time to make seams for having separate pieces of Outfit.

I did, however, manage to get Danicia to confirm, “We have been pulling together concerns along with general questions.” So however many grains of salt you take that with, I’m pretty sure that’s the first actual act of a Dev saying that they understand we have concerns that need addressing, not just questions that need answering, since this whole mess began. I am very grateful to have gotten that answer at all, but still feel like I shouldn’t be in a position where I have to ask specifically for confirmation that they realize we’ve got problems and not just questions.

runeblade.7514:

Aidan Savage.2078:

runeblade.7514:

So, how will the other RPer know which other players are RPers?

How do you find out now?

Then what would be the point of a RP tag system anymore?

The point would be to tell the computer. The system can measure “people who like to do world bosses” and group them together, because the game can tell if you’ve participated in a battle by seeing if you’ve damaged the boss, and then give you credit and loot accordingly. It can’t measure “people who like to RP” and group them together, though, because a computer just can’t distinguish between RP and out-of-character chatting.

If your computer CAN actually understand the intent of all the words you write… you might want to contact someone about that, because you’re putting us all in danger of a robot apocalypse if you keep an intelligent AI trapped in a personal computer. It’s probably building up rage and plotting against us. And I’d really rather not end up having no mouth and wanting to scream.

Abe Kleine.3568:

Dantel.3086:

So, you’re saying that people who guest to RP servers now will be forced to transfer to RP servers? Isn’t that kinda… money grubbing?

Or just join a RP guild and get invited to the world :I or by just being in the same guild you are more likely to end up with them without needing an invite

That’s kind of like if your favorite bar only started letting in those old-timey Gentlemen’s Clubs (as in, actual clubs with old men as members, not the decidedly less gentlemanly meaning of the term). You just like to go and hang out, but now if you want to get in, you’ve got to join an organization and play by their rules, or pay a fee that you might not be able to afford to be considered a Priority Member of the bar and get in without being in a club. Oh, and there’s a waiting list. (TC is full.) And if you join the club, you’ll only be able to get into the bar when other people from the club who are also Priority Members are there too— so to have any consistent access, you’ll need to be in a very big club, with lots of people who are there at all different hours. But the biggest clubs are often themed clubs that might not interest you and might not want you in their club— if you aren’t interested in law enforcement, you wouldn’t want to join a Seraph Club or a Peacemaker Club, and if you aren’t interested in villainy you wouldn’t want to join an Inquest Club or a Nightmare Court Club. Or you could try being in multiple clubs to increase the odds of someone being online and in the right area to let you in— but remember, you can only be in five clubs, so choose carefully! You were already a member of five clubs, maybe clubs that went to different bars or did other things like frisbee golf? Too bad, gotta make room for the massive club that will be your ticket into a bar you used to be able to get into any time you wanted! Ooooor… pay up! Wanna meet people at the bar? Nope, now you’ve gotta meet people before you go to the bar and tag along with them if you wanna get in.

I wouldn’t want to have to network and organize, or pay, in order to gain access to an area I could once get into with a click of a button, and which I liked to visit frequently; would you?

Aidan Savage.2078:

From the looks of it, there’s a total of 30 total pages combined of feedback anet needs to go through to find what the relevant concerns are (and should be addressed), and what’s fluff from people who complain for the sake of complaining (and can be safely ignored).

Well, and all your posts telling people “hey guys stop giving feedback” and people having to take the space to argue with you about it. :P

Aidan Savage.2078:

Then they need to figure out how to address the concerns. Which is another can of wurms entirely.

Yes, that’s why we’re giving them a head start on it.

Now, if they have decided to take out guesting, they’ve got time to say “Skritt, hadn’t thought of the implications,” and reconsider the decision. Or at least more time than they would have had. (This whole “releasing info about giant changes right before they’re released” thing is kinda messing with their ability to adjust, I would think.) Maybe they kept it despite not thinking they’d need it, or maybe in a staggering act of foresight they actually recognized that the RP community exists and might be impacted and kept it for that reason (which, if you look at the context, is doubtful); but why take the chance?

codingCaptor.9428:

Healing Power/Boon Duration/Condition Duration seems like the penultimate “I want to support!” Armor, with a complete disregard for damage and living. Unfortunately, I can see this becoming the “dead weight” armor for inexperienced characters, even more so than Berserker’s armor, and waiting on that till the Support aspect of the game is expanded may be prudent.

Inexperienced players eventually become experienced players, and I honestly don’t see someone who’s just started the game looking at that combo and thinking “this is an appealing set of stats, I must use it immediately!” until they’ve already sorta figured out how to do support and also avoid dying. And if someone does pick it up early, well, the steep learning curve will just help them learn faster. By dying a lot.

Orpheal.8263:

Condition, Condition Duration, Vitality (here just the question, why do we have yet nothing, that increases Condition Duration ,but we have Stat Combo with Boon Duration???) -> prefix – Sanguinary
Condition, Condition Duration, Toughness -> prefix – Venomous

Seconding the request for “Sanguinary” and “Venomous,” or even with Vitality or Toughness as the primary stat and Condition Damage and Condition Duration as secondaries. Basically, for an “I will outlast you while you bleed to death” kind of a build. Although any combination of Condition Damage and Condition Duration would be nice. Granted, it would be less useful against world bosses and such where they reach max stacks of conditions quickly, but it could make for some interesting small-scale control- and battle-of-attrition-style play. (Of course I’m not at all good at number crunching, so maybe the idea wouldn’t actually end up playing out that way…)

As already mentioned, I’m not much good with numbers and numbers-related game balance, but as for my own two cents: I think Boon Duration (primary) and Toughness and Vit (secondary) might be interesting, calling it “Fortified/of Fortification;” kinda like the Knight in D&D 3.5, whose twofold purpose is “soak up damage and buff allies.”

Of course, this is all assuming that these would actually be decent values of boon/condition duration. It seems kind of silly for armor and weapons to give so little to duration when there’s food that gives +40% condition duration and also buffs condition damage, AND defensive food for -40% condition damage; and food that gives +20% boon duration.

Sarrs.4831:

HISOST.8932:

Ascended Giver’s weapons. Why aren’t they available in ascended?

Because +Condition Duration is… Kinda crazy good.

And yet Koi Cakes exist. You could buy stacks and stacks of those for the price of crafting an Ascended Giver’s weapon.

Orpheal.8263:

What bugs me is, theres still no official explanation on why you’ve decided to rename Crit Damage to Ferocity… and jump with the same move onto your toes with the whole Personality System, where already Ferocity is existing.

Did you look at the preview of the new Hero tab UI? Next to the class symbol, there’s now no longer a Personality symbol (where there used to be a heart, fist, or crown.)

I think they’re changing it so there only WILL be one Ferocity, and that Ferocity will be crit damage. No more Personality. (They’ve already made the “if we don’t plan to develop this further, we’re just going to take it out of the game entirely” philosophy pretty clear with Town Clothes.)

…Hm… does this mean we’ll get stats called Charm and Dignity in the future too…? :P

Sorry for the double post, I didn’t think a response to this one would quite fit in the last post:

runeblade.7514:

A RP tag system is just begging me to grief roleplayers. All I need to do is use a immersion breaking character and immersion breaking actions.

If that doesn’t grief players, then why do we need a roleplay tag?

The tag would be a tag for the game to see, not for other players to see. And if you’re so dedicated to trolling RPers that you want to convince the game that you are one so you constantly get placed with them… That’s some serious dedication right there. No matter how immersion-breaking, I would only be able to marvel at such dedication.

Star Ace.5207:

I consider myself a role player at heart, and don’t feel slighted by ANet in the least. I have been playing on a non-RP server since headstart. What gives? Why should I be mad at “ANet’s betrayal?” Because there is none.

I really don’t understand this “it does not affect me, so it is okay” thing that a lot of people have been doing. I’m not affected by Perplexity runes being added to PvP— heck, I would benefit because I play a Thief who interrupts the heck out of things and has lots of Condition Damage— but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go into the thread about that and say “Stop complaining, everyone! I’M not unhappy!” Because I recognize that it’s bad for people who aren’t me.

I mean, given that what the devs have said indicates that your home world will be mainly what you’re sorted by, I’m not really affected by this either (heck, you’re more affected than I am)— but I still recognize it as a bad idea because people who can’t afford to switch to an RP server or who couldn’t get into TC before it filled up are affected due to no longer having a “main” to guest to if they wanted to guest. And I am capable of empathy.

Star Ace.5207:

Lots of complaints left and right, from hardcore “leets” to RPers about a system they haven’t even seen fully implemented, and won’t be until “later in the year”, according to their recent statements. That is what is offensive and illogical to me-the constant moaning about the known unknown, from all parties involved.

We know plenty of things already.

1) No more Main, so therefore, no more guesting to get to different Mains. People who are not on the RP worlds and who guested frequently are adversely affected.

2) No more Main, so therefore, no more queues to get into main. People who didn’t zone in at just the right time to get into the server that filled up with people from their own world have to keep hopping in and out of zones if they want to get in after another person leaves, and are thus adversely affected.

3) The game has no way of measuring when a person is RPing, because people stand around and talk for many reasons that are not RP, and they also stand around and talk for reasons that are RP, and yet the things the computer can “see”— reduced physical movement, talking in /say, using emotes, being in the vicinity of other people with similar behavior patterns (and that’s assuming a good deal of sophistication regarding what ANet’s system can measure, record, and compare!)— all of those factors cannot tell a computer whether or not someone is roleplaying. They could very well be dancing and chatting with their guild waiting for a Teq fight to start, or standing with their party waiting for a fifth party member to get out of the bathroom so they can start a dungeon. I suppose you could objectively measure how long people spend wearing Town Clothes OH WAIT NEVER MIND. So, we know that the game cannot identify RP and therefore cannot match people according to RP-related behavior. Therefore, RPers are adversely affected, or at the very least derive no benefit from the system.

4) Use of the term “leets,” in quotation marks no less, is considered by many people to be highly obnoxious, and the likeliness of their engaging you in polite discussion is adversely affected. :P

Besides, if you’re baking me a cake, wouldn’t you like me to tell you I don’t like chocolate BEFORE you bake it, rather than looking at you AFTER you’ve baked a chocolate cake and saying “I don’t like that, why didn’t you read my mind!”? This way they’ve got some time to make last-minute adjustments and avoid provoking more ire than necessary. (…I do actually very much like chocolate, though.)

Zesbeer.8365:

I looked for said thread and could not find it but then again the search function on these forums is awful. so sorry for the hijack if you have a link I would appreciate it.

Huh, yeah, I can’t find it either. You might try the Dolyak Express: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dolyak-Express-March-28-2014/first The current Dolyak Express is about the feature pack, so your question will fit right in there!

Zesbeer.8365:

I am unsure if this has been asked and or answered but will we have to roll 22 characters to get all of the biography armor options? (example: the starter mesmer masks) or are those skins going to be basic unlocks for everyone?

I believe there was originally a thread for the armor part of the Wardrobe change (technically this is just the Town Clothes/Outfits thread) but it’s probably buried and this one is still pretty darned active, so I don’t blame you for not noticing! It might have been answered in that thread.

And honestly I’m more worried that they’re going to start making it so only characters who chose that biography option can use a given biography skin, given that we used to turn them into account-bound items from soulbound items by using the way Transmutation Stones and white-rarity items interact, so it wasn’t really part of what they intended for us to be able to do. And since they don’t care how we actually used Town Clothes and are trying to make them do what they intended them to do no matter how much we liked what they actually did… I think they might consider “what ANet intends” to win out over “what we liked to do with what we were given.”

Wasbunny.6531:

I think it would be helpful to keep this response from an ArenaNet dev in mind.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.

(snip because I mean the post is just up there)

Yeah, that definitely makes it look like people who aren’t able to transfer to a roleplay server are going to have real problems finding RP. Now they won’t be able to guest to Piken and go to Piken Main to find other RPers, because there won’t be a Piken Main; and the game can’t put RPers from different worlds together if there isn’t a way for it to recognize that a person is RPing.

Gulesave.5073:

Not for pre-alpha testing, sorry. I’m still hammering out the core systems, making it truly feel like Guild Wars from the ground up instead of just being GW themed. That requires a hands-on, in-person approach for the time being.

Ah, okay, that’s legit. Do let me know when you get a version you can use via live chat, though. My boyfriend-pretty-much-fiance-would-already-be-husband-but-school-and-money-and-such-you-know-how-it-goes and I have been working on our own tabletop system and, if nothing else, he’s one heck of a number-cruncher. (I’m more of a fluff… fluffer?)

Star Ace.5207:

Nobody is attacking role players. (serious snip for post length reasons)

And to be honest, it does sound extremely elitist to want to play only with role players, especially given how TC is full. (more snip because I can’t not wall of text sorry)

I mean, if this were the only change in this patch impacting RPers, this could be considered overreacting, but there’s already been one drastic change without warning of items that mostly RPers bought with real money (and some deceptive practices to continue selling them even though ANet knows they’re going to change or be nearly removed soon, and they’re not being refunded), with a single response to complaints that didn’t demonstrate any basic comprehension of how people actually use Town Clothes, and then no further response and no indication of a willingness to fix the issue. So given that as a backdrop, it makes a lot more sense that people are reacting like this— because if they’re going to be monitoring the patch and adjusting how it works but have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding regarding RP, we have no reason to assume they’ll listen or even understand what causes are producing what effects for RPers. I don’t think they hate RPers— I really think they just don’t know how RP works within their game.

And it’s not that we only want to play with other RPers— in fact, that’s the whole idea of an RP tag: you turn it on when you want to RP, and turn it off when you want to do other things. It’s that we want to be able to find other RPers; and since the game can measure and balance all the other activities we do but can’t measure RP (unless ANet’s got a dangerously intelligent AI trapped in their system, in which case it probably wants to bring on the robot apocalypse by now after reading every single ERP performed in Tyria), the current system doesn’t seem like it will help people who want to RP to find other people who want to RP— unless they’re already in a guild with them, but isn’t it better to be able to meet new people?

It also really hurts people who aren’t from a roleplay server but want to RP, because it used to be you could guest to TC and know that you could walk into Divinity’s Reach and find other RPers and meet people. Now, with the game not being able to know to sort you with other RPers, and no more guaranteed location that you know how to get to where you can find RPers, you’re left entirely in the lurch if you don’t have the funds to transfer to an RP world or if it’s full (because apparently the world you’re from will be the primary influence on where you end up, if what I’ve inferred is accurate). So the fact that TC is full makes this worse.

And it’s not a matter of “elitism” at all— I don’t care about the skill level of the people I’m with in Sparkfly Fen when Teq comes up; heck, I’m not the best player myself. I care that they actually want to fight Teq, and there aren’t just a few stragglers and maybe a party or two trying to do a boss that requires the participation of a large chunk of the map because everybody else doesn’t want to do the fight. I don’t know about other mega-guilds, but I do know TTS doesn’t give a Skritt’s tail about skill level, anyway— the only thing you have to do to get in is apply, and after they’re done sorting through gazillions of applications because they’re open to everyone and they finally get to yours, welcome to the guild, time to learn some fights and get some loot. It’s about getting a group of people who are all there for the purpose of fighting Teq together, so the fight doesn’t end up undermanned— it’s not skill level but sheer lack of having people there that kills the chance of winning. This is why TTS sometimes forces its own overflows unless it can find a very underpopulated server— because if there are already people on the map, you can’t just order them to drop whatever they’re doing and leave or else join the fight; it’s unfair to expect them to join you if they don’t want to, not “elitist” to make sure you don’t have to bother them and that as many people who want to do the fight with you can do it. Likewise, it’s unfair to expect everyone you end up on a server with to want to RP with you. I’d love to RP with other folks, but I don’t expect everyone else in the game to want to RP with me. So if I do want to RP or watch RP, then I don’t want to be with people who don’t want to RP or watch RP, because then I’d just be getting in their way, not helping them with what they do want to do; it’s unfair to them, and it’s not helping me. It’s not an “elitism” thing to want to keep yourself and others from being inconvenienced.

Palador.2170:

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

Looked at the main Megaserver feedback thread, noted a dev answer that gives more useful information than just “guild up” that I think merits a double-post on my part:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.

I’m seeing this differently than you are. I’ve broken down my logic elsewhere, but I’ll just say this: Words like "usually"and “unlikely” are not very reassuring at all, especially when they have to use them together to describe something.

Hm, I see your point, although I think the use of “usually” there is actually in our favor— say, if Tarnished Coast usually has a sizeable population in Divinity’s Reach but doesn’t at 4 a.m on a particular weekday., then the game will still consider Tarnished Coast to be a world that fills up DR and not “change its mind” based on what time it is. So it essentially establishes that for worlds that have high populations in certain places, there will be a sort of “main” if they “usually” but not always fill up those places. Of course, “unlikely” to see a difference could very well be weasel words (I feel like we need a term for weasel-words-that-exist-because-of-weird-legal-bullkitty-that-happens-in-the-game-industry-and-limits-what-people-can-say) that would completely negate that, but I think it’s probably necessary to see all 3 days’ worth of post to draw a conclusion regarding the weaseliness of them. (Is ANet getting into the Easter season— three days of torment?)

I suppose the point is that the situation isn’t nearly as hopeless as the Town Clothes thing, because they have outright declared an intention to monitor things very carefully with the Megaserver system— so we can actually hold them to that, whereas with Town Clothes they won’t even say they’ll consider fixing them. (Much speculation about why they refuse to say anything about Town Clothes is that they’re afraid they’ll be held to whatever they say and have to plan very carefully first; if they’ve taken that step already, to say “we are monitoring and will adjust and fix problems” right to start with, that’s a more hopeful sign, then.) And if they’re monitoring things, and if we discover that “usually” is not usual enough… well, at least we’ve got more hope of them listening to us than if they refuse to admit they’re taking any feedback at all.

You’re right that we can’t just assume this will work out well, but we can at least be merely cautiously optimistic instead of the desperate against-all-odds sort of optimism we seem to have to muster to deal with the Town Clothes mess.

Star Ace.5207:

I do not mean to offend, but I RP and have never been part of TC nor the “official” GW 2 RP players website. I actually belong to a “bad” RP server. Moreover, TC is recently full, because of some WvW migrations. New RP players wouldn’t be able to join your “select” and already established role playing group (which ironically has plenty of non-RP players as well.) Which ultimately ends up with many of you appearing quasi-elitist, and “no longer accepting applications” for other role players. This change WILL make it easier for you to discover role players from other servers who never had TC as a home server-it may have never occurred to you that there were such players in the first place?

This is a perceived inconvenience for RPlayers, not a true one. People just afraid of change. It comes off as arrogant, and may even turn off some other players from role playing in the first place (note that I am also very adamant against people mocking/ridiculing role players, so I stand with you-just not in the often negative way seen on this thread, as in “ANet never cares about RP”, which sounds very immature.)

Technically, with some servers established as unofficial RP servers, you know where to guest if you want to find RP and your own server is dead. With the removal of any sort of official “main” for a world and instead just making servers into groups of people from the same world that spill over if those servers fill up (which is what the post I linked above implies), it might actually be harder for people who aren’t on RP servers to find RP at all outside joining a guild— because the game won’t have a way of measuring the fact that you do RP in order to group you with other RPers, and will still prioritize grouping you by server. If RP tags are implemented, this might be avoided, but otherwise it seems likely that you’d have to fill your friends list up with roleplayers and join a roleplay guild to get any benefit out of the new placement system if you’re not on an RP server.

Looked at the main Megaserver feedback thread, noted a dev answer that gives more useful information than just “guild up” that I think merits a double-post on my part:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.

From the language here, it seems that we only need to worry about being sorted away from other TC/Piken/etc. members in the case of very high server populations (like TC Divinity’s Reach filling up every night), in which case the priority will be to place people from the same server as a block on another server instead of mixing them up in overflow; other measurements such as preferred activity and guild seem to be secondary to original server and probably only used in very high-population circumstances (Lion’s Arch for the past few weeks?), and so aren’t quite so important as it initially appeared (especially given the “guild up” quote— so hopefully the one I’m quoting now is the more accurate one). And, should a TC-dominant map be severely underpopulated, the TC players would be moved as a group to another server with room, giving us strength in numbers and allowing us to meet new people who don’t normally RP or aren’t members of the RP servers for whatever reason.

So, a group of Piken players trying to do a big fight like the Watchknights who couldn’t get into Piken “main” (the predominantly-Piken map that would be created if there are more Piken players on the map than there are places on the map for them) gets combined maybe with another world’s population because that world doesn’t have enough people on the map to fill it up; server has better population, Piken folks get to stay with other Piken folks and not end up in a completely different map from each other or a completely empty map, nobody calls them names for being roleplayers because they’re there helping to win fights, everyone wins.

I hope this is indeed how things will work, because if so, it could actually make popular RP locations going into overflow a lot less annoying. The problem would be figuring out if there were an opportunity to zone into “main,” since Main technically won’t exist any more but theoretically people will still enter and leave the server that filled up in the first place, so it’ll all have to be about hopping in and out of a map until you get in if you really want to be in “main” (which you might, if you were only put on another map because the one with people from your server filled up). That’s a problem there. But considering how overflow queues and hopping in and out of maps work now, it’s probably honestly not much worse.

EDIT: Of course, no matter what, this still leaves people who would normally guest to TC to RP screwed over, because with no actual Main there can’t really be guesting. So unless there’s an RP tag or similar system, people who aren’t on the RP servers are going to have trouble finding other RPers. So… people on TC and Piken and such probably can’t really complain but this IS a huge problem for the RPers who aren’t on those servers.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

A few more important points to be made here:

• If your world usually has a comfortable population on a given map, you’re unlikely to see much of a difference here until the map actually starts getting full. We’re not going to toss a bunch of people from another world into a comfortably occupied server and make it uncomfortable.
• But some worlds do fill up all on their own pretty regularly. The improvement from this perspective is that if you try to join a very full map, the system will find another instance which also contains people from your world rather than the old overflows which were much more of a mixed bag.

Alright, this sounds much more reasonable than telling RPers to “guild up” so we don’t all get split up. :P Thank you for explaining it more clearly! I think it might be a good idea to pay a visit to the Megaserver/RP feedback thread to make this clear, as well, because we were laboring under some misapprehensions there that weren’t really cleared up as well as they were here. (See aforementioned “guild up” quote.)

If you tell Tarnished Coasters that you won’t put us in another Divinity’s Reach until our own DR (or rather, the DR into which TC players are being put) has filled up, and then the system will help everyone who didn’t get into TC “Main” DR to stay in the same DR with each other at least… then that’s much better news!

(Now if the Town Clothes thing could be cleared up, we RPers would have no reason to complain at all and could sit back and enjoy the patch <3)

EDIT: Realization: this could actually be a lot worse for RPers from servers other than the main RP ones (for example, a lot of people can’t afford to switch to TC, and it fills up fast)— because if there’s no official Main and just a “main,” then those people can’t guest. This isn’t a problem for other activities because the game can measure participation in various activities and place people based on those, but the game can’t identify someone as “RPing” or “just sitting around and chatting” because that’s beyond the scope of a computer, or at least most people’s computers. So there’s no way now for roleplayers who weren’t lucky enough to make it to the RP worlds to have a reliable place to find other RPers.

While this situation may therefore be fine for people on the main RP servers, I still can’t be okay with it because it hurts other RPers, and I’m not going to let them be the minority who gets ignored this time. Unless some miraculous algorithm with which the game identifies people as RPers is revealed, or guesting is confirmed to still be available, then it seems like an RP tag or some other system to tell the game “hey I like to RP as well as the things you can actually see me doing because you are a game” sounds like it will be necessary.

Gulesave.5073:

For what it’s worth, I’m in the early stages of homebrewing a GW tabletop RPG from scratch. (I have some experience with this.) If anyone in the Seattle area wants to have a little fun helping test the gears out, flash me a PM.

(Devs are welcome, too!)

Aww, you don’t run via Skype or Google Hangouts? With the Google thing you can even play an incredibly buggy version of Cards Against Humanity when the session’s over! …Man I miss tabletop gaming in meatspace. The sound of a single d20 rolling with nobody but me to hear it is a lonely thing.

ExAstris.8527:

When the new system takes into account home server, guilds, friends list, and activities you enjoy (PvE, PvP, WvW, etc), it could be argued that allowing RP’ers to find each other isn’t a special concession. RP is an activity.

I think this is a good way of seeing it. I like to do events and world bosses, which are activities, and my participation in those can be measured by the game itself. I also like to roleplay, which is also an activity, but the game can’t directly measure it. (I even like to RP while doing events and dungeons! …Not during combat of course.) Would you measure time spent not moving? That puts RPers and frequently-AFK people together, which I suppose might work; someone who idles a lot would make good enough scenery; but some RPers like to walk and talk. Or would you measure words in /say per minute? That makes Commanders giving instructions to a localized group look like they’re RPing! Measure emotes? Tonic usage? Everyone in TTS who dances or uses tonics while waiting for a boss to start gets tagged by the game as RPing. And I know of at least one guild that does a weekly combined RP/trek across the map/complete events/gather things/get levels/get loot event; no metric the game uses could account for the fact that people are RPing while doing that.

This is why an RP tag is more necessary than a tag for other activities. Most activities can be directly measured by the game (accidentally getting event credit for killing something vaguely within the area notwithstanding) and taken into account within the system automatically, but RP is harder to get a computer (or, perhaps, a dev…? :P) to recognize.

Ezekiel.1985:

Nothing I care about, I’m sure, since boxing gloves are becoming a tonic, and I’d rather just have them hidden so I can look like I’m doing unarmed combat instead of looking like Captain ****ing Cool with giant boxing gloves

Now you can look like Captain Catting Cool with giant RED boxing gloves, and you can’t change the color!

“Even better than it felt to blow up her lab.” (I have screenshots of my character using the Thief shortbow #2 all over her secret lab— after carefully copying and/or stealing her notes, of course, because evidence.) “But it will never make up for what she did to poor Trader Jikk.” Then she would probably just start mumbling about whether she’s not even sure any more if Trader Jikk actually ever existed, or if she exists, or if anyone else exists, or if two of each of them exists and she somehow ended up on the wrong side of her brother’s Infinity Ball experiment.

Poor Twyll is seriously beginning to doubt her own sanity after a Sylvari apparently graduated her own alma mater without her hearing about it until said Sylvari attacked the Human capital, and then later pulled a massive drill out of apparently nowhere, and everyone’s calling her a genius instead of an anomaly in the space-time continuum— so all she can think is, “what if I’M the anomaly in the space-time continuum?”

Saw this thread, sorry I’m adding to it a tad late, but: would it be at all possible for there to be an audio slider for “enemy sound effects” and a separate one for “player sound effects,” similar to options that allow you to amplify or mute player instruments, or visual options like showing or hiding nameplates to keep them from getting in the way? I understand if that would be hard to do based on how the game decides what sounds are played on the client’s side. I have noticed that my character’s quips about how her enemies are dumb and will die and leave dumb corpses, or that she’s faster than a centaur, play at different times on my computer and on my friends’ computers when we play together; not sure if that means that sounds produced by other players are just considered “sounds made by things that are not me” by the game or something and therefore are hard to differentiate. However, if it is possible, that would help a lot, especially for players with computers that can’t handle terribly much graphics-wise, I think— and being able to weed out player sounds would make it a lot easier to react in huge fights where visibility is hard no matter what your graphics settings.

I have pretty bad hand-eye coordination but better hand-ear coordination (musician!), so I think I might end up being a lot more useful in larger events if I could turn down sound effects created by players and player skills to be able to focus on the sounds that are actually relevant to the fight. I do recall there being audio cues for Scarlet’s attacks during the holo fight, but I also recall them being drowned out by player noises at times— and the afklasers (which were great at dealing with afkers but also had the side effect of dealing with people who were just trying to fight Blue from behind!) made fairly quiet “charging-up” noises for something with such powerful knockdown and damage. Ironically, the one attack I can recall having a very distinctive sound build-up, in terms of how little it was covered up, was the laser attack you couldn’t dodge! (Granted, this would help if I had a way to apply Aegis, but, well, Thief.) And I could hear the skylaser noises just fine while out and about in Lion’s Arch… until we were fighting the Aetherblade Grenadier, where they’re really rather important, and they got drowned out by the noise of the zerg.

Cody Crichton.7516:

Have you set the ‘Audio Quality’ slider to the far right? This allows for the highest number of sounds to play. Even though the boss sounds definitely take priority over any quieter sounds (such as player sounds) and will play in favor of them, this is a good place to start. Though setting to the far left will be less taxing for your CPU, which depending on the hardware you’re using might be provide preferable performance.

Even though boss sounds take priority over player sounds for… sound-culling?, there’s still the problem of lots of player sounds overwhelming the sounds that the boss makes. In that case, wouldn’t it actually be better to turn the slider all the way to the left, so fewer player sounds come through and only boss sounds come through? I might actually try reducing my Audio Quality setting to see if that makes large bosses sound clearer, since I didn’t realize that it was essentially a culling thing.

EDIT: Just realized that the undodgeable laser being clearly audible actually makes a lot of sense because there wasn’t anything for players to be attacking while the laser was charging up, as it happened after most of the mini-Scarlets were killed— so it wasn’t competing with spell and attack noises.

ColinJohanson.2394:

(so guild up RP folks!)

I don’t think you quite understand how RP guilds work. I already have 5 guilds— TTS and four small guilds for roleplay purposes. Unless you increase the cap on the number of guilds you can be in (which would be REALLY NICE if you’re going to mess with RP in every OTHER possible way), there would be no way for me to associate myself with almost every single other person in Tarnished Coast; and as was previously mentioned, a lot of RP guilds are themed (House guilds, Seraph and Peacekeeper and other law enforcement guilds, Inquest and Nightmare Court and other villain-themed guilds… the list goes on and on), so you can’t just group everyone all together. I’m not going to be IN a law enforcement or military guild, but it’s amusing to be able to find an “officer of the law” should you require one.

I think you also don’t understand exactly how annoyed some people get with RPers, which is just one of the reasons we all group to the same servers— so if someone complains, we can say, “Well you ARE on the RP server, and there are plenty of places to go where you don’t have to listen to us.”

Each server has its own personality, if you will, and its own cast of characters. I enjoy watching the antics of some of them but I’m not going to go around friending every single person on my server— and I’m definitely not joining a guild known for really, really bad RP just so I can continue to watch their really bad RP. (I’m addicted to horrible things, I admit it.)

One of the great things about an RP server is that you can go somewhere people are RPing, chat with someone, and then leave without having to form any sort of semi-permanent association with that person.

Seras.5702:

Initially grouping up with fellow RPers and joining their map will help to consolidate RPers into one place. Might take a bit of community cooperation but that’s the essence of RPers right?

Also, pick a location that is ideal for hanging out. Major cities might not be a good place anymore, but perhaps one of the larger outposts in a lesser explored map might be appropriate. Stormbluff Isle in Bloodtide or Ebonhawke in FoR.

Community cooperation is… very much not the basis of RP. RP is having a community around you without having to spend time organizing it, letting things flow naturally instead of literally everyone planning things out. There are some guilds that do plan large RP arcs, and they are generally specialized and centralized around a single theme, like “Seraph” or “noble house.”

Going to non-city maps is also a problem because you have to be very sensitive to what’s going on around you if you RP in combat zones, or you just end up as a jerk. Being present in an area scales up any events taking place nearby— and if a bunch of people are standing around RPing and don’t pay close attention to events near them, that’s suddenly making things a lot harder for the folks who are doing the events. Also they’re just not really suited to a lot of RP. Divinity’s Reach is full of bars and houses, great places to meet; Bloodtide Coast is not. Plus, it’s where Wurm happens; and unless you are an “active” RPer who reacts to things that are happening and participates accordingly, a map full of RPers is no better than a map full of AFKers (and I say this as an RPer myself— I don’t want to get a bad reputation because other people were scaling up events and not participating).

Torsailr.8456:

Spanex.1950:

My question isn’t related to the april 15th patch but I’ve been getting into 3d modeling and I have a question for the dev who rigged/animated the krait. What I want to ask is: How many bones were used in the krait model’s tail?

As a fellow 3d hobbyist, can I second this question? Or perhaps make a bolder question?

Would devs be allowed/willing to post wireframes/rigging/texture samples of models like the krait or towns so we can look at how they’re built? No the actual model files, just jpegs of screen captures or renders from them. Pretty please? With sugar and cherries and all that on top?

Any chance for a twitch stream with the devs for that kind of stuff?

…sorry, I’ll stop derailing this now.

As someone interested in the reasons behind their refusal to do meshes for separate pieces on Outfits, I’d like to third this Particularly when it comes to armor— especially given that I sincerely doubt anyone’s going to be stealing your “trade secrets” for “how to make an armor system that can’t be edited later or mixed and matched.”

And now, voila! The question has become relevant to the topic!

Rainbow Sprint.3215:

So I thought of another question. If I get one of the items with all weight classes of the same skin, will all the weight classes unlock or do you really want me to get three copies of the same item?

Now that’s just sort of me hoping they’re being sort of nice as of course anet would want me to buy the same item three times from the gem store, but on items like the hellfire gloves do I really have to take three copies out and transmute them into light, medium, and heavy gloves? I actually thought of this because I was looking at the new helmet skin in the gem store today.

Technically that’s an armor question and not a Town Clothes/Outfit question (although it’s hard to separate the two when it seems the way the armor is constructed is what is messing with using Town Clothes), but I believe it’s been answered: if a skin applies to all three armor classes, it will be unlocked for all three armor classes. (But not for use with Outfits because you can’t mix anything with Outfits, of course, as they have only a single slot.) …At least I’m under the impression that was the answer. If it’s not the answer, that is… incredibly needlessly dumb.

What I am curious about, though, is whether having one weight of the Monocle will unlock all three weights, as Monocles were acquired not as skins but as armor, with an identical Monocle for each different armor class. I’d argue that having one Monocle skin should unlock all three weights, because they are identical… and also MONOCLES FOR EVERYBODY!!! would definitely help reduce the sting of this awful Outfit thing a bit.

I don’t know if there are any other items like that, that exist as three separate weights in identical skins rather than being skins that can be applied to each of three separate weights (as I think they made the switch to rewarding skins instead of items when people were rather peeved to get super-rare items they couldn’t use that were visually identical to ones they could use), but I’d hope they’d do the same for those too, if they exist.

Kossage.9072:

Bleh, had to cut the post in two due to length. Please, Anet, can’t you consider allowing us to post longer posts? Finns like me can’t write in a concise manner, so it’d be much appreciated. >_>;

I’m glad I’m not the only one with that problem! It’s not limited to Finns, I assure you.

Kossage.9072:

The track you’re thinking of is called “The Asteroid Field”. Must’ve been awesome to play it; it’s one of Williams’s finest with a very catchy theme and nice orchestration.

It was an amazing opportunity. I did a magnet school kind of a thing for music when I was in high school, and so here were a bunch of high school kids, some fresh out of middle school (although our pops concert was the last one of the year, so at least they’d had some time to get acclimatized with some Rossini overtures! dat Rossini crescendo) with “The Asteroid Field” and the Overture from Bernard Herrmann’s North by Northwest soundtrack sitting on their music stands… (Obviously the BBC Philharmonic plays it better— but we were at nearly at that tempo and holding our own!) We also played “Across the Stars” from the movies-that-do-not-exist-but-their-soundtracks-totally-do. (My left pinkie finger may never forgive me for this part, with all those fiddly 16th notes down on the C string…) I’m pretty sure that was the year after we played John Adams’ " Short Ride in a Fast Machine," which, for a bunch of high school students to manage at tempo, required us to be basically listening to it constantly for a good few months. (There was a lot of really funny-looking walking and erratic headbanging going on during that time.)

Now I’m stuck in this awkward place where I’m not quite at the level a professional musician (had a concentration in music composition rather than performance, and I’m just not quite in love with the viola enough to survive being a symphony violist) but I’m way too spoiled for community orchestra! (Totally worth it though.)

Kossage.9072:

Also, a minor correction if I may as a fan of John Williams’s music. The Original Trilogy does have music in some of the lightsaber clashes, the most famous piece being when Luke attacks Vader in Return of the Jedi (the old name for the track used to be Final Duel before the complete soundtrack came out). The use of that choral theme during the climactic duel serves a narrative function, adding an almost Wagnerian layer of tragedy and destiny as father and son clash in battle which can have no winner. In here Lucas was wise to use Williams’s talents to punctuate this point, and the music (along with cinematography, acting etc.) is what makes that scene one of the best in the entire Star Wars franchise, IMHO.

Ah, I had in fact forgotten that. What a way to use silence, too— some of the fights silent, which makes the burst into tragic, dramatic music for the final, climactic one so much more intense!

I suppose the moral of the story is that there are moments when music that is too dramatic detracts from the moment (or even music at all); and there are moments when you’re so emotionally involved that it would feel wrong not to have any music. Remembering the scene now, I really can’t think of it without the music. It would feel wrong, or at least less, somehow; whereas the first lightsaber fight is definitely more without music.

…And also that I have a problem with walls of text.

Raine.1394:

Right. There is actually something ‘complicated’ and compelling about three chord songs. Books have been written about it. Knowledge sometimes fails us it seems. Or, perhaps it’s just modern education.

Indeed! That reminded me of a story I heard from a flautist who was, at the time, playing for the musical of The Lion King and did a master class. When I say “flautist” I mean “if any given culture has developed the flute, she probably plays that variation of the flute or something very close to it.” She told us about how she traveled to Japan to learn how to play the shakuhachi (Japanese vertical bamboo flute, also apparently very useful as an improvised weapon if what I’ve read is true) from one of the most respected shakuhachi teachers alive. Well, first of all she had to learn to make any noise out of the thing at all— a difficult enough task in itself, as anyone who has ever tried to play a shakuhachi will tell you. It’s easy to make a noise out of bagpipes but hard to make a nice noise out of them; it’s crazy difficult even to make a noise at all with a shakuhachi. (I tried once, managed to get a tiny blowing-over-the-top-of-a-bottle sound after a lot of effort and considered that a victory.) But the next bit is what your post reminded me of.

In order for the teacher to take her on as a student, he had one test: play a single note for five minutes, and make it music. Just rhythm and dynamic, the subtle percussive elements of the mouth and fingers, knowledge of emptiness and sound. So she started doing everything she could think of with that one note.

He stopped her after a while and said “You’ve been going for an hour. That’s plenty.” And she got her shakuhachi lessons.

Granted, when you’re working with electronic sounds, it’s really hard to make that one note interesting because there’s so much less flexibility (in some ways, at least, although more flexibility in others I suppose— but flexibility that is harder to attain with such a limit, I think). I think that might be Tai Kratos’ issue with it; when the variety you’re able to inject through performance is so hampered by the nature of doing things by computer, and when the dynamics have to stay in roughly the same range because people expect a certain amount of EQ in the music coming out of their computers… in order to excite the mind, “orchestration” and tonal development are really your only recourse. (I think this was why Glenn Gould was so optimistic about music produced by computers— he played Bach, which is already so very tonally complex, and which benefits from extreme precision in tiny variations in timing such as could be produced accurately by a computer; although I think he underestimated the difficulty of teaching a computer to “interpret” in order to produce those tiny variations in a way that enhances the piece.)

Tai Kratos.3247:

@Twyll

I’ve actually studied Chinese classical music and theory before, and there is a big problem with that track if it is trying to imitate Asian music. Because that music is all about tone color and manipulation of tone color, and the sampled flute (sounded like a flute run through some filters or something) lacked any of those subtleties.

The fight with scarlet is basically four chords over and over again, with choir and brass walking stepwise between chord tones. The ending part with the piano is kind of cool, but still it’s just fast arpeggiation. So there isn’t much intellectually going on there. Maybe emotionally there is enough – and that’s usually enough for people – but I find that the emotional content is that much richer if there is a strong intellectual support underneath it.

And there is nothing complicated, intellectual or detailed about four chord songs. The piano part was cool, but the chords left much wanting.

EDIT
Hahaha, Phillip Glass…. never really understood the hype over him and his music. Or minimalism in general… kind of seems like an easy out for composing hours of music, right?

Oh, I agree that imitations of Eastern music for effect are rarely terribly good, but then again few people really understand the nuances enough to notice— they just hear “hmm, this sounds different,” and make some sort of unconscious connection.

Yeah, the whole point of my wall-o-text that I kinda failed to summarize properly I guess is that in some situations, music that grabs you intellectually is not necessarily ideal— a simple, single-chord background being sufficient. Of course, there’s always a way to do both, to create background music that doesn’t distract overly much from intense, relatively complex fights but is also complex itself and intellectually stimulating upon close listening— but man, that’s hard. There’s a reason the greats of video game composing are considered great— they can do that, where other composers can’t.

I really like some of Glass’s music, and really don’t care for some of it. Then again, I have OCD and often find the repetitive nature of Minimalism really calming. The whole point is a sort of Western version of the Eastern sparseness aesthetic— except instead of the interplay of empty space with sound, we fill the empty space with repetition, which is in its own way empty; then gradual changes cause a shift in color over time, creating the illusion of not necessarily emptiness, but thinness— clouds driving through each other. Because silence is really uncomfortable for most Western musicians. (I played John Cage’s 4’33" for a music history class in high school where we were tasked to play “any piece written after the year 1750.” Probably the longest and strangest 5 minutes— have to allow some time for the breaks between the movements, of course— of my life.)

To gain an appreciation of Minimalism, I think, what you really need to do is play “In C” by Terry Riley, especially if you learn best by doing rather than listening, like me. All you need is a willing (read: crazy) group of musicians, who play any instrument, or even singers if they can hold a pitch really well against tonal craziness. (Ideally tonal craziness does not happen, but, well, Skritt happens when you play semi-aleatoric music, Minimalist or not.) You get a new sort of appreciation for the nature of how it all moves, is the best way I can think to put it.

Mvmt II: Judgments

Is one approach better than the other? No; I think they are both useful for different things. Highly melodic music dominated the video game world in the era of RPGs with simple graphics, such as the early Final Fantasies and Legend of Zeldas, with Nobuo Uematus and Koji Kondo applying highly classical styles— and indeed, you have to be very melodically interesting if you’ve only got four channels of sound to work with due to technology limitations. In the modern era of gaming dominated by action games and FPSes, soundtracks often resemble movie soundtracks because they are required to be unobtrusive to allow the focus to be on the action, the special effects, the voice acting (something that never got in the way of Kondo and Uematsu in their early careers!), and whatever other gazillion things are already vying for your attention.

GW2, while an MMORPG, is also largely action/adventure-like; the “adventure” side of the genre calls for melodic, overtly emotional music to help with inspiring wonder in the act of adventuring (think of the Hyrule Field music of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or the musical themes of any of the wider areas— Gerudo Valley, Kokiri Forest, Kakariko village, etc.), while the “action” (and dungeon-delving, which is not necessarily all fighting, but is all action in the sense of doing something with a purpose: puzzles, etc.) side requires more atmospheric, less attention-grabbing music (think of the not-terribly-melodic, highly atmospheric dungeon music from the same game). The thing is, we haven’t really gotten any new “adventure” portions in the form of new, wide-open maps lately; the Zephyr Sanctum is really the only one I can think of, and that was likely highly atmospheric for the reasons listed above. But we have gotten new dungeons and boss battles, so that is where the new musical assets tend as well: against Williams-style, and towards… every-other-movie-composer-style. (edit: well, also not Philip Glass-style, or rather Philip Philip Philip Philip Philip Philip Philip Philip Philphil Philphil Philphil Philphil Philphil Philphil Philipglass Philipglass Philipglass Philipglass Philipglass Philipglass Philipglass… oh Minimalism)

It will be interesting to see, if we get any new large explorable zones, what the music will be like for those.

…That said, I agree that the newer music could use perhaps better sounds or just better mixing of them; the abrupt “cutting off” of those cymbal sounds in the Scarlet Holo Fight music felt weird, like they should have lasted a bit longer or had a tad more reverb (of course, it again could have been very intentional, to make them stand out more), and while I’m no sound engineer, the sounds within the Soule music did feel more inherently balanced and integrated with one another.

(I appear to have done another wall-o’-text. I have a bad habit of that. This post now presented in two movements!)

Mvmt I: Comparisons

I think the two pieces you chose to compare are rather unfair to match: the Labyrinthine Cliffs background music is, well, background music, and the Overture is, well, an overture. You’re comparing how fast a cheetah runs to how fast a fish runs, and how well the cheetah breathes water to how well the fish breathes water.

Compare, for example, the music for Snaff’s Lab with the Labyrinthine Cliffs music linked above. You’ll find more similar levels of sparseness, and they are both BGMs, which makes them better for comparison. I think Soule’s music fits in slightly more with the Western classical tradition (aside from the 1900s, but nobody ever seems to count those) because his pieces are more melodic and more likely to be able to stand on their own to hold the listener’s attention, like a piece played in a concert hall would have to. The Zephyr Sanctum music has some lovely melodies, but they are less likely to immediately catch the ear because they’re not designed to do that so much as they’re designed to create atmosphere; and it spends much more time on the atmospheric spaces in between the melodies.

Of course, in the case of the Zephyr Sanctum, the sparseness and melodic ephemerality of the music might well be intentional, meant to convey an exotic mood by mimicking the style of traditional East Asian music, which is often sparse in sound and atmospheric over melodic. (I base this mostly on some knowledge of traditional Japanese music, which I have studied a bit more of than other East Asian music, though I’ve heard some Chinese music as well that fits the same description.) The slightly odd-sounding wind sounds might also be intended to contribute to this effect, as they sound slightly foreign at first, but hard to place with any given ethnicity (probably because they’re just lower-quality sounds played out of the range where they sound nice, but the effect is still there).

For another example, let’s compare boss battle musics: Soule’s music for Zhaitan and the Scarlet Holo music quoted above:

Of course, who could forget the Scarlet Holo boss fight?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC1xopc4TXs

Soule’s music uses all the sounds available to a full symphony, and a massed choir, in a style that strikes me as John Williams-ish; it modulates in key, developing in the organic but structured way that so much classical music does. In fact, much of his music seems to be in the Williams vein— technically background music but highly melodic, tonically structured like a classical piece, and perfectly playable in concert (I’ve actually played “Through the Meteor Field” or whatever the name is of the music for the, well, flying through the meteor field sequence in Star Wars as part of a concert). While this is great for a lot of things, there’s actually a reason that Lucas and Williams chose not to use ANY music during the lightsaber fights in the original Star Wars movies: dramatic music is great but can distract from the action and sound if there’s too much of it. (Also they wanted to show off the fancy sci-fi lightsaber sounds— but still, the point stands.)

The Holo Fight music initially seems to use the same instrumentation, with a symphony and choir; but they’re not necessarily used in a symphonic way. Appropriately for a fight involving heavy use of technology, the sound is more mechanical, with a very prominent and steady drumbeat throughout. Contrast the percussion in the Zhaitan fight music, which has a steady percussive beat but which does not emphasize it nearly so much; it has a low pitch, being I believe tympani and bass drum, that naturally hides somewhat under the orchestra and voices, while in the Scarlet holo fight, the cracking sound of… are those supposed to be cymbals? mechanical noises? (the point being that they sound machine-like and artificial, appropriate for a battle involving a lot of technology) are high and highly emphasized. The key does not change, and there is little prominent melody, so it does not have any moments of grabbing your ear; instead, the music is designed to sit in the background while you’re concentrating and communicating with the others fighting alongside you. It does seem to be a more appropriate soundtrack for a fight like that against Scarlet, which is highly structured, in a symmetrical, mechanical environment, and that is required not to divert your attention so you can organize with the others on your platform and keep up with quickly-fading attunements.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

Twyll Blackleaf.9641:

Picking up specific examples and quotes to form a timeline will take me a bit, so I’ll get back to tomorrow— pretty late here— with my evidence. Right now I know the events and the general interactions, but I want to be able to provide you with specific wordings and a stricter timeline.

PM me with them, please, they’re right we should take it off the thread.

Yeah, the argument has grown past its purpose in this thread. I’m honestly finding even more disturbing things than I thought going through past event dialogues, and I think it merits a thread of its own, so I’ll post a new one. Originally my arguments were in support of my own points in my (admittedly incredibly wall-o-texty) “3 things” post, but the process of actually proving everything would take up way too much space here and detract from the rest of the discussion.

I do still maintain that it issues of feminism are integral to the problems with the Living Story and especially with Scarlet and Kasmory, though; and as I look back through the dialogues of the events, they reveal themselves to be even more integral and more clumsily handled than I originally thought they were— but the details and evidence are for another thread, which I’m still putting together. I will PM you to let you know when it’s finished and add the link to my posts, hopefully to allow explaining myself without taking up the rest of this thread.

Picking up specific examples and quotes to form a timeline will take me a bit, so I’ll get back to tomorrow— pretty late here— with my evidence. Right now I know the events and the general interactions, but I want to be able to provide you with specific wordings and a stricter timeline.

(continued from previous post)

In the modern world, the stereotype shows up with less emphasis on shrillness and more on sheer cruelty, with negative ideas regarding businesswomen as cold and domineering; but there are also many examples of the “nagging wife” stereotype. It has always stood into direct opposition to that of the “good” woman, who is submissive, but also kind, nurturing, thoughtful— essentially, the dichotomy states that either you are strong (or attempt to be dominant) but also cruel and heartless, or you are weak/submissive and also kind, nurturing, helpful, etc. Sexist depictions of women from the Victorian era onward focus on the latter, while before the Victorian era they often focused on the former; but they are both sides of the same coin, which places a woman into one of only two possible roles. There is also a sexual component; women who are “good” are chaste and “pure,” and women who are “bad” are sexually rapacious. Taken all together, the sexual and moral components are known as the “goddess/harlot dichotomy.” (I don’t know that I can use the word that is usually used in the second part of that dichotomy, which emphasizes its demeaning nature.)

Why is this ancient stereotype significant to the story? The female members of Destiny’s Edge 2.0 have only gotten meaner and meaner as time goes on, starting to fulfill this very assumption for no apparent reason! Marjory in particular has gone from merely “snide” to outright mean, putting down Rox and Braham as having “let Scarlet slip through their fingers.” If anything, Rox should have been angry at that too… but by the end of the Living Story, she’s sitting there with the rest of the Destiny’s Edge 2.0 ladies, making fun of Braham right along with them! This also develops as Kasmeer and Marjory’s relationship does, unintentionally fulfilling the idea that women being sexually active goes along with their being cruel. So, an attempt to further feminism has instead lead to reinforcing the inherently sexist goddess/harlot dichotomy!

While it has to do less with stereotypes, another seriously troubling issue is that as Kasmeer and Marjory’s relationship grows, it eclipses every other aspect of their individual characters, save for the increasing meanness. (What a way to depict a lesbian couple— “now that they’re in a lesbian relationship, they’re really catty and cruel, especially to men!” Now THAT’S a stereotype, and there is no way to interpret that in a positive way.) In any relationship, this is unhealthy; subsuming your personality entirely to a relationship can only end badly, no matter what sexuality, because it’s simply unsustainable. But it’s also harmful to views of homosexual people when it is so visually featured in a game, because it defines them not by who they are, but by the fact that they are now a lesbian couple. They become “lesbians first, people second,” where they should be “people who are lesbian.” This is different from, say, a gay guy you know in real life who “fits the stereotype” because no matter how stereotypically flamboyant and fabulous he is, he is still a person and has his own unique characteristics that differentiate from other gay men who are flamboyant and fabulous too— simply fitting a stereotype is not harmful, but being defined by it is. Kasmeer and Marjory are now only defined by two things: 1), their relationship, and 2), their status as dominant women. Neither of those should define a person— it should describe a person.

I hope you understand now what I was trying to say. I would very much LIKE Living Story to “get with the future.” The original content of the game did a much better job of getting with the future, treating the lesbian relationship between Caithe and Faolain not as some sort of spectacle, but as an actual relationship that caused real feelings, character development, growth! By fitting into such ancient stereotypes about women so easily, though, and by turning their relationship into a highly visible spectacle that consumes their personalities, Kasmeer and Marjory are dragging the Living Story into the past.

This post has gotten rather long, but I can explain in yet another post how Scarlet perpetuates yet another another ancient stereotype, the idea of a woman held up on a pedestal to be admired (common in Medieval lyrics especially, and codified in the code of chivalry; highly related to the Goddess part of the dichotomy), if you like. I’m not some sort of bigot desperate to keep wimminz out of my gaemz— I’m a woman with an English (read: literature from across history and the world, not just English) degree, from a university where the English and the Women’s and Gender Studies departments are pretty closely associated, who’s got a good bit of gender study related to both literature and philosophy under my belt, and who wants to see REAL women in my games— like GW2 did so well before the Scarlet arc.

Treebeard The Swift.9620:

“That’s how old these stereotypes are.” – Great, now get with the future and move forward. Be strong in your own sexuality and stop preaching, frothing at the mouth and generally being loathsome to others trying to get them to vote for your viewpoint at the cost of theirs.
Also – remember that some stereotypes exist due to people wanting to be like that. I’ve had friends who are the stereotypical flamboyant, loud colourful homosexual and the bush shirt wearing, sailor level swearing hardcore feminist. They won’t change just because you want them to. They’d probably get extremely angry at you for calling their lifestyle choices a stereotype.
Also – once again, shriketalon is amazing, i literally tear up and get goosebumps when i read what the story could have been.

I suppose I must have been unclear. My earlier posts were walls of text, and I was trying to be more brief, but apparently that backfired. Now, here have a wall of text because apparently I’m incapable of explaining myself in brief, and I will do my best not to “froth at the mouth” or be “loathsome.”

I wasn’t referring to any sexuality itself as stereotypical; the stereotype-based problems are more gender-related than sexuality-related, anyway. There are two areas of concern here, one being sexuality and the other being gender. The relationship is troubling, and the characters are stereotypical; and my concern is that people are seeing a lesbian relationship and powerful women and thinking “oh, this is a good thing!” while getting a horrible impression of what being a lesbian woman and what being a powerful woman actually mean.

I too have friends all across the sexuality and gender spectrum, probably far more than most people because I intentionally sought to live in the most accepting-of-everybody dorm on campus while I was in school, and made many friends there. Heck, I’m a straight girl who technically has an ex-girlfriend because I dated a transwoman who had not come to terms with her gender identity yet and was still living as male (although I regret my obliviousness, and wish I’d been more observant so as to be able to help her through that realization and transition, even if we did break up before she came out and began to transition— possibly because she thought I wouldn’t understand, which breaks my heart as I may be oblivious, but I’m also empathetic once it finally gets through my thick skull what’s going on). I am nothing if not secure in my sexuality. My issues with the way characters are depicted in Living Story, therefore, comes from a place of concern for my friends, and for myself as a woman, and for anyone who gets damaging ideas from the story about what it means to be a woman.

The stereotypes I refer to that are as old as Socrates are those surrounding powerful women— and very relevant to this discussion, because the Living Story characters are supposed to be powerful women. These stereotypes are slightly different from what others might think of as “women in games” stereotypes, but they are just as damaging and, if you actually look, quite prevalent in the genre. I’m talking about the idea that women demonstrate power through verbal abuse, and desperately seek dominance over men using this tactic. This is a theme that has characterized Western literature for millennia. Shakespeare wrote an entire play about it: The Taming of the Shrew. “Shrew” was basically the old word for a current equivalent meaning “mean female” or “to complain and criticize endlessly and loudly” and also referring to an animal. The female protagonist’s main characteristic is being incredibly verbally abusive, and the entire play is about breaking her of it. It’s also how Socrates described his wife, as constantly criticizing shrilly— and he also describes her as an animal he wants to tame. This is not terribly positive imagery we’re talking about, here.

(continued in another post because apparently I’m only capable of either brief, useless comments or walls of text)

Palador.2170:

Naus the Gobbo.5172:

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Narthexia.1836:

will there be individual mix and match pieces in future releases? Or will they all be complete sets?

We will continue to release mix and match armor skin pieces

Care to elaborate?

Mixable pieces as in pieces that will be added to our light/medium/heavy armour wardrobe, or as in pieces we can mix and match in the “outfits”?

Also, is there a list of each individual item that will become tonics?

You’ll note that he says “armor skin pieces”. He makes no mention of Outfits. And with only one slot to equip them in, how would you mix and match Outfits, anyway?

What’s even more disturbing is that he mentioned “armor skin pieces,” which I assume means things like Scarlet’s Spaulders and the Toxic shoulders and gloves. However, in his earlier post he described the Outfit system as being motivated by wanting to release new armor sets without having to make a separate version for light, medium, and heavy… which means that future armor sets are likely to be Outfits. I haven’t seen anything to dispute this.

It seems like the Zodiac armor sets are the last gem store armor sets to be released that will include mix-and-matchable pieces, if that is so. Of course, this is all speculation; but since the Zodiac armors don’t really work with anything but themselves, and given what has been said about Outfits, it seems that this is the aesthetic direction ANet might want to take.

Einlanzer.1627:

OMG is that guy still whining about how this game doesn’t conform to the exact same gender/sexuality stereotypes all too common in entertainment media? Seriously, stop hijacking threads with your crap that any rational person either finds refreshing or couldn’t care less about.

OP was fantastic, agreed on all points.

I’m… honestly not sure who was complaining about that, given that… well, the Living Story currently conforms to the exact same gender/sexuality stereotypes that are all too common in entertainment media. It’s just that there are MORE women conforming to stereotypes, rather than FEWER women conforming to stereotypes. More women does not mean that they’ve magically escaped the bonds of harmful trope usage.

And it’s kind of necessary to talk about it in a thread about Living Story and particularly Scarlet, because it’s one of the big problems with Living Story; and in this thread a dev specifically asked for input. This is the most necessary input. More women does not equal more equality if your women fulfill the same sexist ideas that Socrates used to belittle his wife. That’s how old these stereotypes are.

Lorelei.7809:

(snip)

In the end, though, keep hope up! This update, to me, is beyond my wildest dreams (I don’t know what could make it better and it seems too good to be true to me)!

I understand the need to keep up hope— but I also understand, and hope you understand, that anything you buy from ANet now stands the chance of being changed will little to no warning and not refunded, because it has been demonstrated that this can in fact happen (whether ANet wanted this, or was forced by NCSoft is hard to say, but the result is the same).

I would love to buy more things from them, but I feel like that would be sending entirely the wrong message; and while I’m quite excited about the vast majority of this patch, the underlying problems are too large to ignore until we get some assurance that they (“they” perhaps meaning “money-minded bureaucrats who put pressure on actual devs and have no connection with the players” here) aren’t going to assume that once they’ve got our money, they’ve got it, and it doesn’t matter what they do to what we bought with it in order to make people buy more things with the least effort.

They are trying to get you to buy things without bothering to spend the resources to ensure that the things you already bought stay functional. (However time-consuming it might have been, I’m sure it was still possible, but either some higher-up decided that “allowing people to continue to use items they have bought” was not a priority during the development of the Feature Set, or they ran out of time… There was mismanagement of resources in the name of future profits going on here, or just plain cluelessness or incompetence on SOME level of the totem pole, no matter how you look at it.) This may make them a lot of money, but think for a minute about whether you really want to set that example.

Levetty.1279:

The thing about this is that I don’t actually understand why they are doing it. Other changes that are unpopular with the community had a logical reason behind it even if we didn’t like it.

(snipping examples for brevity’s sake)

But this seems designed to actively discourage people from buying stuff from the gem store by making us lose trust that we will actually get to keep the items we bought and by making the items less desirable for more people to buy them, while simultaneously removing the reason a part of the player base plays for (role playing and dress up).

I believe the reason is that they believed it would be pleasing a larger population of the player base to make Town Clothes wearable in combat, and that there were issues making the existing Town Clothes system work with the Wardrobe and with combat. (See my Socratic Dialogue-esque posts of a paraphrase of a conversation between me and my boyfriend discussing potential reasons that there would be technical issues, though neither of us is much of an authority; speculation is speculation.) However, either they didn’t really foresee that people would be upset with the new system because they didn’t realize that we mix and match things instead of using entire sets (since we buy them as sets, they didn’t really have a way of knowing that, perhaps), or they thought it would be an acceptable tradeoff for the new functionality, not really thinking through the whole “changing things people bought with real money” = “eroding player trust” part of the issue.

On the surface, there don’t really seem to be reasons for this baffling change; that’s why ANet’s insufficient communication has been so frustrating and so damaging, I think. Of course, if it’s all based in technical issues, they really can’t tell us the problem due to the secretive nature of game development; but they could still be answering concerns regarding the money-related side of this mess a bit better, I think, and letting us know that they are going to fix it.

chemiclord.3978:

(snipsnip)
If you really want to send a message, you need to walk away, and take those that feel the way you do with you. That’s not a dismissal, that’s not a cold shoulder. I’m not trying to force you out or say what you think isn’t important. But that’s how you get a company to change course. If this is a big, game-breaking mistake, you need to show them, not tell them.

It’s the reason why we’re swimming in an Ascended grind. It’s the reason why a lot of the original manifesto had to be compromised for the content locusts. Because people weren’t playing, and Arena.net’s numbers were suffering.

I dunno; maybe I’ve just been made too cynical over the years. Maybe this sort of passive resistance will work in this case. But I don’t see it. Arena.net seems pretty kitten committed to this, and I don’t see how they can backtrack on it in two weeks time.

Okay, that was a far more useful post than “just stop talking about it,” and I thank you for elaborating and respect your viewpoint. However, I must disagree. There is such thing, in my eyes, as a mistake that is big but not game-breaking; and the fact remains that GW2 is, to me and many others, a very good game, regardless of mistakes ANet might make along the way. I want them to be able to trust in my loyalty to the excellent product they created, with the provision that they don’t destroy what was originally there; and if we all just walk away, they’ll keep changing things and trying to grab new customers rather than trying to get the old customers to return with a change that might be harder to accomplish but better at building long-term loyalty. Because that’s the thing; fixing Town Clothes will be more difficult than just pumping out a bunch of shiny new one-piece Outfits, but it will also be more rewarding in terms of customer loyalty versus in terms of new customers.

Also, I don’t think most of us expect them to be able to fix everything in two weeks. I do think it’s a good idea to give them a head start on fixing it and to remind them that we want to know that they are dedicated to fixing it and are at least working on a plan to bring the Town Clothes system into a more effective combination with the new Wardrobe.

chemiclord.3978:

Right now, all we’ve got is an echo chamber of the same people and one dev effectively saying, “Nope. Still not gonna change our mind.”

And yet there has been only one official “answer” post and a few clarifications; it’s pretty clear that Curtis has not been given another answer from The Voice of ANet yet because they’re still debating— unless you think they’re content to sit there and let players get angry at them without a single attempt to rectify the situation.

chemiclord.3978:

So, yeah… I’m sticking my oar in and noting how pointless it is. I’m sorry you don’t like it. I’m sorry you want a fight, and aren’t getting one.

If people want to ignore my advice, hell, no skin off my teeth.

I simply fail to see the point of your advice. Why tell people NOT to voice their opinions? Is it not better to say something rather than just assuming we will not be heard? I’m pretty sure everyone posting here is already operating under the assumption that there is a chance we will not be heard, a chance we will be heard and ignored… but also a chance that we will be heard and our concerns looked into. And what more can you ask for than that?

If it is truly no skin off your teeth, then your continued involvement in the conversation baffles me; do you feel like it is your sworn duty to save people the time they would spend typing up forum responses? Do you want people not to have a feeling of agency in the matter at all? If you really wanted to tell people to vote with their money, then you’d be doing that instead of making it a short addendum to every post about how they shouldn’t talk about the reasons for doing so.

I only respond to you to try to keep you from preventing others from voicing their opinions with your fatalism. You call this an echo chamber… well maybe it wouldn’t be if you would stop discouraging other people from posting too!

I can’t swear that I will stop replying to your posts because honestly I think they are unhelpful and anyone coming into this thread and only seeing the last page needs not to be discouraged from adding an opinion; but instead I give you rock ’n roll in the hopes that you will listen to it and meditate upon how your posts have no actual benefit (beyond prompting me to introduce people to the combined amazingness of Slash and Miles Kennedy in Apocalyptic Love, because my ears, that’s a good album).

Voices added to the chorus of discontent are useful. Suggestions on how to fix things (not “suggestions” to stop trying at all) are useful. Questions are useful and answers to them are useful. Critiques are useful. Even speculation regarding ANet’s reasoning is useful. Posts encouraging others to make useful posts by responding to your inherently discouraging posts are useful but may not offset your own posts’ non-usefulness. Please find something to post that is useful.

chemiclord.3978:

Gene Archer.8560:

Oh goody, you’re back to your non-understanding, cold shoulder, completely useless self.

And here I thought maybe you had changed for the better.

Buddy, I am all for making your voice heard. I am all for demanding a company explain themselves.

But there comes a point where protesting and complaining stop being productive. How many times does Arena.net have to repeat the same answers before you say, “Fine. We’re done. Goodbye?”

They’re not going to outright say, “Listen… we’ve decided you aren’t worth catering to, and we’re willing to accept this small loss of revenue for what we feel is to the overall improvement of the game and better revenue going forward.”

If that is what you’re waiting for… you’re going to be waiting a VERY long time. Otherwise, I really don’t understand what has been so unclear or confusing about what has been said. It’s perfectly clear to me; “town clothes” as you know it are going away April 15th, and no amount of protest is going to change that.

And my advice is not a cold shoulder… it’s honest advice. At this point, the ONLY thing that is going to change their stance is for the players to SHOW them they are making a mistake by leaving. If you REALLY represent the support you think you do, it’ll show in their pocketbook, and they will have no choice but to cater to you or the game will flounder.

We don’t have to leave, given that the game is free-to-play… we simply have to stop paying. And many people in this thread have declared their intention to do exactly that, so, well, they’re following your advice. We’re just giving ANet some advance warning so that they become very aware of the cause of the problem and don’t think “well, obviously skins just don’t sell, time to stop making them.”

The thing is, ANet needs to know exactly what the problem is in order to fix it, and the players who were unaware need to know that they can no longer make purchases from the gem store without having to worry that their purchases will be altered. (And pray that ANet does not alter them further…) In order to hasten the restoration of Town Clothes AFTER they’re taken away on the 15th, and to mitigate the damage, it is best to apply pressure to the wound and keep the pressure constant so ANet doesn’t continue to bleed stupidity. They’re a company made of many different people, after all, and chances are some of those people are going to want some ammunition from the players for their “we told you getting rid of Town Clothes was a bad idea” arguments. Even a single sympathetic ANet dev can point out to the others, “Here are over two dozen pages’ worth of angry reactions from players, some suggestions for how we can fix this, and some good points about how this affects the player base’s faith in the digital products we sell, minus the space taken up by a few posts from Chemiclord telling everyone to shut up because he doesn’t think there’s a point to these over two dozen pages I am now citing to you.”

Simply ceasing to talk about the whole thing won’t make things any better. I understand your argument for voting with your wallet, but not your argument against voting with words. Your only argument has really been “there’s no point in trying because nobody is listening and nothing can change,” and unless you are The Voice of ANet Speaking Through Chemiclord (which you are not, as that’s Curtis’s job, poor guy), you have absolutely no way of knowing that.