Guild Wars 2

In some Chinese MMO’s, botting is an enormous issue and the developers have to do all sorts of player-unfriendly things to combat the problem. In one game (Perfect World) there is a question that pops up in the center of the screen every 5 minutes. You have 30 seconds to answer it correctly or you get kicked from the game. It’s super annoying. However, it could be adapted into something much less annoying for the players of this game.

What if players got a small karma award or a random prize chest every 30 minutes of play time? To receive the award, you have to click on an accept button that is not always in the same position on the screen (this is just to prevent scripting mouse clicks at the same position on screen). If you don’t click the button in some set amount if time, you stop being able to move or perform actions. You don’t die, or get disconnected, but you also can’t move.

Honestly, I think the players would appreciate a small token reward every 30-60 minutes for clicking a button, especially if they knew it also meant creating a very difficult problem for bot authors to overcome…

Quick comment: It seems like consistent frame rate was chosen to be more important in GW2 than rendering all visible character models. Maybe this is okay in some situations, but it seems like this is the wrong approach in WvW (invisible armies are a serious issue there).

Longer discussion: I was thinking about another MMO I used to play, Perfect World International. This game, when it was popular, would occasionally have massive PvP battles around the major cities with hundreds of players running around killing each other. PWI had fashion (“town clothes”), customized character models, custom weapons, dyes for armor and clothes, etc. Even with all of this customization, invisible armies were never a problem no matter how many people showed up. Yes, there was some lag when hundreds of people showed up (150-200 ms with a lot of people there) but the game was still playable and you got a real sense of just how many people there were. It was, in a word, “epic”.

In my opinion, showing the players and their positions is more important than maintaining a high frame rate. I’d rather have a sense of enemy location (and ally location) in WvW than low pings. What does everyone else think?

For the devs: Is this something that can be tuned on the server side, or was this design decision coded directly into the networking infrastructure of the game?

I painted the whole thing black, lettered the text in red, and used a dremel to shave out the dragon. The photo doesn’t really capture the 3D-effect of the dragon being carved down into the surface, so it unfortunately looks better in person than in the picture (and I’m a computer guy, not a photographer).

Happy Halloween everyone! And thanks again for a great game, ArenaNet!

Wow, this thread took off unexpectedly. To answer a few questions:

1. The video I linked is not mine; they don’t allow cameras in my workplace, so if I got caught filming something on my screen I’d probably get fired. Stupid, I know.

2. My monitors are each 2560×1440 in landscape, but I generally have them in portrait mode (writing documents, working on lots of code, etc.). My game resolution is 4320×2560.

3. My workstation is configured with 2 nVidia Quadro K5000’s. Framerates in the game are generally pretty good, usually around 50-60, sometimes more.

4. Since my character is in the middle of the center screen, the bezels really don’t bother me too much. Plus, the bezels on my monitors are slightly thinner than those in the video I linked to.

I hope this helps. I finally found the camera tool you guys have been mentioning, and it does help my gameplay experience at home on a single monitor! I have a pretty standard 1920×1080 24" monitor at home, hooked to a single nVidia GTX560 Ti. My work computer is part of the reason I look forward to going in to the office every morning, lol.

To fix the FOV issue every single player in this game is complaining about, buy two more widescreen monitors and stand them on end. The game looks significantly better when played like this.

On my work PC with 3 monitors, the game runs smooth. The FOV is perfect, the art looks great, everything just feels more “natural”. I hate playing the game at home because I only have one monitor and I’m stuck with the idiotic 65-70 degree default FOV.

This is the only issue currently causing me to consider moving on to another game. I’m sorry you disagree with all of us so strongly, ArenaNet, since you made a fantastic game. It’s sad to see this single issue causing so many people to leave. My wife already stopped playing because she was so strongly affected by the narrow FOV – it was causing her anxiousness in combat because she felt like she couldn’t see anything.

I was looking forward to getting immersed in this game with her, but that’s just not going to happen. :-(

+1 for adding duels to the game. It makes sense, in an RP environment you should be allowed to pick a fight with one of your mates. It’s also useful for testing PvP builds, as others have stated.

I’m actually somewhat surprised this wasn’t a feature at release, but meh. I hope they add it.