Guild Wars 2

I’ll bet the new group already tried to join Destiny’s Edge long ago, but it turned out Snaff was the only one with invite permissions. Thus the need to start a new guild.

The 64-bit client seems to work like a champ on Linux via Wine. The first thing I did was crank everything up to the absolute maximum and run the Tequatl zerg position, which would have been absolutely unthinkable with the 32-bit client. (the game would OOM crash even before the loading screen finished) Framerate was really bad as expected with a bajillion players on-screen (5-15FPS), but I had no crashes or noticeable anomalies. I attached a graph of some memory-related readings from /proc/${GW2PID}/status during the event.

During my usual daily fractals with my usual graphics settings (mostly high), the framerate felt a bit more volatile than usual, with what felt like more small freezes, but everything seemed to work okay. I didn’t even have to restart the client between runs to ward off crashes. I’m pretty sure the small (0.5sec or less) freezes have more to do with Wine/OpenGL GLSL shader loading/compiling issues than with GW2’s code.

Thanks so much for porting the client to 64-bit, for the last year and a half, the game has been OOM crashing on me roughly every ~40-60 minutes, and doing large group content like Tequatl, Triple Wurm, or even a full Silverwastes cycle on anything but the lowest settings was almost impossible. I’m really happy now.

—

Gw2-64.exe (-maploadinfo -dx9single)
Wine 1.7.51 (wine-staging with CSMT enabled)
Gentoo Linux (kernel 4.2.3-gentoo SMP PREEMPT)
nvidia-drivers 358.09
Xorg Server 1.17.2

Intel i5-3570 (GCC 4.9.3 -O2 -march=native)
8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM (no swap)
NVIDIA GTX 760 (EVGA)
OCZ Vertex SSD backed Btrfs RAID10 array of WD Red disks

friggarn.5360:

Am I missing something or are you adding the auction fees to the profit instead of subtracting them? (dividing by 85% vs multiplying)

Oh! Good catch. That’s a remnant from when those cells were used to calculate something else before I condensed the sheet. Fixed.

McJAC, I took a look at your spreadsheet’s code, and noticed you’re using custom Google Apps Script functions to directly return pricing data from the GW2Spidy API. It’s easy to miss, but custom spreadsheet functions must be deterministic. The price will be fetched the first time the cell loads, but will be cached until you change the item id argument. This means the prices on your sheet will not automatically update as item prices change over time.

I ran into this problem while developing my own sheets and wrote a GW2 API library which will fetch the information into a designated range. Just paste the library key “Mq57i81IlEjI1Kt0fjQAiJVQQbPcGcXLZ” into your sheet’s library list (Script Editor -> Resources menu -> Libraries) and rig it up as described in the documentation, or just copy/paste the source into your own sheet and take a look at one of my spreadsheets I linked in my previous post to see how I have it set-up.

SkyShroud.2865:

argh, too complicated for me….

While McJAC’s spreadsheet is very precise and complete, I have a smaller and slightly less accurate salvaging spreadsheet that might be easier to understand. …and it does leather too! (Updated every 4 hours IIRC)

I even have a luck grinding spreadsheet, to let you know how much clicking you’re in for. (hint: a lot.)

Salvaging things for luck and money is pretty effective, but it’s really time consuming and wears out your mouse buttons. I actually have a second mouse connected I use just for clicking on essences of luck.

While you do end up making gold at the end of the day, it does take a pretty good amount of investment capital to place all those orders. It wasn’t uncommon for me to have 300g-500g in buy orders sitting around, and you better hope you don’t need to pick up anything important while you’re doing this. While I was grinding, It wasn’t uncommon at all for a set of overnight listings to generate over an hour or more just trying to empty the pickup tab.

Needing to bid-war with people for an hour or two to secure that overnight high offer is a pain too. :p

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I recommend stopping sometime before reaching 300%, perhaps at 200 or 250.

This is good advice. I stopped at 270% as at my natural rate of luck acquisition, I should hit 300% in a little over a year or so.

As for MF’s effectiveness, I never used to see dropped rares, maybe one every few weeks. Now that I’m over 300% with minimal buffs, I find about one rare every hour or two just running around doing map completion. Was it worth the dozens of hours salvaging things? Probably not, but I made a bunch of gold doing it anyway, so meh.

Heh, I’ve been wanting to share these screenshots with people, now is my chance.

Oh the fun graphical glitches I’ve seen running GW2 on unstable Wine builds over the years.

A while back when I was doing performance testing and tuning, I noticed that toggling supersampling on and off a few times could cause some weird things to happen. Usually the game would just crash or the world viewport would break, but sometimes I would get lucky and be treated to things like this:

John Smith.4610:

Elrey.5472:

Random questions of the day for fun purposes:
-At the actual market price, how much would it cost a single +70 Agony Resistance item?I managed to get a number like 6665327449000000000000000000000000000 gold, but i’m not sure if it’s accurate.
It also makes me wonder a second question.
-Has anyone done already a +20 item?

Assuming the +1’s are 10s, and we start from 1 and only user 1’s; it would cost (2^69 + 1)/10 gold which I believe is 59,029,581,035,870,565,171.2 which, if I didn’t make an error, is 59 quadrillion gold.

edit: the + sign not displaying for some reason.
edit 2: I forgot thermocatalytic reagents.

I know this is yesterday’s question, but I can’t resist fun math time.

For the lowest offer price of 8s per +1 infusion, the peak gems-to-gold rate of 12.68g/$1.25, and NCSoft’s 2013 earnings report showing $1,479,521,681,932 KRW/$1,459,089,487.5 USD of “total assets”, and of course, the Thermocatalytic Reagents. …

NCSoft could craft a +38 Agony Infusion for $1,286,593,357.82 USD.

I’d love to see the gold-to-gems graph that day. xD

Version 1.3 is available now!

Another update so soon!

I added support for displaying multiple active events, and updated the schedule again to add the “Hardcore” boss events back in.

Version 1.2 is available now!

I’ve finally updated this watchapp for the new boss schedule released on June 17th.

Unfortunately, due to a limitation of the menu display code, the three “Hardcore” bosses are not included in the list.

Luckily, I predicted this and have a solution partly implemented in a local branch, so I’ll see if I can get it finished up soon, ‘cause I know we all just can’t live without that daily Karka Queen kill.

Thought of another couple things to add to this. Sheet updated!

• Moved the path count to the top of the sheet so all the user input can be in the same area.
• Added a field for “Bag of Wondrous Goods” so you can tweak the token numbers a bit.
• You can now select a number for each item so you can keep track of what items you need for your characters, in addition to the skins you need to unlock.

You should be able to “Paste values only” your current data over this new sheet. Enjoy the new numbers!

I uploaded a couple more sheets to sate my hunger for numbers!

My Asset Tracker and the Dungeon Skins Checklist are now up! Check the first post for more details.

I’m working on a couple more, but I need to do some more research to work out some bugs, so I’ll probably have them up in another couple days.

Rumrum.1704:

Could someone explain to me how to use the salvage calculator? I’m not sure what does the whole one, armor,chest columns mean.

Also, which salvage kit should I be using?

Hover over cells with little triangles in the upper-right corner to see notes that explain what things do.

Salvage Calculator:

• I added some extra, more-specific notes to clarify possible confusion about the difference between “Armor” and “Chest”.
• The default salvage kit has been set to 3.52, which is equivalent to the Basic Salvage Kit.

Want to know how many more dungeon runs you need to fill-out your wardrobe? I’ve made a checklist spreadsheet that will help you keep track of which dungeon skins you have left to unlock, and how many paths you need to run to finish your collection.

Just make a copy of this spreadsheet to your own Google Drive, enter the number of tokens you have at the top, enter the number of paths you’re willing to deal with in each dungeon at the bottom, change the cells from “No” to “Yes” as you acquire skins, and have fun with the numbers!

Mystic.5934:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/api/v0.9/json/gem-price

Yes, I know. What I mean is my GW2Spidy library for Google Sheets only supports fetching item data from the item data facility at the moment. Gem information is “Coming Soon™”

Since my Luck spreadsheet seems to be popular, I’ve added a bunch of new information to it.

Mystic.5934:

Master SK is far cheaper than Mystic SK
your calculate seems to ignore the cost of Mystic Forge Stones.

The cell comment on A24 does say “Mystic Forge Stones not included.”

My GW2Spidy library doesn’t support fetching the gem prices yet, or I would have included the gold->gem cost for mystic forge stones. I added the cash->gem price in the meantime.

When I was looking at the spreadsheet last night, I noticed I forgot that Mystic salvage kits cost 3 stones again (I always forget that for some reason) and fixed it. While before I figured it was totally feasible to get 150+ stones for free and just use mystic kits, It didn’t really occur to me to update it after fixing the error made it go over 500, so I added an entry for Master Salvage Kits just now.

I like making spreadsheets, so I’ve amassed quite a few of GW2-related sheets over the past several months. I’ve been converting them to Google Sheets so I can share them with the community.

I wasn’t sure whether I should make individual threads for each sheet, so here’s all of them in one post.

Cloth/Leather Salvaging Calculator

Back when I was salvaging cloth items for ascended crafting and luck, I used this sheet to let me know what prices I should be buying blue armor items for.

Asset Inventory Tracker

When I was trying to flip things months ago, I threw together this basic inventory tracker so I could remember what items I had ordered and what prices I planned to sell things for.

Insert new rows and copy/paste rows for new entries, and drag rows between sections to bring some order to your transactions.

Luck Calculator

This spreadsheet gives you information about the Luck grind from 0% (or wherever you’re at) to 300%. How much luck you accumulate per day, how long until your next level, how many blues/greens/ectos you would need to get to 300%, how many hours you’ll be clicking, all that fun stuff.

GW2Spidy library for Google Sheets

All these spreadsheets use this library to fetch information from GW2Spidy. If you want to use it in your own spreadsheets, it’s available too.

Ascended Crafting Tracker/Calculator

I already posted about this one in the Crafting forum, so go check it out over there.

Dungeon Skins Checklist

Not BLTP-related, so I posted this one in the dungeon forum, go check it out there.

If you have any questions, ideas, or whatever, let me know. I’ll have a few more up probably in the next day or two. Have fun with all the numbers!

Trying to comprehend the bazillion materials I need to complete the several ascended items I want was driving me quite insane, so I did what I do best; complain on the forums make a spreadsheet!

Just make a copy of this spreadsheet to your own Google Drive, enter how many of each item you want to make on the right side, fill in the material boxes with what you have, and enjoy the delicious data.

It’s currently pre-loaded with my own data so you can get an idea of how it’s used. (donations are welcome, of course. )

This sheet makes use of my nifty GW2Spidy library for Google Sheets to fetch prices from GW2Spidy. You can change whether order or buy prices are used by editing cell V1. The cell notes should answer any questions I’ve preempted.

For each item, this sheet does count the materials required to make the Inscription/Insignia, but it does not include the Exotic Inscription/Insignia.

Let me know what you think, and enjoy that grind ahead of you!

I found some time to update this spreadsheet. The undated link is up in the main post. (And right there too. )

• Converted to “The New Google Sheets”, so some UI bugs are fixed (dropdowns, etc). This means the link has changed.
• Added Staff and Focus attacks.
• Added some preliminary information for the important skills on some conjured weapons.
• Instead of weapon damage, weapon is set per-attack. Right now it assumes Ascended quality.
• More might blasting rotations.

Let me know what you all think about the conjured weapon skills, I had a hard time finding information on them.

If you’re using the Possible Healing and Effective HP values for anything, do be aware of the note on cell A31; the possible healing is basically how much health you would recover if you used every healing skill/attack available to D/D consecutively.

The healing calculations are probably the weakest and most rigid part of this spreadsheet, so make sure to check the cell comments to make sure the calculations will work for your situation.

(Edit: There was confusion about EHP and Zealot’s gear here, but I figured out where Zephyrus was going with it after I posted)

This sheet used to have a control for “% of damage taken is condition damage” way back when, which would increase the value of healing power/vitality, but I could never get really good test results to enter meaningful values for it. Maybe I should add that control back in?

Tei.1704:

The man likes making spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets!

I’ve been using a spreadsheet I put together to help crunch numbers for my Elementalist for quite a while now. My guildmates expressed interest in seeing it, so I took a bit of time to convert it to Google Sheets so you all can play around with it.

Check it out over on Google Sheets!
( This is the GW2Skills build I used for the preloaded stats. )

Enter the unbuffed stats as seen on your character sheet, and buff information into the stats area on the left (I use gw2skills for my numbers), and it will tell you your effective power, effective health, and various tuning statistics. You can also enter a second set of stats to get a comparison. The area on the right will estimate the various amounts of damage your attacks should do in various situations.

• White cells are to be edited, shaded cells are automatically calculated.
• A lot of cells have notes that explain what they do. Be sure to check them out.
• You can change which stats set is used for calculations by changing cell I1.
• There are additional tweaks to the damage calculators along the top row.
• No rotation modeling is implemented, but most situations can be simulated by tweaking the provided options.

In addition to being useful for Elementalists, the only thing really Elementalist-specific about this sheet is the “possible healing” calculations. If you ignore the health-related information, and enter attack information relevant to another class, it still works great.

Let me know what you think. If you spot any calculation errors, be sure to let me know about them!

I’m pretty new to this Google Docs thing, so once I get my Gnumeric Spidy plugin ported to whatever scripting system Google Sheets uses, I’ll be able to post a ton of nifty spreadsheets in the BLTC section.

Just a quick update to let all you iPhone users out there know that this app should be available in the iOS version of the Pebble marketplace now!

I’m still working on the daily checklist system. The way it will work is long-pressing on an event will collapse the menu items and suppress reminders for all the events of that boss.

The reason it’s been taking a while is I ran into a problem where when the Living Story comes back and the event schedule changes, the event reminders and checklist entries break. For now I have it set to just reset saved reminders and completions when an update changes the schedule. I’m working on a better way to store saved data for the future, but I’m sticking with the reset method for now, so I can get some kind of daily checklist functionality out to you sooner.

Questions? Comments?

Version 1.1 is available now!

This version adds reminder support. Press select to set a reminder for the selected event.

When you set a reminder for an event, your watch will vibrate at 10 and 5 minutes before, and at the event start.

Reminders are saved on exit, and you will be reminded for that same time slot every day until you clear the reminder.

Because watch applications are unloaded from memory when you exit them, you have to leave this application open for reminders to work.

This version also has a new interface with local wall time included under the event timer, so you know what time slot you’re setting reminders for.

Because you need to leave this application open for timers to work, I’m thinking about modifying the system-provided title bar to provide more normal watch functionality, such as a slightly larger time display, and battery/Bluetooth indicators. What do you think?

Also, how do you feel about the new design in this version? Is the timer font big enough? Is anyone getting stuck at the “Getting time zone from your phone” message?

I’m planning a daily checklist system next, and I already have a few implementation ideas. Not sure how long this one will take me to finish though, so I’ll go with “soon™” again.

I noticed this application isn’t available to Pebble users with iPhones yet. The reason is the Javascript used to fetch the time zone information needs to be bundled inside the Pebble for iOS app, due to Apple’s restrictions on running third-party code, so you iOS users will have to wait for the next Pebble for iOS update.

Hey all you Pebble Smartwatch owners! I’ve put together a Boss Timer application.

• It uses the schedule information from the June 17, 2014 Patch to generate a list of upcoming events without requiring an Internet connection.
• It has a reminder system so you don’t forget when your favorite events are about to happen.
• Like a surprising number of GW2-related things, it’s open source.

You can get it from the Pebble Marketplace; search for “GW2 Boss Timers”

Hannelore.8153:

A Linux port may be possible if it was a portable app.

That essentially means that the entire thing is packaged in a way that it can be moved from system to system and will still run without depending on the underlying system. Typically, this involves using special software suite to pack all the dependancies and everything into one executable (typically ELF), so if the system has a Linux kernel, an X server and OpenGL, it will run.

Guild Wars 2 is already a portable app on Windows if you ignore the DirectX runtime, unlike other games which must be painstakingly installed first.

Distribution maintainers would still complain that it has to be installed in /opt or whatever, and that it doesn’t use system libraries, not to even mention the “impure license,” so it would be restricted to random external PPAs or overlays, which is almost as bad as the Wine situation now.

A huge static binary would probably be okay for Steam or something though. In any case, I’d imagine ArenaNet would want to avoid duplicating the support nightmare that’s going on in the Mac forums right now, due to “official support” for a Wine-based port.

The way I see it, if Steam OS goes well, maybe we can have an official Guild Wars 3 client. /shrug

Naevius.3185:

Please fill out form 1040T(yria).

Heh, now for some reason I’m really curious what my in-game W-2 would look like.

We should totally get them in the in-game mail around the first of the year. I can see a new player receiving the first one and thinking “WTF I have to do my taxes in this game? Whaaaat?” xD

About the CSMT patches, I’ve noticed that when I use them, my frame rate is either awesome (55-60+) or really bad (15-20), depending on how many “objects” are in the area, and can go from awesome to bad and back to awesome very abruptly. Without CSMT, it’s pretty consistently “ehh” (20-30) just about everywhere.

From watching my system with htop/nvidia-settings while playing, most of the “really bad” moments do not result in high CPU or GPU load, so it’s probably still a thread lock contention somewhere. I just lack the familiarity with threading or the Wine code base to do any meaningful debugging on it.

My favorite part of the CSMT patch set is that it fixes the long-standing armor switch texture bug. I keep meaning to bisect witch patches fix that so I can backport and report them somewhere.

About this thread, as long as ArenaNet doesn’t actively shut down our discussions about Linux or Wine, I’m okay that they don’t “officially” support it. We Linux devotees are used to helping each other out to solve our own problems, we just need a place to communicate, and who knows, we might even produce a patch that might fix something for the Mac version someday.

Hannelore.8153:

The game is leaking texture memory for unkown reasons. We haven’t yet been able to track down the problem (its likely in Wine, not GW2), but setting “Medium” or “Low” can buy you another hour or two.

The game has this behavior in Windows XP 32-bit, but for some reason its coming out on Linux even on 64-bit systems when it shouldn’t.

With recent improvements I no longer crash at 3.2GB, but at 3.7GB.

Awesome, I’ve been “debugging” this in my head for the last couple weeks and have come to the same anecdotal explanation. I’ve been playing with Low textures, for exactly that reason, and can make it through a whole fractal set and then some without crashing. Glad to know someone is working on it for reals.

If you happen to be a developer working on this issue, I’d be happy to test patches, run backtraces or whatnot. I’ve become pretty familiar with patching and building Wine and have a few systems I can test on. I’ve been watching Wine bug #34342, but nothing seems to be happening there.

It really wouldn’t make sense to make a native Linux client. Just dealing with the huge number of distributions and their individual packaging requirements would be needlessly time consuming, and that doesn’t even approach the issues with different versions of system libraries for each distribution. There’s a reason every distribution compiles everything from source for their own repositories.

If they made a Winelib executable like they did for the Mac version, or distributed a “Wine Bottle”, it wouldn’t be any different than just using Wine the normal way. Installing Wine on Linux is very easy, and if it isn’t attached to the application you’re running, you can include custom patches to fix bugs.

Expecting ArenaNet to devote resources to writing and maintaining an OpenGL graphics pipeline for MacOS/Linux is just insane. They barely have time to maintain the Direct3D renderer.

That said, I do hope that ArenaNet at least tries to avoid making changes that completely break Wine, and since those would likely break the Mac version too, I guess we’re pretty lucky so far.

Because no Linux thread would be complete without specs, I’m running the game under Gentoo Linux 3.14 with an Intel i5-3570, 8G RAM at 1600MHz and a GTX 760 (binary drivers) with Wine 1.7.15 using the CSMT patchset, and I get 40-60 FPS (capped at vsync) just about everywhere at maximum graphics settings. (performance is CPU-bound) Without the CSMT patchset, it usually averages 20-40.

However, ever since the EFLA release, the game crashes with an OOM error every hour or so, I have the same “c0000005” crashes as the Mac version, there is frame rate jitter when resources load from disk, and all paths of CoE become practically unplayable after about halfway through for some reason. Otherwise, and especially before the EFLA release, everything works great. It’s completely playable, and I’ve been doing so for just over a year.

I know this is just my opinion and all, but I really don’t see what the big deal is about the contested waypoints. So in some situations, I might have to walk less than a minute to get somewhere I otherwise could have waypointed closer to. That’s fine. On the way I’ll probably run across a tree or mining node that I wouldn’t have otherwise, and that instantly pays for whatever I would have to spend to take the second waypoint anyway, and then some.

The only time I ever care that I’m waypointing as close as possible to something is when I’m dead, but in that case, I’m in the zone already, so this wouldn’t be an issue.

Loss of dungeon state is unfortunate though. Hopefully there will be some sort of remedy for that.

I guess waiting 4-8 minutes for taxi flights in WoW made me more patient with these things.

In before thread merge.

I think the tricky part of re-organizing the schedule to have overlapping bosses would be trying to avoid dominant strategy.

For example, if Jormag and Shatterer were up at the same time, everyone would just go to Shatterer because it’s “easier.”

It might work alright to have the low-level bosses overlap, as they are all basically AA/AFK-fests, but they already spawn enough in the current draft of the schedule. Even so, a dominant strategy would likely form anyway. (I can see Fire Elemental being left out in favor of any of the other low level events, due to the need to actually move around just a bit.)

I suppose if all the bosses rotated fast enough that they were all up within 3-4 hours, overlapping events might be attended by people who already fought one of the bosses in that time slot that day.

I’ve got a whole bunch of questions about the MegaServer system. Sorry if this is too long, I tend to talk a lot.

Does the decision of which instance you’re placed in have any persistence? For example, if I disconnect, will I still be placed in the same instance when I quickly log back in, or will I be placed in another instance if the system deems another has become “more favorable?”

Also, is there any functionality to prompt to switch instances if another one becomes much more favorable after you join? Say, if you enter a zone by yourself, then half a dozen friended, but unpartied guildmates happen to land on another instance later due to overflow, server weights or whatever. I think it would be kind-of cool if the UI would show a discrete prompt saying something like “Hey, we found an instance that looks like it might be more favorable, if you’re interested. Transfer?”

I imagine lots of new instances will need to be generated when an absolutely massive amount of people show up to a map for the scheduled world boss of the moment. When the boss is over, do the overflow instances still collapse with the “${ZONE} is ready, transfer?” dialog? Does the MegaServer system actively notice people waypointing from one boss to another to perhaps preemptively place a portion of them on some sort of “boss-killing”-oriented instance to avoid accidentally slamming the original map?

Will we have any user-facing options for tuning the sorting algorithm? For example, I would forsake any kind of home server-based weighting to be with any of my guildmates, where other users might prefer the opposite. There could even be a setting for “prefer Roleplayers” which would simply prioritize people who have set that option, to attempt to satisfy the RP group. However, I can see how such options would likely interfere with metrics gathering for testing, and might disrupt the illusion of transparency you guys seem to be going for with this system.

This one might be a little too close to the secret sauce, but I would like to know more about what sort of metrics the system collects to determine “my playstyle.” I’m just curious. Is it as simple as “you run X events/bosses/champions/dungeons per hour,” or does it go in-depth to analyze chat or keep records on the different people I party with through LFG/etc? I know you guys keep all those metrics and statistics for other reasons already, My question is if the MegaServer sorting algorithm uses any of that data directly. Would we see instances full of people who like to stand at the trading post? People that say “lol” a lot? People that talk about the same topics in /map or /say chat? Zones dedicated to farming bots?

I am really excited to see the performance of this sorting algorithm. I think it has the potential to really liven up some zones, and create a more unified community for PvE.

This wouldn’t be happening if we voted for Evon.

…Somebody had to say it eventually, haha. ;D

KarateKid.5648:

KarateKid.5648:

In my case, the entire UI is slightly “off” leading to this two line issue and some overlap of the “Prev Next” and the Gold Total in bottom right.

No idea what’s really the case; but if this were a word processor or web publishing app, I’d say somewhere there’s a misplaced newline in the UI layout.

This is not happening in Linux. Dunno about Windows… don’t have a Windows box to test.

I lied accidentally. this DOES sometimes happen under Wine in Linux, but it’s intermittent. Relog fixes in Linux, usually.

I was having the same “off” / overlapping issue in Linux. I fixed it by installing the Microsoft Core Fonts (Arial and such) from my package manager and restarting Xorg. Mac OS should have those already, so I’m not sure what would cause it there. /shrug

The prices being on multiple lines in the sell interface is still a constant for me. It’s only mildly annoying though, and is totally deal-with-able.

Just tossing this out there, for any Linux users that stumble across this thread.

I know this is the Mac support forum, but ever since the Escape From LA patch, I’ve been getting the ‘c00000005’ and OOM crashes every 40 minutes or so on Linux with Wine. I’ve been testing and bisecting different Wine versions from 1.7.11 (which worked excellently before) to 1.7.15 with no difference. Seems to happen more when I’m in a highly-populated area or when I change maps.

Just thought I’d toss that out there, since Cider is related to Wine, and to show that this bug is not 100% limited to the Mac executable specifically.

If you guys have to make a patch to the Cider code to fix this, please try to push it upstream to Wine so we few and proud Linux users can have fun too! ;D

I ran across that last night as well.

I figure the great jungle wurm object is stored there just under the surface when the event isn’t happening, but today’s bobblehead thing makes it’s “head” large enough that it pops out of the surface.

Nate McCloud.2417:

Actually specifically had male characters in mind, but it could work for females, too. :P I don’t doubt that, as long as female characters are wearing bras, it wouldn’t be a problem for females to walk around with hidden chest armor, as well.

I was mostly just posting a compromise solution that avoids some of the possible “lawl every1 iz nekkid! xD”, “lolz look @ all teh sexxy bikini ladys O_O” and “Oh my goodness! The ESRB rating did not warn me about all these scantly-clad players! Surely this game is some kind of cesspool for the shameless and depraved!” results that might be holding such a feature up.

Nate McCloud.2417:

penelopehannibal.8947:

If you’re doing combat in pants or bare chest mostly for RP, that sounds like a one-time situation to me! Seems a big request for " ‘Charge!’ /em gets stabbed in the bare back by a Centaur. The End." to me!

Sounds like something that would happen even with light armor. :-P And I wouldn’t think it such a big request to be able to hide chest, leg, and foot armor just as you can with headgear, gloves, and back armor.

Even game mechanics-wise, I still die in 1-2 hits even when wearing heavy armor anyway, so it doesn’t make sense there either.

I get the whole “everyone will run around naked” worry, but I still really want to be able to hide chest armor, even if just for male characters, and hide boots, even if just for Charr characters. I don’t really see why I would want to hide pants though.

I find it amusing that a lot of the stories recounted here involve Elementalists. Here’s another.

On our second day of playing this game, my sister and I were rolling through Wayfarer Foothills on her level 12 Warrior and my level 13 Elementalist, when we happened across the “Help Braham save Cragstead” LS instance. We didn’t know it was a living story thing, so we just thought, “Oh cool, some kind of instance quest thing.” and assumed that because it was in a level 1-10 zone, it was for level 1-10 characters.

The two of us and Braham made it all the way to the last boss with only minor issues, but the boss meant business. What ensued was an epic battle for the history books. The boss would pretty much insta-kill both of us with that crazy sonic periscope attack, so we essentially ended up corpse running the boss while Braham tanked him, taking turns kiting while healing each other, and after what seemed like ages, the molten alliance guy was defeated! Victorious, we stood over our slain enemy, silent for a moment, stark naked, and then a roar came from across the house; “That was SO AWESOME!” … we were hooked. xD

We agreed that we both got the same feeling completing that fight that we used to get the first time beating a raid boss back in WoW. Felt good man. Who knew such a simple and unimportant fight would inadvertently create such a great experience for a couple of new players.

Heh, an amusing addendum; we joined a guild a week or so later, and our new guildmates suggested carrying us through there so we could see it before that story was over, and they seemed shocked when we told them we two-manned it at level 13. /shrug

Speaking of FPS mode, I do hope we’ll someday get Oculus Rift support, even though it would probably be pretty ridiculous to actually play that way. (Go dodge rolling! )

Also speaking of FPS mode, I’d love an option to show a high-granularity frame rate display in-game without needing to leave the options window open.

While it would be really cool if your character’s personality stats had more bearing on available dialog options, the simple fact is it would create more work for the writers, and probably more troublesome; the localization teams. Every line written likely takes days to finalize and be translated. Not to mention checking statements for continuity issues, which need to go through the whole process again if an issue is found.

Edge cases would be weird too, what would happen in a LS dungeon? Take the aggregate of everyone’s relationship rating? Just be neutral even though everyone might have a 0% or 100% rating? Call out individual players? (Imagine that: “Hey! It’s my favorite person! I’m so glad to… whoa, you’re hanging out with that guy? Really? I hope he dies. I thought you had better standards.” )

Maybe NPCs could have “personality triangle” stats for expected player personality so they notice when you’re acting out of character or have had a major personality shift between chapters? How much dialog should be written for that? (Imagine: Anakin Skywalker shows up for the Marionette battle, and a month later, Darth Vader arrives to stomp Scarlet with force choke or whatever. Would the NPCs notice? Would anyone ask “Wow, what happened to you? That Miasma sure is some bad stuff.” “I talked to a speed boost NPC … a few times. darth vader breathing sound” )

Having a lot of extra dialog would also need more voice acting. I know they don’t really need it, but it always strikes me as odd when NPCs give you a few “silent” paragraphs of text (during which you, and all related NPCs usually stand around motionless, while other players, if present, jump around like baboons yelling “y u stnding arnd??? lts gooooo!!! kick pls!”), then the NPCs suddenly spring to life to deliver some opening line and get on with the show. Needless to say, recording audio for everything would be quite a task, especially considering it would all need to be localized, and can’t forget it also needs to be downloaded and put in the .dat file forever.

If you ask me, we’re pretty lucky we get what we get, at the cadence we’re seeing updates.

Clearly, what we need is a Chia Trahearne.

I’ve been wanting a darker night for a while too. I was imagining some kind of “hardcore night” graphics option that made night as dark as the forest part of the snowblind fractal. It would really add some atmosphere.

I get that night wasn’t made all that dark in an effort to not affect actual gameplay much, which is why I was hoping for a fake graphics option of some kind that I can toggle when I’m in an atmospheric exploration mood.

If actual manpower were to be put into enhancing night time at the map level, I’d love to see NPCs setting up bonfires or campfires around dusk (there could even be wood-collecting events! ), village NPCs could congregate closer together, or move indoors, and night watch guards could start patrolling the more dangerous areas. NPCs that stand around in remote locations might even draw their weapon and say “Who’s there” or something when you approach, if they’re a vulnerable sort-of character. That would be awesome.

I’m not so sure about increased wildlife activity during the night, it’s already difficult enough to walk from point A to point B without getting harassed by something every five seconds. :p

I also like the idea of hiding nameplates during the night, but that probably should just remain a UI option, even though I’m very curious how a dark night with hidden nameplates would affect a WvW map.

I highly doubt the developers would go back and enhance existing maps to this degree unless it were part of some huge world-altering living story patch, or an expansion. I think that can be said for any other MMO as well.

Speaking of other MMOs, I’m glad the Guild Wars 2 day/night cycle doesn’t match real time. Back when I played WoW a few years ago, I got placed on a server several hours ahead of my local time, so the world was almost always in the middle of the night when I got to play. I missed out on a lot of nice environments because of that, though I do think the GW2 morning/evening transition is way too fast.

Plus, the day/night cycle being really short lets us handwave why people don’t sleep every night, they sleep when they’re tired, not just every time it gets dark.

The dragon version appeared for my sister when we were questing together in Caledon on our Charr a few months back. The dragon was there for her, but not for me. It was our first time in that area for both of us and didn’t know what it was supposed to look like, so the Teamspeak chat was pretty humorous.

“Whoa! That’s awesome! :o”
“What?”
“What do you mean ‘What?!’ Are you really so jaded that this doesn’t impress you?”
“What? Grubs? What? o.O”
“Come on! There’s a huge dragon right there!”
“Huge dragon? …Where? O.O”
a moment of silence, during which I’m sure she rolled her eyes
“Actually, I think I might have stumbled across a cool glitch, come in here! xD”

She was able to walk all over the area and get a good look at it. Left the area, came back a few minutes later and it was gone. She was familiar with the Sylvari starting quest, so she quickly identified it as a phasing glitch.

Heh, what about the twenty-or-so non-soulbound Infused rings in my bank alt’s inventory?

I assume they’ll follow the same “New AR-only slot with a +5 AR infusion pre-slotted” formula? Will they become soulbound to my bank alt due to having an upgrade applied? Does this change only affect soulbound rings/backs?

Would be nice to know so I can distribute some of them to other characters now that I’ll be able to actually bring them to fractals thanks to the now account-wide fractal level.

BobbyStein.2315:

Nike.2631:

Technical question: can the completion of a dynamic event be used to trigger the sending of a piece of mail (w/ attached rewards)?

For example, if an event sent you out to protect lumberjacks, could success trigger a letter being sent 30-60 minutes later that said thanks for the help and included some small number of wood planks (“Please take a few of the offcuts. Without you assistance we wouldn’t have any lumber at all…”)

So you’re talking about a time delay between completing a renown heart (or event) and receiving the letter rather than getting it instantly?

Adding a variable delay would certainly make it feel a bit more like a character is actually taking time to write you a letter, rather than sending out form letters with payment to every passing adventurer.

I’ve often found it humorous that I’ll kill some enemy, pick up an item or something and immediately get a letter stating “Our town is doing just swimmingly now! Thanks for doing whatever it was you did! I guess I should pay you now, have some silver…” even though their town is clearly still on fire and full of monsters due to some event. Clearly, they must have started writing before I actually finished helping them. Pretty optimistic.

I really like Nike’s example of giving some planks to the player for doing a logging event. I know I’d be more willing to stop and complete an event if I knew I might get an actually useful reward sometimes.

Having heart-specific rewards show up in the heart reward mail would be really great too. I’d even accept vendor trash worth the usual reward price if it fit the situation better. Often times I’ve felt it a little strange when a Skritt would give me 2 whole silvery small shiny things, and a whopping thirty-five orangey small slightly-shiny things for killing a dozen spiders he and his Skritt buddies were handling pretty well already. Awfully generous. Also, where does an Ettin get 4 silver, and why would he give it to me? Does the Tyrian Chamber of Commerce distribute “Adventurer Reward Packages” to Renown Heart NPCs?

I would say that renown heart reward mail could sometimes include a random karma item from that heart NPC’s vendor inventory, as those items have some of the best flavour in the game IMO (and they’re already event-specific, how ’bout that? ), but I can see that being complicated due to the usual problems with karma items and whatnot. At least it might get those items noticed by players more, as some of them are really great.

One last thing about mail delays: If anyone is concerned about “making people wait for rewards”; really? It’s a few silver. To me at least, Waiting several minutes (or even an in-game day) is the least of my worries. Plus, unexpectedly receiving a mail is almost always exciting, even if there’s nothing important in it.

Indefensible.1652:

…Our golems can fly…

Heh, someday, someone will spell our guild name right.

OmegaArts.1029:

when we are fighting ET or FC no one is really paying that much attention to what guild is where.

Heh, it’s always pretty obvious to me when I run into the [VS] group; when I see those 10-15 people with “Bronze *” titles and [VS] tags headed toward me, I know 4-6 static fields are about to happen.

As far as Kiel not having sway over the gate network, I’d laugh if the waypoint cost reduction was “at participating locations only” – namely, Lion’s Arch.

Speaking of gem exchange rate, what went on sale from April 13th to April 15th that caused the gem price to suddenly go from 2.36g/100 to 3.04g/100 (a 29% increase) over the course of a weekend? Since then the daily average gem price has never been under 3g/100.

I had just started playing around then, and didn’t pay attention to the gem store at the time, as I had no money.