Guild Wars 2

I think it would help those of us thinking about suggestions if we knew what the objectives for this event were from ANET’s perspective. Gaile, do you have anything you can share here? E.g.:

Was this a test of having lightweight events in the main game that link to HoT to extend the story beyond the new zones? If so, cool concept, please do more of this. I’d like to see the existing Tyria content impacted by HoT.

Is this something that is intended to drive F2P players to purchase HoT? If so, your data will tell you conversion rates from the event… but from playing the beta I can personally say that the event didn’t “sell” even a part of what I’ve already seen in HoT – which is a shame because HoT looks amazing so far.

Was it just something fun to hold us over till HoT? If so, maybe we should all just chill out and thank you for doing something we didn’t expect, even if it didn’t work out!

Gaile Gray.6029:

As we mentioned in several posts on the forums and in various other media, we have been reading and gathering your feedback about the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns pre-purchase.

Please see this blog post for new information on the Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns pre-purchase.

Thank you again for sharing your thoughts!

Great work ANet team. As someone who runs a small software company (and a very satisfied long-time player of GW1 and GW2) I deeply empathized with the whole situation and am impressed by the response. I’m sure this has been an incredibly emotional time for all of you.

I am really looking forward to enjoying the work your team has put into HoT. I was always impressed with just how much content was in GW2. With each living story expansion, I’ve seen how your team just got better and better at design and mechanics… e.g. compare the Silverwastes to Orr. What I’ve seen from the beta indicates this trend has only continued – the little bit of the world I saw was amazing.

Also – the extra char slot carrying through to Deluxe and Ultimate was a nice touch. I can use the slot from my Ultimate expansion for a new character now, knowing I’ll still have a slot free for the Revenant (and a lot of gems to expand bank tabs for all the gear).

Lots of people here must run highly successful software companies, given all the expert opinions on what ANet should/could do.

Trying to analyze ANet’s strategy or internal discussions from the perspective of a outsider is like trying to call the next move of a chess game when you can only see a single square of the board.

What we know:
– A LOT of forum and reddit activity about HoT
– Gaile and Regina immediately responding in ways that indicate the company is very much aware of what is going on
– Numerous other devs actively going through business as usual, working incredibly hard for the MASSIVE, GAME CHANGING PATCH
– A major marketing activity (E3) that would be consuming nearly all the time of key decision makers

What we don’t know:
– what market research and data analytics said about price points
– what the revenue vs cost is to support all the players who only paid $40 for the base game 3 years ago and never bought a gem
– detailed stats on conversion rates from the pre-order thus far across the 3 packages
– how these relate to playtime, age of account and gemstore purchases
– how many players have used all their char slots
– what technology issues might be requiring the inclusion of the base game (e.g. they have no mechanism to create an “upgrade key”)
– what requirements NCSoft has given them, versus their own recommendations
- ratio of forum views/posts to gem purchases, active playerbase, pre-purchases

I could think of dozens of more bits of data they have that we don’t that would have informed the pricing decision and any future reaction to HoTgate.

I like the 800 gem variant. However they’d need to add this or similar options to all three packages, or else the value of the $75 and $100 packages become diluted.

Perhaps they could add something vets would value more than a slot to deluxe & ultimate – e.g. x% account MF. Because let’s be honest – most vets can source the slot with gold. But another 5-10% account MF would be very nice.

And it’s never too late. They can always send chests out to anyone who’s already purchased the expansion with more gems or other compensation items if they rebalance all three rewards. They have the system, as anyone who got a heroic chest from the last beta knows.

BrunoBRS.5178:

Basaltface.2786:

ZaidDyan.3057:

…
But I think this class will be most highly regarded by the more advanced players who love FPS-like positional mechanics and the energy balance/timing mechanics. I bet the difference between a skilled player and an intermediate player will be massive with the Revenant. Perhaps more so than any other class (maybe on par with engi?).

…engi can choose his kits and swap em whenever he feels like it, he also can carry up to 4 at the same time, no cooldowns and nothing at changing them or he can use no kits at all. Also engi got access to the toolbelt what gives kits basically a 6th skill that can be used regardless if the engi got the kit equipped or not…

edit: Also rev cant change his weapon in combat…so yea if his class mechanic basically is made of 2 “static” skillset kits…then this is gonna suck

he’s talking about the skill gap between new players and veterans, not the options.

Correct. I certainly wasn’t trying to insult my favorite class! From what I’ve read so far the rev. is going to be about understanding timing and synergies between legend skills … just like the engi. I think beginner players find the engi confusing. Intermediate players see the engi as a cool flexible class with lots of customisation via kits and weapons but ultimately it feels underpowered. Advanced players synergise combo fields and blast finishers from different kits and traits to dominate. But this requires precise timing with kit swapping and knowing how to tweak the loadout for different situations.

The recent polygon article has some additional interesting insights… e.g. swapping legends resets the energy bar to 50% and that the legends are intended to be “template playstyles”. If that’s the case, I think beginners will focus on one legend at a time because it will relate really easily to what they know. Advanced rev players will figure out exactly when to swap legends, when to toggle upkeeps, creating several different situational 10+ skill rotations – similar to how an advanced engi (or elementalist) is played.

Of course, all speculation till we see exactly what those skills/legends are…

If they go for fixed legend skill sets then I think this class is going to appeal to beginners and really good players and will probably be less compelling for those in the middle.

Beginners might feel the class is easier to learn and might be less afraid of selecting “the wrong build”. It’ll have the easy learning curve of the warrior, but more variety in playstyle.

On the other hand, intermediate players may prefer the greater customisations possible with other classes. Which is great, because you want new players to start with the shiny but then learn about the other great classes.

But I think this class will be most highly regarded by the more advanced players who love FPS-like positional mechanics and the energy balance/timing mechanics. I bet the difference between a skilled player and an intermediate player will be massive with the Revenant. Perhaps more so than any other class (maybe on par with engi?).

There are a lot of calls for “revert” here – but I don’t think people realise how hard that is to do from a software development perspective.

GW2 is an extremely complex game with many interdependent systems. It’s inevitable that there will be other systems in the game which now depend on code in the new Traits system. Rolling back to the “old” system would break things elsewhere.

This practically means that a roll-back or revert might take nearly as much development resource as building Traits 3.0. Thus the desire to “hotfix” as much as possible and then use the learnings from Traits 2.0 (current) to make a really good next iteration. This learning comes from data analysis of actual players (e.g. how many are really getting stuck due to traitlock at level 40, 60 etc. vs getting to 80 and playing regularly) – as well as forum members and other feedback points.

Of course, implementing Traits 3.0 means adjusting all of the parts of the system that depend on the current system. As a result, this can’t just happen any time. It needs to be part of a “whole-of-system” review. So maybe we’ll see this in Feature Pack 3, 4 or 5…

In the meanwhile, the best thing readers of this thread can do is give them info to implement hotfixes within the current system. If we can help them get 60% of the way there with hotfixes then they can focus Feature Pack 3 or 4 effort on making new stuff vs. fixing existing stuff.

If you haven’t yet gotten a character to 80 through the main game you should – it has its flaws here and there but the first 40+ hours of this game are as good as any other I’ve played, and better than most. I mean, who buys ice cream just to eat the cone? Eat the ice cream… eat it… it’s goooood.

For everyone else this is free expansion content. It’s awesome that a game that comes out of the box with 40+ hours content now gives people who’ve done that already permanent free expansion content across all characters, just for logging in once every 2 weeks. I mean, who pickets the ice cream truck that’s giving away free ice cream because it’s not the flavor they want? Look at all the happy kids in line for their free cone… now a little bit closer to onset of type 2 diabetes… eattt the freeee icee creeaaaammm….

As a casual gamer this is pretty sweet value for money for me. I’ve spent a lot more on games that were done after their first or second play through. I liked last year, but there were times I couldn’t get on during an event. It was also annoying that the gold-rush mentality meant by the mid-point everyone was simply farming, not exploring the event.

That’s going to be the big question for me tho – in 6 months, who will be in Dry Top doing LS1 content and group events? If there aren’t enough people, will I find it boring if I ever get an alt to 80?

Who thinks EoTM is crying for some sort of BASE jump skill, or hang gliding skill, a la Far Cry?

Gaile Gray.6029:

ZaidDyan — solved (not sure which issues, but I’m glad you’re good to go). Will pass along your suggestions.

As best I could tell I was only having the tgupdate issue. The spinny mouse thing has actually happened to me in the past – but only if I’m using the trackpad on my MBA and it’s sporadic at that. I played for an hour or two before applying the patch and did not encounter the spinny mouse.

I hadn’t tried to buy gems before the fix, however I can confirm I can see the gem purchase options when I click on “buy gems”. My understanding is that the bug was that the payment options screen wasn’t there if you clicked… just an empty brown window. This is definitely not the case post-fix.

Hope that helps your devs and QA team. Cheers

So I’ve been meaning to get around to updating this!

I’ve run it in bootcamp, I’ve run it in the Mac client. In my experience, there’s no practical difference. My gameplay tends to cluster into 2 modes: PvE wandering around and WvW and PvE Zergs. With PvE, framerate is not an issue. With zergs, lag and a gazillion other factors come into play. Sure, maybe you get 3-5 fps boost in some places, but it’s not like a 15+ fps boost and it doesn’t materially affect slowdowns due to those other factors like # of chars on screen, lag, etc.

I’ve been playing through a bunch of WvW and PvE content for the last several months exclusively with the Mac Client. I haven’t really ever felt like performance was an issue. Sure, I’d love super smooth 60fps at 1080p, but after about 10 minutes into the game I really don’t notice the periodic framerate drops (still playable, just makes rapid camera moves a bit jerky).

Now, I might feel a bit differently if I was a very competitive PvP player… but if you’re going to try to be competitive I don’t think the MBA is your go-to gaming rig!

Also, it’s worth noting that I often have plenty of other stuff running the the background. Like an IDE, Apache, Postgres, Chrome with 10 tabs open, Word, Excel, etc. Doesn’t seem to make too big of a difference either… which is a pleasant surprise.

I hope this thread and conversation was of help to MBA owners or prospective buyers. It’s far and away the best computer I’ve ever owned since my Amiga 4000 w/Video Toaster. Being able to just fire up the GW2 client whenever I want and hop in is really nice… vs. having to boot into windows.

I can confirm that the solution proposed does work for me; Mavericks MBA, GW2 installed in “non standard” location. Thanks for solving!

I don’t understand the anger around the Mac client. I am happy enough with it that I have not loaded windows up to play this game in months. I know I lose some performance, but it’s actually not that noticeable.

That said, it would be good if someone in red simply put “issue under investigation by Mac client team, will try to give an update within X hours/days.” once more than a few people post to a thread saying something is broken. It would just help people like me know that I should check the thread later if the problem hasn’t gone away. Instead, I read a page of “ANet vitriol” before finding the solution. Had I given up after the first page I would had missed the answer…

When I stop caring about a game I usually stop reading the forums as well. One would think that it takes a non zero amount of care to log in and post to a thread about not caring. But what do I care?

Not sure if this has been raised, because I’ve only scanned about half of the 28 pages of posts…

It would be interesting if the living world had an impact on the economy in some way other than periodically causing rampant inflation due to super champ farming invasions, etc.

What if enemies harvested resources on the map? Essentially shutting down nodes but creating “caches” of resources in their camps? What if they forged these resources into items over time – making the enemies stronger, better armed, but likely to drop better loot? This might lead to an interesting dynamic – small groups of players can prevent enemies from gaining a foothold on the map but it would take a major group of players to clear out enemies once fortified.

Similarly, what if it took crafted items to arm NPCs and allies so that they could attack/defend an objective? Making or turning in specific armor, weapons, etc. (low/mid tier stuff that just gets vendor trashed) might be necessary to activate a DE? This could make crafting mean something beyond just being a roadway to a legendary.

What if NPCs consumed/bought things from the trading post, had varying prices for crafted items… you needed to talk to them to find out what they were looking for; smart players who follow the dialog can profit, the “in demand” items change periodically to prevent exploitation…

I’m sure there are balance issues with all of these concepts – but the basic thing is that the economy doesn’t really factor into any of these events. Yet in our REAL living world, it’s a dominant force. Perhaps there’s something there…

I’m a casual player with a lvl 80 asura engi. I’ve got a bunch of low level alts that are other professions. I’ve had the most fun with my engi. This class has so much versatility in solo or group mode.

I tried various builds while leveling. Started with turrets. Loved setting up “kill zones” using them. Ultimately settled on a grenade build through 80. I spent much of that time feeling powerful and survivable.

Now I’m getting to the very fun part – experimenting with other builds. Particularly looking for good PUG dungeon running builds (casual player, have no time to deal with guilds). I’m looking at an Elixir Gun build because PUGs usually have plenty of people happy to DPS away but few focused on CC and heals. Elixir Gun lets me play a great support role.

The biggest challenge I find with messing with different kit builds is traits and gear. A given trait spec + gear can make or break a kit build. E.g. the difference between no traits, no gear and the grenade kit and optimized gear/traits is 3 or more times the DPS. But it’s not just DPS – if you’re a heal, condition or CC kit user then the “team multiplier” also goes up dramatically with spec. So if you’re not specced correctly you won’t really “feel” what the kit is truly capable of – particularly against tough opponents.

Part of me would love to see a “testing dungeon” where we could set up a lvl 80 char with max PvE gear and play it against a std. dungeon boss. But the rest of me actually enjoys not really knowing what is optimal and having to experiment and learn.

Good luck with your engi adventure – if you approach it as a “discovery journey” you won’t be disappointed. There are a lot of “viable” play styles.

Will be back home in about 1 week and then will be able to benchmark side by side 13’’ 2013 i5 4gb MBA against 13’’ 2013 i7 8gb MBA.
- I will do Mac Client on both in several locations and settings.
- I will then do bootcamp Win7 (can’t bear to touch Win8) on the i7 8gb one, which should demonstrate the “best” possible performance.

This should help everyone figure out exactly what the parameters of the HD 5000 chipset are regarding GW2 gaming.

This is probably relevant beyond MBA as HD5000 is likely to be the standard netbook config for the coming few years. Might boost player #s if people know that the game actually plays on these cheap systems (e.g. 1st laptops for high school/uni students).

Overall, very playable. Just ran around farming holos w/a group in windowed mode (1024×768) with the “best appearance” + AA settings. framerate didn’t drop below 20 FPS.

Hi everyone – just got a new Macbook Air with the Intel HD 5000 chipset.

Figured many of you would be keen to know how GW2’s Mac Client plays on this new chipset!

I’m happy to run some other specific tests – let me know in the thread; I’ve got some time coming up to play around.

My config is the base level – 1.3 GHz processor, 4 gigs ram and 256 gig storage. In a few weeks I’ll have the 1.7 GHz, 8 gigs ram model for comparison.

But want you really want are the framerates:

Resolution – Fullscreen 1440×900
1st setting – Autodetect: low everything, native sampling, no reflections, no post processing, no AA.
In LA strafing Zommoros: 15-20 FPS
In Cursed Shore & Gendarran: 20-30 FPS

2nd setting – Best Appearance: high everything except: no AA, textures medium, shaders medium (can set to high but then you get 1 FPS!), native sampling, reflection terrain & sky
In LA strafing Zommoros: 8-15 FPS
In Gendarran: 15-22 FPS

Funny thing – setting AA to ON (FXAA) doesn’t actually affect framerate noticeably!

Also ran it on Best Appearance in windowed mode – 1024×600 – that boosted FPS up to 30 in many cases.

Impressions:
1) OMG. Expectations = blown away. The HD 5000 chipset is a gamechanger as far as integrated graphics go. I’m expecting to see those FPS numbers +5-10 when I install bootcamp. But this game was basically unplayable using the mac client on my MBP mid-2010 – was OK in bootcamp. Now my MBA is my go-to gaming rig. Crazy.

2) I’m really curious to compare these #s when I get the 1.7 GHz model – I have a funny feeling that some of these FPS #s are CPU and memory limited – might get a bump there. Will also be very interested to get actual #s with bootcamp (but waiting for the maxxed out MBA for that). That said, GW2 was one of the last reasons I had to go to bootcamp and now it’s not necessary.

For me:
- “Best appearance” with FXAA feels nice for world exploration and just enjoying how beautiful the game is.
- Running dungeons or doing any serious stuff, I’ll throw it into Auto-detect and enjoy 20-30 FPS
- Haven’t yet tried a WvWvW zerg yet… will update when I do…

Hope this excites some of you debating whether to get the MBA now or wait till fall for the 13 inch MBPro. Bear in mind that the MBA might actually perform better if they shove a retina display in the 13 in MBPro since there are less pixels to drive….

I am really hoping someone in the etsy world will make a real plush quaggan backpack. Would be a perfect size/padding for a gaming laptop + accessories. That said, I’d probably take mine to work. I think it would go well with a pinstripe suit. Might be a little odd in the elevator for anyone standing behind me. If they hug the quaggan back, is it weird?