Guild Wars 2

Remarks

• Without WT, try to stay below ~90% CPU usage to get a smooth experience. Maybe consider limiting FPS in GW2’s setting so that GW2 doesn’t take all resources it can get.
• There are two rendering methods to choose from in WT’s settings in the “Performance” menu. The default is “Injected”, which should work in all scenarios. The alternative, “Overlayed”, yields better performance, but doesn’t work in full screen and has some other small disadvantages which are explained within the app. I personally prefer the overlayed version because it’s a bit smoother, but decide for yourself.

Special Thanks

Our thanks go out to WoodenPotatoes, who covered the beta of the 2.0 version on a stream quite early (in a very wonky state), as well as to all players who participated in our beta tests. I’m sure there are still a few bugs hiding in our code, but without you it would be a whole lot more. As the beta phase is now officially over, we will contact all of our beta testers because of some little prizes we promised a while ago.

And of course, big thanks to you, who read this wall of text and considers trying out our app. Have fun with it and let us know what you think!

Reddit mirror: https://redd.it/5qpet4

Hi guys!

I’m aRestless and I’m the lead developer on Who’s Talking for Guild Wars 2. Who’s Talking (or WT) is a free app for Overwolf and TeamSpeak that allows you and your friends to see each other’s position projected into the game, marked with a customizable icon. This makes it very easy to keep track of one another, even in crowded situations, and you’ll always know where to go when asked for help. Here’s a quick GIF how that looks. If you’re more into videos than walls of text, there’s a quick guide to the app available on YouTube here.

Very similar to the popular GW2TacO, WT utilizes the official MumbleLink API to extract position information from the game. While TacO aims to be a helpful universal tool with integrated guides and utilities, our projects are all about sharing information and even content between players, to enrich everyone’s gameplay experience. Who’s Talking is one way of doing that.

Who’s Talking is as “officially allowed” as it gets, since its first version won two awards in the Overwolf App Challenge in 2015, where the winners were determined purely by ArenaNet employees. So we can confidently say that you won’t get into trouble for using WT, and, if there’s any problem with it, that ArenaNet will definitely approach us first before taking actions against individual players.

Getting Who’s Talking

If you’re impatient and just want to know where to get it, here’s a direct download link. This installer will either add Who’s Talking to an existing Overwolf installation, or provide you with a version of Overwolf that has WT (and only WT) preinstalled. If you don’t trust directly linked .exe files, just get it from Overwolf’s built-in app store.

2.0

The actual reason for this post is the newly released 2.0 version, which has been in on/off development since that contest in 2015. We weren’t happy with performance and especially usability, so we pretty much overhauled the whole thing. Here are some highlights:

• Nondisturbing by default. With the default settings, your gameplay won’t be interrupted and you’ll only notice WT when it actually benefits you (i.e. there’s another WT user in your TeamSpeak channel).
• It truly works right out of the box. Install it via Overwolf and it just works, no need to set up anything, everything happens automatically.
• We don’t utilize the TeamSpeak chat anymore. That was annoying as heck.
• Customizable icons (not just colors), including the ability to upload your own images. Kappa
• Support for different modes that decide when your own icon is shown to others (see below)

What is it useful for?

While using WT ourselves we encountered three different scenarios where WT is useful for different reasons, and we recommend a different operation mode for each of them:

• Open world with one or two friends. Even while exploring, people tend to get sidetracked and are quickly out of sight, or you stumble into a big event and the screen is cluttered with other players. We wouldn’t have thought so beforehand, but for us WT really shines in these situations. For this use-case, we recommend to set WT to always send your position, regardless if you’re talking or not.
• 5 man instances. Hearing “stack on me” or “I need healing” on TS becomes way more useful when you directly see which character that voice belongs to. For groups like this, we recommend to set WT to send your position while talking, so that the screen isn’t cluttered with icons while you don’t need them.
• For big groups like WvW zergs, we recommend to never send your position automatically for the average player. You can then use a hotkey to ping your current position to others. Important members of the group may use other settings, just as you’d mark certain players with squad symbols.

By default, WT is configured to only send your position while talking.

Upcoming Features

• Discord support. Nothing more to say.
• Support for multiple TeamSpeak tabs / server connections. Currently WT doesn’t like multiple TS tabs, but we’ll change that.
• More performance improvements. We made big leaps from where we were before, but there’s still stuff to be improved upon.

I’m a software developer and because I kind of understand what’s going on behind the scenes, I’m usually that one guy who’s defending ArenaNet in controversial situations.

But in this case I have no sympathy for your decision whatsoever. This is not something ominous and shrouded like fractal leaderboards or the WvW overhaul, it’s a very clearly advertised feature of the expansion. No room for interpretation. And it should, from my perspective as a developer, be one of the features that have a very clear scope and can be planned (effort-wise) way better than most of the other stuff that’s developed for GW2.

And, on top of all that, I think it’s in itself a very, very bad decision, because legendary weapons are the very definition of endgame in Guild Wars 2. It is definitely what keeps me playing right now. Take that away and you’re taking away a big long-term goal and motivation from a serious number of players. That’s a killer for player retention, which should be your number one goal with GW2’s business model.

Alright, I take that back.

The camera lags behind. Without touching the mouse, only while running around, I compared the distance traveled by the camera to the distance traveled by the avatar. While moving the character on an even underground, the distance traveled by the avatar is significantly larger than the distance traveled by the camera (and this difference jitters quite a lot). When I then stop moving, the difference shrinks back to roughly 0 (only roughly because of rounding errors I presume).

So yeah, there’s something odd about that data. Maybe in the on-frame calculations, the camera’s position is adjusted to the avatar’s position after the Mumble data was pushed out.

From my perspective the Desert Borderlands are fine. But they heavily suffer from the low population currently. WvW population took a big hit with HoT, and I think the vast majority of the players who initally took a break from WvW did that because out of a sudden there was something to do in PvE again. Then the weekly reset changed on top of all that and what little common ground those WvW groups and guilds had was gone – and many WvW groups dissolved.

And then there’s learning a new map. As someone who almost exclusively played (Alpine) Borderlands, the passage ways on EBG are still confusing for me. And in a similar fashion, the Desert Borderlands aren’t overly confusing, they’re just unfamiliar. But naturally, the dedicated WvW folks (who didn’t leave for PvE) disliked the map at first (as you’d dislike anything that confuses you), identified that as the reason for the low population and built up their prejudice towards the map, instead of properly learning to play and maybe happen to like it.

So in my opinion, most people didn’t even give the Desert Borderlands a chance.

From my personal standpoint, reverting the map will not bring me back into WvW again. It might even put me off even more, because I’d see that as a step backwards. What WvW is lacking for me is purpose. To be motivated, I need goals, be it personal rewards I can work towards or server-wide goals, in the form of tournaments or seasons. An ever repeating weekly cycle, that may or may not change a placement on a meaningless leaderboard does not motivate me.

What you’re experiencing here is probably simply the result of a dirty read.

The character moves, “away” from the camera. GW2 updates the MumbleLink data. Probably first the character position, then the camera position. If you access the data between those two, you already have the new character position, but still the old camera position, which is the reason why the distance fluctuates.

There’s no way around that. GW2 could set a “writing” flag in the mumble data during the write process, which could be used in conjunction with the tick field to identify most dirty reads, but that would still be a bandaid fix.

Hi there,

before I’m writing up anything sophisticated on github, I wanted to ask about feasibility in this case. Use case would pretty much be to read out the contents of the hero panel’s Story Journal on a per-character basis, especially the active story, next story step, and decisions / branches in earlier story steps.

Cheers,
aRestless

One of my favorite encounters of season 2 is the teragriff boss fight in the episode about rescuing the Aspect Masters. To my knowledge, this was the first enemy in the game that had actual aerial combat. All “flying” enemies in vanilla GW2 just use flying as a fancy evade animation.

What are the main challenges in designing and implementing an actually flying enemy? Are the wyverns in HoT an evolution of the teragriff encounter in season 2, or are they fundamentally different?

Hi there!

I’m aRestless, the lead developer of Markers, Who’s Talking and the SweetFX Preset Selector. The last few months, we worked really hard to turn Who’s Talking, which started as a contribution to one of the Overwolf/Guild Wars 2 app contests, into a really polished and stable application, that doesn’t suffer from usability problems anymore.

We are very close to release of our version 2.0, but because we really want to polish the application before putting it on the official, public channels, we are eager to have a serious open beta phase. That’s where you come in! We really need your help.

What’s Who’s Talking?
If you and your friends on TeamSpeak use this application, it will display a customizable icon over their character’s head, so it’s easy to keep track of each other, not getting lost in giant zergs and being able to help each other. Remember the last time you and a guildmate on TeamSpeak went to an event, they got downed and you couldn’t find them in the clutter? Or someone said “there’s X at my position”, but you didn’t know which of the blue dots on the minimap that was? Yeah, that doesn’t happen anymore with Who’s Talking. Instead, it looks like this.

When this icon is shown above your character is completely customizable. It defaults to when TS detects you talking, but can also be set to “always” or only when pressing a customizable hotkey.

Who’s Talking is an application for Overwolf.

What’s new in 2.0?

A lot. Here are some of the changes:

• Who’s Talking now works truly out of the box. By default, it automatically starts when GW2 and TeamSpeak are running (of course you can turn that off), and automatically detects and connects to other Who’s Talking users on your TeamSpeak channel. No more manual sending of invitations and other shenanigans, it just works.
• No big, obtrusive menu bar anymore. The menu is hidden in a small icon, that can be dragged anywhere on the screen, so it doesn’t bother you.
• More customization. You already could pick the color of your icon before, and now we have all (base) profession icons built in. You can even configure Who’s Talking to automatically detect the profession you’re playing and adjust the icon accordingly. And, what’s even better, you can pick your own icons from your harddrive and use them as position icon (although the coloring option won’t work then).
• Drastic increases in performance. We spent many, many hours to make Who’s Talking run as smoothly as possible, and worked hard at not burdening your CPU when we don’t have to.
• Last but not least, we also hide all icons now when they don’t make sense: We automatically detect cutscenes, loading screens, the character select screen and the world map and stop rendering our icons.

Twitch Stream
If you want to look at moving pictures first (before you decide if you want to use the application), we’re having a short-ish Twitch stream today where we show off the current beta version. The stream starts at 7pm UTC, (approximately 3 hours from this post) at twitch.tv/aRestless. This is also a great place to come if you have any questions.

Participating in the beta and rewards
If you’re interested now, you should check out our beta page. It includes all information you need to get started and how you can send reports and suggestions.

And because we know you want to be bribed, we’re giving away one weapon each from the Improvised , Gallant and Dwayna BLTC weapon sets. The winner of one weapon set will be able to pick an arbitrary weapon from that set.

To qualify for the giveaway, just include your Guild Wars 2 account name in one of your mails to wtbeta{at}smartech.info. If you’re sending us feedback, suggestions or bugreports, you’ll qualify automatically – otherwise just send a screenshot of you using Who’s Talking, so we know you actually participated in the beta.

FAQ

Is using Who’s Talking bannable?

No. Who’s Talking was awarded second place of the “Player Experience Category” of last year’s Overwolf Guild Wars 2 App Challenge . The winners of that contest were picked by ArenaNet developers. So yes, they are okay with it.

Is it free?

Yes. Our promise is that Markers and Who’s Talking will always be free for Guild Wars 2 players, because we see this as our contribution to this community. If you want to make our lives a little easier, you are welcome to donate though.

Does Who’s Talking work in fullscreen?

Yes. Who’s Talking works in fullscreen and windowed fullscreen. It does not work properly in windowed mode, but that’s something we might change if there’s demand for it.

Will Who’s Talking affect my performance?

Maybe. We’re rendering an additional 3D projection on top of your game, so if your PC is already struggling to run GW2, and on top of that you’re watching a Twitch stream on your second monitor, don’t expect Who’s Talking to run smoothly. But you’ll most likely see Who’s Talking having issues with the limited computing power, not GW2. (For the tech nerds: Overwolf windows are background processes, so when resources are tight, foreground applications like GW2 will have priority.)

To ensure that Who’s Talking has enough computing power left, we strongly recommend to limit GW2’s FPS at least to 60, because otherwise GW2 just takes all computing power it can get. On top of that, you can adjust Who’s Talking’s FPS in the “Performance” menu.

On top of all that, we put in a lot of development effort to make sure Who’s Talking only uses resources if it actually has to.

Straegen.2938:

Until holding objectives is worth more than taking them, WvW will always be more about flipping than defending.

This is exactly the angle my proposal comes from. You need to assault your opponent (to gain and sustain personal contribution), but you have to defend (which is a server effort) to actually get rewards out of that. If you don’t attack, you stop getting anything. If you don’t defend, you don’t get more than some baseline rewards from your server’s PPT.

Taking and holding an objective means better rewards for your entire server. I think this is a very good point to start conflicts from.

We all know that rewards are a big issue in WvW and their lack is a big source of demotivation among players. I’m taking myself as an example: I love WvW, but I’m not motivated by some number somewhere on a leaderboard. During a tournament/season that’s somehow different, because even without a reward at the end I have something to work towards, but during the normal, daily routine of WvW I’m missing a long-term goal. And here’s where the rewards come into play.

Rewards are tricky in WvW, because:

• Winning a match is about holding objectives. But defending is very hard to measure for rewards.
• Leeching should not be possible. You should only be rewarded if you contribute.
• Often the biggest contributions are those that happen far away from the actual event. For example the scout that makes sure that the keep doesn’t get attacked while the main force is on the offensive, or a small group that draws attention while the zerg attacks a different objective.
• The rewards should be better if your server does well as a whole.

Under the impressions of the HoT reward system I came up with an idea how you could apply some of the ideas there to WvW. I would greatly appreciate any feedback and general brainstorm, there are probably flaws in my logic, but maybe it’s a starting point:

• A player has a track of rewards just like the map bonus rewards or the PvP reward tracks. A selectable reward track would be ideal. Making a certain amount of progress on that track results in a reward.
• Every player has a personal contribution level from 0% to 200% just as we see it in the HoT PvE areas. Personal contribution is awarded for most sources of WXP like capturing objectives, repairing walls or killing other players. The amount of personal contribution gained does not have to correlate with the amount of WXP gained. Also, exploitable sources of WXP (i.e. building useless siege) could be excluded.
• If no additional personal contribution is gained, it decays over time to prevent leeching, maybe after each tick. It decays significantly slower if other members of your guild or squad(?) gain personal contribution. So for example, instead of losing 25% personal contribution after 15 minutes of “doing nothing” (scouting, distracting the opponent), you’d only lose 12.5% if you’re teamed up with other people who do something else and are successful. This should be limited though, for example to only 10% of all players in a squad. Also you should definitely always lose contribution over time, to prevent indefinite leeching.
• Certain events now grant track progress, depending on your personal contribution. If you have 100% or more personal contribution, you receive full progress, at 50% only half progress, and so on. Events that could grant track progress are tied to “your server is doing well” and examples could be:
  • Your server successfully upgraded an objective on your map
  • Your server held a fully upgraded objective on your map for time X
  • Your server’s tick (higher PPT = more progress)

This system could also be applied to tournaments. Let’s say making progress on your reward track during a tournament would occasionally grant a currency, like a “Token of Participation”. After the tournament ends, you can exchange these tokens for rewards, but the prices are lower the better your server did. Other than the current, achievement based sytem, this would encourage people to keep playing after becoming eligible for rewards.

tl;dr: Assaulting the enemy should grant personal contribution, while defending what you have should grant rewards (or reward progress) based on that personal contribution. Personal contribution should decay over time to prevent leeching, but decay slower for players who team up with guilds or squads to allow scouting. The system could also be applied to tournaments.

Thanks for reading! Now discuss!

Also posted on here on reddit.

Everyone knows the dillema – you want to pop your commander tag for specific people to see you on the map, but you’ll always attract other people as well, because they see that shiny symbol on the map.

This is a particular problem for WvW and guild missions, and it becomes even worse once squads can be used as “megataxis”. People who just want to ferry people in will run around with commander tags. I know we already have our fair share of troll commanders, but that doesn’t mean that screen clutter because of people who actually use squads because of their functionality shouldn’t be reduced.

Because of all that, I’m suggesting three visibility modes for commander tags, configurable by the commander:

• Public: The current version. Everyone can see your commander tag.
• Guild: Only representing members of your currently represented guild can see your commander tag. You can still invite non-guildmates to your squad, which makes the tag visible.
• Private: The tag can only be seen by members of the squad.

Thoughts?

I have a guildmate who’s “lately” experiencing weird lag issues, her estimation is that it started around the Mordrem event.

The reason why this might be correlated is that she has immense trouble with the lighting jump crystals in Dry Top. To be exact, the skill launches her way further than she targets it, to the point that she could barely make the very first jump at the start of Dry Top where you’re supposed to use that skill.

From the description of your technique I’m guessing that these types of skills are very sensible to these kinds of calculations. Especially because her ping is around 100 and therefor definitely in acceptable parameters.

I think the boss phase in the Silverwastes is a perfect example for good reward design: You get a personal, decent reward if your boss succeeds, but you get an even better reward if the map succeeds as a whole.

This basic design principle should be applied to all types of massive open world content. After a baseline reward for participating and meaningful contribution, all the effort you put in should benefit everyone on the map, including yourself.

Also, hasting from event to event isn’t fun. Hasting to an event and arriving late is even frustrating. In that sense: Less, but more impactful events would make things way better.

Actually for the last stress test the download speeds were very low, too (often under 100kb/sec). This time, however, there are way more people invited.

Calm down guys. They will fix the issue. If they wouldn’t fix it, there would be noone in the stress test, which would make the big stream, including analyst desk, battle replays and all that kind of stuff pretty boring.

I’ll be there the whole week! Looking forward to meeting you guys!

Guardian’s Torch #4 skill seems to be applying burning incorrectly.

From the tooltip, upon activation, you would periodically burn up to 3 nearby foes for 6 seconds of burning.

However, in most cases the skill will only apply 1 stack of burning on activation, with a duration of approximately 3 seconds. Only very rarely, after 1 or 2 seconds, it will apply one additional stack with the full 6 second duration.

I tested this on the golems in Heart of the Mists.

I didn’t test the “passive” effect of the skill before, so I don’t know if the patch broke it or if it always worked that way.

@Jon:

While I understand what you were trying to do with the name, “Dragon Hunter” does not have the same ring to it like “Witch Hunter” or “Demon Hunter”. Because a dragon is usually seen as an animal, “Dragon Hunter” sounds like someone who hunts for the trophy, not because it’s the right thing to do.

I like the idea. The only thing that bugs me a bit is that there currently are applications for Tome of Courage skill 1 (think: Stronghold). If that’s gone, the guardian will no longer have access to an ability that, over a certain amount of time, constantly heals up allies significantly.

So if you take away that ability, PLEASE bring it back with the next guardian elite specialization. Tomes as kits (maybe at the cost of losing weapon swap) sound like a whole lot of fun.

Just to be save: Are we talking about the horizontal, vertical, or diagonal field of view?

- I had a crash at one time. You received the report data.
- There was a time span with serious lag. Most funny part was the Wyvern constantly disappearing and popping up again.
- During that time of lag, I was once able to use Judge’s Intervention from the Glider in mid air, with the Wyvern as target. After that I always got the message with the invalid path.

As a fellow software developer: THANK YOU!

The camera is a very sensitive topic and to all those people who are complaining: Believe me, if you got a patch with a bad camera mechanic, you’d be crying louder.

@StevenL: I was actually about to ask roughly the same thing. Pretty much every change to the map size and/or scrolling mechanisms on it would break parts of my app, so I would be pretty happy about a way to participate in the beta tests.

Sorry for two posts in a row, but I just noticed another thing that’s missing in the identity field, and that’s the race. The profession is already included, but the race is not.

draos.9574:

You can do it maybe better. You can check the distance from camera to avatar and the y-coordinate of the camera front. If you are in the map, the y-coord is currently always 0.95 together with the distance between cam and avatar it will be work good.

Thanks! Might not hold with the new camera options though, so we probably got to wait for that patch.

Avatar of Furin.6814:

I think we got around this problem by detecting the position of the camera, which actually goes into a height that is only obtainable by going into map view.

Yep, that’s what I wanted to try for the next version of my overlay. But since you can zoom out pretty far at certain world bosses, I think height isn’t sufficient. It’s probably more a fixed position relative to the character and the direction the character is facing (when you’re coming out of map view the camera will always be facing to your character’s back). But without testing I don’t know how consistent that is if you’re moving while in map view, so…. yeah, I don’t know if a flag would actually be necessary, but it wouldn’t be bad either.

Avatar of Furin.6814:

So to be able to overlay over the in-game map we would need to know the zoom level and relative position on the map the user is looking. Floor would also be extremely helpful.

I’m tracking the mouse (click, drag, mouse wheel) to accomplish this. And yes, it’s a mess.

It’s as offtopic as it gets, but I just wanted to throw in that I’m really amazed by these threads and the work on the repo. This is real collaboration and motivates me as a developer immensely.

Thank you for working with us!

YES! I was about to ask the very same thing! Thank you for considering to put this in!

The only other thing I’d like to see in the Mumble data is a flag if the map is opened. Because… opening the map pretty much breaks every application that relies on the Mumble (camera) data.

Even more exciting would be to know the dimensions of the currently shown portion of the map while in map view or even on the mini map – but I think currently my own project would be the only one benefitting from that, so I don’t really think it’s worth the effort.

Edit: Oh there actually is something that’s missing in the Mumble position data, which is the current floor on the map. Unfortunately we can’t convert player position to floor through the web APIs.

Due to the current Overwolf App Contest… is there a (rough) ETA or priorization for the upcoming API functionality? I could start implementing without the API up and running as long as I knew that the functionality would come within the time frame of the contest.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Whether or not that’s something we can provide is a question that’s above my pay grade :P

Even if you could decide that – you shouldn’t do it. There are already copy-paste low budget games out there that simply copy the Guild Wars 2 UI. Throwing out models and textures in a convenient easy-to-use format would only extend this content theft to all kinds of assets.

Edit, to avoid double post:

ClockworkUnltd.2690:

mahri.8410:

I would like the API to provide location coordonates of players. If I would be able to see my guildmates location on Tyria map in a web app, there would be more collaboration.

I believe this can be done with the mumble API.

Yep. Markers can already do that, although it would display your guild members on the ingame map instead of a web app. However, as soon as the current update is finished (features, performance, stability… ugh, I hate JavaScript) I’ll get in touch with the creators of various map-rendering projects to achieve interoperability. I’ll probably be able to provide a simple JavaScript wrapper that handles communication with a share server and spits out information about player positions and so on.

Flip times for WvW would be great! Would solve quite a few of my problems with that endpoint.

Guild management and especially member management can be a big problem in larger guilds. Having Roster and Roster History exposed would be a huge thing.

First of all thanks a whole bunch for doing this! As a developer it is very encouraging to hear that you do your best to support us a bit more!

My project heavily relies on the Mumble API and it would be fantastic to have some additional information through the web API to better deal with what I already get, for example

• Information about the (vertical) dimensions of floors sufficient to convert from player position to floor
• Zoom Level Information for dungeon maps. For example: Ascalonian Catacombs are on continent Tyria and therefor should have 8 zoom levels, but since dungeons have their own map view, ingame there are only 2 zoom levels. Arah has 4.
• Zoom Level to magnification factor. For Tyria I pretty much figured the magnification factors out by myself, but they seem to differ a bit between Tyria and the Mists … and of course dungeons.

I apologise in advance if any of these are already possible – I’d be grateful for any advise. Additionally, from authenticated APIs I’d welcome two basic things:

• Currently represented guild
• Home Server for WvW (since Megaservers the Mumble API seems to be broken in that aspect)

Also I’m hoping for a Single Sign On solution for authentication … because account theft is a bad thing.

Quick question: Does the floor-API allow to (indirectly) convert from character position to floor?

Cause that’s something I could use for Markers. A lot.

anzenketh.3759:

butch.8136:

Would be nice but still won’t solve the issue.

I have yet to hear a good argument on why build templates would not solve the majority of issues with the stronghold map being in the same queue as the other maps. Would you care to explain it to me.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/pvp/Ready-Up-this-Friday-Stronghold/4794230

Stronghold was advertised to not only require different roles and builds than Conquest, but also to attract different types of players.

If both game modes are in the same queue, we will most likely end up with matches where all players who do not end up in their desired game mode will leave the match immediately. And I couldn’t even blame them for that.

We haven’t seen much of Stronghold yet, but there’s already discussion about teamsizes. Many players seem to want something GvG-ish, which would require something about at least 8 players per team. But there is also reasonable concern. For example 8v8 would make it difficult to watch during tournaments, because with 16 players in total there would be too much stuff going on at the same time.

So as there’s currently testing of the new game mode and experimenting with team sizes, I think it would be cool if you would consider offering two “official” game modes for Stronghold, for example 5v5 and 8v8, both with their separate matchmaking and leaderboards.

The official tournaments could of course still be limited to something like 5v5.

Faux.1937:

I always thought Skill Points could be a way of doing the Trait system, each zone could have 1 Skill Point spot thats an event/challenge more so than a fight, or a fast talk.

You mean like the current blue skill points on the map, with similar tasks, but granting a trait instead of a skillpoint?

That’s actually a pretty cool idea.

It should also be mentioned that, although there are some builds that are more “efficient” than others, pretty much every build is viable in this game. I’m running a very tanky build for my guardian and although some people wouldn’t take me with them on their dungeon tour, I’m pretty happy with it and it works perfectly fine. Different types of gear (or builds) usually don’t decide if you succeed or fail, they only decide how fast you can complete the content.

tronjeremy.5820:

Definitely go to Hot Joy which is an uber ride away or even a walk from downtown.

We’re going to have some HoT Joy, that’s for sure °L°

@amax: I’m not here to discuss about the pros and cons of your design. This is something I prefer getting paid for. I just noticed that there’s a subtle, toxic atmosphere here among the players that basically says: “ArenaNet’s UI designers are bad at their job, hire this guy instead.” The thing I wanted to point out is that these decisions aren’t that simple or one-dimensional and that many of your concepts are indeed debatable.

So although I might have criticized your work, my critique isn’t directed at you. It’s directed at all those players here that are judging way too fast, with way too few information at hand.

As a programmer I feel obliged to step in.

The general opinion seems to be “this is so much better than the current state” and “hire this guy, introduce this now”. But I want to point out that many of those things you might like about that design aren’t actual UI/UX redesigns, but features you are currently missing (lore journal, build templates). And that they are missing has more reasons to it than UI designers not knowing where to place a button.

Also, don’t fully judge a design if you haven’t used it at least in a dummy application. Let’s take the proposed guild panel as an example. I wonder how it would look like when I’m standing with 70 other guildies at Tequatl. It becomes pretty useless, because I can only see 9 guild mates at once, not even able to sort by name or guild rank.

It also depicts some features imitating the LFG-tool, namely guild member activities. Where do you set your “current activity”? At least I couldn’t think of any place in the UI where where you wouldn’t constantly forget that you set your status to “looking for WvW”. Also: The argument for this feature is to “push the social aspects”. Well, I don’t know about you guys, but asking in guild chat if someone wants to do a certain activity feels much more social than using the LFG-tool. And this features is nothing but a very limited LFG-tool for guildmembers.

And, a last thing about the guild panel: The space for the guild message. It’s pretty small, much smaller than the space my guild actively uses for the message. So you’d eventually need a scroll bar. However, with a scroll bar you also need a border around the area that is scrolled (everything else would look or feel weird when using it, because you need to group elements that belong together). But now imagine that design with a scrollbar and a surrounding border. Would look pretty ugly, eh?

Another big thing software developers like me like to talk about is extensibility. The design for the LFG-tool might look pretty, but add one additional category or dungeon and the whole layout is screwed up.

So… please don’t get me wrong. I appreciate and admire the work put into this and I think it’s a cool idea to use such a thing as a project to extend the own portfolio. But in general I think you’re all pretty unfair towards ArenaNet. There’s more to these decisions than might seem obvious at the first glimpse. Just because something seems visually “more appealing” that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily better or without downsides when considering all aspects.

Ventari was wrong.

I’m not mad that we don’t have two patches at once.

I’m not mad that good content needs time to be developed and is hard to mantain over the holidays.

But I think that the pacing doesn’t feel right. As far as I remember, the first half of season 2 was fine in that aspect. But then we had a mid-season break after a point in the story where the plot was just about to gain pace. And that break felt very long. Now the second half began with a big patch, that not only contained a new map, but also a big chunk of story (the library! glint’s lair! and that was only one instance with gameplay out of THREE). Then we had two episodes that not only felt very short in comparison, but both also ended with a massive cliffhanger, with the first one still not being resolved. And now, with the feeling that we’d finally be getting answers, the next episode comes a month later than most people had expected.

I like the story and I really like how you tell it, but with the variation in patch sizes and release intervals, it feels like I’m listening to a stuttering narrator. At a moment, where the story reaches a high pace, the narration seems to slow down, due to smaller patch sizes and an additional break.

So if possible, try to keep a certain pace during a season, that means roughly equal “size” of updates and no interruptions of the update cycle other than season- and mid-season breaks.

With the introduction of new PvE content and rewards we often hear complaints from WvW players, that have no chance to retrieve these newly introduced items with their primary playstyle. PvP players have reward tracks, why don’t WvW players have them?

My suggestion: Get rid of champion bags from tower and keep lords, lower the loot received from enemy players and instead introduce reward tracks where the progress is tied to WXP.

You could also limit the amount of progress per day (or per week?) that can be achieved by the same task, where attacking objectives and defending objectives are different types of tasks. This could have a good impact on attacking vs. defending, but it’s also something that would need to be balanced really well.

If this has been suggested before, I’d be thankful for a link.

John Smith.4610:

Virtually nobody ever hits DR.

I think this is a pretty misleading statement. For specific types of farms you definitely experience DR, first and foremost the Maize Balm Farm, simply because there you can observe it that easily. The labyrinth was also mentioned.

I don’t say that DR is a bad thing (although I don’t like the lack of transparency), but I think that such a statement, suggesting that DR is nothing you’d have to keep in mind is pretty misleading.

Conditions
In the core, I like how the conditions work in GW2. However, it’s often mentioned that these mechanics don’t scale up with many players. I already had posted some random thoughts about that previously in this thread here, but now I’ve taken some time to work on a concept how some conditions actually could work in a fight with many players.

The core of the concept is that on “tough” mobs, like champions, applied conditions are converted to some other, similar debuff, that can stack up, regardless of the condition. But of course these stacks should have a reasonable limit. Also, each stack has a limited duration, which of course could be less than the duration of the original condition.

And, the following examples are what they are: Examples.

• Blind: Each stack increases the chance of the mob to miss the next attack, like 5 to 10% per stack. All stacks are removed when the mob attacks, regardless if it misses or not.
• Burning: A certain number of stacks is needed to ignite the mob. When it’s ignited (and now receives damage for some time), all stacks are removed and must be regathered again
• Chilled: Each stack increases the internal cooldown of skills or reduces the attack speed by X%.
• Crippled: Each stack reduces movement speed by X%
• Fear: As with Burning, X stacks are needed to trigger the fear-effect.
• Immobilized: Each stack reduces movement speed by X%. The maximum of stacks could mean a complete immobilization, or the unability to use some mob-specific skills (such as charge attacks)
• Poison: Let tough mobs have a serious amount of passive regeneration, which is reduced by X% for each stack of poison.
• Vulnerability: Each stack grants less additional damage than usual (say 0.5% instead of 1%), but stacks can go higher (say, up to 50)
• Weakness: As with blindness, each stack increases the chance of an attack to be a glancing blow.

These changes wouldn’t compromise the concept the conditions are based on, but would make them more compatible with huge amounts of players. My vision would be that people don’t just roll their faces over the keyboard, but have to apply conditions in a coordinated, goal oriented way. So for example, when that attack comes, the mob better has a huge amount of blindness and weakness stacks on it, so the damage is mitigated. Or a boss, that simply runs in circles, and everytime it reaches a certain spot, spawns a huge (and dangerous) amount of adds – so you better keep immobilization and cripple on it.

Crystal Reid.2481:

Should raids be restricted to the guild level that require some form of guild activity/currency to activate/enter, or should they be accessible by anyone? What are your thoughts on that specific?

I think we want progression, without the you-need-that-equipment-to-enter we know from other MMOs. I don’t see how this would be possible without a guild that “unlocks” tier after tier.

Out of a quick thought: What if “tough mobs” (not necessarily bosses, but who knows), could have a different version of the Unshakable Buff, that allows coordinated crowd control. Removing the defiance stacks is too random, because many skills (and traits) bring crowd control effects with them.

My suggestion is this: Suppose a mob should stay in a specific area (because maybe he’s vulnerable there) now you could immobilize it with a skill, but instead of an immobilization, the mob gets 1 stack of a debuff. Each of these stacks could hold approximately as long as the original immobilization would – but only if a specific number of stacks is reached (say, 10), the next immobilization that goes through actually chains the mob where it is.

In such a way you could bring crowd control with masses of players into the game, but with the need of coordination. So instead of one CC skill that randomly goes through, you need a number of people executing the same CC at approximately the same time.

One could also think of mobs that receive a huge amount of damage once they’re ignited, but that receives a huge effort of many players putting the burning condition on them at once.