Guild Wars 2

The allure of legendary stuff is not everyone has one. The only way to make sure not everyone has one in the long term, is to use a system that forces it to be rare – like a system where only one out of every 10,000 inputs gives the output you want. Thus the output you want is “rare”, or unlikely. Welcome to RNG.

The alternative I keep seeing posts asking for, a “skill challenge”? Will not keep it limited. Once the first kindhearted soul finishes whatever “intensely-difficult” challenge there is protecting X Legendary Sword from ownership, turns around and makes a YouTube tutorial on how to do it – the economy will flood with X Legendary Swords. Challenges may be hard, but following a YouTube tutorial is not. No matter how “challenging” you make it, if you watch someone else do it over and over, eventually you’ll be able to do it too. If it can be done by a player, it can be done by any player – and you can bet your collection of cats that eventually it will be done by every player.

Thus the need for enforced rarity. Thus, the need for RNG.

Everyone has the ability to get one if they sink absurd hours into it, or buy it off the TP at Scalper’s Prices, or get really lucky one day. But ability does not mean guarantee, because guarantees kill rarity.

Are you really going to argue that the Legendary Weapons shouldn’t be rare?

or: Don’t use Phase Retreat in Tight Corridors

Let me paint you a picture, fellow Mesmer brethren. You’ve gone exploring, as you are wont to do. You stumble upon some sort of “indoor” area – a cave, a lodge, some Inquest laboratories in the Brand, a tomb deep beneath Orr, you know. The sort of place things live that, frankly, you’re pretty sure don’t deserve to live anymore.

So in keeping with that philosophy, you set about depriving them of said. One thing leads to another and suddenly they’ve called friends. Lots of friends.

“Oh, this may be unpleasant,” you say. (Or something less savory. Probably.)

But! All is not lost! You are a Mesmer, one of a powerful few who can become a powerful many. And in keeping with that hope, you fire up your trusty staff and Phase Retreat, leaving a clone…

…who turns and stares behind him at a blank wall. Somewhere, miles beneath his feet, come a muffled “SON OF A BIIIIIIiiiiiiiiiiiiii……………” followed, hopefully, by an equally-muffled splash. If you’re lucky.

You, my friend, have stumbled onto my problem.

I write this post from (by my rough guesstimates) one and a half kilometers beneath Orr’s Cursed Shores, in a subterranean sea as good at defying my expectations as most Mesmers are at defying their enemies’. See, I had the (apparently) foolish idea that I could Phase Retreat away from a Veteran Risen Abomination who wanted to eat at least one of me for dinner. Unfortunately, a smug and self-certain rock behind me has dashed my hopes, as well as my admittedly-tenuous grasp on reality. My sole hope, at this point, is that I have confused him (it? They?) as much as I have inadvertently confused my poor guildmates.

I cast this post adrift in the sea of the interwebs in the hope that some of you may receive it, and learn from my folly. Do not Phase Retreat in tight corridors.

Poetry aside, this is about the seventeenth time I’ve done this in three weeks, so I consider myself a minor expert in this particular bug. It seems to only trigger when three criteria are matched:

-You are (obviously) Phase Retreating, or using another Teleportation skill where the destination is chosen for you by the game – not by you targeting a location.
-Your path crosses over onto another texture-panel, different from the one you are currently on.
-The texture panel you are on continues onward at least up to your destination, but is covered at your destination-point by the new texture panel mentioned in criteria 2.

When the game decides your new position, it seems to like keeping your current texture-panel more than it likes transitioning to new texture-panels. The result is you end up (if lucky) hip-deep in a new panel, or (which seems to be more often the case) sliding down a steep hidden slope and falling off the map. Thankfully the game has a static “sea level” beneath the world, so you end up landing in water. Most of the time. (I’m looking at you, Rata Sum.)

This is a bug that I’ve been a victim of since the early Beta Weekends open to pre-orderers; I can only hope its persistence is just evidence that nobody has reported it.

Consider this my report.

-Aviyara Millionswords, Centurion of Sword Warband

PS Obviously, next time I fall through the floor, I’ll try to remember to hit the Report Bug button.