Guild Wars 2

I saw my first bottrain! I’ve been reading about these bots here for a while but never knowingly saw one in-game. Well, last night I did. In the ‘Blood Fields’ of the Gendarran(sp?) Fields I saw a long, single file line of ten-or-so ‘players’ all hoovering up every last mob in the area. There is at least one Heart to complete in this location and it took fookin’ ages because so many of the bots were landing the majority of the damage it was extremely difficult to earn any kill assist credit.

If this is a taste of things to come in the later stages of the game then I’ll probably reach a point where I’ll support any proposal to get rid, even the more right wing suggestions!

In the light of real world money gambling already being a core component of the game – for shame, BTW – I expect the primary reason your otherwise excellent idea would fail is contained within the opening component of your closing sentence.

I’ve encountered the champion giant a couple of times. Each time I’ve left it alone because without a large group he’s impossible to fend off. The trouble is most people do this [leave it alone] so rarely does a group large enough gather to take him on.

There are at least a couple of locations where a champion spawns within aggro range of a waypoint. I’ve seen a Champion Spider defeat a string of unfortunates teleporting in at a nearby waypoint. Champion placement does need to be re-examined in some cases.

I’ve also had to abandon long chains of encounters through funnelled areas because of a final Champion that is all but invulnerable to non-DPS builds / mobs of players. In fact, if you play a non-DPS build and don’t move around with a gang even regular encounters become a problem due to the unintelligent mob respawn mechanics (i.e., they respawn waaay too fast and often within auto-aggro range). So much for getting rid of the MMO Holy Trinity.

Giving Champions millions of HPs has nothing to do with difficulty. The difficulty of a Champion is defined by whether or not player healing can outstrip the Champion’s ability to deal damage. Once that tipping point is reached, i.e., collective player healing exceeds the Champion’s capacity to deal damage, the battle outcome is decided and the millions of HPs only serve to keep the Champion alive long enough for others to turn up and join in. There is a sweet spot whereby battles against Champions can be fun, where the tipping point hasn’t quite been reached, but far more often than not Champion battles are either over instantly or will drag on near interminably toward the Champion’s inevitable doom (usually for zero player losses).

All in all the Champions system isn’t a particularly clever or innovative approach IMO; it actually seems to be pretty crude (much like the mob respawn mechanics).

I’ve posted about this before.

The issue, IMO, is not directly the respawn rate for mobs, it’s that there is apparently no intelligence behind the respawn mechanic: IF deathtimer(mob01) > 30 THEN respawn(mob01). It really does seem to be as crude as that.

What it should be doing is checking to see if there are any players within the aggro range of a respawn location and if the result of this check is true then defer the respawn event. (The player proximity algorithm could be finessed to check for things like deliberate spawn blocking, et al, by allowing a respawn to be deferred for only a set number of consecutive times, the value for which being defined by what kind of mob it is and its location.)

The respawn issue it more prevalent if you’re playing a low DPS build; no sooner have you defeated mob02 in a tunnel than mob01 respawns behind you within auto-aggro range. It does get pretty silly at times.

There are only three conclusions I can draw from this:-
1) It’s a bug.
2) It’s a design logic mistake.
3) ANet only want you to play high DPS builds / do not want you to play solo.

The problem has been acknowledged and that’s the first important step toward any resolution. (Did you see what I did there? skitten) Cause for optimism: +1

Edit: Wait, why did ‘* s_n_i_g_g_e_r *’ fall prey to the profanity filter?! Oh, I see. Good lord. Lucky that my name isn’t kitteninson, eh.

Edit: D_i_c_kinson. Oh dear.

I had a few ideas for the name of my Asura Engie…

Sidcup Anaphylaxis
Cosmo Beaverhausen
Artfunkle Humpadeer
Buckaroo Bandwagon Jr.
Randle P. Dynamite
Tracy Tardwrangler
Muffly Opalfruit
Napoleon Followthrough
Benjamin Polegrease II
Keyser Amigo St. John
Dusty Smallberries
Jerusalem J’Jones
Tugwillie Sweeney
Zanzibar Philange
Banjax Pistollero
Poontang Kettleface
Skypad Airdude
Willey Leak
Wetlord Wangfist
Gus Barfup
Tojam Mincer
Sukimov Pirate
Karr Angryspanner
Spartacus Slideyhose
Crappamo Appliance
kitteninson Cheekaboo
Dingus Clapsaddle
Fatmarta Mumphandle
Indispensibility Brown
Al Beebak
Pajama Grosshuntsleve
Boomscrape Catapult
Shorty DeLong
Ipsum Lipwart
Butch Ovenglove

In the end I settled for Bucklebolt.

RLD.7439:

The camera and FoV need work. But they’re not going to change it. Ya I was floored too when I read this. Not going to fix something that thousands want fixed… wow just wow.
Throwing away potential is like throwing away money. Too bad

I must have missed this. Where was it said that the camera isn’t going to be re-examined?

To be honest with you, I’m only really holding on for a change in the way the camera works and if that’s never going to happen then I will be shelving GW2 and moving on. That sounds melodramatic, I know, but it doesn’t matter how glorious a world looks if the eyes through which you see it are broken.

I’m 39 yoa and was looking forward to the WvW part of the game. Sadly the shockingly poor frame rate (PvE never slips below 50fps), blinding VFX spam, disasterously aggressive avatar culling, camera problems (can’t aim up or down) and general quibbles about the mechanics of the game mode itself hammered a number of nails into the lid of that particular coffin.

The PvE game is pretty good but I’m getting a bit bored after having reached Lvl50 with my Asura Engie. The game is better when played with a few mates.

No. What we actually need are large, garish in-view perma-arrows that point towards all Commanders in a PvE area. The perma-marker in the minimap is not enough. I need to know where these enormously important people are at all times, even when I’m not in their club.

I play an Asura and 70% of my screen is ground w/ ~40% of that being the ground behind where my character is standing. The camera’s pivot point appears to be a fraction above the top of my PC’s head, which for a halfpint still places the camera far too close to the ground. (Looking up is almost impossible as the camera collides with the ground sooner thus my view becomes obfuscated with the back of my character’s head sooner.)

Another thing that annoys me is the lack of object fade. Start a fight in an orchard and I can’t see a fooking thing because the trees and shrubs block the view. Even Neverwinter Nights got this right and that’s, what, ten years old now..? Oopsie!

I like GW2 but the camera is woeful. I don’t seek to sound melodramatic but it is one of the worst examples in any 3rd person game.

Suggestions:
- Add a FoV slider. (Honestly, how many times has this been asked for. It’s just mental that someone upstairs seems not to want to budge even an inch on this one, even in the face of near universal criticism.)
- Add a Y-axis camera position slider.
- Add Object fade for non-colliding obstructions (trees, bushes etc.)

/signed

It’s an unnecessary mess, frankly. Any meaningful tactical information essential to pulling off combos/interrupts/dodges is completely obfuscated by the perpetually exploding kaleidoscope of colour. I get’s pretty bad in PvE at times but WvW is several orders of magnitude worse. I honestly do not know how melee players manage. (I expect that they don’t, they do what everyone else does: they see a supernova of colour and just spam abilities into the middle of it thus exacerbating the issue.)

Second only to the appalling frame rate in WvW battles this is the main reason why I no longer play WvW.

Suggestions:
- Allow the ability to turn off VFX by category (fields, attack, buffs etc.).
- Set all VFX to an alpha of 50-75%.

dybryd.1358:

This is weird to hear. I am on a low-population server, but I’ve been in a couple of zerg vs. zerg battles, and I could easily see 30 – 50 people running around at once.

Maybe it’s a network relevancy packet throttling routine that decides how much traffic each client is sent based on how busy the server is at that moment. Perhaps you’ve not yet been unlucky enough to be packet shaped at just the wrong moment. I dunno, I’m just guessing. Whatever it is, it’s probably not working as well as was intended so with any luck it should only be a short while before it gets tweaked (or at least explained).

Hickeroar.9734:

Yes, lots and lots of players are experiencing this.
It happens all the time in PVE during defense events too. The NPCs just appear out of nowhere and people couldn’t see them coming.

Strange how I’d conditioned myself to accept that’s how PvE was meant to work, but now that you mention it there are beasties warping in running. Happens a great deal on the Escort type missions. I’m not talking about seeing mobs spawn in the near distance, I’m talking about having them suddenly appear _within_ the player group already beating down on folks - en masse!

Not good is it. *sad face*

It does it with low numbers of characters present as well so either something is a bit screwy with the algorithm or it works [echo]in mysterious waaaaays![/echo]

More than once now I’ve been pottering along an open road en route to a waypoint and before I know it —WHAM!-- I’m right in the middle of six enemy raiders who are all slapping me purple. No warning. It’s like being dropped on by a Terminator squad from orbit. Presumably the group of six were able to see me approach, alone, and couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing. “6v1? This guy must have just arrived on the special bus. This will not take long…”

Until the problem is fixed I can’t afford (yes, afford – it costs money to repair armour after these Terminator squad planetfalls) to play WvW anymore. Sad, because I was getting to like it (even the Zerging).

Object fade would solve a big chunk of the problems with the camera IMO, and FoV control would solve another sizeable lump.

I expect it will be a lot easier at high level. I went from lvl1 to lvl32 before I died to a crappy camera positioning thing (trees and bushes don’t fade which makes battle and jumping in such regions nigh on fatal – and combat in a small room/corridor is an exercise in blindness) but even before then the XP track didn’t show more than 12K.

The counter never seems to make any sense to me. I expect it’s not counting all XP awards or it’s simply buggered.

What it says on the tin. Swapping to Pistol & Shield (w/ Sigil on the Shield) from Elixir Gun during battle does not proc the effect. Maybe this is because Engies don’t ‘swap’ between weapon sets per sé, they switch from kits to weapons.

What I don’t get about the Monthly Ach. list is that you have to not die /and/ wrack up dozens of kills in WvWvW as part of the requirements. Asside from the WvWvW requirement being a rather awkward and uncomfortable fit within the Monthly Ach. and how this puts purely PvE players very much outside of its remit, getting dozens of WvWvW kills and never dying isn’t particularly likely now is it.

Suggestion:-
- Take the WvWvW component out of the Monthly Ach. requirements.

Yes. Oh, yes please. Not having the destination of a Gate show up on the map tooltip is a rather enormous PITA.

/signed

Related: It would be nice if the intra-area travel portals showed up on the map as well.

I am of the opinion that mobs respawn far, far too quickly in the PvE environments or at the very least they take no account of player proximity.

I fully appreciate that mobs need to respawn in order to provide adequate meat for everyone in the area to grind through but there appears to be no account taken of how many players are present in the immediate vicinity of a respawn point. Case in point: as a lowly Asura Engie I make my way through a cave filled with spiders but no sooner have I beaten the one in front of me the one I’d beaten mere moments before respawns right behind me (if not right on top of me); furthermore, the respawn timer appears to be unchanged be there just me or twenty players present. If I am the only player in the immediate vicinity should the respawn timers not take that into account?

This relates to another thing that niggles me about respawns: stuff warping in right on top of me. It is a bit silly to have stuff continually warping in all around me just because I’m not playing a profession that does high enough DPS to plough through so fast as to not be caught up by one’s own respawn wake.

Suggestions:-
- Respawn times should be longer when there are fewer than a handful of players in the vicinity (esp. when there’s only one player present).
- General mob respawning should not occur at all if a player is within a certain distance, i.e., immediate attack provocation range, of the respawn point.

Can’t add any more to what has already been said in support of making the GW2 camera more bearable (which at the moment it almost isn’t).

/signed

/signed.

Something needs to be tweaked re the camera.

I’ve only played Asura thus far and the camera is rapidly becoming a barrier to my enjoyment of the game and its superb area builds.

It’s difficult to put a finger on exactly what’s wrong but the character placement on the screen (for the Asura) is too high and consequently the viewing area is mostly ground. This is fine for combat in open areas but as soon as I need to be aware of anything ‘up’ (or anything ‘down’ where walls and cliffs are concerned), or combat occurs inside a building, the view becomes infuriatingly awkward if not down right obfuscating.

This is a pretty serious problem, particularly in WvWvW whereby I find myself needing to look up to target folks on the ramparts of a fortification: I need to be close enough to be within range but in doing so the camera becomes nigh on impossible to use! The situation is almost the same when trying to aim down whilst defending a fort. It’s as if the Asura have blind spots above and below them where near vertical surfaces are involved. Not good. Not good at all.

When fighting in confined spaces the camera pretty much ceases to be a useful tool and I’m instead reliant on spamming abilities and hoping I come out on top. Backing up against a wall in a corridor or one of the many tiny caves and small rooms is tantamount to having sand thrown in my eyes; can’t see a blessed thing.

The camera works fairly well in wide, open spaces but even this scenario is not without hassle: quite often the view is totally obfuscated by non-collision scenery, i.e., bushes and tree canopies.

I’m enjoying the game immensely so far but the camera is really beginning to seriously mar my GW2 experience.

Suggestions:-
- Raise the camera level for Asura.
- Fade the player’s avatar sooner and to a much higher alpha value (95%) when the camera is close.
- Fade non-collision objects when they come directly between the avatar and the camera position. (Neverwinter Nights 2, for all of its faults, worked pretty well with regard to object fade.)
- Allow a wider FoV.

Sinth, you hero! I’ve been unable to log-in since gold, always being kicked out by the authentication token error, but declining the T&Cs then logging in again and accepting the T&Cs it worked!

Here, have a cookie you sexy beast.