Guild Wars 2

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Yes, as long as it doesn’t show gear or health of other players, and only shows DPS for others using DPS meters.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

They specifically said otherwise. The system is “opt in” and you can’t “opt in” by accident. If you use a DPS meter, then you’re saying you’re fair game for sharing your DPS data.

Simply joining a squad/party isn’t enough, since that’s required to raid/fractal (and a practical requirement of many open world metas, although of course not technically required). Otherwise, the system would be “opt out,” i.e. the obligation would be on the part of those not wanting their DPS to be read to find out if someone else is doing that.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/66m13h/anet_this_really_should_be_part_of_the_game/dgjwapj/

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I think it would be fine to include your interpretation on the wiki, citing yourself as a source. If you don’t feel comfortable doing that, you could just post your notes on the discussion/talk page and leave it for the wiki frequent editors to decide what they want to put in the article.

Heh. I don’t mind throwing in observations here and there when I see the chance (like this thread), but they’re still observations pieced together from client disassembly + the occasional red post + raw analysis of my own. Plus my code notes are all functional so I don’t exactly have any real reference besides “hey I remember this” :p

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Don’t you qualify as “some kind of authoritative source”? Although you don’t speak “officially,” you do have special knowledge about the underlying mechanics.

So while you couldn’t say whether ANet intended health stealing or health siphoning to bypass Endure Pain, you might be able to confirm for the wiki (a player-written guide, hosted by ANet) about whether it is otherwise more consistent with what the game calls direct damage versus what the game calls condition damage.

Even if not, you could update the wiki so it doesn’t mislead people about “falling” damage being a separate ‘type’.

Separately, thanks for confirming my long-held theory that any attack can be flagged as a projectile — for the game’s purposes, a projectile is whatever the game defines to be a projectile, regardless of whether it would qualify as “an object projected or propelled forward”.

All my special knowledge comes from reversing, which is better than having no knowledge at all, but still guesswork since I can still be wrong or only partially right :p In the case of damage, the only variation I see in the raw data of the combat log is a flag that I think means that the source was a ‘buff’. It also happens to coincide with the damaging skill’s “IsBuff” value. ‘Buff’ in game terms seems to mean anything that can be applied on to you: condis, boons, profession-specific, infusion buffs, environmental buffs. Vampiric, the food, and shiro heal skill are all ‘buff’ source damage in that sense and all seem to ignore endure pain (just like condis). Extrapolate from that what you will.

Falling damage is indistinguishable in the raw data from something like an autoattack but it does outright kill you instead of putting in downed state. So maybe it should have it’s own type.

Hitman.5829:

It is a bug because it is not doing what it says in the description as simple as that.

“Take no damage from attacks”. Some things to consider: when you take falling damage, did the ground attack you? When you strike a player with retaliation and take retaliation damage, did that other player attack you with retaliation? If a phantasmal defender takes transfer damage, did it get attacked by whoever damaged the transfer source? “You are still susceptible to conditions and crowd control effects” doesn’t mean everything else is categorized as an attack, it just tells you that you can still get CC’d and take damage from conditions.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

The wiki only mentions three damage types: direct, indirect, and falling. Incidentally, the “physical attack” argument is weak in my opinion: the skill says nothing about being immune to “physical attacks”, only about “attacks” — the only question (to me) is whether siphoning is considered an attack or not.

However, ANet is notoriously inconsistent about such distinctions — there are plenty of projectile-like attacks that aren’t affected by projectile blocking/reflecting … and plenty of non-projectile attacks that are.

From what I know after many many hours of reverse engineering, the engine doesn’t have a notion of direct vs indirect vs falling. It looks more like ‘strike’ and not ‘strike’. ‘Missile’ refers to it’s own object (eg. can have ’effect’s applied to it like combo finishers or legendary effects), others look to be part of the skill’s animation. I agree though, it’d be nice to have some kind of authoritative source for this instead of guesswork.

Thrill.6259:

Apart from the (very interesting) technical details implementing this is feasible “if” ANet wants to. I guess they don’t though. Seems like they’re hoping this problem will just go away by itself (Spoiler: It won’t).

This really is a shame. Solving this would single-handedly make raids more accessible to newcomers. The golem is OK for DPS classes but supporters need to keep track of their uptime. Even making the stats there more precise would somewhat solve this issue.

Maybe when the first wave of compromised accounts arrives ANet will act. Wouldn’t be the first time some shady after-market mod gets a little keylogging feature. I can already imagine the Headline “Thousands of Guild Wars 2 accounts hacked – Auto updater of approved third-party mod at fault”.

Possible*. Important distinction. We can’t speculate on the feasibility of anything about ANet’s client or server architecture because we had no part in writing it. In fact the only hint we have about the feasibility of a combat tracker API was that it would be client-local and that it’s a large undertaking. It’s very possible as well that ANet does not see this as a problem in the first place – perhaps the risk of one of the few meter developers stealing accounts is worth taking in comparison to the hours needed to create the infrastructure. Also important to note that ANet did not approve any mods – they approved hackish means as long as they are only used to get combat data out of the client. The risk is still on the user to determine if the mod is compliant or “safe”. Aaaand it wouldn’t be the first time an enthusiastic developer wrote a 3rd party mod for fun that will fade after the game fades.

An average fight can range from 100-250k events depending on length and composition. If I included single-stack buff removal events, this would be closer to 150-300k. If we had strike healing and passive healing, it would probably be in the range of 200-400k. Even compressed, making that kind of detail available via the web API is probably a bit too hefty.

In a word… yes. Skill cooldowns are server-authoritative for obvious reasons. If you want to check whether or not the client does any compensation you’ll probably want to set up some kind of high-latency testing environment for it, same for damage.

None. The delay you notice is roughly your network latency.

When you try and activate a skill, the client sends a request (even if the skill is on cooldown), and starts flashing the icon. The server will send back an ok / on CD / failed, along with a “put this skill on cooldown for X ms” message.

ANet’s not responsible for overlays.

http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=412822 take the latest from that thread.

The challenge with aggregate stats like wowlogs for GW2 is the difference between no buffs and realistic buffs. In WoW, your unbuffed vs raid buffs get you a spread of what, 30-40% at best? Here that number could get blown up as high as 400% or more. I don’t even know where I would start to compare one pull to another to keep it fair.

And I do track damage taken. Everything I can extract out of the client, including your skills used and weapon swaps and how many times you dodged and how many attacks you dodged, gets lumped into those logs.

Zok.4956:

Then, strictly speaking, any DPS meter would not be OK, because a DPS meter could help to improve someones play/rotation and without it, he/she would have not become this better.

And a tool like YoloMouse could also fall under this rule. Because in the sometimes hefty visual-clutter of GW2 sometimes the mouse-cursor is lost / not visible and a better visible mouse-cursors helps (some) people to play better in this situations.

P.S. I do believe that YoloMouse does not violate Anets rules.

Using distance as an example, if a meter shows distance you can use it to know immediately if you’re getting or not getting a damage bonus from it, and know exactly where you should stand if there were red circles behind you. What separates a DPS/combat meter from this is that the meter won’t tell you what to do or when to do it, only the effect of what you have done up to that point. You are correct though – someone with the meter can have a greater understanding where their damage comes from and what to avoid than someone without. And yes, yolomouse can be interpreted as falling under ‘play more accurately’ making the rules that much more confusing.

ANet doesn’t have a mod interface so they can’t control what a mod does (in theory we can do everything the client can do, automated). Which is why they won’t spend the time to review every build of every mod and say it’s okay or not okay. You as the user are expected to make that call on your own.

From the sticky,

- “Does this program allow someone to play faster, better, longer, or more accurately than someone who doesn’t use it?”
- “Does this program allow someone to ‘play’ when he/she is not at the computer?”
- “Does this program allow the user to gain undeserved rewards?”

If it breaks any of those three basic rules it won’t be okay. However, those conditions are separate from the user agreement which includes the no 3rd party modification to the client clauses and such. The UA is what the february AMA addresses with allowing previously disallowed tools to display combat data. QoL, inspect, distance, and anything else that isn’t “combat data” per AMA definition is assumed to not be okay. Where it gets confusing is that we were asked to ask about specifics in private messages instead of the thread (likely because mods and addons are still a topic of internal discussion), so some of the rules are going to be scattered in different places. From my understanding the major ones were 1) joining a party or squad is considered opting in 2) decouple everything that isn’t combat data 3) do not surface anything about a user that a normal client cannot see.

As title.

0 condition damage mesmer scepter 1 (single attack to apply 2s of torment). Sometimes it hits the expected 16/16, other times it hits 16/32. No difference in the network flow to the client between ticks that hit the expected values and ticks that seem to include this mystery movement. Happens on both the stationary fractal and sfta golems. On longer tests the “actual” torment averages out to roughly 25% higher than what I expect in my simulation.

edit: or related to something weird happening on the last tick. Difficult to say since whatever happens is entirely server-side.

edit2: possibly the last tick (or remainder tick) is being rounded up to the nearest second of remainder for the x2 damage.

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

this is why your tools should be fully blocked by a good paid anti-virus program and windows firewall rules . it can be done for world of warcraft. then it can be done for your stuff too.

To be flagged by virus definitions or heuristics I have to, you know, do things that a virus would do. Likewise I use no network communication at all so there’s nothing to block by a firewall. ANet said that joining the party/squad means you consent for sharing combat data that is already known by the client. Don’t like it? Join a “no meters” group. Can’t find one? Make one.

Sykper.6583:

You know, in a way, the GW2 World Boss Timers are around the same deal, a 3rd party tool giving players information they might not easily track or handle themselves.

We should immediately ban anyone visiting that page on Dulfy.

Let’s not even get started on the mapping overlays that help you out with jumping puzzles.

fishball.7204:

ANet has already said overlays are fine and DPS meters that don’t do specific things such as gear checking are also fine.

Just because ANet said something in 2012 doesn’t mean it applies in 2017.

All QoL was disallowed and not just gearcheck. My hope is that by keeping it available as a use-at-your-own-risk extension I can at least show that not all QoL is harmful in the likes of gearcheck, requires no resources on the part of ANet to implement, and can provide popular community requests (build templates) while adhering to the usual rules.

I’m not gonna defend myself from reading into “decouple QoL” literally, but even in the non-ToS compliant extras I won’t include anything explicitly said to remove. I moved the code out to it’s own module, because that way if ANet is not happy with me providing window flashing or build templates or auto moving reward chests to inventory in there, they can easily detect the presence of restricted. I even keep my code ‘just breakable enough’ so that major game content updates will eventually force you to update so if you can manage to make an old build run without crashes I failed on that part.

I have nothing against gear check either – I’ve seen almost as many helpful reminders as I have toxicity – but ANet made their decision fairly clear. My argument in this is that there is nothing differentiating the compliant and non-compliant way of running it which inherently puts all the compliant users at risk.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

So the INI that I downloaded can’t inspect other people’s gear. I have to do something non-standard to view other people’s gear?

Then in answer to the original question:
There is no compliant version of the DPS meter that allows you to inspect people’s gear without them also downloading the same meter. People looking at your gear are not using the complaint version of the app.

So what you’re telling me it is perfectly acceptable if I include inspection features in arcdps, write in my changenotes that I have removed it, distribute the same d3d9.dll to everyone, and then tell my friends and guild that they can enable it by adding in a single line to the configuration?

Sorry, but there are no multiple “versions” of BGDM. There is only one bgdm.dll. And users who are privileged and unprivileged to have or not have the knowledge on how to turn it on, or that it even exists in the binary they are running.

Because my simulation in arc is accurate enough to be taken at face value.

Edit: and since I’m already posting here, I may as well say that I plan to stick to not using any network resources in closed projects, meaning an opt-out list is unlikely to happen in my tool. It’s a lot of effort to build, and from what I’ve gathered, you’ll likely get kicked for opting out even faster than for low dps.

Amaimon.7823:

They actually advertise 2 versions:
BDGM without gear check, which is compliant with anet’s wishlist.

Can’t seem to find it on BGDM’s site. Care to toss me a link to where?

ZoSo.4867:

I just did a fractal run and apparently everyone in the group had dps meters that let you see everyones dps and gear and all gave me a mouth full at the end for not using the ‘meta’ build. I didn’t concent to people being able to see my stuff they definitely need to not allow this!

You’re not imagining things, one of the meters advertised as the “big 3” isn’t compliant with ANets new rules. I woke up to a couple is this thread real questions, and made a short guide in a reddit post on how users can investigate 3rd party tools themselves to see how truthful the claims of compliance are. Not that it mattered. Apparently advertising tools is ok, but posting that certain tools are not ok is not ok.

So the tl;dr:
1) yes, BGDM contains gearcheck in current builds against ANet’s wishes.
2) yes, it is “hidden” behind a single ini key. This option is not mentioned anywhere on BGDM’s site.
3) yes, by the amount of replies in that thread that mysteriously knew it was related to ini keys, it is being shared exclusively with members of the community.
Anyone who’s used a debugger enough to find how to search module for string references can find it if you don’t believe me.

A different way to look a this: if a tool contained hidden functionality that gathered all resources from a map using all your characters automatically, was advertised as not having this functionality, and then it was shared exclusively that it does in fact do this, does an anticheat system that looks for the presence of a mod care about how the mod is configured? I can say with a 100% guarantee that the answer to this is no. Effectively you’re meat in the shield of ‘they can’t ban all of us if only some of us use the non-tos-compliant option’.

To add on to the masteries UI gripe above, it’s stretched allll the way across on surround (and likely eyefinity) setups.

It’s worth noting this is only on Roger’s cable. 3G/LTE are fine.

It’s a Rogers issue, plain and simple. It’s been happening a lot in the last 4-5 months though mostly overnight and for a lot shorter durations (10-15mins).

~30% outbound packet loss, inbound is fine. Calling em up and saying “your network sucks” hasn’t worked thus far, all we can do is suffer through it.

Chaba.5410:

…
And why the talk about HP laptops? The OP said he has an ASUS gaming laptop and cleans his fans regularly. Somehow the reported facts are being ignored.

The facts aren’t being ignored. You’re drawing baseless conclusions. Branding something “gaming laptop” and regularily cleaning your fans and heatsink doesn’t convert a bad chasis/cooling system into a good one. Acer’s 3820TG is an example of good cooling and it doesn’t have gaming in the name. Asus’ G50VT is an example of awful cooling and is called gaming.

Shakkara.2641:

…
The laptop is old yes, but the hardware is still half decent and can run plenty of other modern games. The question is still, should a relatively simple game like Guild Wars 2 load a GPU to 100% at all times during play, at such low settings and low resolution? I think the answer is no.

But it’s okay if Crysis 2 loads it at 100% permanently? I guarantee the heat output of your 9800M GT will be the same with either game running. If you’re worried about it, that’s what the frame limiter is for. If you don’t like the frame limiter, underclock your hardware. Otherwise the game will run as fast as the slower of your CPU and GPU allows it.

tovadaun.6304:

…
I also know that by changing code, and placing a higher demand VISUALLY from an already Graphically Intensive Program -such as GW2- that it will cause a CPU and/or GPU to overheat.
Look at the PS3 and Skyrim. ’nuff said.
…

No, changing code to better utilize CPU (or GPU) power increases the usage and heat output of the GPU (or CPU). Overheating is a side effect of the heat coming into the system being greater than the heat going out. It’s not ANet’s fault that the user didn’t plan out their rig very well or the manufacturer didn’t provide adequate cooling (in the latter case it’s not directly the user’s fault either, but they’re on the recieving end of poor design).

On a side note; a single 140mm can most likely push more air than all six of your fans combined… I’d stronly suggest looking into a new case.

ClumsyPanda.6897:

Well let’s start with this, if the game causes to get you high temps its either
a) Cooling related
b) Sloppy code
…

So if I decide to use Heaven 4.0 to test GPU stability, while doing some x264 encoding in the background, and experimenting with Haswell’s AVX2 at the same time (just to be certain I’m using every bit of circuitry)… I can blame the temps on the sloppy code of any of those? I don’t think so. And I’m sure as hell certain that will drive temperatures a lot higher than just GW2 and your theory of DX9 being old and used with sloppy code the root cause of it.

As for other games, they don’t heat up your CPU as much because they aren’t loading it as hard (usage from waits != usage from ALU/FPU instructions, yet both count to total %).

SolarNova.1052:

…
If ur CPU / GPU is overheating, u have a cooling issue or hardware fault plain and simple.

TL;DR: ^this.

This one
15char

Shadows → high.

Line 2 of your error report…:

—> Crash <—
Out of Memory

Close all your background processes or upgrade. 3GB is on the low side (keep in mind you need a 64bit OS to use >4GB).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/nVidia-Surround-UI-Placement-Cutscenes-Character-Selection

I know I don’t have this issue on nVidia surround and UKNightWatch doesn’t on Eyefinity, so it might be something on your system. Make sure you’re running fullscreen (not windowed or fullscreen-windowed), try deleting your local.dat, and updating to the most recent catalyst drivers.

I wouldn’t use the word unreliable, since they’re as reliable as any other core. A nice short writeup: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/feature/637.html

tl;dr: Shared cache between logical cores and additional switching overhead makes it run worse when there’s anything besides a game thread scheduled onto the same physical core.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Ivy_Bridge_PCI-Express_Scaling/

tl;dr: no. You could run it at 1.1 x16 and still not notice a difference (not even in Civ5).

4×4 GSkill Sniper (stock 1866/CL9 1.5v), it seemed smoother. Unstable RAM is probably the quickest way to nuke something in your Windows install so I didn’t try to make anything comprehensive.

What I do know, though, is when one of the sticks wasn’t in all the way (showing 12GB), FPS tanked pretty hard.

1. Clock for clock sandy is ~15% better than gulftown.
2. That 2630QM will only reach 2.9GHz with a single active thread (aka not in GW2), which still wouldn’t be enough to beat that 920.

Your problem is your RAM. LGA1366 is a triple channel design, not dual channel, so there’s no way you can run 8GB without taking a huge hit to memory performance. Either risk mixing brands and fill it to a 2×6 or 4×3 config (making sure they’re all in the same colour slot), or replace the whole set.

(based on my experiments, reflections and shadows need raw throughput not timings, so 2133/CL11 does better than 1600/CL9)

That’s what I got on both machines.

A little over 1.1GB

Try changing power management mode to “prefer max performance” in nvidia cpl, and disable flash hardware acceleration (rt click → settings, on any youtube video).

Copy/paste. Run the exe from the new folder on the SSD.

Didn’t read the other posts.
Has it been suggested to disable hardware acceleration in flash (open any youtube video -> right click -> settings -> uncheck “enable hw accelereation”)? A lot of non-reference board vbios’ still have P-state clock problems.

Caused by overlay programs; afterburner, prcecisionx, fraps, etc. Hasn’t happened to me or anyone else I know that uses afterburner, and haven’t seen an end-all fix on these forums either.

All I can suggest is a clean install of video drivers.

$500-600 just won’t cut it. The minimum I’d set is an i5-3xxx paired with either a 640/650m or HD7650. Maybe when something goes on sale for the holidays.

Try running 2×4 on the same channel (same colour slot on the board). I’ve seen this kill FPS for other people.

I’d say Windows is either moving everything to the pagefile (won’t notice anything unusual with 12GB if you disable it), or the memory’s bottlenecking it (PCI-e bandwidth, RAM bandwidth). I’m assuming that’s 12GB in a 6×2 config, otherwise get rid of the smaller sticks.

What’s your RAM config like?

Odd. First line on their announcement

New in R310 Drivers:

Performance Boost – Increases performance for GeForce 400/500/600 Series GPUs in several PC games vs. GeForce 306.97 WHQL drivers. Results will vary depending on your GPU and system configuration:

Doesn’t take long to add your deviceID (eg by changing an existing one) to the inf.

7970 does bench very closely to the 680m. I know nvidia+optimus work well for battery life, can’t comment on how far AMD’s system has gotten (or if it’s moved at all since the 5xxx series with a hardware switch).

It’ll give you more consistent frames in PvE (with high settings even at 1080p), not so much in WvW. That said, the 3630qm should pull 15+.

It should be able do 15. Can’t make any guarantees though, as everyone has a hard time in WvW.

The difference between a 660m and 675m is probably around 30%. I’d go all the way to a 680m if anything (about 2x the 660m in both performance and probably cost).

Download/install MSI Afterburner → enable frame limiter.

(Don’t use GW2’s limiter since it’s using milisecond precision, 1000/60 = integer 16. 1000/16 = 62.5 FPS which will still give tearing. I’ve made that same mistake on a project before too.)

A little searching would have shown that it’s caused by overlay programs (Afterburner, PrecisionX, Fraps, etc), but post the full error anyway.

That 63xxm will slow you down everywhere the low 1.7GHz clockspeed doesn’t. Nothing you can do will help it.

60+ PvE on medium (with a few things high) at that res, 30+ in LA, and a hard time in WvW/zergs.