Guild Wars 2

I noticed a few weeks back that some video options were not causing the settings file to be saved when changed. I was having the same issue with Effect LOD constantly re-enabling itself. You can work around it by toggling another setting that does trigger a save after turning Light Adaption off. I know either of the character model/quality options will trigger a save, I did not test other options.

Panda.1967:

The new movements from the mounts should do a good job of supplementing gliding for those who don’t have HoT. The Skimmer has the ability to GLIDE short distances even… and is it really so bad that each new area might have different travel systems? Honestly it makes the world feel more alive.

Having new movement systems is fine, especially with the way mounts appear to be done in PoF. We don’t have to search for and pick up items to use that prevent normal combat, as we did with oakheart vines and Zephyerite skills. It wouldn’t really make sense for movement systems like those or thermal tubes to show up Elona. But gliding is already part of the core game (provided HoT is unlocked), and something our characters have learned how to do with just a carry-along tool. It’s not exclusive to any specific area, and makes sense to be usable game-wide.

We will be able to glide in PoF, but the content there and going forward will have to be designed as if we can’t. The same seems likely to happen with mounts in future expansions. It’s not a big deal, it’s just a shame to see tools taken out of consideration in design because access to them remains locked to certain expansions. It would be nice for central systems like these to be made available to everyone with future releases, just to keep the options open for making new content.

They weren’t 100% clear on whether HoT would be included “free” in the next expac, but their statement at the time gave the impression that it would be. It seems quite possible that they intended to do that, but left room in their wording to change to what was announced today. It’s something to roll your eyes at, but as others have said, we’d not be getting PoF for $30 if it included HoT for “free”.

Like MO said, they are selling to existing players, not trying to market to new players that already passed on buying the core game in 2012 and HoT in 2015. Including HoT and raising the price would be trying appeal to those no-buyers once again, at the cost of making existing player feel overcharged to benefit them.

The only part of excluding HoT that I see as being bad is the fact that it is required for gliding. PoF and future content will all have to be designed to be completed without it, which means we won’t be seeing some of the design/mechanics we’ve gotten used to having in HoT/Season 3. It would be nice to see gliding slipped into the core game so it can be used in later expansions, instead of those relying only on whatever new movement mechanics they introduce.

I could do without the limit use and time limited movement skills, especially the ley-line organ one that requires killing a creature for every use. The oakheart vines were at least abundant enough to only be annoying when doing some mini-puzzle to get collectibles, but having to go get a new one to retry already frustratingly precise vine jumps can get tedious very quickly.

I don’t mind convenience mechanics like thermal tubes, but I’d rather not have more that end up being required just to navigate or get map completion. Especially when they are temp skills that replace our normal weapon skills. The added mechanic shouldn’t block playing the game normally and force players to lead mobs around (and into other players) because they can’t fight them.

I’m definitely not looking forward to mounts in the expansion, because I have a feeling they will end up being similar to the junundu wurms from GW1. I hated that part of the game because I was stuck in the same wurm skillset for most of it, instead of being able to play my own character. I really hope mounts are just something we can summon to use only when needed to traverse a specific obstacle.

I think one of the biggest failings in this episode was the crossover between raid and main stories. Anyone that didn’t play GW1 or know the raid stories isn’t going to have any clue what the Eye of Janthir is, and be missing some huge pieces of the Lazarus story. Far too little understanding for the Livia revenge story to become a main LS plotline.

The key to understanding LS3 is probably knowing the White Mantle and Mursaat(Lazarus’ race) backstory. The end of HoT and a couple other things don’t seem as important in the current storylines, but I’ll try to knock out a couple of them.

Tie-ins from HoT

The Chak
Bugs native to the underground areas of the jungle that feed on magic/ley line energy. Their current relevance is Taimi’s use of a chak organ in her research and tracking of dragons via their magic energies. The organ is a part of their digestive system that filters different types of magic unique to each dragon.

Aurene
She is the baby dragon that hatched from the egg Caithe acquired in season 2, and ended up in the chamber under Tarir during HoT. The child of the dragon Glint, a former lieutenant of elder dragon Kralkatorrik that turned on her master to help the other races of Tyria long ago. Glint was killed prior to GW2’s storyline, and Aurene is her legacy left in the care of the Exalted for some yet to be seen purpose.

The rival elder dragons
The dragons are established rivals already in lore, which is highlighted in the current story because we are dealing with the fire and ice dragons. The polar opposites, which we were originally wanting to pit against one another. However, Taimi’s research showed that continuing to kill elder dragons and release their energy (which surviving dragons would then consume) would lead to Tyria’s destruction.

LS3 and the Mantle/Mursaat backstory

GW History: The Mursaat, The Mantle, and the Eye
The Mursaat are an ancient race that were rediscovered before the story of GW1 by Saul D’Alessio, an exiled Krytan. Saul founded the White Mantle, who worshipped the Mursaat as gods. The group rose to power when they stopped the charr from destroying Kryta.

During the events of GW1, the true agenda of the Mursaat is discovered by the Shining Blade. They are only using the Mantle and Kryta to hunt down magically adept humans and sacrifice them on a Bloodstone to harness their energy. The Eye of Janthir is the device/being used by the Mursaat/Mantle to identify humans powerful enough for this sacrifice. The energy gained from the sacrifices was used to power a magic barrier, the Door of Komalie, inside a volcano in the Ring of Fire. This barrier prevented another race, the Titans, from entering Tyria from their realm and wiping out the Mursaat. Their demise had been told in Glint’s prophecies, and the Mursaat were killing their followers to prevent it.

The Titans ended up being released anyway, which lead to most Mursaat being killed. The players and Shining Blade then lead a civil war in Kryta that overthrew the Mantle, and wiped out the remaining Mursaat leaders. All but Lazarus, who had split himself into “aspects” and hidden them around Tyria to be rejoined sometime in the future.

Balthazar and the Aspects of Lazarus
The White Mantle cult survived throughout the time between GW1 and GW2, hiding till they could restore their god Lazarus. At the start of LS3, they had all of the aspects and were attempting this, but their leader Caudecus wanted power for himself and had stolen one of the aspects and replaced it with a fake. The human god Balthazar, who had either returned or had been hiding on Tyria for centuries (I don’t think this is ever explained), saw this as a chance to gain allies and power himself.

Balthazar disguised himself as Lazarus and allowed the White Mantle (those not loyal to Caudecus) to believe he was their Mursaat god. After absorbing the energy of the bloodstone explosion the Mantle had caused in their attempts to bring back a Mursaat, he turned his attention to the dragons to get more power. This is what he was doing when we discovered his true identity, and stopped him from killing Primordus and Jormag at the end of ep5.

The Eye of Janthir
The Eye appears pretty much out of nowhere at the beginning of ep6, but it had already been revealed in the Bastion of the Penitent raid. It had been keeping Saul D’Alessio, founder of the Mantle, alive as a prisoner for the past couple hundred years. He was thought to have been killed by the Mursaat at the end of the Charr/Kryta war, after seeing them for what they really are and denouncing them. Instead of killing him to keep him silent, they imprisoned him in the Bastion of the Penitent.

After Saul finally does die, the Eye no longer has a purpose. With no other task, it seeks out its lost masters, following the aspects of Lazarus it can sense. This leads it to chasing Balthazar to Orr, after we find the Eye with Justiciar Araya and take the aspect they had.

Ep6: Where we are now

This episode does seem to leave a few things unclear, but it’s basically a vengeance story for Livia. She was a member of the Shining Blade way back during GW1’s story, and had helped defeat the Mursaat. Livia survived all this time because she had rediscovered the Scepter of Orr, a powerful artifact used in GW1 and lost at the end of its story.

After recovering the aspect of Lazarus from Justiciar Araya and the Eye, we join the Shining Blade, and are let in on Livia’s true identity and her plan to kill Lazarus, the last Mursaat. The Eye leads us to Balthazar and the final aspect, which allows the real Lazarus to be resurrected and killed for good.

The now masterless Eye of Janthir is used one last time to show us where Balthazar has went. It reveals he has gone to the Crystal Desert, which is where Kralkatorrik currently is. The Eye then vanishes, and we’re left to go off to the desert to deal with Balthazar.

Not showing up at vendor for me. I have all the other LS3 nodes.

Fluffball.8307:

mrstealth.6701:

As someone that plays with action camera most of the time, targeting allies in the middle of a fight is not something that usually happens.

They aren’t targetable no matter what mode you’re in. You just need to figure it out and hit F.

They can be targeted, and their description includes “Confront to gain Minor Breakthrough”. I think they are only untargetable briefly (maybe a second or two), when they first appear.

The glyph/shield mechanic can be a bit annoying, but the only thing that actually bothered me in this episode is the Manifestation of Self-doubt. The confront mechanic is just a totally random toss-in that doesn’t have much hinting at what to do. The NPC line hint is easily missed because the whole fight is about “confronting your doubt” anyway, and the other required that you target an “ally” during combat.

As someone that plays with action camera most of the time, targeting allies in the middle of a fight is not something that usually happens. Especially not in a fight where you already have to figure out 4 new effects placed on yourself and the enemy. All of which have somewhat lengthy tooltips. If the ghosts were at least considered as invul enemies, they would be more easily targeted by chance or cycling through targets with default key bindings, so you could see their text descriptions as a further hint.

Astralporing.1957:

mrstealth.6701:

It’s very clear that Anet does not want unhindered multi-account use for collecting login rewards, which is a hint to their opinion on using multiple accounts to gain that advantage in other ways.

Not really. What they don’t want is unhindered multi-account use that they themselves not profit of. As long as you pay for that second (or third, or sixtieth) account, it’s perfectly fine.

I think there are enough other restrictions on free accounts to incentivize upgrading to a paid account. Some of those would even prevent free accounts from transferring profits/items back to a main account if login rewards were given to them.

Giving more thought to it, it seems more likely to be a measure to keep botters from hoarding free login rewards then doing a mass account upgrade through a chargeback/stolen credit card/etc scheme. They are the obvious target of a number of other restrictions placed on both free and paid accounts, and are definitely a major concern for Anet. Even though these other restrictions could potentially stop botters from succeeding in such a scheme, they could still cause significant economic damage with only the free accounts collecting and converting daily rewards to gold.

That said, I don’t doubt that profiting from the extra account sales makes multiple accounts more tolerable from their perspective. But I still think the health and integrity of the game are are more important than short term cash grabs, as it provides long term profitability. Trying to prevent multi-accounting would also cause more problems than it’s worth.

Djinn.9245:

mrstealth.6701:

Djinn.9245:

Faaris.8013:

Menadena.7482:

Free accounts do not get login rewards.

I didn’t know that. Just proves that ArenaNet doesn’t like the idea of multi-boxing to gain advantages :P

That is some interesting logic…O.o

It does make sense.

Having multiple accounts is not the same as multiboxing. So no, his “logic” doesn’t make sense.

Having multiple accounts for login rewards and multi-boxing do share the same benefit. They allow a single person to bring in more loot/gold from an activity than would be possible with only one account. It’s very clear that Anet does not want unhindered multi-account use for collecting login rewards, which is a hint to their opinion on using multiple accounts to gain that advantage in other ways.

There is an obvious difference in scale and impact between the two. A lot more players would be taking advantage of unlimited login rewards if it were possible. Actively multi-boxing requires more effort/input from the player in order to gain more rewards, which makes it less common. As well as requiring a PC powerful enough to run multiple game clients, or access to multiple PCs. It’s simply more difficult to do, and doesn’t create a widespread problem despite giving the same advantage to the player. It is also much more difficult to prevent without creating problems for many other players. Add all of that up, and it’s better to just tolerate it and combat the bigger issues.

If Anet really didn’t care at all about multiple account use or multi-boxing, they probably wouldn’t have placed that restriction on free accounts. But they have proven many times, despite quite a few screwups and missteps, that they do care about protecting the game’s economy from abuse as much as is reasonably possible. I’d say multi-boxing is definitely not good for the game, as it does disrupt the intended balance of time/effort/reward. Which would, with that obvious desire to protect the economy, make it something Anet would probably not want happening.

Tekoneiric.6817:

Having multiple computers (using synergy across them) I typically play the game while browsing or watching a show. I’m not afk and in active control of my character but I do reply on the character auto attacking to smooth out the attacks from time to time as my mouse is on another PC.

I just don’t understand why ANet has to nerf something every time the odd group of players complain about other players finding some advantage in line with the rules of the game. Nerfing popular things is a waste of time and resources plus it tends to push players away. Some players like myself like the gathering aspect during the lulls between new content.

What you describe doing yourself and what was happening in Lake Doric are quite different. Most of them are not actively controlling their characters, they aren’t even auto-attacking because they aren’t paying attention to the game. They are only interacting with the game briefly every few minutes to keep their turrets up. It’s a level of automated play that has more in common functionally with botting than the type of multi-boxing you describe.

UnitedChaos.8364:

I already put forth a solution in a different thread.
-Make minions/turrets/pets only attack who the player is attacking. That way the player has to continuously provide input.
-Make minions/turrets/pets not contribute towards a kill. Only things the player directly attacks himself will count.

I think that is too punishing toward everyone. It also has other factors, like AoE damage, muddying how a fix like this would actually function and affect players. The turrets themselves can cause AoE damage, which under this system, could lead to enemies being killed without credit despite the player actually being active.

It makes more sense to me to have turrets and other summons tied to the existing inactivity/afk timer, and simply stop attacking after a brief period of inactivity. A mechanic for stopping summons from attacking already exists, in the form of a passive toggle for ranger pets. It seems like it would be easier to use game systems that we already have, instead of adding a new convoluted set of rules.

Djinn.9245:

Faaris.8013:

Menadena.7482:

Free accounts do not get login rewards.

I didn’t know that. Just proves that ArenaNet doesn’t like the idea of multi-boxing to gain advantages :P

That is some interesting logic…O.o

It does make sense. If free accounts were able to get the login rewards, a good portion of the playerbase would probably have multiple free accounts that exist for only that purpose. I’d be very surprised if preventing that degree of multi-account use wasn’t a major consideration (if not the only reason) for adding that restriction. It would be a very blatant abuse to allow, and make them and the game look bad.

On the other hand, multi-boxing with paid accounts does also present a few positives from a developer/publisher perspective. Most obviously, more sales revenue and higher sales figures to boast about. It’s probably also nice to be able to add thousands of accounts to your active player stats, without actually having to increase server capacity to handle them. And since the accounts aren’t free, it’s not as widespread, less obvious to most players, and has a much smaller impact on the game.

Sure, it would probably be better for the game to prohibit multi-boxing. But it makes sense to tolerate it, as it’s hard to fix, has some positives for Anet, and isn’t causing any major backlash. Trying to stop it would end up causing problems for legit players and create more backlash than goodwill from trying prevent abuse.

But when you look at something like this engi farm, all of those negatives become much larger problems. It’s in your face, we all know it’s happening, and the potential impact on the game/economy is greater. And these accounts are being used for long periods, eating up space on the servers. There are players that aren’t able to do group events because a pile of semi-AFK’ers are clogging up the population limit of every active map instance. It definitely got noticed by a lot of players for these reasons, and the backlash isn’t easily ignored.

It’s no longer a situation where Anet can accept the positives and look the other way because it’s not creating any big issues. It’s not tolerable when the minor negative impact turns into something large and obvious that puts a black mark on their reputation. Something has to be done to stop it, and let these players know that they crossed the line and abused Anet’s tolerance of less disruptive multi-boxing.

Warcry.1596:

Fivona.5061:

They found new spot. Less effective but still.

Yes, and why do you care? There is NOTHING against the rules about doing this. Stepping away from your computer for a little bit at a time is okay. While farming often people need to use restroom, check dinner, he a parent, etc. Sometimes those just involve a quick ark of one or two minutes, or even longer. There has been a LOT of discussion in the past about that and it has been determined to be okay per A Net.

Going afk is not bannable unless it becomes chronic.

I don’t think people stepping AFK for a restroom break typically meet up with 30 other bathroom go’ers, who all happen to play engis, and drop a army of turrets. This is not, and is not comparable to, an incidental AFK break that players happen to occasionally need. It’s exploiting the turret’s duration and ability independently target/attack to gain loot without actively playing the game, and there is no point in pretending it’s anything but that. And Anet has already decided it is not acceptable, and are actively combating it.

Maybe the rest of us should have asked Anet to add in a ‘5 minute auto-play’ button so we can all keep on collecting loot while we’re not playing the game. I’m sure you’ll see nothing wrong with that, as it’s not any different than what was/is happening in Lake Doric

Kaltyn of Torbins Deep.2946:

Henry.5713:

Anything that people can do on multiple accounts, at the same time and with very little effort on their part shouldn’t be allowed. Neither should they be able to “play” their partner’s or friend’s account in there while they take part in any other content with their own account. ArenaNet shouldn’t allow anything that might lead to multiboxing and eventual botting in due time.

Second, as for your “Anything that can be done on multiple accounts at the same time…” comment, you mean like the Troll Runestone HP in Tangled Depths? I happened to be “multiboxing” last night in TD – I’d left toons from both accounts at the flax farm the night before, when someone popped up in map chat and asked for help. Since my alt didn’t have that point, I went and helped, and managed to get both accounts there in time. Then, after it was done and everyone took off, I hung out and did a little inventory management. On both accounts. And a necro showed up and needed the point. So I dropped a banner, popped my stone spirit, and told him to kick it off. And proceeded to help him take the troll down pretty quickly. Actively using BOTH accounts to do it. AND NO, I didn’t use any special macros or key binds that let me do actions on both accounts simultaneously – all my clicks and key presses were specific to each account’s game window at the time they were executed.

I think the key factor in this case is the “very little effort” part of Henry’s statement. Juggle two accounts that require steady interaction is very different than playing one account while others passively collect loot during long periods of inactivity, broken up by a few keypresses every 5 minutes. The latter is functionally very similar to botting, while your example is a feat of multitasking that takes considerably more effort than normal play. Even using multiple accounts to gather nodes doesn’t give you loot while those accounts are not being interacted with.

Phenomenal.5013:

So Macbooks suck for the price then?

I wouldn’t go that far, but they’re certainly not a good performance per dollar value compared to what you can find in non-Apple systems. Macbooks seem to be pretty well-built, and are definitely nice to look at, but metal bodies and aesthetic-focused designs are more common now in higher end Windows notebooks. Premium machines that still seem to be generally cheaper than Apple’s comparable offerings.

A Mac is something you should probably only get for OSX. Whether that be just a strong preference for OSX itself or for software available only on Macs. I know they are popular, for good reason, among audio/video creators and editors. But for general use, and especially for gaming, you can get a lot more for your money elsewhere if you can live without an Apple logo on your computer.

You’ll almost always get more for your money performance wise with a desktop. Especially compared with a Macbook, since Apple is rather notorious for overpriced hardware/upgrade options. Not that the new Pros are slouches, but they don’t offer anything above an entry level GPU in those high price machines.

That’s more than enough to run GW2, or any modern game. Though with GW2, there will be situations (like wvw or large pve events) where your framerates get fairly low. But that’s due to the coding and optimization of the game, not your hardware. It would happen no matter how much money you pour into a PC.

For other games, you should generally be able to max out settings at 1080p(or even 1440p with some) for all but the most demanding games. The 1070 is a very capable GPU, and an i7 7700k is somewhat overkill for many games.

tldr
That will run any game you can find to throw at it.

Cercie.1025:

I’m sure players would appreciate even a single static ‘Hat hair’ model for each race instead of every outfit’s peculiar attempt to hide all your hair whatsoever.

This seems like it would be the best solution. Having a hat on is going to really mess up your normal hairstyle, so reverting to some universal style is a good compromise. It would have to look better than the awkward baldness we get now, and it’s a lot easier to implement than making hat hair styles for every existing hair. It wouldn’t even need to match the real hair color, or look anything like the normal style. Just having something there is an improvement.

Carighan.6758:

blakkrskyrr.7413:

Honestly the whole gathering and crafting system is a wreck. Some materials are gathered (plants, ore, lumber) and others are only from drops (rare materials, cloths, leather). The rare materials I can understand being from drops from specific creature types, but the leather and cloth should have been a part of the gathering system from the start.

The bigger problem for me is on the crafting side. We would ideally need a system like in DAoC, where all gear is crafted, but due to gear permanently getting used up slowly, most of the time you use “99%” gear, or probably exotics in our case, only very rarely equipping 100% gear (Ascended) when the time is right.

It sounds like a decent gold/materials sink for a game catering to a hardcore playerbase, but a horrible concept for GW2. The sink would get rendered useless by the majority of players only using cheap throwaway gear, and ignoring the higher quality items.

If my armor degraded over time to the point of being destroyed, I’d be running around in green/masterwork gear. I already feel that ascended armor is a waste of money outside of higher level fractals, and there is no way I would ever craft it if it was going to break later on. I wouldn’t even bother with the weapons if that was the system used.

Zain Onyx.4602:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mail

“New accounts cannot send or receive any mail attachments until 7 days (of real-world) time have passed. This even applies to accounts that purchased the game”

The restrictions are because of people, such as goldsellers, who use bank and credit card fraud to steal accounts. They’ll fraudulently buy accounts with stolen credit, use the accounts for botting or gold selling then reverse the charges to get money back.

Right, but she’s had the account for 32 days.

That info isn’t really complete. Free accounts can’t send attachments at all, no matter how old. Upgrading a free account to paid functions the same as making a new paid account, as far as item sending restrictions are concerned. Your friend will be able to send items after 7 days.

My top glider is the Crystalline Dragon Wings and its companion back item. I like the flapping animation, sound effects, and particle trails they leave. And the back slot item is the only set of back wings I like at all.

I have several other gliders, but my most used are Exalted and Bloodstone because they fit the armor styles/colors of a few characters. And the Electromagnetic Descender is just too perfect of a fit for an engi, or a decent general pick for when nothing else really fits.

kitten.4078:

Faaris.8013:

…
“Manuscript of ‘This Book Is False’” sells for 60 silver
“Minor Rune of Grenth” sells for 19 copper

You have to loot and sell 315 minor runes to add as much money to the world as one Manuscript does. You get a fractal ancryption and key easily from a Tier 1 fractal. You need to kill a lot of ponies to come close to that.

You are leaving a lot out of this. The engi farming is generating a lot more than just minor runes that sell for 19 copper. Each salvage might produce a rune, it might also produce mats worth a bit more than 19 copper. Surely with all the loot coming in from hours and hours of unattended game play there will be rares and exotics as well. There’s also the fact that opening the fractal boxes is not free. You might find a few keys but you’ll end up buying a lot of keys which will cut into what you get from the box. And you don’t always get something worth 60s, sometimes what you get is worth a bit less that 20s. And mayb the most important detail is that you’re not going to have Fractal Encryptions to open unless you actively play the game to get them and the keys to open them.

I found the defense more that a bit intellectually dishonest myself, and decided to do a quick bit of research. I don’t have any previous experience with the afk engis, so I went and stood with them for 30 minutes. End result, was a total of 48s 19c from only coin drops, junk trophies, and runes/sigils from salvaged gear drops. 50 people doing that for an hour would to add almost 50g to the game’s pool of gold.

Of course, the salvage value of gear and other drops was a much higher amount, pushing the entire experiment to over 5g in total profits. That’s 5g that I got for doing nothing more than pushing a few buttons every 5 minutes. I’m not sure on the earnings from Fractals, but I’d guess that I probably wouldn’t earn much more than 5g if I spent 30 minutes on them. Looking at where those figures were a year or so ago, I assume it would be less. Especially after the dailies were completed.

Faaris.8013:

I disagree. If making gold is your goal, ArenaNet has no problem with doing it afk via Trading Post. You set up that you want to sell 1000 Hardened Leather Sections for 35 silver and then you can go afk for hours or days. To get those 1000 Leather you set up a buy order before for 27 silver (there are always people who sell instantly because they need the money now). When you return, you will have made gold without being active. How is that less afk-gold-farming than moving to the Centaur farm, setting up your turrets, inviting people, replacing turrets etc.

And the goal is always to make gold, for both traders and farmers.

You are ignoring one very big difference between farming and flipping on the trading post. Farming generates new items from loot as well as injecting gold, while flipping is only shifting existing gold and items between players. Trading also takes some thought and knowledge of the market, or at least some research into what items you can semi-reliably turn a profit with. And it also comes with the risk of losing money, should prices shift before you are able to offload your supply.

On the other hand, afk farming has zero risk and can be done by a poorly trained chimp. You press a few buttons and let the loot pile up. There is no research, planning, or strategizing. And no risk of losing money.

Faaris.8013:

Sorry, but after reading your posts, I think you know little about markets but keep trying to correct others. What do you think those farmers would do if they shut down the pony farm (or did before)? Just stand around in Lion’s Arch and chat? They would generate as much gold by selling crap to vendors as before Lake Doric. Or should I say “as little” and “copper”? Because the currency you create by selling minor runes and other crap is nothing. We only sell it because it’s easier than deleting. Maybe those farmers would play fractals instead and open Fractal Encryptions. Now those really add lots of gold to the market. I would guess that 1 player opening a few of them adds as much gold to the world as 100 farmers do by selling their crap to vendors.

“Manuscript of ‘This Book Is False’” sells for 60 silver
“Minor Rune of Grenth” sells for 19 copper

You have to loot and sell 315 minor runes to add as much money to the world as one Manuscript does. You get a fractal ancryption and key easily from a Tier 1 fractal. You need to kill a lot of ponies to come close to that.

tl:dr: there is no risk of inflation caused by farmers because they would always do something that gives them vendor loot, and also because the amount of money added to the world by selling random crap to vendors is like a drop in an ocean.

The difference here is that everything else you bring up requires that they be actively playing the game. Sure, people can be actively playing the game and getting loot/items. But they’re very likely to spend much more time afk farming compared to actively playing the game. In fact, you were event trying to defend continuing to actively play one account, while passively gaining loot on others via afk farming. That’s giving them their “normal loot” on top of whatever they get from passively farming on however many accounts they have.

This is all putting more gold into the economy and skewing wealth distribution in favor of players putting in minimal effort/using exploitative methods. These players have a supply of easy gold, that has less value to them because it’s easier to acquire. You’re more likely to spend more gold, more willing to pay higher prices, when you have an easy, almost no effort, supply of gold. But those higher prices won’t even end up meaning better profits for the sellers, because the inflation pushes up the gold cost of everything they buy themselves. The only players that end up benefiting are the ones afk farming, while everyone else just gets hit with the impact of inflation and having a new class of money-printing scheme players messing up the game economy.

The core of this situation isn’t really any different than what botters create. And these are the same reasons why game devs have been trying to combat them for years. Left unchecked, they can completely destroy a game’s economy. Now, I don’t think these afk farmers are creating the level of impact that massive botting has shown it’s capable of, but it’s still not something that I think should just be allowed to continue.

If enough people stand around putting drops of water into the ocean, the world will eventually be flooded. Your drops might not matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, but you have to consider that everyone’s drops add up.

Faaris.8013:

mrstealth.6701:

The account is the entity that matters more to Anet. It doesn’t matter that you are still at your PC, or at another PC, playing on another account. If you are not interacting with the account in question, that account constitutes an inactive player.

But is that really so? From what I could collect from reading the forums, as long as you respond to a moderator when whispered, you are not afk. Which makes sense, because afk means away from keyboard, and replying to a whisper kind of proves you are not afk (unless you use a chat bot).

You’re trying to equate being at the PC and being active, but they are not the same thing. You can be at your PC, even paying some degree of attention to a game client/other PC running the game, but not be actively playing on that client/account. Active is controlling what is going on with your character. Dropping a few turrets, then not interacting with the game for several minutes, while your character continues gathering loot, is not what I would call active.

Faaris.8013:

mrstealth.6701:

Meaning that everyone not doing it gets punished with increased costs on everything.

Wait, so now additional leather entering the game through multi-box farms increases prices? I thought we established that additional numbers of X on the market makes X cheaper, for everybody?

The issue I was pointing out is inflation, not the price of leather. If the activity contributing to inflation does so through overfarming certain items, then those specific items can still see a price decrease due to a surplus, while inflation creates an overall devaluation of gold and a price increase with everything else. Of course, leather is not the only item being generated in this farm. The other loot is more spread out and less likely to create a surplus/price drop with specific items, and the junk/trophy items (or anything else sold to merchants) simply inject gold into the economy. This just contributes to inflation without having any considerable impact on the value of specific items in relation to each other.

End result, is that even though effective leather prices might go down, injecting more gold into the economy and giving a number of players a passive source of income creates inflation that lowers the value of gold and makes the price of everything increase. Even leather is effected by the inflation, but its increase in price is likely offset by the increased supply. If the impact of inflation was high enough, even leather with a massive surplus, could still see a price increase.

It’s the shaders for some outfits, but others don’t seem to be effected by shader settings. Setting shaders to low does remove all the shininess and edge glow from the Shadow Assassin outfit. At low, it is almost entirely a deep, flat black with slight tinting on the metal bits. But the shader setting has little to no impact on others like Taimi’s and the Spring Promenade outfits. They always have a powerful brightening effect that looks like a spotlight on the outfit turning black to grey/silver.

It’s the inconsistency that makes me think that someone didn’t implement these outfits’ materials inline with how the rest of the game’s skins were done. Almost as if there is some baked-in/hardcoded shader effect on the material that makes it always overly shiny.

Faaris.8013:

OriOri.8724:

Faaris.8013:

I think many people believe the people behind those accounts are not really playing the game actively. That’s simply not true.

So you admit that you wouldn’t actually be playing the account that is afk farming, but somehow think that you are still actively playing it? What kind of twisted logic is this to defend afk farms?

Obviously, we are communicating in different realms of logic. “People” are real persons, individuals. Those people who play two or more accounts at the same time are still “active players”. They are playing the game actively, just not with all accounts they are logged in with. Multi-Boxing is not against the rules, and I believe ArenaNet has especially no problem if it involves fully payed for accounts. And the farmers we are talking about are not free version players, otherwise they wouldn’t have the autoloot mastery.

What I’m saying is that reacting with pity towards those players is not asked for because you don’t know what they are doing on another box.

That’s really a stretch for justifying what is going on. You’re trying to redefine “active player” to refer to only the person, and intentionally refusing to acknowledge the accounts themselves as an entity involved in this. From the game/dev perspective, it’s the actions performed (or not performed) on the account(s) that matter, not the person behind it. It’s for this reason that botting is still botting, even if you are sitting at your PC interacting with the game in some other way. It’s the reason your account gets banned even if someone else temporarily hijacks your PC and posts bannable comments in chat. For the purpose of the rules of the game, we’re a collection of accounts more than we are people.

The account is the entity that matters more to Anet. It doesn’t matter that you are still at your PC, or at another PC, playing on another account. If you are not interacting with the account in question, that account constitutes an inactive player.

From an economic perspective, the issue goes beyond the supply and price of leather. Having more accounts than active players logged in and collecting loot causes inflation. It generates more income than the player should actually be bringing in, which causes a devaluing of gold in both terms of market inflation and the person’s perception of gold value in relation to time spent playing. That person is willing to spend more because gold means less to them, and when you get enough people like that, the price of everything goes up.

It’s comparable to when overly profitable farms exist or widespread botting is going on, just to a lesser degree. It creates a situation where the price of everything is based on the wealth generation of these players/bots. Meaning that everyone not doing it gets punished with increased costs on everything. If those situations went unchecked, we would eventually be to a point where only players exploiting the most profitable farms or botting would be able to afford anything at all. Inactive centaur farming probably isn’t near that level and likely won’t get there, but that doesn’t mean there is no impact from it. Killing it off and finding a better way to deal with the leather problem would be best for the health of the game’s economy.

The worst offenders are those actively playing one account, while other accounts are “semi-afk” farming. They’re getting one active account worth of loot, while also raking in additional loot/money from inactive accounts. I don’t think multi-boxing is even a proper term for this case, as that implies a greater degree of interaction. It’s just a small step away from botting, in both functionality and economic impact. It’s likely that the only things stopping a massive ban wave are the difficulty in drawing a clear line stating what level of game interaction counts as active or inactive, and the PR backlash of trying to enforce such a policy.

There is something that’s annoyed me for a long time, and prevented me from buying a number of outfits I would otherwise like. A large number of outfits (and I believe a few armors) have a very overstated shine or edge glow effect. Sometimes it’s only on certain parts of the outfit, while for others it covers the entire thing. I know there are different materials that react differently to lighting, but this effect shows up on cloth, leather, and metal alike. Then there are other metallic outfits that completely lack this shine effect, even though it would make sense to have it on some metallic parts.

For me, the problem with this extra effect is two-fold. Most noticeably, it makes darker dyes appear much brighter than they otherwise would. No matter how dark the dye is, the result looks like a neon color. It’s much less of an issue if the intent is to dye with very bright colors. The other problem is that the edge glow created by this shine highlights aliasing/“jaggies” on the outfit, lowering the apparent graphic quality. SMAA anti-aliasing seems to have little impact on this, though FXAA will smooth it out (at the cost looking like vaseline has been smeared all over the screen).

At first, I wasn’t sure if this effect was intended. The first thing I noticed it on was the Shadow Assassin Outfit added several years ago. I thought it might have been a bug, because it only shows up on a couple parts of the outfit, making them stand out very strangely. But then it was never removed and kept showing up on future outfits, being much more prominently featured on many of them. So many years later, it certainly seems that someone in the art department either really likes this aesthetic or doesn’t realize they can make materials without the glow.

While I can certainly appreciate that different people have different aesthetic preferences, this effect seems to run counter to the design philosophy of giving players control over the color and some degree of material appearance of their outfit/armor using the dye system. Every outfit/armor dyes a bit differently, but the outfit glow effect takes that to an extreme. And the edge glow aliasing isn’t something that can be defended aesthetically. It makes the outfits look objectively worse. The shine can be worked with somewhat, but those edge jaggies have got to go.

I’ll include a couple screenshots of the Shadow Assassin outfit, because it highlights both aspects of this effect very well. The glow on the front dangling ribbons, and the aliasing on the rope tied into a bow on the back. For reference, all dye channels are Shadow Abyss to show the forced glow on what should be the darkest color available.

Bigsexy.8302:

If you are going to do vertical maps, make them properly and make a good minimap for navigation. I’m not going to bother ever to do that story again.

For me, the maps are pretty much the only issue, though I do understand that a lot of others do not like vertical or jump puzzle-ish maps at all. Aside from just not liking that style of gameplay, GW2 is a rather bad game for platforming because of how its terrain collision is set up. But I’ve not encountered many situations where that has a large impact on gameplay outside of jumping puzzles.

It’s the world and mini maps are really bad in Draconis Mons(as with Tangled Depths, which made it surprising to me that Anet would try this design again). They are designed in a way that is good for showing a few distinct large layers, not numerous mini-layers that constantly shift and merge into others. The maps are largely useless because they make marked locations appear to be in a certain layer, when they are really several thousand units above or below it, in an in-between/mini-layer with no entrance path visible.

You’re forced to rely on exploration and memory to navigate, which isn’t too big of a problem for map completion or story. It becomes a major annoyance when you’re trying to locate and get to an event or commander. You don’t have the luxury of wandering around to figure out the path when your destination isn’t just waiting for you to arrive. An event is likely to be completed or failed before you figure out which level of the map it’s actually in, which means you don’t even where to go the next time it appears.

Askadia.4395:

For me, I like the Living Story, I’ve never missed a chapter ’till now. However, I love to play to kill stuff, using skills the right moment, cooperate with others in some mechanics to take a huge boss down (yep, à la Raid)…

But spending 2 hours and a half jumping on a rock to reach the next story step is… ridiculous. If people loves spending time in exploring, getting PoIs and masteries in hiden corners in the map… it’s ok, it can be fun, and I also do that myself sometime. But gating the LS behind difficult jumping puzzles is just frustrating and reveals that Devs don’t have any idea on how to make PvE entertaining

The story steps don’t require any difficult jumping to reach, or really any jumping at all. The thermal tubes around the map actually drop you right in front of some of it. I stumbled right into 2 of the story vaults (before even starting that story step) just by following the chain of tubes from the starting waypoint.

I think I had reached all the relevant areas for the story within the first 30 minutes or so, just by following the first few tubes and obvious paths. They lead you pretty much right along the path you need for the story.

Navigating the rest of it to get 100% or reach events before they fail/get completed by others is a different story.

I had fun exploring the map, and only a few of the PoIs were annoying to find a path to. But I can’t see staying around for long to do events. It’s just too much of a hassle to figure out which level many events are on, and how to get to them in time.

I think it will end up like Tangled Depths. Events never getting done because people just can’t be bothered to find them. And the few that do stumble onto them will just move on because they don’t want to wait around for others or have to give directions through a maze to get there.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

There are no changes in DirectX 12 that fundamentally change the efficiency of the intermediate layer between the game engine and the hardware.

DX12 (along with other newer APIs) does have less driver overhead, which means slightly less work for the CPU. This alone is not a reason to swap to DX12, though. It’s not going to give any significant (or any at all) improvements in many cases, but it is there and might have a minor impact in older CPUs.

You are right that making changes to the problematic overused thread would increase performance no matter what graphics API is used. At least in CPUs powerful enough that the game isn’t already pushing them to their limits anyway. Offloading work to the GPU could be of benefit in those cases, if it had some power to spare.

If Anet were to make such huge changes to the engine, it might also be the time to do a full overhaul and change API as well. I don’t really expect to see this happen, but it’s not unheard of. There are at least a couple other MMOs have that seen shifts to new APIs or even total rebuilds of their engine.

kinjiro.3251:

Technically we already have mounts in the game. Same movement speed but still a mount of sorts. Flying broom stick and magic carpet come to mind. We do not need to become WoW just stop. Mounts of that nature are not needed in this game.

It would probably satisfy most of the calls for mounts that crop up every so often if Anet used this system to implement some creature mounts. There are a number of creatures in the game that could serve as mounts, and it shouldn’t be too big of a job to modify those assets and add in animations to have them rideable. Surely much less effort than adding a separate, more comprehensive mount system.

I think all of the “redundant” movement systems give something much more interesting than simply flying everywhere on a mount. I’ve played a few games with flight/flying mounts, and it was a novelty that quickly wore off. It can turn travel into simply pointing yourself in the right direction and holding down a button. At least GW’s systems provide variety and make traversal of the world more than just an idle task.

Though, I suppose if your gameplay mentality is ‘get to location ASAP, complete task, collect reward, go on to next location ASAP’ flying mounts would be the more attractive game feature. However, I don’t think that was Anet’s target audience with GW2. The design philosophy is about the entire experience being engaging, and I think that does include navigating the world. It’s probably why the flight system we do have requires that you actively work to maintain flight, instead of just moving on a level path to your destination.

I do think that ground mounts could be an nice addition, but it would need to be a carefully executed one. Being more of a cosmetic option, than added functionality. No more than a speed boost on par with what is already available through skills.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

mrstealth.6701:

Ishtar.4375:

of course, it wouldn’t be enough to just upgrade to a newer version of directx. there would need to be a way for the game to actually utilize the gpu more

I think that’s about the simplest way to put it. Moving to DX12 alone would have a negligible impact on performance, but could lead to other changes with the engine that do help. Being able to offset the CPU bound nature of current DX9 engine by allowing the currently underutilized GPU to handle more of the work. The issue is the amount of work involved and the high chance of introducing new problems with such a massive rewrite.

You misunderstand: GW2 is CPU-bound because it has a single CPU thread that does work required to calculate and position objects in the 3D world. This is not something that can be offloaded to the GPU (easily).

It is also something that, if fixed, would allow higher GPU utilization with DirectX 9, as the DX layer is not what is causing the performance limitation here.

I understand the problem, and I’m well aware that it’s not something easy to break into multiple threads for the CPU or offloading to the GPU. That’s the reason why I said moving to DX could lead to changes that might improve performance later, instead of giving any noticeable immediate boost.

While fixing the issue with the main thread would improve performance in DX9, DX12 does have advantages in efficiency and ability to lessen the CPU’s workload. It could also be more of a benefit to older CPUs that are already being taxed by GW2, in both short and long term.

Easy or not, the performance problems aren’t going to go away anytime soon unless Anet does something to fix them. It doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see enough single thread performance increases to solve this, with focus shifting to more CPU cores.

FrostDraco.8306:

After doing this for about 6 hrs the other day while working on a painting. I will have to say this is categorically false. I’m one of those people that measure how much loot i get over time because i always have my bag clean once its full, its extremely constant, and while the wiki may say that. Results are proving otherwise. The wiki says a lot of things that are incorrect. It’s not really a source. Nor is it exactly what i mean. It seems we are on two different pages.

It depends on how you define diminishing returns as well. I’m not using the wiki’s statement, but the actual concept. The rewards for events get worse and worse the more you continue to do events. While dungeons its a once a day chest, and then a static reward for further runs. I wouldn’t call the diminishing, but thats just me.

It is possible that Anet excluded this area (or the map) from some types of DR, especially considering that it was added to be a farm where players kill the local mobs repeatedly. They did change HOT maps last year to remove event DR, so I assume it is something they are able to do in this case.

I’d be surprised if Anet didn’t already have some plans on how to stop this. It might be slightly less afk’ing than some ranger and necro shenanigans I’ve seen, but were any of those as widespread?

I hadn’t been in Bitterfrost lately to see the number of afkers there, but almost every instance of Lake Doric I’ve found in the last several days has a pack of at least 30 engineers farming centuar.

The only impact I’ve noticed on other players in the map is from the active maps’ population being primarily farming engis. There are less players doing anything in the rest of the map. Activity has already been in decline, probably because the map has been around for a few months and a new one is so close. But now it seems difficult to get group events done even in usually active hours.

The old leather runs could have a similar effect, but they weren’t this constant thing that went on for the whole day. It’s been a few days since I’ve found a map that didn’t have the majority of the population gathered at the base of the centaur camp.

I think this at the very edge of being considered actively playing, but it is going to vary from person to person. I can’t agree that someone is active if all they are doing is refreshing a set of turrets every 5 minutes. To me being active is consistently attacking, using skills, and interacting with the game. If you can still for 5 minutes collecting loot without pressing a key, you are not actively playing.

Still, I don’t think this belongs in the same category as botting. And in most instances a ban would be an overreaction. But I don’t see it as something that should be allowed to continue. Don’t punish those doing it, just fix the game to where it’s not a possible/viable thing to do.

Ishtar.4375:

of course, it wouldn’t be enough to just upgrade to a newer version of directx. there would need to be a way for the game to actually utilize the gpu more

I think that’s about the simplest way to put it. Moving to DX12 alone would have a negligible impact on performance, but could lead to other changes with the engine that do help. Being able to offset the CPU bound nature of current DX9 engine by allowing the currently underutilized GPU to handle more of the work. The issue is the amount of work involved and the high chance of introducing new problems with such a massive rewrite.

It’s not a fix, but it should be more convenient to kill the game if you change graphics settings to run in windowed or windowed fullscreen mode. You also might be able to get task manager to open with Ctrl-Shift-ESC, though sometimes a frozen exclusive fullscreen game won’t minimize.

Since you’ve already deleted the .dat file and redownloaded it, the first other possible fix I’d suggest is trying a different GPU driver version. It’s possible that some game asset in the airship is creating a problem for the current driver that might not exist in newer or older versions.

Ayrilana.1396:

It could be that it wasn’t an easy fix like copy and pasting code. Rather than let it snowball and get out of hand, they opted to disable it to give themselves some time.

The level 1 character thing was an easy fix as they just modified the primary way which they were doing it by making the scrolls usable only by level 80’s. You could still do it with teleport to friend stones but you’re limited by the number that you have.

It’s certainly a possible explanation, as I mentioned earlier about the weekend break being a potential difference that sparked this response. But we have no way of knowing if that is true, or if multi-instance farming is even the exploit Gaile was referring to. We just have some players convinced that since it was known to be happening, so it must be the reason.

Ayrilana.1396:

mrstealth.6701:

Ayrilana.1396:

mrstealth.6701:

Anet didn’t disabled blood rubies before they put the cap on them, right? I don’t recall it happening then, and wouldn’t expect it this time if the problem was multi-instance/character farming. I’m guessing something more severe was going on this time around.

If multi-farming actually was the reason, the difference could be them not wanting to let it continue over the weekend. I think blood rubies were capped just a couple days in, before the weekend.

This situation is different as it didn’t require character swapping. There was a flaw in how they handled the nodes which I won’t get into. It’s explained further on Reddit though.

I would consider that less of an issue as far as gaining an advantage, since it’s fair to everyone instead of only benefiting those with many alts. Putting in more time/effort and getting more items doesn’t seem like something worth pulling out the nuclear option to stop. A duping exploit or some other method of getting large amounts with zero/little effort just seems more likely given the extreme reaction to stop it.

Whether someone gains an advantage or not doesn’t preclude it from needing to be fixed. Anet found that it was a large enough issue to them that they disabled it. It could easily have snowballed once more people learned of it, and did it, which it could have become a very big issue.

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be fixed. Putting an account based cap on them like blood rubies is probably the best way to do that. But if multi-instance farming is the only reason for disabling them, it’s a more extreme reaction that isn’t consistent with similar previous issues.

With blood rubies, you had people going as far as recycling level 1 characters to get blood rubies and map completion rewards, which has the same end result as instance hopping as far as gathering is concerned. It went a step farther overall, with abusing the small map for completion rewards. But blood rubies didn’t get disabled to prevent it, the free-for-all continued till it was updated and fixed with a cap.

Ayrilana.1396:

mrstealth.6701:

Anet didn’t disabled blood rubies before they put the cap on them, right? I don’t recall it happening then, and wouldn’t expect it this time if the problem was multi-instance/character farming. I’m guessing something more severe was going on this time around.

If multi-farming actually was the reason, the difference could be them not wanting to let it continue over the weekend. I think blood rubies were capped just a couple days in, before the weekend.

This situation is different as it didn’t require character swapping. There was a flaw in how they handled the nodes which I won’t get into. It’s explained further on Reddit though.

I would consider that less of an issue as far as gaining an advantage, since it’s fair to everyone instead of only benefiting those with many alts. Putting in more time/effort and getting more items doesn’t seem like something worth pulling out the nuclear option to stop. A duping exploit or some other method of getting large amounts with zero/little effort just seems more likely given the extreme reaction to stop it.

Anet didn’t disabled blood rubies before they put the cap on them, right? I don’t recall it happening then, and wouldn’t expect it this time if the problem was multi-instance/character farming. I’m guessing something more severe was going on this time around.

If multi-farming actually was the reason, the difference could be them not wanting to let it continue over the weekend. I think blood rubies were capped just a couple days in, before the weekend.

Out of combat you are limited to 133% of base speed. Any boost more powerful than swiftness only has an added benefit in combat.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_Speed

I’ve gotten this to happen multiple times by getting hit while gliding, but only if I don’t get out of combat range before landing. When landing while still in combat, the pet just remains stowed. If I leave combat while still gliding, the pet reappears the next time I enter combat.

This would explain why I still can’t get in there. I hadn’t tried before replaying some story instances for achievements, but I’m locked out of it now.

I did try selecting a different story chapter, but that had no effect.

In windowed mode, the game doesn’t go by in-game resolution settings. It has a completely customizable size, within the constraints of your desktop resolution. The problem is with how Windows 10 handles the borders around some games in windowed mode. The gap left is about the same as the standard window frame/border in Windows 7 (with aero theme). It’s limiting the game window size as if that border was still there, instead of the 1 or 2 pixel border Windows 10 has.

This doesn’t happen with every game, but I’ve seen several effected by it. The only thing I’ve found to do for it is use borderless window instead of a window. Or just try and ignore the gap.

Gaile Gray.6029:

To folks who are arguing for a fix one week in advance of the release of the outfit. Let’s be clear: You didn’t have “early access.” You used data-mined information to try to gain access to, or look at, an unreleased item. We’re not going to try to chase down issue reports related to data-mined or leaked information. Doing so is not productive, and is counter to our policies about such content. Content that is data-mined is subject to change, subject even to removal. Those who view it or try to build a case for its future usefulness — such as seeing stats and expecting that they absolutely will not change — do so at their own risk.

I agree that feedback/suggestions/etc for datamined assets that may or may not be released should not be a concern, but being able to crash another player’s client is different matter. In this particular case there was just a single report, which is understandably easy to dismiss and not be worried by. But if that policy is going to be followed in the face of multiple reports, I think it’s a bit irresponsible.

It’s not just a risk that dataminers or their followers take on. These links are often posted into map or guild chats, where they could potentially cause many client crashes and disrupt gameplay for a large number of people. A lot of players are probably not aware of whether the preview link they are clicking is for a datamined item, or simply something they have not seen before. A scenario that’s even more likely just after an update, a time when new items are being linked a lot.