Guild Wars 2

The Troll’s Revenge jumping puzzle in LA seems to be broken, as you cannot walk on the new decorated halloween lines at the start.

Swamurabi.7890:

THE BAD:

It will end up that all tiers have the same tactic….SMASH RED
Green wants to wipe red twice as fast as they wipe blue
Blue wants to wipe red as much as they get wiped by green
Red will just try to hold on but won’t be able to match up.

The matches will probably be over before the Oceanics get to play in their prime time.

Look, criticism from someone that understands what I said! Thanks. It is a valid point. It should be fixed by making D the difference from the average score in the matchup instead of the opposite-ranked server, but I’ll have to sleep on it.

With my system, different matchups will happen as much as you want: it is sufficient to tweak the M value.

wads: you do not fully grasp Glicko. Glicko is not self-correcting, as it suffers from a problem similar to greedy algorithms stumbling on local maximums. T8, I will repeat, is the proof. NA T1 and T7 are already becoming like that. Ratings WILL freeze if servers play like they played the last weeks. The end result is that curbstomping servers will keep curbstomping, and fair matches will stay fair matches.

Ratings don’t change != all close matches. In fact, If a server goes 500k ten weeks in a row, its rating will not change from like the fourth week onward.

Except one-sided matchups will be the norm. Ask T8.

Glicko will freeze everyone in their current position, eventually. If in T4 green constantly does twice as many points as red+blue, and every week the results are the same, in a couple years their ratings won’t shift one point; despite it being a very imbalanced setup. If the intended goal is to freeze the ladder into whatever (usually bad) form it has at the moment, Glicko works perfectly.

With my system, you will NOT have two different opponents every single week because it’s not straight WULD. How many times do I have to repeat it?

No, 500k’ing one tier goes not guarantee you’re better suited for the next tier. But it gives you the right to try yourself in it, doesn’t it?

Glicko will freeze all ratings. It’s how it works. Look at T1 and T8 both NA and EU. T1 is 100k points ahead of T2 already, and the gap is getting larger. T8 is hopeless for two teams already and in NA the third team might never succeed in getting out. If you look at the formula, you will realize this locking is going to expand toward the center of the ranking gradually until nobody can move anymore. Glicko is paralyzing.

Populations will not shift. Some servers might drop down, and they might do so very slowly (see SBI). But the population flow is expected to be uniform across servers. Therefore, Glicko is “superior” in the only case that you want rankings to never move again for the eternity.

You are indeed a bit misled by the current situation.

The first thing you do is saying my system would have created more volatility: this in a period in which everyone and their mother bandwagoned around. Being volatile is not exactly inaccurate in this case! When there are big power shifts, Glicko does predict the trend correctly. Nobody disputes that. I dispute that it is slow, but not that it is correct. I think it is very ill-suited for our situation.

We are going to have monolithic servers with very small power changes for possibly years to come. With Glicko, we are guaranteed that every matchup will freeze, eventually, because it is the nature of the algorithm. My system creates unfair matchups from time to time, but it corrects itself within a week or two at most.

Let’s move on to your r9-13 example with my system, because I’m not sure you grasped its essence – it’s not straight WULD, it is mitigated, and it is essential to mitigate it. If SD wins by little, and as such the gap is small, it won’t have enough to make it to the next tier unless Cavalon crashes badly; likewise, if r10-12 was a close matchup and as such the gap is small, Urgoz would need a landslide victory.

I would believe that a pummeled Cavalon would be more than happy to spend a week winning some in the lower tier, just as Urgoz would be happy to pit themselves against stronger forces, for once. If they won by enough and the other tier was imbalanced, they get one chance. But if r10-12 is truly balanced, it will be hard for Cavalon/Urgoz to enter it. In the long run, Istan/SD/MK will be the T4 matchup three times out of four.

With Glicko? 5 years straight of Istan/SD/MK. Are you sure about that?

As an addendum, the history of SBI from our last win (17 November).
24/11: third by 60k points, we stay T1 (red)
1/12: second, we stay T1 (blue)
8/12: third by 40k, we stay T1 (red)
15/12: third by 30k, we stay T1 (red)
22/12: second, we stay T1 (blue)
29/12: third by 40k, we stay T1 (red)
5/1: third by 120k, we stay T1 (red)
12/1: third by 100k, we go T2 (green)
19/1: third by 90k, we stay T2 (blue)
26/1: third by 220k, we stay T2 (red)
1/2: third by 410k, we go T4 (green)
9/2: third by 100k, we stay T4 (red)
currently: third by 80k, going to go T5.

Three months to move down three tiers so far. Glicko is not fast for moving rapidly dropping teams.

Actually, I think the current situation is misleading you a bit.

First, I have to ask you a question. You state, let’s assume it to be true, that T7 is a good matchup. I will counter-assume for the sake of discussion that SF’s true strength is somewhere in T5-6. The true power ranking then is such that only two servers are worse than the T7 ones. This means that in the true power ranking, one of the T7 servers actually belongs to T8.

Now, is the better system the one that gradually freezes and leaves SF hopeless in T8 for the sake of maintaining an even pairing, or is it the one that breaks the good matchup because the three balanced teams are lined up wrong with the tiers? Yes, my system would break T7, and I think it is the correct thing to do.

I’ll give you an analogous, still hypothetical, example: JQ is the best server. SoR, SoS, and BG are of equal strength. Should we have these three fight together in T2 forever and leave JQ pounding on kaineng/TC, either in T1 or T2? No, definitely not. JQ should be stable T1, and the other three teams should battle it out. Glicko will freeze T1 as JQ/SoS/SoR, it is already happening, and it is the nature of the algorithm. Tweaking won’t fix things.

On the speed of moving up/down: it is true that my system makes you move up/down for only one tier per week. Being on SBI, I can tell you that it has been around two months since we last won a matchup, and we have ended up third like seven of those times. With my system, we would have had plenty of time to reach T5-6 where we belong now. With Glicko, our super high rating forced us repeatedly into artificially high tiers as we had to be pummeled repeatedly in order to lose enough rating to go down. Then all of a sudden we cross kaineng and maguuma and drop two tiers in once, but well, it’s been very late. With my system, SBI would have stabilized a lot faster. Same goes for Kaineng which has been winning for about the same time.

Scores in different servers are apples and oranges, correct. With Glicko, those playing with apples will never see an orange again though. With the playerbase freezing in the servers now that server transfers are expensive, server strengths will freeze, and Glicko ratings, which are designed to handle well power changes, will instead freeze the server ladder. My system guarantees variety and a “win some, lose some” environment.

I think it is becoming apparent that Glicko causes stagnation in the long run. This is not something that can be fixed by tweaking numbers: the system itself, by comparing your performance to your history, promotes stability in a setup where server populations are not going to mass shift ever again. It should be clear that Glicko is going to give us crystallized tiers over time – T8 is crystallized, and in turn the same fate will happen to T1 (already happening), then T2 and T7, then T3 and T6.

We do not want crystallized tiers. When we say that, we agree that there will be some imbalanced fights every now and then. That said, winner moves up and loser moves down is going to create a lot of imbalanced fights. NA T6 is fighting it out perfectly fine alone, and the proposed simple approach would wreck it.

But, the premise is a system that encourages changes. So we need to start from this, and tweak. On a related note, every sport league I know that has more than one tier (football or anything else in europe) employs this kind of system. With good reason.

So let’s say Winner Up Loser Down (WULD) is better than Glicko. We want WULD to not break such a magnificent setup as is NA T6. Very well, let us add a constraint: the more balanced a tier is, the harder it is to enter in it. Let’s call D the difference in points between the winner (1st) and the loser (3rd) of a certain tier. Let us decide arbitrarily that a tier’s ideal D is 50k points. We call this magic number M.

The tweak would work like this: a server in T7, to enter T6, must have a D(T7) > M – D(T6). What does this mean? It means this: if the difference between first and last in T6 is only 10k points, the winner of T7 will need to have 50k-10k = 40k points of difference from the last team in T7 to go up.

In T1, currently, D is about 35k points: the winner of T2 would need 15k more points than the last in T2 to move up.

In T3, currently, D is more than 50k points; this means that any winner from T4 would move up.

Get it? Now all that’s left is figure out a good M, possibly a variable one according to some convoluted rating system. Now is the time to over-engineer with ratings, since we now have a proper system.

Nnno, it’s not common sense. As you can see, you’re the only one in the thread that considers this an exploit. Someone even suggested that autocast can be moved from the 1 skill precisely for this reason, so I’d be glad if you kept a less confrontational tone, thank you.

My giver weapons are not increasing condition duration either, never have been.

This is exactly why I made the thread. xD

I can see both sides of the argument honestly, I think it’s not an offence, but since Anet has been banning accounts for exploiting an oversight in game design, well this one counts as well. As the snowflake thing could be damaging to the economy, this one might be damaging to server load, especially if everyone does it. Or allow people to AFK in WvW which would be very bad. So, that’s why I’m asking. I’d love a reply from Anet on this.

Well, no idea where I should post this but here we go.

I’ve been setting my autoattack to some skill that can be cast without a target, say Summon Oakheart, to avoid being kicked when I go AFK. I do this to track guild chat if I’m away for a few hours, but it occurred to me that maybe I’m circumventing the game’s limitations.

Is this ok or not?

Yeah, with this timing on the paid transfers… this week’s matchup is over already. But at least one week was bound to be ruined by the announcement.

Just tossing my 2c on why Smith is griefing us all and denying us data.

He has very explicitly avoided the question on purpose, and has made a point of it. It is clear he is trying to convey that he can not, or does not want to, disclose any information. But, I am sure he is physically able to disclose some information – heck, I’m pretty sure he has like 10 charts of wealth distribution glued on all sides of his screen at work. So he does not want to, or someone forbids him to.

I can very well see the reason: for one person on the forums that can actually gain insight from the charts and be reasonable, there are twenty hate monkeys who will jump on the newly acquired data to “prove” that Anet fails @economy, is an evil corporation trying to pass subliminal messages about buying gems, is behind Guantanamo Bay and the Cold War, etc. Sometimes it’s better to leave those people without tools – I certainly would handle stuff this way if I were at Anet. I think John Smith is trying to tell us this with his behavior.

On Reddit I posted a (not so) small guide to help people understand how to leverage DS to a great extent. So many necromancers do not grasp the power of our core mechanic, and it’s a real shame, because I feel that proper use of Death Shroud separates bad players from decent and upwards players. Clicky click

What do you think?

Source on 90% chance?

EDIT: 90% seems to be the amount for Master kits. I used a Mystic one. I suspect the Mystic one yields better results.

So, I’ve been running a statistic for some time and I feel a time has come for results.

I put into the forge L75-80 greens and recorded the rate for a yellow result. Over 450 attempts, I had 104 yellow results (23.1%). The data size is such that it is very unlikely (<10%) that the true percentage is outside the 20-25% range, and my personal guess is 22.5%.

From those yellows, I got 117 ectos using a Mystic Salvage kit. I got most greens with 160c buy orders on TP. I bought in total 1454 greens for 23g27s, and if I sell the ectos for 30s, I’ll earn 35g (+50%). This does not take into account that every other yellow or more I get a sigil that sells for several silvers, and there’s T5-T6 raw materials too.

So, grinding greens is profitable. If you didn’t know that, go crazy on Zommoros. If you already did know, more power to you.

what’s with these teamquitter style threads on this forum

Textile is the thing that makes random formatting appear in posts, like the underlining in my post above. It is supposed to be a formatting aid but it’s only damaging, at least to me.

About choices: they are not real choices. Trahearne says that something has to be done, and then proposes you two different ways to achieve it. Good storytelling would be: Trahearne states a problem, my character proposes two solutions and Trahearne expands on them. Then my character decides, and the NPC is a simple tool for the story. But that means recording lines for 10 different voice actors (the player character) instead of one. Also, the “branching” thing is stupid. Those are not branches. Those are quest-scoped forks, that rejoin instantly or within a couple quests. The story doesn’t change a bit. A branch is something important, an event that splits the flow of the story. Saving your mentor would have been a great branch. Losing LA would have been a great branch. Not unifying the Pact would have been a great branch. All of this could have been possible without altering the actual gameplay too much – just shifting some quest scripts here and there, and moving some quests earlier or later in the story. And recording more dialogue.

What bothers me is that the game advertises a “Personal Story”, but it is not my character’s one! I sat there waiting 80 levels for my character to do something epic and story-changing, but he never does. Trahearne is the one to found the Pact and lead people to victory against Zhaitan, which are the only two major plot nodes. We do unify DE, yes. I would prefer not talking about that, since I have never seen worse story writing than that storyline.

One huge problem with GW2 is that the screen time of the characters is very low – and the dialogue cinematic, in my opinion, detaches characters from the world they live in. This makes every word they say less powerful. Furthermore, the body language is incredibly lacking, and body language is paramount. There are too few quests in the story, or there is too much combat involved; this makes us unable to fully experience a character and let him grow and develop. I felt that the time spent with the mentor was slightly short – for a character that had only one thing to express! Trahearne would have needed 40-50 levels of quests to establish himself, at this pace. So, constraints made the job of making Trahearne certainly harder.

The second problem was the poor layout of the story. Most people will agree that the racial part (1-30) is generally well done. I think it gets the proper space too. What doesn’t get the proper space is the three orders. This is one perfect example to how an old-fashioned cinematic would have worked better than the slideshow we get. The first meeting with the orders is the slideshow of them saying “hi I’m X” “hi I’m Y” “hi I’m Z” and then the writer has to make them start bickering in order to allow them to express their diversity. This fails to convey the fundamental message of the three orders, makes them look a bit alike, and even childish. Picture instead a standard cinematic: we arrive in place and there is the Priory guy who is busy looking at some asuran screen with reports of findings; we have the Vigil guy surrounded by a delegation of four-five warriors armed to the teeth; halfway in, the Whispers guy appears out of nowhere with a cunning line during the conversation. Now the three orders are very clearly defined, and they don’t have to resort to any bickering. We don’t even need to have them do three rounds of quests, so clear their way of acting is. Also, one final step with all three orders acting together is very lacking. Take the sylvari “storm the castle and kill the lich” L30 step. This had to be a quest starting with finding a way to open a gate with the Whispers, join the charge with the Vigil, and do some ritual to trap the lich with the Priory. Or something. It would have showcased all three orders perfectly in one huge, entertaining quest.

One consideration on the plot type chosen: it is clearly black/white morality, and the hero is clearly on the white side. What I’m thinking is: isn’t this kind of plot a bit old by now? If you look around, so many games have abandoned it. They let be good people who want to be good, and allow different actions for other characters. This ties back to all the charisma/dignity/ferocity that Could Have Been. This system, CDF for short, should have been handled differently. It should have impacted decisions. Every story step where we have to choose should have tied our choices to the CDF. Example: how to deal with a thief. Confront him openly trying to talk your way out would have been a 8 charisma, -8 F; while bursting into his house to get our property back would have been a +6 ferocity, -3 C -3 D. Another story step would give the player the honorable option. After a while (L40), the story steps presented change accordingly to what the player has done, not said. If said player consistently tried to talk to thieves, for example, he might start the order unification storyline sooner, maybe gaining an ally order by level 50, so some members of that order sacrifice themselves instead of the mentor, and he stays with you for the rest of the story.

More: it is good, in my opinion, that the player can gain and lose allies. If a player does not do the right thing at least once, then the Pact disgregates or does not fully form. This would lead to dialogue about how “Fort Trinity” failed to live up to its name, etc. It breathes life into the world. It also has some consequences on the scripts of some of the latter quests, with story options closed off. Also the minor races we help should be able to join us in the final struggle if we helped them enough! It is important that players see the effects of their actions.
In short, I have no experience in writing storylines, yet I think I could do leaps better if I had a good budget for it – which makes me think that the budget for the storyline was extrmely small.

Oh and disable textile on the forum pls.

Disclaimer: I believe most problems with the storyline come from my speculation that in like 2008 the writers were told “you have X lines we can afford to have voice-acted”, and that X was very low. This leads to one+five characters (mr. T and the DE guild) doing most of the talking. I will discuss plot quality here without regards for this belief.

asimo.6354:

TLDR version: The main complaint of Trahearne stealing glory isn’t valid since he does the exact opposite.

What a character says, and how he acts, does not impact on what actually happens. Trahearne is entirely in character when he says what he says. But these are the facts:

• he is introduced in your storyline about halfway, and immediately becomes your boss;
• he tells you what must be done every time, and gives you little choice;
• he is considered to be the main hero of the story by our character and all NPCs.

What we played in the second half of our storyline was Trahearne’s Personal Story – which is the mission to cleanse Orr. Our character just happens to be the next “chosen one” (literally) who can act as the sidekick of the main character, much like Darth Vader to Palpatine.

This is the first problem – what matters is what happens, and what happens is the guy’s storyline – we are his pawns, despite what he says.

On to the character himself. As a piece of “literature”, Trahearne would be an effective character if he managed to provoke emotions in the “readers” – us. They might be good emotions, or sad emotions. Take our mentors: they were clearly one-dimensional, but they managed to make (most of) us happy and we were sad and disappointed when they died. This means we grew attached to them, so they fulfilled their purpose. Why? Because we players identify in the mentors’ personalities. We want to have that bold approach to the game, and our mentors were telling us to do just that. We didn’t need to know their backstories, their past, or anything – we felt close to them, naturally. It is a bit of a cheap way to craft an empathic character, but it worked.

Trahearne. Let’s make a count of people who love him, and let’s make a count of people who love their mentor. There will be no contest. Why? Because the writer attempted to create a tridimensional character with Trahearne. They gave him his quirks and traits – the race, the status in the race, the distinctive calm voice; they gave him the big backstory; they gave him an active role, so that he could show how his backstory drives his actions (knowledge etc etc). All the ingredients for a tridimensional character are there; but it fails, utterly. Why? Because we didn’t identify with him. The whole “getting” his character is lacking, for a series of reasons. The first one is that he takes charge in the moment when we would like to see our character take charge. The second one is that the position he assumes is not justified – the video is enough explanation of that. He doesn’t feel “right”. He often goes on saying that this is not his place too – then why doesn’t he step down and leave our character in charge? Given the premises of the three Orders, it was clearly unfeasible. The writer should have had the character unify the orders from within one of them instead, maybe. Plenty of ways to do it without having to resort to Trahearne leading.

Another reason is his lines and voice acting: it is fine in my opinion, but not for your boss. Your boss has to justify in every single line why he’s boss. This is a thing the GW series has always had a problem with. Togo and Kormir were passable leaders at most – but they had, you know, that drive. Trahearne would have made a great advisor.

(continues)

3 tries here.

I’m liking the princess dance, but I can’t quite pinpoint it. Has anyone recognized it?

Ahh kitten Thanks.

^ That wasn’t even a swearing word! Lol, nice! I do approve of kittening it.

Orbs are not listed as Jeweler crafting materials anymore, so they don’t show up in the discovery tab now. Sapphire and Ruby orbs still list correctly as Artificer materials. This prevents me from crafting new jewels, and forces me to use known recipes.

Is this a bug, or did I miss something?

Connection error. Lulz

relevant links.

Also, Kormir 2!

Where can I find a comprehensive list, with pictures? I’m having a hard time finding cool looking stuff because I don’t know where to look, and gw2 wiki is not helping much.

Body blocking requires the server to look for collisions between every moving object in a given map, every split second. It is unfeasible to implement it on a map that might have hundreds of players at any time. It can be optimized but no kind of optimization will make it feasible.

I think. :p

Dunno about spectrals, but Consume Conditions is super strong already.

This is most likely a problem on your side. Either you have a software that is blocking the game (antivirus, firewall), or your router needs to be set up correctly, allowing the necessary ports. Check this out:

In addition, Guild Wars 2 requires TCP ports 80, 443, 6112 and port 6600 be fully unrestricted and accessible, both inbound and outbound. For further information about opening ports or port forwarding, you can visit the following website: http://www.portforward.com Please note, this site is not affiliated with or supported by NCsoft or ArenaNet.