Guild Wars 2

Before anyone else posts in this thread with an argument about why we should accept the current behavior, please think about this:

If you ask for my phone number in person, and I say no, pushing me for it will not help. Explaining why you think you deserve it will not help. Telling me how you think my life will be better if I give it to you will not help. Telling me how you think your life will be better if I give it to you will not help. All this persistence will do is irritate me and make it very clear that you are an aggressor who feels entitled.

The world has too many guys like that in it already. Don’t be that guy. Don’t be another one.

Dear developers,

Please make the game stop nagging me for a mobile phone number. I said no, and I mean no. Continually putting pop-up windows in the way of my gameplay will not change my answer; it will only irritate me and make me less likely to buy your products in the future.

Me too. Lake Adorea.

Yep. I ran into that problem just a day or two ago. I think it was in the Plains of Ashford.

Nice grammar, ANet.

Has anyone else noticed that pressing the Space bar to jump doesn’t work when the Control key is pressed? I often run around with Control or Alt held down to highlight items of interest around me, and have been tripped up by this problem recently when enemies were around and in jumping puzzles.

I’m pretty sure this is a regression introduced by some recent-ish update, because I never had this problem before, but I don’t know exactly when because I was away from the game for a while.

Okay, I jumped through the stupidly irritating hoops required to get access to all my characters’ town clothes again, and even now that I’m mostly over the hassle of having to travel away from where I was in-game and locate the Black Lion Armorsmiths, the new system is kittening me off.

1. I was led to believe that skins would be unlocked for all characters, so I logged in using one of my characters at random, retrieved a backpack skin from my bank, and unlocked the skin. It applied to that character’s backpack okay, but when I tried to use the skin with the character for which it was intended, the game said I had to pay a transmutation charge to do so. WTF? Why would it let me do it with one character for free but not the other? If I had some warning that this would happen, I would have waited to unlock the skin until I was logged in with its intended character.

1.5. (Added after my original post because I just noticed this.) While applying a skin the first time seems to be free, it also replaces the appearance of whatever my character happens to be wearing at the time, with no warning. Undoing this surprising change apparently costs a transmutation charge.

2. Integrating some clothing items into the wardrobe system while converting others to pain-in-the-kitten tonics is horribly inconsistent and rather contemptful of the players who use these things. I used to be able to switch in and out of my town clothing simply by pressing a key on my keyboard. Now, depending on which clothing I want, I might or might not have to open the inventory window, scroll around looking for an icon that represents the clothing (which generally looks nothing like the clothing itself), aim my mouse at it, and double click it. That is a leap backwards in terms of usability.

3. The conversion to tonics also rendered some of my town clothing items incompatible with one another. For example, my kakhi shorts and layered vest, which I bought specifically for use together, apparently can no longer be worn together. My Bloody Prince’s outfit no longer works with my Inventor’s Sunglasses either. Grr!

4. Adding insult to injury, wearing my shorts now forces me to wear a shirt that I didn’t want, and wearing my vest now forces me to wear pants that I hate. I can hear my friends already: “You mamma dresses you funny!”

5. Tonics occupy space in my inventory, so my shorts and vest now consume two slots, where they formerly consumed zero.

6. Tonics and outfits are worn using completely different steps in the UI, which makes experimenting with different looks a frustratingly inconsistent hassle.

7. I can’t preview the appearance that will be applied by town clothing tonics. The only way to see how one will appear is to wear it and then close enough UI panels (or move them around) to reveal my character model. To try another one, I then have to bring the Inventory panel back, scroll through it looking for the item I want, and go through the same procedure again. Meanwhile, outfits can be previewed in the Hero panel. Again, frustrating and inconsistent.

8. Once I apply a clothing tonic, the game forces me to wait several seconds before I can apply a different one, effectively punishing me for trying on different clothes by wasting my time.

9. Switching between outfits doesn’t work until I click in a separate area of the Hero panel to confirm that I really want to spend zero transmutation charges. Essentially, the UI is nagging me to take special action to avoid the consequence of nothing at all. Who the heck though this was a good idea?

10. Transmutation stones seem to convert to charges only in groups of three, apparently leaving the remainder useless. That seems like kind of a waste.

For the love of Pete, ArenaNet, you can do better than this mess. I hope you fix it soon.

Update: I guested my way onto a high-population server and was lucky enough to get out of the overflow just before the event started. We killed all three knights! It’s the first time I’ve seen more than one go down!

Sadly, the game immediately crashed, so I have no idea what happens after you kill all three knights.

/me cries.

I don’t know what the three knights were like before the latest patch, but as things stand right now, this content is pointless. I’ve been playing every battle for the past six or seven hours. In every case, the players on my server coordinate and distribute themselves among the knights. In every case, they pick up the appropriate buff. In every case, they go easy on the conditions when appropriate and lay them on thick when appropriate. Only a few players fail to dodge the pull, and only a few stay downed for long. Even with all these people doing the right things, I still haven’t seen more than one knight taken down.

What an unbelievably boring waste of my day.

I hope the other servers are making progress. (Maybe high population helps?) There’s no satisfaction to be had on my server. It’s just not fun at all.

There was a second run and I missed it? kitten .

Dear ArenaNet,

Will the Bouquet of Roses be available again this Valentine’s Day?

After working through a technical problem the week before last, the subject of system transparency came up, and the support rep suggested that I post about it here. Basically, the game client spontaneously stopped being able to contact the login servers, leaving me unable to play. After a few days and several messages back and forth with support staff, it turned out that the problem was not on my end at all. This was a rather frustrating waste of time, both for me and the support reps.

My suggestion is that ArenaNet operations staff start communicating with the rest of us (both their customers and their support staff) about changes that could cause or fix network issues. Just something simple like a network events page, preferably with a syndication feed for my RSS reader, to let those who are interested know when things are being changed or problems have been found or fixed. My ISP does this, and the transparency is a rather effective way of keeping customer satisfaction up when things break.

+1
Thank you, ArenaNet. Super Adventure Box is fun, and I hope it stays.

Nice job, cinematics department.

Beorn Saxon.4762:

Most likely bc it’s true to old school games.

True to the badly designed ones, anyway. I hated forced cut scenes that wasted my time back then, and I still hate them now. It makes me think less of the designers every time I run into one.

legion.7518:

Can someone please tell me the size of the patch? I’m on a metered connection.

Roughly 430MB, according to the official tweet.

Please, Arenanet, let us show characters’ names without titles above their heads. I find the names very useful to have at a glance. If I’m ever curious enough about someone to care about their title, I’ll click on them.

phys.7689:

I also think people are still getting used to seeing a lot more players with less culling, so its probably partly due to that you feel things are cluttered

No, I’m standing in Hoelbrak right now, and even with the few players that happen to be standing around there, the titles are really annoying clutter that just distract and get in my way. What’s next? Hood ornaments? On-screen advertisements?

Cuchullain.3104:

It would be useful if it was instant cast.

Yes, exactly!

KensaiZen.3740:

However, because of the cast time (a bit long for an interrupt) the only thing you can interrupt (factoring in range for a longbow) would be a skill that requires 2 seconds or more to cast.

That has been my experience as well. The delayed interrupt is occasionally useful, but not enough to feel like a good use of a skill slot. The short bow’s interrupt is much better.

Cufufalating.8479:

LB4 I used, obvious, keeping distance from the enermy,

I guess your enemies must be exceptionally slow, or just never think of running toward you to close the distance. The ones that I actually need to keep at distance tend to be nearly upon me by the time Point Black Shot fires. When there are more than one of them, my target’s buddies are upon me by the time it fires. I think I would be better off turning my back and running than trying to use a knockback that is usually worthless when playing against human players.

I’ve been running around WvW for a few weeks, trying to get a feel for how to play my ranger effectively. After being consistently destroyed whenever I tried to take on another adventurer or soldier with my sword, I replaced it with a longbow. I’m finding it somewhat useful (with Eagle Eye for extra range) for the occasional sniping of a half-dead enemy from atop a wall, chasing down a lone straggler who is already hurt and fleeing, and for tagging multiple targets in hope of rewards when the rest of my team kills them. However, the longbow mostly leaves me feeling lame, unable to take down a foe on my own and unable to defend myself when they notice me trying. Once I use Rapid Fire or Barrage (it’s usually one or the other depending on the situation), I’m pretty much an easy target until that skill is ready again.

Point Blank Shot (#4) in particular feels like a waste of a skill slot. Sure, it pushes an enemy back to a range at which I might have a chance to survive, but it’s channeling time is so close to the time it takes for an enemy to close that distance that I feel like I might as well not even bother. Muddy Terrain and Entangle take even longer to activate, so trying to use one of them to keep the enemy away also fails, additionally consuming one of the ranger’s precious few escape skills. Pet skills that impair movement also take too long to be much help here.

At the moment, I can’t think of any situation where Point Blank Shot has actually been useful. Traiting Piercing Arrows so a column of enemies is pushed back all at once? Cute party trick, but they can still close the distance in no time, and my enemies never seem to be interested in lining up single-file for me anyway. Pushing someone off a ledge? What ledge? The only ledges my foes like to stand on in WvW are walls, and those have parapets that make push-back pointless.

I think I’d like to see Rapid Fire (#2) include the push-back effect (or maybe a movement-impairing effect instead), and have a new, more useful skill take over slot #4. Hopefully something that would improve the ranger’s survivability or make the profession more useful outside of medium-to-large groups.

Can someone explain why there are so many “Core of (something) Alliance” Guilds? So far this morning, I’ve seen Core of Sapphire Alliance, Core of Shamrock Alliance, and Core of Scarlet Alliance. Is this part of a running joke?

Valve just released their latest Steam Hardware & Software Survey. Their Mac OS client was released nearly three years ago and now has a 3% OS share. Their linux client was released just a couple of weeks ago and already has a 2% OS share. I’d say that’s an interesting sign of things to come.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

I just have to say, while many people seem to think this is a good idea, they don’t really understand the basics behind the business end of the idea.

I find that statement kind of funny, since it’s the same thing that used to be said about the Mac. Success in business is in no small part about growth, and anyone watching the growth of linux in the past few years will notice a very distinct pattern. (Hint: it’s not going downward.)

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

People with Linux are mostly people who either don’t want to, or can’t spend money. Exactly the wrong kind of people to try to market a product to.

According to all quantifiable evidence, that is patently false, as others in this forum have already pointed out.

Nels the Cornwhisperer.8025:

developing a working version of an MMO on an OS that changes on the whims of the completely random people that make it is… well, it’s hard.

You’re hawking an awful lot of FUD, sir.

You might have seen some applications change on a whim, but linux libraries and system calls (upon which a game is built) are quite stable, and their developers take great pains to keep them that way. MehWhatever linked a great quote showing just how important this is considered in the linux world.

I can also say from personal experience that, given equivalent competence on both platforms, developing for linux is quite a bit easier than for Windows. It has been for a long time. This is especially true when performance is important, in part because there are no secret behaviors in an open source platform.

Zahld.4956:

Linux users don’t get accounts for free. The question would be, is there’s a large enough market demand in the linux platform.

A better question would be, “will there be enough?” A successful business doesn’t plan for yesterday, after all, it plans for tomorrow. Based on the trends I’ve seen over the past few years (such as a steady increase in commercial linux games, the largest online game distribution channel committing to linux, the rise of a very obvious target linux distribution, Microsoft Windows going in directions that frustrate users and developers more than ever) it really looks like the answer is yes.

John Yanez.5486:

Perhaps aNet should make an OpenGL option for their Windows client and then tell WINE users to use the -opengl argument. I’m curious as to what the more Linux/UNIX savvy people in this forum have to say to my idea.

I would be very interested to try such a thing. I’m not a wine developer, but I have read that wine’s inefficient Direct3D-to-OpenGL translation layer could explain GW2’s poor multi-core performance. Native OpenGL support might make it run much better on wine, and would probably be a huge step toward a real linux client.

DarkHorse.1059:

Game plays fine in Ubuntu with wine. No problems… doesn’t need a special client.

If you have no problems running GW2 under wine, consider yourself very lucky. A quick visit to the winehq page will show you major problems, including these:

The installer crashes at regular intervals while downloading the game the first time.
The launcher disappears and cannot be used unless the -dx9single flag is used.
Character rendering is corrupted every time you change clothes/armor.
The trading post (and therefore the economy) is completely inaccessible unless you have a specially-patched build of wine.
Screen shots are horribly corrupted.
Surround sound doesn’t work at all.
The highest quality textures cannot be selected unless you use an older version of wine.
Multi-core CPUs are not used properly, leading to much worse performance in wine than in Windows on the same hardware. Even with the fastest, newest intel i5 with all cores pushed to max boost speed (which is technically overclocking) GW2 struggles to do more than 20 fps on a quiet day in Lion’s Arch overflow, while the GPU sits and twiddles its thumbs.

danbuter.2314:

You can’t make a good linux client. Which distro? Which download format? What about every 6 months or so when everything is updated for all the major distros, which will probably break this game?

And worst of all: GPL v3. No commercial company in its right mind will allow their product anywhere near this mess.

Yes, you can, as Valve has proven with their Steam client. Target Ubuntu on x86, because it’s the single most widely used desktop distro in the world. Offer deb downloads (or a repo), and maybe a tarball. That covers Ubuntu, all of its derivatives, and probably all debian derivatives as well, natively. It is trivial to extract the files from a deb or tarball for use on other distributions.

Regular updates every 6 months or so do not tend to break apps on Ubuntu systems, because the old libraries are carried forward and remain available in new releases. I’m still using ancient versions of Skype, Nero, Amazon Downloader, World of Goo, Amnesia, Stepmania, and others. All have survived years of OS upgrades just fine. If you’re really paranoid, target an LTS release.

GPL does not attach itself to commercial games deployed for linux, and therefore has nothing to do with this discussion.

I just found out that people trying invite me to their guilds have been getting errors, with no explanation to them and no notice to me whatsoever. I was a member of three guilds and had two unaccepted invites. When I rejected one of the unaccepted ones, a new invitation was allowed, so it seems there is an invitation limit that the game doesn’t tell anyone about.

This is just silly. I could understand an outstanding invite limit if it was high enough (maybe 10 or 20) that people are unlikely to hit it, but I reached the secret limit of 2 just by spending a few minutes in Lion’s Arch, and missed out on who-knows-how-many guild invitations before I had a chance to deal with those first two.

Yes, you’re probably right. I shouldn’t overestimate the (surprisingly many) people who like to post contrary replies in these forums regardless of whether they’re on-topic.

Copenhagen.1257:

It’s called Flavor.
And more would be good, but not need to have less.

I can think of several words to describe repetition of the same lines over and over again, but flavor is not one of them. You want the NPCs to repeat themselves more often?? I am baffled by this.

I might call it flavor if they spoke more without repeating themselves, but in the absence of variety, it’s like listening to a nagging child.

deepwinter.9015:

the developers never said that sword 1 is “working as intended.” Quite the opposite, its been acknowledged as needing to be fixed for the very reasons stated here.

Citation, please? I’d like to see this fixed.

I don’t understand why there’s any argument here. Why not just make a dodge command interrupt the sword 1 auto-attack chain? It seems to me that doing so would solve the frustration here, repair a glaring inconsistency in the game’s combat controls, and preserve the existing skill mechanics.

I love the art in GW2, and I wish I could say the same about the sound, but the truth is that I find it distracting and irritating far too often. Maybe even most of the time. Some of that (as already reported by others in this forum) comes from awkward voice acting, but I think the single worst problem is that there is far too much repetition of the same speech clips.

It seems like every time I spend more than a minute or two in an area with a talking NPC, I am punished with the same voiceover… and over… and over… and over… and over… and over again. The ones that were amusing or immersive the first time I heard them become ugly defects when repeated so frequently. The ones that are poorly acted or too loud become a form of torture. Overall, this problem makes the game’s sound design seem amateurish.

I realize that lots of chatter in populated areas like Lion’s Arch might be an attempt to capture the hustle and bustle of a city, and that is a nice goal, but continual repetition of the same voiceovers not only undermines the effect, it destroys it.

I’m obviously not the only one who notices this, as evidenced by many of the posts here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1704rn/what_is_the_most_annoying_sound_in_the_game_to_you/

As I wrote in that thread, please don’t push your voice actors’ work at us all at once. Allow us to discover what NPCs have to say over the course of weeks or months instead. It will make your game more fun to explore while keeping it from sounding like a broken record.

For an example of judicious voiceover use, play Dragon Age: Origins and listen to the banter between party members. They will talk to each other while running around with you, but never make themselves sound like idiots through repetition.

I think that fixing this one problem would go a long way toward relieving the widespread frustration with GW2’s sound clips, and you could do it without any additional voice acting work. All it takes is a bit more intelligence in the code that triggers sounds.

Thank you for reading!

+1 for this.

I also wish there wasn’t so much ambiguity in the damage section of skill tooltips. For example:

Bleeding(3s): 43 Damage

Does that mean 3 stacks of bleeding? 3 seconds of bleeding? 3 stacks for 3 seconds? 43 damage total? 43 damage per second? 43 damage per stack per second?

This tooltip is practically useless for someone trying to learn the most effective way to use (and compare) a profession’s skills. There are many other tooltips at least as bad.

I don’t know exactly how long it takes before the idle timeout kicks in, but I’m pretty sure ArenaNet knows. It could be 30 minutes or an hour, but it doesn’t really matter because I’m actively using the UI the whole time, so the game clearly should not consider me idle. Even if I was idle, there is never a good reason to destroy a user’s data without his permission, unless perhaps it can no longer be used.

Yes, the idle timer kicks in on all types of characters.

No, it’s not just me. A friend of mine ran into the same problem.

This keeps happening, and I finally figured out what causes it. I was too frustrated to return to the character creator last time it happened, so I immediately entered the game as an existing character instead. I was then able to see these messages:

Unless you resume active play you will be kicked in 20 seconds.
Unless you resume active play you will be kicked in 10 seconds.
Unless you resume active play you will be kicked in 0 seconds.

Obviously, the game’s idle timeout is too stupid to realize that character creation is active use and should not be interrupted. Would you folks please be so kind as to fix this?

+1

It’s pretty common to accidentally brush my finger against a neighboring key when firing a skill, only to find that said key was for a skill that isn’t yet in range, and then be locked out of that skill for a full cooldown/recharge period when I really need it. This has led directly to my death more times than I can remember.

There’s so much to pay attention to during battle, particularly for certain professions, that expecting the player to watch the out-of-range indicators and his fingers and each key on the keyboard while watching what enemies and allies are doing is just too much. Simply removing the cooldown on a skill that couldn’t possibly connect would significantly reduce this user interface problem.

And another:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Wintersday-JP-Must-JUMP-in-box-at-end

I jumped in and got booted to Lion’s Arch. Grr.

Another (longer) thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Wintersday-Jumping-Puzzle-Bug-merged-threads

Another (longer) thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Wintersday-Jumping-Puzzle-Bug-merged-threads

It happened to me a few minutes ago. How frustrating.

A couple more threads about this bug:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Warped-to-Lion-s-Arch-instead-of-victory-room/first

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Wintersday-Jumping-Puzzle-1/first

Me too. Here’s another thread about this bug:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Warped-to-Lion-s-Arch-instead-of-victory-room/first

It just happened to me too. This was my first time making it through the course since yesterday, so I don’t know if it’s even possible to reach the final chest area now.

I don’t imagine I have to describe how frustrating this is.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

You’ll have enough to make any two you’d like if you play all five days.

AnthonyOrdon / ArenaNet, could you clarify, please? I had to miss the first three days, and it looks like playing the remaining two won’t yield enough parts to forge even one mini. If I play the dungeons that I missed once Tixx arrives at Lion’s Arch, will I get the mini parts from those dungeons?

After a connection error message for 5-10 minutes, mine resumed downloading for a while and then ran into another connection error. Looks like the retry works, so I suggest letting it run and doing something else for a while.

+1 for a Guild Wars 2 client native to linux.

Heck, I would very likely buy copies of the game for any of my friends who wanted to play on linux, partly to support the cause, but mainly because of how many friend points I would get once they discover the sweet, sweet experience in store for them.

I’ll refrain from addressing the poorly-informed OS retoric I see in this thread, but I will share this:

I have been a gamer and coder for longer than many GW2 players have been alive, and I have observed a strong correlation between people who prefer linux (once exposed to it) and people who buy games. I suspect the notion that the market doesn’t exist comes in part from polling methodologies that aren’t particularly accurate when free/Free software comes into play, and in part from old assumptions about usability that are no longer true. I will be very interested to watch the landscape change in the next couple of years, especially with the likes of Ubuntu and Steam leading the way.

As for my own choices, I’m happy to have finally left the “dual booting just for games” camp. I ditched Windows several years ago, and now buy games only if I can get them running on linux. I wonder how many others are quietly doing the same.

I don’t know whether the “spam jump” line was among the original patch notes or added to the wiki page later, but I do know that the notes posted in these official forums by an ArenaNet representative and announced on their twitter account do not include it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the same as them withholding the information. If it had been there, I wouldn’t have spent over an hour in frustrating attempts to solve a puzzle while alternately cursing ArenaNet’s level designers and wondering if my keyboard was failing.

So, ArenaNet, some of us obviously think you screwed up by failing to mention this change in the first place. If we seem upset about it, it’s because your decision caused us to have a really bad time trying to play your game when we would otherwise have simply waited for you to fix the bug you introduced.

Side note for any beginning or aspiring coders in the forum: This is exactly why you include all fundamental changes in your release notes. It helps you find your mistakes faster, and perhaps more importantly, avoids having your users hate their experience with your software.

About five or six times now, while making the last few tweaks on a new character, the game has spontaneously exited the character creation screen and dropped me back to the character selection screen. Once, it dropped me back to the login screen and began downloading updates.

This is pretty irritating, but even worse is the fact that it doesn’t save any of my choices when this happens. Without warning, it destroys all of the tweaks I spent the previous fifteen to twenty minutes deciding upon. I cannot overstate how frustrating this is, and for new players, what a bad first impression it makes. I am really quite surprised that anyone would write such user-hostile software today.

Please, developers, have some respect for your users’ time and creativity. If you really must force us out of character creation, the very least you could do is save our choices so we don’t have to waste more time figuring them out all over again.

It’s worth noting that clicking the Back button during character creation destroys user choices as well, even when changes at an earlier screen are reverted before clicking Next.