Guild Wars 2

It is important to remember that while anyone can have opinions, not everyone knows how to formulate them constructively; it’s not exactly a skill taught in K-12, unless you’re in art school or on the debate team. In addition, not everyone can explain why they like or dislike something.

Using the art school example, I was taught that saying “I like it” during a critique is a big no-no because it provides absolutely zero insight of benefit to the artist, but if I don’t understand color theory or the importance of balance and form, I have little hope of being able to explain why I like the art piece.

The only solution is to grow a thick skin and find value in criticisms where one can. Very few people complain just to complain; they’re usually trying to communicate a frustration or grievance, but might not know how to. Perhaps when these posts appear, we should engage the poster and attempt to uncover the reason for the complaints before dismissing them.

Alex.3907:

I think I see what you’re saying, playfuldreamer — that the RNG should be deliberately designed to not by truly random (or close to truly random), but weighted in such a way as to trick the brain into seeing a “random pattern”?

It’s a nice idea. I don’t know enough about designing RNGs to be able to say if such a thing is feasible, but my first thought is that a system like that could be exploitable. At least true randomness can’t be exploited, even if it does lead to a handful of people who end up really really rich or really really poor.

That’s probably what I’m suggesting, yeah. The system I describe is likely weighted so as to limit the possibility of noticeable streaks. But, as you say, you lose statistical randomness in the process.

Antonio Cappello.1806:

playfuldreamer.1920:

I’m simply suggesting that the appearance of randomness is important to successful RNG, and that I define that success as neither feeling lucky or unlucky—it should simply feel random.

But this is part of the problem. Confirmation bias will make it impossible for a system to truly “feel” random to people, because humans just have a terrible ability to grasp what “random” is. There’s no such thing as a system that doesn’t have lucky streaks.

As an anecdotal example, I was running a dungeon with some PuGs the other day. I got an exotic and a few rares out of the deal, and one of the PuGs did not. This, to him/her, was a shining example of why the system isn’t random. If a player can be so woefully incorrect after a single short term trend, how do you design a system that feels random to such a person?

I imagine it would depend on how long it had been since said player was rewarded with a similar drop. If I went months doing the same activity as my peers, watching them loot great rewards while I didn’t, I would feel incredibly unlucky and might question the randomness of the RNG—regardless of its statistical precision. The point is not that the RNG is as statistically random as it can be, it’s whether or not its performance is perceived to be so.

I’m not a math guy; these are numbers beyond my comprehension. I am, however, an experience guy, and in the case of RNG and loot drops, I would hope the RNG is set up in a way to reward players evenly over reasonable time frames.

For the record: I’m not suggesting GW2s RNG is or isn’t random. I’m just making a comment as to the difference between statistical and perceived randomness, if that makes sense?

Antonio Cappello.1806:

playfuldreamer.1920:

10 heads in a row is unlikely (1/1024). Successful RNG should present at least the appearance of randomness; you should neither feel lucky or unlucky.

Which is the exact same probability as any other sequence of ten coin flips (see Alex’s point above). This is how a series of ten coin flips works. It is indeed random, and any exact sequence of ten flips is just as likely as any other.

Yes, but this isn’t about statistics so much as it is about perception. Since RNG can’t exactly be random, it has to be built in a way so as to appear as close to random as possible (most RNG accomplishes this stunningly convincingly).

If I sat down with the goal of flipping 10 heads in a row, I’d be disappointed. If I sat down with the goal of flipping the pattern described above, I’d be equally disappointed.

However, if I sat down to simply flip coins and flipped 10 heads in a row, I’d feel incredibly lucky. If I sat down and flipped the second pattern, I wouldn’t notice it was as statistically unlikely.

Alex.3907:

Antonio Cappello.1806:

playfuldreamer.1920:

Noticeable streaks are a sign of bad RNG.

That’s not entirely correct. Noticeable streaks at the statistical level are a sign that there’s some trend that isn’t random. Noticeable streaks on smaller scales happen all the time and are a natural result of RNG. If you flip a coin ten times and get ten heads, that doesn’t mean the process isn’t random or that it’s biased.

Yeah. This is why I suggested testing the drops at the end of my previous post — if there really is an issue with the RNG, then it should show itself after collecting a few thousand drops. But getting irritated because you haven’t had an exotic drop in a few weeks, or never seen a precursor? That sounds like normal RNG to me.

Our brains are just really bad at grokking randomness; we tend to see patterns where there are none. To expand on Antonio’s coin example: which of the following two sequences is more likely after flipping a coin ten times? THTHTHHTTH or HHHHHHHHHH? You probably chose the first sequence. You’re wrong. They’re actually equally likely.

I definitely agree. Spotting trends is something we’re hardwired to do, but that’s the difference between short and long trends. Short trends are natrual (Oh, I’m rolling lots of natural 20s tonight!), while long trends might suggest a problem with the underlying mechanic (I haven’t rolled a natural 20 in three months).

I’m simply suggesting that the appearance of randomness is important to successful RNG, and that I define that success as neither feeling lucky or unlucky—it should simply feel random.

In the case of GW2, I definitely think a long-term test should be done with a control (perhaps an account with unaltered magic find).

Antonio Cappello.1806:

playfuldreamer.1920:

Noticeable streaks are a sign of bad RNG.

That’s not entirely correct. Noticeable streaks at the statistical level are a sign that there’s some trend that isn’t random. Noticeable streaks on smaller scales happen all the time and are a natural result of RNG. If you flip a coin ten times and get ten heads, that doesn’t mean the process isn’t random or that it’s biased.

10 heads in a row is unlikely (1/1024). Successful RNG should present at least the appearance of randomness; you should neither feel lucky or unlucky.

Alex.3907:

This is honestly just how RNG works: sometimes you get a lucky streak, sometimes you get a really unlucky one. Magic find, as Hannelore said, is only going to help a little bit when it comes to really rare things like precursors, because 300% is only going to take you from 0.0001% to 0.0004%. That sort of difference isn’t going to make a noticeable change in your ultra-rare drops at all.

Ok I Did It’s friend was just super lucky to get two precursors within such a short time. Was it a one in a billion chance that would happen? Of course it was. But that doesn’t mean it could never happen! Look at it this way: thousands if not millions of drops are getting generated every day. If a precursor has a one in a billion chance of dropping, then you’d expect one to drop somewhere in the world once every couple of days. So one random player is guaranteed to get a precursor drop every few days — there’s just no guarantee who.

If you still believe MF is bugged at higher levels, run an experiment: one person with 300% MF and one person with 130% MF go out and kill the same set of mobs a few thousand (yes, a few thousand, MINIMUM) times, and both write down everything that drops. If the numbers don’t look right, send your findings to ANet in a bug report.

Noticeable streaks are a sign of bad RNG.

UncleOris.1892:

I honestly can’t come up with a reason as to why nobody from Anet has responded to this thread, after the patch went live.

But if I had to try and find some shred of a reason, I’d have to go with this: They hope, collectivly, that this thread dies soon. The faster the better.

That way, they don’t even have to come and answer us. They won’t have to explain themselves. They can just keep pretending that everything is amazing.

I’m baffled that Dev’s these days don’t seem to understand one really important factor: The short-term costumers won’t bring you kitten. They might bump your playerbase for a few weeks, hell, maybe even 2 months. But what’s after that? The most loyal playerbase any MMORPG can have will be so kittened off that they left the sinking ship a long time ago – just to be mistreated somewhere else, eventually.

But for that – and for the effects of it, it’s only you who is to blame, Anet. But what’s a loyal customer-base when you can have short, easy cash with buzzwords and less actual service. Got dat patchmoney, eh?

We will see how long this can keep going.

It’s actually common practice in community management to isolate and ignore complaints until posters get tired of themselves and give up. Every major fiasco in modern gaming has been handled this way (a certain city-builder, a sci-fi high fantasy game, and an ancient history battle simulator all come to mind). And since it works, I don’t see the practice changing.

If you don’t acknowledge a problem, it doesn’t exist.

Astraea.2981:

First point: Shoving all complaints into one huge dogpile thread isn’t for ease of reference on your part. Every time you trot out that tired old lie, it’s just flogging your flatlined credibility. There is nothing easy or convenient about digging through this heap. This is about containment and suppression.

Containment, to keep our dissatisfaction from crowding all the happy ignorant fluff threads off the front page, and to make sure the only thread titles for actual discussion of your failures are marketing approved, fully sanitized. Suppression, because it’s impossible to have a discrete conversation about a small part of this fairly involved feature change without following the whole enormous messy thread, and carrying out any such discussion contributes to the overall bloat that intimidates others from joining in. You have corralled us all here because you don’t want us to post, and don’t want anyone to notice or care when we do. This isn’t a feedback thread, it’s an Oubliette.

Second point: Gem refunds for items that you’ve broken are worthless. What’s the difference between a bunch of ruined costume pieces composting in my inventory until I take the time to manually delete them, and a big heap of gems? Nothing. There is no difference. Your gems are trash. You have proven that nothing we buy from you is safe. It doesn’t matter what gorgeous things your art team manages to produce, I will never spend gems again, under any circumstance. You deserve to take the hit in cash refunds and chargeback fees. You have earned that penalty.

Third Point: Now that all Transmutation Charges are unified to Transmutation Crystal rates, why not lock Transmutation out entirely until level 80? I’d hate for some confused nooblet to accidentally use a charge on a low level character to keep a neat sword or his starting class headgear without knowing how badly he’s being ripped off.

Fourth Point: Without the PvP lockers to mix and match armor previews, much of my incentive to hunt down new pieces is suppressed. Why would I waste the time, without the advance certainty that the pieces won’t look like garbage together?

That’s all I’ve got for now on Wardrobe, Transmutation and Outfits. Now to go waste time screaming at the wind about how the Megaserver system is an attack on small-guild RPers.

Sounding an echo for this post. I agree on all points. Well-said.

VoiceOfUnreason.5976:

Hystery.8415:

Overall it remains such a waste of time. If we think about it, why did they decide to do this megaserver stuff?

They say it was to group people together. for more interactions and gameplay.
I say that the servers are getting empty, and thus they need to regroup people together to hide this fact.

It was perfectly working before, and I don’t remember seeing someone complaining about ‘OMG there’s none on this map! Laaaame!’. They did like the town clothes. They took something working perfectly fine, to kitten it up so hard.

People were complaining about empty maps, that is a common issue among players doing events in non-champ farming zones (especially new players). The issues weren’t nearly as present in high population servers, but they were still somewhat present. This system went about fixing that in entirely the wrong way, where higher population servers are now being broken apart. Even with the metrics working properly (they’re clearly not), we would have been broken up. Just not as badly as we’re seeing now. The system, at its core, is flawed. Server Merges carry some bad undertones among players, but they work. They’ve been proven to work by all the other MMOs that came before this. The way you solve underpopulation issues is by working from the bottom up. You take the lowest population servers and have the megaserver merge them up into the next lowest, and the next lowest, etc. You don’t take already high population servers and suddenly filtering them down. That’s just unintentionally punishing players in servers that were operating perfectly fine. Those servers could have benefited from seeing some of the low pop server people brought up into their zones, but they sure as hell aren’t benefiting from being split up themselves.

Make no mistake that the megaserver is about merging servers to cover up the dwindling player population. ANet knows “merger” is a dirty word in the MMO industry as it’s about as close as you can get to admitting that your game is struggling. This is the same reason why BioWare/EA didn’t call their server mergers actual mergers, though everyone knew that was exactly what was happening.

The megaserver was a game-wide server merger, and little effort or care was taken to ensure that communities established before launch were able to stick together. It’s clear that the roleplaying community has been hit hard by this update (outfits being another nasty change for us) and unless ANet addresses these concerns in a serious and meaningful way, I predict that the roleplaying community will dissolve and move onto other games.

You can either compete for our playtime or not, ANet. Splitting up our community and removing features we loved about this game are not smart changes when your competitors are watching…

Sir Vincent III.1286:

mooty.4560:

I don’t see why people are griping about the wardrobe. It’s an addition all the way around.

First off, transmutation charges are slightly cheaper than the stones at 5/150 instead of 5/200. Granted, that may change.

Except for the fact that your Trans. Crystal is a 1:1 exchange for the Trans. Charges, yet you lose a lot of functionality that we used to have.

So how else are we going to transfer the rune/sigil/stone — use an Extractor? Please, I refuse to purchase something I previously do not need.

Secondly, if the skin you want is saved in the wardrobe, you don’t have to obtain more of the same and you can apply the skins across your entire account.

I used Trans. Stones to transfer stats and upgrade more than I use it to transfer skin. If I want the stats and skin from an item but I want to keep my upgrade, there’s no way to do that now.

If it’s cheaper to obtain more instead of buying transmutation charges and they come with the stat spread you want, then get your skins the manual way.

This is an addition to the game no matter how you look at it.

No it’s not. You have a very limited view on how the transmutation used to work.

Indeed.

In fact, all of these changes tell me that ANet can no longer support the game under the “old” model. They’re having to force intricate payment schemes in order to make the game sustainable. Ironic, when you consider that this will push people away (who now see themselves as being punished because ANet couldn’t pull in players), thereby exacerbating the problem.

This just screams like an oversight. That, or the systems they updated couldn’t accommodate the systems we had before, so a change was required—regardless of whether or not said change took things away.

I’m incredibly disappointed by the changes to town clothes. This, plus the megaserver changes have considerably changed the way roleplayers will interface, and not for the better.

EDIT – Let the launcher hang; it will eventually update that last file.

I’m having the same problem. Tried to do a clean install of the game after getting a new PC and the launcher is hanging at 99% with 1 file left.

They really need to add a FOV slider. You miss so much of the environment because the camera is so narrowly focused. While the ground is pretty—sometimes—I’d much rather see more of the sky.

Please give us a FOV slider!

Not sure how simple or complex this suggestion is, but I would really appreciate it if you could separate the log-in and loot messages from the “game messages” chat filter.

As it is, in order to get a chat message that a friend has logged in, you also have to be subjected to redundant loot messages (redundant because we also get the graphic loot messages to the right above the map).

Not gonna lie, I see what you’re talking about. I think Anet went just a tad too far… I don’t have a sylvari character, but I have seen first hand in my travels through the grove how “in your face” the homosexuality of the Sylvari is. (I know they’re supposed to all be bi sexual, but it simply does not come across that way to me from what ive seen).. I would have just as much of a problem if there were similar instances of overt heterosexuality, but I simply have not seen them in this game. Do whatever you want to do, but that doesn’t mean you need to scream it from the rooftops, and then only when it is what is, and go ahead and hate me for saying htis, an alternative life style.

You haven’t seen “in your face” heterosexual relationships? Really?

No, it’s more like you noticed “homosexual” relationships because they deviate from what you consider to be “normal,” but that doesn’t make them any more “thrown in your face” than the heterosexual relationships showcased in the game.

It’s not homosexuality at all, so the question in the OP is already misleading.

Each and every sylvari is capable of loving every other sylvari; the sylvari are pansexual or “omni-sexual.” This is different from our own real world view because while there are pansexual people, most of us have feelings of attraction to one specific gender (whether heterosexual or homosexual).

You have to think about it differently and from the perspective of the sylvari themselves. Once you step out of our own narrow world-view and put on the spectacles of the sylvari, you realize that their love is not defined by who their partner is, but by how they feel about them.

For the sylvari, love simply is or isn’t.

No thanks. Glad they made the choices they did. If I wanted to play WoW 2.0, I’d go play that sci-fi/fantasy title that tanked in less than a year. I came to GW2 because it was different, and while the changes take some getting used to, they’re a step in the right direction for the industry as a whole.

In true sylvari, do-not-discriminate fashion, I’m going to say Trehearne. He’s handsome and inspiring; everything about his story is attractive.

Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that Claw Island was gut-wrenching; it has such a great narrative and really makes you feel like there will be winners and losers by the end. It looked epic and it felt epic.

Nayukhuut.4269:

I didn’t have issues with it on my computer, but I can see where others would have. Simple fix though. Make it like shadows.., if a person want to see it turn it on for all characters, if not leave it off for all characters. That way everyone is happy, those that hate it and those that love it.

I haven’t noticed a UI option for particle rendering (assuming the pollen was even rendered as particles), so that would be something they’d have to code for too.

Keep in mind that beta didn’t have the population of players we have to contend with today. 30+ sylvari standing around in one little area all generating pollen particles would be a nightmare. So as you say, and assuming they were particles, they’d have to include the option to turn them down—or off completely.

Agreed. It was a subtle thing I noticed in beta, but I imagine it has to do with generating too many particles when a lot of sylvari are around. Rendering all of those particles would slow any computer.

There’s a reference to the original Jurassic Park film; a guard named Muldoon says, “Clever girl.”

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m9ztwi3nzv1rq9fyeo1_r1_400.png