Guild Wars 2

Based on calculations from the formula from the wiki, My necro with 1440 condition damage should be doing close to 1300 damage per fear. Instead i’m seeing ticks for 64, and 120. This is using the Reapers Mark fear and the fear from within death shroud, Doom. Neither normally cause damage so its pretty clear when they do.

Not sure as of when this became bugged.

One of the necros I run with reports random success of this trait, as in, it sometimes occurs for him at the expected levels. I have not been able to duplicate it.

Aurora is correct, I’ve noticed significant micro-lag in this game. I can play and chat normally….. and their are very brief moments of me being unable to perform an action. The game snaps back and all of sudden its fine again. These occur once every minute or so?

Its really annoying. I even took steps to watch a tracert/pingpong report live as I played utilizing the /ip of each map I was on. The lag seems to start as soon as I hit arenanet’s ip allotment. I’ve also noticed sometimes spikes along the level3 dallas ip allotment.

Not sure whats goings on but its absolutely new code causing it. I play Counterstrike and haven’t experienced a drop of an issue despite existing lag complaint in GW2.

If you need more info let me know I can paste tracert reports.

Did you guys make any network changes in the last patch?

Is ArenaNET aware of the methods still remaining to players wishing to chat with their WvW enemies? It is still currently possible to invite “invaders” into your party. Utilizing this method it allows players to grief, harass or potentially provide information to opposing factions far easier then should be allowed.

While I won’t post the exact details of how this communication is possible, I submitted the email to exploits@arenanet.com and they never get back to you….

Is this even considered an exploit?

I should mention that bonus glory (if you use consumable) is awarded at the end AFTER bonuses, I believe.

Actually, all glory is awarded in the middle of a match as you earn it. Only the 5-point bonuses are applied at the end if you earned any for “top player” participations.

You can see your glory moving up in the middle of a match as well as get the “chest” if you go up a rank.

The end glory earned award is merely a means of tracking and announcing to you how much you earned total for the match.

Based on my recent addiction to the Ranger class in sPvP…. anyone trying to use two bows in sPvP is bad. Their is almost no way you can survive in the close quarters combat using a longbow on any of the maps (unless your teams awesome and the enemy team is just bad).

Shortbow reigns supreme in sPvP. If you want to use a longbow, go WvW with it.

I’ve been playing my thief since day one. The pistol/dagger build is extremely brutal. I recently modified mine for a large stacking uptime on might that really punishes people for staying in combat with me over a long time. Its more brutal then my standard p/d build.

The point is, I’m not afraid of rangers…. nor was I at any time. Its unlikely I’d be afraid of anything.

Some tips though;
1.) If your dodging all over the place, we can renew stealth with your pet; true. The trick is, if your pet dies, let him. Then continue dodging. The bulk of the p/d thief damage comes from conditions and sneak attack (the #1 pistol attack when we come out of stealth). If you prevent us from easy access to stealth it slows us down a little.

2.) Don’t use ranged weapons, I’m pretty sure ours is better ;p The worst rangers right now are the bow ones. Melee rangers can be absolutely brutal (I know I have one!).

3.) Your conditions are meaningless. My build absolutely sheds everything you can do. Yea we have a talent that removes conditions in stealth. My new one sheds bleeds/poisons/burns when i’m lower then 75% health. Nothing you could cast on me will stick. I use stealth to remove conditions, heal, and then exit it to hit you.

This achievement is currently impossible due to significant bugs preventing progress in lighting the torches. I have placed the tears in the pattern indicated on the stone statues face and replicated it below. Only one of the torches lit, despite me placing the second set of stones down after clearing off the first one.

This is the 5th time I’ve gone to this location after 5 separate server restarts. I am apparently not the only one trying to complete this.

This bug is replicable, just go try and do it right now and unless your on a low population server you’ll be unable to complete it unless you wait to be the first person after a restart.

So the general concensus seems to be monks or bards. The real question is where is the gap right now in this game?

A true support class would be great. The guardians really good at this, but most of the popular builds seem to be selfish bunkers builds.

A class that has no other option then to be succesful with a group would go a long way towards popularizing group play in WvW or Dungeons.

With that said my vote would go to a Bard-like class.

Personally, I would like to see a support control class. Minimal damage, but can annoy the hell out of any class 1 on 1. Lots of stuns, sleeps or “possessions”. I realize this is a bit more difficult in the existing framework but I always loved the idea of an “enchanter” ala EQ (or in this game more Coercer ala EQ2).

I’d also rather see an evolution of the class system. Allow players to pick a specialization; where each current class can pick from 2 different specialization sub classes.
Some examples;
Thieves -> Assassin (direct damage) or Brigand (survivability)
Mesmer->Coercer (direct damage) or Illusionist (survivability).
Warrior -> Berserker (direct damage) or Champion (survivability).

These new sub classes would open up a new trait tree and the players offhand attacks would be different (main-hands would remain the same to preserve class identity). Each specialization would offer the potential for increased damaged potential or increased survival abilities. The combinations of which would in effect give a little more customization to the player base and prevent the feeling your the same as everyone else.

I also think it gives the developers a breather from having to develop entire new class designs, and can instead focus on creating mini professions. Simple requirements would be to be level 80 and chose one (force players to chose one too!)

I wrote up an article about Guild Wars 2 and the recent “Guild Decay” that’s been plaguing a few guilds. It goes into WHY this might be occurring and some possible solutions for guild leaders.

http://www.scree.org/combating-guild-decay-in-guild-wars-2/

I’m going to post a link to the article, but also wanted to reply to a few people who sort of addressed what my post talks about.

Guilds finding less and less players online isn’t a symptom of Guild Wars 2 failing. Players are bound to get worn out on any game. Guild Wars 2 is no exception to this rule. As a previous officer in a WoW end-game raiding guild, the problem rests not on the game makers but on the communities. In WoW, players could end their hardcore run and retire to a more casual pace by merely stopping to raid. In Guild Wars 2 the line isn’t so clear cut.

Instead, Guild Wars 2 allows players to consume content at their own pace. By reducing the size of encounters to 5 players they’ve truly mastered the creation of a casual environment. Players who are on 24/7 and complete every conceivable activity in short order, are the same players you’ll rarely find online in a month. These players consume content at an abnormal rate (your likely to see 700-1000+ hours of gameplay on these accounts) are players who typically will get bored with any game in 1-2 months. If your guild was made up of those, then yea, your guilds probably empty.

Anyhow, I thought I’d drop this here and share with the community some possible tips for addressing guild inactivity. If your looking for an active guild, we are small but taking serious player applications hit me up in a private message (or visit www.shiningforce.net)

Good luck!

I cannot begin to question the players complaining about disconnect issues. If your having connection issues, then dying immediately upon exiting the game is the least of your worries.

First off, you have to requeue for WvW, and then enter at the starting area. This basically is the same as a death penalty in the first place. The only downside worth complaining about is that you now have to pay for repairs. Every other ‘reasoning’ you have for exiting the game is nonsense.

I have fought against far too many players who alt-f4 to prevent death to their characters when I have righteously defeated them in 5v1 combat in the jumping puzzle. Now I get to claim my hard fought and well camped victory rewards.

Beware, the jumping puzzle is your doom (and now you can’t escape me).

You know its an achievement when one of my guildmates begs on the guild forums and in guild chat for a week trying to get people to commit to Arah path 4 for FOUR hours to get his dungeon master title.

Even if the dungeon is suppose to take half of that. Two hours is too much commitment for a ‘dungeon’ run. Four hours is silly. Dungeons should not take longer then 30-45 minutes an hour tops for the hardest ones.

One of the larger culprits for the longer time frames is the sometimes insane amount of Boss HP. It can literally take 20 minutes to whittle some of these bosses down to zero. Clearly their fight mechanics have been mastered after 5 minutes, so how about toning down the HP some? 20-25%?

I’d rather boss fights be about avoiding or utilizing mechanics to succeed then just being forced to tick away at a large health pool.

Other then this, the loot situation is sorta ridiculous. Why would I spend all this time to get a chest with 4 blues in it. I’d rather it be forced into a chance for 1 rare/exotic, 3 greens/blues. Than at least you’d have a reason to go back to these things after the fact.

The bigger challenge for developers is how are you going to make these dungeons relevant after a year. Most players will find it impossible (its pretty kitten hard right now too btw) to find groups for these things. To be clear; I AM NOT advocating for a dungeon finder tool. I am very opposed to the side effects of dungeon finders in MMOs. If you want to hear more about Dungeon Finders and how opposed I am to them, start a new thread devs ;p

So I posted about this topic on my personal blog and went more in depth of the history of guilds and the step that ArenaNet took in GW2. My conclusion was that this game has done everything possible to undermine the typical notion of guilds; both through its removal of guild ‘raids’ and through its ability to allow players to represent more then one entity at the same time. Both of these combined effectively make players transparent to the idea of joining a community for communities sake.

Is it the fault of players? Maybe. I’d be more prone to side with the naivte of the playerbase…. many of the people who are playing GW2 haven’t played an MMO before. My own guild, i’d say about 50% have played an MMO prior to GW2. A shocking number and not one you’d see in the early days of WoW.

The point i’d go on to make is that adding ‘perks’ to the guild system won’t solve the inherit problem with this game. Adding ‘activities’ that guilds are forced to do together would. Organizing a 25 player raid isn’t something thats typically very fun to do in the middle of Orgrimmar so instead players typically resort to joining a guild that can do them. Through this, depending on how your guild is setup, you’ve joined a community.

In Guild Wars 2 my own guild Shining Force has been around since 1998. We’ve built communities in the games we’ve gone on to play. Guild Wars 2 has been the biggest challenge for us though. We’ve taken to do a few things to help solidify our membership in this game;

1.) Require 90% representation. We are your primary guild, so make sure you represent us and show it. We understand the need for the occasional party/dungeon/wvw run to be pugged and thats why its set at 90%.

2.) We require Ventrilo. If your playing, your on Vent. Thats it. You don’t have to talk, if your uncomfortable with that type of communication but you have to be on to listen. This more then anything helps build a community. You get to know the players your playing with.

3.) We hold three weekly events where we do stuff together as a guild; 1.) WvW on Tues, 2.) sPvP/tPvP on Weds, 3.) PvE/Dungeons on Thurs. You have to attend at least one per week (exceptions made for holidays/work/sickness/etc).

4.) We force our recruits to apply to our guild on our website. Tying their gameplay experience into something outside of the game is key to ensuring they remain a part of Shining Force (we are a multi-gaming guild…we don’t just play GW2) even should they leave GW2.

While these requirements for our guild were passed last weekend, we’ve already seen an increase in our active guild participation. More players are online, and on Ventrilo hanging out with us.

The point is, YES, you can create a guild that’s worth being a part of. NO, I do not think having 500 members just so you can have 50 online representing is a valid way of ensuring you have a ‘community’. Those types of guilds are more bound to fail at creating a community then a smaller tight knit organization that emphasizes the social side of things. Are any of these things helped by ArenaNets current design choices?

No.

Cheers!

Relevant Links:
My Article on GW2 Social Failures: http://www.scree.org/guild-wars-the-decline-of-social-gaming-within/
Shining Force Guild Page: http://shiningforce.net

I’m very proud of leading my guild in achievement points. I’ve done things people wouldn’t waste their time on. With that said, my 3500 points is paltry compared to a guy walking around with 10,058 I just saw.

I cannot fathom how this is possible…. I for sure missed a few dailies here and there and I don’t have a legendary yet. The only infinite achievement points I can see is the “Agent of Entropy” one you get for salvaging 200 items.

Am I missing something? Is that guys achievement score bugged?

I recall someone mentioning you use to be able to get infinite points out of transmutes and that the halloween event skins were giving players access to free achievements. Maybe this is left over from that?

Any Ideas

I don’t think queues or the lack of at this point in the game are indicative of a given servers dedication to WvW. I think in general most servers no longer have queues for WvW due to the inattention its recieved in the most recent patches (next to zero). Not only that but Anet seems to have left their plans for WvW vague at best (we know of rewards being implemented supposedly in future).

I’ve spoken with a few of the SBI commanders and most were pretty disappointed by the most recent patch. Is that contributing to a lack of queues? you betcha.

I chalk up this week to Thanksgiving, and even more to the jaded feeling many were left with after building up the “huge” content patch we just had dumped on us. Fractals are fun, but your end game is WvW. Supposedly.

I can only imagine how angry JQ is at tonights puzzle camping marathon on EB. My guild held it against a zerg of 60 JQ (some camping entrance…some trying to get the top of beast room cleared). Pretty hilarious considering we did it for 2 hours with only 10 players.

Just rubbing it in now ;p

http://tinypic.com/r/xelzja/6

image evidence of said conversation to the doubters.

Yea I am referring to WvW. sPVP as long as the loss counts against them, no problems exist there. But in WvW if your server has no queue, its almost like encouraging them to avoid the penalties associated with dying.

I personally find it both annoying and hilarious that someone would leave WvW to prevent a death that has little if any significance in the scope of things.

Just recently noticed a whole bunch of our opponents (wont name servers) logging out to avoid dying in PVP. They are quite funny when they do it, because they typically auto-run in a direction to avoid getting hit. Clearly they are alt-f4’ing or typing quit or something.

You can tell they are alt-f4’ing out because their characters disappear entirely from the world and combat breaks. Combat breaks typically require a few seconds for the enemy to leave the vicinity or to be dead and we may or may not have even touched them.

The reason this is a problem is players are doing this to avoid repairs and to “anger” their opponents.

Typically in a tier 1 matchup you’d find this being a disadvantage, because you’d have to wait through a queue to get back in. However, due to the significant beating our matchup is getting its likely they do not have a queue at all. Thus, they can afford to alt-f4, login, instantly get back into EB and then proceed back to wherever it was they came from.

I’m suggesting that you add a 30 second gap from when they logged out, where their character is still up and able to be killed. The players would suffer the same damage to their gear, and the players who killed them would still get loot bags (if applicable).

It’s a minor issue, but players who earned a kill deserve the rewards and those who got into a bad situation deserve the consequences of their misplay.

I’ve been writing a WvW for dummies guide thats pretty comprehensive. The problem is there is A L O T to write about when it comes down to it. I will likely have the majority of the first draft ready for view in about a week. I am turning it into a pdf so I can spruce it up with some graphics and what not.

Visit and bookmark my guilds website. It’ll be posted there first before anywhere else!
http://www.shiningforce.net/ (click on the guild wars 2 subpage!)

Update: 11/6/2012. I’ve never transfered, but I did participate in the pre-launch event. I’ve submitted a bug report, I messaged the dev who came into this thread earlier and ASKED for people to message him, and I’ve posted here multiple times.

I still do not get bonuses. GG.

Is their an update on this? Is a fix planned for the Nov 15th patch? I know you guys are saving most of the updates for this day but this is a little frustrating knowing that up until now I’ve received no benefit from my efforts in WvW.

Can we count on a fix going in for this patch? At least we’d have an eta as to when it “should” be resolved.

This is sorta boring, sorry. The whole premise of rotating matchups was to introduce new players. We did this matchup last week.

Not a big fan of the whole accumulated points score to determine matchups. I like the idea of winners go up, losers go down. I digress.

Good luck to SBI this week.

Had a blast last night with the boys from Shining Force. We worked with Cohh and were able to “distract” JQ with our sacrificial 5 golem army. Lots of great action in JQ borderlands last night, was too fun.

We of course won.

SBI that is.

Funny how when the orbs disapear and I still have people from Blackgate Report-Messaging me to tell me we are cheaters and hack. I don’t get it. It’s like propoganda to them…. that they have to repeat or risk being executed over. Clearly the guys who msg’d me last night from Blackgate don’t read the forums or pay attention to things like “evidence” or “facts”.

I really loved WvW this week. You’ll see a more participatory SF in the future from SBI. We got our team together finally.

So i’m very worried by this post. And while I 100% agree that removing orbs is the right move, the logic behind your removal is what terrifies me. Before we get there though, my thoughts on this line…

As implemented, orbs tend to strengthen teams who are already winning and make it even more difficult for underdog teams to fight back.

The notion of controlling orbs is a major drive to participating in borderlands combat. Several of my guildmates have repeatedly told me it feels MORE valuable participating in borderlands due to the buff you can earn from controlling the orbs. This relegates the borderlands to more insignificant point holdings. Not an entirely bad thing but hopefully you do come up with something to place increased emphasis on participating in borderlands.

Now onto the most worrisome comment in the post.

In addition, the current implementation seems to be irresistible to hackers/cheaters and will require significant modification to prevent cheaters from having an unfortunately large impact on the state of any given WvW game.

Irresistible to hackers/cheaters? Really? You sure you want to use this phrasing? Irresistible means you lack the capabilities to stop people from penetrating your codes security. It means your incapable of stopping players from cheating. I’ve been on Stormbluff Isle since day one, and our most recent matchup has caused more thread closings then probably any server since. I won’t repeat the charges and/or against whom, mostly because I personally can’t substantiate them (nor do I wish to sink to the level of accusing our opponents of cheating).

If your telling us that the ONLY option remaining to the creators of the game is to concede that they cannot stop hackers from ruining our gameplay, how can we have faith that ANY part of your game is secure? What about credit card and billing information?

Your statement is both terrifying and really inspires a lack of confidence that you’ll be able to restore balance and fair play to a game that i’ve grown to love over the last two months.

If you can’t stop the hackers, try a different route. Implement code that logs every single person who touches the orb. Track its progress. Track everything about it. Once you detect an anomaly, ban the person who last touched it. IF you can’t implement code to stop them, at the very least implement code to track who did it. Attack the source of the problem, the players who are hacking. Saying you can’t do anything about hackers is a in my opinion the worst thing you could say to a community frustrated by these players.

EDIT: I noticed you threw in at the end there that you COULD stop them, but it would require significant modification to do so. So sorry… its not that you CANT stop them, your just choosing not to do the work to make the problem go away. MY BAD!

Please change the developers mind about your approach to dealing with cheaters, and more specifically how you address them publicly to your community who loves this game.

Please. Please. Please.

To any and all JQ/BG who fought in the jumping puzzle last night…. my hats off to you. Shining Force put up some of its best and we had a ton of great encounters with you guys. Ultimately we won, but the point is that the fights were challenging!

I also noticed that SBI just moved up into 2nd place by a thousand (before I logged off). Seems SBI has a knack for moving up against JQ in the closing moments of the week.

Great fights tonight as well on borderlands. JQ Borderlands saw some pretty epic encounters between Blackgate and SBI near redlake. Tons of fun fighting their too.

So I posted one of the very first forum posts about just this very topic. Part of me is inheritly dubious of a cash-to-gem system in which all aspects of price are set by the company making money. I understand the need to make money as a company not making subscription revenue…fine. The comparison to EVE Online made frequently by players is another important step towards discussing this issue.

One must remember, however, that EVE Online has a built in safeguard towards over-inflation; players need to subscribe to the game. This means at any given point if the cost of the PLEX rises too high for the average gamer to realistically purchase one, CCP could merely flood the market by adding them as drops to their in-game “monsters”. More supply, lower cost, inflation now in check (in a manner of speaking). Additionally, EVE Online has very large money sinks installed …. if you die your ship goes boom. Everythings gone. That stimulates the economy via spending to replace it, manufacturing to build a replacement, and mining to make the replacement… which is something that Guild Wars 2 has no comparable systems.

So ultimately should the price be set by the free market? The claim that ANet risks losing money is completely besides the point, they did VERY well during the Halloween Event so I have no doubt in my mind they can come up with other enticing Gem sinks. The more important point is a free market system introduces the notion of “Pay-to-Win”. Why you ask? Anytime players can virtually print money unchecked by spending real money…. and in a far better conversion rate that is currently available you are basically allowing players with cash to buy their way to a legendary or whatever else it is they may want (Commander? As if we don’t have enough players running around with blue icons on their head as it is…whole other problem, I digress).

I for one do not understand player disdain for pay-to-win. If the market is going towards a free to play game model, one must understand that developers need to make money. If you like your games free, and you want to keep them that way…. you have to support the developer somehow. While a portion of an audience may chose to never spend any real life money on that game (a significant portion i’m sure), their are more players who would spend cash.

Pay-to-Win infuriates players who are stuck in the subscription model of an older era of online massively multiplayer RPGs. Its something I’ve written about numerous times and the conclusion is the same. You either support a developer with a pay-to-win model, or you pay subscription fees. Its hard to find a middle ground (what we have now) that is truly sustainable for a developer.

I vote yes, introduce the free market. I’ve loved EVE Onlines approach, I have always felt more games deserved systems as complicated and player-driven. It gives the game a truly alive feeling where everything you do can impact your fellow gamers. Guild Wars 2 needs to adopt the sandbox mechanics if it wants to thrive. I was hoping for more from WvW, but I’m not going anywhere till I see where you guys are going to take the game!

Good luck.

I have never ever recieved bonuses like this. I just thought they were implied. MY WvW icon shows nothing below it. I didn’t even know thats where they are supposed to show up.

I’ve never transferred servers, ever. I’ve been on Stormbluff Isle since day one.

On a related topic, I HAVE seen bonuses that I popped in our guild tab show up on mouseovering the guild icon. If thats how WvW bonuses are supposed to be… then yea, 2 months since launch of nothing.

This whole thread seems to be 2-5 seconds away from being locked. So many accusations of orb hacking that repeated locks by dev/cc’s who’ve continually told players to report it in-game …. and not here.

I think the fact that Blackgate considers it a point of pride to see how many threads have been “locked” about them, a true indicator of the means they are willing to use to ensure victory. I took the time to look at a few of the older threads and its the same thing every time. Orb hackers and portal bombs.

Its not surprising to me that your opponents would imitate success. That doesn’t make it a valid tactic.

I for one hope they ignore AoE limitations. Its silly. If I shoot a catapult at 20 players it should hit all 20. IF you can’t deal with that, don’t stand in a group of 20. What argument is their against that???

As of right now their is little information available to site designers/developers from in game. We have GW2Spidey for sure, but market place prices is of little use to designers trying to help maintain communities of players (I.E Guilds).

Other popular titles allow character information to be accessed by web applications outside of their respective games (EVE Online, WoW, etc).

In designing an API for this information I believe their is a certain minimum level of information that should be made available. These items, in my opinion, include;

Guild API:
-Names
-Ranks
-Character Class (most recent)
-Character Level (most recent)
-Last Seen Date
-Influence Earned
-GMotD

Player API:
-Character Names (all)
-Character Levels (all)
-Character Classes (all)
-Character Achievements (most recent limit of 5, total achievement score, or a breakdown of status of all achievements avail)
-Character Tradeskill Type & Levels(currently active)
-Current Skills, Trait and Talent selection.
-Potentially even allow gear/itemization to be visible (though for some reason inspect isn’t allowed in-game and not sure if that was a design choice or just something that you didn’t have time for).

Server API:
-WvW Current Score
-Servers in current Matchup
-Current Point Total
-Time to Next Tick
-Objectives Held (towers/keeps/etc)
-Orbs controlled

I think with this information made available, we’d see some pretty cool apps. Server alliances could parse information about current WvW activities…. creating scripts that notify players when keeps are taken, or orbs stolen. We’d see a tighter knit community in general with this information leaving the confines of the game (or requiring screenshots for the transmission of this information).

From a guild standpoint, I could research whose playing what, how they are specced and potentially geared. I could discover who ISN’T playing, and potentially recruit them back to the fold. I could also find out whose contributed the most to the guild in terms of influence and/or playtime.

From a player standpoint, I could compare my achievement scores to others. Compare my builds versus those of others….without needing to rely on talent calculator links (useful but not always). I could also parse this information out to my friends so they could see what i’ve been up to (achievement wise).

I’m sure their are elements of the API that the developers do not wish the general public to see due to design choices. I think the information above is relatively harmless for the most part. I think by opening up the games information outside of the game itself, you’ll find developers will create some very interesting and potentially player-drawing applications.

While maintaining an API is no easy job, in fact it would probably require a dedicated developer (or team)…. I believe its crucial to maintaining and even growing a community over time.

Thanks for reading.

Is their any update on this fix? I have a web application I’m developing that could really use the RSS feed being repaired. Any update on this would be greatly appreciated.

Your games been amazing so far. I love it. Well done.

Now. Why do bugs like the “new” dark room glitching out (unable to be completed by almost every server it sounds like) even occur? It seems as if the first person to do this instance did it successfully and the next spawn broke it.

Something like this slipped through the Q/A team.

So my recommendation is, give them some more help. Most major MMO’s have test servers to try out changes to the game. Frequently, members of the community will LOVE to volunteer to test out the changes. In fact, as an active test server pilot of EVE Online, I frequently spent more time there then on the live server.

Bugs like this should be rare. Instead they are quickly becoming an accepted truth of new content for your company. There are easy fixes for this and the solution is to test your content out on a semi-live server.

Bugs can be minimized, and I hope your team ramps up its testing efforts regardless of my suggestion or not.

I was getting DCd every 20 minutes or so, the only thing that changed was adding the google 2-way authenticator. To be honest the whole process was pretty annoying. You shouldn’t require it on a machine that just logged in. I’d allow relogins from the same IP to reduce the number of times necessary to enter the authentication code.

Then again, if I hadn’t been getting dc’d so often it probably wouldn’t have become a major annoyance.

After removing the authentication from my account i suffered no further disconnect problems.

p.s: thank god for no WvW queues last night.

jumping puzzle madness tonight…. trebs and counter treb rushes going on. epicness.

Shining Force still dominates the beast room 3+ hours so far ;p

3.) Imbalance due to time zone differences.
This really is sort of hypocritical of me to talk about, but it needs to be addressed. To be considered a “top tier” WvW server, it is in your interest to recruit Europeans or Asians to your US server. This is due to the fact that when your US population logs off for need of sleep or work, your foreign-allies can login to continue the domination.

A few nights ago, we fought back hard against JQ. We were exchanging towers and supply camps all afternoon and well into the evening. At one point we had lost our primary keep in EB and my guild along with the teamwork of our servers commanders were able to take it back. At one point we had our “third” of the pie back in EB. So we stepped to controlling it. My guild claimed our Overlook keep, popped all of our buffs and went about upgrading and constructing siege to help during the night hours in holding it. I logged off with reinforced walls moving to fortified, and siege engines placed at all of the key doors and wall points to prevent sneak attacks. Safe right?

Then we went to bed.

Morning came around and JQ’s european allies had decimated the entire WvW realms. EB and all of its borderlands were completely green.

The solution to this is easy. Very very easy. You either restrict the strongpoint exchanges during certain hours (making it impossible to cap anything from 3am-10am in US servers) or you eliminate the ability for European and Asian players from playing on US servers. I know it sucks. People will whine because blabla I want to play with my mates from Europe. The problem is the imbalance is completely game breaking.

4.) No way to encourage losers to fight back.

The biggest issue right now is that what motivation does HoD have to even come to fight? To be honest, why does SBI even bother? These lopsided engagements promote a desolate battlefield where one server runs around doing nothing against nobody. SBI had instant queues for the last two nights and I KNOW HoD did (i’ve seen none of them even in the Eternal Battlegrounds as of late).

Promoting the solutions I provided above is one part of the answer (increasing stats to underscoring servers, increasing . I believe the second part relies in creating a means by which HoD could win. This is a more difficult solution and one I won’t promote a solution to. I feel most of the issues could be dealt with some of the above issues, and I’m a believer that small incremental changes should be implemented before anything massive is done about the problem.

So I was going to make a separate topic about this subject, but having found someone with a similar notion I suppose I’ll drop it here (though its doubtful anyone will see it).

To begin with, I’m a Stormbluff Isle player. I’ve been one since day one and I’ve fought against many of the players who will probably read this. I’ve found great joy in camping the jumping puzzle so if any JQ players have ever had to jump to the top of beast room under a storm of 3-6 Arrow Carts….that was probably me! haha.

With that aside their are many solutions presented here, but we have to identify the key problems first.

1.) Inequal level of “skill” in certain server match-up’s.
2.) Inequal levels of participation from certain servers in your matchup (partially related to #1)
3.) Imbalance due to time zone differences.
4.) No way to encourage losers to fight back.

I consider these the larger problems with World Versus World combat right now. Lesser issues would be things like Tower durability or siege efficacy. The major issues will cause ghost towns in WvW and evidence for this is the matchup Stormbluff Isle is going through right now.

I submit evidence item A
!http://www.scree.org/workspace/serverscore.jpg!
and B
!http://www.scree.org/workspace/serverscore2.jpg!

Early this week, Henge of Denravi suffered a significant setback in terms of losing a significant portion of its WvW playerbase. I don’t really care about the reasons why, server political issues have little to do with the key problem. Some people say cancelling free server transfers would solve the problem. The issue here isn’t that players interested in hardcore WvW action transferred to these servers for free, in fact many of them are being penalized by high queue times. Free transfers, having or removing them, wouldn’t solve any of the issues. I’ll leave that issue in the dust.

1.) Inequal level of “skill” in certain server match-up’s. *
&
*2.) Inequal levels of participation from certain servers in your matchup

Players like to win. Its hard to overcome that psychology. Players don’t like to lose. Its even harder to motivate your team to fight when your down as much as HoD is this week in my matchup. At one point HoD had +5 to their point totals. Thats pretty stunning, and anyone logging in certainly isn’t going to login to WvW this week seeing that.

So how do you fix it?

The only solution I can think of is to minimize the rewards for stacking talent on one server. Rewards (from Events in WvW or from loot bags), could potentially be eliminated as a result of the “Potential Points” scoreboard imbalances. For example, any server having a combined total over the other two servers would receive zero benefit from events or loot from players.

Why so harsh? Anything less would encourage the same behaviors. The question your asking is how does this solve the server “talent” imbalances. Well, that’s almost impossible to achieve without ArenaNet logging in and forcibly transferring guilds. So you have to encourage change by not rewarding the band-wagon-ing behavior.

Another major oversight, in my opinion is the lack of rewards for winning a week. Participating players and guilds should have their overall “influence” contributions for WvW cataloged, ranked and displayed. To prevent “zerg-like” organizations from always winning, only the top 25 players influence would contribute to the standings for guilds. These players and organizations would receive badges, influence, blueprints, awards, or whatever, as a result of contributing to the overall victory for the week.

The reason for listing the highest contributors is that people like to see “high scores” and who did the most. Its a reward for a particularly embarrassing amount of time spent playing the game. The catch is that the top scores and rewards would only go to a specific limited quantity of participants. Guilds and players would be incentivized to transfer to lesser populated WvW servers so that they can get top honors. Don’t underestimate a gamer’s (or organized guilds) Ego.

Additionally, the earlier mention of swapping the Undermanned and Orbs bonuses is an excellent solution to motivating underpopulated servers to fight back (and have a shot at it as would be the case this week with HoD/SBI/JQ). Undermanned, however, should look purely at the scoreboard and the impending point awards. You shouldn’t receive a bonus for owning the entire WvW realms and then purposely log off for the evening so your night crew can get a further advantage to hold it all.

By swapping the bonuses, you also reward the “winning” servers by encouraging the victors to farm the enemies and stay on the battlefield longer. They have the potential for increased loot and badges for participating. You could also increase experience awards so players would level new characters and keep the leveling zones active with players in them during queue times.

Server : Stormbluff Isle
Website : www.shiningforce.net
Primary Emphasis : World Versus World
Secondary Emphasis : PVX (Dungeons, sPVP, PVE)
Voice Communication : Ventrilo
Guild Size : 50-75 players currently
Officers/Contact: Morpheus Shadowsong or Scree

Shining Force was established in 1998 as a multi-gaming guild. We currently have full guilds participating in World of Warcraft, Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2. We always look to new games to keep our members interested and consider ourselves a mature environment for players seeking a cooperative, cohesive community to call home.

Our members have graced almost every major MMO in recent history. The bulk of SFs history took place in Dark Age of Camelot, Lancelot server as well as (currently) on Mal’ganis in World of Warcraft. As a top tier guild that spans multiple games we are looking to recruit dedicated players to our World versus World emphasis in our Guild Wars 2 Chapter.

If your interested in joining an intelligent, strategic, goal-oriented guild that emphasizes doing things on our own in WvW (no zerging here if it can be avoided!)…. this is your place.

We operate mostly between 8pm CST to 2am CST throughout the week but our guild has grown significantly lately and our members are online at all times. We are not about recruiting everyone and anyone, so if your interested feel free to drop by our website and register on the forums to apply.

Clearly the game designers wanted to limit stealth in this game by placing not only timers on the stealth abilities of thieves, but also by incorporating debuffs that prevent thieves from re-stealthing shortly after coming out of stealth. Recent battlegrounds have shown me that unlimited stealth has introduced a sort of imbalance in WvW battleground combat.

One thief, infinitely stealthed can hold a supply point against a force of 100 or even 250 players. Clearly this is not intended (I hope?)

There are several ways to correct this flaw. One is to fix the stacking of stealth (explained later). The second is to prevent stealthed players from preventing or contributing towards capturing a battleground point.

The “infinite stealth” is not something I’ve used, but researched. To my knowledge in includes placing a Smoke Screen (talented to reduce its recycle rate to 24sec) and then jumping through it repeatedly with Heartseeker (or supposedly cluster bomb works as well… but I’d assume damaging players would break the stealth). Each jump adds time to the stealth timer, allowing a player to stack stealth rather significantly. While I didn’t spend the time to figure out exactly how the thieves did it in my WvW match, it doesn’t really matter.

The point is, despite playing a thief, its clearly an imbalance introduced by several clever players. I would go so far to call it an exploit.

I agree with everyone about Caltrops. Using a Pistol/dagger build you can kite things almost to infinity. I haven’t stacked condition damage, but I’m sure its a valid build for killing things en masse.

My other new favorite is Blinding Powder. I’ve recently changed over to a crit/stealth heavy build and love being able to go stealth twice as often (I also use “Hide in Shadows” for heal utility). The extra second that traits give you for going Shadow heavy are very useful for running around a map gathering resources.

exphryl.3857:

I think this entire argument is flawed.

People buy gems with real money.
People do not buy gold with real money.

There is zero reason that the free commodity is greater than the purchased commodity.

IF you buy gems with real money with the intent to convert it to gold, then yes you are buying gold with real money. Thats why the conversion exists! You can’t “cash out” your gems so why else would a gem→gold conversion exist in the first place? lol.

My guildmates and I have long debated the opaque mechanisms that control the price of Gems (purchased with real life money) and their exchange rate with in-game gold. Clearly the process by which the transactions are handled has a large benefit for ArenaNet in terms of continued income since no one will be paying subscriptions each month. My issue with this exchange system is that the method by which price is established is clearly not in the players best interest. Before we get their, lets take a look at what you get right now;

1 gold is currently exchanged for 366 Gems.
366 Gems are exchanged for 72 silver 7 copper.
509 Gems are exchanged for 1 gold 4 copper.

Clearly players are being ripped off by trading gold in for gems. The trick here is why?

In theory the rules of supply and demand would dictate a radically fluctuating price of gems over the first month of this games release. For example, during the first few days the exchange rate should have been in the low 1-10s range (not a lot of players had more then that due to leveling characters in lower ranged zones). In today’s market gem prices should have largely inflated due to an increased monetary supply (more players are level 80 and have been farming dungeons or what not to generate income).

The problem exists that the gem prices are NOT set by players. A player cannot set a purchase order to buy 500 gems at X price. Instead the player is forced to use the exchange rate set by ArenaNet. The question now, becomes why?

By relatively fixing the prices, and separating the supply from the demand, ArenaNet has created a system where the prices stay at a specific range. This means that as players need higher levels of gold, they will be forced to purchase more and more gems.

The deception comes from the “market exchange history”. Players think the cost of gems is fluctuating based on THEIR demand when in fact it is not. This deception gives players the idea that their purchase or sale of gems might yield more money one day.

I am not saying that ArenaNet is wrong in this practice, but the idea that they are controlling the price (or not tying it to actual demand) seems off to me. ArenaNet may be approaching this incorrectly. If prices were coupled to demand, then likely the value of a gem would increase (more players would see value in purchasing them if the cost of gems increased ….easy money always sells). As it is, the sale price has continually shrunk (currently around 19s…down from 29s at the launch of this game).

Anyone have any other insight they’d like to add to the discussion, by all means!