Guild Wars 2

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

it’s already quite visible, some people will always ignore it

People panic because they get a message which sounds a little bit scary. A lot of people unfortunately miss the warning because they’re already busy panicking.

If the warning were at the top of the message, then perhaps people would see that first before they started panicking, and would then correctly recognise it as a scam.

People seem to consistently have problems with this and it pops up on the forums all the time. You’d hope that people would be a bit smarter about it and read, but since they don’t and it is a big problem maybe moving the message would be beneficial?

I’ve went through numerous cpu’s until my uncle told me GW2 only uses one core out of whatever number of cores you have which is why having a CPU that has hyperthreading or something can help. He even got me a cpu in theory said would top my old duo core cpu at 3.02GHz but I’m actually worse and found out the hard way that this cpu doesn’t even have hyperthreading!

So what I got from his talk was: GW2 is very CPU dependent and could use a dual or quad core but works well with CPUs that have hyperthreading (I’m limited to slot LGA775 on this 8 year old computer so I think I’m screwed)
If there’s any recommendations on what to upgrade, or IF I need to upgrade, I currently run:
Intel Core Duo E8600 @3.33GHz
4GB RAM DDR2
AMD Radeon HD 6670
I get lucky if I even hit 15 fps lol
Also, a family member gave us a Dell Inspiron 620s that seems like it would have a better time with GW2 because of HT. But will it? Specs are
Intel Core i3 2120 @3.30GHz
6GB RAM DDR3
Intel HD 2000
If that computer is better, I’d rather just start using that but please let me know as I only know so much about computers overall. I’ve been playing since the very first beta weekend with this fps and I’m barely deciding I want a smooth framerate when HoT hits haha

GW2 uses 4 cores btw. the only thing is it can not use all cores up to 100% and only
1 core goes up to 100% and the others maybe 50-80%.

Thanks guys, it’s very much appreciated! I’d switch all the parts over yeah, but the Dell Inspiron case is one of those slimmer models so I might just spend all of today switching everything into my current case which is a lot bigger. Hopefully everything will run a lot smoother. I’m not looking for all maxed out at ultra or high and 60fps, I honestly just want to get the game running smoothly for mainly PvP. Thanks again guys!

Josh Davis.6015:

As mentioned on today’s GuildChat, we will indeed be adding a slew of new stat combos, runes, and sigils to sPvP with the launch of Heart of Thorns. A small example of what we’ll be adding are trapper runes and sinister stats, but there’s plenty more for you to discover on October 23.

As a note (and to address concerns), we won’t be adding dire stats or perplexity runes to sPvP. We’re vetting and discussing each and every rune/sigil/stat combo as a group before adding them in, with the main goal being improving build diversity.

I’ll also mention that we’re going to be changing the 6/6 bonus on Vampirism. After HoT launch it will no longer proc Mist Form at 25% hp, but will instead cast an AoE lifesteal to up to 5 nearby targets. This will reduce the binary defensive nature of the rune and bring it more inline with similar sets.

There’s going to be a lot of change with the launch next week, and we’re going to be watching balance very closely in all game modes. We will be working to address any emergent gameplay we’re not comfortable with as quickly as possible.

-Grouch

W00t I AM GONNA LOVE BEING INSTAGIBBED BY A THIEF! YAAAAY!

Ok lets be honest here…

This change isn’t about gold. It’s about money in real life.

Why would they nerf dungeons?
Because you don’t have to buy the expansion to do them.

Why would they buff fractals and raids in exchange?
Because you have to buy the expansion in order to play it. (At least Fractal 51-100)

And buy earning less money ingame people also tend to buy Gems more.
Congratz Anet! Great marketing strategies!

And to all the questions why they are nerfing dungeons and at the same time leaving SW Chestfarm untouched. These two ways to earn gold aren’t really competing with eachother since they work in different parts of PvE.
Dungeons are instancebased content. SW is open world.
So dungeons only directly compete with fractals and raids.

And now to my opinion on dungeons.

I only play gw2 for the PvE content since i don’t enjoy the PvP (mainly because there is only one gamemode and i find conquest boring) and also don’t find wvw too appealing.
I for myself like challenges. For example playing classes which take a lot of effort to play perfectly. And I always try to do things in the most optimal way. That’s why I don’t do open world for example. Being able to kill “worldbosses” by standing at 1200 range and only using AAs isn’t that difficult. And it doesn’t even make a big difference if I play my rotation optimal or spam AAs since there are 100 other people only pressing #1

Dungeons and Fractals are very fun content! You can always try out new strategies on how to finish the paths faster than before. Already the smallest mistake can mess everything up.
Therefore you will have to use different equiptment aswell as nourishments etc.

And now the problem.

If I don’t get enough of a reward from a dungeon to compensate for the items I bought for it and still having a small earning from it I am FORCED to do content I don’t like in order to keep doing what I like.

I will be able to do raids once per week and 5 Fractals each day.
And that would be it if the dungeon rewards will be nerfed hard. I could only play the game for 1.5 hours a day and have nothing else to enjoy. All dungeons together take 3-4 hours to complete and offer a lot of fun content and I don’t want them to cost more than I get for reward.

Conclusion:
I don’t appreciate the reward nerf but I would be ok with it if I’d be able to buy nourishments etc. and still having a small amount of cash left as earning.
Otherwise this game has nothing left to offer for me and I’d probably quit.

Until now, the only thing really stopping me from pre-ordering HoT was a lack of disposable income. I’m willing to withhold final judgment on this until the changes actually go through and I get a chance to see how it all works, but given what little information is available, it isn’t looking too good.

So…

Casual players get excluded from Raids and Fractals by the Elitists that ANet is pandering to (which honestly will leave the Dungeons to the Casual players) BUT you are going to nerf the Dungeons in an attempt to push players to Raids and Fractals.

This sounds a lot like modern politics and Class Separation. The Elitists get what they want with ANet’s blessing (by pushing everyone to other content) and the Casual Players get kicked to the curb.

How about while you nerf Dungeons into the ground, put the Hero System from Guild Wars into all the modes (Story and Explorable) so that the Casuals can see the Arah path 1-4 without having to pay other players to put up with our Non-Meta play style.

Torolan.5816:

@König des Todes
You don´t know Anet won´t drop them. You just don´t. If the next cycle of fotm content is reached, raids may be dropped quickly again under the flag of “This is new, this is groundbreaking, this is exciting!”. Could very well reasonably happen.
Konrad Adenauer probably said it best:
“What do I care for my speech from yesterday?”

Exactly. My. Point.

Technically, we can never know for sure.

But now ArenaNet has given us empirical evidence that would support them dropping it. Because just about all past “new, groundbreaking, exciting” stuff they did end up dropping after 1 or 2 iterations.

With the intention to deincentivize dungeons, here’s my question for ArenaNet:

Where’s the casual/semi-casual 5-man group gameplay?

• You have open world – full on casual, even Tequatl is by now.
• You have story instances – full on casual, and solo’d.
• You have fractals – short timespan 5-man high level content, with how they’re going about things.
• You have raids – long timespan 10-man high level content

Dungeons fill a particular niche and they are trying to remove it. They are removing part of their playerbase. They’re not just ignoring dungeons anymore, they’re removing them. Maybe not fully – yet, at least – but that’s what they’re doing.

And if ArenaNet is willy-nilly about removing working-but-not-perfect content in GW2 when even in GW1 the most broken content in terms of profit-to-easiness remained for years and years, what guarantee do we have that ArenaNet won’t remove other such content?

Ah, wait. They are. Underwater content they’re also removing, piece by piece.

@ArenaNet, you’re taking the game we paid for away. Do you really think people will keep paying long-term for this? Or have you become like EA – just interested in quick moneygrabs no matter what great games and stories you ruin?

I sometimes wonder if GW2 is not an online game, but a social behavior experiment when I read news like this.

Not enough that you actually deny stuff to people for various incomprehensible reasons like that newbies can´t catch up if you do not(hard cap foir dailies), you also nerf content that is still played for some reason while not giving this type of the community new stuff they ask for(dungeons). I am not even a supporter of dungeon running, but I scratched my head in an attempt to understand your reasoning for this.

Are you really that desperately trying to accomplish that all people have to do raids and fractals? If this is the case, just turn the dungeons into fractals, let mobs drop the tokens there and get over with it.

@König des Todes
You don´t know Anet won´t drop them. You just don´t. If the next cycle of fotm content is reached, raids may be dropped quickly again under the flag of “This is new, this is groundbreaking, this is exciting!”. Could very well reasonably happen.
Konrad Adenauer probably said it best:
“What do I care for my speech from yesterday?”

Drennon.7190:

sicsempertyrannis.3510:

Just to clarify, John, the goal is to make people grind more? Because that’s the net effect here. Take away reliable sources of income and replace them with open world grind.

Here’s the system, simplified:
- remove sources of liquid reward from the game, because there’s no gold sink mechanic (TP sucks up gold)
- drive up demand for materials by “incentivizing” (forcing) acquisition of more expensive equipment in order to complete the newly focused PvE content (ie ascended gear for raids and fractals)
- emphasize content behind paywalls (HoT) by heavily discouraging existing forms of income

The economic side of things definitely fits the new grind philosophy of GW2. From a gameplay perspective, the Mastery system is built to force grind to reduce the rate of content consumption. How does that work?
- only 4 maps, if players can access the content immediately they will blow through the entire expansion in less than a month
- push a lock-out system that requires heavy grind to move to new parts of each map
- level cap remains fixed at 80, but access to the new zones is effectively blocked to people who do not grind out the “new” levels in HoT

Grind is the future for everything in this game.

They go F2P and slowly convert to every other NCSoft cash grab. I’ve spent 10 years of my life happily sticking to this franchise, praising them, and spreading word about how awesome this company and their games are. But this past year has been brutal. I don’t know what changed internally, but it’s disappointment after disappointment. I feel tricked, duped, and cheated.

Same here more or less. This is the only game I’ve played in which I’ve felt embarrassed and apologetic for recommending to friends.

John Smith.4610:

Is the intention to deincentivize dungeons
Yes

Is the intention to reduce targeted liquid gold earning, or are you putting that liquid somewhere else thats targetable?
The intention is not entirely to reduce liquid gold earning, we’ll be using up the slack we generate in other locations

What type of instanced content do you see offering marketable rewards that players can take part in on a regular basis?
Fractals

This is a very sad thing, in my opinion.

Dungeons in GW2 have their own niche, but you’re removing them in favor of Fractals because…

No reason given.

Allow me to state one thing:

Dungeons are NOT the same as Fractals.

Fractals are NOT the same as dungeons.

They care to two different groups of players, even though they both focus on 5-man groups.

In all honesty, I don’t mind the “no more dungeons, only fractals and raids” but to deincentivize dungeons is no different than removing a gamestyle that a certain group will only like. And that means losing players. Which means no future profits from said players.

What’s worse was that back in 2013 you guys promised to revamp dungeons, with the changes to Ascalon Catacombs being the first set of such, but then you decided to just go do other things. You said the same with world bosses, with Tequatl being the first one, but then you just decided to go do other things. How does that make us feel about these promises of “the first of many” with HoT? How do we know you guys aren’t just going to not only abandon raids after the first one, but then deincentivize them later down the road?

In all honesty, I don’t get the intention behind doing this. And you guys don’t explain.

What the hell is so bad about dungeons that you would rather give them Isaiah’s Balance than to make them proper gamestyles that get discontinued?

I bought HoT two weekends ago because I figured you guys were actually going down the right path again.

Apparently I was wrong.

The light gloves for Sorrow’s Embrace cost 330 tokens. Those must either be the biggest gloves I’ve ever seen in my life, or they’re made of pure dragon tears.

Capparezza.4810:

Beldin.5498:

Your GPU runs @x1 1.1 instead of @x16 2.0 or 3.0

Make shure it is in the correct slot, normally the one next to your CPU and if so
reseat it in case there are contact problems.

If the game is running it should look like this :

Wtf, Beldin. You do even give yourself an explanation why it only shows x1 1.1 in his screenshot: GW2 IS NOT RUNNING.

As long as there is no load whatsoever on the GPU, it will always reduce speed and lanes. I do not think there is a problem with so many mobos, as you might believe

@OP: Hit the question mark besides the bus interface speed to get the correct values and then pls post a new screenshot.

Even if GW2 is NOT running it should show @x16 1.1 .. if GW2 runs only the 1.1 will
change to 2.0 or 3.0 .. but it should always be @x16

Welp. I reseated my GPU and I’m back to buttery smooth framerate.

Thanks Beldin, I should have tried this earlier!

The problem with many CPU reviews using games is that they still run the games with all the graphic settings at 11, pretty much forcing most games to be GPU limited and therefore you can’t detect any difference in performance between different CPUs or the same one running at different speeds.

That’s why a proper test for CPUs in games is having them running with a very fast GPU with minimal graphic settings at a lower resolution, to take the GPU contribution out of the mix. But the argument goes “what does that prove, nobody is going to run a game on low at 720p on a GTX 980Ti” so an alternative is using a multi GPU setup. But I see fewer and fewer CPU reviews bother to show game tests with multiple GPUs. On the other hand “what does it prove” if you run a game so it’s always GPU bound regardless on CPU used, in a CPU review?

BloodWave.3075:

This is what I am talking about, look at the GPU usage. The spike in the middle is when I teleport to the location and after that, that’s the boss fight. And when it all ends, as people leave it starts climbing up to normal usage, as you can see in the second picture.

Your GPU utilization% is going to drop when your CPU gets heavy loaded for GW2. That is due to the fact there is 1 thread that controls EVERYTHING for this game and when that one thread is under heavy load (when there is more vector math going on, basically) the GPU must wait for the CPU to catch up.

This happens in WvW, World Bosses, Open areas with LOTS of players, and when lots of players are around you in combat.

It happens with the fastest CPU and it happens with the slowest CPU. Its perfectly normal for this to be happening, and its not going to change unless Anet redesigns the game engine from the ground up (not happening).

It’s CPU dependent from the sense of how fast a core can run a single thread. While the game uses multiple threads, the governing speed limit is how fast the main thread can execute.

On top of that the game doesn’t generate enough “work” to keep all cores fully engaged which is why it hits only 60%.

And the i7-4790K isn’t a bad CPU, it’s one of the best you can get but it does illustrate the game’s limitation that performance drops noticeably when around lots of other players, even if they are just milling about and not firing off their skills. That “housekeeping” of handling all those players on the client slows how fast the primary thread can execute the work required to prepare a frame to be rendered.

Rynier.3629:

There is not a single way in the world wwhere your cpu is bottle necking your GPU. your GPU is the bottleneck.

False. GW2 will most certainly run into CPU issues before running into GPU issues, especially with a lot of people around.

Rynier.3629:

You are going to laugh at me but stop your Overclock. put your cpu on stock then test. Just go with it and if it works i will link you to resources taht can prove OC is not good for your gaming fps

Also completely false, and I’ve love to know the twisted logic behind this statement. If you’re in a CPU-bound situation, OCing your CPU will get you some nice gains in performance.

Specs would be helpful.

wow so many informations….

a glance into the crystal ball said your pc is gone….

seriously if you want support from other users you have to give us informations crash log file and so on

That is not possible.

Well, you cannot expect 60fps anywhere since this is a mmo, there’s a lot of work done in cpu and it’s very variable (note that for every player you see in your screen your cpu has to do its maths).
No matter what cpu you have, there’ll always be framerate deeps in very populated places.

But there’s still things to do to improve the framerate:
- Make sure the gpu is running at pcie 3.0 x16 (you can check it with gpu-z).
- You should have fast memory (2800MHz should be the minimum considered for skylake).
- Overclock as much as you can the cpu (also the cache). 4.2MHz is a very light OC when these chips can go to 4.7 very easily.
- Put character quantity limit to “Medium”, enable “Effect LOD”, play with Unlimited framerate, and disable Reflections, Shadows and High Res Texture Characters.

Envy.1679:

we have the technology….

Primarily it’s two things.

First the strength of the FX-8350 is the number of cores. On multithreaded benchmarks like Cinebench it can perform nearly as well as the i7-2600K. Problem is the FX-8350 is eight cores while the i7-2600K is really only four cores so each FX core is roughly half the performance.

Second the game doesn’t generate enough work to keep even four cores busy much less eight.

So what you have is a slow performing CPU for this game. Note I said this game. Other games stress out the video card a lot more and it’s performance is limited by not as much by the CPU but by the graphics card. This game is not like those games. A better video card helps but so does a faster CPU.

That said you should be able to crank many of the settings up without noticeably impacting the performance you see on those low settings. But if you are expecting 60fps at all times, that’s not this game.

I see that drop in frame rate at that location and direction but there are locals where there is just much more work for the renderer looking in one direction vs another. But I set my settings according to what I’m willing to put up with for frame rate at times for pretty.

heartless.6803:

Ellieanna.5027:

MAGpie.7962:

Yeah… its not actually helping me knowing that I am getting packet loss…. I still cant play…

It will tell you where the issue is though, so you can talk to the correct people about it.

This many people all having extreme lag, it’s the servers we already know that.

The servers can’t handle the rush from F2P like every single game’s switch to F2P. They all end up with overheated servers and kittened off gamers.

See, you say that, and yet yesterday someone posted about having issues, and posted the trace route (like Anet has always requested) and poof, it wasn’t at Anet but one of the hops in between.

That is why you can’t just go “Hey, with this many people, it’s Anet” without proof.

Ok. I’m tired… Not having fun with this game at all since I’ve bought this pc. Finally I’m thinking about geting intel.

So please… Tell me which intels and motherboards are worth buying and what are Your performances in :
-La
-MaW
-Tequatl

What were Your performance in start zone in beta.
What are You’r settings.
The price of i5 4690k is not do bad. Got to check performance diference with other games.

I’ve read on my own that oced fx6300 cant reach 50% of i5.

Fermi.2409:

Even in multithreaded stuff? Interesting, I didn’t notice that when I checked it out.

Yea, if you look at the benches for a 980BE(3.7ghz) vs a FX6300 that gives you an idea of what a highly binned 965BE does against a FX6300. Considering they are about 4 years part…

I wish I had benchmarks for a 4.2Ghz 965BE, it just smokes a stock FX6300.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/362?vs=699

Totally a step back going to the module design.

Even in multithreaded stuff? Interesting, I didn’t notice that when I checked it out.

Fermi.2409:

An FX-6300 is a step back from a Phenom II X6 1075/1090/1100T (maybe some of the others, I forget where the cutoff is). It’s honestly sort of sad.

Its a step back from a highly binned 965BE. Even that x4 beats a FX6300.