Guild Wars 2

I have heard good things about that program, although I’m not in a position to recommend any particular one.

Ceallach — I edited your post only to change a word that, for some strange reason, was being edited, or “kittenized.” Hope that’s ok!

Alice — I agree with the suggestions here. A safe, secure password-retention program might be a real boon for you! (I recommend that you review each program and check user reports and professional reviews, to ensure you’re getting a good one, but recommendations here are helpful, as well.)

Dahkeus.8243:

Wintel.4873:

Can someone please translate what happened in this round:

but guy at srat say ok gusy lisen plan
1 close 1 animal 1 far rest mid
ok ok i say i am mid coz far is noob
burt map say i am 1 mid rest animal no close no far
and i die hard lol
loost

But yeah overall this post made the entire Dec 10 patch seem insignificant XD

Translation:
“At the initial strategy phase of the game I joined, I presented the following plan to my fellow teammates: ‘Dear sirs, would one of you kindly cover the closest point, and then another person attack the nearest NPC type beast for the point bonus, and finally, would the rest of you accompany me to engage the enemy at the middle point?’

However, to my distress, I found myself bereft of assistance when I went to the middle point and when I looked to find where my team was located, I found them all attacking the NPC beast. Not a single person had even decided to attempt in capturing either the point closest to our starting point, nor the farthest!

As a result of this ill fortune, I stood no chance to the overwhelming odds I faced as the enemy advanced upon my position, and I was struck down. Sadly, the game ended up as a loss."

First off, I’d like to thank you for your efforts in broadening the cultural horizons of our day-to-day forum goers. That said, I believe that much of the raw emotion that lives within the original narrative is lost in this translation.

While your version is much more accessible for the everyday reader, I truly hope that they become captivated by the thematic undercurrents and take the time to fully understand the piece in its original form.

Zelyhn, the fact of the matter is, you incited others to spam. It doesn’t matter where you incited to spam, be it our forums, our livestream, another player’s livestream or anywhere else on the internet. You told people on this forum to go to our livestream chat and spam, and for that you were punished and the punishment was well deserved.

You can argue subjectivity all you want. The only reason you weren’t infracted for similar actions is the past is simply because you didn’t get caught. The moderation team cannot read every single post on the forums. We rely heavily on user reports and what we are able to read in the course of the day. If you see an offending post and think “why didn’t he get infracted for that?” you should stop and report the post, not point out flaws in our moderation because you found a post that violates the code of conduct.

If you have to live in fear of being infracted over what you might post, you should take a good, hard look at your posting habits and what you consider acceptable. Then read over the Code of Conduct again and try and understand not just the letter of the law, but also the spirit of the law as well.

What you referred to as a subjective clause is the following:

Forum moderators have full discretion to address any behavior that they feel is inappropriate. Your membership and participation in these forums is a privilege and not a right. ArenaNet reserves the right to suspend or terminate your access to these forums and/or to the game itself at any time for reasons that include, but are not necessarily limited to, your failure to abide by this Code of Conduct.

This is in there precisely to allow us to take action against those in violation of the spirit of the Code of Conduct. We do not abuse this clause as an excuse to remove anything we want, we use it to keep the forums a respectful and constructive place for our players to interact with each other and our staff.

We do not need two threads for the WvW season rewards topic.

Summary of Day 1 of discussion:

1) There are a lot of people that would like to see more colors and/or more shapes for the commander icons.

2) People are arguing for commanders to be able to hide their tags from everyone and only have them be visible to select groups.

3) Improved supplyinfo command.

4) No chat suppression.

5) Account bound.

6) A change to the way the icon is acquired.

That doesn’t hit everything, but it hits some of the most commonly requested stuff. In addition there has been a discussion about if it is more important to redo the whole system or provide some small quality of life improvements first.

I wanted to provide some insight into what might be required for some of the types of changes that are being requested, so everyone has a clearer understanding when thinking about them.

Any change that requires significant UI, especially any new UI functionality, is a long term change. Not only does it take time to design the UI and settle on it’s appearance, it takes time to build the functionality. That is why any full on rework of the squad system will be a large project. It is important to us that when we introduce new UI elements we have fully fleshed out their place in the rest of the game UI.

With that out of the way, I have some more questions.
1) What is an acceptable amount of chat suppression for a commander? It’s important to realize that if the system remains as it currently does, with 100g for a tag, no chat suppression would mean that people can spend 100g to spam you with whatever they feel like. That’s not an acceptable solution. I think there are other things we could do, like provide a commander only channel that has no suppression but that people have to opt in to.

2) How would it feel to have a system that gradually unlocked more commander abilities and icons, but that required dedication to WvW? Let’s say we added a commander line to the ability panel and you unlocked it with WvW ability points. What is the right starting price for that? 100 points? more? If that happens, does it make sense for the system to remain character based? Would requiring commanders to spend their WXP in this way limit them to the point that they didn’t want to do it? What if you still acquired the current tag by spending 100g, but you upgraded to new shapes via the WXP system?

Quarktastic.1027:

I don’t think even the writers know who E is.

Actually, we do.

Just to be clear, neither of the folks talking about being “permanently banned” was, in fact, permanently banned.

Johmel — I don’t think you need to worry about the transfer, but certainly you can take some of the tips that players have suggested if you would feel more secure in handling this transaction.

gidorah.4960:

DevonCarver.5370:

As for posting frequency, it is always the case that our first responsibility is to the game and the continued production of the features and content.

I just think its odd that you are the only busy person at anet. While you where doing a terrible job here there was a active and productive discussion going on in pve and pvp and in each and every class forum. Unless you are saying that everyone else in the company has tons of free time and you alone don’t you probably owe us a better explanation.

Simply put Devon has been extremely busy of late (Edge of Mists etc) and you will note that many of my posts have been outside of work hours. This is my choice and not something i ask of my design team.

We are working to improve the time we can dedicate to the CDI and if we feel that we can’t appropriate more then it may be best to move to 1 CDI thread at a time.

Chris

I have asked the PVE thread if they want to move ahead with the proposal of 1 topic running at a time with a week of conversation around it. Once 3 topics have concluded (1 for each area) then we would have say 3 days of a single CDI process evolution thread and then back to the next topic.

Do we feel like this is a good cadence to move forward with?

Note this should accelerate our combined experience with the CDI and thus does not preclude us all deciding to change the model should we find that we are at a point to do so.

Chris

KitOnlyHuman.6807:

You’re forgetting the people who truly love the unique characters in the living story and are on the edge of their seat with anticipation to see what happens next with them! =)

Glad you’re enjoying it. I do realize that there are a variety of opinions in the community, including some that think we’re doing just fine. That stated, I know we can do better in terms of story, characterization, presentation, and focus.

I think my team has come a long way in the past year. We were tasked with doing something that we as a company had never attempted, and we did it with limited means and tight schedules. We’ve learned a lot in 12 months, and I’d like to use that knowledge along with the constructive comments from our players to steadily improve our stories. Some of that will come through technical improvements and revised game systems. The rest will have to come from us through more focused presentation and better collaboration with our peers in design, art, programming, and audio.

And, hey, thanks for the kind words.

mercury ranique.2170:

Just wanted to add, besides a huge thankyou for this approach that there are some out there that do identify themself with the villian (know who she is) and do like that character. Although I’m a minority, I have expressed both my personal thoughts as well as trying to compromise with the other (bigger groups). But hope you don’t forget that some actually like Scarlet. Specially cause, many times, the people who like things often dont take time to express that on a forum (not saying that the complaints here arent valuable, as well).

Thanks for the kind words.

@ 2on2/3on3: A lot of you guys really seem to like this idea. So do we. We’re looking at game types which encourage this style of play. Another thing we’re looking at it combining the size of fights with larger tactical/strategic implications, so that there is something fun going on the micro level (the actual fight) and the macro level (the map overall).

@ Moba: This plays into another idea you guys seem to be hitting on, which is a moba style game. We think the layout/flow of a moba style map could be really fun, especially when combined with something like killing enemy captains or guild lords. We’re also looking at testing something like that!

@ GvG/castle sieges: I think these can be combined in some pretty cool ways. You guys had some great points/ideas on these, so thanks for those.

@ Lords and protecting them/not protecting them: Players seem to be pretty split down the middle on this one. Some players want the “play” of protecting their Lord and keeping it alive, while other want it to be more like a MOBA nexxus – something you can’t actively heal/protect. We’ll have to try that one both ways to see what has better play to it. I suspect it’s the former.

@ Not having RPG elements in our game when compared to most MOBAS: Keep this in mind. It’s what gives the mobas their flow/pace. We need to build mechanics that change the pacing/feel of the map in a similar way, without hampering the fun players have. I think you get the same thing out of an RTS, but in a different way. Both sides start off with few resources and weak units. Over time they build up in both areas, and the middle/late game are very different than the early game.

I’ll keep looking for other things to respond to in this thread. Thanks for all the feedback/ideas guys.

Jayce.5632:

Capture The Flag

Win Conditions:

• Capture 7/7 Enemy Flags (Includes 1 Hard Flag or flag located closest to spawn )
• Most Flags Captured When Timer Expires
• Most Flags Saved > Capture Draw
• Most Kills > Save Draw > Capture Draw

p.s. Map terrain and thoughtful flag placement makes all the difference. Can provide more details to the above if necessary.

So a few things on CTF:

We found that CTF works best as a “push” the flag, not “cap it by bringing it back to my base”. This means you have to push through the enemy team, and since you need to push it into their spawn, it means they can more easily defend a cap.

If it’s “cap” it by bringing it back to your base, there are often cases where the capturing team gets a flag past a certain point on the field, and no one on the defending team can catch up with them in order to prevent the cap.

We tried various mechanics, like making it so that the flag carrier couldn’t use skills, or they had to use “flag” skills, or they were just slowed down greatly, but in most of those instances, players didn’t have as much fun when carrying a flag. You can see some of this carried over to Spirit Watch and some of the issues it has.

Just some things to think about.