Guild Wars 2

The auto-focus with mouse hover in BLTC should’ve NEVER been implemented in the first place. The way it behaves now is very obnoxious. I want it disabled.

Thanks for your great explanation. Many times we as players forget that the amazing world of Guild Wars is actually a very complex software system. It’s easy to complain when something doesn’t work perfectly, but as an IT professional myself I am constantly in awe of ANet’s programmers. Keep up the excellent work!

David Saunders.3258:

Hi folks, here’s some info on the issue.

There was some work done to how we build character textures (aka “composites”) in an effort to reduce memory fragmentation and out of memory crashes. There were two parts to the change:

1) Reduce the number of asynchronous composite builds in flight from four to one to reduce the total amount of texture memory used by the composite system. This should be reverted back to four soon enough.
2) Make the composite system allocate a small pool of texture to reuse during the composite build process. If there is no more room in the pool, the composite system waits a frame to give active composite jobs an opportunity to finish and release their textures back to the pool.

When a single character composite is built, as many as 122 separate ~1MB temporary textures are allocated, worked on, then discarded. These textures are too big to fit in the Windows Low Fragmentation Heap, so they cause massive memory fragmentation. Fragmentation occurs when a large chunk of memory is allocated from the OS then other smaller allocations occur “around” that larger allocation. When the chunk of memory is released back to the OS, this leaves holes in the address space so the OS can have a hard time finding large enough contiguous blocks of memory for larger allocations in the future.

In addition to fragmentation, character composites would allocate several hundred MB’s of memory during map load, starving other tasks of precious memory. When the OS either runs out of available address space or doesn’t have enough contiguous space for a large allocation, GW2 crashes. The texture pooling helps with both issues by both reducing fragmentation (by reusing textures) and limiting the number of textures that can be allocated at once.

We’re working on finding a good balance between the size of the texture pools and affected load times. Keep an eye out for future release notes related to the issue.

Hopefully this info is interesting to people

Sorry for the inconvenience!

-Dave

This is the most informative post by an Arenanet employee I have ever seen. Informative, Explanatory, Concise, and, well, informative. Well Done Sir.

Asuaka.1528:

Bobby, did you already pick rewards for the restored story missions?
If not, this would be ideal to bring back missing armor skins like the Apostle, Stalwart and Heavy Scale set. The chestpiece of those sets is personal story reward (somewhere in the lvl 40 arc), all other pieces are unobtainable and would perfectly fit as rewards.

That would not be fair for those who already did them with all their characters, since they can’t be replayed.

Those skins would be better given in a PvP track, the WvW skin vendor and karma merchants that have repeated skins already found in other maps.

MithranArkanere.8957:

Asuaka.1528:

Bobby, did you already pick rewards for the restored story missions?
If not, this would be ideal to bring back missing armor skins like the Apostle, Stalwart and Heavy Scale set. The chestpiece of those sets is personal story reward (somewhere in the lvl 40 arc), all other pieces are unobtainable and would perfectly fit as rewards.

That would not be fair for those who already did them with all their characters, since they can’t be replayed.

Those skins would be better given in a PvP track, the WvW skin vendor and karma merchants that have repeated skins already found in other maps.

A karma merchant would be best. It’s not like they’re fancy or prestigious skins, they’re bland and just happen to be unobtainable.

BobbyStein.2315:

Q: Can I reset my character’s Personal Story progress, or revert my story progress to an earlier state?
A: No. You cannot reset your character’s story progress, either partially or fully.

It seems like a poor design choice to tightly couple the personal story like this to other systems. No, I don’t mean poor design choice as an insult. Considering the amount of work you guys have on your plate it’s understandable that, in the heat of the moment and crunched for time, code decisions would suffer. It’s time to go back and clean up those hasty choices though. This should be abstracted out in the code and refactored to be independent of other systems in the game so that we can eventually have the core personal story as replayable content much like the new stories work.

This might not seem important right now, but with all the new features, new content, reworked systems, etc that are coming in the future, each one makes this system look more and more dated.

The excuse that “we tried it and it broke stuff” won’t fly for long. The answer to that is, fix it. Yes, it takes time, but it just sounds lazy for you to say “We tried it and things broke so we decided not to do it.”

I recently read this awesome article on code complexity and the complications it causes: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/998910/Why-You-Must-Tame-Complexity-to-Become-a-Better-Pr

It’s well worth the read, and I think relevant to this response regarding personal story replayability.

BobbyStein.2315:

Knudow.1683:

If they are going to make the maps the same as they originally were during each story instance, are they going to do the same for season 2 maps?

We made art changes to Personal Story instances, not season 2 open world content.

Like Konig said, I meant season 2 story instances, not open world.

When I was playing my first mission in Prosperity, inside my story instance, the town was already full of vines because it uses the same town as in the open world.

Then you leave the town and the next time you get there in the story they are all like “Oh, what happened here!” and it looked exactly the same as the previous time, so I was confused.

Then a friend explained to me that the first mission happened before the vines overruned the town and the next mission was after the vine attack. If someone playes the story without knowing the living story changes before hand it’s really confusing.

With the Lion’s Arch changes upcoming, and the trait lines being changed to core specializations in said update, will we be seeing the personal story changes then too, Bobby?

Or will we have to wait longer?

BobbyStein.2315:

Knudow.1683:

If they are going to make the maps the same as they originally were during each story instance, are they going to do the same for season 2 maps?

We made art changes to Personal Story instances, not season 2 open world content.

Knudow wasn’t asking about open world maps, but the instances for Season 2.

That is: should in the future Fort Salma, Town of Prosperity, or Fort Concordia ever be fixed in the open world, would Season 2 instances follow the open world versions or how they ought to be.

Or, more direct to the present:

Would the final instance of Episode 1 use a pre-destroyed Prosperity instance, as it is weird to trust Taimi to be alone there when it’s destroyed and periodically attacked by Mordrem, then be suddenly ‘oh my, Taimi are you okay?’ in the next instance. (which Knudow mentioned)

There’s currently only one situation, but should you ever decide “it’s time to fix this”, it’ll affect the instances in the long run. With the entire ‘we affect the open world every season/release’, it seems like a good pre-emptive idea to have all story instances – not just personal story instances that currently use a now-changed map – to have their own copy of a map (thus one map per major/story based change).

Iason Evan.3806:

If ArenaNet wanted to do right by the veteran community that has spent countless hours earning progression via earning skill point scrolls and myriad other forms of progression they would give us a way to convert skill point scrolls to hero points.

This goes against their intention, because they want skill points to be limtied by a finite number, with the sole purpose of unlocking skills/ specs and nothing else. If players were able to transform skill scrolls into hero points, then they would be left with leftover HPs with no use after all skills/ specs were unlocked.

The thing is, I don’t have faith this system will be any better than the Trait system debacle. And why should I? They want to limit progression and arbitrarily gate content. It’s disheartening to see a game I adore go the way of cookie cutter MMO mechanics in the form of playing how they want me to play as opposed to how this game was when it came out and allowing me to play the way I want.

The previous trait system changes were a good idea in practice, but poor at execution. For it to have worked, anet would need a higher budget to implement it in a satisfying manner, which they hadn’t. So, what we have gotten was a very generic and broad “trait X unlocked after doing Y”, with no clear UI information/ guiding and with no unique boss or explorable scenario to give flavor to it, etc. GW1 was much better in this regard because it was designed around skill capture in mind from the ground up. In contrast, the new spec system does not demand such a high budget, resources and time to implement correctly, because it is simpler to unlock, simpler to understand and has better UI support. It is, in this regard, much closer to the original system, but improved upon.

Also “play how I want” can be a good or a bad philosophy in game design. It’s important that there’s enough content diversity for different players, but that should not come at the cost of unique and thematically-fitting reward systems. If all rewards are generic, then we get to deal with the much bigger problem in GW2: how unrewarding it feels like. With the new change, hero challenges will give you hero points, and outside of levels, nothing else will. And that’s as it should be, because that’s the entire point of hero/ skill challenges in the first place. If a player can simply get all skills unlocked with consumables, then skill/ hero challenges will no longer feel rewarding.

You are taking away tons of progression and only allowing me to turn it into a currency for the Mystic Forge?

Actually, progression is not changing with this update. You either use skill points to unlock skills or to buy mystic forge materials. After the patch, skill points for skills will be called hero points, and skill points for the mystic forge will be called spirit shards. It’s kind of the same thing, really, but with a clearer division between both.

On a final note, you’ll still be able to use tomes and writes of experience for your revenant, so you should save those.

If ArenaNet wanted to do right by the veteran community that has spent countless hours earning progression via earning skill point scrolls and myriad other forms of progression they would give us a way to convert skill point scrolls to hero points.

The thing is, I don’t have faith this system will be any better than the Trait system debacle. And why should I? They want to limit progression and arbitrarily gate content. It’s disheartening to see a game I adore go the way of cookie cutter MMO mechanics in the form of playing how they want me to play as opposed to how this game was when it came out and allowing me to play the way I want.

I’ve said my piece on the issue and I also don’t appreciate the rude comments I have had in here(sincere thanks to people that added to the conversation though that weren’t rude)and it is really lame that this thread has had zero dev response.

You are taking away tons of progression and only allowing me to turn it into a currency for the Mystic Forge? What happened to options? Please reconsider allowing us to turn our hard work(aka I already earned the skill points and I should get to spend them on unlocking skills when the x-pac comes out)and aren’t even allowing us to apply it to our account’s progression. It’s backwards design.

In response to the “oh well, suck it up” response that is being offered, I’ll just point out that not everyone will just suck it up.

The more ArenaNet decides to monkey with core systems and completely ignore lost progression, the more people will just decide it’s not worth playing the game any more. I didn’t go farming skill scrolls just for Revenant, but I did go back and make sure to get at least 65 skill challenges done on all of my characters. All but one already had access to every trait and most skills.

It took considerably more play than an afternoon. And it left a sour taste in my mouth, and I haven’t played much since.

While I appreciate everyone’s opinion on the subject(I also appreciate some people’s attitudes more than others)the main draw for me with this game was having multiple ways to do things. I could level with exploration. Or with dungeons. Or with open world events. Or other ways. Taking away the ability to play the game how I want is really limiting. I spent a really good chunk of time doing this. I think my opinion is valid that this chunk of time I spent doing what I did to earn skill point scrolls shouldn’t be brushed aside.

We should be able to choose if we want to keep the skill point scrolls we earned previously instead of them automatically being converted. I don’t think having options like that is too much to ask for.

I discovered this thread because, as a new GW player, I found it odd that Bandit Crests weren’t already currencies and part of the existing wallet. They certainly sound like a currency from the tooltip.

Incidentally, I acquired them from a PvP reward track, and, at present, I don’t know where to spend them or what they’re good for. So now they are just cluttering my inventory. It feels like a negative “reward.”

[EDIT] Addendum: The chests from the dungeon PvP reward tracks (e.g. Caudecus’s Manor Dungeon Track) pose a similar problem. I don’t have any max level toons yet, and I haven’t even decided which will be my main, so the chests are just cluttering my inventory. It would be better if the reward was a token (stored in your wallet!) that could be traded to a vendor for the same gear you would get from the chest.

You would use the in-game mail report function (exclamation mark) to do so.

Good luck.

Indeed….so listing the poor person’s Display Name/character name who had their account compromised is not fair. That is like adding salt to the wound. I’m sure anyone who has their account compromised would rather not see their account bandied about the forums where others would assume that Display Name was forever up to no good.

Unfortunately, it’s more than 10 weeks. It was 10 weeks since a fix was announced, but we’re going on 9 months now since it got introduced.

And sadly, it isn’t a bug. The September Feature Patch update notes stated the changes, thus it was intentional. Not thought out, idiotic, and rather sad, but intentional.

Same problem still. Combined with the healing notification bug it is probably not the greatest way to greet new or returning players. :s

You might want to wait to do Story Arah, however, as that’s being changed to a solo instance to which you can invite friends. If you don’t have any other alts near that this will be your chance to see the new version.

The story was reorganized into 10-level units as part of the New Player Experience. In the process, the last couple of chapters got scrambled in order and the Greatest Fear elements were omitted. I don’t know why this wasn’t caught or some objection raised by someone on the story staff. QA is probably more concerned with looking for code that actually breaks something than in vetting lore and story continuity.

I think you would be best off to go ahead and finish on that character. Just don’t take any other characters past the earlier chapters until the revisions are released.

I would say it will take them at least until release of HoT. And im trying not to think about all 30 skins waiting for me in HoM.. makes me want to wear tin foil and make conspiracy theories.

Like the fact that this bug only hurts small portion of players. Majority either dont care or actually benefits from locked rewards(think about it, not a single person got these skins from a few months now..if it was a normal not-accountbinded item, it would have a price of precursor by now). Should it all be unlocked now? Hell no, take your time devs, no need to let others have our skins rush things!

Its been so long and were still on ‘shotgun solution, just turn that thing off’ stage. And information about HoM being disabled is so buried right now, new players have 0 chance to know that linking between gw1 and gw2 do not work.

Ehhh, i know its all paranoia. But gimme a break, every time i see a ranger with black widow running past me i die a lill bit inside.

tovadaun.6304:

I don’t know if this has been brought up, there’s way too many pages to sift through…
I do not care for the new Personal Story Notification overriding all other Map Notifications.
I was lead to believe that completing the Personal Story was a choice, not a demand. However, if you do not complete the current chapter in your Personal story- at any level- the icon for the Personal story will override any and all compass guidance on your navigation. You no longer see if there’s a WP “over there” or undiscovered locations… Nothing. Just that blasted green warp star telling you to go do your PS.
Please, give a way to turn it off. Even if it’s on by default, I’m ok w that.
I have done all the Asura PS’s already, I don’t feel the need to do them again. Until I want to. Constantly pulling up my map every 2 seconds to look for the next WP while clearing- feels like it’s defeating the purpose of the compass in the first place (why even have the clutter if I just pull up my map every 2 seconds?).
Just my opinion.
Happy Day.

You can change this by going into options. On the first page of options you’ll see a box near the top called “content guide”. You can hide the personal story using that box and just use it for world completion.

DigitalSentience.4362:

In the meantime, in addition to zoning, F12 brings up a menu that lets you log out and back in, which also resolves the problem.

The problem is that pressing the Space bar accidentally in the Log Out window will log you out of the game, as it is focused on the Log Out button as the default action. This bug was also introduced some patches ago.

If this can be looked at as well as the Esc key issue, that would be great.

Pilot.6094:

Perhaps it could default to all permissions checked since we can’t pass a parameter of the permissions we require (ideal).

NO! NO! Never ever do that! The less restrictions are accessible by default, the better. A user should have to grant permissions, not revoke them.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

That’s data that can be exposed, but we should have a discussion about how to do it in a way that makes your users happy. I have a hunch that we may want to hide that data behind a separate permission, but I haven’t thought about it enough to have a well-formed opinion.

talking about permissions, i think it might be really useful to have the equipment and inventory of characters behind separate permissions too.

for example i will definitely write a quick tool gathering all the builds of guild members directly from the api (at the moment everyone has to do that manually), but it might make some people uncomfortable that i will basically also be able to view their inventories for whatever reason.

Michael Henninger.7451:

Thanks for the link. I’ve requested a sticky. How are newcomers to the thread supposed to know? I made an oops! Thanks for helping me fix it.

=D

This is now my favourite thread on the forums currently, mainly because its just funny to see people linking the rules to a dev, and I have to say I appreciate your honesty Michael and your sense of humor about it, respect.