Guild Wars 2

I noticed that the Witch’s [ignore this] Hat was accepted by the mystic forge, so I gathered 4 hats from different characters, put them in the forge, and was rewarded with (drum roll)… some level 0 chainmail boots.

I’m guessing this is a bug, and the forge shouldn’t accept the hat at all, but if it is supposed to accept the hat, then shouldn’t it reward a piece of town clothes (instead of armour)? Maybe the (slightly different) hat from the gem store’s Witch Costume, or something like that?

BTW, the Amazing Forum Censorship Filter doesn’t let me write “witch’s” followed by “hat”.

NVranya.5013:

Also, if possible, try playing in the off-hours if possible.
Less others to bug you, less time spend waiting between tries.

BTW, if you are in a group with several friends (I’m not sure if the game tries to keep parties together), and you want to make it easier for them, stay in the chest room after opening it. As long as you’re there, the game won’t “fill your spot” with a new player, so it’s one less player running up the tower, which makes it a little bit easier for everyone else.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

He also affects only one person for the Mad King Says sequence. Anyone who doesn’t see their skillbar change can blissfully ignore the King’s commands. I’m pretty sure it is not supposed to work that way.

I’m pretty sure it is.

Greyfeld.7104:

However, you can’t determine the competence of a player without seeing them play. On the other hand, you can determine a player’s level quite easily.

You can also determine what letter their name starts with quite easily. Does that make it a good way to decide who to invite and who to kick?

I could sort of understand looking at a player’s achievement score, which is global for his account and gives you an idea of how experienced he is (although I’ve met several idiots in GW2 with over 4k achievement points, so it’s still far from perfect – and experience isn’t necessarily a guarantee of skill, awareness or team spirit).

But making everything hinge on the level of a particular character (which will never really have an impact of more than 15% on the total party DPS – most of the times not even 10%) is being an elitist jerk – with emphasis on the second part, because you’re turning a factor that is minimized by GW2’s mechanics into an all-or-nothing precondition.

Greyfeld.7104:

just assume that the person who has more play time and better gear is going to help the group more.

Because a guy that has 6 different characters and happens to be on his level 65 necromancer must have less experience than the guy who just hit 80 on his first character (and could be wearing level 20 gear, for all you know), right?

I guess it’s the way of the “gearscore generation”. Watching people play or asking them a couple of questions before the start is too complicated. Must make all decisions based on a number – even if that number has little or no practical relevance.

But hey, whatever works for you. Me, I like to avoid people with that mentality. In my experience, they tend to lack team spirit (which actually translates into a DPS loss, in GW2) and are rarely fun to play with.

You know who goes on my friends list almost immediately? Someone saying “LF1M for AC explorable; any level”. That means they know what they’re doing. But maybe I’m just an elitist jerk of a different kind.

Conncept.7638:

I would be happy to help people by doing this for free, especially some of the disabled players that will never be able to complete the puzzle.

What for?

I mean, it’s not like you win any amazing cash prizes for completing the puzzle.

The only thing you get out of completing the jumping puzzle is knowing that you completed the jumping puzzle. If someone else completed it for you, that’s just going to be a reminder of your own inability.

Awesome.6120:

You agree to the EULA before you can log in which, in every game ever, says that they can cancel your account at any time for any reason they choose.

Just because someone writes something in a EULA that doesn’t mean it’s legal. For example, in the EU companies cannot prevent you from reselling your games. They can erase all your account data when the game is sold to someone else (because the account is a service, not included with the original game), but they must allow transfer of all the goods and licenses originally purchased (meaning the game itself and a “blank” account).

They still put it in the EULA, but it’s not enforceable, and they know it.

Remember when Arena Net said that pre purchasers couldn’t get refunds? And yet they ended up allowing refunds after all. Did they have a sudden religious epiphany? Unlikely. Probably they just got a note from their legal counsel.

Awesome.6120:

Have fun taking a company to court over $60.

Class action suit lawyers would drool over a game with 3 million players.

And this is a pumpkin that you had never carved before (with that character)?

If so, it’s probably a bug, make sure you submit a report.

Primal.9513:

If you ignore them and don’t want to play with them, that’s your choice, If you want to think they are stupid, your choice too.

But if you decide to insult them based on your assumptions, that’s not what I call respect.

They’re not “assumptions”. I obviously don’t go around adding people to my block list based on the possibility that they might be thinking about asking for “a tank”. I do it when they actually do it.

And why would I bother to “insult” them? I just want to avoid them.

Mario.6309:

A group of level 2’s may be able to complete the dungeon, but not with the same effectiveness and quickness as a group of 80’s.

The choice isn’t between “a group of level 2s” and “a group of level 80s”. If even the guy starting the group was level 2, I don’t think he’d have the nerve to say “only level 80s allowed”.

The choice is between a group where all characters must be level 80 and a group where some characters might be 79 or lower.

Since most players don’t even leave their starting zones until they’re level 15, chances are your average “non-80” player hanging around Lion’s Arch will be somewhere around level 47.

And a level 47 player will have a total damage output close to 75% of a level 80 with a similar build / stat balance (in fact, some stats scale better if you’re lower level, but let’s not get into the obscure mess that is GW2’s stat scaling). Which means his presence would “cost” the party, at most, one extra minute in a 10-15 minute dungeon run (25% of one fifth of the party).

On the other hand, have someone kill a scarecrow at a “bad” moment (or pull a ton of spiders and bring them to a player who is trying to rally, or some similarly dumb move), and you’ve just wasted more than that.

Of course, people playing level 47 characters can be just as dumb as people playing level 80 characters. My point isn’t that the level 47 character is better. My point is that it’s not going to be a determining (or even particularly relevant) factor, and people who think it will are displaying their own ignorance and “WoW-mindedness”.

It’s completely their right, of course. Just as it’s my right to not want to play with them.

Greyfeld.7104:

But please, feel free to continue ranting. I know it can be therapeutic.

I’m not “ranting” at all. I’m telling you that my experience (of literally hundreds of dungeon runs, including dozens of AtM runs) is that bad level 80s can make a run a lot slower and more risky than lower-level characters played by someone with a clue.

And someone who thinks that having some characters under level 80 (in a group of 5) is going to be the determining factor for their success are not the kind of people I would ever want to group with.

Primal.9513:

I personally think that if they ask for lvl 80, that is their right.

Absolutely. Same thing if they ask for a specific class or if they ask for a “healer” or a “tank”. And it’s my right to draw some conclusions about the competence and intelligence of the people making those requests.

It doesn’t, it’s MAD!

Lily Karuna.9723:

This evening I can carve no pumpkins in LA or in the Labyrinth. Someone else can come up to the same pumpkin, carve it, and it then shows carved for me as well.

What do you mean by “then” ? Didn’t you say you couldn’t carve them at all?

Other players see their own version of the pumpkins (same as the resource nodes), they don’t influence your ability to carve them at all. If you’ve already carved that pumpkin before, you won’t be able to carve it again. Go into a different area, that you haven’t visited yet.

Sanctum of Rall currently has the Queensdale events blocked. Two escort events run over and over again but, the doors don’t appear.

If your inventory is no longer full, the ghost should give you a new copy. If it doesn’t, check that you don’t have it in your bank or in some closed bag.

scoop.9613:

In the middle of the plaza in Lions Arch, the Lion statue is gone, and the “Mad Kings Realm” is already open.

How did this happen?

You mean how could things possibly happen in Tyria without you specifically doing them?

Welcome to the wonderful world of multi-player games.

All the original ghosts are still there, all the previous quests / events / items are still available.

Greyfeld.7104:

Actually, your actions and this post prove that you’re, in fact, the one that doesn’t understand how GW2 works.

I guess you think that applies to Arena Net too, since they labelled it as a “level 2 instance”. And I have no problem doing it with level 29 characters (or lower, for that matter), so it looks like I have at least some vague notion of how GW2 works…

Greyfeld.7104:

Sub-30 characters don’t have Elite skills unlocked.

And those 10 or 15 seconds that your elite skill lasts (after its 3-minute cooldown) make all the difference, right?

And gear doesn’t scale upward.

And your ability to dodge, make proper use of combo fields, clear any aggroed spiders quickly instead of having tunnel vision and letting them hit you while you spam the boss, or generally have a clue doesn’t scale up with your character level.

Oh how I wish it did…

The event where players need to put out the blue “fire” with a water bucket is currently bugging (on Sanctum of Rall, at least). Some of the fires are impossible to put out. We even had three players with buckets, at one point, trying from every possible distance and angle, and the last fires would not go out.

Had to restart the event 3 times until finally all fires were extinguishable (on the 3rd attempt no buckets spawned for over 1 minute, despite 3 or 4 players scanning non-stop). Even then, only one of the players was able to extinguish them, the fires were still bugged for everyone else.

DanteZero.3569:

What ever happened to Gum Drops, the Mad King’s Invisible Steed? Will he/she/it be making a comeback or appearance during the next act?

So you didn’t see the invisible steed?

Ayane Hajinmon.9165:

i failed the clock jump 7 times…its so frustrating that it keep sending me back to start instead of inside the clock T___T

It’s practically impossible to miss the last jump, assuming you jump after it breaks (you get teleported into the chest room even if you hit the wall on the left). If you’re getting teleported back to the start consistently, get out of the instance and go back in.

Whenever I see someone asking for “level 80s only” (or asking for specific classes), I add them to my block list. And note that I have one character of each class, and most of them are level 80.

It’s not that I feel excluded, it’s just that anyone making that kind of demand clearly doesn’t understand how GW2 works, and by adding them to my block list I avoid making the mistake of inviting them for one of my groups later.

Garenthal.1480:

Account sharing is illegal

So when did the government pass laws about video game accounts?

Femanon.4028:

That’s where muscle memory kicks in.

That only really applies if you always follow exactly the same path, which is only possible if you have an extremely stable connection and always land exactly on the same places.

Sometimes I land on a cog and get stuck, sometimes I can walk normally, sometimes my camera decides to dive and show me a piece of ground that it found interesting. The difference between the behaviours depends on landing a couple of pixels more to the left or to the right.

And yet I manage to finish it 9 times out of 10 if I don’t have other characters blocking my view, because I can recalibrate or use a “backup” route.

I can do it blind (or almost blind) – I’ve had the “Travel out of overflow?” message pop up in the middle of my screen half way through the puzzle several times and I still managed to finish some of those, without stopping to close it – and it’s probably even possible to do it blindfolded (if you can hear the music), but I don’t think anyone can do it blind consistently, because of those little fluctuations that require you to suddenly pick a backup route or, at the very least, recalibrate your heading.

So while memory certainly plays a role (auditory memory too – since the puzzle is synced to the music), the ability to dynamically adjust your actions is what allows you to make up for latency fluctuations, camera turning speed fluctuations, frame rate fluctuations, finger slippage, etc..

So I wouldn’t really use the term “muscle memory” here. At least that’s not how I do the Clock Tower.

There’s certainly some memory involved (remembering the puzzle layout, knowing which parts to avoid because they make the camera bounce, etc.), but for me it’s always a pretty “dynamic” thing, in the sense that I have three or four alternatives for most jumps, and will pick one based on factors such as visibility, whether or not my character “feels stuck” when landing from the previous jump, whether or not I think I have time to spare, etc..

But maybe that’s just me.

Magic Find is only supposed to affect drops from creatures, not from chests or anything else. Doesn’t mean Arena Net can’t have coded some chests to benefit from Magic Find (either deliberately or by mistake), but without official confirmation I’d say it makes no difference.

Girls can’t jump, everybody knows that.

P.S. – Seriously, now, female sylvari have a point of contact with the ground that is about half a step behind them, when running. I’m not sure if human females do, too, but it’s possible, since the models seem to share some animations. This means you can usually jump when you’re already slightly off the platform, but it also means you’ll land half a step behind the place where you think you’ll be landing. Once you get used to it (practise on a non-timed puzzle) you’ll get the timing right.

P.P.S. – The clock hitbox face gets bugged, sometimes. If you jump into it (after it breaks, of course) and get teleported back to the start, leave the instance and go in again (making sure you didn’t get sent back into the same one – chek the names of other players in there).

Adam Of Awesome.7802:

there is 1 block that drops into the acid a second after the first person jumped on it so you have to be pretty much in sync with the lead and that rarely happens..

Everything in the puzzle is synced to the master timer. Player actions have no influence over anything.

Risque.3598:

We are in CM and we killed last boss and it looks like we didnt so we cant free queen. Any advice?

To you? Stop running CM story mode until Arena Net releases a patch whose notes specifically say they fixed that bug.

To Arena Net? Take CM story mode offline until you fix it. Just pop up a message saying “This content is temporarily unavailable for maintenance.” when people pick story mode. That is far less annoying than making people waste one hour in there and then get stuck at the end, with no reward and no achievement.

Smeave.7590:

Very frustrated since I really dislike this clocktower design to begin with.

Er… why don’t you go do something else, then?

You do realise that you won’t lose access to the rest of the game (which you presumably do like) if you ignore a part that you don’t like, right?

Awesome.6120:

Either I’m misunderstanding what you meant here or you’re smoking some good stuff and I want in.

If a company sells you a product that requires permanent access to their servers and then blocks your access to their servers, they’re essentially breaking their own product, and as such you’d be entitled to a refund (assuming this happens within a certain time limit, which varies from country to country – there is obviously no expectation that the product will continue to work forever).

Anyway, “paying someone” to complete a puzzle for you would essentially fall under the power-levelling type of activity, and companies are likely to enforce it (assuming they detect it and that it’s widespread or happens frequently enough to be relevant).

Letting a friend who happens to be visiting you play on your PC for a few minutes is essentially undetectable, irrelevant for the company, and they would have to be incredibly stupid to ban anyone for that. But you will, of course, be responsible for anything your friend does while he’s playing at your place.

Awesome.6120:

There is the Golden title.

You don’t actually have to pay anything to get it, though.

TheRabbit.9478:

2 – No.

Actually, I’m pretty sure that #2 is a yes. I did two very quick runs of the dungeon. On the first one I got a booster, two greens and some candy. On the second run I got candy and a white bag. Could have been just a bug, but I suspect it was DR (which makes sense, since DR clearly affects the number of bags you get from the Mad King himself).

Kiviar.7063:

In my experience few norn and charr actually make it past the first vertical gear.

Racist!

Now imagine a bunch of guys in suits doing that with other people’s money, and you have Wall Street.

Wildclaw.6073:

Learn to do the beam jump (a full jump at normal speed and then strict stop so you can align on the second beam)

Or, as I call it, the place where people with speed boosts suddenly realise that might not have been such a good idea.

Amelli.9217:

They should have had two or three difficulties so everyone could have ‘fun’ doing the puzzle

It already has four “different difficulties”.

Reach the first chest. (“Beginner”)
Reach the second chest. (“Intermediate”)
Reach the third chest. (“Hard”)
Reach the fourth chest. (“Achievement-Worthy”)

Besides, there are lots of other jumping puzzles in the game (most of which are easier than the clock tower) and some even have timed sections (ex., Spekk’s Lab).

Tarage.8632:

What a lot of people don’t understand is that Norn and Charr aren’t the problem.

If you aren’t ahead of 90% of the people after the first spawned part, you aren’t gonna make it in time.

No, what you don’t understand is that they are.

By your definition, it would be impossible for more than 1 person to reach the top (10% of 15 people is 1.5), and I’ve seen 3 people reach the top several times (even 4).

And by admitting that “you have to be ahead of other people” you are acknowledging that you find it harder when there are other characters near yours.

It’s obviously possible for everyone to reach the top. It’s just very hard because players get in each other’s way. And bigger characters get more in the way.

I can reach the end 9 times out of 10 if I’m a human in a group with no charr or norn. That drops to about 2 out of 10 if I’m an asura in a group with 4 or more large characters (charr / norn). Partly it’s because of the asura camera bugs (the camera bounces whenever players land on certain platforms), but partly it’s because I lose the reference of my own character when I need to correct my trajectory.

Anyone claiming that having your view (of your own character and of the places you need to jump to) blocked by up to 14 characters 4 times your size “makes no difference” should be forced to spend the next 6 months playing GW2 constantly surrounded by a mob of huge charr in bright pink armour.

The clock tower is excellent, but player visibility is a problem and a source of frustration, especially for people playing asura characters, and this is something that should have been detected and fixed before release (ex., by rendering all other players as ghosts or plastic spiders – preserving the feeling of a “mad rush” without giving some races a disadvantage, and letting people focus on the actual jumping puzzle rather than getting mad at other players for blocking their view).

Edtheman.2165:

LoreChief.8391:

3. Don’t stop for chests, they aren’t worth it.

Or, you can change looting to auto-loot so when you pass a chest all you have to do is tap f once, just once, very quickly; then you are free to keep moving. You don’t even have to stop.

One of the chests has a cast bar and will freeze you in place.

“Dance! Dance for me…? Listen to the music in your head… Dance!”

Pumpkin king vs. gingerbread man:

Direngrey.1247:

I’m a Human elementalist and just finished the Clock Tower first try […] I done it first try, easy as can be once you know how.

But… if you did it on your first try, then you didn’t know how.

Clearly you have a gift. Imagine not only avoiding all the places where players get stuck, all the places that cause your camera to go crazy, but also knowing that you have to jump down at the end of the beam, knowing that you need to wait for the clock to turn twice, knowing that you must pick the right side when the path splits…

You’re either incredibly lucky, have paranormal powers, or your pants are on fire.

I won’t say which one of those I find more likely, but I do note that the Clock Tower has been out for a couple of days and you say that you “have just finished it on the first try”. I guess you didn’t play at all during the weekend. Maybe you were using your powers for the good of mankind.

Either way, I don’t think your experience can be extrapolated to the majority of players. Most people do find it easier to play when their own character (and their intended path) isn’t buried under a mob of characters that are 4 times their size.

Am I the only one who always pictures John Lithgow when he talks? Especially in the Ascent to Madness instance.

I think the best solution would be to render the other players as ghosts or spiders.

Not only would it eliminate the differences between the races and allow players so see the actual jumping puzzle and their own character (instead of a wall of fat charr / norn characters), but it would also make it a lot funnier – running up the tower while being chased by a mob of bouncing plastic spiders.

Maybe next year.

P.S. – Anyone who says that having a lot of huge characters on top of you (or on top of the platforms you’re trying to reach) makes no difference should be forced to spend the next 6 months surrounded by a mob of maximum-size charr in bright pink armor.

Pig.5827:

If it does not drop I would much rather spend my time farming gold to buy it off the Auction House.

Even if it had a drop rate of 99%, you could “farm” forever and never get it. Given the apparent drop rate (hard to pinpoint it, since GW2 doesn’t support plug-ins like the Wowhead client, that gathers data from thousands of players), the chances of that specific skin dropping for you are almost certainly lower than 1/1000, possibly lower than 1/10000 (per run – and that’s assuming the exotic drop rate isn’t affected by DR, like the crafting items are).

If you want to be sure that you will get it, if you have enough free time to get the gold, and assuming the stock in the TP looks big enough to last, just buy it from there.

Just being a terminology nazi for a second here:

Camera distance and zoom are different things.

Zooming in and out means changing the FoV (same as using a zoom lens). Your position stays fixed, and you just “widen the edges” of the image.

What the Mad King instance does is increase your maximum camera distance (controlled via the mouse wheel). They probably do this so you can actually see the Mad King; if they kept the old distance you would have trouble seeing above his waist, due to the low camera angle and reduced FoV that GW2 uses. If the game had a wider FoV and a higher camera target, this wouldn’t be necessary.

A lot of people have been asking for FoV slider in the options not just for situations like this one, but also because using an optically incorrect perspective gives several people headaches and nausea. The optically correct perspective depends on how big your monitor is and how far you sit from, and since different people have different-sized monitors and sit at different distances, there is no single FoV value that will work for everyone. That’s why 99% of 3D games have a FoV slider (something GW2 currently lacks).

This FoV control (like the zoom in a camera) is separate from the camera distance control. Although a higher camera distance will show you “more stuff”, it doesn’t correct the perspective, and makes your own character very small (a wider FoV allows the camera distance to be shorter, and still show a wide scene without making your character so small).

I’m just mentioning this because a lot of people seem to use “zoom” to mean “camera distance”, and what GW2 really needs is a zoom (FoV) control (although a way to set the maximum camera distance, like WoW has, would also be nice, since it would save us the trouble of using the mouse wheel to move closer; we could just set the maximum as our preferred distance and then scroll all the way back).

When I saw “soulbound”, I thought “nice, that means we can get 1 per character”. Disappointment and WTFness ensued.

10 slots is probably a downgrade for most people anyway; 15-slot bags are pretty cheap. If they’re only going to give us one, it should be account bound and 20-slot, otherwise it’s useless for most players.

I’m pretty sure Magic Find isn’t supposed to affect chests; only things that drop directly from mobs.

Lotus.3142:

You could’ve stayed in your warm, comfy little beds and missed it. You’re all aware of a site called YouTube, right? You would know that what ever it was that was happening would get captured by tons and tons of people and posted on YouTube, so nobody would really miss out.

Since we had no idea if the “event” was even going to be interactive or not (in fact, we kind of assumed it would, since Arena Net said people had to be online at that specific time), YouTube was hardly a guaranteed replacement.

If people knew this “unique event” would in fact be just an animated, non-interactive cinematic (which was actually bugged for a lot of people, as you can read about in other threads – all we saw was multiple shots of a hole in the ground), maybe they would indeed have just stayed in bed and watched it later on YouTube.

Or in-game, because it turns out that this “one-time event” repeats itself every now and then (okay, it’s not exactly the same – but it could be; the game could simply play the original cinematic when people log in).

So why on Earth (on Tyria?) Arena Net said it would be a one-time event that you “had to be online at that time to experience” is beyond me. I’m in Europe, so this was at a good time for me, but if I was in Asia or Oceania, I’d probably be feeling a bit annoyed.

Nice cutscene (for those who got to see it bug-free), not so good PR for people living on the “wrong” side of the planet, and I think they have every right to be miffed.

If you’re playing through game content you don’t enjoy just in hopes of being rewarded with some virtual pixels at the end, you’re doing “entertainment” wrong.

What there is in the Mad King dungeon is… the Mad King dungeon.

If you don’t find the actual gameplay fun, maybe try a different game or a different activity in general (slot machines, perhaps).

I soloed the Mad King on my guardian (not because of any bugs; I just didn’t notice it was a group instance when I went in, and then decided I might as well try to solo it), and had a lot of fun doing it. I didn’t even open the chest at the end (didn’t notice it until my 2nd run). Did I go “doh!” when I saw it? Yes. Did that somehow erase the fun I had doing it the first time? Of course not.

This seems to be a phenomenon exclusive to MMORPGs, especially affecting ex-WoW players. You never see anyone saying “I can’t believe I beat that track in Need for Speed and didn’t get any loot!”, or “I won that TF2 match but there were no drops? This game sucks!”.

The reward for playing a game you enjoy is the enjoyment you get from playing the game. If players start making it about the virtual “loot” at the end, developers stop having any reason to make the actual gameplay any good.

Zeratul.7153:

Easiest jump puzzle ever.

So you’re having problems with all the other ones? I feel sorry for you, most people can do them just fine. In fact, I’d say most of them (not all, but most) are significantly easier than the Clock Tower.

Luthan.5236:

Can someone tell where the additional chests are? I only know about the one at the top where you get the achievement

I can sort of understand missing chest #2, but #1 and #3 are right in the middle of the way. You land right on top of of #3 when you jump down from the beam.

Easy to solo as guardian, ranger or necromancer (well the last two have minions, so not sure if it counts as “soloing”). Takes a while, though (close to 1 hour). The first part with all the candy mobs is the hardest, after that you can easily pull individual groups of spiders and avoid all the scarecrows and bombs.

Benjamin Mahir.7986:

I blame my graphics card

Did you even read the other posts here…?

SolarNova.1052:

@ Account

Watch this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eCzRcwXJE8

nuf said

So, was that his first successful run? No? Nuff said.

No idea what you’re trying to “prove”. That people who haven’t managed to finish it should do it without seeing their character or the way they’re going? Maybe you think everyone should turn off their monitor. After all, it’s possible to do it simply by syncing your actions to the music…

Does that mean it’s easier than when you can see your character and the way you’re going?

Or does that mean anyone will be able to do it blind the first time, or even that anyone will be able to do it blind consistently after finishing it once (instead of just trying 5 or 10 or 50 times and then posting their first successful run on YouTube)?

And why did people have to be online at a specific time to see this (failed) cutscene? Was it so hard to just play it the first time people log in after the start of Act 3, or the first time they zone into Lion’s Arch?

Arena Net’s decisions are getting harder and harder to understand.