Guild Wars 2

Orr should be harder.

I agree the “mob density” in GW2 in general is excessive. It’s too high and too regular. Coupled with the constant spawns out of thin air it just gets annoying and makes the world feel grindy and futile.

But the game needs areas where even level 80 characters feel afraid. Not afraid that they’ll get stuck killing identical zombies for 20 minutes while being perma-crippled, just afraid that a single scary-looking monster (or a group of 20 tiny spiders guarding a shiny chest) will eat their face if they get too close.

Pikafan.3792:

This is the first time I am hearing someone wants to do AC for the gear. The stats are inferior

You seem to have missed the point of my message. It’s not about which dungeon you want to do or which gear you like. I picked two completely random dungeons.

My point is that, with the current system, you’re forced to do the same dungeon over and over again to get the look that you want for your character.

Part of the problem is that, if you want a piece of gear from one of the dungeon sets, you need to repeat that specific dungeon 10+ times. For the full set plus a couple of weapons, this can easily go into the hundreds.

This is just bad design.

My friends want me to do TA with them, but since I want the AC set for my character, I “have” to keep doing AC, otherwise I feel like I’m wasting my time in TA (the tokens I get from there don’t allow me to buy anything I want).

What kind of sense does this make? Is Arena Net deliberately trying to make the game feel grindy? Why not have a single kind of token that players can use to buy the armour with the look they like, while still allowing them some variety of choice in which dungeons they’re going to run?

By all means, add a small chance (ex., 1-2%) for the final boss in each dungeon to drop one piece of that dungeon’s set, but let people choose which dungeon to play based on what they enjoy or what their friends enjoy, don’t force them to repeat the same dungeon over and over and over again.

The current system is grindier than WoW.

It’s not a matter of the rewards, it’s just that, in the case of the “new” CM, it’s simply not fun.

I don’t mind hard. I loved TBC heroics and hated WotLK’s cakewalks. I tend to play in areas 4+ levels above my characters in GW2. I actually like hard. But I don’t like random. And that’s what it plays like, now.

If you wear light or even medium armor, often you’re at 100% HP and then you’re instantly dead, with some shot out of nowhere that you have no way to predict or avoid. Or you get stunned, then feared, then pushed back to some place where you camera gets stuck, and then hit with 4 bombs while you’re lying down, basically having no control over your own character for the 5 or 10 seconds that it takes you to die. And no one is going to bother trying to revive you because they know it’ll only happen to them (you can’t even blame them; it’s a 50-50 chance at best, and with those odds it’s simply not worth it).

And, of course, there are no respawn points along the way and the only place where you can repair is in the opposite direction (plus the “downed penalty” ensures that you’re completely useless if you try to run back and help your team – you will literally die before you step fully into the room). So doing CM now consists of 90% walking / lying down and 10% of hoping that you won’t get magically 1-shotted or stunlocked out of nowhere. Unless you’re a guardian, but that’s a different issue (and no, I don’t think guardians need to be nerfed; I just think other classes need to stop being 1-shotted so easily).

At some point, someone at Arena Net confused “challenging gameplay” with “a biased random number generator”.

Cloud.2059:

Shrink character size toggle. I player a Norn with maxed out height ~ this has made many things an obstacle that shouldnt be.

While your suggestion could work as a temporary fix, I think what they really need to do is fix the camera and some map areas that clearly were never tested with norns (or charr).

Cloud.2059:

Mobs resetting in underwater combat.

It’s not just underwater. It happens on land, too. The whole “leashing and resetting” mechanism is incredibly artificial and immersion-breaking. In a game that encourages kiting, this simply doesn’t make sense. It’s fine for a creature to “give up” and run back to its spawn location if you are no longer a threat (i.e., clearly running away and not hitting it), but as long as you’re actively fighting the creature should never regain health or become invulnerable.

It’s bad enough that we have to deal with groups enemies spawning out of thin air right on top of us, we don’t need our main target to also “respawn” half way through a fight. It’s immersion-breaking and ruins the sense of progression.

All this leashing + resetting mechanic does is force us to (try to) guess where that “invisible boundary” is which will magically restore the enemy to full health.

And sometimes (as you mention) the enemy seems to the decide that the boundary is 10 cm away from its spawn location, and just resets to 100% while continuing to attack players, although it hasn’t even moved.

I found several mobs that do this consistently (and reported them in-game) during the BWEs, but it still happens with the same mobs four months later.

Cloud.2059:

Crafting from Collections.

This has been possible for three or four days now. Still cant’ use them for discovery, though, only production.

Cloud.2059:

Mobs shouldnt be able to knock you off ledges. By this I mean off high ledges, cliffs, etc. If I use a knockback skill on a mob near a cliff, they get pushed to the edge and no more. If I cant push them off they shouldnt be able to push me off.

I agree there’s an issue, but I disagree with the solution. Mobs should be able to knock you off ledges and you should be able to knock them off ledges as well. Weapons like the 2H hammer lose a lot of their appeal when every enemy comes with a built-in “safety net”.

I think they’re afraid the AI will “panic” when it can’t find its way back, but the solution is simple; if the AI can’t find its way back, it should automatically die from the fall.

Dodge roll (timed) to reduce falling damage.

Allow players to press their “dodge” key while falling, causing the character to roll. If the character is rolling when it hits the ground, reduce falling damage by a percentage (ex., 25, 33 or 50%), stacking with fall-related traits. Should also work when sliding down hillsides (which GW2 sometimes interprets as a sequence of falls, even though the hill follows a smooth curve).

Naturally, this would consume energy, same as a normal roll.

If the player times the dodge incorrectly (i.e., character has already finished rolling when it hits the ground), then the fall should deal the full damage.

I believe the animation for this is already in the game (one of the “diving goggles” skills).

Not only would this feel “natural” (after all, that’s how paratroopers, etc., are taught to land), but it would reward players for an action in a situation where they currently can’t do anything (if you fall, your fate is kind of sealed; all you can do is wait to see how much damage you will take).

P.S. – I had already posted this in its own thread (where it had several replies), but for some reason one of the moderators decided to lock that thread and tell me to repost the same thing here instead of simply merging it into this one. o_O

Jason Yeung.2083:

While falling, move your cursor quick onto the mini-map and teleport to a waypoint immediately and you can avoid death.

Which is so realistic, eh? Anyway, I suspect that’s a bug / exploit that Arena Net will eventually fix, and it doesn’t work if you’re in combat.

Jason Yeung.2083:

Imo, falling to death is absolutely acceptable

I never said anything about becoming invulnerable. And I rarely die from falling; it just annoys me that there’s no way to actively reduce the damage (ex., lose 25% of my HP, instead of 50%), when the game already has the “logical” mechanism for that (dodge rolling).

Rukia.4802:

I hate the fact that there is fall damage in the first place.

Falling damage makes sense (and in fact is almost necessary) in a game where players can push others off ledges, etc.. Which BTW reminds me of a pretty annoying detail, which is the fact that monsters can push players off ledges but players can’t push monsters off ledges. They just hit an invisible “safety net”. Weapons like the 2H hammer become a lot less fun when you can’t actually throw that pesky ettin to his death by launching him over the edge of the cliff.

But anyway, that’s a different issue.

Falling damage “makes sense” but so does rolling to reduce it.

Or I guess not…

I wish map completion wasn’t needed to enjoy the game. Oh, wait , it isn’t.

Stop letting numbers dictate what you do and just play the game the way you enjoy. Isn’t that what you bought the game for? To have fun? So, if something isn’t fun, don’t do it.

To be honest, I was afraid we’d fall into one of these “number-driven” situations when Arena Net decided to add the concept of “map completion”. Not only do some people complain that they shouldn’t be “forced” to do [insert the part they have trouble with] to get the “100%”, and not only does it fill map chat with people asking and telling others how to get to the POIs / Vistas / etc. (why buy a game and then ask someone else to play it for you? and why give spoilers in public chat?), but a lot of other people just rush through the “map completion” checklist and think they’ve seen everything in that zone, although they missed 90% of the events.

This is going to lead to a lot of people thinking they’ve “run out of content” because all their zone maps are at “100%”.

Lrdrahl.6120:

As a semi-casual player (wife and kid) I have been craving a PvP focused game that didn’t reward players with endless time to play the game significant advantages over those who may only be able to play a few hours a week.

While I agree that GW2’s approach is a lot more “casual-friendly” than most MMORPGs, it’s important to note that most “PvP focused games” follow the same approach. There is no long-term “powering up through gear” in the vast majority of PvP games (such as MOBAs, Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, CoD, etc.). It’s only a couple of MMORPGs that adopted that model (rewarding time spent, rather than skill), because it’s the same model they use for PvE.

Maybe that’s what you meant (i.e., you were talking specifically about MMORPGs), but I think it’s important to point out that the majority of online PvP games follows the same model as GW2 (putting all players on a level playing field, requiring at most a handful of “rounds” to access your desired weapons). This isn’t some risky new gameplay model, this is the model that most PvP players prefer.

The title say it all, really.

Allow players to press their “dodge” key while falling, causing the character to roll. If the character is rolling when it hits the ground, reduce falling damage by a percentage (ex., 25, 33 or 50%), stacking with fall-related traits. Should also work when sliding down hillsides (which GW2 sometimes interprets as a sequence of falls, even though the hill follows a smooth curve).

Naturally, this would consume energy, same as a normal roll.

If the player times the dodge incorrectly (i.e., character has already finished rolling when it hits the ground), then it should take the full damage.

I believe the animation for this is already in the game (one of the “diving goggles” skills).

Not only would this feel “natural” (after all, that’s how skydivers, etc., are taught to land), but it would reward players for an action in a situation where they currently can’t do anything (if you fall, your fate is kind of sealed; all you can do is wait to see if your survive or not).

Unless they intend to allow multiple people to play on the same account, they have to consider the possibility that more than one person in a family will use that same computer to play the game, using different accounts. So, in terms of policy, I don’t see why / how they could oppose it.

In “technical” terms there shouldn’t be any problem with multiple accounts sharing the same installation, you just need to log in with the respective names / passwords.

If each person wants to have different settings (different keys, different graphics preferences, etc.), that should be possible by giving each a separate OS user name. I think GW2 stores the preferences inside the user’s “Application Settings” folder (or possibly somewhere under “My Documents”), so different users should be able to keep their preferences separate, even when sharing the same GW2 program folder.

It’s not 100% impossible that something in GW2’s code gets confused with multiple users on the same system, but it’s very unlikely.

I have the full box, with the statue. It was shipped to me on the 24th and arrived on the 27th (possibly on the 26th, but I got it on the 27th).

Drintar.1246:

I bolded the key part the box comes WITH the physical items and retail code

Actually, that sentence can also be read as:

“to receive 1 = (the full Collector’s Edition box with physical items) and 2 = (the retail serial code).”

But either way, that’s not really relevant. My issue is the part about “must return to the retailer”. If all the CE boxes include a valid code, I think anyone would have worded it as “the final serial code is the one contained in the box; if you don’t have the box yet, contact your retailer”.

Surely they must know that some people got the box before launch, so to say “EU customers who bought the CE must return to the retailer after launch” is confusing.

Anyway, Arena Net can clear this up simply by saying “every CE box contains a final registration code”. That’s all I’m asking for. Official confirmation that I don’t need to “return to the retailer after launch”.

Naturally, if the game was for me I could simply try the code and check if it works, but since it isn’t, I would like to get official confirmation.

Fogeltje.2341:

That just means you had a pre-ORDER version and not a pre-PURCHASE version.

Yes, that would seem to be the case. But Arena Net’s page (link to above) doesn’t mention pre-orders for the CE.

Also, I received the game box before launch, so (unless they didn’t charge me until one day after I had the box, which is highly unlikely), this was effectively treated as a pre-purchase. They shipped the game to me on the 24th (the day I ordered it). That means they must have charged it on that day, which means it was effectively a pre-purchase.

In fact, every site I found selling the CE mentioned only pre-purchase, not pre-order, which makes it odd that I was sent a code labelled as “1-day headstart”.

Anyway, that part isn’t really relevant, since the headstart period is long gone.

I just want confirmation from Arena Net that I don’t actually need to “return to the retailer”, and that box I received before launch contains a valid code, that won’t expire.

I don’t think that’s too much to ask, and it shouldn’t be hard for an Arena Net representative to confirm this.

Freyar.3254:

It would be helpful if mails from ArenaNet didn’t result in a “softfail” with Google’s authentication.

It’s not Google’s authentication specifically, it’s SPF (sender policy framework), a protocol intended to reduce spam and source spoofing. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty easy to configure and does help combat “basic” spoofing, so it’s odd that Arena Net’s postmaster didn’t bother to create the appropriate records.

Fogeltje.2341:

I don’t see why the code in the box should expire.

Me neither, but Arena Net’s wording gives that impression.

If all CE boxes include a valid “final” code, then it doesn’t make much sense to say that people must “return to the retailer after launch”. They’d just say “the final code is the one inside the CE box; if you don’t have the box yet be sure to get it”.

Since they say “you must return to the retailer after launch” that creates the impression that CE boxes bought before launch came with a temporary code only.

To make things even stranger, Arena Net’s page says that everyone who bought the CE got access to the 3-day headstart, but when I ordered it I was given a code labelled as “1-day headstart access”.

Anyway, that last part is irrelevant, I just want Arena Net to confirm that all CE boxes come with a valid code, that doesn’t expire (in other words, that I don’t need to “return to the retailer”).

Apotheosize.4293:

They seem to have addressed the downed state close up camera so maybe there is hope they could rework the other camera issues..

Yes, I’ve just noticed this… for a given value of “addressed”. I am now unable to move the camera more than 1 metre away from my Asura character when he dies. In other words, on my screen I see my own character and a bit of the surrounding ground. If I rotate the camera to make it more horizontal it usually gets stuck on something and all I can see is a piece of wall.

Whenever players need to fight the UI instead of the enemy, a game design fairy dies…

It is a bit odd that hunter pets (which have an impact on gameplay) don’t take up any “space” while miniatures take up a bag slot.

Hopefully this is just a temporary system, and in the future we’ll be able to call minis directly from the collection.

Yes, it’s a bit stupid that pets get deposited with everything else (it’s not like people are going to be farming pets…). Hopefully they’ll fix that so that pets only get deposited if you select them individually (or add a way to call any pet from your collection). Until then, as Lokk said, get an invisible bag and make sure you keep the pet there.

I don’t think they’ll start charging for it until guesting is working.

One thing I would add to the list is that we have no control over the camera height, which leads to a very poor use of screen space.

Almost half the screen is showing the ground behind my character (which I don’t really care about), and all the action takes place in the upper half of the screen. This is bad enough as it is (forces us to pitch the camera down to avoid having our own character block the view, which means we’re looking at the ground most of the time), but it’s even worse when you consider that things such as your boons, conditions, skill cooldowns and range indicators are all at the bottom of the screen.

So we effectively have to keep looking at the top of the screen (to see the enemy), then at the bottom of the screen (to see the icons), and so on, which is very tiring.

For example, as a Guardian, a lot of my decisions depend on whether I have aegis or not. That should be displayed near my character, not on the opposite edge of the screen.

If there was a way to adjust the camera height (not rotation, the actual height of the camera pivot point, above the character’s head § ), we could see more of the world in front of our character and move the character itself closer to the action bar, which would put the enemies near the middle of the screen and would reduce the visual distance between the “action” and the icons on the UI.

§ – The pivot point currently seems to be on the ground in front of the character, which is the source of some camera issues, such as the “ping-pong” bug with Asura characters when they approach certain objects.

GaileGray.9587:

Please read this detailed post to understand better.

I had already read that post. The problem is this sentence:

When Guild Wars 2 launches, customers will need to return to their retailer with proof of purchase to receive the full Collector’s Edition box with physical items and retail serial code.

First, it’s not very clear if it’s saying that we need to go back to the retailer “to receive the box” and “to receive the code” (i.e., to receive two separate things) or if the code included in the box will always be the final one.

Second, that post says says “when Guild Wars 2 launches, customers will need to return to their retailer”. However, I got the GW2 CE box before the launch date (it was sent on the 24th and arrived on the 27th).

So, given the situation I described, do I need to “return to the retailer” (now, after launch) for anything?

All I’m asking you to do is confirm: Do all CE boxes come with a definitive code (that won’t be “expired” if registered next month) ?

Simply stating it in those terms on your website would be much clearer. “If you bought the Collector’s Edition, the final registration code will be the one found inside the box. If you don’t have the box yet, be sure to get it from your retailer.”

Telling me that I need to “return to the retailer after launch” isn’t very clear, because I got the box before launch. It just gives me the impression that the box comes with no code (or with a code that won’t be valid), and that the only way to get the definitive code is to “return to the retailer”.

Fogeltje.2341:

I suggest you go pick up your box if you haven’t done so.

I have the box, I got it by mail. It actually arrived before launch.

SirCag.8914:

Cause when you go to retailer to get the final code you get the box too..and in the box is the code.

Would anyone buy the CE and not get the box? If that is the case, why doesn’t Arena Net simply say “use the code inside the box, that is the final one” ?

I’d like some official confirmation; I wouldn’t like my friend to open the box on his birthday and get a code that says it’s expired.

spayced.2016:

It’s not game-breaking so I’d rather they fix other stuff first.

It’s not a dichotomy. Arena Net has hundreds of people, working on different things at the same time. The guys coding the pet management system are probably not the same ones coding the trading post or doing the GPU optimizations.

People should always report the bugs they find; it’s up to Arena Net to decide which bugs they assign to each person / department, and in which order.

MokahTGS.7850:

to save the names of all of your pets (read: all of everyone’s pets) would require another large name database

Pet names are 19 characters long at most. Players can have up to 39 pets.

That’s 741 bytes (less than 1 KB) per player, and only applies to rangers (which are likely to be around 12.5% of the entire population). Assuming the game has around 3 million players, that’s 375 thousand rangers, spread across 48 worlds, or just under 8000 rangers per world (and they won’t even all be in the same zone, so they’re effectively in different servers, but let’s pretend).

This means that each world server would have to load, at most, 8 MB of data to store all the names of all the pets for all the rangers (in fact, they wouldn’t even need to do that; they could request only the names of active pets from the database server). The master database server itself would have to store 375 MB of data, which is almost insignificant by MMO standards.

You’re right that Arena Net would have to code it differently, but the current behaviour isn’t due to some sort of hardware limitation, it’s simply because whoever coded it didn’t think it through, and associated the names with the slots instead of associating them with the actual pets.

It’s not a coding bug, but it’s certainly a software design bug, since the game interface clearly says “pet name”, and what’s being stored is actually the slot name, while the pet name is getting forgotten when pets are changed.

AlphaMuppet.4397:

When I bring Fozzie back his name is there.

Nope. If you do that, the name will revert to the default (ex. “Juvenile Black Bear”).

Any pet coming from your pet list will have the default name.

Any pet that you tame will take on the name of your active pet if you select “make active now”.

And the same pet will have different names in the terrestrial and aquatic slots (i.e., the same pet is treated as two different pets). In other words, the name is being stored by slot (and reset whenever you bring a pet into a slot).

If there’s a final code inside the box, why is Arena Net saying that people who pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition “must go back to the retailer to get the final code” ?

According to Arena Net’s post, only pre-purchasers of the CE got a definitive code (but there was no pre-purchase option for the CE from this retailer, only pre-order).

Can anyone from Arena Net clarify this? Is there a way to check if the code is temporary or definitive without actually registering it? Surely you must have considered that some people will buy the game as a gift for someone else…

The game is currently storing the names for the slots not for the actual pets. In other words, if you name your pet “Fido” and he’s in the top slot, and then you tame another pet, and set it to active, the new pet will be named “Fido”, and the old pet will go back to your pet list and lose its name.

They need to re-code the pet management system to store the names per pet, and not per active slot.

Also, there’s currently no way to rename pets that aren’t active, so the only way you can rename an aquatic pet is to go underwater, which is a bit silly.

And, even after you click on the icon to rename a pet, you need to click in the name field again to be able to edit it (i.e., one extra click that shouldn’t be necessary). The whole “pet management” window seems to have been put together in a rush.

Why not simply enable the Rylock mini on all the Deluxe / CE accounts’ collections tab? Sending it by mail is asking for (this kind of) trouble…

Yep, this happens especially with Asura characters.

Norns have a related problem, where the camera gets stuck inside some walls and will not move or turn at all (you can’t even see your character). It makes some jumping puzzles virtually impossible with Norns (you have to trust your luck and jump without seeing your character or the place you’re jumping to).

The GW2 camera needs a complete overhaul:

• A slider to adjust the FoV (the camera distance itself is fine; it’s probably even a tad too high, the issue is the FoV, which is wrong for PC screens).

• A slider to adjust the camera height. Currently it shows a lot of ground behind our character (useless) and not enough of the world in front / above the character. It also puts the “action” on the top of the screen while our buffs / debuffs / cooldowns / range indicators are at the bottom of the screen. Very unergonomic.

• Option to disable camera “smoothing” and lock the camera to the mouse, like in 99% of other games. The lag introduced by smoothing causes nausea to a lot of people, and the current smoothing algorithm is partially responsible for the two issues described above.

• 1st person view (camera pivot above character pivot, with character model turned 100% transparent).

This last point would fix the “stuck in walls” issue, BTW, which is caused by the fact that the camera is trying to keep a certain distance from the character, and “bumping” into nearby geometry (which is closer than that distance).

The “bouncy camera” issue is caused by a mix of the smoothing algorithm and the fact that the camera target is in front of the character, rather than above the character.

While the FoV slider might be just a “suggestion”, the other ones (camera stuck in walls / bouncing back and forth) are effectively bugs, made significantly worse by the update you mentioned.

I’m betting whoever designs the jumping puzzles tests them with a Human or Sylvari. They certainly never tried to do Troll’s End with a Norn…

Yes, as pointed out above, the interface is being resized after the text has been rendered instead of rendered at a smaller size to begin with.

This can lead to different results depending on your graphics card, OS, and OS text anti-aliasing settings, but it never looks good. Until they code the interface sizes properly, you’re better off sticking to “normal”.

I suggest the creation of a “pottymouth” server, with an “18+” warning and where people can say whatever they want and name their characters whatever they want.

Seriously.

I think Arena Net would save itself a lot of work and keep some players a lot happier if they did that.

Hello. I ordered a GW2 CE from Game UK, to give a friend for his birthday, next month. I received the box and the pre-order code (described as “1-day early access”) but no other code since then.

Will that code work when my friend installs the game next month? Arena Net’s posts suggest that it won’t, and that Game UK should have sent me another code, but they didn’t, and haven’t replied to any of my e-mails.

Naturally, I didn’t register the code, since the game is a gift (so I can’t say for sure if it works or not). I just want to make sure that when my friend opens the box, the correct code is inside it, and not some “expired” code.

Can someone from Arena Net check (via PM or e-mail) if that registration code is valid ? I’ve contacted support but so far no reply.

Was that sword’s skin unique? You might be able to find out in sites like Guildhead, etc..

The forum currently shows the account display name and user e-mail on every page.

If we happen to be browsing the forum in a public place, on our laptop, it’s very easy for someone to look over our shoulder and immediately get those two pieces of information, which can then be used to make log-in attempts or to try to cross-reference data hacked from other websites.

I have to wonder what was going through the mind of your forum developers when they decided to put that there.

The only thing that should appear on the forum pages is your display name, and even that should probably omit the 4-digit code at the end, for security reasons. The full information should only appear on each user’s account management page.