Guild Wars 2

Rarespawn.6028:

I bet I could make your character look good.

And I bet you could say it “looks good to you” even if you don’t think so, just to win that bet.

Ultimately, the issue isn’t taste. The issue is that I paid 30g for a piece of armour that I wanted to dye green, I bought the correct green dye, applied it, and got purple. In fact, I get purple no matter what dye I apply (the only exceptions are grey and black, which don’t trigger the purple tint).

Rarespawn.6028:

I’m not sure what you mean by the leaves turning purple when you dye them green.

I mean that if you dye the leaves green they turn purple. I’m not sure how much clearer I can be.

Also, the boots (despite having been made specifically for sylvari characters) clip through the feet and legs as shown above, and apparently inherit the colour of the character’s face, instead of blending into the colour of the character’s feet or respecting the armour dyes that players pick (if I wanted to make them green, I would dye them green; if my character’s legs are brown – or red, for that matter – and I pick brown as my armour dyes, I expect my choice of dyes to be respected and reflected on my character’s model).

Makes you wonder if the people who designed this armour a) ever actually looked at it and b) understand the concept of dyes.

And I have to wonder, other than “fanboyism”, what can possibly make you defend these errors.

Rarespawn.6028:

I’ll post pictures of my sylvari when I get home

I am not even remotely interested in screenshots of your character, nor do I see their relevance to this topic. This is the bug report forum and my post is a pretty straightforward bug report, meant to inform the developers so they can fix the issues.

Rarespawn.6028:

Mine actually looks really cool….I just use dye that matches the skin colors

Like I wrote above, my character is brown, green and orange, and the leaves turn purple when I dye them green.

“Using dye that matches the skin colors” isn’t really a solution when the colour you actually get is completely different from the dye you used (and bears no resemblance to the colours you picked for your character, either).

Rarespawn.6028:

You could always use a makeover kit if the color bugs you that much.

The solution to a badly designed game is not to spend more money on that game, it’s the opposite.

Rarespawn.6028:

The idea is that sylvari ‘grow’ their armor.

And apparently they manage to grow it over their pants, and with a colour different from their legs. Not very logical and quite ugly, IMO.

In fact, it’s worse than that. I just spent 30g on the tier-3 coat and whenever I dye it green, half the leaves become purple. There is no purple on my character or on any of the other dye slots. There was no purple in the preview, either (it always previewed as grey and black, regardless of which dyes I had on my current armour). My character is brown, green and orange, and the purple leaves look hideous.

And, obviously, there is no way to return it. So thanks for making me waste 30g, whoever defined the dye channels on this…

No wonder so few people wear cultural Sylvari armour. Between clipping bugs and misbehaving dyes, it’s hard to make them look bearable, let alone good.

Have the people posting here not realised that your underwater skill bar is independent from your land skill bar?

You need to go underwater and (while out of combat) and actually equip your skill (in this case, Whirlpool).

Bau Bau.7389:

The only issue I have is that on pc client I can see the animation while on mac client the animation of the whirlpool is not rendered

It fails on PCs too, sometimes (though it might fail more on Macs). Same for “bubble” shields in general (fire shield, magnetic shield, etc.) – quite frequently they don’t render, even though their effect is active and you can see the icon listed in your boons – and other spells such as the necromancer’s Plague (sometimes you just get a white circle around your character, the cloud doesn’t actually render). This rendering issue has been around since beta.

FuVirus.6398:

The title is more so to get peoples attention

And is completely undescriptive, therefore unlikely to attract the attention of the developers responsible for that specific piece of code.

FuVirus.6398:

I am not stupid i dont have a clone around that i did not see.

Maybe you’re not stupid, but some of the coders are. If you look in your minimap, you can often see icons for clones that aren’t visible in the game world. Sometimes you can also see their name floating in the 3D view, despite the fact that the clone itself (supposedly) isn’t there.

It seems that “dead” clones, despite not being rendered, hang around for a bit longer, and some parts of the game still see them.

I’m not saying this is necessarily what’s happening to you (the attacks could be bouncing off the crates, off the point itself, or something else), but just because you can’t see something that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t think it’s there.

It’s not just mesmers in PvP, anyway; elementalist lightning attacks in the dredge fractal, for example, frequently bounce all over the walls while completely ignoring the moles.

You can “fix” it by opening your hero panel and clicking the swap weapon button there. After that, the button in your action bar becomes unstuck, and the key will also work.

This is probably related to the bug that causes players to become stuck in certain animations (ex., sometimes you press F while running, the interaction fails, and your character is stuck running in that direction for 4 or 5 seconds – or you’re just frozen in place for almost a full minute, which happens a lot with some staff animations).

It seems like the animation system in GW2 has the ability to selectively disable parts of the interface, so if the animation system thinks the weapon swap animation hasn’t finished, it will disable the weapon swap button and key. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to disable the one in the hero panel, but it’s still very annoying if you’re in combat.

Yareon.2835:

About the green: it is intended that your character skin color is shown on silvary’s armor, do you have a green skin?

There is some green on the face / chest, but her legs are brown (as you can see on the hands and feet), so if that’s the idea it doesn’t really work very well (and would assume she wasn’t wearing any pants, anyway).

GW2’s handling of the mouse is very weird. For example, press the right mouse button (to go into camera look mode), and start moving the mouse slowly. The cursor moves 3 or 4 pixels before the camera actually starts moving.

Also, if you hold down the button and something “interrupts” the game (like a cutscene, certain events, etc.), the game thinks you’ve released the button even though you’re still pressing it. This means that, suddenly, you are no longer in camera look mode, can’t turn your character with the mouse, etc.. You have to release the button and press it again to make the game react.

In coding terms, GW2 seems to be trying to catch state changes in the mouse buttons (mouse events, onButtonDown / onButtonUp) instead of checking the actual state of the buttons (DeviceState / isButtonPressed). And sometimes it misses a state change or resets its internal status even though there was no state change.

Seems like a weird (very error-prone) way to monitor the state of controls in a game, especially when DirectInput can do most of the work and deliver reliable information about the mouse state.

praeclarus.6321:

It has everything to do with skipping

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/AC-isn-t-fixed/first#post936237

Did you read the thread you linked to? Several people there mention that the NPCs get stuck even when they kill everything in the dungeon.

The Sylvari T1 medium armor boots have some ugly clipping and colouring issues. See attached screenshot for more details.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The problem we are seeing a lot of that is causing this, is that people are skipping mobs and rushing through things, and it breaks their scripts when the players activate something while the NPC is stuck in combat.

Not sure what your definition of “skipping mobs” or “rushing through things” is, but I’ve seen both Detha and Hodgins bug in runs where we killed every single mob in the instance.

But anyway, where does it say that players can’t skip mobs (or bosses, or traps)? The event objective is “Go with Detha to the Hall of the Champions”, it’s not “kill every graveling and ooze in the catacombs”. The event should be triggered by Detha’s presence at the relevant map marker, regardless of the state of mobs which are unrelated to the event’s objectives.

shaktiboi.5194:

BTW if you want to stop groups from skipping trash mobs/encounters

I don’t think they do. In fact, considering the oozes will fight the gravelings & vice versa, I’m pretty sure that running through the former and pulling them into the latter is a strategy deliberately made possible by whoever designed the dungeon.

This “it’s because people are rushing” seems like some sort of excuse or attempt to blame players for what is clearly a bug in the game (specifically in the coding of these events). If the event is “Go with Detha to the Hall of Champions”, the next step should be triggered by Detha’s presence in the Hall of Champions (at the map marker), period.

Making mobs fight each other, running out of aggro range, using stealth to get past them unnoticed, portalling with a mesmer, etc., should all be perfectly valid strategies to accomplish the goal of the event.

Inee.5371:

are you mesmer or ranger?
in our group these two classes still dont have the achievement with over 200 fractals completed, so we assume that illusions/minions/pets trigger the achievement aswell.
we didnt wanted to test that theory further though…

I was actually on my mesmer when I got it, so I doubt that.

More likely, people got close enough to the lava to register as a hit. Remember that GW2 hitboxes are generally bigger than your character, unless you’re a maximum-size norn.

I frequently get hit by AoE even when my characters are clearly standing 2 or 3 steps away from it (ex., the troll stomp in AC). And I know Arena Net has been aware of this for months (I played with some developers and it happened to them), but apparently changing the AoE circles to match your race (or simply making all circles a bit bigger than the actual damage effect) is too complicated (or not possible) with the current game engine.

Although the lava doesn’t show AoE circles, it wouldn’t surprise me if it’s affected by the same issue.

Alk Trio Fan.6357:

Really isn’t. Literally just did it. Waves of mobs are a bit of a joke[…] it’s easily possible. With a group that included myself, a guildie that never runs dungeons, a friend that’s pretty casual, […] it’s definitely possible.

Have you considered the possibility that maybe that run wasn’t affected by the bug…?

Bartas.4908:

There was a time, about a week ago, when I made over 10g making only lvl 350 rare inscriptions and selling those for asking price. I used all my stacked mats that I knew I won’t need anymore.

So you “made” 10g… if you ignore the value of the materials.

Once you subtract the TP cut (15%), it’s rarely worth crafting anything to sell. It is, however, (generally) worth it to craft items that you need for yourself, since you can usually do it for about 10% less than the TP price.

Verone.1063:

For the people trying to get the staff – you need a guild, abomination and Eye can be done solo but Ooze cannot,

Yep, it can.

Lolindir.3518:

You can do also the champion ooze solo? :0

Any class with ground-targeted or player-based AoE can. In fact, the ooze is the easiest of the 3 champions, since you can do it without moving or taking any damage.

Verone.1063:

Mechanics for the Eye:

- At 40% the Eye heals itself to full hp if it can hit anything (probably on a fixed cd so you need a minimum amount of dps)
- At 25% the Eye gets a berserk buff increasing damage.

There’s nothing special at 40%. The eye will heal itself back to 100% whenever it decides that it can’t see or reach anyone.

At 50% and 25% it will say something (“How dare you attack me.” – with a full stop in the chat window, BTW, not a question mark – and some other line), and gain fury for a while. I don’t remember any berserk buff, but maybe that’s random (or maybe it’s like with the abomination, and depends on how many players are near and how much damage it’s taking).

I generally do this chain with my necro. I stand on a ledge to avoid being pulled by the adds and let the boss hit me with the beam and gas cloud (not hard to heal through). I leave auto-attack on the boss and use ground-targeted AoE / Life Transfer to kill the adds ASAP.

Zogyark.4597:

It exists, just no one has got it o.O

That’s pretty much the definition of not existing. You might say that there is a chance of getting it, but until someone gets it, it doesn’t exist.

In fact, I find it unlikely that there’s even a chance of getting it, for one reason: it doesn’t appear in the TP. And the TP lists almost everything, including items that are known to be unobtainable and / or impossible to trade (ex., some account bound and even soulbound ingredients, etc.). But Final Rest doesn’t appear there at all.

Of course, maybe it becomes soulbound or account bound as soon as you get it, and so (correctly) it doesn’t appear in the TP, but I doubt an item dropped from a world chest would bind on pick-up.

That absence from the TP listing, coupled with the fact that apparently no one has ever seen one in-game, makes me suspect that someone at Arena Net made a mistake when setting the item properties or adding it to the database, and the game isn’t actually seeing it.

The issue isn’t the infinite spawns, the issue is the timing between the waves. Normally they spawn about 40 seconds apart, but sometimes they start spawning every 15 seconds, which makes it virtually impossible. I’ve also seen them take over 2 minutes to spawn (i.e., 2 minutes between one wave and the next). So there’s clearly some bug (or excessive amount of RNG) in the timer of those waves.

cdunning.6815:

Dead, you bring up a good point. while it’s worth it to some (like myself), it’s not for you, and that’s ok. I wish there was a way to identify this difference before entering an instance as to avoid conflict.

Yeah, if only people could say something like “speed run” when asking for party members…

The bug introduced before Halloween still happens in SE path #1 about 30% of the times. Instead of spawning when they should (about 40 seconds apart), mob waves at the start often start spawning every 15 ~ 18 seconds, which is nowhere near enough to kill them, even with a group of fully geared level 80 characters (and this is a level 65 instance).

In less than a minute (i.e., in less than the time it takes to kill the first boss), the screen is basically full of enemy mobs, all casting AoE non-stop on the (extremely narrow) walkway.

Can’t pull the boss back because it leashes and resets, can’t fight on the walkway because you practically can’t see the ground due to all the mobs.

It’s been like that for over one month, and it’s getting to the point where it’s impossible to even find anyone to try doing that path, because of the high probability that it will bug.

This has been reported by me and other people, both in-game and in the forum, several times, and there has been no mention of or ETA for a fix.

This bug highlights a couple of problems with GW2:

1. Very incomplete patch notes (that don’t even mention some areas that were clearly changed) and poor testing of patches before deployment. No comments necessary, I think every player is painfully aware of this by now.

2. No CC protection or diminishing returns. What I mean by this is a basic feature that every other game has but GW2 seems to lack, which consists of granting players immunity from CC attacks (ex., immunity from knockdowns) for a duration just slightly longer than the knockdown effect itself, or reducing the duration of each new knockdown (until it’s effectively 0, after 2 or 3 knockdowns in a row). For example, in virtually every other game, if an enemy knocks you down for 3 seconds, you get immunity against knockdowns (or against all forms of CC) for 3.5 or 4 seconds. This guarantees that you don’t get chain-stunned, chain-feared, etc., and that you will always have at least 0.5 seconds to use some kind of defensive ability. GW2 seems to be lacking this, so players have to hope the RNG and each mob’s internal cooldowns are in a good mood that day, or they can lose control of their character for well over 10 seconds.

Shadowsong.1560:

I did Path 1 for the first time this week and found myself knocked down permanently by the first boss.

Assuming you mean Sure Shot Seamus, yes, his shots will knock players down every time. You need to dodge when he aims at you. He will then walk around a bit and then aim at another player (or at you again, if you’re unlucky).

Yes, the mail counter seems to be bugged. Although it only counts mails from players, some NPC mails will block the reception of new mail. I’ve had this issues too (was at 6/10 but could not get any new mail until I deleted some NPC messages).

It’s been like this for a long time (probably since beta). Apparently the code that calculates the displayed amount is different from the code that calculates the actual limit. Poor design.

sarovorn.8291:

Look on the bright side, its an easy way get out of ranged reflect damage from your auto-attack

Doesn’t really seem quicker than simply clicking somewhere empty (although it often still takes 2 shots to stop attacking, due to the weird implementation of attack queueing in GW2).

Anyway, I’d be all for having a different behaviour for the right and left mouse buttons:

Left – Turn camera only (keep character facing the same way).
Right – Turn character (and lose target if the character turns away).

In fact, this is how it works when you’re moving, but for some reason when you’re standing still both buttons behave the same way (i.e., like the left one), which means there’s no way to turn your character without moving (unless you use the keyboard to turn, instead of the mouse).

The horizontal-based FoV was an improvement for some people, a step backwards for others.

The physically correct FoV depends on how big the monitor is and how far people sit from it. Without a FoV adjustment slider, it will never be correct for everyone (or even for the majority of players). A physically incorrect FoV leads to nausea, headaches and eye fatigue. This is why virtually every 3D game made in the last 15 years has such a slider.

Not only that, but the GW2 camera target is extremely low (aimed at the waist of our character – or in fact aimed at a point in front of our character ), which means half the screen is wasted showing the ground behind us.

In addition to the FoV slider, the game needs a way to adjust the camera target’s height, so we can move our character closer to the bottom of the screen and maybe (finally!) be able to see things like trees, buildings, or even (god forbid!) the sky, which the developers spent so much time creating, and which we never get to see because rotating the camera up enough to see those things makes it impossible to see the ground and aim AoE skills.

I’m not sure if I’m more amazed by how bad the GW2 camera is compared even to games released over 15 years ago (ex., the original Tomb Raider) or by the fact that Arena Net doesn’t make this their #1 (or even, apparently, their #99) priority, considering how much it reduces the value of the game (both in visual and gameplay terms), and how it drives so many players away due to visual discomfort.

It also seems that several dungeons (ex., CM) were developed and playtested with a completely different camera, as some parts are nearly unplayable (especially with norn, charr and asura characters) due to the interaction between the camera code, the low ceiling and the “furniture”, but I guess that’s a separate issue.

But surely, preventing a few people from finishing the fractal 2 minutes faster (as was possible when you could AoE the seal) makes these bugs worthwhile, no?

/sarcasm

All characters (supposedly) use the same collision cylinder; your species shouldn’t have any influence on what you bump into (although it might have some influence over where the game thinks your feet are, compared to where you actually see them).

And Zojja is missing her helmet, although she has it on after the cutscene ends, and had it on before it began. Whoever “tested” the Asura story cutscenes seems to suffer from serious ADD.

If my character is attacking an enemy using auto-attack (ex., #1 skill set to auto-repeat) and I turn the camera to look behind me, or even just to the side, auto-attack stops and the red “out of range” indication appears under the action bar.

If I now press the attack key manually, the attack is cast and hits the target, but auto-repeat does not re-engage. The only way to re-enable it is to turn the camera back towards the target.

Note that the character is always facing the target, and the range never changed.

It seems that the code that handles auto-repeat and the range indicators is looking at the camera position and orientation, rather than the character’s position and orientation, as it should.

This bug occurs when using either the left mouse button or the right mouse button to rotate the camera (no difference).

This is probably related to the bug that causes auto-attack to not work when a target is near the range limit (perhaps the auto-attack code is checking the target’s distance to the camera, rather than to the character).

Kaizen.1704:

Empower a group so that Zerg mobs will be destroyed quickly even if you can’t see them you should be able to hit them, and they won’t be able to destroy you in 2 seconds.

Do you realise how little sense that makes? If you can’t see them, where do you know where they are? How are you supposed to select them or aim at them? How are you supposed to know if they have retaliation or projectile reflection on?

And if being in a party somehow makes you more powerful, how long do you think it will take until that “zerg” of 40 players simply forms 8 ad-hoc parties, and destroys your “empowered party” just as it does now?

The way to fix the issues caused by invisible models is to make the models visible. Improve the netcode, enable rendering fallbacks, keep better track of which client has been informed of what (and make sure a player isn’t damaged by things his client hasn’t even been informed of). It’s a technical issue; it should be fixed by technical improvements, not by changes to gameplay mechanics.

Some gameplay mechanics do need changes, but that’s a separate issue.

Visiroth.5914:

No, he’s suggesting that the maximum bandwidth of the server allocated to an individual client is nowhere near saturating his somewhat standard broadband connection.

Looks like you didn’t read what I wrote, or don’t understand the implications of “1%”.

What he said was the the problem would only be fixed “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and / or network bandwith upgrades”.

Then he said the game never uses more than 1% of his bandwidth (which seems a number pulled out of some anal cavity, but let’s ignore that for now and assume he actually measured it accurately, that the packets didn’t get chopped up and resequenced by some node along the way, that the bandwidth wasn’t averaged out over several seconds, etc.).

So, if the server is running at maximum capacity (and only buying extra hardware or a wider upstream pipe could increase its output) and if the current server output ceiling is 1% of his connection’s bandwidth, that means that even his residential connection would be able to handle at least 100 players as well as Arena Net’s servers currently do.

Since there are noticeable delays and culling problems even in battles with less than half that many players, that can only mean (if his statements are correct) that Arena Net’s servers have half the bandwidth of his residential connection (or less).

And that (along with the notion that the issue can be magically fixed “by the financial department”, that presumably refuses to do so due to greed) strikes me as a very silly theory, coming from someone who doesn’t have much (or any) experience in networking code development.

Fixeon.5076:

Red = Dead. Doesn’t matter what server they are.

I see you’re a pro strategist.

Centrix.4065:

Words like “invaders” are actual words, not names. So using these words in your guildname is not “stealing” or “impersonating” as you are suggesting. It’s like saying every guildname with the word “The” in it is copying other guildnames.

This has nothing to do with “copying other guild names”, nor did anyone suggest that it did. An no one (except you) said anything about “stealing”, either. If you want to contradict an argument, you might want to check that someone other than you actually presented that argument.

The issue here is using a different server’s name (prefixed by “Invaders”), in a context where that duplicates a standard WvW tag.

When a guild from Castle of Rock chooses the name “Papery Tower Invaders” knowing that that’s how the game labels players from the Papery Tower server in WvW, it’s pretty obvious that they’re doing it to try to appear (on first glance) as being from that server.

Just as someone naming themselves “Arena Net G M” would almost certainly be trying to appear as an Arena Net game master.

“Arena” and “Net” are also “just words”, but (for the reason above) they are not allowed in GW2. In a game that seems to rely so much on automated name filtering, it’s a bit surprising to see that guilds can name themselves after other servers, and even duplicate the standard tags displayed in WvW.

muylaetrix.2096:

can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ? […] Anet has never come close to 1 % of my downstream capacity (a modest 15mbit).

So what you are saying is that, if there are any delays in battles with less than 100 players (and there are), then Arena Net’s servers’ connection must have lower bandwidth than yours.

I have a feeling that’s not the case. And I have a feeling you don’t have much experience writing (semi-)real-time multi-client netcode or profiling the impact of data spikes on things like firewall CPU usage, etc..

In short, even a small increase in allowable bandwidth peaks can have a significant impact on performance and network choke (which can require resyncing, and so on), and there’s very little that the “financial department” can do to fix the WvW issues (other than maybe headhunting some programmers with more experience in the field – but it would probably take them a while to find their way around GW2’s current code, so that’s not a short-term solution, either).

It’s mainly a software (netcode / game architecture) issue. Throwing more hardware at it on Arena Net’s end wouldn’t magically fix things.

Gurpsmeister.9068:

The price is exactly the same as it was when the game launched. Ten US dollars for 800.

This.

I get the feeling that some people think that paying $60 for a game somehow entitles them to infinite updates and access to 100% of all extra content, forever, for free.

Surely you knew what you were buying when you bought the game, right? There were plenty of reviews saying how many character slots it included, how big the base inventory was, and so on. If you play enough to justify more, then surely spending $10 or $15 a month (which adds up to 30-50 cents a day) is a pretty good deal, as far as forms of entertainment are concerned.

A different issue is the pricing of some of the items. For example, I find that 250 gems (a little over $3) for a haircut is extremely high, and have no intention of ever buying one of those “kits” (how boring is that, by the way? Instead of a barber at each city, maybe with its own original hairstyles, etc., we waited 4 months and got a piece of recycled UI – so much for “putting the RPG in MMORPG”).

I think Arena Net has failed to grasp the concept of micro transactions, or to blend the gem economy properly into the game. The lack of (gem-based) vendors in cities is really hard to understand. It’s as if they didn’t know what their financial model was going to be while the game was being developed (and haven’t even managed to throw in some in the 4 months since launch).

If there were actual barbershops / salons at the major cities, where the NPC charged (for example) 15 gems for a haircut, 15 for colouring and 15 for a change to the beard / horns / accessories, people would be using it on an almost daily basis, trying out new looks to match their new armour, etc..

As it is, most people I know say they’ll just wait until they’re fed up with the way their character looks (if they ever do), and then get a single “full makeover kit” (only about $1 more) and keep that look for the following year or so.

But hey, the “gem economy” was born crooked in the first place (Mike O’Brien said before launch that players would be able to trade gems and gold directly with each other, but then Arena Net decided to become “the official gold seller” instead), so my hopes aren’t very high that they’ll suddenly figure it out. Should have spent more time studying Steam and the Mann Co. Store.

I bought all my gem shop items and slots with real money ($250 or so, including the game itself). Not going to spend another cent, though; the direction taken by the Lost Shores patch felt like a betrayal and makes me think that GW2 lacks a strong designer at the helm. Maybe the game’s original vision came from the guys who left to form Undead Labs, or maybe there was some internal reshuffling after launch that led to the current schizophrenic design. Either way, it’s going to take at least three months “on the right track” (hopefully starting with the Wintersday patch, and necessarily including the ability for players to trade gems directly with each other) to make me reach for the credit card again.

GregT.4702:

Pray For Kosmos.5849:

I’ve quit the game temporarily due to Ascended Gear.

No you haven’t. You’re still here

You do realise the game and the forum are different things, right? A lot of people who gave up on GW2 still come to the forums after each patch is released to see if the patch notes contain anything interesting.

Adine.2184:

Yep they can see who’s reping and who’s not .Personally i find this a better system than having to have 5 or 6 alts taking up slots that could otherwise be filled by other members. Think how much faster the 500 man roster would fill up if each person in a guild had all 8 classes in it.

If the limit was by character, obviously it could be higher, since no player would ever be logged in with two characters from the same account at the same time. In fact, there’s no reason why the guilds could not have a limit to the number of players while still displaying only the character names, and not the full account information. It’s trivial to code.

Only “mutual friends” (people who are on your friends list and who have you on their friends list) should be able to see each other’s account details and the names of all characters. The current system is stalker / hacker heaven.

swordfish.7089:

Anyway to prevent that sort of tracking?

It’s not just guilds. In case you haven’t noticed, you can track any player (and any player can track you) simply by adding that player to your “friends” list. That tells you their full account id (which is also their name here in the forum), informs you of when they’re online, tells you which server they’re on and which area of the world they’re at, and shows you the name of their characters – all without requiring any sort of authorisation on their part.

And then Arena Net is surprised at how easily hackers manage to match characters to real people and figure out where to look for passwords, etc..

This was mentioned again and again by testers during the beta period, but I guess whoever handles GW2’s privacy and security follows the Facebook school of software design.

muylaetrix.2096:

can most part of the question “when will the culling be fixed” be answered with “when the financial department agrees with server hardware and/ or network bandwith upgrades” ?

Unless they can also upgrade the hardware and ISP connection of every player, as well as the hardware and bandwidth of every node between every player and the game server, no.

It can never be 100% “fixed” because there’s always the possibility that the amount of data generated by a large battle will exceed the bandwidth and processing available to the server and / or some of the clients and / or some of the intermediate nodes.

But it can be improved and made “fairer” by changing a few things (see my post above this one).

Habib Loew.6239:

We currently use server-side report culling to limit the number of characters that any given game client is aware of.

Assuming the server keeps track of which entities it has reported to each client (does it?), couldn’t it simply make the client immune to damage from entities that haven’t been communicated to the client yet?

This isn’t a perfect fix (there really isn’t one, since data spikes can always occur), but would at least make things a bit fairer and reduce the “trampled by a herd of invisible enemies” syndrome.

Habib Loew.6239:

There are also some client-side issues which have contributed to the perception of how our culling system works. Once a character is reported to a given client there’s a non-zero amount of time required to load and initially display the assets associated with that character.

I had a feeling that was the case (and mentioned it in a couple of long threads about the issue).

But why not simply render those players with a default model (which is always cached, loaded as soon as players go into WvW – or even as soon as they start the game) until the full “correct” model is available? Seems like a pretty obvious situation to apply rendering fallback, no? I know this could lead to a bit of model popping, but surely that’s preferable to models popping out of nowhere long after they should have been visible (and long after they’ve been affecting the battle).

On a related note, GW2’s engine seems to have pretty bad aset(*) caching . Often I teleport between two waypoints (within the same city, even), and have to sit through a 20-second loading screen each time (I run the game on a 700MB/s array – I can only imagine if it was running on a normal HDD). All while 85% of my system’s memory remains unused. Same thing when I switch between two characters who happen to be at exactly the same location (ex., both in the LA bank). Surely 99% of the assets required to render the scene with the 2nd character were already loaded, and are being reloaded unnecessarily.

Are the fixes you describe also designed to address this, or likely to improve it?

(*) Had to write it with a single “s” otherwise it gets replaced with “kitten”.

Habib Loew.6239:

Oozo.7856:

How should we classify people who are using teleport/flying hacks?

For now you can mark them as “Scamming”. Our security folks assure me they’ll see the report regardless of how it’s mark.

There’s no place in the report to write any comments. All we can do is select one of the reasons and click “report”. So how can they know, when they receive a report for “scamming”, what they should look into (player behaviour, recent transactions, recent chat, etc.)? Seems very inefficient, and would easily be solved by letting players include a short description when they submit a report.

Meadfreek.6789:

The color code tells you who is an enemy well before you read their guild tag.

Looks like you need to read the post again. Namely the part that says: “As a player from the server being ‘mimicked’, I don’t have any trouble distinguishing them from our real players (different colour, no character name, etc.).”

Meadfreek.6789:

If it’s red it’s dead….problem solved.

Believe it or not, some people actually pay attention to who is attacking what, and coordinate their attacks to take advantage of the fighting between the other two servers.

And it kinda pays off.

Livocu.7214:

its a 2 or 3sec debuff (don’t know the exact duration)
that applies when you reveal yourself. You cant go to stealth after, just lookt at your
Buff/Debuff bar

So now we’re supposed to stare at our action bar instead of looking at the actual game?

Surely, if they don’t want people to be able to cast stealth skills shortly after decloaking (which kind of defeats the point of having a “stealth attack” on skill #1 in the first place, but nevermind), they could simply add a cooldown to the actual ability (i.e., to Cloak and Dagger – make it impossible to cast during that period).

It doesn’t make any sense to still let players cast Cloak and Dagger but not have it trigger its main effect (which is to stealth the player and trigger the stealth attack on the next use of the #1 skill).

Sky.2154:

I can definitely confirm on that first bullet point for Mesmer… though I was noticing it happening before the Lost Shores, just less pronounced.

When you still get tracked / shot for half a second or so (which already happened before the patch, sometimes), I guess that is attributable to lag. Even if your latency is under 100 ms, some actions require multiple packets travelling back and forth between client and server, so it’s conceivable that something will appear to be delayed by 2 or 3 times your ping.

But now (after the patch) I am frequently tracked and hit by mobs for practically the entire duration of the stealth (easily for 2 seconds or more, when some stealth skills last 3).

MokahTGS.7850:

Couldn’t this be solved with changing how resource nodes are spawned? Nodes should never spawn in the same place, they should just be scattered around the area randomly.

The server still needs to inform the client about where the nodes are (so the client can render them, show them on the mini-map, etc.), so that wouldn’t make any difference to any bot with decent pathfinding.

The really interesting part about these bots isn’t that they’re gathering resources, it’s the fact that they are teleporting. Because, if bots can do that, so can players with a hacked client. And that has some obvious implications for WvW and PvP.

Proper server design should make this (teleportation, speed hacking, etc.) impossible to begin with.

Esrever.8613:

Velocity.4950:

well please explain to me why a gold bar cost less than a gold?

why toilet paper cost less than an thousand dollar bill?

Are you saying it’s possible to make dollar bills from toilet paper? Hm… if anyone calls for me, I’ll be in the toilet… getting rich!

CassieGold.7460:

Most fun I ever had in Orr was taking a group down to Malchor’s Leap to do every event in the zone.

I would be happy to find one event there which isn’t stuck, on my server.

I actually like the look of Malchor’s Leap, and I think some areas have great atmosphere (like the part of the ocean when you dive and everything goes black, you can’t even tell which side is up). But there are usually 2 or 3 players in the whole area, practically every event is stuck with some unresponsive NPCs or bugged progress bars, and every mob respawns 10 seconds after you kill it, so there is absolutely no sense of accomplishment.

Velocity.4950:

well please explain to me why a gold bar cost less than a gold?

Because it’s a very, very tiny bar, obviously. Or a huge coin.

Celle.2716:

Fuz.5621:

Meanwhile, on the volcano fractal:
Grawl teleport bug on prisoners is STILL here.

It´s not a bug. You have to be quick, thats all.

It is a bug. About 25% of the times, one of the grawl shamans will spawn right on top of one of the prisoners and instantly kill it, right at the start of the encounter. Unless you think players are supposed to kill the shamans in a single frame, this is a bug.

Fuz.5621:

Grawl teleport bug on prisoners is STILL here.
But hey, keep fixing ONLY the bugs that can advantage the player and leave there the ones who annoy and slow us down.

It’s like the fact that players can’t knock mobs off ledges but mobs can do it to players. Or the way some of them magically reset back to 100% or become invulnerable if they think the fight isn’t going their way.

It seems that some of the designers’ #1 priority is protecting the AI’s right to have fun (at the expense of the players, if necessary).

BroScientist.9875:

“Guild leaders are able to demote other players of the same rank.”

Why is this in the patch notes?

So now if I’m the sole guild leader and I want to upgrade my best man to my same rank, there’s a chance he may turn and demote me, effectively stealing my guild from under me? I don’t understand why they changed this.

Because previously, once someone was promoted to the highest rank, there was no way at all to demote them.

If your “best man” decides to “steal your guild from under you”, you have very poor judgement and probably shouldn’t be a guild leader in the first place.

Besides, If you’re that worried about that possibility, simply don’t promote them to guild leader…?

Zatria.5783:

Also, people get really tired of of companies failing to implement a “lesson learned” policy. It becomes fairly obvious that everything learned from the final stages GW 1, was not remembered or used appropriately during the makings of GW 2.

Forget GW(1). Some of the design bugs that affected Lost Shores were exactly the same that had affected the Halloween event.

Arena Net seems to have very poor internal communication (not just between teams working on different content, but also between the QA department and the developers, and between the people who write their blog posts and manifestos and the people actually designing the game, who often do exactly the opposite).

ocelost.4321:

Side note for any beginning or aspiring coders in the forum: This is exactly why you include all fundamental changes in your release notes. It helps you find your mistakes faster, and perhaps more importantly, avoids having your users hate their experience with your software.

This.

Within 3 hours of the patch’s release I had found several significant changes not mentioned in the notes. Maybe they think that by not mentioning the fix they can pretend the bug was never there in the first place?

Xolo.3580:

How about you implement a CAPTCHA when mining, this should fix the bot problem :p
If it works well, you can implement it on looting anywhere

That might have worked in 2002 (but, even then, at the cost of annoying 99% of players, so it would still be a huge mistake). These days, automated CAPTCHA solvers have a higher success rate than humans. The only way Arena Net would be able to stay ahead of that game would be to completely change the CAPTCHA format every week (so that the solver coders were kept playing catch-up).

Anyway, detecting teleporting bots should be trivial (as should detecting teleporting players, which is also a hack and a bannable offense).

In fact, it’s weird that the server allows this at all, and it suggests the same method could be used to cheat in PvP and WvW (if a bot can teleport, so can a real player). Server-side code should never trust the data coming from the client; it should always enforce things such as movement speed limits, etc., regardless of what the client tells it.

I actually wrote an article about this before the game’s launch, saying that the lack of plug-in support in GW2 could indicate that the engine had not been coded with security in mind (proper support for plug-ins forces the game’s engine to be designed in a way that prevents abuse of the plug-in system, leading to a more robust structure, overall), and wondering what that would mean terms of future cheats.

If indeed these bots are teleporting at will, you can be sure that some players are using the same trick to teleport themselves around in WvW.