Guild Wars 2

Props to Tarnished Coast Field Medics and what looked like a couple PuGs for trolling the ever loving bejesus out of me at Golanta earlier today, I think around 1-2pm EST. You guys have got your CC chains down pat. Oh my god I was so mad lol… you were holding that camp with like 5 people.

Unfortunately, it’s part of the reason why you’ve been getting hammered in EB today. I tagged up and went a little berserk after that :P

Welp I’m getting ready for reset so the match is over for me. Mad props to TC for the huge push, we are going to have our hands full tonight and next week for sure. You guys have got me working around the clock; I hope I can keep up!

Hickeroar.9734:

LOL! One of my guildmates got chased by a whole hoard of KN on brooms earlier. They just lapped him and didn’t even do anything to him for a while. Quite hilarious. IIRC it was at Speld.

Haha yeah I was with them on the vista hill by Anz. We were trebbing your keep and then you guys golem rushed us. I think we’re safe, but now even I must sleep!

GREAT match guys, I haven’t had this much fun in WvW since… well, ever. FA and TC are my foe-bros.

Furienify.5738:

Arkanfel.8403:

Whitebeard.5172:

Now I realize that you want a head on battle 24/7/365 but trust me, PINK is playing chess and your playing checkers.

I giggled.

PINK wasn’t running because they were “playing chess,” PINK was running because we wiped them so many times they wouldn’t fight us anymore.

Never took Cryptic Omen to be the trakittenalking type after fairly good-natured posts in the past.

The chess-and-checkers comparison rankled me. I’m not bashing PINK for running (why wouldn’t you? I’ve done it plenty), I’m just disputing the notion that it was part of some grand strategy. Yes, TC was doing VERY well on points last night—and I expect they will do the same tonight— but that wasn’t just because they were running from a CO zerg on one BL.

Whitebeard.5172:

Arkanfel.8403:

Whitebeard.5172:

Now I realize that you want a head on battle 24/7/365 but trust me, PINK is playing chess and your playing checkers.

I giggled.

PINK wasn’t running because they were “playing chess,” PINK was running because we wiped them so many times they wouldn’t fight us anymore.

Checkmate.

King me. :P

Whitebeard.5172:

Now I realize that you want a head on battle 24/7/365 but trust me, PINK is playing chess and your playing checkers.

I giggled.

PINK wasn’t running because they were “playing chess,” PINK was running because we wiped them so many times they wouldn’t fight us anymore.

Squibbles.8724:

My question is, what’s KN doing? Like…I KNOW that there’s no KN/TC alliance or anything of the sort, but TC’s creeping up on them in points and FA’s still getting hammered really hard by KN. Whenever I’m in EB/BL it feels like we’re madly dashing from defending against KN and TC one after another, several times even them hitting Durios and Bravost simultaneously….Our kitten is paper, so I understand it’s easier to take, but kitten Meanwhile, Anz, arguably the most vulnerable tower in EB, has been fully upgraded all day. Is KN just that confident in their SEA guilds to pull away in the mornings?

KN auxiliary commander here, I think I can sort of answer this. I was commanding yesterday and took Durios on a whim even though my main intention was to cave in TC’s skull. I can’t speak for every time this happens, but in my case I was doing it to keep the zerg active and interested in what was going on. Flipping supply camps and NPCs gets boring after a while, and TC had scouts everywhere—their whole zerg (which was much larger than ours or yours) was on me within 60 seconds of attacking any tower on the map. There were a lot of occasions during daytime and early evening NA yesterday where we simply did not have the numbers to face TC, but we could still take points from you guys. With TC creeping up on our score, we need points wherever we can get them.

Another thing (and I’m just speaking for myself here) is simple spite. FA gave me all kinds of hell in the third floor of SMC inner, so when I was more than happy to pay them back in similar coin when we had the numbers to get something rolling. Deep down I knew we should probably be hitting TC instead, but I’m generally a reluctant commander and FA made me keep my tag up for like 90 minutes lol

etrigan.4213:

Had a lot of fun in EB last night.

Got into some huge open field battles with both Kain and Tkittenerally right in a row.

The skill lag was impressive, I’m talking inner SMC type skill lag in an open field battle…oy vey!

Then we golem rushed Kain’s keep which was a huge failure, but fun regardless. We had so many people in golems that we had waypointed back, that we didn’t have enough to fight in the middle of the keep. We should have just left the golems and went into the lords room to fight. :P

haha I was there for some of that. I came in with the zerg that sortied you guys and put the golems in retreat. Most of them were killed, but like 3 pilots bailed on that hill in front of the SMC wall. I think you guys had like 8 golems!

Magiofdeath.2745:

That green keep in the middle of all blue objectives on EB is an eyesore!

Oh man… between about 8-11pm EST we (Kaineng) were on the ropes in EB. Command passed to me when Jang Gun logged, and WM followed him out since they’d all been on for hours by that point. I was herding cats for about an hour and then FA starts pushing SM inner… we managed to take out their rams with cannons, but all of a sudden they break off and my scout tells me that FA and TC are fighting inside SMC courtyard. “Sweet,” I think, "this will give us some time to shore up our defenses and gather up… "

NOPE. NOPE! FA wiped them immediately and was at the barely repaired (it was about 15%) gate with five friggin golems in the time it took me to turn around. I tell my troops it was nice knowing them, and prepare to fight to the death in the lord room.

Then the most amazing thing happened: we won. We lost everything in our corner (except one tower… Aldon’s?) in the time it took to repel the attacks, but considering how few people we had I was surprisingly okay with it. A few minutes after that TL showed up and I de-tagged to give them my handful of pugs. Last night was pretty wild on EB, I must say. I took over again after TL left, but by that point there weren’t any more serious pushes on SMC and we were able to range a bit. Good times.

Clocking out of a 17 hour shift. Today was a wild day. Between at least 10am-2pm EST (I stopped keeping track), all three teams at one held a 100 PPT lead over the nearest contender at one point or another. Great fights, keep it up! I think this is the best match I’ve played since release. I look forward to meeting you guys on the battlefield in ~6 hours!

I posted this in last month’s thread, but it’s still an issue: HoM heavy chestpiece displays salmon trim no matter what dye you apply.

Owyn.1382:

The HOM Heavy Armor Chestpiece graphic is having an issue on my Charr character. You can see in the screenshot, I do not have any portion of it dyed Red and there are some markings from the portion dyed Gold that are showing up on the front.

I am having this problem as well. The color is salmon. Since I had written up something on it already I’ll go ahead and post it.

Race: Charr
Sex: (affects both)
Class: Warrior and Guardian
Affected gear is the Heritage heavy chestplate.

Since last night Heritage heavy armor has been displaying with partial salmon trim on the chestpice. As you can see, it affects the armband on the left and the front and collar of the Heritage chestplate. Dye changes to the chestplate trim only affects the bottom section that goes around the waist.

I only had one other set of armor to test (I really like how Heritage looks on my character and generally just re-skin crafted sets), and it seems that this issue is not present on other armors, or at least not that one.

Okay, I’ll look into that, thanks. I wasn’t sure if it was the card itself or what GW2 might be demanding of it; I thought to post it here in part because it hasn’t happened with any other game and google searches have not provided results so far.

I recently upgraded my graphics card rather profoundly, and it is causing a problem I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I’m running an nVidia 660 GTS, and its great except for this one problem.

The game performs fine except that every once in a while, both of my monitors go black. My main monitor displays the “No Signal” notification while this is happening, but my alternate just flickers black and sometimes stays that way. Usually I get the signal back and am playing again within 5 or 6 seconds, but sometimes the game hangs when the signal comes back and I have to kill it in task manager.

Normally I would be inclined to think this was a heat/power problem, but my temps aren’t particularly high when it happens, and I play a few other pretty demanding games and it never happens while I’m playing them. Sometimes I go hours without it happening, and sometimes it happens shortly after I start playing. It is relatively uncommon (I don’t think I’ve had a session yet where it has happened more than twice, and I sometimes play 5-6 hours at a time) but supremely annoying, especially in WvW.

I might try unplugging my other monitor but even if it works I don’t know if that’s really an acceptable solution since my ancient 8800 GTS never had this problem and has like 1/4 the memory of this card. Frustratingly enough, I haven’t seen Guild Wars fixes in the last few batches of nVidia drivers, so I’m wondering if I’m just lucky enough to be the only one with this problem. Any ideas? I’ve attached my dxdiag.

Please disregard my posts. I’ve now waited long enough for a rollback that I could have probably replaced most of my lost items on my own simply by playing the game. I have updated my ticket requesting that my rollback be canceled. I’d rather play now than wait X more days.

I don’t know if this was standard procedure or I just feel through the cracks, but I’m pretty dismayed with having to wait 5 days for a rollback. I get the feeling you guys are overwhelmed or understaffed, and you have my sympathy for that :/

Thank you for your time, and good luck fighting off the hacker scum!

January or February would be my guess. Apparently they’re adding WvW content in Feb, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens by then at the latest.

Mako Scarlet I’ll give a solid 7.5. There’s a few different ways I can think of to pronounce “Mako” (especially in a fantasy setting) and it flows well with her surname. “Scarlet” sounds more like a first name to me but it still works.

My two hoomanz are Nadia Roark (female ele) and Hugo Stavinger (male ranger).

I’ve been waiting on a rollback since Tuesday night. I guess I got lucky and didn’t get server transferred though. Although thinking about it I’m not sure it would matter if I had, since I haven’t played in 5 days anyway, on account of the rollback negating my progress. By now I heavily doubt that I’d even have my rollback yet by the time the 7-day lock would have expired.

Morguennes.3081:

Arkanfel…

I was thankful that the culprit did not use my credit card info. I immediately deleted the information as soon as I was able to log in. So, it it good to know there are additional measures for individuals who do this.

However, I did buy gems and converted them for gold and all was lost, as well as, the armor I made with my gold. I would be very disheartened if I was not able to get those things back considering the ‘real’ money I used to obtain those items and extra gold I had on each of my characters.

I feel ya. I dropped $70 in the gem store to re-gear my guardian when I regained access. A couple days later (natch) they announced account rollbacks. I asked for one, and have now been sitting on my hands for going on five days.

What really makes me angry about this is I got great support when it came to getting my access restored, but now I’ve been left hanging at a crucial point in the process. I can login to my account, but that doesn’t really do me any good if I have an account restore request in the pipeline and any progress I make will be wiped. They’ve already done the research and verified that my account was hacked, but I haven’t heard anything new since Wednesday night. All someone needs to do is look at my ticket and press a freaking button. I understand that ANet probably has a lot on their plate, but it shouldn’t be taking this long to get around to something that will probably only take a few minutes/seconds.

If you ask me, they need to make rollbacks part of the account restoration process. I can’t figure out what sense it makes to say “yeah we’ll give you your account back, but I hope you don’t mind not using it for a week.” If it weren’t for me having lost six divinity runes on my ele, I’d update my ticket and say “you know what? Just forget it.”

For anyone reading this that might be curious:

I could be wrong, but I don’t think the hackers are in the habit of using your credit card info at the gem store. This would constitute bank fraud and would (presumably) make them easier to find and prosecute. I doubt the justice system cares too much about hacked GW2 accounts, but they’ll likely throw down if there’s real money involved. I lost access to my account for ~14 hours last week, but they didn’t spend a red cent in the gem store. I was actually kind of surprised they didn’t just empty my bank account, but I’m sure they have their reasons.

sunflowers.4389:

Thank you for your replies. I just saw the forum post by Gaile right after I hit my “add post” button.

Does anyone know what [Area] I should put my support ticket under?

I didn’t see a specific designation for Account Restores when I submitted my ticket Tuesday night. I think I just put it under whatever the general account issues category is called. I’d check, but I can’t remember which of my 90000001 passwords this week is set up for my support account.

Brizlyn.8945:

ePeen

I’m going to guess that you either massaged those numbers/examples a bit, or are mostly fighting bad or <80 thieves.

Also, not everyone is an axe warrior. Thought I’d throw that out there.

Yeah I’ve seen a few but the wide majority of Charr I’ve encountered have been male. I didn’t really notice until a guildie said something about it on TS though.

Katz.5143:

They have the account restoration now if you meet the guidelines. Put in a support ticket for help.

Put in a ticket, grab your copy of War and Peace, and settle in. ;p

I’m quickly losing my patience with this. I understand that research and verification are necessary, but my ticket was merged with the original hack support request (as I mentioned) and the response I got from the GM seemed to indicate that said research and verification had already been carried out. He double-checked with me that this was something I really wanted to do (which I appreciate) but that was three days ago.

I’m not sure ANet realizes that for many hacked players, having access back doesn’t do us any good if any progress we make in the days following restoration needs to be wiped for a rollback. I have a sneaking suspicion that account rollbacks are de-prioritized compared to account restorations, and this is bad policy for a number of reasons—not the least of which being that I am a regular gem buyer and have had no reason to play let alone purchase them for three days now.

electricblues.1059:

Also, this game was NOT, i repeat, N O T designed to be balanced on a 1v1 basis. A thief should be able to kill you alone. We’re assassins, that’s what we do. Though I will admit the healing in stealth trait is a bit op, it’s only cause the rest of our self heals are pathetically underpowered.

Well I don’t know about the others, but that’s not really my issue with the thief. It’s not the 1v1 killing that is a problem (on my ele, for example, I often die to warriors 1v1 as well but I don’t really have any complaints with them on account), rather it’s their ability to initiate combat as they please and retreat if they are defeated. Every other class suffers immediate consequences for biting off more than they can chew. Most stealth classes—not just in GW but any MMO—don’t have to worry about this. Their damage and 1v1 power is fine, in my opinion. What irritates me from a balance standpoint the absurd risk:reward ratio presented to virtually any stealth class imaginable. I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I said to myself “you know, the cloaking is really well balanced in this game.” I’m starting to doubt it’s feasible.

Well don’t get me wrong, “Bahamut” sounds pretty awesome, I just feel like I’ve heard it everywhere.

He looks pretty neat to me. I like how male Charr tend to to have canine faces whereas females have more of a feline look. I think they’re one of the best/coolest fantasy races I’ve seen in a long time!

I’ve got three Charr characters, although I don’t use my Warrior very often and my Engy has barely been touched. My Guardian is one of my mains (I probably spend about 90% of my game-time on either her or my ele) and she’s already probably one of my top three favorite characters I’ve designed for any MMO.

Apparently Sarabi is something of a rarity: I don’t think I’ve ever seen another female Charr guardian. I don’t know if people just don’t like rolling female charr or what, but I think mine is great. As anyone who recognizes the name can probably guess, she looks basically like a lioness. I don’t like most of the Charr armor skins very much, but luckily I have the heritage set, which looks pretty kitten in abyss dye with skirted leggings (currently the crafted exotic skin, but I had one earlier that I liked even better).

Stopped reading three sentences in. Please reread my posts. I’m not saying that all thieves only want to troll, what I’m saying is that trolling is a core component of MP gameplay and stealth classes usually make it too easy.

Respawn.6802:

Official response on how to counter thieves? More of an official indication of their lack of time in-game.

For me to counter thieves I thought about what exactly am I countering. It isn’t the class mechanics or culling, it’s trolling. Somewhat in the vein of Arkanfel’s post. I am countering a bad players desire to ruin my fun, to feel powerful and skilled using a broken build.

Intially I had Alt+F4 to deny this sort of person some of their motivation. That is no longer an option.

Now I move to option 2 – /sit.
If the player behind the thief shows any indication of the classic troll thief (found in many MMO’s who repeatedly make the same mistake in class builds) I won’t waste my time, I will /sit, die quickly and WP back into game to continue an honest fight.

The player behind the thief will get their badge and hopefully a piece of vendor trash but will not get a second of satisfaction or validation that they are an elite pvp’er.

This is only the action of one player but my time in EVE Online has shown that the customer can choose their gameplay style against the indifference of developers and force change.

Maybe one day the developers will have to choose between the tears of troll thieves who can’t get any fights outside of a zerg or the “civil disobedience” of the rest of the playerbase.

I’ll still alt-f4. I never did it to deprive other players of badges or loot (in fact I didn’t even know this was happening until the recent fix), for me it’s about skipping that particular fight and getting back into the match. It’s faster for me to re-log and WP back in than it is to /sit and die. They can have their badges, I just don’t see the point in actually fighting them in any 1v1 or most yak escort situations. Usually I’ll give it a shot once to see if they happen to be bad enough to die, but most of them aren’t unless they’re under 80 (I’m mostly a WvWer).

That said, devs know by now (and us players should too) that it is simply good business to design a broken burst DPS stealth character at launch. More people will buy the game if they think they can troll with it, and some of them may even move on to other classes as the game ages. So in the sense that it likely boosts sales and participation, I don’t mind so much. When you get right down to it, it’s not really the devs’ fault, it’s the playerbase’s. It only makes sense to give the playerbase what it wants, and in my experience, trolling is generally a stronger motivator than sportsmanship or challenge regardless of player class.

Bahamut.7029:

gthnk.5218:

Cthule Bloodmane, Iron Legion Engineer
Pronounced, Kah-th-oo-lah

Cthule … sounds dark and evil i leik it 8/10
9/10 if you have a red mane ingame :P

my turn
Bahamut Othman Warrior of blood legion
Gigantic charr ,Dark sand fur, Red mane “hair” awesome Horns. \m/

Eh I hate to be harsh but I’m not feeling that one. “Bahamut” is trite and uninspired, and does not flow well with “Othman.” Say it out loud and you should be able to see what I mean.

I do, however like that you’ve discarded the “traditional” Charr surname practice. I imagine that as the Charr population grows, they will have a harder time coming up with sufficient and unique surnames. There are only so many combinations you can make with words commonly used in Charr surnames, and I have the feeling that in a century or two Charr would have way too many common ones.

Along these lines, I’ve named my Charr similarly. My main (Blood Legion Guardian) is ‘Sarabi Aminata’ and my Charr alt (Iron Legion Warrior) is ‘Ogan Sûn.’ I still haven’t decided on a backstory reason for this. Perhaps it is simply an administrative distinction, or perhaps they’re trying to form their own clans? I dunno. But it’s fun to think about :P

I’m going to guess you need to file a ticket for this.

Elthuzar.9478:

I would quite happily trade my stealth in for increased survivability, burning, confusion, blowouts, knockdowns, water fields, 1200 range and AoE.

Then roll ele.

Seriously though, just because you can be beaten by a d/d ele doesn’t mean thief isn’t broken. D/D eles also deal insane damage if executed properly, and are also soft targets… but they can’t go invisible.

EDIT: I completely agree with this:

The perfect Thief profession for me wouldn’t use stealth, venoms or traps. Instead of stealth I would have rather just have each of my weapon abilities have a different skill related to whether i attack from the front or from the flank (Similar to how backstab works, but without the stealth).

When I was leveling my ranger, I liked a lot of what I saw from his sword/dagger weapon set. While not especially damaging, it incorporated a lot of dodging and lunging. At one point I pointed at my character and said to my brother: “THIS is what thief classes ought to look like in MMOs.”

I used to play a lot of Werewolf: The Apocalypse in high school (I’m a killer with the ladies) and one of their classes had a gift called “Blur of the Milky Eye.” It didn’t make its user invisible per se, but it made perception rolls against him a bit more difficult. I would like to see more of that kind of thing in MMOs, as opposed to LOLOLOL I INVIS NAO

Rant incoming!

About ten years ago I started doing volunteer moderation/GM work for a small, text-based webgame. The guy who ran the site didn’t expect it to become as popular as it did (the site went viral in late 2002) so there were no mod tools at first. The game was entirely unmoderated for months. It launched in November 2002 (we just turned 10) and I was one of the first mods on staff sometime in March or April 2003.

One of the first things I noticed when I started doing GM work was that many people played the game seemingly only to make others upset. I was still young and hadn’t yet realized how much enjoyment people derived from making random strangers on the internet angry. Over the subsequent years, as multiplayer gaming took off, I started to see this tendency materialize in other games. Arena-style multiplayer shooters serve almost no other purpose: kill people until they rage quit or go to sleep. The games themselves are fun enough on their own, but for lots of gamers, the possibility of witnessing or causing anonymous anger eventually becomes impossible to resist. Single-player campaigns in modern shooters exist almost as afterthoughts; in my experience, few pay much attention to them. People don’t want to fight AI anymore, they want to fight other people and not just because people are “smarter” or “better opponents.” I don’t play shooters very much anymore, but when I did I often found myself questioning that line of reasoning. I’ve seen human players do some incredibly stupid things.

How does this relate to MMOs, you ask? Activated stealth. As near as I can tell, stealth classes tend to be among the more popular selections for PvP in just about every game in the genre. Being able to engage enemies at will—and successfully run away 99% of the time if you can’t win—is the single best strategic advantage I can think of in most PvP situations, and its users know that it has a high frequency of degrading their opponent’s gameplay experience. Activated stealth also makes strategy for your class much easier, and marginalizes your class’ shortcomings to a degree enjoyed by no one else in the game. Things like lower armor rating or movement speed or whatever else MMO devs come up with to “balance” stealth become meaningless, for the simple reason that you can’t hit or chase what you can’t see.

I don’t mind that the thief has incredible burst damage. What I mind is the fact that he can engage who he wants, when he wants, and if he has half a brain he will suffer no consequences for it most of the time. RIFT was like this too: I played a cleric with re-skinned valor gear and every once in a while a rogue would pop out of stealth to try and kill me in open world, not knowing how well geared I was. After about 5 seconds of me kicking their kitten they would just go invisible and run away. Some would try again, others just moved on to other targets.

What is the takeaway from this? Stealth is bad balance even when it doesn’t “work.” Even in games where it is not quite as powerful (Global Agenda is a great example of this), gameplay suffers because everyone still wants to play the stealth class. In my view, all classes should suffer consequences if they engage a target they cannot kill. I don’t mind evade or IMS skills, but the whole concept of “welp I can’t do this, better press a button and go invisible so I can run away” has GOT to go.

If you feel like stealth HAS to be part of your game that’s fine, but it shouldn’t be as easy as it is (not just in GW2 but most MMOs) to drop into stealth while in combat, and permastealth should not be possible unless there is a universally available skill or item that can counter it. I wouldn’t mind stealth so much if there was a (5) or (6) rune bonus that gave me area detection ability, for example.

I hate to jump the gun on this, but my ticket [121208-001870] just turned three days old very recently. I’m waiting on an account rollback and as such it won’t really do me much good to play until I get it. The ticket was merged with my original hack support request, which I imagine is affecting my response time.

My account was hacked on 07 DEC sometime between 2-3am EST. Access was promptly restored the next day around 4pm EST, predictably stripped of items and gold. In an amazing stroke of luck, account rollbacks were announced this week and I requested one at 12:45am EST on 12 DEC.

Gaile, in the “Multiple Tickets: Don’t Do It!” thread, you mentioned that compromised accounts are a top priority for the support team. Does that include the rollback process, or does it refer only to account recovery itself? The support I received in regaining access to my account and setting up my e-mail authentication was excellent.

Ouch. That really sucks.

RoRo.8270:

Arkanfel.8403:

Kinda starting to wonder if they did this on purpose so people wouldn’t be able to farm overflow servers for event drops.

I was going to change characters quickly and try that;/ Pretty sure they could have the loot work the same way as the mad king thorn chest

Yeah, I did it on my guardian alt and when I saw my loot I was like “well kitten I guess I should have done this on my 80”

I got 5 epics, all level 55-62. FML.

Kinda starting to wonder if they did this on purpose so people wouldn’t be able to farm overflow servers for event drops. To be completely honest, that was the first thing that crossed my mind when we finally took down the boss.