Guild Wars 2

I was very excited at the thought of Guild Halls and guild upgrades. But it’s been too long with no word about them. I don’t think they know what they’re doing for guilds yet. Specializations and trait changes are good — the NPE is so horrible that anything would be an improvement — and I’m looking forward to those.

I can’t say that I’m hyped anymore, but I’m still looking forward to the expansion.

Chuck.8196:

Just take your charcter with the highest DPS and kill as many as you can asfast as possible. its open world PvE and you can do as you please. If people are DIRECTING verbally offensive or abusive language TOWARDS YOU they can and will be banned.

Or, you could just be nice. Finish your heart and move on. Or switch to a beginner type weapon so that you don’t kill elementals in one swing — it will still kill the ambients in one go. Or do anything that would be considerate to the other players that are playing there. You CAN take care of your own needs and still be sensitive to the needs of others if you give half a care to try.

A lot of the suppression in this game is nonsense. LFG and mail are probably the two biggest offenders.

We were told before the Portal event that this test would be longer than the last. Since the Beta Tests before the release of GW2 were weekend events I sorta expected this one to be a weekend event too. I know they didn’t say that it would be, I know they only said that this test would be longer and more involved than the last. But, I work for a living. I’ll be working on Tuesday. I feel rather cheated. I’d happily give my portal to someone who could actually use it, but that’s not allowed either.

They could have told us that it would be weekday play, or that it would be six hours total. They could have given us enough information to let us know that this isn’t a real beta test but a stress test. There isn’t enough time to find the hidden bugs with three two hour sessions, just enough to find some big stuff and test the servers. Couple that with the fact that there is no NDA and I think what we have here is a preview and a stress test, not a beta.

Nemecyst.5437:

10.28.74.160 is the IP of the Frostgorge Map that doesn’t load.

Ah, great job on providing them with that information. Maybe it will be fixed soon.

I decided to work on Mawdrey this morning. I created the Mysterious Seedling then took all of the other special ingredients (ley line dust, chaos orb, water etc.) and tried to WP to Slough of Despond to enter the jumping puzzle near there. When I hit the WP my client gave me the Frostgorge loading screen, then crashed to a white screen with a GW2 pointer with the error message that I had lost connection to the server. I used the task manager to close GW2, checked Amazon to be certain that I still had internet service and logged back onto GW2.

When I logged back in my character was not near the crafting stations by the Mystic Forge as I expected; he was in the Grand Piazza instead. I tried the above procedure with the exact same results — WP to Slough of Despond, Frostgorge loading screen, crash, restart, back to Grand Piazza. To try to solve the problem I took the LA Asuran Portal to Hoelbrak and tried to WP to the Heart of the Waves WP — Frostgorge loading screen, crash -- this time GW2 did release and return to the information screen instead of the white screen. I did not have to use the task manager to end the application. At this point I did a complete system restart to try to rule out any weird glitches with my computer. When I restarted my character was not at the portal to Lion’s Arch but instead he was at the portal into Wayfarer’s Foothills.

I took my character to the bank in Hoelbrak and deposited all the the materials for creating Mawdrey into the bank, logged to the character selection screen and chose a different character. He loaded into Divinity’s Reach as expected. I WP within DR to Minister’s WP with no problem, got the Mawdrey items from the bank and WP to Heart of the Waves WP, got the Frostgorge loading screen, crashed to the GW2 information/login screen. I logged back into the game and found that I was at a different place in DR than I had left. The WP cost was subtracted from my total money each time.

Character names: Flukke, Teagan Payce
I am happy to try to recreate anything or to have you snoop into these characters to see if you can reproduce the problem.

OH! Almost forgot! When I would log back into the game after crashing each time I was greeted with the error message “The WP you have chosen has become contested…” It may be that this is what caused me to end up in different parts of the cities than I had left from.

I am going to take Teagan Payce and try to WP to Fields of Ruin and walk into Frostgorge Sound. I will edit if I have any trouble getting there.

Edit: I was able to successfully WP to Fields or Ruin, but when I attempted to walk into Frostgorge I again crashed to the login screen. When I restarted I found myself at Sati WP in the SE corner of Fields of Ruin — no where near where I left Fields of Ruin and no message about a contested waypoint.

I don’t know, I still have great hope that Sous-Chef Seimur Oxbone will come through for us. Getting rid of bloodstone dust while crafting to 500 seems like a winner to me.

I go to WvW often just to get the daily there. It is quicker than doing events in a specified map. It may be that you end up wanting to go grab dailies with your friend. If you are just one day in it is better to delete your characters (put anything you’ve earned into your bank first) and switch servers at no charge.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Have your pointer on Hide Events and Personal Story if that’s not the spot. Waypoint into maps and see what it points to and check the map for an icon that looks like a person stepping on the side of a hill. That will show an unexplored area.

I’ve been playing this game since launch and I had no idea you could do that. That is a huge tip. Thank you.

So far:
Belinda was killed, Jory takes up GS and becomes Necro Spec
Rytlock goes to the mists and comes back as a Revenant instead of a Warrior

Pure speculation:
Eir is killed and Braham takes up her bow becoming the Guardian Spec
Kasmeer is forced to turn back an instant of time to save someone… who? Taimi? Jory? Glint’s egg? In the process become Chronomancer.
Rox begins associating with the Hylek of the jungle and becomes Druid.

Surely there are other NPC’s that could provide some lore/story basis for the Specs becoming available.

guildpro.7615:

Call the Class what it should be…..

P/Mo

That would make a lot of us happy.

Nah, more Derv/Para — Righteousness in a ranged kinda way.

JonPeters.5630:

A couple notes on Dragonhunter. We went with this name because we felt it was evocative of the medieval witch hunters. Guardians consider themselves protectors of the innocent. Followers of their faith be it in honor, valor, etc. The origin of the dragonhunter is a more subtle nuanced version of this. Guardians fight for justice and the dragonhunter faction believes justice is the eradication of dragons and their minions. I understand this is a lot more high concept than Mesmer but at the end of the day we felt like we wanted to try and push a more mature theme here. I hope this helps explain our thinking. We had other generic names in mind but felt like it was important to have a mix of spec names that are generic fantasy, more Tyrian fantasy, and more high concept. This one falls more in the third category.

Thanks,

Jon

Where you claim this is a higher, more nuanced, high concept name I don’t see any of those things. It has no magic, no sense of what the spec is or what it does. “I want to protect the innocent so I will call myself a Dragonhunter.” This makes no sense. Sentinel makes sense. Paragon makes sense; hell, Surgeon makes sense.

The very least you could have done would be to make it a more generic name instead of making it specific to dragons. Possibly a throwback to the old Sierra Gabriel Knight series with Schattenjäger. At least that would conjur some imagination. As it is the name is, at best, lackluster regardless of this explanation.

Mainhand torch would be pretty cool; wield it like a mace.

How does this name possibly fit the class? Back line, ranged, support character. Obviously it should be called Dragonhunter.

/eyeroll

From the video it looks like a very slow play style.

Dragonhunter… What a disappointment.

I applaud the effort and cheer for the ban of the hacker.

But, the deletion of the characters by a dev is troubling. Banning/disabling the account and making it so that it is not able to be played on A-Net servers is great, but there should be some limiting boundries as to what an employee can do. In my mind deleting characters crosses that line. The server belongs to A-Net, it’s their property and they can disallow play by anyone they want at their sole discretion. But the characters belong to whoever bought the box; even if they can never activate the account again, the property is still theirs and shouldn’t be tampered with.

My kitty is named Pyre

I wish they would make some armor or outfits with the Charr in mind. I mean build it from the ground up specifically so that it looks good on a Charr. The Countess outfit is fabulous on a human because it was designed for humans. Surely some armor crafter somewhere loves his Charr above all others.

Right now 100 gems costs 20g71s

So, 18 times that… 372g78s

Too much.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

My name is Tallus Dach and I have been woefully used, abused and betrayed.

I used to be a member of my master’s harem of 8 level 80s until day another necro suddenly appeared and I was informed I had been demoted to a… to a…(oh I can hardly say it, the shame is overwhelming) to a puzzle jumper chest opener bank toon. (Sob). “Why? WHY?” I asked. The answer, “I really love the Norn necro facial mask and as a Sylvari, it doesn’t look the same on you”

I was shocked at such a trivial reason. My protestations were spoken to the empty chest I was forced to open and loot. I stood and watched while my rival gained in strength and power.

Then the true day of horror arrived. My master appeared before me with a name change contract in hand. I was forced to sign it. My rightful name was taken from me and given to that WITCH. That FIEND. She stood there smirking as she took my name and I was given hers. Then I was forcibly stripped of all my exotic armor, my weapons, my Acended jewels. My armor and weapons were smashed in front of me for the the few mats they would give and my jewelry was ripped from my body and used to adorn hers. I was given a few low level rags, and then they left me standing there, in the dark.

I stand in that dark, clammy cave now. Every day I open that chest and meekly hand over the contents. There is no justice. No appeal.

I was Slythy Toves. Now I am Tallus Dach. That was my story.

That… That is far more than a Flesh Wound.

I love the Watchknight tonic, but I sure wish it would last longer.

It should be that you can toggle on and off other people’s pets but not your own. If you’re going to introduce that noise to the game you should have to suffer through it yourself.

darksoverign.5360:

welp I started at 5pm my time and its 1am now think im done for the night still no damb key… thanks anet… only 8 hrs of my time waisted in the worst zone ever… by the time this crap is done im gonna hate silverwastes with a passion more than I already did..

If you aren’t enjoying it then STOP! The beta will not be worth it if you don’t enjoy getting there.

Chris Cleary.8017:

I’ll go ahead and comment on this thread, as it seems to be the most recent of the HOM ones.

I’ll try to explain this without getting too technical, and some parts are probably going to have to be left out.

The bug that caused players to unlock achievements/skins/titles and achievement points was caused when the GW1 server that stores the HOM status talks to the GW2 server that controls new character creation. Basically it was sending bad data to the GW2 server, and unlocking achievements that should not have been unlocked.

This means that there were multiple problem points that need to be cleaned up. The first thing to be cleaned up was the bug that caused this to happen, and that was fixed within a few hours. However, the removal of the rewards is an entirely different problem.

We don’t have the tools to easily mass remove achievements/titles, which means it’s something that has to be developed. Unfortunately, this came at a time where our resources are tapped to the max, so it’s taking longer than we would like to fix this.

Thankfully (lol), when the HOM rewards bug was happening, the actual HOM was not accessible, and those players were not able to claim any other HOM entitlements…so the damage was somewhat limited.

We are working on this, I assure you, and we will remove the rewards from players that should not have received them. I do not have a timeframe, as modifying accounts at this type of level is not something we would ever take lightly, and as long as we keep a majority of the entitlements locked there is less for us to clean up.

Thank you for this information and assurance.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Not a bad idea, Randulf. But if I do, some ArenaNet staff members will see it and they’ll then know the answers!

Let me see if I can think of a work-around.

The workaround:

Ask people to post trivia questions without the answers. If you like the question PM the poster for the answer. It doesn’t fill up your inbox, and we get to play along too. Win-Win.

I love it, this is a great way to choose beta players — pick from people that are actually playing the game.

In GW1 there was a scar pattern armor that left characters unclothed, but covered in markings. I didn’t use it but many people did. It wouldn’t seem horribly in appropriate for the new jungle themed content that is coming up.

By the way, both males and females could use scar pattern armor.

I’d love to see some of the answers that people gave to their fondest memory. Copy paste them here!

Lishtenbird.2814:

“Be careful what you wish for, ANet may give it to you,” they said.
We wished for build templates.
We got build templates… predefined build templates.

…

Now the question is: is not having a choice “fun”? Is “balance” worth taking stuff away from players, shoehorning them into cloned builds and making buildcrafting boring and bland?

My answer is NO. Honestly, I’ve been disheartened by many decisions over the past year, but this one has a very large chance to actually break the game for me. If I wanted to play a no-customization game, I would’ve chosen one of those free MMOs with preset race-class bindings, preset character body types, preset full-body dresses, 111 skill bars (and cute graphics on top). If I chose GW2 and stayed here, it’s because there are so many options that it keeps me busy for a long time (despite a desperate lack of content) – and once you take all of it away in favour of “streamlining” and making “less confusing” and “more compelling”, I’m out.

While I’m not ready to quit because of it, this is true and very disheartening to me. With this change they take all of the creativity in build making away from players. It’s very sad.

Like many players I have been planning to insta-level a Revenant in the expansion using tomes for levels and scrolls for skill points. Without being able to use the scrolls for hero points will I be able to create a viable and useful character on the day of release? That is, will the hero points from just hitting level 80 be enough to unlock specialties and skills and make the character viable immediately?

Rigged.1395:

Today I just lost 200g, because of a typo. Now, it’s my own fault, because I typed “50” into the gold sell price field instead of the “number to sell” and ended up listing 85 trivial items for 50g each by accident, and the TP fee alone was 212g. (Dear Anet, please consider moving the sale quantity field farther away from the “Gold” field")

Now I’m trying to figure out ways to ensure this doesn’t happen again, but I realize I cannot just stick my money into a bank to ensure I don’t lose it all to a typo. I know I can put it in a private guild bank, but right now we have withdrawal limits by week. 500g may be a lot, but I don’t want to be in the situation where I might actually need more money than that and not being able to get it out of my bank for a week.

Can we please have the ability to put our gold into our personal bank, or lift the withdrawal restrictions on guilds where there is only one member and he is the one who deposited all the money?

Contact support, they might be able to help you. I’ve seen some things that I didn’t believe they would touch but they came through and provided exceptional service. Can’t hurt to try.

Are the Elite Specialization tracks more powerful than the regular specialization tracks or are they balanced against the other specialization tracks?

1. Alliance Chat
2. Weapon Dye
3. The end to the NPE
4. Build Templates: Save/Share
5. Map specific currencies (Geodes/Crests) to be housed in the wallet.
6. More combat ready tonics like the Watchwork Knight tonic.
7. Guild missions designed specifically for small guilds
8. A guild hall system that is workable for small guilds. I know they’re coming, just hope they’re coming for ME.
9. A wider variety of mid-ranged AP points — 5 AP reward things.
10. Giants.

I’ve only discovered gw2dungeons this week, but I’m very appreciative of the site. I’ll send a donation for your prize money.

Yes, please!

Thank you.

Kudos to A-Net’s customer service. In this case it was the right thing to do.

Eidolonemesis.5640:

Would it be hard to bring it back? Of course! Would it be impossible? Absolutely not.

A-Net has said they would like to do this and that it is a possibility sometime in the future. But, if it is a huge amount of developer time involved I’d personally prefer they didn’t. I’d rather they spend their time building the next great thing instead of re-dos of something that is already passed.

The Living Story didn’t come with the box set. It was added and additional. You haven’t been cheated out of anything; it’s just that players who were active at the time were given extras. There’s a difference.

Season 1 was created for open world play. It did exactly what it was advertised to do, and it changed the world on an immediate basis. If you were there you had the option to participate and if not you didn’t. But, it wasn’t created as instanced play and, in my opinion, it wouldn’t translate very well to instanced play. There were HOARDS! of enemies in Lions Arch, there were NPC’s dying, there were things happening right now and we watched LA fall while trying to save its inhabitants. Sorry you weren’t there when that happened — it was something to see.

They learned a lot about this type of content in Season 1 and they went on to make Season 2 instanced specifically so that it can be replayed. It was designed built that way from the ground up — it isn’t nearly so grandiose, but it is far more accessible not just for new players but for people who aren’t able to play for awhile because of life.

Season 2 is worth the gems if you haven’t played the whole thing yet. There is a lot of content there. Season 1 is gone, and acting entitled doesn’t really make it reasonable or worth the investment of developer time to bring it back.

I’m having a little difficulty understanding the value of this item since it won’t take you into a map that is considered full. Does it take you to areas you have not opened yet?

I will appreciate any discussion about the benefits of this item.

Thanks in advance.

Wow, didn’t know you do this too Foghladha. I’ve been enjoying your hospitality at the open guild missions on Wednesday nights and it’s been a big help to me and my guildies. I must say I am very impressed by your friendliness. It’s nice to see good guys

Dear TheFool: ONE of my reasons is very evident in your responses to the people in this thread who disagree with you. People who want to duel and are told no, whether that is an auto response or an actual response, often become insulting and hateful to the people who do not want to duel. Most of your responses in this thread would be actionable if people were to report them.

Whether you think I’m acting like a little kid, or you think I’m illogical, or you think I don’t know how to read, the fact is I don’t want to have to deal with your crap (or that of other duelists) in my game play session.

Crey.5263:

Rezzing is ultimately sacrificing your own safety/participation in the game for the benefit of another. I think what it ultimately comes down to is what type of community GW2 actually . I think Anet would say that we are supposed to be collaborative community as evidenced by the movement from gw1 instances to gw2 open world content… however, I think that the players ultimately dictate the true community. Based off of numerous post in this thread, and others…the community (MAJORITY NOT ALL) value what is meta…what in raw numbers is better…cold efficiency… The community is elitist and those who die in these simple world events were not an asset worth investing the slightest time in rezzing.

The sooner you can accept this realization the sooner you will realize that if you want to be rezzed from dead in one of these events you need to go in with a group of friends (not one of the countless pick up groups that form at the event) or guildies, or just people who care about your playing experience more than the random stranger you encounter on a world boss train. And if you don’t have access to these supportive players…then use the way point.

Anet can do a lot to influence the market, the grinds, and even the builds of the player base, but ultimately they cannot change the mentality or culture of the players, short of banning non-community oriented players which would be suicide for the gaming company. And even if they offer some reward for the selfless act of rezzing a stranger…someone with far too much time on their hands is going to crunch the numbers and find that it is probably negligible and we will go right back to the meta of a bunch of strangers meeting up at a set time to zerg a world boss down then dissipate with as little meaningful interaction as possible.

And the reverse could be said here, too. If people cared more about the playing experience of others, if this were a truly great community and your fellow players mattered to you, you wouldn’t expect someone else to sacrifice their game play to pick you back up when you die. You would waypoint out of consideration for your fellow players, the community, and the event.

But mostly it’s hogwash.

yolo swaggins.2570:

Simply giving a buff to players that res the dead is not going to make people want to res them more.

Most players don’t even attempt ressing dead players because:

1. It removes DPS.
2. It roots the player.
3. It increases aggro making lethal boss attacks target them more.
4. Ressing the dead takes longer than ressing the downed.
5. Event scaling doesn’t automatically adjust upon death.
6. The closest waypoint is usually a minute away.
7. It is easier to waypoint or not die.

If you really want that mentality to go away, then you must bypass these issues. Otherwise, your idea is not a good one at all.

This describes perfectly why I don’t rez dead players during world events. At other times I take good pleasure in rezzing people.

I loved it. I had great fun running around and playing. I wish they could have made the launch pads at Tequatl not spin us for that day, that would have made it perfect!

I loved the airplane. Especially at Tequatl where there were hoards of people running back and forth. It was great fun. I did turn off post processing after a bit so that I could see the targeting circles, but I played last night, longer than I normally would, and I’ll play tonight too.

The only times I have ever mailed large sums of gold were to my second account and to my girlfriend’s account. The only time I have received large sums of gold was the return of money from my girlfriend’s account. I don’t understand the need for the limit or how it helps honest players. I can understand that if this were working in reverse and you were limiting the amount than an account could send, as opposed to the amount that could be received, it might help ding gold sellers.

This change looks as if there is a way to somehow dupe gold. If this has happened, or is happening, I would hope A-Net would let us know that.

I dislike the change and the limits.

I completely agree that crafted precursors should be account bound. But dropped precursors, even the new ones, should be tradeable. People shouldn’t be “stuck” with a high end drop that they don’t like and can’t enjoy.

Precursors that drop should be tradeable. Precursors that are crafted should not be tradeable. But, if you get a lucky drop, one of those one time in a gaming career things, and it isn’t a part of a legendary that you want to build then you should be able to sell it. I can’t imagine having something along the lines of The Lover drop for me and being forced to either keep it or build The Dreamer — which is a weapon I personally find offensive.

If the precursors are obtained without using the crafting system we should be able to sell them. And the people who really want them should be allowed to buy them.

No complaints from me about Legendaries being account bound though — there is a lot of work that goes into them and that is not going to happen randomly.

Cirian.8917:

I played both sessions from start to end, so 4 hours with a break. I chose to play mesmer.

The content is certainly evolving well and the main demo area is bigger than people realise once verticality is taken into account. Pocket Raptors are cute and explorers are going to love the map.

I managed to get to 2 Maguuma Mastery Orbs and channel them for mastery points. These are going to be a lot of fun… I used the glider to get to one, and beyond the orb itself leads outside the demo area into the Itzel Grounds, which I managed to reveal with a bit more gliding.

Masteries

I’m only going to have a first impression once, so here we are…

• The masteries window was initially hard to find, but once tipped off by map chat that it existed is in a logical place.
• Activating my first mastery and having xp flow to it was more difficult than it needed to be. I placed my first point in the Mushroom mastery, but I didn’t realise I needed to tick a box as well to “equip” the mastery line. The first line a player puts a point into should probably auto-equip.
• I didn’t initially notice the Glider line, as I had to scroll down to reveal it. I did that by accident. Maybe it’s not an issue.
• After learning my first mastery ability (unlock+xp gain both done), the system felt intuitive and easy to use.

Abilities are fun. Overall I’m liking the mastery system and looking forward to the rest.

Adventure

I had quite a few goes at getting the gold reward but I’m not quite there yet. Think I had 82/100 at one point. Other than being rather good fun(! It’s own reward in my opinion), it’s a mysterious activity.

Dynamic Events

The only one I want to bring up is the bonus after killing off the five Burrowers (enemy spawners), which I didn’t see get completed once. There is a strict time limit and the 5 tentrils you have to kill are not marked on the radar… very tough! Otherwise, a nice cycle of events.

Map

Just a tease for other players… I took this screenie of my map showing some currently out-of-bounds areas.

Thank you so much for this!

And the best thing that I’ve seen so far… No hearts! At least none that we can see from this area and screen shot.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

When Guild Missions first were added to the game, lots of guild did Trek:

• it was new
• it was fun
• it helped earn influence for the guild.

It’s been a long time since that release, so treks are no longer new. They are just as fun for some of us (forces you to test your knowledge of the world, if you don’t use the wiki or Dulfy.net), but they do get old quickly.

More importantly, nowadays guild commendations are considered the primary reason to do missions (since a lot of guilds have plenty of influence/commendations), so the idea of doing a for-the-guild-only mission has become outdated.

In short, it made sense at the time.

I’m forced to disagree — it never made sense for a small guild to have to open things that they did not believe would be useful for them. It was explained by A-Net at the time as a time gate for bigger guilds who had lots of influence already stored and ready to spend. It meant that it took guilds at least a month to be able to open puzzles, even if that was one of the things that the guild would have most enjoyed doing.

I have a very large sense of trepidation waiting to see what they have in mind for small guilds with the expansion and the ability to build guild halls.