Guild Wars 2

I like to know what my next log-in reward is going to be. Previously the matrix was only shown at log in when picking up the reward.

I just wished the Daily displayed the same in the panel that it is at login, with the divide between the three play modes. It would let me to easily ignore the PvP ones.

Gazareth.7230:

Brother Grimm.5176:

It’s highly unlikely ANY game developer would attempt to re-write their existing game engine to completely revamp the performance of a 2.5 year old game.

Who’s asking them to re-write the engine? Adding in support for a newer API isn’t quite that big of a task.

Brother Grimm.5176:

Anyone expecting a 4K display to run at a HIGHER frame rate than what you can normally get at standard HD resolutions, does not understand how graphics in a PC work….at all.

What’s this in reference to? I don’t remember seeing anyone talking about 4k? GW2 could probably be fine on 4k, anyway. Usually the GPU handles higher resolutions, not the CPU. Guild Wars has CPU issues, so upgrading your GPU to accommodate for higher resolutions should already work fine.

To take the most advantage of Dx11, they would need to recode the renderer for better multithreaded support. That’s one of the greatest way for speed improvement in Dx11, it’s thread safe meaning you can have multiple threads sending commands to the driver and it’s kept straight. Dx9 requires that only one thread talk to the driver without the driver messing up, badly (a simplification for non-programmer types).

While Dx11 does reduce setup overhead a bit and increases shader sizes, the prime speed advantage is the multithreading support.

My guess with no evidence. Assuming no last minute issues. GW2’s 3rd anniversary.

If you are talking about precursor crafting Jaken then yes they told us it was back burnered early Oct 2013 only 4 months after the original announcement in July that year.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Is-precursor-crafting-going-to-happen-or-not/first#post2981770

And this was talked about in detail when Colin announced it.

Sadly there are a lot of players who believe what they read rather than experiment.

Want a heavy set character, play a norn. They definitely have fuller body types.

Unlike other MMOs, you shouldn’t fear seeing, being helped by or help another player (in PvE). All material nodes and individually instanced, no mad rush to get there first. No shared loot, if you do more than some relatively small percentage of damage, you will receive loot. Same is true with XP, no XP loot pool to split. Everyone can rez fallen players and NPCs. Everyone can heal themselves. Everyone has melee and range attacks (eventually) as well as underwater attack skills. Everyone has support skills.

There isn’t traditional roles of Tank, Healer, DPS. Professions don’t have that extreme degree of specialization. Fighting is more dynamic, nearly all skills can be used on the move and the best way to survive is to move and dodge.

You can pretty much get XP from just about every activity other than standing around. Explore maps and unlock way points, vistas and points of interest as well as unveiling new areas of the map, XP. Crafting goods, XP. Gathering materials, XP. Rezzing fallen players and NPCs, XP. Playing in lower level areas, XP based on your true level (yes you can level to 80 in the starting zone, but big world so why?). Critters off the beaten path that have persisted for awhile since they had spawned, XP bonus for conking them about the head and shoulders. And this isn’t even talking about dynamic events and hearts (drive by quests).

Edit: And you don’t every have to do them if you don’t want to. Everything is optional in this game. Personal story, Living story, Renown Hearts, Dynamic Events. You shouldn’t feel obligated to do anything in a particular order or any activity that you feel like doing. That said exploring just to unlock waypoints so you can use them in the future is quite helpful.

What you won’t see is a rail system to guide players from X to Y to Z. You won’t be required to visit NPC, get quest, revist NPC for reward. Quests are assigned if you are near them and rewards automatically rewarded when done. Only reason to visit the quest giver, which appears as a heart on the map, is if you are unsure what you are suppose to do or need special gear. After completion the quest giver turns into an NPC vendor who will by your junk (junk is a class of near worthless drops) and offer exclusive items for sale that are level appropriate for that area. Sometimes crafting recipes and materials as well.

Can’t really talk about PvP, it’s something I don’t do. WvW is World vs World (vs World) which is like capture the flag with siege weapons between 3 servers across 4 maps.

This should give you a bit of an outline of the game.

IMO the only way it would be $50-60 is if it came with the original game as well. If the new region is the the size of the two largest regions in the original game plus one new profession, that sounds more like a $25-30 package.

Gazareth.7230:

Behellagh.1468:

Do not underestimate what $1,000,000,000 a year in income can buy you toward development…

It’s no excuse. I buy an expansion pack for a game in 2015, I expect it NOT to come with a graphics API that’s from 2002. Especially when you consider that there have been multiple signifigant improvements with that very technology since then.

Everyone who’s getting the expansion will be paying for it, and it’s expected that part of that cost goes into graphics technology, as it does with every other game you buy ever.

I want to buy the expansion. I want it to be great. The aesthetics, lore and gameplay of GW2 are so good, and will be even better in the expansion… But I don’t want to go through the same disappointment as GW2, where the technology is 10 years behind, and runs as smooth as a tractor on a road of a million potholes, with a machine built the year the game came out.

I think that in general, there’s a certain standard that today’s games should meet in terms of performance. After all, games are just as much art as they are technology. It’s easy to see how GW2:HoT will be an objectively poor game if you factor in the weight that technology has on enjoyability of games. I will likely resort to calling it that, “a bad game”, if the peformance is not resolved, and it’s a real shame.

Your point was WoW could do it so … but you ignore that WoW had an order of magnitude or more income for multiple years before their Dx10/11 and 64-bit upgrade came out. We are talking Scrooge McDuck piles of money here. My point was that they could have had more programmers than ANet has in it’s entirety tasked solely on rebuilding the engine over multiple years. It’s entirely and manpower/cost problem and GW2, as successful as it is, simply doesn’t bring in the income where a major undertaking like this would be attempted. Maybe if they had a tiger team secretly working on it since launch but like US’s highway system, infrastructure sadly gets ignored once initially built. MMOs is all about content and most content development is setting up scripts, art, animation and modeling. Not tasks you have people who could sling code that this would require.

Gazareth.7230:

Ansau.7326:

I don’t think so. They already explained why they kept to dx9, so people with older systems could still play it. Moving the game to dx12 would go in the opposite direction from the one they took.

This is based on a misconception. The game wouldn’t move over from DX9, the game could support both APIs at once, where users select which one to run from the graphics options menu. This is what WoW has done.

Apart from the fact that using a more efficient API would work better on all systems, allowing more people to attain playable experiences with poorer hardware configurations.

Do not underestimate what $1,000,000,000 a year in income can buy you toward development. This game gets 1/10th of that. I agree with your assertion that it’s a binary choice Dx9 or Dx11/12 but Blizzard could poach 3D engine devs from every major engine software house as leads and hire a building full of fresh out of college to throw at the problem of developing a new engine with multiple paths of support while maintaining backward compatibility with all the game’s existing assets. It is not a small task nor is it one that only a handful of people can pull off.

ColinJohanson.2394:

Similarly, ascended mats can be acquired from a wide variety of content types and game modes to allow you choice and options so you don’t need to grind to complete those goals.

Except they’re not. Bloodstone from exotic champ bags. Okay, so you have to take on champs. Easy enough to do in groups but sometimes, a lot of times, you don’t “qualify” for the exotic bag. I’m not talking about standing autocasting your 1 attack but throwing everything and the kitchen sink at it. Champs at boss events are a lot tougher simply due to the number of players attacking if the qualifier is some % of damage done to indicate participation.

That said most players have 30 stacks of bloodstone. Dragonite and Empyreal drop easiest from Dungeons, Fractals or PvP. If you don’t do those because you don’t like those types of play, you are stuck getting a few here and there while PvPers or Dungeon runners (including Fractals) get them by the truck load.

You may not think it’s grinding, but when the most direct way to get the materials for ascended mats is doing activities you aren’t thrilled about over and over again, I think most people would consider that grinding.

Just another PoV to consider.

Standing around it’s only 180KB/min, 10-15x that in an event with lots of players, at most. That’s KiloBYTES per minute. I was playing earlier on my logs shows 810KB/min average over an hour play.

Jaws.1569:

Hey, I was just wondering if Anet has a dx upgrade on their minds. If not is there any chance of it happening?

Ronin.7381:

City of Heroes was also shut down based on a business decision, not that it was actually losing money. Were one to go look at quarterly reports of NCSoft, after CoH:Freedom, they were generating a substantial amount of money. I’d almost wager it was comparative to TOR, who mind you – was ranked 3rd on the MMO board of 2014.

Ah, no.

The last 4 quarters of CoH, which 9 months is after it went F2P, it’s income was only 11,992 million KrW, roughly $10.6 million USD, for the year. In comparison GW2’s last reported quarter was 19,686 million KrW.

Basically the game couldn’t support Paragon Studio so when NCSOFT closed Paragon due to lack of any ideas that the mothership would approve, CoH was collateral damage. It may have had 50-100K paying players when it shut down but it wasn’t a lot in comparison to moderately successful MMOs that are still about then and now.

TOR went F2P when it’s annual income dropped below $100 million USD a year.

Devata.6589:

Behellagh.1468:

Grind is always in the eye of the beholder. I define it as stuff I don’t like to do but have to to get X. But I don’t consider it grinding if you are simply trying to accumulate gold to by gems because you think everything should be “free”. Those people are just being cheap.

I did not see anybody say everything should be free. Can you quote them? I for example have been asking for expansion for a long time. I would be fine having to had buy an expansion every year and paying for it that way.

No problem with that, no problem with paying for a game. But I have a problem with grind and I do like to have the end-game of collecting those items without the gold-grind.

Anyway, interested in seeing you quote of people saying everything should be free.

I wasn’t replying to you I was stating my opinion on the subject. I’m sure the devs have their own definition and it may be the stuff they had found grindy in other MMOs not being present in their game. Some players may think dailies are grindy while others see it as a to do list for guided play.

The point is to each their own.

Welcome back.

With megaservers and recent guild changes, servers only matter for WvW. Megaservers populate maps from all servers. If a map is empty it’s because players from all servers in your region aren’t playing that map, or you just happen onto the smallest of the instances. Lion’s Arch isn’t as much of a central hub as it once was before it’s destruction. Things are a bit more spread out there than before.

Populations on servers track fairly well, I think, with ranking in WvW. So here’s a link to EU WvW rankings.

http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups

Grind is always in the eye of the beholder. I define it as stuff I don’t like to do but have to to get X. But I don’t consider it grinding if you are simply trying to accumulate gold to by gems because you think everything should be “free”. Those people are just being cheap.

Otokomae.9356:

Well, there was this shortly after GW2’s release: http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/02/14/ncsoft-licenses-unreal-engine-4

So yeah, an updated engine is possible, though I wouldn’t say it’s likely. The original minimum requirements are pretty low anyway (AMD Athlon, 2GB Ram, & literally ANY graphics card made in the last 10 years); I’m pretty sure my phone could probably meet the minimum specs at this point. So essentially anything more powerful than a potato should be able to run GW2 at Low settings, or with the resolution simply dropped to 720, if needed.

If you are actually using a potato to comment on these forums, however, you can buy an overclockable Intel G3258 Haswell CPU for $50 @ Microcenter now: http://www.microcenter.com/product/435187/G3258_32_GHz_LGA1150_Boxed_Processor
It’s getting harder and harder to even find a computer that won’t run GW2 at this point.

NCSOFT licensed UE4 for development of Korean MMOs.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/14/ncsoft-using-epics-unreal-engine-4-for-two-new-mmos/

loseridoit.2756:

Rainmaker.7594:

Visiroth.5914:

Rainmaker.7594:

Also, it’s not so much a matter of the hardware as it is the software. Microsoft won’t release newer versions of DX on older OS, so DX12 that someone mentioned is a very bad idea because it won’t work on Win7. OpenGL and 64-bit isn’t controlled by MS.

Microsoft is offering win10 & DX12 as a free upgrade to win7 users so that point is moot.

I didn’t realize that, thanks for the info. I might give Win10 a try on my laptop first, because they’re still shooting for one OS for all devices, which worries me that there will still be touch screen optimized garbage on it (I’ve read that they are fixing current complaints about Win8, but they might put new annoyances in. Its good that they are asking the community for their input this time though).
But, as lordkrall said, not everyone will be willing or able to upgrade. I still think OpenGL is a superior option, if they were going to change the engine to that extent. OpenGL can offer everything DirectX can, in addition to more platforms being supported.
That being said, can’t it be agreed that 64-bit is more important than rendering format, since the current 32-bit actually causes crashes, whereas DirectX/OpenGL upgrades are just about performance/appearance.

opengl is not an superior option. Microsoft has invested so much time and money into direct x that it is currently better than opengl.

http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2014/03/25/opengl-vs-direct3d-yawn/

if you looking around articles about the current state of opengl. It is bad. A much better target is opengl next, mantle, and direct dx 12 since there is much less overhead and I think anet devs can pick it much more esaily than direct x 11

Alex St John was the creator and prime evangelist for DirectX, so I think his opinion is slightly biased.

Not as much of a hall than a yurt.

I’m guessing the release will be on the 3 year anniversary at the end of August. It gives them plenty of time to dribble out details here and there.

BilboBaggins.5620:

sevenDEADLY.5281:

Marshall Sed.8643:

I heard a rumour that ANet’s income is expected to be huge for Q4…..not speculating just saying.

I heard a rumor = the definition of speculation. So yes, you are speculating.

The guy was crystal clear about having a demo available to play at pax east. How are people twisting that in their minds to “release date in 6 weeks!”?

But it’s not a rumor, that came from NcSoft’s financial projections.

No it didn’t. It came from an analyst (KDB Daewoo Securities) that have been predicting an expansion for years and every time the analyst declared and expansion was coming out in quarter X of year Y they showed increase income for that quarter. Until their next NCSOFT update where they walk it back.

And so it begins …

Dacar.5283:

Behellagh.1468:

There isn’t really the Holy Trinity. Everyone is more jack of all trades than uber-specialist. Nobody can tank for more than a few seconds one on one, nobody can keep that player healed enough, everyone has range and melee attacks and can heal themselves and rez others. Movement and avoidance rather than massive hit points, damage resistance or healing is the key to survival.

This sounds great and is one reason I quit WoW after 4 or 5 years (besides getting bored and the monthly fee was a bit of a grind). I hated that I needed to learn every specialty and needed to level up a tank or a healer. I just started a Warrior and an glad to know that I don’t have to specialize as a tank.

Speaking of movement and avoidance, are there ground effects that alert you to damage or anything like that?

Just beware of the “zerk” meta for warriors which is getting Berserker ( http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Berserker#Triple_attribute ) stats on all items (armor, weapons, accessories). While it maximizes the DPS, it makes them a bit more brittle than what a heavy fighter should seem in major action.

Dungeons and personal story chapters and instanced. The rest is not. Neither is the traditional quest structure of see A, do thing, see A for reward. Tasks simply appear on the right side of your screen if you are near them and you will be rewarded without needing to meet the contact at all although the contact then turns into an NPC vendor that can buy junk and may sell unique items that can’t be bought at other NPC vendors.

There isn’t really the Holy Trinity. Everyone is more jack of all trades than uber-specialist. Nobody can tank for more than a few seconds one on one, nobody can keep that player healed enough, everyone has range and melee attacks and can heal themselves and rez others. Movement and avoidance rather than massive hit points, damage resistance or healing is the key to survival.

Look for the little red heart icon on the map, those are the armor repair people. In the future you should know that each piece of armor, you have six slots for armor, need to get damaged twice, ie you die by critter (or player in WvW) not by falling to your doom, and all pieces need to get damaged once before any piece can get damaged a 2nd time and become useless.

There’s armor repair in each of the major cities and usually at least one or two on each map.

Corax.7381:

They would…

…

ESSSSSPLOOOOODDEEEEE!

I thought that was Neo-Tokyo

Bristingr.5034:

Healix.5819:

Bristingr.5034:

And Nexon bought out NCSoft…

14.7%.

Yeah, I went back and read up on the info after I posted that. They’re still the largest holder of shares of NCSoft, so Nexon has the loudest/most influential voice.

That’s not how shareholding works. All shareholders can do is vote for board members and since the sale, even after Nexon lost some more than 1/4 the value of their investment, all the board members remain and none are related to Nexon.

rhapsody.3615:

A friend is at PAX and sent this picture and no other info: http://m.imgur.com/WAzvLmK

Obviously HoT is the name of their new line of mouse pads …

Okay. BLTC is the gem shop and exchange. TP is the player run trading area.

Zoid.2568:

Yargesh.4965:

Zoid.2568:

NcSoft said in their report that there will be an expansion 2015 and it will not be free.

NcSoft did not say this.

Yes they did say it. Have you seen the report?
http://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/192028.pdf?attachmentId=192028

“Also, in 2015, NCsoft is expected to roll out an expansion pack for Guild Wars 2, which
has sold more than 3mn copies since its release in 2012 in the US and Europe. We
assumed in our 2015 earnings estimates Guild Wars 2 expansion pack sales of around
2mn copies (US$50 per copy), and note that the expansion packs for Guild Wars 1 have
sold almost as much as the original game in the year of their release.”

And as I pointed out in another thread. KDB has announced this in 2012, 2013 and 2014. And one of these times they will be right.

The worse, that all they are doing is adding a functional search to the forum. While a good thing in general it would not be what the riders of the hype train is expecting.

Malkavian.4516:

Okay, I know we have a hype train going on for what Arenanet will offer tomorrow with Heart of Thorns. Most are expecting it to be a traditional MMO expansion while others are expecting it to be basically Season 3 of the Living Story. I honestly do not care what it will be just so long as the content I will receive is something I will appreciate. I’m just saying to all those who ride the hype train, don’t keep your hopes up too high for what Heart of Thorns will be because if it isn’t what you expected, you’d be sorely disappointed.

With that said, see you guys at the PAX stream tomorrow.

Wow, you’re asking for a lot aren’t you. What’s going to happen is a slew of threads will be generated about what was and wasn’t said during the presentation. Mods will attempt to merge them into an incoherent mess. There will be rage quit threads with the requisite “can I have your stuff” posts.

Basically game forum activity as usual following any major announcement. Let the forum carnage begin.

Someone needs to make the title into a bumper sticker, like those honor student ones you see all the time.

Xpac – How much? Free? P2P?

As I mentioned before, I would rather have misses be tracked in the background and when the threshold is reached on the ultra rare item, bam you get one. It’ll still give the illusion of randomness.

aspirine.6852:

Imagine how old the engine is if they cannot implement this. :/

And on another not, I thought opengl was slow as thick kitten? I remember Unreal 1 on opengl, so sloowwwww.

That’s entirely due to crappy driver implementation, that is money wasn’t thrown at GPU manufacturers to make better drivers by Microsoft for OpenGL support, just DirectX. id was one of the last game companies that strongly supported OpenGL on the PC.

PS3’s graphics API was a fork of OpenGL ES (embedded system version). Most Android devices are also OpenGL ES as well as iOS. And of course Linux as well as Unix variants use OpenGL.

Today’s news on Dx12 performance.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2015/01/21/test-the-impact-of-directx-12-on-pc-gaming-with-3dmark-software/

For utility and money making I would pick the Laurels but if I was crafting a Legendary or Ascended item then those choices would seem logical to me. ToK are good if you are leveling up a new or soon to be new character.

I found the public transit system more than adequate. And if the weather is nice walking is an option. I’m sure since it’s at the convention center that most hotels will provide transport to and from the event itself.

syntohras.1064:

Rashy.4165:

GW2 uses DirectX 9.0 to support extremely low end systems. Problem is, DirectX 10+ has been fully supported for even the lowest of the low end hardware for several years now.

That is really sad…..

But when the engine was being written, the only OS that supported Dx10 at the time was Vista and gamers weren’t migrating to it in any significant numbers which is why XP and Dx9 was supported (not to mention as a reason for the Microsoft’s “Games for Windows” initiative to fade away). Also quad cores was still in the minority so why design an engine that needed more than two cores? Of course taking 5 years meant the whole PC gaming landscape changed. Engine probably got finished about the time Win 7 went live.

Now if they announced that they have also revamped the game engine to use Dx11, better quad core and higher support, displays up to 4K through extra high resolution textures and UI scaling, I think there will be fanfare.

I don’t think it’ll happen but it could.

As much as I like OpenGL, the 800lbs gorilla that is Microsoft in conjunction with the two major video card GPU manufactures has made the previously widely accepted standard in graphics a minor blip on PCs. It took Microsoft until Dx9c to catch up to the feature set that OpenGL had for years but without optimized OEM driver support (as well as Microsoft’s slow OpenGL emulator that came in Vista/7/8) basically discredited the API. Dx11 essentially matches it now and has significantly better drivers.

Blude.6812:

Behellagh.1468:

Don’t use Steam.

Agree for none steam games (ever imho)
Games bought through steam—of couse you use it.

Exactly.

Don’t use Steam.

Because by making an example of him it discourages others from exaggerating their data since they didn’t realize he could dive into a players personal data and extract the numbers involved. Sure clicking 150+ times could feel like 2500 and it may have been player error but it could also have been an attempt to run up the price since it’s fallen noticeably since LS2 started up again and someone got stuck with a pile of dust.

You can only dispel falsehood by shinning the light of truth on it.

A breakfast cereal.
The title to the latest GW2 novel.
The title to a future GW2 movie.
The name of a tabletop RPG version of GW2.

https://screen.yahoo.com/shimmer-floor-wax-000000185.html

Ssshhh! Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns is a tabletop RPG.

Nighthawk.6453:

Oh our prophet John Smith! Since you’re answering questions about Ecto salvage, would you please look at my research and tell if something is wrong? Mystic/Master’s Salvage Kit, for context.

The chance of salvaging 3 ectos from gear being bigger than the chance to salvage 2 ectos is killing me.

Close enough for 1 sigma if 2 and 3 odds are the same. But my data also shows a bit more 3s than 2s but overall they are similar enough.

What I like about these suggestions is it shows off a sorely underused asset that this game has which is it’s artwork. The beauty of this game is a selling point, especially in it’s use of vibrant colors is underused.

I see your problem, you are buying from current sellers. Enjoy throwing money away?

:p

Actually the quantity was set, if it was greater than the number on the Current Sellers side at and below the price you selected, to that total. Example, you set your quantity to 250 and you choose the lowest seller who only has 10, the quantity should reset to 10, not 1. The TP no longer rolls over excess into a bid and hasn’t since the new TP first appeared in September.