Guild Wars 2

Mungrul.9358:

Are there any figures on gem sales at all?
That is, gems bought with cash?

No, but I doubt a significant portion of those sales are new licenses which leaves gems with cash.

Probably he meant the “reflections to none” step.

2nd quarter sales numbers are out at NCSOFT.

GW2 – 28,899 million KrW or roughly $25.9 million dollars. Down from 36,382 million KrW or roughly $33.7 million. Still the game with 2nd largest sales in NCSOFT’s portfolio for the quarter.

$25.9 million dollars in sales would be approximately 575,000 $15 a month subscriptions which isn’t bad. Or 2 BILLION (/drevil) gems bought in the quarter. EDIT: Or 520,000 new licenses and zero gems for the quarter.

But that won’t stop the doomsayers so let the cries of DOOOOMMMM!!! begin.

I’m expecting an uptick in FPS complaints when PvE Culling goes bye-bye. It’s bad enough after every major patch already so I’m dreading the 20th.

I hope the cheapskates out there realize that now is the time to start buying gems than Tuesday. There is already a slight uptick since the news broke.

Avelos.6798:

SolarNova.1052:

The new consols (PS4, Xbone) use 8core AMD systems. Each individual core is extremly week,

nooooooooooooooooope. That’s an understatement. They maybe somewhat weaker than the intel counterparts but they’re not in the extreme zone

Your wrong Avelos. The Jaguar core is an updated Bobcat core found the the C and E-series of low power mobile AMD CPUs, the ones originally designed for netbooks and now tablets, inexpensive laptops and with the occasional “sucker” desktops. The 1.7GHz E2-1800 has a single/dual core Passmark of 446/847. The mobile 1.6GHz Celeron 1017u (dual core similar wattage) score is 869/1547.

Now Jaguar is suppose to be 15% faster per clock so that would put a PS4 or XBox One core at 2GHz (a guess), a single core Passmark of roughly 600 (a guesstimate). So yes SolarNova is right, the next gen consoles will have 8 “weak” cores.

You might have a little problem in crowded areas. The worse case I’ve seen is around 200Kb/s in WvW.

I’m waiting for bank slots again.

You do know that Pingtest tests between you and the nearest server on Pingtest’s list right? Run it again and manually choose Dallas, TX as your target server, at least that’s closer to where the NA servers are located. My score went from an A to a B when I chose Dallas over the server Pingtest picked.

Also not every router in the chain between you and the target when using PingPlotter will respond. Many simply filter out ping requests or treat them as very low priority so those routers report packet loss. It’s not surprising that the game server itself is behind a firewall making pings to it unreachable.

xristosmk.5608:

Nasher.6874:

Your CPU is definitely a bottleneck. Even the high end AMD cpus are pretty bad for games that don’t make use of multi-threading (99% of them) compared to Intels.

To get the most from a 770 you need to be matching it with a mid range i5 at least, plus overclocking. Which also means a new motherboard.

Once more ! Since my cpu worked before, i won’t change it !
End of discussion about changing…

Maybe for gaming Intel is better, but since i am working on this comp too and i need as many cores as i can get at lower costs, AMD is the only way… !
End of discussion about moving to Intel…

Behellagh.1468:

I don’t think the OP is really asking what he could do to make it better. His first post had more to do with how video cards that have radically different performance in other games resulted in little performance gain here. And it boggled his mind that the game is so CPU bound, without realizing that was what he was saying. After all a GTX 770 should be lightyears ahead of a GTS 250.

I already knew GW2 was mostly about CPU, that’s why i could play the game so far ! I didn’t make the topic to ask myself something i already knew. I just wanted some opinions from similar cases that might have been solved or something i am missing without, changing CPU or telling me how things work over and over again. I keep repeating to everyone things i said to the first 2 – 3 people … !

Behellagh.1468:

His 2nd post that since others have noticed this to, and who hasn’t, then something needs to be done because other games perform so well with his hardware. Well those games use different game engines and aren’t putting 100s of players within the same zone.

I said already that i had bad performance standing alone in starting areas too … ! And guess what… ? Ofc there are differences between games but sometimes you have to consider the whole “surrounding environment” if you want something good with your product! So i didn’t literally mean that something needs to be done but mostly i meant that this game will be left behind if it keeps ignoring progression in hardware and software! And to my opinion that really sucks for a game 1 year old that i mostly like !! In other words, i was expressing my disappointment!

Behellagh.1468:

His remaining posts circle back round to being upset that the game’s performance is sub par for the hardware he purchased. I don’t disagree but it’s the result of the game engine. Unless it’s rebuilt from the ground up, which isn’t an easy or quick job.

We are having a discussion over here! No one is upset! You are making assumptions from just plain text! I already made a ticket and waiting for some official response! We just keep discussing on the subject and who knows…maybe something good can come out of this !

Behellagh.1468:

We the technorati here know that when a game is GPU bound, as a lot are, then differences in raw CPU performance are basically moot and higher performing video card means better frame rate. It’s just in this game that isn’t true in areas of the game where frame rate suffers. WvW and Boss events, and now the QP.

Well, i said earlier…! I am not either so young and mindless or too old without knowledge around the subject! I was just seeking for some extra solutions that i probably missed… ! And we should leave wvw, boss events and QP out of discussion, since i never tested at those places cause i wanted pure measurements !!

Behellagh.1468:

And I wouldn’t call his processor old. It can still perform as well as most of the current FX line from AMD.

Ofc it’s not old !! What can you do though with Intel fan boys !! :p

Just for fun … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaNwsa5-97k

The exclamation points in your original post does convey a degree of frustration or annoyance on your part.

And I have said a number of times there isn’t anything you can do at your end, beyond the obvious, playing with the graphic settings to try and get better performance. I personally switch to performance settings in the graphic options when down in the QP arenas. It’s still a slide show, just a slightly faster slide show. However I’m sure with the horsepower available from a GTX 770 that there isn’t any measurable difference between best performance and best appearance settings.

A problem with the card and PCIe slot not configuring correctly would have shown up in other games.

So you got your answer. Ignore the switch to Intel guys and OC is an art and isn’t for everyone. The game engine is constantly evolving and once they eliminate culling of dynamic objects in PvE I guessing frame rate will drop even further. Unless they find something dumb it’s tough to gain performance while easy to lose it.

Stormcrow.7513:

Behellagh.1468:

Umbra doesn’t render anything, it simply reports which objects should be passed further along in the rendering process because there’s a chance it’s visible, meaning it couldn’t be 100% excluded, from your current camera location. Any reflection code falls squarely in ArenaNet’s renderer. Water may be a 2nd or more pass after the original render pass. I’m sure reflection probably is it’s own pass.

Umbra does occlusion which doesn’t seem to work for the rendered water underneath the world map. Ever fall through the map and notice the massive ocean that is below us? Play with the reflections in an area that has 0 water, you will notice performance hits because of that ocean. It is apparent that the Umbra occlusion is not really working as intended or is not implemented correctly in the game.

If the surface of the water isn’t included as part of the “polygon soup” fed into the Umbra preprocessor to build the tomb for the zone then the Umbra runtime doesn’t know about it. My point is water surfaces are added later in the rendering process and doesn’t use Umbra or any other occlusion testing at all.

If you are currently playing on an Intel i5 mobile CPU with an HD 6550M then the A10-4600M isn’t going to be faster. The HD 7660G integrated into the A10-4600M is only slightly faster while the CPU cores are likely slower (since you didn’t say which i5 you have).

I don’t think the OP is really asking what he could do to make it better. His first post had more to do with how video cards that have radically different performance in other games resulted in little performance gain here. And it boggled his mind that the game is so CPU bound, without realizing that was what he was saying. After all a GTX 770 should be lightyears ahead of a GTS 250.

His 2nd post that since others have noticed this to, and who hasn’t, then something needs to be done because other games perform so well with his hardware. Well those games use different game engines and aren’t putting 100s of players within the same zone.

His remaining posts circle back round to being upset that the game’s performance is sub par for the hardware he purchased. I don’t disagree but it’s the result of the game engine. Unless it’s rebuilt from the ground up, which isn’t an easy or quick job.

We the technorati here know that when a game is GPU bound, as a lot are, then differences in raw CPU performance are basically moot and higher performing video card means better frame rate. It’s just in this game that isn’t true in areas of the game where frame rate suffers. WvW and Boss events, and now the QP.

And I wouldn’t call his processor old. It can still perform as well as most of the current FX line from AMD.

Umbra doesn’t render anything, it simply reports which objects should be passed further along in the rendering process because there’s a chance it’s visible, meaning it couldn’t be 100% excluded, from your current camera location. Any reflection code falls squarely in ArenaNet’s renderer. Water may be a 2nd or more pass after the original render pass. I’m sure reflection probably is it’s own pass.

I’m not telling you to spend more money, just why your system isn’t performing as well as you think it should with the hardware you have. Sorry if you don’t like the reasons.

As for the recent performance drop some have seen, they did add Effect LOD. It’s possible that this feature while making worse case better may make average case worse.

xristosmk.5608:

So what do you suggest Behellagh? I like this game … i was waiting for it since they announced it back then at 2007! I had a GFX card that was very good and capable to play GW2 without any issues at normal “FPS” behavior !! Bad luck, i poured some water and it died !! So i should go find and purchase some GFX card from 2010 since this game can’t evolve with hardware and software changes?

The game isn’t driving your high end video cards at 100% because the CPU side of things isn’t feeding your cards with enough commands and data to cause them to run at 100%. Which means it’s a problem with the renderer portion of the code itself.

It’s nothing you can do. ArenaNet home brewed their own graphics engine. They may use Umbra to help with occlusion culling of large fixed meshes however if they didn’t use Umbra they would have to write one themselves and it’s not a trivial task. Also frame rates drop in cases when there are lots of players and NPCs around, more so in combat. That’s likely not Umbra’s fault.

Many games license an already existing game engine and the company that makes and sells that engine is responsible to make it go fast, support physics, multithreaded support, different Dx support, etc. What we have is ArenaNet’s 2nd attempt at a game engine, supposedly starting with/built on top of, the original GW engine. Again don’t forget they started work in 2007.

It’s also not Internet bandwidth because I don’t see my download bandwidth go above 20,000 bytes per second in large combats, most of the time in game it’s around 5,000 bytes per second or less.

As for 30-40% of CPU usage. Those numbers are the aggregate across all cores. 25% usage on a quad core means only 1 core’s worth of total work running. 25% on an eight core means 2 cores, etc. Personally I have not seen this game use more than 3 cores’ worth of work. Also most gamers don’t understand that in a multithreaded application that no single thread can run faster than one core worth of performance. Doesn’t matter how many cores you have. If the renderer is primarily single threaded and is tightly coupled with the graphics driver thread then those two threads combined can’t exceed a single core’s performance. And looking at threads running within GW2 this appears to be the case.

That’s why those of us who chime in on “what should I get” threads stress single core performance and a true quad core over over total CPU performance and more than four real cores. We’ve also pointed out you don’t need a fast GPU for this game at the moment. Now if GW2 isn’t your only game of course buy something more powerful but for you will not see performance where you think you need it. You’ll see it while standing alone on a hill top looking over the wilderness but you won’t see in the middle of a castle raid in WvW.

It’s true that the difference between a 32-bit and 64-bit OS is the ability to access a very large amount of physical system memory. The 32-bit OS can only address 4GB of memory space and PC hardware reserves some of that space for itself. Now 64-bit OS do have a physical memory limit but set for marketing segmentation. The 64-bit Win 7 Home Premium editions are limited to 16GB of physical memory while the Pro and up editions are limited to 192GB. 64-bit Win 8 is 128GB max while the Pro version is 512GB max. This is actual physical system memory and the 64-bit OS will be able to see all of it.

The downside of this switch on a 32-bit OS is that the OS has less memory resources set aside for itself so there is an increase change that the OS will crash due to running out of memory resources for itself. Not the extra USER memory isn’t available for an app unless the app was built to recognize when the switch when turned on. No idea if GW2 is built that way.

No it’s not racist but an ethnic slur. And most certainly it is a slur.

Slang: Disparaging and Offensive. a French person or a person of French descent.

If you think someone is cheating in WvW or PvP then report them don’t engage them because if you lose your temper and they don’t then they win.

The BLTP is actually a separate program that the game launches. It’s a mini browser. If it isn’t being allowed to access the Internet or has trouble contacting the TP’s server you could have problems.

There also may be an issue with some it’s old browser cached files. Delete the files in the folder found at Users→[username]→AppData→Local→Temp→gw2cache-{xxxx}→data→Cache and then try again. Of course it should go without saying to do this when the game isn’t running.

And have you tried after a total reboot of the system. Not restart. Not logging out and then in. Power off, wait 30 seconds, power on.

I’m interested in what the OP believes a 64-bit client will brings to a game in terms of added functionality?

The game started development 2 years before Dx11. Dx10 was out but gamers were staying away from Vista. While Dx11 has a lot going for it, to add it post initial design is nearly impossible if you want to take full advantage of it. They would have to essentially recode the entire renderer to get the performance you think they should be having with Dx11. It is not a trivial task.

Dx11 is as essential to any game as a flightstick.

As for other forums, it’s group think by gamers who have all convinced each other that Dx11 is some panacea to graphics performance and it’s not. It’s a marketing checklist item like a 64-bit client or multicore support. Most have no clue what it does, just that it has to have it to qualify as “good”.

They didn’t say they would do Dx11 post launch, only evaluate it. And Dx11 doesn’t make things magically faster.

You should edit that link out since anyone clicking on gets caught in that trap.

So you took out the hard drive it was originally on? If you didn’t just copy the directory over to the SSD.

If not do you have enough free space left on that SSD?

Vayne.8563:

Behellagh.1468:

Viking Jorun.5413:

They already changed AoE circles from a thin red line that had what looked like heart monster lines to a super thick obnoxious red circle.

Turning a thin line of color A that can’t be distinguished from the background in color B by some into a thick line of color A on a background of color B doesn’t solve the problem does it? It’s not that the line was too thin to see.

It solved it for me, and I’m colorblind. Because they didn’t just change the thickness of it, they animated it too. It moves, like a small flame wall…and that I can see.

Right, they did more than just made it thick.

For those who aren’t color blind, sites like this can show you what the color blind see by feeding it a screenshot and selecting a type of color blindness.

http://www.color-blindness.com/coblis-color-blindness-simulator/

The Wiki is your friend.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Chest#List_of_reward_chests

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/List_of_basic_chests

If it’s their official game account yes, there’s a little red ArenaNet logo next to their name. But if they are on their private account no.

I did see one dev at the opening of the Queen’s Jubilee but up at the pavilion, not in the arenas.

However off TP trading frequently may trigger a gold trader alert that could bring your account under scrutiny and they seem to have a “assume you are” ban first reinstate later policy with a sorry. That may depend on the amount of gold and the rarity of the item mailed. And this is on top of the “get ripped off” problem.

Aruemar.7891:

Behellagh.1468:

Well it was a faucet from a player’s point of view even though by it’s use, the TP, gold was still being sunk out of the active economy.

However, do you understand that overall, the rate of incoming gold into the economy is far greater then what it used to be.

The rate of gold incoming has increase while the gold leaving the economy has, overall, stay the same. Which, it will result in inflation.

More gold in the economy would drive up prices as long as item supply remains constant. Increase price means increase sunk from TP use or set aside from Gem exchange.

We have no evidence that gold incoming has increased. The devs have attempted to balance the rewards across all dungeons so everything NOT CoFp1 gets run. We don’t know if these net changes are increasing or decreasing total incoming gold. Also you may be of the opinion that everyone runs dungeons all day but most players I know don’t.

Now the Queen’s Jubilee is certainly pouring coin and T6 mats into the economy. Maybe the devs mined from their “big data” that simply playing the game is leaving too many players coin poor while only the subgroup of dungeon Zerk speed runners and TP traders are the only ones making enough money to go horizontal at 80. Isn’t doing something you don’t care to do to achieve some game goal one definition of grind? And isn’t that something they try not to do?

And it also may be that the economy is now “mature” in size and that the sinks are working too well so it was time to up the supply side of things.

Doesn’t matter which of these are true or not, I dismiss your premise that the economy is on the verge of some inflationary cycle. Remember inflation is economy wide, not just a class of items.

TP is actually a separate program and it’s nothing more than a lite weight web browser. The problem is “font scaling” is simply doing a Windows scaling function of painting the normal size TP window into a smaller window with the obvious ugly results.

I agree it needs to either be a separate option, leave the TP one scale while the rest of the UI is another, or come up with a better way of handling font and icon size inside that browser. Note that the browser may be 3rd party code that they can’t fix directly.

SwiftFishy.2643:

Behellagh.1468:

My Human is running with Sylvarin weapons.

not a huge fan of sylvari weapons… only because hte colors are hard to match

Got them for the stats not the looks. Just adding another example of cross race use of cultural weapons.

My Human is running with Sylvarin weapons.

Yes.

This message is too short.

As long as you remember you login ID and password and only be logged into the game on one machine at a time, you can have the game loaded on a dozen different machines and still have access to your characters. What you paid for was an account and all your account stuff including your character, your bank, your wallet, etc. is on ANet’s servers.

All you loss was your screenshots folder.

Use /IP to get server IP

Use free version of PingPlotter to check your connection.

Not every router has the ping return turned on since it eats bandwidth. My current average is around 90ms.

I got one from a drop last night.

Viking Jorun.5413:

They already changed AoE circles from a thin red line that had what looked like heart monster lines to a super thick obnoxious red circle.

Turning a thin line of color A that can’t be distinguished from the background in color B by some into a thick line of color A on a background of color B doesn’t solve the problem does it? It’s not that the line was too thin to see.

Well it was a faucet from a player’s point of view even though by it’s use, the TP, gold was still being sunk out of the active economy.

No I don’t remember that and if they did say it then “if it was necessary” hadn’t happen yet.

ANet set up an automated system that sets the price based on two player activities, buying gems with gold, buying gold with gems. It’s simple, it’s straightforward and ANet doesn’t interfere with it. Therefore only our actions dictate the direction prices go.

Look at this map.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/images/8/8b/Wayfarer_Foothills_map.jpg

See all those outlined areas? You have to have “discovered” each of them. On some maps those regions are underground.

It’s not a problem if you aren’t greedy and are willing to wait a bit. Or it this another case of getting undercut on 100g and up luxury items?

Check the trading history for the last 24 hours and post a price in that range and wait a day. It’s not rocket surgery. I routinely post items no where near the current low sell price and they still sell within the day because I know it’s within the current trading range.

Only problem is when there’s a lot that’s been dumped at one price because 1) everyone will undercut it and 2) it’s going to take a while for that price “wall” to be worn away.

As more players buy gems with gold, the higher the price goes. Only way it goes down is when players buy gold with gems.

This video over on Twitch TV has the scarecrow one. 29 minute mark or so.

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/441278394

No it sounds like the file got corrupted.

I thought that was a permanent change from key to claim ticket scraps.

New Items and Promotions

• The Black Lion Chest now has a common chance to drop Black Lion Ticket Scraps and a rare chance to drop Black Lion Claim Tickets, which can be redeemed for Aetherblade weapon skins. Players can visit a Black Lion Weapon Specialist to preview Aetherblade weapon skins. Black Lion Chest Keys can be purchased in the Consumable category for 125 gems each or 5 for 450 gems.
  Collect ten ticket scraps and turn them in for a whole ticket.
• Aetherblade weapon skins* have been added to the Black Lion Weapon Specialist. For two weeks only, Aetherblade weapon skins cost only one Black Lion Claim Ticket! After August 5, Aetherblade weapon skins will cost their regular price of 5 Black Lion Claim Tickets. All Aetherblade weapon skins *are soulbound on use and can be traded until used.

Improvements

• Black Lion Chest Keys are now a rare drop from the Black Lion Chest. Most key drops have been replaced by Black Lion Ticket Scraps. This guarantees progress toward a reward rather than a simple retry.
• Tickets and ticket scraps will continue to drop from the Black Lion Chest and can be used for select future weapon sets.
• New weapon skins purchased with a Black Lion Claim Ticket are now tradable until used.

Really need to save this so I don’t have to keep searching for it …

That’s basically the ratio that everyone uses. Just check out the prices for the next gen consoles.
XBox One – $499.99, £429.99, €499.99 – 1 to 0.86 to 1
PS4 – $399, £349, €399 – 1 to 0.875 to 1
GW2 – $50, £42.50, €50 – 1 to 0.85 to 1
It’s to cover VAT, exchange rate fees and currency fluctuation. If anything GW2 favors the UK more than Microsoft or Sony.

As for them paying VAT
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/gems-1-1-1/first#post90768

Same here. If you are a big retrogaming fan then 80GB should be plenty. But with modern games and MMOs routinely topping 10GB each, that’s not a lot of variety.

Winslow forbid if you have a Steam habit.

The problem the devs are experiencing is the world is just too big. Leveling is too easy. I’m sure mining through their “Big Data” of how we are playing shows them numerous zones where players simply don’t spend a lot of time in. One way to fix that is by putting in special loot in those areas as the quickest way to get the population to go there (re: balloons with chests).

2nd is making activity in that area a daily. Remind players what was awesome about that zone. Plus specifying an activity gets us to congregate in one spot. It could be dailies or boss fights.

3rd, why do you think they published an API that makes event timers 100% accurate? So players can all turn up in one spot rather than wander about hoping to see someone. Players want to see other players. It acts as a confirmation that the game isn’t dead.

So the LW is a way to drive players to different areas of the world, areas we may have only been to once or not at all if you aren’t much of an explorer. This month it’s Divinity’s Reach and around the world for balloon chests. Last month a bunch of mini games and challenges. Tease us with unique skins and we’ll go anywhere.

I’ve seen it with all the drop downs on the TP interface. Choose sell and sort by price and the sort drop down stays dropped. Minor inconvenience but it shouldn’t be happening.

I can’t speak for SolarNova but if the choice is including an SSD but weaker graphics, CPU and no normal HD is straight up dumb choice. SSDs are budget busters.

Same with just going with one over a HD. At 8x the cost per GB you are going to either spend a whole lot more and/or end up with a whole lot less storage. I’m not saying you shouldn’t get an SSD, just get one to supplement a HD not replace it. And if it’s a budget issue, leave it out.

If you had $50 more would you swap out your 500GB HD for a 120GB SSD or upgrade your build from a GTX 660 to a GTX 760? Remember, the OS is going to chew up 35-40GB on it’s own. Could your gaming habits survive in only 80GB?