Guild Wars 2

Pure Heart.1456:

The only thing I have against outfits, is that Anet is making them instead of real armour. And that kittens me to tears. Seriously, it’s heartbreaking.

It’s easier. No need to be concern about horrible clipping caused by mixing pieces from armor sets. They only need to hang them on each race’s animation rig, test them at a few preset sizes and it’s good to go. With armor, to be thorough they would have to test each armor piece with each adjacent armor piece that could clip. Every new armor set increases the mix testing set by more tests than the previous set did. Of course if ANet and the players stop giving a kitten about clipping issues it would make their life so much easier.

And since outfits sell and cost no charges to switch between them or in and out of them to and from your armor, it feels more convenient especially while leveling when your armor is all hodgepodge.

Beldin.5498:

Behellagh.1468:

And I think we had this discussion. 20 sets (assuming you are counting each weight separately) was downright crazy thinking. It’s a level 80 only zone. Many of the armor sets we got for free in game were associated with level, race and region. 5 races, 4 regions, 80 levels. HoT is one level, one region and no new playable races. Maybe we could have gotten exalted or frog inspired armor but we got bladed, leystone, another guild armor set and an addition heavy set to commemorate revenants. .

Why should the level matter for the number of armor sets we got ? For me the
price does matter. For that price we should have gotten simply nearly as much
different sets than in GW2 .. oh and of course as much playable content.

What you said is more .. ohh we get so much less content than what we got in
the original game .. so its fair if we also got less armor sets.

And if the next expansion cost $120 and has only 1 zone, its fair if we also get
only 1 new armor set .. or even nothing at all ?

You are just being obstinate now. Unless you actually thought the expansion was going to be as large or even half as large as the original game you had no reason to expect 20 new armor sets in a year and a half since the time they dropped the last armor set either in the Gem Shop or game.

You are blaming ANet for not living up to your unrealistic explanations just like so many players who put words into ANet’s mouth and then accuse them of lying and scamming. “Only if this game was just like GW, they would be making so much bank.”

i5, 8GB, a GTX 960, an SSD along with a media storage drive and a quality PSU (people always cheap out on the PSU).

Assuming it’s working, there is no need to exceed the frame rate of your monitor so if you are always above it, it reduces the load on your CPU and GPU which in turn reduces heat and power consumption, a major issue with laptops.

And unless you enjoy screen tearing you would have VSync on thus capping the updates to your monitor at it’s refresh rate.

Intel do have a higher IPC per core than AMD, nearly two to one actually. The clock speed differences closes the gap slightly for AMD. Intel can simply execute the main processing loop more frequently than AMD, baring holds for hardware like asset loading from drives and a slow GPU.

And SkyShroud’s analogy is a variation of the bank queue analogy but used to describe the difference in pipelines between the two CPU architectures. I usually use that for threads to core assignment by an OS.

Basically Intel’s cores are over designed which allows more opportunities to process multiple instructions at the same time. So much so that’s where Hyper Threading comes in to improve the number of opportunities to do that. The Bulldozer integer core was designed with significantly fewer resources to allow multiple instruction opportunities but the trade off was they could have more of these cores in the same size sliver of silicon. Great if your system has loads of threads to run at the same time, not so good if you only have a few.

First of all the streamer in question nearly choked on her Subway Cold Cut Combo™ on flat bread when she was told on stream that they were changing it. She quickly stated that any change to the drop down would hose players who double tap send/compact so don’t do it. Only reason the rant ended up on YouTube was her followers ask her to because it was such an epic rant and out of character for her. She then asked what would be better is to have an icon next to the gear that also does the send function since everyone should be using it at all times. But God no don’t change the ordering was her message Friday when Guild Chat was on.

But the reason this caught ANet’s eye was the rant let the devs see the reaction of a player when this happens. Like the glider deployment change that Joel discussed afterwards, it wasn’t until he simulated Oceania lag that he understood what players from there were harping about. It made their issues real to him. The reddit thread that was started about the rant along with the YouTube comments and comments when the rant was happening along with Rubi’s own experience made her go and find out if something could be done.

Now anyone who’s coded UI for an app know that adding or rearranging a drop down is trivial, doing something like this isn’t going to set the next raid wing back.

Now a button to duplicate the send functionality on the Inventory screen is probably to big of a change to slip stream into the schedule so I imagine if they do do this they will simply add a spacer between send and compact rather than move compact to the bottom. Gives the clumsy wiggle room and doesn’t add too much mouse travel to the double tap crowd.

They are saving them for Bubbles/Steve.

The game engine isn’t designed with more than two primary thread and a handful of minor (in terms of CPU usage) ones. Since no thread can outperform a single core the only way more than three or four real cores can help is when you are running other CPU intensive activities at the same time as the game.

As for multiple video cards. The reason that works in some games is the workload is so high on the video card, the CPU can start sending another frame’s work to the second card without needing to wait for the first card to finish it’s frame. This game’s engine isn’t waiting on the video card that often but the reverse is true, the video card is waiting on the CPU to send it work to do. I’m guessing if the OP pulls one of his 980Tis that there would be virtually no change in frame rates because it’s not the video card processing speed being the issue.

But this isn’t news. We’ve been discussing this since launch. Admittedly more and more as hardware improves but it’s a known issue. Tiny God gaming systems are severe overkill for this game. The game engine isn’t designed to scale much beyond it’s minimum two core requirement.

Scribing should have been a guild hall upgrade only and not a crafting profession in the first place. Also decorations shouldn’t cost a queen’s ransom.

I play Hearthstone and Clash of Clans. But I still log in for my dailies and a little character progression.

Like a said, a dribble. We got one with SW and 3-ish with HoT not counting the future Legendary Armor that we can’t start until raids are complete.

And I think we had this discussion. 20 sets (assuming you are counting each weight separately) was downright crazy thinking. It’s a level 80 only zone. Many of the armor sets we got for free in game were associated with level, race and region. 5 races, 4 regions, 80 levels. HoT is one level, one region and no new playable races. Maybe we could have gotten exalted or frog inspired armor but we got bladed, leystone, another guild armor set and an addition heavy set to commemorate revenants.

Counting weights separately that’s 10, 3 light, 3 medium, 4 heavy.

Hellisa.7132:

Donari.5237:

I really did (and do) believe they read the forums. Yet if they don’t process the information on such QoL suggestions until a streamer comments, it may be time to start lobbying streamers to mention issues of concern.

Sad part is, and maybe I’m wrong, but the streamers like Wooden Potatoes and the like do not seem to be streaming nearly as frequently on GW2 lately, and have seemingly given up on this game as many of us are.

Well a number of them got funded to cover the BnS launch for he next few weeks. I think NC West raided ANet’s popular streamers to promote the game. Better to see a game in action played by familiar faces from character creation on than any in house video highlighting aspects of the game.

As for WP he has gone a bit negative with GW2, usually with caveats about very specific things.

Outfits are now the norm in the Gem Shop. New armor are now rewards for doing content and since new content comes out slowly, it’s a dribble.

If outfits weren’t such a money maker, I’m sure ANet wouldn’t be putting them out as much.

His example of 65g would require someone to place an item for sale at less than 55.2415g just to break even when he sells it for 64.99g once he clears out all the below his bait price along with his bait item.

It’s so much easier to simply place bids and let players insta-sell you inventory to flip. The trick though is to find items that have a high volume of trades with an acceptable sized gap for profit.

If someone wants to post a price under the current low it’s their prerogative and it’s usually because they want to sell it quickly but want more than what the instant sale would pay them.

Lots of new sources and sinks when HoT went live and the economy readjusted and still is.

NA servers are in Texas, EU in Germany. Unless you are playing WvW, actual server isn’t important.

If GW2 lost it’s shine, go play one of the newer F2P MMOs. GW2 shines up pretty quickly.

People don’t appreciate what you have until you lose it. I’ve been trying out that new F2P MMO and you will quickly appreciate Dynamic Events, simplified systems, an uncluttered UI You miss the larger zones in GW2, the lack of popup players around you, the standing in queue to cash in certain types of loot. Then of course the game’s “it’s not a subscription” perks like not paying for using certain features, like mail delivery that F2P must bare.

But of course some people don’t like simplicity in their games and that MMO may be for them. But once the Twitch streamers I follow stop playing when their paid to play on stream deals elapse, I doubt I would continue to play it. I’ll just add it to my list of MMOs I keep up to date on a weekly basis because I have minimal broadband and it’s easier in the long run to keep it installed and updated that downloading it from scratch all over again.

GW2 is easy and fun for me. Looks good enough even without nostril size sliders.

Nope, just as Qugi said, P4F (play for free as ANet likes to call it) has chat, trade and economy restrictions as well as minor level gating for major cities and WvW. And of course none of the HoT content.

The goal is enjoying yourself. It’s a game. With online friends.

Same server center for GW2 and BnS. That’s my guess.

Which would be an issue @Brimstar if KDB could guess well, except they can’t.

The 3Q15 official numbers came out from NCSOFT on Nov 4, 2015. KDB issued a report just 15 days before on October 20th.

Going to list KDB’s numbers then the actual reported, rounding to nearest billion KrW.

Lineage I — 72 — 78
Lineage II — 16 — 16
AION — 19 — 17
BnS — 27 — 25
GW2 — 25 — 21
WildStar — 2 — 2
Other — 20 — 15
Royalties — 23 — 23

Revenue — 204 — 196
Net Profits — 49 — 31

So KDB, with a day over two weeks, was 4% high or 8 billion high for sales and 58% high or 18 billion high for profits.

And it was KDB that first put forth the idea of HoT selling 2 million copies. After the PAX South announcement they assumed (15/3/11 report) that HoT would come out 3rd quarter and they estimated 158 billion KrW in sales in the 2nd half of 2015. We’re talking just the NA/EU region. Remember we didn’t get a ship date until PAX Prime at the end of August forcing KDB to revamp their 3rd and 4th quarter number in their October report.

Does anyone else remember that KDB thought the first expansion would be out in 2013?

Aurora Peachy’s rant from yesterday’s stream. Priceless.

The OP is talking about 4th quarter 2016 estimates, which is 11+ months from now. So they predict that the sales will go back to mainly cash shop sales. No surprise here.

Also the other factors for NCSOFT missing KDB’s guess that the OP left out,

We expect NCSOFT to report slightly disappointing earnings for 4Q15, due to 1) weaker-than-projected sales of the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack, 2) a lower-than expected increase in revenue from Lineage I microtransaction events, and 3) higher
expenses related to marketing (G-Star trade show) and the company’s pro baseball
team …

KDB-Daewoo have been walking back their absurd prediction for months now. As you can see they were winging it as usual. They were the ones who suggested that 30 million would buy the expansion at $50 before we heard anything about a release date or a price. Once they heard that the core game was going P4F and the expansion wouldn’t need new players to buy two SKUs they freaked.

Here are the 4th quarter estimates in billions of Korean Won for GW2 over their last 8 reports.

4/15 – 74
5/15 – 95
7/15 – 120
8/15 – 122
10/15 – 76
11/15a – 66
11/15b – 57
1/16 – 51

Sorry, if stock analysts get within 20% of their predictions, they are doing great. These were the same people who thought NCSOFT stock was going to hit 600,000 KrW a share in 2012.

Next the company’s biggest money maker, a game that came out in 1998, wouldn’t be meet their growth predictions; then the big annual game trade show in South Korea; and lastly their baseball team.

At the end of the day, KDB’s only lowered the annual profit from 193 to 186 billion KrW and total sales from 843 to 837 billion KrW for 2015. They aren’t going out of business assuming these numbers are close to actual ones. Comparison, 2014 had net profits of 228 billion KrW on sales of 839 billion KrW.

Nothing to see here, move along.

I’m guessing with nothing to announce, no.

Yes, for some reason at boot or at start of game the card isn’t switching to use all the PCIe lanes so the bandwidth between the video card and the CPU isn’t that much which reduces your frame rate. Also since the CPU is waiting on the video card, it drops speed as it’s twiddling it’s thumbs.

It’s a fun way to go from the bank to the TP. First person mode gives you an idea what a pinball feels like.

zenleto.6179:

I’d love to know what I was doing 4 months ago because I have no memory of anything even remotely resembling this in the game.

It was a flawed event in terms that it unintentionally encourage tag and dash play as players who started and finished the each instances usually ended up with fewer rewards. On top of that the best rewards would require players to play nearly continuously to earn enough event currency.

From a general performance standpoint, huge difference between a GTX 970 and a 960. The R7 265 is an OC HD 7850 (same GPU) and is roughly 25% slower than a 960..

The only news is there’s a vendor that will take any left over blooms in the Durmand Priory and that was months ago.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mordrem_Researcher_

But like many event currencies, there’s no word if they have any value in the future.

I played an MMO with split game mode balance, and while it may be great for players who live in either of the two predominate game modes, PvE or PvP, it’s horrible for players who are moving from one to the other. Your skill rotations that work well in one doesn’t in the other.

Daniel Handler.4816:

I was told by a friend in software development that they are vastly overstating the number of people they have in these things. That if it had been 3 years and they had their purported amount of manpower a lot of things would be fixed by now.

He told me that it’s likely Anet doesn’t have actual coders, only story designers who edit tables, they outsource the rest. I don’t know if this is true, but I do know the company seems to be struggling on a pr front. At this point they need to be more transparent or they are going to lose a lot of business.

Well I would say that there is likely a majority of the staff are in jobs other than client/server software development. Asset/content development I imagine has the most people in it.

A $35-ish popular cooler is the Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO. Yes we are all talking about the same one here.

http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/cpu-air-cooler/hyper-212-evo/

UK suppliers

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-cpu-cooler-rr212e20pkr2

RMT gold is like counterfeit money. It’s not your fault for getting it but what you sold is lost.

Just eliminating possibilities.

And now those same players are complaining that all they see are outfits in the gem shop or where are the armors. There’s only been 15 armor sets offered in the Gem Shop, 5 of each weight.

Now the ability to turn off the helm on the Outfit panel rather than the equipment panel would be nice.

Yeah, no such thing as an inactive player.

RandomWolf.3986:

Behellagh.1468:

Other possibility is that since this is a laptop and settings did nothing is that it’s a thermal problem.

I’ve been palying GW2 since September. The problem only started to appear this week.

Exactly. Check to see if the vents are clear and the fan seems to be working. Also it’s not unheard of the heatsink popping off the GPU due to thermal cycling stress and cheap paste. Check the temps on both the CPU and GPU as well as their clockspeeds while running.

Can’t answer many.

Doesn’t take too long depending on what you are willing to do to maximize XP. The rule I used for “normal” play is 80 hours. However dailies in PvE will give you 5% level XP. Food boosts provide 10% boost in earned XP. Then there are normal XP boosters. Going off path to go after “older” critters will nab you a nice bonus XP per kill. I honestly never tried to see how fast I could level with out living in a EotM farm group in WvW.

Never did PvP, you can check out some footage at the Guild Wars 2 Youtube or Twitch pages.

Don’t know about raiding other than some streams

I think that most of the time it’s a very friendly and helpful community. Less so on the forums due to the fact that as a B2P game, unhappy people will hang around indefinitely and complain to anyone who will listen about how lousy the game is and that it would have only been great if they did X, Y, Z like <insert other MMO>.

If you played other MMOs you may have to adjust your way of thinking. It’s an action combat MMO so you can’t/shouldn’t stand still against a critter. Moving and the game’s dodge mechanic is necessary to survive. It’s also not the standard Tank/Healer/DPS trinity, professions are more jack of all trades than being ultra specialized. You also have to understand that the game won’t lead you about as you level. It requires the player to have the initiative to explore and stumble into event content rather than quest giver to quest giver. The PvE portion is designed around extreme co-op with very little ability to troll other players. One of the game’s mantras was players shouldn’t be upset to see other players who want to help.

Sorry I couldn’t help with PvP and Raiding.

This is common in software development. The schedule is always built around the new because new sells. If you try to tell the powers that be that fixing this pile of bugs would be equivalent to a minor new feature it’ll get rejected. It aggravating as hell as a developer. Often bugs are postpone until that area gets a revamp or it’s done off book, meaning off hours.

Of course that assumes the “bug” is really a bug and not an intended feature that some segment of the playerbase dislikes. The cause has to then be found and assessed as to the odds fixing it will cause a bug to emerge elsewhere or bring the whole Jenga tower of code for that sub system down around the devs ears.

Mundanes would be surprised on how not straightforward development on a large project is.

… like one of your French girls.

Sorry, I couldn’t resist.

Beldin.5498:

Jacob.4280:

Id like to see some ANet staff point of view on this. What led them to change the piece format we got at the begining to what we have now (full not customizable sets).

I guess they would told you that they think costumes are “awesome” and they are
“very excited” about them.

Oh yeah and Linsey Murdock wrote that they will make armorsets earnable as
in game rewards .. so far in nearly 2 years we got Carapace / Luminous .. wow
thats sooo exiting.
Oh .. and i think 3 ugly sets you can grind for in $50 expansion .. awesome.

Well the first interview that said new armor will only be appearing in game is from 10 months ago. And the expansion features, 3 or 4 right off the bat with legendary coming from the finished raid cycle hopefully this year. That doesn’t preclude other new armors from being introduced in 2016.

And yes it’s been a while since a new set appeared in the Gem Shop. Best I can tell it was the Rampart/Strider/Incarnate sets in April of 2014. Also there has only really been 5 sets per weight released in the Gem Shop. Yes that’s 15 in total but it’s not like we had one a quarter. And I think only 1 (or 3 if you count each weight separately) were there at launch.

I think one. Wish it was sorted by date so you could see the newest ones first.

Other possibility is that since this is a laptop and settings did nothing is that it’s a thermal problem.

HoT is very polarizing. The same feature that many love, many hated and vice versa.

One problem for casuals like myself is I’m now forced to play my character well if I want to solo the zones. Since HoT is only level 80, I can’t retreat to a sub level area when things get too tough. So for the first time I’m paying attention to the synergy of traits, stats and skills in PvE. HoT forces you out of JV builds, your college division one now (US collegiate sports tiers in terms of ability). I’m up for a challenge but it quickly become tiresome to always being on your toes. Few places where you could AFK for bio and return to a non-dead character.

Both the drink achievement and the shoulder collection are now in Community Achievements and Rare Collections respectively and you complete either of them.

Well assuming you only need Festive Imbiber for the shoulder and you had the rest down before Wintersday was over as several other pieces of the collection were tied to now absent Wintersday activities.

Please note the Candy Cane achievement hasn’t been moved so using any of the peppermint food/item boosts will not add to the total until next Wintersday.

Can’t wait for the lines of players climbing the lighthouse in Lion’s Arch.

Not everyone got refunds for tools, some liked having multiple sets. The big problem here is that players want refunds on all their duplicates while a shared slot can hold only one item at a time.

The real issue is that players who had the gold and cash to purchase multiple convenience items are now miffed that the less fortunate can achieve the same level of convenience for less now. As it is we have players that refuse to rationalize the cost of convenience items; players who could afford only one copy; and lastly players who could afford multiple copies.

This item could be enough to get a player with no convenience item to take the plunge and those with only one copy of convenience items to buy the max number of shared slots.

My take on armor vs outfits.

Since they made transmutation of sub 80 armor cost 3x as much when we got the wardrobe I’ve gone with outfits while leveling up. Why? A combination of leveling quickly plus the variety of mismatched armor from drops, heart npcs and level rewards translates into either an eyesore, using a lot of transmutation charges or simply buying a matched set every so often from the TP and stick with sub-par armor.

So now I slap on an outfit at level 1 and at level 80 I can worry about making my ultimate final look. We have 33 outfits, not all currently available at this moment. If we simply look at chest pieces to give us an idea how many armor sets we have around 65-66 of each weight. This include drop, WvW, dungeon, craft and gem shop skins.

We were told last year that future armor sets will only appear in game as oppose to the gem shop. The gem shop will be the domain of outfits. The thing is the Gem Shop is the great equalizer. You don’t have to play the content that new armor is found in if it was only available in the Gem Shop. The barrier is only gems (gold/cash). Seeing it in a “store front” for the impulse buy just seems more natural than doing X content repeatedly to acquire it.

Don’t know how useful these will be but Bog Otter put out a series for returning players.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMgOinWh2Y7FbZyBhlqgHoPI2w8_76_1w

Not sure if they go into the new trait system or not.

Edit: Episode eight of the Boomerangs series covers the Trait 3.0 and Skills changes.

Also not sure when you left but the Trait system went through another revamp and took skills with them. This along with the “future” mastery point system caused skill points to split between hero points which are used for skills and trait unlocks and spirit shards which are Mystic Forge currency.

In Trait 3.0, trait lines are now “specializations”. You still have 5 but you can only have three “slotted” at any time (once the slot is unlocked). You spend hero points to unlock all the traits in the specialization in order. No skipping, no doubling down on minor traits. However it also means you will eventually get three Grand Master traits enabled on your character. You can also swap specialization lines and change which minor/major/grand trait in each line for zero cost while out of combat.

By level 80, you will have enough Hero Points to unlock all skills and all traits in all core profession specializations. Hero Points from challenges simply allow you to unlock skills and traits faster than if you didn’t do them.

Before, once you got to 80, every time you “leveled” again you got another skill point. No more. If you own HoT, XP after 80 is directed at Masteries and if you don’t own HoT, they don’t go anywhere. You get Spirit Shards mainly from doing three dailies and they do drop from boss events, fairly unnoticeably (hey, where did all these spirit shards come from?). Skill Point challenges are now Hero Point challenges.

Hope it helps a little.