Guild Wars 2

I thought we were getting MP from XP as well as certain activities, not needing XP to be able to spend MP from activities that ANet though players should have been doing. Especially during the HoT beta where we saw players getting MP from what was equivalent to a POI or Vista.

He’s in every home instance. My Norn first contacted him in the Grove while my Human finished it in DR.

Likely the negotiation between the PCIe controller and your card failed so it defaulted to less than 16 lanes, in your case 2 lanes at a much lower bandwidth.

Could be caused by normal thermal cycling between the card and the slot as well as oxidation of the contacts. It happens.

Moral of story, don’t buy gems and expect to spend them immediately, ever. Too many tales of woe from players trying to buy gems for a short term sale only to miss out because there’s a understandable delay due to the level of fraud in online proxy currency purchases.

biofrog.1568:

Behellagh.1468:

10 K drinks need roughly 45 to 50 STACKS of gifts. While the JP, if you were good at it delivered the best rate per hour but some of us simply suck at JP. I might be able to complete it once or twice every 1/2 hour session. And that was after 10 hours of no successful runs. If it wasn’t Charrs in trenchcoats or Norns in dresses obscuring my ability to judge where to land during the snowflake run/present hop, the kitten snowman would blow me off once I got across the presents (couldn’t dodge roll, to do JPs it’s one hand on the mouse and one on the space bar) or I get hit by a tiny snowball and then crushed and pushed off the path by a large rolling one. I’m glad all those years of playing platform games on consoles and free time over semester break paid off for some of you but understand you are the exception not the rule if you did over 1000 successful JP runs.
..snip..

A little tip, and if you don’t know about it yet – try using the Action Camera mode in F11 options. It gives you a point/crosshair in front of your character which makes it much clearer to see exactly where you are jumping to.

Might not make a big difference to some, but I find from the popping boxes on it is easier in action cam.

Oh I do, but if I can’t see the flake (because tiny flake with a max size charr in a billowing trenchcoat pausing on it), I can’t aim for it with the crosshair. If I aim for the charr I’m just as likely to overshoot. If I do make the jump then I’m “inside” the char and can’t tell if I’m standing in a spot where I could make the next jump. And lets not talk about if the walking carpet decides to jump at the same moment as me.

DeathReign.7821:

Behellagh.1468:

(couldn’t dodge roll, to do JPs it’s one hand on the mouse and one on the space bar)

Wait what?

Yep, can’t use keyboard for movement quickly enough when the platform disintegrates in less than two seconds so I move/steer with the mouse. Need four fingers on the space bar to be sure it registers a press. Never was a PC FPS player so WASD isn’t ingrained in my muscle memory. And I don’t have gamer input devices like a mouse with a ton of buttons, just got the two so remapping the dodge key is out. With my lack of coordination I would just as likely trigger a dodge roll off flakes on the way up anyways.

Got my 15 JP completions over a week for the achievement and I’m done. I think the best I got in an hour of JP was 3 completions. I could get to the presents 80-90% of the time but then fail to cross.

It’s human nature to think if there is something you can do that’s easy to you, it must be easy for everyone. It’s not. Me, I can’t understand why most people can’t do “simple” math in their heads, like calculating unit costs at the grocery store, price with sales tax, a 20% tip or something as simple as change.

Dondarrion.2748:

Who or what is Suck at Love, and why the heck should I care when this post seems to be about a cheating player… they got caught and they’ve been banned, and good riddance.

They produced a number of original Guild Wars 2 songs, some quite good, and created music videos for them as well.

https://www.youtube.com/user/manisenf/videos

I think Go With Thief was their best. 511122

10 K drinks need roughly 45 to 50 STACKS of gifts. While the JP, if you were good at it delivered the best rate per hour but some of us simply suck at JP. I might be able to complete it once or twice every 1/2 hour session. And that was after 10 hours of no successful runs. If it wasn’t Charrs in trenchcoats or Norns in dresses obscuring my ability to judge where to land during the snowflake run/present hop, the kitten snowman would blow me off once I got across the presents (couldn’t dodge roll, to do JPs it’s one hand on the mouse and one on the space bar) or I get hit by a tiny snowball and then crushed and pushed off the path by a large rolling one. I’m glad all those years of playing platform games on consoles and free time over semester break paid off for some of you but understand you are the exception not the rule if you did over 1000 successful JP runs.

And yes there are other activities you can farm but bell choir is maybe half the rate a good JP player can get, and that’s the second best. I happen to be karma rich but not even getting 1/2 a stack daily from buying them from the NPC. I might be able to get 8 or 9 stacks this way before running out of karma. That leaves the TP and 7+ silver a pop is way expensive.

B2P pays the development costs in a way that just a cash shop couldn’t without selling P2W merch or limiting character slots and erecting pricey paywalls around certain types of content.

Cue the poster who will claim that’s exactly what the expansion is, a costly paywall.

They changed it from 400 to 250 (I think it’s 250 … yep 250) soon after HoT launched. Devs thought players would be OK getting the elite unlocked by completing HoT while players wanted to play HoT with their elite.

I thought LWS2 was great, for casual players. They were quick and didn’t rely on needing days to complete a long list of achievements as LWS1 had to get some minor reward that they ended up selling much later.

LWS1 felt a lot like Wintersday feels this time around. You have to commit yourself to do this content exclusively with whatever playing time you have if you want a chance to get the reward. LWS2 chapters only took an hour, maybe two to complete. For me, that’s a single play session and I could go back and do my usual content instead of abandoning it completely because in two weeks there would be another pile of content to focus on to get it’s achievements.

You may have a metric kitten ton of time to play but a lot of us don’t and we would like the rewards to be obtainable without making the game our second job.

LWS1 would have been more fun if we had 4 weeks for each chapter but I’m guessing those who live in game thought even 2 weeks was too long.

Well did you get all the HP in core Tyria yet, since that affects the total needed? You can earn HP in WvW now, well a proxy you can convert into. HP in HoT are 10 each BTW. It’s really tough to say as some HoT HP are in areas that require you to have certain masteries so it’s not just counting all the HP locations in a HoT zone.

And for heaven sake sell on the TP, not to NPCs unless nobody is buying the item there and consider posting your own sale price rather than instant sell.

Material promotion via the Mystic Forge is another way to make money quickly. GW2Shinies has a nice tool to help identify the MF crafting/promotion that makes the most bottom line profit (in coin) but you should temper your decision based on actual profit %, especially with material promotion because RNGesus can screw you over unless you do a lot of promotions.

Even then it’s not unusual to be 15% below the estimated return which means if your projected profit margin is less than 20%, you will lose money on the promotion. I usually look for a 40% minimum profit margin on promotions before I roll the dice.

Four gigs gets hit at 4K resolutions with high AA modes and ultra hires textures. But since this game uses Dx9 and memory allocation is under dev control rather than DirectX, I’m not sure we even get close to 2 GB even. More like hovering around 1GB.

Raif.9507:

Behellagh.1468:

The 64-bit does use a fair amount more over the 32-bit client, side effect of all memory pointers in the data now being twice as long.

Edit: Just tried a quick test, loading in DR at the Royal Terrace and waiting for all the assets load into memory, spinning about just to be sure I get everything. 64-bit used 3.1 GB, 32-bit used 1.6 GB.

3.1GB makes sense for sitting at the Royal Terrace, I’m at 5.3GB ATM while sitting there which is why something looks funny.

Well I have Character Model Limit and Quality set at medium. I’m using the English client with no other languages loaded.

The number of times I’ve shown up to TTW only to see it fail is absurdly high. Hardly an easy 4 points. Diving Goggles has a couple behind JP and if JPs aren’t your thing for whatever reason you’re SOL (one at the end of the Not So Secret JP is especially annoying). Might as well be the 2K gold race armor one.

GTX 745 is a cut down GTX 750 (384 vs 512 shaders) and uses slower DDR3 memory instead of much faster GDDR5. Likely added because the PSU in the unit is weak and it’s better than the integrated GPU in the CPU.

Other than that it’s not bad. Of course Dell’s gamer line is Alienware, and they aren’t that much better. Their slimline towers also have less than impressive PSUs to drive graphics but they do sell an external box with it’s own 460 watt PSU that can house one double wide video card but uses a proprietary cable (PCIe x4 V3 interconnect) to connect to the tower. Unenthusiastic yay.

Just remember, pretty much any “home” PC prebuilt will have a low power PSU and if it has a discrete video card it won’t be all that impressive, just better than the integrated one.

Tspatula.9086:

The one counterfactual to anyone suggesting that there are only a few negative posters ignores the reality that many of these post and posters don’t live long on the forums. This is an official game site and like every other they are very strictly managed and you can be sure that positive post are never deleted so there is an inherent bias to those.

If that was the case then the forums would be fairly free for negative topics, since this isn’t the case your presumption that there is a vast majority of posters who’ve had their threads and comments crushed is incorrect.

The 64-bit does use a fair amount more over the 32-bit client, side effect of all memory pointers in the data now being twice as long.

Edit: Just tried a quick test, loading in DR at the Royal Terrace and waiting for all the assets load into memory, spinning about just to be sure I get everything. 64-bit used 3.1 GB, 32-bit used 1.6 GB.

Dean Calaway.9718:

Lastly, a word of advice, if you can wait till spring, wait.
Right now the GTX960 and GTX970 are advertised as having 4GB of VRAM but they only really have 3,5GB of usable VRAM.

No, the 970 has 4GB and can use it.

Warning, tech talk ahead.

The 970 is a cut down 980, basically a 980 that doesn’t test out fully so they disabled the broken areas down to a known specification. Now basically a 970 has 3 of the 16 streaming processor clusters disabled and one INTERNAL memory bus out of the 8 the 980 has and one eighth of the L2 cache. This means while externally the 970 like the 980 is 256 bit, eight 32-bit memory buses each each with 512 MB of video memory, internally the 970 only has a 224 bit internal memory bus and 1792 KB of L2 cache instead of 2048 KB.

So as long as you use less then 3.5 GB of memory, there is a 1 to 1 relationship between external and internal memory buses. However if you use that last 0.5 GB, it has to double up with another 0.5 GB chunk of memory to share one internal 32 bit memory bus.

So as long as you only use 3.5 GB or less, you have one to one ratio between internal to external memory buses, just like the 970. However if you go beyond 3.5 GB, that last 32 bit external bus has to time share with one internal 32 bit instead of having it’s own which then impacts performance. So there is a small drop in performance due to memory as well as the reduction in streaming processors between the 980 and the 970.

The GTX 960 standard configuration is 2 GB since it’s literally half of a GTX 980 in terms of streaming processors and external and internal memory buses. Going to 4 GB means that instead of 512 MB tied to each of the four 32 bit external buses, they are hanging a full 1 GB. It also means with 4 GB you have the same amount of memory being cached with a L2 cache half the size of the 980. That’s going to impact overall video memory performance as well.

But there isn’t a similar issue with number of internal and external memory buses not being the same on the 960 and the only issue is from gamers who don’t actually understand the tools they are using.

Bundles aren’t bad if they are simply a collection of items, that are purchasable from the Gem Shop individually, that players may be interested in getting them all at once for a discount.

• Gathering tools bundle
• The two account starter bundles

These two are good examples. A bad example are the bundles that came out with HoT that was the only way to get particular glider & weapons skins as well as an exclusive outfit. For Winter’s Day bundle they at least offered the outfit separately (this also came with a mini, offered separately instead of a glider skin).

I have a feeling that the monetization crew are throwing darts and seeing what gets push back as well as what sells and what doesn’t. So plenty of chances for missteps.

My issue boils down to my 3 years of playing content I enjoyed did not align or thought worthwhile at the time is now … SUPRIZE .. the content in core Tyria I should have been doing. Of course there was no telegraphing of that before launch.

And spoon collector? How many threads have there been discussing how the spoon that drops only from Teq is locked up behind RNGesus? I can understand “encouraging” players to repeat content in a subscription game but seriously. The worse thing about tying up so many mastery points behind Teq and TTW is that succeeding isn’t about just your skill but the skill of all the pug players running these raid lite fights.

If I knew now that I had to have done the personal story for every race, that LS2 was needed. That dungeon story mode was important. That the old Teq didn’t count. That diving googles weren’t just for OCD completionists. Just maybe I would have enough MP to unlock autoloot now that I have enough XP.

Actually you will likely need to open 12,500 presents as the drinks drop rate is around 80%. That’s 50 stacks.

At this point of time, with 8 days left, are you good with JPs? 10 per completion and I’ve seen “good” players getting 10 done per 1/2 hour so 200 an hour. I’m fairly competent with the bell choir. You get 18 gifts per completed run and you may get 8 to 10 runs in an hour.

If you have loads of karma you can buy 100 a day with 228K karma. Additional ones are 3850 karma plus a T6 snowflake each.

So lots of gifts needed, not a lot of time, so good luck with that if you are just starting.

Beldin.5498:

Harper.4173:

Because honestly the expansion was bad in a number of ways – the worst however is that in a primarily cosmetically driven game this expansion gave us incredibly few armor skins to work towards.

It’s as simple as that – cosmetics driven game – no cosmetic choices as rewards – nobody bothering with it that much.

Not to mention that we only got 3 new legendary weapons – the high-end be all-end all skins.
3 skins means that people who don’t like any of the current ones they released with HoT have nothing to do – nothing to work for.

I’m personally not working on HoT stuff because there are no HoT skins I particularly like – so then why bother?

^ So much this.

Especially since we didn’t had new armor sets in the gemstore since over 1.5 years
and then we had the blog from Lindsey Murdock (?) were it was written that we
get no more armor sets in the gemstore but instead ingame .. so i expected HoT
to deliver nearly as much new skins than the base game ..

And what did we get ? Nothing .. or yeah 3 ugly sets i think.

I really would be happy if we simply get back armor sets in the gemstore, then i had
at least something i could work for … but so there is simply no reason to play for
me anymore.

But why did you think you would get dozens if not a hundred different armor skins in an expansion? A number of skins in the base game are level aligned while HoT is purely level 80. There were unique ones in each region, each race. That assumption about HoT was a bit unrealistic. We got one region, no new playable races, we’re only level 80. Also if armor skins are meant to be content completion rewards, what, we should get a set from every MP, HP, story chapter completion, achievement, etc? Should we have gotten more than three outside of raids, sure but as many as the core game? No way.

You are also ignoring that HoT was the beginning. LW 3 starts here. There is plenty of room to add additional skins going forward.

Can’t stress going off the oft traveled path to find critters that have been around for awhile. You get something like 3x the XP when you include the bonus. Of course if you are also exploring, you get that XP while encountering “old” critters.

I pointed out a while back that core mastery points that I personally don’t have are all tied up in LS 2, Teq or the TTW. That’s ignoring the 2000g cultural armor one (every race, every weight). Diving googles is only trivial if you have bothered to do map complete and pull up a guide, hardly “organic”. I wasn’t into the personal story but that’s also a source of core Tyria mastery points.

So I spent 3 years and 3000 hours doing stuff on three characters that ANet decided didn’t count for mastery points in core Tyria.

And 100 gold isn’t trivial. It never was to me.

Yes, only the character slot sale is still live and now all the various instance mat nodes are on sale at 25% off as the new sale items introduced today. Sorry.

Yes but there was a lot of uproar about Living Story 1. The two things that come to mind is the lack of replayability and the requirement to play while the content was live, which comes with the territory of near real time story telling, and the unevenness of the content but that was a learning process (fixing signs).

There was a lot of pushback on Living Story 1 which is why we have Living Story 2 the way it is, mostly contained in two new mini zones, fully replayable and obtainable, with gems if you weren’t there when it was originally rolled out.

I’m calling it that HoT was originally LS 3 when the decision was made to push it out as an expansion. And even then they didn’t have time to do the story justice as it was seriously uneven. It’s as if they filmed the action sequences and didn’t have time to tell a coherent story. LS 2 was fantastic compared to the story in HoT.

That said HoT isn’t just about story. It was also a feature pack and included some very nice core mechanic upgrades. But too many simply table flipped and stormed off when their favorite activities can altered. It also doesn’t help ANet’s rep when Fractals once again was incomplete upon HoT launch over what was promised.

Now if they can create an involving LS “3” built on HoT, then great otherwise a fair chunk of HoT was content that was either too hard for the average player or far too easy for the hardcore ones.

Fluffball.8307:

I refuse to visit reddit because of the absolutely nonstop immaturity and hostility. The devs create a (heavily) moderated bastion of civility here and then abandon it for a trashy alternative site… what??

I’ve never seen that in the threads that devs posted in on reddit.

Season 1 radically altered entire zones throughout the world as the story went on. They could fractalize some of the major encounters but to have all the “original” zones during the story could be a lot of work for an hour or two of chapter gameplay.

Also, the devs that do post there may simply be checking it out for other reasons and stumble upon posts that they have answers for or were the lead in implementing a feature being discussed. I also would not be surprised if the devs answering there have been roaming reddit in the days before GW2’s launch.

Let’s face it, you can’t search for anything here. Search for posts with lots of replies that have a new post within the last week. Sure we can search with Google but not as fine as search tools from “real” forum software.

Upgrading your case because it doesn’t have enough USB 3.0 ports is like buying a new car because it doesn’t have enough cup holders. If your concerns were more about cooling such as adding a 240mm liquid cooler or a cleaner layout for better airflow/cable management or even just more room to get your hands in there, that’s a good reason. Just saying, there are USB hubs for a reason. That said I found the HAF 932 to still be a very reasonable case. Also it’s a lot cheaper buying a USB 3.0 port drive bay insert than a new case.

The socket 1366 is pretty old socket in CPU years. The last processor made for it came out in June of 2011. 4 1/2 years is like antique status. The i7-950 is around half as fast as the i7-4790K at stock clocks (socket 1150). While the 4790K isn’t the latest CPU generation from Intel, that is the i7-6700K, the 6700K hasn’t really shown an improvement over the i7-4790K. What the 6700K and socket 1151 does do is lay the foundation for the switch over to DDR4 as well as the latest standards of USB and onboard SSD interfaces. Except I think the socket 1151 motherboards came out a bit too soon for the latest USB standards which were still in flux at the time. But that’s what bleeding edge buys you.

As for graphics, the GTX 960 isn’t a significant upgrade over the GTX 760, about 10%. The GTX 970 on the other hand is a major upgrade of around 70% but only using 25 watts more than the GTX 760. Maxwell GPUs are so much more power efficient. An AMD R9 290X, similar in performance and price to the GTX 970, uses 100 watts more power than the GTX 970.

PSU wise, as long as you are sticking to a single video card, it’s fine. Power requirements are dropping and 600+ watts available at 12 volts is way more than you need.

MBR vs GPT. It’s not really a hardware issue on the motherboard end but a BIOS one. And yes, over 2TB drives need GPT. Can’t think of a modern socket 1150 motherboard that isn’t UEFI nowadays.

And if you are asking about drives for booting, 250GB Samsung 850 EVO is $90. Yea, pain to reinstall the OS but notable improvement in performance. Also newer motherboards have an M.2 slot on the motherboard for a stick version of SSDs so no drive bays are used. The very latest have a PCIe x4 express slot for ludicrous speed (they’ve gone to plaid!) SSD sticks but they are twice the price of the M.2/2.5" variety.

Memory, DDR3-1600 is still decent but you’re either going to need a 4th stick or buy a 2×4GB pair to get you to 8GB.

Honestly I’m having a blast in WvW. How many WvWers walked away in the first week and never came back because they hated the new borderland maps or heard from the vocal posters here that WvW is broken/sucks when it really isn’t. It’s just different now.

It should support any resolution that your card reports. If your card supports that resolution on your extra-wide monitor (example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824025212 ) then the game should.

You can always grab the P4F version of the core game to check.

https://welcome.guildwars2.com/en/play-for-free

skullmount.1758:

Charrbeque.8729:

Djinn.9245:

Apparently they haven’t been silent on Reddit…

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Dev-quotes-from-Reddit

Reddit dev tracker https://www.reddit.com/r/gw2devtrack
:)

Theres also: http://windwarrior.github.io/GW2RedditDevTracker/

Reddit has it’s own – https://www.reddit.com/r/gw2devtrack

No idea if it’s a one day sale or not. May be a cumulative item sale where everyday they add another item to the sale until the sale ends.

#arenanetproblems – never telling us the ending date to events when the events start

Top of the lighthouse.

10000 drinks / 0.8 drop rate / 28 days = 447 gifts per day. We are talking 50 stacks of presents to be sure-ish.

227,500 karma can buy 100 presents.
You get 18 per 6 rounds of bells (1,1,3,3,5,5)
You get 10 per JP run completed
50 per mini-dungeon

Didn’t notice the drop rate from other Winter’s Day activities.

It does appear that the requirement is there to drain both Karma and/or gold from players who want the shoulder piece.

Use GPU-Z to see if it’s setting the PCIe interface right. Also the PCIe x16 slot closest to the CPU is usually the correct one.

The game is also very CPU dependent, more on per core performance than lots of lower performing cores.

Holy heck, the OP is complaining that the expansion is a paywall. All expansions are a paywall. And it’s no different between a P4F account and a original core account who didn’t buy the expansion. They have the same content and activities they can participate in. The same professions, crafting disciplines, etc. P4F simply starts with fewer character slots, bags and chat/tp restrictions plus a few level restrictions before access is granted to certain parts of the game. Boo hoo they can’t get gliders or “peak” in on HoT or the Raids. Want a peak, watch Twitch or Youtube. Go play PvP/WvW and see the Rev and specializations in action.

So no, they aren’t screwing P4F over anymore than vets who didn’t buy HoT.

I believe NPC vendors all have the same item at the same price. And you get the same amount selling items to any of them. No better deal selling armor to the armor NPC than the weapon NPC, etc.

https://help.guildwars2.com/entries/95982157-Account-types-Free-Core-HoT

It is highly doubtful they will ever discount gems beyond pre-purchase of expansions, they prefer targeted sales.

At least in the JP, if you stay you get grandfathered into the next instance so it’s about getting in and not leaving. Problem is some players are simply locking themselves in JP by having their character run off the starting platform infinitely until they show up to actually play them.

Never had a problem with bell choir for getting in but I don’t play in prime hours often. JP can be a pain to get in but again it’s all about when you try. It’s the holiday break for schools as well as vacation from white collar jobs so it’s more busy even in the “off” hours in the US.

Any of the peppermint food from wintersday drops count toward the candy. If you buy items from the TP for orphans (around 15 silver), wrap and deliver to all 30 of them on Dulfy’s map, which can be done in 15-20 minutes, using each of the karma buffs from wintersday (previous day’s orphan’s reward (Winter’s Blessing), peppermint candy (lasts a minute each but stack), peppermint food and either the oil or icicle, you get back enough karma to buy 100 presents with karma.

100 gifts will give you 80-90 drinks and a lot of candy canes (more than the 15 I used). Every daily gives an extra present. There are three trees that give a present and presents are farmable via the winterday’s events (JP, bells, etc). Then there’s the big presents in the open world full of skritts that drop several presents.

As for the Meta Festival achievement, you only need 18 of 23. The shoulder piece needs 5 of the achievements including the drinking one, but the drinking one is active all year.

First it’s LA. Wide open spaces with loads of localized complex geometry surrounded with water and full of players. It’s one of the more stressful zones.

To truly help you we need more info OP. Screenshots of the first page of CPU-Z and GPU-Z and a screenshot of your in game graphic settings. Also if you using any of the 3rd party graphic injectors. What type of drive is the game folder on, normal HDD or SSD? LA takes quite a while to load and while it is being loaded in, even after you arrive, performance will suffer.

Well at one time they actually had value. But the flood of rares from HoT has made rare rune/sigil prices drop which made promoting minor rune/sigils a losing proposition now (a long time ago I made 50% profit on carpel tunnel clicking on the MF).

Only have seen lag “ports”, in both directions and the occasional guy who’s holding his spot in the JP by running over the edge of the starting platform again and again and again and … well you get the idea. Most have the decency as to not trigger the path’s destruction at the start by choosing a different direction.

Fluffball.8307:

Aiglos.2907:

I always misjudge the present jump if silly Charr are around. I think they should be banned.

Over dramatic much? Jeez Louise. I think you should be banned for having multicolored armor, it’s distracting.

No, billowing trench coat or robes on supersized Norns and Charr really makes it difficult to see the landing area for small snow flakes or the presents. I end up waiting for several resets just to avoid Norn and Charr at the present stage. At least ANet turned off backpacks cause wings would be horrible.

Few build dainty Norns and Charr.

Finally I did it. For me the Gingerbread path was the easiest. After a week of trying and failing Quaggan I got to the end of the Gingerbread snowflake path within an hour of trying. Then an hour or two of getting the packages part and snowball dodging worked out.

Charrs with trench coats. Enough said.