Maybe its been announced or maybe I just didn’t see yet, but when does Wintersday start ? It should be amazing to see the new Lions Arch all decked out !
Well, you’re going to be disappointed then. It’s only taking place in the Crown Pavilion. No Lion’s Arch. It’s from what I heard, a copy paste of last year’s event.
I’ve may have played a lot of hours, just not a lot all in a row and if it’s not the time those events spawn, guess it’s too bad for players like me.
They spawn on a rigid schedule and though Teq. is on a 4.5 hour cycle and Karka 3 (I think) it must be possible for you to be able to schedule one play session appropriately.
Maybe it’s different on NA (if you’re on NA) but on EU I get Teq. every evening and only once in the last several weeks did it fail and only for the first time yesterday did I find a map with only a handful of players after I got DCed off a full one.
So yes, their schedule is a bit of an issue but clearly there’s plenty of opportunities to get one.
I would have preferred more MP in what was the original core Tyria, before Southsun Cove, Dry Top and The Silverwastes. Making it not a requirement to do the personal story in every race or buying every cultural armor, which is nearly 2K gold to get. Getting MP from “normal play” like Exploration achievements for each region (not the same as map complete). MP tied to the higher level zones like Orr and Frostgorge Sound. Unlocking the Temples in Orr and doing Claw of Jormag meta, start to finish.
As it is, there are several MP in core Tyria that can only be described as grinding like crafting all the ambrite weapons and bioluminescent armor which is as ridiculous as, coming back to this, buying all 90 cultural armors.
The thing that bothers me the most is you can take a single character through HoT and get all the MP there yet you need to take a character of each race though the PS in the core game to earn all the MP there.
Since the game has multiple threads, it’s using multiple cores and at moments it can be using a fair number of cores.
Remember there are the same number of physical cores in a desktop i5 as in an i7. Hyperthreading is simply a clever technique to improve the usage and efficiency of a physical core. On the macro scale it’s equivalent to an overclock i5 core.
When some of us say it uses only a couple of cores we really mean it only generates enough work for a couple of cores.
Even though a thread can be bounced between multiple cores, it can’t exceed the performance of a single core as a thread can only be running on one core at any particular moment. So it’s no different if it spends 25% of it’s run time on each of four cores or 100% on one. That’s also where we get the notion that single core performance is more important than the multithreaded performance.
Edit: Here is a thread breakdown while standing at the bank in Lion’s Arch. Note I have a quad core and these percentages are based on the entire CPU so no thread will be more than 25% of the CPU’s total performance.
The only reason not to is needing to get enough HP to fully unlock it. Especially if your preferred game mode isn’t PvE. It’s not that I find them better, just another option available in your build. A player who is well versed in the base profession is still superior to someone learning the ins and outs of the elite. And of course “elite” is describing the specialization line, ie trait line, relative to the othe five specialization lines and not the sub-profession. It’s elite because it’s more than just traits in the line.
I hadn’t replied @Sir Jordan because I don’t really know the answer as this happens to be as well, the desyncing of character facing relative to movement and where they are looking. There are still times, and I don’t know how I get into this state, where it looks like the camera and character are pointing in the same direction but once I start to move the character snaps to a different direction.
City of Heroes was OpenGL. It was a forum support nightmare because both AMD and especially nVidia had issues with their OpenGL in the home drivers rather than the professional series of video cards. Times when it was working only to get broken again during the next beta version, which players switched too because new Dx game that came out so they had to choose between latest driver for latest Dx game they got or a stable OpenGL driver for their MMO. Trust me, it wasn’t fun times. Too many gamers upgrade drivers as reflex reaction as soon as a new set comes out.
Armor from the gem store come with one charge per piece baked in then after that they cost a charge. Plus besides the Daily Login reward you can get them from map complete for each race home city plus Lions Arch.
I blame ANet because during the bulk of the MP in core Tyria are locked up behind LWS2, game events and activities that were for the most part toxic for newcomers and running every race through the personal story. Most didn’t even have an achievement tied to that activity until HoT dropped. I’ve done Tequtl (pre-revamp) and the Karka Queen but those Boss Achievements weren’t added until HoT so now I have to do them again, assuming I have the time to kill to get on a decent Tequtl map and wait for it to spawn.
I’ve may have played a lot of hours, just not a lot all in a row and if it’s not the time those events spawn, guess it’s too bad for players like me.
But you still have to scroll through them to find which achievement of that category has the mastery point tied to it. Until I read the wiki article I didn’t even check the achievement tab to notice those icons. You select the dailies via the list that comes up when you claim your reward. There’s no reason to click on the achievements tab if pre-HoT they didn’t matter to you.
Brilliant on the mod’s part to remove the thread with all the replies, there were multiple, and leave the one pointing you to it because it was still there when I linked to it.
With action cam off, which is the default, you have to hold down the right mouse button to pan the camera about and if you are moving this will steer you. Action cam on simply removes the need to hold down the right mouse button. I don’t think I’ve seen what you described. What are you doing, where are you when this happens.
Yes and no. A thread may move around between cores when it’s running but it still can’t exceed the performance of a single core since a thread can’t be running on more than one core at any particular moment.
The best an IP can resolve is the reported location of the ISP who assigns your individual IP. Mine is a good 50 miles away and I’m pretty sure everyone who has that ISP in my smallish state is reported as being from this location.
Ty all for your great responses! @ behellagh-honestly I don’t want to unlock everything yesterday. The grinding nightmare comes in if I want to have the satisfaction of FINISHING Tyria mastery. The only way to get the points to put on the mastery is to either grind story over and over doing all the achieves or grind drytop (I had forgotten that one!) to make a bunch of weapons I don’t want-all for one mastery point.
Tell me about it, while I’m partially through the 4 tier of Pact Mastery I’m nearly out of points in central Tyria. In three years I barely made more than a couple of alts, not necessarily one of each race, never completed the personal story or LW Season 2 or Silverwastes, which I ran through to get to into HoT. I don’t have the gold to buy every piece of Cultural Armor for one mastery point. I’ve barely done any dungeon, never played fractals. Triple Trouble and Tequatl are way above my skill level, and like dungeons, fractals, you can’t really pug them (meaning not knowing what to do other than damage). Yet I have over 3000 hours in this game.
While earning XP is a simple matter, finding what awards you Mastery points is impossible to know unless you do a deep dive through your achievement tabs, something I never really cared about, AP simply accumulates and you get a chest and occasionally you complete one and might get a title.
40% is the macro performance, the entire CPU average across all cores. However the game’s main event thread, like any thread, can’t exceed the performance of a single core. This is a primary factor that limits overall frame rate since this main thread is looping for every frame. Therefore overclocking the CPU, or using a CPU that can do more instructions per second, will allow more loops of this thread in the same amount of time and thus more frames.
Now there’s a 2nd major thread, actually a pair, which is the calls to Dx9 in the game and the graphics driver. Together these pair of threads also don’t exceed the performance of a single core and usually takes less time to run than the primary thread. Improving your GPU reduces the overall time of the driver thread takes to run but the pair is dependent on the main thread to assemble all the information for the next frame, the performance gain isn’t as great as games where GPU performance is the bottleneck.
This information is from watching the various threads in the game code running while playing.
It’s suppose to take a long time. It’s only “grinding nightmare” because you want to unlock everything yesterday. They are account wide abilities that any level 80 can contribute to.
Accept that these aren’t going to come tomorrow and simply play the game as you had been playing it before HoT.
I’m willing to bet this goes back to when the game was first being developed and discussing GW2 on reddit was part information, part hyping the game. And after game launch reddit posting is simply ingrained in some of the old guard including Colin. Reddit was their conduit to the fans.
Now the official forums may be out now, it’s lack of basic features (re: search) makes it less of a preferred means to convey information. A thread on general discussion may get a reply in PvP or WvW or whatever the dev replying (or Gaile) thinks is the best forum. Sure we have the dev tracker but one talkative dev in a thread you aren’t interested in could fill the front page, burying the reply you are interested in several pages deep. All a player knows is the thread where they posted hasn’t had a dev reply yet. Without search or possibly a dev tracker for each board (idea!) it’s frustrating.
Wouldn’t be possible with the current game engine design. The per core performance in the XBOne and PS4 are a third of the performance of an Intel core. At that point they might as well start with an existing multiplatform engine and fit the game to it rather than trying to build a multiplatform engine from scratch. Of course that may mean the some of the systems we enjoy today may have to change to fit an existing engine.
Intel CPU for sure. Sorry AMD but your per core performance is inferior to Intel’s core by a wide margin. Maybe the new Zen architecture will make brand of CPU a coin flip again.
My old piece of kitten rig runs this game smooth as silk. My GPU doesn’t even know DX12 exists. Shhhhhh.
Seriously though if you want a DX11+ game don’t play one that was released over 3 years ago.
10 year old games like DDO that launched with DX 9 support, have added 10 and 11. Is it just that none of you have faith in Arenanet to add DX12 support?
It’s not that we don’t have faith. But some of us understand as a software developers on large projects that devoting the resources toward a major rework of the game engine to dynamically scale for multiple cores and data classes as tread safe versions. Now they were looking for someone who is experienced in multiple APIs and someone with that skill set could be someone who could outline at least how to structure a new engine that could be compatible across various versions of Dx as well as maybe cross platform for a true Mac version.
And as for DDO, Turbine use the engine across multiple MMOs and they added Dx10 back when both games were still subscription based. And Dx11 features they added were minor at best but they get to say they are using it.
Simply go to Twitch and see who’s up. Aurora Peachy is getting ready to record her Guild Gab program and Bog Otter is currently playing GW2 while Devilin, which he was planning to stream, is currently updating their servers.
The 64-bit client was an emergency beta release and is way more beta than the Mac client is. It was rushed to alleviate the OOM issues with HoT, issues that were supposedly fixed a couple of weeks ago and since then I’ve found the 64-bit client doesn’t quite go live at the same time as the 32-bit one does. This case it looks as if it wasn’t pushed to the CDN so everyone was trying to download it from one server.
If you keep using this 64-bit beta client, understand that there will be bumps until it becomes official and that the only official client is the 32-bit one.
I think it’s very presumptuous of everyone to constantly say GW2 is “poorly optimized”.
Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but what evidence do we have?
From my observations, I think the network is the real bottleneck – the game has no trouble rendering large numbers of entities, but the network traffic for 70 people to play together is kind of insane.
Maybe a graphics overhaul would make sense in 4-5 more years, but not at this point.
You’re kidding right?
Evidence 1: Severe reliance on CPU while unable to use multiple cores (something that DX11/12 would help with).
Evidence 2: Memory sinks. Game crashes on top notch machines. Even with 64bit client i still get random freezes on a 5 months old i74790k with 16Gb ram and a GTX 970 (GW2 on SSD), after HoT and before i got 64bit client (which was like the day after it released) i was crashing once or twice a day simply running around LA and such. Need better evidence?
Multicore support with Dx11/12 isn’t automagical, they would have to recode their renderer portion of the engine to take advantage of Dx11/12’s ability to run simultaneously in multiple threads first. It’s NOT something a developer gets for free if they just choose to use Dx11/12.
As I pointed people to the reddit thread from the game engine dev in a previous post, the bottleneck isn’t the render thread, usually and the difficulty is some of their internal data objects aren’t thread safe meaning they couldn’t just make the part that is being the bottleneck multithreaded until they first make those objects thread safe, which they are working on.
It was released as an emergency beta to alleviate the OOM issues players were finding in HoT at launch.
Because it was a side release, it may not be part of the usual push to live proceedure meaning the 64-bit client isn’t guaranteed to be ready the same time on the CDN as the 32-bit. On top of that this patch went live well after normal business hours so it doesn’t surprise me that the 64-bit release had download issues.
As long as you keep using the 64-bit beta client since they “fixed” the 32-bit one a couple of weeks ago and as long as the 64-bit is still beta, expect more of this.
I wouldn’t mind it so much if it took full advantage of my FX8350’s 8 cores…but no…it doesn’t.
EDIT: If there is a way for the game to take advantage of all 8 cores, please tell me.
There isn’t. The game engine only has two major threads and a handful of minor threads. What hurts the FX series (well anything that uses the Bulldozer architecture) is your per core performance isn’t all that great.
You light things on fire and toss around lightning whips. What’s not to like. Sure you are a glass cannon but it so fun wiping out small groups of critters.
You don’t “code” for single/dual/quad channel, that’s entirely hardware between the memory controller on the CPU (nowadays most are on the CPU rather than a motherboard northbridge). What it sounds like that your ram is on the edge of some condition that the memory fetch pattern with this game is causing a problem.
That was brilliant Sharm, absolutely brilliant. And Sammpo’s video was an excellent choreographed and timed creation. And I didn’t realize we had a Colin face.
No, they post new/returning/on sale Gem Store items pretty much every week. If anything these items will drain off existing gems banked up for the next round of sales usually around New Year. So drain off the gold and gems and players would have to spend cash.
It’s all about impulse buying. Who wouldn’t want a wreath backpack skin and a snowflake glider skin that drops snow. Very impulse buy.
No more wings. Please Guild Wars refrain from being just like every other MMO with the stupid cosmetics that relate nothing to the game.
Maybe some more god related stuff, Lyssa mask, Dwayna crown, and also more class related things like more Elementalist jewels, Necromancer claws, etc. for 250-400 gems depending.
Then you sort of missed the point about the microtransactions, it’s all about the cosmetics.
Here’s our philosophy on microtransactions: We think players should have the opportunity to spend money on items that provide visual distinction and offer more ways to express themselves.
I get one every so often. So do your part and report and block when you get one. ANet depends on us to report them. ANet has done a fair job to make their life difficult in creating spam bots.
I guess the assumption here is if you are buffing healing, you want the healer to be a bit more tanky. Of course that may be a problem in raids and certain other encounters.
I’d prefer a “reserved spot” for certain items that I equip/un-equip.
For example, I’ll occasionally equip dagger vs sword vs pistol and it would be great if they always went to a specific location in my inventory when I un-equip them.
I would love this too. Especially when switching from two weapons to a two handed weapon. One swaps with the two handed while the other goes to the first available free spot which is frequently my backpack.
Not adds but content announcements. True. I think we all know that raids are up by now and the league is on the loading screens and any limitations/restrictions on PvP due to the season should be limited to the PvP lobby.
As for DX9 and 32bit: Moving off of DX9 wouldn’t buy us a whole lot performance wise, as all interaction with DirectX is happening on the render thread, which is generally not the bottleneck.
To lazy to look up the last thread on this topic but here’s the game dev’s explanation as to performance issues.
Noticed at my parents who has 75 Mb that the zone loading is quicker than my 3 Mb service and I have a faster system so, yes Internet speed is important.
A video card won’t need a motherboard and possible ram upgrade.
HD 4870 is a 130-140 watts, since we don’t know the size of your power supply is, in terms of 12 volt wattage, so R9 265 or GTX 960 in terms of power needed.
When I’m waiting for an event to pop. I’m not moving around like a hyperactive 8 year old on a box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs, I’m standing still. I’m checking my TP bids and purchases, sorting my inventory, reading the forums, etc. I’m not AFK for the event I’m biding time.
But as a developer, a person who codes the game, it may not be in their wheelhouse set of skills to deal with the customers directly.
<snip>
So really it’s fairly normal for devs not to talk to customers.
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All of that is fine and dandy but it doesn’t address the elephant in the room which is information should always appear in these forums or the GW2 website either first or very soon after it’s published elsewhere, whether that’s twitch, twitter, reddit, facebook, etc. Timely game information to your customers shouldn’t be an like a collection achievement.
(Addressing highlighted parts)
Of course not all are capable of handling salty remarks and angry customers, and they should not post and I don’t expect them to. However if they are posting on a different forum and speaking to customers there then they have essentially declared themselves as capable of handling it, and since they are then they should be giving priority to posting on the official forum.
It feels unprofessional for a business to not use its official platform as the primary site to give new information and to answer questions, but instead to post primarily on some other, non company platform. If they need to have someone who proxy posts for the devs because they can’t handle it, then the game should look into hiring a forum spokesperson whose sole job is to proxy post.
You missed the point I was making, some developers don’t think about what they are saying from the point of view of the customer. It’s not that they can’t handle criticism from customers but like a lot of technical professions, words relative to their profession may have very different meanings to the general public. Plus they can be leaky sieves. I’m sure it’s not fragile psyches that are the issue but what they may reveal, which will get misreported and amplified (see fractal patch coming 1st Dec belief) into something it wasn’t while discussing it. The filter the other was is to narrow opinions down to the most requested that also align with the ideas from upon high.
Anyone else now realize the reason for the moratorium back in 2014 of talking to us was all about keeping HoT under-wraps until PAX South? Because it’s too easy to forget where a fix or redesign is relative to the live game. Imagine some dev reports that they fixed some annoying but not all that game breaking bug and when pressed for a release date, can’t say or after several patches of it not appearing is called a lier. It’s a promise that was broken. This is the kind of missteps/miscues they are trying to prevent.
And as the last paragraph from my previous quote said, information should also be published here soon after if it was published elsewhere.
