Guild Wars 2

Scipio.3204:

That doesn’t really change the way things are. Since the release of HoT majority of the rewards is behind raids compared to other game modes, and yet some claim here they don’t understand how some feel raids are in the spotlight.

We did see an armor set during LS 2 , arguably one of the most fun to get. It’s not a crazy theory we didn’t get one with LS 3 because of raids

No, the majority of rewards YOU want are behind the raids. And specific gameplay modes should have exclusive rewards. There are rewards I would love but they are behind gameplay modes I’m not willing to invest the time in. Raids are no different.

The 39 a year from login rewards and 1 a week from exploring DR with my keyfarmer is more than enough for me. Not to mention they are one of the cheapest things on the Gem Shop.

If the Ryzen can’t reveal which core is part of which CCX to the OS, then there isn’t any fix. Your choice as a company is to either say their isn’t anything that can be done or say it’s say it’s working as expected. Which answer would you choose?

Plautze.6290:

Can’t help but bump this topic again. And again. And again. Until something is done.

I do understand that exotic armor should not come from doing nothing, but the sum of all those changes is just too much. Why do we need 5 patches for just 1 insignia, when all other tiers just need 1 patch for 1 insignia, which makes a lot more sense. Why would any person need 5 patches to make one insignia? What are they doing with the rest of the patches? Practice the inscription?!

All in all, the insignias need more than twice as much leather as the entire armor (for medium armor which is supposed to be made mainly of leather) … kind of weird. Also, the drop rates of hardened leather are almost non-existent.

“the problem is that we needed a slight nudge, and what we got was a hammer blow.”
This sums it up nicely. I’m not asking to make hardened leather cheap as hell, just make it drop more often so one doesn’t have to beggar himself in order to make one set of exotic armor. And pls, pls, PLS change that absolute nonsense of needing 5 patches to craft 1 insignia. There is just no reason to do this apart from abstrusely manipulating the market.

Insignia that requires a recipe you learn or buy from a master, aka intricate insignia, requires more patches than those you discover. And top tier gear, exotic and ascended, requires 5 patches instead of 2. Why? Because it’s top tier gear.

Your character will spend most of it’s life at max level where you will get max level drops including T5-T6 mats, more if you salvage the gear drops you don’t want to use. So crafting top tier gear will cost more mats to suck up that excess amount of mats.

Well just found out R5 is due out April 11.

No, Microsoft could fix it by treating the Ryzen the same way as two physical CPUs in the system, a setup often found on server class motherboards. Once a thread is assigned to a CCX, it can’t be reassigned to the other CCX and can only move between the cores of the CCX. Windows 10 does support 2 physical CPUs.

The SMT thread scheduling “problem” that doesn’t need fixing is the old assign threads first to unused cores first and only then start assigning a second thread to a busy cores.

The original AMD FX Bulldozer scheduler issue was it double up threads on modules first to reduce the number of modules used so power reduction of the unused modules would allow clock boosting of the busy modules. The issue was the clock boost couldn’t compensate for the performance loss caused by both “cores” running within a single module fighting over the shared core components within the module, which IIRC was on the order of 10-15%.

Part 2 (had to get the grocer before it closed —-—-

The issue of the OS resigning an active thread from one CCX to another is independent of SMT as the issue would still exist with SMT disabled.

Now AMD may not think the issue is fixable because there is no way for the OS to distinguished the two CCX quads from each other when it enumerated cores so the scheduler would treat them as two 4 core CPUs ver one 8 core. And this is important as the R3 and R5 quad and hex core CPUs are still using the same 8 core die with two or four cores disabled. And that may lead to hex cores with 3 working cores on each CCX or 2 on one and 4 on the other. The quad core Ryzen may end up with 2+2; 1 + 3 or 0+4 working core arrangements with some performing noticeably better than others. That’ll make the “CPU Lottery” impact more than just about OC headroom.

Well there was an expansion ….
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Wars_2:_Heart_of_Thorns

You can also read these …
http://www.guildwars2.com/en/the-game/releases/
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates

to learn about these.
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Specialization
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Login_rewards
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Desert_Borderlands
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Raid

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I was very curious, and it turns out that AMD don’t think that Windows 10 scheduler changes are either needed, or helpful: https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/03/13/amd-ryzen-community-update?sf62107357=1

The issue isn’t SMT per se but the scheduler moving a thread from one CCX quad to the other as L3 cache is local per CCX and and memory access between the two is at the same speed as from main memory.

We’ve never been reasonably sure about drop rates or what is even in the chest if it was a very rare drop because all information about what was in the chest was gathered anodically by self reporting to the wiki. We didn’t even know what nodes could drop until someone got one. Sure, logically there’s no reason not to make the chance of which node the same.

Even today we don’t even know the chance of a 4th slot much less than the weighting of each item in each rarity group or slot.

A combination of being poor when I first started this game coupled with the load time for waypointing on my system encouraged me early on to run within a map and only waypoint LONG distances (other than rezzing).

The think I missed on the HoT maps is not losing a lot of time returning to a location where I died. Very frustrating when the next waypoint is just around the bend or just over that next hill after a several minute jaunt. And that’s because I think of waypoints more like save points as I uncover the map.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Blaeys.3102:

Ayrilana.1396:

Players were carbon copies before raids. There were always meta builds that players followed. You’re blaming raids for something that it didn’t cause and existed before it. Outside of raids, you can use whatever builds you want for PvE. That still hasn’t changed in the last 4.5 years.

Raids can be cleared with non-meta builds. The only thing is that they’re not as efficient and leave less room for error. No matter what changes Anet makes, there will always be a meta build that is preferred. We had this with dungeons.

That was true among min-maxers, but not necessarily among the greater game population.

Your memory and mine of dungeon LFG’s are not the same. If anything, there was more restriction in dungeons because at least in raids the wanna-tanks and wanna-heals are given a nod.

With dungeons, there was always much more wiggle room. Any build and playstyle was reasonably (very important word) viable, no matter how far from the meta. Players that chose not to min-max could still enjoy the content while retaining some unique character identity.

Have you tried raids with anything goes? If not, why not? With dungeons, there always seemed to be an expectation by players who preferred off-meta builds that the groups advertising meta play should drop their requirements and take them. The same thing goes in raids. Why is the convenience of players who play as they want of greater value than the effort of players who started the group?

Tiered difficulty would bring back that wiggle room – restore the ability to enjoy content with a wider range of playstyles/builds/etc (all without taking away the challenge the min-maxers want) – similar to how fractal levels do so in that game mode.

ANet has designed easier raid encounters as a means to allow players who want to raid but feel barred from doing so by build constraints, difficulty or for other reasons. Have you tried any of the easier encounters?

Without that flexibility, the game will continue to grow more more restrictive and focused on carbon-copies – either by design or by player/community inclinations.

That isnt good for the game – and it definitely isn’t the game many of us bought and loved.

Responses above in italics.

The thing is, meta build considerations have always been a thing in MMO’s. The phrase cookie-cutter build goes way back. There were in fact more complaints about (lack of) build diversity in GW2 metas while dungeons were the hardest content.

You believe that somehow because raids are here that vast numbers of Play-As-I-Want players are going to feel the need to stick to meta builds? Why would someone who chose to pay no attention to them before raids suddenly feel the need to adhere to them now? That makes no sense. Players who go their own way will continue to do so. The copiers will continue to do so.

Because those players are interested in getting the unique rewards that raids offer. And the only way to do so without finding a like minded group of Play-As-I-Want individuals is to conform to whatever profession and build out is the current raid meta and try to find a PUG that’ll accept them.

This thread is still boiling down to Raid Hate. I will bet you if they did add an “easy mode” to raids but that mode prevents you from working toward legendary armor the argument will no longer be “but I wanted to experience the story” but “but I wanted to get legendary armor”.

Waiting for the inevitable “But it’s a MMO, you are suppose to be playing it with other people”.

I’m also detest placing my evening’s enjoyment in the hands of 4 or 9 other players. However that is significantly mitigated when it’s friends rather than random strangers.

I chuckle because I see revs everywhere. Guess a lot of players don’t realize they’re dead.

3) gw2crafts.net still the best source for “speed” crafting.

4) If you have the older transmutation stones you can convert them to transmutation charges. Also you can “farm” for them by doing map complete in the cities. You also get 3 charges per 28 day login reward cycle (day 26).

There are also outfits which are total replacement of your armor. Think of it as an illusion over your current armor. You can swap them or turn them on and off for free but you can’t mix or match parts.

The wardrobe also contains minis, finishers, gliders, dyes, mail carriers that use to be character bound but are now account bound. I think you might have to add them either by cycling through your characters or in the case of minis, right click and add them to the wardrobe from player inventory or your bank.

5) Remember Scarlet and her eventual blowing up of Lion’s Arch? That was Season 1 (January 2013 – March 2014) story. Season 2 (July 2014 – January 2015) story was when the Zephyrite’s ship crashed in Dry Top which was the prequel to the expansion. Season 3, which requires HoT, continues the human story of someone trying to overthrow the queen, that had been hinted at since launch. Season 3 is going on currently. In Season 3 each episode also contains a new map.

6 ) HoT, besides adding “elite specializtions” also added the Mastery System for account progression. You first have to unlock the system by doing the first chapter of the HoT story (I think, it’s been a while) and then you can start putting XP toward Masteries that will unlock account wide abilities such as gliding. Read about it here.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery

You say that now but guaranteed if they add a 2x scale checkbox to the UI scale options there will be vocal 4K players dissatisfied by such a shortcut.

Blude.6812:

Nope(to the op), the devs have acknowledged outlier accounts, both positive and negative. If you have a negative one, you are basically screwed. Farm gold and buy is your only option.

All the devs acknowledged is the normal distribution of a system using RNG.

Lets say you have a class of 30 students. Every student rolls 30 six sided dies and count the number of ones. Now overall the total number of ones for the class will be close, if the dice are balanced, will be relatively close to 150 or 5 each. However the statistical distribution of results indicates it’s likely one student would get 0 or 1 from those 30 dice and one or two students will get 9 or more. That is simply the nature of RNG. One student would think that the dice they got were weighted against him while another would think that they were weighted so ones came up more often.

And this example is with a one in six chance, not one in a thousand or five thousand or what ever the tiny chance is for a precursor drop.

And they do still drop in the open world. I was watching a streamer doing Lake Doric and she had The Legend drop from a random White Mantle. She didn’t even notice until she went to clean up her inventory hours later. Somebody went back and scrubbed the stream and found when it dropped. First precursor drop she had since launch and 4000+ hours.

Buran.3796:

^ Bullcrap. You only need scaled (bigger) versions of the UI. Textures are less important due at high res most of the detail comes from the wireframe itself. As long as you have a nice pixel density and some AA the image quality improvement is nothing short of amazing.

I do play the games at 2560 × 1440 and my may concern to my next display is to chose between 16:9 4K or ultra widescreen (21:9) display. More tempted for the later.

He’s not talking about the textures on the 3D models, he’s talking about the 2D elements. Every skill and trait icon, every TP item icon would need a higher resolution version. Currently there’s 4 versions for each, a fifth would be needed for a scaled up 4K UI. A simple bitmap scale would be quick but will assuredly change the complaint from “too small” to “too ugly”.

And if you want to add multiple pictures, simply preview instead of post and you will have the attachment option again. Rinse and repeat for each picture.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Wasn’t the Gem Shop update always (or nearly always) at 9AM Pacific time, whether it is Daylight Saving time or Standard time?

They have been going live at 11a EST once it flipped over to Standard time last October. At least that’s when existing sales/returning end.

http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

The two big changes for US players, Gem Shop update with be Noon EDT, 9a PDT and daily reset at 8p EDT, 5p PDT.

That’s an OS scheduler fix so it’s in Microsoft’s court. The 1700 is $170 cheaper than the 1800X and may be overclockable to a similar clockspeed, which makes it the value choice of the three.

Forum bug, she’s on it.

Astralporing.1957:

Behellagh.1468:

Being in a friendly guild was the only way to have a friendly dungeon group.

You obviously played a different game than i did. Any of my “casual run” lfgs for dungeons filled almost instantly, and i had trouble with pugs maybe one or two times (usually due to me forgetting to mention "no skipping " at the beginning).

I always get a couple of “pros” who take over and kick everyone else including me and restock with their buds. Or they quit midway through and makes the dungeon impossible to complete because the group isn’t moving fast enough. They don’t care create their own LFG or care to read that the group is not speed running.

Dungeons were never friendly for most casual players. Even before the LFG tool it was a crap shoot whether you get a group willing to teach or one that will scream at you and then kick because this wasn’t your 1000th time through rocking the current meta. Being in a friendly guild was the only way to have a friendly dungeon group. This now extends to fractals and raids.

The issue with a HoT trial would be toggling off HoT progress toward masteries, specializations, etc. when the trial is over.

Ayrilana.1396:

It’s often a DPS loss to revive someone when they’re dead vs having them WP and run back. Especially if they’re one of the ones that can’t stay alive. There are also times where players should just WP regardless such as at the towers in DS.

This attitude existed well before HoT.

This existed during world bosses at the start of the game.

I’m a soloist. I enjoy GW2 due to it’s PvE lack of required teaming on 95% of it’s content, it’s PvE design philosophy that you should never be afraid to see or help another player, and it’s flash mob world events.

But there is this other community of players who want content that required skill and team coordination. We see this in groups that devote themselves to activities that require formal parties such as dungeons, fractals and now raids. I don’t begrudge them their own content just like I don’t begrudge PvP players from having theirs.

The trick with these party activities is to find a group with similar beliefs to yours and it’s highly unlikely to find them in PUGs. It’s much better to find a like minded guild.

As for HoT, yes, open world PvE was a lot tougher than core Tyria. But then again large portions of core Tyria weren’t level 80 and the game’s downscaling in lower level areas still left level 80 characters as tiny Gods. You get reminded of that everytime you level up a new character through play than shortcuts. It’s unlikely your level 80s were just doing Orr and Cursed Shores exclusively. With HoT everything was level 80. VB was a nightmare to travel, you had mastery gates slowing your progress and it certainly wasn’t as solo friendly when it comes to exploring. So yes, it played very differently to Core Tyria. But last April’s patch fixed a lot of that, at least for me. And the new LWS3 maps are also less … abusive for solo players.

Most of the salt I see are players being upset that the devs devoted any time to an aspect of the game that they don’t care about. How dare they try to make PvP into an e-Sport, unlike how it was in GW was for a couple of years. How dare they add 10 man “raid” content even though it was being asked for. And really how dare they reward those groups with their own exclusive shiny things as rewards. Cosmetic things.

Has GW2 “changed”. Yes and no because a 4+ year old game has to, it’s not populated by a majority of new players with first time lower level characters anymore. It’s full of grizzled vets looking for something interesting to do. But GW2 has always been a game where you set your own end goals, that hasn’t changed. It’s just some of those things require a bit more of an effort than before.

This is why all the reset times are UTC.

I find it perfect for soloing. If it becomes an issue for me somewhere I will simply switch to a smaller glider until it isn’t a problem anymore.

With the right dyes, this will be the closest thing we get to Wonder Woman’s Invisible Plane.

A new CPU architecture isn’t something you design overnight. You have to guess at what your market will need 3-5 years in advance and can be scaled from $500 desktop PCs to server racks. AMD guessed wrong when they were designing the Bulldozer architecture, expecting software using lots of threads with more complex math handed off to GPUs with their hundreds to thousands of simple floating point processors. Whoops.

Ryzen is considerably faster than even the pre-Bulldozer Athlon II/Phenom II cores. If you look at Tom’s Hardware review of the Ryzen, single core performance at 3.8 GHz is 95% as fast in Cinebench as the i7-7700K single core also at 3.8 GHz. Bulldozer was 55% of an i7-7700K when both are clocked at 3.8 GHz. Huge improvements, congrats AMD.

Now I’m starting to wonder if issues with gaming is a problem with AMD’s data interconnect from the quad core CCX blocks and the PCIe x16 controller driving the video card. Intel’s ring bus in their CPUs may simply be a superior solution than AMD’s “data fabric” interconnect (will you stop giving marketing naming privileges AMD).

It needs to be big because you are inside of it.

Which is why I like the R5 1400X, single CCX module of 4 cores/8 threads, 3.5 GHz XFR boost to 4GHz, $200.

Now they’ve made individual pieces for the gem shop as well as in game. A couple full sets were added with the expansion. These are the armor sets and when they were released into the gem shop.

Profane/Krytan/Primeval – at launch
Aetherblade – June 25, 2013
Phoenix/Magitech/Braham’s – July 30, 2013
Trickster’s/Viper’s/Phalanx – Oct 29, 2013
Flamekissed/Flamewalker/Flamewrath – Nov 26, 2013
Zodiac – Feb 18, 2014
Incarnate/Strider/Rampart – April 15, 2014 alongside the wardrobe

The R3 is 4 core/4 thread … R5 is 4 core/8 thread and 6 core/12 thread.

https://www.techpowerup.com/230916/pricing-of-entire-amd-ryzen-lineup-revealed

SlippyCheeze.5483:

It’s worth noting that in the industry, 4 cores is still the more or less peak that developers can use to capacity, in languages and toolkits that exist today.

Going beyond that requires either “embarrassingly parallel” problems where you literally have next to no coordination (eg: the opposite of a game client), or specialized languages, or both.

I wouldn’t expect to see more than 6 cores being significantly valuable for games in the near future, unless we get to some strange world where CPU driven effects are super-popular or something again, just because we have those extra cores hanging out.

Basically if you can easily divide and conquer a problem like video compression, ray tracing, various scientific analysis and such, then it’s relatively easy to launch multiple identical threads with each processing a subset of data and get very high performance out of a CPU with a lot of cores. Everything else, not so easy.

There is no “optimized for AMD”, that’s an often repeated myth. People say that when they are asking for a game to be better multi-threaded for CPUs that have lots of cores, such as AMD FX 6 and 8 core* models.

AMD with the FX series tried to provide performance for highly threaded tasks by throwing more slower cores at it versus Intel’s fewer faster cores. Fine for highly threaded tasks, lousy when a task only uses a few.

Seems on par with what I expect. 8 cores/16 threads doesn’t matter for a game that has arguably 2-ish CPU intensive threads. Improved IPS over Bulldozer is a huge plus.

Do you have reflections on? Everything else seems to be on high I just can’t tell.

There was, not sure it’s it around anymore, an overlay that ran on Overwolf. Then there are the various shader injectors to provide additional graphic options like ReShade and SweetFX.

Justine.6351:

Yes don’t hold jump. It’s a hard habit to break but it really doesn’t make you super jump or anything ;-)

You don’t understand playing on a mushy keyboard that it isn’t as easy as you suggest as they don’t often register the jump without holding it down for a time very close to time that’s used to deploy the glider. Quick taps don’t always jump.

And no, I’m not going to buy a better keyboard simply to play games when you can type on it just fine.

UI looks to be scaled for 1080p but 1440p might be fine on a big enough display. 2160p seems to be an issue from many.

DoctorDing.5890:

They should sell patience in the gem shop.

Ed Gruberman still wouldn’t pay for it.

Should be better than any of AMD’s previous CPUs. It’s just it’s 8 cores/16 threads won’t be highly utilized, but that might help auto clock frequency boost.

It’s not more prone to memory fragmentation, it’s more prone to run out of usable memory due to memory fragmentation.

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

You aren’t paying attention. You have to stop thinking about the gold price of gems, because its irrelevant. Regardless if it costs you 1 copper or 1,000 gold to buy 400 gems, you are still buying $5 worth of gems. A different player has already paid Anet the $5 for those gems. ANet made the same amount of money on that sale, and the amount of gold you paid for it will not change that fact. Gems are NOT being created out of thin air when you buy them for gold. Someone has already used real money to buy them from ANet.

you are the one not paying attention im not saying gems are created out of thin air when you exchange your gold for them but the amount of gold per 1 gem can affect the sales of gems since someone will thing oh withh 400 games i make 50g in game for example on a later dates with no gemstore releases while when theres a release and ppl buy gems with gold the same person can make with that 400 like 100g or even more sonce the amount of available gold thees there has raised the value of gems to gold

• A higher exchange rate favors gem sellers wanting gold.
• Selling gems for gold will lower the exchange rate.
• A lower exchange rate favors gold sellers wanting gems.
• Selling gold for gems will raise the exchange rate.

And the cycle repeats pretty much daily as you can see in this exchange rate chart.

https://www.gw2tp.com/gems

Selling gems for gold is ANet’s way to provide a “legal” outlet to buy gold with real money, helping to fight off nefarious 3rd party gold selling sites. I also think most gems that are sold are left over gems due to fix size gem packages Vs prices for items.

Seera.5916:

That’s the thing. We currently get everything for just the price of the base game/expansion pack. To now go and say that you now have to pay for the future whatever, would cause a pretty negative backlash.

Because we’ve come to expect content to be given out for free or included with the price of the base game or expansion pack. And when expectations are not met, problems come up.

The game survived the Ascended armor backlash just fine. So I’m not saying that adding an optional subscription or changing LW seasons to be paid DLC for all would be a game ending decision. I don’t have the information to make that call. I just know that it would cause backlash on the scale of the Ascended armor being added to the game backlash.

Well it took ANet nine months for ascended weapons to arrive and over a year for ascended armor from when they first told us about ascended quality. That provided a lot of cool off time for the table flippers. LW seasons are already semi paid DLC if you weren’t around for it. But I see Season 3 being a part of HoT, even though ANet doesn’t say it.

I don’t think an optional sub would be a net positive as I think it will alienate players and loss of income from those will be greater than that from those who would sign up for such a plan.

Optional subscriptions are problematic with a game that started with no subscription. You need to come up with a list of benefits that aren’t “pay 2 win” that wouldn’t annoy those who choose not to take part of it yet attractive enough for those to part with X dollars/euros/pounds a month.

I’m more familiar with MMOs that went from sub to F2P with an optional sub than those that didn’t. The ones I know offer a discount to the cash shop, xp boost, free in game services, think waypoints in our case, and maybe a stipend of something such as a BL key. The most extreme would be access to locked LW episodes while “subbed” or access to gem store items currently not in the gem shop.

The big trick is making sure this is a net positive in income AND it doesn’t drive players away since they can’t spend gems if they left the game over a perceived “cash grab”. I think it would be a tight rope in a wind storm that ANet won’t be willing to consider.

Purpose is to encourage sellers to pick a price that’ll sell at whatever “speed” the seller is comfortable with. Of course this can be a problem for the seller if the price suddenly drops significantly from where it was.

My opinion was the updates in 2016 makes HoT easier than it was at launch. The 64-bit client, as long as you have 8GB (or is it just more than 4GB) helps a lot with out of memory crashes.

Sartharina.3542:

The flamekissed/flamewalker/flamewrath armors were just reskins of existing armors. I’m not sure if any of the others were as well.

That may have explained the quickness of their release and the large gap between it and the next one.

I believed that was the only time they tried that trick, there was a lot of push back of “tweaking” existing skins and selling them as new in the gem shop, besides the first pass at flamekissed.

Beldin.5498:

If everything is true what they tell us .. i guess they already started to develop the
game 1960 .. because of the time it took to create all the skins that were in the
original game .. lol.

They also started development 5 years before launch and I imagine a fair chunk of development time was asset creation. So we have no idea how many additional armor sets they had done before launch but it took them 9 months before we had the first new set in the Gem Shop.

We really didn’t have that many new armor skins added to the game via the Gem Shop.

Profane/Krytan/Primeval – at launch
Aetherblade – June 25, 2013
Phoenix/Magitech/Braham’s – July 30, 2013
Trickster’s/Viper’s/Phalanx – Oct 29, 2013
Flamekissed/Flamewalker/Flamewrath – Nov 26, 2013
Zodiac – Feb 18, 2014
Incarnate/Strider/Rampart – April 15, 2014 alongside the wardrobe

I personally stayed away from buying armor until they introduced the Wardrobe system. I wasn’t going to spend 500-800 gems on a single weight skin that I could only have on one character at a time. Outfits appeared the same time as the wardrobe and at 700 gems, usable on all professions and using no transmutation charges, it was a way to hide your mismatched armor as you leveled up in game, I can see why players were drawn to them.