Guild Wars 2

You probably wouldn’t have liked the bobbleheads last year then.

They’ve, ANet, always had April Fool pranks. Actually most MMOs do. Last year was Bobbleheads and in GW one was players were turned into stick figures.

I remember this much sturm und drang last year over bobbleheads. So many people who take a game way to seriously.

At the annoying RMT site we’ve all seen the spam for, it’s $125 for 1050g.

$125 is 10K gems and 10K gems will get you currently in game, 1102g, likely due to the rate surge from today’s gem shop additions. Normally I think the RMT company shoots for 10-20% than the exchange. Point is it’s now where near 50-100g per dollar but in the 8-9g per dollar range.

Ravenmoon.5318:

Newsflash, there is NO difference between dual/quad channel ram running at 1600MHz or 2133MHz in DDR3. Infact, 2133 has higher latency. Google what that means, or if you are too lazy, check out the benchmark made by linustechtips at youtube, not going to do it for you. Faster ram means jack kitten in gaming. Period. If anything it can slow you down.

Oh, there’s a difference, just not a great enough difference to justify the cost of ultra high speed memory. Note that this is at a low resolution so the GPU doesn’t bind up. The later chart shows at a higher resolution that the bottle neck caused by the GPU virtually wipes any performance advantage of very high speed, very expensive memory. But remember, we aren’t GPU bound but CPU.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/haswell-ddr3_7.html

DDR3-2133 may have a higher Cas cycle count but it’s also clocked faster. Cas divided by speed is a rule of thumb when comparing two sticks with both different Cas and clockspeed to get an idea which has lower latency. Otherwise with the same speed, lower Cas is better.

But as pointed out in this paragraph, it’s improvements in the whole memory subsystem from the memory controller though the various on chip caches that mask a great deal of latency.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/haswell-ddr3_4.html#sect1

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

Behellagh.1468:

These are questions that only ANet with their player database tools can answer.

1) How many players have multiple accounts? How many move over 500g between them weekly?

2) How many transfers from Guild bank storage to a single player account over 500g occur weekly?

If this is considerably less than the activity they are seeking to stop, RMT brokers by limiting the size of their packages. As an aside, the exchange rate surge due to the new Gem Shop items has temporarily made the exchange a better deal, buying gems for cash and converting them to gold, than the premiere RMT seller we’ve all seen in whisper during free trials.

Also remember that gold in excess remains in your mailbox. This simply time gates large transfers. I can’t fathom players moving that much gold between themselves although guilds I can see.

This strikes me more of the ultra rich complaining they can’t hide their money in the Caymans anymore.

Rest assured if you have been playing since launch or beta and have been smart with your gold, 500g is not a large sum…

I’ve been playing since Dec 2012. I had more than 500g for all of one week. I do not “grind” for gold, I merely play the content I enjoy. A large amount of gold has gone to gems which allows me to enjoy aspects of the Gem Shop without buying gems (although I did buy a Gem card during the 2nd anniversary sale, just too many cool stuff on sale).

That said I don’t doubt there are many players with more than 500g. It’s the need to move more than that amount weekly that boggles my mind.

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

This scenario- I am saving for a precursor… I’ve slowly been squirreling gold away into “my savings account” personal guild bank for the EXACT same reason I would use a savings account, big ticket/dream items. Normally it sells for 850 gold so that is my saving target… Suddenly I see one listed for 700g, around 150g less than I ever have before and within my saved up amount. I pop a bankers express or run to a bank to withdraw and claim my prize praising how lucky I am to find such a deal… oh wait… I now have to wait a week… 3 hours later my great deal sells to someone else that isn’t me… sorry but my RL example is VERY applicable…

And I’ve given an alternative to a personal bank, bids that have zero chance being filled on the TP.

So lets say you are saving for a precursor or legendary. You have some gold you want to but toward it, place a bid. You have more gold you wish to contribute, pull the old bid (no cost) and place a new bid with all the gold you are “saving” toward this. Rinse and repeat. It’s one extra minor step over a personal bank. Actually this way it’s more like a Christmas Club account.

These are questions that only ANet with their player database tools can answer.

1) How many players have multiple accounts? How many move over 500g between them weekly?

2) How many transfers from Guild bank storage to a single player account over 500g occur weekly?

If this is considerably less than the activity they are seeking to stop, RMT brokers by limiting the size of their packages. As an aside, the exchange rate surge due to the new Gem Shop items has temporarily made the exchange a better deal, buying gems for cash and converting them to gold, than the premiere RMT seller we’ve all seen in whisper during free trials.

Also remember that gold in excess remains in your mailbox. This simply time gates large transfers. I can’t fathom players moving that much gold between themselves although guilds I can see.

This strikes me more of the ultra rich complaining they can’t hide their money in the Caymans anymore.

Well AM3+ helps, you aren’t at a complete dead end with that MB.

An R7 260X is a slightly OC HD 7790 and is roughly 2.8x faster than your HD 6670 and is around $115 before rebate at NewEgg. The card does use more power and needs a 6-pin PCIe power connector but it’s still under 150 watts overall.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814202081

Now you wouldn’t see your performance increase that much with GW2, game being CPU bound and all, but you should be able to run with higher graphic options along at similar or faster frame rate, just not 2-3×.

At a higher price point, $140 the GTX 750Ti is a bit faster than the R7 260X, 15%, but doesn’t need the extra power connector so under 75 watts.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487024

The 1055T uses DDR3 so that isn’t the issue.

AMD does not have an performance upgrade path that would benefit this game. The Bulldozer architecture was designed to handle lots of intensive threads but does poorly when only a few intensive threads are used.

You are likely going to have to upgrade your MB because it’s likely you have an AM3 socket Vs the AM3+ that the current AMD FX CPUs use (and good luck finding inexpensive AM3 CPUs other than used). And currently even the Intel i5-4460 (cheapest i5-4xxx at NewEgg) is 75% faster than your 1055T and 30% faster than the FX-8350, for this game. As others have said, the GPU isn’t as important as CPU when it comes to binding the frame rate.

That said the HD 6670 is pretty low end nowadays. So an upgrade is also in order but at that point we are talking about leaving you the case, drives and PSU (which could be an issue as the HD 6670 is pretty low power while newer video cards can use quite a bit more).

So what’s your budget.

Chimera.8263:

I have a friend who around 6 year ago was working as programmer for small game developer. They were using really old engine which was still using DirectX 7 and was told by his lead to take a look at DirectX 9 documentation and see if it’s possible to add it to engine.

He alone was able to add DirectX 9 render to this engine in less than 6 months time.

Engine != renderer guys. Engines can support more than one render without major changes to engine itself. I’m working for quite big game studio (not as big as Arena) and our in-home made engine supports: DirectX9, 11 and OpenGL, PS3, PS4, Xbox360, Xbox One and WiiU and I’m pretty sure that render team is already looking into DX12.

We aren’t disagreeing that you can add another render path.

Also you need to realize that Dx7 to Dx9, both single thread restricted APIs isn’t as great of a change as altering the renderer to get the most out of Dx11/12. A major portion of performance gain from Dx9 to Dx11 is due to the thread safe nature of Dx11 which allows the renderer to be coded to scale with the number of cores available. The gains from Dx12 however comes from reducing the setup overhead needed to call the Dx3D API.

A recent guide I found helpful for newbies DIYers.

http://techreport.com/review/27832/system-guide-current

So unless I’m blind, I’m not seeing it in the finisher panel.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Mystic.5934:

they redesigned dyes almost a year ago (just by looking at spidy, I would say about April 16). used to be all dye unlocks were soulbound. They changed it to account-bound, and also gave everyone unid dyes for any duplicates they had unlocked (resulting in millions added to the market), and drastically reducing how many new unid dyes were added (because everyone needed far fewer). That vast surplus is only now starting to run out. I estimated back then that unid dyes would be worth ~1g each eventually (based on the laurel vender, because if it ever went above 1g, unid dyes would become the best watt to convert laurel to gold instead of T6 mats). Almost there.

You sure?

One unid dye is 5 laurels. 5 laurels will give you 15 T6 mats. The average current selling price for a T6 mat is ~36 silver. 15 × 0.36 is 5.47 gold.

Before the wardrobe it was 10 UniDyes for 5 Laurels. And back in Jan 2014 when they were 28s each, it wasn’t a bad way to convert laurels to coin.

They got rid of personal wallets eons ago (ok 19 months) AS a QoL improvement. You no longer needed to transfer via the bank if you wanted to prime a new character from your Sugar Daddy character.

The only complaint I remember back them was RP players not being able to segregate/isolate earnings for each of their characters.

Dante.1763:

Behellagh.1468:

Since the wallet can handle an almost unlimited amount of gold, why the use of a Guild Bank to shelter gold? That is what I don’t understand.

So people have gold reserves. You know, like a savings account in real life? thats what players use them for, well most. I have problems accidentally leaving guilds so i cant use a guild bank for that

So what you are saying is that you don’t have the discipline not to spend all of it if it was in your wallet? Then why don’t you put in a series of 100g bids for an eternity? The gold is sequestered from your spending ways, it costs you nothing and the bid is unlikely to ever be filled. Viola Voila, gold bank.

This is now about cooking your own dyes. It made dye crafting profitable. Or at least the materials needed profitable to gather.

Since the wallet can handle an almost unlimited amount of gold, why the use of a Guild Bank to shelter gold? That is what I don’t understand.

Honestly, is it so hard to see the disclaimer at the bottom of the e-mail? Maybe it should be blinking red like an old Geocities page.

Keysha.2815:

Chris Cleary.8017:

500G may seem like an entirely arbitrary number, but I guarantee it is not. I took a look at our mail data (believe me, you guys really like mail and there is a lot of data) and set the value based on that. At 500G, it is not only functionally effective, but also it will only impact 0.175% of our players during an entire month’s worth of mails (if an account would hit the restriction once per month/30 days).

“Only”? If there are 1 million players, that is 1750 people you just screwed over.

You ignored the 2nd part

Looking more directly at those transactions, a large majority (98.228%) of those mails are being sent by RMT or compromised accounts (after selling off everything of value on an account).

That would leave only 31 actual players in your example being affected.

Andred.1087:

Yep. I see it often at world bosses. It’s all the kitten redditors who are used to saying only what they think will get them the most laughs. And teenagers who don’t understand that sex is normal and you don’t have to make an asinine joke about it every other sentence. It’s the worst when they use Say chat, because then you can’t even ignore it unless you stop looking at the screen.

But there’s really nothing that can be done about rampant immaturity online. That’s a society problem.

Oh I think you can. A 72 hour “time out” should send a message loud and clear that such immaturity is frown upon in this game. This isn’t a free speech issue it’s about enforcing civility in chat.

Dx12 will only be available in Win 10. Yes Win 10 will be “free” to Win 7-8.1 owners. While reduction in the CPU setup would improve performance some, the big gain is found in multi-threaded renderers which this game, with the non-thread safe Dx9, doesn’t have.

However creating a multi-threaded renderer would allow Dx11 to be used as well and that will make a difference for players running quad cores and higher and will support Windows 7 and up without the need of an OS upgrade.

But coding the renderer to support a single thread for Dx9 and multithreaded for Dx11/12 is a bit of work, ignoring the API shift. This is why fewer and fewer game developers roll their own engine anymore as the UR, Unity, Source, etc engines have all been designed and upgraded over time so their renderers take full advantage of the newest trends. Nobody sells just the renderer.

Dawdler.8521:

ProtoGunner.4953:

Why do you turn all V-Sync off? I hate tearing

V-Sync went obsolete the second Nvidia added Adaptive V-Sync to their drivers. Enabling it ingame is pointless. Fortunetly GW2 is designed as a true exclusive fullscreen game (ie graphics card can hook into it), unlike games that cheap out and use borderless windowed mode (like ESO on release, graphics card cant properly hook into it)

Which is pointless if you don’t own one of the heavily marked up monitors that support nVidia’s adaptive sync hardware. ATI just introduced their own tech and surprise, they aren’t compatible. But unlike nVidia, their solution is free to use in hopes that monitor manufactures would flock to it rather than pay nVidia for the privilege and pass the expense onto the gamer.

Two things. Either promoting items like armor/weapons/sigils, hoping to get something much better and make a profit off of it or promoting materials for the same reason. And a very minor use of actually making special items.

Now forging for profit has essentially been wiped out. The 20% promote for items means on average it takes 16 of one quality to make 1 of the next higher quality. Taking into account the 15% cut from the TP, you need the higher quality item to be at least 18.9x the cost of the 16 items you tossed in. The only item I know with a gap wide enough is masterwork to rare runes and it’s a whole lot of clicks for very little money.

Most are tossing in rare or exotic weapons in hope for a precursor. Some have suggested that the price precursors sell for reflect the cost of creating them this way.

Human and sylvari differences

One does not taste like chicken.

The popular opinion is save them for ascended amulets. My opinion is use them however you want. If you want to convert to gold, buy Heavy Crafting Bags. Otherwise I have no additional bits of wisdom.

A better analogy is that people are suggesting that it’s alright to swing your arms wildly in a crowded room (vulgar language in chat) and those that get hit, it’s their fault for not getting out of the way (turning off chat). That’s bass ackwards. They, those who are seeing the offensive language in chat, aren’t the ones violating the rules of conduct.

If you violate the rules, you should be punished. Period. What that punishment is is entirely in ANet’s purview based on the offender’s history as well as the chat log but it’s certainly not the player(s) who report its fault.

Music video version of Living World Season 1

The footage that it was made from can be found on the Guild Wars 2 Youtube channel if you page back a bit.

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

The major character development change has to do with leveling up new characters especially the Trait system. Fortunately the trait system is being replaced again when the expansion hits.

Other changes have to deal with the shift from character base to account base. Dyes are now unlocked for the entire account. Same is true with armor and weapon skins including gem shop ones. Same with minis. A unified wallet.

On the server, the concept of server identity now only applies to WvW. Players across servers (NA and EU server clusters are still separate) will find themselves on the same map due to Megaserver tech which seeks to fill maps will population over instance for each server. Guilds are now unified across servers as well with full privileges no matter which server your character calls home.

The dailies went through several itterations over the years and the current form provides 4 tasks in PvE, PvP and WvW, do any three of the twelve for 10 AP. The previous daily and monthly reward of laurels are now part of the login rewards, which sort of replaced the monthly.

Boatload of various balance tweaks in PvE and PvP. And most recently, removing WvW maps from World Completion.

Around 220g right now for all 8.

No, it just blanks it out with underscores I think. Sort of turns it into a Madlib.

In the future I’ll use Verbal Abuse and report them. Like I said, it wasn’t directed and the intent isn’t abusive, just language and discussions that are inappropriate in a “public” place.

It’s an upgrade from LS1 content where if you missed it, you missed it. No chance to ever play. Now you have a chance, whenever you feel like with old or new characters, to run that content. At $2.50 an episode you may not think it’s worth it and that’s fine. But the charge was the stick to encourage at least logging into the game once during the two week period when the content was new and the unlock was free.

I’m standing in Divinity Reach doing my evening TP dump. I don’t expect the map and say channels to nothing but provocative, sexual language. This isn’t a boys middle/high school locker room with talk about sexual conquests or discussions about the body of the girl in 4th period math. This isn’t being directed at anybody so it’s not abuse, but it’s uncomfortable.

You wouldn’t put up that that language/conversation in a restaurant and we shouldn’t put up with it here. You want to discuss with a particular person/group, then whisper or party. The suggestion about blocking is equivalent of telling the other patrons in the restaurant to use ear plugs. No, you tell the offending party to keep it down or leave. This is as much of a private space as any restaurant and if ANet considers this offensive then warnings and suspensions should be handed out and not a blind eye turned away from it.

Now this doesn’t happen often and I haven’t encountered it during “normal” hours but only late, late at night. This game is International, it shouldn’t turn into Cinemax After Dark because it’s the wee hours here in NA.

Shrunken heads.

Did you ping the IP you get from doing /ip in chat? That is your current server (hardware) you are on and it changes as you move between maps.

I do admit your pathping is unusual since you jump from Chicago to France. However the IP address of 206.127.158.1 is located at the Hosting facility in Frankfort Germany. Also you didn’t think it was odd that you asked for a path to 174.35.56.101 and didn’t end up there according to your pathping?

Try PingPlotter. Enter the address you get from /ip in chat.

https://www.pingplotter.com/freeware.html

I never could get a screenshot but there were a few times when doing a somersault off of one of the dive spots my character got caught spinning. I could “run” around out of the water, spinning. I had now idea if others saw me this way or not but it most certainly was wacky.

Donut.6914:

Lol you need to get over yourselves. There’s a profanity filter and a block option, if you can’t take people swearing, or talking about sex and drugs, then filter them out.

They’re not obligated to mind their manners around you. Remember, online actions and interactions are not rated by the ESRB.

It’s not there so players are free to use vulgar and profane language.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Why-is-there-a-Profanity-Filter/first#post4436966

They could always merge the two, Easter and April’s Fools, and give us Vorpal Bunnies.

I use CCleaner to vacuum my system of garbage files.

ckotoc.5421:

welcome to the world of online gaming.

Yes but should that excuse basic civility?

Vulgarity was getting a bit much for me last night but there isn’t a report category for simply vulgar, sexual specific language. I’m not talking about eavesdropping on a couple doing some cyber RP. I do think a strong warning is in order so it wanes for awhile.

The Champion Svanir Marauder at Svanir’s Dome in Wayfarer Foothills speaks when he’s at 75%, 50% and 25% health. I never payed close enough attention elsewhere to see if other champs have similar tells.

Guhracie.3419:

I just don’t see how it’s acceptable to make this announcement and then go back to silence. It’s been a year and we can’t even get some hints about what the new-new system will look like? I am just gobsmacked at the lack of professionalism.

But they told us it’s changing and it will be simplified. We should be dancing for joy.

Numfar, do the dance of joy.

MFoy.3284:

Oh, and I’m using an i5 2500K CPU Stock Speeds. Never thought of the game as “CPU Bound” as many seem to. I suspect it’s a configuration issue not a Hardware issue for some players.

The i5-2500K is still a very good CPU. Only about 15-25% slower than a stock speed i5-4690K, only 10% slower in some cases.

It’s still 40% faster than the i5-750, 45% faster than the Q9650 and 30% faster than the PII X4 980. The AMD FX line aren’t even a challenge.

As Cyn points out, the buying of gems through the exchange as the effect of raising the gem to gold rate which in turn makes buying gold with gems, cash bought gems since the difference in the exchange rate isn’t conducive to short term back and forth exchanges.

While I don’t disagree to the attraction of such an item, finding a price that is income neutral yet still within a reasonable price for those who normally wouldn’t buy gems is fundamentally incompatible. Set the price to low, ANet loses money in the long term. Set it too high, those frustrated with charges won’t be able to rationalize the cost (say $50/4000 gems) and remain frustrated.

Memory bandwidth on the video card is everything. There was a time when some manufacturers would off the same GPU with twice the memory but the memory was much, much slower. Newbs would buy such cards because of the popular rule of them that “more memory is better”, which is true if the speeds are the same.

Bus width is often a hint to the “back end” of the GPU. Simple texture mapping frame buffer operations. A 128-bit bus can output 4, 32 bit pixels at a time, 256-bit 8 at a time, etc. Memory width is an issue when it comes to board the GPU is mounted on. All those traces take up space or adds layers which raises the price.

Well it doesn’t destroy gold, it sequesters it while sinking a bit which is the reason for the difference in the exchange rate. That gold comes out when a player sells gems to the exchange. The same is true the other way around, the gems that are sold to the exchange are kept there until bought for gold.

I would also run Windows error-checker on the drive(s). The game may now be located on an iffy spot on the drive and retries are slowing it down.

But if it’s installed on the C drive. Free up some space man and run a defrag on it. Excessive disk seeks devastates read performance. And the defrag with Windows may skip large files like the game’s dat file so use a free 3rd party one like Piriform Defraggler or Auslogics DiskDefrag. Both can target a single file or folder.

Tachenon.5270:

Behellagh.1468:

My point is to me “critical” implies in midst of a crisis, a turning point that could mean success or failure of the whole game. I don’t see that. I see business as usual.

Well, that’s kinda what HoT is. The make or break. The do or die. The little expansion that could or the little expansion that derailed and spilled toxic waste all over the game’s future.

/e opinion, of course.

That assumption is based on the notion the game is dying. That $80-90 million a year for an MMO is a sign of failure and only an expansion can save it. Call me when there’s mass layoffs. Call me when nobody shows up to boss events. Call me when the uber guilds’ active members drop to a mere handful.

How is offering an expansion make the cash shop invalid? What paid for the last 2 plus years of development including the expansion? Gee, let me think. The Cash Shop?