Guild Wars 2

Yeah, sorry man. The GPU is actually under the minimum requirements.

I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault for not knowing where their GPU falls in the grand scheme of things. It’s fine for the minimum to list some GPUs, but if you don’t know where yours falls, it can be hard for a casual consumer (ie, you didn’t build the machine) to really know how theirs compares.

I’d try alternate keybinds first. Especially if your keyboard has a gap between the number keys and the function keys – it will make a huge different for you to remap those, especially. You just have to find what’s comfortable for you.

I’ve heard people cite ~20 hours as a “normal” learning curve for those mice. So if you get one, just be prepared to be not-very-good using it for a while, especially if you think it might be difficult for you.

GW2 doesn’t ask as much of you as some other MMOs. I was considering getting one when I was playing both WoW and GW2, but now that it’s just GW2 it doesn’t seem that important any more.

I pretty much always take “minimum requirements” as “it will barely play”.

I played on a laptop with an A8-3520M @ 1.6Ghz and the integrated HD 6620G for a few days. It got about 25-30fps in unpopulated areas on lowest settings, although I never changed the resolution from the highest.

I actually got pretty far with it and even though the game wasn’t very pretty, it was “playable”.

I’m sure a decent i3 could do significantly better.

Another problem I see is that people are trying to use computers near minimum settings to power rather high resolution displays. When I see the minimum requirements, I take it to mean on a resolution that would have been the current standard when those pieces of hardware came out.

It might be better if they defined a different minimum for WvWvW, since it’s such a drastic increase in resource usage. Or allowing particle effects to be reduced / turned off.

I read the naming policy before I made a single character.

With the fact that ANet seems to be actually enforcing their own rules – renaming with random characters in the name sounds like a great way to get a ban.

28fps is ridiculously easy to debunk. If you have a 60hz+ monitor, just look at videos or gifs side by side that show animations at 30 and 60 fps.

Also, a game is not a live-action movie. A game has hard-edged animation. Live movies capture natural motion blurring on the film – they’re not just totally still photographs patched together.

Human eyes simply do not work on an “fps” system. There are some really awesome optical illusions out there because of how our eyes work. Our eyes basically notice change, and the bigger the change, the more it’s noticed. That’s why “stuttering” in SLI setups is very annoying to people – and why you don’t perceive a hard-edged animation as being as “smooth” as something with natural motion blur.

There are sites that will also show you the effects of motion blur out there – they’ll show you the same animation with and without it.

It doesn’t do justice to our organic eyeballs to try to beat them into an fps mold.

I haven’t noticed people particularly having issues with AMD GPUs. It’s mostly the nVidia ones that seem hard-hit.

I’ve also noticed that people with i7s seem to be having issues, but it might simply be that the posters with i7s also have nVidia cards.

Core speed is notable only when comparing processors within the same family. You might have meant that and are referring to the i3/Sandy or Ivy Bridge.

I read about the game before buying it and got exactly what I was expecting.

I think this is just a matter of taste. I’ve seen the “close to the ground” stance used for males in many, many other games.

As for holding it “properly”, both ways are in fact proper stances. Historically it wasn’t about weight (real weapons were not actually very heavy), but I think it does work very well for modern eyes when paired with a giant fantasy weapon that we do perceive as being very heavy.

I kitten love me some kitten kittenin’ kittens, man.

I’m pretty sure they will not designate official “RP” servers (nor should they).

However, Tarnished Coast (US) and I think Pikin Square (not sure about the spelling ? – EU) are the “unofficial” RP servers.

There are guilds to, search “Guild Wars 2 Roleplaying” on Google or the like and you will find websites for guilds.

It would most likely be a TOS-type violation not because it’s another computer, but because you’d be giving your account information to someone else.

Like someone else said, just invite him over. That’d still be a “grey area”, but it’s not like they’d be watching you in your house if he just happened to take over the keyboard.

I wouldn’t give a friend full access to my account (think you need that to even download the client in the first place), even if I really liked them. :P

Another risk to giving your account info is that you might both try to accidentally log on at the same time. You don’t realise he’s playing or still playing and you try to – your account could get frozen, especially with 3rd parties being hacked and people losing control of their accounts because of that.

/follow just wouldn’t work for this game. It would be complicated to implement and people would likely find a way to exploit it even if they tried their best. It would have to break in combat and there’d have to be a way for the person being “followed” to break it.

It’s just not worth it – there’s very little benefit and too many problems.

If lack of inspect is hampering chatter…. that doesn’t make sense to me. Why not just chat and ask the person what kind of gear they have ? Isn’t just /inspecting less “social” ?

If you’re not just hanging out in a city, I feel there’s lots of playing together in ways that actually matter – people actually helping each other and even forming strategies to take down map bosses.

Dueling will almost certainly happen in the future, and I agree about notifications when someone comes on-line.

A lot of people are “no mounts !!” – but I think it could work if implemented correctly. Have the speed bonus be a boon that works on a cool-down. That way you can’t “run past everything” and you get the looking cool and “mount collecting” aspect.

There was a big fuss about AVG having issues with GW2 around launch.

AVG released a solution, here’s the forum post about it : https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-AVG

Can you run it via something like Boot Camp or a VM ? Or is it not compatible with the hardware (I have no idea where Macs are at right now, haven’t had one for a few years) ?

Sigfried.4317:

You must have had you eyes closed. All the woman I’ve ever spoken with want more ‘sexy’ clothes for men. That’s half the reason why they don’t play male toons, because of how ‘ugly’ they are. We’re minorities and our voice doesn’t get heard as loud. The posts get pushed down, but it doesn’t mean you ignore it.

Women aren’t as vocal about this as men, we talk about it but don’t preach it on boards like men do. We don’t have the need to openly express our sexuality to confirm our femininity like males do. It is seen as strange if men do not preform homosocial bonding and sexualize woman with other males. The men question others masquilinity if they do not join and in order to be normal.

Over compensating for masculinity, that’s how males in this society are raised. Woman don’t have to do this, so they aren’t as outwardly open about preferences. Instead they do it in other methods such as writing Fanfics, chatting and swooning to their friends privately about it.

Just because its not out there in the same fashion that you as a man are used to, doesn’t mean its not out there. There has been plenty of times i’d like to of wolf whistled at a man or had my group of girls obviously check out a man’skitten then to precede to tell him how wonderfully round it is.

I think you were getting to it when you mentioned fan fiction… Tumblr, man… Tumblr.

I actually couldn’t bring myself to watch the new Doctor Who because I was so traumatised by the objectifying and slash-fic-ing of10. I eventually got over it… Mostly.

I think you don’t see this as much on video game forums because most MMOs don’t have “sexy dude” options for them to create content around. I feel like fanfiction, memes on Tumblr, fanart – creating content and talking about is where I see female sexuality expressed more vocally – when there’s something that’s so appealing to fans that they feel compelled to create around it.

To me, it seems like female fanbases aren’t content to just admire the “eye candy” – they want more and want to add content to the fictional world that’s intriguing them. Creating instead of just watching.

/random off-topic-ish

I don’t think messing with the GPU will do much, your CPU+RAM are holding you back.

So is your RAM. When I have GW2 open, I see 4Gb of RAM being used – granted, I don’t close out of all background programs, but 2Gb is just not enough. Are you running a 34-bit version of Windows ?

Upgrading RAM would be my first step. While you won’t get benefit over 4Gb (and less in reality) with an x34 system, even that should help.

Deith.7596:

Premixed.4567:

Personally, real world events shouldn’t make their way into a full fledged virtual one. It opens the gate for pop culture references and all sorts of nonsense.

I havn’t actually seen any indication either way officially.

If you haven’t found games and movies/tv series references in GW2, you’re not looking very well.

I’ve found some, but it’s nowhere near as “bad” as other games. Here, I don’t feel it detracts from the immersion and such – in a certain “other game”, it felt like I was being beaten over the head with it.

That said, I’m all for holidays. An “IRL” holiday like Christmas already “magically” coincides with the Winter Solstice and most people don’t freak out just because everyone admits that baby Jesus (no matter how you feel about religion) probably wasn’t born on that exact day.

You get a lot more for the same money in a desktop – unless you hit a very good sale or someone selling something really cheap on Craigslist.

Desktops also allow for much easier modding and customisation. Say after the OP graduates, they want to buy a better GPU than they could on their lower budget – they can easily add that or maybe go CrossFireX without having to buy a whole new machine if they make good choices now.

^ The OP is in school. If they have a job, it probably isn’t paying a lot. They have other things to worry about until they graduate.

Lots of people in the USA (and I’m sure the world over – for that matter, many people outside the USA make less) work on minimum wage for life. They are entitled to spend their disposable income on “fun” even if they don’t have a large budget and there’s nothing wrong with helping a person find something that fits their budget.

OP, there is no reason to be “embarrassed” for having a budget. Even people making $100,000 a year have budgets – no one can buy everything.

You can build something on your budget, but buying pre-built is going to cost you more. You’ll essentially get cheated if you buy pre-built, because you likely won’t get a good GPU and and PSU and have to upgrade both, at the least.

I built a desktop for ~$600 that would have cost double that to buy pre-made. You might come close with a pre-made if it’s a “scratch and dent” case where they’re selling it cheap because of aesthetic defect. I’ve seen some good deals there.

I agree that RAM might be an issue. I always seem to be around 4 full Gb used when playing – though I keep other programs opened.

Other than that, the 6xx series has known issues with the game. Whose side it’s on, don’t know – but hopefully they’ll figure it out.

/dances

(( since it won’t let me post such a small post, um… daffodils. ))

Names are game-wide and if it’s not a very unusual name, it might have been taken, or she might have picked something else, et cetera. So I would confer with her first.

I wouldn’t count on free transfers for too long. However, they should have guesting available – so you can play on a friend’s server probably around when the free transfers go away. You just can’t do WvWvW for the server you are a guest on.

Moon Guard actually has a really good RP community outside of the trolls / crap that Blizzard doesn’t even try to cleanup.

ANet seems to be much better about enforcing the rules – so I wouldn’t worry about the ERP trolls invading.

Basen.8506:

I did not say that anything was wrong with their current model, I was just worried how long it will take for them to bring out the first expansion, since some players are already practically finishing their endgame, there are videos with people on youtube with full achievements etc…

“Power Gamers” will always clear content super-fast. They do it in all MMOs and all games.

I don’t think it represents the experience of the average player who realises there is no reason to rush to 80 (and that by doing so, you’re only cheating yourself out of the game).

Power Gaming is fun for some, so you can cry “first” ! or be thrilled with how fast you can push yourself. But if you’re not a playing to play fast, I wouldn’t worry about clearing everything as fast as someone who is setting out to do so.

Basen.8506:

I’m not sure how much I like my server, since it does seem pretty empty, deserted even… It’s quite strange, in my city ( Black Citadel ) I have not encountered a single human, sylvari, asura or norn. Do they not have access or do they just decide not to come to that specific area?

I see lots of people out in the world while I’m exploring – so I think they’re simply just not in cities.

Lion’s Arch seems to be the “clustering” city, and I think rightfully so – since it’s a big world hub.

I haven’t explored any of the capitals other than my own, I’m still out in the world. It will probably be a while before my asura gets all the way to the other side of the map. I actually see charr in Rata Sum pretty regularly when my personal story leads back there.

What settings are you using in-game ?

Unfortunately, your GPU is not very powerful. I had a laptop with a similar card – and I tried to play GW2 on it… and you’re not going to be playing on high settings. You’re going to get maybe ~25-30 on low in quiet areas.

It might be a driver issue if you’re playing on low settings – or it could be in part that the new laptop is running at a higher resolution.

Quad-core seems to get the best performance, and yours is a hyper-threaded dual-core (the laptop “i” line is largely dual core – only the i7 with “QM” are actually 4 physical cores). It should have the potential to do pretty decently, but the GPU is so weak it’s going to be held back even there.

It’s okay to like different games. Really. It is !

I’m glad the “holy trinity” is gone. I read about GW2 before I bought it and knew this was going to be the case.

Why make a dude with a shield and heavy armour ? I have to wonder if this is just a troll thread. If you’ve played GW2, you know you get different skills with a shield that can be useful to you and your group – outside of a context of black and white “tanking”.

And heavy armour ? If you’re melee, stuff is going to hit you. You still have to dodge, but it makes it so you don’t get totally flattened.

Deacon.6249:

I don’t (K)now

• I don’t (k)no(w).

While I wouldn’t mind, I’d rather pay a bigger chunk of money for a bigger expansion. It lets them have more room to make something cohesive – adding a new race, plus areas and a story that tie everything together.

A “serial” type release, I’m sure it could be done, but I see that more as gradually unlocking content and I don’t think that would be idea for most people, either. I think they’d prefer to have a big expansion and play at their own pace.

I find it easy to get a name – GW2 allows spaces so I just come up with a last name.

My example is, so “Tim” is taken – be “Tim the Tumultuous”, “Tim Timmers”, “Tim of Timsville”.

This lets everyone be “Tim” who wants to be, while giving a way to distinguish them.

In WoW, I wanted to do dungeons just to be able to say I did them all. It was kind of disappointing that the low-level ones were so easy. One of WoW’s big problems is that they make content and it gets out-levelled and no one ever goes back to it because there’s no point other than farming when none of it offers any challenge.

WoW would have been so much more fun to me if I could go do Molten Core at-level without having to re-roll and start a special guild just to do it. And only to have the guild fall apart because people don’t want to grind up another alt.

I wanted Herald of the Titans in that game because it would be cool just to do it for the thrill of the challenge and saying we did it – but it was pretty much impossible to find enough people to grind up new alts to do it. :/

I am happy that this won’t be a problem in GW2.

I expected “jotun” to be “yotun” – but when my character said it differently, I wasn’t that bothered. It’s a video game and they don’t have to stick exactly to the “real world” words they are using for their own purposes.

Dropping "h"s ?! ’ello, wot ?

On crafting- we’ve talked about this in other threads. If you use the “discovery” pane, like the game intended, you actually do not need many materials to level them up – not many at all.

I’ve never had to “grind” to get my professions up in this game, in fact, I have a lot of surplus material. They might be a problem for the few that rely on random drops – but I don’t know. I’d have to go count up what I’ve collected for leather and see how far that would get me to get a better idea.

As for “RPG”-like. I admit, I haven’t played many MMOs – but I’ve played WoW, and it claims to be an MMORPG. To me, it feels almost nothing like an RPG. It lacks all the reasons I ever wanted to play an RPG. Now, when I was on the WoW forums, I never bashed it for that. I stated that I accepted it for what it did and what it offered and knew that if I wanted something else, I’d go to another game.

Now that GW2 has come out and I’ve gotten a taste of it – I’ve left WoW. I don’t think GW2 is a “WoW-killer” – but it’s a game for those who wanted the “RPG” to be something other than number progression, because that was a part of “RPG” I never really cared about. It was just a way to make sure I wasn’t screwing up too badly.

For instance, playing the original KOTOR – you can go to the worlds in any order, but you don’t get to roflstomp the ones you go to last, even though you’ll level up. I never felt OP in that game.

I played Baldur’s Gate as a kid and have been thinking about re-installing it. But why did my brother and I play that game ? We didn’t play it for the numbers. We played it because we obsessively uncovered as much of every map as we could and took pride in writing notes in the manual when we found a skill tome or a piece needed to create a legendary weapon. That’s what we liked about it, that’s what we felt was so cool.

I’ve been hearing a lot of people say GW2 is the most fun they’ve had in a game in years. It’s those people it appeals to – the ones that want to do 100% map completion not for a reward but just because they can. The people who are glad to give hints for vistas in map chat or help someone track down the right karma vendor.

If you don’t like this game, that’s perfectly okay. You don’t have to play it. There are tons of well-made games – there’s no point in wondering why not all of them fit your playstyle. Because there are different markets and people it appeals to. It’s like tea or lemonade. I hate unsweetened tea, but apparently some people like that stuff. I don’t have to seek to “understand” why they do and deride them and tell them it’s gross because I don’t like it. I can just choose an option that works better for me.

I think tweaking the scaling would really help – since as has been said in other threads, the higher cost of waypoints and repairs is making it hard for people to want to go back.

I’m not sure how repairs should be handled – because it would obviously be an exploit to just zap over to a lower zone for cheap repairs.

Waypoints are easier, I think – have them scale either by what level you are, or the distance you want to go.

It does seem to be a big enough problem to merit its own option.

I was thinking of a general, “Breach of User Agreement” option or similar. Or an “Other” where you could write in in the problem if it didn’t fit.

I’ve been saying this a lot – this is an MMO for people who like RPGs, not the current “clone a WoW”/“carrot on a stick” model.

In all the single-player RPGs I’ve played, they scale the enemies up to your level as you grow more powerful.

Downscaling is just the multiplayer version. It wouldn’t make sense to upscale the monsters in an MMO – it wouldn’t work because there are other players with varying levels. Changing player level accomplishes the same goal without mob-level bouncing all over the place in ever zone.

Sure, in single-player, you appear to be “more powerful” – but it’s just an illusion when everything is growing more powerful with you. You keep your fancier looking armor and you have access to higher-base-level areas, which is exactly what you do in GW2, too. Levels are really just about the illusion of power and filtering content so the game effectively “bars off” some areas to you until you level up.

What’s “the point” of all those classic RPG games ?

It’s a different kind of game, and if it doesn’t appeal to you – that’s okay. It doesn’t make you a bad person. Play a game you do like instead. This isn’t some kind of passive-aggressive, “get out” message – but why play a game you don’t like ?

There should be multiple styles of games. People like me like this kind of game, and I really don’t want to see it changed to appeal to a whole different kind of person. There are plenty of other games made to appeal in different ways.

I’m having a lot of fun on my engineer.

I’d guess all the classes are “playable”, even if they might not be perfect.

True story : single-player RPGs will scale enemies UP to your level.

This is just the multi-player solution since scaling up the level of enemies near you in an MMO would be a disaster and much harder to control.

This game is, I feel, set up for RPG fans. And plenty of RPG fans have wanted a real RPG MMO.

It’s quiet in the middle of the night, but even then I still see the chat moving a bit.

I agree that lots of players seem too busy to just “chat”. I wanted to help someone find a Vista, but I had to find a safe place to rest first – or risk being killed. So I don’t feel like I could chat all the time, even if I wanted to.

I see lots of people out in the world, so doubtlessly they are in the same situation.

Not sure if you’re looking for RP – but if you’re not, you might find it more lively on another server since the RP is what a lot of people are doing on TC when it comes to “socializing” and that alone takes a good chunk of players out of map chat.

Like has been mentioned in another thread(s), the rifle is really more of a shotgun. I’d love to see a real rifle as well as the current “shotgun”.

I like the variety of the kits, because sometimes you do need melee options (ran into a DE where the boss absorbed projectiles – was out of luck since I had no melee abilities at that level).

Maybe a “hand cannon”, though the “rifle” already has a knock-back. Maybe some kind of portable enemy-seeking (not AoE) missile gun.

It would just be nice to have a real ranged weapon.

I don’t know about arenas, but dueling – sure.

1. Make the requests blockable. Problem solved if someone never wants to see one.
2. Limit the area you can fire one off. Maybe have a “sparring ground” in the cities – or none at all. Dueling could always happen in non-cities.

The only other MMO I’ve played is WoW, so while I’m sure there are “better” – this blows WoW out of the water and I have nothing to complain about.

I started a new game in Oblivion yesterday. That character creation is such a pain in the kittens compared to GW2. I haven’t played Skyrim for a while, so I don’t remember if it got improved there.

I’ve been playing RPGs for a while. I don’t think customization is that important when it comes to feeling attached to your character – it’s awesome to have it, but I got by just fine with the only “customization” being picking four different colours : hair, skin, and two for your armour. No hairstyles, no body-types, nothing. And I felt incredibly attached to that character. I wonder if “more custom” is just an excuse to skimp on emotional attachment in other ways – making you “invest” with sliders, instead of your actual character. You know how it’s not what’s on the outside that counts ?

And to be honest, I’d rather be artistically constrained in a game like this than have people given the ability to break the game.

Actua.7521:

Sounds like you want Skyrim: The MMO. Afraid tech is really not there yet to facilitate that kind of a nuanced gameplay experience alongside hundreds of other players. That said, I’d still take Guild Wars 2 over Skyrim any day of the week.

Reading people trying to praise how the Elder Scrolls MMO has “many elements from WoW” makes me cringe. It sounds like it will do a fantastic job of simultaneously being uninteresting to anyone who liked TES in the first place and being just another clone to the “MMO crowd”.

I want to have hope for it… but I’ve just about given up.

• tangent about TES and MMOs *

I’m sorry, I don’t take video game or movie music seriously enough to complain about it.

I mean that in that it’s not meant to be parted from the game. A piece that works great in-game or in a movie scene might not be a song you want to listen to by itself.

That’s just the way it is. I’m not saying having game and movie music isn’t important or that it takes no skill – not at all. Just that it’s not meant to be analyzed outside of its context.

I’ve noticed that I feel the quality of music in GW2 is higher than some other games I’ve played and I appreciate that – but I’m not going to rip it out of the game and try to pick it apart.

If you really want to play this game (it’s okay if you don’t), I also suggest just picking any one profession and sticking to it. Read about it, ask questions.

I don’t think it really matters what you pick – if you hate it, you’re not going to want to keep going. So just pick something you like and make a point to get better.

And if you really don’t like this game, don’t force yourself to play it. I think GW2 is an amazing game and I’d recommend it to anyone, but if you genuinely don’t like it – that’s okay, there are other awesome games out there that you might like better.

I agree with most of it otherwise. :P

Turning notifications off is something that won’t impact anyone else, after all.

The health circle feels pretty gigantic, although I’m not sure how to “fix” it. Maybe flatten it out on top of the action bars and have it move side to side, keeping the dodge as smaller bars on top. It would be an optional change and wouldn’t give any advantage, either – just picking what you like.

They seem to want to control the player experience to a high degree, and I don’t think there’s a problem with that – however, for ideas where it’s not changing the game, adding or removing things, or giving an advantage – I think it should be considered. Moving your map isn’t going to make you miss out on more of the world, it’ll just be the same map in a different place, for instance.

I love this game, this game is amazing – but, yes, the FoV just makes me feel really cramped and kind of antsy especially after a bit of play.

I don’t want any advantage, I just don’t want my poor Asura to have glaucoma. :P

I would tend to agree with you. If the level and rewards are downshifted, you shouldn’t have to pre-farm gold elsewhere just to be able to keep up.

Although, as a low-level person, I really don’t use Waypoints very often, only when I’m forced to. For now, maybe tell your friends to cool it. :P

While I would like to agree with you, I can’t help but want to tune you out after you throw out this “ADHD” nonsense.

It’s like saying people are “schizophrenic” for having a lot of alts. The disease has nothing to do with what you’re trying to describe. :/