Guild Wars 2

Vol.5241:

Quick question Colin – are we still able to kill people doing the puzzle? Or is this gonna be a pve area?

Kill away! It’s still very much a WvW map, just its own map now. It’s all growsed up.

Essence Snow.3194:

Get More Out of WvW
We’re improving the way we award World XP to World vs. World players! Now you’ll gain rewards for a much wider range of activities in the Mists – everything from destroying siege weapons, repairing walls, escort missions, and more.

The End of Culling
We wiped out culling in World vs. World, and now we’re doing the same in the Living World. By removing the limit on the number of characters you can see, we’re increasing the epic feel of exploring through a fully-populated world.

Quick follow up note, sorry about this one folks. Both of the release notes above are still in testing and are NOT including in the May 14th release. Consider this a spoiler for things that are coming soon as they are ready and signed off on.

However, one release highlight wasn’t listed that should be, so bonus info for you to make up for the wrong notes going out → In WvW the jumping puzzle in Eternal Battlegrounds will be split out into its own map, so those folks who wish to play there aren’t counting against the population cap for EB. This means more people can play in the EB jumping puzzle, and more people can play in EB as well with the populations separated.

We’re working out the kinks of doing a more frequent update, sorry again about the confusion!

You’re our boy Blu!

And our other streamers and shout casters as well!

Building in more support for folks who want to support and grow the PvP community in Gw2 is absolutely one of our major projects right now, and not something we’re going to say is good enough and done as is.

Sorin.4310:

Thanks for the answer Colin! It’s nice to know it’s on your guys’ minds. However, I feel a lot of the Anet responses are in this same category, where the topic is something to address in the future. So what is being addressed in the present? Will there be a blog post coming soon about the next big things in GW2, now that Flame and Frost has concluded (almost).

For a high level summary of the stuff we’re working on and where we’re headed (some of this is now complete, a lot still in progress) you can check out this blog post talking about our high level direction:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/colin-johanson-on-guild-wars-2-in-the-months-ahead/

For the more immediate details, we’ll be releasing more info about our first May update here shortly. And absolutely yes, we’ll be doing some more high level blog posts about the direction of the game as well to make sure you all have a clear picture of where Gw2 is heading and can give additional feedback/comments =)

Atlas.9704:

Colin will there ever be a part of Fractals that allow us to play a recap of old content?
Stuff like that would be a win-win for those who want Fractals and others who long to play older stuff as well.

When I said we could update or change an existing dungeon, updating fractals in the future is one of the options that’s fully possible yes. And of course since fractals lets us experience moments trapped in time….it’s entirely possible some content may make its way there as part of a living world update.

Geotherma.2395:

Valento.9852:

lordkrall.7241:

The item itself actually says Able to mine all metals, so it is quite unlikely that they would be unable to mine any possible higher tier.

I see, I’d still like a dev comment on this just to ensure.

On a second thought though, I think it’s unlikely they’ll release new node tiers because then they’d have to add new armor/weapon/etc tiers into the game and they promissed ascended would be the last of them.

You won’t get a dev response confirming, the response you will get is “We have no plans do add higher tiers right now, nor are we working on it. We cannot guarantee we will never add tiers, but it is currently not being worked on or considered.”

This sums it up pretty well:

“We have no plans do add higher tiers right now, nor are we working on it. We cannot guarantee we will never add tiers, but it is currently not being worked on or considered”

=)

That’s an oversight, we’ll make sure to get that addressed if this or content like it makes an appearance again in the future. Due to build and lockdown schedules we won’t be able to get this fixed this time though.

Thanks very much for the heads up!

In other news, Evan has been re-named to “John” so be allowed to remain on the PvP project.

I anticipate the sandwichmancer will once again be overpowered, so sick of it!

We’ll be going through most of these in 2013 and looking at making them more fun and exciting encounters that better scale to support the huge armies of people who mob them.

And of course, we’re also looking into ways to make it so you can see more of those huge mobs of people as well.

Edited to add: This is a great place to throw out your ideas of what you’d like to see any of them do encounter wise to make them more exciting.

Infernia.9847:

@Deified – I’m so glad you linked that post. I was getting ready to go digging around in the forums for that. To boost these difficult events, is a great step in the direction of spreading people out into the world.

Passed that entire thread along to our creature team, thank you!

We’re working on trying to make the ones we’ve already got more exciting encounters, so I can’t promise we’ll change any of the ones on that list immediately unless they are involved enough already to warrant it. We’ll make sure to scrub the list and add them to our polish/clean-up list where it makes sense as well.

As for the late reply, I’ve been in China and missed the earlier thread, but thank you very much for linking it! Better late than never, blame it on the Great Wall, it’s terribly distracting.

We’ll have our critter team take a looksie at this guy, I got a feeling we may have just forgot him in the initial pass.

Thanks!

Mishandia.2087:

Hi, only a simple question : has the server capacity been increased again today?
I see many medium servers today.

Many THX =)

Due to a number of servers approaching full with a recent influx of new players from the sale on Gw2 that just ended, the server capacity was recently increased for a number of servers yes.

Elendar.5204:

Will we ever be able to see our current ranking ingame? (Say on pvp screen)

It’s highly likely we’ll do this at some point yes. This requires different folks than those who built the boards. We’ve got the people who could do that focusing instead on getting custom arenas and spectator mode completed and polished, we don’t want to take people off those projects to try and get your rank info displayed in game at this point.

butch.8136:

^Theres a bug right now. Clicking next makes the ladder switch from Europe to NA. It happens if you change pages fast.

Folks are working on a fix for this, thank you!

Rerroll.9083:

ColinJohanson.2394:

savov.3712:

Just noticed that there are a lot more pages to browse through. Up to page 40 which is 1000 players:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/pvp?page=40
Also if u log in, your name will be marked so its more easy to spot urself while going through the pages.
That was quick and Im happy with my resault. ^^
Sorry if this doesnt deserve its own thread, but its pretty big.
gl hf

Over the course of the next week or two, we’ll continue to expand and show more players, and add new search features once each feature set is stabilized.

Can you guys look into this bug?

“Me and some friends have experienced it.
When you are browsing the EU ladders and you go fastly throught the pages, it will take you to the NA leaderboard without asking. If you dont realize they moved you to NA, you will never find yourself. it’s very annoying also, because you have to go back to page1”

We’ve got folks looking into it right now, thank you!

We’ve increased the total visible players up to 1000 now, over the course of the next week or two we’ll continue to increase visible player counts and add new search and sorting options as each feature becomes stable.

savov.3712:

Just noticed that there are a lot more pages to browse through. Up to page 40 which is 1000 players:
https://leaderboards.guildwars2.com/en/pvp?page=40
Also if u log in, your name will be marked so its more easy to spot urself while going through the pages.
That was quick and Im happy with my resault. ^^
Sorry if this doesnt deserve its own thread, but its pretty big.
gl hf

Over the course of the next week or two, we’ll continue to expand and show more players, and add new search features once each feature set is stabilized.

They show up to 1,000 players now as of this morning, we’ll continue to expand and add search features and additional player listings over the next week or two as each set becomes stable.

Lok.3102:

Top 100 only? Talk about underwhelming. That’s not many players at all. At least show Top 1000. Most your playerbase are not in the Top 100. I didn’t realize you were releasing this feature to be useless to most players. A lot of people want to know where they stand and if they’re progressing, but they may not be in the Top 100.

The list will continue to be expanded over the next week, we’ve got it at the top 100 today to ensure the site handles the traffic load initially, and then we’ll continue to expand listings and search options. Fear not, you’ll be able to search regardless where you are on the ladder and know what % you fall into over-all.

Sera.6539:

I’m not super competitive by any means, but I’d like to see my ranking overall, not just the top 100.

Additional functionality will come on-line through-out the next couple weeks showing more players, more sorting options, and allowing all players to search to find what % of the over-all player base they fall into rank wise.

Bluebird.1890:

Hey Guild Wars devs!

I’ve noticed a silly trend as I explore more and more of the world map. Now, I can’t recall exactly where each location has been, but I can tell you that there are at least one in Bloodtide Coast and Sparkfly Fen:

Which one of you guys loves siamoths too much? :P

There have been multiple occasions where I have found a little cave offshoot somewhere in the corner of a map and thought, “Ooo! Something to explore” only to get in there and realize its just a one room half open cavern with a bunch of siamoth grazing.

The first time I was disappointed. The second and third and fourth times, I just started laughing like I was experiencing some sort of inside joke with one of the developers.

I can’t help but imagine someone sitting in a dark corner of the Arenanet studio just creating siamoth habitats in little tucked away corners of Tyria, very happy and content with their life. When they go home and their wife or husband asks how their day was, they just smile and say “Great! I made another new home for siamoths.”

Anyway, who is responsible for this? :P

It’s like Trolls and Ettin seem to be often found large gathering node farms, one of the great mysteries of Tyria….Perhaps someday the true story will be revealed?

Internally we pronounce it “See-ya-moth”, and since washingtonians speak perfect english as we remind our british design director Chris Whiteside daily, that’s clearly the only correct way to say it, so there ya go.

Max Lexandre.6279:

As the title says I’m wondering about that.

If this mini-game replaces the normal general content updates we saw last months.

Thanks.

There will be another release at the end of April on top of this bonus living world release today for Super Adventure Box. Date, features, and content TBD (spoiler: of course we have a Flame & Frost release!)

Custom Arenas are still being tested on our development servers and are not included in this months patch.

I posted over in News & Announcements to clarify on the items being turned on early by accident to support the Custom Arenas release:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Custom-Arena-Starter-Kits-Time-Tokens

Many of you may have noticed that today from midnight to 7:30 AM PDT (07:00 GMT – 14:30 GMT) two unfinished items were available for purchase in the Gem Store. The Custom Arena Starter Kit and the Custom Arena Time Token items are two items we are working on for a future release but they are currently only in the testing phase and do not have final art, descriptions, or pricing. Anyone that purchased either of these two items today can contact customer support to get a refund if they wish.

For those of you considering a refund: It’s likely the final price for these items, when they are released, will be very different from today. The Custom Arena Starter Kit will likely be far more expensive than it was and the Custom Arena Time Tokens will likely be cheaper than they were today. There will also possibly be ways of earning these items in game through PvP in the future as well. If you would like to hold on to the items you purchased and wait for their official release to use them, please feel free to do so, these items will work fine when Custom Arenas are added to the game in a future release.

We are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

Many of you may have noticed that today from midnight to 7:30 AM PDT (07:00 GMT – 14:30 GMT) two unfinished items were available for purchase in the Gem Store. The Custom Arena Starter Kit and the Custom Arena Time Token items are two items we are working on for a future release but they are currently only in the testing phase and do not have final art, descriptions, or pricing. Anyone that purchased either of these two items today can contact customer support to get a refund if they wish.

For those of you considering a refund: It’s likely the final price for these items, when they are released, will be very different from today. The Custom Arena Starter Kit will likely be far more expensive than it was and the Custom Arena Time Tokens will likely be cheaper than they were today. There will also possibly be ways of earning these items in game through PvP in the future as well. If you would like to hold on to the items you purchased and wait for their official release to use them, please feel free to do so, these items will work fine when Custom Arenas are added to the game in a future release.

We are sorry for any confusion or inconvenience this may have caused.

The data won’t be changed for your character itself, we’re simply recording it to our live website starting today and we’ll need around a week or so to get everything stable on the website, prepare for the traffic load, and ensure the data is updating at the proper intervals. The stability is purely website and database related.

The PvP and achievement point leaderboards will initially show 100 players, and then we’ll expand them to show more once launched to ensure the sites stability one chunk at a time.

For the next week, all the medium population servers will be free to transfer to. Might be worth giving one of them a look!

Doing something fun on April 1st is a good idea, hmmm…

Xuro.5861:

Will all dailies/monthlies and infinite sources be counted in this ranking? If so, it seems rather useless as it will be all about who has the most money to blow on salvaging then.

Could any developer please give us more information on this?

As we warned earlier this year, we’ll be closing out the infinitely repeatable achievements and capping them at a reasonable achievement number due to these rankings and the rewards we plan to add to total achievement points someday. These achievements will get capped with this release.

Daily/Monthly achievements won’t be changed.

Living World is really a broader concept, it’s the idea that Guild Wars 2 is (and will become more so) a truly living game, where the world can change and constantly evolve going forward.

This will come in a lot of different forms. One example of stuff we’ve done in the past is new events, dungeons, guild missions, etc. being added that constantly expand the range of content and experiences. We want to keep doing more and more of this with our world in the future, to constantly provide new exciting things you can discover and experience any time in Gw2.

Another form of this is through special events, things like Halloween, Hunger Games, or Wintersday where content is available for a period of time, is removed from the game when that period is over, and could appear again in the future in some form to help provide unique and fun experiences in the game world.

Finally, the storyline of this type of content going into the world is really the “living story” in a sense for the game. We want to try and theme our releases with storylines and main characters in the game world that have exciting story arcs, a lot of the permanent new content, special events, etc. will all have these core story arcs that drive them in the game world. Much like the story of Halloween drove around the potential return of the Mad King, storyline for our living world releases will play a big part in the content that appears and changes the world as a result.

We want to make this a much bigger part of where Gw2 goes in the future, to give a sense that the world truly can change constantly as you’re playing and every time you login. What we’ve done with Flame and Frost so far is really a very small example of what we view the living world to be as a future possibility for Gw2. Things more along the lines of Halloween, Lost Shores, and Wintersday are stronger examples, along with the new events, guild missions, etc. we’ve added in releases since launch.

The goal is to provide a unifying storyline to the world that ushers this new content into the game, changes the game, and makes the world feel truly alive. It’s like every month your GM is running new scenarios for your gaming group to enjoy, or your favorite TV show is airing new episodes to experience. We’re really barely scratching the surface of what this concept can be for our game, and we’ll be building much more in that in 2013.

I’ll throw out feature wise, many of the things we’ll be doing feature wise across the first half of 2013 are typically the type of features you’d likely only see in a paid expansion traditionally. We’re really excited about the opportunity to be able to do that for Guild Wars 2, and think there is something really compelling in that experience, which is really the only message we wanted folks to take from all of this. March will of course continue this tradition of free releases, major features, and of course the growth of living story as we expand its role in Gw2.

All of that being said, this is exactly why we try and avoid talking about stuff until it’s ready, if we say something early and it ends up not ending up exactly what people expect, it doesn’t work out for anyone. Saying something like “expansions worth of content” means different things to everyone, and is nearly an impossible goal to meet expectation wise since everything expects something different, which is a big part of why marketing stepped away from that plan very quickly after asking us to use it when speaking to the press/fans.

I imagine it’ll still get quoted until the end of time, but hope that helps explain where it came from, and what to expect. Just to re-iterate the post I made back in January:

“To set expectations accordingly, the January release will be a relatively small release that sets the table for the stories and features we plan to roll out with the Feb/March releases and beyond. Also, there will be no new race, profession, or new region with these larger Feb/March releases. One of our major goals with these releases is making our existing world as strong as possible, ensuring there are reasons to go to all the locations in the world we’ve already built, and strengthening the core game we’ve provided. In saying this will be an expansions worth of stuff in these releases, we’re talking about the number of new features that will be rolled out across PvE, WvW, and PvP in early 2013, which usually you’d only find in an expansion for a traditional MMORPG.”

I’m no good at this forum thing

Thread = closin!

Yeah that one is my fault, I’m out of the office doing a tour meeting with press and fans across Europe to discuss the game. While gone, this was something a team started designing a solution for, no one told me that while in Europe, so I said only what I knew at the time. The joys of no one being awake at the same hours.

Sorry about the confusing information, I had this on my list to bring up after the trip, but the good news is it’s already being covered and all of this could have easily been avoided with that answer. In the future, I’ll try and avoid trips this long, this is the joy of game development, feature work can begin very quickly! =)

Locking since the issue is being actively worked on, thanks for all the great suggestions all!

Iehova.9518:

There’s still no reason to kill champs, Colin. Blue does not good reward make.

Just a reminder, blue is the absolute minimum champs can drop, they have much better odds of dropping good loot than regular mobs, and once you’re properly getting kill credit for them hopefully this becomes more visible.

Infernia.9847:

Colin – much appreciated that you are so active in the forums these past two days and that you took the time to post this. It is good for the community to have this communication open.

Can we get an in-game tinfoil hat? I would proudly wear it everywhere on my Ranger.

I would love to wear one as well =)

It’s worth noting, the X-files conspiracy comment was directly responding to the theory something changed in the November release that made it all suddenly worse that has been perpetuated since Lost Shores. We confirmed nothing what so ever changed in November, as we posted after a complete investigation into all parts of that release, thus the comment. Probably not worded the best on my part, but please take the time to read the actual comment in context and don’t apply it to other situations that had nothing to do with the remark.

As posted within the loot discussion thread, we did exactly what we said we would do: we completed our investigation of the November release and all loot tables and found no issues what so ever, we immediately let the community know no issues were discovered from the changes in the November release.

We then expanded the search to other parts of the game, here we found issues that had existed since launch and have both let you know about them, and will be correcting them.

To those who theorized there were issues since launch with qualifying for loot, you were indeed correct and your tinfoil hat is justified, thanks very much for helping us find this issue! November however, remains an X-files level conspiracy that has been debunked. There ya go

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

wildcode.5403:

Waar Kijk Je Naar.8713:

Damage done doesn’t affect drops.

From Colin Johanson

it is still possible to kill a creature and not do enough damage to qualify for loot

Damage does affect drops, but does it also affect quality is what I’m asking.

Again, damage does NOT affect drops. It doesn’t matter if you do 2000 or 50000 damage, as long as 2000 is enough to tag the monster, anything above that is unnecessary, and has no effect on quality of drops or anything else.

Just want to quickly add that officially that is correct, damage simply determines if you qualify, doing more damage DOES NOT give you better loot. The fix we’re implementing should make it much easier for characters who trait/build for support to gain credit for loot drops in particular.

After reading reports in this thread, we spent more time investigating our rewards system. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, we verified that all loot tables are indeed working correctly in the game. Since then, we continued receiving reports that there seemed to be an issue, so we extended our search to all systems that created opportunities for you to get items from loot tables. Here we found an issue that we were able to verify was consistent across everyone who reported problems:

The rules by which you qualify for credit for an event or for experience when killing a mob are different rules than those used to help determine if you qualify for loot. Some of these were set up to be unintentionally restrictive, and as such you could kill a creature with a lot of health (this was most noticeable on champions) and not qualify for loot, despite qualifying for all other credit.

For the February Flame & Frost: The Gathering Storm release we will be repairing this issue to ensure more players are capable of earning loot credit for kills. This should fix the issue such that you got credit for killing a champion, but received no loot from it. Once fixed, all champion mobs will correctly always drop 1 blue or better loot item, and all veterans will have a chance of dropping loot better than regular mobs as outlined in the November release. Please note, it is still possible to kill a creature and not do enough damage to qualify for loot (which is the only way you won’t get loot for a champion), it is also still possible for veterans to not drop loot at all, since they simply have better odds of dropping loot than normal creatures but no guaranteed drops.

On top of this, we’re also updating some of the loot in various areas of the game for the February release that should make specific areas more rewarding. We’ll cover this is in detail with the February release notes.

Thanks very much for all your feedback and reports, that information has proved incredibly useful!

That’s a great reference, nice catch! The back story on that is way back when Gene (Dixie’s owner) was still alive we used to take new hires from ArenaNet down to Dixie’s to meet the man. There were a lot of great stories that came out of those trips and the insanely crazy hot-sauce known as “the man”, along with Gene taunting everyone who would either eat, or not eat it. One trip even included an ambulance visit for one lucky Anet employee.

Sadly Gene passed away a few years ago and with it the tradition, but I hear Porter down in Tacoma is still carrying on in his dad’s footsteps.