Guild Wars 2

Ryan.9387:

What is the reasoning behind the company policy to talk about things only when they are nearly finished.

The reason is pretty simple. It’s the same one for why they don’t make internal deadlines public knowledge or talk about future plans beyond ifs and maybes. Because when things change it is hard to retract any statements made and they will be viewed as broken promises regardless of how they were originally communicated.

The easiest comparison to make is probably to think how you feel if a game that you have been waiting to play announces a set release date but then as that date comes closer they announce a that the game has been delayed. It never looks good. Same reactions would be at play if ANet made announcements about future plans and had to later retract them.

However, I will criticize this policy on one front. Things you talked about before this policy came in place those have now just been left hanging in the aether. It would be lot better for you to take the blow and explain what came of those if anything rather than leave this perpetual uncertainty looming over the playerbase. Because, this uncertainty can’t be much better than the alternative since this uncertainty will never go away while any possible disappointments will only last for a while.

Essentially by not clearing up your old statements from before you stopped talking about things you are just misleading your userbase.

John Smith.4610:

Just this month 7,496,080 Oozes have been dealt with.

It is pretty amazing that you even have the ability to pull such a random and useless factoid. Unless, Ooze’s are actually the one mob that most contributes to the changes in the state of the economy which I find highly unlikely

lordkrall.7241:

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m confused now. So SAB was not added because it doesn’t fit within the current living story narrative. However, WvW tournament does? Huh?

WvW Tournament doesn’t take place in the “real world”. From a Lore point of view it is exactly the same as every other WvW match-up.

That is actually irrelevant, because the impact on playerbase is the same either way.

In other words arranging the WvW tournament now whatever the lore of the Mists may be will still mean the players will have to switch gears from a continuous story plot to something that has absolutely nothing to do with said story.

Which means the argument that SAB could not be available the same time as the living story is ridiculous. Especially considering we are on a mid season break right now.

SAB may exist as part of the “real” world as you say. But so does the Mist War if that is the argument you want to use. Or do those criers in Rata Sum f.ex. suddenly not exist anymore when it happens to be convenient for the sake of your argument.

Also, even at the times of crisis the world we live in does not grind to halt either… people still live their lives as best they can. You could even say that during the time of crisis some normalcy among all the chaos is all the more important especially for the younger generation who still don’t posses the ability to process the events the same way as adults do and that is exactly who the SAB is for in the lore.

Personally, even though I like the side story they introduced for SAB, that is not the key component in SAB in any way. It is nice plus for those that enjoy finding it, but it was never front and center when it came to SAB as a piece of content.

Asgaeroth.6427:

Comparatively no one plays Aetherpath either. It’s not disabled. It’s existence doesn’t hurt the people who want to do other stuff. Leaving it out this long just screws everyone who paid for permanent access and love the kitten thing like a best friend :P

That is actually really good analogy in more ways than one. Substitute dungeon tokens for bauble bubbles and the equivalency becomes even more clear.

Lostwingman.5034:

Dangit people. It’s like none of you have followed this. They haven’t brought it back yet BECAUSE there wasn’t enough people playing it last time around.

True, however, that is not a cause so much as it is an end point. But to think of it as constant would be incorrect. People weren’t playing it for reasons which does not mean that the people who enjoyed or played it the first time around have automatically ceased to be interested in it indefinitely.

I can understand the reason why it is not being brought back, a user here earlier pointed it out pretty nicely (hard to miss because of their overuse of bolding for emphasis) for those who might not.

Why are quite a few people riled up about it now, because ANet screwed up. It is that plain and simple. If you have nothing to say on a subject then you better not say anything at all. Or better yet avoid it being brought up altogether, which was entirely in their power to do so. This wasn’t an open Q and A in a panel but more or less a formal interview they agreed on.

ricky markham.8173:

i know one dev made the original why cant it be his project to do update that get released in feature packs.

I would like to point out that this is not true. SAB was not a one man show. Josh is an excellent environment artist and he obviously has a knack for designing things too. But his skillset is limited. SAB was made by a small team Josh at its helm, but to say he could maintain it alone is probably an overstatement. No matter how much passion or enthusiasm he has for it.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Crise.9401:

This has probably been mentioned already, but since I saw no response for it repetition can’t hurt.

Ages ago, in one of the older Ready Up streams, after the last WvW tournament, a CDI regarding WvW seasons/tournaments was mentioned to be “coming within a week” I don’t think I would have missed it if it did. So whatever happened to that?

Hi Crise,

i will double check. That seems like eons ago so please forgive me for my weak memory (-:

Chris

Some help for you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpyMHLobZQY&feature=player_detailpage&list=PLDCvogxNKN3nmdmYoblp6T3Pz44t5bCI4#t=1019

Drysdale.3826:

Is the vendor still around? I’ve been gone for a long time and would like to spend my remaining baubles.

No the vendor is no longer active. Also, they can’t really re-activate him after this either without making SAB available that is. Because if they did that it would only be viewed as a confirmation of SAB not coming back for a very long time or at all by certain portion of the user base.

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m confused now. So SAB was not added because it doesn’t fit within the current living story narrative. However, WvW tournament does? Huh?

Yeah, the interview was just really really bad. They tried to give some sort of reasoning for it not coming back in the near future but because this was not something they were prepared for they only ended up causing the thing to blow up in their face. It did not help that most of the other answers were void of any real information to begin with.

phys.7689:

Thiagugu.9682:

Woodenpotatoes, always the voice of reason.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMGEGK7Sr4g

not really, he has decided that they will definately do sab, even though thats not what the interview says, he basically just says this what he believes for no reason

I too think drawing that conclusion is mistaken, however, he does have one point worth noting. The unclear future of SAB is not really the only problem it is a symptom of a much bigger issue that has been going on ever since the vague promises of the precursor crafting/scavenger hunt. The recent interview exemplified this overall issue by asking many of the questions ANet either doesn’t want to or don’t have answers to. Thus bringing things to a boiling point on more fronts than one.

This has probably been mentioned already, but since I saw no response for it repetition can’t hurt.

Ages ago, in one of the older Ready Up streams, after the last WvW tournament, a CDI regarding WvW seasons/tournaments was mentioned to be “coming within a week” I don’t think I would have missed it if it did. So whatever happened to that?

Ensign.2189:

World 2 was a mess. The levels were very long and punishing; while world 1 levels were straightforward to complete in 10 minutes or so, world 2-3 could easily take hours

If you had the flute both zones 2 and 3 get significantly easier (an extra shortcut opens up in zone 2 and the annoying mouths cease to be an issue in zone 3). The only things I would outright criticize them on was that they could have spaced the content better perhaps have four zones instead of three, so individual zones are more manageable in size. Also, if you can’t realize a mechanic well don’t use it. I’m talking about the dart traps of course, they were instant death only because they could only make them work that way with the tools they had. This was explained in decent detail back when SAB was around last time.

It’s such a pity that by wanting to give the players more they ended up making some bad decisions and the overall experience suffered as a result.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Crise.9401:

Gerby.6219:

Too much to ask for one red post in this thread?

They probably don’t want to risk making things even worse. I mean trying to circle around the fact that they have no real response to give regarding this subject hardly helps anyone.

Acknowledgement would be a low-risk step in the right direction.

I believe that they’re currently working on how to word that. I’ll keep my eyes open. Would be very disappointing though if they tried to ignore this until it goes away quietly.

I hope you are right there, at least they have told their CS team to basically tell people that there was no announcement of any kind related to SAB in that “unofficial” interview. Which while accurate, doesn’t really change anything but the fact that the agents have been told how to respond to these inquiries specifically tells that on some level they are acknowledging the issue in that interview at least.

The future of SAB remains as unclear as ever though. Personally the recent stuff just reminded me about the fact that it has been too long. About a month or two ago, I remember looking at my bank seeing my SAB stuff and thinking it’s been almost a year soon and then I remember thinking to myself that maybe they are holding it off for the anniversary or something like that.

At that point I was still optimistic and unaware of the planned mid-season break in the LS but after these interviews all of that is pretty much gone and replaced with nothing more than bitter disappointment.

Gerby.6219:

Too much to ask for one red post in this thread?

They probably don’t want to risk making things even worse. I mean trying to circle around the fact that they have no real response to give regarding this subject hardly helps anyone.

The interview GuildMag did was already bad enough, at no fault of GuildMag of course. There are actually two interviews done at around the same time that touch on SAB one of them was executed correctly by ANet in terms of the response given the other (GuildMag’s one) not so much. From PR PoV ANet really dropped the ball on that one. While knowing that their words would immediately be minced and analyzed by countless people, if you have nothing to say say that and be concise about it don’t say anything unnecessary.

The gist of it, they don’t want to make another statement from which only negative conclusions, or at the very least nothing positive, can be made out of.

It was chill when I last logged on too, but I had fun earlier. All those nostalgic sound effects and music. The number of commander tags was also sort of hilarious.

Probably because these posts would not have any discussion. It would merely make following any ongoing discussions difficult in that already ridiculously messy topic. It’s messy because it was merged from topics of varying ages which means that the posts are no longer necessarily in their original order.

I don’t have many pics from SAB, but I managed to find one that was pretty funny (also a great example of the ridiculous hitboxes in SAB, there I am standing on top of what I assume to be the crocodile’kitten box).

Edit: c’mon the word filter is ridiculous appearently the word hitbox will get cencored if preceded by a possesive form of a name.

Goomby.9302:

It didn’t get locked so much as combined with this thread.

I wager it got locked because it resembled a petition too much. If I recall correctly there is something in the Code of Conduct on the forums that says those are a no no. They also locked the topic of the other guy who made some logos for it.

Xenon.4537:

@Crise

I didn’t even look at the forums during SAB#2 because I was so in love with it. I feel like I’m part of a segment of the community that was too busy enjoying the content to realize anyone had a problem with it at the time, and now it’s sadly too late because our voices were silent when it mattered.

You can look up quite a telling blog post on Josh Foremans personal blog from the time of that release. I won’t link it here because I don’t want ask for an infraction.

The issues people were having the change in reward structure and the introduction of ascended crafting played a huge part in why SAB W2 was not as popular and while they addressed the issues, to the best of their ability, at the time rather quickly first impressions matter a whole lot.

Had they allowed you to buy stuff like dragonite ore or empyreal fragments for bauble bubbles, like they allowed Obsidian Shards before, that alone might have tipped the scales significantly if done right.

The opening post actually sums the whole SAB situation really well.

People who were active in the topics about SAB W2, and weren’t completely blinded by frustration, should know this. The posts are still there to be looked at and to me Josh did a great job in dealing with the whole ordeal it is a real pity he was the one who had to take the brunt of it though in more ways than one.

What happened with that release is a great example of the fact that the people who work for companies are just that people and they make mistakes. Although usually they are not allowed to admit their mistakes or talk about them as an individual while representing their company (which is something I believe Josh got reprimanded for, or something like that).

It is pretty simple to see that the content was made first and reward structure changed second. These are usually the responsibilities of different people altogether as far as I understand. The biggest mistake, in my eyes when it came to rewards was that you could no longer get stuff like Obsidian Shards out of doing SAB they have lately been giving opportunities to get that stuff from more places, you can even get stuff like mystic clovers outside mystic forge now but for back then apparently someone decided it wasn’t a good idea.

If we think about SAB as its own game, which is quite fair, the game design behind it is really good and fun. However, it is at times being held back by the tech and the fact that it is part of GW2.

Most of the issues in W2 were not out of bad design but due to bugs. Most of which were caused by the fact that their engine was never intended to facilitate this kind of content and that latency was more of a factor than they anticipated.

If you ask me they made the GW2 engine jump through quite the number of hoops to make SAB happen and even more with all the added bells and whistles for W2. It is also a fact that for W2 they did not have an actual programmer (as in engine level programmer) in their team which is why as far as I recall stuff like the dart traps were instant death because they had no way to make them just tick damage, without engine level support, while still impeding your progress in the same way as they wanted them to.

Maybe they made the zones too long when played without any of the W2 upgrades for your skills and splitting them differently might have been more manageable for players the first time through but that is entirely subjective. Personally once I got through that one bend with the geysers in Rapids I had no trouble going through the other zones of world 2, sure parts of zone 3 were excruciatingly difficult the first time through but also fun because that difficulty was not caused by bugs but by myself (as in I always knew why I failed, and the answer was not the game or lag).

Vesuvius.9874:

Brother Grimm.5176:

You guys do realize how this may just make them NEVER bring it back. If they cave to this kind of “pressure” (not that it in any way matters to Anet), it sets a precedence they likely don’t want to make….

Just clean up the mess a week from now when this dies down and I’ll be sure to wave as I pass thru Rata Sum….good luck.

I was about to post exactly what you said. No way ANET is going to give in to this. They’ll be setting a bad example.

Well the thing is, if they don’t address it in any way that will not reflect on them well either. Assuming this lasts for longer than a day or two, which I personally hope it does precedents be kittened.

From pure PR standpoint the best thing for them is come meet the people half way not enable it permanently or immediately but make a statement that they can’t easily wiggle themselves out of that SAB will come back be it this year or next April or whatever (they wouldn’t even necessarily have to set a time frame of any kind in my opinion).

If they choose to wait it out, do no “damage control” whatsoever, and it turns out it doesn’t blow over as quickly as they expected it to then they have just basically said that they do not really care for what an obviously significant minority of players, based on their own statements especially during the initial round of SAB, are saying or asking for.

You are also forgetting that they sold an item in the gem store that essentially was sold with the assumption that SAB would be back. They did not sell the item the first time SAB was around because then it was just a wacky experiment but with its second release and the introduction of the item it became a permanent part of the game, albeit temporary or rather limited in its availability. The coin was never in anyway implied to be time restricted or consumable after all.

By not bringing SAB back at all they would also also be setting a few precedents of their own. The only question is for how long can they keep evading addressing it in some way.

The weapon skins from SAB have always been account bound aside for the very rare drops from the daily Zone boss chests or something like that. Sure it would bring the skin prices on TP down for a while if it was made more permanent or statically recurring but it would probably normalize to a reasonable price in the end.

Because as far as blue skins go (which are the only skins that can be bought from TP), people who actually play SAB have no reason to buy them from the TP whatsoever in the first place… especially not with the wardrobe since you only need to farm the baubles once now for every skin. Because there would be no pressure of the content going away for indeterminate periods of time people have no reason to do a mad rush for skins either.

The blue skins have no perceived value, unlike the green ones for example (but they are account bound regardless) the only reason the prices climb is because they have not been available and there is no reason why they would want to keep the value of the blue items the same as it is now. Because initially the expectation was that they would be available again anyways back when they became part of the economy.

harris.7964:

I ’ve probably missed that interview.Where is a link please?:)

http://www.guildmag.com/guild-wars-2-interview-part-1-general-game-living-world/

You know, I was just re-watching that interview… and because I sort of know how interviews typically work I have to ask what was the point.

It is likely that those questions were provided beforehand to the people being interviewed before the actual recording, so really if your response to a question is “I can’t really say” or even worse “I can’t really say, but it doesn’t seem likely” what is the point of including them in the actual interview at all much less dancing around the question for a long while without really saying anything at all. I had to stop watching it the half way through because the answers really have absolutely no concrete content and the only conclusions that can be drawn from them can hardly be positive in any way.

You know when the first year they got lot of negativity with the overflowing amount of random festivals their statement was that they were building a core portfolio of reusable content like Dragon Bash, the Bazaar or SAB. If I recall correctly they even said something to the effect of when a particular LW release would need more time they could come back to these. Have they? We got Festival of the Four Winds, before S2 kick off proper but nothing since. Now they announced a mid season break with indeterminate length. Is this not the reason why they built that core portfolio of content precisely?

Yet, instead of something from that portfolio of content what we get is daily blogs about upcoming changes and nothing about what might be coming next in terms of something playable before September. Then they come out with an interview like this… really, you should have had some foresight nothing in that interview is something people want to hear or don’t otherwise already know.

They say things like these festivals or SAB don’t fit in the narrative structure of the new LW, which is the exact opposite of what you said they were for and why the first year was so celebration heavy. They were supposed to be for filling the gaps but now all we have is gaps and nothing to fill them because they are suddenly no longer fit for the purpose you yourself said they were intended for.

Ironically, what I wanted to end this post on is the words Give Me a Break. This is just completely out of whack. This is a slightly more generic post but really wouldn’t something like SAB have been a perfect fit for the gap. I can sort of understand why Dragon Bash wouldn’t have been appropriate but really, that pit is one you dug yourself by choosing such a specific theme for a celebration without thinking forward a bit.

I hope we get something fun for the anniversary at least, but if not SAB and not Queens Jubilee, since we just had the Crown Pavilion then what your supposed portfolio of reusable content has suddenly shrunk to almost nothingness.

If they could anticipate the need for a mid season break then including both the Crown Pavilion and the BoFW content from first year to the Festival of the Four Winds was a mistake because now all they have left is SAB, Dragon Bash, Wintersday and Halloween and three of those four have specific times of a year that they are most relevant in Tyria. You backed yourselves into a corner and are now saying you are not willing to make use of the only reusable content you have that is not in some way tied to the calender.

Props for a job well done….

wipefusens.9625:

I should delete all my SAB related stuff to be a part of the riot!

Having all of that sitting in your bank and not being able to use it is just sad

nexxe.7081:

It was immersion breaking and silly.

Immersion is obviously a strong point in GW2… it is so immersive experience when 100 people start randomly dancing and half of them have bobble heads when waiting for new patch. Don’t even get me started on how fitting some of the new hairstyles are particularly Charr ones. They look like they fit right on in Tyria no problem at all, right?

The SAB weapons also are not pixelated, they would be pixelated if they had low resolution textures but what you call pixelated is a deliberate stylistic choice. That has no bearing in immersion at least no more thna Twilights footfall effect or its swing trails.

It is so freaking immersive when you see people with Marjory’s daggers that are in the lore these special weapons given to her and her alone. The chainsaw greatsword is also such a natural fit in the Tyrian line up of weapons right.

I was one of the people who had immense difficulty getting through W2 the first time (mostly because of lag, those kitten geysers) but that did not make me like SAB any less.

I know world 2 got a lot of slack for being so long and difficult. But after the first time through it honestly wasn’t that bad. Because of how the stuff was designed and with some of the upgrades from zone 3 in earlier zones, which make things significantly easier on repeat runs and allow access to new shortcuts and info.

I think they went slightly overboard with the green highlights in that one bit in W2Z2 when they deployed the hotfix but overall I think world 2 was mostly a success. If only they had kept the reward structure from the first release of SAB for the most part I feel many people would have been more inclined to keep playing W2 (mainly talking about the bauble limits, that combined with the difficulty spike felt bit harsh at first).

And regardless of any mishaps with W2 their response back then showed that they cared, Josh’s posts on the forums were great to read.

I would take SAB as an activity any day although it doesn’t quite fit because it is not really dependent on groups so there is no reason to limit it for the reasons they do for other activities.

Let’s face it, the real reason why SAB is not coming back is because they promised the Chinese synchronous updates and now they are afraid that if they bring SAB out they will hate it or they won’t get the references. And they know if they only bring it back out in NA and EU that would definitely not look right.

Or maybe KongZhong flat out said that they don’t want something like that in their version of the game and because they don’t want it we can’t have it either. Sorry, I am a bit bitter right now I know and I mean no offense to anyone but the fact is something like this could very well be a factor and its not like they can say anything about it if it is.

I get that SAB is not for everyone, but it does not take that much manpower either as we all know. Why? Because of some of the flat out best developer interaction I have seen from ArenaNet or from most other companies back when SAB was around last.

Except that as it turns out what many people consider to be great developer interaction ArenaNet considered to be bad practice. Oh no, this person has some personality in his posts he is spending too much time on forums replying to topics and concerns of the players (most likely on his free time, would need to look up the specifics to be sure). We can’t have that because some of the other employees may feel intimidated by it or it might set too high expectations for future.

I think this topic is going to be moderated sooner or later. But I’ll just say this much.

While I like LS S2 a great deal, if that means we can no longer have random fun stuff like SAB, and are left with only things like bobble head effect etc. Then I will say thanks but no thanks for the LS. Why? Because these new patches regardless of how cool they are only last me from a couple of hours to a day. Especially during the winter when I don’t have time to hunt for the skins and backpieces. Meanwhile, because SAB was repeatable content (that did not have a strong story element, although what was there was really cool) that I can spend 15-20 minutes on and earn something for it, I ended up doing it over the span of several days or weeks as it may just like I sometimes do random dungeons or fractals except with SAB there is none of the tedium of those two and you don’t have to worry about time commitments.

In season 1 of living world, I used to do lot of the achievements always going for the meta if I had the time. But so far outside the explorable achievements I have not touched a single achievement that required re-playing the story. Why? Because of the major narrative element. I have no interest in reading a book twice back to back or watching a movie twice like that. So why would I go out of my way to do what is effectively the same thing with the living story just for these achievements with extremely mediocre rewards. Living story is not repeatable content for me and it will never be that I might replay it in a years time and maybe then I will check few achievements out but in the mean time it is just really cool couple of hours of gameplay every two weeks (when Dry Top was first introduced it took me a bit longer because of the exploration, but this last expansion of Dry Top is just more of the same so I barely looked at it a second time).

For me SAB was a way to take a break from GW2 without actually taking a break from GW2. And the lack of strong narrative beyond the cheesy homage story inside SAB itself made it the ideal repeatable content for me. It was nothing like any other form of repeatable content in GW2. It is unique because it has no narrative or ambient dialogue so when doing runs all there was were those amazing SFX and chiptune music. The levels may be the same each time but it sure doesn’t feel like it, unlike with dungeons and fractals, because nothing reminds you of the fact that you have done it dozen times before and there is no ideal ways to run SAB unlike dungeons and fractals no best gear or skill setups etc so each run will have variance without someone shouting at you for doing it wrong or taking the wrong route.

For me SAB is relaxing, while dungeons and fractals can quite quickly become stressful if things don’t go as planned.

And just for fun, below are my leftovers from the last time SAB was around, nothing as crazy as some of others here but still stuff I never had a chance to cash in so to speak.

tl;dr: Regardless of how much better the new LS is, if the cost of it is that fun quirky things like SAB can’t happen anymore I would rather not have the living story but a proper boxed expansion instead. As for the reasons why, look above. Why don’t you cancel Halloween or Wintersday too, because suerly they too detract from the narrative of the living story.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Pretty sure you can buy 800 for 10 dollars or euros. That would be a multiple of 200 (200 × 4 = 800).

Heh, somehow my brain ignored 800 completely, duh…

Also, to the people with the answers, edited some questions to my first post, that I think are fairly relevant for the long time future of this system.

BobbyStein.2315:

It’s a lot like watching television in that you can watch (and record) an episode for free when it airs. If you miss it, you can buy the episode off iTunes later. Does that make sense?

I feel this is fine, and 200 gems is not a lot, it is an annoying amount in that you can’t actually buy 200 gems with real money directly, or as I recall any multiple of 200 below the 4000 gems pack. But with the currency conversion it shouldn’t be that big of a deal.

In general I think this is a very reasonable business model.

Edit: the only question I really have is whether there will be deals at later date, like say when season 3 is in full swing to buy the entirety of season 2 at a discounted price. Also what is the expected “retail” price for a past season? Mainly asking because if someday season 1 is added, does that mean I would have to buy that content or is it smart enough to know I was actually there.

And for me personally, the most important thing: where does SAB fall into this, is it a festival or living world or its own thing?

Drigan.7382:

For months and months, people have given you feedback about what you need to do to fix World Vs World…at least we’ve given feedback on what you need to do to improve it.

There is no reason you should need to conduct another “CDI” to gather information on how to improve the seasons. You’ve had nine weeks to collect information from us, so go back and read our feedback. Make some changes and listen to what we say because at this point, your attempts at “community outreach” are superficial at best. Its time we see actual follow through from what we’ve asked for since the game was released, or we will continue to see guilds and people leave this game. (Whether you choose to believe “WvW is flourishing”, you should understand that its a widely shared perspective that less and less people are playing this game mode.)

I don’t know if I agree with everything you said… but I agree that there is no need for a CDI related to tournaments.

• They should have plenty of feedback throughout the 9 weeks.
• In some sense it is pointless to conduct yet another WvW related CDI when the previous ones have yet to bear any tangible fruit (ie. had we seen commander improvements, or if we see them before next tourney in both cases the effectiveness of this new CDI is reduced because we have no idea how it would impact the flow of the tournaments).
• The best they can hope out of this, is yet another round of dissatisfaction when it comes to rewards and another for world pairing, maybe length. I can’t see much constructive feedback coming out of it reading a lot on these forums right now.

PattyCakeChamp.5268:

Where are you reading your ranking in the achievement panel btw? I can’t find it. And lastly, patience.

From the hidden achievement that is supposed to award you the chest, it is under the main WvW achievement category and won’t show up unless you have it. I have “5th place” from the last tourney and a “4th place” from the current tourney, latter of which is obviously incorrect (can’t remember our placement for the first one, and can’t be bothered to check).

In another topic I also saw people saying that both of their placement achievements were incorrect (ie. even the old one for season 1) and multiple reports of people saying they got incorrect placement achievements as well, sometimes better than they were supposed to sometimes worse (dunno if this is a text glitch, guess not because people who did manage to get the chest report incorrect numbers of tickets as well).

Disclaimer: the achievement wording might not be exact, but the gist is basically that it is titled based on your worlds position at the end of the tourney.

Edit: ninja’ed with the screenshots

Acrisor.8097:

Trophy Finishers were not in the chests.

This, one, is correct they were not supposed to be. ReadyUp today confirmed that they are supposed to be delivered via the in-game mail system like last time.

Michael Henninger.7451:

The team is working on sending them out – I just don’t have the answers we’re looking for (I didn’t get mine yet either). Please stay positive in this thread. Thanks!

I would like to stay positive but it is kind of hard… because there seems to be a lot of issues rather than just one with no-rewards.

• Battle Historian says my world placed second
• Leaderboards says my world placed 3rd (though I am positive it said second earlier also, still after EU reset).
• Achievements says my world placed 4th, and are still holding my chest hostage (which I assume isn’t even the correct chest to begin with).
• Reddit says my world finished second.

Which am I supposed to believe here? I am inclined to trust the battle historian the most because that makes the only instance of two sources coinciding with one another (even though reddit can not be considered official, I have not seen anyone disputing it either).

And all this talk about season one rewards still missing in action, well let’s just say it does not exactly inspire confidence.

So, we are screwed on any rewards… that is just absolutely stellar, thanks for this.

He’s not: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/So-has-everyone-got-the-season-reward-chest/first#post4074805

So there is two issues here, one with getting awarded no chest at all, and another with getting a wrong chest, both happening to me in my case.

Osculim.2983:

I think we deserve another 300 tickets for getting our chests late

Wishful thinking, but they really need to make sure their reward systems function correctly before they put them in the game. This is hardly a first for them.

I just want the chest I am supposed to get, for the correct placement, over no chest at all.

So I checked my WvW (not the tournament) achievement tab. It shows an achievement related to a placement for Spring Tournament being awarded and I am still missing my chest, I assume it is not going to appear on its own since the game thinks I already got it when in fact I did not.

Also, interestingly said achievement that was supposed to give me the chest was for the wrong placement (4th, when actually we placed second in our respective league, which the “Battle Historian” NPC so kindly confirms for me).

And no I did not mix up achievements, even though there is one for Season 1 with a very similar title.

Edit: looks like I am not the only one with the “incorrect placement” problem, nor the lack of chests — https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/So-has-everyone-got-the-season-reward-chest/first#post4074860

Double post, but whatevever…

People, form EU, missing the chest should check their WvW (not the tournament) achievement tab. If it shows an achievement related to your placement being awarded and you are still missing your chest, contact customer support, because it is not going to appear on its own since the game thinks you already got it.

Also, interestingly for me at least said achievement was for the wrong placement (4th, when actually we placed second in our respective league), so if you see the same mention that too. Be sure not to mix up achievements, since there can be one for the first WvW “season 1” with very similar title.

No chest here yet either, I am in EU as well.

If I don’t have it by NA reset, I will put in a ticket with the CS, I would suggest people do the same.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Summary so far:

• Pre-match filters will increase queue times.
• Voting per-match does not increase queue time.
• Add some amount of randomness.

Personally any of these three would be welcome in most combinations, one and two would be somewhat mutually exclusive I guess… two sounds better with no real downside. Except if it gets to a point where all you get is a single map always winning the vote, which is the only situation where option one wins out despite affecting queue times. Really it would be, do I want to constantly play on X, or play lot less matches on different maps regardless of whether one or two would be in effect, but two being pre-match would mean that even if such situation came to be you wouldn’t be subject (or indeed have the need to) to having to enter and leave matches and play a lottery of sorts.

Things like encountering or indeed not encountering certain comps, not even possible as far as I can see because it would have to be an intelligent self learning filter than can class builds as “cheese” as they emerge and then keep track of what you encountered in the past. Just overly complicated and easy to game around, by just changing a very minor aspect of your build. Because no matter how smart of a system you would have it could not account for minimal variance from game to game, or it would not work at all, unless it puts some kind of semi-persistent flag on another user that only affects you. But just seems too much trouble for what it is worth, if one can use the personal account blocklist already in game to filter matches that contain people on their block list – yes it could seriously kill queue times if overused, but it is an application of already existing feature (if it does not do it already) and entirely each users own responsibility and based on their own judgement.

Brother Grimm.5176:

If you are getting Bronze Chest, the event is being done incorrectly.

Moral of the story is that this problem is NOT solved by one big ZERG.

Yeah, tell me something I don’t know… the problem, however, is that I can’t fix it by myself and to be frank it is pretty kitten hard to care enough to even try. Group content is all fine and good, but when there is no cohesive group to play with there is only so much one person can do. The problem isn’t so much the lack of coordination it is that the game provides no tools or incentives to foster the necessary coordination or group like minded players together. There is literally zero incentive to do better, first impressions matter a lot.

I mean this is bad, the Tamini warbeasts summoned by the centaurs actually drop loot bags (and give XP), like a normal mob. I am expecting a hotfix for this before the economy is in ruins…

/sarcasm off

Seriously, though, while I see the point in how the new pavilion was designed the bronze chest doesn’t even give 6 champion bags and getting into an instance of the map that actually has the coordination required for more than bronze is extremely rare (I have had perhaps 2 viable attempts so far).

Likewise if your mobs don’t give loot why on earth is there kill 50 of X achievements. Getting those was the most braindead gameplay I have seen in GW2. I guess you can get them while doing blitzes though, but then getting any reward of doing the blitz events has way too much “cooldown” in between to keep me motivated to even keep repeating it, and 9 times out of 10 or more the reward isn’t even as good as killing champions elsewhere, such as orr or frostgorge, in the game.

Thankfully the Zephyrite sanctum is actually fun to contrast the tedium of the crown pavilion… which really doesn’t have anything going for it apart from the gauntlet and even that to a lesser extent if you have done it before.

Edit: sure, I didn’t expect the crown pavilion to come back and be as ridiculously lucrative as it was when it made its debut, I went into this expecting it to be “nerfed” but not only was it nerfed to ground in terms of rewards but the bosses are “harder” (as in more often than not, not harder in a good challenging way) to boot with far less rewards.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Speed boosts are not cumulative. They simply prioritize the highest single boost. Basically if you can give yourself swiftness, you dont need any other speed boosts.

Swiftness works well for only some builds and in group setting, a signet is better choice for roaming. I was aware that swiftness did not stack with other speed boosts, but I did not know that the rune bonus and a signet would not be usable, at all (makes the rune set much less appealing 60g is a lot to free an utility slot).

I wouldn’t mind a purely cosmetic mounts, there is no need to boost player movement speed at all though (every profession already has an option for 25% boost, and there is a rune set that grants another 25%, yes you are sacrificing stuff for movement speed but then again life is all about choices).

Well no-one wins, directly… but I imagine they can free quite a bit of resources by doing this. The real queston is if not now then when?

There is no such thing as infinite storage. There is probably much more important data than this that they absolutely have to keep “indefinitely” (read: for the lifetime of an account). Them doing this now could just be something pre-emptive but really, something like this being capped is par the course in the long run.

Vexander.9850:

Jski.6180:

No.
Your more or less asking for ppl to play the way you want and not let them have the freedom to chose how they play.

It goes both ways you know. In games I love playing a healer. Can’t do that here.

Depends. how you define playing a healer… if by healer you mean sitting in a corner handing out targeted heals based on bars going up and down then no you can not. But if you want to just help and support your group that is more than possible.

GW2 doesn’t allow players to let someone else manage their health completely for them, but I have been saved several times by other players (guardians cone heal in particular, but also others).

Well LFG and Two Factor Authentication are both still in “beta” ArenaNet seems to have adopted the Google definition of beta (ie. gmail style, keep things in beta as long as humanly possible).

If I could +1 this post more than once I would, looking at the posts about it this seems like something that should have crossed their mind to begin with when they were making it.

I bought the Captains pass with gold, but would probably buy a permanent Terrace pass as well after seeing the Airship, while the compactness of it is sort of a plus it can also be a negative point depending on circumstances.

Basically I am also on the ship that I would have bought a Permanent Royal Pass, but since there is no guarantee when or if they will be sold again (especially since they were available during Wintersday) I went with the captains one.

Also, while I made my purchase converting gold, I will say this much… the Royal Terrace looks good enough that I might have bought one with actual cash, but the Airship just feels cheap, too cheap to actually use money on it (when essentially, gold equals time).

Cirian.8917:

Just an idea: what if the airship was like the Hall of Monuments? A personal instance set high in the clouds, similar to Edge of the Mists, with the illusion of flying along like in the Highwind (woo, FF7!). Quick to load, no extra players to cramp it up, and for me… it wouldn’t cause my machine to run out of memory for once!

(32 bit WinXP frequently runs out of memory these days in Lornar’s, Bloodtide and Gendarran Fields after a few map changes, possibly to memory fragmentation)

I like your idea of an instance, if we are going to have a load screen regardless it might as well be a separate micro map. Although, maybe they don’t want to generate all those instances for players (sure we have home instances, but who actually consistently goes there or spends extended time in it, same can be said for most other player specific instances).

Re: 32bit XP, while this is entirely off topic considering that Microsoft is pulling the plug on it in April (figuratively, since it will be exploit city population everyone when there is no more security updates, some even speculate that people are sitting on exploits and trying to make money off of them after this happens) an upgrade might be in order.

I am also mildly curious what will ArenaNet’s policy be in regards to XP going forward.

What I am more interested in is, whether it will remain over Gendarran Fields indefinitely or if there is a chance it will move if/when we retake Lions Arch (or when there is another more permanent hub, because I find it hard to believe the current setup is the status quo going forward long term).