Guild Wars 2

BobbyStein.2315:

We’re exploring some ideas for the future, including a system that would allow certain bits of Living World content to be accessed independent of the release. Plans and designs have not been solidified yet, so I want to temper your expectations. But if you have any opinions on the matter feel free to let us know. We’re already looking at ways to leave some LW content behind to evolve Tyria and improve the game. This would be one element of it, should we decide to build such a feature.

Could have story recaps in the form of the cutscenes after character creation, those are absolutely amazing… then some playable bits in there to vary things up, how you would shoehorn the playable parts in the lore beats me.

For recaps though, I have the perfect medium, we just need our fantastic Ministrel from halloween to put his bardsmanship to good use and make a triumphant return.

Queen’s Scandal —- no doesn’t sound right, Queen’s Sorrow would be better-

BobbyStein.2315:

Jornophelanthas.1475:

I think the cause is cost-based. Any line spoken by the player character needs to be voice ten times (5 races x 2 genders). And it is unclear to me whether all ten of the voice actors are even available, since there has been NO addition of player voicing AT ALL since the launch date.

Having said that, I would love more player character voice work, as I am especially fond of the sound of my main character’s voice (male sylvari).

This is partially true. It’s very expensive to voice the player since it costs 10x (or more in some cases, since some actors are paid above scale depending on ability, availability, etc.) for each line recorded. We also have moved away from using cinematic conversations (the two-shot close ups) which were the primary delivery system of PC VO. Outside of the painterly cinematics and PC chatter (the stuff that’s automatically triggered when you’re low on health, suffering from conditions, leveling up, etc.) we don’t have proper control of triggering PC lines. It’s a technical issue that’s partly tied to having multiple PCs in a party.

So, while we can certainly solve these technical hurdles in the future we currently don’t have support for PC lines outside of the conditions listed above. And considering the fact that PC lines are shared across all races and genders, it doesn’t leave a lot of flexibility for making each PC talk differently. We are considering other ways to let players express themselves in the game through choice (actions, unspoken conversations, etc.), though those discussions are ongoing. Will the player speak in the future? Probably, but how and where are still under debate.

I don’t know if I am he only one (or in the minority), but tbh… I don’t mind the two shot close ups, for conversations. Why? if it is just a conversation (ie. nothing but talking is happening) it doesn’t really matter in my opinion whether it is in world or as a close up. If something is happening (like in the QJ LS instance with Jennah and the PC is not really relevant… or he is only being addressed without any cause for response then the new style seems appropriate.

Both approaches have their pros and cons in my opinion. I personally don’t mind mute player character in LS, if we ever get a direct continuation of the Personal Story, then yes PC’s should be talking (it is called personal after all, living story not so much).

Zanshin.5379:

What if I actually work during the day and only have time to do the gauntlet after work but not enough time to farm for hours?

Point taken, however., entrance tickets are required for their whole ability to spectate 1v1 fights (in PvE) so while their pricing when bought might be unfair for those with limited time their primary purpose is hardly a gold sink.

While playing the other content and not necessarily farming per say you already net ~50 tickets in reasonably short time with some luck plus the gold from loot and cogs which can be used on tickets.

If this thing was going away after a week I would be more sympathetic, but since it is here for a month dedicating your limited time on some days for getting tickets and on others to doing the gauntlet seems perfectly fine.

Edit: like Dragon bash there is no indication that the Jubilee and by extension the gauntlet would not run for the whole month even after the second update on 20th (if the gauntlet had been introduced in that patch instead of this one it would be a different story).

NickChabby.8907:

Now tell me, when you run out of ticket, are you really patient enough or in the mood to spend 1 hour to get 15 Watchwork sockets for 5 ticket knowing that a boss fight with gambits cost ~5 tickets or that you’ll need approximatively 50 just for the last boss of tier3?

We lose tickets quicker than we gain them.

Your point is valid if you isolate the Gauntlet and go for efficiency in terms of time, but it’s a choice that you don’t have to make (although I understand why you would).

My point is, this whole event is extremely lucrative in terms of money, so unless you do nothing but QG you will still make a profit at a significant margin.

NickChabby.8907:

Gold sink. Apparently, they’re doing everything to ruin us lol.

You make more gold farming tickets than you loose by buying them presumably. So it is not really a valid gold sink, because most people will be farming over buying…

I don’t usually like oneshot bosses, but at the same time QG is essentially derived from old school bosses (ie. pattern based, although not always completely static), once you know the way through the fight you can beat it usually without too much trouble (provided you don’t sacrifice too much dps in your build to go over the time limit).

They put the trait retrainer in the map for a reason.

That said, even though I like the whole spectate aspect of the design some external factors (ie. zergs below) I could do without. Also the dome shape of the arena makes the camera somewhat finicky, they should have used a round cylinder instead of a spherical arenas imo (though a dome is certainly aesthetically more pleasing, but it does not play well with gw2 camera so…)

Presumably queues… because they decided to not make it an instance (which I agree is a nice idea for the whole community/spectate aspect of it, however, putting it in same map with a huge zerg not so much).

I did one of the runs and only got avarded the first tier of the Luminaries of Kryta or whatever not the daily, can it only award a single achievement.

Why does it say that the content has been temporarily disabled? I did this and the related events earlier (ie. BWE’s and later near launch) and I am pretty sure she has either not been there or that these races have never been in working order. Pity I was kinda looking forward to it :P Considering we have Moa races now, why not Cow races?

Thanks, got it… although as general feedback, the conversation choices are all (but the last) worded as if relative to the current tier… which based on above is not always the case and a bit confusing (this patch so far seems to have few such issues, similar to the achievement tied to dailies).

I did Evon’s Tier II before Tier I and now even if I complete Tier I I can not get the achievement (also getting to actually play Tier I seems like a hassle, it always picks either II or IV instead).

I just finished the last story instance and got that item earlier today. Logged off, then tried to use the journal just now to check the reward cutscene, but it says that I can not use that command yet.

What to do.

Pat Cavit.9234:

IE8+ does CORS fine, you’ll just need to use XDR instead of XHR for IE 8 & 9. We do it regularly & it works great.

jQuery doesn’t support it, if I have to be aware of this… which I am painfully so, because jQuery refuses to adamantly support it and the plugins available to do it all have gotchas to be aware. That kinda defeats the point of using a javascript library that is intended to abstract the differences between vendors away.

To be honest, the only reason why I didn’t just drop it after Cliff’s statement is because jQuery just so happens to be one of the most popular javascript libraries on the market. If nothing more it is something that in my opinion deserves the benefit of a discussion.

As for XDR natively, here: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2010/05/13/xdomainrequest-restrictions-limitations-and-workarounds.aspx

I would hardly call that wall of text of gotchas to be aware supporting CORS fine. Note that CORS XDR, according to above, fails to even address the http/https discussion where CORS was brought up to begin with.

For me personally it is a no brainer, wrapping the API’s server side takes about a minute, and I am being generous. But it does mask several end users of your API under a single requestee because the server is mediating the requests.

SmartBobby.6283:

Why is in this idea an authentication necessary? I mean at the end, when I open the map all three servers of a match get the same information… And for other servers it isn’t relevant, because they can’t really “influence” other matches.

I don’t WvW that much… does enemy siege (ie. trebs) show on map, I know own does, for example…. Just towers and keeps probably don’t need it though. After all it wouldn’t show movement information, except through sentry status but that is public to all.

Edit: I probably thought too closely at the in-game map because it has plenty of server specific info, but now that I think about it, most of that wouldn’t be practical to be represented through an API like this anyways.

I am guessing some events, particularly fail states could very well not be discovered… Event can also run n times, but if no players participating it would not count as discovered either.

When someone sees an event the natural reaction is to complete it, not intentionally fail, with very few exceptions. So unless you happen to it when it has naturally regressed to some point then you would not discover the event. This true especially now that the population has settled.

So especially for new added content, which is only in a world for limited time ie. new living story open world event… the chance of something not getting counted as discovered is possible, unless a group of people systematically tries to fail an event just to see if by chance there is a follow up… and this would have to be off-peak to even be possible.

SmartBobby.6283:

To get information about open fights or tower sieges and the locations would be very cool, so I could implement a map in the browser like in the game. So I could have the game opened in one monitor and the live wvw map in an other monitor. Is this something, you don’t want, when you actually don’t wanna tell us the wvw events at the moment?

How would you verify, that you are from the server/world which data you are viewing… presumably unless they implement private account level api keys for each individual account nothing like this would be possible.

I assume they do not want to expose the authentication “as is” to external applications (hence the api key would function as an auth, much like stream key/secret on twitch for example).

…. would be extremely nice convenience addition… to fetch a collection of even information about every event in said meta event.

Although, it might not be worth it if it isn’t trivial to include such information… since it is reasonable to keep track of things manually too.

poke.3712:

As per this answer JSONP won’t happen for now. CORS support is now there though.

Replied there as well, but anything older than IE 10 does not deal with CORS very well… in particular if jQuery is used… and the fallback methods have some shortcomings.

I feel they are jumping the gun here with the obsolete consideration to be frank… especially considering that jsonp can relatively easily be opt in, and hardly requires any effort.

rhoot.5927:

It’s not, but it’s supported by enough browsers that it would definitely be worth using: http://caniuse.com/#feat=cors

Edit: Regardless, it was just activated!

It is worth using, but why exclude JSONP, when it can be in there parallel… through an argument (ie. jQuery style).

JSONP may be “obsolete” but CORS hardly fully adopted yet either…

Edit: in particular of course I am talking about microsoft, as usual, anything older than IE 10 does not support CORS through standard XMLHttpRequest and using the alternative has some complications.

Also, I haven’t checked recently but jQuery didn’t make use of alternative solution for IE either when I last checked (update: jQuery relies internally on XMLHttpRequest, so yeah with jQuery anything older than IE 10 does not support CORS).

CORS is not supported universally though, while allowing both protocols and/or using JSONP can work for wider array of clients.

Supporting both protocols would be nice… not everyone wants to invest into a certificate, and self signed certificates in production environments are nasty.

Are these supported by the api or do I have to write a server side wrapper for any cross-domain shenanigans for client side components.

I would suggest an ID to name mapping, much like with some of the other apis… if for nothing else for sake of some consistency. HTTP being stateless… multi threading is not something that all… particularly some server side implementations would necessarily want to worry about right out of the gate, it places significant constraints and is prone to race conditions and corner cases even when done “correctly” (of course this is subject to the environment used).

For the OP: consider an implementation side cache to decrease total api requests and store any potential satellite data… not like you will need to make fresh lookups for every request nor should you, for things like items and recipes in particular.

Josh Foreman.8250:

It’s something I’d like to experiment with. Not sure how feasible it is. We can’t currently remove the camera control from the player.

If you could however, this could also be used to control camera during certain puzzles/sections to avoid camera problems… thus allowing for wider variety of puzzles. So it might very well be something to investigate… since it probably would have other merits as well.

That said, I love the idea by OP, though you would also have to separate camera from movement for it (for people who use mouse to turn or move in favor of WASD), so simply locking the camera control to a fixed perspective would not be flexible enough.

Edit: Also, you can control some of it… like with the camera being zoomed farther back for bosses, can’t that be applied on a wider scale and/or in different aspects.

When it’s ready™ – ArenaNet 2010

This one is probably more accurate, since we know it is not coming this or next month.

Plus the rapids chiptune track is amazing… also from what I understand, from the way it ends, that is not really even a complete Zone 1 of world 2.

Still I understand the feeling, perfectly. It’s like “Now we are really getting in the groove, and on with the challenge, but you can’t have it yet?”

It is kinda same as if SMB suddenly stopped after the first 3 levels and then showed you half of another level further down the line.

Really making SAB permanent doesn’t have to mean it is always there… just a permanent or rather quaranteed part of the game. Same way dragons are but they are not there 100% of the time (bad example, since they are on automated timers and short ones at that),

SAB once every 2-3 months seems reasonable. There are two primary reasons an yearly cycle makes no sense to me. One, take wintersday for example, some of the art assets and models for it no doubt could theoretically be leveraged in other content down the line, but SAB is too large a deviation, the assets made for it will essentially collect dust if the project is not finished or takes an year long hiatus.

I said in another topic that temporary content Anet does is not really wasted once it goes away, but truthfully this does not apply to SAB, because like I said it is huge deviation and doesn’t have a real thematic holiday tied to it. So once the SAB is finished (4 worlds), should it just disappear? I think not. Cyclical model makes sense as long as Moto’s game remains unfinished, of course he can always create new stories but eventually the current SAB has to end, should that then permanently vanish?

callidus.7085:

it’s the lack of all these things that really make this fun for me… It adds challenge in a way, no minimap means you really need to pay attention to where everyone is going or if you’re just joining someone would need to come back and guide you to the rest of the group. It’s especially important that there is no health regen, if there were i think i’d die a little inside.

Also, once you ave learnt the lay of the land so to speak it becomes easy, since party needs to gather at pre-defined places, such as Queen beedog, checkpoints, chests and bosses.

For the whole platforming in MMO engine, you have come amazingly far… look at Troll’s End and compare it to this.

Here is another: well not an interview per se, but informative nonetheless

http://www.twitch.tv/guildwars2/b/385321268

Fox.3469:

Crise.9401:

Not this month, some day before the inevitable heat death of the universe maybe, possibly if the team is given the chance.

got any conformation on that? Like official posts and stuff?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/sab/what-to-do-after-rapids/first#post1744990

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/sab/No-pistol-or-rifle-skins/first#post1744255

Generally anything SAB related Josh seems to be the man that has most of the answers, with plenty of maybes on the side, just so we don’t feel too reassured :P

Not this month, some day before the inevitable heat death of the universe maybe, possibly if the team is given the chance.

I am guessing that the bird is like this to avoid some clipping issues or something like that… the variety of character (body) builds in this game does not make designing a skin simple.

Edit: regardless, I pretty much agree that it would look better rotated, but I wouldn’t want it clipping with my asuran ears when stowed either f.ex. (not that I checked how it looks on an asura right now).

The rapids track is amazing, same with some of the forest tracks, more of this please.

locoman.1974:

Also brought me happy memories of playing Day of the Tentacle back then, checking a computer in the game that’s running the original Maniac Mansion, and when using it, you could actually play the whole Maniac Mansion game on it..

Thanks for the flashback, those games were really fun… and they weren’t exactly the latest thing when I first played them, but still great entertaiment.

I think part of this outcry for SAB is because we were all but promised mini-games all the way leading up to launch. People even snuck into the unfinished Polymock arenas (presumably) during the betas.

Then comes launch and all we have is Keg Brawl, even though the hints about a mini-game for each race were there, and I am pretty sure it was even stated that each race would eventually have their own.

Also, for me personally SAB is a clear throwback to the beta finale events, take a zone and completely change the mechanics, only SAB is its own thing and even more ambitious than the branding or hunger royale. I am pretty sure I am not the only one, the beta finales proved that they could do some pretty impressive stuff in a short time span with little resources too.

1UP!

Few reasons:
1. It gives an excuse for their audio folks make more 8-bit tracks, some of the themes are really nice.
2. It is one lighthearted fun experience that you can always do for well fun, when the rest of the game might wear you down.
3. It is not really thematically tied to the month of April other than being bit silly, and that is only one day of April.
4. To the people suggesting making this an April exclusive tradition, rather not… because then they don’t have a reason to come up with something completely fresh for every April Fools day (be it as ambitious as this or not).
5. I would be more than happy if it would come and go, say… have the content available for 1 weekend or a week for every month for example or even less often. Basically just that we would know it is coming back, preferably more often than once a year… not this vague “on a list of content we would like to re-visit in the future, some day, maybe” statements we have now.

As for the arguments about this affecting our Tyrian content production, I see no evidence of that considering it was developed in tandem with the new living story, which especially this last one seems pretty substantial (and certainly most substantial thus far). Also, now that they have the “framework” for SAB it presumably will take comparatively less resources to add additional levels.

I don’t think anyone is suggesting to dedicated more resources to this, but I see no problem in letting the “very small team” that worked on this keep working updates for it as long as they themselves have the enthusiasm and ideas for it.

I mean the ninja’s are great and all (really they are) but someone missed solid reference potential when designing this.

Seriously though, I have had a blast with this… it is the first jumping puzzle that doesn’t make me wish I had never tried it if, or more likely when, I mess up repeatedly… and even when it does frustrate, it is not rage enducing like a certain clocktower.

bcd.4352:

It would be cool if this was an ongoing April Fools / Easter thing. A new world comes out each year.

Too much waiting for my taste, I am all for tradition but the continuity of the, extremely catching and unpredictable, plot of the SAB is at risk… whatever will happen to the fair maiden :P

Chickenshoes.6250:

yes its the end. They’re going to add more this month though.

Where was the “this month” stated, sometime in the future yes (with a cautionary maybe on the side), but as far as I know it is yet to be finalized in any way. Although it is quite obvious from reading the posts that the people who worked on this certainly would like to do more if given the chance.

Edit: again, someone snuck in while I was writing this

Zyphent.2967:

sportman.7329:

Josh Foreman.8250:

We are a very small team. The more skins we made, the less stuff we could make in the Box. So we settled for a minimal set, with plans to add to it with each new World we release. I love Engies and I wish we could have served them and Thieves better this time around, but had to make some tough choices.

i am sorry but to me as player that sounds just as excuse and very insulting.
basicaly it sounds like you saying for some classes there is no reason 2 do the new content cuz you will get nothing for your class from it anyway… really sounds unfair

You can always get the supremely awesome backpack skin.
They had a small team who were working on this project, and they wanted it out as a fun thing for April fools. It doesn’t sound lazy to me, and I too am a player, of an Engineer no less.

I guess it also depends what you are looking for in a content update… this one seems more like a fun lighthearted experience than something super goal oriented. Sure I am bummed that there are no daggers nor guns as skins… but that detracts very little of the enjoyment of it for me. Besides if they do include new skins with future “episodes” then you could always collect the currency pre-emptively since they have no reason whatsoever to change currencies.

Personally I see it as something to do when the normal gameplay begins to wear me down, not something to really run for rewards, not to mention these rewards have a very particular style to them. If I get enough baubles for a skin nice, if not then better luck next time.

In another topic about this, a dev acknowledged the problem, so it is getting fixed.

Zyphent.2967:

Crise.9401:

Zyphent.2967:

These clearly aren’t the same ones you buy from Moto, those are Green and listed as Account Bound, where are these TP ones coming from?

From the chests inside the box, where you get the bubble baubles after a boss.. one chance of a skin per day per character.

per boss, yes?

Presumably yes…

Zyphent.2967:

These clearly aren’t the same ones you buy from Moto, those are Green and listed as Account Bound, where are these TP ones coming from?

From the chests inside the box, where you get the bubble baubles after a boss.. one chance of a skin per day per character.

Teofa Tsavo.9863:

No one knows what the silent majority is doing. Silently playing the game, or Silently uninstalling it.

Except that one party does know what they are doing, and will make choices based on that. Namely ArenaNet, obviously.

Disastro.4086:

The question is when is that going to happen? Days, Weeks, Months?

They have the platform now, so creating additional content for it will be notably faster by comparison… so if there is another release (which by the sounds of it depends largely on us), then it will be done in significantly shorter time than the initial release (of which we have no real time frame for obviously, but we know what kind of content Josh Foreman worked on previously, so it is possible to guess).

Colin also said that this is kinda like an extra living story update which you can read as it is not delaying Flame and Frost, which means the people working on this probably have nothing slated for them to move on to immediately afterwards either because they were not involved in f.ex. living story. Which means that if we the community really want rifle and other skins, then we have a realistic chance of influencing the future of this.

A game that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Some people in this topic really need to learn to compartmentalize, I can enjoy this update for a time and then go straight back to killing the risen in Orr with a periodic dragon for a change of pace (sarcasm) because I like it so much better, or alternatively spend time in WvW for the 5 extra supply I might have some day (more sarcasm).

As for the minipets, it will quiet down in time, they are super popular right now because they are the new shiny for the people who care for them. The login music is temporary and the weapon skins — well how many pop guns or wooden swords you see now? How about halloween pumpkin rifles?

This general complaints thread with 0 focus really helps… sure other areas need attention but most people don’t even bother to name one of those areas, to be fair the sPvP people are the only ones that have a legitimate reason to complain about not having “resources” since wasting resources on this seems to be the elephant right now. Every other area of the game has received notable additions since launch.

Granted starting with 2 holiday events back to back and then this, we have only had 3 months or so of “business as usual” since launch.

Penguin.5197:

Katz.5143:

However, the centaurs took over much of Queensdale in our absence. o.O

Yeah we go off to play in our virtual world for a bit and our real world gets screwed by centaurs :/

Wait, a virtual world inside a virtual world that takes attention away from the real world that is virtual :P.

Yeah, I think that is about right… well at least when you go back to Queensdale then i5 feels ever so slightly different for a brief moment.

The size of the team working on it is unclear, or how long they have worked on it, but judging how the last big jumping puzzle was wintersday, and the guy spearheading this is the one who is largely responsible for both clocktower and wintersday globe, I would say 3 months is a fair guess.

But also from reading between the lines, that is 3 months with a small team, that was essentially required to be self sufficient, ie. they couldn’t “out source” things like asset creation to other teams and were obviously entirely separate from the living world team.

This is speculation, but if I had to guess we are talking about the downsized remnants of the holiday team (which they probably have no pressing need for until halloween, I am guessing). Judging from the things they did for the betas, namely branding and hunger games, I would tend to think that making this probably took less resources than we think and even so they chose to go with minimalistic set of skins so that they could have more content in the box itself.