Guild Wars 2

This is something I’ve been curious about for a while, and this seemed a good place to ask. In games where it is purely a cosmetic choice (so anything but The Elder Scrolls I think) do you tend to create human characters with a skin colour similar to your own, a different one or does it vary?

For me with my main characters the most important thing is that it fits the lore. For example in GW1 my Prophecies character was white, my Factions character was asian and my Nightfall character was black. My GW2 character is as close to a middle ground as I could find because she’s supposed to be descended from all 3 and a bunch of other people from all over.

With my other characters it’s more down to asthetics, I tend to have a mental image of them before I create them and I pick whatever fits that.

But I have to admit I do tend to think of my own skin colour as a kind of default and anything else as a change from that, so I’m probably more likely to make them look like me than not. Same way I tend to end up with more female characters than male.

I’m curious about how other people go about it though. Is it something you put a lot of thought into? Do you tend to stick to one end of the spectrum or vary it? And if you know, how do you decide?

If this many people are annoyed about the ones asking for certain levels or gear or whatever shouldn’t there be plenty of people who haven’t reached that point who can group up together?

Maybe you could even start a topic on the forum for people to find groups that are at a similar level to do it together?

Also bear in mind some of these people might actually be trolling. Like the guy on Desolation during the Halloween event who kept posting “LFG Mad King 80 exotics only Tell gearscore to join” and then apparently just told everyone their gear score wasn’t high enough….

Agreed. I love the jumping puzzles.

Which is kind of strange because I suck at them, but I still have fun doing it. I’ve given up on this one for now, but that’s just because I want to focus on other stuff for now, I’m looking forward to coming back to it later.

I was doing it yesterday with so many people I couldn’t see the platforms, I’m doing it now with one or two other people there and honestly I’m not finding it any different.

With any jumping puzzle you don’t need to be able to see your character, and if you’re looking at them all the time that’s probably a big part of your problem. All you need is an idea of where they are and where to go next, and in that sense other people can actually be helpful because you can watch where they go and get an idea of where to go yourself, or aim for them and be confident you’ll hit a platform instead of dropping through something that’s actually just artwork.

Alternatively you can use the wiki. Of course it’s a work in progress and new things aren’t always added straight away but especially with big things like Lost Shores they tend to have pretty comprehensive coverage, which includes clearly stating which apsects are permenant and which are only for the weekend.

As this topic illustrates part of the problem is that a lot of people aren’t familiar with the term ‘buy to play’ because it’s rarely used.

It’d be redundant to say it with regular games because they’re almost all B2P and the vast majority of MMOs are either P2P (aka subscription based) or F2P.

But importantly Anet never claimed GW2 was F2P and as far as I know most reputable sources didn’t either, it’s just people who don’t realise there are more than 2 catergories or don’t think it’s a distinction worth making.

I haven’t seen a statement from Anet but from what I’ve seen in practice if it’s not an exploit they don’t mind.

Some of those places have been accessible since launch and well documented (like getting down below Rata Sum) and they haven’t stopped people getting there or (as far as I know) banned anyone for going there.

I opened 62 chests and got: 2 sword skins, 1 axe skin, 1 shield skin, 1 focus skin, 1 Southsun Mask and 1 mini Karka. I also got a whole pile of armor skins and crafting components which I didn’t count.

I use the armor skins and some of the shells to make more chests, and sold everything else to buy more armor skins to make more chests.

At the end of it all I’d spent 17 gold and had only 1 mini Karka, which is about the same as if I’d bought it off the TP. So I’m ok with that. Although a little dissapointed I didn’t get the other 2 minis, I think I’ll just buy them to save time.

“Drakes…why did it have to be drakes?”

The sylvari he sends you to see is bugged too, and at the moment there don’t seem to be enough people in the map on Desolation to bump it over to an overflow.

Jabberwock.9014:

I think you can bring ascended gear outside the dungeon into WvW and PvE. And it is actually quite a bit better than exotics. So now we have a situation where the .1% of players who have enough time to grind this crap will have a power or farming (in the case of MF) advantage over everyone else.

On the other hand if you can’t bring it out, then it’s just plain useless.

I think you can bring it out, but I’m not convinced the stats are different enough to make it required.

You don’t currently need a full set of exotics on a level 80 character to do WvW do you?

I’m pretty sure the new dungeon was designed for people who kept complaining that there is no end game and endless gear grind was essential for the game to survive.

Now they’ve got it, but because the Ascended armor is only needed for that one dungeon the rest of us can ignore it.

(For the record I haven’t tried the dungeon yet, I’m much more interested in the savenger hunt type thing, but since it was added to appease people demanding endless grind it wouldn’t suriprise me at all if that’s what it is.)

Agreed. I turned the sound off while I was there and left as soon as I could to get away from him.

Incidentally now it’s moved on to stuff spread around the world, leading to a lot less lag, it’s infinately better.

But I still can’t understand what anyone gains from thousands of players missing out on it.

If you had some lag and some fun you got lucky. I apparently have an excellent internet connection and usually play on max settings with no lag and this was literally unplayable. Not “OMG it’s sooooo slow it’s liek impossible to see what I’m hittin with my leet skillz” unplayable. I mean literally it was impossible to even move and every time the image did update it was rapidly followed by completely losing connection.

For a couple of minutes it got better and I was able to collect 2 karka pieces, then as I was trying to hand them in I was booted again and when I finally got back in the entire thing was over.

If expecting better than that is an unreasonable sense of entitlement all I can say is we have very different standards.

Agreed.

For the first time I’m actually getting to experience one of the one time events and it’s just making me even more sure it’s not worth the hassle.

I think it would be much better all around if the ran it for a week or so and let people do it in their own time. It might not have the same excitement of “OMG Supa-special 1 time event!!11!11!1” but that’s a very small price to pay for getting something which actually works and which most people can participate in, instead of hearing later about how they didn’t really miss anything because it wasn’t working anyway.

enos.1580:

The thing is, I don’t really blame anet’s server team for this. Even Blizzard doesn’t do events like this, you know why? Because there’s not a server system in existance that can handle that much stuff at once.

WoW tried this ONCE. Years and years ago, a large server-wide event to open the AQ gates, culminating in a one-time event in one zone. Every single server that ran the event crashed without fail.

I mean, I give anet props for reaching high. It looked like it would have been a pretty neat event if it was playable. It’s just inexperience showing trying to run something like this, when history has shown we don’t have the server technology to handle it.

The thing is Anet have managed it in GW1. They regularly had events which encouraged everyone to be in the same place at the same time and I never saw lag like this.

They managed it by limiting each map to a certain number of players and creating new instances as needed which new arrivals were automatically added to. Basically every server had an infinate number of overflows which increased or decreased as needed.

I don’t understand why they didn’t do the same thing with this game.

The problem with just selling the items in the gem store is it ruins the challenge of collecting them, which might be fine for some things but it would make the minis fairly pointless.

The minis are basically collectables and the point of collecting anything isn’t really to have it – it’s the challenge of trying to get it and the sense of achivement it gives you when you get it.

I got the Halloween minis, and I had the ghost with me once or twice the first few days but they’ve been sat in the bank unused since. Yes they were ‘rare’ and only available for a limited time but there was absolutely no challenge in getting them. Honestly I got more enjoyment from the mini polar bear in GW1 and I never managed to get one of those at all.

It might be psychological conditioning, but that doesn’t make it totally irrational, or wrong. The sense of achivement, and the fun of trying for it, outweighs the let down if you don’t get it. The same way getting fed (and getting a sense of reward) outweighs a relatively mild and painless electric shock.

(Which honestly anyone could have told you anyway. Aside from the benefits of controlled laboratory conditions that experiment didn’t prove anything in a world where animals will risk their lives for a meal every single day, and not always with good odds either. But that’s a whole other argument which doesn’t belong on this forum.)

It looks like the event isn’t going to end until they get enough karka samples and at the moment no one can turn them in, or even loot more than the odd one or two so it’s going to keep going for a while.

Whether it’ll still be going when they fix the problem or whether they’ll run it again I don’t know.

I agree that they should bring back the multiple districts system from GW1. As far as I can tell at the moment each server has 1 map and then 1 overflow shared with a few other servers and when those are full it just freezes.

For what it’s worth you’re mainly missing dying from lag.

Isredel.4302:

The first thing I said when the event started was, “OH HOLY MOTHER OF SERVER LAG!”

At this point, even the overflows need overflows. I doubt this is what ANet intended.

Can’t help thinking they should have known it’d happen though. They should know what their servers (and most peoples internet) can handle and roughly how many people would show up. I’m not sure what they could have done about it but then I’m not exactly a software expert.

I’m thinking more overflows would have been a start though.

It’s called lag and it’s kind of inevitable when they tell everyone in the game to be in the same place at the same time.

I think the best solution is to work out your own preferences by trial and error. If you find a key awkward or uncomfortable think about where you would prefer it to be and move it.

Hmm…I might just hedge my bets and try a bit of everything.

I’m obviously going to play the new content so I might get a drop (not with my luck!), I’ll buy some chests if I can afford it and if I don’t get them I’ll sell what I do get and put it towards buying them.

(And just for the record if anyone from Anet happens to see this I’m not complaining at the difficultly/random element of acquiring the minis. I was actually disappointed with the Halloween minis because with no challenge in getting them there’s no sense of achievement when you do and not really any desire to show them off “Hey look, I spent a few quid in the gem shop!” is no fun. I’m purely wondering how to best go about approaching the challenge.)

I think they must have removed some of the achivements. My total has dropped noticably too (I’d say about 300-400 points, but I don’t remember exactly what I was on) but when I added them up quickly it was right.

I’m not sure what’s gone, but either they’ve removed some or reduced the number of points they award.

I realise it’s early to be asking (although there are some on the TP already) but does anyone know how likely it is to get the new minis from the new chests?

I have absolutely no interest in any of the other stuff in them, but I absolutely want the minis and I don’t know if I’d be best off buying chests (either with gold or real money, via gems obviously) or buying the minis from the TP. Or possibly trying to get them as drops but I suspect that will be much rarer than getting them from the chests, because obviously they want people buying the chests.

I know the patch notes said they’re very rare, but that’s a pretty vauge term, especially since it’s relative to the other stuff. It would be good to know how many chests other people have opened to get them.

Thanks for posting that.

I would recommend Desolation because it seems to be pretty active across all the maps and people are generally friendly and helpful, but I think it’s full now so it’s probably not much use as a suggestion.

If you’re talking about the Lost Shores add-on coming on the 15th then you don’t need to worry about how long it will take to reach 80 because you don’t need to be level 80 to do it.

As long as you can get there (it’s going to be in/just off the level 40-50 area south of Lions Arch I think) you can do it at any level because you will be upscaled to 80 like you are in WvW and the Halloween Labyrinth.

For future reference, obviously we don’t know, but I think it’s unlikely Anet would go down the route of requiring you to be max level to play any of the expansions. It might not be like GW1 where apart from Eye of the North they all allowed you to start from level 1, but I think they will have either content for a range of levels or upscaling so anyone can join in.

I’m not the guild leader but my guild recently did an activity check by requiring everyone to log in to their forum and post in the relevant topic. We were given 2 weeks to do it and anyone who didn’t (and didn’t give a reason either in game or via the Facebook group) was kicked out.

I think that worked well. I’m probably the least likely to visit the forum and even I didn’t mind doing it and I don’t think there were any mistakes. (And as an added bonus it got people like me on the forum and looking at things like upcoming events.)

The downside is of course that you need a forum, or a Facebook group or something similar, but I think quite a lot of guilds have them now.

Oops, sorry. I wasn’t in-game when I posted that so I just looked at my hand written list of minis (which I use to keep track of which ones I’ve got) and forgot about the orange rarity ones.

I’m not 100% sure but I think you get those from putting yellow rarity ones into the mystic forge and it’s random which one comes out.

I think if you turn dialogue volume all the way down to mute it stops it, but then it also stops all the other voice acting, including cut scenes.

I wish there was a way to stop it as well. It gets so annoying hearing the same phrases over and over again that I’m tempted to stop using certain skills just to avoid it.

I don’t think it’s a contradiction, but I do wonder if it’s ever difficult for charr outside Ascalon. Some of them seem to be glad to be away from the Legions and probably don’t want their kids to go into a fahrar, but I can imagine others feeling torn between staying where they are with the life they’ve established and moving ‘back home’ so their kids can have a traditional upbringing.

Hel.6340:

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think your argument is fundamentally flawed.

After all, humans reproduce, to reproduce, and by the above logic, it is a pointless endeavor. Whether it is or not is an entirely different philosophical discussion.

Sylvari ‘produce’ to increase knowledge, the more sylvari that are knocking around, the more knowledge they attain as a race. You could argue that the sylvari way has more of a point to it. It also ties into the ‘defense mechanism’ theory (which I like btw), knowledge = power.

As for the point that they would be aware of it, that’s not necessarily true. Animals and humans reproduce because that is what they are programmed to do. Yes it may seem like a conscious decision to have kids and it usually is, but at the end of the day, sexual arousal is there for a reason, and that reason is to encourage reproduction. We only know that this because of scientific studies, but I’m willing to bet those dogs going at it in the local park aren’t aware of this fact.

Humans reproduce because an individual can’t live forever so it’s the only way to preserve our genes. The important difference between humans and sylvari is humans can reasonably assume that their children will be able to have children of their own and carry on the chain.

Of course there are exceptions, nothing in life is perfect, their children might not survive, or they might be infertile, they might choose not to have children or never get the chance. But you’ve got a better chance of carrying on your bloodline than living forever.

That’s not the case with the sylvari. As far as we know none of them can have children. They certainly can’t reproduce sexually, with each other or with other races (the devs have said so). So as a form of survival that’s a dead end. The sylvari are born, they live for however long they can and then they die and the chain comes to an end.

Unless they can reproduce via another method which we haven’t yet seen. The Pale Tree is over 250 years old and has only started producing sylvari in the last 25 years so I think it’s possible that even the firstborn aren’t fully mature yet and might be capable of reproduction later, hence the seed theory.

Neilos Tyrhanos.5427:

Danikat.8537:

Disregarding the fact that the real reason is they were invented by game designers who gave much higher priority to what they wanted to create than to what makes biological sense

And thank goodness for that. I like playing a game with magic and undead and ghosts and creatures made from foliage thankyouverymuch.

So do I.

I’m not suggesting it’s a bad thing, I just wanted to clarify right from the start that I’m aware that’s the case and this is an entirely hypothetical discussion of how things might work rather than insisting there has to be a biological explaination in order for them to exist.

There are a lot of minis listed on the wiki which aren’t in game yet. If I remember correctly there were some available in the first beta weekend (after pre-purchase) which were later removed as well.

It’s possible these will be in later sets (the mini packs available in the gem store are labelled as ‘Set 1’) but it’s also possible some have been scrapped and the wiki needs to be updated to either remove them completely or note that they didn’t make it into the game.

Just to compile and clarify what’s been said here there are 2 ‘daily kills’ catergories.

1) Daily Kills.
To get this one you need to kill 60 things, and it can be anything. Enemies of any type, passive animals, other players in PvP or WvW, anything you can attack until it goes down. If you really wanted to you could camp a spawn point and kill the same thing 60 times but that would be extremely boring.

2) Daily Kill Variety.
This one is a bit different. You have to kill 15 different types of enemies. Some of them are grouped together, so for example if you kill an Ice Drake then an Ice Drake Hatchling that will only count as 1. I don’t think anyone has made a complete list of all the catergories yet so I’m not 100% sure what counts as a group (for example I don’t know if killing an Ice Drake and then a River Drake counts as 1 or 2). But in every map there are more than enough types of enemy for you to complete the achivement so if you just keep playing and moving around you’ll get it sooner or later.

In both cases through your progress is tracked automatically. You don’t have to do anything special to start it off or track it, it just happens. Same with the other titles so you’ll sometimes see things like ‘Bandit Slayer’ or ‘Shiverpeaks Explorer’ pop up in the corner too as you gain progress in those titles.

Did you check there’s space in your inbox?

You can only have 10 messages from other players at once. (Although I think you can have an infinate number of messages from NPCs.) If you’ve got 10 already you will need to delete one and then I think the message from your friend should appear.

I apologise if that seems like stating the obvious but I’ve seen a lot of people make that mistake.

Disregarding the fact that the real reason is they were invented by game designers who gave much higher priority to what they wanted to create than to what makes biological sense I’ve been trying to decide how the sylvari fit into the Pale Trees lifecycle.

It doesn’t make sense from a biological perspective to commit a large amount of time, effort and resources to creating a race of ‘offspring’ who can’t reproduce themselves and seem to serve no purpose for the Pale Tree. So on that basis they have to do something and I’ve come up with 2 possibilites.

1) Seeds, or spores. There are many forms of life with multiple, very different stages, including ones which alternate between a mobile form and a fixed one. We know the sylvari can’t reproduce sexually but it’s possible that given enough time and the right conditions they might either produce seeds like the one the Pale Tree came from themselves or change into a form that will. This would explain why there was no sign of a tree like the Pale Tree when Ronan found the seeds and it also fits with the behaviour we’ve seen from the sylvari – they emerge from their pods and are immediately driven to spread out, explore and seek new places. Not that dissimilar from the ways seeds of non-sentient species are scattered by the wind in the hopes that some will land where they can grow.

2) A defense mechanism. We know the Pale Tree is aware of her surroundings, and aware of the wider world through the Dream of Dreams (even before the sylvari appeared) so she would be aware of the threat posed by the dragons, and the various native dangers of the Tarnished Coast. Maybe in order to protect herself and before producing seeds which would need a lot of time and therefore a safe, stable area of the world to grow she produced the sylvari first to create that.

This would explain why so many of them seem driven to fight the dragons and other dangers. Even the ones who aren’t are making the area safer by building up their city, taming and farming the surrounding area and establishing good relations with the other races.

Of course the one problem with both of these is that surely the sylvari would be aware of it if that was the case. But I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Many of them don’t seem to fully understand their own purpose, they just have a feeling from their Dream that they MUST do certain things or go to certain places which is strong enough that they can’t ignore it.

I think it’s definately possible for at least some of our characters. Although at the end of her life my main character went for one last journey to the Maguuma Jungle and was never seen again and for some reason I imagine the rest being cremated, but that might just be because I prefer cremation.

Although I also agree that after seeing Kryta plagued by undead ways to prevent it happening to them were probably on a lot of peoples minds.

Xomic.5792:

Netsu.3769:

Xomic.5792:

I don’t think the fiction perfectly lines up with what’s presented in game. In particular the fiction seems to imply that cubs have little contact with their parents, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case.

Well, as far as I know the fiction doesn’t say that it’s ALWAYS the case. There could be exceptions, and if someone lives outside of Charr lands then even if he wanted to rise his cub in a fahrar there just could be none around.
Not to mention that (as others said) if a Charr leaves his homelands he probably doesn’t want to follow the Charr family lifestyle anyway.
The cubs raised the traditional way don’t have much contact with their parents from what I’ve seen.

I’ve actually found the amount of contact “traditionally raised cubs” that is suppose to go on between cub and parent a bit confusing, in particular given the cub spends more time with their mother than father, I find it strange that the personal story for the charr is so heavily focused on their sire. I’m not even sure the character’s mother is brought up at all.

My impression is that even though cubs aren’t raised by their parents who they are is still important because they’re expected to take after them to some extent. So when they’re growing up in the fahrar they’re told about their parents and told they have to either live up to their standards or prove they’re not the same (depending on who their parents are).

In the case of our characters I assume it’s just that the father is more exceptional than the mother so he is the one who stood out as an example to either follow or avoid. Or the one who’s exploits happen to have an impact during the chunk of their life we see.

My norn and human characters haven’t had their parents mentioned either (I picked the dead sister option on my human) so I think we’re supposed to assume it just doesn’t come up during the course of the game rather than anyone deliberately not talking about it. (Sylvari obviously only have one parent – the Pale Tree – who does play a big part in their story, and I haven’t played an asura much yet.)

As far as I know the only date they’ve given us is the 15th, so I think it’s safe to assume that is both the day the patch will go up and when it will go live.

That’s what I’ve read/heard too. It’s going to be like any DE chain – you can drop in or out as you want (or need) to.

Although it’s also safe to assume on most servers it’ll be one giant zerg from start to finish so as far as knowing what’s going on you might not miss much.

Some people like to upgrade their weapons and armor every few levels and they use karma or gold to do it, so maybe he spent 800k cumulatively on things like that?

General consensus seems to be that sooner or later they will add ways to change your name, appearance and possibly gender (no official word on when it will happen yet) but I wouldn’t hold out for anything more than that.

If you’re wanting to change your race, profession or the personal story choices you made I think you’re going to have to restart.

You can make 8 slot bags at fairly low levels of either tailor or leatherworker and I don’t think they cost much, especially if you farm the materials.

But honestly if you’re finding that there isn’t enough storage space with all the bank tabs and you’re concerned about the cost of creating a mule (which implies you’re expecting to need multiple high-slot bags) I think it might be time to reconsider whether you really need all the items you’re keeping.

I have no idea what it is you’ve got in the bank, but I can’t imagine what you’d need to keep that would take up all that space.

I’m on Desolation (and have been since launch) and I’ve seen it 3 times. Once in the distance during a beta weekend, once during the launch weekend and once about 1 month in when I actually fought it but annoyingly my PC crashed before the fight ended and I didn’t get the chest.

I once spent 8 hours waiting, mostly afk but in the room and watching the screen and never saw either the Behemoth or the event chain start. I periodically went around the swamp and the neighbouring areas speaking to all the NPCs I could find to see if one of them triggered it as well and had no luck.

I’m almost certain it doesn’t trigger on either of the veteran fleshreavers coming out of the portals (the one in the camp or the Necromancers one). I’ve heard a lot of people say it happens but when I ask how they know it always seems to boil down to someone told them or they were standing near it and saw someone trigger the vet then either immediately or a short time later either the event chain started or the Behemoth itself appeared, either with or without the rest of the chain having happened.

The massive inconsistency is one of the main reasons I don’t think the two are connected. Considering you can spawn the vet at any time and in relatively quick succession I don’t find it hard to believe that people have seen it happen just before the event chain started, but I think if the two were directly connected it would be much more consistent. More people would have been able to make it happen and the result would be the same each time.

Mu guess at the moment is that it’s on a timer and bugged on some servers.

You need it to be buy recipies and some crafting materials, especially for cooking. So far all the aquabreathers I’ve found have been rewards from karma merchants too.

Other than that I’m not too sure. For now I’m saving mine so when I do find something I want to do with it I’ll have it there to spend.

You’re not missing much. Aside from the minis all the HoM items are skins. Even the ranger pets are statistically identical to existing pets, they just look different.

Although I have gotten a lot of use from mine. It’s nice, especially at lower levels, to have an alternative choice for armor and some of the weapon skins are really nice.