Guild Wars 2

I’ve had the same thing myself several times today trying to complete puzzles – it’s most disconcerting doing the same fal four or five times over before the spinning stops. And assuming the following is the same thing, it can even get very silly; on one occasion I fell all the way to the bottom in the shaft potion of Troll’s End and lay dead for 30 seconds or so on the rocks at the bottom – and as soon as some kind passing soul rezzed me, zap, I was back up at the top ready for another go.

Same here. Guild bank still exists, guild logo is intact, and the (expensive) in-progress upgrade that our (tiny little) guild has saved (ages) for is still going, but otherwise the reporting at minimum is broken.

Piken Square, Europe

Yes. I’m suddenly getting repeated disconnects (in Lion’s Arch on Piken Square server, Europe) with error code=7:11:3:189:101. I play daily, and it’s been a couple of months since I saw any hint of a problem; suddenly this.

Twice when I reconnected I’d been rolled back several minutes in location (and both of those I was showing as in Shadows of the MIsts before getting back into game).

From the disgruntled mutters in chat, I’m not the only one right now.

I’m entirely with the OP (and others) on this. I get that the final battle is Trahearne’s – fine, no problem. Also that it’s obviously got to be epic. But everything else has been my story; the personal story of the final battle should be just that – the story of my contribution to that battle. Every part of that story before has been just that, even once Trahearne took over the lead character role. As an example, retaking Claw Island was his battle – but the story was of my contribution under his leadership. Forcing me to group for a dungeon to complete the final portion of my story – something I very much do not want to do, and probably never will – is at complete odds with everything in the personal story part of the game up to that point.

Let’s put that another way. One of the biggest flaws I saw in the original Guild Wars was the way it followed the outdated, ultimately lazy model of single player, single computer games, of simply making successive bits of the game harder as the primary way of controlling advancement – forcing max-level players to play ever “better” (if they could) to make progress, until as a solo player you either beat the game with a sigh of personal contentment, or found someone overpowered to rush you through the bits you couldn’t do. Or (as with so many single-player games) until you simply gave up.

Guild Wars 2 was a breath of fresh air in that respect; yes, it gets somewhat harder as you go along. There’s nothing wrong with extra difficulty in moderation; it simply shouldn’t be the overarching feature (and it should never intrude so much that it completely blocks further progress). But mostly the story arcs are tuned OK and beatable (and on more than one occasion, when they haven’t been, the dev’s have changed them so that they are).

Except at the end. Suddenly, BAM. Not only is the game too hard to beat on your own, but it’s deliberate. After weeks or months of support from the designers at every step to make sure you had at least a sporting chance on your personal story, they’ve made absolutely sure you can’t take the final one. “Sorry. Either go find a party to rush you, or go away. It may be the climax of your personal story, but we’ve decided that it’s too hard to design a climax that is both epic and solo-able. You’re just going to have to live with not being allowed to do it alone.” It’s crass. Worse, it’s lazy.

Astral Projections.7320:

How long do you need to be representing though with each character? I have a bank guild which I rep into periodically to take things in and out. I almost never gain influence by doing this. And I do mean almost never, like once every month or two. The only times I have gained influence is when I represent for several minutes at least, usually because I forget and go out into the explorable area.

Yes, that’s the sort of thing that made me ask the question. Because over a period of a fortnight or more, I’d been making a point of logging every one of my eight characters in, briefly at least, every day. And one of the other members logs in and plays at least one of his two characters every day (and usually both). OK, yes, I’ve since seen that there’s a limit of five characters per account giving influence that way – fair enough. But the numbers still didn’t add up – we should have been regularly seeing a minimum of 6 players logged in per day, and as many of 9 on a good day – whereas we were getting numbers of 3 or 4. So I tried logging them all in and playing them long enough to actually do something basic (such as kill a nearby mob). Again, things didn’t balance. I’ll have to do a little experimenting. I think.

Can anyone explain how “members logged in” is measured? My (tiny) guild needs all the influence it can get – but we don’t understand it, and it doesn’t seem to match what we do.

Example.

The guild history log for yesterday says " 4 members logged in for 40 influence". Except.
There are precisely 3 of us in the guild, so “4 members” can’t be simply the number of different accounts that logged in.
On the other hand, we have 12 characters between us, and I know that at least 9 were logged in (and played whilst representing the guild, if only for a few minutes) at some point during the day. So it can’t simply be number of characters logged either.

What’s going on?

I couldn’t agree more. It’s hard to explain, and impossible to exaggerate, just how cheated I felt when I realised that, after working solo so far through “my” story, I was being robbed of any chance of doing so through the end content. Because I’ve cracked every PS instance so far with my own sweat and toil, and I most definitely don’t want, say, to watch the very personal climax of all my effort as a de facto passenger (while some over-powered, over-equipped group of complete strangers sweep all before them and hand me the result on a platter). Sorry – I’m supposed to be the hero, it’s supposed to be my story, and by the end of the PS I believe I’ve earned the right to the satisfaction of finishing it for myself. There are times for grouping – but forcing it on the end of the PS is not one of them.

Gorgeous spring sunshine outside, here. Just had a really pleasant 30 minute walk to the shops and back. Sadly, access from the game client to the login servers is still buried, sulking, firmly in the depths of winter (access to the website is working, oddly – normally, when one’s down, I can’t log in here either). Good grief – at this rate, I may be forced to actually go outside again…

I’m not sure whether this is the precise same problem, but it feels at least like another set of symptoms for the same underlying cause.

Twice today I’ve had the ability to move my character fail (wsad/qe keys, double tap, v key, both mouse buttons – nothing made any difference). I was still been able to move the camera around and cast spells, but as to turning or moving, my character might as well have had his feet embedded in concrete. Logging to character select and re-entering the game cured it both times. None of the keys in question have been remapped.

Just ran one of my characters through The Shatterer (at around 11 am). The same character last ran the same event yesterday afternoon. I got a gold contribution, but no chest spawn. The suggestion in chat seemed to be that the limitation is not “once per day” (allowing a character to do the event at some point during each calendar day, and implying some sort of reset in the small hours), but not within 24 hours of the previous run. If it’s the latter, that needs a serious rethink – there’s a huge difference between the two. With the margin for error on the timed, repeating events, an enforced 24 hour gap means “later tomorrow than today”. In reality that means possibly quite a bit later, and quite frequently not at all. Unless a player has unlimited time (and inclination) to choose when to play, the actual effect is closer to “once every two days”.

Also, it makes no sense (unless you’re simply trying to annoy your player base) to force someone into playing at a particular time of day just to get access to an event that repeats throughout the day. Nor does it make sense (again, unless you’re trying to annoy your player base) to force them to keep a record of exactly when they last ran something, rather than giving them that record in game, or face the extremely irritating frustration of running the event and getting no drops. And in particular it makes no sense to, effectively, penalise someone for doing an event in the later evening by effectively forcing them to choose between running it again in the small hours the next night or missing a day.

With decent loot tables and a better chance of actually getting something worth having, I have no real problem with a “once per day” rule, if that’s what it actually is. But that’s not what’s been implemented, and whoever implemented the change as it stands needs to go back to the code and do it properly. Once per day, to me and many of us I’m sure, means “once each calendar day, at a time of the day that works for me”.

Same problem here. My game was stable until the latest patch got pushed; suddenly I can’t stay in for more than a minute or so at a time.

You say that you’ve swapped ISPs to get faster speeds. I wonder – do you get your internet over a phone line? If so, then, for the last few yards anyway, you’re simply trying to push more down the same old line you’ve always used – and, especially if you’re a long way from the cabinet, one possibility is that your line quality simply isn’t good enough for the speed that your ISP is trying to push over it. Yes, they’ll have done work up front to try to check that, but from personal experience I know that it’s a bit hit and miss. Talk to their support people – there are things they can do to try to check that out, and tweaks they can make to the signal you receive, as well. But if that’s the problem, and they can’t tune your lost packets away, you may need to settle for a lower speed if you want reliability and quality. Annoying, but there you go.

(I had quite a similar problem when I switched to my current ISP. Their initial tests suggested I could get quite a high speed, but I got all sorts of loss problems when they actually tried to deliver. In the end we agreed to their swapping me to a somewhat slower, cheaper package – still faster than I’d been getting, but not what I’d hoped for – and suddenly everything was fine again.)

Sorry to those people who feel otherwise, but, whilst I have nothing against the Trahearne character itself, I ended up here after a search because I, too, loathe the voice acting. “Wooden” really doesn’t do it justice. No, folks, it’s not the voice of a mild scholar pushed into being a military type. Would that it had been.

Sadly, there’s only one thing it sounds like, and that’s exactly like what it is: someone reading words off a page, with instructions to E-NUN-CI-ATE clearly (With audible. Pauses. After important. Words. Presumably because “The storyline is important, and we don’t want anyone not understanding what he’s saying, do we?”).

Unfortunately, no human being alive – with the possible exception of Stephen Hawking – actually speaks like that (nor do the other Sylvari actors in their deliveries, so even the excuse that Trahearne isn’t human can’t be used). So not only does the result often sound hideously artificial and unconvincing – but it also frequently robs the actor’s delivery of such meagre characterisation as he seems capable of. I really cannot overstate how badly I feel the result lets down the personal storyline.

My GW2 Audio Device setting is “Default Device”.

I have speakers plugged to the audio on my mobo, and a pair of USB headphones. I’m using the Win 7 “Set Default” option in the Playback sound devices panel to toggle between the two. However, whether or not GW2 honours the change is in the lap of the gods; sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, it then gets out of synch (by which I mean that, e.g., it swaps to speakers when I set the default to headphones, and vice versa). Curiously I’ve never noticed it then miss a further change and correct itself.

If I do anything to force GW2 to go and discover the default (kill and reload the game, or change the in-game settings to something explicit and then back to default, say), it gets the correct output.

There’s clearly a problem of some sort in there in the interaction between WIn7 and GW2, but the real question is, is there anything I can do to influence and improve it? I would strongly prefer not to have to keep digging into the GW2 settings to make the game do what I expect it to.

Yep, Piken Square too. Looks like it’s a generic bug. Even if they patch the code soon, I suspect it will take a server reset to get it back on its feet.

I think the key may be to take out the non-elite skale, and kill them as they respawn. They seem not only to regenerate but to heal/protect each other.

Yes, getting the same thing since the patch. So far I’ve only noticed cut-scene dialogue. The first speech of every cut-scene seems to be consistently silent, as are all speeches by some particular NPCs. I’d also upgraded my Nvidia sound drivers to (306.23 GeForce) this morning, though, so I wasn’t sure precisely where the problem lay.