Isn’t there a still-unused set of 10 or so Skill Points that aren’t awarded during your first few levels?
Really. Just put those back in if you want more skills in your game.
Because creators of D&D knew that asking players to perform calculations with decimal places was absurd.
The idea was that random rolls average out over time, meaning player skill and actions were ultimately more important than will of the dice. This is still the way and reason it’s used by game designers today. It isn’t there to make things random (although that is also a valid approach, and it’s also part of D&D). The problem there is, if you spread the luck too thin, it will never average out.
If you see where I’m going with this, go ahead and read on. (If not, please direct your attention to the section below the break.)
So what happens when you want your loot to drop after killing lots and lots and lots of things? Or if you want your on-crit effect to only trigger for 0,1 of its effectiveness? Well, what happens is that it now takes few centuries for the numbers to average out. You’ve successfully introduced gambling where there should be none. Well-done!
You know what I’m talking about. The Mystic Toilet. T6 mats. Exotic drops. Ascended drops. Even Rare drops. Chest drops. Black Lion chests. Dyes. Precursors. Mystic Clovers. Those silly on-crit effects that only trigger once every blue moon. The list goes on… It shouldn’t happen. It’s a mistake in design.
But you know what the punchline is? No, really? Remember WoW? Its developers know about this. They’ve seen no end to unlucky players being unable to collect 6 Wolf Pelts in the beginning zone for a month straight. And they fixed it. In WoW, the longer you go without collecting a random reward, the higher your chance that you’ll get it next time. So while an extremely lucky player can still get 10 Epic Loots from a Big Boss, there’s no situation where someone will slay it ten times over and walk away without a single Epic Sword of Rat-Slaying.
There goes you throwing 400G worth of exotics into the Mystic Toilet and getting nothing in return. There goes you farming the champ train instead of running dungeons or whatever else. There go your Exotic and Ascended drops which most players will brush off as a fairy-tale. There go the amazingly underwhelming wonders of Black Lion Chest. There goes that Luck meter – that you spent 50G on – doing seemingly nothing at all.
There’s your problem, ArenaNet.
fixplz.
Okay, a bit more explanation.
Please direct your attention to this article.
More specifically, the graph to the right. It shows how many times you have to roll a 6-sided die before it turns out you might as well be rolling a die with “3.5” on each side. And that number is about 400 times, to be generous. So, it takes 400 rolls with a one-in-six chance for luck to vanish as a factor. Everyone on the same page here? Okay, good.
So. Gaming. How exactly do you award your player 0,01 pieces of Epic Loot because you only want them to have it after killing 100 Epic Rats? Well, you can’t. Okay, you can introduce crafting, but shut up. Traditionally this problem has been solved by having each Epic Rat have a small chance to drop said loot wholesale, because with certain probability in place it WILL drop after killing close to 100 rats for most players.
Same applies to combat. There’s a big difference between your lowest and highest damage, a crit and a non-crit, right? Well guess what. After delivering your 1,xxx,th strike, it will average out.
Or at least it should if you’ve made your game with the basic knowledge of what the heck you’re doing. And ANet know what they’re doing, right?..
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HELL NO
15char
Easy.
Two Steps from Hell, Epic Score, Cliff Lin, and Danny kittene (EDIT: lol.) There’s an entire genre specializing in Epic and High-Fantasy genres. Today is a great era to witness, if you know where to get your fix.
They’re pretty much the only thing that keep me playing, honestly. All great additions to compliment… or create, rather… GW2’s atmosphere.
That’s a real problem, for example openGL can never, ever, gain the support of directX, simply because it’s impossible to control the community … You simply don’t know what OpenGL is going to look like in 5 years, and that’s a huge problem.
That’s an extremely ironic example.
OpenGL is a graphics standard (or API), just like DirectX, and is independent of the platform (so no, it’s not “for Linux”). Right now it’s most widely used in mobile applications (iOS/Android), and although it’s rarely used in AAA titles (Rage), it’s supported by all major graphics cards released within the last forever.
I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. So please don’t.
You can yell all you want that you get horrible performance because of poor optimization/poor game engine all you want, but a lot of people also come here saying they have no problem.
Are you seriously… Just how many times do people have to shoot down your old and tired argument of “It works fine for me, therefore there is no problem?”
Sure you apologized for being patronizing, but then you just keep on doing it! Why? You know what, no. If you haven’t read any of the previous explanations, you’re not going to listen if I type up yet another one.
That’s horrible.
Running @ 1080p Reflections – terrian only, supersampling off,Shadows High – Fps drops below 20 in big zergs = unplayable
in non zergs fps = 50-120 avg 65
Haha!
Actually, I’m running closer to minimum specs (save for a 560 GPU) and I’m getting roughly the same results, compared to your rather beastly rig. “Roughly” meaning heavily dependent on the zone, instance, number of players, number of mobs, phase of the moon…
…Could be a good 60 FPS in Queensdale on one day, could be 18 the other…
(I think 18 is also what I get in PvE zergs, whereas large WvW zergs can easily drop it down to half a frame per century.)
Objectively measuring performance in this game might actually be futile. It’s just too random.
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I’m a big fan of being able to switch stats on any weapon/armor piece out-of-combat. Be it Legendary, Ascended, Exotic or lower, it’s just a plain good idea.
In the game where you can switch out skills, traits and whole trait lines at will out-of-combat, being forever bound to a set of gear with fixed stats seems oddly out of place.
And, yes, Ascended never should have had ANY better stats in the first place. No. Just NO.
You’re saying that wrong. What’s with the “guy” thing?
Not my fault English almost no gender-neutral pronouns.
I’m not trying to insult anyone…
I would hope so.
But telling people their game runs like $^#& because they’ve made utter rookie mistakes and it’s all their own fault and you know better is inconsiderate to say the least.
Furthermore, it’s fairly common knowledge that GW2’s problems lie with the game logic (as in, CPU), as otherwise changing graphics settings (which everyone can and have done in vain attempt to get more FPS) would resolve any performance problems outright.
That’s what I was getting at.
why do you guess that a generic relatively new laptop can run the game while new gaming rig computer can’t?
I wouldn’t know for sure. (See? Not that hard to say it.)
This isn’t a game problem this is a im too lazy cheap or broke to upgrade my system.
And then there’s THIS guy again…
“I farm the champ train 11 hours a day and I don’t see any problems with the game.”
Well, for me. I build my Desktop PC couple years ago, by todays standards it’s pretty old. I have been able to play every game I have on max settings (e.g. Crysis 1, 2, 3; Far Cry 3; Lineage 2; GW1 etc.) and have not had a single problem that made me wonder “Hmm, what’s my FPS here”.
GW2 however was the first game that really stressed my Desktop, and give me close to unplayable frame rates that it just turned into a slide-show … Funny is, that changing graphical settings in the options menu doesn’t help anything
Pretty much the same here. I wouldn’t say “slide-show” (other than in zergs), but definitely well outside the comfort zone. I see practically no difference between all-maxed and all-lowest settings. How many players/mobs there are and what zone you’re in is what seems to matter.
As for RAID and SSD, they will improve loading times quite noticeably (as many posters will attest), but have pretty much no impact on performance. If you have more than 2Gb DDR2 RAM, it won’t come into the picture either. And if you keep your shadows and reflections down (plus shaders, arguably, although these shouldn’t matter on x60 cards), GPU won’t matter much as well…
There’s a problem with GW2’s file system, as well. Indexing an entire 15Gb file every time you want to look up the tiniest of assets is extremely counter-productive when it comes to reading from disk; that’s why SSD has such a huge impact here in particular. Most modern games have the decency to keep their data in smaller chunks.
sooooo did we gain one fps yet?
I run a fairly modest rig, other than the new 560 for a GPU, and I can tell you judging performance increases or decreases is practically impossible.
How GW2 performs seems to depend on the harvest, precipitation, phases of the moon, will of gods, time of day, and amount of ecto on the trading post. It’s completely random.
Or, more realistically, it depends heavily on the amount of players within the zone and the zone itself. (Wayfarer Foothills? No problem. Diessa Plateau? Might as well not bother.)
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As a software engineer (well in half a year) I’m very sorry to insult you with my useless advice.
Your ego is showing.
Either way your “advice” was absolutely bogus. I was just trying to find a polite way to tell you that everyone knows it’s bogus.
You’re basically insulting everyone here by saying poor performance is attributable to rookie mistakes, when everyone knows full-well that the GPU side of things (and by extension, graphics settings) have zero effect on performance overall. Everyone knows the issue is game logic (CPU-dependant) and you’re telling your tales about how you helped your friend by disabling power savings for their AMD card. It’s nonsense.
Again, we have reports from people running pre-2xx generation nVidia cards that can easily “max” the graphics without issue.
There’s always “experts” like you in these threads. Everyone’s heard it: “It runs fine for me, so you must be doing something wrong, and I’m a genius computerist for building my rig right.”
Well it’s garbage, and it’s annoying.
And update your GFX drivers if you aren’t current.
Please don’t say things like that.
Both nVidia and AMD are notorious for botching things up between driver releases. The situation has improved somewhat in the recent years, but not long ago, “updating” your drivers could mean a loss of good 30 FPS in some games.
You can have a 4Ghz 1200 core CPU and it wouldn’t matter. GW2 requires raw clocks from a single thread in order to run well during zergs.
Correct.
It’s probably the amount of actors within the zone/instance that drags down performance more than anything else (and why culling settings work wonders to alleviate the problem). Because of the poor culling, you don’t even have to see any of them to see the dip in performance either. I wouldn’t be too surprised if GW2 tried to keep rendering everything in the entire zone at once.
So, yes, CPU issue.
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You get more XP from doing content of your own level or higher, but lower-level zones might have more neglected mobs which award tons of bonus XP. 100% Completion of low-level zones doesn’t give much of a reward, but is relatively easy to do.
Oh. That reminds me of the tired old argument, how did it go?..
“It runs well on my PC therefore there is no problem.” (And its ugly cousin “If you don’t have a 3,000$ rig, you don’t deserve to play videogames.”)
Yes. This argument will do wonders to convince people who experience horrible performance on their machine, rather than yours. If it works for you and someone you know, there must be no problem whatsoever.
Nevermind that we’re talking about a game that has all the technology wonders of WoW, a game released in 2004 based on 2001 technology meant to run on 1998-level PCs.
/Thick sarcasm
Erratic performance between similar systems – or, in case of GW2, similar zones and similar events – is the very definition of poor optimization.
That’s basically what a poorly-optimized game is: something that demands much, much, much more power than what it seemingly needs. Or, in GW2’s case, much more power than what it says on the box.
The kitten game runs on my 3 year old laptop at 50 fps after changing somethings. A second gen i5-460M.
For the record, I’ve played GW2 on a 450, 560, and an old 9800GT. Unless you turn up the shadows and reflections all the way up, it’ll run the same.
“The same” meaning the same 20 FPS in most cases.
Hell, Someone posted here earlier with similar results on a 9600 GT (“I can run it on max when turning down some settings!”). Other than the horrible shadow and reflection systems, the game barely needs anything in the graphics department, which is common knowledge among the players, and speaking of which…
You’d do well to follow your own advice and not act like you know everything and give out bogus advice. It’s just plain old insulting, and rude. Thanks.
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Horrid performance had always been at the top of my reasons of not playing more often, if at all.
GW2 survived two system upgrades on my machine, and somehow managed to seemingly lose performance rather than improve it. Every other AAA title, on the other hand, gained FPS and shiny special effects density just as expected.
Right now we’re at the point where machines that have no problem chewing through games that look ten times better can barely handle a game that should require ten times less.
Don’t even TRY to pretend the problem isn’t with the game itself.
Healing power only being effective for very specific Thief builds is a very sad state of affairs.
I especially love healing skills that get a bonus like (0.0001 * Healing power), which is most of them. It’s, like, what’s the point?
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I think you give the devs too much credit.
There’s still no Mac support (meaning no OpenGL support, which is what Linux typically uses), and the game barely even supports its Windows build (horrid performance and no 64-bit client).
That said, if they do round up the MacOS port, they can probably do Linux/SteamOS right after considering most of the hard work will be done by then.
I’ve suffered from this from day 1. I’m not sure if there’s any pattern, even.
What I get from your post is that you DO NOT want to work for anything
YES
What exactly is the attraction of having a second job you have to pay for?
In fact, isn’t this the biggest promise Guild Wars 2 rode into the spotlight on its shiny white stallion? That it wouldn’t be like other MMOs?That it wouldn’t be a grind? That it wouldn’t be “work”? That it would be simply “fun”?
This shouldn’t be a second job. It’s absurd. It shouldn’t require “work”. It’s a GAME. For PLAYING. For FUN.
Even if they increase it to 500 or even 1000 stacks for Tequatl, that’s the equivalent of having forty to eighty more mobs on the map.
That’s not how it works.
Most likely different elements of the game are allocated their own number of bits (8 (256 -> 250) for stacks of items, 5 (32 -> 25) bits for conditions, etc.) in the tables, and you can’t really go over that limit. It’s done. Set in stone.
Increasing the amount of condition stacks might require re-writing a huge swath of very low-level game logic. Furthermore, if they do increase the allowed limit, they might now find themselves needing not “a couple more mobs” worth of memory/bandwidth/whatever, but eightfold the total that they needed previously.
Arguably it’s terrible they got themselves in a position where that’s how it has to be solved, but it’s usually not as simple as just raising the “max stacks” number somewhere.
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Good call.
Do that if you can’t do it properly. Don’t make condition peeps useless.
My biggest hope is ANet making lower-level zones into viable adventuring venues.
Seriously. Having an entire world be as rewarding in one zone as the other rather than having to pile into Orr after you’re 80 to get a bit of gold, that’s what I want from an MMO.
Stop doing this dumb temporary content! You have a whole WORLD to work with already! Do that.
EDIT: Actually scrap that, I’ll accept rubbish game balance if they just up the performance a bit. What’s the most important thing about a game?.. Well?.. How about being able to play it!?
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You can very easily salvage 10 rare items with actual salvage rate of 0.9 and still get only 1-2 ectos in return. It’s nothing out of the ordinary.
It’s rather annoying to have to play against your own best interests if you want to have fun. Enjoying running around doing Dynamic Events? Tough luck. Zero profit. Enjoying jumping puzzles (because you’re a masochist)? Tough luck. Zero profit. Enjoying helping lower-level players getting through the world? Tough luck. Etcetera.
The same is true for most MMORPGs, of course, but GW2 DID ride on the promise of getting rid of this nonsense, rewarding dungeon runners and people doing hard content more than anyone else, but not pushing everyone else to be be pressured into doing something they didn’t want either.
So… Don’t craft Ascended. It sucks. Ignore it. Live with the small disadvantage and don’t torture yourself.
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Is there any data on what items yield how much luck on average?
I’m pretty sure greens give MUCH more more luck than blues, for starters. Ectos give more still, but seemingly not by a whole lot.
“Our data suggests that very few players play as mobs, therefore improving them is low on our priority list.”
I would say the offender here would be the fact that good AI costs server power, but isn’t AI server-side in GW1 as well?..
(I haven’t played much of GW1, but why does it sound so much better than the sequel in many ways?)
What you’re asking is that the content developers stop what they’re doing while the people who fix bugs fix the bugs.
Uh, no.
ANet aren’t just adding new weapon and armor skins to the game – LIKE THEY SHOULD BE DOING – they’re implementing whole swaths of events that require proper implementation of every other system in the game all over again.
Would we rather see temporary events on holidays, or more permanent dynamic events in the open world? More rigs and animations for new cutscenes, or fixes to attachment points for old armor? More particles for limited-edition skins, or better-looking dungeon and exotic weapons? Better optimization for limited-edition zones, or better optimization for all the rest?
It’s just marketing.
“Here, we polished our game a bit because it was broken here and there” is considerably less likely to get people to buy the game than “Most updated MMO ever! New content every week!”
I’m at 80, and apparently this cost me 10-20 Gold (buying items for 2-3 silver on TP plus salvaging everything I get). I’m beginning to strongly suspect I’ll never get this investment back.
If Warriors and Guardians are the best, everything else can very easily be the worst. o_0
At least in PvE. PvP has a bit more resemblance of class balance, I think.
What, and introduce sensible cosmetic progression into the game? No. No, no, no.
Players shouldn’t have a reason to seek out new skins. They know they’d either lose their already transmuted gear or have to buy new transmutation stones just to equip their newly-earned gear. This fear and inconvenience is what keeps players from continuing to seek out different content in the game after level 80, and you want to change that? I think we’re much better-off farming the same bosses, same events, and same dungeons instead of always having a new shinies to look forward to in different parts of the world.
Look, this feature works absolutely perfectly for dyes, even maintaining a healthy and costly niche for them on the player market, so there’s just no reason it will work for armor and weapons in the same vein. None.
I have most experience with four classes, so I’ll hold off on absolute judgment, but one pattern is emerging very clearly:
Warrior is good at everything, all the time, in dozens of different ways.
It’s actually rather absurd how large the difficulty spike is going from a Warrior to playing another class. At least in PvP Mesmers and Thieves can generally do something on the level with the Warrior and even have their own useful roles and strategies (playing Mesmer in PvE is some of the most miserable experience I’ve ever had).
Oh and, Elementalist, while not outright broken, seems by-the-numbers weaker than any other class in every way.
Not sure if I remember it right, but can’t you run at an angle at the exact same speed as running straight forward?
I bet ANet’s designers absolutely love working so kitten content that only stays around for a couple of weeks and then disappears to never be seen again.
I’d bet more than 6 cents on that bet.
EDIT: Jesus H. Christ, your censor filter is trying to filter out “working [adjective here] on [making content]”.
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No change in course then.
I’ll spare the rest of the commenters the personal spat. Have fun here on your angry own!
Wasn’t this part of the original Manifesto?
“Our goal has always been to make the most fun content in the game the least rewarding so people feel forced to play some other content instead of having fun.”
I second this advice.
The only way to make money by crafting is to scan the trading post for in-demand crafted items that you can craft and weighing them against the cost of all your materials.
Which I’m not entirely sure is even possible given current market prices, but I did make profit this way on my way to 400.
Such as how many betas have you played?
I’d say about 50, not including of my own design. Many gamers have much more under their belt.
How much programming have you done?
About twenty items of content, most gaming-related.
Do you understand the complexity of this game system?
Yes.
Do you understand issues that can cause the issues you have listed?
Yes. I also know how to avoid and to how to fix them.
And finally can you list your one magical game that has zero bugs in the basic features?
Super Mario World.
Is that personal enough for you? I understand being emotional on the issue, but attacking people is the road that leads nowhere, and, more importantly, attacking people is not a way to win an argument, and that’s all your argument is: an attack against me, rather than the problems of Guild Wars 2. Which isn’t very nice, nevermind simply wrong.
(Personal insults, attacks, stalking, basic fallacies, and a show of feathers do no favors to the objectivity of your argument either.)
Would you like to come again and word your complaints in a way that doesn’t hinge on an Ad Hominem? I don’t expect an apology, but it’d be appreciated, too.
Otherwise it’s just “Charr armor isn’t broken because you know nothing about programming and it’s very hard to make it work, okay.”
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I feel that all the major problems with GW2 as a game – not its business model or the updates or treadmills, but just the experience of playing through it for the sake of having a bit of fun – can be summed up with three words:
“Lack of polish.”
I’d say the content that makes it most obvious are all these “Jumping Puzzles”, which on the quality scale, in gaming terms, linger just above a Super Mario World romhack. Made by Hitler. And Hitler isn’t any good at game design.
Your opinion on the matter is using ignorance on the extreme.
Oh, an insult instead of an argument. That’s just great.
Otherwise the rest of your post can be summed up with “My opinion and experience are different from yours, therefore you are wrong.” You know, it’s really annoying to read such responses, not to mention rude on your part.
Frankly it’s always amazing to state blatantly obvious things that are literally common knowledge by now (I.e. GW2’s performance being horrendous, broken Charr armor, underwhelming class builds) and find someone willing to deny it outright.
I love when PvE guys complain about how is PvE in beta.
Actually, if you’re a PvP player, any problems that aren’t loot related are practically the same as they are for people in PvE and even WvW: poorly-balanced builds, poor hit detection, poor lag compensation, poor performance, poor armor placement, poorly-managed camera… It’s all this stuff.
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I know you are trying to be funny, but targeting GW2 exclusively for this is not fair.
It’s perfectly fair if the final release is less polished than what you’d expect from a beta version.
If my Arena Shooter had a rocket launcher that shot five meters above the crosshair, I wouldn’t call it “working as intended”, and I wouldn’t call fixing it an “improvement”. I’d call it a horrendous oversight that shouldn’t belong in a finished game, but in GW2 this has been default mode of operation for many skills since the early “Beta”.
Charr are still working around with floating shoulderpads, Engineers are still barely functional, jumping puzzles are still the same as when reviewers thought they were hilariously unpolished, projectiles still fly away from autotarget, and performance is about as smooth as a rabid porcupine.
This isn’t about “improvement” of a finished product. It’s about getting most basic features to work properly in the first place. You know, something people expect from an early release, not a released game.
ANet has no business doing all those lovely “More content! More stuff!” updates when the core of the game barely works.
It’s the same fallacy as assuming someone toiling 15 hours a day at a work camp cares deeply about their country.
Guess what. ANet’s devs don’t necessarily have a say in their own game.
In the worst case scenario (such as with many generic dull-grey military first-person shooters), it goes like this:
1)Publisher that knows nothing about game design decide to implement horrible feature A or terrible game direction B;
2)Chief gameplay designer grinds his teeth, and grudgingly tries to salvage the mess by implementing the orders in the least destructive fashion;
3)Programmers are already busy with something more substantial, like making the game push more than 5 FPS, but their suggestions aren’t listened to;
4)Content creators sigh and go back to finding solace in drawing pretty things for content that will be seen almost never anyway.
Now, I don’t know what goes on at NCSoft or ANet exactly, but you don’t have to be a genius to take an educated guess.
Had to log in just to agree.
Good job summing up what’s wrong with 80-90% of the entire game lately.
Yep, you’re right.
Gah. Now just to re-generate every single playlist…
Uh, you do know you can play music with another program in the background right?
Custom Playlists, until now, have supported switching out different music files based on whether you’re in or out of combat, whether it’s day or night, whether you’re in a boss fight or at the crafting screen. Winamp doesn’t do that.
But, uh, yeah. Switching game-critical paths seems like a rather terrible mistake. Brings to mind that one time EVE Online devs managed to wipe out their player’s boot sector with a small typo in in the update program…
Bump.
Still a pretty big internal filesystem issue.
I don’t know what the problem is, but I know it should ordinarily work: I’ve done a similar copy from one PC to the other a couple of weeks ago.
Honestly I have no drive to play without my collection of Two Steps from Hell playing in the background. So, GG.
My guess is, it’s something to do with default system directories. GW2 should write to either it’s own folder or My Documents/Guild Wars 2, and that’s the same place it’ll read custom playlists from.
You DO NOT just CHANGE these things. Come on! This wipes all user settings!
Yes, this is normal.
GW2 is optimized about as well as rotten fish. Even the best hardware doesn’t guarantee good performance.
Try turning off shadows and reflections. They’re the biggest drain on performance and offer pretty much no improvement in the looks department.