Guild Wars 2

I’m posting this on behalf of a friend who can’t get into the forums because it’s telling him his correct username and pass are incorrect. Anyway.

“So, I decided to start doing the gauntlet since most people are farming, and there is space available now. I was able to do all the battles normally without any problem, I got credit for all of them. However, when I went back to try and get the achievements Risk Taker and Triple Threat, even though I was able to complete the fight, I didn’t receive the achievements. I’m not sure why, because I know the gambits were on, and I was returned to the balcony. My only guess is that it was because I had to use Vengeance to make it all the way through.”

Sorry if this has been posted before, but the search function is broken and I don’t have time at the moment to sift through several pages looking.

Had this bug today on Eagle Eye Goggles appearance transmuted onto a level 80 exotic headpiece.

Just tried to get this as well as the one for saving Faren in under three minutes.

Had 3/4th health (valkyrie warrior) and was standing about five feet away from the AOE circles of some of those twisted bug mines, but they went off and downed me anyway. Also freed Faren in under three minutes (was watching the clock) and didn’t get the achievement.

bonus: 12/13 for map invasion achievement despite having done all 13 maps. Often repeatedly. And there’s no list of maps completed, so I get to play them all over and over again and just cross my fingers that maybe I’ll get the right one and perhaps this time it’ll actually register.

To say that this is getting on my last frayed, raw nerve would be a massive understatement.

I’m at 12/13, I’ve done every map, and I have absolutely no idea which one didn’t register.

kill me

I slogged through What Scarlet Saw (oh god it was bad and confirmed everything I said prior) and I said this elsewhere, but I’ll copypaste it here:

“Scarlet Briar: pretty much the same as if Rowling made a 15 year old American transfer student metamorphmagus-animagus, that can cast the killing curse with good intent, who uses their dragon familiar to kill Voldemort while they’re busy at a conference peacefully and successfully revealing the wizarding world to muggles.”

It’s a particularly nasty rub as someone whose main is a Sylvari engineer with a surname. Though he took a surname because he really likes humans and it’s just naive mimicry, I imagine.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

If you’re convinced there’s nothing there, you’re probably not going to find it. And if you’re looking for it and don’t find it, you’ll invent something. But if there’s something there and you say “I don’t see anything”, well . . .

We have gleaned new information regarding Scarlet from the short. That doesn’t automatically make the “something” that is there any good, though.

Eldrake.1543:

Do you guys want to know what’s one of the funniest parts of this?

I’ve seen one of Scarlet’s fans claim that the only reason we hate Scarlet is because she’s a girl.

Accusation of misogyny aside, that claim is easily invalidated just by saying the word “Trahearne”.

As someone who is a huge proponent of equal rights and will freely, happily admit to being a feminist, I find that just as insulting as the people who say that Scarlet needs to look more sexy.

Bad characters are bad characters, it doesn’t matter if they’re male or female.

That said, I believe she’s surpassed Trahearne in awfulness by miles, and it has absolutely nothing to do with her gender. At least she has a stunningly talented VA. I feel bad that Tara Strong will forever be tied to such a badly written character, though.

Just had this happen to me with one I got as a drop. If I had known beforehand that it had a chance of failure (or was bugged?), I wouldn’t have used it.

Traveller.7496:

Well make that time longer, then! It’s your own decision to squeeze these events out every two weeks! I’m sure players will be more than happy to wait a bit longer to get polished and not rushed content.

I hate to post twice in a row but ouch. I do QA work for another game, and if someone told the lead writer that it’s his decision to push out new maps and classes, for example.. Uh. Well, suffice to say that isn’t how it works.
Though I have seen people tell one of the game artists to stop working on new aesthetic content until some bugs in the gameplay were fixed, lol.

Public service announcement: writers are only responsible for writing and artists for art, 99.9% of the time.

Man In Zero G.8312:

Yamsandjams.3267:

Man In Zero G.8312:

I loved it – but as I’ve said elsewhere, having NPCs refer to Divinity’s Reach as “DR” is extremely immersion breaking. Scarlet might as well have said “LOL” instead of laughing.

Otherwise, I found it fantastic.

Is it really that immersion breaking? Throughout history, people have always come up with shortened or slang versions of names, places, people, &c.

Do you find it odd that people refer to Los Angeles as “LA” all the time? You probably don’t because the abbreviation is used so commonly. It’s the same thing with Divinity’s Reach as “DR”. If anything, I’d say it enhances the immersion because it’s something that the people of such a city might do.

It is immersion breaking, yes. In all of the first game, no NPC ever referred to Lion’s Arch as “LA”. Or Droknar’s Forge as “Droks”. Or any of the other abbreviations the players used – and until the living story, nobody did it in GW2 either. They certainly didn’t in the personal story that I can recall. It sounds like an editing mistake – like it was shorthanded while writing but nobody remembered to fix it before it was sent on to the voice actors – it makes the whole thing jarring, it sounds out of place for the NPCs to suddenly start using player slang.
But hey, that’s just my opinion, man.

The only reason why it bothers me is that it makes it come across as though the New Krytan stand-ins for the letters "d’ and “r” are named.. “d” and “r.” I mean, you could say that the language already sounds just like English, but.. man, I dunno. It just strikes me as odd for some reason.

Aside from not really caring for a lot of the story elements (at all), the cut scenes themselves seem to be improving, and especially over the old side-face ones. There were certainly issues during the speech, with Jenna’s weird unrealistic animations and Scarlet being as immobile as a statue, but it’s a learning process and these are baby steps in the right direction. The painterly scenes were nice, though it would be better if the models were properly animated during these scenes. It would also be great if the player was animated and brought into it as well, because it’s beginning to feel as though, since the end of my personal story, that my character is just regarded as some grunt. Not important enough to talk to the “grown ups” and only called on when heads need bashing.

A cinematic of my character commanding Scarlet to stop her nonsense and her response would have gone a long way to pulling people in and endearing them more to what’s going on, for example.

But yeah. GW1’s cinematics weren’t great, but at least the characters were mobile and slightly expressive (though certainly not through their faces..), and if GW2 can at least get a bit past that level with its in-game cinematics (not the movie file ones) it would be fantastic.

Brother Grimm.5176:

If you just wait by a zone exit for a few minutes, you can exit the zone, re-enter and get an overflow that does not have an invastion event running. Pretty simple way to get a clean, zergless, map.

Haha, I don’t know if it’s bizarre, unwanted luck or what, but I almost never end up in an empty overflow even past the ten minute mark.
Unless I actually want to get into one of the overflows the event is running in.

Her design is more than a little awkward (a good design does not necessarily mean physically attractive, either), but why do you think she needs to be sexy?

First off, my main is an Engie.

I was in Fields of Ruin this morning attempting to get map completion. The Clockwork Chaos event started up in the area, and I knew I’d have a lot of difficulty with completing the map while it was running, so I decided to participate rather than leave. Plus, I hadn’t yet won the event in this particular map.

I tried to go it with small groups/solo to try to speed things along, but no matter where I went, the zerg would show up within moments since there were at least eight commanders with their own zergs there. With the gigantic groups and me playing an engie (we don’t output a ton of damage), I couldn’t even begin my auto attack fast enough to hit the normal mobs before they died, couldn’t do enough damage to the vets for kill credit, and with champs, I either couldn’t walk (twenty feet..) to them quickly enough or, if they spawned next to me, I couldn’t do enough damage for kill credit the vast majority of the time, because they literally melted in seconds. I mean, I wasn’t trying to farm, but some reward for the effort besides end-of-event loot would be nice? On top of all this, it’s caused me to crash about five different times since Clockwork Chaos began (even with the wvw models and such) and makes it almost impossible to move from lag at times, compounding the above issues.

And no matter where I went, a zerg would be up my backside within, literally, seconds. Or several zergs at once.

Thankfully the event ended and I could resume map completion. Except I couldn’t at all, because it started up again in Fields of Ruin..

Remillard.8691:

Egon Vidar.9125:

In the end, I think you missed my point, and many other people’s.

Don’t conflate not agreeing with your point with missing the point.

I’m not. When I need to say “that’s not what’s being asked for” multiple times in response as clarification, it seems a point was missed. I really, truly don’t care one whit if you like Scarlet and think she’s a fine character, and I’m not saying that to be rude, I’m being very sincere.

All of that being said, ANet’s story folks did try to put in some foreshadowing that the person exists. (Don’t recall the exact examples, but they’re up on the page here someplace.) The attempt to build up characters is there given that they cannot possibly have had the assets in place to begin with without having had this planned in advance of when they actually need it. They are making this up as they go along and they’re doing something no MMO has attempted to do thus far at the pace they’re doing it at.

I mentioned a few different ways they could have done this without having to go back to the very beginning of the game. In fact, the needed information (an inkling of what she’s all about and enough bits of her backstory to make her at least somewhat three dimensional) could have been implemented in the LS itself 1-3 months back with no issue. It wouldn’t have been difficult if there was at least a little planning ahead, and due to how it’s written, I sincerely have no idea if this character was planned only a week before the first mention of her name, or months prior. Hell, I can’t tell if they just came up with “villain name: scarlet” and left character concept until right before this update.

Anyway, aside from that, I believe I’m going to have to drop this particular line of discussion and, yes, agree to disagree. I can’t really seem to get what I’m saying through, and the last thing I want is for this to become a circular argument that drags on longer than it has already.

Remillard.8691:

It’s fiction, it’s all “contrived”. Frankly, that’s one of those phrases that gets thrown around and it’s entirely subjective based on their notion of how “real people” work. I don’t give it a lot of credence as a meaningful critique. “Decent dialog” as defined by what precisely? How many brilliant psychopaths have you sampled for realistic conversational gambits?

No, it isn’t. Here is the definition of contrived.
“obviously planned or forced; artificial; strained: a contrived story.”

I have read plenty of stories that lack an artificial, strained feel to them as GW2’s writing typically has. It can be subjective, but if this many people feel this way, it should (hopefully) send up some red flags over the writing. Naturally it won’t bother some people – many people also enjoy B-movies. But they also recognize them for what they are.
Decent dialogue is dialogue which feels in character, does not stand out awkwardly, doesn’t feel stilted, etc. To drag out the dead horse, Trahearne’s dialogue feels stilted and doesn’t fit. It’s in character for him because all of his dialogue is written that way, but it still seems out of place when compared to the better dialogue writing of most (not all) asura characters, for example. And while their dialogue is over the top, it’s done in a way that fits in with the world. Her dialogue isn’t as much of a concern as her backstory and other elements. Tara Strong, being as talented as she is, makes it stand out much less.
I’m not going into realistic psychopaths as that isn’t what’s being asked for. The Joker, as he’s always brought up, is an example of an “insane” villain who can be written very well. I have no qualms with crazy bad guys. For an example of the same character done terribly, check out the DCNU.

Anyhow, that’s the impression I get from most of the criticism here. You do not have a linear narrative with ample opportunity for backstory or internal monologue like a book. Using theater is a closer analog but that is still a linear narrative with a captive audience.
(snip)

I am absolutely well aware of every point that you have brought up here. I know that really exceptional and mature storytelling can’t be done in this medium. And, again, that’s not what is being asked for. No one wants an internal monologue.
Backstory is possible, however, and someone mentioned how to do it earlier in the thread. Show Scarlet early in the personal story or in Rata Sum studying in a college. Later, have your character aid her in some way. Have her show up and build her background gradually instead of just tossing her in at random. Hell, her story could have been gradually built on in the living story, so we at least have some idea about her. Find some of her diaries around the world. Do some new dynamic events that involve her. A jumping puzzle through her lab/study. There are so many opportunities to build Scarlet up to the status of a villain you’ll actually fear.

So, let’s break this down a bit. We have a deranged, extremely capable and morally bankrupt character in Scarlet Briar. She’s there for fun, mayhem, and presumably some sort of actual deeper motivation for going ballistic on the world. However, why in the world would she tell us that?
(snip)
Where in there is any motivation for her to open her gob and spout some expository bullkitten about why she’s doing what she’s doing?

Again, that’s not what’s being asked for. No one wants a villain monologue. There are many other ways to get a read on her and her motivations without them coming directly from her mouth, as I pointed out above.

I think the basic criticism boils down to “Scarlet just isn’t MY kind of psychopath.” Fine, I guess. The Joker/Harlequin parallel is very deep and there could be an argument about it being overdone.

Joker/Harley are some of my favorite fictional characters when done well. That is not the issue at all. In the end, I think you missed my point, and many other people’s.I can see some pretty definite flaws in the writing that I can’t just push aside and ignore. It’s okay to like her, and it’s also okay to not. In the end, the LS and Scarlet are B-movie caliber, and it’s fine if you think that’s great. I just recognize it for what it is.

No one is asking for amazing writing the likes of which you would see in something like The Lord of the Rings, as another fantasy example. They don’t even want AAA writing. They just want good. None of the people I know personally who play GW2 thought that Scarlet was a passable example of storytelling.

Bovinity.8610:

I think one of the things that villains in comics/cartoons benefit from is that we get to see things from their perspective sometimes. We see a scene from the Jokers’ perspective now and then, see what he’s up to, see what his motivations for this and that might be, see how his character is impacting the story, so on and so forth.

If every time you saw the Joker, it was just at the end of the storyline, and he just pops out of nowhere and says, “HAAHAH BATMAN, IT WAS ME ALL ALONG” and then Batman punches him and the story ends, it wouldn’t be much of a character, now would it? But that’s often what we see with GW2 villains.

I do desperately wish that we did get that sort of perspective in Guild Wars 2. The writing doesn’t have to be any sort of attempt at writing a beautiful, complex, mature stories beyond the scope of a game like this. Simple motivations, back story, and buildup would go a very long way to helping characters like this, and in turn, helping the quality of the story itself considerably. And don’t tell us she’s a mastermind that can do all these things, show us.

Canach is very similar, but that character I was actually hopeful and eager about because his motivations precluded his finale and were actually understandable, to a degree. He was close to being decent, he just fell utterly flat in the end. But he was a much more admirable attempt, simply because you knew at least something concrete about him before the big reveal.

And don’t get me wrong, it is entirely possible to write an out-of-nowhere villain, it just has to be handled very carefully, and this is not the way to do it.

Remillard.8691:

I’ve never really gotten the impression that this was ever intended to be, nor would it make a great platform for, something with the nuance, subtlety, and plot twists of an HBO drama series.

Asking for decent writing that isn’t contrived is not the same as asking for writing of the caliber typically seen in mature adult dramas aired on that particular network, such as, say, Oz. That’s very, very different and I don’t believe a single person in this thread is asking for that.

I’m so sorry but I can’t stop laughing. She just wants someone to love her.

Erukk.1408:

As for the main Sue topic, I kinda think the better question is: is there such a thing as an original character now? All heroes and villains can be boiled down and fit into easy stereotypes. Once that happens, all roads lead back to tvtropes nowadays, and people shouting exclamations of “Sue!” at the first sight of archetype.

There’s not really a such thing as a character that avoids at least one trope or another, but there certainly are such things as characters that aren’t written abysmally. You can write a goofy, unrealistic villain in a way that isn’t utterly cringe inducing. Since people keep pulling up the Joker, ignore how he’s written in most comics now and go back and read The Killing Joke by Alan Moore, or watch Batman: The Animated Series. The latter might be an even better example since it’s still family friendly. Large ham, not usually serious, but still written in a way that the vast majority of people enjoy. If that’s what Anet was going for, it wasn’t handled well. And if the writing isn’t even at the level of a Saturday morning cartoon.. there might be a problem.
(granted, it was a very exceptional Saturday morning cartoon, but regardless, it’s not the highest standard of writing to reach for)

Sarrs.4831:

I don’t know about anyone else, but if Scarlet were on Trahearne’s level, I’d think much more highly of this content. I’d probably be around ‘meh, at least i can enjoy the mechanical improvements’ rather than ‘guess i’m spending this fortnight chewing on my steam backlist’.

Trahearne actually suffers a lot of the same problems. Let me first say that I don’t hate him because he stole the limelight or anything like that, but instead because his writing is simply bad. He comes out of nowhere (don’t bring up him showing early in the Sylvari storyline, I play four sylvari, that wasn’t adequate warning for what was to come, much less no other race having any idea). He has a ridiculously large amount of accomplishments and number of people who owe him favors/are in his debt. He very, very quickly ventures into idealized wish fulfillment territory.
And yet, I’d rather deal with Trahearne than Scarlet many times over, because his writing is better than hers. Even with her far, far superior voice acting. They did at least nail it with the casting on that one.
I’ll eat my hat if Trahearne and Scarlet weren’t handled by the same writers, because I know there are different writing teams.

Also I’d love it if we can be done with these consistently poorly written Sylvari, it’s getting plain embarrassing to some of us who play the race. I hate that Trahearne, Caithe, Carys, and Scarlet are leading examples of my characters’ species.

I do hope she either improves or makes at least a modicum of sense as the story is revealed, but it doesn’t change the unpleasant characterization, and that it’s one hell of a bad first impression for quite a lot of people.

Yeah, it didn’t fix my issue in the least despite changing the settings. I couldn’t get a cap of it clearly but there were spots where players were in their real armour, WvW armour, were invisible with nameplates, and invisible entirely and popped into existence a few moments later.

As for mobs (which are what is important), I don’t know if you’re working on those but they’re definitely still being culled on a massive scale.

Also yes, catastrophic lag and low fps.

Just did that. However, now when there are a large amount of people on my screen, they occasionally flash into WvW armour for a moment before going back to their regular armour. Also, I still get culling on mobs.

Oh god, it got worse!

In Wayfarer Foothills specifically.

It wasn’t just me seeing it. I had two friends with me, one who also saw the low quality WvW models on PCs, and another who saw us as our normal selves. We also encountered other players in the area who appeared as WvW models.

I don’t know if this is happening in other areas, I can’t get on to check at the moment. I also apologize if this has been posted about before, but the search doesn’t seem to be working and I don’t have the time to hunt for it manually.

First image was taken by my friend, the second was taken by me.

Same. Who would have thought to check the patch notes for something so important you would have expected a lot of hubbub and in-game announcements? When patch notes come out, I tend to skim them since they don’t generally tend to have information this important that isn’t posted somewhere else.

The real kicker? Both of my guilds were saving their tokens for today. As in later today, so they could turn them all in at once. And all were voting for Evon, myself included. Great.

No, and I’ll tell you why.

I got Dusk as a drop from a firefly in Godslost Swamp about a week ago, and was totally going to make Twilight. Of all the ridiculous places for a precursor to drop from..

Then I realized its colors don’t match my GS using classes and it would just look garish, it’s just one item, and maybe later they’ll release more legendaries that I’m legitimately really interested in.. and there are several other, smaller items I want more. So I sold it and bought The Mad Moon, the aetherized pistol skin, celestial dye, purchased a world transfer for a European friend to an American server he wanted in, and I’m saving the other 400g for a rainy day/spending it occasionally on close friends.

Now when I see legendaries, all I can think is “imagine all the other awesome things you could have bought.”

What I do respect? Things that take legitimate skill rather than blind luck, like I had. PVP titles, WvW titles like Stone above me, etc. Those impress me far more than winning the RNG game or having enough money to just up and buy a legendary.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Developers need to concentrate on developing new lore that has a impact on the present.

Yes, they could even call it the “Living Story!”

But to be serious, Ellen seems nice enough and I actually like asura and the EDs quite a lot, but I would rather see what happened to Abaddon.

I find him an interesting character; he was very imperfect, rather than black and white. Which is a running theme with the gods, but Abaddon especially so. It would also mean a lot of new content from an artistic standpoint. Even if they did just drain and modify the temple from the Straits, it would almost certainly require new character models (I do wonder if they might reuse this statue as his model: http://i.imgur.com/3c6YDYw.jpg, or make something new), and give some insight into aspects of the lore I have personally been wondering about.

Plus, it’s not just GW1 lore, it’s GW2 lore as well – they are not somehow mutually exclusive, and it was stated that it was the original fall that happened a thousand years prior to the first game. All Fractals are pieces of the past. Urban Battleground is an alternate version of something that happened during GW1 (though we didn’t get to really witness it ourselves) and it’s a great fractal for the Charr.

That, and it would also help to tie GW1 and GW2 together a little better.

As long as no one is attempting to get into Arah at the time (which often happens late at night) I see no issue with this. It doesn’t break anything, no one is being inconvenienced (so long as no one wants in Arah!) and this is a game that is pretty difficult to make money in. This is really saying something since I usually come down pretty kitten true exploits, I have no patience for others being inconvenienced while people are getting unfair benefits. None of that is really happening with the people I’ve seen farming it on TC at least, but that was late at night.

What does need to stop are people being complete idiots to one another. You want in Arah? Say so. Kill the giant while they farm if they refuse to help, it doesn’t take long. Want to farm? Do so, but stop when people ask you to, the event doesn’t take too long to cycle and in the meantime you can go hit some temples. Have courtesy for each other. And keep in mind, farmers, that people wanting to complete the game get first dibs – but you can still farm it if you just ask if anyone is trying to complete it first. Shocker, there generally aren’t tons of people wanting into the dungeon, so you will generally get a decent amount of time to farm.
The people really coming across looking like jerks are the ones forming groups with the sole purpose of killing the event out from under farmers, and I’ve watched it happen when no one wanted in Arah, seemingly oblivious to the irony that they’re also benefiting from the event as well (drops and karma).

Everyone needs to stop being so childish and just let others enjoy the event how they would like to, unless it is inconveniencing someone else. And if it isn’t, leave it alone.

The issue is that this event does not need to be nerfed. There need to be more rewards in the game so players aren’t driven to this, and this event in particular needs a large reward for actually completing it.

I want the pistol for my Engineer, the other skins are pretty terrible.

Sprint game is just unplayable most of the time due to random bouts of latency. I also have periods where I just lag out for up to five seconds at a time, always when I’m doing something “important,” and I generally come out of it downed. It never just happens when I’m standing around crafting or smashing trash mobs while walking somewhere.

I’ve been trying to do this for hours. Don’t you have any pride in the quality of your work, guys? I hate QQing about games being “too hard” as much as the next person, but there’s a big difference between difficulty and brokeness. And time is running out, since this is temporary content.

Won’t be surprised if this goes the way of the Canach dungeon. “Well, it’s only going to be here for a few days, why bother trying to make it better?”

Wish I would have tried sooner so I could have used food. Naturally, if clever players find an exploit to get around your broken content, that is the thing that takes priority being fixed.

I noticed this the other day on my female norn and a friend’s female norn when we both began to dance, our wrists would twist grotesquely. I don’t have images of that, but I do have pictures of it also happening on my asura while he holds a greatsword. I’ll have to test with my other race characters and see if it happens on them, too.

I have no idea if this is new but I have never noticed it before, which leads me to believe it might be. I also searched “wrists” and got no results (which seems a little odd) so if this has been covered before, my apologies.

The holograms die far too quickly for the amount of people camping them. This is nothing like the Halloween door events where mobs would pour out and it took a large group of players to take them down. That was actually fun, and everyone at the spawns had a chance to get items.

With this event, you have to hit a aoe or other multiple-target skill and hope to god it hits before everything is melted. Forget about running to far away spawns from a waypoint, you will never get them in time. Your only option is to camp them.

I have had non-Sylvari players mistake my male engineer Sylvari for female (usually from behind) because of how coats and the like puff out around his hips and butt. This has happened numerous times, people like to point it out to me because they always seem genuinely surprised when they see the character from the front and realize that he is, in fact, male.
I’m not even going to get into the skirt issues with my warrior and caster class Sylvari (also all male)

By the way, the engineer looks like this, from the back and front. That coat (the Noble Coat) is my favorite on him, but I’ve stopped wearing it because it looks like he’s smuggling pillows under there.

I have four Sylvari so bear with me.

Engineer: White skin + maroon highlights, red-orange leaves, pink eyes, peach glow 100%.
Warrior: Dark blue skin + white highlights, white leaves, grey eyes, white glow 100%.
Necromancer: Grey skin + purple highlights, purple head bark, bright green eyes, green glow 100%.
Mesmer: Black skin + no highlights, black head spines, white eyes, almost non-existent white glow. It’s subtle enough I’ve not even bothered taking a picture of it.

Let me say, first, that my main is Sylvari, and I have three Sylvari alts aside from him. I enjoy the race quite a lot, even if I’m really not fond of many of the Sylvari npcs I encounter.

I wanted to like Trahearne. When I first encountered him, I found him intriguing. I do like his physical design (even if he looks far too young for his voice) and the voice itself caught my attention despite sounding sort of stilted. I’d noticed inconsistency in the writing and had assumed the stilted speech was in part due to that.

But very rapidly, I grew to dislike and resent him. Not because he stole my limelight or anything like that, but because of his massively wasted potential. The VA is an actual competent actor who has been in films and you can hear emotion in his “fake Trahearne” lines when the character is a mesmer illusion. There are a few moments where his dialogue writing doesn’t suck (those same illusion scenes primarily). Occasionally, you see that he has an allergy to responsibility and he seems to be, from time to time, very shy. He’s also a necromancer whose job is to cleanse a land of the dead and aid another in taking down the dragon of undeath. There’s so much story potential there it’s insane.

And none of it is ever pulled off for any length of time, or used as much as it could be. Ever. Everything just falls flat and he becomes the Deus ex Machina Mary Sue, boring you while everyone else loves him and he yanks plot devices from his backside left and right. I did not go in hating him, I was not blindsided by him, and I still can’t stand the character. I absolutely can’t put all the blame on the voice actor, it seems as though he didn’t have a lot to work with.

Jelle.2807:

I hate Trahearne because of what he could have been but never was.

Sylvari, male, mesmer. The only armour I’m having issue with is the pvp light Orrian helm.. I think.

My Sylvari has white eyes. I put the helm on and did several PVP matches, and later removed the helm. For some reason, my eyes are now vibrant red, making my poor Sylvari look even more demonic than he usually does. I’ve included images of his eye glitch, and his eyes as they normally look, though he’s wearing a mask.

edit: in the second image, you can see the stamens that project from my brows clipping through my mask.

If it’s any consolation, Josh, all of GW2 made me terribly motion sick until the camera was adjusted a long time back.

The river canyon zone and especially the raft and bridge made me almost sick to my stomach. The bridge was entirely due to the perceived height however, that part had nothing to do with motion, haha. That raft is harsh on me, though, and messed with me more quickly than reading in the car or being on a boat do irl.

Entropy.4732:

Great posts! Sometimes my Sylvari’s english accent gets a bit wonky in a hilarious way. Most of the time he maintains a slight upper class brit accent, but on certain lines it shifts. For example, when he gets retaliation and says “Hit me! I dare you…” he sounds a bit like Kennedy. Then, recently, out of nowhere I took a camp in WvW and heard him say “That’s done” in a thick, irish accent. It was very startling and hilarious.

Oh my god, I’m so glad I’m not the only one that hears “hit me, I dare you” as sounding like Kennedy. I thought I was crazy.
The English accent completely drops when my warrior says “I can FEEL the adrenaline.” He just sounds American, which the VA is. The accent occasionally fails in the personal story, as well.

Aside from that, the VA’s really great. I love my necro’s lines. “No rest for you yet, sweet soul.” My main (engineer) also has said the “dispenser” line when dropping a healing turret.

His fall screams crack me up, and his laughter is so hilariously awkward. Haven’t picked up any unique lines on my male mesmer yet.

My male Sylvari necromancer’s dialogue and tone of voice when speaking to or about his minions. He sounds respectful sometimes, devious others. The VA couldn’t have done the lines more perfectly.
The humpback whales and dolphins in certain underwater areas.
How some of the arachnids have fairly realistic anatomy, though they could stand to be a bit moreso, like Skyrim spiders.
How perfectly Orr was done. It does look depressing, but they really went all the way with it and didn’t chicken out on any of the gruesome details. I’m also constantly impressed with the variety of Risen, and how disgustingly accurate some of the Risen are to, uh, corpses – the humanoid ones are not generally overly stylized.
Zhaitan. Not the battle with him, but his design. Ditto on Tequatl and the Claw of Jormag. I love that you can see his skeleton within the ice.
Caledon Forest, the green areas of Timberline Falls, and Queensdale. I absolutely love those zones. There are a couple forest areas in the Charr lands I like hanging out in, too. They feel real, and remind me of GW1 at the same time.
The friendlier side of the community.

I have the same problem as Jenosavel. I want to like the Largos, but I can’t, mainly due to their design. Most other creatures in GW2 work from an evolutionary standpoint with a bit of suspension of disbelief thrown in. Asura are small with massive ears because they live underground. Their teeth are sharp, they might have originally evolved as carnivores or insectivores. Charr look like they evolved from big cats, and became bipedal to manipulate things with their paws to compete with other sapient species. Quaggans are blubbery and round as water-dwelling mammals are, as well as some ancient aquatic reptiles like the Plesiosaurs. These designs work well, they’re streamlined with small limbs. And Quaggans are actually amphibious, but those land-limbs can work just fine in the water. Look at otters, with their stubby legs that tuck against their bodies.
Krait work well, too. They look like, well, particularly thick-bodied sea kraits – which are real serpents – just with arms. And if you get close to a Krait and look at it, those arms are stubby and short. They can tuck up against that smooth body, out of the way.

And then you have Largos. The human body is not a graceful thing in the water, compared to animals that evolved for it. Maybe they were land-based humanoids that took to the water at some point. But if they’re mammals that live in the deep ocean, they need blubber to cope with the frigidity of the water without freezing to death. Their fins look awkward and tacked on, and as though they couldn’t easily move an animal of their size and non-aerodynamic build. They honestly look as though they could get more in the way than anything else, and their animations do not look realistic to me. Now, remove the big awkward fins. Imagine them as having a long tail that could actually propel them, an extension of their body that their land-dwelling limbs could tuck up against. Give them thicker hides. A sort of rugged mermaid with legs. They would still be a little awkward, but considerably more realistic, and still capable of wearing armour and clothing. You could tack on a few short dolphin/shark-like fins, maybe on the back to just drive home the “aquatic creature” theme without killing the aerodynamics. If they kept the hair it would probably need to be tied back tightly, otherwise it could become a real safety issue in a fight, and would create drag during an escape. Their hands and feet need to be webbed. Even Newfoundland dogs have webbed feet to swim in water.

I would like the largos quite a bit more if they looked like that. Like something that could actually survive in the water without freezing to death or floundering around uselessly. Right now, they look like a bad case of “a wizard did it” – and very incompetently at that. And they really do look like elves thrown in the ocean imo.

1UP.
Gives me some nice nostalgia and I’d love to have it around whenever I want to unwind.

I’d just like to address numerous things. First off, I’m not “ kitten derp my little ponies and magical gumdrops,” I love the lore and storyline (although it has some serious writing issues) and immersion, I have since GW1. I dig grimdark. I’m also not a fanboy, I’ve had my issues with the game and you can check my post history about that. However.

Shufflepants.9785:

Warlander.1384:

then back packs and hoodies came out in the store…..really ?

Just because people in earth’s history didn’t start digging hoodies and plush backpacks until after the industrial revolution doesn’t mean the order of fashion would play out the same in Tyria. Earth history fantasy is just a subset of Fantasy as a whole. This stuff is still completely within the realm of fantasy.

There already ARE motorized vehicles in the game, just look at the war engines that the charr have. Fantasy just means magic. It doesn’t mean everything has to be identical to Middle Earth.

This. People really need to stop trying to apply Earth’s history to this game. Just because some races use old (to us) techology does not put this game in a Medieval setting. Stop it. You’re all coming across as though you have absolutely no imagination. This IS a world with Asura and insane Asuran technology, it has been since Guild Wars 1, and you need to accept that and the fact that they do crazy things with their technology, like making their own video games. Which makes sense. You would want a form of escapism in a world with Elder Dragons.
And if your sense of immersion is so fragile and flimsy that vaguely modern fashion (animal backpacks and hoodies) in a world with golems and helicopters breaks it, then I feel sincerely sorry for you.

Tarn.1374:

Of course, it seems that freedom of speech is not welcome here on these forums. Myself (and others) voiced our concerns about similar things in another thread and they all got deleted. Of course those that supported the content didn’t get deleted. Talk about abuse of authority. Apologies for actually voicing a rational opinion and critiquing your work Anet, instead of being, what’s the term… a ‘fanboy’. If one is unable to accept criticism, perhaps these forums shouldn’t exist?

Very disappointing. Not so much with the content, but more so with their reaction to users concerns.

Freedom of speech, huh?
“The right, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, to express beliefs and ideas without unwarranted government restriction.”

I don’t see the U.S. Government coming in here and telling you to shut up. Anet, meanwhile, is totally free to delete any thread for any reason at any time with no explanation. You’re totally free to exercise your freedom of speech. But there can be consequences to that expression, such as other users voicing their own opinions against yours, or mods disagreeing with you or seeing your posts as inflammatory or unnecessary and deleting them.

Timothy.7204:

I agree with the original post also. We don’t need this in the game.

How about spending the time improving the boss fights and make things more random, instead of so scripted. Apparently that isn’t important.

Wethospu.6437:

My issue is how much resources they have spent for this (hours of content which has pretty much nothing to do with GW2).
Arcade-style arena would have been faster to create and expand, while still delivering the same message.

I hate to repeat myself over and over on the forums. Really. But a very small team handled this, and Anet has many, many people and many different teams. The bug fix guys were still fixing bugs while this was being made. The balance guys were still balancing classes (or trying to). The texture mapping is so simple it would have probably only taken one texture map artist a very short time to make them. The environment is ridiculously simple and would have also taken one guy a very short amount of time. The AI and programming are simple. Making this dungeon would have been absolutely nothing to a tiny team used to dealing with a game as complex as GW2, and other teams were still working on the main game. I can’t fathom why people don’t understand this. They would not have had all of Arenanet in there working on this ridiculously simple April Fools’ dungeon. Stating “they should have been working on other things!” is no reason to hate on this dungeon, because it’s a moot point. They were working on other things.

Nar.8327:

I don’t insult people who prefer GW2 core over Super Adventure Box. I offer a simple, frank reminder that people enjoy the game in different ways, and that just because you don’t enjoy something doesn’t give you the right to demand it be taken away from everyone else – which seems to be the entire purpose behind this thread.

Bolded for truth.

So, did Anet come to your house, put a gun to your head, and tell you to play the Super Adventure Box? Because I doubt they did. No one is forcing you to play it. If you don’t like it, don’t play it. It is not mandatory. It’s April Fool’s content, which Anet is pretty well known for from Guild Wars 1.

And, are you aware that a very tiny team made this content while the rest of them – which includes different teams for bug fixes and balancing – are working on other content? Because I doubt that, too. Actually, a lot of the people on these forums don’t seems to understand that. Anet has several different teams working on things all at the same time. The guy doing texture mapping art in Super Adventure Box isn’t responsible for bug fixes. Nor is the guy making 8-bit music the same person who handles programming NPC AI, etc. Come on, guys.

Male Engie (main): 2
Male Necro: 3
Male Mesmer: 5
Male Warrior: 7

I really love face 2 because it has a lot of flowing lines and really does look like plant matter formed together to make a face.

Just my two cents.

I think the reason why Rox bothers some people and not others is precisely because of something similar to the Uncanny Valley effect with robotics and CGI humans. If something looks “off,” some people recognize it as being so and are disgusted, unsettled, or horrified by it. Me? I’m rarely deeply bothered by anything uncanny valley, but I still recognize it. Here’s an example of a robot that falls hard into the valley.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aF_8gM4urmA

She most likely looks fine to her creators. She doesn’t bother me, but I see regardless that she looks terribly wrong. To other people, she’s completely terrifying.

Rox, to me, is sort of the same deal. People know the general facial layout of the Charr as a species, and how they look, even when their features vary considerably. Rox breaks that for many people – she falls far outside the design presented by Anet originally, to such an extreme degree that she looks like an entirely different species of Charr, just as tigers and housecats are different species but are still cats. She obviously looks fine to whoever designed her, and fine to many players, but it isn’t shocking or surprising at all that she really puts off a lot of people.

As an illustrator, if I had the time, I could sit down and draw countless Charr that are entirely unique by only stretching the morphology of the species, not shattering it entirely. You could even pretty easily make a housecat looking Charr that doesn’t look as bizarre and out-of-place as Rox.

And talking about design, her “cute” kitten face along with those gigantic horns, large body, and enormous claws look.. Jarring, to me. There’s no flow to the design, the whole thing clashes and, frankly, her face looks transplanted on. I also have a feeling her skull would be pretty unstable and frail with those giant orbits, mashed in sinus (she’d probably have the same issues as a bulldog or persian cat with breathing) and massive horns on top of it all, but this is a game with talking plant people so I suppose I can let anatomical nitpicks like that slide. But not the fact that she doesn’t even look like she falls into the same art style, much less species. You can totally design very unique Charr that don’t look like mutants – Caithe, Trahearne, and the Pale Tree’s avatar look entirely unique in their faces, and they still look like Sylvari.

To me Rox looks like Ugly Tiger with the eyes of a scottish fold cat transplanted on.

They wouldn’t looks so bad if they had more depth shading and were sized down a bit, but right now, she looks kinda soulless. And like she’d have sinus problems with her mashed in muzzle. Her “cute” face (not really cute to me) just looks really out of place with those gigantic horns, fearsome claws, and big, strong Charr body.

I love this sort of thing, helps to keep me from getting bored with the game (and I am not a hardcore player). They’re generally really entertaining and relaxing. I really hope they put at least some of them in.

Took me about an hour to do this on my level 60 warrior, and it was horrible. I didn’t know about the cannon at the time, so I got spanked pretty hard by the acolytes and masses of mobs, as well as something occasionally 1-shotting me. I really don’t think I could have done it without dropping Battle Standard on masses of dead allies. I had to resort to my bow’s adrenaline skill and kiting mobs through the aoe quite a lot, as well, since there were spots where melee was just suicide. I had no problem with this on my Engineer ages ago.

I got one acolyte down and things thinned, but it took me a long time to kill the second one regardless. Every time I fought the acolytes I would periodically get 1shot. This was not challenging in a fun way, it was difficult by bad balancing (and bugs?) to such an extreme degree that I wished I could throttle the game itself. A desire to inflict violence on your game is not really a feeling game designers should inspire in their players. Why do you refuse to do hotfixes, anyway?

I don’t know. I’m hydrophobic so I certainly wouldn’t do it alone, but my main is an engineer, so that sort of offsets the crushing horror of being beneath the water a little. As long as it doesn’t look like the waters of Orr, I think I’d be okay.

But underwater combat really is terribly unbalanced. When I was doing map completion in WvW, I would occasionally get little groups of people chasing me. Whenever possible, I would try to lead them into the water and kitten them. As long as there wasn’t another Engineer after me, I could kill up to six people following me and chase off even more, thanks to Grenade Kit and Elixer X. Eles die really quickly to this. I’m the one benefiting and even I don’t think it’s very fair, but I do it anyway to save myself armour repair costs until it gets nerfed or everyone else gets buffed. I’m hoping for the latter. As it is, a bit of advice: don’t follow an Engineer into water.

It would also be nice if ground skills either became projectiles (like grenades), or bubbles around your body. I’ve tried to fire off a Super Elixer in UW combat and it just flew off somewhere into the distance.. If it became a bubble around my body, I could swim to my team mates to heal them. Actually, being able to target people for heals and elixers in the water would be really, really helpful. You could probably only target one person at a time, but it’s better than what we have now.

Dingle.2743:

(He’s suggesting I’m a horrible, horrible person… better act the part.)

- Underwater maze now has currents that force players in certain directions.
- Currents will change paths periodically
- The maze now contains doors which can only be opened from one side
- Opening these doors will change the current as well

Everybody, enjoy your new underwater puzzle. We strongly believe that this will provide appropriate challenge for the average player, and will be watching it closely to add more features if necessary.

Swimming down the wrong corridor randomly spawns 5 (new, “exciting”) veteran Krait Nimross, a Champion Risen Megalodon, a school of Ancient Barracuda, or 10 Risen Putrifiers. You have no way of knowing which.

First off, I appreciate the bug fixes and some of the content released. I really do, and I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. However, this is bugging me, and I’ve got to critique it.

BobbyStein.2315:

Conner.4702:

You call it teaser. I call it extremely boring and badly written. Teasers are supposed to grab peoples attention. Not have them running around like headless chickens, because you failed to make a compelling intro.

It helps if you could be more specific in your feedback. Do you mean:

• Badly written (full of grammatical errors, confusing dialog, characters talking “out of voice”)
• Badly designed (lack of logical flow, unclear directions, broken mechanics)
• Badly messaged (“I was expecting more because of how it was promoted”)

A story does not have to have grammatical errors or confusing dialogue to be badly written. Take Twilight and 50 Shades of Grey, for example. Editors cleaned those up, but they’re still awfully written stories. Anyone can write, especially with editors on their side to fix their mistakes, but that does not mean what they wrote is good.
Regarding the Living Story, it doesn’t hook you in, for one. One of the most important things about writing is to immediately hook your reader, audience, or player into the story – if in writing, preferably in the first sentence. Part of the Living Story’s problem is massive anticlimax due to the advertisement blowing the teaser way out of proportion, part of it is the fetch quest feel of it, and part of it is the lackluster writing.
The first could have easily been fixed by, as suggested, not saying a word on release of the content. Or, at the most, giving the barest hint that something might be different to entice people to have a look, just in case.
For the second, you could have included only one or two fetch quests with other quests to amp up the variety. Say a few refugees get abducted and you have to rescue them, or the road is blocked by lava you have to build a bridge over, things like that.
The third is trickier. Honestly, one of the biggest issues is the “eh” factor. Everyone just sort of feels indifferent, and it makes the players indifferent.. It’s like Trahearne (sorry to somewhat prove you right, Tobias!) all over again, if Trahearne were embodied by an event. None of the NPCs emote whatsoever. These NPCs are fleeing for their lives but it feels like every last one of them has been drugged into a profound state of not caring about the things happening around them. And the seemingly sloppy way the notifications and dialogue are handled, sorry to say, also makes it feel as though the devs and writers don’t care, either. Naturally, a good number of players are going feel nothing for the content as well. When my guild mates grabbed me last night to go get more lost items, I practically groaned. Game stories shouldn’t make players want to dig in their heels to avoid more of the same stuff over and over again.

And yes, far more empathy for the whales than the refugees. You could tell that the whales were in a truly desperate situation, that they were on the verge of death and if you didn’t help them, they would die. They were helpless and you knew it, you wanted to give aid to them. The refugees? Some people hobbling almost wordlessly down the road with some corpses and passed out drunks lying about. No one was crying, no one was running to you for help, no one really seemed all that desperate or perturbed. In a situation like that, you would expect parents and crying children (or crying orphans if you really want to be emotionally manipulative), folks flocking to the heroes for help, seeking other NPCs out for comfort and shelter. In one area is a Charr child who lost a toy. You find it for him and the whole time, he (she?) really doesn’t seem bothered at all by any of the events, or particularly emotional about you finding his precious toy, his last connection to his home. It’s not good writing and it really breaks immersion.

I’ve got the same problem minus the “alarm” sound issue. I crash during dragon events and huge wvw events with zergs butting heads. Feels bad, man.
I can’t put up with it any more and I’ll be updating to a less resource-hogging OS (ugh Vista) and more memory next month, everything else on my computer is dandy and it should fix the problem. Sorry you’re having to go through this, too.

The only sound issue I have is an incredibly loud, echoing crack. I don’t know what causes it, but it made me drop a drink on myself one time and rip off my headphones another. Very, very jarring; I don’t deal well with sudden, loud noises like that and I wish it would stop.

Blackers.7512:

I’n my opionion it’s not as bad as the Abyss & Celestial combo… getting really tired of seeing people only wearing those colours.

Sure you’re gonna want to show off the rare dyes you have, but i just feel peoples creativity is sacrificed as a resualt.

I like monochromes. My eyes are bad and it makes my Engineer who hops around all the time easier for me to see.

I’m an illustrator so I’ve got a decent grasp of color theory. The blue and yellow isn’t the most fantastic combination ever, but I don’t find it particularly offensive. I think the worst I saw was what looked to be Phlox or Plum, with Sprout and Pastel Olive, and a few red highlights. I didn’t cap it but it’s burnt into my mind’s eye forever. Some light armour class and none of the armour parts matched the others. Ugh. Maybe they loved it, but it hurt me deeply to look at. I’m tempted to re-create that monstrosity of color on my own armour and post it.

Fiddlestyx.9714:

So, I’m just curious, do you judge people based on skin color?

oh wow

I don’t understand people being upset about “modern clothing.” Please remember that this is a game with high tech laser weaponry, sophisticated hand guns, golems, the list goes on and on. The clothing Asura themselves wear is pretty futuristic looking at times, and with Lion’s Arch, there would be a definite melting pot of cultures. Saying “this looks too modern” would just artistically stagnate a game that should have huge freedom of design, especially as far as clothing is concerned. Guild Wars 2 is not set in our past. It is not a straight up Medieval themed game or anything like that. It’s not our past so you can’t say what is too “modern” looking for the setting. Only the creators can do that.

Now, what bothers me? Riding clothes in a game series where horses have never been seen, save for a few undead ones, a celestial horse, and a couple in concept art. I have never seen a living, normal horse in either Guild Wars. If they’re out there, you certainly can’t ride them. Equestrian riding gear is so out of place as to be mind-boggling and far, far removed from what players actually care about. They don’t look that great from a design standpoint, either. If you have to design equestrian gear for this game, you should really push the limits of the design, make something as exaggerated and fantastical looking as the available armours or it just sort of looks out of place and bland. The hoodies, however, are decent imo. Unusual with their sleevelessness, but still simple and not “busy” looking. It would be nice if there were options of hood up and hood down, though.

In the end, I wish clothing was skin you could apply to your armour. I’d rather run around in a hoodie than one of the numerous medium armour coats.