Guild Wars 2

Ryan Diederich.8179:

Hi, thanks for bringing this up.

I’ve looked into the down-scaling calculations and identified the bug that is causing this issue. There’s definitely a lot of stats being lost when scaled down that isn’t intended.

Praise be.

I didn’t think I could be impressed by design choices anymore, but they went and did it.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Cool I agree. After this meeting I will finish my doc and then lets get on with the CDI.

Chris

On which topic though? It seems that a CDI on the topic of guilds would be an exercise in futility at the moment, when one of the most apparent concerns of the forum-going members of the community appears to be the changes to the leveling system (particularly the level-gating of basic functions like skill challenges, POIs, salvaging, harvesting, diving goggles, etc.)

Chris Whiteside.6102:

So the question now is the current environment conducive to starting a CDI or should I wait a few days?

Chris

I think it depends on the topic. A CDI on guilds seems a bit superficial right now, when the major concern of the community appears to be the massive changes to the leveling system.

Things like level-gating resource gathering, salvaging and skill points; the issues with the new compass directing brand new players to high end zones; and preventing players from having full access to their class’s abilities until they’re halfway done leveling all seem like far more pressing issues at the moment

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Traveller.7496:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

There are definitely bugs and some external miscommunication with the system and I want to listen some more before discussing.
Chris

This is interesting.

Chris is saying there has been external miscommunication about the new system. Could it be that you guys realize you went too far with the removing of functions and level gating it too extreme, and it was not supposed to dumb down the game quite this much?

Hi Traveller,

No not really. I m referring to some videos etc that aren’t quite factually correct in all areas and thus there are some misconceptions being propagated by those that have not played the through NPE yet.

Chris

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Traveller.7496:

Chris Whiteside.6102:

There are definitely bugs and some external miscommunication with the system and I want to listen some more before discussing.
Chris

This is interesting.

Chris is saying there has been external miscommunication about the new system. Could it be that you guys realize you went too far with the removing of functions and level gating it too extreme, and it was not supposed to dumb down the game quite this much?

Hi Traveller,

No not really. I m referring to some videos etc that aren’t quite factually correct in all areas and thus there are some misconceptions being propagated by those that have not played the through NPE yet.

Chris

Do you have a response to reviews from big gaming media outlets (like PC Gamer) who are posting poor reviews of the new leveling system?

Link

I just thought I’d make this post, since this change doesn’t appear to have been given the same scrutiny as the core systems changes, yet it’s still a change that will affect new players significantly.

They rearranged the order in which we do the personal story quests, so now we do the Source of Orr as part of chapter 7, then chapter 8 is spent with the Zhaitan threat directly. The problem with this is that it completely breaks much of the continuity.
Think about ‘Through the Looking Glass’, where we learn that there is more than one Eye of Zhaitan and begin to speculate about it with the NPCs. Now, that quest comes after we defeat the Sovereign Eye of Zhaitan. Now, the quest where we discover that there are Eyes and Mouths of Zhaitan – Temple of the Forgotten God – comes after we kill the Sovereign Eye.

Also, the new quest order completely breaks the entire thematic flow of the story. Previously the story went along as we advanced further into Orr in the open world. For once the open world event storylines and PS storylines actually tied together in a sensible way, and as you got further into the story you started to go further and further away from Fort Trinity and the Straits of Devastation until you were in Malchor’s Leap and then the Cursed Shore. Now, you go from the Battle of Fort Trinity and get sent all around Orr at the whims of the new quest order. It breaks the flow and destroys the narrative.

Also, it appears that ArenaNet have outright removed the ‘greatest fears’ portions of the story entirely. You know the parts of the story with Tonn/Apatia etc? Gone entirely. Cut out for no good reason.

I mean, just… why? What possessed ArenaNet to butcher the flow of the story like this? This is worse than what George Lucas did to Star Wars – he made edits to it, but he didn’t go around rearranging the core plot points in this way. I just… I’m at a loss for words.

I realise people on this subreddit were never particularly fond of the last few chapters of the personal story to begin with, but I don’t see how completely destroying the continuity, pacing and just general narrative of it was a good idea in any regard.

Can we get an explanation as to why parts of the PS have been cut and why other parts have been re-arranged into an order that no longer makes sense from a continuity perspective?

This needs a red post

mage.3570:

New content:
1. More skills
2. More traits
3. More weapon combinations

But those would be confusing and difficult to learn for new players…

The mid-season break is going to be twice as long (3 months) as the first half of the season was.

Keeping this post on the front page.

Snowmoon.1758:

Im guessing this patch is Guild Wars 2 equivalent of the NGE huh?

Oh kitten, don’t bring back those painful memories.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

If only there was some way to catch these glaring and horrible errors before the patch went live… like some sort of server… where you test things…

We could call it a TEST SERVER…

That’s one solution. Another vital change would be to stop hiring QA testers on 3 month contracts and employ long-term, salaried QA teams. When QA teams are only hired on 3-month contracts, the experience + familiarity with the game of your QA team is going to be drastically lower than that of the player base.

Look in the materials tab in your personal bank (all the way at the bottom)

MikaHR.1978:

Errant Venture.9371:

MikaHR.1978:

Tulki.1458:

Tried a little experiment with the new system.

At level 21, in a level 17 zone. I hit level 22 and got +40 to all base attributes. Whoo, now I’m more powerful! This turned out to be about +35ish due to the downscaling but still. More powerful.

Then I hit level 23 in the same area, and lost 8 power and 7 from my other stats. Then I gained another level… and lost 8 power and 7 from the other stats. Wait a minute. What?

With the old system, downscaling made you weaker, but it was gradual as you levelled. With this one, you get a huge spike in stats that makes the game easier, but between these big stat spikes the game difficulty rises quickly. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Going from level 22 to 23 caused me to lose 80 max HP. It’s very weirdly designed. With all the stuff introduced in this patch about introducing new players, this change in particular makes absolutely no sense. The game difficulty wobbles violently from level to level.

Did you experiment with the old system since you have something to compare it to?

What were your stats as lvl 22-23 in lvl 17 zone before change? No? Sheesh.

Yes, it ALSO went down since your gear was worse for your level.

In the old system, downscaling was on the same curve as stat distribution so you actually increased in strength as your level increased. In the current system, base stats are distributed in big “chunks” every few levels, instead of in a steadily increasing curve every level. This means that, due to the down-scaling system not changing to mirror the new stat distribution, you go from being seriously for several levels in between a “stat chunk” being awarded to very, very strong for a single level. Then the cycle repeats.

No you didnt increase in strenght while downscaling. I have 12 lvl 80ies. If you didnt upgrade your gear regularly you were weakling as you lost stats on each level (while dowscaled)

But please, since you have teh numbers show us how your stats behaved from going from lvl 22 to lvl 24 in lvl 17 zone so we can compare it ot now.

You used to increase in relative strength when you leveled and entered a downlevel zone. Before, a level 22 in a level 17 zone would be weaker than a level 23 in a level 17 zone. Correspondingly, level 23 would be weaker than a level 24 when both were in a level 17 zone.

Now: you get a huge chunk of base stats at level 22, and very few base stats at level 23 and level 24. So when a level 22, 23, and 24 are in a level 17 zone; the level 22 will end up possessing more stats than the level 23 + 24 because the downscaling is still adjusted based on the old curve

This is exactly how it works on the Chinese client right now too, and the players there have been complaining about it since the Chinese launch.

MikaHR.1978:

Tulki.1458:

Tried a little experiment with the new system.

At level 21, in a level 17 zone. I hit level 22 and got +40 to all base attributes. Whoo, now I’m more powerful! This turned out to be about +35ish due to the downscaling but still. More powerful.

Then I hit level 23 in the same area, and lost 8 power and 7 from my other stats. Then I gained another level… and lost 8 power and 7 from the other stats. Wait a minute. What?

With the old system, downscaling made you weaker, but it was gradual as you levelled. With this one, you get a huge spike in stats that makes the game easier, but between these big stat spikes the game difficulty rises quickly. It doesn’t make any sense at all. Going from level 22 to 23 caused me to lose 80 max HP. It’s very weirdly designed. With all the stuff introduced in this patch about introducing new players, this change in particular makes absolutely no sense. The game difficulty wobbles violently from level to level.

Did you experiment with the old system since you have something to compare it to?

What were your stats as lvl 22-23 in lvl 17 zone before change? No? Sheesh.

Yes, it ALSO went down since your gear was worse for your level.

In the old system, downscaling was on the same curve as stat distribution so you actually increased in strength as your level increased. In the current system, base stats are distributed in big “chunks” every few levels, instead of in a steadily increasing curve every level. This means that, due to the down-scaling system not changing to mirror the new stat distribution, you go from being seriously for several levels in between a “stat chunk” being awarded to very, very strong for a single level. Then the cycle repeats.

crossoverAtt.9680:

Your certainly welcome to so, but forgetting to balance monsters or change the downscaling after altering the stats is like forgetting to open the door before walking through it. Your deserve a bump on the nose. It’s unfathomable this problem wouldn’t occur to an entire team of employees.

It’s the end result of hiring QA staff on three-month contracts instead of hiring QA teams as long-term, salaried employees. Blatantly obvious stuff falls through the cracks because the QA team is going to be wildly inexperienced in game functions compared to the more experienced end of the playerbase.

Something like this should have been noticed by at least one of the people designing the new system though.

Cross-post from reddit user Tulki

I was curious how this worked, so I tested it out. And well… I’m not sure what they were smoking. As some of you know, how it used to be was you would gain some base stats every level. Now, you gain a huge chunk of base stats every few levels. It turns out this approach screwed up the difficulty curve for new players for a couple of reasons.

1) Base stats are now subject to downscaling. Before, if you were a level 40 player in a level 20 zone, you would have L20 base stats plus your scaled gear and trait stats. Now, all of your stats are lumped together and downscaled, and the result is almost always that you’ll have lower stats than before because you don’t gain base stats every level.
2) That plus the fact that you gain base stats irregularly causes the difficulty curve to shift violently as you level up. Example test case:

I was level 21 in a level 17 zone. All of the mobs were overly difficult despite me having level-appropriate gear and a lucky power amulet drop. I hit level 22 which is a stat bonus level, and gained +40 to all stats (which turned out to be ~35 points when downscaled). Immediately after gaining this level I started absolutely wrecking everything in sight. At level 21, I fought a champion and it destroyed me. At level 22, I destroyed the champion.

I then levelled to 23 (same zone), and I lost 8 points from all of my stats. I then levelled to 24 (same zone), and lost 8 more points. Now the difficulty was significantly higher. I levelled to 25, and almost the entire bonus I had gained before was now negated.
The point is, players who are levelling now reach absurd power plateaus on levels where they gain stat spikes. And then as they level up, difficulty rises dramatically until the next stat spike arrives to alleviate it. It makes little sense, and I have no clue why Arena Net decided this was a good idea.

I recommend cross-posting this to the bug forums anyway. It may not be a true “bug” but it’s definitely an un-intended effect of leaving downscaling on its original curve while changing the distribution of base states to a step-wise curve. You’ll probably have a better chance of getting this noticed in the bug forum as well.

Keep this at the top. If anet is going to completely re-work the rate of release of base stats, they need to completely re-work the downscaling system at the same time. I don’t understand how a change like this could possibly get past QA.

Mike + Colin it’s time to stop hiring QA on 3 month contracts and actually get some full-time, experienced QA teams

Soulshot.6340:

Are you a new player?.. No? Well — I am.

I know the bank access at lvl 24, the downed state at lvl 5, the waterskills at lvl 22 might frustrate the lot of ya, crying wolf over how easy it is now.

I on the other hand — a new player (1 month of play) — can’t begin to tell you how complex GW2 is compared to other MMO’s. About a month ago I kept being underlevelled for new zones, I thought I’d do all the hearts and then leave the area. Didnt know you could trigger quests, didnt understand what was happening when I got downed, didn’t know you could port from waypoint to waypoint.

I mean… I learned all that, but the new guidance seems great.

The new character guidance seems very sensible for a first time player.

But what about when you go back a few months from now to level a new character? When you go back to level one of each class to 80?

It’s going to be massively frustrating and alt-*un*friendly to have to go through tedious and slow skill unlocking when you already know how to play. The new player character system should have the option to be disabled once you’ve leveled one character to 80.

Simple option: remove the new character changes once the account has a character that has reached level 80 (or even level 60 tbh).

You don’t need your hand held once you’ve leveled one character

Seras.5702:

And wait, you said you now have access to PvP at 22?? I thought the point of PvP was that any character could do it at level 2.

You can, but you don’t get access to it via the UI until at least one character on the account reaches 22 now.

Amicable Pugs.4503:

COE :
1st door skip fixed.

How “fixed”? Invisible wall?

Will be listing them here as info comes in:

Arah

• P2 Operative Belka does not activate rendering path uncompletable.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Sylvari, Errant Venture, and others who also help run the site: let me know if there are any significant updates that would be interest to the broader community (like a lot of new builds added), because we can plug it again in the future so that more interest is generated and I hope more contributors start pitching in.

Will do! We just rolled out mouseover tooltips for traits for Warriors and Guardians. In the future we’ll be pushing those changes out to the traits for each of the professions and expanding mousover information for weapon/utility skills, items, and food!

Biohazard.7523:

Where is the voting ? Your builds are your idea. How can we know if your ideas are bad ?
We need voting on builds. If there is no voting builds can be bad and good, and everyone needs to test it.. Isnt your page designed not to test build but to have a good builds?
Every build that is in meta, good, great, all is garbage without voting.

All builds in the good/great/meta tags have already been voted on. The testing tag has a voting mechanism built into it: once the build has 5 votes it is moved out of testing to the appropriate tag and can no longer be voted on.

The hype is real!
Thanks for the shoutout Regina + Stephane, we appreciate you guys getting the word out about our awesome community site =D

Gaile Gray.6029:

None whatsoever. To go back and review thousands of suspensions to determine if they would have received a warning at the time, coupled with the impossibility of knowing if the warned player would have stopped the exploitative action takes such a retroactive review off the table completely.

Disappointing, but understandable. thanks for response.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Sorin.4310:

How detailed will these warnings be? Will it be more like “you need to stop what you are doing.” or more like "At ##:## you started “doing such” and is in violation due to “such rule”, or somewhere in between?

Will we be able to respond to the GM’s comment, assuming we are polite and courteous?

Let’s face it. If you’re engaging in a disallowed activity, you know it. So the message may be specific or it may be a little more generic, but in the end, we believe it’s a kindness to let you know “You’re doing something right now that needs to stop.” (As far as I know, the warnings will not come later, they’ll be at the time of the disallowed activity.)

No, you may not enter into a dialogue with the GM. You may, of course, contact Customer Support, which is what the message will direct you to do if you have questions.

Hopefully, players will be smart enough to recognize what they were doing and not try to engage in a huge exchange defending their misbehavior or arguing against a friendly warning. We have a lot of players with legitimate issues we’d like to help, rather than trying to quell a “No, i didn’t do it” or “But is that precisely wrong, or is it your fault?” sorts of discussions.

Any chance of having this policy enforced retroactively? I know I’ve got a couple friends whose accounts were terminated for the 2012 snowflake incident and they never got a warning/temporary suspension =(

John Smith.4610:

Elrey.5472:

Random questions of the day for fun purposes:
-At the actual market price, how much would it cost a single +70 Agony Resistance item?I managed to get a number like 6665327449000000000000000000000000000 gold, but i’m not sure if it’s accurate.
It also makes me wonder a second question.
-Has anyone done already a +20 item?

Assuming the +1’s are 10s, and we start from 1 and only user 1’s; it would cost (2^69 + 1)/10 gold which I believe is 59,029,581,035,870,565,171.2 which, if I didn’t make an error, is 59 quadrillion gold.

edit: the + sign not displaying for some reason.
edit 2: I forgot thermocatalytic reagents.

Out of curiosity, do you have information available on how much gold exists in the game currently?

No, torment on each auto attack is too strong. Have the last attack in the chain apply two stacks of torment and create a clone, remove the torment from the first two auto attacks

Flinxe.1623:

I don’t understand why forum people are already complaining about an update not implemented yet. We haven’t seen how the changes will affect the actual gameplay

We saw the horrific meta that was generated in mid-2013 when condis could be indiscriminately dumped everywhere by auto attacks and low-cooldown AoEs. We know what effects easily spammable condis have on the game. We know how strong condi mesmers are. It’s not hard to extrapolate from that experience to see that buffing an already strong condi spec with more brainless condi spam will have a poor impact on the game.

frifox.5283:

Then the times I edited gw2 memory to achieve teleports and then get my client disconnected was all my imagination?

You were using a very clumsy and outdated method, that became partially broken about 10 months ago.

frifox.5283:

Dub.1273:

Theres no anti hack detection either, by the way. It’s pretty sad that endurance, position (therefore speed and teleports) are all client side.
Also, benefit of the doubt for exploiters.

Summary: Nothing happens.

If server detects abnormal dodges or movement (teleports) you are dc’d immediately.

This is false. The client will suffer a DC if you use endurance hacks that set regen above a certain level.

No disconnects occur when teleport hacks occur, though there is some evidence that teleports longer than a certain distance flag accounts to customer support.

There’s no detection or DC associated with speed hacks.

Don’t spread misinformation to look cool on the forums.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Ok, let me clarify

“Skips” generally require abuse of terrain to accomplish. An example of this would be “breaking out” of the map in order to bypass content. Doing such would be quantified as exploitation, using an exploit and profiting (“selling” runs) would be quantified as selling an exploit.

Without going into punishment or policy, we are going to be ramping up on GM coverage in dungeons. If you believe that someone is exploiting, please do report them in-game.

Why not fix the terrain glitches or completely sequence paths so that skipping bosses prevents the reward chest from popping (as the design team did with Arah P2 18 months ago)?

Come on teamspeak right now and I can show you three different ways to break out of the map and skip half of Arah P3/4 that have been in game since launch. The burden is on the design team to fix these breakout spots (or even better fix the sequencing) if they disapprove of players using skill-ful leaps to skip bosses.

Banning players for being talented and creative is distrubing, and you should be ashamed of yourself for doing it. Especially when players like myself have offered to show the design team how such map-breakouts are performed and were ignored.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Yes, I meant report the players exploting the dungeons (in-game report is fine, not a bug report).

:) Sorry for confusion!

You’re seriously going to ban players for skipping bosses? Why not fix the instance so that bosses can’t be skipped instead?

It’s been 2 years, and most paths have been completely sequenced by now so that skipping bosses breaks the instance. Why haven’t you done this to every path by now instead of banning players for taking advantage of ingame mechanics.

If you’re not using 3rd party software to skip the bosses—i.e. just clever use of jump mechanics—then you should be kittening ashamed of yourself for banning players for skips. They’re not cheating, and the fault is on the design team for leaving these mechanics in game for 2 years without “fixing” them.

I’m absolutely shocked that a security team member is advocating persecuting players this way.

Perhaps it’s time that Arenanet reconsider their policy regarding discussion of development progress.

Players do not deserve to be blindsided by announcements that incredibly popular facets of the game like SAB and dungeons will not be receiving developer attention for the foreseeable future. That’s not information that should be handed out in interviews as if it’s obvious to community.

I think the community would be far more tolerant of design goals not being met on time than Arenanet management believes. All of the issues with the community recently seem to be the result of management at Arenanet failing to properly inform the community on the direction the game is heading.

If management were to return to quarterly (or hell, even yearly) state of the game posts, I think you would see much less discontent in the community over the direction of the game. Put out a blog post stating, "we’d like to do x, y, and z this quarter (or even year) and we’re making no guarantees that x, y, z come out on time, that they come out in the exact form we’ve detailed here, or that they’ll be released at all. "

Management has a catastrophic misunderstanding of its community if it does not believe the community is capable of understanding those conditions. We are not children and we realize that goals are not always met and changes mid-production are often necessary. We prefer to be informed and expect change in the plan than to be left in the dark.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

celestial is meant to have unbalanced stats because they do not focus on 3 stats but all stats instead.

non celestial stats may have lower overall numbers, but they are more focused.

i.e.
soldier, berzerker, Valkyrie will always have highest stat in power.

it is all working as intended.

Problem is, runesets like Strength + Hoelbrak allows these hybrid specs to pack nearly as much overall power as a Soldier spec with much more condi damage and as much (or more) defensive potential .

@Devs: In terms of total stat points provided, the breakdown is as follows:

Celestial amulet gives:3038
Berserker amulet gives:2340
Any other amulet:2208

Celestial stats in PvP give 27% more stats than any other type of amulet, and have become incredibly popular in Warrior + Ele + Engi + Ranger builds. Combined with might-stacking runes, this amulet allows hybrid specs to have significant amounts of Condi + Direct damage with large amounts of sustain. Does the balance team feel Celestial amulets are becoming a problem and do they have any plans to balance the Celestial amulet so that it does not provide more total stats than any other amulet?

Seiishizo.7162:

Well I wouldn’t say its OP or not. I would say it is unbalanced.

Lets look at the following numbers.

Celestial amulet gives:3038
Berserker amulet gives:2340
Any other amulet:2208

Celestial amulet gives 27% more stats then a non berserker amulet….

Thanks for this post. It hadn’t ocurred to me that Cele grantes almost a 1/3 more stats than other amulets. That strikes me as really odd, and definitely unbalanced.

mooty.4560:

It’s tough to argue against the merits of using celestial builds but not every weapon set suits them. i.e. you probably don’t want to play longbow ranger with celestial as it’s hard to bring the damage up to par as it is. You might also have some wasted investment, for instance, healing power on the hambow spec doesn’t scale much despite having ~700+ on average with celestial.

For the moment, I wouldn’t call them entirely OP since other amulet specs(i.e. berzerker/soldier/rabid) are still the norm. If, however, at some point in the future it’s all you see.. then I’d say it’s time to look at scaling them back a bit.

You’d be surprised actually, longbow/GS (or S/D) with Read the Wind, Sun Spirit, cele gear, and runes of the pack is a already an absolute bear to deal with 1v1. Once the Longbow is buffed next balance patch, it’s going to be an excellent solo queue spec.

Take a look through some of the builds from this weekend’s Euro qualifier. Except for dedicated bunker guards, the majority of specs are running Celestial hybrids with Strength, Hoelbrak, or Pack runes.

During the massive condi meta of summer 2013, players complained that stat combos like Rabid allows players to have too much sustain + damage at the same time. Does the stat distribution of Celestial have a similar damaging effect, by allowing players to obtain significant amounts of direct damage, condi damage, and sustain in a single spec?

^ Ran into this issue myself. I’m at 29/30 and I’ve been to each of the 30 coins (i marked + listed them to make sure i didn’t miss any).

Charak.9761:

actually endure pain shouldn’t decap

Currently you can contest points with Endure Pain up though really you shouldn’t be able to do so considering other forms of invulnerability (Mist form, Renewed Focus, Distortion, Elixer S) and stealth do not allow you to contest points..

Lilith Ajit.6173:

Serious note: If I fractal and I see more than one guild member, I screen shot all account names. Also I screen if anything funky happens in chat. I’ve not once been kicked, but I am ready for it. I never do this for regular dungeons, but fractals just eat up so much time it’s foolish to not protect yourself. I also usually start my own group and instance. These things can prevent getting kicked and losing progress (unless anet wants me to lose progress)

Make sure to announce in team chat that you’ve screenshotted all party members as well and will be filing a ticket if anyone is kicked on the last fractal

gesho.9468:

and whats with this parrot and rock dog

Parrot has a massive pile of health and the rest of the stats on the runeset buff might

Evan Lesh.3295:

We did ship with 3 round round tournaments with 8 teams and rewards were based on placement. However, the barrier to entry was high and queue times were long. Having a structured (in-game) way to support multi-round tournaments again would be fun though.

Perhaps implement scheduled (3x a day?) automated swiss-style tournaments in the fashion that GW1 has used for GvGs (and hero battles) for 6-7 years now? Swiss style makes it so that the number of rounds depends on the # of teams that sign up, and if you get >16 or 32 teams signing up you can have Swiss rounds leading to a single-elimination round for the top 8 teams

Melee Push occurs always when attacking inside of “max-melee” range. When you’re at the range where there red “out-of-range” bar appears underneath your skills, but you can still hit the boss you’re in the “max-melee” range. At that point you can still hit the NPC with melee weapons but they will not be pushed by your attacks.

.