Guild Wars 2

Given that from every location on Tyria we have ever been they’re able to experience the full orbit of the planet around the sun and can also see the stars – it’s a spherical planet. If Elona is equatorial, which it is heavily suggested to be, then Cantha would have to be on an interior plane of the torus, their view if it were would be quite different to what the rest of Tyria can see.

Almost all of the main areas/paths don’t require you to jump at all. The only exception to this is the very beginning of the map which does require you to use the Zephyrite Crystal abilities. Everywhere else tends to follow the easiest possible path and you just walk there. If you following each living story chapter through that area the markers actually show you exactly how to get through.

Mental Paradox.3845:

Tyria is not a globe. It’s a Torus. A donut.

There’s absolutely no evidence to support that >.> (in fact most evidence points to the contrary, it would be a bit weird if a planet that’s littered with observatories had no clue that it was doughnut shaped). I’m going to assume that you’re saying that because the texture is a square… It’s a lot easier to make a square texture than one that will actually fit around a globe. Of course they could do it, but, as the giant map sitting right before me suggests, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having a square map; square maps are usually a little bit easier for people to comprehend.

New macs that have dedicated graphics cards seem to be able to run the OSX version of the game incredibly well at high settings with upwards of 50fps.

Slightly older macs (I have a late 2011 MBP which also has a 6750M graphics card) can run the game decently, but suffer quite a performance hit in comparison to running it in windows on the same machine.

The game is a cider port though, so it is Wine and suffers from the same limitations that Wine has.

It depends on when you downloaded the game I guess. The longer you’ve had the client the more little bits are left over. I’ve had the game since beta so my extra 2GB is probably leftover bloat that the client didn’t do an effective job of getting rid of :S

I’m not really willing to redownload the whole thing just for a slightly smaller client though xD.

Almost every single update added to the game is for players that are level 80. A lot of the recent LS updates contain throwbacks to GW1’s story. WvW has seen large updates: the EoTM map is a great example of that.

I seriously don’t know what you’re asking for.

They’re not just catering to the hardcore playerbase though. And if you consider yourself to be a casual player (Ravion Hawk) then perhaps you need to reconsider that exactly a casual player is.

The story chapters can be completed reasonably quickly, but once you factor in all of the achievements and the other content in each release it can actually take a truly casual player (which is a large portion of the player base) at least a week to complete everything.

No no no. Seriously, I have enough trouble seeing in that area as it is. Without looking at the minimap I would not have been able to navigate it. (and this is not a gamma or brightness issue, it’s just that dark to me).

It can vary a little in size, but mine is 22.34GB.

Where are you running the file from? (try the dekstop), and are you doing it with admin permissions?

You can’t res NPC’s for the achievement. You have to prevent them from dying. It is a really poorly done achievement and its one that I struggled over for a very very long time. Dulfy has a video guide which tells you which order to do it in and all I can reccomend is having a very high DPS build. I’m an ele and I had to completely change my build and gameplay style just for this one achievement… It was pretty frustrating.

Erukk.1408:

Talk about obvious placeholder names being obvious. Though, I’m looking forward to traveling to the exotic lands of: Wetlands, Arid, Gwen, Yeh, and Kim. I hear they’re wonder this time of year.

You forgot to add Dahye to your list; it’s also a staff members name

I’m sorry but what on earth is a 161 server? Not even google seems to know what you’re talking about…

Do it in a group. I did it in a group of three, and again in a group of five. It was ridiculously easy. Unfortunately a lot of the LS achievements aren’t super easy for solo play.

The percentage is for the amount of files, not the size of the files. It just means that some files are bigger than others, but each still only counts as a certain percentage regardless of their size.

The client is around 20GB in total.

The downloader tells you how many files are LEFT to download, meaning that each time you close and re-open it the % complete will be at zero – but it has still downloaded any files you’ve previously downloaded.

It’s exactly the same as the windows client. You’re not losing any download progress by restarting the client; it’s just showing you the percentage of downloaded files from the point at which you open the client – the download is, however, just continuing from where it left off.

Because one of the central mechanics of the thief is their ability to steal environmental weapons. Rogue is just as stupid a term. They should have stuck with Assassin, which is what we had in GW1 and essentially exactly what the Thief profession is based off. But it seems like they were trying to get rid of Canthan references so they named if Thief.

They outlined some of the changes they’re planning on making. They never said that the LS was going on a break so you can safely assume that we will get the next chapter on schedule.

Zaxares.5419:

Not quite, Foxx. With the Shoulders, you received them as the reward for completing the Hidden Arcana instance. This let you gain one Shoulder piece per alt that completed the Living Story chapter.

With the Gloves, you get it as the reward for completing the Living Story chapter achievement, making it only obtainable once per account. If you want the other two armor weights, you’ll either need to grind an additional 2000 Bandit Crests, or hope to get lucky from the Bandit Chests/Greater Nightmare Chest.

Ahh, thanks for the clarification. That’s pretty horrific. How many bandit crests are we expected to grind for the entire set I wonder. For anyone with only 1 level 80 that’s already 4000 bandit crests to grind.

The Labyrinth only pops up at the end of the breach event, and only it is successful. So I don’t really see the problem. I understand what you’re saying about it not being compelling content – I got sick of it very quickly – but I don’t think it has too much of a negative impact on the zone progress and it gives people a reason to actually participate in the events leading up to and including the breach.

I don’t understand. They haven’t changed how you get carapace armour pieces. The gloves are acquired in exactly the same was as the shoulder pieces were.

(If what you mean is that they should change how you get them… Well, maybe I agree?)

I completely get what you’re saying. But if you think of it as a continuation of the personal story, which it is meant to be, then being able to quit without having finished it doesn’t make much sense. You can’t quit the personal story, so you can’t quit the living story (with the exception of any subsequent play through of any chapter)

Casual player with a Celestial Ele… Yeah, I’m kind of torn on this. I don’t think it was a bad fight, but I don’t think it was good either.

The issue with inserting mechanics like that into a boss fight is that a player doesn’t have any idea whats going on. In an open world fight this is fine, you’re expected to do it multiple times and learn – but for a story fight you’re theoretically only going to be doing the fight 2 or 3 times (story + achievements). Players don’t want to spend a long time trying to work out the mechanics of a fight that is only really there to progress the story.

If you look back to most RPG games, the mechanics of boss fights are usually obvious. You should be able to figure out what you’re meant to be doing pretty quickly, either because it makes sense or because the game makes it obvious to you.

If you want to add complex mechanics to a boss fight then do it to the open world bosses. Having every single boss in the LS instances have completely different mechanics which in the end just make them frustrating fights for casual players who want to experience the story is… unsurprisingly… frustrating.

As I said, I don’t think it’s a bad fight. But I really wish they would stop chucking in mechanics for the sake of having mechanics. Not everyone is running a zerker build, and not everyone should have to run a zerker build, so please stop catering to them. Anyone with an slightly defensive build just gets stuck in fights that take a needlessly long time.

Yeah OpenGL has a far wider range of support since OpenGL can be run on Windows, OSX, Linux and the PS3/4 (unsure about Xbox? It’s Microsoft so would make sense if that was DirectX). From what I know there isn’t a huge difference between the two in terms of what the end user sees, the difference is in the resources/knowledge required to create games in them.

Unfortunately shifting a game from DirectX to OpenGL is, I believe, quite a heavy undertaking. So I guess it’s not very likely at all to happen :/

I would assume that if the character has not finished that episode the first time (which is essentially ‘story’ mode, since you can’t do achievements the first time) then the game counts it as their active story – similar to with the personal story. Which might explain why some people are unable to properly quit it.

Kurrilino is pretty much right, though I wouldn’t go quite that far.

Anet have pretty adamantly stated that their preferred method of content delivery is the Living Story, not a traditional expansion. Unless they’ve been working on an expansion behind the scenes, which would make their adamant denial of doing so kind of strange, then there isn’t going to be an expansion any time soon.

With that said, however, it’s possible that they might concede that the Living Story isn’t being received as well as they had hoped and decide to move to an expansion based model. But if they were to do that it certainly would be a while before we saw anything come of it.

Could you just lift the restriction on 250 stacks. To get a lot of the rewards for the LS you have to acquire ridiculous numbers of stacks of things so it’s becoming a real problem.

The bank should be for storing any armour pieces or weapons that we aren’t using, not for having to store all of the LS currencies, blood stone bricks, etc.

kalash.2375:

Incorrect Krall !, The ritualist armor specifically the headpiece is referred to as a “head wrap” as it covers the top of the skull and covers the eyes, in the sense it is not a traditional “blindfold” that is sourced from the Char NPC at Cathedral of Flames.

Scorch and burn?

It’s still a blindfold… Ritualists close their eyes during combat. Just because it wasn’t until EoTN that an item specifically called “blindfold” turned up, doesn’t mean that they didn’t functionally exist in the game or lore before that point.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

There already is a forum for Patch Notes…and whenever it is updated, it changes from greyed-out (if you have previously read it) to black. And it sits directly below the Announcement sub-forum.

I’m not sure what difference it would make moving it to a different sub-forum.

Now, if you are suggesting it be given the ‘Big Red Splash’ treatment that ‘Announcements’ gets, I suppose they could do that. Though, I would hope we, as a playerbase, consider ourselves bright enough to see that there are new patch notes when the, as stated above, sub-forum has new posts.

I don’t recall suggesting it be moved to a subforum… I’m not talking about moving the patch notes, I’m talking about utilising the “announcements” box on the front page of the forums that is frequently empty for having a link to the latest patch notes.

With a lot of the new LS releases Anet have started putting subsequent patches/bug fixes underneath the initial release – even if they’re days afterwards – so it isn’t always obvious that something has been patched and people miss them.

It’s still a way of ensuring that more people can see it, or at least that more people know when there’s been a patch. Obviously it makes little difference to those who already read the patch notes and it only affects those who go on the forums – but I still think it would be nice to have the announcements column actually used to show people when there’s been a patch.

Forcing players to have to manually sheath/unsheath weapons is a bad idea. It doesn’t add anything to gameplay, it simply forces players to go through a button press every time they want to battle – the game assumes that you need to sheath a weapon in order to use it so it does this for you automatically.

This has bugged me for a long long time. On the front page of the forums on the right hand side is an “Announcements” section, it seems like the perfect place to put a quick link to the patch notes each time the game is updated. Why isn’t it used for that? A lot of the time there is absolutely nothing in there, and right now there’s just one thing – some WvW tournament.

Can we please put a link to patch notes in the announcements? It would possibly mean that more players actually see the patch notes and have a clue what’s going on in the game. This is especially an issue when there are smaller, post update, patches – a lot of players miss these and then you get 20+ threads popping up in the forums about how Silverwastes has suddenly become a wasteland and people asking what happened to the Amber chest farm.

lordkrall.7241:

Can we really base such thing in a fantasy world on real world knowledge?

Well it would be nice to be able to base them on something. Yes it is of course always to be assumed that fantasy worlds don’t always follow real world science because they’re worlds in which magic exists, but if you aren’t able to use any kind of real world science within those worlds then they become less and less plausible (and yes plausibility should be a concern within fantasy and it’s something the devs should consider). Yeah you can say ‘this jungle is now a desert because this is a fantasy world and erosion etc. don’t have to occur in the same time frame’, but the second you say something like that players begin to lose the ability to relate to and understand that world. It’s precisely why we have/like realistic relationships in fantasy, because it makes the world familiar to us.

Um. It does disappear O_O. Or at least it does for me. Have you maybe not finished that episode all the way through the first time? That’s the only reason I can think of for it not disappearing.

But for me, I open the story panel, click “quit this episode” and then change maps (if I don’t change maps the little markers still appear on the world map, but the quest tracker UI disappears completely).

They mean that the GW2 patches usually don’t come until later in the day (depending on what time zone you live in anyway). Also how fast they patch absolutely depends on your internet, and if you look at the average speeds in most countries that play on the NA and EU servers it’s going to take the majority of people a bit longer than 5 minutes.

Yeah Kalash, Eye of the North was the last GW release, well after the release of Factions which, as lordkrall points out, brought in Ritualists with blindfolds.

The world is not that huge, it’s not disrespectful to peoples time. You purchased the game in order to play the game – the game world, and all of the events in between waypoints, is part of that. If there was absolutely NOTHING in the world to do between WP’s then you would have a point, but what you encounter on maps, all of the enemies, JP’s, PoI’s, Vista’s and Skill Challenges – they’re undeniably part of the game. Exploration is part of the game, you can’t argue against that. You can say you don’t personally like exploration, but it is part of the game that players are intended to play – and most people have no issue with that and in fact a LOT of people enjoy it.

So basically what you want is to be able to go to any WP without playing the game and have instant level 80 characters. You’re asking to skip huge chunks of the game; which to me suggests this really isn’t the game for you. I’d love to see your statistical basis for “most people” skipping the main content of the game. If people want to level up through trains then that’s absolutely their choice, but being able to just skip the games content so that you don’t have to ‘waste your time’ playing the game is ridiculous.

Apparently some of the cutscenes can’t be skipped because they involve moving characters/objects around in real time. Though they managed it in GW1, so i’m not 100% sure what the problem is.

Earning the 10 points required for the Fiery Dragon Sword is going to require you to play a substantial amount of GW1. I strongly advise you use the free trial first and figure out if the game is something you’re actually interested in playing, because if you don’t like it then you’re not going to enjoy playing through it to get the sword – and if you don’t enjoy it then the monetary investment for that one sword isn’t really worth it.

So yeah, definitely try the trial first. As others have pointed out you need to purchase at least one campaign (Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall) and the expansion, Eye of the North. Nightfall tends to be the fastest/easiest GW game to solo if you’re just looking to buy one.

I’m sorry what. Why should people be able to just pay to unlock waypoints instead of actually playing the game. Next thing you know people will be asking to pay gold to insta-level characters to 80 because ‘who wants to have to level multiple characters to 80 and have to spend hours playing all of that content’….

Either the second or the fifth one, but probably the fifth/last one – it’s the most cohesive look and it’s badkitten.

Olvendred has a point with the dragon champions. Dragon champions come in varying shapes and sizes. Zhaitan has had Norn champions, Tequatl, the Eye of Zhaitan. Jormag has had the Drakkar lake dragon/leviathan thing, the Nornbear, and the Claw. So there is nothing stopping the DSD from having some terrestrial or aerial champions who could cause some major issues.

neilug hyuga.5634:

In order to save the humanity, to discover and learn more about Dragons, we actually need to go in Cantha.

Where on earth did you pull that from. There is nothing to suggest that Canthans have any knowledge of the Elder Dragons – and given that it is a continent populated by Humans and Humans came to the planet of Tyria WELL after the Dragons fell asleep after their most recent rise they’re unlikely to have any knowledge that will help. And as I said in my post they’re incredibly unlikely to aid Tyrians in their fight against the Elder Dragons because they are xenophobic and aren’t going to want to have anything to do with the other races who the humans of Tyria rely incredibly heavily on in the fight against the dragons. Tyrian Humans need the Charr, Asura, Norn, and Sylvari a lot more than they need the Canthans…

Rebound, Lordkrall is absolutely correct. He’s not using the in game ‘Champion’ term for enemies that are a step up from Veterans. He’s using actual lore of Dragon Champions showing that they come in varying shapes and sizes… Go look at the link he posted.

Tanner Richards.2134:

I am hopeing this dragon egg will hatch when the 5 races have it and it could be a new elder dragon but on our side and give people a new power which can be the new proffesion for the game

It’s Glint’s child. It might become an Elder Dragon, but I don’t see how on earth her child would be born as an Elder Dragon. We’ve seen one of her children before, it definitely wasn’t an Elder Dragon

BlackBeard.2873:

I’m surprised nobody brought this up, but WoodenPotatoes on youtube has some great videos on guild wars 1 and the lore.

Nobody brings it up because I guess general consensus is that WP gets things wrong/puts a lot of his own conjecture into his videos. Which is fine, but if you’re trying to objectively introduce someone into the lore of the GW universe, then having errors and opinions presented as if they’re fact can get a little problematic because other people start spreading false ideas. (But I do really like his videos and he seems like a greta guy with a genuine enthusiasm for the lore)

Perhaps she wanted that… Caithe is supposed to have a secret, one that Scarlet (who was hearing Mordremoth in her head) knew about. Maybe she wanted to give away our position? Who knows.

If anything I think the effect duration on the other legendaries should be reduced, the Bifrost seems like it is in a good place, the others are obnoxious.

The issue with opening up Cantha and Elona is that it would draw players away from existing content in Tyria and detract focus from the dragons that we already know about. Arguably Mordremoth does the same thing, but I think it’s quite likely that Mordremoth was the answer to bringing in a new dragon that could be defeated without creating discontinuities on the existing maps.

Yes you can go on about the DSD – but the reality is that we don’t know WHERE in the ocean it is, there is absolutely nothing indicating that it is between Tyria and Cantha. The reason we couldn’t sail to Cantha is because of Zhaitan’s dead ships. Yes Zhaitan has been defeated and his minions numbers reduced, but his minions aren’t gone and presumably that means the dead ships are still there as well (and the lore suggests that his power is leaching out into the world and making his leftover minions stronger). And sure you could take some airships and go over to Cantha. But as lordkrall has pointed out there is no substantial reason to do so.

Last we knew Cantha was completely xenophobic, so if you were hoping for their help in defeating the Elder Dragons then you’re probably out of like. There is zero chance of them working with the other races. And yeah, we could march off down into Elona – but Kralk is in the way (I suspect that when they eventually decide to let us go after Kralk parts of Elona will open up), and Palawa Joko pretty much has the entire area enslaved. So on top of fighting the Elder Dragons that are already terrorising Tyria, you want us to go off and add another incredibly powerful enemy to our list of things to deal with?

I know people really want Cantha and Elona, I REALLY want them as well. But Arenanet hasn’t been doing so great with the storytelling in GW2 (in my opinion), and rushing off out to other continents when we have threats here that already need immediate attention is just going to turn the story into even more of a clusterkitten than it already is. So guys, can we just be patient. All signs point to them eventually wanting to open up Cantha and Elona, but there’s plenty of content for them to release between this point and a time when that is going to make sense.

(Also connecting with a xenophobic group of humans isn’t going to strengthen humanity. The humans of Tyria have strong and invaluable bonds that have been forged over a large period of time with all of the other races – even the Charr; encountering humans who completely disagree with those bonds is more likely to start a war, at the very least Canthans wouldn’t want the other races coming anywhere near Tyria, and they probably wouldn’t want to go there either. So what are you going to do? Open up an entire continent that has gameplay that only human characters can play? I don’t think so. Also what on earth makes you think that Cantha has technology that exceeds anything on Tyria. I would actually say it could be quite likely that the opposite is true. The Kurzicks and Luxons were dissolved and had their culture oppressed and eradicated by the Canthan ruler, so any technology they had is gone. And the Charr and Asura are incredibly adept scientists and engineers; there is absolutely nothing that points to Cantha having superior technology to Tyria. Your point is completely baseless)

In order for the lore to function pretty much every single MMO out there simplifies it so that, for the purposes of the story, you are the singular hero. It wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense in the lore for us to be so important if there were actually as many heroes as there are players running around. So for the purpose of the story, you’re the only one who exists (sort of… It’s a video game, they don’t put quite that much thought into this kind of stuff because it gets too complicated). It’s an MMO so they have to have group content, but it would be very difficult for them to account for that in lore. I assume that in GW2 it’s kind of the same as in FFXIV (though it’s never stated) where any time you have a group of people you are still the main, super important, hero person, while everyone else in our group are just other adventurers who are helping you out but are, for the purposes of the story, less important than you are.