Guild Wars 2

Gate of Madness and Sorrow’s Furnace, transfer to another server (for this week) where WvW is actually fan. I had a blast fighting for Maguuma.
Let Yak’s farm some mats in peace and quiet.

Can’t even get a tower at our own borderlands. Oh well, guess I’m transferring too, since all who I knowed already did that.

To GoM: use this to as your guide where WvW actually is. I’m going to Maguuma.

To Yak’s: have fun with killing skritts.

Well, I know my server and people there, so I really doubt GoM can make comeback after this. Almost all our commanders just ran like little girls during last week. So, a glorious day of second tier from the bottom is coming. Sigh…

=__________=

GoM, mate, please have a habit to check taken keeps for mesmers inside before rushing to another keep. It was embarrassing.

Titles

But yeah, it’s not enough and kill count works kinda silly in GW2. I’d like to see weekly/monthly leaderboard, but this won’t going to happen anywhere soon.

Ya, let’s make night capping more easier than it already is.

Merlin Dyfed Avalon.5046:

Basicly necro is, as it is now, a support class wich also means there is little to no loot to pick up.
…
I tagged somany people in pvp with conditions, crippled many people rushing tried to convert boons etc, etc.. no rewards gained, no deaths recorded no use playing necro..

That part is quite untrue.

Tyaen.5148:

You’re laziness is also ignorance. If you read this or any number of other threads you’d understand that doesn’t work.

Either that or you just assume everyone experiencing this issue are complete moron’s who hadn’t thought of these most basic steps already.

Well, that was rude.

It works for me. I’m not saying dots are visible all the time, but in this 3 seconds window when thief forced to come out from stealth (but not rendering) I can see them.
It’s the same thing as SM large battles, at least in my situation – I can’t see a thing, but I still can target with tab and see damage numbers.

As for tracking thieves all the time, for necro with his marks it’s possible (traits: Greater Marks + Staff Mastery).

Some good soul made an awesome list of all food.

So, for me it’s Rare Veggie Pizza the best choice. As a Condition Necro I can use those +40% Condition duration and +70 Condition damage.

TheFinal.9847:

How can I report this people?

Reach the stars
fly a fantasy
Dream a dream and what you see will be.

Well, you can complain and all, but for the time being start using map more often, it can provide you with almost all information you want.

And if the chat is quiet – start coordinating your team by yourself and people will join. If it won’t help – transfer to another server.

Again, how exactly it’s commanders’ fault?

CriSPeH.8512:

Its easy.

1. See Zerg.
2. Run from Zerg.
3. Exit WvW.
4. On Friday after reset enter WvW and have fun for 2 days.
5. If your team isn’t dominating by Sunday nite…refer back to #1

Hate those people.

Gate of Madness.
5 people defending a keep at NA night.

Where are you going get Final Rest, if it’s not a secret?

Ping.
Americans have maybe most kitteniest internet connection right now.

Ouroboros.6483:

The least drastic fix would be to double or triple the existing outmanned buff.

+60% free magic = BvB.

Q:

1. What are the hardest bugs to fix?
2. When it comes to the priority of fixing bugs, do you fix the easiest ones, the most important ones (even if they are hard) or both?
3. How many people do you have working on fixing bugs?

A: (ArenaNetHabib)

1. The ones that we can’t reproduce in house, or that happen only very, very rarely, and don’t result in an actual crash. From a player perspective crashes suck but they’re great when you’re trying to fix a bug because it’s often pretty clear what’s going on (and we get all kinds of good data from crash reports). If there’s a nasty, infrequent bug that doesn’t result in a crash it’s like hunting a ghost spy while wearing a blindfold.
2. We always try to focus on the most important bugs (which are also generally some of the hardest) but it can be nice to take a break from a giant bug and spend an hour fixing something that’s relatively easy. It’s good for the game and programmer morale.
3. All of them. Seriously, everybody is always responsible for fixing bugs in their code (or their content if they are designers). Of course we also have people working on new features, but since making a new feature generally includes making some new bugs they’re also fixing bugs as they go (ideally, and usually, well before those bugs go live). That’s just how programming works. Actually, that’s just how game development works. I’m pretty sure even the writers fix bugs.

A: (ArenaNetMike)

1. The hardest bugs to fix, by far, are the ones we can’t reproduce in house. If a crash only affects 0.01% of players, that means we might never see it ourselves, but could still end up seeing thousands of players with the issue.
2. Certainly the most visible and game-breaking bugs are worked on first, but we also look for low-hanging fruit that can improve the game for players without a lot of effort on our part.
3. There’s no fixed number who only work on bugs. We work on fixing things, making new features, or improving other parts of the game.
   __________________________

Q: (full question)

1. Can we please get a WvW queue number? This would REALLY help, especially since it’s gotten long on my server since we started winning more. Probably part of why we’re winning more.
2. Can you discuss if anything in the works (design or otherwise) to help with WvW queues, outside of swapping servers? Maybe more maps, overflow, or some sort of WvW guesting mode? Technically feasible?
3. edit: (sorry, steam of consiousness) How some form of way to get to the front of the line, with limited use? Say, allow a guild to skip to the front of the queue one night a week. Players can only use during one period of time so as to avoid multi-guild abuse. I’ve only spent about 15 seconds so haven’t thought it through, and this is more of a design thing, but this would allow casuals to better-plan a WvW night with their guild. Technically feasible, though?
4. I understand guesting would have to be done carefully so as not to mess up balance in a tight WvW match, but could also be great. Maybe only allow players to guest to “undermanned” servers or those who are behind on total or current points. Could help create more balanced matches, and maybe you could even put a small price on it, for either the joining players (pay to have no queue!) or the ones being joined (undermanned? hire mercenaries!).

A: (cameronjdunn)
Hmmm this is probably secret, but we’re all friends here! We have something in development which will greatly increase the number of people who can play WvW at the same time.
I think that answers most of your questions…

Not, it’s not >__>
__________________________

And this is pretty much it. There might be more answers later, but most of the team went off.
AMA has about 80-90 answers from programming team. Some answered questions are interesting, some of them are not (especially “teach me, sensei” ones). I think I posted here all WvW related answers.

Well. At least we got a one honest answer about rendering issue.

Defending donkeys gives you nothing.
Killing one – exp, karma and gold.

No wonder there’re so many karma trains in WvW and zerging is the only way to get some fun as a pug.

zerospin.8604:

30 vs 5? Call for help and start planning an escape route lol.

Pretty much ^

Oh, and Condition Necro can alone push nasty zerg from gates with his AoE. Not for long, but it can buy some time for reinforcement to arrive.

Well, there’s no really any other good format for this depth of conversations. AMA on this forum would be just horrible, at least on reddit you can quickly find answers, upvote good questions and downvote bad ones.

From technical standpoint mid-90’s forum design is the only one that can handle such amount of data.
But this is offtopic.

Q: (most upvoted question)
Any plan to implement multiple trait set? Because we need to use different traits for PvE, Dungeons and WvWvW.

A: (cameronjdunn)
That would be cool. I’d use that! We have a lot of things on the “cool to do” list though – we’re working through it!
——-

Q (full version):
With the rampant botting in GW2, what is the current status of fighting the botters and hackers? These same botters are using slots in WvW and is a part of the reason there are queues there. I’ll also add the hackers that cheat on WvW(fly-hack to orb, speedhacks). You can read these things in the official forums and other forums.

Is the stealth mechanic how ANet thought it would be used? (Mainly WvW)

(WvW) Dead players(Not downed) have a huge advantage of being scouts, are there any plans to give dead players a black screen(a la Counter-strike) or force them to waypoint?

…

Server balancing is a major problem in WvW right now, people think that the free transfers are one of the major reasons this is happening. When will free transfers stop and when will guesting start?

A: (ApochPiQ)
Apologies in advance for only hitting one of your questions, but I’m not certain of the answers to the rest of them, so ;-)

As for bots: we’re very reluctant in general to discuss our strategy publicly because we don’t want to tip our hand; however, I can say that we have a lot of great progress in detection and prevention in the pipeline, and we should start seeing a noticeable decrease in botting over the next few weeks.

So, Nevron was right >_>
——-

Q:
Why are you guys doing an AMA when you should be bug fixing?
I jest, I jest. I don’t really have an actual question, I just wanted to say ‘kudos’ and well-done for a great game. :]
EDIT:
01 – What, in your opinion, has been the most difficult feature/element of the game to program in?
02 – Which feature/element’s coding are you most proud/pleased with?

A: (ArenaNetHabib)
Well, I’m actually off today as I prepare to have surgery later this afternoon, so I wouldn’t be fixing bugs right now anyway :P

I think one of the most difficult things about working on a game like Gw2 is just the sheer scale of the thing. It is a massive undertaking, and the more code that has already been written and the more systems that have already been designed, the harder it becomes to take things in a completely new direction. But, of course, new directions are generally where all the new cool stuff happens, so we end up doing that a lot and it’s quite a challenge at times. Which is probably why I love it so much

I’m proud of a lot of my work on Gw2, but I’ll pick two relatively specific things:
1) Trebuchets! This wasn’t a huge amount of code or anything. We already had projectiles, etc., but making the change that let them have such a super long range was really, really satisfying. My screensaver at work is actually a bunch of screenshots that I took in a row of one of our first trebuchet tests. It’s like a flip-book of awesome!

2) I’m pretty kitten proud of the conversation system. It’s flexible, stable, clean, and relatively easy for designers to use. It’s also a fairly complete state-machine based scripting language which puts a lot of power into the hands of designers who then make amazing things with it. So that’s pretty cool
——-

Q:
What technical issue was the most interesting for you to solve with Guild Wars 2? Making an MMO of this scale couldn’t have been easy!

A: (ArenaNetHabib)
For me the most interesting set of issues (there’s always more than one) have been associated with WvW. It’s a very different game type from our PvE game in many ways and required us to build systems to support a new kind of server-to-server communication (which is how we get 4 maps that behave a bit like 1 map in terms of markers, etc.), game state serialization, world interconnection (so the different worlds can fight), etc.

Well, there are plenty of ingame content questions, it’s just mostly “teach me, sensei” get answered. If it take all the time I’ll hate reddit fanboys even more >__>

Q: Is the culling issue in WvW (making other players invisible for sake of server/client issues) going to get better? Do you like the state that it is currently in?

A: (cameronjdunn) Actually we have plans to improve this a lot. The biggest problem is making sure that we don’t send too much data down to the client and make people on slower connections lag out. But we think this is solvable, we’re on it.
Cam

another dev’s reply to ^: (ArenaNetHabib) See, this is how it goes, I write up this giant reply and then Cam totally ninjas me with the tl;dr version :P

Better Answer: (ArenaNetHabib)
The issues with invisible players in WvW comes down to a couple of factors. One is to do with when the servers notify any given client about other characters in the game (I’ll call this reporting/culling) and the other deals with the time it takes the client to present the character on the screen after it has received that notification (I’ll call this asset load).
The asset load issue is all about how quickly the client can show you something it knows it should show you. We’re looking in to ways that we can make that process faster, but it’s always going to take non-zero time. However, that’s not where the bulk of the invisible players come from. For that we have to look at the reporting/culling side of things.
In the situation where the local population density is relatively low, when another character comes in reporting range of your character the server sends a notification to your client with all of the data that it will need to track and render that character. That includes appearance data, race, gender, profession, weapon sets, etc. etc. It’s an easy model to think about and works well, until the local population density goes up. When there are a lot of characters in reporting range we start to get into a situation where, under the current system, there’s an overwhelming amount of data to send to the client (hello n-squared problem!) – after all, resources like client CPU/Memory/etc. and bandwidth are finite. In order to deal with this situation we elected to change the criteria for reporting characters slightly. Rather than just using a fixed range we instead also limit reporting to the closest N characters. By doing this we help to ensure that we’re not overwhelming the available bandwidth and, since clients clearly can’t draw or process characters they don’t know about, we get some savings on client performance “for free”. This works out pretty well in PvE and doesn’t seem, at least as far as I can tell, to have a detrimental impact on gameplay.
Unfortunately in WvW, where large battles are quite common, we find that players are bumping into these limits quite often and the effect has a real, and unfortunate, impact on the gameplay experience. Do I like the state that it’s currently in? No, honestly I don’t. WvW has been my baby (though not mine alone!) for quite a while now and I really want to see EPIC battles play out in all of their glory. If there was a switch I could flip to just make this work then I would have flipped the hell out of it by now, believe me. However, when you’re dealing with resource utilization issues like this there are rarely any easy answers. I’m currently, actively looking into what exactly our options are in this regard. The fix is likely to be large-ish in scope, with changes on both the client and server, but we have some ideas that look like they may work out. So, will it get better? I can’t make any promises because we’re still experimenting and building new tech, but as a person who works on this every day I certainly believe that it can and will do everything in my power to make that happen.

It just started

Nah. They’re actually answering questions over there: 6/6/2012 Reddit ANet AMA

arena.net/blog

With Guild Wars 2 out the door, our programmers wanted to take a some time to answer the burning technical questions that players and aspiring (or current) game programmers may have about Guild Wars 2 and about working as a programmer at ArenaNet.

The Ask Me (Almost) Anything session will start at 10:00 AM Pacific Time on October 17 on the /r/gaming subreddit and will run for about two hours.

The initial post will come from the ArenaNet Team, and we’ll have ArenaNet Technical Director, Cameron Dunn, as well as most of our Guild Wars 2 programming team answering your questions. You’ll be able to ask our programmers technical questions about engines, tools, game play, and more!

Do you have a technical question about Guild Wars 2? Ask our programming team today on Reddit!

Original post.

I hope WvW community will prepare some questions about technical part WvW.

Hooray GW2 community, doing PvE stuff on massive PvP environment. Why do we need those towers anyway? Let’s just all be friends and farm some skritts and centaurs!

Until last man standing. If you’re dead – you’re dead for good.
Only 30+ man guilds can participate. Only 80 level players can enter.

On a new map. Every guild has a home-tower where they spawning.
Only one supply camp for 2 towers, so there be always fight for supply.
Without siege weapons and NPC camps.

I want this soooo badly. A really competitive massive PvP.
Sadly, this will never happen.
. . .

I like this idea.

“One color map” isn’t that scary as it looks. It might be just night capping, who knows. You can always try and take your land back.
But when you see a score “200k v 100k v 30k” there’s really no hope for comeback or even a point of trying. Majority will just wait for next match or transfer somewhere else.

etsmith.9025:

maybe this one .. ill just stack them up for you

There’s like 10 of your friends near.

He actually has armor, it’s just black (dark green?) while only his skirt is pink purple for some reason…

fractalKinesis.8569:

Turn the orb into a suicide bomb.
Problem solved.

Or load in a canon and nuke some keeps.

RayneOfChaos.9856:

nobody has problems with necros lol?

We have only two, maybe three possible good builds.
Half our skills and traits are just broken.
There’s no really good armor and accessories for condition necro (possibly our best build).
Worst downed state skills ever (only engi as bad as we are).
Minions, one of our specialties, have broken AI.
Etc-etc.

Right now 30 gold cost about 85$ to buy through gems. It’s more than a copy of the game itself.
And by the way, the codes I talked about are available starting from today. So they CAN generate at least gems. Gems = gold, gold = items.

Kodiack.2783:

You kitten sucking motherkittener.

I can even illustrate that and won’t get banned.

Awesome.
Once I wanted to do something like this, but then our zerg just killed the grub…

I call it “losers buff”.
Losers buff is not for helping.
It’s a sign for winning team to stop holding and zerg all your stuff.

Sadly, there’s way too much fanboyism right now to criticism be actually matter.
How many people are just playing the game? 2 millions? And how much of them on the forum? Doubt more than several thousand.
It’s just more profitable make a holiday expansion than just fixing bugs.

And now I’m sad.

Unlike imaginary world, you can sue banks for that kind of BS. Oh, wait…

Silly lie.
There’s a “redeem code” function in gem store, so there must be codes for gems. If Anet really wanted to compensate the loss – they would just generate a code and gave it to you. But they didn’t. Now, send them more cupcakes and write a post on reddit about how awesome they are.

Also, I found it unbelievable to developers actually be unable generate items. How then they tested stuff? Farming for legendary and killing each other for badges? Riiiight…

Anet doesn’t care. In fact, whole their office is laughing right now: “such great way of sinking gold! We should make those crashes more often”. True story.

This is why I turned off all game sounds. Can’t stand this “whoom-whoom-hate-anet-whoom-whoom” nonsense. I had serious headache because of this.

Don’t worry, it’s just a bug. I’m sure Anet fix it in next 3 months.

There’s no way in hundred years Anet will remove downed state, face it. But there still a hope they’ll balance it. In next 5 years. Eventually. Maybe.

Necro.
We have WORST downed state skills: only one AoE and it’s #3 skill – poison for 3 sec. We can’t move and our fear only for single target.

Thieves – invisibility and teleport, ridiculous.
Ele – can move to safe place while in downed state.
Warriors – can get up for 15 sec before death.
Guardian – AoE #2 skill to push back enemies.
Ranger – AoE #2 daze skill + pets skills + pets can heal them.
Mesmers – clones, invisibility.

Only Engineers as bad as Necromancers, no good AoE or running/hide skills.
It’s just unbelievable how Anet screwed up to balance those 4 skills.

Well, it’s your problem then. WvW is PvP area and PvE-minded people are not welcome. Basically, you’re taking a place in queue for your PvE business when other people want to do legit WvW. Kinda selfish.

—

Btw, about me – I’m not attacking until someone attacks me (or any person from my team). If someone killed me – I’ll pay for it by killing this person (or just someone from their team). But again, this is PvP and blaming people for killing you there is last thing you have right to do.

It’s PvP jumping puzzle. Wait on the entrance for more people, make a group or two and kill them.

Don’t worry, WvW is ruining by itself pretty successfully.

I don’t blame Yak’s Bend, all is fair in love and war. They won, good for them. Now, it’s just another boring match where nothing really happens.

But I’ll blame GoM for lack of WvW guilds, teamship and ridiculous amount of PvE people, who showing up only when we have leading position.

Oh well. I have Dishonored to play.