Guild Wars 2

GW2 is trying something different. They have no plans for an expansion because they hope to introduce expansion like content through the living story. There’s nothing stopping them from adding a new class, profession or land through the living story, and besides advertising and box sales, there’s no point of an expansion.

There’s no reason to expect one of the old continents to appear anytime soon, because the first one isn’t even complete. There’s still many areas left to explore, and at the current rate, the old continents may actually never happen. Will they ever actually tell you that they never plan on implementing them? No, because they’re something that could happen, they just currently don’t have any plans for them, just like expansions. Additionally, they don’t like detailing future plans because people would only complain about broken promises when it doesn’t come true, even though a promise was never made.

Lastly, if it was up to NCSoft, ArenaNet would have released an expansion, because that is what they expected, as mentioned in their earnings report almost a year ago, which ArenaNet had to clarify. More recently, they have stated that there is no decision on an expansion and it won’t be looked into until after the Chinese release.

Hard mode would be pointless for open world content because it wouldn’t be hard mode for the majority, it would be zerg mode.

Pie Flavor.1647:

Whenever I hear “lol twilight is ugly” or “lol everyone has a twilight” or “legendaries take no skill, there’s nothing legendary about it”, all I see is someone bitter because they can’t have what I have, and that just gives much more value to what I have, even if nobody is ever going to admit that.

Any casual player can obtain a legendary if they want to. After about 6 months of only playing a few hours a day, I obtained more than enough resources to craft one, without ever specifically trying to or even farming in general. I just play the game.

Legendaries take no skill to acquire and Twilight has, since the first month, been far too common. Purple SAB weapons will be more legendary than legendaries. Imo, there should be a legendary path for each aspect of the game (WvW, SPvP, dungeons, JPs, crafting, etc) that requires you to specialize.

PvP only. If you want it in PvE, you’ll have to obtain it through PvP and then wait for the wardrobe.

Travis the Terrible.4739:

If it takes you a week to get 100 gold in gw2 you’re either playing 1/2 hours a day and afking half of that time or you’re not doing anything besides sitting in town.

If I can make roughly 15g a day while actually playing (not sitting in town) in a matter of an hour and a half you’re doing it wrong.

So…

100g/week must be mostly AFKing for 30 minutes

vs

105g/week requires 1.5 hours of actual playing

The temples will not be changed. Each instance of the map will have its own temple status and you will not be able to determine this status until you enter the map. Unlike other boss events, they are not on scheduled timers “since they heavily influence the content ecosystem that they exist in.” (from the news post)

Unless they release a new API that supports querying by the map instance id, rather than the world id, you won’t be able to determine their status. Even if you rely on manual updates, there could be overflows.

With the ability to level by practically doing anything, a lot of players never actually learn how to play the game. I’ve seen many players not know basic mechanics, like what to do when downed or what a combo is. Back during Queen’s Gauntlet, I even had a warrior ask me how I was “dodging” without dodging. The funny part was, he was in t3 dyed black/white and had twilight. This is what happens when people aren’t forced to solo high level content and instead are given the option to zerg everything.

Regardless of being a leveling option, an area to teach the basics is needed and it should be something people want to do, to encourage everyone to do it, rather than skip it.

Although this would never happen, it’d be great if there was a training area specifically setup to challenge all aspects of your class and your ability to play. On completion of these tests, you’d be assigned a rank based on your performance, which would be used when matching players.

Outfits are a workaround. Each armor weight uses different texture alignments and each piece has to fit into a specific section of a larger texture. Because of this, they can’t just copy and paste armor between weights. Outfits bypass this problem by entirely replacing the main section (chest/legs) of the texture.

In order for single pieces to become outfits, they would have to be merged with something else, or you will end up with a shirt and no pants on. By making single pieces tonics, they’re basically cheating the system, making another workaround.

To properly fix this, they would have to redo these single pieces for each armor weight, which may cause modifications to the look of the piece. I wouldn’t think this would take much time to accomplish, but I guess they deemed it not worth the time and complaints (changes, clipping, etc), or they don’t want all weights using a similar look, even though outfits will causes this.

You have to bind the skin in order to unlock it (equip, use or salvage). If you forge them now and sell it after the patch, you won’t get any skins. If you equip, then forge them after the patch, you will get both twilight and sunrise unlocked and get to sell eternity, assuming they keep it sellable.

Back in my day, guilds would claim keeps and actually defend them. Over time, guilds would get to know each other and rivalries would be created, causing a war between guilds in open world PvP. If the guild wanted to do something smaller and more fair, they would queue together and do PvP matches.

Just because there isn’t a “queue for GvG” option doesn’t mean there isn’t guild wars. If you want a war, create one.

If the armor is ascended, it will be account bound. If you just want to copy the skin, you can do so through the wardrobe.

It’s probably just a empty slot for future purposes. I assume it’ll be filled sometime during season 2, if they actually introduce a new zone.

Why not just either leave it as TBD or disable it. Personally, I don’t include unknown events and instead, use an updateable list while also allowing the user to insert their own. Don’t just hardcode it, because there’ll be even more added in the future, as well as temporary ones.

Apparently they’ll just be deleted.

Tyler Chapman:

I suggest to open all your chests, don’t just leave them unopened as they will be deleted.

I would have expected them to make a bigger deal out of it if they were actually going to delete them though.

Ryan.9387:

I’m pretty sure you can call count=0 and then you will get a thing which shows the current number of orders. Then call count=that number to get a bloated chunk of json text. At least that is how it works for checking buy/sell orders.

That works when searching listings, but your history is limited to 100 at a time, regardless of what count you put.

During the ready up stream, Colin touched on everything being random (gathering nodes specifically) due to megaservers, and how their original intention was for it to be like this to reward explorers. Every time you enter a zone, it’s supposed to be different and something to explore. If you assume this is the truth and not marketing to make a loss look better, the idea of having a real time event API makes no sense.

With the change to transmutation stones, they’ll probably end up removing them from map completion. Now you’ll get… unidentified dyes.

Tutorial

How to pull your complete bought or sold history. Instead of making a single click app to do it, here’s how to do it through your web browser.

1. Obtain your in-game session key

With the game running, open the trading post. Once open, press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC to bring up the Windows Task Manager. Under the processes tab, look for the process awesomium_process.exe. This will only appear while the trading post is open.

Once located, right click and select Open File Location to open the folder in Windows Explorer. Within the gw2cache folder that was just opened, there should be a data folder and within that, a Cookies file. Open Cookies using notepad.

Search the Cookies file for the following: tradingpost-live.ncplatform.nets

There should be a series of number and letters with dashes, which ends with a /. That is the session key that you want to make a copy of.

For example:

tradingpost-live.ncplatform.netsXXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX/

Your key is: XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX

2. Accessing the trading post

Depending on what web browser you use (IE, FireFox, Chrome), you may encounter minor differences, but they should all work. For this example, I used FireFox.

Open your web browser and go to https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net

It should display ERROR: Invalid Authorization.

Press F12 to open the web console. You want to find the input section of the console, which is usually noted by a textbox containing “>” and/or a run button.

You will need your session key from before. In the console, input the following, using your own session key:

document.cookie="s=XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX"

Refresh the webpage and you should now see the trading post.

3. Accessing your history

There are two types, “buy” and “sell”
There are two times, “now” and “past”

The following url will display 100 item’s that you have bought:

https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/me.json?time=past&type=buy&offset=1&count=100

Only 100 items will be displayed at a time. To view them all, you must increment the offset until you reach the total amount.

Instead of doing it manually, go back to the web console and input the following code:

var listings = [];

var doRequest = function(type,offset)
{
 listings = [];

 var _doRequest = function(type, offset)
 {
  var xmlhttp=new XMLHttpRequest();

  xmlhttp.onreadystatechange=function()
  {
   if (xmlhttp.readyState==4 && xmlhttp.status==200)
   {
    var e = JSON.parse(xmlhttp.responseText);

    listings = listings.concat(e.listings);

    console.log(parseInt(e.args.offset) + e.listings.length + " of " + e.total);

    if (e.listings.length == 100)
    {
     _doRequest(type, parseInt(e.args.offset) + 100);
    }
    else
    {
     document.body.innerHTML = JSON.stringify(listings);
    }
   }
  }

  xmlhttp.open("GET","https://tradingpost-live.ncplatform.net/ws/me.json?time=past&type="+type+"&offset="+offset+"&count=100",true);
  xmlhttp.send();
 }
 _doRequest(type, offset);
}

Once inputted, run the following to iterate through all bought items:

doRequest("buy",1)

… or all sold items:

doRequest("sell",1)

After running one of the above, it will display the result in JSON format as the webpage. Copy the text to notepad and save it, or do whatever you want with it.

“If you want to look further back into your transaction history, you’ll need to do so in the next two weeks!”

That sounds like the data will be deleted. They could archive it, but I doubt they would because of a minority.

If you want to simply save your history now though, you can do so by accessing the TP API using your in-game information.

This is something they could somewhat do behind the scenes by prioritizing low level players together when selecting overflows.

The current API could still work. All they need to do is replace the server ID with the instance ID in both the API and memory link, and optionally display it in-game somewhere.

If it’s not an outfit or a hat, it’s becoming a tonic. After April 15th, you may request a refund for any pieces that were turned into tonics.

^

[&AgGV+QAA][&AgGW+QAA][&AgGZ+QAA]

GW2 has used the “megaserver” concept from the start. All servers are just boundaries created on a much larger server that everyone is on. Maps are dynamically created to support the amount of people required and kept alive for everyone to access, as long as 1 person was on it. Because people were separated by severs, multiple maps were created to fit individuals when only 1 was truly needed. This ended up being a waste of resources, though it did save bandwidth, and even though they had the “megaserver” tech from the start, they chose not to do anything.

1. Servers are being consolidated by removing the boundaries, but servers are not being merged, like what you would see in older generation MMOs, because they already are.

2. Maps that are always in overflow will remain always in overflow. The only difference is that you will now be prioritized to the overflow that contains the most amount of your friends, guild members and home server players.

3. The goal is to make the game feel alive by making zones more populated, rather than spread amongst several instances. On a technical level, the megaserver system is just the overflow system by another name. The only difference is that now there aren’t multiple near empty instances of the same map to waste resources.

I assume the megaserver concept will basically be overflows without main servers, meaning no, you can’t get a empty map, or at least not for long. Too bad though, considering some things are faster to solo than to play with a terrible zerg of leeching AFKers.

Max Lexandre.6279:

The big problem with WvW, sadly will continue with low pop servers.

“We’ll also be discussing the long-term plan for WvW in relation to our megaserver system, so check back each day this week for more information!”

2000 is the 1st time discounted price. The actual price is 2880 gems.

Urxx.6840:

I don’t know Champions Online, but the fact they just announced they are adopting the same technology of a major MMO that is currently in early access phase and is launching in two days, and they are calling this “new feature” exactly the same, makes all this appear like Elder Scrolls Online scares the heck out of them.

Gw2 has had this tech from the beginning. All this is, is main servers turned off and everyone in overflows.

Every change had a reason. These are from memory.

Town clothes were the result of costumes in Gw1. In Gw1, a lot of people were wearing costumes to a point that the prestige of armor was diminished. In some cases, (silly) costumes would also make the game unrealistic, destroying the feel of the game. By making costumes town clothes, they attempted to limit these issues.

SPvP game types. They had concerns over splitting the player base. In Gw1 they found that the population was split between to many different modes, which made it hard for new players to join.

GvG. They have said that WvW was what they intended GvG to be, but it wasn’t possible back then.

Guild Halls were something they had plans for, but weren’t able to implement. They still have plans to add housing and halls.

Traits. They wanted your build to mean something. In Gw1, people would switch their build for every map. They didn’t want people to switch their traits for every boss.

hedix.1986:

How can we now possibly look for a noob-free map to have a good organised megaboss run in?

It really depends on how the system will work specifically, but I’m predicting events like Tequatl will now be dead for most people who used to guest and not be in one of the mega guilds. Mega guilds will probably be able to zerg a map to create an overflow, which will then cause additional players to get matched to the new map. This is where everyone in the original map jumps, but that’s assuming the system doesn’t create many half full overflows and instead, prioritizes creating full maps.

Izaya.2906:

Even daily World Boss Tours will be hard to get on(you might get pushed to a dead “megaserver”/no one in the map wants to do the meta event you intend to do) as opposed to right now people can agree on “Lets guest to x server and do these meta events”.

That would be the equivalent of showing up late and getting into an overflow. With the megaserver, at least you know all the other late people will also be joining you, rather than showing up on their home server.

How the megaserver matches people specifically will end up being very important and can easily make or break the system.

“For players in guilds, the world your account uses as its home world is the same world that will receive your guild influence. That system has not changed (for now).”

Chinese guild changes almost confirmed? Wonder how they’ll end up handling that.

Dungeons would be more likely to be open now, considering the maps should be a lot more populated. As for world events, they’ll probably all be on static timers, like Tequatl.

There’s a problem with invalid/expired sessions that force you to login to view the forums. This problem can also cause other side effects, such as displaying a “page not available, try again” when accessing the forums.

To get around this, you can either start a private/incognito browser session (or clear cookies) or manually logout by remembering the url.

It’s the result of people bypassing the queue by joining people already in the map. I’ve also heard the queue is a lie and multiple people see the window at the same time, resulting in first click wins.

Astralporing.1957:

Achievement points as a measurement of actual accomplishments were always meaningless, and that situation is not going to change after the cap. That’s because 1 AP can have a different “worth” (as far as accomplishments go) depending where it is coming from.

Yes achievement points had odd values, but if temporary points (dailies/monthlies/living story) weren’t a factor, endgame level achievement points would have had meaning. In their current state, you can’t tell the difference between a day 1 player who has only done dailies and a new player that has managed to 100% all the achievements. Remove all the dailies however and suddenly (example numbers) 1000 is worth a lot more than 999, because 999 would be the standard amount of points, which would include all the common achievements.

It would still be pointless to most people however, since people tend to specialize into a certain type of content, in which case you need comparisons by category. Only the hardcore completionists would find value in the total.

Gele.2048:

now you can focus on making 100% on all accivments not just grinding daily day by day

That was the point. By having unlimited daily points, it gave casual players the option to eventually obtain the rewards, but at the same time, it made achievement points meaningless as a measurement of actual accomplishments.

Even with the daily cap, there’s going to be a rather large disconnect between new and old players due to the living story. Either they will additionally add a cap for these points, or they will have to add a cap to the rewards, where nothing new is ever added. In a few years for example, it’d be kind of silly to add new skins at 80k+ points, when less than 1% will ever have access to it, due to not being day 1 players.

Laurels?

LumAnth.5124:

DirectSong is one of the only places to get Soule’s work legally. However, there are NUMEROUS stories of discs never ever arriving, even when the customer has already paid. In fact, I recall IGN had to intervene for 1 customer to get a hold of the disk.

DirectSong is Jeremy Soule and they’re probably a small business that is very understaffed compared to the amount of orders GW2 generated. I always imagined them as the typical “do it yourself” shop where they basically have 1 guy that places an order with a 3rd party print shop, and then mails them all by hand. Since they have to place orders in bulk, they probably always wait until they have the minimum amount of orders ready, rather than taking on the cost themselves.

GvG is located in WvW, which is what GvG was originally intended to be.

Claim a keep, defend it, and enjoy your war of guilds.

Each transaction stores at the minimum, an id, account id, item id, quantity, price and date, which I’m guessing is 8,4-16,2,1,4,8 = 27-39 bytes + padding. Now imagine the hundreds of millions of transactions made since last year. Space really shouldn’t be an issue, but a database with billions of records would be, due to the lookup times.

Behellagh.1468:

Hate to ask but where is this information coming from? Didn’t see it in any of the announcements. Please don’t tell me Reddit strikes again.

It was hidden in https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/new-finishers-back-items-and-more-in-the-gem-store/

Last I heard, Jeremy Soule is exclusively with EQNext now.

Jeremy Soule

No, I won’t be returning to Guild Wars. EverQuest has an exclusive with me for the future projects that involve MMOs. [Guild Wars] was a good experience over many years. As with all good things, it had to come to an end

http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/03/07/composer-jeremy-soule-reveals-everquest-next-exclusivity/

It won’t help new players because they will forever be behind due to the living story unless they also cap that. They could have made the daily meta worth 5 points and capped it that way, but considering they didn’t, it’s because they didn’t want to have to continually expand the achievement rewards because of a potential minority.

A full server is full until either the population caps are increased or someone else transfers off.

Unless your goal is WvW, just guest.

Pandaman.4758:

Would have been better if they just made town clothes sets to be individual armor skins like the single clothing parts will be, so that people can continue mixing and matching while using them in combat.

They can’t. It’s a technical limitation with how they handle different armor weights. Each armor piece is assigned a different area of the image used to texture your character and different weights have different sections. The outfit slot being a single piece is simply a workaround. They could have left in the town clothing slots as a full override (can’t mix armor with town clothes), but I guess they didn’t want to save the data for those extra slots, on top of the 1000+ they just added for wardrobe.

If they made outfits single pieces and wearable as armor, they would look different and it would limit future options. Not sure why they’re making the single pieces tonics though, when they could just fit them to the closest matching weight. I can see why they wouldn’t want to have stuff like the t-shirt as armor though.

Nonconsensual PvP in the open world (PvE) would go against one of their most basic design goals. It’ll never happen.

StinVec.3621:

Hyper Cutter.9376:

I still don’t see how they can justify charging 500 gems for that mask (or the other two that preceded it). They’re nice skins, but not that nice.

I think 500 gems is reasonable for it now that it is no longer a one time use skin. Once the wardrobe goes into effect we can apply them as many times as we like to multiple characters.

For the tattoos at least, you can open up a texture editor and make your own. This is something they were okay with in Gw1 (they won’t confirm anything for Gw2). Considering you can retexture any existing item and that the “face paint” model already existed, the tattoos really aren’t worth the cost.

The last thing the said about it was that it was further delayed due to the feature patch and upcoming changes to how they’re handling horizontal progression. In other words, you won’t be seeing craftable precursors for another ~6 months. Personally, I think they’ll never make precursors craftable and instead, change how legendaries are made for the second series.

Vag? is a perfectly legitimate 3 letter tag. What if I made the guild: Vagabonds [Vag]

Moderation should take the actual name into account, which they claim to do, for chat at least.

Kind of seems like a slap in the face to all the contributors that maintain the wiki.

Lux.7169:

Gemshop purchasable please.

A potion/wand to cause this effect was data mined 2 weeks ago. I doubt they’d actually sell it, but it could show up as a free item for the day.

The reason they are becoming tonics is because there is a technical limitation with how they handle textures between different armor weights. Everything has to be fit into a certain area of a bigger texture. They could have remodeled the pieces to fit each weight or even restricted them to the closest fit, but considering they didn’t, I’m guessing either they wanted to get rid of them or only a very small minority actually purchased them, making it not worth the cost.

Outfits becoming a 1 piece is a workaround for this issue. Considering they’re not accepting refunds before the patch, maybe they’ll try to fix the others.