Guild Wars 2

Bugabuga.9721:

Wharghul.6819:

I got a frost tool box today.

Was it collected the same day? Or bought on the TP?

There’s no difference between wintersday gifts collected from the home instance vs those bought off the TP: they have the same item ID.

Tachyon.5897:

I want to stack them in my bank, I don’t want to be paying waypoint costs to go gallivanting off around different maps to stack them.

You can just go to the character select screen; that counts as ‘changing’ maps.

Lil Puppy.5216:

I have mine on a schedule using a shortcut with the -image tag to check and download updates daily.

This is what I do for both GW1 & GW2; I prefer to do all my waiting upfront, rather than while I’m playing.

Lil Puppy.5216:

GW1 had content streaming by default, not sure why GW2 didn’t but then again, GW1 had a lot of great things they left out of GW2.

GW2 is more complicated and its game files are much bigger.

How many wintersday gifts have you opened without seeing a frostbitten box? Are you talking about dozens or stacks and stacks? (During wintersday, I think I had some really long streaks without seeing any.)

Thanks for the report. I was going to open a few, almost entirely to get some more frostbitten tools. I will hold off for now, just in case.

PS did you report via the in-game reporting tool? that’s helpful, too, as it allows anet to backtrack to when you opened the gifts.

I agree with the OP: why artificially restrict crafting combinations? Why are some prefixes account bound? I would also like to see a change in this direction.

Great idea.

There are, of course, social issues that will come up: who gets to decide on the new name? is a vote required? can people veto it, if they have sufficient rank? how much does it cost? who pays? and so on. Still, a lot of guilds regret their original name, but have no way to transfer the influence/improvements later.

Steeldragon.7308:

captains bootie.8523:

I realize this is an old thread:

Didn’t feel like creating a new topic eh?

I think it was entirely appropriate to rez this thread: Steeldragon is asking for the same thing.

I don’t use the skin because I have yet to find a suitable arrangement with that shape and color.

I hope that this experience will prevent ANet from ever releasing an un-dyeable armor skin again, even if this one never gets the colorful ‘makeover’ it deserves.

lumidxb.3047:

Hey.
I will be livestreaming opening 250 Black Lion Chests and giving away a shadow skin for each black lion ticket or 10 scraps.

Great idea for developing a base of followers. This might be the only time where I almost hope someone doesn’t get that lucky with RNG (because it would be really funny and painful if you ended up with 25 skins to give away).

Good luck to all the contestants and to the OP and their future streaming.

see also: http://www.guildwars2roleplayers.com/

I keep hoping for happier faces: a lot of human/norn faces look like the person just got fired by their boss, after being caught under the influence, resulting in breaking up with their significant other. Some look as if they ran out of ExLax two weeks ago.

You might be interested in an old reddit post asking for people’s favorite cheap dyes:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/2ubt34/

Some highlights:

• charcoal and pitch are decent blacks, for fraction of the cost of abyss (and now shadow dyes); midnight dyes aren’t cheap, but are cheaper than abyss
• blue ice, icing, fluff, fog are alternatives for celestial and some recommended mithril for metals
• brass, burnished steel for metals
• illumination or redemption, instead of pyre

ToxicTorgo.1805:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Put them all in your inventory, change maps (or use [f12] as if you were going to swap characters), and they should combine ok afterward.

Saw your post on another thread – worked for me – thanks for the hack!

Great

(I just had to do it myself, although interestingly, all I had to do was move the items into the bank and back; they stacked the next time I logged on, even though I didn’t move any of the existing stacks into that character’s inventory.)

Lazaar.9123:

Why not have both?

See above: having public testing doesn’t prevent all of the problems we are seeing and introduces its own set of issues. It’s often not cost effective, in terms of resources and even reputation.

The better thing is, in my strong opinion, for ANet to figure out what went wrong this week and make substantive process changes to prevent things from getting this far again. Without robust procedures, introducing public testing will make matters worse, by introducing the need for much more coordination and distracting the development teams.

(I have to admit that before working with software developers, I would have agreed that more testing could only help.)

There is no software company that will ever have the resources to fix every bug or annoyance in their products. As Behellagh says, this means they have to prioritize. The usual practice is to look at

• scope (how many affected),
• severity (how much is someone affected),
• difficulty (how easy is it to figure out what’s wrong and fix it),
• opportunity (can this be fixed with other changes or fixes),
• importance (how much does it matter in the grand scheme of things),
• interoperability (how much does adjusting this affect other things), and
• luck (was it noticed sooner or later, was it described well, was there sufficient data to troubleshoot, is there a test environment set up suitable for replicating/confirming fixes, …)

It’s a lot like fixing potholes: everyone wants their town to fix the ones in front of their own house, but the city has to choose which to fix first. Then, before they fix the next set, there will be new ones appearing. As a result, pretty much most people are annoyed by potholes at some point, even if the city does a great job of fixing them.

edit: missed a line-break

When Guild Missions first were added to the game, lots of guild did Trek:

• it was new
• it was fun
• it helped earn influence for the guild.

It’s been a long time since that release, so treks are no longer new. They are just as fun for some of us (forces you to test your knowledge of the world, if you don’t use the wiki or Dulfy.net), but they do get old quickly.

More importantly, nowadays guild commendations are considered the primary reason to do missions (since a lot of guilds have plenty of influence/commendations), so the idea of doing a for-the-guild-only mission has become outdated.

In short, it made sense at the time.

reffe.5647:

It don’t take that long to fix 1 bug on a skillpoint that is blocking progress for everyone.

If it didn’t take that long to fix, it would be fixed already. I very much doubt that ANet would avoid attending to the easiest fixes, because if nothing else, it reduces the number of bug reports they are seeing.

It seems this particular skill is tied to a change in the combat mechanics and is affecting other skills. They are apparently looking for resolving the root cause, rather than applying a temporary work-around.

Of course, knowing the background doesn’t make it any easier to be patient about it; it just explains why stuff like this doesn’t get fixed instantly.

90% of everything that has ever been in the gem shop returns at some point. Most of the exceptions are due to the game having changed since (town clothes, for example, were replaced by tonics that can be sold on the TP, but neither the clothes nor the tonics have returned). Some stuff returns seasonally or with certain special events, such as wintersday outfits/skins, lovestruck weapons (valentine’s day), and so on.

Limited Edition dyes (the ones that ANet calls ‘exclusive’ because they only drop from specialty dye kits) have all returned, except the latest ones. I believe all of the infinite-use gathering tools are ‘permanent’ additions to the store (although there’s probably an exception that I haven’t spotted).

In short, everything returns at some point. (Unless the game changes.)

it also means that there’s a good chance of delays, lag, and so forth (as we noticed — sometimes — during the pre-launch stress tests)

10,000 people running around Tyria are going to spot bugs that professional testers and automatic regression tests aren’t going to have found. But that doesn’t make public testing ‘better’ for the game.

In case it’s not obvious, once the worst bugs of the original patch are fixed, there are going to be a lot of very uncomfortable conversations at ANet about what the heck happened that so many things that worked fine in the live environment failed after the patch, that some seemingly obvious bugs weren’t caught before the release, and so on.

There are all sorts of ways stuff like this can happen that have nothing to do with the quality of the QA team. For example, it’s possible ANet’s change & release management systems aren’t sufficient for the game’s aggressive update schedule (a symptom would be that the stuff released into live doesn’t precisely match what was tested by QA).

Further, setting up public testing introduces additional expenses and creates new issues: you have to maintain multiple code environments (increasing the likelihood that something that is a viable fix in one breaks something in another), additional virtual environments, and additional support staff (or take away from existing teams). Those in the testing environment will gain advantages over those who aren’t, including practice time for PvP and economically beneficial ideas.

In short, just because public testing would spot more bugs doesn’t mean that public testing is better, overall, for the game and the community.

Instead, what would be better is for ANet to figure out why stuff like this happens and take steps to prevent us from seeing it. If they are able to do that, great: problem solved. And if they aren’t, then it won’t matter how many resources they throw at testing; we are still going to see issues in the live environment.

My primary concerns with shield are:

• Shield skills in the game so far are lackluster; they are rarely useful except in niche situations (e.g. guardian focus is a much better ‘shield’ than a shield).
• It’s an off-hand weapon; mesmers already have three decent off hands, but not as many main hand options (sword is great, but scepter is bleh).

So, yeah: I’m sad we’re getting a shield. I expect never to use it and end up focusing on another prof’s specialization.

In another thread, I suggested that there be some way to update ascended gear in the mystic forge, something like

• Ascended item
• Skill point item (philosopher stones or eldritch scroll, e.g.)
• Vision Crystal
• Relevant Insignia/Inscription

This would encourage people to experiment more with ascended gear, without the fear of wasting their time/coin.

While I like the idea of getting more chances to get more stuff, I can’t imagine why ANet would actually implement this.

• Key prices are based on the assumption that they are the only way to open the chests.
• Keys are one of the reasons people buy gems with cash and convert gold to gems; remove it as a cash-attractor/gold-sink and it would have to be replaced.
• It would take substantive resources to set this up: what would get used for the materials, setting the breakage rates, the UI for it, etc. This would take time away from some other interesting idea or gem shop addition.
• It would also generate a lot of controversy, since a lot of people have spent a lot of time/cash/gold on keys and feel invested in the current system. That’s not a reason by itself not to change the status quo, but it can’t be ignored either.

In short, it’s one of those appealing ideas that is really unlikely to get past the forum discussion stage of evolution.

Belzebu.3912:

Sorel.4870:

Vague Memory.2817:

Software RNG are not truly random, it isn’t possible to program real randomness, however they are generally good enough to fool us.

Everything you stated there is true.

Half true, software only RNG are not truly random, but recently I learned that you can achieve true random for a software using Hardware RNG

It’s a myth that software RNG isn’t “truly random.” It’s not as random as the actual universe is, but it’s as random as players can detect and even as random as the programmers can measure. Thus, for the purposes of MMOs, it’s indistinguishable from ‘truly random’.

Of course, if the programming is faulty, then it might not be random at all. It’s also possible for the randomization to be other than intended, but in this game (as in most premium MMOs), that happens very rarely.

I haven’t heard anyone else saying they were missing chests. AFAIK, they all remain 1x/day/account bonuses and 1x/day/character for the ground chests (if any). These limits reset at midnight server time.

A few events, such as Rhendak, can be affected by diminishing returns, but only if you park the same toon next to his spawn location.

There are a few situations in which you have to wait for some time to elapse (not just reset), but none of them are world bosses. The ones I know about are all nodes of some type: rich plat, JP chests, etc.

tl;dr something else is going on with your account, FireCrescent. Perhaps you missed one of the other requirements (as Inculpatus cedo suggested) or you haven’t waited through a reset as you thought or something more complicated.

I think you have two choices:

• Wait 24 hours from reading this to try any world boss at all (stick to dungeons or something). And then return to your usual rotation, keeping track of the time you participate for 2-3 of them just in case.
• Contact support and provide them with the same info as above (plus some specific times, if you can manage).

(You could also do both.)

Good luck and please let us know how it turns out.

Pandaman.4758:

Wow, I never thought I’d see someone complain about that.

As the OP says, some people spent a lot of time learning to play GW2 instruments and figure out specific songs. I can really see how they could be miffed that someone else can just download a macro and imitate their skill, with few of us the wiser.

Regardless, ANet made it clear that such macros are ok to use in-game. They took a lot of feedback, spent time internally discussing the pros|cons, and made a decision. I doubt very much they are going to revisit it so soon after publishing it.

Put them all in your inventory, change maps (or use [f12] as if you were going to swap characters), and they should combine ok afterward.

GW1 isn’t a true MMO. The only places that can hold more than a single party are towns; every map (dungeon or surface, mission or explorable) is limited to 8 players (with a few exceptions with a limit of 4, 6, or 12 players), all of whom must be in the same group.

It also is an old game, by 2015’s standards: there’s no jumping or true z-axis, you have to stand still to use most skills, and it’s missing a lot of things GW2 and WoW players take for granted.

That said, I really enjoyed it and you can certainly take your time exploring nooks and crannies. I would think of it more as a single player, small group game that allows you to socialize with a lot of others at the same time.

Cazamar.7148:

I can’t believe some of these comments. It’s allowed by Anet people. Whether you like it or not is irrelevant. Of all the things to get worked up about this should not be one of them.

Eh, folks can get worked up over whatever they choose.

Although, as you point out, it’s probably not worth their attention, because ANet has already given an official ok to using macros to play instruments.

The wiki shows the color of each (on each type of material) using css-code. There are plenty of tools on the web that can convert this for you.

Alternatively, you can look them up yourself using the game’s API.

The full list is at:
https://api.guildwars2.com/v1/colors.json

Which shows a listing for Abyss as:

:{"name":“Abyss”,base_rgb],“cloth”:{"brightness":-18,contrast,hue,saturation,lightness,rgb,“leather”:{"brightness":-18,contrast,hue,saturation,lightness,rgb,“metal”:{"brightness":-23,contrast,hue,saturation,lightness,rgb,“474”:

That shows the base RGB as 128,26,26 and 26,24,27 for light/cloth armor.

Most guilds don’t spam their message. They post once and move on. I ignore the messages. Yes, a few recruiters are too aggressive and the easy solution for me is to /block them (or if they were really out of hand, to /report them for spamming).

If there are changes to the suppression ruleset, I doubt it had anything to do with guilds.

There’s a work-around for this:

• put all the items into your inventory.
• change maps (or use [f12] as if you were swapping toons)
• come back

they should stack after this.

ANet is aware of it; they haven’t announced an ETA for a fix.

If an item can be bought from the gem shop or on the TP, always purchase it from the TP unless you want to pay for the thrill you get “rolling the dice.” The market always adjusts to fit the drop rates and prices tend to drop a lot after those who wanted to be “first” finish collecting.

This goes for Black Lion skins, limited-edition dyes, and minis.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

…ANet ought to add powerful incentives for moving to low-pop servers, just as they do for people ‘volunteering’ to move out of an instance after the end of World Boss events. For example:

• 0 gem fee to transfer to the 3 lowest-pop worlds.
• A one-week buff increasing MF by 25% and PvE movement speed by 15% (same as the speed booster), for those who move to a lower population server (maybe one month, if that server is in the bottom 3).
• Perhaps some sort of special mini or other gem shop-like reward.

Azhure.1857:

I like your ideas on incentives. Though I would hesitate on anything material, like your third example, as it may have consequences.

Thanks. And fair point about ‘material’ rewards. I mostly just want to get people thinking creatively about encouraging people to transfer to balance server pop, as opposed to adding servers, merging servers, or raising caps. I don’t like the last three because they have a lot of negative consequences and worse, they don’t actually address the root cause, which is that people still think it matters which server you’re on for PvE.

tl;dr I think it’s perfectly fine to “hamper the financial incentives behind the forge puzzles.” So, I hope you won’t “stand by [your] guns” and consider finding some other sort of way to reward those who discover a recipe.

A wiki-trigger would be better, but doesn’t address my concern that asymmetric distribution of data goes against the implementation of the game’s philosophy elsewhere. A ‘free market’ requires that all the players have the same information. I see ‘discovery’ of MF recipes as fundamentally similar to discovering chef’s recipes: the first to find has an advantage, but it’s only temporary.

If John Smith et al feel that this is an important incentive and still want to balance with the cooperative spirit that distinguishes GW2 from other MMOs, a time delay is ok, but I wonder if ‘supply’ would make a better trigger. That is, hide the recipe until there is a supply of at least e.g. 5 units. That allows the first people to discover a recipe more time, as long as they don’t get (too) greedy. Theoretically, the recipe could be hidden if the supply ever drops (“5” is a completely arbitrary number).

To me, the incentive behind the forge puzzle should be similar to the incentive behind jumping puzzles: it’s a puzzle and solving it is its own reward. I understand the idea behind also wanting a financial incentive, but should that really mean an additional element of PvP in the marketplace?

Disparity in availability of data already leads to player dissatisfaction. Witness the number of complaints each time there’s a market disruption: accusations of “insider trading” or despair over being unable to logon in time to profit from the market frenzy. I see these gripes as evidence that the community feels disadvantaged, even though I know that many of the plaintiffs are misunderstanding basic economic principles. My feeling is that design choices should limit this type of frustration, all else being equal.

Thanks for taking the time to respond thoughtfully and offer a reasonable compromise. While it’s clear I strongly prefer a different outcome, the choice of using tangible rewards to ‘solve’ a “bartle’s spades” problems in gaming is tried & true. The number of ‘hidden’ forge recipes will be relatively small, so the overall economic impact will be tiny. I’m sure your time (and that of others) would be better spent other API issues/features, so I’m okay with letting this drop after reading your response (if any).

You can show 100% completion without being 100% complete

• You got 100% of a map before a Living Story chapter added/removed/changed a POI, WP, Heart (I don’t think there were any vista changes).
• The zone continues to show as “100%” until you return to that map.

The easiest way to see if this is the issue is to return to the Chantry of Secrets and exit. Often, that triggers some map completion subroutine, recalculating your % and, if the game thinks you have 100%, you’ll get your reward when you exit.

If it’s not that, you’ll have to systematically return to each map that might have been changed. Fortunately, there are only a few such maps and I think the wiki has the list under the map completion article. Off the top of my head: gendarran, Div Reach, LA, Wayfarer, Kessex, Lornar’s, Bloodtide, and perhaps the NPE-changed zones, Caledon, Metrica, Ashford, Queensdale.

Good luck and please let us know how it turns out — I’m sure you’re not the only one in this situation.

thomdane.3670:

shadow.6174:

Beezlebub.1538:

THIS IS A CRITICAL COMPONENT OF AN MMORPG. If you can’t get this right and don’t care to fix it, don’t make an MMORPG. Seriously, this is sooooo baddddd, GET IT RIGHT A-NET OR PASS IT TO SOMEONE THAT DOES CARE /endrant.

taps his ears Unneeded yelling, also they wouldn’t break their own game on purpose. Chill off, there is a life out of game :P

You necro’d a post that was over a year old to post that comment. Can we meet somewhere in game so you can train my Necro in this superior ability? : P

No, they didn’t resurrect an old post. A moderator mistakenly merged new guild issues into this post. It’s entirely possible that the root causes are related, but the threads should not have been merged. The recent posts are about issues with the 16 March patch, not with any patches from 2012-2014.

Malediktus.3740:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

They don’t have to roll back an entire patch to fix this. They have retroactively ‘fixed’ other issues with achievement points. I’m sure they can fix this too.

It took them 6months to make a fix for that. Considering all the testing involved to not break it even more (eg. removing the wrong achievements or from people who legitimately earned them), I would expect a fix to take minimum a month.
If they fix the HoM portal stone before they fix this bug, they also have to find a way to remove ill gained skins from your wardrobe (never happened before so far).

It took them six months to fix what? Some stuff takes a long time to fix, some is easy to fix but hard to test, and some stuff is just… annoyingly hard to nail down completely.

I have no idea why this stuff borked with this patch or what’s involved with fixing it. But I do know that rollbacks are much harder to pull off than it sounds; it would mean devoting resources from all sorts of other things to do properly. It also won’t solve ANet’s “upset customer” problem: sure, the people complaining in this thread would be (mostly) mollified, but it would annoy an entirely new group of people.

Accordingly, I think it’s far more likely that ANet will spend 1-3 weeks developing/testing a way to remove the AP, titles, and skins that people unlocked by accident today. Mostly because there’s a simple 1:1 relationship between the actual GW1 HoM score and the titles/skins/APs granted in GW2.

It might not be clear that I am, myself, upset about ANet screwing this up. I can’t imagine what goes on in their change control/management and QA departments that something this simple to detect wasn’t prevented. But I don’t work there, so I can’t even reliably second-guess them. I expect them to work hard to resolve the issues and I’m willing to wait for them to do it, even though I would prefer to donate my patience to something else.

They aren’t going to do a rollback. Title, skin, and achievement point bugs can be fixed without that.

I don’t know if they are from your character or not, but they happen in instances, too. I was in the home instance with two humans and we heard non-human voices for skills we weren’t using.

The OP’s commander with 25 stacks of stability was …shortsighted thinking that would be enough after this morning’s changes. These changes were announced ahead of time and it was clear that it would be much easier to remove stability than before. That means folks have to ration it out, instead of stacking it and YOLOing into a fight.

Every time there’s a disruptive update, we get people who are alarmed that the status quo was destroyed. But that’s exactly the intent of such builds: to shake things up.

After each such change, people go back to the drawing board to figure out what works better. A lot of people like such research/testing. Some guilds will figure it out and become the new vanguard for open world WvW fights. Some guilds won’t figure it out or won’t enjoy the new meta and …well, that happens.

I think the cooldown is just fine. I only use it when soloing/duoing tough content on characters that don’t have access to a substantive ‘pet’, e.g. the wolf is very helpful to my mesmer, to keep some aggro off when illusions aren’t robust enough for that purpose.

Any shorter CD and the skill would be OP’d compared to other elites, defeating its purpose of being an early-access elite for players with special editions of the game.

Blackhearted.1264:

Yea, you’re best waiting a few days while they spend time fixing insignificant bullkitten like minor vendor bugs instead of fixing the significant things.

Some so-called ‘minor’ bugs are easy to fix. Do you really want them to delay patching those while they work on the ‘significant things’? Besides that, everyone has different definitions of minor/major.

Personally, I agree that the vendor issues were minor (mostly because I’m not planning to buy skins any time toon), while the guild/HoM/chat issues affect me immediately. But there’s nothing so bugged that I’m unable to enjoy playing the game. I’m happy to make use of the new camera and wait for them to fix the rest.

The workshop buff isn’t working either: I should have two concurrent builds (but have only one). Plus, yeah, I lost progress (and probably influence) on other things in the queue.

They don’t have to do a rollback to fix issues with HoM or achievement points/titles.

They don’t have to roll back an entire patch to fix this. They have retroactively ‘fixed’ other issues with achievement points. I’m sure they can fix this too.

moorindal.2635:

If you are still having this issue, change your online status to invisible, and then back to online. That solved the issue for me.

That does work, but I’ve had to do that every time I swap characters.

Dr Ishmael.9685:

You’re reading too much into how the wiki treats the MF recipes.

Then you’ve missed my point entirely.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a technical distinction between how the wiki treats the functions. The wiki publishes recipes for both the MF and crafting and sometimes doesn’t distinguish between them. That is a design decision, not a technical one.

Similarly the decision to publish the MF output in the API is a design decision, even if it requires doing something different behind the scenes, where the typical player wouldn’t see it.

So I reiterate: continuing to ‘hide’ the MF outputs after they have been discovered is something that benefits that tiny of fraction of players that have access to such information. It gives them a competitive advantage in converting materials into sellable goods and into pricing such goods on the trading post.

Therefore, I again urge ANet to change the design decision and to publish standardized MF outputs via the API, so that they are more universally available to the community as a whole.

Full disclosure: this decision would likely hurt me financially. I already spend time researching recipes, experimenting with MF inputs, and have my own tools to calculate profitability. I’m also a relatively patient producer/consumer of goods. So, the status quo allows me to take advantage of the uneven distribution of data. I’m happy to keep profiting off this. But I’d prefer the playing field to be level.

edit: late reply; I just noticed because this was referenced recently in another post

Malediktus.3740:

Guild upgrades are broken, too. The upgrades I started before patch were instantly completed after patch even though they had several days to go.

Oh. well then it’s worse for me.
I queued up some guild catapults. Since I wasn’t online when I absorbed the patch (naturally), I didn’t get them.

Sigh.

If they have different labels, they probably are actually different items

You can test this by linking the item in chat & prepending with ‘/wiki’, e.g.

/wiki [Tome of Knowledge]

Even if the wiki doesn’t have the items linked, the initial page that pops up will show the item ID.

This, unfortunately, isn’t a new problem. You are probably aware that there are already (too many) items with identical names that don’t stack, because they are actually different things (sometimes with identical mechanics, sometimes not). I expect it to keep happening until ANet appoints someone to be responsible for ‘change management’ for the game’s naming conventions and item inventory.

My guild has the Guild Workshop improvement that allows two simultaneous builds in the queue. Currently, the unlock shows, but I only have one build going on, with several others queued.