Guild Wars 2

LONGA.1652:

They just need Local server for PVP, Raiding. But then there need to be server technology that transfer character data in real time.

They tried to do that for the NA|EU data centers, so that players from both region could adventure together. They weren’t able to get it working well enough at the level of performance they think is required.

And though your modification of the proposal would be less expensive, it’s not free. It’s still not going to bring in enough new revenues to pay for the changes.

Ryou.2398:

The best way to do wvw is join a guild that does it as an event once a week especially for new people. Trust me it helps allot.

Definitely a good idea.

Ryou.2398:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ryou.2398:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ryou.2398:

I could not agree more, I think it has more to do with ego and the meta community acting like it has to go through them first to be acceptable.

There’s no such thing as a “meta community” and absolutely no one who has publishes data on “best DPS” builds insists that there’s only one way to play.

That’s like accusing the “fun police” of being against DPS meters — different people enjoy the game in different ways. This game makes it easy to have fun in dungeons and fractals and especially open world without worrying much about having optimized builds, so if you don’t care to research & won’t use someone else’s build, then why worry if anyone else is doing so?

I hope your being sarcastic because there is a huge meta community and multiple websites for gw2 meta, I am not accusing anyone im stating facts and experience from multiple mmorpg experiences including this ones.

You claimed that there’s some group that is dictating what other people should play — there isn’t. You claimed that it’s about ego — it’s not, it’s about different ways of approaching the game.

Certainly there are people who publish results of their attempts to eke out the best numbers possible and certainly there are people who will follow in their footsteps. And certainly there are people who will /kick anyone who seems to be marching to the beat of a different drummer.

But that’s nothing close to any sort of community organized around the idea of insisting on what others should do. That’s just human beings exhibiting human nature — some like to push the limits of their abilities, some like to push other people around.

And again, what possible difference does it make that such people exist if you want to just play the game to have fun? Nothing is stopping you from any content, with the possible exception of raids … and that’s only because raids are challenging enough for 10 good players that the choice of build/comp can matter.

The original post asks, “does anyone just have fun anymore?” To answer that question, we don’t need to pay any attention at all to “the meta” because the answer is “yes, people are having fun exactly the same way they had it at launch, doing whatever they like in the game.”

Umm yes there is lol I certainly do not need your validation neither, I never claimed anyone is stopping me from doing content you sure make tons of assumptions about me when I never said any of those things, and your sure going out of your way to justify something you do not think exists.

Stop trying to be so condescending.

I’m sorry that you think that someone disagreeing with you is “condescending.” I’m also sorry that you can’t separate my reply to you about your bold claims & my separate point addressing the OP’s question.

Ryou.2398:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ryou.2398:

I could not agree more, I think it has more to do with ego and the meta community acting like it has to go through them first to be acceptable.

There’s no such thing as a “meta community” and absolutely no one who has publishes data on “best DPS” builds insists that there’s only one way to play.

That’s like accusing the “fun police” of being against DPS meters — different people enjoy the game in different ways. This game makes it easy to have fun in dungeons and fractals and especially open world without worrying much about having optimized builds, so if you don’t care to research & won’t use someone else’s build, then why worry if anyone else is doing so?

I hope your being sarcastic because there is a huge meta community and multiple websites for gw2 meta, I am not accusing anyone im stating facts and experience from multiple mmorpg experiences including this ones.

You claimed that there’s some group that is dictating what other people should play — there isn’t. You claimed that it’s about ego — it’s not, it’s about different ways of approaching the game.

Certainly there are people who publish results of their attempts to eke out the best numbers possible and certainly there are people who will follow in their footsteps. And certainly there are people who will /kick anyone who seems to be marching to the beat of a different drummer.

But that’s nothing close to any sort of community organized around the idea of insisting on what others should do. That’s just human beings exhibiting human nature — some like to push the limits of their abilities, some like to push other people around.

And again, what possible difference does it make that such people exist if you want to just play the game to have fun? Nothing is stopping you from any content, with the possible exception of raids … and that’s only because raids are challenging enough for 10 good players that the choice of build/comp can matter.

The original post asks, “does anyone just have fun anymore?” To answer that question, we don’t need to pay any attention at all to “the meta” because the answer is “yes, people are having fun exactly the same way they had it at launch, doing whatever they like in the game.”

Among the problems with a cap-less game are that too many people end up gravitating to the easiest content with the most rewards. We saw that with Auric Basin multi-map looting and we see it with the Fractal 40 farm, the Lake Doric turret farm, and Silverwastes. That’s good for those only interested in farming and bad for the overall health of the game.

Another problem in games without these sort of limits is that some people tend to burn out more quickly. We’ve seen this with people who get too focused on getting max levels and max gear, who forgot to smell the orchids along the way. I’m sure they had fun in their brief time. All the same, it’s better for the community overall if people were slower to reach their limit.

Diminishing Returns & Caps are indeed designed to discourage people from doing the same thing over & over. Sure, some people will do their “daily” routine and leave. And more people who enjoy the game will diversify. Or at least, one presumes that’s what ANet’s data shows.

In other words, it’s a small price to pay so that the game is more better for more people for more time.

Stitch.1794:

…the wording used in the UK on jars to describe the lid’s anti-tamper button – ‘May be depressed if opened.’ Makes me feel bad for upsetting the lid whenever I open a jar.

Lol. That’s classic.

I’ve seen translations into English with that sort of … misunderstanding, but it’s rare in English written by & for native speakers.

Daddicus.6128:

It’s not the dying that is freaking me out. It’s the instant downing, and from long range. And, the fact that stealth doesn’t work at all is a big problem, when I was planning on relying on stealth to escape enemies (I had three stealth skills, but none of them seemed to have any effect at all).

You’re not being insta-downed; you just think you are. Stealth doesn’t prevent you from taking damage, it just prevents you from being seen — an experienced player knows this and lays down covering fire to make it hard for you to escape. Plus, if you do any damage (often via autoattack), then you won’t stay stealthed or be able to stealth again immediately.

In other words, you’ve described what it’s like to go up against a veteran while being new to the game mode.

It sounds like the OP would like to have a place to go that is intended for pick up dueling. GH duels are by invitation only. Duels in WvW maps can be spoiled by, well, anyone walking by. And even match ups agreed to in the PvP lobby require some logistics. The OP would like an arena in which people just show up for dueling, if that’s their thing.

I’d argue that Obsidian Sanctum could be used for that already and anyone who wants to can dedicate their PvP arena to dueling. Therefore, in the OP’s shoes, I’d try to show that there’s a real demand for this sort of thing by picking one of those two options and publicizing it like crazy. Make it known that [tbd] is the place to go for pick-up dueling — tell people you meet, in /guild chat, in /map (without spamming), in wvw /team, and in Players Helping Players and/or Reddit.

Ryou.2398:

I could not agree more, I think it has more to do with ego and the meta community acting like it has to go through them first to be acceptable.

There’s no such thing as a “meta community” and absolutely no one who has publishes data on “best DPS” builds insists that there’s only one way to play.

That’s like accusing the “fun police” of being against DPS meters — different people enjoy the game in different ways. This game makes it easy to have fun in dungeons and fractals and especially open world without worrying much about having optimized builds, so if you don’t care to research & won’t use someone else’s build, then why worry if anyone else is doing so?

Grimheart.2853:

It’s not a matter of my personal subjective storytelling preference in the slightest. There is an objective answer and it is that Trahearne was a bad character, just like beforementioned Skarlet and Kormir.

It’s an opinion, regardless of how sure you are that your point of view is shared by the masses. There’s widespread differences of opinion about Trahearne, Scarlet, and even Kormir.

You do damage to your own points of view by trying to insist otherwise.

If you use the mouse buttons for utility 7, 8, 9, 0, you might consider adding a secondary shortcut for weapon swap to something like Shift-7, so that you can swap without moving the cursor or clicking.

Isanox.3498:

Yup. Still bugged. Hate that months go by and these things just don’t get fixed.

Things never “just get fixed.” It takes considerable research to discover why one person (or a few persons) don’t get credit while many (or most) others do.

If you really want this fixed, help ANet to help you by providing them with as many relevant details as possible. For example:

• Time|date
• Were you in a party/squad or not?
• IP address of the map.
• The status of the event when you started
• What you did during the event.
• Did your character die during the event? If so, did someone rez you or did you WP and walk back?

Without those details, it’s hard for ANet to identify the issue(s) that might be preventing progress.

People who play WvW know all the tricks and have quicker reaction times than you do. Really good players can sneak up on the unwary, burst them down, and that causes a panic, which causes the player to forget everything they ever learned about surviving a tough fight.

Literally the only reason my mesmer carries Signet of Humility (aka the Moa-ification skill) is to freak out those with equal or less skill, to give me a momentary advantage — that’s generally all I need to win the encounter (either by defeating the opponent or having them run off and leave me alone).

As a newcomer to WvW, you won’t have any experience in such encounters. Even players no better than I are going to surprise you, be able to take down your health before you get a chance to think, and/or stun-lock you, while you watch your health drain.

So you have a couple of options:

• Don’t worry about — focus on dailies or the easy kills and be prepared to waypoint a lot. (That was my first month or more of WvW — I got map completions without winning a single encounter.)
• Worry about it a lot — use each fight as an opportunity to learn. You’ll still WP a lot, but each time, you’ll get less worse about dealing with the various encounters.
• Worry about it a lot — watch videos or play PvP or try out different classes, using a WvW havoc build from metabattle.
• Worry about it a little — find someone else to travel with you. Good players will still be able to take down two (or even three) newbies, but a lot of players aren’t all that good — they’ll avoid you instead.

Ayrilana.1396:

There’s also a farm for war supplies but I can’t remember which mission it was that was completed repeatedly. I could be thinking of Hearts of the North though since it involved Kieran.

One of the later “Guild Wars Beyond” missions can be farmed for supplies, but it’s tedious way beyond Silverwastes chest farming. Plus, it’s slower in supplies/hour compared to the bounties (the only advantage is you can farm all day; the game only offers one bounty per day).

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

Yeah that seems to fix the double tap. As for the weapon swap I need an option to have it activate on the button press not the release as it’s most likely my pointer leaving the field before that happens.

You’re not using a keyboard shortcut or mouse-equivalent to swap weapons?

It takes exactly twice as many clicks as before. I prefer to have the option to one-click cancel, but I don’t think it’s worth ANet’s time to worry about it.

I really don’t want an option to “Cancel All” unless we have to type a long code word or something — I’d hate to accidentally click & confirm

People have always been obsessed with min-max, from day one, even in this game. Maybe you were too busy having fun to notice how many people demanded specific comps or stats for dungeons, for the Mad King fight, for… well, just about everything. People raced to finish the personal story, raced to finish world completion, and so on.

The thing is, there’s no point in hiding the numbers really — some players always want to see all the details and get involved in the math. What’s great about GW2 is that you don’t have to if you don’t want to — virtually all of the content in this game can be done without worrying about builds.

Raids aren’t designed with the “just have fun” player in mind; the rest of the game already focuses in that direction. Raids are for the people who want a bigger challenge and for whom the numbers are interesting.

So ignore raids, enjoy the rest of the game, and don’t worry about what others are doing outside your circle of folks.

Are you saying that the item can’t be salvaged? If so, contact support. Tell them the name of the item you have it in and your goal (to recover it).

There’s a strong chance support will have a solution for you, possibly to give you a replacement Queen Bee and ask you to destroy the other item.

That sounds like a fine plan.

War in Kryta is considered by many to be the hardest content in the game, until you get to Winds of Change (the Cantha/Factions equivalent). The mobs are tougher, the fights are more challenging. If you managed hard mode missions in GW1, you have the skills you need to pull it off — you might need to change builds or tactics, but you will succeed.

When you get to the point where you can do the bounties (I think it happens sometime before finishing the quest line), remind me here or in-game — while you can do any/all of the bounties, some of the harder ones offer the fewest tokens and some of the easier ones offer more.

It turns out that there’s a specific set of 3 that you can collect and do using one route, allowing you to earn 40 supplies with the least amount of effort, so you’d need to repeat that 6 times for one weapon. (Not worth going into detail until you’re ready for it.)

Someone always says that ANet is killing “play as you want.” I can’t agree. No matter how stuff is balanced, some will feel their preferred build type is buffed and some will feel it’s nerfed. There’s always going to be some builds that do better DPS and those will be chosen for the meta — in the past, that was zerker’s or zerker’s; now, it’s viper’s plus some alternatives for important niche builds.

That doesn’t mean that ANet is deliberately promoting one style or the other; it just means they are trying to change the balance without toasting everything. They can’t possibly get the balance perfectly, so someone will always feel that they ‘lost’ and others will feel that they won.

There’s an interesting discussion on reddit about the idea that this is less about condi|power than it is about getting the balance right for burst versus ramp-up builds. Power builds tend to be burst and those were preferred for the short fights we used to have in dungeons. Ramp-up always should be better in the long run, which makes it important for the encounters in the more challenging content.

Originally, this game’s power builds were mostly burst; it’s condi builds were entirely ramp-up. There are more power-variations possible now and more condi variations; the problem is that burst is still primarily power and less important for raids and T4 fractals, while condi is still mostly ramp-up and very important.

tl;dr ANet isn’t trying to push us in any direction; they are attempting a delicate balance and we each perceive that differently. Further, they might be struggling with how to find the right balance between burst and ramp-up, something that’s inherently more difficult than just worrying about zerker vs viper.

It is rarely cheaper these days to make an ascended with a cheap stat and reforge to a fancier one — you end up using the same materials. There are a couple of notable exceptions:

• Transmuting from core stats to HoT stats means you can avoid worrying about Jeweled patches or dowels. That doesn’t save on costs; it saves you time. (And if you have ‘extra’ fulgurite, you can make & sell jeweled patches or dowels to others.)
• If you’re just making 1-2 of an item and you know the recipes for stat A, but not stat B, you can sometimes save a few gold — you need a recipe for the relevant insignia|inscription and for the armor|weapon.

There’s another option for saving money: using the PvP or Fractal crafting recipes. The costs for making zerker stats is about the same (with market variations), but you pay identical costs for HoT stats — there’s no fulgurite needed, nor do you need premium mats like Maguuma Lilies. This probably won’t work for the OP; it might be helpful for others.

Allowed? No, botting isn’t permitted in any form.

How big a problem is it? Almost certainly not as big an impact as you think. There are millions of transactions per day, from tens if not hundreds of thousands of players. It’s easy to get into bidding wars with someone who is keeping track of their offers/competition via the API.

So report (via support ticket) any specific examples that you see that worry you (item name, time|date, transactions) and move on.

If you do the bounties, Oppressor weapons can be acquired efficiently (although not always quickly, depending on how you run the bounties).
Destroyer weapons use a variety of mats, some of which you’ll probably have to buy from a vendor.

However, if you have coin to spend in Kamadan, I’d go for Destroyer’s — those require the least work if you can afford the mats.

A build is bad if the person running it doesn’t know how to make it work properly or if they don’t know how to survive using it. But, that’s irrelevant — no one deliberately chooses to run a bad build (except maybe for Schlitz and Wiggles).

So it’s not possible to offer unsolicited generic advice about builds — you need to know the target audience and they need to be asking for advice or at least willing to listen.

Tarasicodissa.7084:

I I am fine with people playing literally anything, as long as they meaningfully contribute.

Absolutely. I’d rephrase it as “I’m fine with people playing whatever they like, as long as they understand how to make it work in the context of our current task.”

Favorites: Taimi, Phlunt, Canach, Female Sylvari PC, Mad King Thorn, Tassi (“that’s an…interest costume”), Evon Gnashblade, both asura PC

Makes me cringe: Female Norn PC (“new land! NEW LAND!”, Braham (before Season 3), original Trahearne (“this won’t end well” <cries>),

Besides there being no “food crash,” there was another food that spiked in price just as seaweed salad dropped.

In any case, we do not know why ANet decided that sigil swapping would have to wait. Obviously, it wasn’t something obvious, otherwise (a) we would have figured it out ourselves and (b) they would have not been surprised by it (as they said that they were when working on implementation). It might not be the sigil market, but instead something that feeds into the sigil market (or vice versa) or it might be something other than “just” the market.

Sorry you’re still having trouble

Could you show a screenshot of you in the location, with the mini map visible and the achievement panel open (or two screenshots if that’s easier)?

It might help us pinpoint something that you’re not seeing or it might suggest a new thing to try.

Passe.3971:

thanks for the information. It’s been a while since I did the quests, so I did forget about it

If it makes you feel any better, even people who did the quest ‘yesterday’ don’t notice that bit of dialogue. Fortunately, we players tend to make that mistake only the one time.

Labjax.2465:

I don’t think it’s the voice actor’s fault. Probably a combination of direction and writing.

Indeed. This matters a lot in TV, film, and stage, and even more so in voice acting — the VA has no way of knowing what the part calls for except what’s written in their ‘sides’ and whatever background the director provides.

Some VAs are amazing talents and can do all sorts of stuff, which sometimes mean different accents, but often means making a strong and sometimes risky choice and waiting to be told to reign it in (or not).

Listen to the interplay between Mad King Thorn & Bloody Prince Thorn in the Labyrinth and imagine trying to do that without the other actor present. Sometimes the actor will make a strong choice and many people will love it while others will have kittens trying to block it out of their memory — that’s how it is for some of us with Taimi, with Scarlet, and especially with Zojja (Felicia Day has an interesting form of vocal fry, which is off-putting to a lot of people, regardless of what she says or does).

Matthew Brenher isn’t my favorite voice actor in the game — far from it. All the same, I think he did a brave thing to come back and re-record lines and risk making strong-but-different choices the second time around. (I mean, I’m sure he got paid for his efforts, too.)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Thanks, I couldn’t find the passage. =)

It’s hard to find

It’s a random drop. I had to kill over 40 ice elementals, 15 in the final location I tried. My friend only had to kill one. So I don’t think we can say with certainty that the ones near the reactor in Metrica don’t count.

In fact, Passe, your character assured Ridhais to never offer the weapon to Zommy:

Player: Now that Caladbolg is restored, what are you going to do?
Ridhais: I’m not certain. There’s still a lot to think about, now that my quest is finished. I might still drop by to check on Caladbolg every now and then, though.
Player: I won’t toss it into the Mystic Forge or anything, I promise.

Gudy.3607:

So whatever caused this less than robust drop behaviour, at least I have the thing now and can farm for the remaining druid rune stones…

Glad to hear it. Thanks for letting us know.

Grimheart.2853:

It has next to nothing to do with Trahearne’s voice acting and pretty much everything to do with him being straight up a terrible, unlikable and useless character all along. No amount of voice acting can fix that.

Not everyone agrees. I was a big critic of both the acting and the text and I was pleasantly surprised that I started to like Trahearne after the update. I’m still not a big fan — I just think the updated recordings fixed most of what I hated.

The devs have stated that Orr is basically stuck in time. It’s partly like that as new players wouldn’t have defeated Zhaitan yet, so Orr “should not” be cleansed for them.

Doam.8305:

all they’d have to do is revamp the S1 movie

That would be a good thing.
I’ve been asking for this since S2 began (long before there was an S1 movie) — the in-game recap barely covers what happened.

I’m not sure why they couldn’t have done what folks did in the various vids that someone collated together into an hour or so recap. Presumably, the cutscenes still exist, as do the 30-second previews. The NPC in LA could show each one in turn as part of the mini-achievement.

Ashantara.8731:

And while I agree that most things are a question of taste, I doubt that bad voice acting is one of them. You can like or dislike a voice per se (like in your example of the female Norn PC), but you cannot really argue about an obvious lack of intonation. Intonation is either there or it is not.

You’d think that would be true: it sounds reasonable, it passes the usual ‘smell’ tastes for quality, and it seems possible if not likely that there’s some standard by which to measure acting.

But in reality, it’s not true. Fans like what they like. I think the Norn female PC voice lacks any affect at all — there’s no emotion at all (to my hearing) and yet I’ve seen people post in these very forums that they really like her. (And don’t get me started on Law & Order: SVU, the longest running member of that franchise — I think the actors can shout or drone on & on, just two dimensions, but the fans love them year in & year out.)

Acting connects to people at a visceral and emotional level and there’s simply no way to reduce that to a well-defined standard of measurement where there’s universal agreement about what’s bad, what’s good, what’s effective, what’s off-putting.

It’s currently considered by many to the best-in-slot power food — whether it is or not can be debated elsewhere; the point is that lots of people think it’s important.

Incidentally, there are big differences among the community supporting the wikis.

• English wiki: 65 thousand articles
• German: nearly 38 thousand
• French: 42 thousand
• Spanish: less than 4 thousand

In other words, the English wiki has 50% more pages than the German or French wikis, each of which has 10 times more than the Spanish. (That doesn’t address quality or redundancy; it’s just the simplest way to compare the relative attention each gets.)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Why would you want ANet to work on something in which they have no expertise,

Leablo.2651:

Oh… was there something in which Anet has expertise?

In fact, several things, including the no-downtime-for-maintenance|patches upgrade system, megaservers, dynamic event system, combat system, etc.

Leablo.2651:

Are they expert at programming web browsers? Because they have that integrated in the game.

The web interface is nearly required for UI, especially the parts integrated with the API. And, they aren’t that good at it. It shows in the original version of the TP and the fact that it’s hard for them to upgrade the TP and other interfaces, that they aren’t able to cross-post between twitter|facebook|reddit|forums.

So yes, I’d prefer that ANet not add to the list of things in the game that they don’t do well, since there are already 3rd party tools that do the job.

when there are already several VoIP solutions out there, several of which are free to players. In particular, you can create discord channels on the fly.

Leablo.2651:

Yes, there are many voip solutions out there, including middleware that requires only programming the interface, as most other games with integrated voice do. Do you think all those other games were designed by speech codec experts?

No, but I think the way they interface with the game did require people familiar with the codecs and the APIs.

Further, given how hard it is to get WvW regulars to join VoIP, what makes you think that PUG mobs would be inclined to make use of an in-game chat for the particular scenario you envision?

Leablo.2651:

Because they won’t have to go out of their way to use a third party program. Which is the whole point.

Except that even people who have the tools, who are already authenticated — they don’t always join.

There’s no question in-game voice chat would get a lot of use. The issue is whether it’s a good use of ANet’s time to work on it.

Leablo.2651:

As opposed to the time spent programming home instance cats that do nothing, I think integrated voice would be extremely good use of Anet’s time.

If you think it’s equally easy to add VoIP as it is to add a few NPCs that re-use existing animations, then sure, that would be a better use of their time. On the other hand, if you realize that adding cats to the home instance is something that can be done in the spare time of a few devs and adding VoIP is an entirely new enterprise, you might agree that they aren’t comparable.

Actually, Matthew Brenher voices several post-HoT characters, including the one by LA’s Mystic Forge, some in various Pact camps, and so on. He was brought back for HoT and agreed to re-record some of his lines from the personal story, including his battle lines.

I think the result is a much improved Treahearne. Instead of sounding like a whining Eyore (“this won’t end well” and “moving on”), he sounds like a librarian reluctantly fulfilling his destiny as a leader in the epic fight against an elder dragon trying to destroy the world as we know it.

Voice acting is, in my opinion, a lot more difficult than stage or film — you rarely get any sort of useful ‘feedback’, since you have neither an audience nor any other actors around (at least, not for video games). Everything you do lacks the full context — you don’t actually get to play the game, since it’s still being coded when you come to the studio.

In other words, it’s incredibly easy to do a bad job and really difficult to do a good (never mind, great) job.

That doesn’t excuse what I consider to be “phoned in” performances — some of the actors seem extremely sedate when confronted with end-of-the-world situations and bored when making life|death decisions and that’s definitely bad for our experience as a player.

On the other hand, there’s no performance that’s so bad that everyone hates it and none so good that everyone loves it.

I think Debi Derryberry nails Taimi’s personality, but some people find it cringe-worthy (and she’s uninspiring as Belinda Delaqua). For reasons I can’t fathom, there are people inspired by Claudia Christian’s performance as the female Norn PC.

Some people love the female Sylvari NPC, but think Queen Jennah is meh (or vice versa), despite those being voiced by the same actor.

In short,… well there’s no short about it. We all have very personal views about the voice acting. It’s generally a good sign when the acting generates strong feelings, even if those aren’t necessarily what the story tellers or actors were intending.

I think that’s a lot of work that I’d rather see devoted to figuring out how to increase personal storage options. It benefits those with multiple accounts, without doing a thing for the majority who own only one. It creates all sorts of potential support complications, including making it easier for hackers to divert resources from stolen accounts.

If ANet is going to add storage capacity, I’d rather they do it for primary accounts, since every player owns at least one.

Or they could round up instead of round down. It’s rarely the case that people are unhappy with finding out that they have to wait less time than they thought; it’s nearly always the case that people are annoyed if they have to wait longer.

It would help a lot if y’all could identify the specific locations in which you think this has happened. If it’s Auric Basin, what point is the meta at? There are a number of possibilities that would explain the behavior, besides “instant respawn” (although, of course, that’s also one).

It’s difficult for ANet to figure out how to fix it if they don’t have enough details to find examples or (better yet) how to reproduce the issue.

Is it possible that it’s not instant respawn but a coincidentally different set of spawns? There’s a spot on the ledge west of the Heathen waypoint with a bunch of destroyers, which one can dispatch without too much trouble. My impression is that there’s a second spawn of them that appears … possibly associated with the meta (7 destroyer infestations → 4 burrows → 2 lieutenants) -- they aren’t in the area of these events, but they seem to pop up as the status of the meta changes.

So it can easily happen that you kill the one spawn and as you do, the unrelated spawn appears. The foes are roughly the same; I’d be hard pressed to say which was the original group and which was the new one.

The same thing happens in the Inquest presence near Rata Arcanum — you can kill the foes that are up and poof, you get respawns — not the ones you just killed; they are the ones that were killed by someone else, shortly before.

Ashantara.8731:

@Illconceived Was Na:
It is no secret that a game code, where you change one thing that alters something completely different alongside and thereby messes it up, cannot be considered good coding in the first place. And that is exactly what we have in GW2, with story-missions suddenly no longer working etc., even though the update had zero to do with that specific content.

It’s common in large systems for things to interrelate in ways that folks aren’t always aware of. To the player, these things were unrelated; to coders, they might well have been.

I can’t say if the issue was the coding or the documentation or people failing to follow protocols — it’s not certain that it was “bad” code.

But let’s say it was “bad” code — do you really think that bad coders are going to do any better with the OP’s proposal? If ANet has already done a bad job of hiring, would having more money mean they do a better job when expanding the staff?

The point is that the OP’s assumptions aren’t accurate about the issues at hand, which leads to unsuitable suggestions (at best).

Ashantara.8731:

Aeolus.3615:

Voice acting can be quite expensive if u want to get many languages on your game

You wouldn’t have to dub the voices (!), just translating the text and subtitles would be sufficient for many who struggle with English.

That’s true. However, “just translating” isn’t cheap and there’s a lot of text in the game. (And there are issues with the translations of the currently supported languages.)

Ryudnard.2587:

Could you make in game voice chat for squads? This will be very useful when doing anything that involves creating big squads.

Why would you want ANet to work on something in which they have no expertise, when there are already several VoIP solutions out there, several of which are free to players. In particular, you can create discord channels on the fly.

Further, given how hard it is to get WvW regulars to join VoIP, what makes you think that PUG mobs would be inclined to make use of an in-game chat for the particular scenario you envision?

There’s no question in-game voice chat would get a lot of use. The issue is whether it’s a good use of ANet’s time to work on it.

Unless they fixed it today, I’ve been able to farm the same node multiple times, on different /IP instances of the map.

However, since they are all in out-of-the-way places (for me, anyhow), I haven’t checked all of them.

Of course lots of people in Brazil (and Portugal) play, just as lots of folks play in Russian-speaking countries.

The question is: if ANet were to spend the considerable costs to translate the existing content to Portuguese and the additional costs of translating each update’s new and changed content… how many new players are going to buy GW2?

(Plus ANet would get flack if they didn’t also translate into other widely-spoken languages, such as Russian.)

Egrimm Van Horstmann.7921:

There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the what generates what aggression

You’re assuming that there’s one rhyme and one reason, as there might be in other games. It depends on the mob and the situation. It could be any of the follow or even several:

• Highest toughness: some raid bosses use this and this alone.
• Sickest: some mobs target their foe with the least health.
• Weakest: the one that seems glassier (possibly a combination of health + toughness)
• Most damage: whoever is hurting them the most gets their attention.
• First to hit them or last to hit them.
• The one causing the most annoyance to the boss, that is, “adds” will sometimes go after the boss’ aggro target or sometimes an alternative target to free up the boss.

Low level mobs will do dumber things, like stay on the pet all the time and challenging content bosses will (often) focus attention on more sensible targets. That’s exactly what good AI should do — keep us guessing, so it’s not so easy to control them.

In practice, of course, the AI isn’t all that intelligent and it’s always artificial, so it can exhibit quirky & unexpected behavior.

Still, if you look for rhyme & reason with specific foes, you’ll see patterns emerge.

tl;dr It’s not any one thing; it’s a variety.