Guild Wars 2

mitcho.7926:

They’ll probably work on and finish the Mac version first then decide if they’ll port GW2 on Linux. Personally, I don’t see why they shouldn’t. A friend of mine had Linux and I thought it was OK, but liked Windows a bit better. That was a while ago though.

The thing that bothers me most about the Mac client, other than their PR statements that ignore the existance of any OS other than MSWindows and OSX, is that they could have supported everything, simply by using the free MSWindows translation layer (WINE), rather than the Mac-specific one that they probably paid quite a lot of money for.

Well, they’ve contradicted themselves in their answers already, so I don’t think I’ll believe anything they say:

4: Ascended Gear is designed to fill the ‘Time’ gap in regard to the distance between exotic and Legendary in terms of progression.

9: With regard to minimal Grind, how is going from 5 Ectos to 50 Ectos for a piece of gear minimal? 5 T6 items to 250 T6 items, minimal?
9: Good point Nacho. We are currently discussing these particular items and it is fair to say that we don’t want have such big hikes in requirements moving forward.

So they say that they want Ascended gear to be hard to get, but that they don’t want it to be hard to get. Right. Life of a PR mouthpiece I suppose.

Bushido.2184:

much more prone to exploits.

Much more prone doesn’t quite make the point clearly enough. Back in ~’02, I read about a study done to compate currently active exploits in Linux, Mac and Windows: The numbers were 2 for Mac, 7 for Linux, and they stopped counting for Windows at ~6000. I doubt the relative stability has improved all that much (is 7 really that much more secure than XP?).

If you want a laugh, look up “Windows for Warships”. The article “Sunk by Windows NT” gives a decent overview without all the laughing.

Google has stated that they do. Anyone running Chrome does. And Valve seems to think there’s enough of a market (or that they can encourage enough of a market) for it to be worthwhile.

Yes, Linux wins on infastructure. Thats where a larger fraction of people make an active choice about what OS they use, rather than just using whatever came on the box without thinking about it. Mostly because Windows isn’t secure or stable enough for serious use.

Here’s a question:
Other than applications availible and hardware support, why would you, as a user, not want to run something that is as stable and secure as the most reliable and secure internet servers and supercomputers?

Oops, missed one bit of the original idea:

Remove Magic Find from all other armour sets. Make Travellers, Explorers and Wayfarers give some other effect instead.

My suggestion would be:
Travellers: Vitality
Explorers: Toughness
Wayfarers: Healing Power

marnick.4305:

There are two major layouts for Linux systems: Debian and RedHat. Most distros use one of those two. Also, you can build your stuff so that it doesn’t care. It normally involves rolling your own libraries in, which makes your software easier to support, as you then don’t have to figure out which version of libraries they’re using or where they are.

And yet for Windows there’s only 1. Should I tell my customers I only support RedHat? That would be even more of a joke.

It’s no more of a joke than only supporting windows.

If the Linux world can step up and provide one monolithic distribution that everyone is expected to use, it will become competitive for industrial use.

I think you’re missing one of the key strengths of Linux there, and one of the reasons that it is so secure.

I don’t mean joke in a bad way. Linux is a very good way to learn the innards of computers. But on a company scale, it indeed is a joke because Linux development requires far more resources for far less results.

Apache would disagree with you. So would Skype (which is now Microsoft-owned), Google and a whole bunch of others.

Which is why most of my customers are running the extremely solid and proven operating system called XP service pack 3. Some still use NT4.0 and there is no reason to “upgrade”.

How many security holes have been open in those since release and still aren’t fixed?

I know Chrome and Android is based on Linux, but the reason for that is because Chrome isn’t an OS developing company but rather an advertisement company. Google is known to allow their employees free time to program joke projects. Some of those become good, most fail. Gmail and Android happened to be joke projects that had potential, but all those other projects, you never heard of.

Actually, Google bought the company developing Android. You know, for a lot of money.

The only thing I mean with “joke” is that it’s not intended to earn you money. Please understand that. Developing for Linux can be good because it deepens knowledge of your software and the machines it runs on, but only the largest companies have the ability to earn money on Linux.

You’re calling CentOS big? I thought they were pretty tiny in the grand scheme of things.

The choice being made is in the following: a 15 years old newbie installs Linux because it’s cool to hate Windows. His GW2 doesn’t work and he buggers support. The time it takes to solve his problem, could be used to check 20 hacked account tickets. Which path should a.net take? Even if I personally wanted to support the rare Linux question I get, I simply wouldn’t have time for that.

Got any data to back up that assertation? Linux client support isn’t Linux support.

Not my idea, but a brilliant one.

Thought process:

ANet wants players with Ascended Items to be at an advantage over players with Exotics.
A large number of people do not want Ascended Items to be a power boost over Exotics.
No-one likes other players running Magic Find Gear.

So: Make Ascended Items have Exotic numbers, but instead of only having 1 primary and two secondary stats, give them 2 primary and two secondery stats. But one of those primary stats is always Magic Find. Give them cool new skins, add an Infusion slot to everything, and call it a day.

This does everything they’ve stated they what from Ascended items, and stays (mostly) true to the “No Vertical Progression” promise:
Magic Find as a bonus stat will not change the outcome of a fight once it has started: No power creep, so not required to be at maximum effectiveness in WvW.
Magic Find will allow players with Ascended gear to be at an advantage over players without: They don’t need to farm as much for stuff, so will be able to get new stuff faster than players with Exotics.
Players who want to run Magic Find can do so without hampering the rest of their party.

I see no downside here. Does anyone else?

Merthax.5172:

Magic find should be the stat bonus that has ascended gears have over exotics: ascended stats = exotic stats + MF.

Lower tiered gear shouldn’t have MF at all. It should be replaced with something else.

Actually, That’s a brilliant idea. I’m going to throw out a suggestion thread for that.

[quote=845336;Narkosys.5173:
You always start small in something like this cause it is less likely to provoke a reaction instead of releasing say weapons as the first thing.Back slots ect are meaningless compared to armour and weapons and would cause less blow-back from community.
[/quote]

If this was a small blow-back I really don’t know if I want to see a big one. Maybe it would involve cracking ANets servers or something (Not that I’m condoning that, I just don’t see how much bigger a responce could get without something like that).

Zzod.5791:

Eh, no.
3rd attack in chain for Attack number 1 is too delayed and awkard while fighting strafing/dodging/moving targets. Needs to be made faster.

Fix number 5. People should not be able to just dodge roll out of it. That is BS.

Umm, you are aware that one of the current Meta Builds is built around that attack, aren’t you?

Ok, Ascended gear is here to stay. I really don’t see ANet dropping it’s stats back to exotic quality.

Lets take a look at what they did with it though, as to me it looks like it was built using the tech they aready had, rathre than adding what would be nessecary to do it properly for everything.

Current ascended items are Back and Ring. Back and Ring, as far as I know, have no upgrade slot items that give anything but stats. Most people don’t mix the upgrade, and match the upgrade stats to the item stats. So rolling the stats into the item isn’t going to change a lot. (I’m staying out of the fact that they increaced the stats just now*) Since they wanted a new item slot, accessories are the only place they can get rid of the existing item slot without destroying runes and sigils. Since they don’t have the tech to give an item two upgrade slots, that works.

All this means that I doubt we’ll see any ascended items apart from accessories.

@ANet: Don’t even think about doing ascended Armour and Weapons until you have the tech to do an infusion slot and a rune/sigil slot. And make it a fourth slot on the transmutation stone so people can pull their existing looks and runes/sigil across.

• Just going to point out that GW1, which made enough money (with only minimum updates after GW:EN) for GW2, never increaced the stats on “perfect” gear. The stuff I have there currently has equivilent stats to the stuff available at release.

New content: Good

Going back on the promise of horizontal progression and no grind for better stats: Bad

Releasing bigger numbers on new content: Not what was advertised.

Drop them back to exotic stats, ANet.

marnick.4305:

- Also, you never know when a Linux branch is going to die. If, for example, you base your software kit on emacs, it may just die tomorrow unless you support emacs financially. However, emacs is open source so all your money is down the litter bin and you have no rights to any code you paid for. If you base it on Visual Studio, you almost certainly know Microsoft and VS support will still be there in 10 years.

Is Microsoft any less likely to die than RedHat? Really? You would put money on MS still being relevent in 10 years?

Oh, and please actually read some lisenses sometime. You seem to be under some major misconceptions about the GPL. I can correct those some other time.

- Windows is actually very flexible, and if something isn’t possible yet, it’s usually possible to make it. The company I work for has a real time kernel that runs completely parallel to Windows. There’s nothing you can do with Linux which you can’t with Windows.

True, but it’s almost certainly cheaper and easier on Linux. I program on Windows for my day job, and the number of times I’ve run into a bug in Microsoft’s code that I could probably have fixed if I had source access 10x faster than the work-around took is pretty big. And that’s not mentioning the one that I can’t work around.

For companies who have to pay salaries and share holders, going with open source partners is simply unfeasible and corporate suicide. Valve is big enough to start a joke project they know will cost more than it’ll earn, but I don’t think a.net has that luxury position.

Again, I really suggest you take a look at what Google says about it’s systems. In fact, I’ll quote them so you don’t have to go looking: “Why would anyone use anything else?” Or there’s Oracle, why don’t you ask them about their “Unbreakable Linux” (or you could ask them about Solaris, I suppose). Even Microsoft run some of their servers on Linux.

Also, Valve is getting better performance on Linux than on Windows. “Joke project”?

When I have customers calling me with Linux problems I invariably say I can’t and won’t help them. It makes no sense to devote 90% of resources to a minority of users, because frankly, solving a single Linux problem takes more time than 100 Windows problems. We allow customers to use Linux but don’t give any form of official support on it.

So while I support this thread in that a.net could one day allow a dev write an unsupported Linux client in his spare time, I would not expect such a thing to happen anytime soon. Unsupported and spare time being the key words here.

I’m not even asking for a native Linux client. Mac doesn’t have that either. All I’m asking for is official WINE support. Even official support for a specific version of WINE with a specific set of patches applied would be good for me. Because then I won’t need to worry about a future patch stopping me from playing.

Oh, and we already have the “make it work in WINE” flag on the game, which is why I keep telling people that if you want to see official Linux support, to run it on Linux. So that when ANet poll how many people are using it, they see the actual numbers.

So many misconceptions here.

marnick.4305:

I’m not talking for a.net here but more generally from an industry point of perspective. I work for a 2000 people industrial automation company and have a few Linux customers every month.

- The company I work for has a pretty big software environment which only works under Windows. There are very good reasons for that. First of, with Windows, you know what you work with. As bad as Windows is out of the box, you never now how bad someone kittened up his Linux distribution.

When you’re helping Windows clients, do you tell them how to sort out their utterly trashed Windows system that’s been trojaned up the wazzo, or do you just tell them to reinstall and call you back? Why would anyone expect you to do anything but support your own software?

There are two major layouts for Linux systems: Debian and RedHat. Most distros use one of those two. Also, you can build your stuff so that it doesn’t care. It normally involves rolling your own libraries in, which makes your software easier to support, as you then don’t have to figure out which version of libraries they’re using or where they are.

Be honest, would you be willing to help anyone with his homebrew Archlinux, Gentoo or LFS??? How much would you charge for that? On the other hand, Microsoft actually gives pretty good support to it’s industrial customers. In case of emergency, our in-house developers are 2 phone calls away from any Microsoft developer.

- For Linux, such support does not exist. Whenever a company develops for Linux, they also have to hire someone to develop Linux for the simple reason that lots of stuff is in beta and for serious use that’s not an option. Most big Linux software packages are a joke by industrial standards, not because they’re bad but because lack of serious support

You should really try talking to Google, RedHat or Canonical about that.

Then there’s the fun question of “When does a Beta end?” Would you consider any Windows OS from before it’s first service pack to be ready for serious use? Beta means something differeing in Free Software circles to what Microsoft means by it.
Beta for MS seems to mean: “We’re going to release this in 6 months with whatever bugs are left, and then patch some of the rest after you’ve paid for it, maybe they’ll be the ones that you care about.”
Beta for Free Software means: “We still have some major bugs in there.”
Most Microsoft prouducts would still be considered Beta by Free Software standards, wouldn’t you agree?

Also, what’s the standard web server set: LAMP. Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python. How much of that is Free Software? Try again with your “Not up to scratch” claim, please.

Bushido.2184:

Just tried out Guild Wars 2 with Wine. I too agree that people who say Wine is fine, there’s no need for a native client are kidding themselves.

After the ghetto-rigged install on Linux with the installer crashing every couple of files downloaded (which is warned by everyone that it will happen), I proceed to play. It takes around 3 minutes for my install to initially load the char select screen every time.

Then, I must play at much lower settings to achieve similar Windows framerate plus many graphical and miscellanious errors, and suffer from stuttering which ruins the gameplay experience and makes me fear ever engaging in tPvP due to its instability. The stuttering is also a widespread occurence.

And the Black Lion trading company is broken, though I believe you can patch it. Even then, every user must do so much modifying, tinkering, manual patching, and diagnosing individual situations in order to get a ghetto-rigged, inadequate, crap, non-native client working barely.

TLDR: Wine is not an adequate substitution for a proper native client.

Ok, several things wrong with what you’re saying:

1: Default WINE isn’t ok for GW2: true. If you read anything about this, you would know that you need some patches, and if you don’t know what you’re doing, then you should use PlayOnLinux’s GW2 build. This includes rawInput and awesomium, which fix the mouse-look and BLTP (Though I think I saw that rawInput has been rolled into core WINE now). I write software for a living, and I stull use PlayOnLinux, purely for the convinience.

2: The installer crashes every few thousand files. But if you already had a copy of GW2.dat, you could have simply copied it over.

3: What model is your graphics card? WINE has always played best with nVidia cards for me. I have had major issues with the DirectX converter on AMD cards.

4: Of course on WINE you have to use lower performance settings than on a native Windows install. It’s doing run-time translation of every system and DirectX call. Unless your system was screaming along at max settings on Windows, what do you expect?

Personally, I don’t think they’d need to do much at all to support the PLayOnLinux WINE build officially, other than cope with an outpouring of support from the Linux community. My biggest issue is a low framerate for about a minute after loading into a new zone while it background-loads everything.

And for fair comparison, here’s my system specs:
AMD Phenom™ II X6 Processor
GeForce GTX 460 (1GB)
16GB Ram

GW2: everything is on high, 1280×1024 monitor.

marnick.4305:

I’m with Illiander. Don’t get hacked. That’s YOUR responsibility, although A.net is cool enough to help you out when you kitten up. I wouldn’t go as far as to recommend using Gentoo, your common sense should suffice by not going to particular websites based on goldselling, stealing software and female body parts.

I’m not sure I’d go as far as recommending uning Gentoo to someone who isn’t technically minded. Though I would suggest Ubuntu or Fedora. I’ll skip the list of reasons why for now though, and just link the Linux thread.

As someone else has said, this would add very little benefit, for a lot of effort.

Leaving aside the fact that most of us keep our best gear equipped, what are the ways someone gains access to someone else’s account? (I refuse to call it “hacking”, look up the jargon file)

The possibilities I can see are:
ANet screws up: This happens, your bank is the least of your worries.
Your Email gets compromised: Attacker requests a pin reset, ANet sees that its from your account’s email address and grants it.
You tell someone your account details: If you fell for a phisher in this day and age, you’re an idiot. If you use the same account name and password as on another site after ANet yelling about it as much as they have, that’s your fault.
You get a keylogger on your system: Again, in this day and age getting your computer compromised? Really?

The first two are highly unlikely. The third has happened a lot. I haven’t had to worry about the fourth in about 5 years (see sig).

Jelle.2807:

Rehashed Jibe Tube.7102:

does the grumpy old norn they partner you with when you join the vigil count?

Hey don’t diss forgal! He isn’t grumpy, he’s the most awesome warmaster! Seriously the best character in the game to me so far. Much more likeable then freaky Sieran.

Try the Order of Whispers storyline. Tybalt Leftpaw (look at his right hand) is brilliantly done, (except for the end of Claw Island, they messed that up badly <jumps on Traherne hate-train>).

What does the legendery axe look like?

The legendery hammer is the same skin as the lightning hammer, maybe the axe is the same?

phooka.4295:

Illiander.8049:

Let me just get something straight: To adjust the drop table for monsters, ANet need to update 8 files on the client.

Am I the only person who’s disturbed by this?

Since you know next to nothing about the source code (OK, drop “next to”), why do you complain? I can’t remember seeing a patch that had less than 40MB and 8 files. Maybe those files contain some information that changes with every build like… build number. I don’t know. More importantly, you don’t know.

I work at a software company myself. We ship source code. One of our mantras is “we don’t explain source code”. We don’t give justifications for why we did things the way we did them. Often, there’s many ways to do things and at the time you develop it, one’s as good as the other. As a developer, you pick one way to do it but you don’t have to defend that decision before the customer. Software ships “as it is”, just as you can read in many EULAs.

Actually, we know quite a bit about the general structure of their server architecture.

Login server, BLTP server, general servers which may or may not have seperate item servers; probably has a seperate process for each zone, and the clients. If the client is handling drops, then there’s a big problem. Updating the drop rates should ideally be done by telling the servers to reload the loot tables (less ideally by a server restart). It should need no updates to the client at all, because the server should simply be telling the client what it got, not asking it what it got. Authoritive clients are a cracker’s wet dream in a server-client architecture where you can’t actually trust the clients. If you know anything, you should see that.

I also work at a software company: we do intricate and complicated simulation. We do have to be able to justify how we do things, because we need our software to be certified for some of its uses. Also, the process of explaining how something works normaly exposes a good few flaws in your methods. No, we don’t explain every line of code, but we do give an overview of the maths and physics we’re using. It’s called “Good Customer Relations”.

EULAs are rediculous, and mostly unenforcable anyway. Software Engineers are the only Engineers who even try to say “What I do is not fit for any purpose whatsoever”.

Not what I was getting at at all.

If they need to update the client to change a drop rate, that implies that the drops are calculated client-side. This is a very bad thing, look at non-league Diablo 2 for why.

If there were other fixes included in there, then they should have at least given us an overview of what they were (even as vauge as “Fixed some botting openings” would be enough), so we aren’t left thinking that their security design is Microsoft98-quality.

Let me just get something straight: To adjust the drop table for monsters, ANet need to update 8 files on the client.

Am I the only person who’s disturbed by this?

Ok, so you’re upset that the enemy is spending resources that they could be spending defending their point-scoring locations, to instead defend a resource-granting location.

Denial of resources is a time-honoured tactic in war, if you feel it’s not worth the effort to commit resources to taking it back, go enjoy your tactical superiority and go take Stonemist.

Or organise a group to take the only non-scoring objective left in WvW off them.

WvW isn’t just PvP, it’s Massive Team PvP. If the other side consider something worth defending, then don’t expect to be able to take it off them without at least 3/4 of their numbers.

Spike Firebrand.8943:

Once again you prove just how dumb pvpers are. Can you read and understand english Varya ? If so what is SO HARD to undertand about the following FACT. wvw is played under BOTH THE PVP AND PVE RULES. One of the PVE rules is that YOU CAN NOT GRIEF PEOPLE. Therefore if you grief people in wvw your breaking rhe rules.

You can’t seem to grasp the concept that killing your opponents in the most efficient manner possible by the rules in a PvP zone isn’t griefing. Stacking 30 siege on top of the chest so that your allies can’t open it is griefing. See the difference there?

YumCHA.8706:

Not that I care much for this thread, but how do you explain a terrain filled with mountains, cliffs, tight corners, rigged traps and irritating jumping areas be considered a good place to PvP?

Launches exist. Launches are no better than knockdowns without cliffs to throw people off of.

Also, go watch the fight between the Dread Pirate Roberts and Inigo Montoya. Or any Indiana Jones film.

Ualtar.5047:

MithranArkanere.8957:

Quaggan singing GW’s version of Bohemian Rhapsody

This MUST be made! Seriously, Anet can we please, please see this?

Agreed. That would be absolutely adorable.

“Any way the tide fllooooooooowwws”

It’s been requested lots.

Sigh. Think of it as a fortrass that gives blueprints rather than points. It’s the only non-scoring objective left in WvW.

No, but the second tab says something to the effect of “more coming soon”.

Sigh. If they’re building arrow carts up there, use the standard counter to arrow carts and destroy them before running the puzzle.

What’s the standard counter to arrow carts? Ballista/catapult out of their range. It’s WvW, if they’re defending something with siege, you need to attack it with siege.

castlemanic.3198:

Cinder, i think you may be confused. What the OP is suggesting is to centrally ban the software from gaining access to the game, instead of individually on each account. It would prevent new accounts from using the software to begin with, limiting the capability of goldsellers even starting up in the game.

Lets clear some stuff up here:

Software Key: the string of numbers that came with your box (if you bought a physical box).

Software: Program running on a computer (not the most accurate description, but it will do for our discussion here)

Banning the Software Key is equivilent to banning the account.

Keeping the software out is impossible. Look up “The Analog hole” for DRM, the fundamental problem is the same.

one more nail in the coffin

If you use one of those fancy mice, why don’t you just put a macro on ` to switch your button ordering at the same time you switch weapons?

UI changes always take a lot of dev time to do.

Smackjack.5071:

I dont see how there is any valid argument against it really.

There are better things to spend developer time on. Also, what would the UI be like for rearranging them?

ANet has a long list of bugs that are much higher priority than this.

Fight the interface.
Learn the interface.

Which one you do is your choice.

Been suggested before. Lots.

Doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, just that I doubt it’s high on the dev’s list.

Here’s another one that would be wonderful: A back-flag with your guild emblam on it.

New areas can be 1-80. That’s one of the big reasons for the downscaling.

A new race will almost certainly add in a new 1-15 area at a minimum.

And if you expected a DirectX game to run well on Wine on a minimum/reccommended-spec computer, then you were kidding yourself.

The run-time DirectX→OpenGL converter is possibly the biggest contributor to people’s performance issues, and still seems to work best on NVidia cards. (disclaimer: I haven’t done extensive testing on this, so this opinion is not statistically backed)

And I have a suggestion for those of you who want a Linux client but who don’t have a good enough machine to run on WINE: Run with the same flags as you would on Linux (-dx9single), as that’s the only way I can see for ANet to count Wine users. That’s the petition that they’ll actually look at.

Novalitus.7382:

Why get a Linux if you know its not supported by most game developers? XD

Some of us use our computers for more than just gaming.

Kain Francois.4328:

Unfortunately, it probably wont be worth it from a profitting perspective because GW2 is already able to be used with WINE.

WINE runs fine on Mac, yet they felt the need to do a Mac client. The same economics apply to Linux. Then again, they probably can’t do official WINE support now, because it would mean that they’d have to admit to wasting money on the Transgaming port.

We’ve been asking for a mouse-look toggle keybind for a very long time. Probably first started in BW1.

Seeing as ANet can just poll the clients to see which of them are running on Wine, I still don’t see the point of an online petition.

Hell, I’d be happy if games companies decided that they’d support Wine, never mind a specific Linux distro.

That’s also the best decision for them, as it gets than the entire non-Windows x86 population in one fell swoop. No messing about with which distros they support, no worries about installers, and almost everyone is happy. (ARM machines tend not to be decent gaming rigs (too low spec for modern resource-hogging games), even though I’d love to be able to play on a RaspPI, I don’t see it happening anytime soon)

They even get a cool logo that they can stick on the box.

I just hope we lose the round before they start charging for transfers, so they all go somewhere else.

First off, I don’t get how you’re counting generations. Is this something like “web2.0”?

Second, this would be brilliant for casuals, except that they won’t have headsets. And everyone with a headset is already on their Guild/World Mumble/Vent/TS, so would have issues with channel switching, so wouldn’t bother.

Third, have you ever been on a public VoIP server? Read the map chat sometime. This would be even worse, as instead of having a message pop up on your log every five minutes asking about the dragon time, you’d have it in your ears.

The best thing I could see coming out of this would be to have it as a broadcast-only option for commanders, with a range of “Map” in WvW, with player opt-out.

Except that they won’t charge you again for a Linux client. You buy a set of login details for their servers, and they hand the clients out for free. I’m pretty sure you can even download and patch them without a login. Look at how the Mac client is handled.

Now, saying: “I’d buy more gems if you gave my choice of OS actual, official support (without breaking anything)” might have an effect, but I doubt they take statements like that seriously.

Again, I’d like to point out that ANet already have the numbers of people playing on Wine. So forum polls on this are rather pointless. If you want Linux support, play on Linux.

Also, if you want a laugh, go look at the Mac bugs list, and compare it to performance in Wine. Looks like they really made a mistake in what would be easier to support

I think part of the problem is that a monster’s skill-set is entirely defined by it’s name. So the centaurs in Hrathi Hinterlands are exactly as difficult as the centaurs in the Human tutorial instance, after you account for stats. The only reason the Risen in Orr are harder than in Caladon Forest is because they introduced new types of Risen there.

Something that was wonderful back in GW:Beyond, was that they gave the monsters quality builds based off players, and the AI to use them.

Onshidesigns.1069:

The point is to one day have a game without level. Where you play for fun and not to grind for exotic gear that does not improve your character much.

Already exists. It’s called Team Fortress.

I quite like this idea. Can I ask if the following sum-up is accurate?

Balance PCs for PvP. Balance PvE for PvP-balanced-PCs. ANet seems to only currently be doing the first half, so it would be good if they could also do the second half.

Is that about right?

Where did you find any reference to 3rd party applications here?

This thread is about adding pet scripting into the game as a feature. Not about using a 3rd-party bot to just control your pet.

Scripting in MMOs has been done before (WoW). Pet AI scripting specifically been done before (Ragnarok Online). If you think there weren’t sites with decent scripts around for anyone to download in those games you’re kidding yourself.

All that allowing players to write their own AI for their summoned NPCs does is make them useful (and remove all the raging about stupid pet AI). Give me a legitimate downside.