Guild Wars 2

fauXnetiX.6459:

If the grinders go away then you don’t have an MMORPG. MMORPGS are inherently grindy whether it’s grinding for badges, grinding for gear upgrades, grinding for gold or just grinding for pvp rank.

If the grinders stay, you have an MMO, but not an MMORPG. If you do RP, grinding isn’t required at all.

Your statement about WoW and games like it is false. Not only do people backtrack because they are able to do it easily but people can also make some in-game currency running alts and new players through content. More options for the players is never a bad thing.

That mainly happens with instances, not open world PvE. Also, you have the same options in GW2 (as I said you’re still mighty, just not almighty) and rewards are certainly way better than what you get from low level mobs in WoW.

Allow higher level players to be treated to a bit more karma and currency but keep the item rewards level appropriate for the zone and don’t have the reward be equivalent to say, Orr where the events are more difficult.

Totally fine for me. Reward event completion, not mob grinding. Imo, event mobs shouldn’t drop anything at all, that would solve several issues, especially with people intentionally not completing events so the respawn can be farmed.

I have to ask, if it’s all supposed to be “endgame” why would you have a problem with some people choosing to grind easier events? It’s their time and completing an event doesn’t harm other players.

Yes it does. Many events already are terribly easy as of now since with just a few players, it’s just a question of AoE efficiency. Most of the time, the mobs hardly get past their spawn point. As soon as that problem is fixed, by increasing mob health and adding in veterans with many players, we’re talking. As of now, the event system is already “broken” to a degree.

Bahamadude.4925:

Bish beat me to the punch. Yes it seems as if you meant this post to be in the WoW forums.

Same here, and I’m still confused.

But not by increasing the number of mobs and their respawn rate. Same problem with events btw., mobs just die way too easily.

nachtnebel.9168:

Just checked that one. You have to kill 1-3 to get to the point, but you don’t have to kill them at once. On your way in 1 is enough, then you can reach a “safe spot” where only regular mobs can reach you. Fight them till one of the two vets next to the statue moves away, then take down the other vet and grab the skill point.

I found the vista in the northeast of the plains of ashford pretty annoying, there are two veteran trolls with adds in a narrow cave, the trolls hit hard, have some nasty capabilites including AoE and there’s hardly any room for kiting.
Anyway, I’ve only been waiting for two minutes until somebody else passed by. I don’t think things should be made easier in general, almost everything already is pretty easy, but mobs shouldn’t stand so close and respawn shouldn’t be that fast. It’s somehow unrewarding to clear a cave area and have to fight a complete respawn on your way back. Or worse, respawn happens while you’re in a fight on your way back and there’s no way to react since the mobs have instant-aggro.

/e: and sometimes it just looks stupid. I first noticed that in the sylvari start area, mobs are placed so evenly to prevent you from running past them unseen, it looks almost mathematic and very unnatural. Also, I’m a mesmer and I have to adopt my playstyle (which isn’t bad, but sometimes it causes problema others just don’t have) – if I throw in a berserker for example, I can be sure to pull almost the whole area.

I didn’t think of any negative side effects yet, but I kind of like the idea. It adds more complexity and skill required than simple combo fields without requiring extra keys, buttons or anything, and it doesn’t seem to break balancing at first glance.

They simply don’t play that much. I guess that’s why GW2 is using a pay once + micropayment system and not a monthly fee, people don’t have to be forced to grind that way. If the grinders go away and there are less players, then just reduce the number of servers or go to one that has a higher population. You never see high level players in low level areas in, for example, WoW just because they can “crush” enemies, they’re only in the capitals and then back grinding in high-level areas. Introducing that system wouldn’t help a bit. And just changing the event reward scaling would have the side effect that the people farming Orr events would then simply farm even easier events in low-level zones, which would make it a lot less of an experience for actual low-level players. I don’t feel zones are empty (I’m currently playing all starting zones on a relatively low population server), and I’ve yet to see an event that’s not being completed sooner or later. There are some exceptions, like the Krait Witches in the human or sylvari start areas which are just anoying, but then again – there’s no special reward for it, and nothing bad happens if it isn’t completed within five minutes.

Lighthammer.3280:

You get punished for playing the game. I know you said that there is no grind in this game, but that should only be for lvling. Other than that grinding is in fact desirable. It lengthens the game life. Pve players, like myself, enjoy doing stuff for loot, it feels good when you dedicate couple of hours for dungeon or events and get good loot in the end.

Grind is never desireable. It is a completely stupid game mechanic introduced some time ago (I guess it’s been there before WoW, but Blizzard perfected it) and I’m glad ANet doesn’t encourage it (although you may say you have to grind a lot for a legendary, it’s more like “play everything the game has to offer for a long time and you’ll be rewarded”).
Also, what do you think would happen if there was an easy way to farm gold? Prices would simply rise, making items unaffordable for people with less time – something Anet doesn’t want to happen. That’s also one of the reasons most players hate botting and gold sellers (ANet also hates it for economic reasons of course).

I just got a three day ban from the German forums for nothing, just because there is a score system in place that also punishes you for off topic posts, and several of the posts that were deleted were totally on topic, not insulting or anything. I can totally live with a temporary forum ban, but if people are also banned from the game, which I’m not totally against, this has to be an individual decision and based on at least three moderator votes and not based on arbitrariness and an intransparent score system.

You could also easily pass by areas crowded with mobs. I feel I’m fast enough by now, we’re already running in the game as long as we don’t press the walk key and have our temporary sprint skills like swiftness and many waypoints. Being able to sprint would add more complexity, change balancing in some zones and may generally encourage an “ah well, that guy needs help but I’ll just sprint by” behaviour. Same reason we don’t have mounts in GW2.

Please add an option to hide generic / just show unique NPC names. Currently there’s just an on/off option. I’d like to hide generic names like “Citizen” and only show unique names like “Councillor Zudo”.

I totally agree, you really have to double check what the game considers the “nearest” target or you’ll often end up in very, very stressful situations.

Did you just delete the thread and recreate it? I wrote a long reply but now it’s gone, just like all other replies. Short version: I feel ANet held their promise and made GW2 a good game for busy adults, I feel a lot stronger, but not almighty, in the starting areas I’m playing now, even at level 35 with crappy equipment and senseless trait points, I feel it rewarding enough to help out with events and people’s quests, and I hope many of the former WoW players will just quit playing GW2 in the long term.
The only things I really criticise in PvE right now are respawn timers and how event scaling currently works (or doesn’t work, since mob health doesn’t increase), which makes them a stressfull AoE spam experience depending on which class you play.

@NinjaKnight: making it harder would mean make the mobs harder to kill to me. Not just crowd the area and have insane respawn timers. There are people/classes that need more space for kiting and time for killing mobs than others.

Stobor.8041:

The questions should be how many people that answered here even reached 80 lvl. This game is not an MMO but a single player experience.

It’s just what you make out of it. There are tons of concurrent players, so it’s massive multiplayer. And for sure it’s online. RPG is all up to you, it’s not strictly a game mechanic, although the game provides a story and possibilities to switch roles like it should. Can’t say GW2 feels like an SP game just because you can manage many situations alone. I felt much more alone in WoW.

PS: 30 and still breathing.

Events = bad scaling = AoE = loot, that pretty much sums it up.
Maybe Kanto should better clarify who he meant (“You’re both very strange”).

I agree with the op and have yet to see see a good argument that MF is indeed needed. Farming with MF increases income for a group of players in an undesirable way, the op already mentioned why this is a bad game mechanic. Grind wasn’t supposed to be one of GW2’s fundamental economic principles, and MF somehow encourages it.

He doesn’t even participate in an event, he’s just aggroing groups of mobs in orr. How’s that even relevant to what Hoboed is talking about (brilliant post btw).

No noticable performance increase for me (GTX 670, 310.33). I’d strongly recommend to wait for some time until the worst initial bugs are fixed though, there’s still some relevant problems with both NV and AMD drivers. Except for that, if you don’t care about the start button, Win 8 is a great OS.

dacooli.6712:

Stop lie, Swordbreaker. I go down to 16 FPS in WvW and I got a gtx 680 and i5 2500k 4.2. I get 15% gpu usage under this circumstances which proves that its my cpu that is bottlenecking in this game, even if its top notch (i7 3930 3.7 equally expect HT). This game is hugely CPU heavy, HUGELY, and an I7 is to prefer.

If you intend to overclock anyway, an i5-3570K is probably just as good as, let’s say, an i7-3770K, except for 2MB of level 2 cache. HT won’t help much with GW2 anyway, and that are the two major differences between these CPUs. But i7 = good pretty much nails it

Cool retro effect Everything else runs fine? Which driver(s) did you try?

So many people with good computer knowledge having such severe problems in just one game, that would be a very unlikely coincidence. I don’t know if the problem lies in the game or in the drivers (I hear a lot of complaints from Nvidia users though, including me with a GTX 670, and the experience changes a lot with different driver versions, e.g. 306.63 and 310.33 behave very different), I just hope this will be fixed one day.
Also, FPS problems in WvW and in PvE are two different things, WvW is probably heavily CPU bound, while there seem to be more problems with GPU utilization in PvE (which is a problem you eventually just don’t notice in WvW because it’s CPU limited anyway, but it’s probably still there).

Does anybody else experience crashes when using the injector when the game should be closed? The launcher crashes for me then. Not a big deal though since the game should be closed anyway of course. The error message is always related to the injected d3d9.dll.

When I’m in the Black Citadel, FPS drop to <5 every two minutes or so, looking at Afterburner monitoring is see that the GPU clock didn’t drop but GPU usage is suddenly constantly at 100% (GTX 670, 310.33 beta briver). After Alt-Tabbing back into the game, everything is normal again for a few minutes, then it happens again. I can reproduce that massive drop by going through a tunnel near Hero’s Canton / Canton Factorium, happens everytime there. Also happened a few times on exiting through the mustering ground portal. Never happened anywhere else in the world so far. Settings are all maxed, including supersampling (no FPS problems elsewhere, except WvW where I have to reduce the settings).

Same here, very annoying.

That’s what this setting does, that’s all I’m saying. Of course there can be electrical/mechanical faults, also sometimes there are BIOS bugs, but GPU-Z showing that one lane is in use alone doesn’t mean there’s a problem. PCIe simply reduces the number of lanes as a power saving mechanism when there’s no load.

It is normal that GPU-Z only shows PCIe x1 in idle btw., that’s a power saving mechanism controlled by the PCIe setting in Windows 7 advanced power options.

I noticed that the Shader setting has an enormous impact on Kepler (GK104) cards, more than it should in my opinion. If this uses compute capabilites, maybe have a look at the blocksize. I doubt it should cause a performance impact comparable to 1920×1200 vs 2880×1800 downsampling.

SweetFX just looks totally oversaturated to me, also dark spots become too dark (not that bad in GW2, but in BF3 for example it’s gamebreaking). Also it changes ANet’s art direction, the way they want GW2 to look, which I don’t really like. But if you like that candy look, go for it, in the end it’s just personal preference.

Please give us enthusiasts more options to enhance graphics quality by providing us with more ways to use supersampling/downsampling. GW2 isn’t that demanding, so we have some spare power.

Some suggestions:

1. allow higher UI scaling values so we can apply heavier downsampling. When downsampling from a 2880×1800 resolution, it becomes too small, even at the biggest setting. Not to mention even higher resolutions. Compare:
http://i.imgur.com/CwA1P.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/TBhLK.jpg
At 3840×2400, text is already unreadable. And btw., please fix the bad font scaling in the trading window…

2. allow us to specify the supersampling resolution we want to use internally instead of just giving one option. That would be an even better approach than the first suggestion since the UI wouldn’t be affected by it at all.

3. provide working AA-bits in cooperation with NVidia so we (at least us Nvidia users) can enforce SGSSAA, which would be the best solution by far. Since there’s no MSAA option in GW2, we cannot simply enhance this to SGSSAA. Wouldn’t have the same effect anyway. Or add SGSSAA instead of “dumb” supersampling directly to the game, it is way more efficient anyway and would also work for AMD users.

4. implement SMAA instead of FXAA. FXAA in GW2 is really blurry, while SMAA is sharper and provides better AA at the same time, especially in motion. Disabling ingame FXAA and applying an external SMAA injector as many of us currently do is an option, but it also affects fonts when not integrated directly into the engine.

No, it’s not otimized well. I’m active at some well known hardware forums like Guru3D and there are many people, including me, suffering from either bad hardware utilization or way too high load with GW2, and not only in SLI configurations or in WvWvW. Many of us have watercooled high-end rigs and the FPS fluctuations and limitations are ridiculous. Also, there are many spots that are not optimized at all. Choose human and go to the bandit cave right at the beginning for example, FPS go down from about 60 to way below 20 there. The upper area of Divinity’s Reach also suffers from bad performance. Most of the time, changing graphics options helps little to nothing since it’s CPU limited, even beyond 4,5GHz.

SolarNova.1052:

make sure your on single display performance mode, […] triple buffering on

Both options only influence OpenGL applications, GW2 is DX9.

Does GW2 do that?

psyway.4356:

anet did comment on this,i got response mail from them and they said they fixing low fps and performance issues,so i believe they work on it quite hard,btw game is so epic that i dont care to much for this problems as long as i can play it.i can wait as long as anet need to optimize it.thank you anet

That’s pretty egoistic, judging by the fact that there are thousands of people who have heavy problems playing at all.

I’m using it combined with supersampling 1920×1080, it slightly blurs text but it’s still far better than FXAA, especially in motion (which is one reason SMAA was developed anyway). Doesn’t look as good as driver forced SGSSAA alone (via Nvidia Inspector bits), but I tried that and the performance hit is just too hard (probably because I just had to try bits, maybe there will be better ones one day).

GW2 doesn’t depend on the GPU much, I have a Core i7-920 @3,5GHz and a GTX 670 @1280MHz and I can set whatever I want in the graphics options, it doesn’t change the FPS as much as it should. Since many people are experiencing this and there are also other threads here about GW2 not fully utilizing the system’s ressources (being limited by something within the engine) I guess ArenaNet has to do some more optimizations. Like the LOD adjustments with the latest patch.

Or it’s just a sign that they forgot to change the DNS records at launch, are using the IP address instead or didn’t change the client but just the DNS list.

GaileGray.9587:

As a side note, I’m sort of surprised that the system would send to you for a dynamic IP situation, since the IP would still be in that same location. I had believed that an IP at 12.34.567.890 would be considered “the same” (geographically) as 12.34.567.9. So I rather believed that a player would not be asked to authenticate every time.

I can only speak for German users, but our biggest ISP (>10 million customers) allocates addresses from several completely different subnets on every reconnect.

MLAA isn’t even close to SMAA, it’s actually even worse than FXAA.

Now that it’s working again I realize how annoying it is, especially here in Europe where you get a new IP address at least daily. There are tons of well documented, secure, open two-factor authentication systems available and you chose the worst. Most people being hacked will have their mailbox compromised anyway, so it’s just annoying and not really secure.