Guild Wars 2

DaveGan.8065:

You’re presenting a false dichotomy here. Hotjoin exploitation happens with strangers. I’m sure if you played it with 9 friends you guys would do whatever possible to ensure teams were as even as possible.

The issue is that this isn’t the case, so you have the prisoner’s dilemma. Exploit or get exploited. Welcome to all of society. Honor isn’t tracked, and rewards are purely based on win-loss.

huh, thought I responded to this.. must not have gone through…

At any rate, where did I present a false dichotomy? O.o I haven’t presented anything with “choose from these options.”

Additionally, this isn’t a prisoner’s dilemma either – the exploiting players end with maximum reward and no punishment or downside. You do realize in the prisoner’s dilemma scenario, the act of both exploiting each other results in a middle-ground outcome for both, right? That’s not what happens here… the exploiters all stack on one side and all receive maximum benefit.

Regardless, I presented a simple solution to help really curb the problem, which you didn’t even acknowledge.

Or you could, you know, stop trying to just throw out the baby with the bath water and actually attempt to fix it, instead of the lazy way out of avoiding it entirely.

Hotjoin is supposed to be a place to prepare for tPvP and to test out new build and play styles – you can theorycraft til the end of time, but actually vetting it is the only real way to find out if something works. There’s also people out that that would like to just play a casual game of sPvP where it actually resembles an actual match.

That’s not to say it doesn’t exist in hotjoin, but a majority of the hotjoin games in no way prepare anyone for tPvP whatsoever. Many of those games don’t really validate a new build or playstyle either. It doesn’t really tell you anything about your build if you do really well in a 4v3 where the other team consists of players new to PvP, thanks to all the team stacking and exploiting of auto-balance.

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

They need to do something with the fall-instadeath concept. Maybe don’t die from the fall and add a way to get back up, so that falling is like a very hard CC.

As someone who doesn’t mind this map really… that’s not a bad idea.

Dies too fast. http://www.twitch.tv/isilzhasb/c/4498813 Totally OP.

My current guardian build, while it wasn’t built for the specific purpose, absolutely destroys most of the thief builds.

The only one I had trouble with, was a chain stun for 8 sec+ build. I figured out how to counter play it after a few engagements though, to the point where I won a 2v1 vs the stun chain thief and a ranger (admittedly by the skin of my teeth, but hey it was a 2v1.)

So no, they’re not unstoppable.

On that note I also had a recent, straight up 2v1, me vs 2 thieves, where I dropped them both in under 10 seconds, then finished them off. Then when I died to a 4v1 those thieves stated calling me “bad.” lol

DaveGan.8065:

Then they should implement something to fix it. If switching teams gets more rank points than not switching, of course people will switch. If rewards for winning are 250% the rewards for losing, of course people will want to win at any cost. When you can spend 3min12sec on the winning team to get the same reward as 8+min on the losing team…

Yeah, I’ve suggested before it could be a simple fix: Don’t allow players to switch to the other team once they’ve picked one. Even if they drop back to spectator, don’t allow them to swap to the other team.

The vocality of the teamswapping you reference is a good thing, not a bad one. Announcing “I’m abusing the system because I can” and making “Afk Cuz Skyhammer” characters in Solo Queue bring these issues to discussion much faster than stealthily switching teams or putting in 1% effort on Skyhammer to bypass the AFK check.

Stop asking players to be honorable. “It’s just hotjoin”, and if you don’t switch teams someone else on the team will. Why him and not you instead?

Just because you can exploit something, doesn’t mean you should. Who wants to play with someone acting like a kitten like that? So if you play a game of chess with a friend, and it’s clear he’s about to win… you flip the board around and claim victory? Do you then just announce “it’s not a tournament, it doesn’t matter.” I mean clearly in that situation if you don’t do it, the other person will, so why not just do it?

Evan Lesh.3295:

At what point are you seeing players join teams from spectator mode? Rewards are based on time played on a team, so are people forgoing partial rewards to be on the winning team?

I’ve watched people who consistently join a game – and if their team gets about 50 points behind, will swap to the other team that’s winning… and back again if the tables turn.

One night I ran into a really obvious abuse of it, and I called the guy out on it. When called out on it, aside from a lot of raging and calling me a “worthless n****r” (stay classy.) He tried to claim he was justified in abusing the system, and in the end his final argument was the circular logic of “lol it’s hotjoins.” The problem is, hotjoins are terrible because of players like him, who then use the excuse that hotjoins are terrible so it’s totally okay that they do it. PS: I have video of this abuse. The guy would even announce he was switching.

I’ve called out several others I’ve caught blatantly team swapping when their team starts losing, and they all end up with the same “lol it’s hotjoin” and continue to be the plague that makes many hotjoin games awful and ludicrously lopsided.

Yeah, in the last few weeks it’s gotten really bad. People just dump to spectator if they’re losing and swap to the winning team. Most of time, when I go looking for a hot join game, I have to cycle through 5-9 servers as I come across 90% of games as 34 to 389, etc. I think part of the problem is the removal of 8v8s for hot join. More players means 1 or 2 of them dropping out or swapping around makes less of an impact. Just to take the example to the extreme: if you had 100 player teams, would 5 people leaving make much of a difference?

Veteran Oakheart.4035:

I think my gif is pretty accurate of how fun this map is :P

What about this? http://youtu.be/8ot8Hy-IIa4

:p

SHTSKATE dot com.9310:

I have gotten up to 4+ minutes of swfitness on my engineer juggling low-duration skills over and over again several months ago, and probably could’ve gone higher but got bored. After testing the same rotation of skills I can’t break more than 1.5 minutes, so this is definitely a post-release ninja change.

Not to be mean about it, but that’s not a valid or even provable (or falsifiable) claim without you having documented exactly what you did before. The post here seems to indicate it’s always been there.

shadow.6174:

Oh really? That’s weird because the hovertext for the Swiftness applied, that icon above your skill bar, says “stacks duration” but it never stacked even if I get swiftness from another source when already having it given from Temporal Curtain.

Assuming this is true, they may have basically cheated with Temporal Curtain, and to make sure you can’t stack TC on itself, made TC set your swiftness stacks to 9, preventing all swiftness stacking until it expires.

cheezwhiz.9517:

I’ve gotten several minutes of swiftness before, and have noticed the cap.
@Tyler: It would be helpful to know all of the quantity/duration caps and single cast caps so we can document them on the wiki. Especially for Stability, as I have noticed something different from what you’ve mentioned. And are “stacks” of duration removed and applied in a FIFO fashion or some other order?
To clarify: I’ve managed 3min+ of swiftness on my warrior but only 15 seconds of stability from a group of five guardians with “Stand Your Ground.” Did I miscount (possibility)? Or is there a duration cap that can only be exceeded by a single skill, similar to movement speed caps?

The Wiki already indicates that Stability has a max of 3 stacks.

I could see that being the case, though I’ve seen others claim to have much more than 2 minutes. This is most easily possible in WvWvW where most players take some form of swiftness and everyone tends to spam them as a zerg group moves around.

Svarty.8019:

What the heck is this? New rules nobody knows?!! A year after release?

haha, apparently these rules have been there the entire time, and no one really noticed or dug into it enough? I only happened to reveal it because of the new Symbol of Swiftness, which rather quickly provides a lot of short duration stacks, making the limitation much more apparent. I had no clue about this, and thought I was witnessing a strange bug.

I already added information about it to the Wiki.

So to clarify: Intensity boons stack up to 25. Duration boons stack up to 9 times (except Retaliation, which is 5?)

The Wiki includes duration boons, like swiftness, in it’s list of boons with no indication that there is a 9-stack limit (which says nothing of the intensity of each stack, you could get 9, 20s duration stacks for 3 minutes of swiftness.)

Perhaps I will work to remedy the problem on the Wiki side with this information.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Buffs can only stack 9 times total. This might be what you are seeing.

Okay thanks, that makes perfect sense actually.

Going off of Symbol of Swiftness – 9 stacks x 4s/ea. = 36s.

This is either completely undocumented or very poorly documented (I can’t find this documented anywhere.) The wiki still states that all affects except specific ones stack up to 25 times, and includes boons. I can find nothing in-game that suggests a 9 stack limit of most buffs.

Still I thank you for your answer, and this does then need to be indicated in-game/documented.

I had taken a bit of a hiatus from GW2, and jumped into WvW to try out the new Symbol of Swiftness with my Guardian and I noticed something odd about swiftness yesterday. Whenever swiftness would put you at or over 40 seconds, it seems only about 50% of swiftness buffs actually get taken and applied.

This includes symbol of swiftness 4-second ticks (not that big of a deal) to Save Yourselves’ 11 seconds of swiftness not applying at all.

I’ve done it about a dozen times; it only happens once an application of swiftness would put you at or over 40s of swiftness. You’ll note in the video that if I’m at or above 37s, about half the ticks of SoS don’t apply. Last night, I thought there was a new hard cap on swiftness of 40s, but I looked around and couldn’t find anything.

http://youtu.be/NjLqfaJJEZ4

Sooo… why does your zerg lack any retaliation?

CnaeusDane.2938:

Glad that I’m not the only one noticing it then. It’s a larger issue than people think, especially in PvP situations where a dodge can mean the difference between winning or losing.

I’ve had it where I hit my heal while I was immobilized… and then a random dodge interrupts it and puts my heal on cool down (which got me killed.)

Yep, same here. It seems to happen less, but it’s still there.

I’ve also had it queued up from going down, and when i rally/get revived, my character immediately rolls.

^^ Umm, that doesn’t sound like a bug. Normally you can’t teleport up ledges.

The main list needs to be updated, some of those bugs have been fixed (like Virtue recharge rates being reflected in their tool tips.)

There are still some major bugs that have yet to be resolved, though. Symbol of Swiftness is one of the worst skills for actually applying swiftness due to multiple bugs:

1) Even with larger symbols enabled, it is possible at times to run from one end of the symbol to the other and never receive swiftness.
2) If you already have swiftness, it will only keep resetting your duration to whatever you had left +1s. IE: If you had 0.25s left of swiftness, it will set you to 1.25s of swiftness while you stand in it, essentially being a total waste if you already had swiftness on you at all.

The multiple bugs on Protector’s Strike make it terrible at its intended purpose. Most of the time it doesn’t block /any/ damage (though it’ll trigger its counter-attack,) and of course, if Aegis is up, your Aegis will be consumed as well.

Those bugs seem like the worst ones on the Guardian, at the moment, and they’ve been there since launch, still broken.

Yeah I got confused by this, too. “Why won’t she give me another gun.” Then I found it in my inventory. It’s not very clear.

I think the biggest thing that makes it confusing is that it is completely inconsistent with how all other special guns like this behave. (As soon as you swap weapons you have to go get a new one, you don’t get one in your inventory.) So it’s a totally unexpected behavior.

I like that the Karka are much more challenging; and generally in the right way. Their powerful attacks are painfully obvious, and you only really get hit by them if you haven’t left yourself with any endurance or defensive abilities.

I can solo the Vet Karkas with my Guardian, it’s a fun challenge.

style.6173:

Also, the AC change is nice for those who like to defend. On the flipside, it just encourages more zerging now to attack a tower.

lol what? The AC, which can hit up to 50 targets, is going to encourage more zerging? I guess if you want your (mindless) zerg absolutely slaughtered…

Ruprect.7260:

They fell apart after that first loss to us, realized they were not going to T1 as they had been planning to do and gave up.

It is soooo unfortunate because the matchup with KN has been great fun, we finally got some sea/oceanic servers to be more competitive with them and they all start leaving

If that’s true… what poor sportsmanship.

But yeah, it was pretty great when both KN and FA were running around. KN is virtually a non-issue the last two weeks of W3.

For the record: I’ve only ever known of these alleged guild moves as rumors. I don’t really care one way or the other, just that I’m disappointed that KN fell completely out of the T2 competition for the last two weeks (though last weekend it started to look like they were coming back with a lead on FA, but that quickly fell off, and I never saw a significant KN presence whenever I was on.)

If no big WvWvW guild moved out of KN, what happened, then? They were a challenging opponent, then suddenly after I saw those rumors about some big W3 Guild leaving KN, KN just stopped showing up.

At this point I’m hoping KN drops out of T2. Ever since a few weeks ago, when I saw mention of a major WvWvW guild leaving KN in the map-chat, KN’s presence diminished substantially.

I hardly see any Kaineng and have rarely seen a KN zerg in the last few weeks. It really feels like a 1v1 with FA with KN occasionally appearing.

Liquid.9672:

Atrophied.8725:

What if I’m on a treb/ac/ballista for 45 minutes-1 hour? I get kicked? Bad proposal is bad.

They can set the rule so that it doesn’t apply to auto casts. Press a skill button manually, or make any character movement and you’re “active”.

Autohotkey —> key press the skill button every time it’s off cool down (include some random offset of 1-20s after it’s off cool down to avoid looking too much like a bot.) Could even have it run back and forth a bit.

Insanely easy to do, could create the script from scratch in under a minute. It doesn’t involve hooking into the game whatsoever.

Sadly, if people really want to avoid being auto-kicked for inactivity, they’ll find a way around it. If we start going down the path of making really harsh auto-kicks for idling, it starts creating bigger problems by kicking people that are not actually idle.

eithinan.9841:

IsilZha.3608:

eithinan.9841:

As to the guardian above. It sounds like you and a thief had a solid stalemate. Well done. How does it feel to be the wall the thief was bashing his face against with no good outcome?

While I was annoyed that he could get away without much effort, I still /laughed that he had no chance of beating me, and it did have a purpose:

Was on TC Borderlands (I’m on TC) and it was pretty empty. A guildie and I were taking the southern most camp and this thief kept running over with perma-stealth to prevent us from capping. So I ran him off then stood at the entrance and he could never get passed me while my guildie took the camp.

so you were literally a wall he bashed his face on :P

You’re kitten right!

eithinan.9841:

As to the guardian above. It sounds like you and a thief had a solid stalemate. Well done. How does it feel to be the wall the thief was bashing his face against with no good outcome?

While I was annoyed that he could get away without much effort, I still /laughed that he had no chance of beating me, and it did have a purpose:

Was on TC Borderlands (I’m on TC) and it was pretty empty. A guildie and I were taking the southern most camp and this thief kept running over with perma-stealth to prevent us from capping. So I ran him off then stood at the entrance and he could never get passed me while my guildie took the camp.

eithinan.9841:

GameRex.8735:

Stealth is a broken mechanism.
Arena Net give nothing against it, it is a HUGE mistake. Thief and Menser can’t lose a one vs one, if they are losing -> Stealth -> They are no more losing.

Running from a fight is losing the fight. The only difference with this is the winner does not get the bag at the end.

Yeah, this is one part of the problem with Stealth in WvW; if the thief is smart with their stealth, it’s a get-out-of-fail-free card that they can play at pretty much any time, as much as they like. Now, the situation above is not, in itself, that big of a problem (some loot denial, but otherwise the thief is just losing fights and running away.) Hell I had a thief the other night on a dead borderlands that engaged me alone 6 times (was running my Guardian,) and fled with stealth each time.

The bigger problem is when a thief runs around in perma-stealth keeping objectives contested; and there’s no real counter to it aside from a mob of players big enough to kill it quickly (if they can find it and be in range.)

Take my example above with my Guardian, I was running GS + Hammer.

Problem: There is absolutely no way to tell if I am actually hitting the thief, or if they evaded a critical skill., and of course it immediately breaks targeting.

The best I can do is immobilize + ring of warding, or pull with GS —> swap for Ring of Warding then start blindly swinging in the ring area. I have a good chance of putting all my skills on cool down and it being a total waste; most of the time the stealth outlasts a ring of warding and they just pick a random direction to flee when it goes down, and there’s just no way for me to tell.

In PvP, getting hit needs to reveal, or at the very least display combat messages at their location (damage, evade, block, etc.) With the later, you can at least AoE in areas you suspect the thief is in and track them down.

Yeah, I’ve done it before to play with friends (which is the whole point of free transfers) but this announcement comes at rather short notice, just a little over a week, and most of that time I will be stuck in my week where I cannot transfer back. I’m going to have just a few days of opportunity to go back over, assuming it isn’t full the entire time.

…I moved servers to play with a friend, just before the announcement of the end of free transfers, and my main server, where most of my guild is, is on Tarnished Coast, which tends to be full. While servers were just opened up, I saw TC has already become full again. Are the servers going to be kept more open up to next Friday, so that I can get back onto my server?

I don’t want to have to pay the fee due to TC being full because I’m stuck in my 7 day waiting period shortly before transfers will no longer be free.

Better yet, could Support just move me back over to TC (and just restrict me from moving again until after the fee system is in place?)

Now I want to pull the champion karka on top of the rich ori node and have it stomp them all to death.

There needs to be actual counters to stealth, or a change in the mechanic. As a tanky Guardian I can survive the burst, and use binding blades to counter the stealth, but it’s not really a true counter for it (for one, you have to know that they are there beforehand.)

TheComet.6471:

I’m going to go out on a limb here….don’t kill me…

Guardians.

As a Mesmer player every now and then I find one of these that understands how to shut down our everything (thanks to the patch which made phantasms damn near impossible to cast vs players), put up walls we can’t pass, and just generally sustain through even my sustaintastic build.

It’s a scary thing

edit: every 4th player is a mesmer? I’m sorry, but I can’t help but laugh at that. I’ve watched more mesmers jump ship to other classes than I can count over the last 2 months, I highly doubt there’s even that many of us left, and those who try to start a mesmer tend to get thinned out by about level 30 before the tier 2 traits kick in

Why hello there…

Soooo, 99.99% of the WvWvW players should have to continue dealing with people cheesing out so the 5 of you that play a special made-up game won’t have a number with an arbitrary value (actually dies vs PC crashes/internet cuts out) increase?

WAT

You’re near their safe areas. I think it could use some adjusting: If you exit the invulnerability zone, and enter combat, you will not become invulnerable again until you exit combat.

I understand the need for it to prevent just overrunning the final area for a server, but it’s not entirely clear where those lines are, and people abuse the hell out of it and will retreat into their invulnerable zone while continuing to attack.

If they want to attack, they need to give up their invuln.

Varonth.5830:

30 people killing one person. Good sport and should definitly be rewarded.

Thanks for proving my point about being a bad sport. Anyone that complains about being killed by 30 people is a poor sport that is trying to make up any excuse for their failure. Why did you get caught by 30 people? Why shouldn’t they destroy you if they catch you? We are trying to win, not have “fair duels.”

Alt+F4ing out is abandoning the game entirely; as I said, it’s like throwing the game board ‘WELL YOU DIDN’T BEAT ME CAUSE I DESTROYED THE GAME BEFORE YOU DID.’

Rewarding Roflstomping is bad, because it promotes stuff like zergs. If it is easier to win a fight, but you still get the same reward, why should you not make your life as easy as possible by grouping up to the biggest zerg ever.

Stop getting caught. If you refuse to join an allied zerg, and keep running into enemy zergs alone, or severely outnumbered, that’s your own fault.

Let them implement similar systems for other parts of this game aswell. Fractals level one should definitely give everyone who is doing it the same reward as level 30 fractals, and of course you should be able to join level 1 fractals with groups up to the size of 50 players, and of course the loot shouldn’t get significantly worse, than doing it with just 5 players.

This has nothing to do with anything, and just illustrates your failure to get what the actual point is.

Yes it fixes rage quitting in fair battles, but it promotes zerging. And if there is anything this game does not need anymore, than it is huge zergs.

Stop playing WvWvW and go play sPvP then.

I’m okay with the current solution of just killing any character in combat if they suddenly drop out of the game (Alt+F4, disconnect, etc.) It takes care of the problem, but I have a suggestion that should eliminate a lot of “false positives” that will likely occur:

When someone logs out or disconnects from WvWvW:

If not in combat, log out normally.
If in combat, wait 30s or until the character is no longer in combat before their character is removed from the game world. If they person reconnects or logs back into that character, they’ll just retake control of it.

This should eliminate any concerns over being stuck in combat and you are off in a safe place. If you are legitimately in combat, you are more likely than not going to end up dead from whoever was attacking you (incurring the penalties, at which point the character is removed from the world.)

I agree that WPing to all major cities should be free. I currently do the same thing: Mists —> LA --> City. And it’s especially annoying for me using a low-end laptop (LA takes forever to load.)

On the other end of it, I think the biggest problem with level 80 WP costs is the minimum (1.46s?) Drop the minimum cost down, the cost to WP around shoots up drastically once you start getting close to 80. I have a level 42 warrior and I can port across an entire zone for ~55c, yet at level 80 (which isn’t even double my current level) it’s nearly triple the cost if I’m /standing on top of the WP./

Before hitting 80, I tend to port around a lot – finish up an area, or need a few missed things to finish an area completion, teleport around – port back to whatever outpost/city I need to directly, etc. Suddenly at 80 every WP is “is it worth it?” Including just jumping to a WP to try to get to an event or help with one of the Orr temples.

Ian.7380:

anyone complaining about the alt f4 thing is just mad cause they hate to die and would rather alt f4 than be a good sport. Good excuses tho guys.

It also denies their opponent the rewards they deserved. It’s the equivalent of throwing the game board in a fit of rage because you were about to lose or be set back. The mark of a truly bad player (and poor sport, as you pointed out.)

Bad builds and those that play a class poorly in w3 get punished for their mistakes.

JaNordy.6149:

mOlder.4803:

JaNordy.6149:

You people dont seem to understand why repair costs is bad. Say your a guardian and your job is to charge enemy line and break it. You got entire zerg attacking you, almost guaranteeing death..

I’m a guardian. I can make you a few pointers if you like I charge in among the first in our “warband” but are likely to die last. I think you probably spec or play wrong

Great only reply to my post so far has been someone that again did not answer any point I raised about repair costs. You people supporting repair costs really need to stepup your AnetIdea defense force.

Sure they did. Stop dying so much and your repair costs won’t be so high. :P (I too play a Guardian and I tend to come out ahead after my W3 sessions.)

While that new Alt+F4 thing will definitely work, I hope it’s just a stop-gap until a more refined solution can be implemented.

I suggest that anyone in combat that disconnects for any reason, their character stays in the world for 30s. If they were in the middle of fighting someone, they’ll get killed. If they were stuck in combat mode somehow but are sitting in a safe area, they’ll eventually just get logged out with no penalty.

If you really do trust them and they are just trying it out and you are going to do this anyway:

Change your password first, give her a bit to try it out. Charge your password again when finished. (This way you are not giving up the password you were using, especially if you use the same password elsewhere.)

Why are you just standing around in HB?

Crapgame.6519:

I was pretty bored last night so I spent a couple silver to port out there and try to farm some bags for Giants Eyes. Over the course of a hour or so (about 90 bags later I guess and no eyes ) I went ahead and played my favorite game.

How many mobs I can take at once before I die

All cool-downs and gee-wiz bang options are allowed to be used as is weapon swap. Needless to say I was able to pull 5 or so with ease to include a vet once or twice.

That’s a great game! With my full MF rune-set armor (Draconic) I took on a Veteran Giant + ~10mobs that showed up along with all the grubs the Giant spawned and won without ever going down.

This is like the party of 6 that I’m sure I pissed off (or not, they probably thought they were hot kitten) in W3.

I was my Guardian retreating from one of our towers that came under heavy attack. This party of 6 chased me down a hill, across a lake, and way up a road; I was leading them to a friendly camp. Well I had not quite made it there, but I was out of stuff to keep me alive and running, so I went on the offensive to do as much damage as possible (which was a hilarious amount since they blew a lot trying to get me, I binding blade —> whirling wrathed all of them and then some.)

Well they did finish me off… about 5s before my friendly army came over and steamrolled them. End results: They got 1 kill, I got 6, I got revived on the spot to join the attacking force, while they were deep behind our lines and had to WP rally.

My level 80 Norn Guardian. I just recently crafted the Draconic for her, right after completing my human god armor set (which I keep around as a separate set.) I’ll have to get a new screenshot though, while this color scheme was nifty, it was too MegaMan-Xish for my liking and I redid it in Guardian-blue colors.

EDIT: Added another, closer shot for some more detail.

umm, as a Guardian, I was laughing at the absurd amount of tanking I was doing and living. Yes, those Karka shots do hit /hard/ – be sure to adapt your play style to the area!

PS: Lol @ AH and spamming symbols in the middle of the Ancient Karka event and just watching my health stay full. XD

Midnight Blue+Oxblood+Butter+Blood (just one, barely visible part.)