Guild Wars 2

Great post. Truth is the sets were designed probably right before confusion was introduced and we never retrofit them. If we introduce a new set I will take this into account. Perhaps we could make a PvP version of one of the magic find sets, pirate for example, that does confusion. We will talk about this next week.

Thanks,

Jon

Hey Hiba. See you all the time in game. Good luck finding a team!

We have pressed the magic button and paid tournaments should be live within 5 minutes. Thank you all for your patience and enjoy.

Jon

Yes, lose game due to DC

This crash does not reproduce on our test environment as it is caused in part by server load and player volume. That doesn’t mean that when it occurs we can’t fix it but it does mean it may not occur until it goes live. It is for reasons such as this that we turned off paid tournaments so that and unknown unforeseeable error wouldn’t cause players to lose gems.

3 minute timer should be in now . 3 minutes = reasonable bathroom break.

Also fix for other crash is found and testing . I’ll update more soon but expect fix today.

Jon

Got it. Thanks. Update coming!

Poof! Someone called and I am here. We made some ranger changes this patch, but had to go back on them because of risk factor. There are some bugs being fixed and quality of life improvements coming in the next patch, as well as some other significant ranger improvements. I would Literally tell you but I think it would be considered a bit of a spoiler so you will have to be patient.

While we work hard to keep updates going on all professions, not very build us going to contain fixes for everyone due to the nature of software development. One problem with rangers is the lack of build diversity created by a number of sub par utility skills. Many signets, a shout or two, and spirits are all a bit lackluster. That is the first place to expect improvements. Second is trying to improve the feel/ pacing on some weapons.

Ok I can’t type more with tiny phone finger keypad. See you in game!

Jon

Expected today. Minus a client crash which is being looked into things were quite stable with free when I logged off at 2 am. I’ll update once I talk to some programmers.

Jon

I think the reward update went in but timer did not. I will check that this morning. Also due to the tournament code being heavily updated paid are disabled. There is a client crash we are tracking down and will examine data from tournaments overnight with the intention of enabling paid tournaments today and ASAP.

Jon

Edit: obviously if people figure out how to reliably do this we will look into a hot fix.

It’s a bug. We saw the video and have a fix already but because the build is underway and we need time to test it, and because this is kitten hard to do reliably it will be some time before it goes in.

Jon

Fix going in today fyi

Emphasis on may, it also may be a bit after the build as well, but is coming…

Along with the upcoming build we will be making some server side changes to tournaments. This may go live a bit before the build so I wanted to give some warning.

1) down time between rounds is being reduced from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.
2) Glory and rank rewards are increasing
Free
a) 1st place was 300, will now be 400 glory/rank
b) 2nd place was 200, will now be 300
c) 3rd and 4th place was 100, will now be 200
Paid
a) 1st place was 360, will now be 500 glory/rank
b) 2nd place was 240, will now be 400
c) 3rd and 4th place was 120, will now be 300

Thanks and enjoy,

Jon

To SteveMJH,

Same thing that Rob said about dungeon loot is also true in open world. I recently started looking at this and its literally such a bad chance of getting good loot from those big world bosses. Champions as well, the numbers are just too low. The Halloween patch is just too close to put this in and test it, but we are also working on improving this.

Jon

Thanks to you guys for bringing this to my attention. I can’t read every thread but I caught this one, and I will look into a confirm button asap.

Took a couple of days to get debugging in on this. It is in fact a 40ms difference which equates to about 7% less damage when spamming 1. We made this change because it was creating some animation bugs to leave it where it was. It was also encouraging just spamming 1 which isn’t the most fun gameplay. If our data shows shortly that shortbow is now not effective we can certainly address that, but would do so by improving other skills on that weapon rather than by reintroducing the spam on 1 and the bugs that it was creating.

I’ll take a look on live right now!

An update! By popular demand and because it was a simple numbers change we lowered the net on any systems we felt were too harsh. These are not the last number changes, but this should help a lot an you can expect to see this change in the very next live build which should be in the next few days. We are not currently adding any new systems now or in the foreseeable future. There was an update a little while back that limited oricalcum farming via server and overflow swapping. This update was too harsh on normal players and we will try to increase the supply of these resources again soon. This requires some more number crunching and testing than the other change we made so it might take a bit longer.

Thanks,

Jon

Hammerholm.7218:

JonPeters, I’m sorry to say but your response to ALL of the FoV threads is just stupid in my hoenst opinion.
Why is it SO HARD for you and the dev team of GW2 to understand that FoV threads will continue to pop until you DO SOMETHING about this?!
A FoV of ~60 on a modern PC game is stupid, no matter what you blame it on, there is a reason there are tons of threads on the official and the unofficial forums discussing this topic every single day.

Sigh.

FOV in GW2 is 75, which is the same as the default in Half Life and WoW. While I understand people’s desires, (I play source engine and quake engine games at about 105 or 110), we are not just limiting it for technical reasons, there are also gameplay implications that we are taking into account that we believe are a core part of the game. Additionally we keep it at 75 to maintain the integrity of our art which is also important to us and many of our fans. If there was a single reason we might think about looking for a workaround, but because it relates to core issues for 3 of our major departments this is not an easy problem and will remain that way for the foreseeable future.

More specific choices are things that we can add, but more flexibility in a very tight balance like this will create balance problems and tend to lead to more exaggerated min maxing which will in fact reduce the actual build variety.

Adding a new stat combination takes time because we must test it against what we have thoroughly to ensure we aren’t shifting an already moving meta game.

Jon

I’ve seen a lot of topics on this both here and externally so let me try and address it. The current FOV is going to stay because increasing it, while having some benefits for some players, has too many drawbacks.

1) performance suffers greatly because of how things are built and view distances

2) art suffers because of texture tiling, LOD problems and just general stretching from the fisheye effect.

3) gameplay suffers because positional awareness becomes less necessary in a game where combat is greatly designed around positioning.

There is a a serious camera problem, however, which is making some players nauseous. We believe a large number of these cases are not FOV related but rather due to bugs in camera smoothing. Because of this we are expediting a quick fix to this issue that is currently in testing and should see the light of day in the next build we do.

Jon

We thought we should put in our 2 cents as well.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about freedom. We want you to be able to explore the world and engage in a huge variety of activities, focusing on whatever best suits your tastes.

Some players have run into “diminishing returns” thresholds we put into the game to provide a safety net against unanticipated economy-breaking issues. We do have these thresholds in place, but it’s not our intention that normal players should ever run into them. We’ve recently had bugs and imbalances that have caused normal players to hit thresholds, and we’ll fix those.

These systems are put in place to protect the economy from botters and exploiters. We will close exploits as quickly as we can. These thresholds help create a safety net to keep the economy safe when we aren’t there to deal with the offender. It’s important to have a safety net in place. It would be bad for everyone if, for example, a group of players learned how to speed-clear a dungeon in 5 minutes, with full rewards each time, and then repeated that continuously. When one activity emerges that’s order of magnitudes more profitable than anything else in the game, it forces everyone to either engage in that activity or get priced out of the economy.

While we need a safety net to stop unanticipated economy-breaking exploits and botting, we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm. If a player finds a normal game activity fun and would like to keep doing it, that’s fine with us.

Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.

I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.

Jon

This is absolutely an issue as the game matures and we are working on ways to make running story mode with someone worthwhile even if you have already run it so players just reaching these dungeons can more easily find groups to play with. It will probably take some experimentation before we find the right motivator.

Jon

To answer the original point they are account bound. This was part of what was creating the strange bugs from last week so making them account bound has fixed a lot of the problems. It also addresses a concern of people exploiting and then circumventing using different characters.

Jon

Strifey.7215:

Long story short, I run a few different dungeon paths everyday that take anywhere from 20-30 minutes.

I have 2x 80s and 1x 52 right now, so run a couple 80 dungeons twice and AC path two 3 times a day.

Before tonight’s patch, I would always get 60 tokens per path per character and never experienced DR.

After tonight’s patch, I just ran 5 dungeon runs across my 3 chars. 2 on two different characters, and one on my 3rd character.

First 3 runs I got the normal 60 tokens, but last 2 runs I just did I only got 30 tokens. Is this intentional now?

Sounds like you are not even hitting the exploit code and in fact are just receiving half because you are running the same dungeon for a second time in a row without switching. This has in fact always been part of the system since day 1.

Jon

We are considering it. now you know, and knowing is half the battle…

I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.

1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.

2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.

3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.

First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.

I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise. We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.

• Players need more rewards for WvW.
• Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
• Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
• Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
• And so and and so forth.

We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…

TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.

OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!

Jon

Hey all we have some plans to fix some of this. It is currently being looked at so expect a fix in the next few weeks. Basically we like that Portal has this power, but it shouldn’t be able to bypass walls, etc.

As for the problems with players not appearing this is a more difficult engine problem to solve. While we would like to solve it there are definitely counters to this strategy, because anyone doing it has just clumped up their entire team for AoE nuking. Ultimately if they outnumber you by a lot there are much more effective ways for them to kill you.

Jon

rickets.1386:

JonPeters.5630:

Plain and simple this system is a safety net for stopping crazy farming when people find exploits that make each run super fast. We are also addressing those loopholes, but that takes time and new ones might always be discovered. If you and your group do the dungeons without skipping large sections and run different chains this system shoul(bugs aside) never impact you.

Addendum for clarity, super fast means < 30 minutes, and even then you must hit that speed multiple times in a row before you start seeing any impact.

Thanks for the reply Jon, and thanks for giving a time. However, my group just did a legit maggs run and a legit AC path 2 run in 25 minutes each. Of course with the bug we all got different rewards but i will post that in the proper forum with times.

They were not death free runs and we didn’t feel like we did them as fast as we could have, so when we bring our “A” game we will basically be waiting in front of the last boss room for 10 minutes to make sure we get full rewards….not fun. But, I guess if the system starts to work like you hope and it takes multiple sub 30 minute runs in a row we should be fine.

I will also be posting links to the 2 runs we just did(as soon as they are uploaded) to prove we did them legit.

Thanks and i hope a fix is on its way soon.

Thank you this is excellent info. We would like dungeons to be legit hard enough to take closer to 45 mins but if we can’t accomplish that goal we can look at the speed clear times from non exploiters and easily adjust the system. The goal is that hardcore farmers don’t even see this thing but only exploiters. We will keep working towards that goal.

Jon

Plain and simple this system is a safety net for stopping crazy farming when people find exploits that make each run super fast. We are also addressing those loopholes, but that takes time and new ones might always be discovered. If you and your group do the dungeons without skipping large sections and run different chains this system shoul(bugs aside) never impact you.

Addendum for clarity, super fast means < 30 minutes, and even then you must hit that speed multiple times in a row before you start seeing any impact.

3+ heavy bleeders, but yeah…

Might as well chime in and say big crowd events where condies are stack capped is also a problem we are investigating.

Jon

I just wanted to update everyone on where we stand with this. So far we have found a single bug with the system that is causing certain players to get stuck in a state of reduced rewards without actually exploiting. A fix for this has already been made and is being tested locally now. We are going to do more significant testing on this new version but we also believe it is more bulletproof to begin with. Please keep posting data as these cases are somewhat rare and are hard for us to find with internal testing but seem to be exposed quickly when thousands of people are playing the dungeons.

All rewards are susceptible to our code that is dealing with people who are speed clearing dungeons. This means that if you are speed clearing and then play some new chain for the first time it may not reward the full 60 tokens. If you find yourself getting less rewards consider whether or not your rate of dungeon completion is extremely high.

If you think you are running at a fairly reasonable pace post all of the chains you have run and the time of day they were completed and we will file it to try and figure out if it is a bug. Please post accurate times, otherwise we cannot determine if there are in fact bugs in the system. Please continue to use this thread as a place to post this data so that we have it all in one location.

Thanks,

Jon

All rewards are susceptible to our code that is dealing with people who are speed clearing dungeons. If you find yourself getting less rewards consider whether or not your rate of dungeon completion is extremely high. This did not get reset with the patch.

If you think you are running at a fairly reasonable pace post all of the chains you have run and the times to complete and we will file it to try and figure out if it is a bug. Please post accurate times, otherwise we cannot determine if there are in fact bugs in the system.

Thanks,

Jon

Do not remove old shards. Old shards will be updated to be account bound in the next patch.

Jon

We will be making pre-patch tokens account bound in the next patch. That will probably be is less than a week. Hold onto your old tokens they will automatically update. This will also fix old Obsidian Shards.

Guild Wars 2 has some camera smoothing built into it. It is generally more intrusive than it needs to be, but it also has a bug with it that makes it feel really bad for people with specific mouse look styles, like mine. This bug, and reducing the amount of smoothing is being actively looked at, but must be done carefully and tested carefully as its impact will effect every single player. Thanks for your patience.

Jon

p.s. These are not the only camera issues, but are far and away the most egregious so we will address them first.

First of all there are a handful of targeting bugs that we are addressing right now.

Once those are solved we will try and design a stickier targeting option for those players that want to keep their target a little bit better.

Personal tip since this happens to me a lot. I lose my target a lot because I am ground targeting and click a bunch of times to fire it off, after the skill has fired, the subsequent left clicks end up deselecting. I have started using my mouse to aim, but double tapping any ground target skills on the keyboard which has mitigated a lot of my issues.

Jon

Malediktus.9250:

Giving more tokens or reducing the price is unfair to those people who already played dozens of dungeons and maybe even bought gear for those tokens.

And not doing it is unfair to the game because it makes one of the more repeatable content types feel like more of a grind than it needs to. We weren’t going to release a perfect game, and can’t let things live this stop us from improving the experience for the majority of the players.

Jon

A good call and easy fix. I’ll look into this Monday.

Jon

Xetelian.9278:

Jon could we also get the costs of items down a couple 100 tokens please?

You asked so nicely, but how about we just give out more tokens instead?

I certainly agree that we need to improve effectiveness of condition damage builds against objects. We have some ideas, but none of them are simple and easy to implement/test. Rest assured it is something we recognize as a problem.

Jon

I agree.

Seriously though this change is coming.

Jon

We have completed the Wolf finisher and it will go in as soon as we put out a new build. You guys are too good and got there faster than we could build it. Rest assured we are already almost done with the next one so we don’t expect this to happen again.

Jon

Let me clarify the change a bit since not everyone understands it.

If you run the exact same chain twice in a row you will have your rewards cut. This means you can bounce back and forth between 2 different chains, even in the same dungeon without ever hitting this change. This change is made to encourage people to try different chains.

If you speed clear dungeons at a rate of more than 2/ hour, and continue to do that for some time your rewards will slowly begin to degrade. It doesn’t kick in after running a single dungeon and it doesn’t immediately zero out rewards.

Finally we reduced the value of repeating the story mode, because they are built to be easier and we want to encourage those repeating dungeons to run explore mode.

Hey all, it is my fault the updates to those 3 dungeon chains did not get into to the notes. There is a lot going on right now and as we establish our patch process sometimes things will slip through the cracks. I wanted to shed some light on the dungeon speed clear stuff as well. You should not see any diminished returns unless you.

1) Run the same exact chain over twice in a row
2) Complete multiple dungeons in 30 minutes or less each.

We also reduced the rewards of completing story mode, once you have already completed it, because the rewards for story mode were never intended to be a high as they were.

At this time, dungeons should one of the most efficient ways to level and get gold, and it is not our intention to make them feel like a grind. This is a very large game, and we have a lot of people playing it in many different ways. Right now we are working hard to make sure there are not any ways for players to circumvent the normal rewards in the game and then we will be able to look at the actual rewards and make sure they require a reasonable amount of investment.

Dungeons are meant to be difficult and we will continue to update them to try and reach a point where the time invested to XP/Gold/Tokens is similar for each dungeon. Some right now are just too easy to complete while others may be too hard. Moving forward we will try and post more clear change notes for those dungeons we do fix.

Thanks for your feedback, we really appreciate your desire to help us keep improving on the game.

Jon

Torm.5831:

Mr. Peters, please read my post on why Death Shroud is very limiting at the moment and puts Necromancers in a vulnerable position to anyone familiar with the Necromancer class.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Let-us-see-our-boons-and-conditions-in-death-shroud/first

Yeah agreed we want to fix this.

Let me try and clarify myself a bit more. Death Shroud is very powerful because it gives Necromancer access to a secondary health bar which is is much more reliably renewable than normal health is for other professions. On top of that it essentially also gives them a 3rd weapon set that they can use to circumvent the basic weapon swap cooldown to reliably bounce between powerful skills in 3 different sets. For both of these reasons, Necromancer has a high power ceiling but also an extremely high learning curve.

In the current condition heavy meta-game, there is a lot of condition removal. The problem this is causing for Necromancers is that they do not have a lot of build diversity in this meta, because they don’t have any great power builds they can turn to. What I would like to try and do is increase build diversity without increasing effectiveness because I don’t believe we have really seen what strong Necromancers can do yet.

Hopefully that explains a bit where we stand. We are still working towards getting rid of all of the bugs in everyone’s skills and traits at which point we can get a much better idea of where everyone stands. That time will also give us the chance to see where the large amount of current players actually takes the meta game.

Jon