Guild Wars 2

And here is my little YouTube contribution I slapped together last year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PegX3QH-gy0

The bad camera collision in GW2, is sadly one of those things that cannot get enough attention IMHO. I think players are either very forgiving, or they actively avoid areas where it’s particularly rough (closed-in spaces, JP’s etc) or perhaps they just think “this is the way it should be and couldn’t be any other way”. It’s sad.

As such, I don’t even think this (and the many, many other camera issues) are even on any of ArenaNet’s lists of stuff to fix – certainly not priority. In the mean time, we get showered with new content, promises of more content and other fixes … and yet, these issues, dating from pre-beta, (that’s right … it’s been there even before BWE!) still remains completely unattended.

Here’s another 2 month old thread I made regarding the vertical camera offset (or pivot height) and how the lowness of the camera’s centre point in general, greatly affects races like asura (and even humans and sylvari): -> LINK

For once, I would just like to tilt the camera UP and not have it colliding with the ground making it zoom in, and giving you the POV of a mini-pet. Do we really need another 1200+ reddit upvote “petition” (like the FOV post during one of the AMAA’s:)?

Please, dear ArenaNet devs … please give these issues some love. Please.

It looks like it’s all the same still. See my attachment. Immagination is a powerful thing. hehe

(Seriously though, my hope for a FOV and camera pivot height slider to be implemented still stands strongly.)

Fay.2735:

Makovorn.1706:

fellyn.5083:

You’re a few months behind. They made the fov change about 2 months ago.

I think they might have been referring to a change, in addition to the horizontal FoV “fix” they implemented back in November.

Yes, I’m not referring to the one a while ago. I meant the one that happened with this new patch or at least it feels like it has changed to me I can’t pinpoint what has changed but when I logged back into the game last night after the patch hit it seemed changed to me.

I was just wondering if there was a change made or if it’s my mind imagining things. It still feels different to me today on both my human thief and asura. It’s annoying me to no end!

I’m in the process of testing this right now. I’ll post some screenies soon. Hopefully that will answer the question.

fellyn.5083:

You’re a few months behind. They made the fov change about 2 months ago.

I think they might have been referring to a change, in addition to the horizontal FoV “fix” they implemented back in November.

Jason King.2647:

I apologize for the lack of the updates on this issue; I can assure you all that we are still working on this. We attempted a potential fix with the last patch, but after checking the crash reports, it looks like it didn’t solve the problem. While we will be continuing to work on a solution, you may encounter this less frequently in the meantime if you lower your sound quality.

Thank you for your continued patience while we work on this bug.

Many thanks for the feedback Jason! Wishing you guys all the best in solving this one.

I dunno … GW2’s vertical FOV has always been so darn horribly constricted. When I logged in yesterday after the patch, something felt very odd on an almost subliminal level. Not sure if it’s my imagination either.

I just wish … really wish they would add some option to customize the FoV and the centre point of the camera in terms of it’s height. Judging by previous posts from the devs, it seems like implementing even the smallest little feature, is a logistical nightmare … it’s like “management by committee” almost. A real pity.

As an update to my previous posts (incl. the ones with the sound quality slider work-around) I just want to mention that I got this audio bug a few days ago while fighting in the Claw of Jormag battle – that is, with the sound quality slider a notch down from it’s highest setting.

Even though the work-around has worked great in the past months, I’m sad to say that it doesn’t solve the problem 100% of the time. I would still reccomend it for those that haven’t tried it, as it seems to greatly reduce this problem.

Hopefully, ArenaNet will find a solution to this … or perhaps give us a bit of an update. This problem has been with us for quite some time now.

Same issue on Aurora Glade [EU] – DE is stuck at 85% completion, with the Iron Barracuda at roughly 1/4 health. The separatists still spawn, but the event never completes in a fail/success.

Visionary.5681:

Wow, positive news on minion AI

Jeez, about time too! Really glad they’re working on a fix for this.

Many thanks for the update Colin. To be very honest and frank, the most I’m hoping for, are improvements and fixes to the game’s core functionality i.e. the multitude of camera collision issues and other camera woes that’s unfortunately been with us right from the start.

Evan Lesh gave us great insight into some of the difficulties and “bureaucratic” challenges in implementing something (that would seem) as simple as an option to i.e. turn camera smoothing off entirely. I would immagine the same difficulties for say, giving us adjustable camera pivot heights, FoV and so on.

So, I would be extremely happy with ArenaNet giving attention to (what some considder) the smaller, annoying things that don’t neccessarily break the game, but make it slightly less fun to play – all these little things add up in the end. There are many other examples – better LFG tools, guesting, better guild management tools … the suggestions section is full of them.

All the holiday content, the Lost Shores content … it’s been amazing and I’m sure you guys worked very, very hard to get it as good as it was. With all that behind us now, perhaps it would be a good idea to “return to the roots” … core issues that really deserves some attention.

A vertical offset (or camera-height adjuster) is IMHO something that seriously lacking in GW2 at the moment. I made a detailed post about it here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Adjustable-Camera-Pivot-Height/first#post803645

iniside.4736:

Small update to make my point clearer:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/70400220/GuildWars2_offsets.jpg
Here is comparison between Human and Norn character.
And that’s the reason we really need vertical offset slider. Or you guys can adjust offsets to match those of Norn, as these are perfect. No wasted space, clear view even if close up.

It seems we’re on the same page. Here is my comparison pic:

One thing that makes me laugh every time while doing this event, is the vocalizations of your character when you make lots of mistakes (and your HP drops). For my norn female characters, it sounds so comically out of place – “I’m dying!???” … the sense of disbelief … or when you hear someone else’s character go “Help! I don’t have long!” and then see them being booted out.

Hat’s off to the audio team for creating great in-game music post-launch (and post Jeremy Soule I guess).

Did Maclaine Diemer write the Wintersday stuff as well (like he did with Halloween)?

One of my biggest wishes for ArenaNet and Guild Wars 2’s music, is that they make so much money from this game, that it would become feasible for these creations to be performed by a real orchestra. We saw this with Blizzard – the progression from the synthetic to the real. I’d love to see this with Guils Wars’s music as well … someday perhaps.

The amount of bloom in Guild Wars 2 has been commented about, long before the launch of the game. It’s not just the snow, it’s sand in some areas as well. Some areas are more affected than others – parts of Caledon Forest, being one example.

Caedmon.6798:

Did you ever went outside on a snowy day while sun is shining onto the snow… do you know what it does.. ? It blinds you !

Yes, IRL snow is blinding to look at (much like other white surfaces strongly illuminated by the sun) … but we’re talking about a stylized, artistic reality in a virtual world created for comfort, entertainment and fun. Being blinded by excessive amounts of bloom is not comfortable and it is not fun … (just like being deafened by virtual canon fire wouldn’t be fun).

Games are meant to delight the senses, not strain it to the point of pain.

The bell choir is amazing – one of the best things in Wintersday 2012 for me, so far. Due to latency, the music generated by this is of course more chaos than melody, but it’s fun none the less.

It would be really awesome if ArenaNet found a way to incorporate something similar into say, a city mini-activity, in the same vain as the Keg Brawl and the Shooting Gallery (which is still closed, despite being the most talked about mini-game, long before launch).

“Bell Hero” … make it happen! xD

I seem to have a problem grouping with fellow players for this dungeon. When we group up and enter, only 2 or 3 of us are visible, with the rest in another instance of the dungeon. Why is this happening and is there any way to fix this?

This time around it’s a lot better than the Clocktower … that one was just brutal and not a lot of fun IMHO. I still wish for a more ‘segregated’ experience – even though it’s a lot better with the multiple paths, I still find the crowding a bit uncomfortable, especially with large norn and charr characters around.

I logged in very early this morning, and managed to complete the JP with only myself in it most of the time, which was much more enjoyable.

It would be really cool to jump into the action faster after a fail. The wait becomes … boring!

Also, the rolling snowballs towards the end are very unkind to people having 200+ ms latency, especially if you’re in overflow. The lag spikes give you a false impression of where you are – you think you’re out of the snowball’s path, only to be knocked off from what you thought was a a position of safety. Not cool.

Perhaps ArenaNet should tweak these events, the timers etc. in such a way that it takes into account the latency issues on the overflow server(s).

On a positive note – it’s been a really fun Wintersday overall so far. So a big thank you to the holiday team. Love your work.

The Red.1025:

Camera for the Asura characters is still unsatisfactory.

EDIT: Character is in the middle of the screen; ie too high up. Feels like I am playing with a visor obscuring the top part of my view.

Totally agree! When playing an asura (and even humans and sylvari), and especially if you play ranged, it feels like the frontal action is either happening underneath UI that shows the enemy portrait, healthbar and buffs, or its happening near or off-screen – very uncomfortable.

I made quite a detailed post about this over here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Adjustable-Camera-Pivot-Height/first#post803645

Screenie attached: Just look at all the wasted space behind my character – human, in this example. The action is so high up, you feel slightly impaired. The increased FoV helps a lot, but there are other issues that goes hand-in-hand with a good FoV, like the height of the camera’s pivot (especially when zoomed more inwards), and the position of your character when zoomed out.

Halcyon.7352:

Yashimata.2986:

On my overflow:

25 minutes of catapult building
5 minutes of wondering what’s supposed to be going on

at 30 minutes after the boat opened up and everyone left.

Exact same thing happened here. I completely missed out on the LA attack, never even knew anything was going on.

Fortunately, there wasn’t too much to miss. We waited about 46min past the time the event was supposed to start (which in hindsight, was probably a good move on ArenaNet’s part, because the lag was significantly lower than last night). We fought some mobs, like last night and then it was over. Quick quick.

The main thing to phase 2 is the opening of the new zone, which you can access by taking the boat from Sanctum Harbor in Lion’s Arch. From there, it basically doing the various DE’s on the island – helping the Lionguard getting a foothold and building camps – which is quite cool.

Hopefully, the fix for phase 1 (the Noll bug) will be forthcoming very soon, as the completionist in me would like to have that done – even though you only get a jug of karma (afaik).

maDDoc.9347:

Makovorn.1706:

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

-snip-
We’ve identified the fix for Noll’s event but this fix will require additional time to implement. Because of this we’re going to leave the Phase 1 dynamic events (investigation of the Karka attacks) open even after Phase 2 starts (Saturday November 17 at 12pm Pacific Time) …. -snip-

… To complete Phase 1, you have to complete the dynamic event chain leading to Noll before Saturday November 17 at 12pm Pacific Time; -snip-

Unless I’m reading this horribly wrong, this information seems contradictory? Apologies if I’m misunderstanding, but if not, I think this needs to be cleared up.

Needless to say, the events can’t progress if Noll isn’t fixed and from my experience, he’s basically bugged both on our home server (Aurora Glade) as well as the overflow. Hopefully the additional time ArenaNet requires to fix it, won’t place it in an unreasonable time-frame to complete it before it’s gone.

If you have completed the events leading up to Noll, and that you are standing and waiting for him where he is supposed to spawn, you have nothing to worry about, everything from that point onwards will still be able to be completed after Phase 2 has started.

Thanks bud! For some stupid reason I missed the “leading to” part. Thanks for clarifying.

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

-snip-
We’ve identified the fix for Noll’s event but this fix will require additional time to implement. Because of this we’re going to leave the Phase 1 dynamic events (investigation of the Karka attacks) open even after Phase 2 starts (Saturday November 17 at 12pm Pacific Time) …. -snip-

… To complete Phase 1, you have to complete the dynamic event chain leading to Noll before Saturday November 17 at 12pm Pacific Time; -snip-

Unless I’m reading this horribly wrong, this information seems contradictory? Apologies if I’m misunderstanding, but if not, I think this needs to be cleared up.

(EDIT: Sorry, see MaDDoc’s post below. To complete phase 1, you will have to have progressed up to the point where you meet Noll. Stuff past that point in phase 1 will still be available post phase 2. )

Needless to say, the events can’t progress if Noll isn’t fixed and from my experience, he’s basically bugged both on our home server (Aurora Glade) as well as the overflow. Hopefully the additional time ArenaNet requires to fix it, won’t place it in an unreasonable time-frame to complete it before it’s gone.

I have to say that this has been a rather disappointing affair so far, but I’m looking forward to whatever fix they’re trying to implement … l just hope it doesn’t come too late.

I’m all for new content and I’m really thankful for ArenaNet’s hard work. However, it’s a great pity that the one-time event components are so incredibly unplayable, due to many progress-stopping bugs and of course, server-side lag.

With ArenaNet trying to lure players towards these events (and with the invite-a-friend ongoing), I just cannot see how they couldn’t have anticipated massive player server load during these events.

I’ll revisit the content tomorrow – hopefully ArenaNet will have ironed out the wrinkles. For now, all we can do is be patient – and hope that this doesn’t reflect too badly for the new players.

Subdirector Noll – Aurora Glade [EU]

I’m experiencing what appears to be server-side lag spikes on Aurora Glade [EU]. I’ve run some trace-routes and it appears normal. Also, my latency in GW2 is between 290ms and 350ms – normal for South Africa.

When you use certain slot 1 skills, the fire rate is erratic. For example, I would use skill 1 (Orb of Wrath) on my guardian – my character does nothing for a second or so, and then suddenly a whole spread of orbs go flying outwards. Rubber-banding is quite bad on skills that propells your character forwards (or backwards).

UPDATE: The lag seems to most severe in Diessa Plateau … weird.

I’ve had this option enabled for some time now and it’s been a very positive experience compared to the way it was before. The vertical FoV still feels weird though and I think this is affected by the fact that the camera is just so low to the ground for all races, except the charr and norn.

I really hope they’ll consider giving us some way to adjust the vertical camera pivot (height), similarly to the way we can adjust the horizontal. IMHO, that would go a long way in making things feel right from a frontal point-of-view.

Right now, it feels like the increased FoV is just giving me more ground to look at, and looking forwards and upwards is challenging because of the lowness of the camera and the way it collides with the ground.

Some problems still persists – screenshot attached. Spamming shift-F5 doesn’t help and I’ve tested this issue with Chrome and IE.

Feedback about this issue would be most welcome at this stage – perhaps a fix will be coming with the big update this month? Anyhow, as stated many times before in this thread, a temporary fix for this, is to reduce your sound quality slider to one notch below maximum.

MajorMelchett.6042:

Couple of updated pics with the new FoV of what the game could look like with a minor vertical shift in camera.

The 1st and 3rd pics are standard, the 2nd and 4th are adjusted. This is what it could look like with a 1 inch adjustment only.

I see where you’re going with this. It’s true that with the new FoV, you’d actually be able to enjoy much more of what goes on in front of you if the pivot of the camera was able to be lifted just a few notches.

I posted the below attachment in an earlier post – we already have a great camera height with the norn. Because they’re so big, the camera has to be higher to accommodate this, but a nice off-shoot, is if you choose a norn female with minimum height, the camera still remains higher – which is very, very nice.

I sincerely wish ArenaNet would look at giving us some way of lifting the camera pivot – similar to the way they gave us an option to shift if left or right. Together with this new FoV it would be just perfect … and then I can start having proper fun with some other races as well!

Same issue here – Gendarran Fields – stuck on loading screen. I’m also on Aurora Glade [EU]

Wow, I’m really saddened by this – it will be such a shame to not have the statue there anymore. I mean really, the game has hardly been out for two odd months. Why do this?

A huge thank you to all the awesome content creators, writers, programmers, technicians, community managers … everyone at ArenaNet, for creating a spectacular and truly special Halloween event.

You guys have set the bar very high and I can’t wait to see what you have planned for Wintersday. Also, a very special thank you to all who created those amazing costumes! I’m a proud owner of the Witch outfit, which is just too good! Thank you for the costume brawl – it’s a lot of fun.

Gosh, I just noticed the amazing zoom distance just now as well (after the Mad King dungeon). Please ArenaNet, make it stay! It’s amazing.

Athanasius.3875:

Those having motion-sickness or low-FPS issues with the new FoV … are they mitigated at all by simply zooming in a notch or two ? i.e. you do have the option to effectively go back to the old FoV.

With the new FoV, I actually do zoom in a notch or two, because the beauty of a higher FoV is that you can effectively see and experience more without loosing touch with your character or being too far away from the action – something that a pure, linear zoom can’t do. It’s the best of both worlds, however it comes at a slight cost in terms of FPS on lower end systems.

I don’t think zooming in would mitigate FPS drops because the FoV is “still at a constant” – it’s like putting a wide-angle lens on a camera and then zooming in or out – whichever zoom point you’re at, the wide-angle lens is still attached and doing what it does – increase the FoV. Whether the game’s occlusion culling tech actually culls more when zoomed in, I can’t say.

I have an Intel i7 rig with a 580GTX, and for me there is no performance decrease, because aside from a few problematic (not sufficiently optimized IMHO) areas, GW2 usually hits the 60fps hard limit in the majority of areas. On my friend’s i5 laptop with AMD integrated graphics, you do see a slight performance decrease, but it’s easily mitigated by turning the shadow quality down a bit and not having water reflections on full … it still looks absolutely marvelous though.

Having the same issues, using either Google Chrome or Internet Explorer – no reply, report or edit post options on some pages. For example, I’m viewing this thread right now: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/FOV-Field-of-View-Changes-Beta-Test-Feedback-Thread/page/6#post566641

… and I can’t see the “Quote this User” arrow icon or the “Report this Post” flag icon.

However, I can see it on this very page. Bizarre.

Thank you ArenaNet … so much for this! (… and thanks Martin Kerstein for being the baerer of great news – you are the “destroyer of dreams, crusher of hopes, spoiler of fun” no more!)

While the devs are busy tweaking the FoV, I thought it would be a good idea to ask that they also review the FoV as seen by the different races in-game. I know this sounds strange, but the vertical FoV is very much reliant on having a good height on the camera pivot.

Different races have different heights, and this also impacts the camera pivot height, which in turns impacts how much you can comfortably see ahead of you and how comfortably you can “look up”.

So far, the norn female character option (with character height at minimum), gives you the most comfortable playing experience, which is greatly enhanced with the FoV parameter now available.

• The first image attachment illustrates this – note: asura vs. norn. vs human (from left to right).

• The second image attachment is a comparison between GW1 vs GW2 vs TSW in terms of how much viewable real-estate your character takes up when zoomed in (note, this is done with the new GW2 vertical FoV command line parameter present).

• The third image illustrates how good the vertical (and horizontal) FoV can be in games like TSW and how character placement and camera pivot greatly impacts your ability to look ahead (without the camera colliding with the ground, as is most noticeable with the asura).

Hope this helps and I sincerely hope ArenaNet will consider these points. In all, well done ArenaNet. Even though a higher FoV has been a very requested feature, ever since BWE1, I’m not going to dwell in the past – I’m just so happy that I’ll be able to play the game now without feeling claustrophobic.

I would ask that a slider, or some option be added to the options menu though. Again thank you!

Having just completed this jumping puzzle, I have to say that I am glad I managed to do it … but, it wasn’t the most fun thing I’ve done in GW2 so far – it really wasn’t.

While I firmly believe that big rewards comes from big challenges (i.e. the exotic boots and other chest goodies), I also believe that everyone should at least have a fair chance at getting all of the Halloween achievements.

Some issues and suggestions:

• There is a MAJOR camera collision issue just after the very first cogwheel. When you jump and your character touches that small floating block in your path, the camera tend to spazz out very badly, making that part of the jumping puzzle more an issue of luck rather than skill.

• The non-instanced nature of this puzzle creates problems, especially for players who’d like to take their smaller asura, human or sylvari characters through this puzzle. In the end, I rolled a norn, made it big, and dyed my armor pieces ridiculous colors to make it stand out more amongst the crowd.

• Due to the nature of this jumping puzzle, it should IMHO be instanced, or at least thinned out in terms of player count.

• Players should not be able to grief the event by using mid-puzzle speed buffs. I’ve had a few cases of this happening, despite the skill bar being locked. How they managed to do it, I’m not sure – perhaps it was auto triggered by some class-mechanics, but this shouldn’t really happen.

• To give everyone a fair chance at getting 100% completion for Halloween, I would decouple this jumping puzzle from the achievements – the chest awards and a guaranteed exotic alone should be worth it.

While there is a great sense of accomplishment when you do finish this, I would lie if I said it didn’t come with a fair amount of frustration … all one needs to do, is to check the player chatter during this event. I’ve found it mostly negative, with the occasional vocal minority giving it high praise.

Frustrations (and the issues above) aside, I do think the idea behind this jumping puzzle is a good one, and overall ArenaNet have designed wonderfully creative and challenging events for Halloween – probably the best I’ve ever seen in an MMO. However, I stand by what I said above. Take it as constructive criticism.

Very noticeable lag playing on Aurora Glade [EU] at the moment. Activating skills is very sluggish and any skill that moves your character (i.e. a ranger’s “Quickshot” retreat) makes you rubber-band quite badly. Attacks in general (like skill #1 attacks on auto) are very laggy, and sometimes everything just “pauses” and resumes like it’s being played in fast-forward.

Latency seems normal (290ms, for South Africa) and I’ve done traceroutes and constant pings at various points on the path to the game servers, both locally and internationally, without seeing any significant time-outs are other network anomilies. I’m also not seeing any of these problems in The Secret World.

I think it’s ArenaNet related. Hopefully someone can investigate this.

malevolence.9487:

Changing the Audio setting to High Quality creates this issue, moving back to Lower Quality solves this issue.

Indeed. I think for the sake of newcomers to this thread, this can’t be repeated enough. I’ve only reduced my sound quality one notch below max (which is still above mid-way).

A question (for anyone at ArenaNet willing to answer): If I’m not mistaken, there are 5 notches on the audio quality slider. I’d love to know exactly what happens audio-wise with each notch. (Similarly with the latency slider).

Thanks, and good luck tracking this one down!

There’s a good thread that’s been going for a while, discussing this particular issue and with people giving feedback. Have a look here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Annoying-Sound-Bug/page/6#post368234

TL;DR – It seems you can decrease the occurrence of this bug by putting your sound quality slider one notch below max. The link above is to a post I made detailing how I’ve gotten around the bug (at least until they fix it). Hope this helps.

I love Jeremy Soule’s work, but too much of anything isn’t always good, however, custom playlists are just … so … darn … handy!

I’m a bit of a “philistine” with my custom playlists, as I use quite a lot of Russell Brower, David Arkenstone and Jason Hayes’ music (some of the composers for Blizzard’s games) in it.

With all respect to Mr. Soule’s personal quest to create the perfect digital orchestra … there is just something about a real orchestra, the expressiveness, the “soul”, the emotion the instruments convey, that cannot be trumped.

It’s such a shame they couldn’t employ a live orchestra for Guild Wars 2’s music, but I know costs (and the sheer logistics behind working with a full-on orchestra) can be somewhat daunting. So for GW2, I’m glad if they saved on those costs and used it in other, important areas of the game. One can dream though, and I tend to dream pretty big.

P.S. Zone customization in the playlists are a fantastic idea! I really hope ArenaNet could give us this functionality some day.

Hands-down, the asura are my favorite when it comes to lines and voice-acting. They are just so funny! There isn’t a day that goes by I don’t have a good chuckle at what NPC’s (and even my own character) has to say.

One that cracked me up a while back was this: “You’re dumb. You’ll die, and you’ll leave a dumb corpse.”

It’s not always what they say, it’s how they say it too. Complements to the voice-actors and the directors behind the glass.

Oddly enough, this is actually one of the features of the game I like a lot!

Granted, there are some one-liners I don’t particularly like, i.e. the sylvari cooking vendor in Lion’s Arch (the “Seize the moment” line mentioned by Tewi above), but that’s just because I don’t particularly like the way the sylvari sound in general. However, that’s very much my own taste – most players probably love it.

If I’m not mistaken, the Lion’s Arch cooking vendor uses the same voice actor as the one who greets you after you’ve completed the sylvari tutorial instance … the " … such a momentous task …" dude. I cringe every-time I hear that. lol

Just a quick visit to this thread to say, thank you ArenaNet, for expediting the quick-fix to the camera smoothing issues. The game feels so much more responsive now – you folks are definitely heading in the right direction.

Also, thank you for recognizing that there other problems too. I sincerely hope this thread (and the other feedback threads) helps in terms of feedback.

Thank you ArenaNet, for this speedy fix. I had the same problem last night, but it’s fixed now.

I had this some weeks ago (I posted in this thread as well). What seems to have solved it (or at least lessened the frequency of this bug), was:

• Putting the “Mixing Buffer Size” to half way

• Putting the "Sound Quality* one notch below highest quality

I also have all my other volumes about 1/4 down from maximum (don’t know if that would help).

I have not noticed any decrease in sound quality by doing this, and I’ve been free of this irritating bug for more than 2 weeks now.

IMPORTANT: If you guys try this and it works, please come back to this thread and confirm it, as I think that the ArenaNet folks are very much still scratching their heads with this one and I’m sure feedback (either way) will help them track down the cause of this anomaly.

Our entire guild on Aurora Glade had this problem today (green base). I’ve replied in this tread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Eternal-Battlegrounds-Jumping-Puzzle-loads-infinitly/first#post350804

Our entire guild had problems with this today (Sunday, 7 October 2012) at around 16:30. The loading screen stays stuck and occasionally, 2 or 3 members will actually arrive inside, or pets will go through (not the players), or the commander’s icon will appear on the map (without the commander).

This is obviously rather irritating, especially when community events are planned around this and then have dozens (if not hundreds) or players booted out of the game due to Code 1065 (disconnection due to an excessive period of player inactivity).

If there is some sort of or queue system in place, I urge ArenaNet to at least let us know – or even give us some indication of a queue. If it’s a bug, then let us know as well. It seems this has been going on ever since launch.

gene helo.1590:

-snip- …what about the snap/zoom camera collision with objects in the game? That definitely needs to be fixed.

Yeah, I’m hoping a fix for that will also be expedited – I made a small 30 sec video about it here – LINK

Aside from the FoV, which I guess can be seen as an subjective thing, there are a quite a few things that’s presenting some difficulty at the moment when playing, that potentially affects the entirety of the player-base:

• As mentioned in Jon’s post, the camera smoothing issues

• Camera collision problems as a result of it being too sensitive to objects, and sometimes colliding with small objects on the ground, like little pillars (in the video) and tree stumps from chopped trees – and spazzing out as a result of that.

• Camera collision problems in cramped or cluttered areas i.e. like when you’re making your way through jumping puzzles up a mountain etc. where the camera auto-zoom’s in fully onto the back of your character, making it near impossibile to see where you’re going. This is especially true for larger races.

• Camera collision problems specifically associated with the asura, where the camera will spazz out on things like floating stairs (also in the video). This doesn’t happen with e.g. human characters.

• The height of the camera pivot (especially of the asura) being too low, causing the camera to collide with the ground and then auto-zooming into your asura character’s back when you try to look in an upwards direction. This is especially challenging in caves, hill-sides etc. where there’s a lot of up and downwards slanting terrain.

• (On a personal note) – when you zoom out, your character still feels a bit “centralized” on the screen, and together with the lowness of the camera pivot, it feels like you cannot view “up” properly, to view (and admire) the sheer scale and beauty of some tall environments.

• Related to the previous point, the amount of view you get to see horizontally (I guess you could call this the “horizontal FoV”) doesn’t seem enough. I constantly feel like flipping my monitor on it’s side in postcard view just to see more of the distance, the sky and tall structures. For the moment (and especially with the asura), a comfortable “resting position” for the camera seems to be in a position where it points to the ground more often than not – this is not ideal IMHO.

I hope they’ll consider these issues as well.

As someone else pointed out, a possible solution to the camera collision issues, would be to make certain objects “no-clip zones” for the camera only, so when the camera collides with those objects, it goes through them while gracefully fading out from your view so that you can still maintain some zoom-distance in constricted areas.

I think for the sake of the discussion, it’s perhaps a good idea to quote Jon’s message in here as others have linked his thread, which is regrettably now closed. The issue surrounding the field of view in GW2 is obviously a very heated topic for some and something that’s not simply going to go away. The good news is that some of the other camera issues are on it’s way to being fixed!

For the moment, we don’t really know exactly what this “serious problem” refers to, but it seems to be related to camera smoothing:

JonPeters.5630:

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

This is a follow-up post by Jon as well:

JonPeters.5630:

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.

IMHO, threads like this one (created by Baxuz) as well as SeanPoez’s thread over here (LINK) are very important places to discuss camera related issues, and it’s perhaps a good idea to try and tone things down a bit for the sake of keeping these open.

In any event, I sincerely hope Jon and the other developers will consider some of what was said in Jon’s thread, as there were IMO quite a few very valid counter-points raised in response to the original post. It would also be great to get some feedback on the possibility of ArenaNet loosening the reins a little bit when it comes to community developed tools to aid players who are affected by Guild Wars 2’s constricted FoV , as well as other community tools that could aid players with disabilities.

It feels like it’s been a long fight … but I’m grateful for Jon’s response, even though I don’t agree with it 100%. In the end, it’s all about making a great game even better.