Well, due to the inherent performance difference in the OSX client to the Windows client, I’ve always rebooted for longer WvW sessions or events like the Karka invasion or Marionette.
As a gamer using a Mac, it’s just not feasible to not have a Windows partition. At some point, the frustrations with OSX ports (or lack thereof) is bigger than the effort to reboot.
The reason why you can’t zoom in without everything looking like crap is because the screenshots are already taken at a small resolution (that of your screen or lower). If you’re zooming in, you’re trying to look at details that aren’t there. Changing the file format isn’t going to change that.
There used to be an option to take screenshots at higher resolution than what the game is running in, but that was removed before launch.
Same way daily gives the option for multiple activities, one of those activities could be “Complete a Cultural Mission”.
You must have missed the multiple threads where people are ‘forced’ to complete the dailies. Someone always finds that things are not ‘optional’.
This wouldn’t have been (as much of ) an issue if Ascended didn’t come with increased stats. It doesn’t matter how big the stat difference actually is, the perception of difference is enough to move it from ‘optional’ to ‘mandatory’ in a genre where players have been taught for years that stats, above all else, determine your chance of success.
SsEeXxO, you may want to read up on the progression CDI . Some of what you’re suggesting has been brought up there for consideration.
You need to set the game to play in windowed mode to be able to use a second screen. Then you need to set your second screen as an extended desktop, not mirroring the first screen. I’m not sure AppleTV supports this, it’s usually intended to just do mirroring (extendeed screen only works if the specific app is designed to use it).
Thanks for the update, Gaile. Whatever happened to Ashley btw.? She was so enthusiastic about communicating with the Mac community, then she vanished without a trace. We’re a bit concerned about her well-being. You didn’t lock her up becasue she was fraternizing with the players, did you?
The first 5 minutes of this talk from the Steam Dev Days have some very interesting insight into why DX11 support in games is actually not nearly as much of a forgone conclusion as one might think:
I’d start looking for activities that you enjoy but that don’t have an expiration date. Everything that is progression related will inevitably run out at some point, that’s a basic fault in most MMOs design.
If you find something that’s fun to you, and that doesn’t have some kind of cap, than you won’t run out of things to do. PvP is the easiest answer, as that never ends. For PvE it’s a bit harder, you essentially need to make up your own goals to pursue.
How much per month would you say you spend on microtransactions? In WoW there’s no need for microtransactions, barring few select circumstances. Though mainly I was referring to the greed and not listening to players aspect.
Interesting question, never bothered to calculate this before. For me, it’s €2,22 per month.
Besides, they are very much listening to feedback, if it’s written in a way that makes it worth reading. Yours wasn’t that bad initally. Lose the attitude, and they might actually read it. Playing a staff Ele in fire attunement, I absolutely sympathize with you.
Oh, and just to make sure: you did of course check out the sound options in game where you can turn these down, right?
They have a fix going on, Gaile already told us. It might be deployed before next Tuesday, or it might not be. Hard to tell, as you know, having experience with software development.
There’s always some percentage of your playerbase that can’t play the game right now because of technical issues, sometimes it’s just 1%, sometimes it may be as much as 10%. There’s a much more frequented non-OSX tech support board too. You don’t throw your release schedule overboard because of that.
Us OSX users are in a kitten situation here, no argument. We can reasonably demand to get the problem fixed. We cannot demand to ruin everyone elses experience just for our sake.
Make sure no other apps are running when you want to play GW2. Other than that, there is no ‘software that causes low framerate’, so there’s nothing you can disable to improve it.
There are two different problems at work here:
1. Since the last patch, performance has gone down for everyone playing GW2 on OSX. This is a problem with the game, not with peoples hardware or software.
2. If you had this problems before the patch already, you may have another issue on top of that. Please note though that 20 to 30 FPS is not all that unusual for a baseline iMac.
Can we assume that there is no way they’d release the next chapter of living story while the game client is still broken for all mac users? None of us would be able to participate in the climax of the living story, so I don’t think they’d do that, would they? Any update, Gaille?
I don’t think the other players would appreciate that all that much.
Please keep adding comments to these threads to keep them on the top of the active threads list.. I think its unfortunately the only way to get their attention. Or at least to get somekind of status update on this issue.
We already have their attention and a status report. They aren’t going to suddenly forget about it just because the thread isn’t at the top anymore. It’s time to be patient. Problems like this aren’t fixed in a day.
I don’t even have the Win7 discs (and for that matter this iMac doesn’t even have a DVD drive).. I think I might still have Win98 installers somewhere but thats not supported with the current versions of bootcamp.
I get that you don’t want to use BootCamp. I don’t want to either. Just wanted to point out that you can install it on recent iMacs (without disc drive) too. The new BootCamp assistant will make a bootable USB drive for you, you only need an ISO-file with a Windows installer image on it and a USB stick or external hard drive to put it on. You can get that ISO from Microsoft directly, or from various other sources.
The biggest proof is the Guildwars 2 Wine version, all graphic features are working flawless, just need more performance tweaks to be perfect.
The wine work is just replace Direct3D calls for opengl calls and Windows calls to Linux calls.
As far as I know the current MAC version was written the same way, replacing Direct3D calls for opengl calls. If that’s true, to make a linux version, just need some tweaks in the MAC port.
Unfortunately for us OSX users, this is not exactly true. The game engine is written for DirectX9. The OSX port uses a translation layer (Cider) to translate the API calls from DX9 to OpenGL. It doesn’t change them in the engine, it intercepts them and replaces them. This comes with considerable performance losses and potential for incompatibility (see the massive performance problem since the last patch), a number of limitations (related to memory usage) and various workaround needs for interface and window management.
A native OpenGL client comes with is very own host of problems though (which version of OpenGL to support, OS specific implementation problems etc.).
As much as I would love to see a native OpenGL version of GW2, I don’t see it making a lot of sense for Arenanet to divert resources to it until SteamOS sees a major gain in market share. And since it’s intended mostly as a living room device/console alternative, the need for controller support introduces yet another host of problems.
Have you tried the steps outlined in the thread at the top of this forum, named “Basic Mac Beta Client Troubleshooting”? They do solve the issue with most of the problems with the Mac port.
Well I don’t have bootcamp on this new iMac and I have no means to install it since I no longer have my old iMac .. so I am locked-in to OSX only for GW2.. (also have no desire to install bootcamp either)
I can sympathise with your lack of desire to install BootCamp, but you shouldn’t need anything (except Win7 install data) for a BootCamp installation. You can always install it on a new Mac without the need of any other machine.
@ g e o: Please don’t confuse opinion for fact (“sprockets are useless”) and please don’t think this gemstone strategy will stop at “just” sprockets. Hence the word “precedent”.
It sets a precedence of a cash shop item with an inconsequential secondary effect. I can live with that.
I don’t have a problem with one-time events in principle. You may miss them, but that’s ecaxclty what makes it so cool to have them, they are something special compared to the ever-repetitive rest of the game world.
It’s just not particularly clever to design them in such a way that you’ll end up with the majority of your playerbase in the same place at the same time. It’s inevitable you’ll run into technical limitations, and that’ll just spoil the fun for everyone.
The Karka Queen was quite disastrous in this regard. Let’s hope they learned something from that for Scarlets big day.
It reduces the gap between zerker and non-zerker setups. Reduces, not eliminates. The intention being that this makes it more viable to chose a non-zerker setup. If the gap wasn’t reduced somewhat, zerker would still be the prefered setup even if the meta changed, simply because it is much more efficient due to the inherent synergies between the offensive stats. It’s the solution to a scaling problem.
As you correctly pointed out, as long as the meta isn’t reworked, this change alone will not accomplish the stated goal. It is still a neccessary step though.
All they need to do is jettison their current, overrated, core which is based on grinds, stat based combat/character progression as well as the pain of balancing this kitten and overdone classdesign for a bunch of run-of-the-mill classes which end up in the melting pot called balancing process anyway. (I mean making a mage type class just for the sake of it? really?)
I think the reason why developers aren’t doing this isn’t a secret. Go to any MMO forum and dare to suggest a MMORPG that does away with the traditional RPG stat mechanics.
Torches and pichforks will be out before you even leaned back in your chair.
On topic, I don’t have much problems with immersion in GW2. The events already make it a lot better than your typical static world. Loading screens aren’t great, but I’m not switching maps all the time, and when I do, I usually have a reason to, and at that moment the quick travel actually comes in handy. When I want to immerse myself in the world, I simply don’t use it. Helps with keeping my gold together, too.
Hi All,
The two areas I think we need to work out or improve on are:
1: We need to keep thread and post sizes more manageable. Should we put a limit on the word length of posts?
2: How are we going to chose topics moving forward, for example, by votes or by Anet choosing them etc?
Chris
1. Feedback in this format needs a bit of space to be useful, but I guess some form of limitation is needed.
2. NO VOTES! There’s a place for democratic processes, and game development isn’t that. You guys know what topics you can use input on, this decision is yours.
You can just copy the .dat file from a Windows installation on an NTFS-formatted drive. You can format one with the tools provided by OSX.
Personally I use exFAT file format, works with both Windows and OSX, read and write, and doesn’t have the 4GB limit. It’s useful to have such a drive around if you’re working with both systems a lot.
You can’t join people on the main map when that map is full. That’s what sends you to overflow in the first place. Free spots on the main map usually get filled quickly by people from the queue.
Your friends can join you on the overflow, as that’s what the overflow is made for, unless that overflow is full too, then you need to join a different overflow that isn’t.
There’s no difference in functionality here between the Windows and OSX version.
— Sociopolitical Diversification: Player housing (Customizable from rewards gained in the open world), Guild Halls (Customizable from mass play rewards) and Map Wide Meta events unlocked through Faction progression (Leading to both individual and group rewards such as titles and skins)
I’m of two minds regarding the meta events in that list. On on hand, I want it there to make sure it doesn’t fall by the wayside. I think this point is more important than any other on the list.
On the other hand, I don’t think it belongs in this CDI at all. Discussing it as an aspect of personal, or character progression is the wrong perspective in my opinion. This feature is about World Progression (which there was a rather nice discussion developing about a few pages ago).
As such, a CDI on World Progression, where map meta events are discussed alongside scope and persistance of DEs, meta event chains, and interaction with the Living Story, would be a more suitable place for discussion of this, and frame the topic in a different, and in my opinion, better direction. I’d hope you have this topic on your list for future CDIs already.
Why do you think that A-Net doesn’t care about the Mac client?
It’s not cost efficient. That’s the main reason to use a cider port, significantly smaller cost ( initially and long term) than developing a real OSX client. I guess Arenanet did the math and figured the additional work just isn’t going to pay off.
Unfortunately the configuration options for iMacs are either insufficient for gaming or ridiculously expensive. The game will run, but nowhere near as good as it does on a comparatively priced Windows machine (er even a bootcamped Mac).
The GW2 client is only 32bit, but it can detect when it runs on 64bit Windows and that does open up higher texture options. So far those options are not available when running it on OSX.
Another nice change that seems undocumented is our Persisting Flames trait. Changed from 30% to a flat 2 seconds, for Lava Font a 50% increase, which now makes it easier to blast it with Eruption when switching both ways.
There’s a bug though in that the increased duration is not displayed in the tooltip.
Not in favor of this at all. Well, not in this context at least.
The tool is usefull for evaluating individual events. I didn’t read Chris’s post to be about that, but about having discussions about the games design and direction on a much larger scale, something this tool should not be used for at all.
Also, the original post here (“Let’s see what community thinks since you said you care so much for our feedbacks – Let’s make things crystal clear once forever.”) kinda carries this vibe of “lets all vote on this to prove we’re right and Arenanet is wrong”. Maybe I’m just reading to much into that post, but that’s not a position to base a constructive discussion on. Game development by majority vote is a terrible idea.
