Guild Wars 2

Ok, I rebooted my whole computer again, and it finally started downloading and finished (but even then it was going at like 1k every ten seconds or so). Problem solved. . . ?

Is it hanging on the last file of the patch? If so, that’s a bug that a lot of people have been dealing with since this last patch. No fix yet.

Nope. Still nada. I’ve left it running for about a half hour now, and it’s still sitting at 0%, one file remaining like it has been all day.

I’ve left it going for an hour or more with no luck, it seems kind of random whether it’ll connect or not.

Report sent. Please get this fixed soon!

I’ve had mine open for at least an hour at a time and the last file still won’t download.

I can’t imagine how this would be related to anti-virus or anything, since every one of the previous few dozen patches since launch downloaded without a hitch, and all but the one file from this patch did as well.

Yes, the ones bought by Moto have always had green wording in their description and have always been account-bound. The ones that you find in boss chests within the SAB have always had yellow lettering and have been free to sell. I haven’t been able to log in to see whether this remains the case.

Same here. It got to 99%, stuck there for a while, then I restarted the launcher and it’s stuck at 0%.

We could have a huge philosophical debate as to what privileges should be granted to users on the basis of the their financial transaction with Anet. Within that discussion, an incredibly small minority might argue for “the right to be able to obtain everything in [GW2].” I’m assuming an implicit “over a reasonable period of time” claim tacked on the end. As written, or even with that out clause, I’d argue that GW2 already satisfies that claimed privilege (although it’s still likely a minority view). The fact of the matter is there’s no compelling argument to support that demand. “But we paid money” doesn’t carry any weight as the money paid was to access the software and absolutely nothing else, express or implied.

Let me be clear. I do not believe ANet is under any legal obligation to provide me with a Legendary weapon. I do, however, consider it a flaw in their economic eco-system that it is designed in such a way that earning many of the items within it (short of a lottery win), requires players to engage in certain very specific and unfun elements of the game, which offer considerably higher reward over time than other, more interesting activities. I do not believe that market day trading should even be a rewarding activity, much less the most cash-rewarding activity available.

The question we should be asking ourselves here is, What is the real life equivalent of CoF 1?

Being a lawyer?

Instead of saying the “typical” player, you could say nothing should cost more than 500G, which is what I gather you believe a typical player earns in a month

If the typical player earned 500g per month then we wouldn’t have any problems.

It’s not a matter of deserving, it’s a matter of having a range of goals so that different players with different play styles all have something to work toward.

And that’s fair if all playstyles progress towards that goal at a similar pace, or if the goals were specific to that playstyle. I don’t expect a TP daytrader to max out their Slayer achievements as fast as someone that farms events, or for someone that farms events to max out the “Gold Hoarder” achievement at quickly, but when there are real tangible goals in the game like getting a Legendary weapon, if some methods can earn it in a fraction of the time that most other methods can, you have to justify why that should be the case.

For what reason should TP daytraders have better weapons than dungeon crawlers or event completers?

It doesn’t seem fair to me that the hard core folks should be denied something to work for because the more casual folks would have to spend a really long time to get it.

Fair enough, but with the way this economy works, those “push goals” should never have anything to do with money. If there are to be goals like that in the game, goals that are considered very difficult to accomplish, then they should not care whether you have 10 gold or 10,000 gold. If you can buy it with money, or buy any significant portion of it with money, then it isn’t a goal worth honoring.

Besides, the idea that getting one legendary should be the end-all of a layer’s experience is silly, there is an achievement for getting ALL of them, that’s, what, 21 legendaries? Even the most diligent players don’t seem to have more than two yet.

So would you feel differently if legendaries weren’t crafted and were just really rare drops? They would probably be just as expensive.

That would be even worse. Getting lucky on an RNG is not an accomplishment, it’s just luck.

My point isn’t that you’re wrong, it’s just that defining an “optimal” economy using the concept of a typical player when we have no idea what a typical player looks like isn’t particularly illuminating.

Perhaps, but the only ones who can define a “typical player” work at ANet, and so far they haven’t. Until then I have to imagine what a typical player likely is, based on what I do, and don’t do, and what others claim to be doing, that sort of thing. It’s a rough guess, at best, but it’s all I have to go on, and I’m fine with that until better numbers come in. I’m not just going to throw up my hands “welp, no numbers, not allowed to have an opinion!”

For me, an optimal virtual economy is one where the majority of players can afford what they need to experience all the content of the game, and have some money left over for non-essentials.

That, to me, would define a functional economy, rather than an ideal one. Anything less would be a “non-functional” economy, but just meeting that bare minimum does not mean there isn’t room for improvement.

I think in GW2 the necessities are almost too affordable, and the “nice-to-have” things start looking like necessities, and there’s not much in between those and the high end luxury items.

That’s the thing, I think that the entire concept of “high end luxury items” is ridiculous in a game. What defines which players are eligible for “high end luxury items” and which aren’t? Are only people who buy gold off gold farmers entitled to such items? Are only people who farm CoF1 for several hours per day eligible for them? Are only people who spend their time flipping mats on the TP worth having access to these items?

Why would those people be more deserving of “high end luxury items” than any other players who have been having fun and playing the game as intended since launch? I’ve put in hundreds of hours playing the game since launch, I think that if there’s any reasonable barrier of what one needs to achieve to be worthy of these “high end luxury items,” I’m fairly sure I’ve met it, and there are plenty of others who have as well without even getting as close as I’ve done. I’m not saying that I’m entitled to have more than other players, but I certainly don’t think I should be entitled to any less.

The way I see it, anything you might define as “high end luxury items” should really fit into the category of what you define as “nice to have” things, if perhaps the high end of that range. They should all be achievable through a month or so of driven play, or several months of relatively casual play.

There’s a thread by a player today asking what he should do with the 8000+ gold he has in the bank (he included a screenshot of his bank).

Give it out to everyone else.

So how much does the typical player make in a month? I’m guessing you believe you are typical, or probably above average. That’s human nature. That’s also a terrible yardstick to use, because it is entirely possible that the typical player makes far more than you think they do in a month.

Perhaps, but I doubt I’m wrong in thinking that the average player makes less than 500g per month.

My unsubstantiated guess is that I make less than the average player, but more than many. I have eight characters, five at level 80 now, and between them over the course of the game I’ve accumulated roughly 200gold, most of that over the past few months with an increased availability of rares and spending more of my time in dungeon runs than I once did. I think a reasonable stab is that the average player makes less than 50g per month though, 10% of the cost of many precursors.

I think we need to forget a bit about the average player for a second and talk about the economy as a whole. I would love the thread to focus on the real world versus THIS in game economy specifically. First and foremost, we can really debate all day about what it should look like, but the bottomline is that we really have no hard numbers.

If the numbers we tend to throw around turn out to be inaccurate, then ANet can take that as a request for more accurate data. We can only act from our own experience.

Could you please describe what you believe an “optimal economy” looks like.

One in which some items cost more than others, but in which no item costs more money than the average player makes in a month of typical gameplay. It should also be impossible to take money, apply it to the TP in some fashion, and end up with more money than you started with.

In an attempt to get back on topic. You see this in all modern economies and it’s the same concept. Only the people that have the money to play in the top tier markets are playing around in them. It in some way benefits the average player if they happen to stumble on one of these top tier items. . . In correlation to that, several people i know in game got precursors and turned to sell them for a tidy sum.

Yes, but it shouldn’t be that way. Nothing should be so rare that if you luck into it you make a fortune, and conversely, nothing should be so rare that you need a fortune to buy it.

I think John has mentioned (and i’m pretty sure he has far better numbers than what’s available to us) that the market isn’t being manipulated as much as some people tend to believe.

It depends on what you consider to be a problem. Is it “buying all or the available copper ores at a minimal price, letting the price rise a bit, and then slowly trickling it in?” That may be fairly rare. Is the problem “people buying up a bunch of items when the price just happens to be fairly low, and then selling them for a profit when the price happens to be higher?” That seems to be far more common.

Here’s the issue. You’re not an economist, and you don’t know an “optimal economy” when you see one.

No, I do. The optimal economy has nothing to do with theory, and everything to do with outcomes. If the outcome is 300g+ precursors then there is a problem.

What people see, and think to themselves as a “good” or “bad” economy is one in which their personal wants and needs are satisfied at a high level. But this is a judgment not on how well the economy is performing overall, it’s a judgment of how well the economy is satisfying one individual person’s unique preferences.

This is a relatively transparent economy though. We can see how expensive everything is in it. We can see if those prices are out of line with where they should be. This economy works great for people who’s goal it is to be a virtual day trader, but it’s a complete mess for people that actually want to play the normal game and feel that the economy works in their favor.

How do you think they view this economy? Do they think the things they want to buy are too expensive, or the things they’re selling are too cheap?

Well look, the economy I would want to see should work identically to that happy-go-lucky fellow. The items in the price range he’s shopping should neither rise nor fall significantly. It’s only the top that should come way down, and the bottom that might see a slight bump. So if they made the economy that suited my “personal perspective,” it would suit this imaginary chump just as well, so why not do that?

When something costs more than you’re willing to pay, you generally think “that’s too expensive” when the more accurate description is likely “my personal demand for that is lower than the current equilibrium price.”

When actually. it’s both that are true.

That’s really the difference between a real economy and a virtual one. When an item is “overpriced” in the real world, it tends to come from that item costing more to design, produce, and/or ship than one might expect. A Yacht isn’t more expensive than a dingy because someone just figured he wanted to make more money off of it, but rather because the yacht involves a much larger quantity of materials, higher quality materials, it requires far more labor to produce, etc. There’s a higher mark-up, certainly, but there are also valid higher production costs. Compare that to an ingame item. The sword Dawn is literally identical to Khrysaor, with the only difference in function being that Dawn can be used to make a legendary, and yet Dawn sells for 25000% the cost of Khrysaor. Why? Because there is a given demand for Dawn that Khrysaor doesn’t have, and yet ANet has not increased the supply to meet that demand.

They could, if they wanted to, make it so that you get a Dawn automatically with every mob you kill. The market could be flooded with millions of Dawns over night. I’m obviously not suggesting that they should flip the lever that far in that direction, but they could, and it would cost them nothing to do so. There are no Dwarven miners toiling away to produce a limited supply of Dawns, there are as many, and as few of them as ANet chooses to introduce to the economy. They should not produce enough that they lose value completely, but they should produce more than they have been.

Look, I’m not an economist. I don’t know the best methods for achieving an optimal economy, I just know an optimal economy when I see one and the current one is far from it. Too many items are selling for far too much. A lesser problem is that too many other things sell for far too little because there is no vendor price for them. How they solve it, up to them. I offered my suggestion but if that it’s the best one, fine by me. What’s important is that they do solve it, and what’s most important is that they don’t consider what we’ve got “solved.”

You keep claiming there’s “hinjks [sic]” that occur because of TP and NPC prices not being similar, but you’ve provide absolutely no argument as to why that would be, or why anyone would ever even consider this to be a problem. You have yet to establish a single issue other than “Ohoni thinks this is bad.”

When there’s a huge discrepancy, it gives manipulators room to maneuver. The vendor price provides a “floor” for transactions, and keeping the floor as close to the ceiling as possible leaves less room to cause trouble. If the TP price is 15% higher than the vendor price, then it leaves room for everyone to get their beaks wet on a first sale. If the TP price is 200% higher than the vendor price, then it leaves a lot more room to buy low and sell high.

Wait. I thought the player economy IS the global economy.

The global economy includes the NPCs.

Since when did selling items to a vendor “throwing it away?”

It’s not.

If you sell an item to a player, you get money, he loses money, the item goes to him for whatever purpose he wants. If you sell an item to a vendor, you make money, the vendor loses nothing, the item is effectively destroyed. It’s no different than the “destroy” option except that you get some cash for it.

You seem to not like the existence, or even the concept of rare items.

What’s wrong with items being rare?

I like rare items, I hate super rare items. I think it’s fun to have some items show up more often than others, I don’t like having items being so rare that unless you’re very very lucky you could farm for weeks straight and never have it drop. In this game, rare items and standard mats have a reasonable drop rate. Exotics and rare mats have way too low a drop rate. Precursors are idiotically low. Lotto odds are no odds at all.

why is this path so easy?

can we make this super hard please. Thanks

Only if they put an NPC at the entrance that gives you 60 CoF tokens and a couple of gold each day when you interact with him. Otherwise, leave well enough alone because it’s the only hedge against the hedgefunders.

Whatever hard mode they do implement, it should not come with greater rewards, or at least not significantly greater. If people WANT to play harder dungeons, then they can be allowed to do so, but they don’t deserve extra candy for playing the way they enjoy to play. If they’re unwilling to play hard mode content for the same rewards as everyone else then they clearly don’t enjoy playing hard mode content enough that anyone should care what they want.

That said, I imagine hard mode will take more time, and likely result in more deaths, so here are two concessions I would be ok with in the name of balance:

1. There would be more anvils placed around the dungeons. Any anvils that are placed in such a way that you have to fight your way to them (ie not at the entrance) would be free. Die all you like.

2. There would be slightly higher rewards, just slightly, based on the estimated time difference. If the dungeon takes a good party twice as long to complete as a good party in the regular mode, it can have at least 50% more gold/loot drop over the course of it. If, once it goes live, people figure out how to farm any one of these dungeons at a faster pace, the devs need to be willing and able to pull the plug on this at a moment’s notice and drop it back to standard levels. If hard mode takes more time, more rewards, if you figure out how to do it in the same time, same rewards.

3. Absolutely NO “unique” prizes that can only be earned through a hard mode. None.

Why is it a problem that items can sell for more to an NPC than on the TP? How do these things cause a negative impact upon the function of the TP or the economy itself?

It’s not a problem that they can sell for more on the TP, they should sell for more. It’s a problem that it can sell for considerably more. It’s a problem when the player economy is significantly out of what with the stable global economy. It creates a gap in which hinjks can occur.

If items sell for more to the NPC than on the TP, that could simply mean that the currency has not yet inflated to the level Anet would like it to (or at the very least, a level they would consider to be acceptable).

I kind of doubt that, given the prices at the high end. If the floor hasn’t risen to the level they like in the past six months, it isn’t likely to get there any time soon, especially since more items get added to the TP every day and some have tens of thousands of copies of items no player needs more than one of.

Additionally, why should vendors pay “fair market prices” for all goods. This would discourage people from using the TP to sell items and increase the supply of gold in the game. It is also likely that TP prices on desired items would rise as a response to the increased NPC “competition” for these items.

They shouldn’t match, they should be close. The profit a player makes for selling an item for a vendor should be slightly less than the profit he would make from selling it on the TP (after taxes). This gives him good reason to sell it to other players on the TP rather than throw it away.

The more important factor though is to better manage the faucet, to make it so that if there are items selling for way above the reasonable vendor price, then more of them will filter into the world to increase supply. If demand is high enough for something that the price rises so far above vendor, then clearly the supply isn’t up to snuff.

You list these things as absolute, self evident facts, but I think you’re begging the question here. Why is there inherently something wrong with a vendor price being higher than the TP price?

Because it goes against the purpose of the TP, which is to take unwanted items off the hands of players, and to provide desired items to players. Any element that gets in the way of that process is a corrosive element to the TP.

Items selling for less than the vendor price isn’t the worst thing that can happen on the TP, but it does represent at least a minor flaw. The glaring problems are items that sell for far too much, or items that are so volatile that people can buy them for one price, and sell them at a higher price to turn a profit. Balancing the vendor price to the TP price helps to decrease that sort of volatility.

So you’re saying that if a player-driven price set by the market is different from an arbitrary value Anet set, there’s something wrong?

Yes. If the player determined value is significantly lower then the arbitrary value, then that means that ANet is either providing too much of that item into the economy or has set their arbitrary value too high for it, and if the player determined value is significantly higher than the arbitrary value then that means that either ANet is not providing enough of that item into the economy or they have not set their arbitrary price high enough.

They can be forgiven for not correctly making their initial “guess” at the fair market value, but after that they have the tools to either change their vendor prices as they see fit, or change the drop rates as they see fit, either of which would bring the prices back towards balance. If a price remains out of balance of days, weeks, even months at a time, then it is because they have dropped the ball. It would even be possible for them to develop a mechanism by which the vendor prices would be automatically locked to TP prices, but with some measure of inertia and “fishy business alerts” built into it to prevent abuse.

I think that the problem with artificial scarcity is that folks don’t understand that scarcity of resources is absolutely essential for there to be a game economy, and I would contend, necessary to make a game like GW2 interesting. Yes ANet could flip a switch and increase the supply of anything, but it wouldn’t be good for the game.

That’s only important if one values the in-game economy as its own thing, rather than seeing it as a means to an end. The economy shouldn’t be an end to itself, it should just be a facilitator to allow players who have things they don’t want to get something back for them, and for players who don’t have things they want to be able to get those thing. It should not be a massive profit-make for ANYONE, it should a best be a way to make marginally higher profits than the vendors.

Basically, if any item sells for less than you could get on a vendor (after fees), then something is wrong with either the drop rates or the vendor prices. Conversely, if something sells for more than ten times the vendor purchase prices, then something is equally wrong with either the vendor prices or the drop rates. The TP should offer players a better deal than vendoring things, to encourage people to put their spare items on the TP and maintain a ready supply for those that want them, but it should not encourage people to “game” the market, buying low and selling high to actually turn money into more money.

I think it’s worth considering real world economies when talking about game economies, since there are at least some parallels, but they should not be confused, because there are clear differences too. There are no “necessities,” for one thing. Food and shelter are both entirely optional, while most people in the real world spend the bulk of their income on fixed expenses, there’s almost nothing GW2 players must spend money on, maybe WPs, maybe repair costs, everything else is luxury.

It’s also something in which some people choose to make it a “full time” occupation, spending many hours a day on nothing but farming cash (in the legal sense), while other players treat the game as more of a hobby, playing maybe a few hours a week. Yet this latter group still wants to have fun, still wants for the “good things in life” to be within their reach. If the economy is allowed to be tailored to the former group’s means, then the latter group stands no chance of keeping up with them.

On the plus side, unlike in the real world, “the government” holds EVERY economic level. If more tungten is needed for production, ANet doesn’t need to find a new Tungsten mine, they just just make more tungsten. If people need more cars than the car companies are producing, ANet an just spawn more cars, no problem.

Supply is 100% in ANet’s control, so if they’re aware of the demand, and they should, they can provide supply as close or as far from demand as they choose. All scarcity is artificial. This is why people get upset with ANet when certain high-demand weapons and other gear rise to outrageous prices on the TP, because this is clearly an example of supply not coming even close to demand, which should signal ANet to pump up the supply on those goods increasing the rate at which they drop into the world, but so far that doesn’t seem to be happening.

I don’t think I made any combat-speed impossible jumps in Griffonrook. Though I did make finding and using the speed boost eggs an important part of the strategy.

What speed boost eggs?

3. It’s unfair that a player can receive another 2 bauble bubbles by playing a different toon. It strongly encourages farming SAB. For example, I have 8 toons. Basically, I just play all of them and get a skin within 2 days. Comparing to my friend, she plays only one toon, so she can earn only 7 baubles per day unless she farms baubles. And because she hates farming, she just buys her favorite skin from TP. My suggestion is to make those drops from chest account bound and increase the reward of bauble bubbles to 5 per chest AND per account, not per toon.

I wouldn’t mind if they changed the way Alts work with the SAB, but they’d also need to change the reward rate. I’d hate if they made it so that alts didn’t get BBs, or got less of them per run, if they kept the initial pass at 2BBs per zone. I’ve been getting around 21BBs per day with my current path (three characters), and I would hope that whatever changes are made, I could make roughly that same amount or more per day.

If I were you, I would discard/spend any unused Baubles after the end of the month, but keep the Bubbles. I’m been keeping one stack of 250 Baubles lying around in case I want to “power level” another alt into the SAB, but any time I collect 250 beyond that I just convert them right into Bubbles. There’s nothing worth keeping the baubles around, and if for example World 2-1 2.0 adds in some more in-SAB items you’ll need to upgrade to, you can get hundreds of baubles in only one ~10 minute run of world 1-2, so it shouldn’t set you back any.

We’re currently focusing our engineering (programmers, not guys with net guns) resources that could work on solutions to issues like kits/skins on major systems that address issues higher priority and wider reaching like lag in large battles, LFG, custom arenas, spectator mode and so on but this issue is absolutely on our radar.

Large battles are important, especially the dragon fights, and we definitely need a way to access gw2lfg.com through the game itself, but Custom arenas and Spectator modes really aren’t anywhere near as important as Engineer kits. Those are sPvP-only issues, and nobody cares about sPvP.

The ones in the boss room? I had an extra gem after beating him once, and chucked it at one, and it did about 50% damage to him. It might be possible to kill them all if you patiently targeted them while ignoring the boss. I lack the patience for this, but wonder if it rewards anything.

Well, there are plenty of small chests in the world and nobody really bothers to grind them daily. I don’t think the reward should be so great that you’d bother to teleport into the zone for it or camp an alt there just to mine it daily, it should just be something where if you happen to be nearby it’d be worth going a little out of your way to pick it up.

I’ll give you an example of a prime dig spot. I was doing a plateau jump puzzle in Diessa the other day, and found a route that I thought was the right way, leading along the cliffs to a tree, but it turned out this was a dead end. There was nothing there and I had to turn back and go a different way. This would be a perfect spot to dig and maybe find a small prize. If they were randomized then it would sort of defeat the purpose of finding “clever places to hide things.”

One of the more fun elements of the Super Adventure Box is the shovel, being able to find secret locations on the map, where nothing is going on, and finding a treasure there. The open world doesn’t have this. Yes, there are sometimes hidden chests, or hard to reach harvesting nodes, but there are no spots where there is “nothing,” and then, using a tool, you find “something.”

I would love to see you guys add a shovel tool, or something similar to the game, and then adding several “dig spots” to each zone, otherwise invisible points where if you dig anywhere within, say, a 10m area you’d find a prize. It could be something simple like the loot from a small chest table, or a clump of high quality crafting mats, or some type of token, just something that would be worth seeking out without being too much.

Well I hope people don’t mind, but if this is the case I’ll be holding on to my spare Greatsword skin, so I’ll be able to trade it for a precursor in a few months.

Have you ever considered “nerfing” the cantrips that way: taking away the stunbreaking effects from some of them and putting those somewhere else? (Good candidates are Conjure Shield, Arcane Shield and Signet of Air, in my opinion).

Good point. I feel like every class should have at least three Stun Breakers, each in a different utility set, so that all but one of the sets has at least one option for breaking stuns (give or take).

Personally I think the water heals should be removed entirely, I can assure the devs that 100% of the players in the ele community has chosen this profession thinking it’d be something similar to the GW1 version, loads of control and very decent damage, we’d be more than happy to have a 3-5k base HP more along with more damage and control and you can then give the heals to some other profession

I agree with a lot of your points about needing better range options and stuff, but I can assure you that at least 1% of the Ele Community doesn’t even know of what GW1 Eles were capable, much less caring whether GW2 Eles bare any similarity. I never played GW1, although I’m sure it was a lovely game, and I made my Ele because D/D Eles are like characters from Avatar, spazzing around shooting fire and rocks and ice every which way and it’s awesome.

Ele’s probably should have a ranged option, just as a Warrior can go into Rifles/Bows or a Ranger can go Greatsword, but the melee range option is a lot of fun and should remain that way too. Specifically, D/D Eles need their healing prowess, because we wrack up a ton of damage otherwise.

The larger issue here is the fact that we are building a particular KIND of game on a platform that is not optimized for it. To me, the question is: Does the experience given outweigh the quirks of being on a less-than-ideal platform? The answer is that it varies depending on your lag. Overall the feedback has been very positive, so I think the answer for most is that the experience given does outweigh the quirks. I understand that forum response is not a perfect gauge, but it’s all we have to go on. I absolutely would LOVE to widen the net, to include as many as possible in that positive experience category, and as stated above, I’m happy to look into tweaking some values if that will do so.

I’m going to make two suggestions, no clue whether either might work. The first would be, could ANet ping a player, determine the relative lag, and then adjust the timing necessary? That is, if a player is right near the servers, and gets near zero lag, then he will need tight timing, while if a character has a very poor connection and a ton of lag, then it doesn’t expect as much from him, and as long as he gets it relatively close, it works out?

The second would be, why not make positioning more client-side, so that lag isn’t a factor? If I tell it to jump, I jump, I stick the landing, all client side, and then my client tells the server that I nailed it.

I’m well aware that both could be abused in various ways, and who knows how viable either would be, but maybe it’d be worth it?

Yeah, I can do the dodge-jump occasionally, but it’s random chance for me. If there ever comes a time where an objective absolutely requires dodge-jumping then that’s the point at which I’ll have to stop, because I’m not going to keep trying and failing until I luck into it. I like things that take skill, not luck.

I just got my Engie to level 60 and dumped my points into the Explosion tree, and I’m not loving my Grenadier. I run pistol/Shield (which I almost never use), and then Rocket Turret, Grenades, and Elixer Gun. I have the ‘Nades maxed for range, refresh, etc. I’m just loving the hell out of pelting enemies with torrents of grenades at 1500 range, especially on top of walls.

Can it be tricky to target moving enemies at long ranges? Sure, and it should be, but so long as they have something to keep them occupied at that distance, or if you fight them at melee-ish range, they’re brilliant. Playing an Engineer is more complex than some classes, but it’s still got nothing on the headache that is a Mesmer.

Keep in mind you are scaled down unless you are an asuran.

Yes, but his point is a valid one, regardless of which character I’m using the key’s attack has an effective range of half the stick’s. Maybe it’s got something to do with the stick having an arcing cone attack, while the key is perhaps a single target thrust? If this is working as intended, fair enough, it probably should have a reduced range, but if it’s a bug. . .

That’s not lag. That’s the player collision cylinder being a bit wider than your feet.

It’d almost be nice if the player’s collision cylinder were depicted on screen, like the new banner-circles that show the buff’s effective range. just a small permanent circle around your feet to show exactly where you’d start to fall.

There are a lot of little changes. As people mentioned, they added a new “township” off of Wayferers recently, and another one in Diessa Plateau, as well as refugee camps in three of the cities. I kind of doubt we’ll get any “cataclysm” events that completely destroy and replace an entire zone any time soon, but they do add entire event zones and things like that.

About corner jumping, you shouldn’t need SAB just to practice the technique. There are dozens upon dozens of corner jumping “opportunities” in the open world. One that I can remember just off the top of my head is in Lion’s Arch. Look up “Urmaug’s Secret,” a jump puzzle in the eastern side of the map. At about the middle of the puzzle is a jump that requires you to swing in and then arc back a bit. If you can pass it, great, if not, you only fall very slightly and it takes little time to get back into position to try again. I’m sure if you spent some time looking at the world from a parkour perspective you’d be able to find plenty of places where one could choose to “corner jump” from point to point, even if there would generally be no point to doing so.

So on the Achievement Leaderboards, how do you search to find your own name? I mean, I assume I’m in the thousands someplace and don’t want to go through hundreds of pages to find it.

I agree with everything except this.

A achievement for collecting all the Bauble’s in a stage would imply map completion. I don’t want feel like I discovered all the secrets in a stage. In my opinion it should be a mystery if there is any secrets left to find.

The achievement already exists. If you have this achievement then you’ve found every secret bauble (although presumably there could be other little tricks to find). The only thing Malafide’s asking for is that currently, if you have 95% of the hidden baubles in a zone, the achievement still reads zero until you find that last bauble, instead she’d like to see it show that you’ve earned most of them and only have a few to go, and more importantly that if you’re at 90% and find a new one, you can tell that it was a new one. I think this would be a nice idea.

Personally I’m speedrun the SAB several times, found most of the hidden areas and all the gear, but still have none of the full “completion” ones. I’ll maybe pick those up later at some point.

So basically the dialog that pops up after the end of each fractal?

Does it? I haven’t played Fractals in forever, I seem to remember getting oved along from a Fractal without ever agreeing to do so, I think those might be majority rules rather than unanimous consent, but yes, if so, that.

2. I’m pretty sure we are keeping them character bound. That’s the best way to experience it more than once if desired.

Once I got the hang of the place, I didn’t really have any issues “leveling up” subsequent characters (I currently have three characters near-maxed, aside from the slingshot and gust move on the latter two). What I would do is go in with around 100 baubles from another character, and then get a shovel. Then I would rush through towards the end, picking up a candle along the way. If I had enough for a bomb, I’d buy it, if I had enough for a purse, I buy it, otherwise I’d just continue to the end. When I got to the end, if I still needed either of those things, I’d just load up with the appropriate amount before going in, and then just start in 1-2 or 1-3 and run to the nearest store to pick them up. The whip and slingshot would just be casual purchases whenever I had the cash on hand, but the shovel is the must-have tool.

In either case, you can fully kit out a character in less than a half hour if you know where you’re going. I assume this will get harder to do with 3-4 worlds in and the many upgrades you’ve been promoting, but I find that even on the “efficiency” runs I’ve been doing I’ll come out with 300+ baubles per run.

I don’t think we have the tools to control the camera target. The going bonkers part is the real issue. I try to stay on top of the crenelations and I don’t usually have any problems there.

Yeah, it can be avoided, but it is kind of annoying, especially when you don’t have ti all down yet. It’s also a bummer when you trip over a crenelation and get zapped into the drink. I’ve got the pattern down fairly well now, but it takes a lot of trial and error.

Oh, and one more thing I’d like to see, there is a delay after beating each boss, which gets longer after each one, so the final boss is like 40s+. This is good in that it gives players time to reach the prize if they’ve fallen or died (and even still they miss it sometimes), but is annoying when not needed. I was hoping you could add a “poll” element to this portion, similar to choosing paths in dungeons, where you can ask the group “Continue on? 1 yes, 2 wait” and if everyone picks 1 then they teleport instantly to the next zone, while if anyone says 2 or picks nothing then they get the 40s time before zoning.

I think it would help if the team could somehow slow the readjust speed within certain thresholds. For instance the camera won’t adjust as fast until the player moves ~20% from the center of the screen. Additionally, I think centering the camera above the players model would help too as it would increase the vertical field of vision.

I originally put this in the suggestions board, but may as well mention it here, I really wish that on the world 1-2 boss fight, on the big tree stump, the camera axis would shift to the center of the tree and remain at an absolute fixed distance so long as you were up there, so that it wouldn’t go bonkers as you pass in front of the various crenelations of the tree.

I don’t think that when balancing the Thief, at least from what I’ve read about ANet’s intentions, we need to have a fight between PvE and PvP.

Well, two factors. If they ever think to themselves “well, we could make this change, but Thieves are already good at doing [this and that] in a PvP/WvW setting,” then we have a problem.

Second, they’re talking about giving Thieves “boon punishing” abilities. Boon punishing is fairly pointless in PvE, it can come in handy in certain situations, but not useful enough to care about. If this new “boon punishing” tool involves counterbalancing nerfs to existing options, or a reduced interest in buffing up other areas that could use it, then again, we have a problem.

So long as PvE balance doesn’t suffer for the sake of PvP, I’m fine with it, but I am concerned.

Hate to tell you this, but balancing professions in a way that works for sPvP against real intelligence is always a better solution than balancing it against AI mobs if you have to choose only one.

Only if PvE content is anything like an sPvP match, which it’s not. You need to survive damage over X amount of time is different, your need to deal damage over X amount of time is different, and fights are more likely to end up 1v1 or 2v1 in sPvP than in PvE where it’s often 5vChamp or 5v5. A class can dominate in sPvP and not be terribly useful in a dungeon, and vice-versa.

So I repeat, they should balance PvE for PvP, the other game types aren’t relevant.

How many times have you played it? A common feeling in platform and adventure games that I’ve experienced, is the first time you come into a new level, dungeon, or what-have-you, the strangeness of the new surrounds, new color palate, new sounds, new mechanics, etc. build up and form a gestalt impression of overwhelming difficulty. But you push through that, and become comfortable with all those elements, and eventually find out that it really was not as hard as you thought.

I will say this, I have cleared 2-1 several times, including many of the optional paths and the water puzzle, just so you understand that I’m not crying because I can’t beat it. 2-1 is significantly harder than 1-3. Now, there are still optional elements of the earlier levels that I haven’t gotten through, so perhaps it’s harder to get a full-clear on 1-3, but it’s fairly easy to get from one side of 1-3 to the other, while even with the available shortcuts, it can be hard for a poor jumper to reach the end of 2-1, and it also takes far longer to reach a checkpoint than any other zone.

I do think that these levels can start requiring that at least one player in the group knows how to jump, but they should also allow the team to drag poor jumpers along by the scruff of their necks.

It might help if there were some sort of horizontal shortcut to get stragglers across the final “croc jumper” string. I also hope that when 2-1 is complete, there will be stronger weapons available, because the ninja enemies are real jerks on a linear bridge. Does the tech allow for horizontal or diagonal jump pads? Maybe a bridge that only opens when activated from the other side?

dude, i do not care about your stupid WVW or PvP, i want to be useful in PvE parties ! and not to be kicked like trash, did you guys wonder why all parties want 1-2 guardians, 2-3 warriors, and a mesmer ???

/Second. If there’s ever a balance discussion, and someone mentions “but sPvP. . .” or “but Wvw. . .” then kick that person from the room and continue the discussion. You can balance for those two things, but leave your peanut butter out of my chocolate, I’m allergic and will suffocate. Balance the classes around PvE ONLY, then you can start worrying about whether they are balanced in PvP or WvW.

I’ve had the same thing happen to me numerous times with the Modnir boss in Harathi. I’ve completed the entire boss fight and received no boss chest, no daily chest. I did get the event completion medal and the cheap loot off the boss himself.

My Mesmer is a female charr. It;s much easier to tell where your clones are when you’re the only cluster of purple charr on the battlefield.

I think the cinematic is really only a problem for people who are farming. (It’s also not a real cinematic that can be skipped.) Farming is a bigger issue that I have some ideas about. I’m thinking of tying score to the amount of bauble bubbles you get in the end chests, so you’ll have to actually play the game instead of running from point A to B over and over. Doing that will obviously require re-balancing the cost of skins.

I would think that the easiest solution would be to leave normal mode alone, but make it so that hard mode requires you to do all the little side stuff to unlock the checkpoints, but since you have to do more work you get at least a few more baubles for it when you get to the chests. Of course then you’d probably have people figuring out which zone is easiest to complete on hard and speed-running that.