Guild Wars 2

Thryfe.2576:

It’s probably best you don’t think about it too deeply.

I don’t think not thinking about things (and in consequence, not communicating about things) are good ways to deal with conflicts and issues. When people get emotional over stuff, they do so for reasons. You may not agree with those reasons, but that doesn’t make them go away.

I want to live in a world with as little conflict as possible, and that means that people’s issues need to be taken seriously and addressed, whether I agree with their assessment or not – only then we can create in a society that is based on understanding, common ground and consensus that allows more people to live in non-conflicted ways.

bhagwad.4281:

So we’re talking about internal consistency – what we call willing suspension of disbelief as long as the fantasy world plays by its own crazy rules whatever they are.

High heels are not consistent with a scenario of an engineer building robots for defence.

I do agree with this. Actually, I remember specifically pointing out to people in the past how impressed I was that characters (including female characters) in GW2 were wearing sensible shoes, and GW2 was a nice break from the heeled boots of action heroines we see in comics and movies and most games and which to me make zero sense.
GW2, so far, has decidedly not given us any such context, which is why the watchkinghts’ heels stand out so much.

bhagwad.4281:

It’ll be nice if we also had bots with sizeable pricks as well. Then I don’t think anyone would object. But we only get female nudes and not males. Why?

Eh, the Cliffside Colossus is wearing a loincloth, so you can’t really see his manhood or buttcheeks (if I remember correctly, next time I will have a closer look) but he is chained up, helpless, almost completely naked, and as a player you approach him from a very clear “upskirt” angle. If he was a female character, he’d tick all the sexism boxes of a “damsel in distress”. But for some reason, he’s a guy, and such goes unnoticed.

I have talked to many, many people in my life, trying to open their minds towards gender bias, pretty much as an active feminist. But it’s now 2013 and I’m suddenly in the position that I feel I also want to open the minds of feminists towards a wider perspective. There’s no “right side” and “wrong side” here and people aren’t either outspoken feminists or women-haters. I think everyone should at least try and be as fair as possible, and that means critically calling into question from the gender stereotypes you grew up with, as well as the views you may have developed in response to them. I haven’t stopped being a feminist… I have grown to also be an -ist to support everybody who finds themselves unfairly pre-judged (be it for gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, or anything else really).

bhagwad.4281:

Lol. What? I have no objections to nudity male and female. But when there’s only female nudity, I question the motives of the designers.

About FemFreq,

Kalathra.3128:

Her videos are quite bad for misinformation, or at least misrepresenting information, and cherry picking. I think they’re a good thing to watch to hear what she has to say, I agree with some of her points, but please don’t listen to her videos alone and claim them absolute. Get other views and opinions, too, and form your own opinion from the pool of them.

This is how I feel about them as well. The videaos are worth watching as some of the arguments and examples are perfectly valid, but they convey a very narrow perspective. I think in the interest of fairness, what we all need is an as broad as possible perspective, so if gender issues matter to you, please check out various sources and form your own opinion.

Cirian.8917:

Can I be blunt on this forum? Both genders can be cynically boiled down to two equally insulting gender roles. Men are inherently disposable drones used for anything that involves dying, especially while they’re young. Women are inherently precious drones used for making babies, especially while they’re young.

It’s true that gender stereotypes and bias go both ways. People of either gender benefit from some and are put at disadvantages by others. Logically, in a species with (for the most part) binary gender, inequality affects everybody.

But that doesn’t mean that we should stop talking about gender issues or stop trying to work towards equality. On the contrary. I have heard one time too many that “it happens to men, too, so shut up”. Gender bias and inequality harm everybody.

As such, this discussion is a good one. Many good and valid points were raised, on both “sides”.
And many other people are not firmly taking sides, and don’t have to, and yet contribute valuable thoughts to this.

Please keep the discussion going, and keep open minds. I dream of one day living in a society where people don’t give a skritt about gender roles at all anymore, and no one will be pre-judged; if we continue to talk about this in a mature way, one day I might.

I really want player housing, and it always made sense to me to connect it with the personal story. Then at least you would have a reason to repeat the later, generic parts on all your characters, rather than stopping after the racial and order chapters.

I really want player housing, and it always made sense to me to connect it with the personal story. Then at least you would have a reason to repeat the later, generic parts on all your characters, rather than stopping after the racial and order chapters.

I would love a ping-in-chat functionality for all sorts of things. Right now we have WP, POI, and items. (Right?)

But not dynamic events, achievements, NPCs (vendors and hearts)… It would make it a lot easier to answer people’s questions in chat.

• Which achievement is that? ping achievement
• I’m missing a heart, can someone ping them for me? ping heart NPC
• Which vendor has the guild kite? ping vendor NPC
• Where’s the Oakheart? pink dynamic event
• And also, when you’re achievement hunting in a group (fractals, mini-games or whatever) Wohoo! ping achievement

I don’t think that you need to ping a specific enemy in chat – I’d rather see this implemented for dynamic events, and bosses would be covered by this.

BuD.7851:

Or at least have to be in the basket to take a ride.

This.

Just here to say that this is probably my favourite short story so far! It is all sorts of lovely, almost every sentence made me smile inside.
Also, I have developed sort of a soft spot for Rox, and this little bit of text totally reinforced that. <3

Rytlock and Frostbite were written very well, too. Suddenly I find myself wishing I could read an entire novel of this stuff.

Secondly, while a story instance would have been nice, it would have lacked a lot of detail from the short story: what Rox is thinking, how Frostbite gets anxious or playful, etc. – I would have missed out on half the things I love about this text.
I think that different media have their own strengths and weaknesses, and there is room for story instances and text-based story fragments.

I still also kind of wish these were collected in the hero tab, similar to the personal story (we’ve all seen the mock-ups).

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

What is happening here is that we have a character design that has sexualized elements. This is a fact.

The amount to which this offends us is subjective. Some, don’t think twice about it, while others are highly sensitive, or even offended by it.

So who is right?

Well, in my opinion, everyone is. If you have a problem with the design of this robot, your feelings are perfectly valid. You have every right to feel offended by something you see in the game (Bathing suits, skimpy armour, shirtless males, half naked statues).

What you don’t have the right to do however, is tell others they’re wrong for not feeling offended, or to claim they’re sexist, insensitive, misogynistic, or whatever.

We can all argue the practicality of this robot all we want. If you think high heels, or breasts on a fictional robot are a stupid idea, then by all means voice your opinion.

What we need to stop doing here IMO is throwing out buzzwords and assumptions without regard. We need to be careful not to make assumptions about people, and not belittle people for their views.

I have no problem discussing this stuff, but we need to stay rational. If we start posting videos of radical feminists, or calling each other names, then the only thing that will happen is that it will further divide people on an already volatile topic.

Here, have a +1!

PS: I have +1’ed everyone in this thread who is trying to have a mature discussion about this, on all sides.

Dahkeus.8243:

For anyone that is truly interested in learning more about this topic and isn’t here to simply defend their world view with straw man arguments, ad hominem, cherry picking, etc., you may be interested in the following link: http://www.feministfrequency.com/tag/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/

I’ve seen the three videos released so far and I, as a gender-issue-aware person who fights double standards and gender bias consciously and every day, am really not a fan of them. She raises some valid points and issues, but her argumentation in many cases is too biased to remain objective and falls short.

Anyway, back to guild wars. Here’s a picture of a damsel in distress that is almost completely naked, chained up, and that I have to rescue on a regular basis:

I agree with much (not all) of what you said, but not this:

Kalathra.3128:

There are people who are naturally that shape, women come in all shapes and sizes, whose breasts are indeed that perky, butts just as round, and comparatively as thin.

There is indeed such a thing as exaggerating the female form to a degree of anatomical impossibility.

The watchknights are by no means the worst offenders of this at all (as I’ve said before, I love their design). However, Giselle Bundchen is a supermodel and she has twice the watchknight’s waist size… (see below)

Also, their pelvises are actually at an angle that over-emphasizes their butts to a degree that is also anatomically impossible. There is a picture out there that illustrates this by taking a 3d model of a woman and gradually photoshopping it back to fit onto a human skeleton. It looked quite different afterwards. Unfortunately, I can’t find it.

(I’m not saying that the design of the watchknights is bad or inappropriate. I am saying that yes, they are sexualized. I personally don’t have a problem with that, although I understand it if other people do.)

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

They are sexualized yes, but not in a sexual way.

I honestly don’t understand the distinction you’re trying to make: “sexualized” literally means “made to be in a sexual way”.

Sexzualize
1. to make or become sexual or sexually aware
2. to give or acquire sexual associations
- To make sexual in character or quality
- to render sexual; endow with sexual characteristics

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

P.S. Bat-nipples

Those are generally critisized and mocked. Do you know anybody who liked the bat-nipples?

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

• I don’t have a principal problem with that. It is okay to depict women and men in sexual ways. (If only men and women were depicted in sexualised ways in roughly similar proportions, overall. There’s disproportionally little sexualisation out there for straight females to look at.)

The new Wolverine is out in theatres. :P

I said “disproportionally little”, not “none”

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

I’m kinda tired of seeing Quaggan plushies, and other cute things. I’m not saying that these things are bad, but having these more mature, and realistic designs are a breath of fresh air.

I prefer a more mature design, too, although for me, that really doesn’t have to go hand in hand with more sexy stuff. The absence of immature content doesn’t automatically mean sex stuff – mature means many things besides “sex”.

I also want more realism in the general design of GW2, but calling the watchkinghts “more realistic” in design really would be a stretch…

Crazylegsmurphy.6430:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

• I am not offended by the art, or by the form, or the quality. What bothers me about this is the lack of context. Are they supposed to be eye-candy, or sexual, or fighting machines? They can be all three, but context was given to only one of the three – fighting machines. (Maybe two if you count general “eye-candy” as “Jennah wants to show off”, which I believe was said in the live stream.) So in the end, it is awesome, beautiful fight-bots which have overly sexual visuals tagged on for… no real reason (that I can see) other than “let’s make them… sexy!!” And I can totally see why that would offend some.

The question I have is why is this choice any more, or less valid than any other choice? Are we questioning it because they’re female?

Would we be asking the same questions if they were big “male” robots? Would be be asking why they’re big, muscular, and mean looking?

If they were big, muscular, and mean-looking male robots with pronounced, naked, hairy butt-cheeks and a rather large fun package between their legs, yes, I believe many players would absolutely be asking these questions.

(I still want to see them. Although I’m not too hopeful that I’ll get them. /sad)

I would love to see male robots in game, done in the same style.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

I think they should simply boost the health on those crystals, so more people can hit them, and give the Shatterer a massive aoe attack that also turns the whole backline into crystals.

But would that help? As far as I understand, you have to be the one to deliver the killing blow, not just tag the crystal… or is that wrong? Then giving them more help would do absolutely nothing for the achievements.

I am in two minds about the watchknights.

• I like that they’re female. Not because I prefer female models over male models as a default, but because it makes for a nice change from the Asura golems and, well, most robots out there. (And of those who are out there, almost all of them are either firly-pink or sex-bots, so we definitely need more variety of female robots, for diversity.)
• I find the design lovely. I stood in front of one and admired it for a long time, two nights ago. I don’t know if the Metropolis-esque-ness is a deliberate reference, but it’s lovely. Love the art deco style.
• That being said, I do feel they are sexualised. They do not just have a female form, they have an exaggerated female form, and stilettos (which, sorry, I wouldn’t wear for fighting or running ever, no matter my weight distribution), and nipples that serve no function and are clearly for the looks. All three of these design choices are used in sexualised depictions of women. Any one of them I would have maybe just raised my eyebrow at and whatevered if off, but in combination, yes, there is a sexual component. (See also Sorayama’s illustrations of robots, easy to google.)
• I don’t have a principal problem with that. It is okay to depict women and men in sexual ways. (If only men and women were depicted in sexualised ways in roughly similar proportions, overall. There’s disproportionally little sexualisation out there for straight females to look at.)
• However, this is not what I expected to see in GW2, which in other design choices has been a lot more conservative (in an “American” and “suitable for 13+” kind of way) so these really stand out. Otherwise, they might not even be a discussion about this.
• I am not offended by the art, or by the form, or the quality. What bothers me about this is the lack of context. Are they supposed to be eye-candy, or sexual, or fighting machines? They can be all three, but context was given to only one of the three – fighting machines. (Maybe two if you count general “eye-candy” as “Jennah wants to show off”, which I believe was said in the live stream.) So in the end, it is awesome, beautiful fight-bots which have overly sexual visuals tagged on for… no real reason (that I can see) other than “let’s make them… sexy!!” And I can totally see why that would offend some.

ShunsuiKouKyoraku.9106:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Martin Kerstein.3071:

Tara Strong was also the voice of Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls!

cough

Ok, back to the topic at hand ^^

She also does Twilight Sparkle from MLP. I heard this from a friend of course.

BRONIE SPOTTED.

MUST REFER TO [MLP]

But you didn’t catch the OP’s “Purple Smartywings” in the very first post?

Not an expert brony spotter :P

I think what would help is some Shattiquette.

If all players agreed that if you already have the achievement, you try to stay away from the crystals, everyone else would eventually get theirs.

It is what I do, but I think many players just hit everything (whether they have the achievement or not) because it is less effort than stopping your attacks for a minute.

My directx is the up to datest it could be.

I’ve been asking myself, the selection of 4 mini games seems very arbitrary.

Based on forum feedback, yes, I think Sanctum Spring and Southsun Survivor were more popular than Aspect Arena. But Aspect Arena was less hated than Crab Toss.

A good reason to bring Crab Toss back would have been to allow people to complete their achievements, as those were broken during the event so people who didn’t get them early later didn’t have the chance – but that’s not even the case here.

Soooo… I really don’t know!

PS: I liked Aspect Arena.

Another quick update,

with the last patch, I am suddenly seeing artifacts again.

Here, too.

Most players that hang out in LA are just there because of the bank / TP / MF / crafting access and don’t get involved in /map chat or any sort of activity at all. Just gold down ctrl or alt for fun and sount all the names of the people you don’t even see thanks to culling.

LA is way too full of players, and I wish they would spread out more through the racial capital cities.

I’m using Rata Sum as my “home” on all my characters as the trade and bank NPCs are closer together, it’s just more convenient than LA, not to mention I get a lot better FPS and less lag there. I only go to LA for the Mystic Forge nowadays, activities NPC, and occasionally /map chat.

Most players in LA contribute nothing and just stand in everybody’s way, the place is far too crowded; I think guild halls or player housing or whatever wouldn’t make too much of a dent on this.

Xenon.4537:

Oranisagu.3706:

bri.2359:

what’s that, a meme for ants?

It needs to be at least…. three times bigger!

and at least… 20% cooler!

ShinChuck.9805:

Interesting. What’s the point of the other ones if they don’t count? Are we getting some rewards for them I’m not seeing?

Upon completing all four of them, you get an achievement in the Living Story category (this is a different one from the daily achievement that we’re talking about in this thread) as well as a permanent torch object. And fun.

The website you linked to lists all the armours

Try this website: http://argos-soft.net/GW2ArmorGallery/index.php?sex=0&race=3&color=10&weight=3
It will tell you what to get how/where.

Hobo-Tron?

I miss Heroic Dolyak . :’-(

Invictus.1503:

Frankly I don’t see anything in the OPs thread that isn’t already in others (despite his/her opening statement) except the point of measuring how much they play a toon based on how much gold they have. There is a better track for that, type /age. Tracking by gold accumulation is inaccurate at best because playing a short time in some areas nets more gold than playing triple the time in others.

The OP is (was) not using gold to see how much they play the character, but how financially viable it is. This information is “gold earned” / “/age”, not simply “/age” on its own.

Of course playing alt A always in queensdale and alt B always in Orr will yield different results due to factors independently of profession, skills, gear and level. But if you go about your daily routine on alt A today and alt B tomorrow, of course over time you will have an indicator of financial viability.

And that is actually a good and valid point that I hadn’t seen in other threads.

I think they randomly drop from other things as well, at least the balloon chests.

I do wonder whether all the support tokens that still drop in PvE were supposed to be gauntlet tickets…

Kal Spiro.9745:

I actually figured it out on my second try because when you look at the LS torchbearer achievement it only shows you the one in the central plaza as being for the achievement.

When you look where it shows you what?

Sammuilee.5814:

It’s more like 2=2. As it’s now you can spend 1 ticket to do easy mode and get 1 bag or you can spend tickets to activate gambits to do hard mode, but still ration of tickets spend and reward bags is 1:1, only difference is that with more gambits active you take greater risk of failing.

Spending the same number of tickets without gambits:

• same reward
• lower risk
• takes longer
• better practice
• no achievements

…. which means it’s really not worth it using gambits, unless:

• you’re going for achievements
• you’re super pressed for time

Day Trooper.3605:

How did you know that only Central Plaza was needed?

Through trial and error, and then we got dev confirmation here
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Krytan-Torchbearer-Daily

Don’t worry, the mistake lies not with you.

Would be totally cool though if you’d reword the achievement, because these continue to come in:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Daily-Krytan-Torchbearer-not-working
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Daily-achievement-torch-bearer-bug
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/jubilee/BUG-Can-t-get-daily-torch-run
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/jubilee/Krytan-Torchbearer-Daily-1/

I play living world content and PvE a lot more than dungeons, it’s true.

But even if I started to run daily dungeons, the sheer amoung of tokens needed to complete just one outfit would mean that it would take months before the dungeon tokens even begin to seriously pile up…

Well, thing is though, if I spend 2 tickets on 2 normal fights I get 2 normal rewards.

I spend 2 tickets on 1 difficult fight I get 1 better reward… but 2 normal fights are still easier than 1 hard fight.

But you also get better loot (higher reward) IF you succeed (higher risk), as well as achievements (additional reward, albeit only once per.)

Orion the Cursed.1206:

Zaxares.5419:

Still better than smashing pinatas. XD

Better than 50 sonic device as well.

But sonic devices were a great karma-farm ontop of everything, so I didn’t mind the grind.

But seriously, if I could pick exactly one out of those three and that’s that, I think I would play with Tengu character creation for a while and then roll a Hylek because they don’t get enough love.

Benkaze.2146:

This is just a random question but which of the these 3 races would you be if you could play them?

Tengu
Quaggan
Hylek?

Skritt.

Lorelei.7809:

You don’t get half as much of the new currencies as the standard ones, though (so there is less of a reason to include them). But yes, they are a problem.

I don’t know, I usually end up with stacks and stacks of event currency, but never with stacks and stacks of laurels or dungeon tokens…?

Thank you people.

Yeah, I must say that a mouseover is not the perfect solution in a setting that has you busy – normal dynamic events have timers in the top right corner, that’s where I’m used to looking, and without mouse-hovering breaking my routine. Why suddenly change that?

As the the queue thing, I have talked to all NPCs and not found any information, although the thought of looking to see if any of the NPCs have any buffs on them honestly wouldn’t have occurred to me.

I’m usually the biggest apologist when it comes to shipping software with bugs. No matter how hard you test your software, there is always something that will only be a problem in conjunction with a customer’s specific setup, or an unfortunate data combination.

But many of the bugs that we’ve seen in the last few weeks were avoidable and make me question whether even one person tried a thing even once. (Such as casting a debuff and it debuffs the player instead of the enemy. How can something like that slip through?)

The majority though are sloppy oversights, such as not removing support tokens from the drop tables, implementing account wallet without any regard of secondary use of tokens (such as fractal relics in MF, dungeon tokens in crafting), continually forgetting to restrict food/potion/skill buffs before/during mini-games, etc. etc. – I could go on.

Then some of these oversights would be very easy fixes, such as replacing one string (remember how several Southsun events counted defeated enemies down instead of up due to mislabelling? Also: current torchbearer daily?), or deleting a duplicate NPC from a map; but they’re not given high enough priority to be addressed, even though I’m convinced the fix would take only minutes out of a developer’s day.

And what really does bother me the most is that sometimes there is a definite bug, and it is getting addressed, but some players are still out of luck: those who didn’t get the crab toss achievements a few months back when the achievements randomly just stopped working mid-event still can’t get them, and weren’t compensated in any way (that I am aware of) despite ANet (as rare as it is) openly acknowledging that the achievements were 100% broken.

So yes, software will always ship with bugs, we all know that (and people who work in IT know it a little better than most) but there is a lot going on here that is not okay regardless.

I feel like I’m missing something. Is there a countdown anywhere in the UI, and if you’ve found it, would you please direct me towards it?

• Where can I see how many seconds I have left in my torch run?
• Where can I see how many seconds I have left in my guntlet fight?

On a related note,

• Where can I see my current position in the gauntlet queue?
  Getting skipped is bad enough, but sitting there waiting for 15 minutes to be on the safe side rather than knowing you were just skipped is worse.

Maybe I just don’t see the info on screen… ?

In addition to the Obsidian Sanctum, there is the Shark’s Maw jumping puzzle in Lion’s arch, and then there’s also the dwarf mini dungeon that has some pretty extensive dark content.

But yeah, those are the only 3 examples I can think of right now.

I always liked darkness as an element in puzzle mechanics, and I would like to see more content that utilises it.

On a related note, many players feel that nighttime in Tyria should be darker in general. As it stands, you can walk anywhere during the night (including caves!) and see perfectly where you’re going.

Yeah, the standard currencies really weren’t the problem for me in the first place. But every month, ANet comes up with 1-4 additional currencies (last month alone we got kite fortunes, fortune scraps, golden scraps, support tokens, support badges Kiel, support badges Gnashblade, Black Lion scraps and Black Lion tickets)

e_e

The daily torch run achievement is mis-worded. You have to complete the torch run in the garden on the top floor (the one where you jump on the hedge things) – only that one counts for this daily.

There is multiple threads about this.

I didn’t have too many problems defeating her on my non-serker engi (she’s traited for condition damage, elixir gun and such). I think I was wearing pvt armour even.

Anyway, I will try again tonight using the fire debuff, and my plan is to bring more stun to the game, pin her down, and kill her before the fire or tornados get me. Whether pvt or carrion gear is more useful for that I don’t know yet, but I wasn’t under the impression that you need to go serker.

Vayne, I feel ignored.

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

Vayne.8563:

Except that the living world is populated by tons of people and keg brawl isn’t…no matter the reason.

Do you have any numbers or even anecdotes to support this, because my own experiences with Keg Brawl in the last month have been completely different. There was always several games going on at the same time, on days when Keg Brawl wasn’t on dailies, and during off hours.

Vayne.8563:

Except that the living world is populated by tons of people and keg brawl isn’t…no matter the reason.

Do you have any numbers or even anecdotes to support this, because my own experiences with Keg Brawl in the last month have been completely different. There was always several games going on at the same time, on days when Keg Brawl wasn’t on dailies, and during off hours.