Guild Wars 2

Thanks everybody for your additional input!

I want to say again that over the course of the last updates, I feel that ANet has moved in the right direction, but maybe not far enough. I can imagine them sitting in their office, designing awesome new items for us (such as the backpacks), adjusting drop rates, giving us PvE drop coffers, and still people are complaining. We must come across as a terrible little community…

All I did was to take the whole thing a few steps further. I know we have all the mechanisms in place already, so it would be relatively easy to test something like what I described in the original post for one month, and see what happens in terms of player reactions as well as economic impact. Each living story chapter has been a little different, ANet are already trying out things.

Or maybe they’ll come up with something else entirely, but I hope this can be an inspiration at least.

I second this
+1

I see how this would work in an RPG but not an MMO. That’s why the personal story was added.

Are you suggesting that the new little village exists on the map for some players but not for others? We need a consistent, persistent world because people play in teams.

Rouven.7409:

The range is in inches – you can take a ground targeted skill (maybe), like the mesmer blink – that’s 900 inches away.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Range

Did you see this? He talks about the coordinates …
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api/Map-API-Mumble-Mashup

Wonderful, thank you.

I will check out the links when I’m back online (maybe I shouldn’t have started this thread the day before my vacation)! In the mean time, feel free to discuss… very much looking forward to doing some maths when I return

I’ve used this feature in game maps wherever available; Tyria is a big place and I would love to be able to save down my own notes +1.

Palador.2170:

Pixelpumpkin.4608:

I’d just like to work out the walking and running speed of the characters because I’m geeking out about the numbers right now, that’s all.

Okay. That I can understand wanting to do.

And now I’m wondering… if you can figure out the height of something in-game, and then jump off of it and time the fall, can you figure out Tyria’s gravity from those numbers?

You’re taking it to a whole new level!

Good luck!
/charr

Palador.2170:

As for the maps, keep in mind that they don’t show everything. They only include the stuff that’s important and interesting to the game. In a city, they have the important buildings and enough other structures to give you the feel of that part of the city. The same kind of idea applies out in the wilds, important points of interest and enough of the other stuff to give you a feel for the area.

During Flame and Frost, you had refugees trudging along on long journeys as they made their way from their destroyed holds and settlements to safety. However, we only saw one or two settlements come under attack, and none actually destroyed. A walk of 30 minutes or less to safety isn’t all that impressive, either.

Not to mention the sheer number of refugees that walked down that path every hour – probably exceeded the entire rest of NPC population at the end of the event

Palador.2170:

The full distance and all the destroyed houses are simply not shown, because they would be nothing but empty areas and a waste of time. Would you REALLY want it to take 4-5 days to cross Wayfarer Foothills, even with the game’s 2 hour night/day cycle? With still only as much to do in that area as there is now, just spread out much wider apart? Heck no!

In short, the distances shown on the map vary by what’s in the area that’s important. Empty fields or tundra? Assume a lot of it’s been cut out. Middle of the city? You’re going to have more accurate distances, but there’s still stuff missing. You simply can’t measure large distances on the map with a single, consistent standard of measurement.

I’m aware of these things, and I’m not trying to take a little pickaxe and hack away at the in-game consistency. For the record, I think ANet’s designers have done an incredible job giving us the illusion of height (shiverpeaks mountains, pig iron quarry) and width. Even if the sea around southsun is the size of an RL pond with a fountain, that doesn’t change any of the lore for me.

I’d just like to work out the walking and running speed of the characters because I’m geeking out about the numbers right now, that’s all.

Karizee.8076:

http://www.guildwarsinsider.com/in-game-character-heights/

That is very helpful, thank you!

Rosen Myst.7641:

To get a rough estimate I would use a known value from the real world: the average time it takes a human athlete to run a set distance for instance 50 yds or 100 meters. Assuming our characters are in good athletic condition they should be able to run at the speed of a real athlete. Once you determine the average time an athlete can run 100 meters for instance then you can run that distance in the game. Now you would know about how far it is from point A to point B in the game. Or you could run from one end of Lornar’s Pass for instance to the other and see how long it takes. Based on the average speed of a human you would have at least a rough idea as to the length of the distance covered.

But they don’t run at the speed of athletes, that’s exactly my point – they seem to be much faster. Look at the ground while your character runs. (Running from one side of a city to the other in a matter of minutes… try that in Berlin, athlete or no)

locoman.1974:

GreenNekoHaunt.8527:

The developers said the Dragon Ball arena takes place below LA… but is it really below LA? I don’t know..

It’s a posibility. Several maps can be contained in one map, so you can get into them with no loading screen in between.

Yes, but the dragon ball games are instanced, so it hardly matters.

In any case, the vistas shown on the dragon ball map align perfectly with the LA ones (with the dragon ball arena right below the traders’ forum) if you overlay the two maps on top of each other.

No, switching to a medium pop server costs 500 gems, high population 1000 and very high population 1800.

There were short spans when you could move down to less populated servers for free, but only ever for a few days at a time.

By the way, there is one exception: you can transfer for free to any server that isn’t full, if you delete all your characters first.

As for static/dynamic: TC has been very high in population pretty much from the start, and it is unlikely to change.

foofad.5162:

Human males at max height are six feet tall, norn males are nine. You can probably work out the rest from there.

Thanks. Where did you get these numbers?

They’re pretty static.

I expect neither an exodus from TC nor a sudden huge player increase on other servers anytime soon. I think the only way that could happen would be if ANet merged some of the lower population servers together, unfortunately.

I wanted a second dragon pistol but it wasn’t meant to be. :\ I could live with the revolver though.

I know my boyfriend was the rapier and revolver very desperately for his thief.

Yes, but I’m less interested in inventing the “Tyrian foot” than how the distances relate to the real world. For example, if the shortest possible female human character is assumed to be 1.50m tall, then I still need to find a way of mapping this height to equal length on the ground…

draxynnic.3719:

Something to note:

The Dragon Bash isn’t ending when Sky Pirates starts – they’re concurrent (or you could view Sky Pirates as the final phase of Dragon Bash).

Actually we just discussed this the other day: the transition seems so fluent this time, if not for the Dragon Bash achievements being “done” now, I wouldn’t even identify the next part as the start of something entirely new.

It’s very fluid, I like it. (Hasn’t always been the case.)

One thing that has been on my mind for quite a while is this: The maps are a lot smaller than they seem… the mountains a lot lower… and our characters run at incredible speed. But what are some actual numbers?

How tall are the Norn, Charr or Asura (min/max height) based on Humans? This one would be easy to work out if we decided on either the minimum or the maximum height of a human character.

What are the actual distances in the game – how many meters or kilometers are the maps, across? How big is Divinity’s reach really? How high up is the pig iron quarry’s jumping puzzle? It looks quite far away from the ground, but once you’re up, everything’s suddenly tiny.

The game messes with our concepts of near/far/large/small/slow/fast quite a bit.

If we had a way to measure the distance between A and B accurately at least once, then we’d easily be able to work out the actual speed that our characters run at with/without swiftness.

I would love to work our some numbers, but I’m not quite sure how to go about starting to measure distance accurately. If anybody has any extremely clever ideas, I’d love to hear them!

Arc DLad.2194:

Draknar.5748:

“Well years ago the Dredge and the Flame Legion banded together to try and take over Shiverpeaks and Ascalon. We had to fight our way into the Molten Facility and kill the two leaders of that group and the boss dropped this jetpack skin.”

“Oh, so can I get that skin?”

“Sorry pal, had to have been there.”

slow clap
pretty much what the living story is about creating a history for tyria you can pass on (and torment others over)

I think this is a bad example, as the jetpack (unlike many other special reward items) is actually tradeable, so you don’t have to have been there. And even if you were there, you had to be super lucky (I wasn’t, despite daily dungeon runs). So players who were there feel exactly the same torment.

Arc DLad.2194:

Q:how does Treaherne change a light bulb?
A:Commander can i have a word

Hahahaha

It is a balcony with no balcony door?

Edit: those wooden steps do make it look like you’re supposed to go up…

… we can hope

dadamowsky.4692:

If you’re looking for numerous weapon sets Engineer is something you’d like to try. He only have one main and on off slots, however kits can make your build extremely flexible.

I was going to suggest this myself.

Engineers have the least weapons available to them, but each kit is 5 unique skills, and the kits bring such diversity in skills and playing style.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/livingworld/dragonbash/Gw2-Facebook-ruined-the-investigation

Astral Projections.7320:

And because they want some items to be soulbound because it reflects what that particular toon did. The same reason that karma earned by a toon is for that toon only and is not pooled like gold is.

But that’s onl partly true; sure, when I do an event, then the karma goes to the character I did it on – but karma rewards for dailies, monthlies, map completion, and story completion (including personal (!) story iirc) are account bound. It is common practice to do the activities on the character you’re leveling and down the jugs of karma (under the influence of bonus banners) on the character that you want the legendary for or buy Orrian jewellery boxes with (or whatever).

Equally, you can do 99.9% of the dailies on one character and then do the last revive on a low level character and gt the daily/monthly reward.

And the same for the living story events – the character who gets the reward item is not the one who did all the activities, only the one who did the last activity.

So I sincerely doubt that that is the reason for anything…

Yep, that was unfortunate. Let’s hope it was a one-off.

Isaac.6041:

But this patch seems to be going to the opposite extreme of making everything overpowered.

How can “everything” be overpowered? Overpowered means that something or someone is powered over something or someone else…

I think you only make a decision to join your order around level 30 (?).

Before that, there is several mission that you can do to “try out” their approaches. One chapter will give you the choice between Vigil and Order, on between Vigil and Priory, and one between Priory and Order.

So you can try out all three orders prior to making a decision, or you can try out one order twice. And then you decide.

If I remember correctly, anyway.

Jam.4521:

Ive played a few hours a few nights this last week and got the shattered wings, plus a jade skin and all the mini’s, I wouldn’t exactly call that a grind.

That’s awesome for you, but as per the recorded drop rates, the average player had to open ~2000 coffers to get a ticket.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dragon_Coffer/drop_rate

A coffer seems to drop every 4 or 5 mobs. So on average that is 8000 to 10000 kills for a weapon ticket.

Yes, some people were extremely lucks, and others extremely unlucky (such is RNG) but the average says: yes, this qualifies as grind.

:(

In that case, I’m sorry.

I thought the same, but then I remembered Canach, Braham and Rox (!).

I think every race (and gender) is going to get their slice of story-cake, just the last few weeks were very human-centric. It could be coincidence!

But I’m all for balance, an I hope future stories will feature Asura and Charr more.

You might want to add your +1 to this brilliant post then (not by me):

Marjory’s Journal additional Features

Septemptus worded it better than I did!

Outlaw.3421:

I am bumping my old post to provide just another updated concept of replaying cinematics since this is from the recent update. Didn’t feel the need to post another thread.

The image attached shows a way to provide background story as well as replaying the cinematic present during Dragon Bash. Other cinematics and stories would be in their appropriate event tab.

I support this. A lot.

draxynnic.3719:

What I would probably recommend is making everything last for at least a fortnight, or even a month. Have overlapping content if need be to make that work, but don’t make it that if you happen to be busy at a given time, you miss out entirely.

I think that is what we have right now… at least a fortnight for most content.

Also, the updates are in the middle of the week, so if you’re away one week from weekend to weekend, which applies to most business trips and planned vacations, you have a chance to see the content on either end of your absense. Good!

Flame and Frost felt way too slow in February/March, but I agree the last 2 months it’s all been pretty fast for someone who can’t play every single day.

Septemptus.7164:

First I would like to say, that I LOVE THE IDEA!
I watched it few times and still love the cut scene.
After few hours I asked myself “why only cut scene?”

Same here!

• Add dialog with 4 options:

Basically, a table of content – it could also be styled “diary-style” to make it more fun.

Dear Diary,

• Today Logan Thackeray entered my bar… (click here to view the cutscene again)
• Later I met with <character> at the scene of the crime… (click here to re-visit story instance)
• etc.

Septemptus.7164:

• Add option to skip cut scene (if you clicked it by mistake you have to watch it)

Yes, please.

Septemptus.7164:

• Add journal’s collectable tab

Absolutely.

Septemptus.7164:

• Allow dungeons to be done with at least 2 people (like story mode)
  - Let’s say that in few months some friends of your start of come back to the game. You can then invite them to party and say – there was this event and it was awesome, you want to see it? I can invite you to party and you will be able to see it again. (no rewards of course)

Originally I was going to suggest to make the journal(s) tradeable so new players could easily “catch up”, but your solution is even better.

A) I want the story instances to support 1-5 players (like personal story instances) anyway but also
B) this would strengthen the social aspect of the game – if you missed an event, find somebody who witnessed it and let them tell you a tale…

Septemptus.7164:

I would also want to see similar journals with options just as I marked them for: Flame and Frost Journal (Rox mission, Brahm mission and Molten Factory) and Southsun Cove Journal (Canach fight, Null Fight, Escort mission).

That would make me so happy, but I think the chances of these getting retro-fit into the game are even slimmer.

Septemptus.7164:

Please show some support for the idea .

I would +10 your post if I could.

Yep, I do that with long posts, but I don’t for each and every single reply, and it kind of sucks that I feel I have to apply an “additional effort” workaround each time for a problem that only appears sporadically.

Some of the individual items look pretty sweet. It’s not a style that any of my current characters would pursue, but there is some stuff in there that I wouldn’t mind to pick up. I think I like the light pants, some of the helmets and shoulders, and the medium chest (male only) the best.

But I always mix’n’match, I wouldn’t want to go “full clockwork”.

synk.6907:

Please keep making cutscenes like this and not like the two-person shenanigans we were forced to endure throughout the personal story.

I loved the Marjory cutscene, but mostly I did so because the comic style does suit the 1950’s noir theme.

I wouldn’t want ALL cutscenes to look like this. The dialoge style ones are perfectly acceptable for dialogues between two characters (it only gets awkward when more characters are involved) plus I like that they allow me to take a good look at NPCs (and players’) faces and armour. (For instance, it was awesome for me to be able to see all the design detail on a dredge, for once!)

I think diversity is the way to go: I think a healthy mix of comic style, dialogue style, rendered live cinematic cutscenes, and whatever they come up with next.

SlothBear.9846:

aspirine.6852:

Ok, but make it ffa instead of teams.

Now this would be awesome.

People said the exact opposide after Crab Toss: It would have been more awesome if it was team-based.

That makes me wonder.

Anyway, Yes, I think the mroe mini-games the better – diversity is always good. Not everybody likes this or that (or any) mini-game, but why not leave the choice or how to spend them time to the players?

Astral Projections.7320:

Pretty much to bolster the economy. If you had 3 light armored toons for example, you could buy one set of armor and one set of weapons for all three to share instead of buying a set for each. Since quite a number of people have alts (I have 8 level 80s for example) this would really affect the economy.

Yes, but then I think that items that can’t be bought (i.e. event rewards) should forever remain account bound. There is no money to sink, it’s strictly one per player.

marnick.4305:

Paul.4081:

http://shoryuken.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/gems1.jpg

Off-topic much?

Not really.

Items like the motlen pick-axe (etc.) are soulbound so if you want to used them on another character, you have to buy another. Makes sense, somehow.

It does irk me that some of the soulbound items are unique (as in you can’t buy another because they were special event rewards) and some are limited time only (as in, you couldn’t buy the molten pickaxe for your brand-new lava-loving character even if you tried).

So I looked it up at home last night, and yes, the dragon ball arena is directly below the traders’ forum in LA.

They’re sort of doing this already, just with the background music in character select.

It’s a good idea +1

This is amazing.

Elegant approach. +1

Magic find doesn’t work on chests.

(I’ve opened 2000+ boxes and got 1 weapon ticket, and I’m already the lucky one in the family – my boyfriend opened as many and got nothing.)

Going by the many, many people who post similar stories on the forums, I believe “use magic find” is not the answer to our problems.

Reivaxe.1358:

And the best part is, we see SO MANY good suggestions on how to fix RNG from the players! From “make opening 1000 coffers a achievement that gives you one ticket” to “have a consolation ticket for people who buy 5+ rich coffers and don’t get anything” to “make the rich coffers actually greatly favor the player so that they should realistically have a good chance of getting one or more skins from the gem coffers” to just flat out “allow people to buy these skins on the gem store”.

You forgot: “allow people to get one guaranteed weapon skin for completing achievements”.

It didn’t explicitly say that there weren’t going to be RNG boxes – and it is my assumption that the Aetherblade weapons will be based on weapon tickets again.

I guess they will add “Aetherblade Airdrop Boxes” after the Rich Dragon Coffers go out of sale.

Well, the forum description says “bugs and issues”, but if this thread was moved to “suggestions” by the mods, it would be fair enough.

I think it’s time to give this thread a bump:

Dear moderators, it would save you time you would otherwise spend on moving threads (like you have had to do today), it would de-clutter and keep the living story subforum for only those post concerning th living story as a whole, and all around be more orderly.

:)

Eyelusion.8205:

That sucks. I hate dungeons and jumping puzzles, yet I have to do both in the next event if I want to have a “chance” to earn it.

I love jumping puzzles so I’m happy. And it will be permanent (right?) so we’ll have time to practice (if the achievement is permanent, too, anyway, which remains to be seen)

I have high hopes for the dungeon, too, after the Molten Facility was so much fun.

As for the RNG items: no words yet on BLC-issued chests! Rare, but tradeable items. The monocle could be the next jetpack (?).

That’s the sort of RNG implementation that I don’t really have a problem with.

Of course, the Aetherblade weapons are probably still going to be RNG weapon tickets and stuff, but let’s wait and see.