Guild Wars 2

TBH It doesn’t bother me much because day and night mean very little in this game in terms of visibility or mechanics. Zones just look different from time to time. If night was actually dark, or certain things triggered or took place based on time of day it would be a valid concern but as is there are a lot more important immersion issues with the event system never failing to bother noticing how fast it got dark.

I think the reason stats are arrayed in very specific combinations and quantities is a designed balance rather than some sort of oversight. The tradeoffs for survival/damage/support stats and the specific numbers on the specific types of gear prefixes are set in stone specifically to balance these stats against one another, which is why we don’t have a more granular system.

Call me old fashioned, but why aren’t you and your friend in the same guild anyway? And I’m guessing the one from your country is some sort of special interest same-language speaking group or something?

If you’re the leader of a guild how is it you have to check around outside your guild to find people to quest with? Isn’t that the reason you started your guild in the first place?

Considering pretty much every story quest is perfectly doable solo… and nearly all of them provide you with one or more NPC helpers already I don’t quite understand the difficulty you’re having.

Are some of them harder than others? Yes. But it is literally impossible to fail story quests. There is zero penalty for death and no chance of failing objectives. if something is giving you problems and you’re at the proper level for the quest, just looks at why you’re getting killed and swap out some major traits and utility skills to counter whatever headache you’re having with the mission, and do it again.

I’m in favor of this as an option for pretty much every game. People should have the option to opt in to a more cutthroat environment if they so choose, but there’s no reason to force it on to people who don’t want it.

That said there are numerous design problems with open PvP in this particular game in terms of how zones are laid out and how events work. As much as I enjoy open PvP, I’m not sure it would add anything of merit to guild wars 2’s PvE zones as they are now. Future content? Sure, but the zones would have to be placed and designed with PvP in mind from the jump the same way that WvW maps are.

There’s really no need to unlearn skill points, as you have the ability to acquire an infinite amount of skills points. You’ll eventually know every skill available to your class and race, and from there you’ll be using those skill points to buy mystic forge items.

As for the guild filter/hashtag idea, I’m not really sold on it. The idea behind representing and multiple guilds is that you can be a member of several, but are only functionally a member of the guild you currently represent. This is why stuff like /g, the bank, and guild armors work the way they do. The multi-guild function exists to keep some semblance of community intact in terms of players not simply joining ten billion random guilds, but rather to join only as many guilds as they need. If you’re having problems with people representing and being able to contact them perhaps you should be a little more stringent on your membership criteria. If you’re a guild that expects players to represent for the majority of the time, maybe that should factor in to how you select your members.

I’m fairly certain Neither Charr nor Asura give birth to Litters, and Charr young are pretty much always referred to as cubs.

Asura and Charr child rearing is very similar in that they have their young, and then the young are placed in a sort of boarding school (Fahrahr or College) by the parents to be raised, and are checked up on every now and then (often silently and without the child’s knowledge)

Norn seem, like most other aspects of their life, to have no real “standard” way of going about things. Some norn seem to settle in family groups, while some seem to be a part of a larger lodge, and there doesn’t seem to be a stigma of which is the “child rearing sex” in… well… any of these cultures.

Lonami.2987:

Anyway, did anyone else find the Crazed Quaggan at Timberline Falls? I felt awful for not being able to help him T_T-.

Yes. He went all Nicholson on me and I euthanized him. In the face. With a gun.

In hindsight it might have been something I said…

I’d be much more inclined to believe that the elder dragons ate the six gods, and that’s why when they got up they all went to such random places and then just… hung out.

Digesting a god is difficult and takes time.

For the record the disparity in numbers doesn’t mean anything. We saw that we could just write in whole new gods (and then kill them and promote military commanders to the position) with nightfall, and Grubb+Soesbee have said that things are often intentionally left vague so they can write in major things of importance without having to slog through a lot of annoying retconning.

Hunted to extinction by Seers…err…Largos.

I mean how else would the “stand here and imbue armor” guys have become what is apperantly a race of assassins? Practice!

Draco.9470:

My original point really wasn’t about space, so to those who posted about that, the point was missed, but just the fact that you have to spend gems to buy the slots, and with that being so, then why not have it go across all your characters instead of just one.. or drop the price some, one of the two.

To those who are saying, well you can buy gems with in game currency, well not everyone has that kind of money in game. Ive been playing since 3 day head start, granted, casually. I have a 42, a 25 and a few lower level toons. I think I have seen 1g+ on one of my chars once. So, really that isn’t an option.

Your lack of gold seems to be less an issue of time to play and more an issue of being an altoholic. Not that that’s a bad thing, mind you.

Making bag slots account wide would necessitate bag slots being a lot more expensive because of the multiplicative effect of the total account inventory space being far less expensive than a bank page. Basically, unlocking bag slots account wide would supercede the necessity to ever unlock bank slots. Then you’ve got a game where it’s actually cheaper to manage inventory in the most annoying way possible (rolling a lot of mules) than it is to manage account-wide inventory in a sane fashion (getting more bank space)

Personally I’d rather not have to track a bunch of mules just because it was cheaper to get “bank space” that way.

Nuprin Feelgood.9257:

Once a majority of the population gets their too-lazy-to-mine-for-it behinds out of the first crafting tiers, copper prices will come down.

Buy Iron!

Mac Twinsong @ 80

The monocle makes him shoot straighter.

The knife on the gun is largely useless.

If the camera didn’t reset when downed, and the stealth lasted a bit longer (give us five seconds, and have it still break on doing other stuff) I’d be okay with it.

The teleport is very helpful, but a pain to use, and the stealth, for being the “3” should have a bit more oomph to it.

Steal is the difference between pretty good theives and great theives. Great theives trait steal to work with their weapon combination and stat build, can recognize on sight what every stolen item does, and know exactly when to use it to gamechanging effect, and when to hold it.

The major problem with steal is not that it’s useless. It’s far from useless. It’s that the use you get out of it is largely dependant on how well you trait it to match up with your chosen weapon combo.

This is just like every other class in the game. At level one your profession mechanic is semi-useful. By 80, once you’ve traited that mechanic to fit your weapons and utility skills, it’s a great deal more effective. Theives are not alone in this. Elemental attunement switching sucks without traits. Toolbelt sucks without traits, adrenaline is slow and fairly awful without traits, the list goes on.

The difference is that steal requires you to learn every single thing its capable of, and know these by heart to use it effectively.

I think the soultion of ramping up difficulty for each successful win of the same event is a really good one, but then you’ve got the problem of in stead of one event repeating, now you’ve got two.

You lose the defense of A, and now you’re on the leadup. Then you complete the leadup one time and back to farming A.

I think a better option would be a sort of “wipe event” on chains if its been sitting in ultimate win for too long. For instance, seraph has totally held centaur lands for two hours… the centaurs finally have enough an simultaneously assault everything with massive rock dogs, creating a large scale no-win “survival” event that still rewards participation as a win. Something like “Hold out against the centaur uprising” that tags all involved waypoints as contested. Now you’re playing for a scaling reward based upon how long players can keep a fighting force active until it is ultimately removed.

Now you have an entire metasystem in “full lose” mode and the ecosystem can return back to normal events, minus the players that decided to go to a different zone to camp winning chains for the easy way out.

This would also shake up orr and get it away from the “camp three defenses for infinity” and back to the intent of the zone, which is the packets of players would need to do DE chains up to their objective zone (arah door, god shrine, whatever) and complete the task there, then hold it until it becomes unsustainable.

Heck, you could even put a timer on the ME itself notifying players that this is going to happen. “Zhaitan is enraged. Counterattack begins in 10:00” or somesuch, basically letting people know that they have a small amount of time to accomplish whatever they came to that point to accomplish.

In my mind every trip to Arah should really require players to start at straits and fight their way in, and there shouldn’t really be any “safe” waypoints in Orr proper in the first place.

Keep in mind it may be some placeholder flags used more extensively in future content, as the assumption is that GW2 will work on a serious of proper expansions rather than standalone campaigns like the first game, and as such you’d expect to have continuing personal story that isn’t exactly the same as everyone else’s based on your creation questions and certain important choices later like your choice of minor race to assist or order.

The Largos in question bears a striking resemblance to the race of Seers, which are a sort of lore black hole in the Guild Wars universe. Seers are supposed to have predated the human gods (and by extension all other current races of tyria) and been at war with the Mursaat (and lost) and a few show up in prophecies to help players with a specific ritual to help them combat the Mursaat.

That Largos is supposed to be mysterious as she’s probably part of foreshadowing some future content where a lot of long-standing lore questions regarding the mursaat and the seers are answered (as well as possibly the silence of the human gods)

Personal theory? They’re all fighting the next big bad and the mentioned “concordat” the largos speaks of is a truce between the mursaat, seers, and gods to fight it. They’ll obviously eventually need our help with that after we’re done killing off all the dragons.

I think a major point with the writing in general is that a vast majority of the characters (including the player character) are very much flawless, and the vast majority of them experience little to zero personal growth. Characters like Traherne or Logan have a very shallow insecurity that is quickly forgotten by the storyline in the space of a single mission, and the cast of the personal story in the last quarter too quickly introduces and then steps away from so many characters that you never end up spending enough time with them for them to be memorable.

Don’t get me wrong, the sort of seven samurai feel of the general plot is a good one, but while the overall “epicness” of what’s going on in the world remains intact, we lose the connection and empathy we have for a lot of characters because we don’t get to spend a great deal of time with anyone but Traherne, and Traherne is sort of shoehorned in to a “chosen one” role, never questions it, never doubts himself meaningfully, and never does a whole lot to make us care about him. He’s just a cog in the plot that moves everything forward

Compare this with the heroes in Nightfall, or Even Rurik in Prophecies or the major cast of Eye of The North. All of the above had interesting quirks, insecurities, or flaws that very much defined both who they were and served as a springboard for development of their character. They were different than the majority of the people around them as people, not because they were chosen by some all powerful plot device. The major cast in GW2 with the exception of your order mentor (and the mentors are all quite well done!) just sort of shows up with no fanfare and then is removed from the plot rapidly, leaving us no time to become attached to them.

Meanwhile some of the most interesting characters are introduced to us early on as part of our racial story, and then mysteriously dissappear never to be seen again with no explanation.

Couple that with the fact that everything in the story is just plodding along a predictable path due to an insane amount of heavy-handed foreshadowing and lack of any unexpected plot twists (save one, again, that deals with the order mentor, and is well handled!) and you’ve got a personal story that feels a lot more like just the story of the world you could easily pick up from doing events and walking around.

You’ve built a unique game that does a phenomenal job of characterizing the story of the world at large through dynamic events and ambient conversation, but the personal story seems so adamant about rehashing that same story that it doesn’t feel very personal at all.

That isn’t to say the missions aren’t well designed (though a penalty for failure would be nice.) but the lot behind them in the last half seems like a lot of filler material while simultaneously leaving a lot of unresolved plot threads from the first half of the story. I would have been quite happy to have spent more time with the characters from my home town or my order than to have been promoted to “commander” like every other person in the game.

In future releases, how about making us less important to the world and leaving those plot threads for the dungeon story, and letting our personal story reflect more of our personal lives, contacts, and friends?

Faction gear, while neat looking, is by no means statistically superior to something you can get in the AH for the same or lower price than what you want.

Getting the exact look and stats you want on gear in GW2 is going to require transmutation stones, just save up ~50 silver, trade it for gems, and buy a pack of 5 stones.

Premium.4075:

You don’t need Vitality at all, you wont get enough to survive pretty much anything at Caps and in WvW its a joke.

You are FAR better going full out Crit Damage over Vitality, that extra 400-500dmg a crit will do FAR better than whatever couple thousand health will get you.

I have a 52% Crit Rate with 80% Crit Damage, I can do over 5k dmg in WvW/PvE (depending on class/champ/elite/etc) for my Heartseekers, when you can spam 3-4 of them when a person is below 50% they’re dead by a thief.

If you struggle then I guess go get VIT but 13k HP is plenty more than I need to survive.

For weapons, whatever you feel like, I always keep a Dagger/Dagger combo as I have 2 fantastic daggers, I think switch between Bow or Pistol/Dagger depending on the activity.

I tend to agree with this. I have vit on my gear, but its mostly because it’s part of the package of stats that comes with power/condition damage gear. Played properly a theif is avoiding damage through use of shadowstepping and stealth enough that soaking hits isn’t super important. If you’re skilling acrobataics/shadow arts you should be doing it for the traits rather than the stats.

Personally I’ve run Pistol/Dagger-Dagger/pistol all the way up to 80.

The idea was to take the conditions/pressure ranger that was so successful in GW1 and transition that build concept to a theif. I’ve been pretty happy with the results!

This is a white damage/conditions build focused on versatility that works well in both PvP and PvE.

Traits:
20-0-10-10-30
Utilities:
Spider Venom-Shadow Refuge-ShadowStep-Daggerstorm.

For gear I’m using Carrion armor with bleed duration/condition duration runes and a focus on vit/toughness/condition damage jewelry.

The primary single target damage of this build relies of bleed stacks from the pistol’s sneak attack, enabled through the stealth granted by cloak and dagger. On single targets this allows you to keep up around 12 stacks of bleeding on a target constantly with more than enough initiative gain from traits to keep the chain running for a very long time. In addition the multi-hit nature of the sneak attacks makes the build extremely combo friendly, meaning you can stack bleeds/fire/whatever with field effects from other classes like a champ.

The traits from shadow arts and acrobatics grant an extra bleed/cripple from dodge/trops (which I use offensively as part of my attack chain when I don’t need to conserve endurance) as well as self-stacking might buffs which push the damage very nicely.

Unlike some theif builds, this build is made for adaptation, as it relies of maintaining a high pool of usable initiative at all times, so that when that single target fight turns in to a multitarget fight you can pop venom (which also grants even more might and weakens targets with the traits from deadly arts) and dump your whole stack of initiative on dancing daggers to put a long cripple/poison on the new targets, allowing you to flee or keep focusing down the most dangerous ranged target. Steal is key with this build as it becomes a single button that provides a massive debuff/condition stack on the target as well as an interrupt.

Playing defensively you’ve also got enough initiative to keep distance from the target with a combination of footwork and shadow shot, and between the lifesteal from shadow refuge, and the condition removal from hide in shadows and shadowstep you’ve got an insane amount of survivability.

It is a difficult build to play as it requires a mix of ranges, ground targeted skills, and knowing how to properly time steal and dodge-trops to be most effective, but when played properly you’ll find yourself dancing around the battlefield crippling, bleeding, and poisoning things and then just walking away while everything falls to the ground while you’re looting and mining.

Transmutation stones.

If you’ve spent the time and effort required to acquire a legendary you most definately have enough gold to exchange for 200 gems (current exchange rate is 1s/3gems) to grab a pack of fine transmutation stones. Or you already have some from full zone exploration rewards.

Its the same reason the obscenely expensive cultural karma armors and the order vendor armors have fixed stats: because transmutations are cheap and the best stats in the game come from master crafted items so as not to make crafting a waste of time.

Dark Night.5601:

I’m brand new to GW2 coming from City of Heroes (which is shutting down). I’m very confused and am hoping to find some help.

Welcome. I played City of Heroes/Villains for a long time as well, right up until they went to “Freedom” and implemented the most blatantly exploitive cash shop possible. I quit at that point out of protest.

Dark Night.5601:

I’m currently playing as a human Guardian. It’s not that much fun and perhaps not a good choice for a first character. Melee seems very involved. Is there a better ranged option I should try out?

Combat in GW2 is pretty involved all around compared to CoH. Primarily there is no autofollow or autofollow to maximum range. However you can “auto” one ability just as you could in CoH, and this should always be your first weapon slot. This will allow you to effectively range-check a target but hitting 1 to start the auto-power and then move until it starts auto-firing. Since the ability will only auto-fire when its in hitting range this is a good indicator for when you’re in range to use your other abilities.

Other things that you’ll need to get used to are target facing (which is manual) and slow backpedalling speed. Wheras in CoH you could kite at range while facing the target, in GW2 if you want to kite effectively you’re going to have to turn around or at least turn 90 degrees from the mob to move away at full speed.

Also, make sure you bind a key to dodging and get used to watching enemy attack animations and otherwise get accustomed to knowing when is a good time to dodge as dodge not only moves you, but evades any and all attacks, making them miss you completely.

I’d encourage trying some different classes, but in general you’re going to find that timing, positioning, situational awareness are much more important in GW2 than CoH. If you’re looking for a less complex class to get the hang of things I’d suggest trying a rifle warrior. Warriors have the least complex class mechanics and the rifle skillbar for the warrior is one of the easiest to understand. In addition warriors have heavy armor and a good chunk of base health. This “ranged tank” will allow you to make quite a few more mistakes while learning the combat system. The rifle warrior even has a CoH-style “snipe” ability like what you might be used to on a blaster or corruptor as its adrenaline attack. Warrior also has a large number of weapon options so once you’re more comfortable with dodging, positioning, camera facing, and other aspects where GW2 is different you can transition to something a little more complicated or move to a melee build without leveling another character.

That said, GW2’s combat only gets more complicated as you progress to higher level zones, so while just hitting your rotation as soon as it pops up may work fine in the beginning, by the time you reach Orr you’re going to find that timing and use of all of the abilities on your bar is going to be very important to your success.

Finally, don’t give up! GW2 is a more complex and more difficult combat system than CoH, but once you get the hang of it it’s extremely rewarding.

Dark Night.5601:

Also I’m confused on leveling. As I gain levels, what do I do to “skill up”? I’m a little confused on this one.

Before level 11 you’ll only get skill points. You can spend these skill points on skills by opening your hero panel (H) and clicking the skills tab on the left (it should have a little red ! if you’ve just leveled up but haven’t purchased skills yet.)

After level 11 you’ll also get trait points which you can spend to unlock traits as well as increase various base stats in the traits tab of the same interface. You’ll need a training manual before you can do this and the lowest tier training manual costs ten silver and can be purchased from your skill trainer. To find the skill trainer look on your map for a little icon near where you originally spawned after the tutorial. To unlock the second and third tier of your traits you’ll need progressively more expensive skill books as you reach high enough levels to unlock them.

Don’t worry too much about picking the wrong skills or traits. You can reset your traits at any time by buying and using another book, and as for skills you will eventually be able to learn every skill available to your class. After that you’ll be spending those skill points on items related to the mystic forge for various things like philosopher’s stones for crafting material upgrades or even components and recipies you’ll need to craft legendary weapons!

Sadly no, its just random number generators being random. In my experience the chance of getting rares seems much better when combining greens at the mystic forge than it is picking them up as drops.

Grinding didn’t equal advantage in the first game and it won’t in this one either. That’s just a fact of this franchise and one that is unlikely to change.

If cosmetic rewards and collections aren’t the type of progression you’re in to then this probably isn’t a game you’re going to stick with for very long. This isn’t a “well GTFO then” response, but rather a simple fact. That environment is what has kept the first game going for years and is the same philosophy around which its sequel is based. The people that are going to leave are the people that expected something different than what was advertised, and the people that are going to stay are the people that like the system the way it is. It’s really that simple.

At the very least the original Guild Wars has shown us that a non-statistical progression model coupled with a microtransaction and per-box revenue stream is enough to keep a large number of players playing, and lucrative enough to pay for the production of ongoing content, and indeed even massive sequels. Will it steal players from other MMOs because it does their type of progression better? No. Players that want that sort of progression won’t stick around. GW2 will keep the players that like the somewhat different way that it does things, and that will be the community that sticks with the game in the long term.

Yes. You will remember your recipes and level when you switch, but will be unable to actually use your jewelcrafting to craft things until you switch back. Also, until you’re filthy stinking rich it may be a bad idea to swap crafting disciplines frequently as it costs in gold every time you swap out.

Basically you can master every crafting profession on one character, but can only have two “active” at the same time, and it can be expensive if you’re continually swapping them out.

Hold alt and click any spot on your map to place a personal waypoint. Alt-click it again to remove it.

Hold shift and click on the map to ping points for teammates or draw lines on the minimap like you did in Guild Wars.

Remember that you can combo with yourself!

Probably the same reason I played the first game on and off for seven years. Because it never felt like work. Because Just getting top end stats on my gear didn’t guarantee winning. Because the hard content was actually hard. Because I worked toward the gear I wanted because I wanted it, not because the game said I had to have it. Because there was always a new build to try. Because there was always more content that I hadn’t done yet and I always got something useful out of that content. Because the numbers on my stat sheet and those of my party were less important than how good we were at the game.

GW2 isn’t a numbers progression game, just like its predecessor it’s a game that wants you to play content because that content is fun, not because you have to, and it wants to reward you with gear that proves you’ve done something awesome rather than requiring you to have gear to do something awesome.

There are quite a few skills like this. For example the theif’s basilisk venom only stones for one second, is the only venom with a cast timer, and has a cooldown so long that the one second burst of (admittedly awesome) cc the skill affords you is largely useless when compared with any of the other class or even racial elites.

What you need to remember about racial skills is that they’re supposed to be weak in comparison to class skills by design because arenanet didn’t want certain races to be better with certain classes than others. Racial skills are meant to be lesser utility skills that are usable to add some functionality to your character that the template may otherwise be lacking. This means that even if the suit gets a buff, its still not going to be as good as a comparable class elite skill with a similar function like the elementalist’s firey greatsword or the guardian’s tome.

PsykoJ.2650:

okay thats good i guess.. im looking forward to gvg

If I recall they said they didn’t do guild halls at release because they didn’t want it to be “just a place” like it was in GW1. True, they were used in GvG, but that was really the extent of their usefulness. If your guild was mostly PvE there wasn’t much of a reason to have a hall other than for bragging rights and a few vendor tricks that wee only useful for brand new players.

I’d wager that they’re cooking up something with the event system and guild influence in terms of guild halls so that for PvE players they’re not a largely useless feature.

Yes. I’ve done this with several items. You can transmute items that have already been transmutes as many times as you like. Transmutation stones can be used on any two items of the same type no matter what.

Offhand sword options would be nice, as well as a mainhand mace option.

I’d see offhand sword skills being a sort of defensive melee offhand option for theives since shield-theives seems a bit silly, but something like a channeled block and a oneshot projectile reflect would feel right at home on a theif offhand sword.

What theives shouldn’t get in an offhand sword is big damage abilities or CC since we have other offhand options that do those very well, plus it seems thematically wrong for theives to use an offhand large weapon to do big damage like a warrior would.

For the same thematic reasons I feel like theives should have a mace mainhand option, but with as large as the maces are in this game it would feel a little silly for a thief to be able to offhand them. I figure theif mainhand mace skills could function as a low damage high CC melee option which would be very nice for support-focused theif builds with a reliable amount of confusion/weakness utility but low base damage on the skills.

Should put together a post with some requested weapon types/class allowances.

I could see Scythes being a nice thematically appropriate melee option for Warriors, Necromancers, and Mesmers.

I’s also like to see land-based spears come back to the game as a weapon type, possibly for use on Guardians, Eles, and a few other classes that don’t have the pistol option.

That said I’d guess that new weapon types are likely one of the things we’ll see in expansions as well as possibly a few playable races (All signs point to Tengu being playable at some point) and maybe even a new class per expansion.

Basically, the legendaries all require a crafted rare item, which is then combined with several things in the mystic forge.

The major financial reasons for crafting are both the legendary components, and the extreme amount of rolls you can easily make in the mystic forge. Basically, as the rare drop rate is rather low, and many skins only drop on rare items, crafting is often the cheapest way to obtain rares, by crafting several greens and then combining them at the mystic forge for a much better chance at rolling rares, or simply rolling equivalent items with runes or inscriptions that can be salvaged out and sold.

Not only that, but crafting is the best way to get exactly the top tier stats you or a client wants on a piece of gear, which can then be transmuted with a rare skin to get exactly the mix of stats and look you or your clients want on a piece of gear!

Cliff Spradlin.3512:

Hi,

Thanks to skagrin, I have a new solution for people who are unable to load the trading post. I’ve tested this on a Windows XP VM here to make sure it works, but haven’t done much.

The theory is that the root certs on your computers are not up to date. Follow these steps to update them:

1. Close the game client
2. Download and run http://download.windowsupdate.com/msdownload/update/v3/static/trustedr/en/rootsupd.exe
3. You’ll probably have to click ‘run’ or ‘allow’ a couple times, but after that, nothing will appear. But that’s OK, your root certs have now been updated.
4. Open the game client and try to access the trading post

If you haven’t been able to load the trading post at all, try these steps. If this works for you, I’ll ask our customer service team to write up more formal documentation on this procedure.

This worked for my Vista 64 ultimate installation as well! I think the root cert theory is sound as I disallow automatic windows updates by default and have a tendency to be very choosy. Thus, those certificates weren’t current and I got blank black lion pages.

Spread this one around and test on 7 as well, but the issues with 7 may also pbe people who elect to not let windows automatically update itself for bandwidth use or other reasons. I think skagrin may have nailed it here!

Cliff Spradlin.3512:

OK, so it sounds like the fix wasn’t perfect. So for those of you who are having issues loading the trading post in the last couple days, DaKwL offered a good suggestion. I’ll expand it a little bit.

Note, by following these instructions you will lose at least your graphics settings and have to set them up again:

1) Close the game client
2) Delete the local.dat file located in Documents\Guild Wars 2\local.dat
3) Open the game client

Hopefully this resolves your issue until we can apply a patch on the server. If you don’t feel comfortable doing this change, we’re still working on fixing it on our end.

Sorry for the trouble.

Sorry Cliff, no help there. Again for reference sake if it helps at all I’m running Vista 64 Ultimate (Service Pack 2) The user account used to run the game is an administrative account, UAC is turned off (Because itskittenannoying) and I don’t run any third party firewall software as I have a firmware firewall installed at the router here.

Could it possibly be a routing issue or does the AH use standard web routing? Is it calling its own browser code or is it piggybacking on something else my system may have installed/configured separately. I do a lot of tweaking and script disabling stuff in firefox and I never use nor update IE so if the AH has dependancies on an external browser that may have some effect.

Just throwing ideas out there to try and nail this problem for those of us suffering from blank black lion pages. I’m having friends proxy buy for the moment so its slightly less annoying but I’m looking forward to a fix so I can buy some gems and pick up that sweet free hat from the gem store. Keep at it!

Cliff Spradlin.3512:

For those who are not able to access the commerce panel at all – were you able to before?

Yes, Vista64 ultimate, Once (and only once) in one of the late stress tests the gem store interface and such were working fine for me.

At the time I didn’t mess with the feature much because I was stress testing requested zones and didn’t want to buy gems before release.

This is actually due to the description on shadow refuge not being clear.

Shadow refuge actually grants 3 seconds of stealth as soon as you enter it. The thing is it grants that 3 seconds continuously over its lifetime, to allow others to enter and get stealth, of if you’re super smart allowing you to use a smart few dodges to throw off opponents and if you’re quick re-stealth back in the refuge.

This means if you simply stand in it without doing anything to reveal yourself you’ll remain stealthed through the entire duration, as well as around 3 seconds after.

Similarly, if you get the timing right you can get 2 stealths out of the ability if you pop SR, immediately attack, then remain in the area until your stealth immunity wears off.

Basically, think of it like this:

Shadow refuge grants 3 seconds of stealth every 1/4 of a second as long as it’s on the ground. While stealth doesn’t stack, it can appear to stack if you’re stealthed and don’t take any aggressive actions to trigger your stealth immunity, because the duration is refreshed by the field constantly, leaving you with 3 seconds of stealth after leaving the field (or the field dissipating)

I’ve also had this happen. I’ve noticed it seems to be a bug related to distance/doppler for sound effects as once or twice I’ve heard a full volume voiceover, and then a much quieter followup VO coming from nearby. Seems to happen more frequently right after zoning.

Kirito.8479:

Still getting empty Trading post screens… All are like this. Some people say it is working for them… what can I do to get it working for me?

Still having the exact same issue. When can we expect to have this at the very least acknowledged?

Same here, all options are just a blank loading circle forever

I have the same exact problem, and have had the same problem since release, although it loaded properly in the beta stress tests.

Same here. All panes of the BLTC, including the gem store and currency transfer still display no interface, just the yellow circular loading icon that loops around itself forever.

Asked around on Lion’s Arch mapchat and some other players are also having this issue.