Guild Wars 2

My current gw2.exe is signed by Arenanet, and it was always signed since release, and the signature is valid. At least this is what Windows Explorer tells me.. You may perhaps look what binary exactly your monitoring software is complaining about, and if it has been tampered with. Perhaps you have some kind of malware on your system – exactly for this situation the signature check is made.

I wonder how did you find out that your minipet counts toward the success of the achievement. As soon as I have the achievement, I cannot see if I fulfill the requirement again, can I?
And if I don’t have the achievement yet, how can I tell it’s the minipet that forfeits my success and nothing else?

Since the blooms are put into our inventory as physical items and not made an entry in the wallet, I assume they are a one-time currency for this event only. If the blooms are a regular HoT currency, they’d get a wallet entry for sure. I destroyed my blooms, and with them the reminiscence of the event, I hope.

Lambent.6375:

What is there not to understand? You may not agree with it, but it’s easy to understand.

Players think the process to obtain Black Lion Skins is too expensive, and they don’t feel that other things you get from black lion chest make up for it.

Players who farmed keys because they were too expensive to buy, cannot do math. It’s about the worst time investment you can make.
I was told you were able to get about 3 keys per hour. One key costs 90 gems if you buy 5. This is 90*1.25cent = $1.125. Per hour $3.375.

You are farming for the equivalent of $3,35 hourly wage. I don’t know how you get paid in your country, but here in Germany a cleaner for your household gets about 10 Euro per hour (assume $1=1Euro).

If you go farming keys for 12 hours, you get 3*12=36 keys.
But if you go working as cleaner for only 4 hours, you get $40, which also gets you about 36 keys. For the remaining 8 hours, you can go playing Guild Wars 2 and do whatever you like – you don’t have to waste your time and create and delete characters the whole day.

If you now tell me you would never pay $40 for black lion keys with money you earned the hard way in 4 hours as cleaner, why would you tell me you waste 12 hours of your life time by clicking through a computer program to get the same amount of keys? 4 hours as cleaner more wasted than 12 hours as nothing? This alone should tell you that you should never started farming in the first place.

Interesting to see my opening post suddenly aged by 6 months

I may have news on the issue. It may be connected to outdated sound drivers or improperly matched sound drivers for your mainboard or sound chip. I don’t know if there is some kind of bug in GW2, or with the sound drivers, but having the proper sound driver for your mainboard and for your operating system seems to prevent the problem happen.

The “sound bug” started to happen for me after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10. It never occurred on Windows 7. Under Windows 7, I used the Windows 7-certified sound driver for my Asrock mainboard that was available for download on the Asrock webpage. In the past 3 years, Asrock provided some updates for the driver, and I always updated them as well. All was perfectly fine.

After the update to Windows 10, the Windows 7 sound drivers were still present and seemed to work ok. But I found that Asrock provided newer sound drivers for Windows 8.1 for my mainboard, but no Windows 10 ones (yet). So I thought that the Windows 8.1 drivers were more similar to Windows 10 that the Windows 7 drivers, so I updated to the Windows 8.1 drivers.

Now the “sound bug” occurred in GW2 for me. And I saw a small change logging on in Windows: A small delay of about 5 seconds before the desktop appears that was not present with the older drivers.

On the Audacity website (Audacity is a audio recording and cutting application), I found some information about the sound system of Windows 10, and they said there were subtle changed in Windows 10. Additionally the advice to seek for Windows 10-certified sound drivers – all older sound drivers may exhibit strange behavior now and then.

A few days ago, Windows 10 drivers appeared on the Asrock download page for my mainboard. I updated immediately to these drivers. The 5 second delay at logon was gone, and the “sound bug” in GW2 didn’t appear yet. It’s too soon to give a definite answer, but I have a good feeling about that it will not return.

If the manufacturer of your mainboard does not provide Windows 10 drivers that were tested with your mainboard, try a generic one from the sound chip manufacturer. But first seek on the download page of your mainboard or your laptop support.

If you have the Realtek HD audio system, look here on the official download page of Realtek:

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsview.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=14&PFid=24&Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false

There is an alternative set of drivers, version 6.0.1, available from Realtek as well, and WHQL’d (certified by Microsoft) as well, but not advertised anywhere – to be found here:

ftp://spcust:hwwk758z@ftp3.realtek.com.tw/Realtek/GeneralRelease/

Interesting question. The answer is yes, I would have more fun with the invasion if there were no rewards.

I would played it as often as I actually did with rewards present: one whole event (30 minutes). Perhaps a second one at another day, if my guild mates wanted to do this once more. But not more than 2 times.
But I would have no hard feelings against the creators of the event, because there were no unobtainable trinkets. With the unobtainable items present, I feel I have been trolled by the makers. And I don’t like to be trolled.

kimeekat.2548:

I don’t understand why people keep falling all over themselves to link this to HoT content when this event is way closer to a S1 living story update than a permanent map-driven event chain/area event. They’re totally different beasts.

I definitely link this failed event to HoT content, because from my point of view as customer/consumer it is some kind of spoiler or trailer content to the upcoming events in HoT. A part of the upcoming content is shown here to motivate more players to want and buy HoT. From a marketing point of view, this makes absolutely sense.

Hey, this is the first new content after how many months? 8 months? After 8 months of waiting and HoT to be released in only one more month, I expected that we get a nice carefully designed and balanced living-story-like introduction or transition to the soon-to-be-happen events in HoT. In such a trailer, spoiler or demo I expect to see some part or concept of the future content. And you say now this is not like HoT will be? I almost cannot believe it.

About loot:

In the previous years, players got more and more loot from enemies. In general, the players were educated that filling the inventory is the way they are rewarded in this game. We clicked all containers open, recycled stuff, sold stuff, stored stuff, and after that, our account store contained a few more materials and we had a few parts in the trading post for sale. Currently, we are expecting that things are working that way, because we were conditioned this way by the game.

Now, in this event, suddenly there is nothing of this kind. Absolutely nothing. Only after half an hour, if you didn’t have a disconnect, some mordrem blooms. A few tokens. Too few tokens. To get real stuff out of it, we actually have to pay gold to get it from a vendor. So even the tokens are no reward, they are only unlocking some item for sale at a vendor.

So, the whole event is about unlocking items at a certain vendor, so you can buy them with your gold you earned previously somewhere else.

But while you are occupied with unlocking the vendor items, you don’t get any character progression or earn the fruits of previous character progression. No XP. You cannot level new characters. The precious Magic Find is useless. No Karma. MF or Karma Boosters aren’t working – all the banners. You are also paying for the waypoints to get more events to get more tokens.

In the end, you first pay gold for the tokens, then pay again for the vendor items. If you don’t get enough tokens at the end of the 4-day event for your desired items due to the very short time frame, your whole time and gold investment was in vain. It’s like a disconnect in the middle of the action.

After I found that out, I chose to not visit any of the invasions again. I enjoyed the gameplay of one invasion. I fought the Mordrem, destroyed the targets, and the Mordrem force retreated in the end. Nice fun event for one time. But not for repeating it over and over again and not be sure if I can get enough tokens to buy that certain reward at the vendor that I’d like to have.

I have both a Logitech G700 (this one has 4 thumb buttons and 3 on top of the mouse) and a G600, so you might be interested in my comparison of a somewhat normal mouse (G700) and a MMO mouse (G600).

My layout on my G600:

F1..F4 and skills 1..5 and 7..9: mouse buttons 1..12
Dodge: G-Shift Key (this is cool!)
skill 10: press mouse wheel
pick up aoe loot: tilt mouse wheel left
switch weapon: tilt mouse wheel right
skill 6 (heal): R
Movement via ESDF instead of WASD
Interact: V

My layout on my G700:

F1..F4: mouse thumb buttons 1..4
skills1..5: keys 1..5 as usual
skill 6: key R
skill 7-9: keys T,G,B
dodge: key X
skill 10: press mouse wheel
pick up aoe loot: tilt mouse wheel left
switch weapon: tilt mouse wheel right
Movement via ESDF instead of WASD
Interact: V

I don’t click skills, I use the keyboard. With the G600, I tried to move skill usage to the mouse buttons and free my left hand for movement only, so I could react faster and be more precise in combat situations.

Unfortunately, in the long run, I prefer the G700. The profession-skills F1..F4 on the mouse is essential, but it is enough load on the right hand.

After practice, it finally takes about 1-2 seconds to activate a skill on the G600 instead of a split second with the keyboard. This is much too long.
I practiced quite some evenings, ingame and out of game, to make pressing the skills on the mouse an automated action without thinking as with the keyboard. But I was never able to get faster than about 1-2 seconds per skill. It’s the latency of the mind and of the thumb: it takes this 1 second from the decision to activate a skill, to the movement of the thumb, the pressing of the button, and finally the activation. Additionally, pressing a G600 key needs some power, and you have to hold against the mouse with your little finger or ring finger to not have the mouse slip away. This kills any precision.

The pressing of the corresponding key on the keyboard instead is much faster, which is supported by the fact that on my left hand, I have 4 fingers to activate 9 different skill keys. On the G600 it is only 1 finger for 12 different skill keys, and moreover, it is the slow thumb and not a fast finger like index or middle finger.

Mixing movement and skill usage with my left hand and only having F1..F4 on the mouse was always faster for me than moving only with the left hand and having all skills on the mouse with the right hand and being able to move and activating a skill in the same time.

For me, there are 3 annoying noises, and they are annoying because I am unable to turn them off:

- the repetitive talking of the tron-backpack. Funny for 5 minutes, annoying after that, because no information is given with the talk.
- the repetitive talking of the copper-fed recycling kit. Funny for 5 minutes, annoying after that, because no information is given with the talk.
- the repetitive noise from one (or more?) of the SAB minipets, I think the banana is one of them.

I’m experiencing somewhat slow behaviour of the TP UI as well. It’s not the loading time of items, it’s the animations of the UI elements. Windows and buttons within the TP UI that are fading in or fading out, this is what I mean. It is as if the TP window alone has very slow fps of perhaps 15. Some frames during the fade animations are never drawn. The animations are not smooth like in the the rest of the game.

Also the responsiveness to button clicks is not fast. In other parts of GW2, response to a mouse click is instant. But within in the TP UI, you are waiting perhaps 300-400ms after a click for some kind of visual response. The whole TP feels sluggish and slow.

It’s not that the whole game has low fps. All the stuff from the game world around me is displayed at 60 fps on my machine, only the stuff inside the TP window is drawn at a much lower fps rate.

At launch, the speed of the new TP UI was fine. But it got slower and more laggy only perhaps a few months ago.

I would like to address concerns about enlarging mouse pointers as bannable offense, because one might argue that this is an unfair advantage in combat: This is not the case.

You can enlarge the mouse pointer just as I did (with Yolomouse) without any external tools by just turning down your GW2 screen resolution to fullscreen 1268×714 and let your monitor scale this up to the whole screen (which is default for about all monitors). If the native resolution of your monitor is 1920×1080, this would scale the screen back up including the mouse pointer by 50%, and this is exactly what I did with my modified pointers.

Just for a laugh, change your fullscreen resolution to 800×600 or even 640×480 and let your monitor scale this to full screen. You still see the whole game, a bit blurred and less detail, but with a nice huge mouse cursor that you cannot miss even in the largest zerg battle.

I made a set of enlarged GW2 mouse cursors a while back, to be used in connection with YoloMouse. It became an essential addon for me – without it, I always lose track of the original pointer that becomes smaller and smaller the larger your screen resolution in GW2 is.

YoloMouse: http://pandateemo.github.io/YoloMouse/

My mouse cursors for YoloMouse: http://www.wombaz.de/uploads/2014/10/gw2mousecursors.zip

A video demonstrating the look and how to apply the cursors in Yolomouse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYc11uUGYfQ

Another “real life” video from the Karka Queen boss:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoZx3yeGiE8

Yolomouse itself comes with very visible and shrill cursors, but they don’t fit a stylish game like GW2, so I made the above cursors from the original GW2 cursors – try them.

I have 409 pristine relics, 9 fractal weapons still missing, so 45 per weapon would be fine with me. Everything above 45 is unacceptable.

But seriously, the leaked number of 20 is absolutely fine with me. No matter how high the number, the best skins (like the sword) will be taken first and proudly presented, so it doesn’t matter if it is 20 or 200 relics. So give the frequent fractal runners a choice of more than 1 weapon and don’t set the price too high.

With the patch after the first patch, almost everything is ok again for me.

However, there is still a red exclamation mark on the traits tab of my main character as if I did not unlock my traits. But everything is already unlocked. The exclamation mark vanishes if I close the hero panel and always returns whenever I map travel.

after the update today:
- the progress of my dailies is reset for some characters of my account, but not for all
- the living story season 2 is locked for some of my characters of my account, but not for all (was completely unlocked before)
- the traits of some characters of my account are reset (and the hero points not refunded), but not for all characters

I restarted the game, but no change.

Since account-wide things are inconsistent between characters of the same account, which is impossible, I assume there is some kind of bug…

I bought an SSD 5 years ago, I use it since then as Windows system drive including my GW2 installation. There are no signs of wear-out.

As far as I understand endurance tests of SSDs, you have to write Terabytes day for day for years to break an SSD. A normal user like you and me will never get close to that. Even if you do video recording of your everyday gameplay onto the SSD, you will not get close.

You are throwing your money away, if you sell immediately. Here is a screenshot of my current sell transactions, the oldest being 8 months old. I always offer things for the lowest offer (or a few copper above, depending on the item, but never lower). And I never withdraw stuff. I just let them accumulate. Stuff really gets sold this way! You can see from the age of my oldest open transactions that only very few items stick around.
The fee for offering and withdrawing only stuff that sticks around is much lower than the gain when you offer instead of selling immediately.

The second half of the screenshot shows the sell history, from which you can see that I am actively using the trading post and sell stuff. It’s probably different from your stuff, because I salvage almost everything. I only sell stuff whose material tab is full or which has no point in storing it.

Since the update from Jun 23 2015, ground target skills are not activated in huge battles like Karka Queen or Tequatl. It feels the same about as it was at the Claw of Jormag event 1 or 2 years ago: you press a skill, its icon spins for a short time, but then it’s available again, no skill effect, and you can try to activate again.

This only happens on very crowded events where the map is probably full and all players on the map are attacking the same boss. The same event at non-peak hours yields no such behaviour.

Today, I made a video of this on the Karka Queen event. I added red arrows that show when I press the key for a skill, but the skill is not activated. Only after retries. The first half of the fight is ok, but some 40 seconds into the fight it starts to take multiple tries to get out some skills, and especially stubborn is the frost bow at the end of the event.

You also see the ping from the F11 panel: it’s a very good low ping during the whole event, so it’s probably no latency problem with my internet connection.

My server: Kodash (that’s Europe)

https://youtu.be/UoZx3yeGiE8

I never did find one single jumping puzzle on my own. I was led into each of them either by fellow guild members, or by the wiki, or by a video guide.

In my opinion they are not best suited to be run by a beginner. Do level your char, do the short puzzle-like ascensions to the vistas during map exploration to get used to this kind of movement. Only after a bit of practice go to the jumping puzzles.

For my part, I hated jumping puzzles for the first 2 years of the game from the bottom of my heart, made them unwillingly with the aid of my guild, and never revisited them again. But in the last months, while roaming with my mule account, I rediscovered the jumping puzzles, tried them again for the account points, and even enjoyed some of them, because they seemed much easier now. They were the same, of course, but I did know how to jump this time. Part of it may be the better camera as well and the 1st person perspective that was not available at release.

A commander tag is useful in a few places in PvE in addition to leading farm trains, but especially buying it for this is a bit wasted, in my opinion.

It could be used to show someone on the map a certain location: if someone asks and you are by chance on that location, turn the tag on and write in map chat: “at the red tag”. Also good for showing an event location for the daily event achievement.
I also sometimes tag up at Tequatl, if nobody else does. The crowd demands 3 or 4 tags and scatters if there are no tags – even if the commanders don’t need to do any actual commanding. They’re just standing there.
To organize some of the guild missions it is nice to have a few tags to show some of the positions.

In the past 3 months, I played a bit as Ele with my mule account which has very low AP. Including dungeons and fractals up to level 32. That means I joined the fractals with PUGs about 40 times. I was not kicked even once.

I witnessed only 2 kicks in all my runs, both in the fractals deep in the 2nd or 3rd fractal where it became apparent that one member did not have agony resistance and was not able to make it up with good gameplay (for example to dodge the agony attacks).

There was one Mai Trin encounter where 3 of 5 always died very soon because they either weren’t able to dodge the cannon attacks or did not have enough agony resistance. No one was kicked, I duo’d this encounter as Ele together with a Ranger and all was fine.

I started doing fractals with the mule account at 1500 AP, currently 2200 AP. No one asked about this or complained about this. Of course I never joined groups with a “5k+” requirement or other requirement I did not fit, although I am an experienced fractal player and am able to go with “lvl 50 zerk meta groups”. But this is not apparent from my mule account character, so I did not join such groups. It has not enough agony resistance to play 40+, anyway.

You have to read the lfg descriptions carefully. I tend to join “all welcome” groups. They might be not the fastest runs, but they are always relaxed and friendly groups.

An SSD disk makes a huge difference, from the first start as well as on subsequent map loads. I copied the game from the ssd to my hard disk and started from there – this adds approx. 30 seconds to each map loading time.

But even with an SSD, loading times got longer and longer over the lifetime of the game. As far as I remember, in 2012/2013, I loaded Lion’s Arch in 10-15 seconds. Nowadays, it is about 30 seconds. I always used -maploadinfo.

Fellow guild members with not so fast laptops and no SSD have loading times up to and sometimes over 1 minute. If someone with such a hardware has a disconnect in the fractals, we have to wait about 3-4 minutes until he is back in. With my desktop, I’m back in under 1 minute.

If I recall my good drops, I seem to have been really lucky.

Permanent Black Lion trading post NPC from dropped (not purchased or farmed) key
Zap
The Chosen
Black Lion Claim Ticket (not scrap) from dropped (not purchased or farmed) key
Genesis (4 times at Queen’s Jubilee. 1 sold for 30G, 1 sold for 15 G, 1 sold for 90g)
Gift of Souls (from which I made The Crossing)
Abyss (while opening my stack of saved unidentified dyes right before the dye update)

Another thing worthwhile mentioning: got Final Rest 4 times, 3 of them on consecutive days at the Shadow Behemoth.

I kept and used all, sold only the duplicates.
approx. 3100 hours.
Last good drop from the above exactly one year ago.

A few guildies tried and retried this achievement in quite many runs in the last months, but not even one of them got it. They tried several different tactics to get through the event, but no one made it. One of them even painstakenly browsed through the combat log and did not find any entry that he was hit by the fire, but was not granted the achievement.

I assume there is really something wrong.

2 problems:

1. We had a strange encounter with the Imbued Shaman in the Vulcanic Fractal. The Shaman was still in the middle of the island and clearly out of reach of every prisoner, but suddenly he made the animation of devouring one prisoner, and he regenerated life.
And in fact a prisoner far away was consumed, but he absolutely wasn’t in reach of anyone.
Here is a video to show this (3x slow motion):

https://youtu.be/sz-xOeEgA2g

The prisoner at the far right end of the island is consumed.

2. There is a another thing in the video (saw this in other videos as well): his shield won’t lose one stack for every “blocked” hit from skills like Meteor shower, Lava Font or Sand Storm. In the video, there are 2 times 3 “blocked” messages from him, but the shield won’t decrease even by 1. Is there a cooldown for the shield decrease or even only 1 stack per skill activation and not for every hit that was “blocked”?

You assume that the geolocation services have correct data, but that is not always the case. In case of your pingplotter image, you can be sure that all hops are in fact located in the US or at least in North America.

It can be deducted from the latency. If the data packets were routed to Switzerland (or generally, to Europe), they would cross the ocean, which adds about 120ms for each trip.
There is no internet site in Europe that has less than about 120ms latency if contacted from the US (and vice versa). This is simply because of the long distance.

In your graph, there is no such high latency. The low latency shows that the data packets don’t leave your continent. Whatever the geolocation services might say about the IP addresses: they are in fact located on your continent.

Global companies like Telia or even NCsoft/Arenanet tend to reallocate their address pools to foreign countries or even foreign continents, if they need address space, and the geolocation services don’t adapt fast enough. Even Arenanets european datacenter is an example for this: The network 64.25.47.* is located in TX, US according to whois, but in fact is located in Frankfurt, Germany, Europe. Otherwise I would not have a latency of only 12ms to it – I live almost next door.

Farming the keys ingame yields probably the worst hourly wage you imagine.

Depending on the hourly wages in your country, of course. One key cost 90 gems if you buy the 5 pack, 1 gem cost 1.25 cent, that is 90*1.25 cent = 112.5 cent or $ 1.125 or 1.125 Euro for one key. (gems cost the same in Dollar and in Euro).
You get approx. 1 key in 20 minutes, 3 keys in 1 hour, this is the equivalent of $ 3.37 hourly wage.

I don’t know how your country pays for work, but here in Germany there is a minimum wage of 8.50 Euro, which is approx. $ 10. A cleaner in a private household is paid approx. 10 Euro here, three times the benefit of one hour of key farming.

If you go cleaning for 4 hours, you get 40 Euro, which yields about 35 keys if you buy them in the shop. On the other hand, ingame farming for 35 keys takes about 12 hours.

A very bad deal if you go ingame farming for keys, if you ask me. Go cleaning for 4 hours, buy the keys with your wage, and play what you have fun with in Guild Wars 2 for the remaining 8 hours instead of meaningless ingame farming/grinding.

Ingame key farming gets you absolutely nothing but the bare key. No character progression, no chance to become better player, no gold, no interesting new story, no teamwork with fellow gamers. It’s totally wasted.

I’m proud of having resisted entering PvP even once since prerelease. We have a special guild member that will drag me there every time if he sees me there even once, so I have no other choice than to resist. Otherwise my evenings will be filled with denials and bad conscience that I do not fill 4-man guild parties.
Deliberately playing bad to get no invitation in the future would not be an option.

I’m a bit proud of that I am sometimes last man standing in some dungeon or fractal run with PUGs with my squishy zerk ele. I consider myself not a good player – but how bad are the others? I’d rather not think about it.

And I’m proud of the fact that I never ever kicked a party member from an instance we played.

I confess that I made a autohotkey script a year ago (or even longer, don’t remember exactly) that links holding down the right mouse button with holding down the ctrl key. Whenever I press the right mouse button, the ctrl key is pressed as well, and whenever I release the right mouse button, the ctrl key is released as well.
This improves my game experience tremendously.

If I should be banned because of the usage of such trivial convenience functions, then I so be it. I would not try to return. On the other hand, it’s only “pressing one mouse key becomes pressing one keyboard key”.

I like variety and good looking characters. That means if possible, no 2 of my characters should look alike. Not only dressed differently but also look different in face and body. So instead of having 2 characters with same race and same gender, I rather create one male and the other female.
Additionally, I wanted to have at least 1 character from every race (5) and 1 for each class (8).

So I planned my characters before release:

• my Asura must be an Elementalist. An Asura Elementalist should be male, so I created him male.
• for my Norn, I remember some pre-release video with a bad-kitten male norn in there. He was cool. He became my warrior.
• my Sylvari is female, because male Sylvari don’t look good. She became my Necromancer.
• my Charr is male, because female Charr don’t look female enough to create a female Charr. He became my Guardian.
• my Human should become my Mesmer, and a human Mesmer should be female. She also looks more pretty than a male.

This left me with 3 races who got another character.

• no more characters as Charr, because I don’t like Charr that much
• no more charaters as Sylvari, because the second Sylvari would be male (already had one female), and male Sylvari don’t look good.

• my ranger should be Norn, because this seems the best race for her. She is female, because I already have a male Norn.
• my thief should be an Asura, because of her height and body she seems the best choice for a profession that steals things. She is female, because I already have a male Asura.
• my engineer should be a Human. I created the look of a frail and shy woman, but who was clad in steel and throws death and ruin onto her enemies. Oops – a second female human. Well, it’s also because the female human is simply the most pretty crafted character we can play. A male engineer would be somewhat ordinary and not very inspired, so I chose a second female.

This makes 3 male and 5 female characters on my account.
But my main is my male Asura, I play him 80% of the time. The other one I play is the male Charr, which gets the remaining 20%.

If I were to recreate all characters today, I would probably create them again just as they are now.

Most funny, I did not yet chose race and gender for the upcoming Revenant. Perhaps a male human in the end.

Doesn’t happen for me in Firefox.

Click on the crossed lock to display the reason and show the certificate information. You may have been a victim to some man-in-the-middle attack for web connections.

Weirwynn.2390:

It’s a convenience item, it should be convenient.

Yes, and because it is inconvenient in one of the important details, I cannot currently recommend it to fellow guild members and will not buy other convenience items of this kind.

Every time it pops up in the shop, I am getting asked by my fellow guild members what good brings it and I can only answer that I cannot recommend it – running through Heart of the Mists through the portal in Lion’s Arch is not so much more inconvenient to spend 1000 gems to get off this inconvenience.

Don’t buy hardware by looking for an “architecture that is best suited for the future”. That is marketing bull…. bingo.

Buy hardware that actually and currently has the best cost/performance ratio and that is best suited to your individual use case. Buy by catalog, price list and benchmarks. Don’t buy by brand, marketing and advertisement.

About honesty (keep money you found somewhere? No! Amount doesn’t matter).

Just a few days go, in our company’s canteen the guy in front of me found a 10 Euro bill on the floor right in front of his feet. He picked it up and asked the crowd if someone lost it. Nobody answered. He shrugged and asked himself something like: “what should I do now with this?”
He put the bill on the counter, and one of the canteen staff asked what he should do with it. Shrug again. By chance the canteen boss showed up and asked about that 10 Euro bill on the counter. He was told it was found on the floor.
He took it, put it into the official locker with the lost goods (“treasure chest”) and brought a piece of cake, which he handed to the guy who found the bill.

They all didn’t take what was not theirs.

I played some time with my mule account (bought at the sale 2 months ago), which now has approx. 1700 account points. Did dungeons, did fractals up to level 19. Completely with PUGs.

I was not kicked once and did not see any other party member even requested to be kicked. And there were quite some members who had not much experience and it was clear they completed their first dungeons ever.

Everyone waited patiently for anyone who watched a video, was disconnected and tried to reconnect or requested a break to go to the restroom. Or had problems with skipping mobs in dungeons, dying on the path.

Of course I did not join groups where the description in the lfg tool invited impatient players. (“zerk only, exp only, gear check, 5000+AP, fast run” – avoid this like the plague)

- you can choose your difficulty level
- the difficulty level is gated through the agony system, so you find reasonably experienced players in all fractal levels
- interesting challenges in comparison to the dungeons
- loot is ok

Many thanks to the story line repair!

I still have a question, it has to do with the “why” you mentioned in your introduction: Why did you do the changes last year in the first place? This is something you never explained. I’m just curious, not trolling.

I never understood why you removed content and left the game in a state worse than it was before. Instead of putting the work into enhancing it. And keep it like this for more than half a year. For me, it appeared as a burning and bleeding open wound in the story line. Yes, the Apatia part of the story never was the best content, but it was not so bad that it was worth removing – in my opinion.

Perhaps you encountered a lag and didn’t realize it. While you stood at some point or moved, a fire field appeared under you, or you were hit by a wave, but you weren’t able to see it, so you didn’t dodge or moved away: the data packet that contained the information was stalled on the network.

Sometimes we have simultaneous lags for some or even all party members, so it fits perfectly with your description that not only you but also party members were downed at the same time.

4 months ago I posted a mouse heatmap to show that the combat action takes place slightly above the middle of the screen, and I complained that the top of large things are cut off due to this.

Now I took a new heatmap from my gameplay since the patch, where I customized my FOV and camera height to my desires. Lo and behold, the heatmap moved and now the action actually takes place in the center of the screen, exactly as I thought it would. Thanks!

It is not completely in the midde because of the FOV-reset-bug after game restart and I sometimes forgot to manually correct it. If that one is fixed, I bet the action will really take place in the middle.

Left picture: after patch
Right picture: before patch

runeblade.7514:

Add In-combat and out of combat camera.

This is a bit too much automatic zoom in and zoom out, in my opinion. The game already zooms back and forth a lot, depending on the environment and event. Except for exceptional circumstances the camera view should stay constant. Imagine how often you change between in-combat and out of combat – every few seconds in the open world in an explorable area.

What I would like instead is a possibility to custom-create a few fixed zoom levels. I would use this to create 3 levels:

• 1st person
• almost completely zoomed out (usual gaming)
• completely zoomed out (casually looking around, but not suited for combat, since the characters are too small and the fps is too low)

With the mouse wheel, I would simply switch between these 3 settings instead of zooming only a few percent for each mouse wheel tick as it is now.
Other players might want to create 1 or 2 additional custom zoom settings.

I tried Trolls’s End with a human character, and I noticed that I was not always able to zoom to 1st person.

I started in 3rd person view, going to an especially tight place, and then tried to zoom to 1st person. 1st person view was enabled, of course. The character was still visible, half-transparent. I had to move around a bit to be able to completely zoom in.

In case you want the actual color values, look here:

http://colors.gw2tools.de/

Interesting to see that for light armor, midnight fire is already at (0,0,0), so it cannot get darker than that. For medium and heavy armor, there existed no such color before, but the new shadow colors provide that.

Abyss was never the darkest black for all armor types, by the way. Midnight Ice and Midnight Fire was. Look up the values in the color table.

This works, because this way the game runs from the desktop folder, where your user have all file permissions. If you explicitly install it via gw2setup.exe, then it installs it in c:\program files (x86), where special OS-restricted permissions are applied. GW2 must mess with these permissions to allow updating the client, and this is the problem.

An equal solution is if you simply install the game anywhere outside c:\program files (x86), for example to c:\games.

If you are unable to provide a different path during install, open the Windows explorer after install and copy all files from the folder c:\program files (x86)\Guild Wars 2 to something like c:\games\Guild Wars 2 and delete c:\program files (x86)\Guild Wars 2 afterwards.

Do a copy+delete, not move. With move you move the restricted permissions as well, and with copy+delete you get rid of the permissions.

This is truly an amazing camera update! At first glance, everything I asked is in. It is possible to better look up. You can zoom out to a really, really wide view (I will use the max setting probably only for screenshots – for actual playing it is a bit too far). And you can position the camera more far away to top/bottom/left/right than I would use it, so it probably fulfill everyone’s desires, even for extreme people.

I ran around in Lion’s Arch a bit to see the camera smoothing, compared the maximum and minimum collision sensivity settings, and this really the best change of all. This works! Since I got headaches and illness more or less often with the old camera, this is probably one of the biggest game improvement for me ever.

I’m a smart_ass and often cannot help posting “smart” answers to “stupid” questions in map chat. My last one was while waiting for Tequatl. There is always someone who doesn’t know the fixed time schedule despite all the timers, so it was asked:
“How long?”
I immediately felt the urge to answer:
“15 inches”
Then it dawned to me that at 20:00 there may be minors present and the bold answer may not be the best one, so I desperately sought for an innocuous addition:
“That’s the height of my Asura”
I got away! And it really sounded only like a bad joke. (I don’t get away every time.)

My second confession is that there are things I cannot even confess in a confession thread. My guild may read it.

It’s probably not an expected or designed variant to defeat Jade Maw, but you are using game features in fight that work the way they were designed. You use no loophole, no glitch. You just use a certain weapon feature or combo feature. I assume it would be easy to “fix” by Arenanet: just make Jade Maw immune not only to direct damage but also to life steal. But they did not for 3 years (it is known since fractal release), so they let players use this method.

In my guild, we always use dark fields and frost bow if we happen to have a necro and an ele. It’s still a challenge because of the strict coordination that is necessary, and the reward is a shortened fight. You skip no essential or especially difficult part of the boss fight – you still have to avoid the Maw attack for the first half of the fight, get rid of the Jade adds etc.

I bought a mule account at the sale a month ago and decided to play one character a bit, to see what the NPE feels like.

I don’t agree with most of the points of the OP. The experience was mostly ok, and I actually enjoyed most of the way to (currently) 70. There are only a few things I have to criticize. Some are present since release, not only since the NPE change:

- hiding some gameplay elements from the very first levels like skill point challenges. This causes more confusion than it solves, because veterans speak about these points, but you as new player aren’t able to see such things!

- leveling is too fast to keep up with the equipment. You are constantly playing with totally outdated armor and weapons. There are still not enough fitting drops to outfit oneself with current equipment.

- no hints and notes if your equipment is grossly underleveled and you should upgrade

- the features you get at level-up aren’t explained anywhere. And the level-up usually comes in the middle of some action, where you simply click it away and don’t really read and understand it. There should be some information page within the game where you can read all the notes about the features you were getting while you are safe and have the time to study them.

- getting the traits is absolutely awful. A new player don’t have the skill points to buy the traits (he has to spend them for the utility skills), so he must play some event to get it. But some things are nothing for a new player, like the giant in the Harathi Hinterlands, which nobody knows. You don’t even have a waypoint or point of interest to ping on the map. Or doing some WvW jumping puzzle – no way. This causes the situation that new players will go without eqipped traits.

- irritating: I got the first 2 account reward chests just after creating the first character. I connected my secondary GW1 account to this mule account and got 500 account points. I assume this is confusing, and also not appropriate for a totally new player. Getting this reward should be postponed.

- starting with about level 60 your damage output lowers and you must start working on your equipment, trait points and traits. Building your build. This isn’t mentioned anywhere. New players are frustrated at this point and some will give up the game eventually, because enemies get stronger than they were before, even in starting areas due to the level scaling. I very well remembered this point on my first character 2 years ago. This hasn’t changed since.

- PvP and WvW not available right from the start. This leads to confusion when veterans tell new players about the game options and general features.

- scaling of the reward chests and champion bags. Starting from level 35, a player should get them and should get rare items out of them.

- it is still not possible for a new account to level someone’s crafting in parallel to the character level, so he can craft his own equipment while leveling his first character. You don’t either have enough money, or enough crafting material.

Good things:
- XP boosts at the daily login rewards and daily achievements
- the free XP boosters given with the heroic edition. I started using them at level 20
- rewards and explicitly given features at level up
- equipment given in level up have mostly power/precision stats. Good.

The OP complained about other locked things like dodging or the trading post. This complaint is invalid, because features like this are available and usable right from the start, they were only mentioned at a later point.

Having read my post again, I come to the conclusion that the standard leveling process was probably too slow for me, and using boosters it was fine. I didn’t mention that I also used food and every other available booster like the festival booster from the daily login rewards.

It has to be Eirsson to show the players Brahams relationship to Eir. If it were Braham Whatchamacallumson, nobody see Braham in any way related to Eir.

Yes, the relationship is also mentioned in some LS instances, but few people notice this.

Probably under 1% of all active players have fractal skins. Only few players do fractals at all, fewer do this regularly, and even fewer do this on levels above 10. Not counting the low droprate.