Guild Wars 2

Viking Jorun.5413:

False, actually. The U.S. had an isolationist policy up until World War II when we were forced out of seclusion due to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and was the fastest progressing nation in the world both industrially and artistically. Cantha could be the same way, opened up by the rise of Bubbles who guards the Unending Ocean.

That was only a kind of political isolationism, where the US chose not to involve itself in foreign affairs. It was still heavily dependent on trade – otherwise, the Great Depression wouldn’t have affected the rest of the world.

If it were completely incommunicado like Cantha is, the US would probably not have out-developed the rest of the world – you’re basically competing on relative sizes of economy and investment in science – where the smaller fraction of humanity is at an automatic disadvantage.

Of course… even counting other races… it’s possible that Cantha actually has the upper hand in the world of Tyria. There are also other, more deus-ex-machina, explanations you could pull out of the hat.

I still wouldn’t assume Daniel Dociu’s art piece actually means anything, though. We’ve seen a “futuristic” (or at least close to modern-day) work from him before, which was in fact a GW2 piece, but the explanation from ArenaNet was that it was more for sense of scale purposes than to illustrate actual content. Perhaps this is in a similar vein; or perhaps it’s for a different game outside of ArenaNet.

On a slightly-related note, it was nice of them to follow up the Glint thing this year. I didn’t actually expect it.

Sky.7610:

However, it is without doubt that sales of this title has now ceased to insignificant numbers.

Source?

Nightingale.9714:

If you people at ANET are trying to tell me not to buy black lion keys

Whether they are or not, this is exactly what you should take away from this: don’t buy Black Lion keys. They aren’t worth anywhere near what you pay for them.

You do realize that the one that isn’t picked may well also show up, just a little later? Especially if they’ve already started production work on them.

I do get that feeling. Will look out for it.

It is true; elect Kiel and there will still be RNG, and elect Evon and there will still be waypoints. But which would you prefer – save money on waypoints which you almost certainly will use, or save money on keys that will still be a scam, just slightly less of one?

Of course, if it emerges that Evon is proposing a 95-99% price cut on keys, I’ll quickly change my tune…

Agreed. Great “IC” writing and also speaks to the real OOC reasons why Kiel is the better choice

The usual go-to is an i7 2770k, though it probably can still be overloaded by some stuff (not sure how much turning down graphics settings would help but it’d be worth a shot).

In WvW sieges, I’m not sure there is a CPU on the market that can run a constant 45 fps on any resolution.

Do we have any evidence that there ever was a “before” Glint was a champion of Kralkatorrik?

It’s really, really hard for me to like Braham more than Eir. I would hope he’s not a replacement.

Realistically, those slums wouldn’t have stood up to much. A tidal wave would seriously weaken the lower levels of the structures, which would probably cascade and cause the whole thing to collapse. That’s if a fire didn’t get to it first, before Zhaitan rose. Not much to stop it from spreading for miles there.

…and that’s if gravity didn’t get to it first. Not exactly a stable structure. Kind of wonder if all bets are off.

Look on the top deck outside the Great Lodge; you should find the bank up there.

So as far as I can tell: no. Zephyrites at this point appear to be almost all human (apparently largely Canthan or Elonian), if not entirely. I don’t think there are any tengu in the new map at all.

Are BL chests still worthless?

…yep.

Will be interesting to find out. I also noticed that the architectural style isn’t terribly familiar to me from anything I can recall from GW2 to date. Maybe a couple more things from different places that are similar in GW1 (bits of Elona and Cantha I think), but… it’s hard to say.

It’ll be interesting to learn what this bazaar is and where it came from.

Interesting question. Most of what would improve the game isn’t anywhere near this sum of money though. The things I can think of would tend to turn the game into something it isn’t…

Still, there are certain things. These aren’t on that scale of budget, but probably would require increases, so hey.

• Expand the PvP side of things – get some people actively working on making it a more competitive game, getting spectator stuff in there, and also promoting it again so GW2 has a better chance of making it back to the “e-sport contender” thing – the promotion is probably where the big bucks will go, to be honest. Not $1b worth since that’s what might be spent on a presidential campaign, but still.
• Oh yeah, the engine. Needs to be optimized more, and if we can find and train the personnel to pull it off, why not look at going cross-platform?
• Fix armor clipping. If I have a billion to throw at this, I don’t care how much work it is anymore – we can find a way.

…most of the rest of the gameplay stuff isn’t budget-dependent. So time for some slightly… blue-skies stuff.
While I’m not totally sure of the merit of throwing out WvW for a re-imagined but essentially different game mode, keeping both is probably going to dilute players. But it could be bigger. Inject a bit of Minecraft, let players build their own fortifications around strategic locations (resources, chokepoints, and so on). Throw in large numbers of AI-controlled soldiers (probably requires improved AI) to hold these locations when they can’t be there. Actually, maybe the AI can do sieges by itself just so you can’t slack off just because the other server is asleep or at work. And I wouldn’t say no to making the map size bigger, although on the other hand GW2 isn’t Daggerfall and I’m not sure it ever should be (kind of conflicts with the art/design direction for the game).

Not totally sure it’d work, but if you’ve got the budget, a lot of experiments become worth the effort. Especially if you don’t need to make the money back. (Do you?)

Yeah, I don’t “convert”, I add new characters if I want something different. Currently only one is norn (even if it is my main), so… still want to keep one around.

Yeah, it’s not really intended to be a replacement. Umm… as for the mounts: there really aren’t any, what someone was referring to was probably some witch broom or something vaguely similar, which doesn’t really qualify in most people’s minds. Definitely nothing that adds flight. Although there are some vague hints that there might be something similar coming in the next Living Story update, but I expect it’s just a minigame thing.

And, well, the norn forms. I always felt they dropped the ball on them, but because they’re racial skills, I guess even if they do agree, they’re not in much hurry to do anything about it.

You need to reach level 30 before you can learn the elite skills, snow leopard included. Probably more for that, actually, because snow leopard is in the second tier which needs to be unlocked by learning two other elite skills first; so you’ll need 50 skill points altogether.

Also, it’s not really something you’d have a “build” for. It’s not really like Diablo 2 or even GW1 in that way – if you want to use a skill, you just take it. Focusing on certain traits or attributes may improve its effectiveness to a point, but usually only to a point. (Norn elites don’t have enough uptime to be the primary focus of your play anyway.)

Hmm. Mostly just the same people. I agree though, Talon’s descendents are going to be in the Dominion of Winds (it’s even outright stated that one of them helped found it) rather than Cantha. For that reason there’s a very good chance we might see them sooner than anyone else listed here. Zhed, I’m not really sure about, considering Palawa Joko’s … disdain for centaurs. He might come back undead…!

Razah is definitely intriguing, and I think most of us are interested in seeing/hearing more about him.

Mhenlo/Cynn – as far as I recall they already have descendents in Rurikton? Might be mistaken since not everyone was represented there…

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Tengu, which I’d say is about 95% or more chance
Largos, which I’d give to be about 50% chance
Djinn, which I’d say is about 40% chance
Kodan, which I’d give to be about 20% chance

…I’ll bite. Why do you rate Djinni so high? That’s about the only surprise in this list.

Mad Queen Malafide.7512:

Maybe Norn women in general are resilient to his influence, and die in the process of resisting him.

As far as I recall this is roughly accurate. There was some discussion in the book Edge of Destiny about the subject – I think it suggested that the women die, the men come back as icebrood. As for why? Not really sure. The Sons of Svanir may point back to the Svanir and Jora tale, but who’s to say that was the cause as opposed to merely the first example of Jormag’s “preference” for male norn?

Maybe they have (Mail)Bags of Holding.

The Pact is going to be pretty hard-pressed to fight a two-front war though. I’d figure they’re going to have to go after one at a time whether they want to or not.

An exception for this one does seem justified, especially if it’s sticking around post-Dragon Bash.

Other than that, though, there really isn’t anything that could be done about disconnects – ArenaNet can’t tell from their end whether it actually is a connection problem or you just yanked the cable on purpose. (Also, network outages don’t usually have much to do with programming.)

Mystic’s calculations ring truer to me. There’s a handy little tool on http://www.gw2spidy.com/ that gives you the USD-to-gold exchange rate, which would peg Eternity at just under US$1000. Considering the GBP-USD exchange rate I’d expect that to be on the higher side of 500 pounds.

And yeah, I also came to the realization that you’d quicker be able to earn the weapon with a real part-time job than through playing GW2. It’s not something I’d actually do, but it certainly does put the idea of getting a legendary in perspective. If you’re not having fun while working towards one, you need to ask yourself if it’s really worth it.

Ursan.7846:

I’m going to bring up this quote from Anet Prez Mike O’Brien every time someone mentions “But GW2 was promised to have no grind!”

Here’s what we believe: If someone wants to play for a thousand hours to get an item that is so rare that other players can’t realistically acquire it, that rare item should be differentiated by its visual appearance and rarity alone, not by being more powerful than everything else in the game. Otherwise, your MMO becomes all about grinding to get the best gear. We don’t make grindy games — we leave the grind to other MMOs.

http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/21/guild-wars-2-interview-monetization/

GW1 and GW2 has always been about cosmetic grind. You’re fooling yourself if you assume otherwise.

Largely agreed, but there is some danger in the way the “best gear” thing is going. Level 80 exotics already take quite a while to get – not unreasonable, probably still within the reach of the average player, but they are expensive. Ascended equipment is even worse, and outright requires time commitment because of the laurel thing. So that’s dangerously close to the “grinding for more powerful gear” O’Brien was talking about already… it’s certainly not as bad as legendaries, but it is to the point you can only realistically get so many of them.

GW1 I’m with you 100% though – max gear was so cheap you really only needed to finish a campaign on a character and you could already buy a full set of it. The grinders were going after obsidian armor and chaos gloves, which didn’t do anything at all besides look “cool” (YMMV, mine certainly did).

OK. Does it mean you’re playing WvW for that world, as opposed to in their borderlands or something like that? I would assume so.

When checking a guild roster I’ve seen a few people who are listed as being on a different server – but more recently I’ve noticed some of those server names are tagged with [D] and some aren’t. What’s the significance of that letter, if anyone worked it out? Somehow I don’t think it’s guesting, but I can’t be sure.

Only thing I do know is it seems to be somewhat unDocumented

Pretty much all of Ascalon was blasted by the Searing though, whether we visited it or not. There just wasn’t enough to grow much food on – that was the real damage done. Ascalon was still initially strong enough to keep the charr at bay for years – but they had no hope of keeping that up indefinitely.

Adelbern I see as more of a tragic figure. If I recall, in his younger days he was something of a war hero in the battles against Kryta and Orr during the Guild Wars – and that appears to have colored his view against those nations permanently. He took great pride in his own nation and distrusted the other two – even after the world changed, Orr was destroyed, and Ascalon was burned. Eventually the qualities that served him so well when his adversaries were other human kingdoms no longer helped him and, maybe, led to Ascalon’s final fall (except for Ebonhawke, but we have the Vanguard to thank for that who seemed to be a different, more pragmatic breed).

I agree that the only explanation for his actions in causing the Foefire required at least some twisting of the mind, though. His advanced age and the rapidly approaching specter of total defeat may have been contributing factors there. He probably reasoned that he and his people were about to die anyway, and why give the hated charr the satisfaction of a real victory? Evidently at that stage revenge mattered more to him than the fact that he’d be condemning his people to a grotesque eternal unrest.

I don’t think that makes him evil though – just stubborn to the last, and he pretty much lost all perspective on things.

ColinJohanson.2394:

You don’t get to be a Moa for this specific activity

What if you use a tonic?

Apparently there is at least one thread where the URL isn’t caught – the actual text is. Might be OK if nobody checks that
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/The-most-kittened-up-targeting-system-EVER

Probably too late to turn the train around, but I’m not even sure much of the premise of this thread is true. All that we know is that the Canthan district of Divinity’s Reach was removed because some people complained about it. I’m not sure we know whether it had to be removed or ArenaNet just agreed that it wasn’t up to par and decided to take it out; or whether NCSoft was part of that decision; and we certainly don’t know that there’s an overarching conspiracy by NCSoft to excise anything remotely Asian-themed from the game.

Cantha is probably not being “blocked” for cultural-sensitivity “business reasons”. It probably just hasn’t been made yet because ArenaNet wanted to start on one continent first, and Tyria made the most sense for that. Unless there is actually an anti-Asian business plan (which, as has been explained countless times above, wouldn’t make much sense since other games got away with this kind of content) Cantha isn’t gone forever, we just don’t know when we’ll be back.

Any itches to scratch that aren’t handled by WvW anyway?

Indeed, it’s very hard to find a computer of any kind without a flat screen anymore.

RuneCrimson.7380:

I kinda like the BLC’s cause if you can get a key there are some things that are useful in them sometimes.

Well, you can buy them off the trading post for dirt if you ever need them then The fact that keys never drop in the game outside of a few story rewards means that the vast majority of chests go unopened, which makes them have nearly no value.

I wouldn’t be opposed to this in specific new zones that were designed for it, but only in those new zones. Retrofitting it to existing areas will do more harm than good.

Yeah, people can still be bad with gear that “checks all the boxes”, so I’m not sure this really helps much. You weed out some people you don’t want, you weed out a few people you do want but think you don’t, and you pass through a decent number of people who look good but are actually worse than group 2.

Ultimately there’s no shortcut for finding out if someone can play – you have to watch them play. For that reason, in random groups you’re always going to run the risk of picking up the wrong people. Luckily, for almost all of the content you don’t need to care, because while they may not be top-notch with substandard gear or substandard skills, they’re good enough to help you beat it anyway.

For the toughest content, there’s still that problem, but I kind of figure you don’t want to random group for that.

Wouldn’t it be more effective to make the player stronger (or, more likely, enemies weaker) than give them a henchman, if something really needed doing?

A lot of the early game for me has been learning not to bite off more than I can chew, actually. Doesn’t make it particularly fun for the group events that there is no group to play through, though (actually worse in Orr, where that means nearly everything) – I mostly just avoid them.

It’s very unclear what the Windows 8 kernel in the XBox One actually lets you do. I’m not even sure there will be games for it (it would stand to reason, opening up the Windows Store to users, but it wouldn’t be the first missed opportunity), and I’d be really surprised if desktop software like GW2 will run.

There’s still a substantial block to any porting effort though – the CPU architecture is only one part of the picture, and honestly, it could be the lesser one. The real headache is adapting to changes in the APIs provided by the operating system. XBox might use DirectX so it could be the simpler of the two, but I doubt it’d be effortless… and you still have to tailor the UI to the controller setup (even Kinect doesn’t let you get too lazy – it only has so much accuracy, due to the limits of the human body if nothing else).

Zaxares.5419:

Alright, fair enough. I’m happy with the supposition that individuals would likely be able to change Houses through marriage or a process of “adoption”; as long as there’s a plausible explanation for why our Tengu character looks like an Avicara, yet he belongs to the House founded by the Angchu/Sensali.

And there probably will need to be an explanation for that. Humans don’t have Canthan/Elonian/Tyrian heritage tied in with appearance, so I have my doubts they’ll make such a drastic change for tengu (that said, never say never… it’s theoretically possible).

It’s quite possible they did, at the time.

maddoctor.2738:

Even at release I was solo farming them easily, I don’t get how anyone might’ve had problems with Hydras in GW1. Hydras have only one skill to watch out for and it has a huge casting time, of course without any kind of protection and/or interrupts they could easily kill you, much like Karka without projectile reflection.

That was the thing… if you were just running with a party of five henchmen, they didn’t actually react to the meteor cast – they wouldn’t move out of the way, and wouldn’t even cast protective spells most of the time – they just sat there and took it up the backside. This was also before you could order them to move elsewhere without using the leash mechanics (difficult if even possible to pull off effectively in that situation). For that same reason, pulling them rarely worked unless you were very careful, because the henchmen would instantly engage as soon as you did that. So pretty much the only options you had were
1) Try to DPS it into the ground faster than it could get the cast off
2) Bring interrupts (probably the better option)
The chances of this working dropped away exponentially the more hydras you engaged at once, of course.

If you had other people to play with or at least weren’t a monk like I was, it got much easier. Since I didn’t have any way to prot the entire party I pretty much had to either avoid them or take them on one at a time if I absolutely had to.

Probably. Can’t really see ArenaNet blowing it that hard, and there are a few things I’d pay for even if they did…

I’m not particularly enthusiastic about the spectre of ascended armor showing up, with how much effort ascended equipment takes to get currently – especially since it also renders most crafting professions useless for endgame gear. (Could we get that fixed, by the way?)

If there’s an upgrade process (I don’t particularly want to replace my armor skin, and I’d prefer not to have to pay for transmutation stones which for some reason are not available in-game, only through gem exchange) that doesn’t cost an arm or a leg – or 2-3 months of laurel grinding for a full armor set – it would make it a lot more acceptable though.

Largos either don’t use breathing masks or they always use them – we see them above and below water already.

The krait showed up in EotN, and I think that concept art was from after. They may have changed the designs from GW1 to 2, but not quite that much…
From what I recall, the best guess was that it was art that never got used.

I actually would like to see Orr restored at some point, maybe get some more sense of what that civilization used to be like – not sure it’ll happen though.

Once the undead are gone it’ll be great for the archaeologists, I can say that much.

I, uh… I can’t say I’m sad his hairstyle isn’t available. I don’t think very much of it.