Guild Wars 2

Yargesh.4965:

I was mostly talking about developer stress, though some players worked themselves up as well.

haha, yeah, it would be a radically different world for developers. I doubt you could just change from the current model to the new model without having aimed for it from the start.

the same way that GW2 doesn’t do downtime, but pretty much every other MMO does, and those other games couldn’t just adopt what anet did easily.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

So, the one suggestion I didn’t see there was: gw2efficiency.com (and a bunch of other sites) can use the API to search your inventories to find things. I’ve used that to answer the question “is X somewhere on a character?!?” in the past.

Scroll up a bit

Oh, you used the proper name, not the DNS name, and I managed to not put it together, haha.

Ashen.2907:

There needs to be a text font or color that is universally recognized as meaning, “just kidding.”

First thing that happens: bad jokes that color.

Second thing that happens: you are a kittening kittener, in that color.

People, eh?

Yargesh.4965:

That was LS1, the staff got stressed the vocal people where vocal and it did keep people playing and paying for “stuff” on a regular basis.
They switched to LS2 model due to stress and people not actually wanting what you are asking for even though there where more consistent log-in numbers during this time.

Hrm. I thought the stress mostly came from the fact that the world changed, and the content went away after two weeks — so if you missed it, it was gone forever.

I’m thinking of things like that persist in the world, or at least last for years. Like, adding new dynamic events — extend the slime investigations where you had that big fight with the blob in the Asura starting zone, to do something else with slime, or add a new caravan route to a Charr zone.

Maybe long term changes, like building a new town, over the course of literally years, but not “do it now, or it vanishes.”

My theory is that this (a) adds life to the world, and (b) gradually builds a bigger and bigger pool of content for players to interact with, without everything having to be world shakingly huge. (Plus it gets the teams really, really good at delivering content fast, making it easier to grow the scope of what they build over time.)

zealex.9410:

OriOri.8724:

Theres no point to this post. Its way too late for Anet to change what legendary weapon they want to release next tuesday, if it is the sword then this post had no effect, if it isn’t the sword then no one at Anet could possibly get the sword out instead.

Its not a serious post.

Sadly, the problem with your joke is that it was completely indistinguishable from the people who would seriously ask for this, and expect it to be done.

FWIW, US East Coast and West Coast evening during the week, and most of the days on the weekend, I find meta-events in HoT maps being run, or advertised.

I also found that when I wanted to do, eg, VB metas, just sticking an advert in LFG and ignoring it was pretty effective — all the other people thinking about it saw the advert, and came to the map, so it got a good population.

Achievements are the next things to focus on. There are a wide range of them, some of which will involve working with groups to complete during the meta, some of which are obscure things, and so on.

Sceylan.1078:

Taimi is annoying, but for me Braham is the worst character. Acts too much like a spoiled brat and doesn’t think with his brain only his whiny emotions.

A perfect rendition of a traumatized 16 year old boy from a culture that focuses on violence and self-reliance at the expense of support, though, gotta give them that.

Aury.1367:

Since we got the toy “Magic Carpet” and now the suitable characteranimation for a glider seen on the SAB-Cloud glider, why cant anet add a glider with the same animation, only as the carpet. People owning the carpet already should ofc get it then per mail.

They probably can … but I’ll bet that whatever the technical problem with making the animation work for “standing on a glider” rather than the flying stuff hard was only recently solved. So … now they have the ability to do it again, but it’s the first time, and they need to work out if that rework of the super-old things is worth more than, eg, xpac 2 and the next LS episodes…

SkyShroud.2865:

Supporting dx11/12 is one thing, getting it to actually be optimized to work with dx11/12 is another thing.

Regardless, I believe many would agree that the main point isn’t about dx11/12, it is about the performance.

There is nothing significant that alters the performance character of a DX9 vs DX11 game; DX12 includes a radically different programming model that can allow better performance when multiple cores are working on building the scene … but that’s a radically different way to work on graphics than anything more than a couple years old.

gavyne.6847:

Something’s wrong if they have 400 employees and yet WvW & PvP are in such bad state. That’s 2 out of 3 game modes doing poorly with declining participation and population.

cough An accurate statement would be “… 400 employees and yet I think that WvW and PvP are in such a bad state.”

I mean, it’s perfectly legit that you think they are in trouble, but I’m pretty sure that anet have the actual, concrete numbers that tell them the real story, and are actively working to ensure it works to support the real number of players, increase engagement, etc.

(Of course, if you really think that, you could also apply for a job at anet, and use your ideas for how to fix the problem to sell yourself as a great hire to the company, in the interview…)

castlemanic.3198:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

I said it somewhere else recently, but … I’d love to see an MMO company that experimented with the policy: “this team needs to ship something new every two weeks”.

The goal being that, eg, new dynamic events, mini-boss events in the world, gradually grown quest chains, etc, ship on a routine basis, and the team become expert at getting things done fast. Bonus points if it included adding new creatures, textures, bones, etc, on a routine basis to just gradually expand further and further across the range of things that you run into in the world…

I don’t know if it would work out well, but it’d be an interesting experiment to be sure!

Living world season 1 did exactly that, tying it all up in a grand storyline that eventually culminated in the new designs used in season two and beyond.

Unless you’re talking about much smaller and less noteworthy (and less marketable) updates, in which case we don’t really live in a world where that type of thing is viable, since it’s the big stuff that draws in paying customers and is more likely to keep veterans as well. In a perfect world this would be fantastic, but in the real world, it isn’t viable.

I’m talking about testing the thesis that small updates adding variety on a constant basis, plus much rarer large updates, are sufficient to not just succeed, but excel, in the MMO market.

So, no, it’d be much more “add two or three new dynamic events across Tyria every week or two”, or “add a new type of monster in the open world”, or whatever … plus the LS3 paced larger scale updates.

Like I say, it’s an idea that I think would be interesting to test … but I can’t say it’d be a success. I think it might, but IDK, could be a huge flop because people would regard that small but constantly growing world as pointless compared to rare, large updates.

Gomes.5643:

castlemanic.3198:

DarcShriek.5829:

So let me get this straight, you guys want ANet to make GW2 more like a single player game?

I don’t think that’s a fair assessment of the requests. I think the requests are for more open world experiences within GW2.

Exactly. Its just about the world design. GW2 is an Multiplayer game and should stay one, but that does not mean that nice features of singleplayer titles cannot be adapted into a multiplayer game.

I said it somewhere else recently, but … I’d love to see an MMO company that experimented with the policy: “this team needs to ship something new every two weeks”.

The goal being that, eg, new dynamic events, mini-boss events in the world, gradually grown quest chains, etc, ship on a routine basis, and the team become expert at getting things done fast. Bonus points if it included adding new creatures, textures, bones, etc, on a routine basis to just gradually expand further and further across the range of things that you run into in the world…

I don’t know if it would work out well, but it’d be an interesting experiment to be sure!

So, the one suggestion I didn’t see there was: gw2efficiency.com (and a bunch of other sites) can use the API to search your inventories to find things. I’ve used that to answer the question “is X somewhere on a character?!?” in the past.

You should file a support ticket, which is how you can work directly with anet support to figure out the issue.

Corbin Crow.6351:

Hi guys, hope someone still reads this cause I’m having issue with 7:11:3:191:101, it happens once every few hours, unless I try to do living story, then it disconnects me after few minutes. I installed PingPlotter, run it and did some reading on problem solving, but to complete layman it’s very ingotum per ignotum, just a lot of three- and two-letter abrevitions to absorb and learn what they mean. I will get back to it tomorrow, cause I have a lot of additional reading, and note making to do, but if anyone could give me any tips how to resolve this issue I would be really grateful.

I’d get in touch with anet support, and include that image. I’m not sure if it’s telia or ncsoft servers where the packets fall off, but either way it’s something anet are best equipped to deal with.

So, if Windows as a whole is crashing, GW2 is just triggering some driver or kernel bug that leads to the failure. It’s entirely possible that nothing else hits whatever obscure corner of the driver that causes it — like, if it was common, it’d be fixed by nvidia, y’know?

I’d suggest checking with GPU-Z that the GPU is running at PCIe 16x, which can cause odd problems, and also checking that the hardware is seated right, power connections are solidly clicked in, etc.

Nah, doesn’t matter at all. It’s basically a portable app. Just move the folder over, update any shortcuts, and you are good to go.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Demosthenex.7368:

Ever considered making a compressed bulk file available hourly for the most common endpoints?

Our stack makes it pretty difficult to do that; currently the APIs don’t have any sane way to trigger periodic events.

Don’t tell anyone, because it’s kinda an ugly hack, but this one time I implemented that sort of endpoint in a system with the same limitation. I just let lucky number one request after the hour do all the work of fetch-and-compress, and then saved that to a cache to serve for the rest of the hour.

Silent The Gray.3091:

Ashen.2907:

Another alternate view:

HoT maps – I dislike them. I know that I dislike them because I tried them. Playing on them may not even qualify as play because it is not particularly enjoyable for me.

Action – avoid HoT maps for the most part.

Its not reasonable to expect people who are paying to have fun to spend their “play” time not having fun. Customers telling you that they do not like aspects of your product is kind of important if you want to continue to sell to them in the future.

But pointing things out you don’t like and the reasons why you don’t like such a thing hurts people’s feelings, and it’s 2017, you aren’t allowed to approach things in such a logical manner anymore.

This isn’t actually true. If your personal experience is that every time you try and point out that you don’t like something, and why, people react as if you are insulting them, the problem is almost certainly with you.

(This thesis is well supported by the structure of your statement here, which assumes that everyone except you is clearly the root cause of your problem, and it is because nobody else is “logical” about things.)

Gayle has a great explanation of how to give good feedback on the forums, which includes concrete advice that will absolutely help you communicate without the unpleasant responses you have grown used to.

PS: you can also seek coaching in the subject, which may be useful. I certainly found that helped me with similar interprersonal communication issues.

Uh, just so you know: claiming a guild hall is one thing, upgrading it is another, and it’s a big undertaking that is absolutely not intended for solo players, or even small groups.

Unless you really, really have both a strong desire to throw away your time and (in-game) money for the sake of others, and a strong purpose for creating a new guild, I’d encourage you instead to join up with an existing guild.

I got it done by not trying to race through it, but instead, just playing the game, and jumping in to kill the legendary critters when they popped up. I think it was about a month ago I finally got the bear, and the achievement.

Was happy about it, but much happier than if I’d been frustrating myself trying to solo grind the thing to completion.

Oh, and you asked for tips: watch out for when the daily event zone is in an area that the critter you want is in. That brings piles of players, enough that they will spawn much more frequently than through normal zone populations.

Vicariuz.1605:

yeah they only had how many years to work on it?

It’s like you imagine that anet literally did nothing but spend the time working on the armor. Like, the raids don’t exist, caladbolg stuff doesn’t exist, living story doesn’t exist, etc, etc.

You, uh, don’t really believe that, do you?

Savvy.3258:

Now let’s get rid of the double cast by simply placing the excess gathers on the first cast and gg. Quality of Life > All.

That, or keep channeling until all possible strikes are exhausted. I think ten is enough for trees and rocks, and three for vegetables.

Ayrilana.1396:

If you reduce the number of player models, performance increases pretty significantly. I can run the game on max setting with an average 40 FPS at world bosses with the model limit at medium.

This is because, while GW2 uses three or four cores well, there is a single thread that manages model animation and location, and that turns out to be the place that you hit a wall with first when you have eliminated every other slowdown in the game.

Also notable, changing that is one of the single hardest problems in programming, it has the highest possible risk of introducing bugs, and the nature of the problem means is extremely difficult to test for problems.

Finally, that thread is not limited by any graphics layer locking, meaning that even if you bump to a newer version of DirectX for fun, it wouldn’t change anything meaningful.

All that said … I wish that anet would do this, in the sense of literally just compile the exact same code with DirectX 11. It would make no performance difference at all, but it would get the kittens asking for it because of magical thinking to shush, and that’s getting to be a more and more pleasant idea every week.

NotASmurf.1725:

The whiteknights on this forum are unbeliveable. I swear if Anet had 1k employees people’d still say “it’s a small company” and would claim at least 980 are artists/management/janitors which means we should be glad that this poor small company has enough resources to at least keep the gem store going.

400 is probably more than WoW has. At the time of GW1 Anet had ~60-80 employees total yet were capable of dishing out 3 campaigns and 1 expansion in 3.5 years with regular balance patches inbetween. Granted it was a somewhat smaller in scope (no gliding, masteries, achievements, etc although there more content to play), but still. Stop making excuses for them.

Blizzard had 4,700 employees back in 2012, and were actively hiring. That’s not exclusively on WoW, but they have a grand total of five games, so … math math math.

In any case, we are not trying to “white knight” anet here, we are trying to inform you of the realities of business, especially around software development. Your choice to disregard that is fine, but don’t mistake “we disagree with you” for “we are doing this out of ignorance”.

Elsewhere they devs asked for an in-game `/bug` report mentioning `nvidia 1080 shadow` in the text so they could easily find them. That includes technical details that might help debug this.

Ooooh, so … sad fact: your image shows 95 percent packet loss at that one node, but the next one goes back to the “standard” level, which means it’s just one machine not responding. (That’s pretty common on big routers.)

See how your packet loss percent is five to seven percent at every single hop there? That first one is between your computer and your router, the second one is router to ISP. If you have that much packet loss there, it’s your computer and/or network and/or router causing you pain!

Vodlich.7854:

You are pointing out the problem, I told them but their solution was something with my software. They just have no solution. There are also a lot of complain on the french forum. They sould know there is a problem.

So … right now, in the absence of any of that proof, I’m assuming you are just wrong about this, and it is something with “[your] software” and/or connection, since that is the most likely case.

(So far, it is 50 percent “my isp”, 40 percent “a third party transit provider”, and 10 percent “anet” in my stats for what actually fixes the problems. Those odds, like my expectation, don’t really support your assertion in the absence of proof.)

AngelArchangel.2106:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

PS: when I say there is no reasonable way, what I mean is that it is not technically impossible for anet to determine what the code is doing by, eg, reverse engineering it, or capturing video of your screen, or whatever.

I’ll expand on that with info I know
If one day Anet decided to go on a witch-hunt for the non-ToS compliant “DPS meters” out there, they’d be able to figure out who’s running the proper ones and who’s not.

As far as I know, through interactions with the developer of Arcdps, Anet developers can pull information about the .dll files since each of these carry the ‘build info’ within it. The developers can match that info with the ones in each of the developer’s website and find out whether you’re in compliance or not.

Nit: calling it a “witch-hunt” is pretty opinionated, and I’ll say this: regardless of if you agree with their position or not, anet set the terms for playing their game, and it wouldn’t be an unfair persecution of anyone to enforce those.

Anyway, it is possible that anet could pull build information from the DLL, identify it, etc. That hopefully means they will do that, compare behaviour, and so on.

Unfortunately, in some cases — notably, not arcdps, since deltaconnected is being really solid about this stuff — there is only a configuration difference between “good” and “bad” behaviour in the tool, or it includes the non-compliant features by default.

That means that it is not that simple in practice … and even if it is that simple, that only lasts until someone publishes “how to hex-edit the build info to look compliant” somewhere on the web … at which point the whole game is blown, until you start looking at secure hashing over the content of the file, and that whole arms race … which costs anet more and more.

eg: if this becomes an arms race, anet juts blanket ban this stuff, because it’s a losing game.

I completely understand that hesitation. At the end of the day, anet support are equipped to help you out, but … don’t forget to point them here.

uh, silly question, but … it’s not that something is saturating your outbound (or inbound) connection, or close to it, and so when combat starts (and, presumably, as a result we see an uptick in traffic to the server compared to less busy running around), it just starts to lag?

Vodlich.7854:

I have the same problem it happens a lot, during missions or when a map is loading. I already tried to contact them they have no solutions for that. They replied “remove some software in the background” whereas I know it is from their servers. I hope for a fix soon.

If you know it is their servers, why didn’t you supply that information to the support team with the ticket?

Yah, WoW tracks this is the range of 150 to 300MB of data for a “night” of raiding, which is around three hours of concentrated play for 20 people, uncompressed, for some comparison. It does compress well, though.

Sigmoid.7082:

Auto attack is fine as it is aside from the final attack. That needs to be 3/4s cast time since it is currently a dps loss to complete the chain. Bad design on Anet’s part.

Never understood the part in bold. Someone explain.

The basic math, ignoring aftercasts…

Dusk Strike: 402 + 1.0 * power in .75 seconds
Fading Twilight: 484 + 1.2 * power in .75 seconds
Chilling Scythe: 503 + 1.4 * power in 1.0 seconds (plus chill, which we ignore)

That makes for 886 + 2.2 power in 1.5 seconds for the two-attack sequence, and 1389 + 3.6 power in 2.5 seconds for the three-attack sequence.

Normalize those to per-second values and you get: 577.3 + 1.47 power, and 555.6 + 1.44 power per second.

Aftercast doesn’t really move it that much, honestly, but … do you now see why it is considered a DPS loss, if you ignore chill? (If you don’t, and especially if you factor in three bleed stacks and an explosion every 8 seconds, it’s a different thing, but for pure power, that’s the size of it.)

So, unless the utility of chill attracts you, you get a DPS increase at 3k power of 4987.3 – 4875.6, or 111.7 by using only the first two swings of the auto-attack chain.

Obviously, in the real world where power is often less than 3k, it’s lower, and once you add 25 vulnerability and might it’s higher, and if you factor in crits it becomes even more complex, but that also means the difference is higher.

That’s about a 2.2 percent DPS increase, give or take, if you ignore the rest of the universe.

PS: the simple mechanical fix would be to increase the hitting power of the last swing to a power multiplier of 1.41, which makes it an even more marginal increase to complete the last swing (or 1.401, which is equal within 1 point of damage per second at 3k).

For a condition build, you might investigate Trailblazer’s gear, which has the two defensive stats, plus condition damage and duration. It’s about as tanky as you can get for condition oriented damage.

Try the “looking for group” forums here, or the reddit gw2 guild recruiting forum, and find a guild that do “raid training”. They will have people who can absolutely help you, and the practice getting folks up to speed.

Even if you don’t have the gear, etc, yet they will likely be able to help you figure out how to get to it.

I’d check for two things: one, corrupted file on the desktop. Easy path, since the laptop works, is just to copy over gw2.dat from the laptop to the desktop.

Second, check your GPU is seated right, and working as expected. Grab GPU-Z and verify it sees a PCIe 16x link, make sure it’s fans are working, etc.

If you have the mastery, the pact supply network people sell karma to map reward converters, which you can purchase, then spend per the map reward profit tool in the wiki to obtain quick bursts of relatively valuable materials.

Doing the map event completions daily in those has the noted reward, which is 20+ gold for capping out the rewards daily, not counting anything you get in drops and sell.

My secret, though, is just … do the daily things, do whatever I feel like, and sell the results. Even just gathering T6 metal and wood, then selling it raw, has a pretty good rate of return, and the ability to do “whatever” is great.

I normally include the LS3 BitterFrost chests — one or two runs through — in my routine, because they are at least kinda interesting, relatively fast, and reward well in terms of salvaged materials.

SilverWastes and HoT meta participation are still pretty good options, and enjoyable as long as you don’t try to grind them to death. They are pretty balanced in terms of rewards, so it’s fine to mix it up.

Enjoy. I think it’s probably best to try and save for the “big bang” of all the episodes at the discount, than buy them one by one, but either option should be fine.

FWIW, the wiki is accurate for things like this. Also, to reassure you, it’s not possible to “downgrade” an ascended weapon.

However, do watch out for one thing: if you change the stats, any sigils in the weapon will vanish in the process. So, expect to repurchase them afterwards.

Donari.5237:

Arden.7480:

Weli.4568:

So Lazarus not being the real Laz confirmed?

Nothing like this has been said, I still believe Lazarus has a good intentions.

Well, there are two lines in the trailer. “Lookie here, a piece ‘a that set of things needed to reboot Lazzy’s life, without it we don’t got no real Laz” (heavily paraphrased ) and “Mursaat slash not-Mursaat on the way!”

Those seem to point to it not being the original Lazarus.

Well, at least not being the full original lazarus without something else being a problem. Could me “mostly him but with something added…”

Healix.5819:

Randulf.7614:

Looks like it’s now on sale

It’s not a sale. They permanently dropped the price. The funny thing is, it’s been hovering around $30 for over a year now at official 3rd party retailers; DLGamer.us for example.

It seems odd to drop the price now, considering the next expansion will likely be revealed within the next 3 months. They offered 5 months of refunds when HoT was first available for pre-purchase. Either the next expansion is over a year out, they’re no longer going through with their 1 box model, or maybe the pricing rumor was true.

Alternate theory: in the last earnings call, conversions from free to paid players were lower than expected. This could be an experiment to determine if a slightly lower price point means more purchases, meaning closer to the expected income from conversions.

I’m not sure if anet will be able to read that or not: for legal reasons, they are pretty limited about where they can view suggestions, and consider them, simply because they otherwise risk someone asserting their idea was used without payment, with all the lawyer fun that follows. (and that doesn’t require it actually happening, just someone being willing to assert it hard enough.)

The forums are an exception because we sign away the rights to our ideas when we post them here, and I don’t know if posting the link from the forums is enough cover for anet staff.

If it was me, I’d make a group of posts about the different areas that covers, and do it that way. You get 5,000 characters per post, so you could also just post it as the thread, and the first three responses….

Killdozer.5731:

Nikal.4921:

I have to think #FakeScarcity works against sales as much as it works for them. I have moved on from wanting and waiting for an item to re-appear in the store way more than I have wanting, waiting, & buying. That is substantial lost sales from me.

Again they wouldn’t continue doing this if it was not more profitable. Do you really think they are doing this to be obtuse, lose money, and anger players?

If they don’t believe that it is the best way to achieve some goal — possibly “maximum profit”, but it could also be “enhance the sense of ‘only I have’ for buyers”, or something else.

Just look at the “legendary means nothing now everyone can get one” folks, and the “I want raid-only bling so I can be known to be an awesome raider” folks, and recognise: some people really, really feel something is special if, and only if, they can see other people who can’t get it.

I’d rather like this, but in my head it sits next to “focus on bringing out new dynamic events on an existing map every two weeks” as an approach to constant growth, as “too expensive both computationally and design-wise.”

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ithilwen.1529:

I find myself spending more time in GW1 than in GW2 of late.

This evening/morning I finished Nightfall for the first time. I sat in awe and watched the entire credits roll by as a tribute.

One thing that really stood out is how much turnover there has been. I think that the current GW2 staff could benefit a lot by playing through GW1. There is much to learn there.

Could you be specific? There are certainly things that I prefer in GW1, but just as certainly tons of things that GW2 does better and some that are just different.

Yeah, the key thing here is the concrete detail. I mean, taking the stupidest possible approach to your statement, “GW2 would benefit from removing jumping? I don’t think so.”

So, be concrete: explain what part of GW1 feels better to you, and why, and how you think it can fit into the GW2 universe in a way that improves it.

Gayle recently posted a longer version of this statement, too, if you want a red painted version of it.

Sniggy.6078:

I just want credit for the mission I’ve already completed twice, is that really so much to ask?

You would need to put in a support ticket for that to happen. Forum posts are read, and occasionally responded to, by anet, but to get anything changed you need a ticket.

That sounds mostly like network problems to me. https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a pretty good guide to tracking those down; I’d suggest trying that first, and seeing if the rest of the problems persist when network communication isn’t being a pain?

https://www.pingplotter.com/fix-your-network is a good guide to tracking down network issues, and it can sometimes find issues (like intermittent lag) that simpler tools can’t. (Alternately, mtr does the same thing, and is FOSS.)

What you describe sounds like outbound traffic to the “world” or “map” server is being held up, but inbound traffic from it (eg: monster hits you) is working, and connection to the chat service (separate system) is working.

It’s not technically impossible that graphics drivers have something to do with this, and it’s definitely worth trying turning off NVIDIA ShadowPlay if you have it enabled, to see if that helps … but other than shadowplay it’s pretty unlikely compared to network issues.

To help narrow it down, answer this: does the game client notice your key presses?

That is, do you get the flashing “i’m casting” indicator on the ability you tried to use, but it never activates or goes on cooldown?

Cinnamon Toast King.3062:

So if some how it was limited to only your party everything would be good? Which is till against TOS even though they are in a party that information is known?

Again thank you guys for the amazing responses and I think this will be the last question.

The reason (as I understand it, and keep in mind I’m talking for someone else here) is that this information isn’t normally available. Like, damage you do: available. Amount of health of target: not available.

That’s the difference that caused that one little feature to be pulled. Same deal as “exact unit distance to target”, which got pulled ages back for the same sort of reason.

(…and, in part, I think target health was probably in a grey “probably ok” bucket, until it turned out that some meters were really pushing boundaries, and things got a little more black and white in response. but that’s just speculation on my part.)

Anyway, the other thing is that arcdps now only shows people in a group with you, because that was identified by the anet team as a high enough degree of “consent” to being measured. There are lots of valid arguments on either side of that, but that’s what WoW does, and that’s a pretty solid standard to shoot for, given their position in the market.

At the end of the day, though, even the most concrete thing here is basically anet trying an experiment where they relax the rules a bit, and see how things go right and wrong, and try to work together with the community to do something that folks want, but they can’t build internally.

So … don’t take any of this as concrete or forever. If things don’t work out, DPS meters might go back to being banned, or whatever, because the experiment failed. It’s just … try not to abuse things, try to play with the spirit of the permission — that is, only showing your (groups) DPS and history of DPS — and you should be ok.

MyPuppy.8970:

Could we define what junk is, so we could sell it along other junks? Like minor/major runes or blue/green items for those who dont bother salvaging. Some people don’t craft either and maybe just want to sell all upgrade/crafting components out of their inventory.

Forgive me, but almost all of those are worth more on the trading post than sold to the vendor; it’s probably not the most useful strategy for dealing with the situation.