Guild Wars 2

Nope, just the one account, one name.

I’m probably not the only person who makes that specific comparison in this sort of thread though. It’s the tired old answer to a tired old question.

Yseron.8613:

A project ? What project ? It’s just a min igame i make for the GW2 community that will allow me to give gold coins to the winners. The game will go to the trash bin or to whoever want it after that.

I’m sorry to break it to you, but the “minigame you make for the gw2 community” is exactly what I’m talking about.

I know that copyright and trademark law is awful. I know it gets in the way of doing cool stuff. I think it should be wildly different. I think your idea should be legal to make.

What I want, and like, isn’t the issue, though. It’s a question of the law as it stands, and the law as it stands says: you need to be given specific permission by anet to use their 3D models, and they have not granted that permission.

…and that permission is a “talk to the lawyers” sort of permission, because they need to make sure they don’t accidentally, for example, make it possible for another company to use those same models in building an MMO of their own, and all sorts of things like that.

I’m sorry. I know it sucks that your cool idea is stuck behind this wall of annoying legal kitten. That doesn’t change the fact that, here today, it is.

Daddicus.6128:

Now all I need to do is get my other 14 characters over there (the device is soulbound).

Yeah, I recently went through and did it on an additional character. It’s really annoying that you have to do it that way. At least it’s relatively fast.

Pro tip, since I was confused for a bit: go to each destination with the stage 1 stabilizer, then go through it one more time to break it. Not just visit all the destinations. I found this out after a long time wondering which one I had missed, deciding on one as “the most likely”, and breaking it when I screwed up and jumped to the pond.

Yseron.8613:

But then again, how do i get their attention on this matter ? Should i conclude everything i sok for the moment ?

You should approach their corporate office, like they were a company. The forums and so forth are for player support, but you want to talk about licensing their IP to use in a third party product — in a way they have not already cleared.

That’s a “talk to their lawyers” sort of thing, though your first step is to convince the anet staff that it’s worth spending the money and time doing that talking to support your project.

Finally, under the law, you are absolutely NOT able to “conclude everything is ok”, but rather, “without permission, you may not do this.” Worse, the way the law is structured there is a real chance that anet will be obliged to send you a cease-and-desist letter to protect their future rights, even if they don’t really care about your project.

nsochoa.6589:

So its not a game problem its a client problem? I tried following directions but it didnt work. I think I’m gonna wait it out to see if it works later

A client crash is pretty much guaranteed to be some sort of client issue, yes.

I’d also suggest that you disable any intrusive software (eg: reshade, memory reading DPS meters) that you have attached to gw2, and see if it can be reproduced also.

Anet absolutely could write the relevant code to detect this and adapt, but I do wonder: do you have a specific output device selected, or “Default Device”?

I ask, because my system correctly switches between headphones and speakers in everything expect Blade and Soul — and B&S is the only one where I’m not using “Default Device” as an output. (Because it doesn’t show up.)

Anyway, seems worth checking?

Are you using something that injects code into the game client, such as reshade, gemfx, or a DPS meter such as arcdps, bgdm, etc?

If so, remove that, and see if the problem reoccurs. The balance patch definitely required changes to the memory reading components in DPS meters, in order to adapt to new internals in the game client.

I’d suggest you check in the options if the flag for “lock target reticle at max range” is on, or off. It’s definitely in the “is it plugged in” category of questions, but maybe it got toggled somehow?

PS: there is an “email address for reporting exploits”: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Reporting

demitel.1340:

These lag spikes are general issue, not just one or two people.

They are hitting some-but-not-all players. Personally, other than a couple of hours of pain one evening, I’ve had absolutely no problem.

So, yeah, it’s not “one or two” people, but it’s also not “everyone”, which is what most contributes to the belief that it’s in the network outside of anet/ncsoft’s directly controlled network.

Also, note that this is a web thing: you might need to allow “coherentui_host.exe” to access the Internet, if you have a firewall thingy maybe getting in the way.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

^Ha! Much less the thousands of hours many of us play. I’m too tired to do the math, but I’m sure it’s a penny or two, or less, for my entertainment/hour.

I’m too afraid to reveal the real cost per hour based on my /age, I’ll confess.

JordanJD.3209:

Nightlark.4029:

Hey Jordan, here’s a proof of concept for something like that you might find interesting that creates a websocket event api that exposes mumble link data (could be easily extended to expose chat/combat data if the right hooks were added): https://github.com/nightlark/gw2ws

I will look into this, is any part of this process against anet TOS?

It shouldn’t be: the ToS says you can’t do things that are not exported, but the mumble data is. There is nothing about how you process that data once you have read it.

It’s also literally the model used in the GW2navi tool, which lets the gw2route.com website have GPS features, etc. (They use a local browser with some custom functions instead of websockets, but it’s basically the same deal.)

They have been cited as “cool” by anet many times. So, yeah, exporting this data to a web thingy, that’s cool.

AzureWolf.9150:

Sephas.8793:

Knight In Shining Armor.1708:

I completely agree with you. We have to carry multiple instances of these items on each toon we bring along. Clogs up space and is getting repetitive.

um, you can just throw them away…

Although you can just throw them away, I know many players (myself included) who don’t like to throw away collection items until the collection is completed. Perhaps a separate wallet or bag that only holds items like this so regular bag and bank slots are cluttered?

The achievement tracks which ones you have found, or not found, and shows tooltips. Other than being able to drag them around to different slots, that sounds like what you want to me?

Stevieboy.4192:

The only time I have noticed a populated DS map is when the daily is there.
A lot of the masteries in DS are gated behind map progression.
I believe an achievement relies on meta completion too.
In fact more than one…

I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve certainly found that US EST and PST “peak” evening times, and weekend afternoons, are pretty reliable for tracking down an active map. That’d be ~ 6PM EST through to ~ midnight PST during the week.

Despond.2174:

I was going to buy it when I saw it was 50% off, I was a bit too late since I was ordering a new PC. I am a bit hesitant now but they say it happens a lot during the year and the next sale should be April. So I am just getting all other slots to 80 and if by April I am still having fun I will definitely buy it during the 50% sale.

To be honest not having gliding and the elite specializations is a little frustrating, I might cave in before April who knows, but that’s pretty expensive to pay if you just want those 2 aspects. I kind of want all classes 80 but then I would have to pay quite a bit for 4 more slots, then you slowly start to see all the $$$ starting to add up fast.

Well, you also get the HoT story, which I personally enjoyed, and masteries, which also include some of the best quality of life features in the game, IMO. (Auto-loot FTW.)

FWIW, a good way to think about the price of an MMO is “dollars per hour of fun”, which is a very useful metric. Paying $80 for a game is a steep price, but if you play for 240 hours then you payed 33 cents per hour for that fun.

Suddenly an MMO looks like good value compared to a $20 game that you play for ten or twenty hours, and are done with…

AliamRationem.5172:

Sartharina.3542:

The only time I’ve had a problem with the Exit Instance in H&M is when I group up with someone else and don’t have the mission active in my journal.

That could be it. As the character I help out with has already completed the story, I wouldn’t have the mission active in my story journal. In any event, it sure is annoying! I will try activating the mission next time and see if it stops doing that. But still, it sure is an annoying “feature”.

…and this may actually be the information anet require to solve the problem! Figuring out how to reproduce it is definitely the hardest part of fixing many of these issues, especially because I, like most people, and probably like the devs, would not have guessed at that combination to trigger it!

IndigoSundown.5419:

Amadan.9451:

guys, does any number of spirit shards really change your game experience? you can get spirits shards from tome of knowledge, from dailies, from so many surces that the original OP just sound like an angry rant for something very stupid (xp numbers distract me cause i don’t raid and raid is evil).
if anything i find stupid to not even take a look at raid content to try to unlock the mastery track which honestly is not gating anything that you can get more or easily elsewhere

It’s not about the shards. It doesn’t have to be shards, it could be anything. It’s about the wasted XP that the game throws at players in job lots. XP is an everyman currency, but only completionists get anything out of it. The system is borked.

O_o I have to say, you would hate playing pretty much any other MMO out there in the world.

In every single one of those, at max level, all that XP … vanishes. Like, literally nothing. No spirit shard equivalent, just … gone. Kill a mob, that XP was wasted.

If GW2 only hid the “you earned 12 XP” notifications, it would be identical to everywhere else in your situation. Which … wouldn’t have been the worst decision they could have mode.

Just sayin’

Daddicus.6128:

And, what does a rift look like?

http://dulfy.net/2016/10/04/gw2-october-4-current-events-guide/ — includes a picture of a rift, as well as general guidance to getting it done. FWIW, dulfy is both good and fast when it comes to guides for pretty much all the current events in the game.

I can only assume someone pays them the big bucks for doing this.

Gryphon.2875:

Obfuscate.6430:

• remove Tome of Knowledge from Black Lion Chest loot table
• allow Tome of Knowledge to be a currency for useful consumables or items for people who no longer need to level characters.

/signed.

Tome of Knowledge is consumable for a spirit shard. Spirit Shards are convertable to gold, per: https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

Looks like right now, following the most expensive possible path would net you 15s per shard, which is “instant buy all materials required, instant sell the result”.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Since what I know about computers/internet can fit in a thimble with room to spare I’ll ask a couple of dumb questions.

Isn’t ping the route the data is taking from the game <—> computer and spikes are a holdup on that route? If it’s the internet that causing ping, what can ANet do to fix it? (Obviously the OP thinks it’s ANet’s fault since he made the post to tell ANet that the game has lost a player).

Yes, that’s correct: the “ping” is the time the packet takes to make it from your computer, through a bunch of different computers, and finally to the anet server, then all the way back again. (Almost always taking the same path back as it did on the way to the other end.)

Your hardware and your ISP are the first three to six machines that touch that data, and the last … one or more … are anet machines. (technically, I think, a bunch are ncsoft, since the anet servers are in an ncsoft data center, which is possibly just a leased part of a data center owned by someone else…)

Most of the issues reported recently have been with machines owned by level3 in the US, which is a “transit provider”, which you could think of as an analog of “owns a private highway” that your packets use between your isp and the ncsoft/anet owned parts, and which … has some, possibly indirect, relationship with anet.

eg: it is possible that ncsoft pay someone for space in a data center, and the data center pay someone for access to “the internet”, which could by level3, or could be someone who pays level3 to carry their traffic, and so … anet are maybe two or three steps removed from the problem spot.

which means they complain to the support people at ncsoft who talk to the data center who talk to their provider who maybe yell at level3, who … well, you get the idea.

Remember all: if you have a graphical hack (eg: reshade, gemfx, etc) or a DPS meter (eg: arcdps, bgdm, gwhelper) installed, make sure you remove them and reproduce the crash without them present.

Etiope.5923:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Another common issue people highlight for this is “do you have a PCIe 1x connection live on the GPU”, caused by misseating in the slot, or insufficient power to the GPU. Check with gpu-z and ensure it is at 16x

That’s Exactly what happen! Thank YOU Man! You are the best!

Thank the other contributors here who I learned that specific thing from. I can’t take any credit for literally repeating what they said.

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

However, is it really a given that players will calculate optimal builds? Isn’t GW2 flexible enough with its skills to avoid this? For example: dmg of a certain skill ramps up so gradually, that one or two points of power don’t make that much of a difference, right?

Experience from WoW says: people will still do it, anyway, despite it not being of any real world value. Alternately, you could do what they did with the random “third tier” attributes, which is devalue them to the point they are ignored, since they are otherwise just another bit of grist for the mill.

(Plus … once you have the ability to manipulate anything, there will be a theoretically optimal value calculable, at which point it becomes the “necessary” thing. See also the berserker/viper meta in PvE, and the “X is dead in raids” when they can be cleared with pretty much any composition of competent players…)

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

Maybe if somehow everything related to skills would increase gradually and proportionally with these custom stats this can be avoided? It would make for an incredibly difficult update though…

Neither of these are bad ideas. They are so good, in fact, one of the best funded and most dedicated MMO companies in the world tried them!

Sadly, that tells us that they don’t result in the gameplay you would hope, in non-trivial part because this is really a people problem — in the sense that it doesn’t matter if the difference is mathematically invisible because it is smaller than the margin of error due to human reaction time variance, people will still believe it matters.

…and the sad truth is, you can’t solve people problems with technology.

HardRider.2980:

Trouble will this game is enemy attention is based on toughness […]

…in raids. Elsewhere, including fractals, it varies a bunch.

Khisanth.2948:

AliamRationem.5172:

Speaking of dialogue boxes. Did you know you forgot to put one on the updrafts so that players end up scrambling through, jumping into, and ultimately just dying instead of being able to take to the air to avoid the auto-death mechanics of the fight? If like every other interact-able object in the game they popped up the box prompting you to push your interact keybind, a lot of frustration could have been avoided.

Hmm I do remember seeing those but I feel like they messed up the timing. Instead of having the spouts spawn as soon as the phase starts they don’t spawn until after the speaking is done and you have about 2 seconds to look around for the spouts and run into one. That is cutting things a bit too close. There is one that always spawns near the NPCs but that doesn’t feel like a great justification for that timing.

Having just completed this, and gosh was that just some fun, I was never more than two dodge rolls away from an updraft, thank goodness. You are able to avoid the ground effect using those, so perhaps save your dodges?

solfizz.5730:

Is HoT areas easier to solo now (I am much more solo than group-oriented)?

No, and the newer living story 3 content is a step up again in terms of “player skill” requirements, so if HoT was frustratingly hard, LS3 will likely be worse for you.

There have been few changes to things like hero points that made them easier to solo or anything like that. (Player skill improvements may have made some possible to solo that were not before, but that isn’t going to help you out any.)

solfizz.5730:

Are graphics a bit more optimized now?

Nope. I mean, I’m assuming you mean “will I get more FPS on the same hardware”, which isn’t so much “graphics” as “game client”, including all the CPU intensive simulation parts and all that jazz, but the net effect is: no, no more FPS on the same hardware, and it still bottlenecks on single core CPU performance.

solfizz.5730:

Have there been more skills added (I thought the skillsets were really limited)? Etc..

The design has absolutely not changed, so you still have roughly the same number of skills, and about the same amount of flexibility in allocating them.

This is also extremely unlikely to ever change, so either look for GW3, if it happens, or accept the current model is what you will get.

So, long story short, don’t bother, you won’t like it any more than you did before.

EnemyInEffigy.1247:

This is my first post and I am curious what you guys think. Are there flaws in my proposal? Does it have potential?

WoW tried this with reforging of gear to move stats around. Ultimately, it turns out that even with a non-trivial penalty to stat amount for doing so, this becomes a game of:

• gear drops

• put in bags

• visit a spreadsheet or website to calculate optimal stat allocations for all gear

• reforge all gear to match

The optimal values for stat allocation were pretty much uniformly copied from websites, where they were recorded based on simulation and real world testing, in the same way that the current GW2 meta builds and so forth are.

So, the end result was that reforging was what could best be described as a “don’t suck” button that you pushed between “get gear” and “equip gear”. It added no complexity, no build diversity, no real choice between gearing, just a push-button-get-stats metagame in between the two.

If you want to know about the details and experiments they undertook, you can probably find the history over at the mmo-champions forums.

rukia.5497:

what is your laptop?, have you checked if you can put in a M.2 SSD?,
my laptop has a M.2 SSD slot, so i have the game and OS on an SSD and the 1tb HDD for everything else

Even running off a 5400RPM hard disk busy with other things makes three minute load times … less likely. That’s slow no matter what it’s loading from.

Seriously, though, I’m also open to being asked nicely to open rifts for people in game.

So, it actually turns out that it is technically challenging for them to combine salvage kits, etc, since they are “one item, many charges”, and there isn’t good support in the existing engine to merge those sort of things. Which sucks.

felincyriac.5981:

I was looking more into the hero points stuff in the HoT map, whilst I can solo some of the boss ones there are a couple in each map that are just impossible to solo and with the lack of players you can’t really do much…

Have you tried asking other players, either in your guild, in these forums, or via reddit? All of those sources are effective and useful.

You can also try asking after the completion of a meta cycle in the maps, when there are usually a bunch of players around, or checking LFG at various (typically, local peak) times, since groups completing this content are regular.

You could also advertise in LFG for others to do them with you, and see if you get any takers. You are unlikely to be the only person ever wanting to complete these maps.

ThomasC.1056:

As OriOri said, mere CD fixes or adding 2% here and there don’t seem to justify a 3-4 months delay. This is more tweak than balance, to me.

You are assuming that a few percent difference isn’t enough to change balance; it practice, that can actually make a significant difference to performance over a fight.

This is equally visible over in WoW, where balance changes are of a similar order, and where the results are much better measured, studied, and aggregated.

ThomasC.1056:

There’re lots of underused skills, traits and runes that’d need a rework, ie change the effects, big changes in numbers etc. so that they’d shine like the most used ones. This kind of patch justifies a once or twice a year frequency. Not number tweaks.

Part of the issue there is also that you suppose that getting skill balance right is easy, so a redesigned skill, trait, or rune would slot right in to be equally strong with everything else already in balance.

I’m pretty sure the gap there is obvious, but: if it were really that easy, we wouldn’t need balance patches, we would already have balance. They would simply have designed those traits, skills, and runes, in that balance in the first place.

The need for balance changes is, itself, proof that you can’t “simply” redesign things and achieve balance.

What OriOri said: if you want to run around 24×7 in combat, play a class that doesn’t root while using abilities. Necromancer, for example, has no root in the scepter condition rotation. Ranger mostly doesn’t.

The trade-off for that amazing “boss stands still, you don’t have to move” DPS you see with elementalists topping the DPS rankings? In the real world, where the boss isn’t static, and you do have to move, your DPS drops way, way more than classes that perform equally well on the golem and in the real world — but “equally well” can be as low as 1/3 of ele DPS.

Which, coincidentally, is around the output of an average ele DPS in real world raiding and so forth.

Also, the “official” way to jump through them is to wander around the lake where they happen, since they will sometimes open without human interaction. Getting someone who already has a stabilizer to open it is much easier though. (Also, when the daily is events in one of the zones they spawn in, at least some people like me run about and open them, so just looking around might work.)

Daddicus.6128:

The rift events could be it.
And, it’s impossible to jump through something when the only way to create it is by having a device that you only get AFTER you’ve jumped through it.

Finally, if it was it, and it’s this easy to figure out, why doesn’t tech support know about it? The latest action they gave me was to rebuild my game from scratch.

Perhaps they assumed that you knew about the rift events, and wouldn’t report something that was working as designed? Alternately, perhaps they don’t know about them at all. Hard to say.

You would have to ask them about that. Incidentally, adding that to your ticket would be a useful way to help communicate back that they need to update processes to handle this…

Reminds me of maybe the sound of waypoints or something like that?

Last I checked, the metabattle page for that suggested the changes to make. If not, check the power PS build which definitely did. Mostly you drop a banner for a personal boost, and so does the other warrior.

The “must stay close to NPC” behaviour you describe is one of the two standard modes; Tybalt does the same thing in the whispers personal story. Also, they usually move at standard walking pace, which is now way, way below the standard movement rate of players, because speed boosting traits.

Also, I’m pretty sure that you don’t need to interact to catch the updrafts, just walk into them. Sadly, though, WALK is required, not jump, and that screws people up. It’s as designed though…

ArchonWing.9480:

The recipes come with MRM. Only one legitimate user per copy. Unauthorized use may result in lawsuits.

The asura don’t punish you for having unauthorized content in your brain using the law, my friend. They use a spoon.

It’s worth knowing that this recently changed, and prior to that recipes were character-bound even from sheets.

It’s not going to be pre-announced; anet as a studio are following a current policy of “we would rather show you what we built when it is done, rather than talk about what we might do tomorrow”

also, I understand this was kind of a side project for a dev, rather than daily work, so it’s likely a bit slower by way of that.

huh! wow. that’s definitely not right. it should do small damage over time! good catch testing that thoroughly. that’s the sort of detail the developers need to figure out and fix it.

Another common issue people highlight for this is “do you have a PCIe 1x connection live on the GPU”, caused by misseating in the slot, or insufficient power to the GPU. Check with gpu-z and ensure it is at 16x

ouch! sorry to hear it. I’m not aware of any other way to recover that, but there is a sticky for posting ignored tickets.

given it was two years back, I’d suggest give it three days (if you have not already) then post here and/or in that sticky.

Axl.8924:

Its just stupid i have to be babysat 24/7 in fact:its kittened.

Can I have your gold when you quit?

CptAurellian.9537:

Walhalla.5473:

Forcing diversity could also make some boss fights awkward.

That’s just a minor issue. But what if no one wants to play a certain class, which will probably happen rather often when there are 10 people and 9 classes?

You don’t raid, or you LFG for that class? That’s the logical implication of the requirement.

The Great Al.2546:

I strongly dislike the whole ‘special action’ key and I think the last thing this game needed was another reflex mechanic. Not to mention that the default key binding is in an incredibly awkward place.

The instances are getting way too long. This is just a personal preference I guess.

…but everyone always loves quicktime events, especially game reviewers! (seriously, though, I kind of agree, and kind of don’t. wish it used the same “interact” button as everything else though.

The instance length thing is definitely personal preference.

I’m not saying it’s magic … but it’s magic.

Gatvin.6510:

Why are some things outfits, while others are armor skins? Just wondering what the reasoning is.

Which team builds it, the team dedicated to producing “sold for money” items that fund ongoing game development, or the team producing all the rest of the content, pretty much.

Blindness is a “soft” CC, so it will do “damage over time” to the breakbar, rather than instantly reducing it. It ticks when condition damage ticks, once a second, as I understand it. For all the details, see the wiki on the subject