Guild Wars 2

Fizz.1072:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

From what you say, play reaper.

Hmm maybe but I keep hearing there bad or unwanted…I guess that’s the big reason why I’m hesitant

So… fun fact: there are the “meta” builds. Some folks love to fetishize them as the be-all and end-all of content. Assert you can’t possibly clear raids without being fully meta-of-the-minute. (Despite people clearing bosses with 4 of 10 slots with players, etc)

Necro got bumped down a bit because they had an “unintended consequences of game mechanics” DPS boost, which got stopped by ANet. (Possibly resulting in lower than intended DPS, but probably more accurately, what was intended by the team.)

So, right now the sort of players who can’t imagine that player skill makes any difference, and that only picking the “right” build matters — even when it is less than one percent difference in the real world, hi wow raiding — are all “OMG, NECRO IZ DED!!111!”

It might pose some issues for you in playing high end content — T4 fractals, raids — with random pugs, because they may be lead by a kitten player who believes in “meta or bust”.

It absolutely, positively will not stop you from completing any content in the game. Find a good guild, and you should be golden.

AliamRationem.5172:

Sister Saxifrage.7361:

Also, is “IP” In Progress, or a map ID, like as in IP address?

IP refers to a specific map ID, yes.

IP, as in, the IP address of the machine that is running this instance of the map. (Also, /ip in that.)

aiinseinn.5914:

just my 2ct: GET RID OF SERVERLINKING. it hurts..

What would you replace it with, then?

sephiroth.4217:

The Game Slayer.7632:

News flash: If you aren’t good enough to carry anymore, you are where you belong.

Exactly!

If you can’t carry 80% of the team, you are where you belong.

Or is this not sarcasm? I can’t tell anymore with these comments…

…wait, wait, just checking here:

If you are not good enough to carry 80 percent of your team vs 100 percent of the other team, you belong in bronze, right?

…or is it that if you are not good enough to carry 80 percent of your team vs the person carrying 80 percent of their team on the other side, you belong in bronze?

I’m just not quite clear which of those you were thinking of there, “The Game Slayer”.

Unless you meant that if you are not good enough to carry despite the ANet team having written code to always assign dead-weight to your team, and never the other team.

Yes, reporting people in-game works, and is the only way to achieve results. Posting in the forums does not.

It sounds like you expect instant action, which is never going to happen. Infractions super-rarely happen the instant of a report, but they do happen.

Undead Lives.7045:

While DC Games count as a loss pretty well everywhere except your rank, I don’t think this is good enough. We need to have dc games not count as a loss in the first 10-it’s simply not a proper representation of skill.

The only difference between placement games and non-placement games is the label they stuck on them, in an effort to make people not QQ about how their MMR wasn’t a true reflection of skill while it was extra uncertain right at the start.

Don’t worry, your placement makes literally no difference in the long term. If there were zero placement matches you would still have the same MMR in the long term as you get with these ten.

Buran.3796:

And that provides an interesting feature: currently PvE raids demands a relevant degree in team coordination, build selection and roles to fit if one want to success, because raids were designed with the current specializations in the background. But in the future is most likely that the power creep will trivialize both PvE raids and high level fractals, and for sure the current PvP meta will change and become obsolete.

Since the “meta” is largely built around players zooming in until noise between specs overtakes signal, it’s really not that much of a big ol’ thing to say that it will change.

OriOri.8724:

I would love it if they could find a way to implement dying on leg backpacks only. That way they only have to worry about a very small handful of backpacks (since I assume we will eventually get more leg backpacks, at least I hope we will). I don’t know if they can just make select backpacks dyeable without reworking the entire system though

They can’t. (Specifically, as a developer, I’m used to reading developer text for the underlying meaning, and what was said above was: huge rework to allow dying anything.)

It’d actually be more work to make some-but-not-all backs dyeable, because not only would you do all the work to make them all dyeable, you would then have to do extra work to make some non-dyeable again afterwards.

You can’t remove the screaming — how else would you know you stepped on a super-hot stone and burned your foot!?!???

Don’t destroy my immersion. (In lava, after this joke, I suspect.)

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

It’s almost inevitable that with a single file the size of gw2.db that bits of it get whacked. “Repairing” it periodically can be useful or, if you have the HD space, making a copy and renaming it (which accomplishes something similar). Although current versions of Windows aim to prevent fragmentation, the system doesn’t really work for gw2.db.

tl;dr

• Repair your game or
• Copy the gw2.db and rename it

Systems to avoid fragmentation work passably, but the longer the delay between writes, the harder it is for them to succeed. GW2 patches are weeks apart, being the most painful case for that.

As to corruption — even on cheap consumer drives, bit-flips are less than one per full read, on the 8TB drives, so it’s not the most common source of problems. That said, it’s also inexpensive to run the repair process, so y’all should def. try it.

(Defragment after repair, since it may cause deletes, writes, and rewrites to the file.)

Khisanth.2948:

I usually see that right after the game has loaded. After playing for a while it goes away although that is still only in some locations.

That exactly describes the file being cached in memory — slow to load the first time, but fast afterwards, until you hit something not yet cached which causes it to be slow.

anTastico.9084:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mist-Band-can-t-be-attuned/first#post6468656

Post in here too, get it bumped to page one.

The ANet team have acknowledged this is a known problem. You don’t need to keep yelling at them to make them aware, and it’s extremely unlikely that yelling at them constantly will make them work faster.

Also of note: running sweetfx injects additional code on both the CPU and GPU that modifies the rendering of the game. Since you describe the graphics freezing, I’d strongly suggest you remove that (not just no filter, but remove the hook, etc.) and see if this changes things.

Maybe this is a silly question, but is there a guide to what upgrades are good or bad to get somewhere?

Jeknar.6184:

Wait. You saying the most played map in the game is a problem?

They are — because they believe that WvW would have better battles (and smaller squads) if the borderlands were the only places to fight.

It’s … well, I don’t agree, but it’s a coherent theory.

I’m pretty sure that you should read each division as their part of a bell curve of ability scores: gold is the center, silver and platinum people within one standard deviation better or worse than average, etc.

ANet: couldn’t we see a nice shiny graph of this, though? That’d be amazing.

Martnor.1746:

I got dc’ed from a ranked match the other day. Reconnected as fast as I could. Even though I rejoined, that match still counted as desertion and I got about 12mins of timeout. Should that have happened? I thought that if you rejoined, you would not get a dishonor for that. And no, it does not happen to me often. Only my second dc in 2-3 years.

Eh, just too slow. It’s super-annoying, but if it’s the second time in a few years, it’s not a hugely common problem compared to the (spit) abuse this sort of thing can be used for.

I blame the people who cheat for ruining it for the rest of us.

Shaogin.2679:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Shaogin.2679:

So I decided that I won’t need to know the ratings of everyone in these decay recovery matches since I’m only looking at how decay affects volatility, or more so how your absence from the game does.

So, I played a few games tonight, had some good matches, and have now gone from 1378 to 1507 effective rating, not decayed rating. Gonna see how long I can ride this out, then I’ll see if it drops me back to lower Gold 1.

Decay won’t change it, but the absence will increase volatility. Since you can’t separate the two, as decay and absence use the same “time not played” trigger, you can’t distinguish the actual cause of the change.

Yeah, I’m not trying to distinguish the actual cause of volatility change. Evan already stated that a player’s absence causes their rating to be more volatile. I don’t really have any reason to do any testing on that outside of seeing how long that volatility lasts, how quickly it builds from a player’s absence, and if this feature can be used to a player’s advantage or exploited.

Oh! I’m completely sorry that I missed that reasoning. If I’d managed to read for content and understood that was what you were testing, I’d not have interjected at all.

Enjoy your science!

Gizmorage.6412:

Well the system is fairly simple you play against high ranked players and win, you win big. Still I don’t think placement matches should take your further than gold I. Getting higher on “placement” is ridiculous.
This was taken yesterday after doing placement matches on my alt (which I played extensively before, a year ago).
edit: I am just posting this as I find this utterly crazy that placement matches could put you into one of the last divisions, so to speak.

Being placed in the #1 position after exiting placement would make literally no long term difference, though. You would either play, and your MMR would quickly come to reflect your real skill, or you would not play, and your MMR would drop because of the decay thing they added for just that reason.

Djinn.9245:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Djinn.9245:

Waiting for someone from Anet to answer that it isn’t griefing and that all those people just happened to die and want to just lie there.

That is unlikely to happen, not least because ANet doesn’t discuss infractions in-game, or anything related to them.

If you didn’t actually report them for it, while in the game, nothing is gonna happen though.

They do discuss non-specific infractions (not about a particular player). There was a previous thread about people spawning interactibles (merchants, fun boxes, food trays) around things to get in the way. Gaile answered that thread.

Yup. Every MMO has a slot in their infraction list for “being really annoying, even if you found a loophole in every other rule”, for just this reason: people spend huge amounts of energy being creatively awful.

WoW had a while where people would pop huge mounts over the top of some festival things, and then they upgraded that to mounts with vendors on, making it really hard to get at them. They ended up temp-banning people doing it, and making it unmountable around the interaction point, to fix it — both a people solution, and a technical one.

Without in-game reports, it’s not gonna get fixed. With them, ANet will be aware of the issue, and will put it into the list along with all the other things that suck. It may not make it to the top — but the more it upsets people, the more reports, the more likely they are to look and find out how prevalent it is, and how to fix it.

Burtnik.5218:

I honestly have no idea why gw2 forums are censored in the first place.

Because the kittenkittens ruined them for you. You know the ones: the people who complain about how it’s censorship when you ask them not to make kitten “jokes” in guild chat, and start “no drama” guilds and that sort of thing.

They ruined it for everyone else.

I strongly suspect you are better trying to get the API team to add this (if it doesn’t already exist) so that third party websites can fill this niche.

It’s probably not something significant enough to extend the in-game UI for, because full completion of everything isn’t really a core goal the team seem to want to push players toward. (and, I think for most players, that is probably the right call, too.)

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Or, sometimes, it is neither of the above, as it affects large swatches of the population as before, and the Devs acknowledge and tinker with the engine.

It may just be that, yet again.

Sorry, I should have quoted, so it was clear my suggestions were directed to the OP. I have no speculation regarding what may be hitting your game.

I suspect that since Level3 and/or Telia are the final hop before ANet, they hope that ANet (or NCSoft) will lean on them and all. Either way, it’s kinda sorta a game of whispers three steps removed.

Razor.9872:

If you recall, before HoT, the majority of Ranger players were being ostracized from (meta) dungeon groups because we “didn’t bring sufficient party support that another profession could bring better.” So, A-net heard our pleas and gave us the Druid spec; we are now about the best supporting profession in the game.

Next on the shopping list is a solid dps role. I urge you be to patient, as it will likely be coming next expansion.

Solid power DPS role. condi ranger builds are doing well in both theory and practice.

Agent Mulder.4531:

I only have zerker’s ascended armor. I’d have to spent 800g+ to get a magi’s set just to beat the fractal? That’s pretty insane.

I really hope they buff normal ranger soon.

Well, you could also learn how to DPS more effectively, or experiment with moving your DPS build more gradually from full-zerk or full-viper toward one of the various WvW or PvP “meta” builds.

Those are much, much more robust than the glass cannon DPS builds, and might be worth it to see if you can’t, say, not die almost instantly.

Drake Bauer.6034:

I’m so gonna use it on a Levle 79 toon … Would be Epic !!

I did exactly that — because it let me experience the class and learn the game, then get geared instantly and for free.

Eventually turned out I chose the wrong class, but hey, whatevs.

From what you say, play reaper.

Yes, they work. No, the experience enrichment doesn’t work because you do not gain — as Inculpatus says — XP in WvW, you gain WXP (or World XP) instead.

Things like the karma enrichment, though, they work fine.

Ocosh.5843:

1. Harping on the quality of the comparison is obtuse; that’s not the relevant part. The point remains that player ability trumps theoretical optimal dps of a spec.

Thank you, that’s what I would have said if I had come in here earlier. I chose that at literally random, because a joking example was fine, I thought. Obviously not so much with the folks here.

Ultimately, yes, my point is that raiding involves doing the mechanics correctly and delivering effective DPS. It’s great that some spec or other you never played before delivers higher theoretical DPS, but…

Are you really gonna get the DPS golem rotation in a raid situation, while handling mechanics, boss movement, target switching, other players, etc?

Are you gonna have the ability to focus on both your skill use for DPS and the mechanics as effectively as someone who has more practice? What about those clutch heal-or-immune mistakes? How many times you gonna miss that emergency button when someone who knows a spec better will hit it, and wind up on the floor?

…and remember: you know how bad the average player is, right? Half of ’em are worse than that.

LehmD.4938:

but the mmr displayed was the same for both accounts so why are my alt accs match ups easier+ more rewarding

Easier? Human memory bias, or random luck. It could just have easily been perceived the other way around.

More rewarding (or punishing, if you lost instead)? Volatility is higher if you have not played on the account for a while, or if you are not hitting the predicted results (win or lose) frequently.

Volatility is what determines how far your MMR changes, win or lose vs the predicted result is what determines what direction it changes in.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/How-to-Give-Good-Feedback seems pretty relevant to this post.

Shaogin.2679:

So I decided that I won’t need to know the ratings of everyone in these decay recovery matches since I’m only looking at how decay affects volatility, or more so how your absence from the game does.

So, I played a few games tonight, had some good matches, and have now gone from 1378 to 1507 effective rating, not decayed rating. Gonna see how long I can ride this out, then I’ll see if it drops me back to lower Gold 1.

Decay won’t change it, but the absence will increase volatility. Since you can’t separate the two, as decay and absence use the same “time not played” trigger, you can’t distinguish the actual cause of the change.

Fun fact: if “ELO Hell” (or Gliko-2 hell) was a real thing … it’d help you out, because the other team have five slots the bad players could fill, while your team has four. (Assuming, of course, that you are not, yourself, the “bad player” under discussion.)

So, yah, if you down low, it’s not because the game conspires to keep you there, it’s because you can’t play better than that.

Extending what Deepcuts said: this is caused by a physical limitation of the keyboard. When you see a fancy gamer keyboard advertising “six key rollover” or whatever, that’s not just marketting fluff, it’s actually a design that doesn’t suffer that limitation.

Comes down from using minimal wiring to detect which key is hit.

The most likely causes for this are delays reading content from disk, or delays reading content from the network. The 5400RPM drive is a good candidate for this.

You might try defragmenting your drive — usually, that’s not much of a thing of relevance, but the biggest thing that a slower drive like that means is lower random read performance, because it takes longer to find stuff on disk.

If the new patch put some content scattered further away, that’s going to take longer to find, and that could contribute to a delay popping in the content if it is done “when it is ready”.

Defragmenting should put the content closer together which, while not perfect, could help reduce the amount of seeking required to load it all.

If the issue is network, other than making sure you don’t have long delays (eg: large downloads, torrents, etc) going on at the same time, there isn’t much you can do to instantly improve it.

Definitely possible. FWIW, it’s useful to use the in-game tool to report bugs like this, because it captures a bunch of extra info (eg: where you are, where you look, “time of day”, etc, that might change lighting.)

Azzara Nectum.1734:

Let’s take Druid and move it the recycle bin. And let’s introduce: Shapeshifter! Transform into a werewolf or something along that line… Werewolf would make some sense from my PoV.. You absorb nature energy and unleash it in it’s most deadly and feared form… Never gonna happen but I would prefer that over kitten Druid!

Well, that is kinda the thing that’s gonna happen in the next xpac — not so much that druid goes away, but that ranger is extremely unlikely to get a second support-focused elite, so … you should have something else to play.

Agent Mulder.4531:

It’s awful. I do high level fractals mostly, and even when I switch to sword/axe to raise my DPS, I can’t last long in melee range since we have no blocks/reflects/etc in the meta builds. Even with that increased DPS, we’re dead last out of every single major build in the game : https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/4v76gq/qt_updated_guides_and_dps_benchmarks_for_all/

Perhaps you should consider one of:

Run a condi ranger or power ranger core build, instead of druid. Dedicate three trait lines to DPS instead of two.

Use something similar to the meta build, but with a few more defensive options, so that you don’t die so much.

Using the druid more to increase overall team DPS instead of focusing on personal DPS, which isn’t negligible, but also isn’t why the buff-bot druid is included in the “meta”.

Focusing more on healing builds with “zero DPS” target.

Furajir.3815:

Oh snap, The Pineapple WArrior himself

Have you considered finding a guild that does fractals, and playing with people who are not random players, looking to be carried by other people, or otherwise kitten-headed?

Khyan.7039:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Roald.1260:

Herald isn’t that bad in terms of dps or cc. But it is lower than Temps and thiefs and scepter guards.

Lower theoretical DPS. Higher practical DPS than the person who just grabbed that Scepter Guard who they levelled to 80 last week with tomes, and know very little about to play, so wind up on the floor a lot.

Player skill >>>>>>>>>> class choice for most people. and if you were in the 4-person qtfy team clearing the raid, you wouldn’t be debating this here.

Guard has nothing difficult to learn, it’s a really bad example you did there.

I’m just gonna sit here and pretend that was the joke.

FWIW, uh, I have less that 20 WvW ranks, and I got one of those. It’s just RNG, friend.

Shaogin.2679:

Ok, so my rating has now decayed the full 700 points. When I get back home on Monday I’ll start playing ranked again, probably just one match per day so I can check everyone’s ratings as I recover my decay. This way, I can investigate how decay affects matches, if it does at all. Also interested to see how my absence has affected my rating volatility. I’ll have the results from the first of those matches up here Monday night. Looks like my decayed rating is in Bronze, so we’ll see how it all plays out.

You, uh, could also just believe the developers when they said that decay does not change the MMR used for matchmaking, just for “rewards”. So we already know that it will have no effect.

Your volatility will have increased. (It uses “count of three day periods” as the actor there, btw.) Again, thanks to the developers for letting us know that, and also, that they are planning on changing the way that happens during season play for S6.

Wolfric.9380:

I also find this season good and the system goes in the right direction but still flawed.

Main faults this season:

A.) Placement matches to impactful and volatile. (I fear the damage is permanent unless resetting MMR).
MM has serious flaws in side balance (At least Evan is working on it).

No, they aren’t, and I really, really wish ANet had simply placed new players at MMR 350 instead of doing the placement matches. It would have been absolutely the same effect, but much less whining — the placement matches make people feel like it matters, when it really, doesn’t.

Also, the bug with replacements when people don’t accept the queue and stuff suck, but you would be hard pressed to present anything like proof that they are a significant minority, let alone majority, of games.

(Evan, hint, hint, some actual numbers would really help here. Please stats it for us?)

Wolfric.9380:

B.) The long term problem since HOT (or the trait rework)

Build diversity is low. Focus lies on one maximum two builds per class to be “Meta” (In an MMO like GW2 diversity is a key for long term exitement).

It’s interesting to note that toward the top of the ladder, people don’t play the same “meta” builds, they play things that work for them. Almost as if it was the majority of people who don’t really understand PvP using them, because they are told they are the “best”.

Sadly, that’s a people problem, and can’t be solved by technology. WoW has amply demonstrated that if you have less than half a percent DPS difference in real world measured performance, people will treat it as if the entire world has ended, and you have “god tier unstoppable” vs “trash, couldn’t kill a level one creature in a week” level differences.

Wolfric.9380:

1.) Drop placement matches. Set new players MMR acording to their PvP level but at maximum mid silver and let glico do the work. (Maybe MMR reset is needed. The alt accounts in top ranks must go or the leaderboard stays a joke and it is one main part of PvP).

You, uh, know that the only thing the placement matches achieve is to give you ten games thrown into the MMR system before you finish placement matches, right?

Like, if you had 20 placement, or 0 placement, you would still have the same MMR system making the same changes. There is no “anchoring” from whatever your MMR starts at.

Wolfric.9380:

3.) Lock class swap with map roll and use per class MMR.

That’s something I’d certainly agree with.

xeonage.1253:

one word : lucky
You may be have a little chance hit them between their dodge. But this is all about Lucky. No any skill there. And also you can watch them kill the lord of Foefire in the NPC stacking position but no way to stop them.

Have you considered things like traps, or ground-effect pulsing aoe, which don’t require “landing” a hit so much as the enemy being in the zone?

Marxx.5021:

With a skill rating of 1598 I got matched against 1643,1808,1865,1905,2012.
I have never checked that before but I got the feeling that my opponents did
not belong in “my” matchup. Matching players with such a huge skill difference
is not fair.

If your team had a similar distribution of MMRs, that’d be reasonably fair. In any case, it is also possible that duo-queue, the substitution bug, or simply being off-hours, so getting queued faster rather than fairer, influenced this.

At least you would also be predicted to lose, so you shouldn’t see a significant MMR change downward, if it was stacked against you.

Witi.2916:

My rating is 853 and i start to play with ma friend who has rating 950. U write here that ppl with high rating get less points to win a more to lose yes correct.

If someone wrote that, they were wrong. The size of your MMR changes is determined by the “confidence” value assigned to you, so the more often you win or lose as expected, the smaller the changes are.

That means a person with bronze skill and bronze MMR will have small changes, and so will a person with platinum skill and platinum MMR.

What you might be seeing is that by using a duo-queue you force a person to be placed against teams they would not normally match with, and so they unexpectedly lose, leading to both lower confidence, and more losses.

TheFamster.7806:

Hell im in unranked now and its getting worse. I won 6 times in a row and now Im paired with teammates who die at mid and insta quits the game. I’m losing 5~6 times in a row and literally being punished for my winning streak.

What am I supposed to do when my teammates decide to go afk or die so easily as a one man?

Be thankful that the other team have five slots those insta-quitters could be assigned to, so you are more likely to win a game than lose it because of them?

You can read about all the details of the MMR system elsewhere, but the short version is:

You got larger changes on your alt account because you hadn’t done pvp on it as much. As you do more, wins and losses will change your MMR by smaller amounts.

eg: when you get big jumps because of a win, you would also get big drops because of a loss.