Guild Wars 2

Two points:

One, this is not a “new” game in which pathfinding is mystically worse than an “older” game like Day-Z. In fact, GW2 predates Day-Z by a year, and is built on the GW1 engine which is older, and influences some of the systems, likely including the servers.

Two, pathfinding is actually one of the most difficult problems available, and the best known algorithms without pre-processing give `O(|E||log(V)|)` complexity without preprocessing, and are not guaranteed to find the optimal route.

So while it is absolutely possible that pathfinding and, in this case, “legal traversal path” validation, could potentially be improved in GW2, don’t mistake your ability to do it fast and efficiently for the ability of a computer to do so.

This is one of the problems that keeps the best and brightest CS people in the world up nights trying to figure out how to do better.

videoboy.4162:

+1 to this awesome idea.

Would this be easy for the Devs to do? It seems like all they’d need to do is copy the existing weapons and then alter the color. However, I don’t know much about game development so maybe it isn’t so easy.

More the 2D and 3D artists than the software developers, and guess which skill is usually in the most limited supply? It is, though, not one of the more technically complicated changes in the world, you are correct.

(Though making black things look good is harder than it sounds.)

Yes, those specs are sufficient to run GW2 – I played on a similar system for some time. Given the macOS client is, in essence, the 32-bit Windows client, it is already limited to ~ 4GB of RAM max, so the memory available won’t be a thing.

Don’t expect amazing performance, but that is a product of the macOS client, not the hardware.

It’s worth noting that the unlimited tools are hugely convenient, but they are not economically better than simply buying the tools at vendors. (Laurel tools are also useful in that regard, lasting longer, and using what is essentially a free currency from login rewards.)

I’d strongly, strongly encourage you to actually play at least one character through prior to using the boost. It’s true that levelling doesn’t give you the full experience of the class, but it is much more likely to let you know how much you enjoy it before you commit to it via the boost and associated soulbound bonus items, etc.

The PvP suggestion is useful to get a preview of the elite spec, though, which is certainly valuable…

Yobculture.5786:

Guild decoration trophies are currently the only way to keep a metric of actual multiple kills of a certain boss, though I still don’t like using it since ppl seem to keep using it for decorations or throwing it away ¬_¬

well, you do get the shiny bronze / silver / gold statues in the guild hall to let you know how much you spent those items…

Sublimatio.6981:

the correct answer is, neither of them. roll power necro

The correct answer is “the one you know best”, I’m pretty sure. This, however, is also a pretty good correct answer, and I <3 it a lot.

Ocosh.5843:

find a spot in the average pug because the community’s not exactly the thinking type.

So much this ^^^^^^. I’d recommend finding a guild for the content you want, because that way you can have people who are aware that unless your wipe is to the enrage timer at two percent of boss health left, every single time, it’s probably a player problem, not a class/build problem.

(Which, yes, includes it being a player problem when your damage is low, so you need more healing, and healers run out of oomph, or whatever. The “meta” build with higher DPS doesn’t fix your problem, it just means that maybe you don’t notice it this time through.)

It’s worth remembering that ANet often read, but rarely respond, on the forums.

Zodi.8932:

Did you actually bother to read anything in this post?

I already said I have no problem winning. I fought my way to Plat from Silver T3. What I’m speaking about is how the new system is so dependent on your team mates and its so scary that you will get on an “unlucky” losing streak.

Absolutely: I one hundred percent read what you wrote, including “I should just stop playing PvP other than the minimum of games required to avoid decay, because I’m scared that I won’t keep the current high ranking I have.”

I just don’t agree with you that “not playing PvP” is the best way to maintain your position, or even that your position in the ladder should be significant enough to you to demand that you do something you (presumably) don’t want, like “not playing PvP” in order to maintain it… at the expense of doing the thing you (presumably) want to do, which is “playing PvP”.

eg: your statements tell us that you care about your position in the ladder, not about PvP. Given the choice of (a) play pvp, or (b) retain ladder position, you chose (b).

Shafara.8217:

Something needs to be done especially for us that really trying to get that trying to win a match.

I can do something for you: there are five slots on the other team, and four slots on your team, in which these people can be placed. That means you are more likely to have them on the opposite team than yours!

Congratulations, you will get more wins than losses, overall, because of this behaviour. Enjoy!

TBH, if people are trying to get position, then ducking out of actually playing PvP at all… it’s probably a win for everyone that they are no longer involved.

Caring more about your rating than actually playing is not an indicator that you are good for PvP…

Astralporing.1957:

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Astralporing.1957:

And yes, the 32bit memory limitation is not a hardware, but a software one. It’s still very real, and still a major cause of gw2 crashes nowadays.

It’s both. If your OS is 64-bit but the client is 32-bit it’s mostly a software problem. If the OS is 32-bit it’s a combination hardware/software problem, because the 32-bit mode on the CPU actually puts limits – including the need to allocate address space for the PCI bus devices, and the kernel – on how much memory can be used successfully.

It’s a purely software problem. And it’s already been solved, long ago. Microsoft just decided to not put that solution in their 32bit home systems.

I’m sorry, are you referring to PAE? That allows more than 32-bit physical memory space to be used, but the virtual address space for any individual process is still limited to what is available in 32-bits, and some of that is still consumed by the kernel, etc.

Ultimately, 32-bit mode on an Intel CPU does not allow reasonable access to more than 32-bits worth of memory space for a single process. There are some potential work-arounds, including “paging” physical memory in and out of visibility, improvements be segment-swapping when entering kernel mode that “only” cost ~ 5 percent performance, and so forth.

These are really not worth it compared to just having 64-bit hardware, OS, and client software though – and they don’t solve the problem in a way that is invisible to the client application or anything.

maddoctor.2738:

Orpheal.8263:

Anet should do first some big redesigns on their most meaningful 5 pillars of their totally outdated Combat System that is

I’d rather for a change they redesign nothing and focus on giving us entirely new things. Redesigns mean less new things.

Hey, now, don’t be so mean: just because Orpheal wants GW3, the newening, without sticking that label on it…

Dulfy has guides for the HP in HoT, which include notes on which are soloable – for the definition of soloable that is “requires no particular skill to acquire”, rather than, “yeah, I can totally solo a champion mob on my <insert class here>, l2pskrub”.

lukejoe.1592:

They might be. I’ll tell you what they aren’t doing; they’re not fixing the bugs that stop Renewed Justice from working properly in a half dozen Personal Story missions.

No really, you probably haven’t leveled a guardian in a while, but go make one and play through. They have core mechanics that straight up don’t work in multiple personal story missions for more than 4 years ago.

So yea, I’d say they are both understaffed and misallocating resources.

I’m reasonably confident that if you present the owners of ArenaNet with a detailed plan for how you would improve on that, along with the proof that this is what is happening, they would be more than happy to consider your application to run the studio.

Ellie.5913:

Fishing>champ farming
I want fishing like this though, it was very enjoyable and required effort and skill https://youtu.be/S8eR8PghHE0 (and the fish were very colorful and beautiful)

That actually looks better than most implementations in MMOs. Thanks for the example!

Semris.7520:

I also miss the PvE auto-loot which is very very convenient. Sadly it´s locked behind content I don´t/won´t do. Hopefully it will change one day.

You won’t do any of the things that award mastery points, not even accidentally through completing collections? That … actually seems like an awful lot of effort to go to, since a bunch of them are for excitingly challenging things like “level any character past 30, and do three personal story steps”.

Ashen.2907:

I would appreciate the event dailies if they were about encouraging people to play together, to cooperate in a shared game world. Unfortunately, in my experience they are more about putting players into conflict, competing for event credit.

I’d like to introduce you to a new game, Guild Wars 2, which improved on previous MMO design by allowing all players who participate in open world content to receive credit!

Unlike other games, other players can’t steal your kills, or your gathering nodes, as you both receive equal rewards from them!

So… unless you mean that you run around and events are completed before you get there, nobody is competing for event credit with you. They are simply completing events.

If you do mean that they are complete before you get there, I’m not sure what else to suggest, since this is observably not a problem for many, many people on many, many maps.

cough I’d probably do it by changing the players instead, so that they went over and played berserker LB condi warriors, or dragonhunter LB guards, rather than asking that rangers mutate into something that plays very much like them.

Trenker.6420:

I agree. Being a healer from other games I’m used to seeing my team/squad health-bars above the characters heads.

If there’s a group of players on low HP, how am I going to position myself to heal them specifically if I don’t know who needs the heals? Or perhaps it is up to them to stand in the BEAM lol.

Yeah, much of the design is around passive/splash healing and self healing, especially UI. Bringing a much more focused healer class in was probably a mistake, ultimately, which will be regretted for a long time to come.

Perhaps it will bring an option to display these, or perhaps it will bring hover-casting to the squad UI, but most likely it will continue to push druid away from direct healing over time as the changes to make “DPS or healing” a choice by increasing healing power contribution to heals did.

fluidmonolith.3584:

I think placement matches are insufficient to do a good job of determining initial ranking. It is very possible to climb (or fall) to your true ranking after placement, but it could take a lot of games. I think for S6 they should require many more games for initial placement, or get rid of placement matches completely and start everyone with a ranking of zero.

I started off with a low placement around 850 with 3 wins, 7 losses. I have since climbed to around 1150 with 96 games and 55 wins (57% ratio). I am playing exclusively power Rev, which may not be the best choice this season…

The MMR system in use should converge to a good approximation over 10 to 20 games; it’s pretty solid, honestly. Starting with a rank of 0, or 350, or whatever, makes very, very little difference in practice.

Of course you feel that the matchmaking is to blame for your being placed lower than you believe you should be. It’s easy to blame anything other than yourself.

Try and remember that every complaint you make about matchmaking, you have a statistical advantage – the other team have five slots that “slop matchup” could fill, your team has four, because you are not the problem, right?

FWIW, the net effect would have been the same if there were zero, and fifty, placement games. Ten is actually pretty solid, since convergence on the “correct” solution in the MMR algorithm used is more or less exponential.

I’d honestly kind of prefer new players started at zero, but whatever, initial MMR is insignificant within the first two hours of PvP gameplay, replaced by a fairly accurate guess of your position relative to all other players.

To the later suggestion, that MMR be entirely disregarded and replaced with “First In, First Out” grouping … that would lead to a terrible experience. Your queue is unlikely to be significantly shorter than the current queues, but it would lead to situations where games were absolutely, positively no fun at all. (eg: one or two great players would dominate every match, to the point it’s no fun for them either.)

You probably also need to state where and when you play, since my experience is ~ 1 to 2 minute queues for PvP with MMR as it currently stands, etc.

Tiefsee.3647:

Play a week PvE and decay will be your friend, lose the decay-restoring first matches and you will be in bronce

ANet confirmed, elsewhere, that decay is your “visible/reward” ranking, not your MMR, and the later remains the same. So decay will not move you down to bronze.

Zodi.8932:

So PvP is the main thing I focus on in Gw2. Across the previous seasons system I enjoyed playing for the entire season amassing around 350 games each time. Even when hitting legendary there was still a desire to keep playing.

This season however I literally log into PvP once every 3 days just to stop decay and maintain my platinum rating. The badge is the main thing I care about and im sure i speak for many PvPers too. I know I don’t have enough skill to climb into Legendary but at the same time I know i’m where I belong however if I play more regularly then i could hit that unlucky streak that sends me falling and unable to climb back up.

So im stuck in this horrible position where I find myself desperately wanting to PvP (its in my blood) but refusing to play more than once every 3 days so I don’t drop rank. Surely I’m not the only one to be feeling like this.

Is this really how everyone wants PvP to be?

Well, I sure do: if you can’t maintain your rank without opting out of PvP then you are placed too high, and are essentially avoiding actual gameplay to retain it.

Which I’m one hundred percent behind: it means that you won’t spend time yelling at other players because you believe that you are amaaaazing, and so the loss must be their fault – or whatever other toxic behaviour you end up falling into when you stop getting the rank you “know” you “deserve”.

PvP for the PvPers, is what I’m saying. Not PvP for the people who sulk when they turn out to be less good than they imagine they are.

Rodzynald.5897:

I have mixed feelings. I see polearm and get hyped but then It turns out to be a kodan torch.
I am sooooo into polearms in any game, it’s my favourite kind of weapon on par with hammers and fist weapons.
I would throw up rainbows if Anet ever announced a polearm for some classes as a new pick for elite spec (its a must on a guardian!)

FWIW, when I got my DD thief up, I went through and found that about 20 percent of staff skins have a sufficiently “polearm” look to meet my own standards for this. Which, granted, is look, not “name”, but …

Menadena.7482:

Ashen.2907:

I didnt bother to learn the thermal tube mastery in the prior zone but had no problem getting around in the most recent map. Am I missing something?

You do not need a mastery to get around in the current zone (although there are mushrooms, updrafts, and thermal tubes). The mastery in ep 3 is for using the flame.

…which is not actually required, since I completed EP3 story prior to unlocking thermal tubes, let alone anything else. Just FWIW.

Ardid.7203:

Mi toon is pahologically curious. She will jump at every door, portal, bunny burrow or volcanic vent available; try to talk to every stranger, friend, foe, alien or dragon; eat every thing barely similar to foodstuff (including dead enemies, rocks and odd energy); and in general, try to know more of anything that cross her path.

Rift events are just standard duty for her.

As a Sylvari, this ^^^^

Astralporing.1957:

And yes, the 32bit memory limitation is not a hardware, but a software one. It’s still very real, and still a major cause of gw2 crashes nowadays.

It’s both. If your OS is 64-bit but the client is 32-bit it’s mostly a software problem. If the OS is 32-bit it’s a combination hardware/software problem, because the 32-bit mode on the CPU actually puts limits – including the need to allocate address space for the PCI bus devices, and the kernel – on how much memory can be used successfully.

Ultimately, 64-bit CPU, OS, and game client are all needed to make issues triggered my memory “address” space go away. Which you should really work toward having be a thing, because it’s now standard enough that newer games will simply ignore the 32-bit option entirely.

Menadena.7482:

I have never had problems getting the xp and it has always been the points that were the throttle. If you are not planning on doing raiding (so can not max out every HOT mastery line and get spirit shards) I would not bother with getting the top tier of every mastery line just so you have it. Look at what each one gives you, I decided all of gliding except for ley-line and the other lines to the area vendors met my needs.

Even if you do end up throttled on XP rather than mastery points – you dedicated point hunter, you – the new LS3 maps reward mastery XP blobs in addition to their other rewards. Enjoy those pushing you significantly forward as you play.

(Do the scrolls of XP also work there? I’m not sure.)

Anyway, even without that it doesn’t take much actual play time to finish each stage of the mastery, and progress to the next one.

They are limited in number because, like with every game, they are short term content, costly to produce, and don’t bring much joy to players compared to always-avaiblable content.

DoctorDing.5890:

“WOOOOOSH!”
That’s the sound that XP points make as they rush past any L80 player who has not maxed their masteries.
And I believe that is the MAJORITY of players. It’s not good.

Why? Serious question; for a while there no reward was given to any player, masteries maxed or not, and … the game didn’t die, players didn’t revolt, nobody wept themselves to sleep every night over it.

We can look to other games, if we want to, as well: WoW, XP vanishes at cap. ESO, XP goes to an alternate progression system, then vanishes at cap. BDO, technically no level cap, but progression slows down to the point that amazingly grindy players are at cap+8 with no cap+9 in sight. TSW, eventually you cap out all the things and the bank, and it vanishes.

Which is a fancy way of saying: nobody else has figured out a more useful thing that (a) it vanishes, or (b) it goes to effectively nowhere. GW2 rewarding spirit shards is shockingly good value, but it’s clear that it’s hardly essential for a game to do that in order to succeed.

OriOri.8724:

Astralporing.1957:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

OriOri.8724:

The biggest problem that I have when people say that you have “options” in regards to MC is that its just simply not true. Superficially, yes, you do appear to have options. Realistically, you don’t.

That’s simply not true. I always have the option to buy mystic coins.

Read closely, that’s what OriOri said. You have an option to buy mystic coins, or you have an option to buy mystic coins. The “farming” option is unrealistic for any larger MC quantities.
(and the option not to play the game… let’s say it’s not the one devs should want their players to pick)

This is exactly what I was trying to say. Its the illusion of choice.

…or it’s a design decision that owning all the legendaries shouldn’t be “standard” for players, plus a mechanism to let people who really, really want to do so get around it.

I think at heart, though, the reason you are getting argument is simple: you are treating it as axiomatic that buying mystic coins on the trading post is a bad thing.

The folks arguing with you disagree. I sure do. Seems like a perfectly legitimate and functional situation to me, especially as there are currently more than 20,000 coins available to you by way of doing … anything at all, even just the three dailies which reward you with ~ 2.17 mystic coins a day in gold.

I’d strongly prefer a system that made MC available via gold purchase in-game than one that reduced my choice in how to obtain them by sticking them behind, well, any specific activity. If I can turn time into gold into MCs, life is good, because everything rewards gold.

Amazon were recently selling this at a discount, although that seems to have ended presently.

haha, yeah, I’ve never had the experience of being on a map where someone else applies the strategy of winners: gather food, run the heck away from everyone, and wait for the dot to kill everyone else.

Gets me first place every time it’s the daily.

I’d strongly suggest finishing core content first and, as you are newly returned, treating it as a chance to get experience with the mechanisms and gameplay as it exists today.

I used the boost at level 79 for the extra gear, but you can of course do as you please.

Amaimon.7823:

Wow has fishing. When was the last time you saw someone fish in wow?

Oh, you see it all the time, because they made it valuable enough in terms of food for buffs for end-game content. What you pretty much don’t see is anyone who gives a kitten about it because … it’s boring.

No MMO has yet figured out a better minigame than “click to cast, click when it wiggles” for fishing. It’s not … really interactive, or fun, it’s like a game of solitare with one card.

If you really want fish based content, advocate for being able to get into the water and murder fish for their tasty flesh instead.

I don’t actually disagree with it being longer than justified, but: how quickly do you really need them out there? I usually swing past and refill the production line with whatever is waiting in our guild, maybe two or three times a day. A couple more people doing that and it’s pretty well maintained without anyone having to pop in and out.

I’d kind of rather that it just automatically started producing anything that could be produced, though.

Ayrilana.1396:

Have you been tracking what guild missions have been available and then ran an analysis to determine if they’re not random?

What they describe actually sounds like they ARE random – in the sense that duplicate bounties, and “no puzzles again” are things that people would not include in a non-random sequence.

It’s not something from the patch notes, and it is a significant enough change that we should have expected to see it there if intentional. (eg: smaller changes got called out that way.)

So you can pretty safely conclude that it is a bug that it got in there. It /might/ stay, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Assuming you did not destroy the item, and even if you did, you should report a bug via the in-game tool. That will link it to extra details (eg: account, character, time, etc) that will help the developers identify the root cause and fix it.

Sit on the item until the feature is reenabled. You will get your ring, eventually.

Restarting the client (or any other form of relogging) does not “lose map bonus”, though it does kick you out of queues. Your map bonus progress remains – though you would lose credit for an incomplete event.

Are you using any third party software, such as SweetFX, here? That might account for why you observe this leak, while I don’t, in similar configurations. If you do, try getting it out of the way and see if the problem continues.

Likewise, antivirus, etc, software would be worth investigating.

Finally, are you able to reduce or remove the impact by turning down the number of models, and high quality models, visible? That may help.

The client does a lot of things asynchronously, guessing the future and then correcting invisibly if it got it wrong the next time it hears from the server. This includes your movement, etc.

If you are having packet loss or other communication problems – including in one direction only – you will potentially see this. I’d suggest checking that you don’t have any of the firewall, etc, issues that might get in the way.

Just to reconfirm what Inculpatus said: this is definitely not happening to me, on my ranger, thank goodness. So, whatever the issue hitting you two, it’s not universal, and a client repair is a great way to start.

I also wanted to check: this isn’t happening when you switch between game modes (eg: PvP, WvW, and PvE, right? Separate builds in those game modes mean separate pet configuration in them – but it should “stick” once you have changed it over there.)

If that’s not effective, contact CS directly, because something nasty is happening there which will require specific investigation of your accounts to understand.

Rhyas.5169:

It ONLY happens to NCsoft stuff. That’s way more annoying than the randomness of it all.

It’s worth noting that the traces I’ve seen people post lead to AWS data centers, so it almost certainly hits “NCSoft stuff” and a bunch of other random things that you are not using and/or that are not latency and packet loss sensitive in the same way.

So it is more likely you noticed it only here, rather than it only touching this one service.

If by “no response” from support you mean “nothing at all”, then you need to resubmit. There is an automated email returned to any ticket that confirms it has been registered in their system. (Which I suspect you did get, but just to be on the safe side.)

To your point about the time limitations, I agree they are annoying, but they also limit the ability of gold sellers to abuse the system by creating multiple accounts. (For example, if they use stolen money to buy them, odds of getting no value before the theft is reported and the account closed are much better, etc.)

Finally, I can reassure you that the odds of getting any drop that actually matters at low level are miniscule at best, but you can also use external tools such as gw2efficiency.com or one of the other trading post websites to verify that they are not useful.

You should, likely, instead focus on salvaging the items you get and stashing the resulting materials away against a rainy day on which you level crafting skills with a view to getting the craft-only gear unlocked, or something similar.

Irijia.6073:

How the heck did you manage to conclude that you can only have four pets? The system is almost the same as WoW where you collect all the pets and use whichever one you want for various situations.\

Nicer, actually, since you don’t have to traipse back to the stablemaster in GW2, unlike wow, which still has that one of the last relics of “visit town to level/skill/gear” that MMOs are holding onto.

Changes to druid healing made it much, much more dependent on healing power to be effective. So, without focusing on that and consequently reducing DPS, don’t expect a great deal of healing output.

The magic number is … wait for it … “it depends.” In this case, specifically, it depends how good the rest of your team is. The less healing you do, the more they need to be good at avoiding damage, and spike damage.

So we can’t give you “the” number because, hey, we are not your team.