Guild Wars 2

From the October 1 patch notes:
“Updated map completion rewards for Plains of Ashford and all World-versus-World maps to match the map level/content.”

Logically, reading this, I quickly log in to the game, fully expecting a friendly mail (or actually, a series of them) from ANet, apologizing for the inconvenience, sending me replacement rewards for all the great level 15 (or whatever) gear I previously got when completing these level 80 WvW maps some time ago, and throwing them away in disgust.

To my big surprise, after logging in post-patch, I didn’t find any such email in my inbox. I didn’t find anything. No replacement, no nothing. Not even a map completion reset (which would be pretty embarrassing still, but at least slightly above nothing).

Well, I think this is a bug of some sort, and should be looked into.

OP:

I hear there are some people in Soviet Russia who find your ideas intriguing and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I want the 20 seconds of my life back.

exploits@arena.net

There’s supposedly a runaway respawn with the exploding barrels, stacking millions of them on top of each other. It has been reported many times before, as far as I can tell.

Map completion rewards are random. I get the needed pieces by exchanging with guild mates, or selling mine on TP and buying the ones I want.

Seems to be working as intended.

How can you steal a guild’s name?

Additionally, as for the OP’s concern:

Being interested if that other person’s claim bears any truth, or if something really changed on how server population is being reported, I’ve snapped servers status at two distinct times, yesterday at 8 PM PDT, and another now at 8 AM PDT. The results are literally identical, with all but two particular servers being either HIGH of FULL.

So I think that pretty much concludes the case.

Redscope.6215:

Mark my words, we’re going to have a bunch of people running around with the little icons on the map. And then it will be useless.

Don’t know about your server, but this is what we already have now. I can log into WvW at any time of day and find at minimum 3-4 commanders running around the map, during the most hilarious moments even few of them running side by side, patting each other on the back (yes, some even come from the same guild).

People, at least those new to WvW that didn’t yet learn to ignore them, confusingly run back and forth as two of the groups get close to each other, not mentioning four.

I’ve been talking to people who long thought the "commander" is a map specific high-value NPC you have to protect (actually had people split off my group *during a fight* for exactly that reason, as some random commander just logged in), I talked to a person who thought they are ANet employees roleplaying a WvW event, I’ve had a person thinking there is only one commander in the entire game, being some kind of superhero player and that "he heard that _the commander_ once killed 40 people at the same time".

1-2 years for 30-40 commanders on the map? More like a month from now.

Yes, I perfectly understood that, and addressed it with a most appropriate example given the particular time at hand.

You, on the other hand, didn’t even bother answering my question, nor clearly realized any of the points I already made, so considering your lack of reading comprehension, I agree we can call this discussion over.

829 kills still sounds like heck of a lot for a few hearts. I find this interesting, because I too noticed an unusually high number of kills with a staff, on my... Guardian.

I mean sure, I probably did run a lot of dynamic events while wielding a staff, but a few thousands kills (up until recently a long leading achievement) sounds a little bit excessive...

Back then I just shrugged it off as "weird", knowing at least I’ve been actually using staff from time to time... Now I’m not so sure.

Try checking in the menu after pressing Escape.

And what time would that be so I can see it? Because at no point in time that I play GW2 I’ve ever seen all servers on "medium", excluding the first minutes of the 3-day headstart.

At the time of writing this post, it’s 4:30 UTC, which makes it, say, from 4 to 6 in the morning for pretty much most of the Europe. Yet as of this moment, majority of EU servers is either HIGH or FULL. So, do all Europeans play in the early morning / deep night?

You can check after the next major patch rollout and subsequent servers restart, that they don’t magically go to EMPTY, but stay at HIGH or FULL as they were.

Don’t forget the single-use Bank Access Express for a mere 35 gems.

Echelon.5384:

I think Lion’s Arch should be a little box with 1 waypoint and one POI that has one crafting station that you can craft anything at a NPC that serves as a bank, a trading post, a skill trainer, and a merchant that sells every item in the game. I hate having a city that actually looks nice and populated!

Mister, I would easily pay again the full price of the game just to get this, so that between Lion’s Arch visits, I can actually have a while to enjoy the game, instead of the neverending back-and-forth trips between the crafting stations, vendors, banks, and Black Lion merchants.

While I think, unintentionally, you just single-handedly won the entire suggestions forum.

Having the ability to play without a pet doesn’t equal in removing them from WvW.

Having a particular class crippled only so it can run with an unguided mine that messes up people’s targeting doesn’t make a good class design.

As an actual software developer, albeit obviously not working for ANet, I can assure you that your pseudocode is horrible, but you indeed explained the situation well.

As a general word of advice - when reporting bugs, there is rarely need to explain the behavior with snippets of code, pseudo or not, especially without an actual access to the original code in question, as it only unnecessarily clutters the flow of information and doesn’t add much to what already has been said (this based on many years of general practice).

Looking at your description, this is (even without access to the code) a pretty clear and simple oversight in either early timer termination, or respectively not checking for a death state upon calling a death procedure, so if they are not fixing it since BWE1, the most probable cause is that it’s just buried under a ton of other bugs classified with higher priority, and not that hey can’t find a solution for it.

See the rest of the sentence:

"Or additionally, drop all pets from the game (read: make it a possibility to play without them), give all pets-dependent professions back their stats they lost because of those worthless little buggers"

Or without putting it sarcastically: Currently there is no possibility to play a Ranger without a pet, so people are forced to run with them, despite them having no useful role in WvW (yes, they work somewhat better in PVE and sPVP). And this, kind of unintentionally, results int he OP’s original problem.

There is no useful purpose for pets in WvW (and I’m obviously not counting lone 1v1 encounters here), other than enemies occasionally tripping over them. There are good and viable builds for a Necromancer to play without his summons. There is no such possibility for a Ranger, it’s a class constantly crippled by its (pointlessly roaming and smacking headlong into walls) pet.

I say, give Rangers the opportunity to get rid of their pet, but boosting their stats (i.e. damage output) accordingly, so they are comparable to other classes, if they wish to go that route. Easy, isn’t it? Only that it will never happen, of course.

I could see the mention of pet target spam as an obvious take at sarcasm, and well executed, so to say.

Playing a Ranger, I can only guess that this is how most of us actually feel. Since pets are completely dumb, very weak, almost uncontrollable, using their skills purely on random without any logic whatsoever, and I’m not even going into the ton of actual bugs involving them, most of us simply ignore them and let them roam freely around the battlefield, as the only other option left is setting them on "avoid battle", making them even more worthless and that much annoying, constantly tripping a step behind your back (you can’t even "lock them in" and let them stay unsummoned, as they automatically pop out the moment you take a first hit).

As for being lucky to have a pet, you’re forgetting that because of them, "pet-classes" (let’s say Rangers and partially Necros) got heavily weakened, as by theory, they should be getting half of their damage output from their pet (that especially in the case of Rangers).

You know how much they do. You know why you ignore pets, and why we all ignore them. Because in WvW, they’re completely worthless, and laughable.

I don’t think you realize that there isn’t one single "morning" for the entire planet.

"Heck, the target spam is one of the few things they are useful for."

Thank you, this is probably the most awesome (and true) statement about pets I’ve read in these forums.

"If this were true then the full servers would say full all the time, which is not the case at all. In reality, the status of a server changes throughout the day based on how many people are playing at that time"

This is because server transfers are still free as of this moment and people routinely jump servers to play with friends, or looking for one that hasn’t a particular skill point or NPC bugged or crashed. There are people constantly moving between servers and that’s why you see some of them flipping from HIGH to FULL, and vice versa.

Pets really need to get either scrapped from the game entirely (I play a Ranger in WvW, thank you), or get a complete overhaul to not suck as much as they do now. You can tell there is something very wrong with their current design when players actively call for removal of pet targeting and would rather ignore the enemy pets altogether.

Considering the current state the pets are in, I support the OP’s request. Or additionally, drop all pets from the game (read: make it a possibility to play without them), give all pets-dependent professions back their stats they lost because of those worthless little buggers, and call it a day. I can guarantee that from that moment on, you won’t see a single person running with a pet - in WvW - anymore, thus also solving this particular targeting issue.

Take the 1 copper, delete the mail.

"The checkbox is basically there for Engineers."

Not even slightest. Every guild backpack (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Guild_Armorer) you can buy can be toggled on and off.

There is a bug report feature in game, even allowing you to attach a screen shot of your issue. I reported many of those, many got fixed in the next patches (if based on my reports, or someone else’s).

Knowingly using bugs in the game is always exploitation. Getting into places you know (or as you say, "suspect") no player was supposed to go, is exploitation. Plain and simple.

Elowin.9078
"Every bug reported should have at least a one-line acknowledgement from ArenaNet with or after others have seen and not speculated on the problem included."

And that line could be, for example "We appreciate your feedback and will now proceed to close this thread."

Duh. Waaaait a second...

This exact thing made me really furious the day it bit me for the first time...

Back then, I was counting every copper, barely able to keep up with the cost of teleports on my crisp fresh level 80. I’m at 98% of so of the daily achievement, but decide to take a little break from all that constant Orr killing, so I hop on this whatshisface level 1 alt of mine and run to pick up some crafting materials with him...

I smack a random white rabbit while passing through the village - *pop* - daily achievement complete. Whooping 5 copper reward. I literally couldn’t believe what just happened.

These days, I do it the other way around... There being more or less nothing you can buy in the game after you get your first full set of exotics and money just keep piling up, every time I see that a daily/monthly achievement is nearing, I hop on one of the alts I rarely play and let him make the final honor killing, so he gets at least those 10% or so experience the achievement usually gives.

That, again, only shows how dumb the entire system is.

Ok, that puts it into perspective, sorry for misunderstanding you.

Nevertheless - People in PVE have the same right not to be bothered by the self-proclaimed "commanders" as have the people in PVP (WvW). There is absolutely no reason to keep showing the commander icons to 99% of people present at any place, at any time.

Despite that, and despite the bug that commander icons travel with them into PVE areas, pretty much anyone I ever talked to wouldn’t mind it, if we were able to block them / turn them off. There is no need to remove anything, as long as there is a way to prevent them from annoying rest of the people that are also trying to enjoy this game. I would also welcome this to be a default, and not the other way around. But I can still manage, as long as I can at least turn them off.

I already have to put up with a "Storyline" marker constantly cluttering my map despite me not running storylines 99% of the time I play guild Wars 2.

Now, as more and more show-offs keep buying the commander icon, my map looks like a 1970’s disco ball. It’s distracting whenever I play WvW or PVE.

If they wish to "command" their group of friends or lead a personal roleplay event - I don’t mind. But don’t show it to me across the entire map.

Who is trying to take away what? Have you actually bothered reading OP’s two lines long post?

Enerjak.2475
As aforementioned, one less self-righteous moron for me to bother with. Go ahead and block me. [tears...]

For the second time, your entire reply has nothing to do with me asking to be able to not see your icon constantly cluttering my map. Please, go away.

"I got Commander to assist my guild alliance of 7 guilds to coordinate properly. A party is only 5, and when we’ve 50 people blah blah blah... . One less self-righteous troll for me to bother with in my efforts to play with my alliance effectively. "

I’m not sure if you’re a moron or if you’re simply roleplaying one, so I will repeat that for you:

I. Do not. Care. About. You. Or. Your. So Called. Alliance.

I don’t play WvW for you, with you, or because of you.

I didn’t choose you to command me, or to command anything else in this game.

I don’t need to see you on my map.

Your entire reply has nothing to do with me asking to be able to to not see your icon constantly cluttering my map. I do not ask for the commander status to be removed from you. I ask for the ability to not see you, because your presence on the map has absolutely nothing to do with me. You’re one of the hundreds of players that are running around, no more, no less. I don’t need, from all of them, to see you, and specifically you across the entire map. It has zero information value to me and actually distracts me at times when I’m looking for a commander that I want to see and follow. From just the two of your posts I can easily tell you that you’re not one of those. I want you out of my map. You are free to stay on anyone else’s map if they wish to, but I don’t.

I too wish to have the ability to block the so called "commanders" completely, no matter how much they paid for a shiny icon.

These people do not represent, nor command me.

Some of the most obnoxious I have blocked (still having to put up with their icons constantly cluttering the interface), some I do respect for having a good play style but even then rarely follow them, because there’s much else to do and my own group is already well commanded, some I tolerate for at least staying quiet, but I still don’t need to see their icons for that.

I wish to have an opt-in to display a particular commander in case I decide to follow him, or be commanded by him. Otherwise, get them out of my face.

Mistfire Wolf can be bought ingame for 2000 gems (which is a bit much for a worthless skill, but at least not deal breaking), and doesn’t require you to play a wholly different outdated game that isn’t even a proper MMORPG.

I may be missing something here, but doesn’t the same also apply to Black Widow Spider, Rainbow Jellyfish and White Raven?

Why is only Black Moa special?

Coincidentally, this may also be related to the issue:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Any-updates-or-plans-to-resolve-the-reflections-issue-with-nVidia-600-series

Simply uninstalling NVIDIA drivers - at least to my knowledge - doesn’t remove all settings and presets from the registry (as this kind of changes from version to a version, it’s hard to constantly keep a track on it).

That particular check box I pointed to should ensure all settings are completely reset to defaults, which is always a good thing to start with if it wasn’t attempted before.

While not exclusively, this issue can be pointing to a physically failing GPU. I don’t mean it as a guess, but as an actual experience. In case you didn’t, it may be worth checking if all of your usually played games render correctly.

Also in case you didn’t try, you might want checking that particular "completely reinstall drivers from scratch" option in the NVIDIA installer (being the only option there, it’s kind of hard to miss, but still), and see if it makes any difference.

I can report gold sellers sending 1c the same as any other mail.

That of course doesn’t disprove OP’s claim.

I find GW2 to be one of the easiest MMORPGs on the market. To fully level two characters to 80 and finish over 60% world with each of them, I ended up dying about 80-90 times (there is a /deaths command ingame to check for it).

This compared to _thousands_ of deaths in pretty much any other MMO I remember playing, and that usually half-way through the character leveling progressing.

Sorry, but I think that to make GW2 any more easier than it is now, they’d have to resort to removing all monsters and turning it into a game of fishing and crop watering.

"I’m interested to know what makes you believe its client side, particularly CPU related?"

Well, to put it bluntly, it’s an indisputable fact by now that the current client-server implementation is pretty much of a prototype-stage level of quality and that the game has been released way too early and unfinished. There are literally thousands of posts in the tech support section of the forums from people having _major_ performance issues on HW configurations that can easily run latest flagship titles in ultra settings, easily even few at the same time. Yet those people on occasions drop to single digit framerates when playing GW2, which, visually, really isn’t a state of the art technology here. You see more and more exploits popping up each day, people speedhacking, flying, teleporting, bots running in trains in front of everyone’s eyes so we can party like it’s 1997 again - this showing the server will happily accept anything the client sends without much sanity checking. You see, daily, tech support being unable to restore, or even know what kind of stuff people lost due to one of the million of server bugs, because there was clearly no basic journaling and logging put into the place. And that could go on and on...

Now why do I mention all this. Among all the many bugs, I think there is something very seriously flawed in how the current GW2 threading model is implemented. Reading through the "FPS problems" threads, you can see this mostly affects AMD CPUs, especially those that don’t push the raw GHz-per-core performance, even for machines that can otherwise run state of the art game titles flawlessly.

I’m one of the people affected, running GW2 on an older Phenom X3 and another Athlon 64 X2. So it’s easy to see how bottlenecked on CPU the game performance is, while the both GTX 560 Ti 448 and GT 240 basically idle through the game. Comparing this to a last generation AMD Bulldozer running with a budget GT 640 (which is despite the two-generation gap basically only marginally faster to a GT 240), that computer doesn’t exhibit any issues at all. All enemy characters appearing instantly, at any distance, always.

Also other thing to notice is how there are no more issues with the characters that already squeezed through the queue and got displayed once. No performance or network issues, like them getting stuck, disappearing, or jumping from place to place... From that point, everything works as it should. Now let the 30-man party jump through a mesmer portal, *pop*, you instantly lost the game, because you won’t see them rendered for the next half a minute.

My (very simplified, for the sake of readability) guess is that the particular thread or threads that manage character appearance, or at least queueing it, run either completely unmanaged, or at unintentionally low priority to the rest of the game mechanics (you can also see it in the constantly broken sound system how puppied up the entire threading model is). I just assume that a slow CPU makes it more easily observable, but this clearly frequently happens even to many of the still relatively modern CPUs. For some reason, not so much with Intel, based on many reports I’ve read.

No amount of verbal/vocal coordination would allow them to stand, or actually move on the exact same coordinates without each one of them running a bot designed for that, so this being a real possibility can be easily ruled out.

As for the screenshot, it really only shows a bunch of people clustered together... during a fight. This alone hardly supports a theory of being able to overcome the cap limit. Additionally, they all stand pretty far from a single specific coordinate.

Also, this would be a pretty big number of people literally asking for a perm ban in the most dumbest way ever possible to achieve, so i personally, at this moment, think you probably just got trolled.

Still in case there is any truth to it, did you contact exploits@arena.net?

From software development aspect, this claim makes no sense whatsoever, but I’m looking forward to a DEV comment on it.

Yep, I’ve been there. Went for a full rings+earrings+amulet combo without realizing the three-jewel requirement until the first discovery... Almost got me a heart attack.

Needless to say, ended up with two rings, at that day.

Examples: Every single time I run into a group of 30+ enemies.

Sometimes wondering why the entirety of our force stopped and I’m the only one still running forward, I notice the enemy force only by the time they completely surround me and start popping up all around from every direction. This has been happening from day one, so by now I’m kind of slowly used to that and play the game accordingly, usually tailing behind few selected people who I know can see the enemy force properly.

I run a 10 Mbps connection completely dedicated to GW2 and I maintain all my routers and the local network, so any kind of latency issue is out of question. There is (figuratively) only a single thing that at that moment runs over the network and that is GW2.

I have also reasons to believe that despite you claiming a server-side problem, this problem is actually very much client-side and very CPU bound, but as at this moment I have no relevant data to back it up, only some observations and comparisons, I’m just mentioning it for completeness.

Queensdale is undoubtedly the first map that most human players finish, and has surely been finished for tens of thousands of times (give or take a zero) by now. You can rest assured that all points in this map are in their right places, you’re simply looking at the wrong one.

Also, this may help:
http://www.guildhead.com/zone/32/queensdale

You’ve read your discovery window wrong. I’m pretty sure it displayed (as for me it did) that it will consume 3 jewels, which is a right number for this recipe:

http://www.guildhead.com/recipe/818905/beryl-mithril-ring

As you state, it consumed 3 jewels, so all is ok. As for the missing recipe, you might want try using the search function in the recipe window, to see if you’re simply not overlooking it.

There is a sound in Guild Wars 2?

This has been happening from the day one and is a pretty "normal" occurrence (at least to me, I get it literally each day, at least when I notice). For a simple "fix", just keep playing as you normally would and try again in an hour, everything should work just fine again.

I have been trying zone changes, relogs, waiting out longer periods offline, nothing ever seems to affect it in any positive way... Only time.

I get pretty much the same. While I can’t test the location in the ’prologue’ instance as all my character slots are full, the same problem also exhibits in the ’real’ version of the place.

Nor lamps, nor the fireplace seem to act as light sources, so lighting isn’t right and there are no shadows being cast. Excluding the "low" option which doesn’t try to produce true shadow, just the expected static blob.

This with NVIDIA GTX 560 Ti, which rules out a local problem, considering ATI hardware gets the same results.