Guild Wars 2

It seems like everyone else hates Scarlet.

But I think the character is interesting, find her dialogue hilarious, have been generally enjoying the story, and am curious to see how it ends.

Does anyone else like the Scarlet arc?

We witnessed it happening in the Fractured! story mission.

Am I the only person wondering if getting elected to the council seems to have gone to Captain Kiel’s head? As far as I know, the Consortium has not been charged with any crimes in general, nor has Dessa been charged with any crimes in specific.

So it’s rather disturbing that Kiel thinks she’s now allowed to just barge in someplace and arrest someone simply because they own something she wants.

I’m sure we’re all well familiar by now with what the corrupt Krytan monarchy tries to pass off as “justice”, but I for one am outraged that little Jenny thinks she can distract us from her complete failure to apprehend Scarlett by making a scapegoat of poor Hobo-tron.

And too add insult to injury, Lion’s Arch is forced to be the stage for this farce, our proud citizens being swindled out of their hard earned gold to pad the pockets of the Divinity’s Reach nobility.

This is exactly the sort of exploitation that Lion’s Arch’s independence was supposed to prevent, yet here we are having our noses rubbed in their perfidy! I say we need to form a good old fashioned mob to go down there and free that poor golem from the bonds of oppression!

Doghouse.1562:

For most of the last 20 years I was a professional software tester for IBM, on a mature product core to the businesses of some very big names indeed. If something bad got through into released code, in a worst case it could bring a customer’s business to a halt. We didn’t just get a few disgruntled posts, we risked our CEO taking phone calls from the CEOs of Wal-Mart and the like – and then asking us ever so politely just when they could expect a solution, because a key customer was losing millions of dollars an hour? And I support every word in the parent post. Code without bugs doesn’t happen except in the dreams of people who know nothing about developing code. Fixes are almost never as simple as they look. And you can’t test everything in any reasonable time-frame and still put code out, so bugs will inevitably get through. The best you can hope is that the dev’s don’t muck up TOO badly, and that the testers manage to catch the more embarrassing ones before the customers can hit them. After that, it’s all about damage limitation and prioritisation. So don’t rag on either the dev’s or the testers just because you don’t like one bug in particular that got through – YOU COULDN’T DO BETTER (and if you think otherwise, frankly you’re welcome to go try). And, yes, sometimes you get a bug where the cure would be worse than the disease, and you just have to roll with it and do the best you can in the circumstances.

I, on the other hand, have 15 years experiences doing systems engineering for an aerospace company. If my code fails it gets dozens or hundreds of people killed. So it certainly is possible to test your code enough to make sure that there’s no critical bugs. And if I was doing my job the way ANet does theirs, quite frankly I’d be in jail.

Software is not a dark art, as much as companies like to pretend it is so they can play the “well you’re not a programmer so you can’t understand how hard this is!” card. There should not be massive, obvious bugs in nearly every event patch. And when non-obvious bugs are discovered, there should be a way to test fixes without endangering the operational system.

It should be obvious to anyone with experience in the industry that ANet has a woefully inadequate test process. Yes you can’t get every minor bug, but they should be catching a lot of the ones that are getting through and they sure as heck ought to be able to fix them. They don’t because they don’t really care. It’s probably going to be gone in two weeks anyways, so why bother?

Danelin Raelon.1605:

At what point did A-net decide it was OK to abandon good customer service?

The second event (“The Lost Shores”) when it was impossible to complete the scavenger hunt because the NPCs kept bugging out and ANet refused to delay the next phase until the problem was fixed.

ANet’s standard response to bugs in event content has always been:

1. Announce they’re looking into it.
2. Announce it would be too hard to fix so that nothing can be done.
3. Proceed to ignore the issue until the next event starts.

Her term must be going really badly. Apparently she’s been sentenced to some sort of weird execution via fountain. Forced to stand there as she’s slowly sliced apart by razor sharp mechanical boats.

With the SBA patch, a number of the displays in under the historical achievements display have been messed up:

1. There are two identical copies of Bazar of the Four Winds
2. The partially completed achievements no longer show how far your got for most of the categories (the exceptions for me being Shadow of the Mad King, The Wondorous Workshop of Toymaker Tixx, and Support for Gnash Evonblade)

Ayrilana.1396:

For the part in Frizz’s lab you can just use stability to prevent getting pulled by the robots. Every class has access to this.

Every class except for rangers. Our only non-elite stability skill just gives our PET stability, which isn’t much use in the Frizz fight. We do have an elite that grants stability, but being able to briefly do it once every 4 minutes also isn’t much help in the Frizz fight.

Excalibur.9748:

No the dungeon is fine. The more I do it the more I feel it’s fine. Just make sure you have 1-2 guardians.

Since the supposed design philosophy of this game is that you’re not supposed to be locked into particular party builds to be successful “Just make sure you have 1-2 guardians” means that the dungeon is not fine.

lordkrall.7241:

If I go out and by a lottery ticket in real life I have no idea about my chances of winning the jackpot.

Sure you do. Pretty much every lottery is legally required to provide the exact odds of winning.

My feedback for this event is the same for The Lost Shores event: your developers ought to be ashamed of themselves. Once again they delivered a buggy pile and then used the fact that it was a limited duration event as an excuse to avoid fixing it even if that meant people will never get to actually complete the event.

I’d rather have a well done event every two or three months than a rushed event that doesn’t work released every month just for the sake of releasing something.

The developers know it wasn’t not working, but they don’t care, since it would take away from the time they need to come up with new RNG containers. Getting more gem store cash purchases is more important than actually delivering a quality product.

@Beta

None of the crabtossing achievements are currently “detecting” any progress toward them, so if you haven’t already completed them there’s no way to complete them. Since the event ends tomorrow, that means we’ll likely never be able to complete them.

Well, ArenaNet has successfully ignored the fact that all the crabtossing achievements have been broken for the last week, so I guess none of us who still need to finish are going to get to.

Thanks ArenaNet.

Textman.1347:

It’s been a few days now and no word on what Anet is planning to do, so I posting here in hope to finding out.

I’m guessing what they’re planning to do is ignore the issue until the event ends on Tuesday and then tell us how sorry we are some of us weren’t able to complete it, but we can all kitten off because they already have our money.

The actual “Secret of Southsun” is that ArenaNet puts code into production without testing it properly.

So once again there’s a limited time event that the players can’t complete because ArenaNet seems unable to get basic functionality working (I mean really, how hard is it to get an achievement to work?) coupled with a short time frame that leaves them no room for error.

And I’m sure they’ll give us a lip biting post about how “sorry” the developers are that we weren’t able to get it working in time, even though they’re not actually go to do anything to make it right.

How many times must the players keep going through this cycle before we finally get some changes to development practices as a result?

I agree with the people who think F&F handled the narrative better than this story section. The little cut scenes in F&F were great, and I can’t see why they didn’t put any of those in this section.

Heck, I would have been fine with the “side by side” cutaways from the original personal story, although I seem to be the only person who actually liked those.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

We’re having a small issue with our patch notes we are attempting to resolve currently. The Meta Event is not yet active on the island.

That makes no sense. How exactly do you have technical “issues” with a text file?

That seriously upsets me. That sort of “we’ll just stick the story in some magazine article because it doesn’t really matter if anyone can actually follow the plotline in the game” attitude is exactly the reason I ended up quitting World of Warcraft.

Was there supposed to be some content between the sample collection and the dungeon that got cut? Because it seems like we jump from “we need to figure out who did this!” to “we’ve got him cornered inside this cave!” without going through the necessary narrative steps one would expect between the two.

It would be nice if in the future, the achievements didn’t give the entire story away before you even start it.

Behellagh.1468:

1) The game is installed in C:\Games\Guild Wars 2

Which would be “not installing to the Program Files directory”. This also makes the computer less secure as the executable or in a place where any process is free to modify the executable however they like.

abomally.2694:

I don’t have this issue. Unfortunately, I don’t know why you do. It isn’t a problem in the code or everyone would have this problem.

If they aren’t then either:

1. They’re not installing to the Program Files directory.
2. They have UAC disabled
3. They have it set to Run as Administrator

All three of those options reduce the security of the system and really shouldn’t be required to run a game.

If you do the default install, it puts everything in the “Program Files (x86)” directory. If UAC is enabled on the system, only processes with admin privileges are allowed to write to this directory, which means GW2 asks for admin permissions every time it starts and tries to update itself. It should be storing non-static program data in the “Program Data” directory, which only requires user level access to write to.

I was hoping this would get fixed on its own, since you’d think professional programmers would know the basics of Windows programming, but apparently not.

A game shouldn’t have to have Administrator privileges every time it’s run. If you were storing the game data in PROGRAMDATA where it’s supposed to go (as per the Windows Logo Software Program guidelines) instead of in PROGRAMFILES, you wouldn’t need to.

There are a number of things ArenaNet could do to make the process of updating the game more convenient, especially for users with slower internet connections.

The first is the timing of releases. If patches were released in late evening or early morning, users could download them during off peak hours, like in the middle of the night while they’re are sleeping or during the day while they are at work. Instead you release them in the afternoon so they can’t dowload until they get home, wasting hours of game time waiting for patches to occur, made worse by the fact their trying to download during the network’s peak usage time.

This is made worse by the fact your download client has no way of capping the bandwidth used, so they can’t even do something else while they wait, because your application prevents anything else from accessing the internet in a reasonable fashion.

After a long day at work, two hours staring at the Guild Wars 2 progress bar isn’t much of a way to relax.

I can’t believe I’m actually complaining that a company isn’t doing enough to monetize their game, but it seems to me that Arena.net is missing a huge opportunity with the Gem Store around the holidays.

Everything on the Gem Store is account bound, which means you can only buy stuff for yourself. I’m sure there’s a number of players who would have liked to have bought their friends something for Christmas, but there’s no way to do that.

It seems unbelievable that there’s no way to buy something on the Gem Store and have it sent to a friend rather than to yourself.

ReginaBuenaobra.6953:

There were some events that we could not extend past Phase 1, unfortunately. Extending all events in Phase 1 would have been a much more extensive fix, requiring much more time to thoroughly regress. Given the time sensitive nature of the event, we extended what portions we were able to effectively.

Translation: we were flat out lying when we said we were gonna extend Phase 1, because we figured by the time you all realized that, Phase 2 would be out and most of you would stop caring about Phase 1. You should be thankful we bothered to fix anything.

Our developers are reading all of your feedback and are taking all the critiques on board.

Translation: Because kitten you, that’s why. It’s not like anything bad is gonna happen to us as a result of this debacle.

We apologize that this means that folks are not able to complete the Miyani chain.

Translation: So sorry. QQ moar.

The Lost Shores? More like The Lost NPCs.

I liked the “lab assistants” in Spekk’s laboratory where if you fell and died, they would automatically rezz you and then teleport you back to your last “checkpoint”. This was so much better than some of the other puzzles where one missed jump requires you to start the whole thing over again.