Guild Wars 2

What exactly will happen with existing skill points?
Will there be any difference between what happens with existing skill points on a level 80 toon with all skills unlocked and a sub-80 with only some skills?
What about skill point scrolls?

Saying “skill points will be converted into crafting materials” is a very vague answer and does not help me make any intelligent choice with the thousands I have been saving for legendaries and ascended items.

Ayrilana.1396:

I’ve seen a tier 1 be completed with 5 people. The only one that needs to be scouted is the tier 3 and this is only if you want a high success rate. I was in a guild before where we split into two groups and we did succeed that way. What really helps is that everyone knows the routes and follows them against the path that the bounty walks.

Which two bounties?

The only way it’s going to happen is if you randomly get two really easy ones to find, like Trillia or Poobadoo. If you get any of the medium or longer paths, there is no hope, even if you have 5 incredibly skilled people. Out of the 18 targets, at most 6 have short/easy paths.

You’ll need to acquire the light and medium versions from the HOM to unlock them in your wardrobe.

Unfortunately, rewards from the HOM are disabled because of a bug that awarded many points to players that did not correctly earn them. They’re working on a fix.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Instant-God-Walking-Amongst-Mere-Mortals/4961498

Just to start:
Google has servers all over the world, and your pings are routed to the nearest. GW2 servers are only in 2 data centers in the world in NA and EU, so your traffic needs to go there.

There are many other issues that your high pings could be caused by, including all kinds of ISP chicanery that Arenanet has no control over. A single screenshot showing high pings really doesn’t help determine what the problem is and whether you or Arenanet can fix it.

This probably falls under other skill timing bugs.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Skill-Timing-on-live/4936747

It looks to me like you learned the recipe to craft the greatsword, not the inscription. If that’s the case, you’ll need to buy the inscription recipe (21k karma, cheap) from a master weaponsmith.

HoM rewards are disabled due to a bug from a couple weeks ago that awarded many HoM points to people who did not earn them. If they re-enable the rewards before they remove the incorrectly earned points, it just makes yet more work to fix. So we can reasonably expect rewards to be back once that happens.

I eagerly await all the gritty details. The overall setup looks excellent. Big plus on the map bonuses.

I assume this effects most account bound/account bound on acquire items, but Blade Shards can be added to the list.

Add Blade Shards to the list of things that aren’t stacking correctly.

Branden Gee.2150:

Alright. This is now a feedback thread! I’ll be updating the list as thoughts and ideas come in.

Loooooooove the camera changes. Seriously, good work.

Troll’s End. On a Norn. First time. Oh Yeah.

BobbyStein.2315:

We have a feature called the Content Guide that allows you to customize what is shown in the upper right.

Can we get an option for the Content Guide that only displays events in the zone? I hadn’t realized until last night that the “New Challenges await you in [next zone].” that comes up after you’ve finished one zone prevents the guide from displaying nearby events.

Tachyon.5897:

(Desolation) to be red

3 weeks ago.
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/254

5 weeks ago.
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/250

8 weeks ago.
http://mos.millenium.org/eu/matchups/history/242

The Gates Assassin.9827:

PvP Specialist here

Few questions about this:

1. How often do you swap from your main class to the class daily to get the AP?
2. Do you enjoy the encouragement to try another class?
3. If you were to change this daily, what would you want it to be changed to instead?

1) Most days I get the daily for the extra rewards.
2) Yes – however if it’s a class I’m not comfortable with, I go to hotjoin for a match or two to get the win so I’m not being a detriment to my team. Unfortunately not everyone else does the same.
3) I don’t have a problem with the daily profession win in-and-of-itself, but of the effect it has on queues and match quality. Last night I queued up on my main (not a class on daily) and was in a match where my team had 2 thieves (on the daily). Neither of these players appeared to have the slightest idea how to play their class. We of course got completely stomped. Maybe they were average players with a class they knew and it would’ve been a good match otherwise, but they just were bad as thieves and we had no chance to win because of it.

So how would I change it?

How about instead of “Win X Daily” it’s “Win X or Y Daily”

So day 1 could be
1) PvP Capture
2) 3 PvP kills
3) Win as a Thief or Mesmer
4) Win as a Guardian or Engineer

day 2
1) PvP Rank points
2) PvP Defender
3) Win as a Engineer or Necro
4) Win as a Warrior or Ranger

and so on. Assuming I remember my Prob/Stat correctly, there’s 70 combinations for 4 out of 8 professions and 630 combinations for 4 out of 9 professions when we get Revenant. So that should give ample variation so that the queues aren’t overwhelmed with 1 or 2 classes and still encourage people to play other classes besides their main.

Exodus.6501:

Its not unbearable but it kills the spirit of pvp in my opinion.

Yes, this. I’m not so much against the idea, but the inevitable results.

It screws the queues up by overloading it and forcing bad matches. It makes the team swap/autobalance issue in hotjoin worse.

So what are the benefits? Only thing I can think of is that it encourages people to at least become familiar with other classes – which is a good thing. But maybe can we achieve the same result without the problems that daily profession winner causes?

Brandon,

Thanks so much for the info on Ready-Up.

The enhanced camera looks amazing. Can’t wait.

Thanks Anet for the added QoL changes (and bug fixes). These look like little things, but really are worth it.

Also fixed all those extra BL ticket collection not-really-unlocked skins bug too.

20. When you get a map you don’t like, sit in spawn and complain that the map is bad because 1 bad player can doom the team… while the rest of you team is getting stomped 4v5.

You won’t get a response to this on the forums.

Put in a ticket and support will give you an answer (though they may still be overwhelmed from all the returning players).

Never noticed, but then I don’t spend much time on the character select screen.

Solution: Play more in game as Asura and examine the gloriousness that is Asura there.

Yamsandjams.3267:

I think part of the reason they haven’t added any new wallet currencies is because it’ll break their nice and neat 4×4 UI grid that they made for the wallet currencies. LAME

The last time this topic came up and got a response, that actually was the reason.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Suggestion-Currencies-The-Wallet/first#post4566660

And ya, its an absurdly silly reason.

Have you been in PvP anytime in the last 6 months or so? You keep the look of your gear. You keep your weapons. So basically what you’re asking for we’ve had for a long time.

The only things that change (amulets, runes, sigils, racial skills and such) are to keep everyone on an equal footing.

Rabbitisabd.4796:

Please Explain why

Takes a bit of history. At launch, getting credit for escorting a yak was much easier. It didn’t require any combat. It was also very rewarding with very little work. So much that you’d almost constantly see 20-30 people following yaks. Many of them bots for gold sellers since yaks were on a regular schedule every few minutes. So the event was changed to require a higher threshold for credit, including a few kills very close to the yak to discourage bots and zerg escorts.

Healix.5819:

Tamasan.6457:

There’s just no way that is possible.

It’s possible. The software controlling the instances would likely know how many there are but the game doesn’t need to know that information, so it might not be accessible. In order to provide that functionality, they would have to update their server software.

Of course they would need to update software, probably write up some interface and something to parse it to the game client. That all is relatively simple, because all of the needed information is already there – or somewhere – since all the systems that exist need it. This really bugs me about this topic. We’re not asking for the entire server infrastructure to be rewritten. We’re not asking for megaservers to go away. You can learn a heck of a lot from an outside perspective on how a system works and what is possible. We’re not asking for something that is from a technical standard very difficult.

Tron.3471:

So are you guys are saying it was better before? With the desolate maps and such. Maybe I am not fully understanding but I always thought megaservers were a good thing, to keep more people on the same map. Honestly its hard to read through the OPs post because he is so negative.

There are a number of things that megaservers are good for – one of the big ones is what you mentioned about empty maps.

But there are some cases where dealing with the megaserver system is a nightmare.
-Organizing large groups for world bosses
-Finding and developing communities (roleplayers among others)
-Seeing the same people regularly and getting to know them
-Calling in help for WvW from populated PvE areas
-Bugged event chains

There have been some small improvements on number 3 in the year or so we’ve had megaservers. None of the others have been addressed at all. We keep getting larger and more zone-wide events – just look at Silverwastes. We’ve been promised more of these in HoT. But we lack any kind of tools to actually organize more than 5 people at a time.

Phoenixlin.8624:

developers said that with their current server infrastructure they can’t provide a map selection option.

I think you’re taking that statement very much out of the context it was answered in.

There’s just no way that is possible. To assume that it is, you must assume that ArenaNet has no way to tell how many instances of map X are running. You must also assume that the infrastructure doesn’t have any way to tell how many people are connected to each of those instances. Both of those assumptions are absurd.

The entire megaserver system depends on those facts being known. Without that, there is no way to tell whether to add a player coming into a map into an existing instance or to start a new one. There is also no way to tell what low populated instance to shut down – or whether not to shut it down at all (since it may be the only one).

Thanks guy for all the info and gameplay. We want more streams like this one!

Rangelost.4857:

And yet, the solution is so simple. It has been suggested thousands upon thousands of times, inspired by the original Guild Wars and its flawless implementation. And I am suggesting it again, after 9 months of suffering with no relief in sight:

Show us the list of open map copies. Tell us which map copy we are on. Allow us to select which map copy we want to go to.

You already have drop-down lists. You already have queues. You already have everything you need to make it happen. For the sake of Tyria, please, stop ignoring this outrageous problem. This is simply insane.

+1.

I’ve never seen any kind of reason why this solution isn’t feasible.

Keep everything else about megaservers the same as it is now. Just add an optional UI window that I can see how many other map instances are open, and be able to move to another without requiring that I party with someone in it. Simple.

I’m stuck inside a finished map. It won’t let me out. Swapped toons, logged out, exited and stay out of game for 5 minutes, nothing works, it forces me back into foefire.

nightwulf.1986:

There are two things happening here. 1) People didn’t pay attention to/didn’t know about what was outlined to be discussed at this POI and 2) People don’t care about point one.

You can still go look at the news announcement on the front page. It says “Heart of Thorns gameplay” – so how can you say people who expected to actually see some gameplay didn’t know what was going to happen?

The announcement has been made already. It’s time for the devs to stop treating any information on HoT like the nuclear launch codes. I love hearing about funny things that happen during the design and design philosophy and that stuff after I actually know what the design is and can make some guesses on the impact.

Not a bug. Arrows arc. Differences in elevation matter. It’s not just Rangers that benefit.

And the skill is tiered. 0-500, 500-1000, 1000+. Range over 1000 doesn’t add any additional damage.

To those who want a direct player-to-player, can you state why you want it? Are you just used to having it from other games? Do you object to the market fees? Some other reason? Why is it important to have it?

There may be a few good reasons to have it – but there are many reasons why having it would be bad. First, it undermines the trading post in at least 2 ways. Yes, the TP is a gold sink (and a gold sink that is very important for the game economy). But a more important result is that a direct P2P system makes the TP less useful. Markets and the TP work better when they are competitive (so in general, the more people buying and selling, the better). Basically everything you’ve learned about supply and demand is based on something called perfect competition. So the more people buying and selling things, the closer the price is to what both buyers are willing to pay and what sellers are willing to sell for. Someone above mentioned that people using a direct sales system could figure out a fair price (not get scammed on price) by looking at the TP – but the fewer people using the TP the more likely that price won’t reflect a “fair” price.
(To any real economist, I know I’m vastly simplifying this. Trying not to get too bogged down in details.)

Zera Allimatti.2541:

There is more money to be made by enticing the majority of the players to keep forking over money to buy gems to buy keys for a chance at something they will likely never get than having those same players pay a one-time fee for the same item.

That’s fundamentally dishonest. And I don’t think Anet is doing that; they’re better than that.

As far as shareholders, you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are a lot of problems with the constant focus on quarterly profits, but it is still that: quarterly. Which means so long as Anet is regularly releasing desirable things in the gemshop for gems, there’s no need for RNG lottery boxes.

MethaneGas.8357:

But really… your team is just as likely to have class x as the other team. If both teams have 2-3 professions from the daily, tough luck, but you’re on equal ground.

It doesn’t really matter whether the teams are on equal ground class-wise, because the abundance of the daily classes are overwhelming the matchmaking system. Instead of having equal skill based matches, the system has to deal with so many class x and class y sitting in the queue for too long and throwing them into matches that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

Draknar.5748:

Sort of. There’s the one set of odds you’re talking about “what is the probability the 8th flip is heads”—that is 1/2, yes. But then there’s a different set of odds: “what is the probability you will get 8 heads in a row”. That is not 50%. That would be (1/2)^8 or ~.4% probability that heads will land 8 times in a row on a coin flip. While each flip can be considered independent of each other, probability is based on the larger set of data. It can happen that you get 8 heads in a row, but it is certainly not common.

Yes, the chance of 8 heads in a row is 1 out of 256. The flip side of that is that for any specific string of 8 coin flips, the chance is exactly the same, 1 in 256.

HHHHHHHH = 1/256
HTHTHTHT = 1/256
HHTHTTTH = 1/256

Whats my point? That 8 heads in a row is nothing special. But because the human mind is really good at finding patterns, we want to attach some special significance to it.

I have little doubt that RNG is working perfectly fine as designed and coded. There’s a decent amount of evidence* showing that in aggregate over the entire game, precursors drop at a fairly steady, predictable rate from the MF.

That doesn’t mean that the actual design is “fair” or “good”, though. That’s a whole different question – and you can’t answer that question by looking at the math. I am not at all a fan of RNG being used for the extremely low chance events that we’ve got currently. Luckily, when HoT comes out, this will be a mostly moot issue as we’re being given a guaranteed way to acquire precursors.

So back to the topic – which is effectively statistics. The largest and most reliable datasets I’ve seen on mystic forge precursor drops put the chance of getting a precursor by putting 4 sufficiently high level rares into the forge is somewhere around 1 in 800 attempts*. That is an extremely small chance – so in order to get a typical and reliable distribution curve requires tens of thousands of attempts. A normal player, even putting every rare they get into the forge is unlikely to reach that threshhold – in other words, any single player’s (or even a small group’s) experience is not likely to match the aggregate of all players.

(*This is why TP data is useful for seeing the aggregate. So some people have kept track of large numbers of attempts and given us 1/800 or so. So one data point is that putting 3200 rares into the forge will give out 1 precursor. In the attempts 2400 rares are destroyed[4 rares in, 1 rare/exotic/precursor out]. If we then compare that expected rate to TP prices, we see that it holds up. Once you factor in TP costs and profit taking, the most desired precursors and prices of high level rares track very close to that expected rate. If there was some bug either raising or lowering that rate, it is not reflected in the TP.)

Maybe it’s not as populous as it used to be, but I log on to work on HOM stuff occasionally and still see plenty of people around.

1 vinewrath kill, 2 coat boxes for me.

Are you not getting credit for the first achievement that guarantees a drop?

No.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zNjQecyjE8

Justin ODell.9517:

How would you guys suggest we go about teaching this to players?

The absolute first thing you need to do is get rid of personal score completely. Before you can teach new players good habits, you need to stop encouraging the bad habits.

I’d also really love more death match maps. But I’m not a fan of Courtyard. It feels too constrained on my normal playstyle – either I’m getting obstructed, or right in the melee and instantly dead. And being forced out of the spawn before your team can recover and regroup more often than not just leads to runaway snowball matches and spawn camps.

We also definitely need easily swappable specs before more DM or other game modes are in play.

Don’t worry, if it was a precursor, it was an underwater one.

Rooster.3261:

after my 10k cap, it’ll be 4 days (40ap) til the 13th. what happens to the 40ap?

You won’t get it. That’s what a cap is.

I hit the 10k cap months ago. Haven’t gotten any from any daily since.

Bernie.8674:

Gaile Gray.6029:

I see two concerns: The player who cleared the area and the offensive language. The first isn’t as big a deal as it might appear, or as it might be in other games. This is because the Level 80 is “down-leveled” to a level appropriate for the area. So s/he isn’t operating at true Level 80 powerfulness.

Well, yes and no. Yes, we’re down scaled, but recent changes have increased the gap between down-scaled player in ascended and new player in level-appropriate gear. My wife recently started playing, and when I joined her she was astonished that I was practially one-shotting almost everything in sight with my full berserker exotics,

It’s not necessarily the down-scaling of higher level players (though that could be contributing).

In many parts of the starter zones, the level of the mobs was lowered for the ‘New Player Experience’ thing. Before, the mobs were at the same level of the area, but now most of those mobs are 2 or 3 levels below the level that characters are down-scaled to. This greatly reduces the health of those mobs, so yes, they’re going to get 1-shot by any higher level player.

Compounding that issue is the scaling of events in most zones is really horrible. Outside a few of the world boss events and longer event chains, there is practically no scaling. Everyone’s familiar with the frozen maw/svanir shaman event in Wayfarer Foothills, right? Shaman dies in a minute, maybe minute and a half. But even that is much better than the pre-events before that. The first, where grawl steal supplies – even if there are 100 people by it, you get about 4 waves of 4-6 grawl each (from two spawn points). The next, escorting the scholar spawns exactly 5 mobs, 3 grawl at the cave and 2 ice elementals by the totem. Do I even have to mention that the totem goes down in 2 seconds? You get the idea – these examples are by far the norm.

Since the problem is systemic, it takes something more than a band-aid fix. Get to the root cause – a lack of resources dedicated to keeping existing systems working well when there are major changes to interacting systems. I’d suggest that a permanent, dedicated team be formed for ongoing quality of life and bug fixing purposes. New content is important – and I won’t disagree that it is what keeps people coming back. But the reason many of them left in the first place is because they see things that used to work great ignored, left to wither and die.

Wanze.8410:

If thats what you want to do, just do it. Avoid the tp and achieve your goals in game.

So I can achieve my goal of getting Sunrise without the TP?

FYI, got my first precursor a week and a half ago. 5745 hours in game, very rarely not doing something. First precursor drop. It was Rage (underwater harpoon gun precursor). So I’ll get Dawn… when exactly?

The whole point of the article and many of the comments here are based around what feels fun and rewarding to the player. That point is being ignored whenever the economic arguments are made.

Personally, I don’t think precursors or the gold economy is broken from the game economy perspective.

But those things are kitten well broken from the fun perspective for the 99% of us who don’t want to play trading post wars or farm the most efficient gold generator (e.g. opportunity cost) all day.

Audience with the queen

Wanze.8410:

I am not a programmer or IT specialist but i wouldnt be surprised, if autoclick macros put too much stress on the servers.
They once mentioned that one reason why conditions and aoe are capped to prevent lag.

If you send too many commands to the server in too short a time period (such as with an auto-clicker with too short of a delay), the server will boot you immediately.

:cough: I can’t independently verify this, because I would never have done something like that. :cough:

Cuddy.6247:

Given their explanation for macros, I’d say an autoclicker falls well within the realm of something acceptable.

Incorrect. From multiple threads, Anet’s policy is that the use of auto-clickers is a bannable offense.

I understand why they have that policy: so that if someone figured out a way to abuse something using one, they couldn’t hide behind the excuse that they were “only using an auto-clicker that had been permitted.”

Frankly, we all know why so many people want to argue with this policy. It’s the thousands of things that Anet has made deliberate design decisions to send our way that requires stupidly clicking thousands of times – luck, trick-or-treat bags, wintersday presents, etc.

So, if Anet is listening to player feedback, we need to make it absolutely crystal clear to stop doing the root cause of the dissatisfaction, or if that is not an option, that a Quality-of-Life change is a high-priority item.

I much prefer the new system. I’ve been playing more PvP since, and enjoying it, than I have in a long time.

I’m not a hardcore PvPer. But I’m also not just a PvEr doing dailies. I wanted exactly what this update was designed to provide – a casual play option that was more structured than the cesspool that hotjoin is. So I play in the unranked queue, and I enjoy it, and it is far better than solo or team queues were for me. Queues are short for me even out of prime time, 50% or so of my matches are good, and most of the rest are at least decent. 4v5s are rare.

I’ll accept that there are issues in the ranked queue that need to be addressed, but don’t call for a rollback of everything because of those. I know I’m not the only one that much prefers what we have now compared to the old.

Double-click with the bank open is supposed to move items between your inventory and the bank (and into a stack at the destination if there is one).

Are they ending up in your bags, or just vanishing?