Guild Wars 2

Spirigo.2897:

No mater how much time you spend testing, a program will always have bugs. That’s a fact which everyone who did any kind of coding knows.

While this is true, testing needs to account for typical cases, and that seems to be lacking.

Anet is all gung-ho for megaservers, and what that amounts to in the current megaserver implementation is 150 random people all squeezed into the same event/area.

So when multiple problems occur because there are 150 people all jam packed into trying to do the same event, it shows a lack of testing the very typical expected use case.

Still broken after recent patch/reset/whatever.

Not new. That’s one of Tricksy Trekksa’s disguises.

The guild window is being a bit weird. I have a “personal” guild for [reasons], of which I’m the only member. When I’m representing my personal guild, I can only see 1 person in other guilds that I’m a member.

It’s like the length of the roster is being overridden.

Zardul.3952:

would be happy with removing waypoints and giving us mounts even if it was JUST a +33% speed boost( like Swiftness)

I’d be happy with a 33% increase in waypoint costs just if someone with a red name comes in and says ’No mounts, not ever, not even after the heat death of the universe, times infinity."

Hyper Cutter.9376:

Calling it “Skynet” isn’t nearly as clever as you seem to think it is.

Yeah, at least Skynet had intelligence. This is more like its lobotomized cousin.

Tyops.5894:

I am deeply concerned. Someone needs to rethink this communication strategy.

Arenanet seems to go through phases of communication blackout. Whether its intentional (someone high up enough on the management org chart muzzled everyone), or unintentional (everyone’s just too busy), it needs to be fixed. We need someone who’s primary job is to interact with players. Someone who can read, but more importantly respond, to threads like these. Someone who may not reveal everything that’s going to happen, but at least can assure us that when bad things happen, we can know why and be proactive in getting answers and making sure the 43 pages of feedback get to the right person that can get flaws fixed.

Believe me, I know its really a frustrating job, but we need another Allie – someone with the kind of personality that can take the sharp edges of the internet and still be as bubbly and happy as Allie always seemed to be.

FenrirSlakt.3692:

Afaik, Gravelings are counted as ghosts.

I was under the impression that gravelings were considered demons. Please don’t take my word for that, though, its been so long since I heard it and I don’t remember if there was any data to back it up.

(On a related note, the sigils of demon slaying seem to have had their bonus change to +damage against elementals. Since there are sigils of elemental slaying with that bonus, it’s a bit redundant, although as they’re both mostly useless, I guess it doesn’t matter much.)

Asmodeus.5782:

Districts are not possible.

This I don’t quite understand.

Do we need something that is exactly like what GW1 was? No. And I don’t think anyone is asking for that. We can keep the same infrastructure, the same population caps, etc.

We can already join (or attempt to join) any map where someone in our party is. Why does it seem like this requires a massive undertaking?

There are two things that would need to be created to make this happen:
1) A way or telling the client how many maps are active of the zone the player is currently located in, and their designation/code/number/whatever.
2) Client UI to select and join a particular one from that list.

I would like nothing more than to rage for a post or two about how badly implemented megaservers have been, and how 2 months has gone by with zero improvement. But that won’t fix anything.

Let me state some facts though:
Megaservers do not work as advertised.
It is harder to play with the same people than it used to be.
It is harder to end up in the same map as the rest of your party.
It is harder to end up in the same map as your guild.
It is nearly impossible to end up in the map as others from your home server.
Server communities cannot organize events.
Guilds can barely organize events. When guilds do missions, they frequently end up in different maps.
Orr Temples are nearly impossible to do, and yet that’s how we’re supposed to be unlocking traits.

The solution seems blinding obvious and simple to me.

Spawn more maps. Proactively spawn more maps. We don’t have to go back to what it used to be. But we need to spread the population out over more maps so they’re not all jam packed full and no one can play with their friends.

You have 2 months of usage data on megaservers. Use it to predict load and spawn more maps ahead of when they’re needed.

What do I mean about proactively spawning more maps? Instead of having one map that everyone gets into until it’s full, have multiple maps and spread people out amongst them like all the information we were given said we would be (party/guild/server priority). If you don’t spawn a new map until the first one is full (or nearly), then it doesn’t matter how you prioritize what map people end up in.

Examples:

World Bosses – you’ve got a schedule for world bosses, this should be easy. On how many maps was world boss X killed the night before? The week before? Spawn that many maps 30 minutes ahead of when that boss spawns.

Guild missions – most guilds do missions on Saturday and Sunday evenings. During the weekend, just keep more maps of particular zones open, and if a guild has a mission active, put them into a map where all representing members will fit.

Server community events – I’ll admit this is tougher, but the servers that organize events aren’t making a secret of it. So if a server gets together to spawn Tequatl every night at a given time, spawn a new Sparkfly Fen map so they can do so without having to try to jump maps so they can play with their community.

And for Grenth’s sake give us a dropdown of other maps (districts) so we can move around easier. The party/join “hack”/workaround is really absurd.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Because without RNG, rewards would all become common as dirt. No prestige. No desire to have. So once you take away the desire to have the reward, you take away the desire to do the content that gives the reward.

Why do you assume that the prestige must be attached to the item/reward? Can’t the prestige come from doing the event in and of itself?

Just look at Super Adventure Box. There’s always threads asking for it to come back. The skins and rewards aren’t difficult to get and many loved it. Tribulation mode didn’t offer any reward you couldn’t get from normal mode, and again many loved just doing Tribulation mode for the prestige.

mtpelion.4562:

The big difference between those games and GW2 in terms of gear (other than the obvious treadmill that comes with a subscription game) is that in those games you need to grind Activity A over and over and hope for Item A to drop whereas in GW2 you can grind Activity A-Z and use the gold generated to buy Item A-Z.

Some people feel like grinding one activity for each item is better (heaven knows why). Other people realize that GW2 gives you MORE options for getting your gear and appreciate that they can do the stuff they like doing to get the stuff they like having.

This is not true. You’re competing with a lot of other people also trying to buy the same thing you want. If what you’re doing earns gold significantly slower than activity A, and there’s a bunch of people doing activity A, then activity B won’t get you ahead if it gets you much less gold. In economic terms it’s called opportunity cost, and its a really important concept.

Was your group in fractals when the patch hit? If you patched and they did not (or vice versa), you cannot join their instance (you’ve got different versions of the game).

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Rarity exists, even in MMOs.

But we’re talking about an online game, where any rarity is artificially imposed.

Is super-ultra rare items fundamentally a good thing for the game? I don’t think so.

Arenanet wants to keep most of their players playing, right?

Having achievable goals that players can progress towards, and can feel good about achieving keeps players playing. Having unattainable goals and no alternative just makes most people frustrated.

CoL is around 150g on the TP as I’m writing this. I don’t think we’re at risk of everyone having one, but we’re at the point where it is achievable for a moderately dedicated player to get it if they want it.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

When there’s too many snowflakes around, it just becomes common snow that no one cares about.

I don’t accept your assertion. Some of the best looking and most memorable characters I’ve seen aren’t using super rare skins or expensive dyes, but finding lesser used skins in different combinations with a coherent color scheme. I don’t claim to be the least bit artistic myself, but I can certainly appreciate what those players have created.

If you want rarity for rarity’s sake, I don’t suggest playing an MMO with 4+ million other people.

Zaxares.5419:

I don’t suppose we can get a direct answer about whether the Chaos of Lyssa drop rate is working as intended

I love a thread where John comes and dispels a misconception.

But this is what bothers me most about these threads (this backpiece, precursors, other really rare items). We never get the answers to the questions that really matter, because we always seem to get caught up in arguments over market manipulation or “Anet just wants us to buy gems to convert to gold” or other distractions.

I agree with John, and I think the economy works great the large majority of the time. As far as MMO economies (at least that I have any passing familiarity with), the only one I’ve seen that I think is better is EVE, and that game is a whole different ball’o’wax that just doesn’t compare to any others.

The real question is: are these items too rare? Or more specifically, is the drop rate of these items too low?

A related question is: is it a “good thing” that there are very desirable super rare items that even moderately dedicated players have little chance of ever getting?

I feel personally that GW has an over reliance on random drops, and that is only exacerbated by the abysmal drop rate on certain items.

A firm grasp of statistics is really necessary here. A quick example: how many times would it take you to guarantee getting an item with a 1 in 3 chance to drop from doing an action? We’ll define “guarantee” at 95% of getting that item. The answer isn’t 3. Or even 6. It’s 8. What??? Sorry, maths below.

So let’s take a hypothetical 100 people that want some item. They run a dungeon, or kill a boss, or whatever until they get it. The item drops 1 out of 3 times the action is performed.

First attempt with those 100 people. 100 people times 1/3 chance = 33 of them get it and are happy, and move on to something else. There’s 67 left. On the second try, we no longer have 100 people, we’ve only got 67. So 67*1/3 = 22 successes. 22 people are happy on their second try, leaving 45 that aren’t. Third try 45*1/3 = 15. Left with 30 now. Fourth is 30*1/3=10. 20 left. Fifth 20*1/3=7. 13 left – sixth try 13*1/3=4. 9 left, seventh try 9*1/3=3, 6 left. Eighth try 6*1/3=2, and we’ve got 4 left who are still unlucky, but 96 out of our 100 got the item, and meets our 95% limit. If you want a better explanation, you can find many good ones on the internet.

So here’s the formula for finding this out without having to do it repeatedly: s = 1 – (1 – c)^t
s = success rate after consecutive tries
c = chance to succeed per try (1/3 on this example)
t = number of tries

You can quickly see that with lower chances, this gets more ridiculous for the people trying to complete it. For a 1/10 chance, it takes 29 attempts for a 95% success rate.

When we’re talking about precursor forging (somewhere are 1 in 800 chance for 4 rares into the forge last I saw anyone do sufficient testing), we’re talking 2400 tries. Overall this is balanced out by those really lucky attempts where someone gets it after a few tries – but it still doesn’t help that poor guy on the low end of the bell curve trying to get his precursor by putting rares into the MF. Those unlucky people have the right to be frustrated when they’re subjected to random number statistics with no real alternative to speak of.

Sure, no one “needs” a precursor, or Chaos of Lyssa, or whatever. They also don’t “need” to play GW2, so if you want to keep them, give them a reasonable way to make progress towards getting them (without just grinding whatever the fastest way to earn gold is at the moment – even assuming they can keep up with the inflation trend of those items).

I firmly agree with OP that hotjoin should be much more fun than it currently is.

-I don’t want to wait for matches to start – I’d do solo or team queue for that.
-I’m not completely against some minor punishment for leaving a team, but think that would be treating the symptom, not the problem.
-I enjoy the downed state system.

I disagree on how to fix the problems. I think a much simpler and less resource intensive option is to make autobalance actually balance teams. People stack teams and leave losing sides because you can rarely get an even match, and there’s no incentives to staying on the losing outmanned team when you can force your way onto a winning side or jump servers.

-When joining a match in progress and the teams are even, players should be put on the losing side.
-When one side has more players and is 100+ points ahead, autobalance should force someone onto the losing team.
-Much faster activation. Right now it takes 10-20 seconds between the point a team is 2 members short and when autobalance activates. It then takes an additional 10 seconds to find a person to switch. This shouldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds each.

Evan Lesh.3295:

Community team members are really helpful when relaying information back and forth between devs and players. ( Like Allie :’( )

Where are they?

I realize all the coders are busy with China. While I’m not thrilled that a huge patch was released and no one has any time for fixes or tweaks, I realize it happens.

But where are the community coordinators? I read the dev tracker every day. The only thing happening is that all feedback gets merged into the gargantuan feedback threads where there is no red name activity. It’s great that you’re reading the threads. But communication is two-way. Someone needs to step up and get involved in a discussion, because if we can’t see that happening, we have no way to know what’s going on, and we feel ignored. It’s 2014, the internet expects interaction, not passive silence.

nekretaal.6485:

5-2-1 or even 4-2-1 would be better.

Assuming you kept the same matchup system, those would be even worse. If your server is in the top bracket of your 9 server league, there would be more incentive to place 3rd in one week, so in the following week, you drop to the second bracket and beat up on the lower tier, get 1st place. You’d easily outscore the server that was in 2nd place both weeks, by losing the first week and having an easier match the second.

That’s the problem with the matchups this season. If all matches award the same points (regardless of difficulty), then over the course of a season, all servers should have a relatively even set of matches compared to any other server. But if you’re basing matchups on how well a server does, then then 2nd or 3rd place against a very difficult opponent should be worth more than an easy win against a weak opponent. We’ve got the worst of both worlds in season 2.

Svarty, that quote was about the PvP Tourney, not the WvW tourney.

Even with the many blowouts, the season 1 schedule was far and above much better than the season 2 matchups where most servers are stuck alternating between one matchup on odd weeks and another on even weeks.

+1 this thread and every other thread about getting rid of personal score.

#RealStatsOrRiot

Beldin.5498:

So you want them to “fix” that so that you can get ruined items even if you DON’T have any of those traits equipped ?

That would not be my first choice, but if it is the only option to fix the bug, then I would rather have that then the bug.

Right now, we have a bug in the gathering system that only impacts some classes spec’d certain ways.

I would much prefer if the only way to get ruined items were to use an inappropriate level of tool, instead of what we have now that depends on your class, your spec/gear, the status of cooldowns on your traits, and the particular time an enemy hits you with something to trigger those things.

Yes, it is a bug. Please read the thread. It has nothing to do with being in combat. You can harvest all day while in combat and never get a ruined material as long as you don’t have one of those traits/runes/sigils that automatically activates another ability. If it wasn’t a bug, then manually activating abilities while in the middle of harvesting would also give ruined pieces, and it does not.

This is a long standing bug. It is not caused by taking damage, or “too much” damage, or being hit by any particular attack or condition.

It is caused by certain traits that will automatically trigger an ability. An example is the warrior’s Shrug it Off trait, which automatically triggers Shake it Off when a condition is applied. Or the engineer minor trait Hidden Flask where you drink Elixir B when hit below 75% health.

Many classes have these – some are major traits, some are minor traits. If it’s a major trait, then you can swap out while gathering. If it’s a minor trait, it’s harder to deal with, but you could spec out easily now that you can reset traits anywhere.

Regardless of whether you can stop it, it is an obvious bug, since you do not get ruined ore if you manually trigger the same skill when harvesting. So please fix the thing already!

Dany Little Star.2837:

I want to ask to some dev to think about remove personal scores in the sPvP.

+1.

Personal score means little to nothing. Get rid of it ASAP.

We have a completely different ranking and progression system now than when we did when those points were implemented. All that personal score does is promote generally bad play in the only official game mode we have (conquest).

A scoreboard that shows straight numbers of captures/defends/kills would be great, but please get rid of the personal score where killing a NPC is worth 25 personal points and a team score of 25, whereas capping and holding an objective is worth 10 personal points but can increase your team score by 150 or more over the course of a match.

Joined a solo q arena, ended up in a bugged match that wouldn’t start and was permanently stuck at “Waiting for players.” Left after a few minutes, now can’t join any other solo arenas. Getting a network error message (code=1033:53:5:1314:101) when I hit the join button.

If I don’t immediately put in a ticket for a refund of a few gem store town clothes pieces, will it still be possible to get a refund later? I would like to hold out some hope that there’s a better option.

I really would like the khaki shorts and cherry blossom top as skins instead of the tonics. Frankly, the top that is now paired with the khaki shorts is hideous, and the skirt matched with the cherry blossom top is just… boring.

I know everyone has their own favorite pieces, but come on. In the ~18 months since launch, the number of individual town clothes pieces released from the gem store was very minimal (especially since most of it was headgear/helm/hat of some sort and isn’t relevant to this point). I fully accept that there could be clipping issues if these items were converted to skins – I don’t think that is a major hurdle, and I doubt I’m alone in thinking this. Can we have at least one pass through the individual town clothes pieces and see what could be easily converted to real wardrobe skins?

On the whole, the wardrobe system is great. I think the interface is a bit unintuitive in places, but not a big deal. I don’t like that my feelings for the system as a whole are really soured by the few skins I no longer have access to that I quite liked.

The world boss schedule is absurd and far too limiting. I can accept the idea of “a” schedule for these events, but “this” schedule just doesn’t work.

Please increase the number of events active to at least double what the current schedule includes – so 2 bosses every 15 minutes. That would give us some choices.

As far as mega events, is a 4 hour rotation instead of 8 really all that much to ask for? The guild consumable is nice as an idea, but the 20 merit cost is absurd. It is above what most smaller guilds can manage. The large guilds specifically setup for the mega events are in no better position, as they to want to spawn these event multiple times per week, if not multiple times per day so it makes no sense for them either.

Any idea if the soulbound on acquire runesets that drop from dungeons will ever be fixed to be account bound?

Seems like a pretty glaring omission on a feature patch that made almost everything else account bound and included a full pass on all runes and sigils.

Astral Projections.7320:

If they are truly forcing you to change your password, and this is the first time I’ve heard of it, just tack on a 1 to your old EPIC password. Easy to remember and your account security isn’t compromised.

:headdesk:

I work in information security… a post like this tells me I have utterly failed at it.

One key idea that you should have gotten from the sticky post is that there is no such thing as a “secure” password.

The way to look at security is in a holistic manner. In addition to passwords, look at the patterns that many people use to “change” their passwords – by adding 1, and then 2, and then 3 onto a password that is thought to be “good” and don’t let people fall into that trap. Don’t just assume Anet’s database being secure is enough, work on securing your own system. Don’t depend on single authentication (“something you know” aka a password) but also implement two factor authentication (add in “something you have” like a smartphone or key fob).

To the first OP, sure, your password might be theoretically unbreakable. It may not be prone to bruteforcing even if Anet’s database is breached. Yes, changing your password can be annoying. But this isn’t just about you. It is also about the other million Anet customers. And if large numbers of those other customers are compromised, it is also bad for you – the secondary effects that will be a disrupted game experience.

downwithdragons.8291:

You do understand the the wurm is not TTS’s personal toy, right?

Never said it was. The OP said he was offended because someone called him dead weight. Maybe I’m offended at his suggestion that would destroy a community that I’m part of. It works both ways. I don’t consider myself some elite snob and I resent being referred to as such. I’m just willing to put the time and practice into doing the hard stuff, even if it takes me many failed attempts to get right.

Star Ace.5207:

(If this is a concern, ask for ANet to modify the event, rather than pretend that it NEEDS 150 perfectly coordinated people. The map doesn’t belong to anyone, raid guild, or event group. I frankly doubt they playtested it with such an absurd requirement.)

If the event is made easier, it effectively negates the entire reason for the guild’s existence. TTS and other guilds were organized specifically for these very difficult encounters. Without them, these communities would be destroyed.

TTS killed wurm last night with 5 seconds to spare. If even 5 people out of the 150 map cap were not in teamspeak doing exactly what they were told, it would have failed. Nearly everyone there was already familiar with the fight – if there were even 5 randoms not from TTS who had never done a serious attempt before, it would have failed. The encounter was designed to be this difficult purposefully – go back and read the dev comments on it at release if you don’t believe me.

Beating the encounter as is feels like a huge accomplishment because it is so difficult. Taking that difficulty away would mean that there’s no need for TTS anymore. The stated goals of this update include bringing communities together. Making wurm easier would destroy the TTS community.

Ohoni.6057:

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On the schedule:

• It is not written in stone. We will adjust it as necessary.
• There’s lots of ways to go about this, but the current thinking is that it would be more convenient to plan for specific daily times rather than have a “sliding” rotation. We felt this was particularly necessary for larger events like the Triple Wurm and Tequatl.
• Although the old system had certain advantages, it had some major disadvantages as well:
  • Although non-scheduled events are more dynamic, you have a low chance of encountering events with long cooldown periods. Although it was originally thought that big events would be happenstance and rare opportunities that players would stumble on and become immersed in, we found that many players enjoy this type of content as a mainstay of their GW2 experience. When they can’t access that content regularly, we have a problem.
  • On the other hand, you may be aware of the external event tracking sites and have been using them play on regularly basis. This is a good approach in concept, but there’s some major pitfalls if you miss an opportunity to play because of a new build or encounter an overflow server.
• The intent of the schedule is to:
  • consistently provide access to large scale content for players who want to play it
  • deliver that content in such a way that players can plan and organize to prepare for it
  • help ensure that there are always enough participants in the content
  • help ensure that there is always enough server capacity to for all of the participants regardless of overflows, megaservers, etc
• There are still and will always be a large number of meta-events and bosses that are not on the schedule.

At some point, we would also like to introduce a messaging system in-game so that it’s always clear what world event content you participate in without having to utilize a resource outside of the game. I have no guarantee or ETA of when we might actually see this though.

Having a schedule is all well and good, but one thing the schedule currently handles poorly, when the events you want to do ONLY occur at times you’re unable to play. Players are not at the beck and call of your master schedule, we have lives outside the game. There needs to be better ways that the player can find the event they want WITHIN the time they have available to play, rather than having to structure the time they play around the game’s schedule. Predictability is good, but there also needs to be choice.

Make it so that multiple events are running simultaneously, so that they can stack up on once-per-hour cycles instead of “one per three hour” cycles, and you can choose which ones you want to join at any given time.

I’m not saying that the current system is perfect, only that the new system you’re proposing is worse.

My sentiments exactly.

I see the benefit of set times for events and I’m not against the mega-server concept, just the seriously limited schedule for bosses as posted in the blog.

There’s a really good reason that world boss trains happen and most of the rest of the dynamic events in the rest of the world are not regularly completed – and it’s not just a population issue. The karma/gold/loot rewards are horrendously bad if they cannot be very quickly chained. It is very natural to try to get the most benefit for the least amount of effort – how electrons stack up in orbitals of their atoms is all about finding the lowest energy states, and everything from the number and locations of leaves on plants, to hunting strategies of predators is based on minimizing energy used over potential gain. You will not be able to code that behavior away.

It should be about making as many different options both fun and rewarding and it doesn’t appear on the surface that the schedule as is remotely comes close to that.

Lishtenbird.2814:

I would really prefer to have several standard/small bosses spawn at once, instead of a single one at a time. There’re bosses I like, there’re bosses I don’t, there’re bosses I’ve done already in a different timeslot.

Furthermore, if we have a single boss at a time, we’ll always have to fight with the full zerg, and I think I don’t have to tell developers that killing Frozen Maw or Inquest Golem with 5 people is a lot faster and more fun than a 10-minute auto-attack on a gigantic HP bag upscaled by a large zerg who had no other bosses to do anyway. This is a design decision which will make the game less comfortable with the new system.

+9000

I enjoy doing golem mk2 solo or svanir shaman with a small group, and as it can be done in 3-4 minutes instead of autoattack-for-10-minutes-might-as-well-read-the-forums-or-go-make-a-sammich.

- Schedule of World Bosses
Horrible. All the spontaneity taken out of it.
As far as efficiency, even worse than horrible. Right now, I could get 80% or more of them (plus 2 or 3 temples) on an average night immediately after daily reset within an hour or two. The schedule as it stands would now take me 2 or 3 times longer for the same amount of rewards, and a lot of waiting around or doing earlier part of the chains (with the pitiful gold/karma rewards from them). This is especially noticeable on the events with long chains – Modniir Ulgoth as an example – that’s as involved of an event chain as most of the temples, with the large majority of the rewards at the final step. if that scheduled time is when the first event in the chain starts, then the question becomes: do I go then, and spend half an hour working for little benefit, or wait 20 or 30 minutes, then try to get lucky getting onto a map that bothered pushing the event?

-Rewards
Rebalance of rewards from them? I don’t think its going to come close to making up for it. Blog was noticeable lacking details here.
Downstream effects of this could be quite dramatic. Think of ectoplasm. All of it in game comes from salvaging rare or exotic gear. Only John Smith knows for sure, but how much of that is gear from daily chests from world bosses? Based on my experience with over 200% magic find, I get very few rare or better random drops. I would guess upwards of 80% of rares, and therefore most of the ectos come directly from world boss events. If I was in the mood and position to speculate, I’d be buying up all the ecto I could get at the rate of 37ish silver each and relisting at 2+ gold each.

Event frequency should probably be doubled as compared to the schedule on the blog. Rewards should probably be tripled as compared to today.

-Waypoints
Initial reaction is bad. Will dramatically increase travel time and annoying loading screens. I have dual SSDs (OS on one, game client on the other) and the rest of my system is top notch. Loading screens are still long and annoying. I really can’t even imagine how annoying this could be on slower systems.
Want to know how bad it really is? Get to an overflow map now and see how many waypoints are unavailable across the entire world.

-Dungeon entrances
This sounds like possibly even the worst news yet. Again, any efficiency is gone. I frequently (2-3 times a week) run with a guild group and we run through 5-8 dungeon paths in an hour or two. Might as well drop CoF and CoE out of the regular lineup as it’ll be completely hit or miss on reliably getting in.
How about this? Similar to story mode unlocking explorable paths, track whether each character has completed the dungeon open event, and let them enter anytime regardless of event status after they’ve done it.

-General
I am reserving judgement on how easy it will be to get into the map with the people I want to play with, and the general impact on server communities. If done right, this could be a very good thing. I’m just afraid it will end up being just as frustrating as overflows.

downwithdragons.8291:

People who are advocating for private servers and who feel that using the overflow and dead worlds as private playgrounds for their guilds need to remember something. These were designed as open world events.

Triple Wurm was absolutely not designed as such. Even TTS has been having trouble taking it down lately by taxi-ing only members into a nearly “private” overflow. When the incorrect positioning of one or two people can be the difference between success or failure, it was not designed for casuals at all.

If ANet wants it to be doable, rebalance would be necessary. But the flip side of that is then the TTS community ceases to be needed and would probably not survive for very long. So what is the update about? Actually increasing social communities, or unintentionally killing them off?

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

• Gathering nodes are still randomized on every map instance.

How will this work with rich/orichalcum/ancient wood nodes? These are currently limited to being harvested once a day per character.

Will we be:
- limited to harvesting each potential location once a day?
- have a max number of harvests of these regardless of location?
- something else?

Hellmasker.1649:

REJOICE!
REJOICE!

+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1

Thank you Anet!

Big +1 from me.

One thing I want to expand on. Briefly touched on in 6, 7 and 14. The medium here is a video game.

Interaction, game mechanics and playability need to keep up with the storytelling.

As much as I have loved the epic zone wide battles, the clunkiness of the overflow system needs to be fixed before we get another release that requires mass zone coordination. (Are numbered overflows and a way to easily way to select one really too much to ask for?) As great as the dialogue has been, our character being left out of most of it needs to be addressed. And as great as all the pretty shiny stuff is, can I have some option to limit the amount of spell effects so I can actually see what the heck is going on?

Josh Davis.6015:

If you had to choose one, would you prefer RANKED Solo Arena, or UNRANKED Team Arena?

If I had to choose, I’d go with ranked solo Q over unranked team Q.

Personally, I don’t see the need for an unranked queue. I think a far more ideal (and hopefully would take far less development time) option is to fix hotjoin so it can be a viable place to play. I’m afraid a third queue plus keeping hotjoin would just stratify players even more than they are already.

Tightening up autobalance to provide far more fair teams would be my choice.

Proposed changes:
-When joining a match in progress and the teams are even, players should be put on the losing side.
-When one side has more players and is 100+ points ahead, autobalance should force someone onto the other team.
-Much faster activation. Right now it takes 10-20 seconds between the point a team is 2 members short and when autobalance activates. It then takes an additional 10 seconds to find a person to switch. This shouldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds each.
Risks:
-Longer matches. I don’t really see this as an issue, but rewards may need to be adjusted upwards (which is already happening soon, right?).
-More people feeling like they are getting bounced around. It can’t be any worse than what we’ve got now, and if it leads to more balanced matches, I’ll take that risk. And anyway, this is for hotjoin – we have arenas for stable teams (and arenas are much more accessible now than tournaments were when the current autobalance was created).

CC Danicia.1394:

I have a quick tip. When we create Feedback threads, put your feedback in them. Too many folks come to General Discussion and start new threads, without checking to see if there is an on-going discussion.

I keep up with the forums nearly every day. I’m still unaware of some threads and discussions.

Perhaps if the forum search feature actually worked, you wouldn’t get so many duplicate and random threads.

At the time that I’m writing, this thread is on page 2 of general discussion. Doing of a search of “feedback chance” returns zero results. Only searching “feedback” gives me 7 results, all posted within the last hour, which does not include this thread.

MithranArkanere.8957:

How do you prevent some cases without affecting others?

You address CC themselves. A single creature continuously CCed should progressively become resistant to CCs the more it takes within a short time, until it gets a free stun break and becomes immune to CCs for a short time.

Ding. Continuous CC spam no longer works, and CCs go back to being what they should: Strategic tools to turn the pace of the game.

+1 to this.

The frustration only sets in for me when I can’t fight back for an extended period of time.

owlmanatt.2415:

Since WvW reset yesterday, FA players (not sure about other worlds, sorry) have been experiencing regular, severe skill lag followed by swathes of player disconnects in EB — I’m talking 15+ players just suddenly getting booted to character select in one go.

This problem is only affecting EB; the borderlands have been fine.

I can confirm that large numbers of SBI players are having similar problems on EB as well. Same matchup, same map.

Evan Lesh.3295:

We intentionally shipped the scoreboard without showing things like k:d ratios because it put unnecessary emphasis on certain aspects of the game and can lead to ridicule from other players.

Evan, that’s a really good point. The problem is that the scoreboard we have now is the same as what we had at launch, but the scoring system is completely different than what we had at launch.

Rank points and rewards are awarded team-wise based on whether the team wins or loses, but the scoreboard (and the big 5/10/etc numbers that flash up on kills/caps/etc) still shows individual performance as if it was more important than winning.

I can’t be the only one that regularly sees multiple people capping a completely uncontested point in solo queue when they could be doing something useful, or piling up and getting tags on downed players about to be spiked instead of moving to the next guy. It’s a learning issue, but the indicators are countering teaching good team-play over individual “I see big numbers so must be doing it right” feelings.

Behind Tokk’s Mill by the entrance to the pirate jumping puzzle, there’s a pretty bad texture issue. Screenie doesn’t quite do it justice.

I was not granted the 5 achievement points when the wurm demolitionist achievement was fixed today to count towards the meta. (I also did not get them a month ago when it was first broken.)

I would like my AP, please. If it means resetting that achievement and needing to place 5 barrels, I’m perfectly okay with that if it is easier.

+1. I’m having to delete that cookie once or twice a day to keep up with the forums.

I’ve started noticing event messages getting stuck on my screen in WvW. Not sure when it started – may have been a month or more ago, but I don’t recall seeing any other bug reports on it (pls fix forum search).

Seems to happen most often on kill enemy dolyak events, but is not limited to those. If I stay on a map for long enough, I usually end up with one of these sitting around for quite awhile, long after the dolyak is dead.

Quite annoying as there’s no way to get rid of it. And it can be downright misleading in same cases. Had it also happen to the Defend Stonemist event, and it showed the lord’s healthbar, stuck at full. Didn’t realize it was a stuck event until the enemy had already capped – I thought it was fine since as far as I could tell, the lord’s health was full.

Changes are needed to the autobalance system in hotjoin. It is not even coming close to giving fair or balanced matches. It hasn’t been changed as far as I can remember since launch, and it hasn’t kept up with the changes to tournaments/arenas and rewards.

Why doesn’t it work well? Because of the current reward system. Under the old system, the autobalance we have now was fine: skilled player could still feel like they were accomplishing something by getting their own kills/caps/etc, because it directly increased their rank/glory. Now there is no incentive to joining or staying on a losing team, leading to failure cascades. The best way to get rewards are for fast one-sided matches (the decreased rewards for short matches doesn’t seem to help any), so teams get stacked right from the beginning, and the team that is outmatched goes elsewhere.

Why is this bad? Aside from the obvious “this isn’t fun” aspect, hotjoin is usually the first introduction someone has to pvp, and badly lopsided teams game after game turns many away.

We need a far more aggressive autobalance to insure better teams.

Proposed changes:
-When joining a match in progress and the teams are even, players should be put on the losing side.
-When one side has more players and is 100+ points ahead, autobalance should force someone onto the other team.
-Much faster activation. Right now it takes 10-20 seconds between the point a team is 2 members short and when autobalance activates. It then takes an additional 10 seconds to find a person to switch. This shouldn’t be any longer than 5 seconds each.

Risks:
-Longer matches. I don’t really see this as an issue, but rewards may need to be adjusted upwards (which is already happening soon).
-More people feeling like they are getting bounced around. It can’t be any worse than what we’ve got now, and if it leads to more balanced matches, I’ll take that risk. And anyway, this is for hotjoin – we have arenas for stable teams (and arenas are much more accessible now than tournaments were when the current autobalance was created).

cymruvoodoo.3851:

It was beautiful.

How accurate to the circumstances and how rewarding was it to be a part of that army of PCs charging across the ruined face of a once-loved city? An army to fight Scarlet’s army? An army of righteous (it may be cheesy, but still righteous) wrath, rampaging through the occupying invaders, sledgehammer smashing clockwork alchemical terror-weapons back into scrap iron and making that chunk of civilization a little bit safer? I loved that moment when I first saw the zerg happen and it felt right. This wasn’t a precisely timed commando raid where every group has to get their job right for you all to succeed, this was a hundred bodies or more all saying “we’re done with this, we’re done with finding your tendrils everywhere and trying to fight your plots after they’re already underway. We’re coming for you.” Just to see all those different characters charging away and diving into the water, swimming to the next Assault Knight, kerb-stomping mobs en route as an afterthought was fantastic because it fits the story. That’s what should be happening! People are supposed to be mad about what Scarlet has done, they should be upset to see what this proud city looks like, and they should want to crush everything they find in that zone that looks like Scarlet’s handiwork. To force players to focus on game mechanics, to institute rigid game limits on the ability of people already in the map to participate feels like it numbs the experience and encourages people to farm the assault knight of their choice rather than beat the event and be part of the story.

After having seen the beauty of the righteous zerg it just seems a shame.

Couldn’t agree more.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the story, I love the fights, and I love the sheer epicness of what the Living Story teams have given us.

I feel the underlying game mechanics are thoroughly ruining what the LS teams have done.

They have given us awesome top-notch content. And yet trying to experience it is at least 50% frustration.

Tequatl. Scarlett’s invasions. Marionette. Triple Wurm. Escape from LA. Battle for LA. All these events are great – but they require varying degrees of coordination. Again, the problem is the underlying game mechanics. Large scale coordination tools do not exist in game. The best we’ve got is a blue dorito over someone’s head and a party system for you and your 4 buddies. We have overflow maps that are randomly populated and in the last 3 weeks, you’re just lucky to get into the same one with the other 4 people in your party. The other 100 people you want to play with are spread among an unknown number of maps. A few people in the wrong place, doing their own thing, shouldn’t screw up the experience of a hundred others. People on smaller servers or that play on off-hours should have just as good a chance at doing all content as those on high pop servers in prime time.

We shouldn’t need to “abuse” the party mechanics to ferry people to the same map.

We shouldn’t need out-of-game voice comms to have a pleasant experience.

We shouldn’t need the entire map to participate in an event to win. What happened to dynamic scaling that actually worked?

I realize you’re trying to increase the average skill level of the players. And that’s a good thing for permanent content that we can practice on for months. But they are not learning at anywhere near the speed you’re ratcheting up the difficulty for the 2 week releases. That frustrates everyone who wants to experience it. The average players are frustrated because instructions are very unclear and they keep dying/getting yelled at. The more skilled are frustrated because our success is determined by people who still can’t dodge or do (to us) the simplest things.

Give us the tools we need first. Give us more realistic learning curves next. Then the potential of the LS teams won’t be squandered.