Guild Wars 2

GonzoNeo.4965:

Ascends items are only to backslot

From the Lost Shores page, thats what this actually looks like. It looks like a back slot item.

But that doesn’t match what the community news sites reported though it would still be technically true: ascended has higher stats than exotics*.

*sic: there is no exotic back piece in game, every back piece is better than an exotic at this point.

~ Design game and every dungeon such that you don’t have to run any particular dungeon over and over for anything more than a skin.
~ WvW weapons and armor are sold at exotic level, you can entirely avoid PvE to gear out for WvW.

And now…

~ Add a dungeon to completely bar WvW from getting the best gear from playing WvW, and make everyone have to grind one dungeon to get best gear for PvE.
~ Add a new resource to further limit WvW players access to this without being forced to PvE for even more things (aside from just grinding gold).

^ Who thought this leap in principles was a good idea? Or are you going to tell us all that the 3000 badges we spent on our gear is now obsolete and either suck it up, kill another 10k players for another 5k badges or grind a PvE dungeon/events/nodes just to craft some “slightly” strong gear?

I thought went over this in GW1, don’t force people to play one form of the game in order to be the best in another. You were pretty kitten close this time around but you’re just going to slap WvW around some more?

Kriton.5402:

http://guildwars2hub.com/features/previews/lost-shores-preview

This makes it sound like Legendary Armor, with items related to it ending up in vendors and it being “gated” such that you can only acquire a piece at a time per event as the events are released. Or something…

Ganzo.5079:

But the change to legendary weapons (now they have better stats then exotics, look the DB) keep people think that this new ascended items, are a new tier (the red tier)…

I hope that this blog come out very soon. Too many question to answer!

The information on the DB is old, the Legendaries never had and do not have, better stats than the exotics.

It’s strange how a single uninformative, slab of information can really kill a person inside. Its not my game, I can’t tell them what to do, but I feel like the spirit of a game I’ve played since seven years ago is slowly vanishing before my eyes.

GonzoNeo.4965:

by the way, the famous blog post where they will explain “all” to calm the community is still missing ?

Its being re-written and the items scaled down to exotics.

Oozo.7856:

It’s definitely hurting the game, but on their side of things they really have to be concerned about unintended consequences when it comes to balancing.

Now, bug fixes on the other hand…

Bug fixes are a bigger can of worms than balances. You can say you’ve fixed “X” but ended up breaking “Y” in the process… and this was a problem early on at/around release where one bug fix cascaded into other bugs coming out of the wood work. If anything, the fact that they might have actually taken their time to test and run this update-to-be through the grinder of ID and their testers, probably means its a rather big deal.

If all they wanted was to roll out a balance patch and not even care, you’d have seen it with the dye drops update. There’s doing a job for the sake of getting it done, and then there’s doing a job for the sake of doing it right.

Jon wasn’t in the mists testing out thief burst for kitten and giggles, and that’s probably going to be their hardest en-devour in the whole thing: how do we fix this class without giving the Smiter’s Boon treatment or just making it broken somewhere else. Fixing mesmers is easy by comparison: “Portals no longer work in combat, require LoS, cannot carry more than X people, and cannot move environmental objects or bundles.” and “Phantasms and Clones cannot reach where the Mesmer cannot reach and require LoS.” The LoS issues being largely for the WvW abuse that these skills bring.

I’m not sure what to expect out of Guardians or Elementalists… I smell bad winds and many tears.

WIZBASKY.6894:

anyone know exactly what they have in mind to nerf these power houses of dps, 50% reduction in damage maybe? would be a small step in the right direction i think.

I think if you leave thief dps alone and just remove stealth, so we can see them coming that would be enough to balance them.

1.) Aftercast on the all Shadow Step and “leap” style moves.
2.) Culling on stealth and, possibly, break on damage.
3.) Inability to stall cap by being in or just out of stealth.
4.) Spike drop across the board, initiative cost increase on skills but increase in damage.
5.) Condition damage and mobility drop.

And if all else fails,
1b.) Deleting the class.

Jacobin.8509:

Paid tournaments have been out for around 14 days and already have very long wait times. For newer teams that do not want to face pugs over and over this means they can have to wait for 20-40 minutes only to get stomped in less than 8 minutes by a hardcore team. Then they have to wait even longer for the next tournament.

Usually when a new game mode is released there is a ton of interest. Its very concerning that the newest addition to sPvP is already in such a lackluster state so soon which is why so many people are concerned.

Perhaps I worded my statement poorly, I meant that paid tournaments have existed for only a week after an event that had pretty much everyone’s attention. During Halloween just about everything else was less than populated if it wasn’t orange or Mad King related. WvW was low on pop, sPvP was low on pop, PvE end game zones were low on pop, because everyone and their dog was in one of the countless overflows in LA or the Labyrinth. Its hard for something brand new to take off when the player base is occupied with something temporary (this is simply how it works, people do what has a limited time on it). Not to mention that Halloween offered a very fun alternative to general sPvP and I, and many others, were busily doing that instead (much the same way that many people did the event PvP maps during GW1 much to the expense of most other formats being barren during that brief time).

So while it may well have been two weeks of hard time, that ignores the reality of the situation.

As for the imbalance of match making, this was more or less what GvG was like at the start of GW1 because, while matchmaking existed, winning only a few matches quickly drove you up the ranks and quickly put you against far better geared and prepared opponents. This is a problem that will always exist though it is exasperated in paid because its seemingly expected as an unwritten rule that stepping foot in there you expect the best of the best… which would be fine if there existed a more general middle ground for people to practice on which, unfortunately, is currently lacking (much as it was lacking in GW1 at its onset and didn’t really appear until over a year in when they added custom GvG).

Also this isn’t a new game mode. Its the same game mode with an upped ante. Its natural that, since it is not actually a new mode, that people who did not like the mode to begin with would not return for said mode anyway. Compound to this that people who were already good would remain good. I think the idea was to introduce an established competitive format for those who wanted it in from conquest. (But as always, its crippled because we lack proper matchmaking at a middle ground.)

Jacobin.8509:

A lot of people clearly don’t feel like sitting around while all their friends leave, so we make forum posts. Is it really necessary for all related ‘PvP Feedback’ to be in a single thread?

When most everyone says the same thing? Why does everyone need to create multiple threads. This thread hasn’t magically died or become irrelevant nor have your points of view that people (like myself) continue to talk about. You speak as if the moderators obliterated your point of view which is very much not the case, and it still exists here. The only difference is your name isn’t the first one on the topic. If people stop talking about your valid concerns then that can mean one of two things: they are no longer relevant and the thread you started would have died off anyway, or we’re all gone. :P So long as the topic of discussion is worth pursuing it will be pursued irregardless of whether or not it has its own little fancy forum post all to itself.

Jacobin.8509:

Yes it is concerning, but at least we got someone’s attention.

This issue is already practically at the top of Reddit:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/12vuqr/guild_wars_2_spvp_the_death_spiral_of_competitive/

You guys really need to chill with the “concern” about moderation. They merged two topics which covered and said the same thing: sPvP is messed up, here let outline the reasons. I read and posted in both of those threads and I felt like I was wasting my breath half repeating myself because there’s only so much you can say in a topic that has been covered, is being covered, and will continue to be covered when everyone decides its their turn to post their opinion (usually exactly the same one, since the problems are glaringly obvious).

Before I get my panties in a bunch (since, as I’ve stated, I know full well the growing pains the first GW went through to get to the “glory” everyone keeps quoting), I’m going to see what they do with this next update and I’m also going to give ptPvP (paid tournies) a little more than a single week on the heels of a massive event to show me whether or not it can foster some amount of competitive game play. In its current state… I doubt it can but if certain issues are ironed out (and from what I’ve seen of Jon’s recent in game forays, this seems to be the case with at least half of the glaringly obvious issues on the chopping block) and some form of matchmaking makes its way into this game, I might have reason to hope.

Take note, there’s a difference between being hopeful and being rational.

Meanwhile, Blackgate has some WvW ground to make up tonight.

Ammandril.9150:

And where did you get that information from? That’s speculation? You’ve even speculated a tournament and it’s prize pool! You’re a true clairvoyant!

Go home Atlas, You’re drunk.

More, he basically went over the cycle that GW1 experienced though it launched with only PvP as any sort of aspect to its end-game play (the PvE of GW1 was made to train you for PvP style maps) but was idiotically railroaded into an imbalanced mess by terrible design decisions like tying PvE grind to your equipment for PvP.

It was about six months in, the first world championship, that GW1 PvP truly hit its zenith. It took close to three months for Faction (the ability to unlock PvP gear through PvP) to be introduced (and we had been crying for that update since almost launch). It took ~never happened~ for TA and HoH to be balanced.

Updates back then (the starting days of GW1) were as sought after as they are now, Wednesdays (or was it Mondays? Its been so long, my memory is fading) were big days of either celebrating or crying when nothing got fixed. It really wasn’t until that championship that the game as a well known PvP-sport took off.

admiralnlson.2380:

yup, thread merge = less visibility. gj…

why not merge all threads in this section into one even?
They are all sPvP feedback threads after all. Gosh

Why not just delete them if they just wanted to “cover it up”? Ban your accounts too.

Get a grip, the merged threads were nigh identical and repeating themselves.

nerva.7940:

hopefully bunkers and portals got their heads smashed by the nerf bat. thanks for the update.

Portal and Retaliation (and aspects of Thieves) have been on the chopping block for a while, and were alluded to before as being a part of the 15th update. I’m going to hope that rankings of the team variety make an entrance in the soonish future.

DalzK.9086:

They’ve added paid tournaments, which are an exact clone as free ones but with better rewards and a barrier of entry (have I mentioned that queue times are ridiculous?)

They also gave us a week of a good PvP format during Halloween. Dodge really does shine as a mechanic in death matches.

Archaon.6245:

Do you mean everyone that was unable to play a proper balanced maybe? GW1 HA required more skill to just pass UW than the whole GW2 spvp, tournaments and wvsw together…..if i’m wrong please tell me…

No, I don’t mean only scrubs. When NR was NR, everyone ran it. Why wouldn’t they run it? It shut down every single enchantment in the game and made Protection (the strongest line of skills in the game) weaker or unusable. Remember, more so, that this was during a time when Protective Bond and Ether Renewal were not nerfed. When NR was axed, you should have fond memories what happened to every format because of ER -> Elementalists became Prot Monks with infinite energy and Heal Party spam that could reach across the entire map. More over, IWAY was a build that not to rarely actually won in Halls (though it had no holding capability and would usually last only a few rounds at defense). ViM was hit or miss, if it could reach Halls and win, defeating it was like pulling teeth. It was a bunker build to make all bunker builds blush because it exploited the simplest aspect of Halls: the Ghostly Hero needed to cap the altar. Good luck capping it when he runs into 100 traps and dies instantly while every ranger instantly regenerates all his energy and health and proceeds to spam every single trap + spirit on his bar (and then good luck managing your energy with QZ up).

HoH was a fundamentally flawed format because it had maps like Twin Spiral in its rotation along with varied objectives, some of which (Halls itself) encouraged the most degenerate form of game play: turtling. It should strike you as odd when HoH games amounted to several minutes of standing around waiting for the timer to be almost expired, and every opposing team bum rushing the middle trying to get their Hero on the pedestal to cap. The team that evaded on interrupt won. Rarely was a Halls match anything more than this. (That isn’t to say that some of the best fights of memory were here because some crazy stuff could happen on certain maps that brought on fond memories, but the best PvP was rarely found here and was consistently found in GvG.)

And again, I am not saying sPvP is better than GW1 (GvG reigns superior) but introducing HoH into GW2 isn’t going to help GW2’s PvP. You don’t need to do that much to band-aid save GW2’s PvP (add death matches and introduced team rankings, the latter being far more important). Conquest is not a bad format (there are better formats) but there exists no middle ground on which to foster growth at the moment. You have: basic sPvP with premades steam rolling randoms, and tPvP of elites facerolling everyone, because there are no match making criteria aside from: “Needs 5 players. Are there 5 players? Yes? Good. Let them fight.”

GW1s PvP had a similar issue. You literally had bad and great because of the nefarious grind introduced by having to farm PvE for PvP to the point where you just couldn’t be competitive if your whole team was fresh out the gate in any format except for GvG when you were (hopefully) ranked against equally noobish players. And, again, we’ve come full circle to what the problem is with GW2 PvP: a ranking system for s/tPvP. Add the ranking system to the format and make pPvP have no or lesser ranking restrictions therein people who play that format play it expecting good players but play the lower tier formats expecting roughly equal footing but a lower reward.

There was a pretty terrible lul in GW1 PvP at around… the same time as we are seeing now, because of terrible design decisions. It picked up when some smarter decisions were implemented into the game and was very strong when PvP was rewarded with PvP rewards.

Plague.5329:

^ GW1 had its own problems. Point being, GW2 should be an evolution of GW1. Not a step backwards and an attempt to reinvent it completely.

Part of my point was that they have made positive steps forward, particularly the removal of all of the grind (GW1 still has a grind for a brand new player because you still have to unlock).

As for the old formats vs. the new formats, TA was never a popular format. HoH was only ever popular because of its easy builds and /rank. Random Arenas was the bread and butter of introductory PvP and that is (balance aside) what the 8v8 format is doing (with a spicing from AB). The problems with it at the moment are no different from the problems faced by RA: imbalanced teams, builds, and classes (and that 8 people are fighting on 5-man designed maps). Its a kitten around format.

The problem is that there is really no calibrated middle ground. tPvP and pPvP are good ideas on paper of “good teams go to fight good teams” but it skips over the steps of teams ever becoming good because there’s a severe lack of middle ground for training and playing against equally skilled opponents. Like I said at the end of my post, they need to introduce an aspect of PvP, lets call it rPvP (for ranked PvP) where you are faced against players based on ranks either of your team leader or guild.

CA may be able to address this problem based on how expensive (or not) the renting of servers is, though it really shouldn’t be the solution. Arena themselves need to introduce the ranking system not wait for others to do it for them.

And, as always, I don’t see see why death matches are bad.

Archaon.6245:

We want GvG and HA not other arenas…they’re fine as they are, hot join like old random arenas, and tour like old team arenas. Time to put something more tasty on the table.

Wanting HA…

HA was a broken format from the time it was called HoH to the abomination it currently is. It was terrible, it was pugs vs. premades vs. top teams with everyone running the same cancerous builds like IWAY!, ViM, NR, and so on. It wasn’t good PvP, half of the maps were objective based rather than death match (requiring vastly different builds and obviously favoring one team over another based on build mechanics), Twin Spiral being a piece of crap 1v1v1 where winning amounted to which teams the idiot team didn’t pick to fight while the other team cruised to victory with no opposition, and the Hall required “bunker” builds more than anything else. And Ghostly Hero…

There’s some very obvious rose-colored glasses effect going on here with GW1. The best PvP that game ever had was at and around its first world tournament, and that wasn’t until close to half a year into its life (the golden age). Prior to that, you had:
- Farm PvE for PvP with the majority of the player base being kittened out the door if they didn’t spend hundreds of hours farming ettin for Superior Runes. Want to change builds? Screw you, go farm Ettin.
- Unbalanced maps that favored certain build types over others. Degenerate rush tactics (Hello, WW spiking your GL because 100+ dps from one single skill.)
- Above mentioned garbage in HA with entire builds being rendered useless by one skill (NR). And boy did that take forever to balance.
- And then everything went to kitten when Assassins and Treewars were introduced.

That’s not to say that the sorry excuse for PvP right now is good but at least I don’t have to spend 200 hours farming runes and weapons for serious PvP. The thing I find dumbest of all is that they showed us a good format PvP in the Halloween event. Use it. Expand it a little (it needs to be sped up a bit) and add it. Its ALMOST GvG, why are they so scared of simple death matches? They have all the ground work laid out for death match formats or even just GvG, they don’t need to do any serious reworking to make GvG-styled 5v5 but they aren’t doing it…

Heck, they aren’t too far from making a viable Conquest style PvP if they are that hard set on it. But they need to balance the classes out for it to work, and they need to add a more lax structured format for Conquest where you’re not either steam rolling randoms or getting crushed by top ranked teams. What is this thing? Its called a ranking system based on either: rank of leader or rank of guild. Why… that reminds me of GvG.

They clearly have the ground work set for more than one format (see; Halloween). Why they have use limited to only one is beyond comprehension.

@Sprawl

That will happen when you have one format.

I know several people on my FL are waiting for custom arenas and the ability, hopefully, to re-create GvG and other death match style formats. Personally, the Halloween PvP spoiled me and now I have do this… stuff again.

A lot of stuff is still underwater on the NE coast as well.

You’re also hitting the gauntlet of holiday seasons, elections, and midterms.

Mursaat Rally in Maguuma Stade. Google it and learn your history, sometimes things only happen once and repeating them ruins the magic. No one cried fowl when they missed the spectacle back then… but those were different times, I suppose.

… We all got killed in town. Didn’t earn anything but boy was it funny as hell as Mursaat just poured into the town and decimated everyone.

Kahlan.5609:

Ursan.7846:

Anet stated already that this one-time event won’t have anything to do with achievements.

What about items?

Nothing comes from this event except for a spectacle. The reason its a one time thing is because of this. Nothing is lost except a popcorn show, and you can watch a popcorn show on youtube. People can flaunt having “been” there but they won’t have anything more to show for it than what you’d have to show for it from watching it on youtube.

When the Mad King destroys/renovates LA, its not going to make much sense to have the event repeating. Not to mention the logistics of repeating something that is, more than likely, the first (and a major) live event for the game.

Bobudo.7943:

Vena.8436:

It would seem that they have un-nerfed the chest’s contents (perhaps this actually was a bug?). I cannot speak for the ability to open it more than once per character, though.

I was able to loot the chest once, but the contents are still a joke. 2 more greens and some plastic fangs: what a threat to the economy.

Guess it’s back to just being disappointed rather than worrying about a bug.

What is RNG. Hello, good bye, and top of the hat to you.

It would seem that they have un-nerfed the chest’s contents (perhaps this actually was a bug?). I cannot speak for the ability to open it more than once per character, though.

I’m not sure what there is to complain about. I got over a thousand candy corn, close a hundred of each of the rare mats, and a bunch of the shards/lodestones from each category. I easily gained the equivalent of about 10g from these chests.

Oh and three shoulder skins. Woo.

VonFox.2834:

just craft them Artificer 400 so get crafting
http://www.gw2db.com/items/27849-mystery-tonic-s

Those are not the same. They have the same name but the BLC versions are account bound. The limiting reagent will likely be the boosts rather than the tonics anyway.

Also to the person who posted the angry post that was promptly deleted, this update is for the people who spent a lot of money on the cash shop to get utterly nothing festive at all. Calm the kitten down.

@Louis
I’d hope that those people would get a gem refund. Arena isn’t losing anything from doing that, they get their money, but it makes the people at least less SoL. A handful will get lucky that they won the lottery and get their gems back, the majority will just be not mad or, more importantly, disappointed during what is supposed to be a festive event.

The issue here is two-fold:
(1.) Poor off-the-bat information from ArenaNet on the drop rate/in general.
(2.) Players blowing all their money/gems on chests on the first day.

This event could rap up in the coming weeks with all of us being rewarded the skin of our choice, for all we know, and that could be the big “finale” surprise for everyone (or it could be something else, exclusive to the finale). At which point the two-fold problem ends up making everyone look like a fool: ArenaNet for not telling people what to look forward too, and the players for dropping their wallets on the first day, which is, ultimately, more lopsided towards ArenaNet’s fault than the players since the players lacked information. Though it is nevertheless a stupid thing for a consumer to do in any economic environment. (Being a first adapter is always sure to lead you to some sort of trouble for new things.)

Still, I don’t understand why they needed to do this with such low drop rates. Economically it makes no sense to me in the long run. If they put the drop chance at >10% (grater than), then that means 1/10 chests give or take would have had a skin of some sort. With those odds (or, perhaps even better 1/5 or 1/4) people would have been all over dropping 10$+ on keys, and if they got skins they didn’t want they could levy or trade them for what they did want as skins would not only be more abundant but cheaper in raw gold sums. Putting the drop rate at what we now know is sub-1% makes buying the chests a pointless gamble that no one is going to bother spending any money on in the future.

They did costumes, consumables, and the helmets right. There they are, buy them, get what you get. I like this, people like this, I have no problem buying this in the future, and ArenaNet will make a profit off of this hand-over-fist. There’s no reason to add in such steep odds on the chest, they’re making money short term and then no one will ever bother buying keys/chests again ever. What I could have understood was having this abysmal drop rate on the chests if the skins remained in there post Halloween (you know, they are always in there but the chance to drop would be worse than the endless use banks or expresses), but during Halloween (and in the spirit of the event) the chance be upped to 25% or something of the sort.

And for the record, I spent 20$ on the skins that I knew I would get. I spent the rest of what I had on keys, which really wasn’t much, maybe 5 keys or so. I didn’t get anything, I don’t feel bad about it, I don’t want to demand my money back because I’m happy with my things that I did get for my gems… but, really, ArenaNet should have told everyone off the bat that the chance at getting these skins was terrible. People would have far less reason to whine if they knew, people would have never even done this in the first place if they knew. I don’t know how you can fix this, as its rather damaging to the image of the company and thats rather unfortunate because everything else in this event and the cash shop has been handled well, but you really do need to do something. Give those who bought keys with their gems for keys (and you can track this, the BLS tracks this for you to tell you recent purchases) a refund or something relative to how many keys they bought, and by this I mean a refund in gems. ArenaNet still gets their money but the people get their gems back and can save them for the future or can use them to buy things they might want like the skins. Ya, there’ll be a bunch of Black Lion extras floating around but seeing as how those are bound, I don’t think there’ll be a problem. And everyone walks away from this happy.

ArenaNet gets their money and recoups their image a bit.
Players get a second chance and can spend their gems knowingly.
And everyone is happier.

That was a bit long winded… sorry.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of he BLC having something like these skins in them perse, but the rate is a bit stupid as is the decision to make it such without telling us off the bat, its a bit of misleading advertising. I dropped 20$ to get the costumes and the rest on keys, and I’m very pleased with the costumes and I don’t mind buying more (they did this right) but why make the chest drops so absurd? You’re just angering many people and making a quick buck but losing long term profit because now no one will be dumb enough to ever gamble on a chest. 25 to 50% would have gotten people buying, 1% though is just going to alienate everyone.

I don’t even know how to fix this now… I don’t want or need a refund, I’m happy with my costumes, but you may want to consider some sort of reimbursal form those who spent so much for nothing, especially since you didn’t clarify on odds until after the fact.

Last night was strangely fine. The five dragon fights I ran around doing, only Claw had any of the missing models everywhere issue. The others were unusually smooth and rendering an unusually large number of people.

WvW was also strangely ok for a while though all I was doing was squatting a tower to keep it defended, so that may have something to do with it. This seems to be a day in, day out issue and on some days its god-awful and on others it doesn’t seem to even appear.

mcl.9240:

My machine has 16GB of RAM. And three SATA3 SSDs. And a Sparkle Calibre GTX580.

I see the problem within about 10 minutes.

Therein lies the problem, its not consistent. I run this game, usually, on a paltry 4 GBs on a five year old Phenom II, and some old fashioned hard drives, and the problem was only particularly bad on Tuesday (I was borked from the moment I loaded into Frostgorge and the Claw). I was in WvW all of Monday night and the problem was not immediate, heck I didn’t even notice it (or start to) until our commander said something about it. Maybe, I had been walking by invisible hordes all that time… (but certainly the defense of Cliffside, which was an on going affair for over an hour, never had any loading issues aside from the usual culling). I don’t even remembering anyone complaining about the issue on Monday on our server until later into the night.

But anyway, just look at the posts in here. There’s no consistency to it aside from “eventually” or “after a while”, and all of it seems to wash out with a restart of the system. Seems like an almost textbook memory leak and differing machines will reach that limit at differing speeds.

I’m not defending Arena, they messed up (and they’ve messed up in the past with GW1 too…), but I can see how something like this can get missed in standard testing on a development machine.

To those saying that they aren’t communicating, what do you expect the PR people to say? They’ve said they are working on it and all they can say past that is the same thing. If you’re curious, though, the WvW developers were in-game all of Monday and Tuesday, shouting to the whole map in WvW for people to explain their status. The people who need to be doing something are doing it. I can only hope they give us something tonight.

Now, looking at the problem and having gotten a few more days with it, I’d say its almost exactly like a bad memory leak. Its like they tried to iron out the memory usage (probably working on the culling without telling us about it) but ended up introducing a leak. I say this because I start the day (first hour of playing) seeing more than I remember seeing in the past be it in WvW or in PvE, but after an hour or one big zerg, I then see nothing. Its as if the game has not cleared out the stored information of past encounters and, when new ones pop up, has no idea what to do with and no where to put the information. The problem is made worse for the developer because its not a simple error that occurs consistently across all machines, everyone has had the problem at different times (as you can see in this very thread some people took a while to notice an issue). If this does fall down into a memory issue (and I think it will), I wouldn’t be surprised if their machines are running a very large amount of memory (why wouldn’t they be?) and as such testing for this would have been far outside the bounds of what anyone would have or could have expected. They likely fired up their tests as normal, simulated a few hundred connections and players, and tested it for an hour. Which, for their machine, probably wasn’t reaching the memory caps. But for you and me, who don’t have 32 gigs of RAM stashed away, this problem quickly appears in an hour or two or even less.

This is happening now in PvE as well and its not an immediate effect but an overtime build-up of sorts. At first you can enter a map and see everything but overtime it piles on and on, and eventually nothing starts to load for a long time. This issue appeared earlier while running about Frostgorge, after about an hour in the zone all I saw were nametags. WvW was exceptionally bad after only one large encounter.

Its as if the code started dumping everything into memory and then never cleaned it out, and so you quickly hit a bottleneck on the computer as available mem for the game dries up.

Oozo, you certainly never ran into us,

There were close to twenty of us walking the low road and another five keeping an eye on the path under A. Hills, but we could never find the orb or the carrier and had no idea where he was. We went there immediately after the orb was taken from the Keeper and we even saw the orb teleport a good distance (which may have been a portal) from the Altar to outside of Spiritholme, then it was gone. We were running around all over trying to find your runner but nothing, and before we knew it the orb was put away in Hills.

I don’t know what just happened on BG borderlands, but the orb disappeared from the map when DB (fairly) took it from our altar and found its way into DB’s keep. I’m not calling foul at the moment but something went terribly, terribly wrong as it literally was gone from sight on the map and, some minutes later, appeared in A. Hills. We were looking to run an intercept on the carrier but that proved impossible when we couldn’t see where it was.

Alarox.4590:

I’m impressed. You’ve managed to make an entire wall of text with constant claims, without any reasoning.

Oh my…

Alarox.4590:

If teleporting into your group is an exploit due to rendering, then technically so is simply running at your group normally. After all, they both don’t render players. When we use Mesmer portals, we do it for positioning and surprise, not for rendering.

No, the situations you describe are quite different, for one it’s far slower and forty people running at you is far different than forty people appearing out of thin air behind you, especially when they are assisted by a class that has access to several blink-type skills that can effectively remove a large chunk of the hazard of moving through an open warzone. Moreover, moving one person is far easier than moving forty as some of them will end up being rendered by the game as you move, and a pack of people moving in unison is very much noticeable. (Also, you seem to misunderstand where the rendering issue arises. It is not simply the people; it is the massive spike server side of transporting that many people at once from point A to point B, and even in a light combat battle this will cause a temporary lag on model loading. The game will not render them immediately, whereas forty people running at you are not causing massive spikes and will come into view gradually.)

I cannot accept your claim be it true or not because, whatever reason you MIGHT do it for, does not change the grotesque advantage it coffers onto those using the ability. You could claim that everyone has access to it, and I’d call that degenerate as I have. If the number of people allowed to be ported is limited, the lag spike is limited and in general situations you will not have the same effect of wiping out everyone before they can even react that something like 20+ people can accomplish.

Alarox.4590:

Secondly, how hard is it to look for a Mesmer? Takes about 1 minute in a keep, 20 seconds in a tower. You have NO REASONING WHATSOEVER why it’s ridiculous to look for a Mesmer. You just continuously claim that it is ridiculous, and make fallacy after fallacy to support it (“you don’t look for a Guardian or Thief after you take a keep” how is that relevant?").

It is relevant because it shows how unbalanced the mechanic is, hence why I gave you a list of scenarios (small armies hidden in keeps) that require you not to focus on location ONE class in a game of EIGHT that can effectively render any and all sieges moot, but to find an army. These are two distinctly different things, and hiding an army is quite a trick to pull off. Hiding a character that can stealth is not… unless you’re army happens to be composed to thirty stealth thieves which is a curious problem in and of itself but requires a group coordination far higher than having a Mesmer hide in a corner and then porting an entire army across walls.

The whole point of it was, simply, to show that Mesmer create an unparalalled effect in this game that no other class does because of how important keeps, towers, and a castle, are in this game. If a Guardian could solo kill a Lord and his guards in under a minute and steal keeps that’d be a problem too because, again, you’d have to sweep the entire keep for ONE class. But, alas, I have not heard of these super Guardians. No team, after winning a keep, should be forced to sweep something the size of SM or a Bay for all of one Mesmer. For an army? Sure. For a single character? No. The logistics of finding the former are far different from finding the latter. And, again, the latter has skills designed for circumventing large distances quickly with blinks and warps. So not only do you have to find it, you have to chase it down before it’s stealth goes off cooldown and it disappears again.

Alarox.4590:

I think you misunderstand what War is. We didn’t send a letter to the Nazis asking them if it’s okay if we can invade the beaches of Normandy. We didn’t ask them if we can drop paratroopers behind their lines. We develop a tactic, you either lose or counter it.

Godwin and only three paragraphs in, that’s impressive.

Alarox.4590:

If you use Mesmer portals better than us, we won’t go raging on forums asking ArenaNet to break a skill because we’re too lazy to counter it. Instead, we’ll copy your tactic and improve it and learn to counter it.

Personally, I refuse to use a mechanic that I consider to be an abuse of a known limitation in the system.

Kolly.9872:

what about making supply from towers\keeps\castle only pullable when that tower\keep\castle is under attack? maybe it could fix the problem a little? I also hate screaming in chat “do not take supply from the tower”

No, because at times of sieges, running to a nearby stacked tower (full on supply) for supply is a viable and necessary tactic. Take, for instance, XHills. Its being sieged from the north and you need supply immediately but, unfortunately, XWater has been tapped out by the constant train of people getting supply. Ahh, but only a few feet away, is XLake, and its been fully upgraded and has 700/700 supply. You’ll want to tap into that as (a.) XLake is safe and has more than enough supply, (b.) XHills is an important position.

No idea how to quote in this fine forum.

I will say one thing though, these arguments are somewhat absurd. Having to sweep an entire keep for one profession/class is beyond ludicrous, the fact that it is one and only one profession should really make it apparent that there is something fundamentally wrong here. Do you have to scout the entire keep for a lone guardian? How bout a warrior? A thief or even five thieves? Some eles might be hiding in the back corner, better go check. Sweeping your keep to make sure small armies of people are not hiding, say for instance, on top of Garrison’s jumping puzzle or somewhere in the massive expanse of the inner sanctum of SM, is one thing, and failing to do so is a sign of poor foresight, but scanning an entire keep like SM or any version of the Bay’s for a single character? No. That’s beyond game breaking, especially when said class can stealth. Oh ya let me get out my stealth breaking… oh, right. And what if there’s a bunch of them? Heck, if this tactic is valid, every keep, upon being taken, should be filled with mesmers from every team just waiting each other out. What sort of pointless gameplay is this? There’s no longer even a siege at that point, just a cycle of who’s mesmer was the last to be found before an army of 50 showed up to wipe you.

Which bring us to the second point. Stop the mesmer before he drops the invisible army on top of you. How? When? One, he’s invisible. Two, damage doesn’t break his stealth. Three, in a big fight, if he comes running in out from the distance (beyond render range), he’s not going to render for anyone. So who’s going to stop him? My keen sense of clairvoyance that danger is approaching? I’m not spiderman, nor are most people.

The tactic (for moving on the battlefield, taking keeps with it is tomfoolery) I am fine with, abusing the fact that the tactic succeeds because your entire zerg of 30+ people is invisible for upwards of 30 seconds, is nonsense. It leads to degenerate play, people get angry because they died to literally nothing from all around them, and it’s simply down right discouraging.

There is no learn to play or plan here, its pure abuse of rendering to drop massive armies wherever you see fit in the middle of a big fight that no one would ever have a chance to react to because the game will simply not render them. Want to use that portal to sneak in five people to crush the altar in Hills? Good, that’s a sneaky trick and good luck living through the barrage of AoE at the tiny entrance. Loading in 30 people behind a line of siege that no one will see because it won’t render till everyone’s dead? No, that’s not tactics. That’s not being clever. That’s being degenerate.