Guild Wars 2

Ashanor.5319:

Whether they can win or not is meaningless, and they can win against inexperienced players. The point is that whether they can win or not isn’t what matters, it is that at the end of the match they look at their scores and think they did a good job.

I can see that idea but, I guess, in my mind I never associated that “score” with how well a person did. Take bunkers, for example, how would one reward such? They hardly ever kill anything and just squat a point. Invaluable for their team but you can’t exactly discern them from an AFK from a rewarding perspective half of the time.

Ashanor.5319:

I would say the problem is more in the scoring system. It encourages zerging around and getting kills instead of defended nodes and capping nodes

A zerg can’t win against a team that simply back-caps, they can move to-and-fro two points all day long and will never hold more than one of them.

That’s not to say that winning doesn’t need more encouragement/rewards.

Xeph.4513:

Alright lets make a few things clear mesmer and elementalist dps is high, but right now their kill potential is no where near being as potent as necro.

There’s a bit of problem here in that the reason M&E have no kill potential at the moment is because their burst specs are countered by the current necro meta, they no longer have the luxury of running their glass specs safely as S/D thieves and necros eat them right up while avoiding or soaking up that damage.

If you blow up necros completely, then those two classes will re-emerge and their only stopper will be a thief.

I don’t think necros need to nerfed directly, more the general AoE condi-spam capabilities of several classes in conjunction.

Skeletor.9360:

3 lines of code

You mean your idea to have queues on a 1:1 map population basis?

I have a growing suspicion that the reason it hasn’t been implemented has nothing to do with the Jubilee but because its a stupid idea.

Erasculio.2914:

What if we, as in those asking for better Dynamic Events, are the minority?

This is a strange line to me because the game world has been evolving on several rather divergent paths under each of the four teams (+ SAB). Moreover, the notion of desiring more and expanded upon DEs requires that the base structure of reward, effort, and fun, actually have some congruency… which for a long time they haven’t had.

Take Orr, classic old Orr, which has changed in mob mechanics (stealthily) with almost every patch and the testbed for almost all scaling algorithms. Prior to this past patch, the zone was only really vibrant during Temple chains (and before at all of two events that were farmed nonstop) but its full of BIG events that simply go/went undone because no-one wanted to fight that Champion/Legendary mob irregardless of how challenging/fun the fight might be (and many have evolved into rather fun little fights that were never mentioned in the patch notes).

And this part of where the disconnect for me has been occurring with this discussion as a whole, this patch didn’t just add a pie for people to run around in. It retroactively made many past events actually enticing because people actually get something for killing a champion (people will always find the path of least resistance, and irregardless of how good an event is, whatever is easiest and fastest will always be most popular), and it makes future DE additions “interesting” for people who chase shinnies because a system has been added to give people the sense that there will be shinnies. Few people do things for the lore or story, thats just the nature of it and has been the nature of it since GW1. People will run the story ONCE, and then they will look to “Does it give me shinnies, where are my shinnies?”.

More, these updates have been tinkering with mechanics that we’ve seen evolve in time: Karka -> F&F mobs and mechanics -> Aetherblade Retreat -> Gauntlet, all of which are far more fun than dungeons/events of the past which, now comparatively, are incredibly simplistic. These sorts of under the hood changes need(ed) to occur before compelling new DEs can actually be made. And, its not like they haven’t been made*. Sanctum, with its Samus Aran gameplay, is a completely different “game-mode” from Jubilee.

There is one last point to make: an open world is hard to truly make challenging or engaging. There is a reason why many MMOs diverged off the path of “epic world bosses” and “epic world events”, and thats because they are either incredibly brutal to the point of frustration and requiring perfection from everyone in attendance, or completely trivial the moment X+1 people show up. Finding a middle ground is next to impossible because people will always subvert difficulty curves in whatever ways they can, and exploit them to trivialize mechanics. And… ultimately, such “bosses” or “events” simply become farming fodder on a timer (which is probably one of the bigger +s of temporary content in this vain).

We’ve had our dalliances in this, with SSC #1 -> SSC #2 (and honestly, I love the trolling nature of Karka), and we’ve seen how such content will be abandoned the moment its finished, but nevertheless that map has had some of the most epic things in it, and I would love to see more that incorporates much of the things that have only recently started showing their shine.

*I, for one, think the Temples -> March on Arah are some of the best DEs in the game and they capture the nature of Orr from the narrative perspective and put into gameplay, and its a fun domino effect to start from one Temple and end up, a couple hours later, standing on the corpse of the plate-wearing, perplexingly named High Wizard who fights you in melee rather than with magic. I would say the same of the re-vamped SSC… though I find that the brevity of “the calm” is far too short (the whole map can be re-overrun in minutes). The mechanics of the Queen and the nature of her existence vs. the state of the map, are an evolution of DE mechanics.

SAB is a game in a game and, you know what, I love the kitten thing.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

You’re not forced. Veil and portal don’t require specific weapons.

It was more on the utility aspect of things, where you are pretty much pigeonholed into 2/3 of your options, you’re right. I misspoke.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Probably should be in suggestions forum.

I always wished the engineer was like a Sapper and able to erect small cover, ditches etc. would love it if there was a class specific for wvw support operations. But that will never happen. We will just get more of these wvw abilities so everyone can be part of the same blanket.

Problem being, they’d start ending up in a role like what mesmers have now: “You must run THIS ONE spec or else!” No choice in utilities or even weapon sets because of the importance on veil and portal. Do we really want to subject engineers to the same thing?

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Vena.8436:

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Vena is actually blind and uses a Braille monitor. He takes offense to your reading jabs.

Don’t spill muh secrets!

And its not Braille, its properly aligned croûtons.

Sophisticated!

And delicious.

WhiteAndMilky.2514:

Vena is actually blind and uses a Braille monitor. He takes offense to your reading jabs.

Don’t spill muh secrets!

And its not Braille, its properly aligned croûtons.

Cactus.2710:

And for AT LEAST the last six months you and Lordkrall have taken every opportunity to defend ANet no matter how indefensible their performance has been, so at the very worst I’m just on the flip side of the same broken record you guys are on.

No, I really haven’t.

Just go look at other posts on the subject of: zerg lagg (where my statements on the issue have as far as I recall never actually taken a stance on the matter but bit discussions on the technical aspects; tldr I don’t like it but I also don’t think there’s much to be done about it because the engine wasn’t built for it), the recent particle effects culling (its nice to be able to play at better frame rates but not the expense of being dead because of it), arrow carts (after initial buff), ascended items (way, way back when but I got over it), culling (back when it existed), and I certainly wasn’t the happiest camper with the buffs from the guard lines.

Things I have defended: the masteries (because I find them useful), the match-up system (because its better the dull routine we had before), and the game in general since I find it, not surprisingly, fun.

But do try again.

Cactus.2710:

If you bothered to check my forum posts over the last six months you should have noticed that none of the MMO’s I expect/hope to have decent open world PvP aren’t due to be released yet.

I know your posting history, we go back and forth too often not to know it. But I’m not actually here to defend what ANet has or has not done or delivered, the whole crux is: why bother to keep playing and investing time in something you don’t like anymore?

That was the whole point.

Cactus.2710:

Learn to read. I said I was checking on release updates of UPCOMING MMOs. Checking on the release dates of past MMOs apparently makes sense only to you.

Before chastising, you should be more careful in noting that I said I was amazed you hadn’t found one (a new MMO), which is, as common sense would dictate, what one seeks when looking to upcoming release dates. Since you’re opinion about this game has been the same thing repeated without end for the past several months, one would have imagined that you’ve been long looking into replacements. Unless you happen to be someone who simply looks at release dates as some sort of prophetical tool, or a masochist.

As in: “I’m amazed that you haven’t managed to find an MMO yet in your six months of repeating yourself on this forum.”

And I know how to read.

Ynot.8397:

I think it is great. Devon can stay on the dev team now! Isn’t this exciting!

This is a public forum! Positive opinions are not allowed!

Rune of the Ogre is better in every way.

Cactus.2710:

*sighs … checks for release date updates on other upcoming MMOs

You’d think you’d have found one in the past six or so months of you seemingly having this exact same sentiment.

… Oh there are quite a few! But… they were all kitten. Oh well.

zone.1073:

When the “competitive” PvP population is only ~40-50 players in an MMO, and they all happen to use the same communal Teamspeak, there can be no such thing as a true solo queue.

Pop was definitely high during prime-time because the queue was popping nigh-instantly and I had the same player all of once on my team but never saw repeat names else where.

The problem starts when you get into the wee-hours of the night and people, obviously NA for me as I play on an NA server, start going to bed, and I started to see sync’s or at least oddities of same team, same guild.

DevonCarver.5370:

We are looking into what happened today. Captain Culling thinks he has found the culprit, but regardless we will fix this as soon as we can.

On the plus side, I was actually able to play more than a powerpoint presentation in some of the clusterkittens.

Problem was… I was dead because I couldn’t see the billions of AoEs murdering me!

Bushido.2184:

What major competitors for RvR MMOs were there?

Don’t look a gift horse in its mouth; is probably the appropriate proverb here.

Why? Because with effectively unlimited funding and freedom aside from some lore at his disposal, the man (Jacobs) (who’s all of a sudden, now, going to make the greatest RvR game eva!) failed to give the market any major competitors because his last product was a pile of dog kitten that lasted barely a year before it went down in the history books. There is a reason why WvW has no competition: all its other competitors failed, in one aspect or another.

If WAR wasn’t the craptastic game that it was, there should have been competition but, alas, it was and there wasn’t. We can talk all about “will be” and the future as some great pasture of great IP that will succeed, or we can ground ourselves and actually observe the reality of the matter. For all its faults, WvW has held up for close to year on the basis of its solid core. Games, with constant additions and whatnot, fail in that same amount of time.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

Doesn’t #4 make #2 less effective?

Not really? You have more supply to tick which is hardly ever a bad thing when supply actually matters.

I’m having fun.

Even against the sync’ers.

Lord Kuru.3685:

It’s a problem that has showed up with these new patches. There’s a big thread about it in the technical support forum. I don’t think it’s a normal “bloat over time” issue.

I’m not exactly saying it without reason.

It may be completely coincidental but it fixed my load times.

There seems to be a new check-box at the bottom of the graphical settings: Effect LOD. Is this what they added or have I completely missed this in past builds?

Go to your …/Documents/Guild Wars 2/ folder and delete local.dat.

It will tend to bloat over time and after big patches. It should be ~1 MB in size.

Note: This resets your graphical and audio settings.

Go to your …/Documents/Guild Wars 2/ folder and delete local.dat.

It will tend to bloat over time and after big patches. It should be ~1 MB in size.

Note: This resets your graphical and audio settings.

zen.6091:

Trouble is with MMOs, you invest such a ridiculous amount of time getting the point where you believe you’ll be having fun that it’s difficult to rationalize quitting and finding a new game, which would also likely be another half-finished good idea.

Not sure that really works in this game seeing as how the “time invested” in anything meaningful (short of the handful of WvW ranks) is… a week to level and free gear at 80 from karma? They’re handing out laurels at this point too…

We’re not talking Sunwell in Burning Crusade where you’d literally be throwing away half a year of dungeon grinding and tread-milling because M’uru kicked your butt.

Obscure One.4357:

If you feel Arena Net accomplished their mission you have low standards for what you’d consider the best MMORPG ever created.

How to instantly defeat your own stance: insult a person indirectly while not actually doing anything to refute the point aside from “No, my opinion on X is right. You are wrong!”

Kranky.8231:

The fairweathers are awol however and there’s less whining and shorter ques to contend with, so there’s a lot to like about this match up.

Everyone has the fairweather problem, and come… 10 hours from now, I suspect BG will only have queues in Divinity’s Reach and the Pavilion.

KorKor.9452:

A mostly human council…in a city that is supposed to be a melting pot of every race… ya…. Charr gets killed to add in more humans… GW1 is calling they want their human empires back.

Lord Kuru.3685:

But… Think of the children!

Anyway, they already assassinated that charr from the ships council so it’s not like that’s never been seen in GW.

Its like you didn’t even pay attention. The dead charr was a representative, the person on the council who died (was assassinated) was Captain Theo Ashford, a human, and a good friend of Logan’s which is why he is the one who has Mai start the investigation.

Fallout.1798:

You were expecting that you yourself would become the god instead? How on earth lore wise would that work out?

Nah, just have him blow up.

I’d have dealt with the consequences either way, after all I (and I’ve done it solo, no credit due to henchmen or heroes):

• Annihilated an entire race.
• Annihilated an entire army of titans, and their source.
• Annihilated an entire army of humans.
• Annihilated an entire army of charr.
• Annihilated an entire army of Margonites.
• Annihilated an entire army of destroyers and their broodmother.
• Bested a god.
• Bested another, more drowsy god.
• Bested an undead lich.
• Bested an idiot with two swords.
• Overthrew a nation.
• Ascended three times, so I am tri-scended. (By my rough calculations, this means I have all three pieces of the Triforce.)

Some random god blowing up? My portfolio would have soaked that up as if it were a mere coffee spill, or, at worst, Koss’ hair would have absorbed it. I was so grand, in fact, that no history book even recorded my death or whatever the hell happened to me later in history. I suspect I founded a space program and colonized some other planet.

CMEPTb.8091:

Kiel is actually a physical avatar of Kormir to turn heroes away from the Abaddon Fractal so Kormir can retain her deserved godhood.

*Un*deserved godhood.

Kal Spiro.9745:

The actual issue was the direction that Living Story would take for the next two plus years. You people chose more of the same rather than to change it up and trying potentially interesting things. Kiel is a putz and she will continue to be a putz. Gnashblade could have been interesting, but now he’s nobody. Thanks a lot community.

Kiel for Aetherblade Leader!

Xiahou Mao.9701:

Why does a Charr care about human gods? Why would a Charr try to push the investigation into events involving human gods so many years ago?

The fractals both were putting forward don’t make sense for their characters. That’s just how it is.

Abaddon is the source of the Flame Legion “gods”.
Abaddon was a human god who nearly destroyed all of humanity.

Both Ellen and Gnash have connections to Abaddon from their race perspective. Neither of them has any connection whatsoever to CoE v0.5, which is partly why I find the choice to to be utterly contrived and stupid… along with how the two candidates were portrayed.

Kirchhoff.5876:

conclusion: this is a PvE game no one cares about PvP anymore :/

Correction: No one cares about NA PvP.

Teldo’s 2v1 in the finals had more views that NA PvP.

meep.2601:

anet created this jaded and bitter community themselves by basically ignoring (and continuing to ignore) WvW since launch.

Nah, it was the players.

Most of us waste our time on server forums for WvW, not here where people post some of the dumbest suggestions imaginable.

TheKillerAngel.3596:

You know, I think the developers at Anet are going to have to work extra hard and come up with something epic to satisfy the people who wanted something epic. I just hope they succeed at that task.

Easy. Everyone judged books by their covers, and Kiel turns out to be the Aetherblade leader.

Tada! The whole election was a pretty comical sham with how the characters were portrayed to begin with, so unless they do a real twist… it’s pretty bad.

MRA.4758:

Don’t get me wrong, even “just” a quadratic growth might be a problem. In the context of real time systems, you always want to be “as close as possible to linear” (or, preferably, sub-linear). I just wanted to point out that it seems Devon Carver was most likely speaking of exponential growth “figuratively”, and not literally.

Unless they are running a many-body system, I doubt they’d have true exponential growth.

I think the problem in our basic analysis is that we’re looking at it like:
1 person targets 5x → 6x
2 people target 10x → 12x
ect…

When in reality, increasing 5x → 6x doesn’t just add one to a damage tick, it also adds one to several other procs that would have been limited to 5x but now work on 6x like blasts on fields. Likewise you’re also causing allied things to now tick at 6x rather than 5×. Not exponential, but is the rate of growth constant at that point?

I’m in a lunch rush to think any further, and my brain is defaulting to trying to look at this as a semi-lattice of one cell given X NN to interact with. Scaling that X isn’t fun on computational time.

Ragnar.4257:

They are if they take up developer time from other things.

A developers who codes traps, is not a developer who creates maps, is not a developer who modifies models, is not a developer who creates skins.

“Developer time” is not some conserved quantity over multiple developers wherein one developer doing one thing destroys the possible time of another developer to do something else.

Ragnar.4257:

What we get, that nobody wanted:

There’s that stupid over-generalization “I speak for everyone.” notion.

Ragnar.4257:

Siegerazer.
WXP ranks.
Traps.

1.) Many people wanted push-out-of-spawn mechanic.
2.) Many people wanted progression.
3.) Options are never bad.

That isn’t to say they are perfect, for example: Siegerazer, shouldn’t feed 80 people 10 supply, it should feed 10 people 10 supply. Stealth trap is useless, supply trap is good.

Convenant.7092:

Grindy, useless, rushed WXP system. Not exactly our idea of progression.
…That’s it.

And PVE has seen…

Queen’s Jubilee
Cutthroat Politics
Bazaar of the Four Winds
Sky Pirates
Dragon Bash
Southsun

…See where I’m coming from?

No, I don’t see. Because, for one, your opinion on the worth of WXP (don’t use the word “our”, you are not multiple people nor are you some mass representative; using the word is pompous and presumptuous) is hardly congruent with my own. Its not a grand addition but its far from worthless, though I will agree to the grindy-ness of its nature.

And, for your PvE complaint, how many of those had fine-tuned maps? How many of those even had new maps to begin with? Most of them are scripted NPC events, on old real-estate with some model additions. The best map added, Bazaar’s map with cool abilities and thoughtfully placed scavenger hunt items, is roughly the size of Garrison. Know what else was added and actually carefully tuned and balanced? SAB. Know how long it took to create the few levels of SAB? Months. And SAB was still comparatively small and easy to balance when compared even just a Borderland map.

Kalan.9705:

Why is there no new art in WvW in a year?

What relevance does this have on content?

Kalan.9705:

Why is there no new zone in WvW in a year?
Why is there no new subzones or meaningful changes to existing zones?

Pre-development, it took 6 months for just one of the current maps to be made. Would you like a good map, or would you like SSC?

Kalan.9705:

Why is there no new NPC’s or environment changes?

Siegerazer says “hi”, also why would you want more NPCs?

Kalan.9705:

Why is there no new objectives or mechanics?

Dunno.

Convenant.7092:

“We’ve also transitioned from our original single Living World team, which operated with very short turn-around time for most of the first half of the year, to four Living World teams for the second half of the year.”

in https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/looking-ahead-guild-wars-2-in-2013/

Okay. Glad to see this game’s heading in the direction we all want it to.

Why is this thread even a thing? The four teams were formed months ago.

… Right around when actual devs took over WvW with a full team.

Clockradio.3257:

PVE map completionists, LOTS of new transfers, or an extreme case of “Fairweather Syndrome”. Only reasonable explanations.

Its morale/fair weather. JQ doesn’t not have a population, and they have a fairly sizable NA, its just that they disappear with about the same speed as paper keeps. The number of “hard core” WvW guilds on NA JQ is low, the population isn’t.

DeWolfe.2174:

This is the 3rd week of JQ being stuck in Tier limbo and player confidence is waning. I understood Anet making these matches the prior two weeks. This one is a true head shaker.

That’s because JQ is in Tier limbo. You don’t have the force to contend with BG/SoR and Waha is the only reason you even beat TC, who is also in Tier limbo (though Waha’s presence in T1 makes him and JQ the king-maker because of the SEAs conflict with BG). So either way, someone is going to get matched up poorly because there are four servers that can all contend for three spots with two of those four servers being so stacked as to make everyone else look empty.

Either TC is farming whoever is in their match-up, or JQ is farming them.

You’re going to tower train for a bag? A single bag? If you want to PvE, go PvE.

Stopping your tower train will net me 80+ bags and all of your tears.

uberkingkong.8041:

Funny how anet puts JQ against T2 and T3. JQ is clearly a T1 server and has proven itself many of times, all this nonsense just brings our WvW rating down because we are playing against servers way under our league.

You’re gaining rating.

A lot of it.

mjharrison.3209:

The server sends only itemIds to clients, eg: player id 3455 wears items 1234, 2345, 3456 etc. All the models, textures etc are loaded from disk on the client. Graphical complexity has zero impact on server performance. The only thing that comes close is the complexity of the collision scene (ie: world geometry) and whether player collision is done as a single cylinder/box or multiple (GW2 does only single).

If only you’d bothered to read anything else you’d know that I wasn’t talking about the servers at all but alas… you didn’t bother.

Would it kill you to multi-quote in a post rather than spam the thread as well?

mjharrison.3209:

The reason is that the computationally complex part of the calculation (ordering entities by distance to avatar) has already been done in order to calculate the 5 targets, so the only impact of bumping 5 targets to e.g. 8 is a network cost (as dmg packets need to be sent to more players), not a CPU cost. The computational cost of calculating dmg for a few extra players per AOE cast is miniscule.

Except that is incorrect. Each of those new 3 targets have to have everything calculated for them as well (ie. condition/boon/etc modifiers) but you seem to be ignoring any and all such details to talk about distance based calculations.

Nikola.3841:

Let me tell you how I would do it.
My necro uses Carrion Leggionaire Staff of Corruption…lets assume there is less than 65536 different weapons in GW2…I would give that staff a 2-byte code, and send only those 2 bytes over network…I would then render it completely on client side…same in GW2 as in DAOC…same for each of 6 different armor parts, I really doubt theres more than 65536 parts of any of 6 armor positions. Now, why would GW2 need 400 bytes instead 2?

Each bit of data sent has to incorporate and cover all: skin, stats, and sigils for weapons, and skin, several dye channels, stats, and runes/orbs for armor, and stats/jewels for jewerly. There are ~4 weapon slots (none is also a data value), 6 armor slots, and 6 accessories. Each string of data has to cover, therefore, 16 locations with an average of three to four possible value combinations per slot, ie 48 to 64 units, merely for appearance. Now, each character also has a specific coordinate string, data values that are updated on a 1/4 second tick for conditions and boons and any other buffs like food/oil, this alone is probably more units than appearance, and damage and healing.

This is merely all that you see for a single character.

Its questionable whether or not the data of accessories and upgrade slots is ever sent beyond the server where calculations occur, so appearance units may be less than stated, being limited to 4+6 with only skins/dye variations or roughly 20 units. But I hold to the point that the majority of the data has to do with conditions/boons (and all timestamps there in) and many other non-appearance related effects all of which are sent to you because you need to know about them.

Boulderbolg.3460:

Anet probably doesn’t have any immediate plans to have a short term free server transfer period, but has Anet ruled out that there will be another one at some point in the future?

Thanks!

Probably not, especially with the ratings of servers starting to stabilize. The cost restriction helps keep giant shifts to a minimum even if they still do occur.

Nikola.3841:

You mean GW2 sends us video frame by frame as jpegs? That sounds extremely inefficient?

No…

That was more a point to show you how data size have changed over the years, hence why I said a simple example.

Nikola.3841:

And how much more data is sent? I mean, it still has to send 6 pieces of armor per pesron, and color of each piece, same as in DAOC…it doesn’t have to send each pixel so that increased resolution would mean difference…same with color of armor…try to explain WHAT is that additional 199 times more data needed to be sent, because I really can’t figure it out

Here’s a basic one, make all files 1600×1200 for normalcy:

Make a .jpg file and use one color and save that file.
Make a .jpg file and use 256 colors all at the same time and save it.

Make a .jpg file and have a pixel density of 2^4.
Make a .jpg file and have a pixel density of 2^8.

Compare file sizes. I hope you don’t think the linear mesh of DAoC that is wrapped around a character to form the skin has the same file size as that of a GW2 mesh.

Tyler Chapman.1832:

Your roster will disband once the match is over.

Would it be possible to consider making it continuous down the line? It would help “feed” some population for queue times into the team queue.

Then again, that might not be the best of ideas either.

Either way, thanks for the quick reply.

Nikola.3841:

What appearances? All enemy players look the same because when I’m in WVW i put gfx to minimum, and still die unable to use skill because of skill lag in bigger fights (not that it would help me, anyway). So game actually looks worse than DAOC, too

Btw, do you even have idea how big is 200 times difference in something?

That data is still sent to your computer, the only difference is that those settings tell your computer not to render it off of the hard drive and to save your own, personal, cpu/gpu capabilities in rendering everything else.

Yes, I know how big two orders of magnitude are… and you could probably take a moment to consider that data traffic from individual products nowadays is several orders of magnitude larger than what it was even just a decade ago.