Guild Wars 2

Vocal minority who want it harder???

Totally untrue. And here’s why:

People are far, far more likely to post when they’re frustrated or angry than if they’re bored or feeling lackluster.

- For each person who posts screaming that things are too hard there are only ten more who don’t make the effort to post.

- But for each person who posts asking for things to be more complex and challenging there are hundreds who just shrugged their shoulders and wandered off to do something else because they were bored.

- For every complaint you hear about there are ten more you don’t.
- For every customer who says your performance was “good” there are a thousand more who don’t say it.
- For every person who takes the time to tell you you’re doing great there are about fifty more who are silent, but hopefully will tip!

I’d say 99 of 100 people who want more content that requires people to work together do NOT say anything. They just get bored with running around solo and turn the game off.

About half of the people who think things are too hard come to the forums and complain.

Daralii.8940:

And if I try those and no one bites?

In all seriousness:

I’d stand at one of the few uncontested waypoints. There will be a steady stream of people reviving and, as they come through, I’d use Say chat:

“Are you tired of dying yet? LFM”

If nothing else, the people who are tired of dying will be much, much more amenable to calls for coordination.

Anet:

We all know that people worked hard to get hero points for a specific purpose.

That is, to use them to unlock specializations.

Refunding them on a soul bound basis completely defeats the purpose of the effort that went into getting them.

I know, not easy to implement, right? Wrong…

Make a new coin. Call it a hero token. Each account bound hero token can be double clicked to convert into a soul bound hero point. You don’t need to revamp a bunch of stuff in order to let people have those refunded points in a way that’s account bound.

The company won’t need to dedicate a whole team to this. You can reuse existing code from Luck. Just change the variables so that it converts the appropriate quantity to hero Points instead of MF.

And then the players can apply those points to the purpose for which they were intended. Unlocking specializations, even if it’s for an alt instead of a main.

From a reply I made to someone else:
—————————————————————
Part of the story is a test of leadership, which revolves around gathering and coordinating NPC allies to survive something that cannot possibly be survived by yourself.

Now if that story mission isn’t enough of a “Clue by Four” then I’m sorry but there’s really nothing else to say.

No, you can’t wander around ALONE in the worst neighborhood in the whole world.

What on earth ever gave people the idea that they’re supposed to be able to???

Team up. If there are no guildies available or you’re guildless then use map chat. We all have it there because these are not FTP zones. Stand at the entry WP and use say chat…

But stop thinking you can walk to your car by yourself. The neighborhood is way, way too dangerous for that.

And it’s supposed to be!!
—————————————————————

- You work together for the events in VB.
- Your entire storyline revolves around the idea of “find allies or die in the jungle”.
- Your role as “Commander” is to pull people together and coordinate with each other.

How many hints does ANET need to club people over the head with??

You have guilds.
You have map chat.
You have LFG.
You have say chat.

USE THEM.

Or, if you’re adamant about being able to do everything solo, then go to a zone that’s designed to be done solo. But STOP asking them to nerf the very few zones we have that actually require coordination.

People who want to be able to walk around alone already have many, many zones to do that in.

Those who want places that require more mature cooperation and coordination are happy with this.

Leave. It. As. Is.

Rant over.

Look,

By the time you get to these zones you should have already dealt with Frostgorge, Orr, maybe Southsun, definitely Dry Top and Silverwastes. You should already have leveled to 80, understand how to make a synergized build, use it’s capabilities and have some set rotations or combos under your belt.

That’s good because you need to know that stuff in order to survive the new zones.

It’s supposed to be that way.

ANET: Do NOT nerf these areas. We have more than enough nerfed zones already, please leave these few difficult ones as they are.

1) 400 is not too much to do in order to unlock your elite… ONCE

2) The better solution is if 200HP were awarded to each alt after your main hits 400.

This way you’d still have to earn it the hard way once but not nine times… or more.

In VB there are so many rares dropping off trash mobs that the price of ectos has been affected. With this in mind consider the following:

Legendary Wyvern…

We worked hard. Really hard. We prevailed.

We each got one common gear bag and many of us only received two blues from it.

After that much work… no. I understand it’s based on the meta performance… But, just no. There is a better way:

Look at it like bounties. When we do Trillia it takes only a few minutes of our time and I get a guaranteed rare plus some other thing that can vary.

Why not do the same thing for the Legendary fights?

Beat a Legendary? You should be guaranteed one rare plus a random drop that is seriously weighted by the meta map performance. This way it’s always worth your time and effort but you still need to coordinate and do well in the meta in order to get anything really good.

Which is, I believe, is the idea was behind having the legendary loot table attached to the performance of the map meta.

FX6100 here and I get 24-50 fps with a GTX760

My gf is using my old GT640 and matches my FPS because her CPU is an FX8360

AMD is fine… but I wouldn’t want to try it on the A series or anything less than a six core.

Unbelievable.

You thought you were just going to be handed a whole trait line and elite spec?

You thought that you would be able to go and craft a legendary without having to run all over the place, gather mats and do tasks?

You thought that you would be able to walk right on through the heart of what is supposed to be the enemy’s home turf without having to worry about LOTS of really, really big bad nasties trying to kill you?

You didn’t realize that the neighborhood was going to be so bad that you’d have to walk the streets in groups or get mugged?

You didn’t realize that challenging GROUP content meant all over the new zones, not simply in dungeons and fractals?

That’s okay.

For some reason I expected less sniveling. Looks like we’re both going to have to get used to disappointment.

Hey folks,

I know you’re overworked and THANK YOU. Maybe you’ll see home by Tuesday.

I’m trying to test the druid but the consumables box only contains DPS sigils. There are no sigils at all for support, such as Sigil of water, etc.. Without these I can’t really test a hard core healing build properly.

I’m a former first tier raid healer from (unmentionable) and I’m looking forward to putting the druid through some hard core paces and being able to help you tune it.

Please patch this ASAP, possibly adding a new consumables chest to every character that contains the support sigils (Edit: And Cleric’s runes? Monk is okay but I’d like to test them both).

This is time sensitive because we need it to test the druid properly and the clock is ticking on this beta.

Thanks again and make sure that your cat naps are in 45-60 minute increments. Trust me, I’m an old man and ex-military. We know how to work on snippets of sleep.

Scott

Regarding the reward system:

The reward costs will need to be increased to accommodate the following:

1) Tag and Run
This can be addressed by changing the credit system. In each event your reward is as follows:

1 Kill = 1 Mordrem Bloom
2 Kills = 2
3 Kills = 4
4 Kills =7
5 Kills = 11
6 Kills = 16
etc etc.

If you move to anther event, you start all over at one. This will create a strong incentive to get into each event as early as possible and stay until it’s finished.

2) Do away with only awarding blooms at the end and ESPECIALLY with awarding blooms in a way that you need 5 stacks or 10 or 20. These create an incentive to go afk once you hit 10 but may not have enough time to get to 20.
Replace it with the reward system above. It also makes every single kill count, from start to finish.

3) Increase the cost of rewards as necessary however don’t make the costs double for each level up. IE: 225 for a skin but 450 for a potion is no good. With the increased points it might look more like 10000 for a skin but 13000 for a potion.

Anyway, it’s an idea. Hope it helps.

Scott

Morning after feedback… not about loot.

Sorry if this is repetitive but I can’t read 7 pages of posts before starting the day, no matter how much I want to.

1) XP. New players have lowbies for mains… lowbies that they’re trying to level. This event is going to suck up hours and hours of their time but they’re supposed to willingly do this without making one iota of progress toward leveling their characters?

Ah, no.

This morning my gf said she came away from the event feeling “depressed” because all this time she was looking forward to leveling her lowbie alts right there with the new players in this.

I expect this to be fixed before dinner time GMT because ANET is going to show all the new players that ANET, unlike some other companies, consistently responds with action when things like this and the loot issue happen. This responsiveness is perhaps the most important thing new players need to learn about GW2 from all this.

2) Scaling. It seems to scale somewhat but not nearly enough. This is why people are complaining that things die too quickly and that they can’t run from event to event fast enough.

I tried to two man an event and got eaten on my 80 main ele and the other person with me was also on an 80. It was a LOT tougher than 2 people trying to retake a fort in Silverwastes, which I’ve done many times.

Yet when 15 people come along they rip through the event like it was nothing. The mobs melt like butter. I think it should stay impossible for 2 people to do an event but it clearly needs to be scaled. A lot.

New people aren’t going to get a feel for anything if the mobs evaporate before they can even get in a hit or if the players themselves get slaughtered before they can figure out what to do.

3) Reward vendor. If this is for new players then why do so many of the rewards require gold that new players clearly, obviously, aren’t going to have?

Did you want them to look at the coolest stuff and come away feeling teased by the cool stuff they can’t get or frustrated that it’s impossible for them to come up with 10 gold?

I’m sure this will be fixed too. Quickly. As a way to show new players how responsive ANET is when things don’t go as smoothly as the company, and the players, would have liked.

That’s all for now. Maybe I’ll think of more after coffee…

It’s happening to my gf right now. Her ping is 61 and she has an 8 core monster CPU.

It didn’t start until after she zoned into her Arah story instance, which she is trying to solo.

An hour and a half later, she’s on the ship and can’t seem to stay in the guns. She has to hit F repeatedly and then when the queue catches up she pops in and out of the guns repeatedly without touching a thing.

Ping is still great.

Found it! ……………. <- Message Body must be at least 15. So you get periods.

Post edited, the trait was found, thanks Zicarous.

“Elemental Surge”. Arcane track, middle choice.

The UI has always dragged on the system. It was most obvious when running in Linux, where I had mapped the Show/Hide UI toggle to a key in order to keep frame rates up.

Not sure why Windows users are just now noticing it but it’s always been a thing to a greater or lesser extent. Maybe it was just more obvious on Linux until the latest patch.

Ditto. I posted a thread about this before and it definitely detracts from the FPV experience.

IE:

Run around in the Charr starter zone in FPV. Go up to one of the mounds with a vista on top and run around the hill in FPV while glancing at the hillside, looking for a path up the hill.

Every time you glance towards the hill you turn into it and smash your face on the hillside. Anyone watching must be laughing themselves to death or thinking that you look like an idiot.

;)

No.

FOV is absolutely not best set to max and I do look at my character from far away in PvP but use First Person View in PvE.

If you don’t like the changes to the camera then the fix for you is easy… just set your options so that it works the way that it used to.

But to revert the changes would leave the rest of us unable to set the camera the ways that WE want it. And then it would be broken.

Set yours the way you like and leave ours to us.

In short, turning your head while running straight is possible when not in FPV but is impossible in FPV. The inability to look from side to side in FPV disrupts the imersive experience.

To replicate and see the difference:

1) Scroll to FPV
2) Hold W to run
3) Hold LEFT click and look side to side while running. Your character will turn so that your character is no longer running in the same direction (in other words, you turn with your mouse movement).
4) Now stop and scroll your mouse wheel out only one, single click so that you see the back of your character’s head.
5) Repeat the run and left click test. You will note that you are now able to look from side to side while still running in a straight line.

In FPV, it is really important to be able to scan from side to side as you’re running along. You’re going to be looking around for paths, mobs or even landmarks, if you HUD is off while in FPV.

Please fix this so that the camera in FPV will act the same way it does just one click out of FPV… allowing us to turn our heads while running on a straight line.

Thanks, and great work so far!! Love most of what you’ve done!

I have recently been studying the intricacies of ele staff combos and I know how you got the idea that you should get more.

It used to be that ALL rolls were blast finishers if you had taken Evasive Arcana in your grandmaster Arcane trait. There was, however, a cool down. This would have made one of your rolls into a third blast finisher.

In 2012 that was changed by a patch so that only the earth roll is able to act as a blast finisher. Your rolls while attuned to fire aren’t triggering squat.

You could, however, take a risk at the start of a fight by evading backwards with Burning Retreat, hitting Arcane Blast just as it finishes, buring a heal with Arcane Wave while popping over to Earth Attunement at the same time and then dodge rolling back into the fire while in Earth. You’ll need to be FAST to pull it off and I can’t remember if attuning to earth will interrupt the heal cast. You may need to play with the sequence of finishers to get it to work.

Another option is to try a similar set of moves with Burning Retreat first for some finishers and then use Lava Font to use the rest of your finishers. That will allow you to stack all the might without having to sprain your fingers by trying to move so fast.

If you’re running PvE you could also try adding even more combo possibilities with Fire Axe, which gives two more fire fields, another blast finisher plus gives you a leap finisher for fire aura. I was going to run it in PvP but I spoke to one of the best Elementalists in the International Tourney scene and he thinks that the utility slots provide too much needed defense to sacrifice one of them for more offensive capability.

He did say that running Fire Axe for more combo possibility is a lot of fun though. Considering that PvE mobs aren’t nearly as dangerous as a skilled PvP player, you could probably get away with it out in the world and it would teach you a lot about making obscenely complex combo chains with multiple fields and finishers.

PS:
Try getting together with another ele to see what you can make happen. I’ve yet to see if one blast finisher can trigger a field from each ele but I’ll be testing that tonight.

PPS:
Don’t waste a trait or utility spot in order to be able to move faster. Just attune to earth and start Eruption (2), pop into air (gives swiftness since you should be traited for boons on attument swats), lay a Lighting field (5), Arcane Wave, Arcane Blast and then pop Air (4). The combo gives about 50 seconds of swiftness and you can reapply it at the 30 second mark, allowing you to build up swiftness faster than you use it.

There does, however, seem to be a cap somewhere around a minute and fifty seconds. I’ve tried and tried but I can’t get any more duration than that. Since I still can refresh every 30 seconds, it doesn’t bother me any.

Also, you could skip erruption, pop into air, hit (4) right away, lay the lightning field, use the 2 arcane skills, pop into earth and dodge roll for the third finisher.

An even better example that includes teleporting through roofs:

Actually that may not be a hack. There are specific places, especially in PvP, that are known for this. Yes, they teleport stright up walls… that’s what makes them such a big deal. There is even on in the Legacy map where you can teleport up onto a high bridge using nothing more than a Mesemer’s phase retreat.

In the example video below Supcutie shows spots you can use to teleport straight through a wall or two.

You will find entire videos of them if you search Youtube for a combination of

“Blink” / “Phase Retreat”
with
“locations” / “points” / “spots”

IE: “Blink locations”, “phase retreat points”

Might this be what you saw?

Supcuties video is one such example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj19-ELyHlw

3D has been a hobby of mine for about 15 years so when I saw the World Series Tournament logo I decided to see what I could do with it.

Here are a couple of examples. The last two are lower res and show a side view as well as a chrome texture instead of the duller metal.

I wonder if Anet would be interested in it…

Thread deleted because apparently it’s permissible to link from one thread to another if you’re trying to bring attention to a build or a guide but not if you’re trying to bring attention to a logo.

One thread linking to another is absolutely not a duplicate post; though apparently an overzealous mod somewhere doesn’t seem to agree.

Therefore the logo will be reposted in a different forum, sans any pointers, at some point in the near future.

Update:

(Temp Partial Fix: I was really trying to avoid inverting primary and secondary buttons in the Windows Control Panel because I wanted the mouse software to load the appropriate config for the game when the game launched. For the moment I’m forced to invert them via Control Panel and just do this back and forth when starting the game.)

It appears to be an issue in which the game can’t handle remapping of buttons 1, 2 or 3 but handled remapping of buttons 4 and 5 without a hitch.

Remapping of buttons 1 and 3 to the W key results in the character not running when commanded from the mouse but running when the w is sent via keyboard. When testing by entering text into chat or a text editor the mouse is working properly and sending a stream of W’s, as it should.

ANY attempt to remap mouse buttons 1, 2 or 3 appears to give the game an apoplectic fit in which it will not allow character moment control via the remapped button, even though the mouse is proved to be working perfectly in several other tests. Remapping these three buttons back to original configuration immediately fixes this but is causing loss of targeting issues that are completely ruining the gaming experience.

The end goal here is to stop losing target when left clicking the ground during mouse movement. Clearing target via left clicking the ground, while at the same time having mouse movement require holding left and right mouse buttons, is causing MAJOR issues.

Try being in PvP and losing your target every 4-5 seconds… You lose all auto attack and can’t use half your skills. “Next target” often takes the wrong target so you get burned to the ground while you run in circles, trying to get the game to go back to the original target you started with.

There needs to be an option to NOT change / clear target upon clicking the ground. It’s really that simple and I honestly have no idea why such a common sense thing wasn’t implemented a long time ago. I’d just click that option and go on happily with my game. As it is, I’m spending more time trying to fix this than playing.

Using a pretty standard 7 button mouse. (Model number below.) When using the manufacturer provided software to change the button mapping to what I need, control of character movement immediately becomes intermittent and completely unreliable. Changing the button assignments back to standard configuration (which is what I need to change away from) clears the issue and movement control returns to working normally.

However: Verifying the functions of all remapped buttons in both game chat and a text editor verifies that the remapped mouse is functioning perfectly.

Remapping the buttons, even simply inverting moue buttons 1 and 2, causes the issue.

Two Examples:

- Goal: Invert Mouse Buttons 1 and 2.
-Method: Used manufacturer provided software to swap the “click” and “menu” functions between buttons 1 and 2.
-Result: Movement by holding left and right buttons together becomes intermittent however using the remapped buttons 1 and 2 to select a target or click on buttons in game works flawlessly. It is ONLY moment that is affected. Sometimes character will fail to move 10x in a row and then respond properly 2-10x, then quit working again. Testing proved that target selection was still functional when unable to move, even when alternately selecting targets and trying to move the character.

-Goal: Use Mouse Wheel for Forward and Backward Dodge Rolls.
-Method: Remapped scroll wheel forward roll to be forward (w or up arrow) and rearward to be backward (s or down arrow).
-Result: This caused the game to cease camera zoom on scroll wheel motion (as it should once it’s remapped) but the character does not move or roll. Placing the cursor in the game’s chat window and later in a text editor confirmed that the mouse is properly sending multiple w’s and s’s (or remapped up and down arrows) when the wheel is quickly spun. Test of double tapping to dodge by sending the command via keyboard were successful at the same time that mouse wheel control was failing to cause the character to move at all.

Also, I’m not sure what “Lock Target” should do but I believe that most anyone would intuitively think it should lock the target until you select a new one with next target, previous target or by clicking on yourself to deselect all targets. Clicking on the ground should not deselect your target if you have target locking enabled because mouse movment often involves random mouse clicks on the ground in a chaotic, fast moving fight.

If target locking were to work that way then that alone would have solved most of my problems.

Thank you for any assistance with this.

System:
GW2: 44,039

Mouse: Gearhead MPT3200RED
Using mouse software for the correct FCC ID which is: V4P-MS-148OR-2
Driver Ver :1.01
Mouse software acquired from: https://pcgearheadsupport.com/php/download/detail.php?item_id=1287

Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
Processor: AMD FX-6100
Mainboard: ASUS M5A97 R2.0
Nvidia GTX 760
Nvidia Driver 344.75
Resolution 1920×1080, 60Hz
16G Ram

Archaon.9524:

NeXeD.3042:

Archaon.9524:

top players usually don’t have any problem finding a team to play with….

Not everyone is a “top” player…. not sure what you are trying to say here.

Guild name [TAG]: Top Players [LFG]
Description: A collection of people that play at a high level. The guild is to help top players find a pug group or a team to play with.

did you even read op?

Advertisements from guilds are only moved into the OP to make them easy to find. “Top Players” is just the name of one many guilds that advertised and so had their ad copied to the OP…. just like most of the other ads. It’s just an ad that happened to end up on top by chance.

So no, this thread is not at all about helping “top players” find a team to play with.

If anyone thought it was then it appears that person is the one who didn’t read the OP carefully enough. Try looking again.

PCIe is set to x16 and has always been there.

Though it most likely has nothing to do with the CPU issue stated in my OP the Power Saving Mode may still be a huge factor in overall performance…. get this:

I keep selecting “Prefer Maximum Performance” and after every reboot it’s been reset back to “Auto”. After re-re-resetting it back to Max Perf the tab now looks like this:

Nvidia Settings: PowerMizer:

Adaptive Clocking: Enabled
Graphics Clock: 901Mhz
Memory Transfer Rate: 1782Mhz
Power Source: AC
Current PCIe Link Width: x16
Current PCIe Link Speed: 5.0 GT/s
Performance Level: 1

NOTE: Performance Levels are listed as follows:

………………….Graphics Clock…………………Memory Transfer Rate
…..Level………..Min………………..Max………………….Min……………….Max
………..0………..324Mhz………..324Mhz………..648Mhz………..648Mhz
………..1………..329Mhz………..901Mhz………..1782Mhz……..1782Mhz

Edit: Killing off all older drivers and installing 331.67 … seeing if that helps.

Linux has specific power saving options for the graphics. I’ll check that and make sure it’s in 16x, thanks.

Okay.... I’m sure this isn’t precisely what you wanted but it was VERY enlightening.

InfoSistema was a bust but lshw was a winner. Among a lot of other things in it’s report was this info on PCI-0. Please remember that my Nvidia Settings dialog says I’m running 331.49 (just triple checked... that’s what it still says.)

I’m wondering if the original drivers were never properly purged because get a load of this:
" product: GK107 [GeForce GT 640] "

That is the old driver that came with the install. There is no mention here of the 331.49 driver that the Nvidia settings tool claims is currently in use.

*-pci:0
description: PCI bridge
product: RD890 PCI to PCI bridge (PCI express gpp port B)
vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 00
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pci pm pciexpress msi ht normal_decode bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=pcieport
resources: irq:52 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fd000000-fe0fffff ioport:c0000000(size=301989888)
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GK107 [GeForce GT 640]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
resources: irq:80 memory:fd000000-fdffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:e000(size=128) memory:fe000000-fe07ffff
*-multimedia
description: Audio device
product: GK107 HDMI Audio Controller
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0.1
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1
version: a1
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0
resources: irq:25 memory:fe080000-fe083fff

Working on the GPU-Z thing…. it’s a little different with this OS. GPU-G doesn’t show info for the bus interface other than the fact that it’s a M5A97 and it won’t run tests on the video hardware.

However InfoSistema will. I’m downloading it and will run a few tests after dinner.

I’ve been running GW2 for a year and a half now with no problems. I have it on 2 different systems and over the last month or so it’s degraded performance on both of them. Mostly I get what appear to be loading hiccups when I enter a new area and they seemed to scale with the shader graphics setting, high causing the most often brief freezes.

Today all **** broke loose. Just walking through Vigil Keep in fullscreen was so bad that I had about 5 fps. It was full of people so I figured that reducing graphics to max performance would help… no joy. So I thought that restarting the game in windowed mode would help and for a time it did.

As part of trying to fix whatever was messing with my performance over the past month, I had the system monitor running. It’s a good thing I did because I caught the whole history of things going from a tolerable 12FPS to being so bad that my character’s head stopped rendering for 1-2 seconds at a time.

Note: Don’t even bother tyring to blame it on my OS… I know better. This is intended to help Tech Support run down problems that everyone is experiencing and, to be honest, I seem to have having fewer problems than many friends who run windows 8.

GW2 has sort of an in and out history with multi-thread / multi-cpu issues… might this be part of it?

Hopefully this is a clue that can help Tech Support figure things out.

System:
AMD FX-6100 Bulldozer
16G RAM (hardly used, as you can see)
NVIDIA GT640 (I thought that was the issue but this pic shows otherwise)
Authentic Nvidia Driver 331.49 (current)
Running Mint 15 with POL and WINE 1.7.1 (Known worldwide as solid with GW2)
System and GW2 are both fully up to date.

AGAIN: This system has run GW2 just fine for over a year. This new issue isn’t the system.

And to be fair I think they key word here is, as TheTechnician said, “Option”.

No one should be forced into it. But neither should people be forced to not do it either.

I really do hope that the ability to zoom “all the way in” is one of the unadvertised changed in the feature pack. Fingers crossed…

It’s nowhere near impossble, it’s called camera.zoom in most cases. It has a min value, all you need to do is reduce it to just above zero and then you’d get the same effect as if you stood next to a wall and rotated the camera so that it shoved into the character… and the character disappeared.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing else that would have to change at all. It’s one variable that is restricted by one minimum value and one maximum value. All you do is change the minimum value and let players zoom in on themselves until they can’t see themselves anymore.

Problem solved.

The chat is already able to be toggled. At worst if it’s a subcomponent of the overall HUD then it would need to be broken out and made into it’s own thing that was independant of the HUD (allowing it’s toggle to be completely independant) and that’s a whole lot easier than 95% of the things coming in the feature pack.

The hardest thing would be the health indicator…

If it were me, I’d just duplicate the chat so that there are 2 of the same thing (which is already able to be toggled) with one that’s in HUD on mode and another in HUD off mode. This re-use of the same code would greatly facilitate the process and make it easier to code. After that, I’d created a small graphic of a human silhouette that is all black and place it in the corner. At 100% health it’s color code is 0,0,0 and at 0% health the color code is 255,0,0 … then just use a % of heath variable to alter the color.

Nothing fancy, nothing too involved and that would make it 3 problems solved.

And CNTL-SHIFT-H turns my HUD on and off. It does not take a screen shot and I often run around with the HUD off. When I want a screen shot I have to use PRT-SCN … but like most people I do turn the HUD off for screen shots.

(Later edit: Okay, make the health fade from green to red with yellow in between. Whatever colors you like, the idea is pretty much the same.)

After I ran this by an Arenanet employee in game the employee asked me to be sure to put this suggestion up in the forums because s/he felt that:

a) The idea would greatly improve the quality of play.
b) The implementation should, that is should, be easy and fairly painless.
c) It’s an idea that, once you think about it, actually is necessary for no-HUD play.

The idea is simply this:

1) With the HUD on the chat has, in OO coding terms, a “.visible” property. For some reason the ability to toggle the chat is dependant on what I can refer to as:

if (HUD.visible==“True”)

Why? Even without a HUD you should still be able to talk to other players. Speaking to each other is not an electronic enhancement the way a minimap or ground targeting circle is.

2) When the HUD is off there is no way to know if you are dieing. Really? Even if you took away all my character’s electronic enhancements that you see in the HUD I think the character would know if his arm was half chopped off and he needed to throw a heal. As it stands, wihtout the HUD you have no idea if you’re injured or not. Therefore, the health bar should be able to be toggled even if the HUD is off, just as the chat window should be.

Here are the reasons these things are needed and how they would make a positive difference:

- If I’m running around I personally prefer to use the M map and then actually look around at the landmarks to navigate, exactly the same way I have to navigate when I’m out for a hike in real life. This results in feeling as if I’m actually exploring a new place that I’ve never been instead of just running to the next POI or waypoint that I need for map completion.

- If I don’t have tags above the AI mobs then I have to open my eyes and look at everything to make sure I don’t stumble into a hornet’s nest and you know what?

I actually notice all the detail that went into the world of GW2. It’s really amazing how much people never notice when their heads are buried in a HUD and a minimap. Running around staring at the minimap may get you around quickly but you miss out on seeing a lot of things in the world that make you stop and say “Wow… WOW!”

Have you ever gone to NE Metrica province and looked up? Way, way up? Try it sometime. That’s the kind of thing you notice when you’re looking around instead of at a minimap.

The quality of the experience goes way, way up when I turn off the HUD and zoom in as much as I can… but the fact that I can’t communicate with anyone is worse than inconvenient. The fact that I don’t know when I’m hurt and need to use a heal is just absurd. After all, it would hurt to have my leg hacked off!

chat.visible should be usable regardless of the status of the HUD.visible variable and there should also be a Health.visible and it too would be able to be toggled regardless of HUD.visible’s state.

Thanks for reading this and I hope it’s as easy to implement as I believe it should be. (Hate that word “should”…. )

P.S. : Actually no, I’m not an RP’er. I’m a guy who has spent years navigating by sight as I explored thousands of acres of forest in real life. I found that the game has much the same feel if the HUD is off and I zoom in as much as possible. I like that feeling… and would use it as often as possible if only I could see the chat and my health.

Oh, and being able to zoom the camera all the way in to 0 would be great too. Come on, I know it’s possible… I already make it happen by standing next to a wall and rotating the camera and just want to be able to do it without being next to a wall.

Am I the 1,000,000th person to ask for a zoom to first person ability? If so, do I win a prize? :p

After I ran this by an Arenanet employee in game the employee asked me to be sure to put this suggestion up in the forums because s/he felt that:

a) The idea would greatly improve the quality of play.
b) The implementation should, that is should, be easy and fairly painless.
c) It’s an idea that, once you think about it, actually is necessary for no-HUD play.

The idea is simply this:

1) With the HUD on the chat has, in OO coding terms, a “.visible” property. For some reason the ability to toggle the chat is dependant on what I can refer to as:

if (HUD.visible==“True”)

Why? Even without a HUD you should still be able to talk to other players. Speaking to each other is not an electronic enhancement the way a minimap or ground targeting circle is.

2) When the HUD is off there is no way to know if you are dieing. Really? Even if you took away all my character’s electronic enhancements that you see in the HUD I think the character would know if his arm was half chopped off and he needed to throw a heal. As it stands, wihtout the HUD you have no idea if you’re injured or not. Therefore, the health bar should be able to be toggled even if the HUD is off, just as the chat window should be.

Here are the reasons these things are needed and how they would make a positive difference:

- If I’m running around I personally prefer to use the M map and then actually look around at the landmarks to navigate, exactly the same way I have to navigate when I’m out for a hike in real life. This results in feeling as if I’m actually exploring a new place that I’ve never been instead of just running to the next POI or waypoint that I need for map completion.

- If I don’t have tags above the AI mobs then I have to open my eyes and look at everything to make sure I don’t stumble into a hornet’s nest and you know what?

I actually notice all the detail that went into the world of GW2. It’s really amazing how much people never notice when their heads are buried in a HUD and a minimap. Running around staring at the minimap may get you around quickly but you miss out on seeing a lot of things in the world that make you stop and say “Wow… WOW!”

Have you ever gone to NE Metrica province and looked up? Way, way up? Try it sometime. That’s the kind of thing you notice when you’re looking around instead of at a minimap.

The quality of the experience goes way, way up when I turn off the HUD and zoom in as much as I can… but the fact that I can’t communicate with anyone is worse than inconvenient. The fact that I don’t know when I’m hurt and need to use a heal is just absurd. After all, it would hurt to have my leg hacked off!

chat.visible should be usable regardless of the status of the HUD.visible variable and there should also be a Health.visible and it too would be able to be toggled regardless of HUD.visible’s state.

Thanks for reading this and I hope it’s as easy to implement as I believe it should be. (Hate that word “should”…. )

P.S. : Actually no, I’m not an RP’er. I’m a guy who has spent years navigating by sight as I explored thousands of acres of forest in real life. I found that the game has much the same feel if the HUD is off and I zoom in as much as possible. I like that feeling… and would use it as often as possible if only I could see the chat and my health.

Oh, and being able to zoom the camera all the way in to 0 would be great too. Come on, I know it’s possible… I already make it happen by standing next to a wall and rotating the camera and just want to be able to do it without being next to a wall.

Am I the 1,000,000th person to ask for a zoom to first person ability? If so, do I win a prize? :p