Guild Wars 2

Apolo.5942:

Tman.6349:

Apolo.5942:

Tman.6349:

aRestless.6213:

First: It’s not an exploit. An exploit is the benifitial abusing of bugs. And there is no bug.

Second: Through this, no gold is generated, it’s the opposite. What farmers do, is to sell the stuff they find to other players which then pay the gold and 15% of the price simply evaporate. So the amount of available gold in the game actually drops through this.

In FACT, to add to this point, it is ACTUALLY those that are “farming the Labyrinth for hours on end” that injecting huge amounts of gold into the game’s economy. I’ll just chalk the OP’s misunderstanding of the vast difference between these two activities as ignorance or jealousy.

Nothing to see here folks. Carry on.

lol you are seriously going to say that running random drop in the labyrinth out farms getting 15 trick or treats in like 10 seconds flat? I want some of what you are smoking.

Except farming the Labyrinth drops REAL COIN, adding gold to the economy. Farming and selling ToT bags transfers wealth between players. Instead of ‘smoking things’ maybe you should read some books.

I have no problem stating that i cant access the exploit, does not make it less of an exploit thou.

I can’t access the first instance either and I have to deal with groups of 10 people, that try to farm the same spot in the open world.

But that doesn’t make the thing I can’t do an exploit.

You can’t sell the candy corn to NPCs. It’s vendor price is zero.

You could sell the bags. For 18 coppers each, instead of over 5 silver when selling over the TP. You still could sell some of the contents to NPCs, like the skulls for example. But I don’t think that many people do that, simply because there’s no reason to (the TP price has a minimum that’s bound to the vendor’s price).

I have a problem with this farm myself, because a majority of the players is excluded from it, while it’s the only reliable and stress-free way to farm using the maize balm, where you don’t have to deal with trolls that kill the ambient creatures “becuz lol”. And of course they benefit from it. But this is neither an exploit, nor does it hurt the gold-to-gems-ratio, which were your arguments in the first post.

You might wanna try to find other players for that in the LFG tool and taxi them on your map (or vice-versa).

First: It’s not an exploit. An exploit is the benifitial abusing of bugs. And there is no bug.

Second: Through this, no gold is generated, it’s the opposite. What farmers do, is to sell the stuff they find to other players which then pay the gold and 15% of the price simply evaporate. So the amount of available gold in the game actually drops through this.

Proposal Overview
Guild Fractals – going back to Tyria’s Living World challenges with your guild.

Goal of Proposal
Reuse and polish already existing content that’s already tailored towards large groups of players. Also, this would give us the ability to re-enact those large open world events from season 1.

Proposal Functionality
In existing PvE, you can use the Fractals of the Mists to revisit specific events in Tyria’s history. Some content, that already had been in the game, was brought back through the fractals. Also, since season 2, the story journal gives us the ability to go back in our own story line. What we can’t do until now, is to revisit the massive open world events that vastly shaped the world we now see our characters in.

So I’m suggesting you could bring back

• The Boss Blitz
• The Tower of Nightmares
• The Twisted Marionette
• The Siege of Lions Arch (evacuation and offensive)

Especially the last two are challenges for numbers of more than 50 players, something that’s pretty hard to achieve with the “traditional” dungeon-like concept of a raid.

I already suggested this before and in the original thread I also talked about possible costs and rewards. In short, my idea was to replace the event-specific rewards with a new currency for raids. You can find the original thread here.

Associated Risks
While big guilds might be happy to finally face such big challenges “on their own”, this might lead to guilds to stay out of such big open world events in the future and wait for them to be available as a guild fractal. The replacement of event-specific rewards with a general currency (and therefor making specific rewards only available when the event takes place in the open world) could mitigate this.

Also, as a player, you’d need to be in a big guild to revisit these events. Solving this would be a very nice use case for guild alliances.

TheTroy.2386:

I am actually more concerned about the shared farm. People are using low level characters (2-5) to tag the transformed mobs to get additional bags. The lvl80 will then kill them. This allows up to 5 people to farm the ToT bags simultaneously in the dungeon. Potentially more in open world (such as Rata Sum), depending on the damage per hit.

Doing this allows for a single vial to yield (5×9) 45 ToT bags. If you don’t deem this exploit then I really don’t know what would be called an exploit any more.

It’s not an exploit because there is no bug.

And for Rata Sum: On my map there’s a troll standing afk on the spawn and putting the Ranger’s Flame Trap on auto attack. So you can pretty much forget open world spots.

There’s only one other place known to me in the entire game world where this is possible. And you can imagine that you’ll never have this place alone for you. Even without the trolls (and they do exist) trying to farm this is a pain.

Would you like to explain?

It has been mentioned multiple times that in the personal story no NPCs drop loot.

Edit: Just tested it myself in some random story instance. They give XP, but they don’t drop loot.

Maybe it’s not an exploit in the sense of “using a bug”, because there is no bug. But this doesn’t change the fact that it should be fixed. Soon. I wouldn’t have a problem with that if players could repeat the first instance, because, you know – same chances for everyone.

If “playing the game as intended” permanently declines access to the best farming method in the game, that’s not a good example of how things should work.

That’s something that also isn’t taught on my server. Zerg goes in, captures the camp, takes the mats, and goes. Nobody stays, waits for the camp to be full again and starts that double supply upgrade, which is SO important for upgrading towers and keeps.

We’ll hit the second place this week, and I believe the reason for that is that our (winning) enemies permanently had 2 to 3 people, including siege weaponry, in each camp of their homelands in the first 48 hours after reset. With small groups, it was nearly impossible to flip those camps.

On the other hand: Last week, I was up all night trying to upgrade our own bay to the waypoint. We were two people, and had big problems, just because one really good 1v1 guy constantly flipped back the adjacent camps and killed the dolyaks on their way.

Dayra.7405:

1) there are better boni for higher scoring during the Week

That’s true. But is this a motivation for you? “Oh guys, let’s do some WvW this evening, so we have that extra percent magic find tomorrow”?

Dayra.7405:

2) first get 3 bonus WEXP-chest, second 2, last 1 bonus chest at the first WEXP-lvlups of the next match.

Wow. I honestly didn’t know that. When I received more than two chests I always thought I had missed a level up. Then maybe it’s not about the reward itself, but about the way it’s presented. As said before: I didn’t even know that there is a reward, so a bit more confetti would be nice.

Hi there,

I just recently became an active WvW player again and the last weeks, during the tournament, we had some really close matches and it was really fun to fight for each single point. But I realized, that something that really motivates me is the fight for the better reward in the end.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not playing WvW for the reward itself. And I’m also not talking about big rewards. But currently in WvW the only thing that motivates you to win is some abstract leaderboard – and I don’t care about leaderboards. It might be motivating if you’re in gold leage and fighting for the first place, but in my case, on an average server, you might even find yourself thinking “ouh, if we win this week this might mean tougher opponents next week”.

So what I would suggest is, if you’ve participated in WvW during the week, you get a small, place-dependent reward that says “You’ve accomplished something, this is your prize”. Also, these rewards can be focused totally on WvW, like (superior) blueprints or liquid of world experience. The only important thing is, that you should get a personal reward you can work for during the week and that’s at least slightly better if you end up on a better place in the end.

That’s quite funny, because that means that the mouse tracking works and the only thing that isn’t recognized is the mouse wheel. I suppose you haven’t set any fancy gaming mouse macro functionality to your mouse wheel, have you?

So, that actually means that for some reason, the way I track the mouse doesn’t work completely with your mouse or mouse driver. The keyboard and mouse tracking will be completely redone, but that’ll take a while. So you’ll have to wait until then :-/

Wow, thanks for that video, that’s helpful. Does the marker also stay on the same position if you drag around the map using the mouse?

Also, for those interested, a little peek for one of the changes coming up for version 1.0.2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xOT0wsRstY0

Shinhwa.1604:

Edit: I don’t know what the api looks like, but if you can track the zoom level on the map then it would be nice if the markers adjusted. Right now if you zoom the map the markers get all wonky.

This should not happen. I’m not accessing the API, but listening to the mouse input. So if you use the mouse wheel to zoom out, it should adjust itself (although there are inaccuracies, cause the method I use bases on rough approximations).

May I ask where you tried that, which resolution you use and if the markers adjust at all? Also, to achieve the maximum accuracy, you shouldn’t move the mouse around while zooming. I forgot to mention that on the help page.

Okay, I’ve got a hotfix for you. It needs you to replace a file in Markers’ folder. For the sake of completeness, however, I should mention that you do this at your own risk: This script file that you’ll put into your folder isn’t reviewed by Overwolf staff and therefor I would be able to send you malicious code. I don’t tell you that to scare you off, but because I feel that’s my duty as someone who’s specialized in computer security.

Download the file from here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2075612/preferences.zip and extract it. You now need to navigate to the extension folder of Markers. For that, press Windowskey + R, paste this here and press enter:

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Overwolf\Extensions\kpcdmnpikpmlffgalcadkgenkpclnmomnkjljolm\1.0.1\Files

The windows explorer will open in the appropriate folder and you can paste the extracted file, preferences.js, and replace the existing one.

Please let me know if that worked

Yeah that’s an issue that sneaked into the app directly before publishing. I don’t know when I will be updating the app next time, but I’ll take a look if i can find a hotfix for you.

Windsagio.1340:

Xillllix.3485:

Yeah that’s all nice and everything, but Overwolf is for windows only, while GW2 is for windows AND mac. It would be better if those features were included in GW2 in the first place so that mac users weren’t left out.

Surely there must be some mac users who know enough scripting to work with htem and set the app up on mac too!

No?

Yes… and no. I’ve got not doubt that an Overlay Application like Overwolf would be possible to implement on Mac and maybe there even is something similar available out there, but if you take a look at Overwolf’s app store you’ll notice that the number of available extensions for Overwolf (and that’s what’s giving advantage, not the host application itself) is not that high so far.

Also to my knowledge, developers who create apps for Overwolf don’t get rewarded monetary in any way (except of app contests of course). So to really create a benefit for players, you need volunteers who like to contribute such apps. Assuming that there are a lot less developers on Macs than on Windows computers, the number of these volunteers should be quite low, and the motivation to create apps for a relatively small audience also isn’t that high.

In the end you could say “hey, why not develop apps that work on Windows AND Mac?” That’s a good idea and in some cases this might work out, but for example my contribution to the app contest uses two operating system specific plugins for Overwolf. The first I would have to completely rewrite from scratch to get it running on Mac, the other one is completely impossible to implement on Mac.

So although I can understand you Mac users might feel left alone, I fear that there is not much hope for you.

Here you can watch the stream in case you missed it: http://www.twitch.tv/arestless/c/5128367 . Also Markers is now available in the Overwolf App Store.

I hope this wasn’t posted before. If it was: Sorry!
Edit: Oh, it was posted, right above my post, but not as a full proposal, so I think I’ll leave that one here

Proposal Overview
Make guild chat persistent when changing characters.

Goal of Proposal
No need to interrupt ongoing conversations when logging in with another character.

Proposal Functionality
Just like whisper messages the guild chat should be restored when switching to a character that is representing the same guild. There could or even should also be a timeout for this feature. E.g. if the character switch takes longer than 2 minutes, the guild chat won’t be restored – in exchange, also messages should be displayed that were received while in character selection screen.

Associated Risks
None that I could think of.

Hi there,

for the recent app contest I created a Guild Wars 2 app called “Markers”, which I want to present in a stream today at approximately 4pm GMT, if you’re interested you’re welcome to pass by at http://twitch.tv/arestless . You can also follow me on twitter (http://twitter.com/a_restless) if you want to be informed right before the stream starts.

Although I’m german, the stream will be in english so you know what’s going on.

In short, “Markers” is an application that lets you place icons, so called markers anywhere in the game world, add information to them, and even share them with others.

Curious? Then see you soon,

aRestless

Aaaaand another question:

As my app is going to be a Guild Wars 2 specific, I’d also like to theme it that way. Do we have permission to use game graphics for our overlay apps?

That’s exactly the link I used. And I got the problem: I used quotation marks. They were escaped in the JSON-String via \", but the error occured anyway. As soon as I removed the quotation marks, it worked.

I just wanted to sign up for the contest, but I get an error (“something went wrong, please try again”). To be exact, there seems to be a problem with the generated json-string, the server response contains the following text:

“Message”:"Invalid object passed in, \u0027:\u0027 or \u0027}\u0027 expected.

meh.6784:

Gil.9346:

Does anyone know whether the Overwolf API does even handle the Mumble Data Link?

It does now.

This is really great work. Thanks a lot!

Since probably some of us are going to use this library, I’d appreciate if you could clarfiy which license you’re going to use for it so none of us gets into trouble

The chat displays the players’ names bold, so the formatting isn’t restricted to colors. So for GM whispers, you could turn the text itself bold and the GM’s name additionally italic or so. This would also stress the importance of the message and would work independently from colorblindness and similar scenarios.

An alternative would be underlining, but that’s ugly as hell.

I’d love to revisit the major open world events from season 1. I’ve also been a fan of the Lion’s Arch events (evacuation as well as the attack on scarlet). A few days ago I made a suggestion called “Guild Fractals” for exactly this type of thing (Link).

In short: Through fractals and the story journal we are now able to revisit parts of past living world events, I’d really appreciate the same option for the large open world events like the marionette, boss blitz, siege of LA, tower of nightmares and so on.

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

On the topic of using siege weapons as a role mechanic in these fights, is that something we want to see more of? I often worry that siege weapons can be just as boring as standing in the safe corner pressing the same attack. Do you feel that they can also cause some contention between players?

It depends on how it’s done. The solution at Tequatl is really good in my opinion (the turrets are vital and you need extra people to operate and defend them, in the battery phases it’s all about defending, not about attacking).

At the opposing side, the mechanics at Claw of Jormag are awful. In the first phase, defending the cannons is nearly impossible, since the mobs spawn directly on top of the NPCs operating the cannons. And in the second phase there seems to be a huge portion of players who think the best tactic is to attack the Boss directly and to ignore the golems. Last night we were there with a small group from my guild defending the golems, while the majority of the rest (including so called commanders) was either killing mobs or attacking the Boss. And when the event finally succeeded (and the Behemoth already had been slayn a long time ago) the mapchat was flooded with “good job all”, “thanks for the lead!” and other stuff that freaked me out.

tl;dr: I like siege weapons. But they have to force the players to split up and bring an immediate effect that is apreciated by all players participating in the event. Also, being AFK in the attack range of a meta boss should always kill you (which means: PLEASE also remove the safe spots from Golem Mark II)

Very good upcoming changes. Can hardly understand all the complaints. The only thing I’m a bit worried about is the future of key farms but even that wouldn’t make me mad.

RemiRome.8495:

aRestless.6213:

Am I the only one not getting the difference here?

Yes.

Try reading it again.

I know that the difference is a moving boss versus a stationary one. But I could put it the other way around: “Having a spot in a bosses’ aggro range that isn’t reachable by him is poor dungeon design.” An arguable point of view, is it not?

My point is, that the given explanations might give clarification for some specific cases, but cannot be used as a global rule of thumb for what’s an exploit and what isn’t. I would have been happier with an additional, general statement such as “taking benefit from unintended behaviour is fine, while provoking unintended behaviour is not”.

Chris Cleary.8017:

Standing on a rock/ledge/platform while the boss attempts to hit you from below (yes there are some bosses that still have abilities that hit you), is a problem with pathing and the boss not resetting when it can’t reach the target. This is exploiting a bug.

[…]

Standing outside a stationary boss’s range is not an exploit, the boss “should” reset after an extended period of time, but is not. This is an example of poor boss implementation, and not an exploit.

Am I the only one not getting the difference here? The example is both times “the boss should reset, but isn’t” and one time it’s a bug, the other time it’s “poor implementation”. The only difference is: In one case the (boss) designer made the mistake, in the other case the programmer. I, as a player (and as a software developer by the way) find it hard to judge from the outside if something is a real bug or simply “unintended behaviour”.

Thanks for the hint – I didn’t know of the mumble-stuff. I thought I had to screenshot the map and get the player’s position from comparing it to a reference map. That would have been hell.

I’ve got other worries. The idea of a contest might be great, but some of the ideas presented here: http://developers.overwolf.com/guild-wars-2-app-ideas/ sound like they would mean a high rate of automization and clearly would give an advantage to players using the app. As some of you might know, ANets policy towards third party software is “anything that gives advantage is forbidden”. I don’t want to invest time in an app which then is rejected cause it violates the ToS.

Here’s the official statement concerning 3rd party tools: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first#post354869

Thank you very much.

By the way: Is there any official statement that explicitely states that dungeon selling is allowed? Don’t want to bring up a discussion about that, just being curious.

Ask yourself if you could report someone for standing in your way while you want to take a screenshot.

And if you’re coming to the same conclusion like me, ask yourself if a GM should be allowed to take actions against a player standing in his way while taking a screenshot. A screenshot probably taken for his or her personal archive and not for the PR department or any other “official” ANet stuff.

That said, it remains unclear if the DCs really were caused by this GM (or what rank he might have). So: I can’t judge the situation, but from my opinion, it definitively needs to be investigated.

It’s a good thing for guilds and friends. A bad thing for the LFG-tool.

And this is the definitive end for dungeon selling. Two people can join, kick the seller and collect the dungeon reward. I don’t like dungeons being sold, so I personally don’t have a problem with that – but I know that many people do not share my opinion there.

As some of you might know there exists something called Law of large Numbers which says, that if a statistical experiment is performed a large number of times, the portion of the different possible outcomes will eventually converge to their probability. Meaning: If you kill and loot a mob over and over and over again, and the chance of dropping a precursor is, let’s say, 0.1%, then eventually and approximateley 0.1% of your overall drops will be precursors.

BUT for small probabilites the Law of large Numbers should better be called “Law of freaking huge numbers which are not likely to ever reach”. Every experiment which any of you performs is way too small to conclude anything and if your big samples are of the form “I know so many people which…” that’s heavily influenced by confirmation bias as already mentioned before in this thread.

To give you an example: At least in germany, there is a common belief that babies are more likely to be born when there’s a full moon – a belief, that is shared by many nurses. However – there is no statistical evidence for that. None at all. And the same thing happens here.

Many people here already wrote smart things about randomness and RNGs, but I wanted to stress the “seed thing”:

From a developer’s perspective, a seperate RNG or seed for each player makes no sense at all. The same RNG will be used for many events and players. For example, if you deal a critical hit is also decided by an RNG and so is the (partially) random movement of NPCs.

While it may be true that pseudo random number generators (and especially those who are used in a non-cryptographic environment) put out odd patterns, the amount of queries to the RNG between your loot-drops or even between two blows with your weapon is so incredibly high, that any pattern that might exist will be long gone when you let the RNG roll the dice for you the next time. So: Even if the RNG isn’t truly random, the number of events needing the RNG between two of your dice rolls definitively is.

I’d like to see that debuff on everyone who uses the letters “5kap+” or “zerker” in the lfg tool.

So far, I really like most of the upcoming changes for the second feature pack – but as the latest blog post shows, there is still no concept for activities for large guilds. The guild missions may be fine for medium sized guilds – but even the guild bounty, which has different ranks, doesn’t really “scale up” beyond a group of 30 players or so. There may be ways to enhance the existing guild missions through various additional challenges, but I’d like to suggest an independent concept which I’m going to call Guild Fractals.

Since the Fractals of the Mist and, even more, the Story Journal, ArenaNet gives us the chance to revisit parts of past events like dungeons and story instances. What’s still missing, are the huge “open world” events, like the Tower of Nightmares, the siege of Lion’s Arch or the Crown Pavillon’s Boss Blitz.

What I’m suggesting is to bring back these events for large guilds and to replace their typical rewards (like toxic spore samples or blade shards) with an own, general currency, similar to Guild Commendations, which then can be used to purchase rewards.

This would not only preserve the already created (and otherwisely thrown away) content, it would also give back value to merits and influence. My idea would be to create a new guild upgrades and consumables for each of these Guild Fractals and let these consumables work like time tokens for custom arenas (probably per hour, instead of per day).

I think the implementation of such a feature would give a huge boost to large guilds, as it would finally give them the chance to organize and beat really big events, a challenge to organization and teamplay. Sure, we’ve got Tequatl and we’ve got the Triple Trouble. But on the one hand, there’s a huge lack of diversity and on the other hand these things are mereley large guild-organized events. What I dream of are large guild events!

And, last but not least: Many of these past events have been pretty good farm spots. I don’t want to suggest to give large guilds (and large guilds alone) the opportunity to farm champions and such more efficiently than in the open world, but I like the idea of giving these farm-oriented players an opportunity to team up and be on their own. Blix and Queensdale have shown what happens when “farmers” and “casuals” clash, so I think it might be good to create an alternative to the traditional open world farm zerg.

So: What do you think? Is this a good idea or the worst you have ever heard of? Let me know!

Disclaimer: This isn’t the most inventive of all ideas and I’m pretty sure I’m not the first thinking or posting about it. If the topic has already been discussed I’d be thankful for a link!

Although this topic is megaserver-related, I think it belongs in a seperate thread, as it’s no direct feedback or question. If you (mods) think otherwise, feel free to merge it into the right thread.

One big issue concerning megaservers is the challenge to shift a huge amount of players to a specific version of a map. Not because the players like to, but have to be on the same map, for example to kill a boss that is coordinated via voicechat or to complete a guild mission.

In the german forums the idea emerged (beginning here), that commanders and squads could be used as “taxis” just like parties are used now, giving each member of the squad the possibility to join the commander’s map. In a more advanced version guilds could produce a consumable that allows them to create an initially empty map, that, for the first few minutes, could only be accessed via the squad or, additionally, parties.

But even without the ability to create maps, I think being able to join the map of your squad’s commander would be a great improvement – and that’s why I wanted to share the idea with you guys. What do you think? Would you welcome this or does this have disadvantages as well?

Using a language that isn’t understood by all people around you is mostly considered impolite. So let’s say you’re living in germany and you go to a bar with some friends and one of them would show up with his new girlfriend, who is from france and doesn’t know german – and yes, I really had a similar situation some months ago. Even if those two usually spoke french when they were alone, the whole group would probably switch to english, as it probably would be the most common language. You don’t want to exclude anyone from the conversation.

But let’s say that bar had its “spanish evening” today, where all the spanish folks living in the city gather up to chat in their mother tongue. Would you expect from them to switch to english, too? Especially if your group is the minority? What if suddenly a large group of guys comes in, who speak nothing but english?

As made up that last paragraph sounds, that’s the experience I currently have with megaservers. It’s neither impoliteness nor arrogance that causes all these problems, it’s the constant change of the environment that causes confusion and frustration.

As it might interest some of you: In the german forum it was stated that they were working on the “language problem”.

Just for clarification: The new schedule for world boss events will still be introduced as announced, right?

After reading the last two blog posts, especially regarding the “guilds can start meta events” thing, I think the upcoming changes have potential. BUT this applies if (and only if):

- I can determine which version of the map I am on, for example through an identifier (like “Queensdale #42”)
- Based on that identifier, I can join a particular version of the map
- There’s a hint about how full the current map is

Given that, a specific, large group of players is able to gather on the same map for an event, can easily communicate the map you should join on and probably can pick an (initially) empty map.

Why do we need that? Well, ever joined your folks in edge of the mists when not initially member of a party? I don’t want parties and “Taxi playing” to be a workaround to answer the question if I’m on the right map or not.

I’m concerned about “server organized events”. E.g. on Drakkar Lake there’s a Karka Queen Raid each day at 10pm, Tequatl three days a week, you get the idea. Where’s the common ground for events like these? Do we have to join one giant guild for these things?

As already expressed in another thread: Let transmutation of legendaries cost more transmutation charges and I’m totally fine with this. The problem is that I don’t want legendaries to be “just another skin”, even if it was hard to get them in the first place.

That said, I think it would be consequent if two-handed weapons would require two times the transmutation costs of one-handed ones, regardless of legendary or not.

I really like the new approach. However, imho, it would have been better if different “rarities” of skins would require different amounts of transmutation charges – especially with higher cost for legendaries. Twinks with legendaries, that simply doesn’t seem right. And let’s be honest: You build legendary weapons for the look, not for the stats.

This also applies to other rare skins, like black lion weapons – they’ll lose their value and that’s kind of sad.