Guild Wars 2

Skyrim did it this way so you can see an example of how it works.

I like the idea.

- Don’t put any combat trigger on the slot either. Why: Because there’s a thing called “personal responsibility”. It’s remembering to take the food out of the slot when you don’t want to use it. To that effect don’t do anything to the slot to take this responsibility away from the player either.
- Changing the food in the slot to another food would spend 1 food immediately to change the buff.
- Slot should allow oil/sharpening stones as well.

Being nearly invincible and still dishing out damage. Hence my current minion master reaper in PvE. Minions absorb all the attention while I dish the damage with the greatsword. No other character I have rips through a pack of pocket raptors as efficiently as my reaper.

+1 for this from me. There are so few fashion options for asura that finding a proper skirt is nigh impossible. This especially goes for leather armor asura, where your only option is leather pants and an overcoat.

Technical difficulties: nope. The armor types already exist for all the races and professions.
Balance difficulties: nope. There’s generic character models for PVP. Your character would still be restricted to their class’s armor type. Only the transmute restriction would be lifted.

I’d think that the reason ANET doesn’t move to Dx12 is the same as why my company doesn’t change compiler from visual studio 2008.

There’s no reason to upgrade something you don’t plan to take advantage of especially if the current solution is working well.

Upgrading to DirectX 12 makes sense if ANET plans to take advantage of the features in it. It can also introduce more issues (like client side crashes) because it is nearly impossible for them to test on every possible client PC configuration. If ANET has no plans to use the cloth simulations and the framerate is acceptable there is nothing to gain and potentially a lot to lose from doing the upgrade. It’s not worth it when they have issues with Dragon’s Stand to deal with.

The idea of Directx 12 is probably on a whiteboard somewhere in ANET’s coffee lounge (along with the improvements to the Music system i’ve been asking for) and maybe they’ll get around to it when there’s some downtime but for now I suspect they’re not messing with something that generally works well.

It’s been a year. I’d say i’m for a revert of stability. Hammer train was more fun than pirate ship.

I would only hope that the invisible wall that breaks the devourer run guild rush in Diessa Plateau would be something they would notice in their private test server. Thing has to be useful for something right?

Think of it more as paying for the restaurant to improve their current menu. Restaurant opens 3 years ago.

I came into this restaurant long ago knowing what the chef was capable of doing before. I liked the taste of some menu items, didn’t like the others. The other customers at the restaurant added suggestions for the chef to change up some things. The beef was too dry. The chicken was too good. The soup needed salt, etc. The dessert was incomplete.

The chef listened at first but now we see other dishes come out instead of the improvements to the ones we like.

We now propose to the chef that we would be willing to pay him to fix the dishes we like in addition to whatever we pay for the current versions. How does the chef respond? we don’t know yet.

You’re perfectly in your rights to go to another restaurant. I personally like the taste of the chicken at this one and would like to see them finish the dessert to the point where I would be willing to pay them to do it.

I know I’d back a kickstarter to finish the music system in GW2.

This was nice. The contrast from soft to foreboding was cool.

Thanks for listening

This should be simple to do. It would be like how you can “join party member in lion’s arch” from the portrait menu, but add it to the guild menu so i can join a guild member in the same zone without having to join party with em for taxi. The idea is to help me join my guild mates in the same zone when the megaserver algorithm doesn’t get it right.

Is it something in the works? If not I think it should be. One more quality of life fix for GW2.

I have the desire to make my character either sing or at least look like singing. The reason is to use the recorded footage for music videos.

I had remembered a feature from another MMO where the character would appear to speak the words that were typed (was FF14 i think) but i didn’t find such a thing in GW2. In searching for a way I tried talking to NPCs, using shouts, adding various boons to trigger flavor speech. Nothing happened.

The only way I can think of to get my character to look like talking is to use the HoT storyline scenes where my character has lines. Only thing is I don’t want to record the “music videos” using only the jungle scenery.

Is there a way to make my character look like she’s talking? or would it be a feature ANET wants to add?

My wish is a completed player music system:

• Add the halfsteps to the F keys for each instrument: F1 = C# F2 = D# F3 =F# F4 = G# F5=A#
• Add sustained notes to all instruments up to at least 1 second in length.
• Normalize the keys for all the instruments: Bring Flute and Trumpet into C range, Fix the unbreakable choir bell to go from C to C instead of D to D

As a bonus to this i would want to see a violin and/or cello instrument added. Say they’re from Caudecus’s manor or something.

Lioka offers a song of hope before the battle with Tequatl.

https://youtu.be/lXhFtlo64LE

Enjoy and may your dragon slaying be successful!

Loosmaster.8263:

Wryscher.1432:

Major wvw over haul
-golems are now free to build
-golems now move 100% faster
-golems now do 100% more damage
-golems can now use gliders.

Done and done

Don’t forget “Enter Golem, get buffs, leave Golem” PVD…

Don’t forget the change where you get 25 or more golems together in one spot and they merge into a voltron like mega-golem 100 meters tall. It looks like a cross of the Megazord from Power Rangers and Godzilla. It has a gigantic Twilight sword that can obliterate the walls of stonemist like the bomb bird in angry birds. It has a point defense asuran megalaser that blasts any enemy within 1500 units of it and every time it punches a wall it blasts a loop of AC-DC’s Thunderstruck. When it moves it sounds like a monster truck revving. As it nears a location enemies in that location hear the distant roar of the motors and Thunderstruck along with footsteps like the t-rex from Jurassic Park.

To top it all off it has an elite skill on a 20 minute cooldown that the commander driving it activates. A count down starts. The tail on it starts pulsating with electricity. The mouth opens. At 3 it says “Commence Primary Ignition”. It then blasts an enormous blue fireball with a blast radius the size of the green keep in EBG, destroying all walls, players, siege, fish in the moat around the castle. Activating this move disintegrates the mega-golem causing players to fall from the sky. Only the ones in the feet survive the impact to claim whatever objective just got nuked to kitten.

The commander may select from a set of theme songs
-AC DC Thunderstruck
- Blue Ooyster Cult’s Godzilla
- 80s version of the theme from My Little Pony
- Yakkity saks

Don’t they also teach in gaming 101 to “make the game you want to play”. In that respect the ANET devs wanted to fly around in all of guildwars and not just the jungle so they made the game they wanted to play.

They wanted to keep the challenge of certain areas though (jumping puzzles, fractals, etc). Gliding/flight would break that challenge so it’s disabled in those areas. Makes perfect sense to me.

All the times i’ve announced these things i’ve never posted videos to go with. Here’s one where i covered Moody Blues’ Tuesday Afternoon.
https://youtu.be/n8cIqMDLcSs

Last night I recorded a cover of Nights in White Satin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeANDsSct1I

For this recording I had one band member sit out and “hold the camera” while the others played. This was so i could see what other players see and hear. My assumption about music was true. What you hear on your end when you play an instrument is not piped through the server but routed directly out. You could think you’re playing fine while the server lag garbles your song.

That said the server does do a faithful reproduction of what you play. I recorded more from last night and I’ll post it later.

I know this song. Sang it last night…
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/creations/Live-music-with-midi/first#post5917159

I had to do it myself but i do wish there was official support for midi.

I’ve strayed to other games but I always find myself coming back to Guildwars 2. Before GW2 it was the first Guildwars game I would find myself coming back to.

I particularly love how easy it was to get into playing music in the game too. I feel the pull of the desire to drive in wvw again. I’ve never had the experience in any other game that I get in Guildwars. Kudos for a good game.

This might seem oddly starstruck but…

Gaile quoted one of my posts!

save em for next year

Most nights im on I play live music with a band I put together from multiple accounts. I recently did a question to see where music in GW2 is going and had a request to re-link my midi keyboard project for GW2:

https://github.com/michaelhester07/gw2musician/releases

v1.2 was the last update I did for it. I’ve been using this app to make my band work. I control 4 characters through it with a Midi keyboard, currently a Roland FA-08 (it sounds way better to me than what you hear in the game).

I play mostly covers of 70s to late 80s music and some original pieces. The play list usually includes:
Pink Floyd’s another brick in the wall part 2, Mother, and Hey You
Journey’s Open Arms, Lights, Wheel in the sky, separate ways (working on Dont stop Believin)
Bunch of Andrew Lloyd weber hits
Working now on some Moody Blues stuff: Nights in White Satin, Tuesday Afternoon (which looks promising for GW2 instruments currently)

I used to stream the shows but the stream never got any hits. Anyway I’ll be doing a show tonight starting at about 9pm EST near the dwayna statue in divinity’s reach. Look for Little Red Lioka there. Other show times will usually include the weekends 10pm EST till late generally in the same place. I may be joining the Musician’s Guild of Tyria during some performances. See you there!

there’s a link buried in the community creations section. “gw2 midi” search will dig it up. I don’t know when i last updated it but its stable and open source so you can see how i did it.

I actually wrote my own program to do exactly that. It’s not too different from a macro program and for music ANET actually allows macros. I would like to see that as a core feature though. I’m just looking to see if they have any real plans for music in the future.

I love playing music in Guildwars. It’s easy to access for any character and gather a band together. The music system hasn’t changed since last year though. Now that the expansion is hitting its stride i’d like to think that ANET has time to work on it a bit.

ANET seems to be opening up a bit too. In that respect I thought i would field this question. Is there anything they can share about the future of musical instruments and player music in Guildwars?
- Is there a plan to provide the semitones (sharps and flats)?
- will the instruments all be brought into the same key?
- Any plans for new instruments?

Would be cool to know if anything like that is on the radar. Till then i’ll be performing in divinity’s reach as usual.

So asura girls get Katara loopies. Could be fun.

For me I keep requesting these things because music is the one thing in GW2 I truly like. I liked it enough to write a multibox app to perform with 4 accounts at the same time (1 key 1 press still, just better handling of octaves). Even with the system’s drawbacks (which my requests address) I think its one of the best things going for the game.

The biggest drawback I think for the system is the lack of keys other than C and A Minor. True you have E Major on the Flute though but there aren’t enough instruments in the same key for that to be worth while and you can’t combine the flute with the other instruments.

A lot of music I love IRL is in F and G keys. These require the largest transpose on my keyboard and the songs just don’t sound right. E minor is popular for classic rock. D Minor is popular for Movie songs. The Star Wars theme is in G. Some classic rock I try to play writes the song in one key but accidentals it into another (Rush and U2 do this).

A lot of broadway music uses key changes to denote a change in the character’s attitude during the piece. A character starts singing a song in one state of thought, then the key changes after 2 verses and you feel the character’s ideas changing. A final key change brings a new light to the character’s thought at the end of the song, like a change of heart. There are key changes in rock and pop songs too that can’t be done in GW2. I’m really fond of B Minor and Bb keys.

I tried music in lord of the rings. It was okay. The music system there is complete in the sense of keys and instruments. There was not easy access to bass instruments though. Only C3 through C6 were available on instruments. The flute and clarinet did seem to be an octave apart though so there was a chance different instruments filled the gaps. The game itself was fairly dead and I think the macro loading thing gets in the way of true live music. I come back to Guild Wars 2 with the ease of finding an audience for my performances. I might not be very good at performing yet but that will take time.

I understand how busy Arena Net is with patches and new features so I keep the thing I really want to a bare minimum while providing them an incentive to do it. Making the magnaminious bell available “off season” on the gem store would give them a modest boost in gem sales for minimal effort (probably a few lines of XML). To me it’s not that they “can’t do it right” but that they’re busy. A small change should be easier to fit in the schedule than a big one.

Cool. I’m going to be paying that guy a visit and making him filthy rich (at least as far as 4 bells are concerned)

It’s time for my semi quarterly music request
Initial requests:

Can you guys at Anet make the magnaminious bell available on the gem store? I’d like to have that on more than one of my accounts and don’t have general access to it. I remember it being like a rare reward from one of the wintersday events.

Barring that can you update the unbreakable choir bell to allow it to do chords?

The above i’d really like to see. There are other general music requests I’ve made before and I’ll do em again.

Easier requests
- Put the flute and trumpet into key of C so they can play with the other instruments (they’re in E right now). Flute would make an excellent substitute for a vocal track.
- Fix the range of the Unbreakable choir bell so that it goes from C3 to C4 (in the default octave) rather than D3 to D4. Do this for all of the octaves so that the numbers align properly.
- Remove the internal cooldown on drum skills to allow more complex beats (the spam filter is fine)
- Reduce the volume of the bass by about 60%, maybe reduce the distortion a bit to bring it in line with the other instruments which are mostly classical instruments.
- Remove the internal cooldown between notes on the Bass (there’s a short cooldown but its noticable when doing bass chords)
- (new request) Raise the spam filter cap on the harp and Mag-bell to allow for solos with fast parts. I can’t do the solo for “Freebird” without it cutting the notes off at times. I want to be able to do at least 2 bars worth of 16th notes at 120bpm.

Harder requests
- Add an upright bass with a clean bass tone. This one doesn’t have to be done if the current Bass sound is changed.
- Change the lute sound to match closer to a modern acoustic guitar (you did a modern guitar for the frog guy in HoT btw)
- Use F1 through F5 to provide semitones. This especially now that F5 is a skill key. Key map would go like this: F1 = C#, F2=D#, F3 = F#, F4 = G#, F5 = A#.
- Make an Asuran synthesizer instrument (looks like the one from Revenge of the Nerds) on the gem store (I’d buy it in a heartbeat). Use a square or sawtooth synth sound for it.
- Add ringing notes to harp, bass, guitar: Holding the note key down will let the note ring until the key is released. Notes should have a realistic maximum ringing time though.

Thanks for reading this. Lastly are there any plans for updates to music instruments in Guildwars?

XP boost grinding.

Pop an XP and killstreak booster and kill creatures in locations not frequented by players (away from common quests). Each mob ends up being worth near 2400xp. 30 seconds worth of killing gets you near the xp output of an event. A lot of Verdant Brink and Auric Basin paths are not frequented so you’ll get a steady chain of mobs to kill.

Each mob in GW2, even players in WvW, gets a bonus to its XP value based on how old it is (how long it has been spawned on the map). I think the XP caps out after about 5-10 minutes. XP boosters will effect this bonus. Needing the mobs to be spawned for a certain amount of time is why you want to visit areas that aren’t frequented (away from event areas).

Best yet the XP for masteries is account bound so grab your character that does the most DPS to make the grinding go faster.

Boysenberry.1869:

And then the group decides to leave a child Asura all alone deep underground in a region surrounded by Chak and Mordrem. She is at most two feet tall, can barely walk, and has no golem to protect her. What can go wrong?

You come back later to find she tamed half the Chak as she comes riding up on one. “Scruffy was fine but this thing has Claws! How awesome is that!”

Viking funeral… napalm the whole jungle. It’s what Traherne would have wanted.

I’m here to tell you i can read your mind.
“no you can’t.”
I see what you’re thinking of right now.
“ok what is it”
Shinies.
“MINDREADER”
and my work is done here.

sorta like that.

Unless you’re actively crafting be sure to regularly clean out your materials storage. You can take the mats out and sell them on the trade post directly from your inventory.

At this particular point I’d save the mats till after HOT drops. The prices will vary.

I think the bulk of the content is already downloaded onto your pc to save time in the final download.

Commander UI (though it’s delayed)

OO that stuff could also be sold as guild hall decorations.

I’d want to watch my dress get muddy considering the bogs and jungles I drag it through. My little asura would end up smelling like a mix between undead brimstone and maguuma jungle with just a hint of yak fart. Need to wash that nasty dress.

As far as a chair… don’t need it. It’s harder to climb up into one than to sit on the ground.

I had a dev catch the end of me botching Guns and Roses’ “Don’t Cry” and all of Pink Floyd’s "Another brick in the wall part 2)! I wonder how it sounded for him.

Anyway a while back I posted about a Midi Keyboard interface I wrote to play music in GW2. I took it further towards the multibox side and bought 3 other accounts to play with.

The result is the Pelenoria Sisters, a cover band that does some original jams. I play most nights at divinity’s reach near the dwayna statue. I occasionally run the twitch channel where you can hear some of the songs:.
http://www.twitch.tv/xliokaqiaox/profile/highlights.

Some of those highlights may have the midi keyboard sound coming through.

I’m planning to do another performance tonight. My playlist typically includes:
Journey:
- Open Arms
- Lights (when the lights go down in the city)
Disney:
- Can you feel the love tonight
- Part of your world
Andrew Lloyd weber
- Think of me, All i ask of you, Music of the night from Phantom of the Opera
- Memory from cats
Pink Floyd
- Mother (natural key, not transposed)
- Hey You
- Another brick in the wall part 2

I know Lynard Skynard’s Freebird and can relatively fake the solo sometimes. This one is done in natural key as well (avoiding that F# as much as possible)

Some nights include:
- Select sight reading from a fairly large set of sheet music
- Rush: Closer to the Heart
- Bob Sieger: Turn the Page
- Garnet’s Lullaby from FF9

Original stuff:
Doodle in Am: I play an 8 bar chord sequence of A minor and G with F, G, A at the end of the bar. Bridge typically includes E minor. I jam with the melody half during this thing.

March to battle: Transposed out of E minor key (wish i could play that key ANET its so cool of a key. That and G minor is perfect for spooky Halloween stuff.) it will sound similar to the doodle in Am until I throw in the 16th note chord sweeps (think the server can’t handle it sometimes).

Band members:
Lioka Pelenoria: Lead, “vocals”, High range harp. Sometimes does mid/high range bell.
Zuei Pelenoria: Chords, Low harp.
Evalee Pelenoria: Chords, mid harp. Part of the melody most of the time.
Vespa Pelenoria: Bass

Why multiboxing:
I did multiboxing to get around a piece of lag that occurs when switching octaves. The full range of notes in GW2 including the bass is also accessible with at least 2 characters playing. The Bass goes from C1 through B2. The harp goes from C3 through C6. The octave switch thing doesn’t really matter for the bass as it usually plays in the C2-C3 range. The harp octave switching can be lethal to a piece when lag spikes hard. The octave switch lag seems to be that the client tells the server what octave it will be playing in and the server has to respond back before it can switch octave again. If you switch faster than this then the second switch is not registered. For my midi interface this means it de-synchronizes with the GW2 client and notes sound an octave off. I can impose a lag to compensate for this but that prevents fast pieces and chord inversions which cross octaves. Am and G chords are particulary susceptible to this lag.

By splitting the octaves among multiple characters I avoid this switching lag and am able to play these chords without issues. I can also do arpeggios between low and high harp without breaking octave sync.

I personally would love if a midi interface were part of the actual game client but I’ve made do with what’s possible. I’ll be on 8pm EDT till late tonight where i mentioned. Hope to have you listening!

edit: Octave switching

What do you call a sylvari on an arrow cart?
- A salad shooter.

Heard on the radio at Rata Sum that an inquest mesmer broke out of the brig. They said there was a small medium at large.

Did they open a home depot in The Grove?

We kind of do have this mission in the game. It’s the Quaggan rescue guild mission. Except here dumber than a bowl of tartar sauce doesn’t quite cut it. The quaggan I’m escorting to safety takes the long way around and attacks them like he’s sending a message to the krait. All the while im thinking: Just escape dude. Any way out of there, i’ll escort you back to your home (that’s literally 100 yards from the Krait base).

The servers are a room full of specially trained monkeys with abacuses and switches on the walls to toggle when they finish calculating. That the game runs this smoothly on such hardware is a miracle.

Serious answer:
Client side: Most likely C++, like said before tools written in C# or python (I’d go with C# this day and age). I’d expect a custom game engine based off the GW1 engine. Client is DirectX9, that should give you a lot of clues for that.

Server side: Solidly C++ on Linux. You don’t really do any other language on Linux with exception of maybe python. And you don’t do python if you want any serious performance out of the application.

Data storage: Most likely proprietary storage mechanism rather than a database engine like MySQL.

If I remember correctly thunderhead keep was technically an escort mission. At the end you had to protect king “squishy dwarf” as he did some ritual. That the enemies came from both sides and in large numbers meant you had to catch then with your tank running around. This was near impossible with henches as you couldn’t really control them so you had to get a player group who knew what they were doing.

I’m all for levels like this in GW2 as there are no henches but please oh please limit the number of escort missions you guys do. All the strategy in the world is for naught when you have an AI character to protect who’s dumber than a bag of skritt shinies.

I’ve been asking for this roughly once every 2 months here and I second it too.

I’m sick and tired of butchering the opening to Freebird because i can’t have that F# in it. Forget any song that key changes (Music of the Night from Phantom of the Opera) or plays in a nearby key (Rush’s Closer to the Heart, U2’s Beautiful Day).

A good key change can change the entire feel of the song even if the melody and chord progression are the same otherwise. Lord of the Rings “In Dreams” changes key after the bridge from C to D and it gives the end of the song a whole new meaning.

My suggestion is the same as yours too.
Map the semitones to the F keys: (note that the sharp for one note is the flat of the note above it)
C# = F1
D# = F2
F# = F3
G# = F4
A# = F5

The following changes should be included too (if possible. I’d be willing to settle for semitones even if nothing else is done):
-Magnaminious Bell: Add a low octave.
-Flute, Trumpet: move these into Key of C (they’re in E right now)
-Flute: Give it a low octave
-Unbreakable Choir bell, (breakable) choir bell: Fix the notes to start on C instead of D, give it the ability to do chords.
-Bass: Improve its ability to do Chords. It has a note play lag right now. Also tone down the distortion a bit, it doesn’t quite fit in well with the other sounds.
-xLute: Name the chords in chord mode so we know what they are (I’m pretty sure they’re C, G, F, Am, G7 but I can’t tell), Change the sound to more like a modern acoustic guitar.

The acoustic guitar sound is my preference. I think the lute sound is a little muted and not very pretty. A good acoustic guitar sound would make the lute more popular of an instrument.

PS: xLute is the Lute. The forum profanity filter is a bit too powerful, crossing between lines of text even.

I can see druid rangers becoming wvw scouts. Staff 3 combined with the 33% swiftness trait (basically true permaswiftness, not the 25% stuff).

Anyway I disagree with keeping beta characters out of wvw as it gives valuable insight into the class balance needed before release in the wvw format. 1v2 Rev and Scrapper.. good job. Seems anet needs to buff the classes slightly.

Better to have them be overpowered or underpowered now than when things go live.

Adding the name could be augmented also with a commander hat on siege build sites for siege that was dropped by a commander. It would be really easy to identify which siege to build first. Hat can be on or off, depending on style or even toggleable, after the siege is built. That hat could also match the color of the commander’s tag so you know which one dropped it.

The current system is simple. It’s not effective though. Currently:
- You have to guess at how much supply you have. Do you have enough for rams at stonemist? The extra ram can be the difference between a capture and a wipe.
- You don’t know your zerg size or composition. Now you can know it. This will help you determine if you can win a fight or not.
- You don’t currently know how your zerg is holding up in a fight, instead you end up wondering why everyone’s dead.
- You can’t setup parties for pugs so they miss out boons.
- You can’t issue retreat orders because noone pays attention to the chat screen while fighting.

We’re getting a far more effective system for managing your zerg/squad and sacrificing a bit of the pure simplicity for it. This system will let a commander focus on map strategy and fighting rather than unknowns of supply and zerg capability. Now the commander can know that he can take a tower or two. He can know whether his zerg can fight an enemy zerg. The fights, plays and movements become more calculated than before.

I’m feeling like it will mirror what healbot used to look like in world of warcraft. It will not be so horrible once we get to use it. For raids even it will be essential to clearing some of the content.

If you’ve never tried to calculate moves while commanding and just collected bodies and ran with it i guess you can ignore the UI. Otherwise it will be an valuable tool for your conquests.

This UI takes WvW 1 step closer to the strategy game it actually is for commanders. I actually do agree that if you can’t manage the commander UI you shouldn’t command. This is because you throw away a wealth of strategies that come with it. With the UI you get to
- Setup group comps the way you want them quickly. No more fussing around for 15 minutes at the start of your raid to get your players in the groups they need to be in.
- Designate groups to tasks (Got 5 rangers? stick em on a sniper team or a scout team)
- Instantly see the supply you’re carrying instead of having to guess.
- Use squad order markers
- Get up to the minute status of your squad. This one is huge. It lets you know how much pressure your squad is taking so you know when to call for a heal burst and know when you can push and pull back.

If only the game had in-game voice comms connected to squads (or in general) it would be heaven for commanders.

That UI doesn’t seem to difficult to figure out either. We’ll see this weekend (as I dust off my commander tags) how hard it is to use.