Guild Wars 2

Hahah that’s a pretty good analogy. “And in the end, the house caught fire and the car exploded. Some people said it was an act of God, but you knew better: It was all the Client’s fault.”

One reason might be that the data type being stored doesn’t easily exceed the current limit, or that some place else in their database → server → player client communication pipeline, there is an assumption about the limited material storage size that is not easily changed.

Relic – place buy orders for the T6 mats with a portion of the gold you’ve made after each time you’ve played. You will have them in no time at all! Grats on your ascended, I still don’t have a single piece of that, but it may change with the new wvw rewards. I agree with your sentiment of having fun; GW2 is the only game I come back to again and again, because it’s never pushy about hpw I spend my time, and there’s always something fun to do.

I’ve been thinking about getting a second Legendary, but since I love swords, it’d either be another Bolt or (hopefully) a new sword currently unreleased. When I got Bolt, that was still during the days of old school mat farming, and I really loved the map completion aspect. Farming gold was frustrating sometimes, but I did get very good at dungeon running! I think I might start collecting mats for the obvious gifts, and then look at where I am after that.

C’mon ANet, put out another sword!

I imagine trolls are among the overwhelming minority of boombox owners. I play mine at the beginning of boss fights, or in wvw zergs. I also think they sound a wee bit too quiet, and could do with a nice increase in volume.

Oor used to be so epic around launch. When I got there on my Warrior I had to actually learn to play my class. I soloed most of the HPs back in the day. That took a lot of planning and plenty of deaths. Then it got nerfed. At least HoT brought some of that old difficulty back, I loved having to experiment with new builds and learning enemy weaknesses.

You’re right, SoD and Oor should have a quality pass done on them, and the difficulty restored to pre-nerf levels.

They do get an awful lot of flack and are generally, very patient. GW2 and Elite: Dangerous are the only games I play at the moment, and both are played at least in part because it is plainly obvious that the developers love their games.

Eh? They said it was an April Fools joke, not something done on the side intended to be separate from the game that somehow made it in.

Overloading functionality like the jump/land/slow mechanic is pretty common, and creating a “category” would have required either premptive knowledge that a mod like SAB would exist (evil, evil over design) or, probably, a massive undertaking affecting their core engine to introduce now… And only a feature used by SAB.

I think the solution they came up with to update all of the places where SAB hooks into and overrides GW2 is a perfectly good one; sometimes you must make the best of what you have.

Incidentally, at my shop people are adding a new game to an engine, and it has been decided to totally redo the engine because Reasons. Naturally, all of the back end stuff this engine hooks into remains the same. Moving forward, we will be supporting two engines instead of one, just because someone’s ego trip required it. That’s your “category” solution right there, put into effect. God. kittening. kitten it.

Good luck, zone 2 sure was a blast.

This was its last year, sorry OP.

Got my trib world 2 infusion to go with world 1, plus both hardcore boom boxes and my red sword n board. I learnt to have everything done before patch day ever since the karka event chest debacle. There’s always next year OP

If you were a client…? Well, you know what they say about clients :P

Oh yeah it would be totally simple. No problem at all moving all that authorization stuff client side, won’t be any problems with duping or exploits. Let’s just make this game totally single player, why even bother with chat at all? Clearly the OP is among a growing majority of players who don’t want contact with others, even in a game that was billed as an MMO which they knowingly signed up to. Afterall, it’s easier to force one’s ideas unto others to make oneself comfortable than to change themselves.

The OP is speaking in four dimensional cube space. All other teachings are a lie. You must understand four day time space and the 16 time points that describe the time cube. Everything else IT JUSR DOESN’T MATTER!

May I interest the OP in the teachings of the time cube?

Eh I almost never fail my dodge jumps they really are only useful in SAB though, where the extra couple of steps it takes you is crucial for certain jumps.

Right after I finished my final run of w2z3 trib. I had a few minutes to admire my admission to the red and blue cube club before poof!

Maybe you shouldn’t spend four years trying to get some pixels? :p

AliamRationem.5172:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Congrats! I’m 8/16 runs through zone 3 and it’s a lot easier than zone 2. Everything about that zone is simply better – pacing, variety, colour scheme, monster placement and behaviour… The only downer is the screwed up ice physics but that hasn’t killed me often. However the rams can go burn in hell, them and their walk on / walk off pressure plates. My current best time is just under 21 minutes.

I’m just a few runs in, but holy cow! 21 minutes! I must be missing a shortcut somewhere. I mean I know I have room for improvement, but I didn’t get caught up for very long on any particular part and it took me 48 minutes last night! Zone 2 took about the same. Am I missing something? Or do you just never fail at anything in there at this point? LoL

I almost always fluff up the start, especially at the ledge where you have to jump and turn. I feel like low latency has a lot to do with success; sometimes I go for ten minutes on one ledge repeating what seems like the same motions until miraculously, I make the jump. The poles in z2 were the worst for this: I dropped 50 lives one run, and only one run, on them. It was weird! Z3 has the same tendency for this, and last night I could not make that first jump for love nor money. I also have, on video, random moments where my character slows right before a jump for no reason – no aggro, no bumps to get snagged on, nothing.

I think that perhaps my running these zones at a moderate pace (speed runners have sub 15 minute videos up for z3) is as much down to being proficient at jump puzzles as it does with plain, dumb luck/server/latency mechanics.

I do have a few tips that might help though, so here they are. I imagine most people are aware of them but just in case:

1. Ensure you have five hearts!

1. Carrying the balloon passed the trib cloud spike section means you can’t premptively shoot the barrels. However the balloon is a necessity because the vertical jump puzzle has a tendency to kill you. Therefore, to consistently survive the barrels, run up to them and execute a dodge roll at the last moment. Your invulerability frames usually keep you alive.

1. Ice movement bugs out when you are touching a non icey surface like a wall, in these cases, jumping while moving slowly can help.

1. In the spike room, you can jump onto the first two no clouds from the ledge to the right. Also, the doors are on a timer that alternates between a short and long pause. After reaching the midway point on the left by the second no cloud, wait. When you see the second door on the left, and last door on the right open, it’s time to execute the final part of the room.

1. The climb before the yeti can be executed quickly by moving straight up the hill and spacing your jumps as far apart as possible. You will hit a sweet spot where you lose very little momentum per jump. You can also use the bugged out physics to push up the walls, which keeps you moving fast.

1. The yeti can be killed in one go by dodging its first two attacks, circle strafing the third (if it comes) and cancelling any further knock down with stow. You will need plenty of hp and a bit of luck.

1. The wizard is a jerk. Don’t feel bad for killing him.

Twice I forgot to look if they were coming and I lost my last heart. Lol. The bouncing ram puzzle is most annoying though, jeebus. It’s so tempting to rage and start hitting the buttons at random, then you get hit by a ram and lose yet another precious heart. Even so, this is probably my favourite zone. There is a huge variety of challenges and very few insta spike traps.

Congrats! I’m 8/16 runs through zone 3 and it’s a lot easier than zone 2. Everything about that zone is simply better – pacing, variety, colour scheme, monster placement and behaviour… The only downer is the screwed up ice physics but that hasn’t killed me often. However the rams can go burn in hell, them and their walk on / walk off pressure plates. My current best time is just under 21 minutes.

There was a slightly more open system for allocating points in the early days, which was reworked into the current system. I imagine a lot of thought was put into the openess of what we have right now. If you give players too much choice you risk giving yourself exponentially more work to do to create a balanced system. Or, you end up creating the illusion of choice, where a myriad of possibilities are collapsed into just a couple of overpowering configurations, thereby rendering most of your work moot.

It’s a fine balancing act, but hopefully with the new expac will come new elite specs, which will open up the game to new builds without rendering previous options inadequate.

At the risk of getting infracted, I’m going to speak my mind but attempt to do so politely.

First, I’m certain that at some point if it hasn’t been already, the sort of malady the OP is experiencing may actually receive a name, and all of the special treatment that confers in today’s society.

kitten it! I was doing so well.

But wait, don’t infract me just yet! OP: there is likely a considerable body of analysis surrounding the idea that those who do better than us, do so purely, or mostly, by luck.

This is a fallacy.

In a raid of one hundred players you are likely to have a couple of players who receive rare loot, and they are going to be elated and link this in chat. Why? Because for as many players who “lucked out”, there will be players like me who ran Teq for months once a day, and finally got his hoard to drop.

I’m also one of those jerks who links his Bolt whenever he gets the chance. Why? Because I spent one and a half years farming for it. I " lucked out" with a precursor feom the karka queen boss event chest, which I flipped for Zap years ago. However in the grand scheme of things, Zap was a small portion of my overall journey that took me through all walks of the game.

Most of the players whom you seem to have inferred to have bought their legendaries did not buy them. They simply played the game.

Don’t be envious, or jealous of players linking their drops. All that will do is sour your mood. You want Nevermore? Play the game, you will most assuredly get it eventually, and it will be a day to remember!

tl;dr: when someone gets good loot, congratulate them. The chances are they have been looking forward to it, as you have, for some time.

It wouldn’t be trib if the save points didn’t try to kill you.

Thief has a great playstyle, I had lots of fun getting mine to 80, but I don’t know what the Daredevil’s like. My main used to be a warrior, and that had a lot of different styles available owing to the fact that the warrior has a huge selection of weapons to choose from. The Revenant/Herald is my favourite at the moment for 80, but it was also the absolute worst to level. I quickly became frustrated with the playstyle and boosted her to max level, but I still had to collect enough hero points to unlock Herald. Luckily Verdant Brink vomits points on you once you know where to look, and I had tokens from wvw to convert. Had it not been for that, I wouldn’t have bothered.

Since you have all classes at 10, it seems to me that you should keep playing them as you do now, and just wait for a favourite to emerge. There’s no “rush to 80”, the game doesn’t magically get better at max level. You are more effective in wvw sure, and fractals and raids are unlocked. Still, I’d just enjoy the world and go with the flow.

I’d like the fish replaced by a drowning villager from super adventure box. Occasionally (every second) it would play that horrid “miaaaaaaaoow!” sound followed by a sort of distressed 8 bit gurgling.

I’m on zone 3 now, it’s longer but easier, and brings a more varied and interesting series of challenges. I like that the areas are connected largely by jump puzzles instead of jumping rocks and spike trap runs. With that said, my first, two hour run, ended in failure when I lost my last life on the final stage of the wizard and moto glitched me outside of talking range in the continue room. You had one job moto. One god kitten ed job.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Playing MMO’s (and other video games) is wasting time, unless you’re one of those playing an ESport game and are making money doing so. I would not be concerned about playing this game being a waste of time — it probably already is.

The only point to a video game for most is to have fun. If you’re concerned about something other than fun, I’d say you’d be better off giving up video games completely. If you like GW2 as you claim, you’re probably having fun. If so, I’d say keep playing until that changes.

I’m not concerned about the game dying. Not at all. I expect GW2 to last for years more. I’ve seen games with much lower populations hang on for a half a decade and they’re still hanging on.

Truer words are rarely spoken in gaming. People forget, because games are designed to make them forget, that they have a choice: Games are entertainment, they are not crucial, they are not some sort of personal identity without which one is less of a person. One does not have to play a game if it proves frustrating.

If you are slaving away at a game, because you have been told it “gets good at max level”, or because item X will make it all better, then you are making yourself miserable based on an empty promise.

Play games that are enjoyable right now, and if they aren’t, throw them in the bin and do something worth your time.

Ayrilana.1396:

nosleepdemon.1368:

I’m finally done with w2. 18 minutes was my fastest time and I never made it passed the trib cloud needle arena without dying. I think I will upload a video of my swearing. What an ordeal that was. Starting on the final zone tonight!

It’s possible if you know the order and can fake out the cloud to do its AoE attack out of the way.

I found its aggro to be very random, sometimes it would walk away after i moved behind a pillar, other times not. I saw a speed run where the cloud didnt immediately aggro upon bouncing up into the arena, I never managed to replicate that.

I’m finally done with w2. 18 minutes was my fastest time and I never made it passed the trib cloud needle arena without dying. I think I will upload a video of my swearing. What an ordeal that was. Starting on the final zone tonight!

I got orange last year, and blue this year. I’ve been targetting daily quests this year, plus the world 2 weapon skin achievement. I think I have opened maybe 5 boxes this year. I feel that I got very, very lucky!

Do you need to learn the songs first? Dumb question, but I’m pretty sure that’s a requirement, and sometimes the obvious questions get overlooked!

I’ve not played TSW, so I can’t really comment about it.

The technical limitation for moving on from d3d9 is the paradigm shift that happened with the rendering pipeline from d3d10 onward. Now, I’m mostly an OpenGL guy that happens to work loosely with d3d9, but depending on how GW2 is structured, it may be quite a task to upgrade to take advantage of modern graphics hardware.

Leading on from the possible cost of upgrading the graphics engine, one must consider the advantage of doing so: how can this feature be sold to players? For example, one way to justify the upgrade might be a simultaneous console port, opening the game up to a giant new market. However, since gw2 relies not on a subscription, but on micro transactions, remastering the game would need to open up some sort of new avenue for making money in this way.

Another option for remastering, as people have mentioned, is upgrading character models. I would not call this a remaster, but something like that might be more plausible, although perhaps only focussing on body features and not on armour.

Improved graphics, for example, would require moving away from Direct3D 9.

GW2 relies on microtransactions, so unless these start to dry up as a direct result of the game’s aging graphics, what purpose would remastering the game have?

WoW has had some moderate graphical updates, but still looks dated by any standard, I wouldn’t describe it as remastered.

They do sell it, it’s part of a pack.

In a word: No. My evidence: every other MMO that was never “remastered”.

For no fathomable reason, I began dying at the end of zone 2 again, on those posts. I lost 48 lives bouncing off the edges, or having the jump pads not activate when landing on them, or having dodge jump execute a dodge but no jump. Then, miraculously, everything worked once again… I was a little perturbed.

I think he is trolling, nobody would willingly contradict themselves like that. Obviously, trib mode requires twitch reflexes, and that example is actually a really good one. If you don’t jump at the right moment from the right point along the ledge, the rocks knock you off. It’s the very definition of twitch gaming.

World 2 zone 2 in particular has a lot of twitch reflex moments, for example doding rockets, swords, falling rocks, shurikens, the tribulation cloud, piranhas, ice, the mini boss, toads… All of these with the exception of the rockets are semi random, as they are based on monster behaviour. Perhaps you’ve not played that zone yet, but I can definitely see how someone who is bad at platforming would rage with having to contend with not only unpredictable movement, but also unpredictable AI.

Abelisk.4527:

And then, here I am, forcing myself to complete World 2 Trib 16 times.

Also here’s a tip: you don’t need infinite coins. Just convert your plentiful bauble bubbles into continue coins until you have 250, and you’re set.

250 coins? Just how hard are you planning on dying? :P

I do agree though, at 10 baubles a pop continue coins cost you 2 baubles per death, the infinite continue coin is an absolute waste of money.

Deihnyx.6318:

For some reason I don’t have many issues with w2z2, took me a while to learn, the first half is definitely the challenging part, but after that… it’s pretty much like normal mode.

For z3’s ice room I just follow the strategy of the dulfy guide. Works very well. From the second no cloud you can jump to the second part of the room, then slowly walk to no cloud 3, get hit, run to cloud 4, get hit, almost done.

I’ve more or less got it down now, but the encounter with the small assassin surrounded by spikes (after the mini boss) and the tribulation cloud / dart launcher / box puzzle always cost me a couple of lives. Also the first rocket has begun killing me every time for some reason. I’m 8/16 done now, still averaging 25 mins almost on the dot per run, looking forward to zone 3 har har.

Flumek.9043:

25min is great. Just find and do it at own pace

When i and others did the full marathons it was like 30-45min for the w2z2 and z3. You cant have perfect runs all time and consider mental breaks

The z3 usually takes 5min longer, but it was my personal favorite tho. Anyway i commend you on your courage to doing the marathon, i cheer you pass the test of manliness

Thanks I did look up some speedruns before hand to get an idea of what to do, my first run was an hour or so and 15 continue coins. Luckily the rewards make up for that. Im looking to get zone 2 done by next weekend so I can blast through zone 3 over Saturday. Fingers crossed!

There are some spectacular ice fails possible even in z2. I take a path that reaches the final checkpoint before hitting the gong, and it requires you to launch onto the gong from the checkpoint to continue. Except once I forgot, and ended up back on the ground. I had to skid around the edge of the cliffs on ice to climb out. kitten the ice physics was terrible! I dropped 50 lives on those thing poles right before that; I kept slipping off them, or not having the bounce pads activate… All at random. Argh.

If you don’t already, always equip slingshot or bombs so that the stow skill becomes available. Stow will cancel knockdown effects upon activation. You need to wait for all the rocks to land, or you will cancel on knockdown only to be thrown immediately. Doesn’t help you once you are stuck in a stunlock, but it helps to prevent it. If you already do all this, then I can only offer my condolences.

World 2 Zone 2 is without a doubt, the most irritating, long winded and unpredictable zone to do on tribulation mode. Everything about it is simply evil, from the pixel perfect edge runs and non-stop badgering from mobs, to that awful series of pole jumps near the end.

It takes me <9 minutes to run any other zone (I haven’t done w2z3 yet mind), but w2z2 takes me 25 minutes a pop, and that’s running at full tilt. It’s just the mobs behaving so randomly and the dodgy physics when interacting with angular objects that cause random deaths.

W2z3 seems more technically challenging, but also more predictable. Please someone tell me it’s not as aggravating as zone 2.

I wouldn’t mind, but I need 11 more runs on z2 and a full 16 on z3 to get the full wizard weapon skin set…

kitten me why did I choose to do this?

You’d think that it would be easy enough to establish a party member’s contribution in a dungeon, and allow them to rejoin or receive rewards based upon that. If they’ve crossed zero checkpoints in SAB trib for instance, then no rewards are given. Instead people get boned like this.

Doesn’t GW2 still run D3D9 as its renderer? Not sure if that ever got updated but if it hasn’t, oh man I wouldn’t want to be on that boat. We had some talk at my office with updating a particular engine on an arcade cabinet to “4k” with “improved 3d graphics”… It runs on D3D8…

Oh my gosh, first Andromeda, now Guild Wars 2! It’s a conspiracy!

Rauderi.8706:

kamedin.4698:

You know if they didn’t allow dps meters they would use AP to exclude people and if they get rid of achievements they would want the API to look people up on that gw2 efficiency, or even something else. So pick your poison, because they will always find something else to use.

Also you have the choice of who to play with, as do these other people. They want to have everyone carry their own weight. If you don’t want to play with these elitist then make your own group or get into a guild group. Just because this is a MMO doesn’t mean you have to play with every single person that enters a group/map/party/guild, otherwise they wouldn’t have a block list so you can ignore people you don’t like.

In general, yeah, this is true.

But there’s a rather large section of the community that seems to think “pick-up group” and “high performance” are somehow a good intersection of traits to look for. Hate to break it to the pro players out there, but you’re not breaking speed records with a PUG just because you have a DPS meter. There’s a very entitled attitude that goes along with it, and it’s not healthy for the game.

For the 1% of the 1% who have static groups and push boundaries, sure, DPS meters and sharing that data makes for a great tool. For those who want to be better for themselves, cool beans and rock on and hone those rotations into shining diamonds.

For those who will cry and whine when a fight takes an extra minute (after spending an 15-60 minutes finally putting a dungeon/raid group together), stop inflicting that sourness on random strangers and get a thicker skin. A DPS meter around random strangers does nothing for you.

Speak for yourself. I ran a UBRS raid pug in wow for three weeks and the DPS metres were a pretty good indicator of if I was going to invite a player back to the group for the next run. We were a pug, sure, and the content was not exactly taxing, but speed was king and every player wanted a particular item. The rule was, you stated one item you wanted and if no one else had dibs you got invited. If your DPS sucked you were uninvited, as we didn’t have time to just be sitting around.

DPS metres are a great tool, you aren’t going to make someone who is already a jerk less of a jerk by banning them.

Eh you aren’t looking for DPS before 80 though. If you are, you’re doing it wrong. Some people say that the glasses skins help but, in general, levelling is perfectly possible even without those. Here’s how I levelled my Rev:

1. Make character (this is easily the most time consuming part, so set aside an hour or two).
2. Ignore/avoid/run through the tiresome intro. The lore gets in the way.
3. Proceed to your nearest bank.
4. Retrieve 1 level 20 scroll and 60 Tomes of Knowledge.
5. Put on reading glasses.
6. Start clicking.