Guild Wars 2

Bah. I was hoping I wouldn’t like it, but it’s beautiful.

My thief in PvE is a major Shortbow user for pretty much everything not a veteran or higher (which is quite a lot of stuff), so now I have to get ready for the precursor quest.

kitten . I was hoping I wouldn’t want it (and wouldn’t need to do the resulting journey!)

Mouse.3608:

kurfu.5623:

What would they even gain from doing that?

I thought I read somewhere that pet-only kills give nothing in return…

You initially will get some coin/trash drops back, but DR kicks you in a matter of minutes if you kill the exact same 5 mobs over and over again.

That’s not correct. Pet only kills don’t give anything. I’ve routinely had a pet agro something I didn’t walk by or get agro – it’ll kill it and run back, with no xp for me.

pet only kills don’t net you any loot or xp, so what’s the benefit to the player? I agree with others, they were probably AFK.

I brought this to the attention of GM Awesomeness, and he said he’d check to see if it was on the radar, but no confirmation as of yet.

Thanks, Gaile!

/15char

confirmed here too.

I’ve been getting credit for dailies that aren’t actually dailies today.

I just completed kryta vista viewer today, despite the fact that it is not on the rotation today. I did it in Kessex Hills, which is on the rotation today for event completer, but that’s not the achievement that updated.

Is this a new thing? It’s also possible this is happening because I am on an alt for the first time in these regions, perhaps?

Thanks.

Magic find changes which encounter table is used to roll rewards. It does not increase the chance of getting a particular item on that encounter table.

In other words, if there are two tables, one with one exotic per 1000, and one with two per 1000, magic find increase the chance that your loot roll will come from table two instead of one. This increases your overall chance of an exotic, but doesn’t actually change your roll on that table.

Champ bags aren’t included in MF because they already use a higher table than mob drops by default (in essence, they already have MF baked-in).

Those sounds are positional – if you rotate your camera position you can affect the amplitude of those sounds. I have that problem standing at the bank, and rotating my position can significantly reduce that sound.

Regardless, I eventually bought the terrace pass in part because I hated the design of that ship, including the sounds

GM Awesomeness.8619:

Tracker has been updated again today with some minor changes:

• Solved moved to top
• Added a “Need more information” status to let players know when we could use their help gathering details about an issue

Re: Jira or formatting changes: right now I’m focused on getting all the major issues in the tracker. I’m talking to our QA and Web Dev teams about changes we can make in the future to make the process more streamlined, but for now the current version (or something very much like it) is what we’re stuck with.

Thank you, SO MUCH, for your work on this. I cannot express enough how wonderful a tool this is to have visible to the playerbase.

Gaile,

If I recall, the reason this didn’t happen originally was concern about that amount of liquid currency re-entering the market, and the effect it might have.

Is this no longer a concern?

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

For BL skins, you can just double click a ticket (or a scrap); brings up the vendor without talking to an NPC.

Holy crap! I had no idea! Thank you!

I have both, but only use the airship when I want a BL skins merchant or Daily activity. I prefer the design of the terrace, as most of what I use is on the same floor in close proximity, and it’s a larger area so it tends to feel less crowded (even if it probably isn’t).

Also, the sound of the escaping air on the airship can be a little annoying depending on when you stand when using the bank and whatnot, though I suppose that’s subjective.

I tend to use the passes, also, to reduce WP fees, and for nearly three months out of the year, there are festivals taking place near the terrace that you can literally walk to.

I had the temporary terrace pass first, then the permanent airship pass. I still bought and now use the permanent terrace pass because it really does just feel better designed to me.

Zok.4956:

Kraggy.4169:

So you play games not because they’re fun but because they have great graphics.

Playing a game that has great graphics is part of the fun for a lot of people.

I’d argue that gw2 is, in fact, quite beautiful.

Switching to DX12 would kill the current Mac implementation, which may well be as large as group as the current DX12-capable folks

Other games do not have this limitation because they have a native Mac port, not a Cider/WINE implementation.

Jon Olson.8439:

shaden, what are you current in-game settings? I’m referring to things like character limit, and such. This sounds like an out of memory error, which is rather common with Cider due to it emulating 32-bit Windows. Also, how long do you play (and where) when these occur?

Jon, as a point of correlation for you, whenever I’m doing anything with people around, setting both the Character model limit and quality to “Lowest” tends to allow me to stay for the duration of the fight. I have nearly the same system as the OP:

16GB of RAM (Not that this matters thanks to 32bit)
3.4Ghz i7
GeForce GTX 680MX 2GB

I can turn up just about every other setting to max (other than FSAA which I have off because I run high enough res not to care).

I’ve noticed that events that decorate zones crash me pretty consistently though, I’m assuming because you’re piling the decorations onto existing terrain and massively increasing the texture count as a result.

The single greatest thing you could do for the mac community (aside from a native client or another emulation layer that’s 64-bit capable) would be to really work on memory fragmentation and garbage collection so that the 4GB limit and heap overflows don’t happen.

Thanks.

First, on behalf of the GW2 community, thank you so much for creating a tool for us!

Second, I note this will be a .net VS application – I suppose this means to web or contained version, leaving us Mac players out of the fun?

Thanks.

Hello!

(Somewhat) Newbie question: I know combining exotic weapons in the Mystic Forge gives chances at precursors, but what about Armour and Trinkets? Is the best bet to sell these (or salvage in hope of rare materials)?

Thanks!

Vikkela.7261:

People are really different, I’d think that as a nice gesture too. I also thought that when roaming and downing an opponent, but leaving him unstomped was a polite gesture until I read here some persons take it as an arrogant insult towards them. No wonders those thieves immediately sprang up and spammed all their available bursts when they got up again, which I again thought was most disrespectful of them (never leave a thief unstomped nowadays)

I remember the first time I ever entered WvW – I was there to get to the jumping puzzles and for world completion – and I was killed, repeatedly, by this same enemy that I kept, over and over, failing to see coming. I just stopped even trying to defend, instead letting him stomp me. After the third or fourth time, he downed me and left me there, which was a relief! So, I doubt everyone thinks of it as an insult.

Vikkela.7261:

But ontopic, scouting, sieging up, refreshing siege, defending/flipping camps, escorting dolyaks and roaming are incredibly important tasks that go so unrewarded, I’m really hoping the expansion would make them worthwhile to do.

Agreed – while I already consider it “worthwhile”, obviously, I’d love to get some sort of reward for sitting on my tower all day, especially when the only role I play is essentially announcing troop movements and babying the tower up to T3 – those are the days when I’m almost wishing for an assault, so I can both 1) have something to do, and 2) maybe get a bag or two and a couple completed objective defense events. I’m really interested to see the expansion and the changes coming.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Regarding tips: I’ve never been tipped (or even heard of the practice before now), It’d be nice if there was some sort of “team bank” where one could deposit gold for upgrades, or similar mechanism. Would allow the load to be spread more evenly, though I suppose you’d run the risk of people spending it on unnecessary upgrades to paper/easily flipped objectives the same way people steal supply from towers and keeps today.

Hello.

I play on Dragonbrand as Moleni. I’m not sure when I won’t feel like a “Newbie” anymore, but I certainly do still at this point.

After playing WvW for about 3 months (of which about half was with WvW as my primary play choice) I’ve just passed my 50th WvW Rank, so I thought I’d share some thoughts from a new player perspective.

First, some background. I was an exclusive PvE player (having just obtained world completion after about a year of casual playing), hating PvP mainly due to the perception on my part that PvE = “Build Wars” and a lot of 1v1/1v2/2v2 matchups that I wasn’t especially interested in. then I found WvW, and changed my mind.

I prefer to play a scout/floater. I’m usually in our borderlands either running around making sure upgrades are running, dolyak paths are safe, or towers are defended/siege refreshed, etc. I really enjoy that role, and will happily play it unless I’m not the sole person scouting a tower and someone either asks for everyone on tag to repel invaders or retake an objective/help defending a keep/tower, or when people ask for help backcapping a camp, etc.

Occasionally I’ll head to ebg or an opposing borderland if someone asks for help there, or for a change of scenery. I occasionally will go disrupt camps in opposing borderlands with my SO for fun as well.

I’m going to presume I’m not your average WvWer. Most are probably in a guild, on TeamSpeak (I unfortunately can’t be due to the environment I play in), and far richer than I am.

Things I’ve learned playing WvW:

- Help deploy siege in assaults, but don’t use it – there’s almost always someone with better mastery than I around
- Same for defence. Use siege if I’m trying to hold an objective waiting for the calvary to arrive, but then step back – again, someone else probably has better mastery than I do
- Being wall-fished sucks.
- Burning Oil is almost entirely useless thanks to the range on most AoE’s from players and the lack of protection up there
- a well-timed siege disabler can mean the difference between holding your gate or not until calvary arrives
- The North camp of the borderlands is the single most important objective to hold if you have any hope of upgrading the NE/NW towers, or the garrison with any speed
- WvW infusions are great. I wish I knew this before I wasted laurels on PvE ones. :/
- good commanders really make the difference.
- Off hours, you are nearly guaranteed to 1: lose your siege everywhere but garrison and maybe bay/hills due to expiry, 2: lose towers that don’t have siege or 3: aren’t actively staffed to hold until the reduced population can mount a defence and coalesce from around the map.
- one person can make all the difference in holding an objective
- WvW is really, really fun.

As a new player, I have had some concerns. here’s what I’ve come up with over my playtime:

1 – I get almost no loot or wxp for my choice of playstyle. I exhausted what little gold I was able to obtain via PvE and have no hope whatsoever of being able to afford a commander tag so I can go yellow and actually show people where I’m scouting
2 – #1 means I find myself often running with the zerg on tag just so I can afford to go back to playing the way I prefer.
3 – I’m lucky that I’ve found some great people to hang out with on my server, but the barrier to entry was really, really high. The attitude towards new players can be pretty vitriolic – I’m not surprised it’s hard to attract new players to WvW.
4 – The inability to either run supply yourself to an objective (as in, run supply by hand and drop it in a depot) or otherwise affect dolyak supply rates beyond increasing the amount per delivery makes for some frustrating experiences. I know part of the reason for this is to make it difficult to upgrade an objective to full, but even if players could run supply, you could still supply constrain by taking camps, no?
5 – overnight coverage is really disheartening sometimes. Spending all day working to fully upgrade and outfit objectives only to find they flipped overnight (or, lost all their siege) not because of a well-planned assault, but because a handful of opposition attacked your objective and no one was around to defend it (or, in the case of siege, no one refreshed it) is extremely unfortunate, and I’m sure made worse by the separation of NA/EU servers, preventing better coverage.

So, that’s about it. Just some thoughts from a new player, who is excited to be a part of WvW and of the community surrounding it.

So now over to you – how am I doing? Any suggestions or sage words of advice?

Thanks.

Svarty.8019:

• I note with a little disappointment that the other fireworks from this event can’t be used in WvW.

I am pleasantly amazed that WvW got some (albeit superficial) attention! Woohoo!

The skins look beautiful.

I’m going to bet the lack of these in WvW has to do with the idea of a whole zerg fireworking at once and lagging everything to hell or somesuch would be an issue.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Sariel V.7024:

Unlike crafting recipes, which are often bought as sheets and remain forever documented in your UI after you learn them, the combinations of the forge are intended to be a puzzle. They are a secret, and their revelation to the world at large remains at the discretion of the players that discover them. Or, in a single case, at the discretion of John Smith ;D

FWIW, I share this sentiment.

They might be intended to be a puzzle, but they certainly aren’t. They get documented on the wiki. The ones that don’t get documented allow a few people to control a niche in the market, which seems unfair to me.

So, I’d argue that it’s ok to hide undiscovered recipes from the API, but the greater good to the community is to expose known recipes to everyone.

No way. Nothing is stopping others from discovering these recipies, so it isn’t about fairness at all. If I farm and dump 50k of item X into the forge in various combinations and find a recipe you don’t have, NOTHING prevents you from doing the exact same thing.

Just as if I find a new way to combine my skills to be more effective in my class, I am not suddenly obligated to tell the world, because anyone else could do the exact same thing.

“Fair” == equal access to opportunity.

What stops someone from deserting when it’s clear they’re going to lose, so they don’t take the ladder hit, then?

The client is now nearly, if not over, two years old. I don’t know how large your mac user base is relative to your windows user base, but I will wager not a huge percentage regardless.

Nevertheless, it is a not-insignificant number of players, many of which have been using the client since it went live. I personally have been using it now for over a year. You even have specific update notes for the client now. (yay!) You also have at least one individual focused on customer service specifically for the mac client, at least some of the time.

I have used the client across three OS versions, 5 mac laptop specifications, a mac mini, and an iMac, all with levels of success expected of each environment.

It is the only client I have ever used to play GW2.

I doubt I am alone in my experience. Perhaps it is finally time to stop calling the client “Beta”?

Thanks.

This isn’t a “problem”. The game heats up both the CPU and the graphics chip (GPU), and those need to be cooled.

If you use bootcamp to install Windows, and then play the official GW2 client, you will still get the fans to “go crazy”. This is just how the laptop is forced to run when the components run hot.

Rising Dusk.2408:

Quint.3765:

Evan Lesh.3295:

http://i.imgur.com/fSV89.gif

pretty childish to post that. i would have atleast expected an update on what is going on and what are the delays for when it will be fixed and why it is bugged. Not a stupid image. It’s funny to see how Anet don’t really care about PvP. When there is a bug in PvE it takes less than 20 mins before you patch something and update everything. Ive had my screen bugged for more than 2 hours with the stupid map selection tab and i can’t do nothing because even if i close my client and re-open it the tab is still there. So please fix it…

These are the developers who WORK on the bugs posting. I’d much rather they post a GIF to confirm they read the thread than post an essay when they should be working the bug. They fixed it very rapidly, so I say: A+ Evan / Justin.

Here Here. That gif told me exactly what was going on.

Rozbuska.5263:

Is she responsible for creating all that living story story stuff? Its could be explanation why we must again and again fight all those plants and dealing with sylvari and all this girl style stuff:-)

Seriously?

Leah, I wish you the best of luck. Know that there’s a silent group of us who love your work and can see the incredible amount of time and effort you’ve put into it. Despite the fact that we are “gamers” we can see beyond the fact that your reproductive parts are on the inside instead of the outside. Don’t let Mysogony like this deter you.

Disney stories are timeless and only work because the core of the story appeals to adults as much as children. That requires skill and care in the crafting of a story, and it’s why a book like the Hobbit, or Harry Potter, or the Hunger Games, all written for children, can have such loyal adult followings.

Not that I personally believe the story in gw2 is at all young-adult in nature.

And those of you who think the story in gw2 is never dark should go read the memorial wall in LA again.

I see. Confusing presentation (and, obviously, story progression!) in game, but I understand the rationale.

Thank you for your quick, detailed response and details! I guess I’m off to the Cathedral of Silence.

I was just sent from the Personal story step: “Ships of the line”, to the step “Against the corruption”. Everything I’ve read says this is a much older story step and this is some sort of bug. Because of this I can’t proceed to “Victory or Death”, which should have enabled me to go to Arah.

So now the question is, what do I do? Will I mess things up further if I continue playing? We’re talking something like ten plus missions, and if I do make it to Ships of the Line again, then what? Will I simply reset all over again?

AFAICT My next step should have been to go to Arah and complete my PS.

John,

Firstly, thank you for your efforts to discuss this, and the economy as a whole. I’ve been a longtime lurker of your threads – this is my first post in them.

Secondly, way back in the now-lost-annals of the MMO world, an SOE developer published a blog post, titled “Random vs Fun”, which encapsulated my beliefs entirely. To summarize, most players believe they want a truly random RNG, but that a truly random RNG isn’t “fun”, because past failures are no indicator of future successes, while most players believe that “after X failures, I must be due for a success, right?”, even through truly random number systems indicate that each roll has an equal chance of any result.

That being said, the natural way to combat this, to me, is to increase the success probability after each failure (or after X number of initial failures). I will bet, though, that tracking the number of failed rolls for each player for every instance where the RNG could effect the economy (crafting, forge, loot, etc) would be unduly burdensome.

So I’m going to wager that “loading the dice” as a mechanism is probably too difficult. If I’m wrong, then wonderful.

So, what are the alternatives? I have one which might be interesting: Get “rid” of the RNG entirely.

Obviously, a game where everything was “do this X times to get your reward” is unfun. The random element provides both fun and opportunity for risk vs reward that would simply disappear if removed. But the question, to me, is: What is the probability of success there to provide, exactly?

My guess is, an aggregate consistency to the rate at which items of value enter the world, when taken as an overall sample.

If the “average” number of combines in the forge needed for a precursor is “X”, then what if we provided another mechanism to reach X, without simply saying “combine X times to get your reward”?

What if instead of combines returning precursors, they returned a random number of tokens, that, when aggregated globally, created enough tokens to create a precursor after X combines?

This is very, very similar to the system in place for the gift of luck, but tradable. All that’s really happened is that you’ve moved the value from the consumables put into the forge, which are tradable, to the tokens. And if you happen to be an outlier and you fail to get your tokens easily, you can then choose to purchase them instead.

If these tokens were the only way to get precursors by forge, then I would presume that two things would happen: 1) the rarity and rate of precursors as a whole would mostly be unchanged, and, 2) wealth redistribution would be more even. Instead of the lucky combiner getting an expensive precursor to use or resell, anyone, regardless of why they are using the forge, gets a token that represents a portion of the value of that precursor to accumulate, or sell.

Additionally, you’d have progress more incrementally, rather than the all-or-nothing method that exists today.

Thanks again for your time. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Scott McGough.6897:

KarateKid.5648:

If you kill her, I’m coming after your goldfish (assuming you have goldfish). So unless you want them to sleep with the, ermmm, mammals; she better stay safe.

Dr. Fishy! NOOOOOOOO!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPJr96Wc4xs

(8 seconds in)

I literally LOL’d.

Welcome! So glad to hear that you are supporting the Mac player base.

Please let us know if there’s anything we can do to help (round up issues, etc.) I’m sure many of us would be willing to assist!

ExTribble.7108:

What’s probably throwing you off is the animation of the health bar/bubble whatever you call it. The number will jump to the correct value, but it will have a quick filling animation. The ‘delay’ of this animation does not add to the cast time of heal skills.

Aha! this is what I’m seeing. So it’s just an animation thing, good to know.

Thanks for the insight!

Right, got that part – but once the heal “fires”, that is, once the activation time is complete, does the heal amount (as listed in in the “Heal:” skill fact) get applied instantly?

Thanks!

If we look at two different elemental skills, say Ether Renewal and Glyph of Elemental Harmony, Ether Renewal pulses 8 times over 4 seconds. Clearly, since you can be interrupted, this is a heal-over-time.

In the case of GoEH, ignoring the boons for your attunement, it lists one stat, “Healing”. Does this mean that I get this entire amount the second the cast is complete?

Visually, It appears that the healing isn’t instantaneous, it instead appears to “fill up”. I’m concerned that if I use other skills immediately following a heal, that I could interrupt this fill up".

Does anyone know if “healing” is instant (and atomic), or fills in, say, over a second or so?

Thanks!

Behellagh.1468:

I understand where the OP is coming from and what he’s suggesting.

Imagine a hot dog street vendor. You dislike the notion of paying $10 for a dog when you know the ingredients cost the guy less than a buck. You want to open your own food cart and sell hot dogs for $3 each. No reason to be greedy. Except you find out there is some regulation (enacted to prevent another hot dog vendor massacre due to price wars) that you can’t sell them for $3 each unless you are 100 yards away from the nearest hot dog vendor, if you’re closer you have to sell them at the same price.

There isn’t a way to intentionally manipulate the price lower on the TP by setting up a “$3 hot dog cart” as long as there are players willing to pay $10. The only way to do so is to flood the TP with enough supply first satisfy all the existing higher price bids above your target price. That means you have to be sitting on a hoard of items and only then you can start listing your sell orders at your lower price.

It’s the opposite of buying up the current supply to spike the price. In this case you are satisfying all the higher bids. Problem is there’s a reason the price was high to begin with and that has to do with lack of supply relative to demand.

This is not an analogous condition, your parallel is tilting.

If there was a line up of people already at the cart area willing to pay $8 for a hotdog, but the hotdog seller is only selling for $10, and they choose to wait, then there’s no benefit to a seller to come in and offer a $3 dog. They aren’t going to “drum up new business”, the business is already there.

There’s nothing stopping the buyer from lowering what they will accept to $3. They’ve chosen $8 (which is less than the hot dog sale price or else they’d have a hotdog now), because they’ve valued the hot dog at that price and are willing to pay it.

The idea of a clearance sale to get rid of items doesn’t make sense either, that’s a red herring. Lets say there was a mystical world where you had 100 items, all with $10 buy orders (each) on the TP. you would sell them equally quickly on the TP at the $10 price than at the $3 price, provided there were enough buy orders at that price.

That, to me, is the only argument I can see for setting lower prices. What if you have 100 items to sell, only 90 buy orders at your price, but you want to sell all 100 right now? Then you have to list multiple times. This becomes worse if, say, there’s only a handful of buyers at each price point – you end up having to put in a LOT of listings to sell your stack.

But in a trading post where you can’t see the name of a seller, there’s no benefit otherwise to selling below a buy order.

Scyrka.1356:

If you agree with anything I said, or have CONSTRUCTIVE feedback, post it below.

If you don’t agree, then don’t say anything. Nobody wants to hear how dumb you think these ideas are.

Feedback is only constructive if we agree with what you said?

It sounds to me that you are more interested in being heard and supported than in having an actual discussion. You might want to rethink that strategy.

Arikyali.5804:

Lord Kuru.3685:

• Starter zones are where you are supposed to learn the game.
• The game’s largely a zergfest.
• Thus, having a train in the starter zone is actually good: it teaches players how to properly zerg.

I think they’re trying to avoid that, haha.

…Actually, where else is a zerg needed, aside from WvW?

Nowhere. Don’t listen to the haters.

Firstly, Thank you for taking a renewed interest in the Mac client. I hope this is an indication that the player base on Mac has become large enough to warrant attention.

As many have suggested, either a native client, or, assisting the Cider team to support 64 bit or multiple processor cores would be my first priority, but that’s a tall order. Still, hopefully we warrant that attention now.

Otherwise, my other four requests are:

1) TP. Please.
2) Work to eliminate OOM issues within the confines of the Mac Client and Cider. This may mean artificially capping textures on the Mac client or other changes, but texture-related crashes, and the TP represent the two most common issues I have as a mac player.
3) Communicate updates in the beta forum letting us know your progress.
4) Please consider creating a Beta tester roundtable or other means for your Mac player base to assist you in testing or finding issues. I’m sure I’m not the only one who plays Guildwars who is also versed in OSX QA, or otherwise able to provide valuable feedback. We want to help you. Truly.

Thanks!

My girlfriend and I have three macs – a top-end iMac (Feb 2013), a brand new Haswell 13" MBA (July 2013), and a 2012 11" MBA. We use all three to play guild wars, from her network, and mine. My network is apple-based, hers is SMC based.

In both homes, on all three systems, we routinely and regularly are unable to use some aspect of the trading post. The issues break down into four categories, and some, or all, of these issues may exist at once (but not always):

1 – Gem store menu will load, but no content.
2 – “Buy gems” dialog is blank and does not load
3 – Trading post will not load
4 – Gem exchange will not load

I’ve yet to find a fix for these issues that is consistent, and it seems to happen most consistently on the iMac (which, ironically, is the most powerful of the systems). Deleting the application support folder doesn’t help, nor does any of the other forum posts I’ve read.

Basically, these issues may randomly pop up during a session, and only quitting the client and restarting (often more than once!) will restore normal function.

It’s unbelievably frustrating, and my girlfriend is prepared to quit, as she’s almost guaranteed each day to be unable to use the TP to sell her loot from the day, or to search for items. It’s gotten so bad that each day, I log in for her now, and log out/in repeatedly until the TP is working so she doesn’t have to deal with the stress of it all.

It’s really unfortunate, because we are both HUGE advocates of GW2, and we really, genuinely want to support the game and the paradigm shift in MMO’s that it represents. It’s pretty sad that often I can’t even give ANet money, because the gem store won’t load or won’t let me purchase gems!

So, I ask ANet: Can we please run a QA sprint on this? Can we work together, collectively, to troubleshoot this problem and collect data for you so that you can squash these bugs, and remove what is, essentially, the only barrier we run into in our gameplay? Can you please, please provide us some direction on how we can best help you to solve this issue for us?

Thank you so much.

Another i7 MBA owner here, 8GB RAM.

The game is incredibly playable, even in the current live content areas. I’m beyond amazed at this little system!