Guild Wars 2

I have a magic carpet. I also have a witch’s broomstick. They already “fly”. Why can’t I use them to glide?

More than anything, though, I want them all to have more dye channels. I spend a lot of time picking the exact dye (I have all the base and about 1/4 of the gem store dyes unlocked) to use on armor, and then get a very hard match w/ most of the glider skins.

What appears in the in game chat window is not the purview of this forum. The API refers to a set of interfaces where we can query the status of game information from somewhere other than the normal game client.

IMO, I’d still like for this and personal/living story completions to be higher on your list.
I have 32 characters across three accounts. Keeping track of who’s done what is a real pain point.

And really…. do we have to confirm each and every purchase?
We went from 6 clicks to 60.

:-(
:-(
:-(

I was wondering where on the list getting per character map completion information is?

With several new zones to explore, and a plethorea of characters to explore them with, it’s quite difficult to track who has been where. I currently manage this manually via a spreadsheet, but would much prefer to be able to script it.

We’ve gotten to where I can replace almost everything else in my ridiculously crazy pile of spreadsheets, so this is the biggest soar thumb left from me be able to completely deprecate it.

I don’t need per point information, just something like:
{ zone: “Lornar’s Pass”,
vistas: 7,
waypoints: 14,
hero_points: 9,
renown: 12 }

Well, and a list somewhere saying how many of each there are in each zone. (looks like I should be able to get this from the mapping info, assuming it is kept current.)

The way it is structured now, by the time I’ve fully unlocked an Espec…. there’s no more open world content to do as an espec….

+1
I have a few guilds I’m in, but one that I “main”, which somehow ended up as /g3, where I’d prefer it to be /g1.

I would see a couple main uses for this:
1) Automated Notification of added/deleted items… However as long as we have Dulfy, she does an excellent job of this.
2) Posting tables of item prices in terms of gold (use current gold→gem rate)

IMO, It’d be nice to have it on the list, but it should be pretty low, unless it’s really quick to crank out.

Some fields to make it useful:
- ItemID
- [{qty: 1, gems:250}, {qty:5, gems:1000}, {qty:25, gems:4500}, {qty:1, gems:150, limit:1}]
- Expiry time, if any
- Gemstore sections (the tabs across the top)

I pray that never happens, because the the entire TP economy would be overrun by bot wars, and everyone would feel compelled to try and run their own bot just to keep up.

Let’s keep the playing game inside the game.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

I’m honestly can’t come up with many use-cases for it.

Let’s see:

• Some guilds want to track who all participated in some event. Instead of doing something manual, you could designate a commander for event, and then periodically poll where other guild members are, and if they are near-ish the commander during those times, give auto-credit. (Assumes guild members submit a suitable API key, of course).
• WvW, having a map where you can see what part of the quadri-verse the other (registered) commanders on your server are rampaging. Bonus Points: include dorito color, and supplyinfo/squadinfo counts.
• I have 16+ characters on my account… where did I park them all?
• What map instance am I on, and what events are in my general area? (Makes events endpoint useful again in a megaserver world) I’m not gonna move THAT far in 10s w/o portaling.

Could most of this be done by having everyone download some app that reads the mumble data, and then streams the data to some central server? Sure. But people can do that now, and for the most part they don’t, because it’s too cumbersome.

That said, I wouldn’t this high on the priority list.

Presumably, this issue goes away in late October, so I’m not sure it’s worth any level of priority vs things which will stick around for longer.

Woot Woot
/hands_in_the_air

I think I’m okay with having a larger number of permissions which someone can use to fine tune what they want to give out…. but there would need to be some easy to use packages or presets which would be good for most people, covering the most common cases. Thus, site could tell people "get a key with the Trader’s preset (or perms X, Y, Z, W, K, & R)

I don’t see wallet contents anywhere on your board.
This makes quaggan sad.

If you’re getting Courage, you might consider pairing it with Moonshine for 4g more.

Another great skin for guardians at a good price is Cobalt… a greatsword with blue flames.

Alternatively, he might have made some TP sales, not realizing that 5% gets taken from your current bankroll.

I used to try playing the specialty bag game, but anymore, I generally stick with an invisible/safe bag at the bottom, and the rest are normal bags.

Once in a while, I’ll take a junk bag, since those things can accumulate over time, where as most of the rest I can generally salvage/deposit/tp away.

Crafting bags sound nifty, but I hit “Deposit All Materials; Compact” so instinctively, that I never even see them. But then it can get clogged up with runes and sigils, which you don’t see, since you minimized the bag, etc….

I tried out the fractal boxes, (well, the masterwork ones, not the rare ones), and I found that I just really didn’t care about white vs blue vs green. They all get fed to my good friend Mr Copper Fed Salvage ‘o’ Matic. (which, btw, it the single best inventory management investment you can make)

Rares and exotics… I just don’t get enough to dedicate a box for them. Most rares are either TP’s or fed to Mystic Salvage kits.

Just to be sure, I’d put them in your bank, which doesn’t get cleared on the free moves.

No account b-day gifts.
Only character b-day gifts.

You can also view the 15% as a convienence fee. You don’t have to spend any time looking for a buyer. Not many people are in the market to buy a 5000g item, and they might be in a different timezone. There’s no need to find that person, coordinate with them, then arrange for a trade time.

750g is a lot to see taken away, but I suggest you focus on the 4250g you get to keep, and go buy stuff that others will get 3612g for.

I just wanted to point one other option out there:
Instead of selling items to the TP, you can also come out well w/ salvaging most of your unwanted loot, and then sell the materials on the TP. Materials stack more easily, can be deposited for bulk selling, and have a very high turnover, so Sell orders often get filled quite quickly. In addition, you’ll be increasing your magic find, which leads to better drops down the line.

What kits to use for what items vary by person, but my rules are:
Black Lion – Exotics with really expensive runes/sigils. (I tend to get these kits from dailies enough to not buy them)
Mystic/Master – Exotics and Rares >L65
Basic/Copper-fed – Rares <L65, and all white/blue/green.

Advantages:
- In the same ballpark for income as TPing items.
- TP Sell Orders fill quickly.
- Increases Magic Find
- Really quick to mass salvage items, deposit mats, then get back to killing.
- Mats can be used for crafting instead, if you’re interested.

Disadvantages:
- You can make a bit more money by selling select items on the TP directly.

Anyways, not saying you need to do this, but making you aware of an alternative option.

I’ve created keys on this account before w/o issue, but today when I try to make one, I just get “Error”.

Any thoughts?
(Devs, feel free to check logs against this account if needed)

Lawton Campbell.8517:

You’re not far off the mark, though there’s an order of magnitude more servers than the ones you’ve listed.

Cool. As someone who works on non-game systems that are just as complicated, that’s totally reasonable. I just haven’t heard you guys talk about the other servers, so don’t know what you’ve decided to lump together vs break off separately.

The 30s cached option sounds intriguing, though.

Over time, from listening to various comments that Lawton and other devs have made, I believe I have a rough understanding of the general types of servers that ANet employs to run the game. (Of course, I might be wrong, but what I’m going to say should apply in broad strokes).

There are several different classes of servers. At a minimum we have:

• Login Servers, which could also likely be called “Character Servers”. These are responsible for holding all of the durable information about your account and characters.
• Trading Servers, basically, the Trading Post, and likely the Gemshop as well.
• Map Servers. Each of these drive one or more map instances at a time.
• Asset Servers, which are what the client downloads textures, sounds, etc from.
• Config Server, where they are able to do things like disable a trait on the fly, or where gem store sales are turned on or off, etc.

When a character enters a map, they connect to the appropriate Map Server, when then contacts the Login Server, and checks out a copy of the character. The Map Server is in charge of player location, combat, etc. Any changes made to things like inventory are first applied at the Map Server, and then pushed to the Login Server on a frequent basis (details a bit fuzzy here, and rightly so, as this gap is where duplication bugs crop up in other games).

With the API system, they’ve added another set of servers, which I’ll call:

• API Snapshot Servers.

When an API request is made, it looks to see if it already has that information snapshotted. If so, it serves it directly. If not, it goes out and asks another server for that information. In order to ask those servers for information, an internal connection has to be built to allow for that. This can often take a lot of effort, since those other servers likely never expected to have these types of requests asked. Also, extreme care has to be given that these things are done correctly, so that the stability of the main game is not compromised. Thus, many of the delays in getting information are likely a result of coordination with the team which owns those other servers.

The first round of APIs were able to pull things from Asset and Config servers, and as such only gave you global information, which was mostly static. (Though I’m not 100% sure how event information was pulled). Later, we got a connection to the trading post added, which was later upgraded to give per person information. Most recently, we’ve gained access to the Login servers.

This request is about getting information about current location. This is strictly a function of the Map Servers. There’s several issues that come to mind with getting this:

• Update Speed. The API system is set up to take snapshots, and then serve off that snapshot for many minutes. Changing to a direct feed would require some rework.
• Potentially significantly increased load on Map Servers. Constantly getting this information isn’t free. Responding to requests takes resources, especially if many people do it at once. Think of a WvW map, where several of the major guilds are using this to coordinate attacks. Would this be worth it if in response to this side load, they had to lower the max map population by 15 people?

Overall, the effort needed to make this happen is very non-trivial. Meanwhile, there are lots of other things that can be done with the newfound connection to the Login servers, such as Wallet, Unlocks, and Guild info. From the Asset and/or Config servers, we can get things like Skills, Specializations, and Traits.

There’s also the overall question of the right tool for the job. Is a constant stream of pull requests against a REST API the right way to do this? Or should we instead look to expand on the Mumble model, where we’re getting information direct from the client, and thus avoid many of these issue. We’ve already got location and map information kludged into the Mumble API. Perhaps at some later point, we could get a similar direct memory tool which expands on this more cleanly. These things, however, almost certainly would require the effort from people on a team other than those currently working on this API.

Hope that helps.

PS – I’d love to know how wrong I am about your server structure.
PPS – I also understand if you’re not allowed to tell me.

Overall, I like the course grained approach. It’d also tell you where you parked a character, info which is listed on the character select page, so I’d think it’d be cached somewhere convenient, but again, I’m not in your codebase.

This would be handy for me, since I tend to park my alts by rich ore nodes, and remembering which is where can be a chore.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

The new wallet’s out now, so I should probably take a look at exposing that functionality.

My first read through was “The new wallet API is out now”…. so much happiness squashed on re-reading.

Another way to be backwards compatible would be to have the old block stay there, but add a new block on items, which presents things in a saner way. Then if there’s ever a v3, we can drop the old block.

Alternatively, give us a cheat sheet endpoint that tells us skill_id 15755 is {power: 32, ferocity:18, precision:18, agony_resist:5}

Much coolness.
I think we’ve just hit critical mass on data to make some truly cool tools.

I could see getting the wallet info out to complete some projects, such as checking Spirit Shard and gold count for questions like “Can I finish my Legendary with what I have right now?”

At present, if you’re not spending all of your hero points, such as you’re level 20, and saving to unlock a specialization at L21, then you’re constantly getting the red ! on the menu bar and hero build.

Please give me a way to dismiss the notification, much like you used to be able to dismiss extra trait points by going into the dialog, and exiting. With trait points, it’d come back when you got more points. With hero points, it comes back on every map load, and after every cutscene.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

rodadams.5963:

Pat Cavit.9234:

https://github.com/arenanet/api-cdi/pull/36

We should be able to turn it on sometime after the next patch hits, IIRC.

I presume we’ll get /v2/account/bank at the same time? The two pretty much go hand in hand, and I’d expect similar challenges with the two, but I’m not in your codebase.

Yeah, we’re hoping to turn on /v2/account/bank and /v2/account/materials around the same time, barring any catastrophes.

Excellent!
I’ve got some plans for that data.

Divine Don.9752:

Pat Cavit.9234:

We should be able to turn it on sometime after the next patch hits, IIRC.

Next patch meaning sometime next week (Tuesday)?

I believe he means that the next patch will get some changes into the backend, which will let him work on getting it out to us. I’d expect a week or two later, most likely.

Pat Cavit.9234:

https://github.com/arenanet/api-cdi/pull/36

We should be able to turn it on sometime after the next patch hits, IIRC.

I presume we’ll get /v2/account/bank at the same time? The two pretty much go hand in hand, and I’d expect similar challenges with the two, but I’m not in your codebase.

I’ll point out that against a group of 3 foes, which is extremely common in PvE, not having ricochet is a 75% damage nerf, which is completely build breaking.

Being forced to take an Elite Specialization, which features it’s own weapon, to make a base weaponset effective again is…. pretty lame.

Frankly, about the only way I play a thief is as pure Glass Hand Cannon. I gotta be pumping more bullets than a classic John Woo movie… and my only defense is keep shooting. Low on health? Signet of Malice and Blackberry Pie says the answer is MOAR BULLETS. Life and Death becomes a game of do they all die before I’m out of initiative?

Is all of this the most effective build ever? Nope.
Is it a complete blast to play? Yep.
Will loosing Richochet break it? Yep. Without it, a group of enemies (read: most of PvE) will get into melee range, and then it’s all about strafing, etc…. overall a different playstyle. Might as well play LB Ranger. At least there I get a cat.

Oh, my swap to is D/P for structures and movement. And I would miss the hilarious quirks of Richochet bouncing my Shadow Shot bouncing me over to a nearby rabbit.

Please don’t kill my fun. :-(

I’d be happy for a /petname command to rename my current pet. That would at least make it a lot easier to change, and far less mouse clicky.

So… are hobosacks gone with the specialization content update, or do we have to wait for HoT?

Have you tried checking the wiki? It has research results for many objects.

You’ll have to pull all the prices you’re interested in, and do the sorting/filtering yourself.

I could, however, see an argument made for “show me what I can see in game”. As such, I’d be able to see the account.1234 of everyone in the guild, along with their AP total, and some stats on currently logged in character, such as name, locataion, and crafting skills.

I can pass on the crafting skills, but if the above were available via API, one could poll it every so often, and slowly build a list of characters that people play with, thus delivering roughly what Markus wanted.

I don’t see this as a guild leader skeleton key, just a base feature.

Zodian.6597:

Is it as simple as just downloading the library I want then importing it in a class and calling get methods on the object fields?

You just described an extremely large portion of all programming. The trick is knowing which method of which object from which library to call with what arguements.

However, most any url fetcher library will do, (you’ll want to look at how to add additional headers for the auth stuff), and then a json parser library. Retrieve page, feed it through a json parser, do stuff with resulting data. You’ll have greater challenges figuring out how to do what you want to with the data than you will getting the data.

Daddar.5971:

It’s actually the only fair way to handle it.

Uhm… No, it’s not.
IMO, you should instead be arguing for there to be more WvW and PvP methods of getting those extra ~65 points needed after you hit L80. Perhaps the option to convert WvW rank points into these points. Add a PvP reward track to earn extra points. That seems pretty fair to me. Much more fair than resetting everyone’s map completion, essentially out of spite.

A decent start, but there are a lot of features that jump out at me as missing.

Always mention the date range covered.

Sort on any column.

Collapse mulitple listings of same item into one. I’ve sold many a fair amount of hard wood logs. Instead of listing the piecemeal they really sold as, give me option to collapse it all into one line, with total qty, and average price.

Sort/Collapse by type. “How much have I made selling rare sigils?” “How much of my TP income comes from raw materials sells? rare materials?”

Graph over time of total income, outgo, taxes.

On ‘Home’ screen, Income Statement seems to be complete repeat of Sold History and Bought History sections.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

Giltheryn.8603:

I’ve been messing with this API just for fun and I was wondering if it’s be possible to add a field like last_played or is_online to individual characters?

That’s data that can be exposed, but we should have a discussion about how to do it in a way that makes your users happy. I have a hunch that we may want to hide that data behind a separate permission, but I haven’t thought about it enough to have a well-formed opinion.

It should go with the Guild permissions, since you can see this of any guild member in game.

Not sure if this is already on the list somewhere, but there are a many different “account unlocks” in the game, and being able to pull them up in an API would be nice.

This includes:

• Home instance nodes.
• LS S2 chapter unlocks, and later HoT access.
• Deluxe mode (Mistfire Wolf, new char golem, etc)
• Hall of Monuments progression. (Can I haz Black Moa? Fellblade?)
• Weapon/Armor skins
• Dyes
• PvP reward tracks
• Outfits
• Finishers
• Mail Carriers

I’m likely forgetting a few here.

I think I see the ‘account’ scope as being something pretty basic, and being something that is on by default, and completely harmless.

Meanwhile, I consider my achievement history to be something fairly private, and also something which is separate from other tasks. Reviewing my TP efficiency doesn’t need to look at this. Checking my gear for a build doesn’t. Basically, nothing except an explict tracker for such things would need it, so having a separate scope makes sense.

I’d name it “Account Progression”, and have all of the AP and XvX Ranks included.

I’ll point out that we can overcome not having backend support for this. You could build a single internal scanner, which would poll the backend with as fast an update speed as you can, and then when you notice a change, push that out.

It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s an option.

Oh, one last comment. Stop thinking “attack, then reposition”. Think “reposition while attacking”.

You need to understand that Legendaries are COMPLETELY OPTIONAL, and you can get other weapons that are just as powerful far, far, far, easier. Legendaries are there simply to be a long term stretch goal, which rewards you with a weapon that looks different.

You can enjoy absolutely enjoy everything the game has to offer, without ever thinking about making such a thing.

You’re not going to get all of that in one build, because it would be too powerful. So in each of them, so you’re going to have to give something up.

Longbow Ranger is by far your closest choice, that’s why everyone is saying it.

• 1500 Longbow Range (traited) is longer than anything else.
• Reasonable burst options.
• Send the pet in early to take aggro and distract.
• LB#3 gives 3s of stealth on a 12s cooldown…. plenty of time to reposition.
• Pet will keep attacking while you’re repositioning.
• Try pets other than a bear. Like a Jaguar or Reef Drake.
• Swap to Axe+Warhorn for dealing with crowds.

Your next option is Mesmer.

• Greatsword and Scepter give you range
• Illusions distract and can take aggro
• Several stealth options, though most are short and long CD.
• Harder to build up a burst damage to “snipe”, though.

Third is Dagger thief.

• More stealth options than you can shake a stick at.
• Lots of options to continuously reposition yourself.
• OMG amounts of burst damage.
• But you gotta live in melee.
• One mistake can kill you.

I’d say those are your major options.
But really, you want LB Ranger.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

I haven’t decided whether or not it’s something we should fix, since having a fixed permission set seems like it would be more straightforward for application developers (e.g., if you’ve got a key, it’ll continue working until it’s entirely revoked).

On the flip side, I can see two things happening:
1) New APIs with new scopes keep getting generated
2) Fan site keeps expanding what it can do for a user over time, needing new scopes.

Having to keep re-issuing a key could get onerous. Also, well designed sites are going to have to (somewhat) gracefully handle being given an API with inadequate scoping when it’s first recieved anyways. I don’t see it as that large of a stretch to deal with it again down the road.