Danikat.8537

I think it might also be based on the total number of map copies open. People will often form bounty squads immediately after the Pinata event in Crystal Oasis, and often get told the map is closing even though there's still an active squad and several people afk, and others running around doing their own thing, and I suspect its because there's a lot of copies of the map with roughly equal population, so it throws the message up on all of them and waits to see which empty out and which fill up. I agree that it should allow for meta event timers though. If there's a meta active which starts at a fixed time the map shouldn't close until it's ended. Ideally I think it could be a bit more sophisticated - like allowing maps to close if it's below the absolute minimum for the meta (e.g. 4 for Auric Basin, 6 for Dragon's Stand) or only protecting ones where the meta is actually progressing so you don't get a map staying up for 2 hours just because 1 AFK person is auto-running into a wall in a corner somewhere, but I'm not sure that's possible or worth the trouble. Having said that I also agree that more players should look at how long they have until the map closes and how long the event they're doing has left (or is likely to take) and think about the decision. I've seen people quit in the middle of a boss fight with a 10 minute timer and 50% health left because they were told the map is closing in an hour. They act like as soon as the pop-up appears they have to get out ASAP. (Which is especially odd because people in real life usually seem to do the opposite. If they're told the event, exhibit, whatever is closing in an hour they'll wait 59 minutes and 50 seconds to start thinking about beginning to head in the general direction of the exit, as long as nothing else catches their eye along the way.)

WoW is a good example of why I think "How many people are you likely to see and interact with?" is a more important measure for players than "How many active accounts are there?". Not just because it's split into servers (and now different versions) so you'll only ever meet a minority of players but because the game's design gave me one of the least sociable experiences I've ever had in an MMO. I did the free trial around 2013, when WoW was still universally regarded as the biggest MMO and even playing at peak times it took over an hour to find another person in the starter map and when I did all they said was "pls leave" (I later found out I was in 'their' grind spot and just by being there I could cost them XP or drops). When I found a settlement/quest hub with a few people around I said hi and was told not to 'clog up' chat unless I had something to sell, and I was too low level to have anything worth selling so I shouldn't speak at all. I tried 3 or 4 different characters with different starter zones and it was all like that - stay away from other players, do not speak to them, do not stand near them, do not expect them to acknowledge you in any way. I was later told if I got to about level 40 playing solo I'd probably be allowed to join a guild and then they'd let me speak to them. I've had far better experiences in less popular MMOs, including some others with kill and loot stealing (although that was back when MMOs were a bit of a novelty for everyone, and I only ever played Runescape with friends which will have made a difference). I know I only met and tried to talk to a tiny minority of WoW players but what stuck me about it is that the game itself seemed to be discouraging playing together. From talking to friends who played it for years it seems like the majority of people rarely play with anyone outside their guild or friendship group, except when using the automated queue to fill spaces for instances, which means in terms of number of people you can interact with it's kind of more comparable to lobby games than other MMOs.

I think it's very unlikely. They said they scrapped it because of some combination of the mechanics not working well enough and overlapping too much with other mounts. I suspect they came up with concepts for a whole load of different mounts, then picked the best ones to actually go into the game. If they start throwing all their old, redundant ideas into the game just for the sake of it the end result would be a mess.

They didn't give us an unlabelled graph, but they did announce that EoD out-sold PoF and that the number of active players more than doubled between 2019 and 2022. The forum topics generally dismissed it as an unconfirmed rumour which could not counter the established narrative that EoD was a failure.

Again: they have never shared that info. If not telling us player numbers is proof the game is dying then it's been dying since the moment pre-orders went up for the base game 12 years ago. What's really weird is people do it to single-player, offline games too. You could be the only person in the world playing a single-player game, or there could be 10 million people playing it at the same moment and either way your experience would be the same, but apparently because some people can estimate how many people might be playing it they can then declare them 'dead' and act like anyone who is still playing needs to stop.

Anet have never publicised that info, beyond saying 16 million which is most likely the number of accounts created. You can find lots of websites reporting numbers but those are all estimates. Some are arguably more reliable, based on things like tracking Steam activity and extrapolating it to the whole playerbase (the game was out for years before it was added to Steam so there's only a small number of players on there). Others are far less reliable, based on things like number of results in an internet search for the games name, or rating search results as either positive or negative and assuming all the positives are current players and all the negatives are people who quit. But they're all ultimately guesses. I doubt even Anet could report a single number for active players, even if they wanted to. Without a subscription there's no clear distinction between an 'active' account and an 'inactive' one. The closest is probably number of unique logins over the past X days, but that will include alt accounts owned by the same player. Maybe they could count logins per IP address, but that would miscount family members as being all 1 person, or cut out accounts that logged in for less than 5 minutes at a time, but whatever they pick would be an arbitrary cut-off. It's also not a very useful number for them. It is for subscription games because that's where the majority of their money comes from, but that's not the case for GW2. I suspect they do track total unique logins and peak concurrent logins, but only as part of a series of figures to help build up an overall picture. The numbers they publicise are all about what players do - number of times a boss has been killed since it was released, or how many people have gotten an achievement, time spent on each mount, things like that. (The most recent example is the WvW Beta Feedback article, where they used the number of commanders, time spent commanding and how that compared to a normal week.) (I don't think it's a very useful number for players either, because there's no guarentee those people will be in the same region as you or online at the same times and doing the same things, and if they were everyone would be split out into duplicate maps anyway. The important thing is whether there's enough people to do what you want to do when you want to do it, and answers to that vary hugely based on a lot of factors.)

Yeah there's a few minis taller than a minimum height asura. Mine's had that before, although she's gotten into wearing very tall helmets, so it doesn't happen as often now.

I suspect a lot of people do it to everyone and just don't care because it doesn't affect the game mechanics. Stacking doesn't prevent anyone from using the bank, and I doubt anyone is using 1st person camera at the bank. If someone doesn't care about being able to see their own character it probably doesn't occur to them that other people do. Add in the fact that bankers are often in small spaces and you often have to crowd around them to get to the NPC.

I saw someone (possibly you) mention this in another thread and I thought it was a good idea. A lot of my characters have a 'fun' build for the open-world and story and a 'sensible' one for groups and when it uses different equipment I try to make the sensible one look sensible too. Not that I think groups require that, but I want it to look different so I can tell them apart at a glance and it's a logical way to do that. I try to pick small/plain back items, but this gives me a way to hide them completely without having to change the check box each time.

It's a pretty tall order to come up with something new every year. But I missed out on this one when it first happened and I've been longing to participate so while it may not reach the heights of previous April Fools it's not a stretch to say I'm pleased.

Some gem store releases are automatically scheduled, so some people can predict when they happen. Others are manually set by Anet so there's no way for anyone outside the studio to know when they're coming. The only guarenteed way to know is to regularly check the gem store or this thread where updates always get posted, and look out for news articles about gem store items which sometimes include a schedule of upcoming re-releases. One possibility is that in August, the anniversary of the game's release, they'll bring back the Black Lion vouchers. The Backpack and Glider Voucher includes the Eternal Mandala glider so you'd be able to get it that way.

One of my main characters is a max height female norn and she's never felt out of place. I have occasionally mistaken short asura characters for large mini pets (I'd probably do the same with my asura if I ever saw them side by side) but I don't think it's ever affected my perception of the game as a whole. But maybe it helps that I've had 4 characters since day 1 (charr, human, sylvari and norn) and added an asura a couple of months later and I've always gone between different ones (those and the others I've made) instead of sticking to 1.

I forgot about that. The griffon wasn't even mentioned in any of the advertising for PoF and no one knew about it until the first players completed the story and started the collection to unlock it. My favourite surprises have always been the jumping puzzles. They're not completely secret, but at most you'll be told which map they're in and maybe get a hint at which area. So many times I've been poking around the scenery, thinking I'm wasting my time trying to climb something that was never intended to be climbed and gradually realise I'm on the path to a jumping puzzle. As someone who will always try to explore everywhere, even in games where that's not intended, it's really nice when there actually is something there for me to find.

I can confirm you can complete the meta-achievement without doing any story instances. I managed to complete the whole thing in about 2 hours (luckily I had enough keys already) - starting in Dry Top doing events around the map and staying through the sandstorm then going over to Silverwastes and doing the meta. Ironically the last achievement I did was talking to Ogden in the Grove. I also finally got the last coins for the Coin Collector achievements in Dry Top.

It's not (just) a timed spawn. You can use Levvi's Device to see when it can spawn (and to make sure it hasn't already been killed in your map), but then you or other players need to kill sharks in one of the maps where it can spawn to trigger the event. If you just stand and wait, or if you're trying outside the spawn window, it won't happen.

One thing I haven't seen mentioned which often catches people out: you won't be able to equip a staff until you select the Druid specialisation (or unlock weapon master training in SotO). Elite specs have to go in the bottom of the 3 specialisation slots, if you click either of the top ones you won't see it as an option but if you click the bottom one it will show up.

I'm not saying I don't believe it because it hasn't already been announced by Anet, I understand they need to tell shareholders news like this first. The problem is that I can't read Korean so for me the sources on this were either an article which admitted they used automatic translation they know to be unreliable, or an article I can't read even enough to determine whether the site looks legitimate. Meanwhile I'm very aware there are people online whose entire business model is to stir up debate on unverifiable topics and something like this would be easy bait for them. If/when GW3, or some other big Anet project, does happen I expect it will be announced to NCSoft shareholders, but for that news to get to me it needs to come via a reliable English language source (or French, but English is more likely) and that's most likely to be Arenanet announcing it.

I agree. There were rumours that NCSoft had told shareholders Anet were working on an expansion for GW2 in early 2013 (over 2 years before HoT was released). I'm not sure if it was a mistranslation and they were referring to the Living World releases, or if it was completely made up, but either way it wasn't true. For anything like this I'd at least want someone fluent in both English and Korean to translate it from an original transcript, because there's a lot that can get lost with summaries and automatic translation. A common English example is the confusion around items in the gem store being 'on sale' which can mean either 'available to buy' or 'discounted' depending on the context. (Or all the different things which can be called 'DLC'.) We've known for years Anet are working on at least 1 other game (which sounds unlikely to be GW3) so it could be about that. Or it could be the next GW2 expansion, or something they're going to say is not an expansion like how the LW wasn't an expansion or DLC. Or it could be entirely made up. I'd prefer a direct, reliable source, ideally Anet saying it themselves, rather than speculation based on Google translate.

There's no kill stealing in the sense it works in other games, where only the person who hits an enemy first, or last, gets the XP and loot. But if someone kills enemies so fast no one else can hit them at all then those other people won't get participation in events and won't get XP or loot. It's entirely possible for a high level character in a low level map to rush in using a mount, use their engage skill, then an AoE and wipe out a whole group of event enemies right as they spawn.

I doubt it would be the whole solution but I do think level scaling should be adjusted. Higher level characters have always had an advantage even when down-scaled because it scales down each attribute individually and at higher levels you can have many more attributes. It also doesn't apply to extra effects from traits, runes, relics, jade bot etc. if their damage is based on your attributes it will scale them down, but it's still an additional source of damage (or boons) which lower level players won't have. I've noticed this. I've got a 'survivor' or 'iron man' or whatever you want to call it challenge character who (among other restrictions) only wears white quality equipment with no upgrades, and because I suck at it and die sooner or later I keep repeating the lower levels. Because white quality equipment is restricted to beserker stats (mighty or strong at lower levels, giving power and precision) I always have matching stats and (unlike on most my characters) I make sure to upgrade it all every 10 levels. Also because I know I'm restricted to beserker stats I'm using a power build, although focused on defence rather than DPS because my top priority is not dying. That puts me in a weird position where I'm noticeably much weaker than the high level characters who come storming through events, but also often stronger than other low level characters, in spite of lacking higher tier equipment and upgrades. If it's just me and other low levels I have to be careful not to be the one sniping all the enemies before anyone else gets a chance, because I'm trying to stay at range and can kill them in 2-3 hits. But then if anyone above our level comes along, especially level 80's with lots of mastery points (meaning they're likely to also have full ascended and all the upgrades) I'm almost guaranteed to be unable to tag anything because they're gone before I get there. Especially since I can't just hop on a mount (not allowed on this character) or equip a speed boost (not unlocked yet) to rush to mobs when they spawn. I don't think it's an easy problem to solve because there's so many factors that can go into how much damage you do and how many targets you can hit, and I absolutely wouldn't want Anet to simplify the game to 'fix' that, so I'm not sure what the solution is, but I'd like them to investigate options.

That was mostly true for the first few years, but by the time EotN came out it seemed like doing everything possible solo was the default for most people. Any time I asked in outposts or in guild/alliance chat if anyone wanted to join me I'd inevitably get told I could solo it. When I said I'd prefer to play with other people I got told it's 'more efficient' and you get more drops solo. Every single time it was a debate just to get people to accept that I might want someone else there. And yes I thought it might just be my guild/alliance, but I went through several over the years and it was the same in all of them. Also it's true that GW1 was designed from the start so you could play a lot of it solo if you wanted to. That's why they had henchmen. It wasn't a completely new concept, but older games tended to make a distinction between things you could do solo (it was often impractical to do those activities with other people because of XP/kill stealing) and things you needed to do in a group. GW1 made it much more flexible.

The Wiki will show which ones you've completed if you put in your API key, although sometimes that's not working. The way I did it was to make a spreadsheet with a cell for each story section (and arrows showing how they join up) then colour it in as I went through the story. Since each of my characters has a colour scheme I colour-coded it based on which one did it first. I don't have 30 characters either but I used temporary characters to go through all the options my permanent ones didn't do and marked those all in the same colour. That might be overkill for most people, but I wanted to make sure I eventually did all of them and I have a bad habit of making spreadsheets for all kinds of things.

There was another option, but that was to pick up "hints" from people at work or school and hope one of them would eventually be genuine. A lot of false information spread that way, and a lot of real info which sounded fake, because a lot of games did not take themselves seriously, especially when it came to cheat codes. The strangest one for me was finding out, many years after I routinely did it, that the 'Missingno' cheat in Pokemon Red and Blue really wasn't intentional and some versions really could corrupt your save data, making the game unplayable. I assumed there's no way something like that could just happen in a game, it had to have been programmed by the developers, and therefore safe and the warnings were just rumours to scare people off. (I know that wasn't pre-internet, but it was shortly before I had internet access.)

I missed that in the first post. If Elder Scrolls Online is their standard for sufficent hand-holding I can see why they'd find GW2 frustrating. I like ESO but that game wouldn't dare let players go anywhere or do anything without a quest marker pointing to the exact object they need (where the only option will be 'press the interact key'), with the compass bar at the top of the screen to make sure the quest markers are always visible. They've only just accepted that new players are probably going to be able to find their way to the DLC without an NPC literally running at them shouting about it every time they're in town. I don't mind it, partially because I use an addon to hide a lot of the quest markers and another to hide the compass, but I have a lot more fun with the way GW2 does it where puzzles, achievements etc. will expect the player to figure it out (or get help) rather than showing them the solution before they've even had a chance to look for it.

Ah, now you've hit on the silly part of this process. I'm making medium Mistforged Triumphant armour because I like the skins and my main character is a ranger. But I rarely play WvW on medium professions these days, I mainly use my elementalists. So they're playing swapsies - my ranger is collecting all the parts for light Obsidian armour for my eles.