Danikat.8537

I take it this would only show up for people in the same guild? I mean my rank in one guild is "Purple Piranah" and in another it's "Me", I don't think that's useful information for anyone outside the guild. (I'm just now realising I'm in a 3rd guild where I don't know what my rank is, I know it's the standard member rank but I don't remember what it's called.) Edit: My guild ranks are: Me Imperator Pineapple Bush Purple Piranah One Of Us

They're not hidden, they're just not on timers so they don't belong on that list. There's a lot of events, including some meta events, which are on a constant cycle and start up some time after they last finished (I think it's usually 10 minutes or 30 minutes for bigger ones) so it's impossible to predict the schedule because it's different for each copy of the map and depends on if players finished it last time.

I like that there's no unique rewards because it means I can do as much or as little as I want. I'll hopefully be able to get the weapon box but might not finished the whole meta-achievement. But I'm also considering mainly doing it on my second account which has never done Fractals before and doesn't have any of the box tonics unlocked (they only show up on the reward vendor if you don't have them already). I suspect the target audience for this is newer players who haven't done Fractals before, to give them and extra incentive to try it. (I can't remember why I first played Fractals but it was the first WvW 'season' that got me to finally try WvW instead of telling myself I'd get around to it someday.) It will also be a good time to do achievements which require specific Fractals, since there will be people who just need to do a Fractal or several Fractals in different tiers and won't mind which ones they do. I joined a group last night which was doing T1 Jade Maw for an achievement, just because it was the first group with a space.

Another option is to avoid "effortlessly blasting" events. Most events don't go any quicker just because one player is killing the majority of enemies, and it doesn't take much to get gold participation so you could kill a few things and leave others for other players to kill so they can get participation too.

In case it's not clear yet this forum topic will do nothing. You need to report them in-game or using a customer support ticket if you think you need to explain the context or maybe attach a video to show how persistent it is. It would probably also help to explain why you and your guild need to stay in the same spot and can't move somewhere else if people in the area are bothering you. Even then there's 2 things you need to bear in mind: 1) You will not get told what the outcome is. Anet don't discuss actions against one user with anyone else, including the person who report them. 2) Firing weapons in town is not against the rules so unless you can provide additional context to show they're doing it in a deliberate attempt to annoy you the best you can hope for is someone at Anet will agree it's excessive, but even then it's unlikely the person will get more than a warning because, again, they are not doing anything wrong.

Ranger pets can be named and necromancer minions are temporary. Other than minis which other pets are there? Anet might be reluctant to allow players to name minis because there's hundreds of them so that could be a lot of data to store. I might be wrong on this but I think even if the majority of players choose not to name their minis and those who do only name specific ones they still have to have a field, and therefore database space for a name for every mini every player has. But maybe they could do it like how ranger pets used to work, where the name was only saved for the active pet and if you changed them it reset to the default?

I'd say it depends on what exactly "updating" them means. If there's places where they're noticeably more blocky or flat than newer pieces (like features or fur that's one solid lump) then maybe changing that would be ok as long as the changes are minimal. But if there's any possibility of adding more effects, patterns, accessories etc. then I'd rather not because it's nice to have the option to use simpler armour pieces and I'd hate to lose the ones I like using for new "improved" versions. Maybe a better approach would be what they did with the Aureate weapons - they made new, more colourful versions for Lunar New Year but kept the originals available too so people who prefer the originals can still use them (which is good because I think they're one of the most popular 'realistic' weapon sets). Then when they "fixed" the new ones to also glow they kept the version without the glow available too for players who preferred that.

One of the nice things about GW2 is that there's almost nothing you have to do, just lots of options and you can focus on what you want to do. The only thing you literally can't do without ascended equipment is high tier Fractals, because they have a mechanic called agony which you need protection against and agony resistance infusions can only be slotted into ascended equipment. (There are temporary sources of agony resistance you can use at lower tiers, but I don't think they provide enough resistance for the higher ones.) Ascended is recommended for raids and if you want to spend a lot of time in WvW, but there's no gear checks or anything like that, it's just that you'll want the best stats you can get for those areas and that comes from ascended. For everything else exotic is fine. (Legendary is exactly the same stats as ascended, but with some convenience features, it's completely optional.) However the other reason many players will recommend going for ascended equipment is because unlike in some games it's not difficult to get. You can get ascended weapons and armour from the Wizard's Vault by doing dailies, and buy ascended trinkets with laurels (which also come from the wizard's vault). You can get ascended pieces from some achievements, including story achievements. Or you can craft it. If you get lucky you can get it as random drops in some areas. You don't need to be a hardcore end-game player to build up a full set of ascended equipment so its sometimes not worth putting a lot of time and effort into getting exotics. For example if you want trinkets with one of the newer 4-stat combinations it's likely to be quicker to quicker to farm Season 3 and 4 maps to buy the ascended version than to farm materials to craft exotics. But for now I'd say don't worry about getting ascended equipment and just focus on playing what you want. You've probably done some already. 'Meta events' are events made up of many smaller events. Meta is a Greek prefix which means 'self encompassing', 'bigger', 'beyond'. You've probably heard of it in the context of meta gaming which means 'playing outside the game' - pre-planning builds, tactics etc. ahead of an encounter instead of simply getting in there and trying to figure it out as it happens. In this context it means 'events which are made up of events'. (There's also meta achievements, which are ones you complete by doing other achievements.) Meta events vary in size and complexity but they're all things anyone can do. A small one you might have seen is the build up to the Shadow Behemoth world boss in Queensdale - players have to complete 3 different events at the same time to trigger one big one in the middle, then the boss spawns and during the fight additional steps appear where you have to destroy portals to make it vulnerable. There's also big meta events which take over the entire map. Silverwastes is a good example - players have to do different events at all 4 forts simultaneously to get access to the boss, then there's 3 'lanes' who each have their own objectives to complete that all have to be done together to kill it. They're basically an open-world form of end-game and a major part of the game once you get to level 80, but they're open and available to everyone and like other events you can just join them when you find them.

This is why I'm torn on the idea of housing in GW2. I suspect it would be similar to Elder Scrolls Online where it's basically just a space to decorate. You can add a few basic services (bank, merchant, crafting stations) but once you've finished decorating there's not many reasons to spend much time there unless you're a role-player and want to ensure you're not disturbed by trolls. That makes it seem a bit pointless to spend much time on decorating it, although the process can be fun and some people do some very creative things with it. I fully decorated one house and I've done some decorating in others, but lost the motivation to do all of them properly because most of them don't get used except as free teleports. But I definitely prefer it in games like Valheim and Minecraft where your house is also (likely to be) your home base and the location of a lot of important services. Not that I stick to essential stuff - my Valheim house has a balcony with a table and chairs to sit and enjoy the view which doesn't serve any functional purpose, but it seems more worthwhile to do stuff like that when I'm going to be spending a lot of time in the house.

I'd love that! I've tried a few times to find a jackal skin I could dye to look like the mistfire wolf and it's never really worked.

"Passion" is impossible to measure, especially based on forum posts. According to some people World of Warcraft has 'died' every single time it put out an expansion because each one was so bad most players quit as a result. That's obviously not true because it's still online and still played regularly, and there's no reason to think those types of posts are any more accurate for other games. That's not to say the people posting them are wrong about their own opinions, but that's all it is, their own opinion (and maybe that of their friends who will of course have similar preferences). They don't speak for everyone and can't possibly know what the majority of players actually think, even if they try asking first. Only a small minority of players ever visit a game's forum and even then if a topic looks like it's just an endless circle of people ranting about how bad the game is now it's highly unlikely people who are actually enjoying it are going to want to waste their time trying to convince anyone when the chances are the people posting aren't interested in anything other than venting. Also this has been convered several times in this thread already but you cannot compare the release schedule of MMOs to conventional games. They are intentionally designed, from the start, to be different and that's often part of their appeal for both developers and players. For new players it can often be a good sign that an MMO is a few years old, because it shows it's gotten past that initial period when it might never actually take off, they know it's more likely to be a game they can commit to without worrying it will disappear when they start getting into it. There used to be (and maybe with some games still is) a concern that they'd be at a disadvantage due to being 'behind' the day 1 players, but I think most games have taken steps to address that. That's why GW2 gives everyone a level 80 boost when they buy the game, it doesn't take long to get to level 80 anyway but it's a good way of showing new players they won't have to face a long struggle to catch up and will be able to jump straight into the newest areas if they want to. Both of these will have different answers depending on who you talk to. I'm sure some people consider predictability to be a problem, but others like it - they want to know what they're getting from a game and what they can expect in future. What causes someone to outgrow a game depends a lot on the person. In my experience it's often to do with their life, not the game. A common example is they started when they were a teenager, but now they're an adult with a family and a job and the freedom to persue other hobbies and can't (or don't want to) spend the same time they used to on the game. I know a lot of people who consider it a selling point if a game is very short (as in 2-5 hours in total) because if it's longer they don't expect to finish it. I'm in my late 30's and a bit of an anomaly among my friends because I do like long games, but I don't mind if I never finish them.

That is what pay to win means. But like a lot of terms it gets misused and misinterpreted a lot. In this case I think it's a combination of people who may have never played an actual pay to win game (or only played one which managed to be subtle about it) assuming it applies to any situation where buying something gets you a better experience, or even just different, and people who think being able to call a game pay to win is a quick way to make any criticism valid. Multiboxing is a different complaint, and is against the rules regardless of how many monitors you're using to do it. Assuming the guy is actually multiboxing of course, meaning he's controlling all the accounts together so they all move and attack simultaneously. If he's only controlling one at a time and the rest just stand still until he switches to them that's technically allowed, although he can get into trouble for unattended gameplay if he's not very careful. I know you're unhappy and want to find some way this is a problem, but this is like finding out what brand of keyboard a hacker uses and insisting it should be banned because it's been used for hacking.

I like the story, but I don't like achievements which amount to "now do the same thing you've just done but faster" or "do it again but now the boss has more health". If I happen to get them while playing through the story that's fine but if not I'm highly unlikely to do it again to attempt them, unless I have to for some reason (like if I want the reward from a meta achievement). In most games I don't care about achievements at all because they all fall into two categories - either they pop up to tell you that you've just done what you already know you did because you were there when you did it, or they're "hard mode" versions of things you'll have already done and repeating things just to get a tick box to tell me I did also doesn't interest me. In GW2 I do pay attention to achievements because they're the main (and often only) way of sign-posting what's available to do, but even so I'm only going to pay attention to the ones which actually interest me.

I think the difference is the 'find X objects' type are just finding objects hidden in hard to reach places in a map, like the coins in Silverwastes, whereas the scavenger hunts can be much more complicated, with different requirements for each item and tend to have more of a story to them. They're some of the ones which in other games would be side-quests. For example the precursor collections are scavenger hunts and even when the items on the list have similar names they require very different things. The Dreamer III has you collecting dreams but the actual requirements range from visiting locations on different maps to completing Fractals, event chains and hearts or killing world bosses. Some of them (like the skyscale achievements) require completing other collection achievements.

I'd like to be able to dye it, but I don't expect it to happen. I don't care about variants, especially if they're based on the fractal weapon sets. Ad Infinitum is a bit of an anomaly for me because so far it's the only legendary I've made where I didn't care about the skin. I wanted a legendary backpack because I had a bad habit of thinking level 80 exotic or ascended ones are hard to come by (which was the case very early on) so I made a legendary one just after the armoury was added because then I didn't need to worry about it and could clear out a lot of bank space. I don't mind the skin and sometimes use the glider, but it's not one I'm likely to use often even if it was dyable. It would be nice to be able to 'turn down' the glow a bit by dying it a darker colour though.

Have you tried changing the field of view setting in the options menu? I think by default it's set to about 50% and that will probably make a bigger difference than an ultra-wide monitor. I suppose both together would allow you to see a bit more to either side, and maybe if an enemy was coming at you from the right angle it would allow you to see them a bit sooner than other people, but it needs such a specific set of circumstances I definitely wouldn't consider it pay to win. Also if you really want an ultrawide monitor I recommend shopping around. They were a big thing a few years ago and there's a lot available (including second hand) and some are relatively cheap. I'm not sure how much this specific model is but it's far from the only option.

If they've been there for over a week it's unlikely to be because of the Wizard's Vault, because this is the first week we've had the updated weeklies with alternatives. Also they'd only need to kill 100 bandits for that and even if they're staying in 1 spot killing the same 1 enemy when they respawn it wouldn't take that long. I'm not sure why else they'd be there, as far as I know bandits aren't a good farming target, but it also wouldn't make sense to do it that much for the WV. 'AFK' farming isn't new in GW2 and apparently it's not against the rules as long as you're not actually AFK and not using botting software to automate the process. Anet will check on farmers who are reported, but if they respond or react to the checks (some are messages, some are things like teleporting them to a new location to see if they react) to prove someone is at the computer then it's allowed.

How long is a piece of string? Some of the oldest MMOs are still going and are over 20 years old now. For that matter some of the MUDs (multi-user dungeons) which pre-dated MMOs are still going too. On the other hand there's some games which have come and gone in the time GW2 has been online and are considered to have had a good run because they lasted more than a year. The aim for any MMO is to stay online (and keep getting played and updated) as long as possible, I don't think any of them are built with the intention that after some number of years they'll be replaced or closed down, it only happens when something goes wrong. There's a lot of reasons that can happen, the most common are probably fans losing interesting to the point where it's unprofitable (especially if the game wasn't that popular to begin with) or the developers run out of money and can't keep supporting it. But all kinds of things can happen, maybe they don't have a cohesive long-term strategy, or the studio is a bit of a 'cult of personality' and when the person driving the vision leaves things get disjointed and start to fall apart. Or they get bought out (or sold) or the publisher goes under because of unrelated problems and then the new owners have different priorities, or they lose the rights to the underlying IP. You could group some of them together but in a sense there's as many reasons as there are failed games. But it's not like traditional single-player or small multiplayer games where the plan is always to make and release one, maybe support it for a few years with updates and possibly an expansion and then use the profits to make the next game. GW1 and GW2 are a bit of an anomaly in that sense. GW1 was very unusual when it launched in being an MMO without a subscription, that was almost unheard of at the time. Even then I don't think they planned to replace it with a sequel, but making and selling annual expansions proved impractical (especially when each was also designed to work as a stand-alone game). Even then according to Anet part of the reason they decided to make GW2 instead is they kept coming up with ideas they wanted to use but which wouldn't work in GW1. I'm not sure what they were but based on ideas they experimented with in GW: Beyond I suspect dynamic events were one of them. You're right, but to be fair that's partially because it's only about 25 or 26 years ago that the concept of an MMO was possible. There were some graphical MUDs online before then, but they were more like lobby games. I remember when Ultima Online launched in the late 90's and firstly the whole concept seemed novel and strange and secondly the total, global population of MMO players was estimated to be under 100,000 people. At the time it wasn't even sure the internet would catch on.

Elder Scrolls Online does the same, although I don't think it affects material nodes (or I've just never noticed them changing), but you see it sometimes when you're running up to an area where a quest takes place and suddenly everything will change, with enemies and even structures appearing or disappearing. That was the main point of it - so you could see areas change as you completed the quests, so it usually doesn't mess them up, but it used to be incredibly annoying if you wanted to play with other people. If one of you had completed a quest and the other hadn't (or if you'd made different choices) they'd just vanish as you got into the area and you had to move out of it to rejoin them. That also meant if you wanted help with a quest you had to find someone who was on the same part you were. It's a lot better now, they removed a lot of the phasing or replaced it with enemies just going neutral instead of disappearing but it's still weird sometimes. I agree with the people who have said it would be even worse in GW2 because so much of the open-world stuff is events and there's no guarentee they'll be running when you change maps. The pop-ups are irritating sometimes, but I'd much rather have that, and therefore have the option to ignore it, than just get dragged into a new instance whenever the game decides it would be more convenient for the servers.

I was going to say I think laurels might be redundant now (I know that's a currency, not an item), since they only come from daily and weekly achievements and achievement point chests and astral acclaim does pretty much the same thing. Then I realised the difference is we can store as many laurels as we want but only 1,300 AA (or 1,799 if you're on 1,299 and then get a 500AA achievement), so if they were merged it would make buying anything from laurel vendors annoying, even if the prices were corrected to allow for the conversion being removed. I think those can be useful for making it obvious to players they got a spirit shard. I have no idea how many I have in my wallet so if they just go in there I'd have no idea I got them unless I happen to catch the little icon at the side of the screen. But I think that's only necessary when you're buying it from somewhere - like converting tomes of knowledge into spirit shards. If they're just a drop then I agree they can go straight in the wallet.

I'd like to see a primeval warclaw and skyscale, I think they're the only ones we don't have primeval skins for yet. I'd also love a full set of plant themed mounts. Sylvari, mordrem or just generic plants. But not like the mordrem jackal where the undyable skull makes it impossible to make it look like anything except a mordrem wolf. I also like the idea of a dolyak skin. Maybe for the turtle since dolyak was suggested a few times as a 'tank' mount before the turtle was added.

Relics are the same as any other exotic equipment, including runes. You will be able to get another one in future if you want it (including the ones that initially come from achievements, they can be bought from vendors in SotO maps once you've done the achievement) so if you've got one you don't currently have a use for you can get rid of it. The only reason to hold onto ones that aren't equipped is if you think they will be useful soon. For example if you've got a character who is almost level 80 who could use it. (Admittedly I've got a bunch of relic boxes and about 4 or 5 individual relics I'm just holding onto, but that's because I haven't decided which ones most of my characters will use. I keep telling myself I'll do it sometime but I always have more interesting things to do.)

Do you have more than one character? How do you reconcile them having the same story, often with the same dialogue? I'm genuinely surprised this is a problem for you but not all kinds of other things in the game (and other games) like events repeating, visiting maps 'out of order' (like going to ones where the Pact hasn't been formed after doing the Battle of Fort Trinity). In my experience all RPGs require some degree of using your imagination and suspension of disbelief because it's never going to all fit perfectly.

Important note: The Pact has more than one commander. It's one of the top ranks but not completely unique, kind of like generals in real life. I think that's one of the reasons the player character wasn't put in charge - if you've been playing through the story with 1 - 4 other people you can all become commanders instead of one person being singled out. Although the other reason is that, just like real life militaries, the person in charge does very little actual fighting so it wouldn't work with the game mechanics. While you're playing an RPG Traherene is playing an RTS - taking a back seat to direct everything rather than fighting on the front lines. But whether it's NPCs or other players the player character's rank has never been unique. For example in Orr when you have to choose between the Priory, Whispers or Vigil plan you're told all 3 will go ahead, you're only choosing which one you'll be involved with and someone else oversees the other two. But there are also times when we get to be in two places at once - like doing the story side of the assult on Mordremoth inside his mind and the meta-event battle against his body. The canon version is that the player character wasn't in the meta event battle (and if I remember correctly no one calls you Commander during it), so for those sections you're just another soldier.

What is currently being called AI doesn't understand anything. It's not true intelligence, or even a serious attempt at it - it's one part of what researchers think will be needed but not the complete process. It's basically an elaborate, probability weighted, sorting system. It's got a database of thousands of images and a text description of each one, which it tries to mix-and-match to fit the description it's given. So for example if you ask for a "huge armoured bipedal cat with horns" it will search and combine images tagged as containing armour, bipeds, cats and horns, combine common elements from each and produce... well, something like this. Stylised images of real-world cats, sometimes with horns, standing on their back legs and wearing generic armour. It's 'good at' general concepts because it's got many more examples of those to use, and makes the art look good because the people building the databases favour work with popular styles and gain feedback from which of the results are used, ensuring that in future results like that are more likely. The AI couldn't tell you why those are considered good, only that it's been programmed to prioritise those styles over others in it's database. It won't be able to depict charr accurately because there won't be many (or any) images of charr in the database to use, and the ones that are there may not have accurate tags. If they used the description from whatever site the images were pulled from it may just say 'charr', otherwise it may just say something like "fantasy monster".