mindcircus.1506

The framerate issues with Second Life are largely a problem with the builders not optimizing their creations.What happens is they will (among other things) use a very high definition texture on a small object, not realizing that a smaller texture would give an almost identical fidelity many times. The average builder in Second Life simply buys items off the market and places them. The items sold are almost always at an irresponsible level of resolution for the included textures.While professional game designers and world builders always have their eyes on performance and optimization, most builders on SL have no clue.This is made worse by the fact the the official LL clients for SL have zero ways to measure the performance impact of your creations. They tend to measure only how many primitive objects are used in the area you own. Linden Labs has never really cared about this. They left it to the creators from day one. The result was the Virtual World equivalent of a bad Myspace page circa 2007.The upstream bandwidth was not a huge concern in terms of the framerate once everything got loaded. The problem was that rather than use a 256x256 texture on a tiny prim, builders in SL who really didnt understand the issue would use one four times the size. Instead of learning the proper methods of tiling textures, builders would use one 4 times bigger than needed.Then they would clutter their Sim/parcel entrances with hundreds and hundred of these prims in the form of Ads hoping to monetize their creations. The problem was/is compounded by the fact that while an MMO will load files from your hard drive, Second Life operated more like a web browser in that it would request the assets within your field of view at any given time, download and cache them. Sometimes you could go back to a parcel a couple hours later and have to download it all again.It was/is a highly inefficient system and the poor performance of Second Life was one of the main factors that keeps it as the niche product it is today, suitable only for the hardcore RPers and people who flock there for the adult content. The casual users have moved on to products like MMOs where framerates are better and it doesnt take a someone 2 hours to learn to put on a pair of shoes.

If you used a less salty tone you might find people willing to offer you proper advice.

You don't need to have played CoH to understand the problem inherent with the idea.Let me explain:City of Heroes offered players the ability to create their own mission arcs and enemies. It took their fantastic character creator/customization tool and gave it another use, allowing the user to create their own enemies. You could assign whatever powers in the game you wanted to them. You could design tiers of enemies from basic trash mobs all the way up to "Archvillains" which were roughly the equivalent of Champions in GW2. You then would choose a map for the mission to take place on (out of a couple of hundred instance maps), create events in the map such as villain ambushes, text events such as dialog, create interactable objects for the player to hit for any reason. You could assign failure or success conditions and then when you were done you could chain up to 5 missions together to create a "Story Arc".The only real limitation was the fact that the missions had to start with an NPC (who's appearance and dialog was set by you) in a specific location.Otherwise it was pretty much the same tools as the developers used to create content for the first 4 years of the game. It was incredibly powerful and amazingly fun. The goal of the tool, and selling point of the "mini-expansion" was full rewards.Players could level from 1-50(the game's level cap) solely in User Created Content at a competitive rate to the dev created stuff and be rewarded in about the same way. At the level cap the rewards became tickets that the player could cash in to buy gear.It was the answer to every MMO company's problem of players burning through the content too fast and complaining there was nothing to do. And for a small number of hobbyist game designers like myself it was a dream come true. Without getting into a lot of the issues with the tool, such as bugs and exploits here is what the players did with it:They would build a character and stack their defenses against Fire damage as an example. Then the would build their toon with Fire attacks. A Fire/Fire melee character hardly an abnormal thing to do.Then they would go to the Mission Architect and create enemies that were weak against fire and did fire attacks.So now the player's challenge was gone. They could safely mow down enemies at an accelerated rate because they specifically designed or picked enemies that were weak to their attacks and did little damage to their build.Then they would trigger waves upon waves of enemies to come at them. No downtime. No risk, pure reward/profit. When the mission was done, they exited the instance and restarted or just played the next mission in the arc which was typically just a cut and paste of the first. The result was in a game where it could take you a couple of weeks to reasonably level a toon the the cap, you saw players hitting max level in less than a day, without even really exploiting.There were a lot of other factors but this is in essence the problem. When you a player can pick their build and their enemies they will simply choose the path of least resistance. They will create easy encounters, mitigate risk in any way they can from both the player and designer end and hit publish. Then they will use that system to benefit as fast as they can. Then what happened is the content discovery systems reflected this. Actual story arcs that people created went unplayed or were given low player ratings because they werent for powerlevelling/farming. The farm missions dominated the content discover system. The actual good stuff was lucky to get a couple dozen plays, the missions created for farming would get thousands of 5 star reviews.This made the issue worse because the top rated content that put on the "front page" of the content discovery system was the farm content and the stuff that reflected the original intent of the tool was never seen or played. Anyways.... sorry for the wall of text.TLDR: Gamers will use any system to their advantage. Giving them developer tools is a mistake.

If you think people are really eager to give up their mounts and gliders for some kind of retrogaming fad, then please cite the numbers for this "quite a large community of individuals".

No you really aren't.Those that want this tend to scream very loudly, painting their desires as "needed for the game to survive" or even depicting their personal want as a community one. The simple fact is this:If one looks at Gw2 efficiency's stats you can plainly see that the most popular race by far is Human, and the further one gets from human looks the less popular the race becomes in terms of time played (Human accounting for almost 45% of played time across all players, Charr less than 10%). These numbers are of course from the most dedicated players of the game.Even one of the developers is on record as saying he found it a little disconcerting that the player base didn't enjoy playing the other races as much. The armchair developers of this forum who want Tengu as a playable race will invent a business case with zero facts or figures on a weekly basis. The will ignore the fact that even the game's bigger competitors had to half-ass their new races by simply reskinning existing ones or gender locking them.But if you went into Lion's Arch and asked what new playable race was wanted I am sure you would get an even number of votes for Tengu, Skritt and Quagaan.And none of those choices would be any better than the others.

You're literally making excuses for the game being p2w You seem to be confusing P2W (which GW2 is not) and B2P with a free trial (which GW2 is)

Let's not act as if Arenanet is the only one at fault here.The most highly publicized incident of a PVP streamer wintrading saw that player welcomed back by the community with absolutely open arms. Who cares that the first Montly AT was tarnished by this person who for years went off about how bad wintrading was before selling out for a Chak Egg Sac. Lets get him back on Tea Time to discuss PVP!And no one said a thing.Arenanet did the right thing in this case, they outted the player, stripped him of rewards and handed him a suspension that was in alignment with other punishments.It was this community that welcomed him back as some kind of hero, subbing to his stream and treating him like a celebrity.

Posts like this that abdicate control over one's emotions and behavior until a video game company makes rules changes always make me laugh

The way I interpret silence is that nothing of importance has changed so there's nothing to talk about. I most certainly don't interpret it as an indication that the policy and direction has changed so they're now working on something (expansion) that they've clearly stated it's not their current way forward. If/when this changes I expect that Anet will be excited enough about it that they will come out and tell us about it. that sure is a lot to infer from silence.

Edit your poll to include "I would be happy to pay full price if they could make it run on an Android Tablet" and I will vote.

All MMOs with user created content (UGC) have displayed two things: If the system does not offer rewards in line with normal play, the players will abandon it.If you offer players rewards in UGC they will simply use the system to get as much reward for as little risk and time investment as possible.City of Heroes touted it's UGC system with a boxed version, selling it as a small "mini-expansion". 6 Months later, the system had been abused so badly to power level, exploit and farm rewards that the developers finally just nerfed the rewards and said "we'd love to support it but...". They halved the rewards for all but a very small number of story arcs that were vetted by the devs and let the system wither on the vine.The levelling process became trivialized (in a game who's only endgame for 6 years was "roll alts"), the economy was a shambles and the player base was completely polarized.City of Heroes' vision was to give the players maximum power to create anything they wanted and by far the vast majority used it to create farms.It was a disaster that so bad that when the game resurfaced a few months ago (thanks to private servers) the problem came right back. PWI's games that used UGC (Star Trek Online and Neverwinter) shuttered their systems a few months ago. Players reported the exact same problems. A playerbase that flocked only to farming missions, content discovery systems polluted by exploits and a developer team that eventually just gave up trying to balance it all. Would I like to see a system like this in place?As someone who no-lifed making content in CoH for months, someone who toiled away making what I thought were good stories with interesting enemies, I can say no.I don't think there is a dev team going that could handle the problems inherent to the idea.

It's called Illeism might be a sign of narcissism, personality disorder or result of extreme stress. My feedback was certainly not intended to infer some form of personality disorder. It was only to say that the OP's constant talking about themselves detracts from the value I get out of their posts.You may want to look at why you made this comment, @Krzysztof.5973, it's pretty unhealthy.

Who decides just how many ranks of difference is an acceptable target?You I suppose. How about instead of putting out a post telling people not to attack zerglings you spend the time teaching the zerglings how to gear up and fight properly? Part of WvW's problem for newcomers are all these "unwritten rules". All these silly personal "thou shall not"s don't help the game at all. They create a situation where newcomers are afraid to pick up supply and learn what it is. They are afraid to attack other players because they "might be dueling", and think all rewards are on pause until they join voice chat. Humblebragging about your code of honor and a poll does not make it any better.

Kitty I find your writing style and particularly your self-aggrandizement to be so off-putting that it's hard to get past it to see the value in your posts. You make interesting builds and I do enjoy some of your ideas. But this way you feel the need to present them by constantly talking about yourself really sucks the value from them.Just my feedback.

This community will never be happy until they get raid rewards from Fire Elemental.

In the time it took you to make this poll and write this post, you could have learned to effectively deal with aggro on desert maps.

For me to say "I'd rather not see more of this content, it doesn't appeal to me" is not nearly as "rediculous" as you are trying to make it sound. Particularly when a post is made that calls for expansion of this content as "needed", attempts to paint a personal desire as a community one and throws shade on ANet for not doing it. I play SAB for about 2 hours per year. I enjoy the campy goodness, take in how well crafted it is and then move on.I spend a bit of money on this game to support it's ongoing development monthly. My voice deserves to be heard every bit as much as the entitled consumers who try and hyperbolze it's impact in yet another attempt to have the tail wag the dog.

youre literally making excuses for the game being p2w If this is what you call Pay to Win you have a very rough road ahead as a gamer.

If displaying the ears only was possible it would have been a nice gesture to offer those of us who already owned the outfit a discount on them. Not a big deal for sure.But in no way does it devalue the existing outfit. It's only of the very small number of gemstore outfits I have purchased. I like it quite a bit.

@Blocki.4931 up there is absolutely correct. That Soldier's armor is really hindering you at this point. If you are going to stay on Dragon Hunter definitely consider swapping out your gear. Berseker's gear on the TP is pretty cheap, I would start kitting out with that. Dragon Hunter does ridiculous damage open world. Those two or three veterans become less of a concern when you are wiping them out before you draw more aggro.If you have season 3 definitely consider farming up some winterberries/stumps/blood rubies ect. for some ascended trinkets.

Dueling is not supported by this game. There is no official spot to duel. There are several spots where duelers go, the spot you mentioned, another post mentioned the windmill spot. There's even a couple of spots in EBG.But these are all informal spots. Any rules about them are a consensus of the people taking part. Anyone not taking part is not bound in any way shape or form to adhere by any rules.Your confusion comes from the fact that you are interpreting a set of rules that simply do not exist.Until Arenanet actively supports the concept of duels with some kind of mechanics and rules, you are looking for structure where there is none. This is why you are frustrated.

there will be next expansion when we fight the sea dragon... and fight in the jade sea... i could see entire maps being underwater and then we could use a water mount... or some other way to quickly traverse water. The Jade sea is solid.

I would be very disappointed to see Arenanet devote any significant development resources to underwater content.Seeing an underwater mount would make me rethink the money I regularly spend on this game.

Or they are using them for crafting.The earlier comment was right. Your comment was an absolute cheap shot that makes assumptions.Attempting to cast shade as you have does nothing but detract from your already weak point.