Zephire.8049

AI is no substitute for a human's training and skill. Using AI to help upscale textures wouldn't be bad, but animations would need to be done by human (or at least the key frames, which is how it's already done) lest they break or enter uncanny valley territory, something humans can sense and steer away from while working on it but AI would have no way to sense what would be natural movement and what by all accounts should be fine but human brains pick out minutia that make it very wrong. Then the process would have to happen all over again with hope the AI gets it right this time. AI shines best when it's used to augment a person's skill or with a set, defined limited scope. Things like scaling textures and merging textures seamlessly, not creating animations from scratch or touching the engine, because despite the name, AI isn't smart—it's coding that does something it's told and needs human oversight. And once it gets into generating graphics, that gets a lot more ethically and legally dubious. And keep in mind some of what the game has (low res textures, low polygons, simplified animations, etc.) isn't because they couldn't be done better but because it would be too resource intensive—for both developers and customers' computers—to manage. It's a choice, not a lack of ability, when it comes to using low res or few polies for something that most people don't notice (e.g. the infamous snake model in Team Fortress 2 that caused major issues for some players because it had an obscene amount of polies despite being an ambient creature most wouldn't have noticed except for the issues it caused) or when accounting for it being an MMO and having to render multiple people at once wearing and doing countless things versus a single player game where everything can be accounted for thus textures/models/animations can be more detailed.

It's out of your control in that you have no control over whether or not someone follows you. You can remove them in a convoluted way but you can't stop it from happening in the first place, and you need to be vigilant about it/aware that friends, blocked, and followers all same the same limited resource pool. Which, again, isn't likely to be a problem to most people but has a huge negative impact on content creators (AKA people marketing GW2 organically) and people who do large community events. If the developers have to pitch the idea of creating a small program to go through someone's follower list for them to delete said followers because it would take ages to do it manually (and would fill up pass the threshold quickly after doing it) there's a problem that needs to be addressed. It may not affect most people but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.

It's not just blocked and friends that share the pool of total accounts you can have in your contact list, followers take up the same space as well. So you could do nothing but still hit the cap because you it's not up to you if someone friends you or not. Granted the cap is high so most won't even notice it, but if you're a content creator or your name is out there for doing events, HP runs, raid/strike training, etc. you could hit cap through no fault of your own. If that happens, you get thrown errors when you try to friend people and it impacts things like gemstore giveaways because of how the gemstore works. Considering it's an old system with many complaints over the years, it deserves a look at. At least split followers from the cap and/or add bulk removal of followers if it can't be removed from the total.

Those are ones you can buy on the trading post to turn in for completion, other items like Yellow Gentian Flowers and Renegade Battle Plans are soulbound so can only be acquired at the heart on the character you want to complete the heart with. There's no gemstore item that gives heart progression, and while sometimes you get lucky with events that will instantly complete hearts for you (also the skritt heart in Plains of Ashford sometimes completes for you out of the blue, unless they fixed that bug), they aren't to be counted on and it's faster to do the heart manually rather than waiting for the event. Except for Shadow Behemoth as the swamp heart in Queensdale is a slog to do without it and it's an event with a timer so you can plan ahead.

Off the top of my head: Charr Scrap Metal - Fields of Ruin Barracuda Meat - Fireheart Rise Seraph Badges - Kessex Hills Crab Meat - Kessex Hills Pirate Outfits - Bloodtide Cursed Amulets - Bloodtide Skritt Artifacts - Bloodtide Caledon Lavender - Caledon Hylek Armor - Caledon Volcanic Earth Elemental Cores - Mount Maelstrom Supplies - Mount Maelstrom 10x Inquest Alpha Key and 10x Inquest Beta Key - Mount Maelstrom Jellyfish Remains - Lake Doric I don't recommend the Skritt Artifacts as those are expensive on the trading post and the heart is easy without them, the rest fluctuates so buy at your discretion. I'm also probably missing a few. And while you can't buy them from other players, you can get Seraph Badges (not the ones from Kessex) from two hearts in Harathi Hinterlands and turn them in at a third heart at Greystone Rise on the West side of Harathi to complete it easier than you would feeding animals and killing limited centaur.

Some hearts could be streamlined but your suggestion wouldn't work. In addition to what AgentMoore said about map completion rewards and how they could be acquired nigh instantly after 4 characters, each Gift of Exploration "sells" for 500g or so, give or take. It does require some other account-bound materials but the bulk of that price is because of the time required to do map completion and your suggestion would end up tanking the price of Gen 1 legendaries far lower than they already are as each character can get two Gifts of Exploration. There's also some hearts where you can make silver by gathering materials and selling them on the trading post. It's not much but it is a way to make some free silver as there's always people willing to buy them to save a few minutes on a heart. If you start at 99% map completion, the moment you grab any such item, you'd finish the heart so the supply for those items would start drying up. Fast. Given there's already a waypoint unlock item for sale, it would make sense for a (regional) heart unlock to be for sale as well, but it should only give 15%-20% completion per item bought. That way if someone really wants to skip through hearts they can... but only for one character. To ensure it's only a convenience item to save time, it would have to cost more than what one would get from map rewards and potentially locked to how many one account could get. But an account-wide buff that puts all hearts at 99%? That would be tons of free gold per character, further deflate exotic weapons and ectos, and deflate Gen 1 legendaries. Not to mention it would ruin map completion for those who enjoy it because there is no way to do 100% map completion and not hit 80 partway through. You could make it a toggle but that still doesn't change the impact it would have on the economy.

It's far from that simple. The model is easy, the animation is what takes time to do. If I recall what devs have said in the past correctly, armour was not intended to be animated so they had to create workarounds and pretty much get the raid armour to work through duct tape and hope. It was so much work they didn't do it for PvP or WvW legendary armour because that would have delayed those sets years. Particle effects are the easier way to give armour (some) animation. Between DX11 and cloth physics in terms of capes being added since then, there's a possibility that they could come out with a fusion of armour and cloth physics to create non-particle animated armour but for armour that transforms, that's extremely unlikely to happen because it takes so much time and removes a dev team from the ability to work on something else.

Not true. They're increasing the recommended minimum specs and there's frequent posts by people with high-end rigs wondering why they're getting <60FPS. The game uses a 20 year old engine (it's GW1's engine) that's heavily modified and CPU-locked. It used to be true the game could run on low specs but that's no longer a case and technically runs =/= looks good. The change over to DX11 helps with some of that but the game is terribly optimized, can't utilize GPUs to mask the problem, and is so old that it's extremely unlikely it's even possible to integrate VR. The closest you'll get outside a new game built with VR in mind is to use a headset as a monitor and have the camera in first-person mode.

The moment you make legendaries have better stats than anything else is the moment you make legendaries a requirement for group content and make it even harder for people in a mix of exotics and ascended gear to get into it. Anet also did that "It's just 7%" stat increase when they added ascended gear, which the playerbase absolutely despised. To the point Anet said they won't ever do something like that again. That was a decade ago and a different team of devs so their stance could change but it's unlikely. Legendaries are convenience and QoL items where their value is in that and the status they convey because they show that someone did not need to spend the time or resources on it but did so anyway. If you want a gear treadmill, that's pretty much every other MMO out there. If you want GW2 to bring in a gear treadmill, you don't know the history of it or the type of player GW2 appeals to the most. GW2 is a sandbox-ish MMO where you're free to do content you like, play multiple characters, and your IRL time and commitments are respected—and if you want to put GW2 down, you can do that too without punishment if you decide to come back. The content releases absolutely need to be adjusted but the solution to a lack of (new) content isn't to add a gear treadmill or punish players for having alts.

Increase player cap. Seitung, Kaineng, and Echovald had their caps raised but it's still lower than other maps, with Dragon's End caps out at round 60-75. Optimize maps. Some people don't have issues, others cannot play on EoD maps due to the poor optimization. Increase rewards. We went through this with PoF and they waited too long to (barely) increase the rewards so those maps died outside of a handful of metas. Speed up events and/or increase meta timers. There's a whole lot of filler that isn't hard but eats up time in non-engaging ways, and a meta failing at 1% because it hits the timer isn't enjoyable. Adding even 5 more minutes to would go a long way. Make navigation more intuitive, namely for Kaineng. The teleporters tried but they aren't marked on the map nor have the network shown. It doesn't help that when they're most needed (the map meta) they're down. Reduce map size going forward or add more waypoints. Big maps sounds good on paper but if they can't or won't optimize them and/or having 100-200 players on a map causes issues, reduce the size. Artistic vision doesn't matter if people avoid those maps because they're dead/empty of NPCs/cause the player's PC to scream in pain. Add events that aren't part of the meta or a long chain or collection. They're just something fun that sometimes pops up that doesn't involve fighting an elite solo or an escort that takes you in the opposite direction you want to take. I honestly don't think a whole lot needs to be done to revitalize Cantha, but it was pushed out too soon. Optimization, rewards increase, and player cap increase to HoT levels would go a long way. Two of which were a problem after PoF launched thus Anet shouldn't have repeated the same mistakes (plus extra) for nearly a year. Launch pains are understandable, this is not.

This is a such a key part of it. When people don't enjoy or have the time to wait in LFG for 30+ minutes before they can even play the game but doing that is required for supposedly casual drop-in content, there's a huge problem. One of the selling points of the open world was that you could do events as they happened, including meta events. This worked in core then HoT and even PoF before it changed in EoD. It only worked for a few weeks in EoD because the map population cap is so much lower so odds of being on a meta map organized enough to actually have a chance is low, particularly with map instances soft-locking before hard cap is achieved. In core, you can zone in right before a meta or during a meta and succeed. Odds of that happening organically in EoD are slim because one squad eats up the bulk of the allowed number of players in a map instance and then you have people fishing, doing various non-meta things, or are AFK taking up the rest so it soft-locks and you end up on a map that can't or isn't doing the meta. Core and HoT were designed so the map was populated enough and events funneled players into group or being in the same area as that was an invisible alternative to Go Here quests in other popular MMOs at the time. "You should be happy to see other players and waiting to do things isn't fun gameplay" was a core part of the manifesto. Now large maps combined with drastically reduced player caps means odds of seeing another player is lower and waiting to play is a core part of the game. Even the events that are supposed to funnel players together are no longer a thing because everything is spread out and travel is a nightmare, so even if you see an event, there's less desire to change your plans to do it, particularly if dying means waypointing to the other side of the map and running back. So to answer the OP's question, there are several factors involved but one in particular is because the original maps were designed with one philosophy in mind, EoD another. People who prefer the former or dislike the latter are less likely to be on the one they enjoy less, and GW2 spent years building a playerbase who prefers the former as other MMOs tend to be the latter. And since other maps are just as relevant (some with better loot), people can choose to play on the maps they enjoy rather than being forced to play the ones they don't. And that's not even getting into the technical issues EoD has which discourage or prevent people from going there.

This is the biggest issue, IMO. They haven't gotten it to be completely stable yet and are now giving themselves (and players) a deadline to get it stable. A deadline that could result in rushed work to meet it or it gets pushed back, and you really don't want the former to happen to a game engine. If they need to rip out the DX9 code to see if it's stable, that's what PTRs are for, not live games. Also after the fiasco of them pushing post-processing on everyone without the option to disable it, there's no good will left for changes to graphics or the engine where players are forced into it because Anet removed the option to opt-out because it wasn't seen as a big deal to them.

As has been pointed out, today is a major holiday so viewership is down across the board. Plus you were looking at Twitch during an off-peak time (It's up to 1k viewers as of this post). Once some of the bigger name streamers start, that number goes up because GW2 just isn't super interesting to watch most of the time and it's the streamer's community that keeps people coming back. Yes drops do artificially inflate views, but it's passive engagement rather than active engagement. Something to show the shareholders or friends if you're in a MMO vs MMO argument with them and are using Twitch views as a solid metric, not something that people playing the game would notice was happening. Anet absolutely needs better marketing, but Twitch drops don't really advertise to anyone who isn't already playing the game, though the rewards from them are such only newer players would be interested in them except for maybe the makeover kit.

Never said there wasn't a way to remove followers, just that it's easier if it was a two-button option instead of multiple clicks, different tabs, and scrolling.

The friends list needs a complete overhaul, and has needed it for a long time. I remember in beta and around release that these concerns were brought up only to be ignored. It's not a big ask to have a confirmation when someone tries to add you to their friends list, or at least the option for it, so that random people can't friend you without you knowing. It's also not a big ask for non-mutual friends to not get your in-game location and online status. There's zero reason for a complete stranger to get notifications in their chat box when you come online. And yes one can play offline but that means you can't participate in guild chat or whisper friends and it can cause problems when trying to form parties or raids. It also doesn't stop people from knowing you're online and your location if you're repping a guild as even if you're offline, if you forget to do that you still get a bright yellow dot on everyone's map as a guildmate. Only since you're offline, no one can let you know you're obviously online unless they know to send you a mail. At the very least people should have the option to easily remove followers in the form of right-click > remove follower. And also not give non-mutuals your location and online status. If someone wants to add me to a list because I ran a meta or to easily message me later, fine, but that doesn't mean they need to know my online status, location, and what character I'm on, complete with a handy notification when I log into the game.

Did you try his character's name? The gifting is odd and uses character name rather than account name if someone is online.

The end goal: Doing what you find fun. For some it's the story, some it's fashion. Others want to raid while others focus on legendary armour. There's fishing, there's collecting mini pets, there's roleplaying, there's achievement hunting, there's PvP, there's WvW, there's fractals, there's building wealth. And so much more. Compared to other MMOs that push you hard on vertical progression, GW2 can feel uncomfortably open-ended, but it's not so much that it's up to you to make your own fun but rather the game provides you multiple ways to have fun and it's not detrimental to stray from the push of chasing better gear and higher numbers. Doing fractals and raids while also working on getting legendary gear is about as close as you'll get to standard MMO vertical progression, however, so that's probably where you'll feel most comfortable. Especially if you approach fractals as a challenge to build up your agony resistance organically rather than buying it from the trading post and jumping to max AR.

Unfortunately I have yet to have a spare ~$500-$600 for a new GPU + adapters. I'm fine with a game not looking pretty if I'm scraping the minimum requirements, but minimum requirements should mean playable, not "You can load in but your computer will freak out if you move the camera". I've played other games either having the minimum (or below minimum, whoops) specs and still been able to play the game, or it tells me from the start I can't play in which case that's on me for not reading or trying to press my luck. But EoD is one of the few I've come across where I meet the requirements but the game is still unplayable in the technical sense. There's some really weird optimization (or lack thereof) in EoD and it would behoove them to either fix it or up the minimum requirements for EoD if they're not going to prioritize fixing it.

Thanks for the reply. The "funny" thing is I actually play on desktop and the only reason I use integrated graphics is because my GPU died a bit over a month ago, which is why I know it's not just the CPU that's an issue. I was able to play EoD just fine up until my card died and only after did EoD start causing such issues (that I noticed anyway—I wasn't actively monitoring before it died) even though my integrated graphics actually have much more memory than my old GPU (2GB vs 8GB). If it were purely CPU related—or any other component—I would have expected there to be issues from the start, but as they only happened when my GPU died, I can only conclude it's either a flaw with how the game pulls info from the GPU or a GPU-CPU hybrid issue as integrated graphics do put more load on the CPU. It also means if I met the minimum specs before I should still meet them now, but I don't even though my integrated graphics are listed as the minimum requirement. If I didn't meet the base requirement I wouldn't complain, but I do. So either Anet lied about base requirements, "minimum specs" is being treated like a technicality in that technically the game will load even if you can't do much, or there's a serious issue (e.g. memory leak) that higher specs can compensate for but get the more obvious faster the fewer resources you have to spare.

That won't happen. The controls needed are not conducive to default console controllers, the engine is decades old (GW2 actually uses the GW1 engine, albeit modified), and for something to be on console it needs to get approval for patches ahead of time. Not just days but weeks unless NCsoft pulls strings to get GW2 into the priority stream. It would put a major constraint on what could be done and force Anet to decide whether to keep PC and console on par or let PC edge ahead. This is, of course, assuming it could even be ported in the first place as porting games not meant to be ported isn't actually that easy. Add in GW2 uses a proprietary engine and that means there's no tools whatsoever that would make porting to a different system easier and it would be a nightmare and a half to port, require a medium-to-large team to do so, there would be a mountain of compatibility checks and issues, and by the time it's done the current console gen would be aging out. Plus the legal aspect and console owners (Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo) may demand a cut of in-game sales. Steam also demands a cut but porting PC to Steam is less work than from PC to console, especially when the engine is from a time when PS2 and the original Xbox were new.

Pretty sure you can already do this if you have a VR headset, the main difference being the lack of hand sensors. It seems needlessly complicated and the financial barrier to VR is getting higher and higher, especially when you start adding sensors to multiple parts of the body. And of course that's not even getting into the physical space issue if one is expected to move around. It's something that would need to be built from the ground up (and certainly on a new engine), not tacked on. And like someone else said, VR has been around for decades but has never gotten bigger than a gimmick, much like how 3D TVs became the "in" thing briefly but fizzled out quickly. GW2's big appeal is that it's affordable compared to similar MMOs. Lots of people have a computer these days, not many have a VR headset and sensors and that's going to add hundreds—if not thousands—for the consumer to play a "free" game. The return of investment ratio is going to lean heavily into the cost to create such a game with very little return. Which, again, is fine for other games if they have that amount of capital to burn and are built from the ground up with VR in mind and specifically markets to people who already have or are planning to get a VR set, but you can't port a 10 year old MMO running on a 20 year old engine and get a 1:1 VR experience. Especially when most of that audience doesn't have a VR set and has no interest or ability in getting a VR set.

Of those options, new elite specs. It means people can play their existing character(s) in a new way if they so choose instead of having to start a brand new character, which may be fine for people who have stacks of tomes and scrolls and the money or gold to get a new character slot or three but can be an extreme turn-off for those who don't. Plus the character creation UI would need to be changed and updated for new classes and that hasn't been touched since HoT. It could be fine but with how much code has been added since then and the engine is notoriously spaghetti, it would be a risk. Not to mention pulling the UI dev and artist away from the expansion proper. Elite specs may not be seen as sexy as announcing a new class but it's far more accessible and it means each expansion gets 9 new "classes" instead of only 1-3.

OS: Windows 10 CPU: Intel i5 2.9ghz GPU: Intel UHD 630 8GB RAM: 16GB MOBO: MSI B460 Other programs: Logitech Gaming Software, Windows Defender, n52te. If I'm feeling spicy, Malwarebytes and Task Manager as well. Resolution: ~10"x5" window on a 23.5" 1080p monitor (custom size through trial and error) Settings: Literally everything turned the lowest it can go and max model culling and lowest draw distance. All drivers are the most recent ones. I don't expect the game to be pretty but there's zero reason EoD should cause RAM to spike to 12+ GB and have the GPU spike to 8GB in an isolated part of EoD but hit 8-10GB of RAM and 6GB of GPU RAM during massive open world metas with ~100 other people there. Something on the game's end is off because while my specs are certainly low these days, they still meet or exceed the minimum specs Anet lists for EoD—released less than a year ago where nothing new has been added so should still be relevant—and I would expect to at least be able to zone in to the New Kaineng chest without my computer screaming at me that it's out of RAM and the CPU hitting max usage even if I couldn't do the EoD metas due to the sheer number of people there.

My GPU died earlier this month and I've had to swear off EoD maps. I could play the rest of the game without too much problem with my integrated graphics full screen and with mid-low settings but anything in EoD would cause system-wide lag. Even with a window less than half the size of my monitor and all settings turned as low as they can go, even zoning in to the New Kaineng chest spikes my CPU and motherboard to 100% capacity instantly. Rest of the game? 30%, 60-80% if it's a blob of people with particle effects. Unless I'm staring at a wall in EoD, then usage drops to 50%. But the moment I look up it hits 80%-100% instantly with New Kaineng being by far the worst. PoF-IBS maps do have slightly increased usage but there's no reason doing the northern Drizzlewood meta with all the snow and player effects should have a usage number far below standing in an empty spot in Kaineng with no players or weather effects.

You also need 8 clumps of suet for that recipe. Either you're killing animals to get it or killing Sons/Icebrood (meaning formerly sentient peers) and harvesting their body to get it. Not sure how you made it all the way to LW3 if you find kicking a chicken (which is fine afterward) to be too much since there's a lot of murder and killing of animals leading up to that point, either as a story step or as collateral damage.