EagleDelta.4726

@"Chris Cleary.8017" himself popped into the Reddit thread when the Build Templates released to talk about how he worked with delta to create something that was acceptable to ANet. It was still a "Use at your own risk" plugin, but it was OK'd by ANet with the caveat that it would have to be removed if they ever made their own version of the feature. I do agree with most of what else you said, though you don't need to be so combative in your responses.

Coming from a tech background working as both a Systems Engineer and now a Software/Backend Developer, I don't want them to go back to Expansions if they can avoid it. Expansion style work/releases are simply not really viable for the longterm health of a project anymore.... unless it's an established product already deep into that model (which GW2 has never really been in). It requires a lot of extra work from devs (who don't get paid extra for that work.... we are usually exempt salary which means no overtime in exchange for a steady paycheck), increased stress, increased risk on release day, decreased quality of work due to increased stress, rushed work, etc. If you want a full breakdown of different release cadences, take a look about 1/2 way down this page: http://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/choose-release-cadence/Note that the release cadence that Expansion fall into (Annual releases and "More than annual" releases) have is significantly higher risk associated with deployment as so many moving parts are touch at once and/or several changes introduced at once. Not to mention that the "Higher risk" ends up usually being a self-fulfilling problem caused by the less frequent releases. You mean the skins that people will eventually stop buying because they already have them? Or the "upgrades" that people already have because they bought all they needed? They have to make money and sometimes that means looking forward and covering for when people don't need the initial products anymore. Additionally, as I mentioned, you're ignoring some factors here: Cost to make and maintain GW2 is higher than GW1 ever was (or will be)We don't have anyway of know how much GW1's shop has made vs GW2's. I'm sure that you're right and it has made more money, but you don't know what the actual margins are.Revenue != Profit. Just because GW2 gets a decent amount of revenue from the Gem Store (Which I think is what we see in the quarterly reports), that doesn't translate into profit. A company's goal is profit. I.E. the amount of money actually brought in after all the employees are paid, their benefits are paid, infrastructure costs are paid, rent is paid, etc. We don't know those details....

I remember recalling that they specifically stated the gem store would be cosmetics and convenience. That's been a thing since the beginning. Just because someone spent their free time making a .DLL file that gave pseudo build templates for free doesn't mean you should expect that from a bunch of devs who need to get paid.

Then don't purchase them carry on using Arc templatesThere won't be Arc templates. They will be shut down as soon as ingame templates appear - that was the deal between delta and GW2 devs. @shadow.6174 said:For those complaining about additional ones being charged or too few slots... that's why we hardly get nice stuff, whenever something is made, there are always some whining :tongue: Impossible to please everyone.Nah, the reason why we nardly get nice stuff is that, like in this case, whenever Anet decides to do something nice, they always add something to make us sorry we ever asked for it. Because you want everything for free and continually ignore what it costs to actually make this stuff. Every content update PvE has gotten since PoF has been free. Everything. WvW hasn't had a content update in years. Most of the players use build templates. Monetized, and ban the free version. Yea...You completely ignored the points I made in there, nice. We knew when Arc templates came out that if ANet ever decided to make their own templating system, that ArcTemplates would end.ANet has to make money.... they don't make money, they can't pay bills or employees, and both GW1 and GW2 die completely.You can't make money on the same things all the time. Any business that has tried to make money simply on the same exact product forever has failed. There's a reason Windows has changed so much over the years, why Google sells phones and chromebooks now, and why the Gem Store cycles through their skins/mounts/gliders and add things like this to it. People won't buy the same things forever. Without diversification, there is no cash flow, without cash flow there is no business.

Then don't purchase them carry on using Arc templatesThere won't be Arc templates. They will be shut down as soon as ingame templates appear - that was the deal between delta and GW2 devs. @shadow.6174 said:For those complaining about additional ones being charged or too few slots... that's why we hardly get nice stuff, whenever something is made, there are always some whining :tongue: Impossible to please everyone.Nah, the reason why we nardly get nice stuff is that, like in this case, whenever Anet decides to do something nice, they always add something to make us sorry we ever asked for it.Because you want everything for free and continually ignore what it costs to actually make this stuff. Comparing it to GW1 doesn't make sense as most of that game's development was over 12 years ago...... I've been in tech for 10 years and things have changed ALOT in 10 years. For one, pay for everyone has gone up and devs have gone up in cost. A single team of 10ish devs can cost anywhere between $1/2 million to more than $1 million a year depending on skill level, especially once you factor in the benefits for those employees. And this is one team of just developers, I'm not counting the managers, designers, writers, artists, etc. Then factor in datacenter costs, costs for engineers to manage those datacenters (separate from the devs), support personnel (which tends to have more people in the company than the dev teams), etc. Compare to GW1 all you want, but the ongoing development of that game was short-lived when compared to GW2. With GW1 I had 3 $50 purchases to make and 1 $40 purchase to make for everything. With GW2, I've paid $60, $50, and $30 to get the base content and expansions. I've paid nothing for LW content. So already they make less on the physical copies of GW2 than GW1, especially when you factor in the fact that costs to make this stuff increased, not decreased, over time.

I believe this statement answers your question ...... "Equipment Templates can also record the customization of legendary items, which can freely change attributes and upgrades. You can equip a single legendary item to multiple Equipment Templates with different attributes and upgrade choices for each." The issue is that those who will most likely use templates can use a large number of different runes/sigils for different scenarios (like changing runes/sigils between fractals) an can easily have wy more then 3 or 4 different varieties all for the same armor stats. The impression I've gotten from the people I play with and the average player is that the player base that needs more than the 3 build, 2 equipment, 3 storage (+3 more) is actually a huge (but vocal) minority. The company has to make money or the game goes away. Developers are expensive to have on staff, so to justify the time spent on this feature, they have to charge money somehow. And doing so will only kitten of the player base, because they are losing what is a free system with infinite options that they have had access to for years. It's this or a subscription, you choose. Why are those the only two options? That's a false dichotomy. There are other options too. Just because they offer this, that doesn't mean that it's either their offer or a subscription fee.How else do you suppose they make money then and pay their devs? As I've already stated devs are not cheap. There's a reason that in the 90s and early 2000s many "old-school" companies (and some current ones) see the Devs/Admins/Engineers as a black hole of cost. Technology is expensive, and will continue to be as long as there are more jobs than bodies to fill those jobs. You want this game around, then it has to monetize. Boxed prices can only be used for large content releases, but those don't sustain the game on its own, if it did then MMOs would've always worked that way. It doesn't MMOs have always functioned with MTX and/or Subs as the primary income source. Players don't want a rise in boxed price, players don't want to pay subs, players don't want to pay MTX...... what is the option then?

Question for the devs: How do the Character bound Build Template tabs interact with the Account Bound Build storage? Will there be anything similar to the Build Storage for Equipment templates in the future? Thanks for the hard work!

I believe this statement answers your question ...... "Equipment Templates can also record the customization of legendary items, which can freely change attributes and upgrades. You can equip a single legendary item to multiple Equipment Templates with different attributes and upgrade choices for each." The issue is that those who will most likely use templates can use a large number of different runes/sigils for different scenarios (like changing runes/sigils between fractals) an can easily have wy more then 3 or 4 different varieties all for the same armor stats. The impression I've gotten from the people I play with and the average player is that the player base that needs more than the 3 build, 2 equipment, 3 storage (+3 more) is actually a huge (but vocal) minority. The company has to make money or the game goes away. Developers are expensive to have on staff, so to justify the time spent on this feature, they have to charge money somehow. And doing so will only kitten of the player base, because they are losing what is a free system with infinite options that they have had access to for years. It think you're being overly dramatic about this. Most people I play GW2 with don't even use ArcDPS, let alone Arc Templates. It breaks after every update and doesn't add enough to be worth the effort when it does work. Even then builds randomly disappear from it and if your PC/Laptop/Harddrive went down/died you lost the templates.I know non-technical users like to compare things like this as if they're the same..... they're not. To you it may seem that way, but you're comparing a plugin someone worked on in their spare time to something a company put money, a lot of it too, into. Additionally, a dev can cost between $70-100K per dev/per year (sometimes less for junior devs, and a lot more for senior devs). You have to justify where that dev spends his time otherwise the company (whose goal is to make money) won't approve the work. It's this or a subscription, you choose. I am not being dramatic about this at all, just pointing out that the system being used is likely to annoy the players who would use it. Most of GW2 player base does not care about builds at all. Thus this template thing is useless to them. Templates are used by those who have a lot of characters and whose characters change their build a lot, as in the more hardcore community. Correct the company put time and money into this, something that should have been released at the start of the game given it already existed in GW1. As the years went on and there was no signs of a template, another person spent their personal time to make something that was free to the user with essentially unlimited slots. True it would break when there where game changes, but that was because there where game changes and there where constant updates to fix it. Now that templates are coming to the game itself, that hardcore community is losing their free unlimited template, and you think they will be happy with this change?The problem with your argument about someone else putting their own time into it for unlimited templates..... the community will always be able to do things and give people things for free that ANet can't do. They don't get to work on templates for free/in their own time for us. It never has and never will work that way in business. Additionally, we don't get to say "you can't charge for that, it should've been in at the beginning". That's not how design works. Just because players ended up taking things beyond the original design does not mean that ANet ever intended there to be a need for build templates. The GW2 player base demands/expects a lot without realizing the fact that only some of those desires can be met at any given time.

To add onto this: Several DPS meters offer plugins for build and gear templates (completely free, btw). ArcDPS notably has had the feature for years now. These templates supported theoretically infinite numbers of build and gear templates. My questions are thus: Why are you downgrading players on a feature that we have been promised for years? And charging for the privilege too? I thought Nintendo Switch Online was a bad joke, but jeez. ArcDPS agreed to discontinue their build template tool if ANet ever made their own. Not only that, but the dev announced back when the work on Build Templates was made known that he was discontinuing development on the Arc templates. Once this goes live and the Arc Dev no longer maintains his, then it will be a bannable offense to use the template tool. Which is pretty sad, because as others have pointed out in this thread, you could just save the traits chat code in a text file, thereby circumventing their monetization. The only thing you couldn't save independently would be the equipment setup.It could very well be that is intentional on ANet's side. Allow you to keep the text files around for the capabilities and monetize the convenience of already having the saved template in the game. :shrug:

I get what you're feeling, but you have to keep in mind that in the last 14 years the cost of making games (specifically the cost to hire experienced developers and artists, etc) has gone up. The cost to maintain a game running at this scale is not cheap and money has to be brought in to offset those costs AND profit. Those costs include employees, benefits for employees, server costs, network bandwidth costs, storage costs, backup storage costs, security costs, compliance/auditing costs, office costs, etc. Where I work, we do that by charging out customers (other businesses usually) monthly or yearly recurring fees based on usage, etc. We also work on our back end to improve the performance of our systems, usually unbeknownst to our customers, to reduce maintenance costs and improve revenue and income. So, while the cost of making and maintaining a game (or any persistent tech stack) has gone up, the average cost of boxed content has stayed the same or gone down. That money has to be made up somewhere and players/customers don't seem to be keen on subscriptions or price hikes, so that's where the Gem store/MTX stuff came in. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Nothing stays the same forever and GW1 was in a very different world than GW2 (and it costs very little money to continue running due to its unique nature compared to other MMOs)

I believe this statement answers your question ...... "Equipment Templates can also record the customization of legendary items, which can freely change attributes and upgrades. You can equip a single legendary item to multiple Equipment Templates with different attributes and upgrade choices for each." The issue is that those who will most likely use templates can use a large number of different runes/sigils for different scenarios (like changing runes/sigils between fractals) an can easily have wy more then 3 or 4 different varieties all for the same armor stats. The impression I've gotten from the people I play with and the average player is that the player base that needs more than the 3 build, 2 equipment, 3 storage (+3 more) is actually a huge (but vocal) minority. The company has to make money or the game goes away. Developers are expensive to have on staff, so to justify the time spent on this feature, they have to charge money somehow. And doing so will only kitten of the player base, because they are losing what is a free system with infinite options that they have had access to for years.It think you're being overly dramatic about this. Most people I play GW2 with don't even use ArcDPS, let alone Arc Templates. It breaks after every update and doesn't add enough to be worth the effort when it does work. Even then builds randomly disappear from it and if your PC/Laptop/Harddrive went down/died you lost the templates.I know non-technical users like to compare things like this as if they're the same..... they're not. To you it may seem that way, but you're comparing a plugin someone worked on in their spare time to something a company put money, a lot of it too, into. Additionally, a dev can cost between $70-100K per dev/per year (sometimes less for junior devs, and a lot more for senior devs). You have to justify where that dev spends his time otherwise the company (whose goal is to make money) won't approve the work. It's this or a subscription, you choose.

To add onto this: Several DPS meters offer plugins for build and gear templates (completely free, btw). ArcDPS notably has had the feature for years now. These templates supported theoretically infinite numbers of build and gear templates. My questions are thus: Why are you downgrading players on a feature that we have been promised for years? And charging for the privilege too? I thought Nintendo Switch Online was a bad joke, but jeez. ArcDPS agreed to discontinue their build template tool if ANet ever made their own. Not only that, but the dev announced back when the work on Build Templates was made known that he was discontinuing development on the Arc templates. Once this goes live and the Arc Dev no longer maintains his, then it will be a bannable offense to use the template tool.

I believe this statement answers your question ...... "Equipment Templates can also record the customization of legendary items, which can freely change attributes and upgrades. You can equip a single legendary item to multiple Equipment Templates with different attributes and upgrade choices for each." The issue is that those who will most likely use templates can use a large number of different runes/sigils for different scenarios (like changing runes/sigils between fractals) an can easily have wy more then 3 or 4 different varieties all for the same armor stats.The impression I've gotten from the people I play with and the average player is that the player base that needs more than the 3 build, 2 equipment, 3 storage (+3 more) is actually a huge (but vocal) minority. The company has to make money or the game goes away. Developers are expensive to have on staff, so to justify the time spent on this feature, they have to charge money somehow.

In fact, DX12 has more in common with Vulkan than DX9/10/11. It was an entire rewrite from the ground up and was borne out of the AMD Mantle project (just like Vulkan was).

You got to play the expansion since you bought it up to now when they couldn't. This kind of promotion is nothing new. The expansions have gone on sale numerous times. Should those that bought them when they came out at full price feel entitled to receive compensation? @Ayrilana.1396 said: You got to play the expansion since you bought it up to now when they couldn't. This kind of promotion is nothing new. The expansions have gone on sale numerous times. Should those that bought them when they came out at full price feel entitled to receive compensation? On sale is one thing .. free is another. Lets keep it real here. Not really. Lol. I see. So I buy a Hyuandai, my neighbor gets one later on sale, everyone else gets a free one. No diff, huh? You're ignoring the key point that someone else already made.... every other MMO already does this and usually far sooner than GW2 does. This is not unusual

They hyped up over the last season that LW can deliver Expansion level content, even to the point of making it an expectation for this announcement. ArenaNet set the expectations here, not the players

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 - After you add d9vk support, could you keep the non-d9vk support around until Nvidia stable drivers catch up to the beta ones? Some distros (namely Pop!_OS from OEM System76) have some QoL and performance improvements that they install for Nvidia Optimus that, but they only support stable drivers, they do not include beta drivers in their repo. Installing with the Graphics Drivers PPA will uninstall their system power and Optimus tools as they conflict with what the nvidia-prime package tries to do.

Anyone seeing FPS slowdown since the last patch?

@"ArmoredVehicle.2849" I'm not familiar with how their "builds"/Install scripts work either :(It's something I'm willing to look at, but it won't be until closer to the end of Oct, busy with some other FOSS/Conference obligations first.It would be nice to update the Wiki page about running GW2 under WINE with your build and a link to this Forum post

@"ArmoredVehicle.2849" - Would you be willing to have your build used as the Semi-"official" process for running GW2 via WINE and link to it on the GW2 Wiki and/or creating a Lutris installer for it? This way (long term) you don't have to necessarily be the only maintainer of this

May I ask what kind of instabilities are you getting? Of course. I can try again this evening, but last night (1) the new package first crashed to limit of open files, which I fixed based on the info here, and (2) after reboot it still crashed to an error I can't remember atm. I reverted the changes I made and went back using previous one. It might not be optimal, but for me it is OK if it can run PvP and WvW in minimal (graphics) settings. If you want, I can try the patch again this evening? EDIT: I'm running GW2 on Linux Mint 18.3, if that matters. It's Ubuntu-based distribution.I had the same issue. If you are running on a newer Linux distro that uses SystemD, then SystemD is managing the open files limit and /etc/security/limits.conf is ignored. I'll take a look at my configuration tonight and post what I have setup (I'm using Pop!_OS 18.04), because you'll also have to setup your system to allow your user to change process priority as well.

@ArmoredVehicle.2849 I'm getting a Network Error when attempting to download the latest update