Request to raise the decoration limit in the guild halls.

[shaya.4710]

Dear people of arenanet.

 

I've been playing GW2 since release and have loved it ever since. The many magical moments in this game have gradually made me become an ice princess. To the point where I wanted to build my own ice castle. You gave me the opportunity to do this through the wonderful guild halls. Unfortunately, the decoration limit prevents me from fully realizing my dream. For this purpose I would like to ask you from the bottom of my heart to at least raise the limit in order to build a castle that does justice to GW2.

 

With icy greetings
Guild Wars only true Ice Princess

[Ronin.4501]

7 hours ago, shaya.4710 said:

Dear people of arenanet.

 

I've been playing GW2 since release and have loved it ever since. The many magical moments in this game have gradually made me become an ice princess. To the point where I wanted to build my own ice castle. You gave me the opportunity to do this through the wonderful guild halls. Unfortunately, the decoration limit prevents me from fully realizing my dream. For this purpose I would like to ask you from the bottom of my heart to at least raise the limit in order to build a castle that does justice to GW2.

 

With icy greetings
Guild Wars only true Ice Princess

 

I can sympathize with you.  But you didn't specify whether you're requesting raising the decoration cap overall (it's currently at 2000 decorations per guildhall) or whether you're requesting the limit on how many decorations you can place in a single area?

 

I ask because if you're having issues with the decoration cap for a single area, I have a few suggestions that might help (and because it's unlikely that Anet will change the current caps).

1) Make certain you are NOT running the dx11 beta.  I decided to try the beta while I was making a minor change to a decorated area in my guildhall and suddenly the area cap was significantly reduced.

2) Play around with the decoration pieces as you're building.  What I mean by this is use ground targeting (at max range) so you can move the pieces around slightly, spacing them out slightly further to avoid the dreaded area decoration cap.

3) I know you have your heart set on an ice castle, but consider incorporating bigger pieces for the walls with the ice pieces spaced intermittently.  For example, the https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ominous_Fortress_Wall allows you to make enormous structures using few pieces.  

 

Please take a look at the video I linked in a recent post to see some examples of what I was able to build using those pieces. (specifically at 15:05 and also at 19:05)

 

Edited January 18, 2022 by Ronin.4501
added time marks to look at in the video

[shaya.4710]

I meant the decoration limit per area. Thats whats limiting me. .

 

1) I'm not running the beta so no problems on that front.

2) Thanks for the tipp, I'll try that one out!

3) Surely i could use other themes for a castle. But me being an ice princess has become so normal for my friends, I could never change that (not that I wanted anyway^^).

 

And wow, thats some huge builds you made there. Very impressive! My I ask what decoration you used as the ground floor in the video (15.55)?

[Ronin.4501]

On 1/28/2022 at 7:29 AM, shaya.4710 said:

I meant the decoration limit per area. Thats whats limiting me. .

 

1) I'm not running the beta so no problems on that front.

2) Thanks for the tipp, I'll try that one out!

3) Surely i could use other themes for a castle. But me being an ice princess has become so normal for my friends, I could never change that (not that I wanted anyway^^).

 

And wow, thats some huge builds you made there. Very impressive! My I ask what decoration you used as the ground floor in the video (15.55)?

Ah, the dreaded decoration area cap.  I can truly sympathize as several of the structures you saw in the video I posted had to be rebuilt multiple times because I ran out of space before I was finished.  Unfortunately the only advice I can offer is what I said above about using the ground targeting and tinkering slightly with the positioning of decorations to work around the area cap.  It's not super-helpful, but another thing I will do on occasion is place a lot of decoration pieces in an area I'm working on (using something like torches or crates) to get an idea of how many more decoration pieces I can put down before I'm capped. I'm not certain if different sized pieces count differently against the cap, but it can still at least give you an idea of how much "room" you have to play with.

Rather than changing one aspect of the theme (ice), perhaps consider changing another (castle)?  If the area decoration cap is limiting how many of the ice block pieces you can place, rather than attempting to build a continuous wall, perhaps consider a more open type of building, such as a temple (think of the Parthenon) which replaces walls with columns.  You could even forgo the columns along the sides and focus on placing the blocks in the corners.

Those are the racetrack decoration pieces (the piece you specifically asked about is the https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Racetrack_Long_Straightaway) acquired by doing the daily beetle race time trials (running the time trials will earn you race tokens, which can be used to purchase the decoration pieces from a vendor nearby).  They're EXTREMELY useful in making floors and ceilings but will require you to practice your beetle racing skills (or consider recruiting someone to your guild who is proficient at beetle racing).

The racetrack decoration pieces are also EXTREMELY useful in building other projects even where they may not be used in the final product, but rather where they serve another purpose: scaffolding.  Pieces such as the upward/downward ramps are great if you want to climb up to build in the sky; straightaways are great for either placing decorations upon and then deleting out afterwards to create floating decorations (which can also be used underwater to create decorations that "float" on top of the water) or creating a platform above a project to give you a better view of where you're placing decorations.

 

Best of luck!!

PS. Sorry for the numerous edits.  More helpful responses came to me throughout the day lol.

Edited February 4, 2022 by Ronin.4501

[Lamont.5973]

Ronin - amazing decorations.  Love em.  I am going to have to remember that temple of the gods idea - i've been messing around with a Greek column temple and that is fantastic

Shaya, since you really want an ice castle here are three different iterations of mine:

https://imgur.com/a/CfnmABU

Some things to know:

1) use the ice castle floors for corners and between every 2 lengths of ice castle walls.  The cylindrical floors not only make nice turrets but they are big enough (just barely) to make enough distance between sets of walls to help avoid the area decoration limit.

2) Try turning items around, exactly what part of each decoration counts toward the limit varies.  For instance, one end of the long race track counts but the other end does not so you can kind of sneak an extra one in sometimes simply by placing it from the other end.  This is also true with the ice walls but, since they are smaller, makes less difference

3) If you hit the limit sign out of the game and back in.  Some times the limit does not correctly reset if you have done a lot of deleting and replacing so allowing the guild hall instance to reset may be helpful.

4: Since you are making an ice castle use the ice floor you can get in the eye of the north.  It is huge and takes the place of 2 or three race track pieces when it come to making floors and ground work.

5: unfortunately, no matter what you, you will still be pretty limited about what you can actually put inside your castle because of the wall pieces so furniture may wind up having to be a bit sparse.  (I was able to get a decent amount into 1 and 3 because they had large spaced.  But with number 2 I had to be satisfied with a few large pieces of interior decoration)

Edited February 4, 2022 by Lamont.5973

[Ronin.4501]

On 2/4/2022 at 5:07 PM, Lamont.5973 said:

Ronin - amazing decorations.  Love em.  I am going to have to remember that temple of the gods idea - i've been messing around with a Greek column temple and that is fantastic

 

https://imgur.com/a/CfnmABU

 

Some things to know:

3) If you hit the limit sign out of the game and back in.  Some times the limit does not correctly reset if you have done a lot of deleting and replacing so allowing the guild hall instance to reset may be helpful.

Thank you for the compliments!!  Your work is extremely impressive as well!! I'm curious...do you have the interiors of your castles decorated as well?  If so, I'd love to see more pics!!

 

Also, I appreciate you sharing your suggestions for potential workarounds to the decoration cap.  Tip #3 was not something I was aware of, and whether you're new to decorating or have been doing it for years, I think we all benefit when we get together to share/discuss our suggestions for decorating!!  Thank you!!

[Lamont.5973]

On 2/6/2022 at 8:41 AM, Ronin.4501 said:

Thank you for the compliments!!  Your work is extremely impressive as well!! I'm curious...do you have the interiors of your castles decorated as well?  If so, I'd love to see more pics!!

Thanks. 

I don't really have good pictures of the insides as the angles were hard to get a good view.  The first castle was my first version.  Since it has a courtyard it did have a lot of trees and fountains.  The inside of the keep had a gold back wall, a throne, freezie's heart on the throne, a couple of banners and a char statue guard.  The third picture was actually my second attempt and it was largely a big open area so, again, lots of trees, a fountain, three raven shrines and the three shrines from bjora marches.

The second picture is my current castle (interior is the first of these pics - again hard to get a good interior angle for a pic).  It is intentionally minimalist inside.  It is supposed to be a sort of temple of snow in contrast to my temple of fire (pics 2 and 3).  I did have some other furniture besides the crystaline devourer and the snow but I removed them because the snow makers have an eerie wind sound so the emptiness and wind gave it the feel of winter out here on the plains of Wyoming so I Iiked the feeling of cold and desolation - kind of like where winter goes while it is waiting for summer to pass.

https://imgur.com/a/B6tSVKk

Edited February 8, 2022 by Lamont.5973

[Lamont.5973]

I do have one other suggestion for decorating.

  Some items like the cylindrical ice floors have significant overlap (the ice floors, for instance, overlap about 1/4 of their height).  So you can increase height and reduce the number of items in large structures by placing a flag pole at the correct spot on one ice floor and then placing the next ice floor along the pole to reduce the overlap then remove the pole.  This is true of many of the larger items such as the fountains and, if I recall correctly, the obsidian walls.

 

Edited February 8, 2022 by Lamont.5973

[Ronin.4501]

On 2/8/2022 at 4:58 AM, Lamont.5973 said:

Thanks. 

I don't really have good pictures of the insides as the angles were hard to get a good view.  The first castle was my first version.  Since it has a courtyard it did have a lot of trees and fountains.  The inside of the keep had a gold back wall, a throne, freezie's heart on the throne, a couple of banners and a char statue guard.  The third picture was actually my second attempt and it was largely a big open area so, again, lots of trees, a fountain, three raven shrines and the three shrines from bjora marches.

The second picture is my current castle (interior is the first of these pics - again hard to get a good interior angle for a pic).  It is intentionally minimalist inside.  It is supposed to be a sort of temple of snow in contrast to my temple of fire (pics 2 and 3).  I did have some other furniture besides the crystaline devourer and the snow but I removed them because the snow makers have an eerie wind sound so the emptiness and wind gave it the feel of winter out here on the plains of Wyoming so I Iiked the feeling of cold and desolation - kind of like where winter goes while it is waiting for summer to pass.

https://imgur.com/a/B6tSVKk

 

Wow your current castle is IMPRESSIVE!!!  I thought my watchtower was tall (11 stories) but your castle dwarfs it!  I'm curious as to how many wall pieces you used?  I know my watchtower had 108 wall pieces (108,000 candy corn!!!).

 

On 2/8/2022 at 8:01 AM, Lamont.5973 said:

I do have one other suggestion for decorating.

  Some items like the cylindrical ice floors have significant overlap (the ice floors, for instance, overlap about 1/4 of their height).  So you can increase height and reduce the number of items in large structures by placing a flag pole at the correct spot on one ice floor and then placing the next ice floor along the pole to reduce the overlap then remove the pole.  This is true of many of the larger items such as the fountains and, if I recall correctly, the obsidian walls.

 

 

I do something similar.  The https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ominous_Fortress_Wall has a good bit of vertical overlap, and when making my watchtower I also had to contend with the fact that I'd be placing 8-10 of those pieces on each level and I wanted them all at exactly the same height.  I would stack items like https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Basic_Crate to achieve the desired height, then place https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Racetrack_Long_Straightaway on top of the crates in the center of the structure, then add additional straightaways branching out in different directions so that I could add all 8-10 wall pieces around the outside of the structure and they'd all be uniform in height.  The following pictures showed an example of the process while I was building the watchtower.

https://imgur.com/VM0YBWB

https://imgur.com/bTTRd05

https://imgur.com/WcX3Exl

[Lamont.5973]

3 hours ago, Ronin.4501 said:

Wow your current castle is IMPRESSIVE!!!  I thought my watchtower was tall (11 stories) but your castle dwarfs it!  I'm curious as to how many wall pieces you used?  I know my watchtower had 108 wall pieces (108,000 candy corn!!!).

My fire castle is 16 stories all together using 147 pieces I think.  However, I doubt it is any taller than yours as I did not worry about overlap on this one so I suspect 11 stories with no overlap is about the same as my 16 with overlapping.  I think mine only looks taller because each successive story is a little smaller than the one below it so it gives a forced impression of perspective.