Originally posted by ReginaBuenaobra (Source)

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We want to give you a heads up: Starting with the new WvW rotation tomorrow, we will limit the free World transfer to one transfer every 24h. This should address some of the unwanted WvW exploits we have seen, while still giving people the opportunity to switch a server to play with their friends.

Some of those exploits mentioned are larger guilds transferring to other servers to clog their queues.

Graph is of Henge of Denravi

Originally posted by Mike Ferguson (Source)

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This data was collected from 8:00PM Sept 14th to 9:30PM Sept 18th. I believe the time zone listed is UTC, but I’m not 100% sure about that.

There can be up to four lines on each chart, one for each map that world is playing on. A line is only present for a map if it was full and there were people waiting in a queue. The map abbreviations are:

EB – Eternal Battlergrounds
RB – Red Team Borderlands
BB – Blue Team Borderlands
GB – Green Team Borderlands

Be sure to pay close attention to the vertical axis on each chart as the scale changes from world to world. Some worlds have hundreds of people queued for all four maps while other worlds might peak at a hundred in queue on one or two maps.

Unfortunately I just realized I didn’t put the world names on the chart. A chart’s filename matches the world it represents, so you’ll need to look at the end of the url when looking at a chart (or before clicking on it) to see what world it represents.

We thought these charts would be useful information for people to see, as it helps illustrate why some worlds have much longer waits than others. Hopefully it will also help some people decide to leave some of those higher population worlds for one of the worlds with smaller (or no) queues, which would reduce the queue pressure on the overloaded world and help provide more manpower for the smaller world.

Some other information we gathered from this timespan:
- Almost 30% of the total players who logged into the game queued up for WvW
- About 3% of the total players who logged in and queued never got in.

We’re completely ecstatic about the first number and not happy at all about the second. We’re looking at a number of short term and long term solutions that should help make that second number go down even if the first one goes up. As we make progress on those solutions we will keep you updated.

You can find all the graphs in the link supplied above. The graph shown above is the highest populated server (HoD) in the game. Kaineng appears to be the lowest where there is almost never a queue, and when it is, it’s 20 people or so.

Yesterday, Mike O’Brien, President of ArenaNet, had a few words to say about account security when it comes to Guild Wars 2 and other MMORPGs like it. He had more than a few words to say, in fact, and delved into some interesting topics, including the methods in which account thefts occur, how to successfully create passwords for games, the implication of gold sellers in a game with a cash shop, and the steps ArenaNet is taking to curb future instances of account theft.

O’Brien also mentioned this bit:

“We know customers also want a native implementation of two-factor authentication, and we want it too. This is an area where we should act faster as a company, and we’re going to. We had our own homegrown implementation of smartphone two-factor authenticator in testing, but we’re going to pull it back and instead integrate Guild Wars 2 with Google Authenticator, which already has robust authenticator implementations on most major smartphone platforms. We expect to roll this out in the next two weeks.”

First off, just let me say that the honesty here is refreshing. Secondly, great news on some type of authenticator heading our way in the weeks to come. In the announcement, O’Brien made a recommendation to all players, asking them to change their account passwords, and ensuring those passwords are used uniquely for Guild Wars 2.

Make sure and read the full news article.

For anyone who’s journeyed to a lower level area in order to help friends, complete exploration objectives, or gather crafting materials has noticed that part of the time, loot scales with a character’s level. The rest of the time, players receive loot equal to the area they’re in. This is quite an interesting mechanic in theory, one that attempts to strike a balance that meets the objectives of multiple players. Need Jute Scraps at level 40? No problem– run some starting area DEs. Helping guildmates in Metrica Province? Fear not– you might get some cool upgrades, so it’s still worthwhile to loot.

But what about in practice? Is it better to farm on a low level alt, or farm on a level 80? Also, how about WvW? How does loot scaling work there? Yesterday, Linsey Murdock, Games Designer, answered a couple questions in regards to WvW loot scaling. It seems that ArenaNet still might be working out some of the kinks in the system.

There has been wide spread complaints that the rewards for finishing your personal story have been quite lackluster. For example, some folks have been getting normal green and blue rewards while some people, at level 80, are getting level 30 or 40 items. Arenanet is looking into fixing this:

Originally posted by Jeffrey Vaughn (Source)

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I don’t set up rewards, so I don’t want to give any inacurrate information… But we are fixing this, and we’re looking at a retroactive reward for people who have already finished the final dungeon. (No ETA on either, sorry!) But you have not been forgotten, nor are you being ignored.

Mike Ferguson, systems designer at ArenaNet, had a few words to say about the current state of WvWvW yesterday in an official news article. In it, he talks a bit about Guild Wars 2′s queuing system for WvWvW, and how to make the most of it. He also discusses matching and the timing of matches, and how those times have chanced since headstart.

Here’s a snippet:

One reason some people experience long wait times is that we are still seeing extremely high concurrency rates, which makes queues longer on worlds that have a large number of players focused on WvW. We also discovered a bug that was allowing people to queue up and enter maps ahead of players who had been queued for much longer. Please check on our forums for an announcement when the fix has been implemented. This should fix the problem of some people staying queued for hours while other people can queue up for the same map and enter within a matter of minutes.

Make sure to check out the full news article to read the rest.

Here are the patch notes for today’s game update:

General

• Fixed missing female voice over lines that were not playing during some story cinematic sequences
• Fixed an issue where NPCs would stop moving and result in some events from being blocked
• Fixed a Mac client crash and added better crash reporting support

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Let me clarify the change a bit since not everyone understands it.

If you run the exact same chain twice in a row you will have your rewards cut. This means you can bounce back and forth between 2 different chains, even in the same dungeon without ever hitting this change. This change is made to encourage people to try different chains.

If you speed clear dungeons at a rate of more than 2/ hour, and continue to do that for some time your rewards will slowly begin to degrade. It doesn’t kick in after running a single dungeon and it doesn’t immediately zero out rewards.

Finally we reduced the value of repeating the story mode, because they are built to be easier and we want to encourage those repeating dungeons to run explore mode.

Originally posted by Robert Hrouda (Source)

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Hey folks, I’ve been reading this thread for a bit and figured I’d come weigh in on things. I built this dungeon, and fixed the problem, so I’m going to come at you from the designer perspective on things to try and illuminate why I did what I did, and what exactly I did. It wasn’t made clear, and I apologize for that.

The main thing I am seeing, is that people are upset that I took away their super profitable low risk, fast, token grind. I did not go into this thinking everyone would be happy with my changes – I knew I would be upsetting people because I was taking away a super easy speed-run money printer.

I took it away for a few reasons – chief among them being what I feel is taking advantage of a couple bugs found in the same chain, and our leashing/aggro system. I played with groups who did this, and watched you-tube clips of what was going on. The problems I identified with the speed run aspect of this are as follows:

• 1. You just need 1 person to get to the magmacyte across the magma field. This will cause an invulnerable Magg to run across the entire field through mobs and progress the dungeon. Then this person teleports back.
• 2. Instead of fighting the enemies in a timed event at he door buster, you just circle strafe them or leash aggro them to “kill the clock” since it was only a 100 second timer on the event.
• 3. Final Boss encounter isn’t threatening.

So what did I do?

• 1. I made it so that Magg has to get to the other side of the Magma field and close to the magmacyte – not just a player. Magg not taking aggro from nearby enemies was a big reason for this issue to be resolved. By giving him aggro, and forcing you to escort him to the ending, I fixed what I considered to be a bug/exploit that I introduced through poor planning.
• 2. I extended the time from 100 seconds to 200 seconds at the Door Buster event. I intended for you to fight those guys, not circle strafe them and aggro leash chain them. I also added 1 additional mob to the encounter at the very middle (a bow dude) to account for you now having twice the time to defeat the waves that come in.
• 3. I made the fireballs hurt more. Not greatly more – they’ll do about 3-4k damage to a DPS focused player, but you should have anywhere between 15k-25k HP, so there’s a bit of wiggle room for error.
• I made this path hard, because it was easy. It’s an explorable dungeon path, and they should be hard. Wearing the flame legion armor set should be a symbol of what you went through to obtain something. It should mean something. Right now it means you did 40 speedruns in 2 days.

I hope this helps a bit, but I understand you’re upset. For all it’s worth I’m sorry, and I hope we can move past this.

Many players anxiously awaited Guild Wars 2′s crafting system because of the ways in which it differs from other crafting systems found in most MMORPGs. The discovery system, the fact that crafting cast times aren’t stagnant, the idea of one character having access to all of the crafting disciplines, and, of course, the fact that crafting gives pretty awesome experience all ties into this original excitement. In fact, leveling through crafting was one of the ways the first level 80s leveled so quickly. ArenaNet definitely attempted to do something a little unique with the game’s crafting system.

Now that we’ve all had some time to take part in the adventures around Tyria, and see for ourselves what GW2′s crafting has to offer, the real question becomes– does GW2′s crafting system live up the hype? Is it as good in practice as it first sounded on paper? Each individual person is going to have their own answers to this question, naturally, but let’s take a look at both sides of the coin, shall we?

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Let me try and clarify myself a bit more. Death Shroud is very powerful because it gives Necromancer access to a secondary health bar which is is much more reliably renewable than normal health is for other professions. On top of that it essentially also gives them a 3rd weapon set that they can use to circumvent the basic weapon swap cooldown to reliably bounce between powerful skills in 3 different sets. For both of these reasons, Necromancer has a high power ceiling but also an extremely high learning curve.

In the current condition heavy meta-game, there is a lot of condition removal. The problem this is causing for Necromancers is that they do not have a lot of build diversity in this meta, because they don’t have any great power builds they can turn to. What I would like to try and do is increase build diversity without increasing effectiveness because I don’t believe we have really seen what strong Necromancers can do yet.

Hopefully that explains a bit where we stand. We are still working towards getting rid of all of the bugs in everyone’s skills and traits at which point we can get a much better idea of where everyone stands. That time will also give us the chance to see where the large amount of current players actually takes the meta game.
Jon

General

• Asuran players will now aim toward their targets when using a rifle.
• Fixed various broken events and skill challenges.
• Fixed various locations that allowed players to move outside the map.
• Fixed various locations on maps where players could become stuck.
• Discovery crafting may now use items directly from a player’s bank.
• Fixed bugs in the Exploration achievement so players can now receive 100% map completion.
• Added a system to limit the experience and gold that players can receive from speed-farming dungeons.

Story

• Fixed bugs in “A Different Dream,” “A Fragile Peace,” “Dredging Up the Past,” "Forging the Pact,” “Pastkeeper,” “Ships of the Line,” “Stealing Secrets,” “The Priory Assailed,” and “The Source of Orr.”
• Reduced the overall difficulty in “Dead of Winter.”

World-versus-World

• Retaliation: This boon no longer reflects damage received from siege weapons.
• The Experimental Rifle is no longer usable in World-versus-World.

Professions

Warrior

• Smoldering Arrow: This skill’s casting time has been reduced.

Mesmer

• The Prestige: This skill now requires full recharge if it’s interrupted at any time.

Thief

• Descent of Shadows: This trait’s effect can now only trigger once every 8 seconds.

Engineer

• Rocket Boots: This skill is no longer usable underwater. This is a temporary change until we can figure out why players can launch themselves into the sky using this skill.
• Detonate Mine Field: This skill is no longer a blast finisher.

Next up in our series of Guild Wars 2 area completion guides is Diessa Plateau, the second charr racial area, intended for players between levels 15-25. The area’s home of some interesting challenges, included three jumping puzzles, a cow-flinging catapult, and plenty of old, decrepit ruins waiting to be explored. To get there, travel to The Black Citadel, and head north through Memorial Quadrant and through the portal.

These completion guides are intended to help players achieve the completion series achievements. We’ll just be covering the more difficult-to-find Points of Interest, all of the Vista Points, all of the Skill Challenges, and the area’s jumping puzzles. Also included is a humungous map, with every major Point of Interest (PoI) and Waypoint (WP) labeled. Points of Interest have black-bordered text, Waypoints dark blue. Renown (heart) quests are also labeled with their suggested level. This should help you decide on a path of adventure, if you so choose.

I’ve also labeled nearby portals to other maps as well as the entrances to the map’s secret jumping puzzles. When reading my tips for completing the jumping puzzles, make sure to take a peek at the pictures that are linked at some of the tougher areas.

Players are reporting mixed feelings about Guild Wars 2′s dungeons so far. Some think they’re too difficultly tuned and not quite worth the rewards, others think they are just fine, and merely need an organized group and a bit of smart tactics to successfully clear. Yesterday, Colin Johanson, GW2′s Game Director, had a few things to say about the inherent difficulty of many of GW2′s dungeons and how dungeon difficulty in general was approached during the game’s alpha stages as well as in comparison to Guild Wars 1. It’s an interesting read!

Here’s a snippet:

I’ll point out ironically, when we first turned on DoA back in Gw1 the posts you’re seeing in this forum from a few folks about difficulty were the exact same comments everyone had about DoA. It was “impossible, mobs were just tuned to do insane damage and have huge HP, there was no tactics to defeat DoA”, etc. I went back and read through the original DoA launch feedback and it was literally identical to the comments folks on the forums are leaving now.

We made the choice back then to stick with the difficulty, and give people time to learn how to play the dungeon better and overcome it. A few months later, people viewed it as the most fun thing in the game and totally reasonable without us changing anything.

Keep reading for the rest of the quote!

Guild Wars 2 Junkies is proud to present our first episode of the GW2 Podcast. Listen to hosts Draegan and Clementine discuss the topics of the week along with a weekly update of W3 discussion. Draegan is the owner and editor of Guild Wars 2 Junkies and Clementine is a guild officer of PRX who is also kicks ass for the Titan Alliance; which dominates Henge of Denravi.

Listen to us each weeks as we give you the latest drama and news from WvW servers around the world. Each week we’ll also round up the news of the week while dropping wisdom. We’ll also try to bring on guests from different Alliances and Guilds from all over the world.

We’re also beginning a contest to name our show. If you’ve got a great idea for a name send it to [email protected] with the subject line: “GW2 Junkies Podcast Naming Contest”. The winner will receive either a free copy of the game or $50 in Diamonds. This contest is open ended and will end once we have a name we like the best.

If you have any ideas for topics or have any tips for us you’d like to hear on the show send an email to [email protected].

STREAM HERE
 
[DIRECT DOWNLOAD]

Coming soon on iTunes!

Yesterday, John Smith talks to us about the Market, the Economy and Statistics! Arenanet has put in some Mystic Forge recipes in the short term to take out specific items from the economy so that it isn’t diluted. These recipes return boxes which contain gold and other useful items.

More interesting however, is that Arenanet has released some information regarding the distribution of classes in the game. Warrior appears to be the most popular class and the least popular seems to be Engineer or Mesmer. Where do you stand?

Also if you were wondering about recent exploits and why they are bad? Here’s your explination:

Exploits are a really interesting topic because they are, in the end, dangerous and self-defeating. The game has gotten to a point in size where there is no such thing as a single player discovering an exploit. Exploits come in waves of mass participation and in the end, if they aren’t dealt with, the economy becomes hyper-inflated. After mass exploitation, your wealth is only relative to how good you were at exploiting, rather than your success in the game. This damages the integrity of the game and makes it unfriendly to new and honest players. There have been cases where exploits have severely damaged and arguably killed a game.

Read the full blog post here.