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.

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

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.

Originally posted by Mike Ferguson (Source)

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The match that ends Friday September 14 is scheduled to be our last 24 hour match.
The match that starts on Friday will be 1 week in length. We anticipate having week long matches for a couple weeks before switching to the 2 week format.

We are switching to a 1 week schedule so we can continue to let the ranking formula adjust server rankings faster than every 2 weeks, and it will hopefully help people get acclimated to the cadence of a longer match.

Originally posted by MikeFerguson (Source)

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Starting on September 1 we began using the results of the 24 hour WvW matches to begin rematching worlds using our matchmatching system. We needed to fix a few bugs with the matchmaking server in the first few days which is why our data starts at that point.

Below are the current up to date rankings for all worlds. At some point we would like to deliver this data in a much better format but for now we just want to get the data out there for everyone to take a look at.

I am still trying to format the results of the 24 hour matches so I can start posting them here as well, but right now I have an excel table with lots of columns that I need to convert over and it’s not playing nice. Hopefully I can post them sometime in the next few days. I’ll try to update this thread with current rankings whenever possible.

Continue reading to see the results.

Guildwars 2 is now live and it’s one of the fastest growing MMORPGs on the planet and we’re looking for help to cover everything that might be interesting! If you love the game and want to share your knowledge and skill with the rest of the world, this is the best place to do it. We’re looking for all types of talent from writers, to bloggers, to video recorders. Here are a few details.

• Guide Writers: Dungeons, Crafting, Professions, Leveling
• Bloggers: Write about your stories. If it’s interesting, we’ll publish it.
• Community Beat Writers: Want to write about guild drama? The latest funny video? Find a great guide you want to talk about? This position is for you.
• News Writers: Help cover the up to date news of Arenanet and GW2

Maybe you want to do all of them? It’s up to you. There are no deadlines, no expectations; we just want you to have fun and be part of building something great. So if you’re really interested in joining Junkies Nation shoot me an email at [email protected] and let me know how you’d like to help. Make sure you include a short writing sample as well!

The official forums are now officially launched with full profession, game, pve etc. discussion ready to go.

Official forum link: https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum

From Arenanet’s latest Press Release:

ArenaNet suspended first-party sales and retail replenishment on August 30—just two days after the game’s retail release—to catch up with record demand and to ensure that players who bought the game would continue to have the best online experience possible. Despite the suspension of first-party sales and retail replenishment, Guild Wars 2 grabbed the number one position in the All Formats charts across 10 European markets— the first PC game in the UK to have accomplished this in nearly two years.

Since suspending sales, ArenaNet and NCsoft have substantially expanded the game’s capacity by deploying new servers in both North America and Europe, and by nearly doubling the number of customer support agents. Game systems that have been under extremely heavy demand, such as the Trading Post, have been bolstered and prepared for the continued influx of players.

“Preserving the customer experience has always been our top priority,” said Mike O’Brien, president and cofounder of ArenaNet. “We’re supporting Guild Wars 2 for the long run. We’ll always do what it takes to deliver the best online gaming experience for our customers, even when that means throttling sales.”

To celebrate the reopening of sales, ArenaNet has released the Our Time Is Now video. The video was directed by James McTeigue, known for his work on the Matrix Trilogy and V for Vendetta. Our Time Is Now captures the revolutionary spirit of Guild Wars 2 and puts forth a call-to-arms for gamers everywhere.

Account Security

Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else! If your current password isn’t unique to Guild Wars 2, change it today! Do not under any circumstances use the same password for Guild Wars 2 as you do for your email account.

We’ve observed hack attempts against hundreds of thousands of accounts that don’t even exist. To protect those people in case they purchase Guild Wars 2 and create an account, we will now disallow customers from picking passwords that we’ve previously seen used in a hack attempt.

See this article for more tips on choosing good passwords and keeping your account secure.

Account Security
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!

When accounts are hacked and then used for botting or spamming ads for gold sales, we ban the accounts until we can return them to their rightful owner. If you login and see the message, “this account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement,” and you’re not a gold seller, it’s likely that your account was hacked. Please contact customer support using the instructions below.

If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn’t initiate and from someplace you don’t recognize, that’s a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account. You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.

Account Security

Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.

To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!

Today a Guild Wars related fan site announced that its account database has been breached. That’s important but just one of many apparent breaches of other games and web sites that hackers have been collecting email addresses and passwords from. Protect yourself by using a unique password for each game and web site account you care about, and especially be sure to use a unique password for your Guild Wars 2 account.

Account Security

Read this! If you don’t want your account hacked, don’t use the same email address and password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve used for another game or web site. Hackers have big lists of email addresses and passwords that they’ve harvested from malware and from security vulnerabilities in other games and web sites, and they’re systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.

We’re doing everything we can to protect you. But to protect you in this case, we have to start with, “the hacker knows this person’s account name and password; now how do we keep him from stealing the account?” That’s hard to protect against. Don’t let it get to that point. Please immediately change your password to a new, strong, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.

Hacked Accounts

Our customer support team is prioritizing tickets from customers with hacked accounts or who are otherwise blocked from logging into the game. If your account was hacked, please follow these instructions for submitting a ticket, to make sure that your ticket is correctly prioritized and to make sure you’re submitting all the information we need to restore your access.

For hacked accounts, expect a response within 72 hours. As of this writing we’re working on tickets submitted August 30. If you submitted a hacked account ticket on August 29 or earlier, and haven’t received a response yet, your ticket may not be correctly prioritized. In that case, please submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, “Hacked Account – Ticket submitted August 2x – Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx” (fill in the date and ticket number), and we will prioritize your existing (August 29 or earlier) ticket.

Reset Password

We’re leaving the “reset password” feature disabled for now. If you forgot your password, please contact the customer support team.

We’re leaving this disabled for now because we believe that a significant number of customers are unaware that hackers have the passwords for their email accounts. If we enable “reset password”, a hacker who can get into an email account can use that access to get into the associated Guild Wars 2 game account.

Email Authentication

Email authentication is a feature we use to prevent hackers from gaining access to an account even if they know the account name and password.

We suffered an outage of email authentication mails today, preventing players from authorizing logins from new locations. This is now resolved.

When you receive an email authentication message, or any other email from [email protected], do not mark the email as spam! If you do, your email provider may prevent you from seeing any future email authentication messages.

Parties, Guilds, etc.

We’ve made significant fixes to parties and guilds. However, you may still see intermittent outages. These outages cause symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, party members not staying in the same overflow servers as they travel between maps, party members not joining dungeons together, and guild invites not working.

Trading Post

We’re periodically opening the Trading Post for testing. This morning it was open to all players for six hours. As of this writing, the Trading Post is offline so we can apply further bug fixes and performance improvements.

This morning during testing, some users purchased items and didn’t immediately receive them, or sold items and didn’t immediately receive the gold. We do have record of these transactions and are working on completing them. Check the “pick up” tab on your commerce panel to see if your transaction has completed.

PvP Tournaments

PvP tournaments were temporarily disabled today. We have now restored them.

World v. World

World v. World matches are now updating daily. We’re running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Worlds

We added three new worlds in Europe on Thursday, and three new worlds in America on Friday, and increased the population limits on all worlds.

Overflow

During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. If you want to play with a friend, but you’re not on the same overflow servers, you can form a party together, then right-click on your friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”.

We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.

Botting and exploits

It is our policy to permanently ban accounts engaged in botting and exploits, and we’re ramping up to do that.

If you discover an exploit in the game, do not exploit it or publicize it, but instead please notify us immediately at this new email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. (This email address is for notifying us of emergency exploits. We cannot respond individually to questions sent to this address.)

Forums

Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.

Next software updates

We’re making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We’ll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.

Arenanet is serious business. They are policing this game tremendously and they are doing a great job of it. Not only have they been banning people for using excessive language (which was hilarious by the way) they are taking people down who abused a bug in the game. There were certain karma vendors and an exploit that allowed you to buy weapons for 60 karma when they should of been around 63,000 karma. People were buying 100′s of these weapons and then heading over to the Mystic Forge. Here’s what Anet had to say on the subject:

Today we banned a number of players for exploiting Guild Wars 2. We take our community and the integrity of the game very seriously, and want to be clear that intentionally exploiting the game is unacceptable. The players we banned were certainly intentionally and repeatedly exploiting a bug in the game. We intended to send a very clear message that exploiting the game in this way will not be tolerated, and we believe this message now has been well understood.

We also believe and respect that people make mistakes. This is in fact the first example of a widespread exploit in the game. With this in mind, we are offering the members of our community who exploited the game a second chance to repair the damage that has been done.

Thus, just this once, we will offer to convert permanent bans to 72-hour suspensions. Should those involved want to accept this offer of reinstatement, contact us on our support website–support.guildwars2.com—and submit a ticket through the “Ask a Question” tab. Please use the subject heading of “Karma Weapons Exploit Appeal”, then confirm in the body of your ticket that you will delete any items/currency that you gained from the exploit. You should submit only one ticket. Once you have done so, we will lower your ban to 72 hours, and following your re-activation we will check your account to make sure that you have honored your commitment. If that commitment is not honored, we will re-terminate the account.

This is a first and final warning. Moving forward, please make sure you that when you see an exploitable part of the game, you report it and do not attempt to benefit from it.
We look forward to seeing you in game,

Yours Sincerely,
Chris Whiteside- Lead Producer ArenaNet

Other people have been getting banned for exploiting parts of the game. For example, a popular streamer was buying cooking materials for cheap karma, combining them, and selling them for a large profit. So this should be a warning to everyone out there: if there is a part of the game that seems too good to be true, don’t take advantage of it. You’ll get the bannhammer.

This is the current status of the most important issues we’re tracking with Guild Wars 2 live service.

Account security – We’re seeing an uptick in reports of account theft and attempted account theft. We believe hackers are using databases of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and pre-existing trojan horses, to search for matching Guild Wars 2 accounts which they attempt to compromise. To prevent this, we have temporarily disabled the “reset password” feature, and we’re working to bring email authentication online. To protect yourself, please ensure that you use a unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you don’t use for any other game, email account, forum or web account.