Over this past weekend, Colin Johanson, Guild Wars 2′s Game Director had a few words to share on the philosophy behind PvP ranks and ArenaNet’s stance on the addition of competitive, instanced PvP such as the new paid tournaments coming to the game in Shadow of the Mad King, Guild Wars 2′s first major content update. He also hints on more PvP content in the future:

Originally posted by Colin Johanson (Source)

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Rank is intended to be a metric to show much how you’ve played of PvP, and how experienced you are over-all as a result. The various banners that come with rank is a bit of a prestige thing that says “I’ve played me a ton of PvP!”

The addition of our new paid tournaments, and the features that will follow after it will be how we answer that clear question of: “who is the best”. We think it’s important to have both. As we begin our new live releases, starting with Shadow of the Mad King (and the new pvp hero tab and paid tournaments) you’ll see pvp feature additions come very regularly going forward!

All the best and happy n00b stomping,

As a random note, I kind of like any game developer who’s comfortable saying a phrase like “n00b stomping”.

Over the weekend, Cameron Dunn, Studio Tech Director of ArenaNet had an update for the guilds out there that are still experiencing issues as a result of a bug in Guild Wars 2′s guild leadership system:

First of all I want to apologize for the radio silence on this issue. I should have kept everyone up to date with our progress in tracking this down, and sadly I didn’t. I apologize.

However, I have some good news. We are pretty sure that we’ve found and fixed the bug with guild leadership. The fix will be going out in the next build.

I can’t officially tell you when the next build is, but let’s just say that you don’t have to wait very long from this point.

Once this bug is fixed, hopefully both the entirely missing guilds and the guild permissions problem will be things of the past. We also have a solution in the works for restoring missing influence, but that’s something the community team can tell you more about as it becomes official.

Apologies again, and I can’t wait to get this next build out and make everyone’s experience better!

Good news on a fix coming for this long-standing issue.

Yesterday, John Peters, Game Designer for Guild Wars 2, had a few interesting things to say about the diminishing returns some players are seeing for rewards such as karma during dynamic events. These diminishing returns, it seems, were put in place to stop bots and economy-breaking exploits, and not normal players who happen to be enjoying an endgame gear farming session. The problem? It’s affecting everyone, even some players at lower levels.

Guild Wars 2 is a game about freedom. We want you to be able to explore the world and engage in a huge variety of activities, focusing on whatever best suits your tastes.

Some players have run into “diminishing returns” thresholds we put into the game to provide a safety net against unanticipated economy-breaking issues. We do have these thresholds in place, but it’s not our intention that normal players should ever run into them. We’ve recently had bugs and imbalances that have caused normal players to hit thresholds, and we’ll fix those.

These systems are put in place to protect the economy from botters and exploiters. We will close exploits as quickly as we can. These thresholds help create a safety net to keep the economy safe when we aren’t there to deal with the offender. It’s important to have a safety net in place. It would be bad for everyone if, for example, a group of players learned how to speed-clear a dungeon in 5 minutes, with full rewards each time, and then repeated that continuously. When one activity emerges that’s order of magnitudes more profitable than anything else in the game, it forces everyone to either engage in that activity or get priced out of the economy.

While we need a safety net to stop unanticipated economy-breaking exploits and botting, we have no desire to stop farming. Farmers are a part every online economy and when they are doing normal game activity they do not cause any harm. If a player finds a normal game activity fun and would like to keep doing it, that’s fine with us.

Initially we have to rely on smaller data sets, instinct and some guesswork to find the correct cutoff. What this means is that some players are going to bump into the edges of these systems for a while as we get them sorted out. Please bear with us while we gather more data and lower the safety net until it’s only providing critical economy protection. Looking at the numbers this morning, we believe some of the threshold systems are just too harsh empirically and we’ll be adjusting those systems within the next few weeks to ensure that fewer legitimate players are being impacted.

I hope this helps to explain why a game like this needs systems such as this to protect its economy. I also hope it gives some insight into our philosophy about botters (BAD) and exploiters (BAD) vs. farmers (GOOD). Thanks for your support and we will see you in game.

If you enjoy playing melee or know someone who does, you’re probably familiar with two in-game combat messages when it comes to the burrow areas of Explorable Ascalonian Catacombs and quests involving destroying supply carts and similar items– “Miss” and “Obstructed”. There’s a bug that’s been around since the beginning where melee and physical damage weapons seem to miss more often than not when it comes to facing these dangerous enem– er, objects.

Robert Hrouda, Content Designer of ArenaNet, acknowledged this bug yesterday on the official forums, and had a few words to say regarding it:

We’re aware of this problem, and it affects more than just the burrows. There are certain gadgets where if you stand still and melee attack them, you miss or get the obstructed pop-up. However if you continue to move around while attacking, you hit it. This is most apparent during “hundred blades” type skills that require your player to stand still.

We’re aware of it though, and trying to fix it.

With any luck, a fix will come soon. This bug can make completing Explorable Ascalonian Catacombs with certain group configurations pretty difficult. At least for the moment, we have another tactic to try and overcome it, as well. Solution– run around like an idiot attacking a dirt pile with a giant sword– got it!

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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I wanted to post a bit on here because I was playing last night at a time where our numbers were dwindling and the influx of enemy players from another region pushed our server back to basically its last tower/supply camp. I spent a good portion of my time split between a few different things.

1) spamming, stay here and defend in team chat once ever 15 seconds. Please if your team only has a small foothold please get it supplied up and upgraded before trying to take a keep on the other side of the map.

2) Organizing a small group of people (5-10) to make targeted raids on supply camps to slow down enemy supply gain. Synchronizing taking all supply camps right around the score tick is a good way to mitigate some of the overall score damage being done by not holding any keeps.

3) Chatting with various people about night capping. This third one was time consuming, especially because I wished I could have posted what I was telling them on the forums. Well now I am trying to do that. Let’s assume that my private chats were much more compelling, eloquent, and well reasoned than this because it was midnight and I was frantically chatting in /whisper with 3 people while simultaneously fighting off hordes of enemies.

First of all I just want to say, the game is young. We know there are areas that we want to improve. Being steamrolled into a corner of your map is not the only problem in the game and not even the only problem in WvW. We are working on these areas, but I know it’s still possible to have lots of fun playing, and as the game matures these areas are going to get better and better.

I know we all know this, but it is nice to remember that WvW is persistent. This is one of the best things about it and we don’t want to inherently make logging in at non peak hours less rewarding than logging in during primetime. We already have long queues and off-peak is a chance to avoid those and still play the game. That being said, there are some things we need to do to encourage you to log in even when your world is being dominated by a massive rush of enemies who live in a part of the world where they aren’t checking their watches to see if the sun is about to rise.
We have been talking about this since about 2 or 3 days into launch and have some ideas. The problem is many of them require resources which we do not have right now as we work to keep the game stable and bug free in its infancy. However some of these ideas have some traction and we are working on them actively. They will still take some time to implement and time to test, but we are not ignoring the fact that players want to feel like their late night efforts are worth more than just a pat on the back.

• Players need more rewards for WvW.
• Players need to be given opportunities to break out of their base when they are trapped in by a wall of arrow carts.
• Guilds need a better reason to claim and HOLD objectives.
• Commanders need to be rewarded for their success and need to be able to reward their followers in turn.
• And so and and so forth.

We are just as into playing GW2 and WvW as you guys are, and we welcome and appreciate all of your feedback. Just know your feedback is going to a good place where we are constantly trying to improve the experience for each and every player. I hope this helps clear up our position and ease your concerns about the long term health of this part of the game. I know this was really long so…

TL;DR Night capping is fun, WvW is 24/7 but getting steamrolled is not fun and we need to work on that to make it better.

OK, time to get back to Bluelake Tower in JQ Borderlands, there is bound to be a mass of HoD invaders at the front door!

Jon

Over the weekend, Mike Ferguson, ArenaNet Systems Designer, responded to a question on the forums regarding areas in Guild Wars 2 with super-fast respawn timers. “Is the team looking at adjusting any of the respawn rates?” the original question asked. Here’s the answer:

We are trying to adjust respawn rates in areas where the non event related respawns are just too fast. We know it can be a problem and we’ve already slowed down some spawns, but we also know there are more areas out there we need to look at.

If we know the map area and creature(s) involved we can usually find the spawns pretty quickly, so if you know of problem spots please give us as much information as you can and we’ll look into the spawns in those areas whenever we get a chance. Thanks!

So, if you notice any areas with mob respawn timers that simply seem too quick, make note of the area, and provide ArenaNet with a bit of feedback.

In response to using portals to stack players and pop them into the middle of an army causing increased server load where models don’t load fast enough:

Originally posted by Jon Peters (Source)

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Hey all we have some plans to fix some of this. It is currently being looked at so expect a fix in the next few weeks. Basically we like that Portal has this power, but it shouldn’t be able to bypass walls, etc.

As for the problems with players not appearing this is a more difficult engine problem to solve. While we would like to solve it there are definitely counters to this strategy, because anyone doing it has just clumped up their entire team for AoE nuking. Ultimately if they outnumber you by a lot there are much more effective ways for them to kill you.

Jon

More interesting, does this mean we’ll see a nerf to the Portal skill where Mesmers won’t be able to hide out in keeps and open portals to allow people to sneak in?

Originally posted by RamonDomke (Source)

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Hi Everyone,
All is fair in love and war – and as love, WvW is a battlefield.

There are exploits, I’ll give you that – but then there is coordinated effort to ensure your world or your team uses each and every resource they have to their advantage.

War is not fair, war is not pretty, war gets out the worst in us – and the best – and even if we have excluded open world pvp from the rest of the game, this is exactly what happens on the WvW maps: It is the ‘playground’ for strategists and great tacticians, it is the place for coordinated efforts and mean ideas in the middle of the night.
Night capping is one of those valid tactics to score some points in a lasting battle – to get your world the upper hand, or cancel out daytime supremacy by another well coordinated opponent.

As Guild Wars 2 will progress in time, so will world vs. world and core gameplay mechanics. But for now, night capping is one valid possibility to ruin your enemie’s days – pun intended.

Night-Capping has been a huge point of contention this week. In the top tier competition this week (HoD vs. SBI vs. ET), HoD has been able to catch up to win, in part, because they have a strong Oceanic presence on the server. The dev quote above goes to show that all is fair in love and war.

If you’ve haven’t been following the saga on Guru or the Official forums, there has been a raging debate, and cry of unfairness, that ET and SBI servers only lose because they don’t have a big enough presence over night. Unfortunately for them, as shown in this thread on PRX’s public forum (key guild in the Titan Alliance on HoD) you can see all top tier servers had either high or full statuses almost throughout the day.

Of course, players on ET would decry that they always won North American Primetime hours and that is all that matters. However, the rebuttal on HoD is that since it’s the most populated server, it is more difficult to get core guilds in side the fight in larger numbers. Because of this, their coordination and their force was effected. This could of been evident as HoD did not take the lead until approximately Tuesday.

Where do you stand on this debate? Is it fair or not? Who really won this week’s matchup?

Keep an eye our for this week’s show, as we will discuss Oceanic guilds and their effect on the game.

During Tuesday’s update, we saw some pretty significant changes to the dungeon reward system, and how reward tokens are affected by diminishing returns (DR) as well as offered at the very end of a complete run. The changes were done to discourage players from exploiting certain dungeon bosses and environments in order to skip certain fights, and run through areas as quickly as possible, multiple times, to farm tokens. This may seem like a good intention in theory, since the system will undoubtedly see subsequent changes once ArenaNet’s team actually fixes the exploits.

Except for the fact that, well, the DR system– and the changes that occurred– seem… not quite right. Instead of seeing diminishing returns for super-fast dungeon completion runs (less than 30 mins) that are ran back-to-back, as intended, some players are seeing diminishing returns on the amount of tokens they receive the first time through. And the second time through, even though their run took far longer than 30 minutes. There are also players who are finding themselves kicked out of groups right before the final boss so their groupmates can quickly grab a friend who can then earn the completion rewards, leaving the original player who battled through the entire dungeon empty-handed.

Yep, something’s definitely off. The changes, and the implications players are seeing as a result, are frustrating and confusing to many. Yesterday, ArenaNet’s team issued two responses on the official forums, both in this discussion thread regarding the changes. The team is asking for reports of any bugged rewards. Here is that announcement, posted by Jon Peters, Game Designer:

I just wanted to update everyone on where we stand with this. So far we have found a single bug with the system that is causing certain players to get stuck in a state of reduced rewards without actually exploiting. A fix for this has already been made and is being tested locally now. We are going to do more significant testing on this new version but we also believe it is more bulletproof to begin with. Please keep posting data as these cases are somewhat rare and are hard for us to find with internal testing but seem to be exposed quickly when thousands of people are playing the dungeons.

All rewards are susceptible to our code that is dealing with people who are speed clearing dungeons. This means that if you are speed clearing and then play some new chain for the first time it may not reward the full 60 tokens. If you find yourself getting less rewards consider whether or not your rate of dungeon completion is extremely high.

If you think you are running at a fairly reasonable pace post all of the chains you have run and the time of day they were completed and we will file it to try and figure out if it is a bug. Please post accurate times, otherwise we cannot determine if there are in fact bugs in the system. Please continue to use this thread as a place to post this data so that we have it all in one location.

Later in the thread, Robert Hrouda, Content Designer, gave players this update:

A bit of misinformation I am seeing in the threads is that if you complete a single dungeon in ten minutes, we’re going to punish you for it, as though we are punishing you for being “too good” at it. This is not true.

Our DR system combats repeated runs, and has a global presence as well effecting other dungeons. So if you run multiple 10 minute dungeons, back to back then you are going to get hit with the DR system no matter which paths you choose.

However the notion that your group will be punished for clearing any single dungeon in any amount of time is incorrect. Running through multiple speed clears back to back will result in the DR system influencing your rewards.

I have updated the Patch update page to reflect this information.

With any luck, ArenaNet will quickly straighten out the bug in the reward DR system, and hopefully, ideally– work on a real solution. As players continue to become better geared and more familiar with Guild Wars 2 character builds and their teammates, dungeon runs will continue to become faster and faster, even without exploits.

What are your thoughts? Feel free to share them in the comments section below!

For players who play a Guardian character or go up against them frequently in PvP, here’s an interesting bit of info that you may have already realized– the visible range of the Shield of Absorption bubble (for shield offhand) varies based on the racial size of the character who’s casting the ability. This essentially means that charr and norn absorption bubbles will appear much larger than asura absorption bubbles (check here for a comparison).

Does the size of the Shield of Absorption bubble affect the actual range of the spell? The answer to that question is a definite no, as confirmed yesterday on the official forums. Here is what was said by Karl McLain:

Hi there, I’d like to clarify a bit on this issue (and figured I’d do it in the original thread):
The size of the actual skill is the same, regardless of race. What I see in the video is that the asura’s first Shield of Absorption pushes back its maximum (and closest) 5 enemies, then the next Shield of Absorption pushes the rest out of the skill’s radius. The skill’s visual effect is what’s dependent on the size of the character and will be fixed shortly, but the actual area of the ability is static.

The video in reference is this video, which was referred to in the original thread. What some players presumed to be a knockback difference as a result of the size of the character hit boxes is actually just a result of the second Shield of Absorption knocking back the closest available five targets, which were farther away than the five mobs that got knocked back during the first cast.