Guild Wars 2

Guild Wars 2 Dev Tracker




26 Apr

Comment

Originally posted by Dlax8

Here are my thoughts as someone who plays WvW most of any game mode currently and has for the past year. WvW has a LOT of vocal minorities, and it is hard to get one communal opinion on what it needs. You can find the major threads through the community if you look hard enough and dilute the salt.

It requires playing almost exclusively WvW for a few good months . Play it all, roam, group up with a guild group (and actually run what they ask and try to help not hurt). Go hop into a massive blob, spend time building a keep up from T0-T3, tear down a T3 keep until it is swiss cheese then spend the next hour fighting to cap it (This is by far my favorite). You will learn a lot.

There are server identities, absolutely. and every server has their own flavor, as examples I will produce the 2 polar opposites of NA. Maguuma and Yaks Bend. I spent the better part of a year on Mag and have fought YB in every single tier since moving from Mag. Mag is extremely fight heavy and...

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Thanks for your thorough comment, Dlax8! I wanted to express gratitude for yourself and many others lately being and/or further raising awareness to one of the problems with changing WvW: multiple groups of players who want different things. Sometimes mutually exclusive things.

Even imagining an idealized world where we could take turns fulfilling the wishes of one of these groups with any given update, with N groups, any one group isn't going to be as pleased with N-1 updates we make. Since N > 2 any/all group(s) may, with most updates, feel like they're the only sane ones in a world where their favorite mode is "just getting worse" or is "out of touch".

It's impossible to make everyone happy at once whether we make changes or don't. But, we'll continue doing what we can, including the current work in response to the latest priority poll.


20 Apr

Comment

Originally posted by dan9khoa

Did they get a real ram to do motion capture? ;o

Multiple, actually. We went through a few ram actors until we found the one that was really able to capture the emotional weight of the scene.


18 Apr

Comment

Originally posted by penemuee

This isn't the option to disable Quip and Dreamer's sounds, right?

I'm currently looking at different options for how to proceed with these two weapons. Gaile was nice enough to post a feedback thread a few weeks ago that has given us a good read of what people do and don't want. We have numerous paths for how to proceed and I want to make sure we pick the one that pleases the most players (ideally everyone).


13 Apr

Comment

I was lucky enough to be there and it was amazing. The amount of talent up on stage totally floored me!


07 Apr

Comment

Originally posted by innerlambada

Yes, though this was unranked PvP not ranked so I don't think the class restrictions apply?

Max two of each profession per party. We need a real error message for this...


31 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by TheRiverBlues

I hear "aeiou"

:)

Comment

Originally posted by Varorson

Let's see:

  • Cloud at top plays SAB music when clicked.
  • The quote in OP is from the Back to School instance (partially)
  • We see the Genie again for first time(?) since Back to School.
  • Scrolling thing talks about CODE, makes me think a hint to that instance? Did we actually truly did get an update to SAB but it wasn't World 3? I'm doubtful but that's all my brain can think of atm

If this is truly a hidden scavenger hunt you've placed, reminds me of the beginning hints to War in Kryta, with the hidden urls...

But something tells me it's just hinting that the "cat" in 2-2 just wants soup. :(

Check the browser console!


30 Mar

Comment

There's another feature that I don't think anyone's found yet. It was very hard to find, but a recent update should help ;)


21 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by cardosy

Again, I think this uncertainty from the in-game speaker is fascinating.

It's a common plot device for building living game worlds. By doing so, they're able to retcon the story and events whenever they see fit for the development of the game, since they're not actual facts, but just stories told within the game world.

People involved in the narrative and overall direction these games take come and go all the time, and ideas are thrown into the pot constantly. It's natural that some of them are discarded, while others turn into canon as development goes. Still, it's an immersive and elegant solution to this issue and I also love in-game narrators and the fact that they're not always right or honest, but rather just telling their point of view.

I just wanted to say that you're absolutely right. I'll also go a step further and say that telling game stories through absolutes makes it too easy to shut the door on stories we know and love.

Interpretative techniques like an in-game narrator resonate with a sort of post-modern take on knowledge, which is that truth is almost always colored by perspective and somewhat impossible to know. To that end it also makes it possible to come back to these stories later, retelling and expanding on them.

These nature of these debates are, in my opinion at least, made a little more interesting and magical by the idea of a living MMO world.

Comment

Originally posted by Andulias

That's nothing really new, they simply expanded upon an already existing theory. Since the launch of the game we have known that the kodan consider the norn to be their devolved cousins. Scratch that, we've known since before the launch of the game: https://web.archive.org/web/20130208175641/http://www.arena.net/blog/the-wisdom-and-power-of-the-kodan.

EDIT: But you know that, you linked it as a source.

For what its worth, I think it was worthwhile to actually get that lore manifesting in the game somehow. Once I realized that our narrative designer was doing this, it became influential to the work I was doing on the mastery for this map. It being part of a line called "Ancient Magic" was a sticking point for me anyhow.

Fortunately the aspects of Kodan lore that involve them watching over untamed spirits made for a harmonious spin-off into this little tale about one of the lost tribes carrying a sacred fire through the ages. Major credit goes to the community for uncovering that and documenting it here: https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Fl...

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14 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by wrongkanji

I am not ready to say .... FareWell.

I laughed harder than I should have at this.


10 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by InkTide

Ohhh, that's interesting! I don't know why, but I'm holding out hope that this all ends well for Blaine.

Hopefully he'll join Dragon's Watch so it's not just Taimi and me. Imagine having a King on our side!

"I don't know why, but I'm holding out hope that this all ends well for Blaine." FTFY ;)


02 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by [deleted]

Great post, Crystal!

Thank you!


01 Mar

Comment

Originally posted by smitske

Are you implying htat whatever samarog is achieving in his spare time (spearthrow championships) is not something you care about? So mean.

Correct.

Comment

Originally posted by BobHogan

Ah, that's interesting! In terms of design, does this mean that going forward, new content will be more "consistent"? And by consistent I mean that new content will be using the AI system in a similar way (tuned to desired difficulty of course).

Difficult question to answer since the goals of each team vary. The AI system can get pretty complicated when you get really deep into it. I would say the raids team uses the most simplistic form of it since we only care about the combat behaviours. Other teams care about both combat and what the creatures are doing when not in combat.

Comment

Originally posted by BobHogan

So does this mean that the other designers at ANet were not using the same tools that the raid team designers were?

All designers here use the same tool, but different teams will manipulate it in different ways. For example: the way the Raids team uses the AI system is different from how a Living World team might use it.


28 Feb

Comment

To clarify... The designers I helped spin up were a mix from different teams and none of them joined the raids team. There has always been "two teams on raids that leapfrog" (not including Spirit Vale) except at various points in time the teams were a single designer.

Edit for clarity

When I say "teams" I'm specifically referring to designers only. All other resources (art, programming, qa) are shared between the two.


24 Feb

Comment

Originally posted by ggunslinger

Removed this ability’s interaction with quickness.

What the HELL.

I mean, Weakening Charge was still better than quickened Vault, but Vault wasn't as clunky to use as WC rotation. Now we're back to turning autotargetting off or what? Please don't let it be true.

EDIT: For those who didn't know, it's propably caused by a bug with Vault and quickness. Basically quickness makes the attack happen while you're still in the air, not on target location. It's not noticable in melee range, but it completely negates your damage on far targets.

Hopefully this interaction will return after they find a fix, but it feels f**king bad man.

The new interaction with quickness (and slow) indeed did turn out to be more detrimental than we had desired. As such, we're pulling the change time-scaling change for now. If we can get the code to work right at all ranges, we'll give it another go!


22 Feb

Comment

Originally posted by Vaarsavius

While you're looking into bosses, the double-wiping on Deimos is really annoying too.

Also fix incoming for that too.


21 Feb

Comment

Some changes have been made to the PvP infrastructure and we are actively working through some issues. Apologies for the inconveniences!