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[Noisy Ninj4]

An average of 31 TP transactions per second for year... Holy crap.

 

[Kos Luftar]

Can anyone manage to invite Grayman?

I will when I get home otherwise but it's going to be a long day.
Nice little piece. Finally letting themselves use the 3.5m mark (edit: that's as of June)

Pfft. Somebody's riding the coattails of the bigger targets he fights alongside.

edit: Happy official anniversary everybody.

Logged in from work and invited him.

Welcome to the guild, Grayman.

Happy Official Launch Anniversary to all of you!

Going through that Guild Wars 2 by the numbers made me remember a lot of fun times I have had with all of you.

How many of you remember when Alpha in CoE had more health than the open world dragons? Those were some crazy nights.

Maybe...one day...I will know the paths too... *hope*

Stick with Adriaa and Sophrelia, and you will learn a lot.
Next time maybe NoisyNinja can bring his Warrior as well and we can have 3 W 2 Mes run and see how fast we take down Lupi!

 

[Levyne]

Looks like I'll need to buy a new set of armor for the Gauntlet, :l. I don't do enough damage in my current set..

Yeah. The time limit makes a berserker or high damage condition set ideal. In fact most of the pve game does...

The gauntlet makes me feel inferior sometimes because I can't complete Liadri. At the same time, I'm not helping myself because I switch classes often enough that I don't really know one well enough to excel at it.

You'll beat it eventually. You're too good not too. It just takes a bit of luck.

I just started playing as a Guardian, but I'm having framerate issues with an i5 3570k and a gtx 770. I feel like those should be able to handle maxed settings while giving me 60 fps, but I guess not.

I have a 3750k and a 670 if that means anything. My 3750k automatically boosts and maintains 4.2 GHz under load and that helps a bit for the frame rate since a fair portion of it has to do with rendering the players. I also run SweetFX at it's default settings since I don't like the game's AA. I get a constant 50-60 FPS unless it's in WvW or WvW-like settings in PvE where things can be seen going slightly slower since it's chugging a bit at ~20-25 FPS.

I guess for starters, what in-game settings do you run? My settings

Yah, gaf guild helped me overclock my cpu just a tad and it's a solid +4 or 5 everywhere. I still have shadows and reflections cranked up though...maybe that's what destroys my framerate at the first CoF door. Doesn't help that I'm trying out a slightly more demanding sweetfx config.

Anyone know the state of Tier 1 NA WvW?

I haven'y played for over a month. It looks like JQ recruited a bit?

Also, yay SAB I sold the skins I farmed last time for about 100g so hopefully their's some money to be made.

Advent/Chasecs/TrounceX will know. Hopefully he pops in.

 

[Moondrop]

Yeah. This was the build video someone sent me; I apologize for it being a really stupid video but you can see how easily the build can wreck someone 1v1 at least:

Thanks, that's very interesting. But it's hardly a complete build. Sword/shield and longbow has one interrupt between them. Mace/shield and rifle, for example, has four. That build is more about condition damage. Hard to give up power for precision. Did notice the Dolyak Signet.

could I make this work you think with greatsword/sword-shield?

I wouldn't try, for similar reasons as above. Only one interrupt on your weapons.

Pretty sure Runes of Perplexity will be nerfed in the next patch.

Because of all the QQ? Yeah, I'm not spending my laurels just yet.

 

[Hawkian]

Thx for getting him in Kos.

Maybe...one day...I will know the paths too... *hope*

I still haven't done 1 or 4. Not easy to get a willing group. I like the dungeon a lot though. Especially headrushing the Wraithlord's crusher on Path 3 wheeeee

How many of you remember when Alpha in CoE had more health than the open world dragons? Those were some crazy nights!

I got my Inquest dagger and a handful of runes from the days before Baby Alpha. Sharpened my teeth... nothing scares me in dungeons anymore.

Kinda feel like some CoE tonight now. Maybe there will be a Maelstrom invasion.

 

[shysaursoft]

A quick reminder: this game is pretty.

That is all.

 

[Kos Luftar]

A quick reminder: this game is pretty.



That is all.

You have some crazy sweet-fx settings! Looks like a painting.

I'd be up for CoE but who knows if I will get a chance to play tonight.

 

[Hawkian]

Because of all the QQ? Yeah, I'm not spending my laurels just yet.

Perplexity ramped up the effectiveness of my Mesmer control build, at the expense of losing out on my swiftness supply and switching to focus. As long as it's not nerfed too hard I'll probably stick with it. Love da stacks.

edit: Caledon does look crazy pretty with sweetfx. Maybe I need to pump reflections back up though, gotta have that moa and bull in the water...

 

[shysaursoft]

I actually use DarkD3 (Hardcore) - http://darkd3.com/ -, because I found it gives me what I want, and is more economical on framerate than SweetFX, since it does very little other than pre-sharpen and some mild color toning.

 

[Moondrop]

Perplexity ramped up the effectiveness of my Mesmer control build, at the expense of losing out on my swiftness supply and switching to focus. As long as it's not nerfed too hard I'll probably stick with it. Love da stacks.

Losing my Lyssa rune functionality is brutal. My elite goes from cleansing all conditions and providing stability to... ressing keep lords.

But that is the greater question, the degree of the hypothetical nerf. Remove the confusion on hit or tone down the bonus duration? Fine. Add a 10 sec. ICD on the interrupt ability? I'm done with the runes altogether.

 

[Levyne]

The cool down would be my guess.

 

[Hawkian]

Losing my Lyssa rune functionality is brutal. My elite goes from cleansing all conditions and providing stability to... ressing keep lords.

But that is the greater question, the degree of the hypothetical nerf. Remove the confusion on hit or tone down the bonus duration? Fine. Add a 10 sec. ICD on the interrupt ability? I'm done with the runes altogether.

Yeahhhh, an internal cooldown that onerous would mean a hasty retreat to my old runes and a silent thanks to myself that they weren't expensive ones to begin with But if it's from 5 stacks to 3 or whatever then I'm still good to go.

 

[Moondrop]

The cool down would be my guess.

Sure that seems like the obvious nerf, but these are all just assumptions. The Distracting Strikes trait has the exact same function with no ICD- do you leave that alone, or go ahead and nerf that too (thereby wrecking my spvp build)?

There's been no official warning of a nerf, just a community manager acknowledging they've heard the complaints. But we've seen this before with others skills where they just leave it as is. Nevertheless, I will have my fingers crossed come Tuesday.

 

[Levyne]

Eh.

 

[Shanlei91]

I actually use DarkD3 (Hardcore) - http://darkd3.com/ -, because I found it gives me what I want, and is more economical on framerate than SweetFX, since it does very little other than pre-sharpen and some mild color toning.

How taxing is that on your comp? I'm kind of cool with playing as I do now as framerate rarely drops but that sure is perty.

 

[Noisy Ninj4]

Yeahhhh, an internal cooldown that onerous would mean a hasty retreat to my old runes and a silent thanks to myself that they weren't expensive ones to begin with But if it's from 5 stacks to 3 or whatever then I'm still good to go.

That's still have warriors putting up 7-10 stacks on confusion in a single interrupt. Crazy nuts.

 

[Hawkian]

Rune of Perplexity isn't even available in PvP, so I do not see Distracting Strikes getting touched with a ten foot pole even if Perplexity is nerfed.

If it's really a problem big enough to address in a balance sense I would love for it to be split right alongside Confusion itself in WvW. I like seeing stacks pile up on mobs in PvE and it's not hurting anybody ;(

 

[Shanlei91]

Game: Invasion in Timberline Falls!
Me: To Timberline Falls!
...
Me: Where the fuck is Timberline Falls????

 

[Hawkian]

This is me learning that Troy Baker is Logan. What an absolutely wounding and soul-crushing waste of talent.

 

[shysaursoft]

How taxing is that on your comp? I'm kind of cool with playing as I do now as framerate rarely drops but that sure is perty.

Zero impact. However, I'm running 2 GTX 560 SE's in SLI, with 8GB RAM on a i5. So I'm not really a good benchmark for it. I have some friends that run DarkD3 on their systems, and I've not heard anything negative. I think at most, you'd sacrifice a few frames.

This is me learning that Troy Baker is Logan. What an absolutely wounding and soul-crushing waste of talent.

Looking at his Wikipedia page, yeah, wow. I'm surprise the guy has any voice left to give Logan. He's like, in *everything*.

 

[Hawkian]

Looking at his Wikipedia page, yeah, wow. I'm surprise the guy has any voice left to give Logan. He's like, in *everything*.

Really funny thing is, I was just thinking about him Monday because I helped somebody with the Conscript the Dead Ships PS quest, which I had never done, which has the female Asura named Elli in it, and contains this line:

"Agent Zott: Elli, get a move on!"

 

[etrain911]

The game is very CPU dependent, and like most MMOs you will never maintain 60 FPS when there are many players onscreen fighting. I recommend using the auto-detect then fine tuning stuff based on what gives you acceptable performance with a lot of players on screen. Jumping into World vs World and finding a Commander in the map is a good way to easily get lots of players on screen.

You are maintaing 60 FPS or close to it on Auto-detect with no players nearby, correct?

That's about the gist of it. I think I'll take the advice on lowering the shadows and reflections per some of the advice I've been given.

 

[Kos Luftar]

Interesting interview with Mike O'Brien
http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32955&storypage=1

So we think about the content differently. The content is not about laying new runways in front of people, it is about players are changing the world as they play the game. We start to think about it as layering it into the stuff we already made. This is kind of a thought exercise, but you could layer in new events all the time and to some degree players wouldn't even know that you are layering in events all the time because they are just playing the game. Now is an event one that has been around since launch and a player just hasn't seen it before, or is it one that was coded into the game a couple of weeks ago and this is the first time it is getting triggered?

I do not think this has happened yet...unless it did but they never mentioned it. The only thing I could think of was the mini-dungeons but they told us they added them. I would love stuff like this to happen. I also would love for them to start opening the map more...especially unaccessable zone between Lornar's and Timberline, Dominion of Winds...head towards Magumma at some point.

 

[Jest Chillin]

Interesting interview with Mike O'Brien
http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32955&storypage=1

Most interesting part of the interview:

With changing the world, does the personal story prevent you from being able to change too much? Like with Orr, new players would still need to experience the risen through their story instead of an Orr cleansed through the Living World.

"At the beginning we steered away from things that would affect the personal story because we wanted to keep this clean and simple. There is no way it should be the case now that anything which is touched upon in the personal story isn't fodder for the Living World as that would go against what we want to avoid in Guild Wars 2, which is the world being too solidified that it can never change. So we are going to start changing that stuff."

 

[Kos Luftar]

With 25 or 26 updates a year, imagine if each update we added a dungeon so we end up adding 25 dungeons in a year. Then after a year, a player is trying to run a dungeon but other players want to run some newer dungeon. Then if we do that another year there are 50 dungeons.

They do not need to add new dungeons every update. One or two a year would be interesting. Add one with 1 path, than keep adding the other paths through out the year. Go back to older dungeons and totally redo a path to fit with the current living story.

I don't know what it is but every time I read interviews with ArenaNet staff I get more and more excited about the future.

Great catch there Jest. Can't wait for them to stop worrying about the Personal Story.

 

[Jira]

Dat 460k concurrency....for reference the two most popular games in the world (DoTA2 & LoL) have hit around 500k concurrency. If that doesn't show how successful GW2 is and STILL is, I don't know what will.

 

[Jest Chillin]

Dat 460k concurrency....for reference the two most popular games in the world (DoTA2 & LoL) have hit around 500k concurrency. If that doesn't show how successful GW2 is and STILL is, I don't know what will.

We need our own Leroy Jenkins/Onyxia Raid type of video to go viral. That will cement us.

 

[Kos Luftar]

We need our own Leroy Jenkins/Onyxia Raid type of video to go viral. That will cement us.

GAF taking on Lupicus, without Armor? That might go viral.

 

[Hawkian]

Interesting interview with Mike O'Brien
http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=32955&storypage=1


I do not think this has happened yet...unless it did but they never mentioned it. The only thing I could think of was the mini-dungeons but they told us they added them. I would love stuff like this to happen. I also would love for them to start opening the map more...especially unaccessable zone between Lornar's and Timberline, Dominion of Winds...head towards Magumma at some point.

They added 40 events at the same time as those minidungeons... exactly like he said, no way to know whether or not something you come across is from launch or more recent, unless you've seen it before. The Modus Sceleris (whom I STILL have not seen) were added back in that same period.

Most interesting part of the interview:

Yesssss glorious.

We need our own Leroy Jenkins/Onyxia Raid type of video to go viral. That will cement us.

Pity it doesn't have that "catastrophic breakdown" aspect that is so fun to watch... but did you guys know search for "Golems vs. Krait Witch" on google you find us?

 

[Kos Luftar]

Pity it doesn't have that "catastrophic breakdown" aspect that is so fun to watch... but did you guys know search for "Golems vs. Krait Witch" on google you find us?

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/...t_in_timberline_falls/?already_submitted=true
Too bad non of you redditors up-voted it...we could have been internet famous.

 

[Jira]

The thing Mike talked about is the very stuff they were talking about right after launch. They want to just drop events into the game without warning and as he said you may not know if it's always been there or if it's new. It seems they never really got to to do this in the first year outside of maybe the Skritt Burglars and Modus Scelaris. I remember reading an article with Colin where he said imagine three years from now you go into a zone and there's 300 events in it. I think this is something they wanted to do but it got put on the back burner. Now it sounds like they want to pick it up again but do it a bit differently since the Living Story now exits.

 

[Kos Luftar]

The thing Mike talked about is the very stuff they were talking about right after launch. They want to just drop events into the game without warning and as he said you may not know if it's always been there or if it's new. It seems they never really got to to do this in the first year outside of maybe the Skritt Burglars and Modus Scelaris. I remember reading an article with Colin where he said imagine three years from now you go into a zone and there's 300 events in it. I think this is something they wanted to do but it got put on the back burner. Now it sounds like they want to pick it up again but do it a bit differently since the Living Story now exits.

I'm a bit worried this would lead to what Anthony Ordon said about the min-dungeons that they added and how very few people actually played them or even know that they exist. I hope they use the living story to tell us specifically about some of the new events but at the same time also add events that we don't know about but we may encounter while we are doing the living story stuff.

I know it is probably difficult but it would be awesome if at some point the NPCs in a zone also understood that the world has changed, where their dialog maybe changes slightly when an invasion occurs or whatever happens next.

 

[Jira]

I'm a bit worried this would lead to what Anthony Ordon said about the min-dungeons that they added and how very few people actually played them or even know that they exist. I hope they use the living story to tell us specifically about some of the new events but at the same time also add events that we don't know about but we may encounter while we are doing the living story stuff.

I know it is probably difficult but it would be awesome if at some point the NPCs in a zone also understood that the world has changed, where their dialog maybe changes slightly when an invasion occurs or whatever happens next.

Well, with the next update people are gonna be doing mini-dungeons cause new crafting mats will drop from there. If you also remember they pointed out mini-dungeons as part of some Living Story achievements so that people would go and see that they even existed. I mean personally Ash and I did all the minidungeons when they released.

 

[Weltall Zero]

Nah. Sylvari are all evil and the Nightmare Court is actually the way they're supposed to act. It's only because the Pale Tree's seed was separated from the others and the Ventari Tablet was left where they'd find it that they're good.

Well, there's also

Spoiler

the Sylvari you meet that's not from the pale tree

, in one of the Sylvary personal stories.

Spoiler

He didn't seem evil; on the other hand, he didn't seem to have any sort of connection to his own tree, either

.

I still think Scarlet is something different though. The short story seemed to imply that she has knowledge beyond any other being, and has actually seen the "Eternal Alchemy" (which is basically the mechanics of all existence). Either she's crazy, and that's boring, or she knows The Truth and will dangle it over us for years, which is also boring.

The story is honestly my biggest disappointment with the game so far. And it's not like they can't tell stories, because Ree's book was actually really good. I think there's either too many cooks in the kitchen, or the storyline square is being forced into the gameplay's round hole.

Pretty much a summation of my thoughts. This Scarlet character definitely hit a new low with GW2's story. And I'm one of the few that actually liked several of their personal stories.

Looks like Moto's been busy chopping wood. Now players can cross my uncrossable river! I'll have to rename it. Any suggestions?
https://vine.co/v/hirFnqpVOBx

Holy logjumping Frogger, Batman! That's all kinds of awesome.
For whatever it counts, and I know I'm in the minority (if not straightaway alone) Super Adventure Box might be my single favorite GW2 thing, period. I definitely played it more than any other part of the game, and it wasn't for farming, since I have like three skins that I still haven't even applied, plus 90+ unused Bubble Baubles.

I actually use DarkD3 (Hardcore) - http://darkd3.com/ -, because I found it gives me what I want, and is more economical on framerate than SweetFX, since it does very little other than pre-sharpen and some mild color toning.

Wow, I just installed it and I love how it makes GW2 look; I'll check out more locations when I have the time. It's so incredibly easy too, just drop the .zip contents onto your GW2 folder (doesn't even overwrite anything) and you're done!

 

[Hawkian]

I'm a bit worried this would lead to what Anthony Ordon said about the min-dungeons that they added and how very few people actually played them or even know that they exist. I hope they use the living story to tell us specifically about some of the new events but at the same time also add events that we don't know about but we may encounter while we are doing the living story stuff.

I know it is probably difficult but it would be awesome if at some point the NPCs in a zone also understood that the world has changed, where their dialog maybe changes slightly when an invasion occurs or whatever happens next.

These guys were there since launch and knew about the Molten Alliance!

 

[Hawkian]

Well, there's also

Spoiler

the Sylvari you meet that's not from the pale tree

, in one of the Sylvary personal stories.

Spoiler

He didn't seem evil; on the other hand, he didn't seem to have any sort of connection to his own tree, either

.

Malyck and the Soundless are both good examples of how the Sylvari are able to not suck. All of the "big-ticket" characters that come from them are just so poor. At least Caithe got some atypical romantic drama and temptation, but there's little more than duty before self to her character or Trahearne's.

edit: sorry for the double. GAF is loading crazy slow and returning a bunch of errors for me at the moment.

 

[Kos Luftar]

These guys were there since launch and knew about the Molten Alliance!

Yes it was awesome when their dialogue changed.

No one in the 13 zones that get attacked by the invasion know that anything is actually happening.

 

[shysaursoft]

Wow, I just installed it and I love how it makes GW2 look; I'll check out more locations when I have the time. It's so incredibly easy too, just drop the .zip contents onto your GW2 folder (doesn't even overwrite anything) and you're done!

The only thing it doesn't play nice with is Mumble's overlay support. If you have DarkD3 and try to run mumble with overlay, GW2 will fail to launch. You can either switch off the overlay, or just rename the d3d9.dll to something else in the meantime. (This had me vexed for a while).

You can toggle DarkD3 ingame using the Pause / Break key. I do this now and then to remind myself how blurry and oversaturated GW2 vanilla is.

 

[Hawkian]

The only thing it doesn't play nice with is Mumble's overlay support. If you have DarkD3 and try to run mumble with overlay, GW2 will fail to launch. You can either switch off the overlay, or just rename the d3d9.dll to something else in the meantime. (This had me vexed for a while).

You can toggle DarkD3 ingame using the Pause / Break key. I do this now and then to remind myself how blurry and oversaturated GW2 vanilla is.

Huh all of that applies to SweetFX as well. They must use the same method of dll injection.

Did renaming the dll actually allow you to use the mumble overlay with GW2 and Dark3D, or just keep it from crashing?

 

[Lunar15]

I don't quite understand Anet's definition of "permanent". It seems to be a word they're using more heavily because fans have begun using it.

To say that the things that have happened in the living story have been permanent is... dubious? The entire conversation is weird to me, and I can't quite articulate it. It's not that I want permanence, it's that permanence, semantically, is the opposite of their definition of "living changing world". They mentioned removing quests because they wanted players to have an impact on the world and not just talking to NPC's. But as a result, we have events that re-start over and over again anyway. It's actually the opposite of what they were aiming for. Is this good or bad? I don't know. But it's their actual definition of a "living changing world" that just seems too vague for me to get a handle on how they want to approach it. Quite frankly, I'm tired of them using the phrase.

Ironically, they are touting the invasions as a permanent inclusion. But they are one event that actually makes very little sense to keep around for an extended period of time. I don't even think people WANT them to stick around much longer, even if they like them. It's odd and seems like they're just saying it to appease fans when it's not actually the solution fans think they want.

The quote about not being hindered by the personal story is good, but it's so vague that I can't parse out what it means. I used to be in the "yeah yeah, content every two weeks!" crowd, but I'm constantly shifting towards the "well, if they're going to do updates, they kind of need to reboot the game", just because the game they keep talking about is not the one they have right now. This is less of me saying "oh, this is something that makes the game less fun for me", and more "it's kind of difficult for me to see where they're going to go with this, and I'm trying to decide whether it's worth tuning in each week or not".

Oh boy, another ramblethoughtpost. I bet everyone loves those.

 

[shysaursoft]

Huh all of that applies to SweetFX as well. They must use the same method of dll injection.

Did renaming the dll actually allow you to use the mumble overlay with GW2 and Dark3D, or just keep it from crashing?

Renaming the DLL stops the injection, so it stops the crashing. But I just turn mumble overlay off instead, since I don't need it.

 

[Trey]

Oh boy, another ramblethoughtpost. I bet everyone loves those.

Players do have impact on the world. It is just brief. It is a compromise between giving players some more power over the world, while mitigating that effect in the interest of not changing things too much.

It's a hell of a balancing act that Anet is trying to get ahead of.

 

[Sophia]

Whoa, DarkD3 really does look good with this game.

Left without DarkD3. Right with DarkD3.

 

[Kos Luftar]

You have to turn AA off for DarkD3 like you do for sweet fx?

 

[Jira]

I don't quite understand Anet's definition of "permanent". It seems to be a word they're using more heavily because fans have begun using it.

To say that the things that have happened in the living story have been permanent is... dubious? The entire conversation is weird to me, and I can't quite articulate it. It's not that I want permanence, it's that permanence, semantically, is the opposite of their definition of "living changing world". They mentioned removing quests because they wanted players to have an impact on the world and not just talking to NPC's. But as a result, we have events that re-start over and over again anyway. It's actually the opposite of what they were aiming for. Is this good or bad? I don't know. But it's their actual definition of a "living changing world" that just seems too vague for me to get a handle on how they want to approach it. Quite frankly, I'm tired of them using the phrase.

Ironically, they are touting the invasions as a permanent inclusion. But they are one event that actually makes very little sense to keep around for an extended period of time. I don't even think people WANT them to stick around much longer, even if they like them. It's odd and seems like they're just saying it to appease fans when it's not actually the solution fans think they want.

From my conversations with Colin, they're still in the warm up phases. They're still just barely touching on what they want to do with Living Story and the Dynamic Event system. Within the next 365 days, the difference between how the LS and DEs work now and a year from now should be night and day. It's a massive undertaking to completely change how your company operates not once, but twice within a 4 month span. They've obviously improved with each update but they're still working towards a certain goal that is just over the hill that we as players cannot yet see, but they're currently designing and we will see it in the next year.

A point Mike brought up is that if you just keep adding permanent stuff, it gets played with for a while then tossed out when the next new shiney comes around, is never played with again or rarely, and can fragment the playerbase. This isn't even an issue for just MMOs but all of gaming. The problem is as you said players think they know what they want but they really don't. In regards to the invasions, it makes sense that they stick around until Scarlet is dead in the story and the decreased frequency will actually help with getting people out and doing them, especially if they maybe only pop a couple times a day. When it comes to permanent additions, no matter what they are, they are ALL prone to burn out. Once you've exhausted the new content or got all the rewards from it, you may not want to step foot in there ever again. Take SAB for example, after a couple weeks I didn't feel like going in there cause I had played it a ton and got everything from it. Though I'm excited for it to be coming back cause there's a new world, a hard mode, and new rewards. If it had stuck around I certainly wouldn't have stepped foot in there after a couple weeks.

TL;DR: My point to be made here is that both temporary and permanent stuff is prone to burnout and exhaustion. This is something that is very difficult to balance between being fun and not being too time consuming at the same time. They're working on very big systems for both the LS and DEs which we will see within the next year that will completely change how we view both of those things. They're still just getting started even though they've continually ramped up the LS since it began.

 

[jersoc]

oh wow, guardian is not the most popular class after all. also, superior human race

 

[Lunar15]

I understand that they want to change the focus of the game over time to bring it closer to their idea of a living world. And that's totally commendable. But part of me does wonder if the current state of the game is at a point where gradual introduction of these concepts works better than a massive focus shift.

They want to move away from hearts and personal story. It's clear, at least to me, that they're not huge fans of these concepts, but were forced to work with these to introduce players with the world. The world they want to make is entirely possible, and we've seen glimpses of it in the living story. But it's just that: glimpses. I want the game they want to make, I just don't know when it's going to actually come about, so I don't know whether or not to stay invested.

I also understand that's the point: they have to keep saying 'soon' rather than "here's the date!" because then i'll just stop playing and wait for that date. But they do run the risk of tiring out people with tedious updates while waiting for the quality updates to hit.

 

[Jira]

I understand that they want to change the focus of the game over time to bring it closer to their idea of a living world. And that's totally commendable. But part of me does wonder if the current state of the game is at a point where gradual introduction of these concepts works better than a massive focus shift.

They want to move away from hearts and personal story. It's clear, at least to me, that they're not huge fans of these concepts, but were forced to work with these to introduce players with the world. The world they want to make is entirely possible, and we've seen glimpses of it in the living story. But it's just that: glimpses. I want the game they want to make, I just don't know when it's going to actually come about, so I don't know whether or not to stay invested.

I also understand that's the point: they have to keep saying 'soon' rather than "here's the date!" because then i'll just stop playing and wait for that date. But they do run the risk of tiring out people with tedious updates while waiting for the quality updates to hit.

I think, Lunar, in your case specifically you're waiting for something to happen but even you don't know what that is. You don't actually know what you're wanting or waiting for because you haven't seen it yet. When you do see it, then you'll be like oh man this is it! Thing is, as you said this will take time...could be after SAB could be 12 months from now, we just don't know. Also, it's well known that ANet doesn't talk about stuff till they're ready and they don't give dates cause that locks them in and if they delay people bitch up a storm. But hey we have PAX on the 31st and there's gonna be multiple things revealed there (Colin said as much to me). So who knows, maybe they'll preview something for the LS that's being worked on that will come out in a couple months that's exactly what you want.

The work they do is very significant, it's just in 2 week increments instead of many months all at once. Big changes have come already and continue to do so, just not all in one go.

 

[TrounceX]

Anyone know the state of Tier 1 NA WvW?

I haven'y played for over a month. It looks like JQ recruited a bit?

Well, JQ has definitely seen a 'renaissance' of sorts after their vacation into tier 2 for a couple weeks (you probably missed this). Playing against the weaker competition seemed to re-energize their player base, and the fair-weather players have been out in force.

What you see in PPT, however, is more due to server politics than JQ suddenly becoming an actual contender.

So briefly, here's the deal:

JQ's exit from T1 only served to aggravate the already strained relations between SoR and BG. In fact, it's now become an all out grudge match. So much so that either server would rather help JQ get PPT than let the other have it.

It basically plays out like this:

Oh, JQ wants a tower? ok, whatever.
BG taking our supply camp? ALL CALL 80v80 collision in the camp.

So basically whoever JQ decides to leach points from, they do so without much resistance. Good for their PPT, and for the casual players to get their karma and some unorganized fights in, but not much fun for the hardcore community that is looking to be competitive.

Whichever of these groups you happen to belong to will probably be the biggest factor in whether you enjoy WvW on JQ right now.

 

[Taffer]

On an unrelated note, which zone are all the screenshots for the legendary weapons taken in?

I don't remember an area being that dark and cloudy. Kinda looks like Sparkfly at night maybe?

Bit late but I would bet my hat that that's the beach on the south side of the lake in Caledon Forest.