Guild Wars 2: A Different Kind of MMO

Explain something to me about gold selling ... why don't these companies have a bayesian spam filter and a single low wage worker who just sits there all day and insta-banhammers gold sellers 5 seconds after they post their first gold selling spam message or email?
 
I dunno but I've developed the ability to report + block in under 5 seconds flat.
 
Dresden you didn't seem to upset about losing your level 50 toon. What exactly happened?
 
Dresden you didn't seem to upset about losing your level 50 toon. What exactly happened?

Ever since the last minor update, the game had started crashing on me. I would verify the game data and things would be fine. Until the next time it would crash. Anyway, I was playing my level 50 and it crashed. Ever since then logging onto that character results in an immediate CTD. Literally like a second after logging in. I tried logging on a different character and had no problems. Something with that characters data got messed up. I'm not too upset. I was contemplating making a different character anyway for the sake of spending karma more wisely and skill traits.
 
Okay that makes sense.

About those graphics. Lion's Arch is far and away the most amazing thing I've ever seen in a videogame. It is a true masterpiece, beyond my imagination.

It actually struggles a bit on my new computer even on my measly 1440x900 monitor. That would be the i5-3550 + GTX670; I'm not sure if it's a CPU limit or what, but I do wonder if there are any computers out there that can maintain 60fps in that city.
 
About those graphics. Lion's Arch is far and away the most amazing thing I've ever seen in a videogame. It is a true masterpiece, beyond my imagination.

There's a mountain area later on which is just stunning, I just stood there for a while looking around...
 
Spent the entire day in WvWvW yesterday. It's amazing. We went from only controlling a few camps and one tower when I started to controlling the entire map when I went to bed.

The experience completely changes once you have a competant commander in charge and people who know how to follow directions. IE - teamwork.

Binding roots ... if you intend to play WvWvW spec for it (human) or learn to hate it.

I love it. But simple CC removal will get rid of it. If you run into a player that has even a remote inkling of how to play PvP then Binding Roots can end up a waste of a 150 second CD (or 120 sec. with the right traits).

It's best used against noobs, or people who spec for max dps or survivability while ignoring CC removal skills.

Given weapons hit everyone on their paths and some have an area of effect , knowing who's targeted wouldn't be a great help.
You must watch the monster you are fighting, their animations are usually rather helpful.

Some do, some don't. Rifles for example will hit almost everything in a line to their target. Short and Longbows however seem to stop at the first target hit.

For melee weapons in melee they can't hit something if it isn't in their range. So a greatsword or hammer hits alot of stuff. Daggers on the other hand you generally have to be right on a mob so you won't be hitting much other than your target or what's immediately in front of you.

BTW - shortbow ranger is amazing for stacking condition damage on retreating foes. :D

I was contemplating making a different character anyway for the sake of spending karma more wisely and skill traits.

Heh, I did the same on my first character. I've been more careful with my additional characters but that's not so much to conserve Karma (a little bit is) but I think mostly because I can make a lot of stuff now and unless the Karma gear has some nice armor set bonus's they generally aren't terribly better than what drops.

Right now I don't have a single character over 40 yet, but I've got multiples in the 30's. So fun to try different stuff.

Ranger for example is great in the open world. But kinda sucks during sieges as they don't have much in the way of AE to hit people on tower/castle walls when they duck out of the way of your direct fire.

Regards,
SB
 
Wow the art in this game is amazing. I love the big cities, esp. Rata sum and Divinity's reach.

No performance problems with my 6950, everything smooth maxed. My wife's 560ti has some framerate drops, for example when opening the map.
 
After researching the cultural armor sets for each race, I'm pretty happy I wound up making a human. Tier 3 heavy armor looks incredible. Tier 2 is nice, also, but Tier 1 looks kinda weak.
 
I love it. But simple CC removal will get rid of it. If you run into a player that has even a remote inkling of how to play PvP then Binding Roots can end up a waste of a 150 second CD (or 120 sec. with the right traits).
AFAICS balance doesn't allow you to walk out of them, they have to be destroyed first ... but I just read somewhere that if you get rid of immobilized (which balance will do) you can dodge out of the roots ... gotta try that.
 
Every fucking time I play a MMO for a while I wonder, why the fuck don't they just have a public bugzilla with user visible priorities? Do they really think ignoring people is better PR than showing the truth? Do they really think they can keep track of bugs accurately by just looking at the forums with it's gazillion repeated reports while their eyes glaze over?

Players are the QA of MMOs, you can't fucking do QA without a decent bug reporting system with some way to filter out dupes and look at existing reports ...
 
Mac client released.

Good to see more games getting a native Mac OS X client.

Update: Spoke to soon ... shitty Transgaming Cider port :(

Well, yes. But still, it allows me to play on my late 2009 iMac (with HD4850m graphics) at 2560x1440 at 20-40fps and decent settings. The HD7970 GHz ed equivalent of my PC gaming rig holds 60+ fps at Very Nice Settings Indeed, but the OSX client is surprisingly performant all things considered. After a minute or two the visual compromises fade in my perception, and only the dubious frame rate bothers me. But in this game, not enough to make me drop the resolution.
 
Well, yes. But still, it allows me to play on my late 2009 iMac (with HD4850m graphics) at 2560x1440 at 20-40fps and decent settings. The HD7970 GHz ed equivalent of my PC gaming rig holds 60+ fps at Very Nice Settings Indeed, but the OSX client is surprisingly performant all things considered. After a minute or two the visual compromises fade in my perception, and only the dubious frame rate bothers me. But in this game, not enough to make me drop the resolution.

Yeah, tried it on my friends iMac (same generation as yours) and it played surprisingly well at the native resolution.
 
Well, yes. But still, it allows me to play on my late 2009 iMac (with HD4850m graphics) at 2560x1440 at 20-40fps and decent settings. The HD7970 GHz ed equivalent of my PC gaming rig holds 60+ fps at Very Nice Settings Indeed, but the OSX client is surprisingly performant all things considered. After a minute or two the visual compromises fade in my perception, and only the dubious frame rate bothers me. But in this game, not enough to make me drop the resolution.

I'm playing with the same config, at least as far as GPU in the iMac goes. Core i5 2.66 on the CPU side. What settings are you using to get 20-40fps in full screen? I get nowhere near that and currently play at 720p in a window.
 
I'm playing with the same config, at least as far as GPU in the iMac goes. Core i5 2.66 on the CPU side. What settings are you using to get 20-40fps in full screen? I get nowhere near that and currently play at 720p in a window.

I can PM you the specifics if you want, but my first suggestion is that you simply compare your fps between 1280x720 windowed, and 2560x1440 full screen. I suspect the difference will be negligeable. And if so, look for the culprit outside of graphics settings.

{ To try to provide you with better data, I went to the village of Shaemoor and entered Divinity Reach. From where you end up when entering, (Plaza of Dwayna) I have 26 fps.
There are a number of settings, but a neat feature is that they get applied in realtime, so you can see the effect from the fps counter in lower right hand corner of the overlaid settings panel.
None of the setting affect my fps much. In fact, if I go down to 1280x720 (full screen or windowed) I still get no more than 29-30 fps, and incidentally this is exactly the same as my fps when I do the reverse experiment, and go from Divinity Reach to face the vista of Shaemoor.

It seems to be largely system limited rather than GPU limited.
I have a 2.8GHz core i7, with 16GB of 1333MHz memory.
GW doesn't require tons of memory (1.38GB atm, I have it in the background as I type) so unless you have a ton of other cruft going you should be fine there. Memory speed is a factor, but couldn't do more than 25% maximum between us and that's the upper bound. The only reason I can see for your fps to be significantly lower than mine is if you have background tasks running that draw a lot of resources. My fps only increased by a single fps when I shot down 2GB worth of safari + app store + iTunes running at the same time. You'll have to experiment. I have shadows on low (don't care about them much) and post-processing low because I find DoF effects obnoxious. Other settings are decent to high.}

Edit: I run OSX 10.8.2. Drivers could of course be an issue as well.
 
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Thanks for the tips. You're right, there wasn't much in the full-screen 2560x1440 vs the 720p window after I turned post-processing down to low. 20-30fps is common but the lowest fps comes when there's a lot going on in an event and there are a lot of toons and enemies. CPU usage is really quite high for me, two cores get loaded almost fully almost all of the time.

Full-screen disables some of the OS X gestures but I don't mind so much I guess, keeps me focused on the game! 10.8.2 for me too so as up-to-date as I can make it I think, drivers wise.
 
I haven't played the game since a few weeks after it came out. You can join me in GTAV, but I'm telling you now you better keep one eye pointed to the sky. I have a blimp and I kinda sorta know how to use it.
 
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