Guild Wars 2

Mouse and Keyboard Warriors
elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Sun Mar 24, 2019 10:46 am

Snowy, another friend of his and i seem to be making a loose routine of running fractals on a weekend morning - we've had a fun few runs the last couple of weekends - very relaxed on the whole! :D


Few little bits of news and info:
Super Adventure Box is back! If you never got to play Super Mario 64 but wanted to experience a spiritual follow up to it then check this out! There's normal mode for someone wanting some old school platform fun, and Tribulation mode for the old school masochists who believe it's fine to die to invisible traps until you memorise the whole thing! It's fully accessible to everyone, even F2P accounts.
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/supe ... next-week/



Aside from that, a big quality of life change in the simple amendment of how loot drops:
We’ve been working on a few major changes to loot drops at level 80 which will provide both quality of life improvements and help with the long-term health of the economy. These will go into effect on March 26.

• Core Tyria and the Heart of Maguuma regions will now drop Unidentified Gear rather than individual fine, masterwork, and rare items.

• Magic find will no longer affect the results of identifying Unidentified Gear.

• Unidentified Gear reward tables are being changed to account for their availability across Tyria, including:

o Setting the frequency of rare item drops in the Crystal Desert region to the same frequency as rare items from the rest of Tyria
o Removal of Eyes of Kormir, Congealed Putrescence, and Pulsing Brandsparks from salvaging Unidentified Gear—they’ll now drop from the Crystal Desert region loot tables
o Addition of fine and masterwork Reclaimed Weapons from the Heart of Maguuma region to Unidentified Gear loot tables


This means Unidentified Gear has the same value to everyone once it has dropped, regardless of your current magic find.

If you’ve been playing in areas that dropped Unidentified Gear, and you were identifying those items, your overall chances to receive exotic gear and legendary precursors will decrease. If you’ve been playing in core Tyria or Heart of Thorns maps, your chances for exotic and precursor drops will increase if you choose to identify the Unidentified Gear you find. This equalizes your chances of getting those drops across any part of Tyria you like to play in.

To summarize the changes:

Before the 3/26 change
• Unidentified Gear drops are influenced by magic find twice—once when received as a drop and once when identified.
• Fine, masterwork, and rare equipment drops are influenced by magic find once, when received as a drop.

After the 3/26 change
• Unidentifed Gear drops are influenced by Magic Find once, when received as a drop. Exotic equipment still has the same chance it currently does to drop directly in addition to the rare chance to obtain it from identifying gear.
And finally, a resource for those of you who like relaxed mmo-ing, but perhaps get frustrated by too much scavenger hunting without clues:

Guild Wars Taco is an overlay that enables you to enable tracking of collections and other items in the game. If you enable it, it will often lead you to efficient farming routes, map exploration or collection items you might otherwise miss.

It's not essential, certainly not for newer players, but if your playstyle is better enjoyed with breadcrumbs, you might want to consider it:
http://www.gw2taco.com/

And while Taco itself is great, what Tekkit has done is a LOT of work saved into one marker pack:
http://tekkitsworkshop.net/index.php/gw2-taco/download

If you care about DPS meters and the like, then ARCDPS is your add-on of choice:
https://www.deltaconnected.com/arcdps/x64/

Plonk the d3d9.dll file into your bin64 guild wars folder and it should start when you launch your game.
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Tue Mar 26, 2019 7:12 pm

Freebies:

A recent episode of Guild Wars 2 introduced the roller beetle mount that i posted about some time ago.

This week GW2 is running a bring players back campaign.

If you missed the beetle living world chapter, log in now and claim it from the gemstore.

If you don't have PoF or HoT, they're on offer this week with a promo code, which makes each xpac 15EUR, or 25 EUR for the both of them (standard editions)
Free Episode Unlock: “Daybreak”
If you missed picking up the first episode of Living World Season 4 while it was live, visit the Gem Store in game to unlock “Daybreak” for free! All players can also grab a free Tradesman’s Package this week in the Gem Store (limit one per account). These items will be available from March 26 until April 1.

You’ll need to own Guild Wars 2: Path of Fire™ to play Living World Season 4. If you haven’t upgraded your account yet, use the coupon code GW2WELCOMEBACK to take 50% off* when you purchase the expansion through our official site..
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

User avatar
Sly Boots
Bar Staff
Posts: 6277
Joined: Thu Aug 09, 2018 8:34 am
Location: Hampshire
Contact:

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by Sly Boots » Tue Mar 26, 2019 7:57 pm

Cool, thanks for the heads up mate, will grab that free mount.

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Tue Mar 26, 2019 8:22 pm

Sly Boots wrote:
Tue Mar 26, 2019 7:57 pm
Cool, thanks for the heads up mate, will grab that free mount.
The chapter contains the mount, but you don't get it until you've done the story and a (reasonable) scavenger hunt - just fyi!

If you logged in while it was active then you should have the chapter anyway!

Beetle is awesome btw! 8-)
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Mon Apr 01, 2019 7:53 pm

Another free story episode unlock this week:
Free Episode Unlock: “A Bug in the System”
If you missed picking up the second episode of Living World Season 4 while it was live, visit the Gem Store in game to unlock “A Bug in the System” for free! All players can also grab a free Metabolic Primer this week in the Gem Store (limit one per account). These items will be available starting April 2 until April 8.
If you logged in while the event was active you will have the chapter already. But if you weren't playing then, log in now and grab it from the gem store. It's worth grabbing even if you won't come back to it in the near future. Free accounts quality too, to the best of my knowledge.

Another top tip: If you are trying to find that object in your inventory, or want to see what percentile of players have x or y achievement, or your total net worth, or the cost to craft something with or without your stored materials, then you want to be using GW2 Efficiency. Log into your guild wars account on the main website and create an API key.

Add your API key to GW2 Efficiency and open up a world of stats! :D

https://gw2efficiency.com/account/overview
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Tue Apr 02, 2019 7:46 pm

Blog post today from Mike Z as Game Director on the status of things and next steps following the recent cuts:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/what ... ld-wars-2/
What’s Next for Guild Wars 2
by Mike Zadorojny on April 02, 2019
Hey, everyone,

Over the past few weeks, most of our team has been focused on getting the next couple of releases ready, which will culminate in our Living World Season 4 finale. Meanwhile, we’re also looking toward the future.

Our Philosophy
I’ve been speaking with members of the team for a few months, examining the way we create content to make sure we continue to do what’s best for the game. Lately we’ve been scrutinizing not only our plans for Season 5, but our core development philosophy. Ultimately, we believe that our core pillars for Guild Wars 2 have not changed:

Encourage players to interact positively
Support player autonomy
Focus on horizontal progression instead of vertical
Build upon previous designs
Strive for the fun
The Living World of Guild Wars 2 is a great way for us to accomplish all of that. It’s the best way to provide our player community with regular content updates—great features, new horizons to explore, and an engaging story that brings our world and characters to life—without charging a subscription fee.

New Guild Wars 2 Team Structure
So, what does this mean for Guild Wars 2?

We are taking the opportunity now to reorganize ourselves into four fully staffed content teams with additional teams dedicated to supporting the core game like Skills and Balance, Rewards, WvW, and sPvP.

Content teams will have more flexibility to decide what makes sense for a given release—for example, we could focus on expanding the boundaries and content of an existing map if that would provide a better experience than creating a new one. Ultimately, this will mean a relatively steady release of new content that will allow us to continue telling the story of Tyria in exciting new ways.

The Next Few Months
So, what’s next? We released Super Adventure Festival so players can return to Moto’s game world and experience the homage to the games of yesteryear.

After that, the Current Activities Team has a release that will build toward the Season 4 finale.

We’re in the process of wrapping up Episode 6 now, and we’re excited to not only announce a release date, but also to play the finale alongside all of you. It won’t fall within the two-to-three-month window that we tried to target throughout Season 4 because of the adjustments we had to make in February, but stay tuned—more info is coming soon.

We’re currently adding more polish to the final encounter in the next raid, which continues the story of Qadim and will get its own release after Episode 6. We’re utilizing one of the new team’s efforts to build some additional small-scale open world content so all of our players will have something to celebrate with the release of the raid.

The Future
The commander’s tale will continue in Living World Season 5. As the teams get going and plans become more cemented, we’ll be able to talk a bit more on that topic.

We also have our sights set on a few features that have already been in development for some time. Please understand that these are all works in progress, so details can change between here and the final version, and we don’t have a timeline for the release of any of these. These features will ship when they are ready.

The rune and sigil salvaging release last year was in anticipation of releasing legendary runes and sigils—the final components of legendary core equipment.
Over the past few months, astute players have been noticing a trend of updates and improvements to how our skill-slotting system works and have accurately speculated that the long-requested feature of build templates is in the works.
We’d like to increase the max cooking level from 400 to 500. This crafting profession needs a refresh to make lower-tier foods important to the ecosystem and help reinvigorate various resources throughout the game.
We’ve mentioned in the past how important world restructuring is to our WvW initiatives, and that hasn’t changed. While the Programming Team is focused on this initiative, the team is also focusing on smaller updates that can temporarily change the game mode, like the No Downed State Week we’ve done in the past. We’re also talking about different types of reward structures for events.
Swiss tournament support is the next major feature the sPvP team is working on. This feature will be utilized by our structured tournaments moving forward.


Further Down the Road
Beyond all of this, here is some of what’s on our radar for the future. None of these have been fully designed and are even more subject to change—or being shelved:

For WvW, we’ve talked about changing the matches so that scoring matters in 8-hour intervals. This allows us to address gameplay in off-peak hours in a way that doesn’t invalidate the work of the most active populations.
After the cooking 500 update, jewel crafting is the last profession needing to be extended.
The Competitive Team has been working on the idea of building a festival that highlights both sPvP and WvW. It’s a fun concept that would allow us to focus on those game types and try new things.
This sort of discussion of projects that we’ve kept under wraps until now is a departure from how we’ve been communicating for a while. It’s our hope that through posts like this we can help clarify for you what our priorities and goals are for the game. And while this isn’t everything we have planned for the game, it at least gives you better insight into its development. The team is passionate about not only supporting Guild Wars 2, but continuing to grow it alongside all of you.

Thanks for your time and see you in game!

z
Build Templates will be a big win for a community that's been asking for it since the launch of the game!

A few other bits in there are exciting for me as a veteran, but probably less so for many others. No real big ticket news here on longer term direction and exciting developments, but these teams aren't exactly known for sharing up front on these things. Nice to see them try and engage the community more though.
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Tue Apr 09, 2019 3:16 pm

My furious rampage of Guild Wars 2 news continues this week with week 3 bonuses on their campaign to get people back into the game:

If you missed it first time around, log in now and go to the trading post to get another chapter of the living story now:
Free Episode Unlock: “Long Live the Lich”
If you missed picking up the third episode of Living World Season 4 while it was live, visit the Gem Store in game to unlock “Long Live the Lich” for free! All players can also grab a free Experience Booster this week in the Gem Store (limit one per account). These items will be available starting April 9 until April 15.
Also.... teasers abound on the new living story chapter, which has a teaser up:



And new videos today reveal a new MOUNT! So that's 8 classes of mount with unique skills, if we add this to the jackal, springer, skimmer, jackal, gryphon, roller beetle and recently released war claw!

Not bad for all free content.



More details in the article on Eurogamer
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Thu May 02, 2019 8:24 am

The next content drop video has come in, which probably means patch a week next Tuesday:



The teams are also looking at how to fill gaps between festival events:
While the team is working toward the release of Episode 6 and the future of Guild Wars 2 development, a few of us are building out a stable of bonus events. You’ve already seen the World vs. World weeklong bonus event with no down state, and the Queen’s Jubilee Boss Blitz weekend, but soon we’ll release other bonus events. The first iterations of two of the planned events are complete, and we have two more in active development. Our intention is to run these during times when there are no major releases, and reward players for participating.

The first of these events, World Boss Week, starts May 6 and will run until May 13. During this week, all world boss kills in core Tyria zones will reward a Bonus Box of Goods in addition to normal loot drops.

The second event, Meta-Event Rush, will start a few weeks after the World Boss Week. During this week, our intention is to remove the daily cap on all world meta event completion rewards and to reward additional loot for some of our Meta-Events to pair with some improvements to the Path of Fire map meta events. More info will come closer to the event.

While I can’t talk too much about what we have planned beyond that, we aren’t restricting ourselves to “inside the box” design for future events. Some of them may make significant shakeups to their game modes during the time they run. Future iterations we’re thinking about are:

No daily limit on world boss loot
Rare harvesting nodes spawn after world boss kill
Community goals and rewards
Collections and meta achievements with titles
This is where our community comes in! We want to make events that leverage existing content and resources, while being fun and rewarding for you to play. We welcome your ideas for additional events and would love to hear your feedback on the events you’ve heard about so far, including their rewards.
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Wed May 15, 2019 7:45 pm

New Patch came out yesterday - final chapter of Living Story Season 4, and conclusion of the current story arc.

Lots of spoilers in the video below for last chapter if you're not up to date!
Spoiler
New Map is fun - mix of Silverwastes with Dragon's Stand, and the new mount seems like it will be good to have, although it's locked behind a series of scavenger hunt collections too!
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Sun Sep 01, 2019 8:59 am

Not sure if anyone else is still active on this game, or following the news, but the community had another fun week. It's been a tough year for ArenaNet since their layoffs.

Unfortunately their marketing team is utterly, utterly clueless, and it's a bloody shame, because I feel it damages the game more than represents what is actually there.

About a month ago they started hyping up a big event, with a live countdown timer, and a theatre booked for the "big event".

The community already knew from earlier press that there would be no expansion, and that the team planned to move from Season 4 of Living Story straight to Season 5. Expectations were very low.

But the sheer amount of nothing that was announced, barring a (nice) reveal trailer for Season 5 and the next chapter of Guild wars is really disappointing for the hype.

The community would have been quite happy to have had a website announcement, reveal and be able to hype and theorise and all that.

But to have a convention centre to reveal a video, some pop vinyls, pricing changes,but absolutely nothing substantive about gameplay mechanics, how the content will differ from the existing, or any other reason for all those who travelled to be there live is... just wow.

Now the developers and those laid off are, naturally, defensive. And that's ok. ANet were reeling from the layoffs of veterans from their ranks, from having to restructure and refocus, and from people having to step up. And the community was supportive of it. But come on.... to anyone who isn't in the know, and even to those IN the know... if you've having an announcement, have something material to show....

So yes.... their marketing team is SHIT beyond belief, and goes does it do this great game no favours.

Anyway - for those interested - trailer for the new chapter - there's no spoilers for previous content, but there are classic Guild Wars 1 locations we can expect to see! :D





For anyone who wants to sit through 40 mins of... content from the actual announcement:




For what it's worth - i still consider GW2 one of the easiest pick up and play MMO's out there, and I consider that it has years' worth of content for those who haven't done so to enjoy. It's a truly great game for players to jump into at any time.

As a very veteran player, and an active one, I do find the cadence slightly frustrating, but I guess as someone who has to divide fun stuff with RL responsibilities, it's probably better for my real life that this is the case. Whether you do more or less on any given day matters little because it's all still there the next day to pick up from!

I'm still always available for fractals or other content if people want to jump back in, so just let me know! Work is a bit hell right now, but i'll find a way to make it work sometime! :D
Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

elgaucho
Posts: 259
Joined: Mon Aug 13, 2018 7:50 am

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by elgaucho » Tue Nov 12, 2019 8:48 pm

It's the last week to unlock the current living story chapter for your account, if you have one. This chapter was a really pleasant change from previous ones - much more Charr community activity based with lots of lore building on the Charr - I do recommend you give it a go if you haven't.

The trailer for the next chapter is up, and it's looking dark and foreboding - I'm hoping it will be good after their recent community snafus!

Image
Proud PW Member since 15/10/2003
A lurktastic 2678 posts!

User avatar
Medicine Man
Bar Staff
Posts: 2625
Joined: Thu Aug 09, 2018 1:44 pm
Location: Under the Stairs

Re: Guild Wars 2

Post by Medicine Man » Thu Apr 30, 2020 2:18 pm

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guil ... ree-gifts/
In addition to the anniversary celebration in Guild Wars, we’re celebrating with free gifts for Guild Wars 2 players.
Prince Rurik’s Vanguard Cape
From now until May 19, this exclusive cape inspired by an iconic Guild Wars character is free to claim in the Gem Store!
Free Black Lion Trading Company Goods
You’ll find free items in the Gem Store in the coming weeks. Each is available for seven days.
Friday, May 1: 5 Transmutation Charges
Tuesday, May 5: Experience Booster
Friday, May 8: 2 Black Lion Statuettes
Tuesday, May 12: Toy Mini Egg
Friday, May 15: Communal Boost Bonfire
Happy anniversary, Tyria!

Post Reply