Update on Precursor Scavenger Hunt

It is been a while since we were told concerning the precursor scavenger hunt that ArenaNet wanted to implement in-game. Last night, with the intention of being as transparent as attainable, Colin Johanson has updated the community with its development timeline:

Just a swift update on where the entire scavenger hunt program stands since I know that's a topic loads of of you have brought up lately. We are not right now actively working on building any sort of legendary precursor scavenger hunt, this really is something we should do in the future & we're in the midst of designing how this would function, however no one is actively building this feature & you will need to not anticipate in the Jan/Feb/March releases at this point.

We are yet working on expanding reward strategies to make them more re-worthwhile across all parts of the gw2 gold game, making the open world more gratifying, and adding new ways you can earn precursors as rewards by means of new reward methods taking benefit of our open persistent world.

Some of these additions will come as early as the January release, & will get handled in more detail in the next week or two as well release all the details about this release once checking has signed off it is all ready to go in January. (we'll also provide a high level summary of our objectives with reward methods, and so on. within our 2013 blog post, which will need to be out next week)

Update:

To clarify since I think these 2 statements could be tricky without context, Linsey is indeed working on designing the method by which we'd add precursor scavenger hunts to the guild wars 2 gold game. We are not actively implementing that design but, it hasn't been finalized, and building it that will involve a much larger team.

No conflicting statements here, as a game designer when they are working on something, by and large that implies they are designing it, as that is their employment.

Marvelous catch & thank you for asking for clarity!

helpful resources:

http://www.leapzipblog.com/blog/read/91436/darkfall%3A-unholy-wars%3A-the-games-of-2013%3A-darkfall-unholy-wars/

http://www.webcosmo.com/listing/Details.aspx?postId=1514325

GW2 running into the same issues that Rift and WAR had

Dynamic events, Rifts, zone invasions, Public Quests... all fail once the games population out levels an area or the Guild Wars 2 gold games population dwindles.

I've seen this happen with three games now. First with WAR public quests. They were great at first and then after a month or two you were left soloing them or skipping them entirely.

Then Rift came along with its Rift events and even with population scaling they failed once populations dropped.

Now here I am... in a mid tier zone in GW2 and i can't kill a orange event/mob because no one is around. I find myself avoiding content as I level.

Sure everyone loves open world content. its great when a game first launches and everyone is leveling together. WAR, Rift and GW2 were all great the first month or two.

But in hindsight was it really a good decision to put these mechanics into the game? Now that GW2 is mostly top heavy, even with down scaling people are left skipping events or begging for help in map chat.

I'm sure at this point A-net is second guessing their decisions now. Same as Trion and Mythic did back then when the gw2 gold game worlds became ghost towns.

You would think after watching two companies fail with on the fly open world group content that A-net would have design GW2 to be adjusted later on when populations dipped.

They didn't and now anyone thats leveling gets to suffer...

So what do they do? What could they do that Mythic and Trion couldnt? You guys have any ideas? because right now im at the point of wishing Gw2 was a tad more traditional with its leveling content and didn't entirely focus everything on massive zone popluation.

Guild Wars 2: ArenaNet announces new sales figures and plans

Guild Wars 2 months after the release still successful. Above all, the winter has driven the sales of MMORPGs on. Overall, pleased the makers more than three million copies sold.

Guild Wars 2 in August 2012, saw the light of the video game world. Even months after the launch, the Tyrian MMORPG still enjoys great popularity. Especially the severe winter has pushed revenues for the role play further up. Overall, the look of ArenaNet developers back to three million copies sold, while in September, could break the mark of two million.

You want to rest in the house of ArenaNet why but that does not, because Guild Wars 2 is to be further improved. The focus currently are improvements on achievement system and the ongoing development of safety in terms of hacks and digital attacks. When you can expect with the new Guild Wars 2 development is, to date not yet fixed. On our topic page for buy Guild Wars 2 gold we will keep you more up to date.

Details of some of the mechanisms governing the McM

Mike Ferguson participates in a thread on the official forum where he provides information on many of the rules that apply to WvW.

However, the exact number of gw2 gold players battling simultaneously on a card McM or the number of players per team per map remains a mystery. Since the launch of the game, ArenaNet has never wanted to communicate these figures.

Didji wrote on the forum dedicated to the World against World, an excellent summary of this information:

Siege
Laid siege weapons but unbuilt disappear after 10 minutes if no one built. Whenever refueling is spent to build the weapon, this timer is reset.

Built siege weapons disappear after 30 minutes if no one uses them. This timer resets each use.

This system is in place for each siege weapon is a small part of memory servers, which means that if the siege does not disappear, it would eventually clog the servers.

ANet working on the idea of ​​making visible the disappearance timer siege weapons ("working on the idea," says it all).

Each siege weapon or construction site siege weapon has a radius of 1000 in which it is possible to use four other siege weapons or construction sites. It is therefore possible to lay siege five within 1000.
There is a limit of 100 siege weapons (excluding rams) and 100 rams per team per map. Can not ask more than that siege.

Release plans for siege weapons that others can retrieve is expected behavior. This is not a bug / exploit. ANet would prefer to be able to directly exchange plans, but there are technical difficulties that prevent it. This situation is unlikely to change.

ANet tried to make plans siege weapons are linked to the account and not the soul, but it was dirty impact. So this change is not in the program.

The fact that some skills can destroy projectiles siege weapons is expected and normal.

Strengths / Tours
Reinforcements / fortifications (T2/T3) to the walls and doors not only increase their points, but their defense.

Being able to TP for attacking a fort because the timer has expired and the attack that takes 2 or 3 seconds to restart is a bug. This will be corrected.

Commander
No changes planned at this time.

Dead
ANet is working on a forced return to base if a player has been dead for some time. They do not like the idea that the body may spy.

Loot system
The bags will stay there again for a while, put the loot directly into the player's inventory can have bad consequences (if inventory is overloaded, the character slows down a lot) and nobody is working on currently.

Various
The player limit is evenly distributed between the three teams. ANet can not reproduce the problem where Guild Wars 2 gold players must go through a queue to get the buff inferiority.

Ranger pets or Necromancers do not count in the limit of players per map.

Players from other servers appear as "invaders Server" or "Server defender" to avoid harassment, strengthen the spirit of competition and quickly identify the server to his opponent.

ANet has no plans to introduce a system of "classification" ratio killed / dead. The disparity in classes played McM program is not either.
ANet working on the usefulness of badges, new armor and McM by McM drop rate (or gains compared to PvE), among others. It should arrive in the coming months.

Guild Wars 2 Snowflake Jewelry exploit punishable with perma-ban

A Guild Wars 2 exploit which allowed players to generate as a good deal of prized ectoplasm as they wish has resulted in permanent bans. The exploit was introduced by the MMO's recent Wintersday event & has since been patched, with ArenaNet enforcing a relentless, no-excuses-accepted policy. In a thread on the official Guild Wars 2 forum (spotted by VG/247), ArenaNet Support Liason Gaile Gray justified the policy.

"Any time you take 1 factor & can make two, after which 4, after which sixteen... ya gotta know that is just wrong. (I won't quibble on the odds, having said that overall, that form of doubling was not outside the realm of possibility.) & to perform that action hundreds & hundreds of occasions? That is known as "exploitation," and that's against the User Agreement, the Rules of Conduct, and all that is holy."

She signed off her post with the following words of wisdom: "Exploit closed. Worst offenders terminated. That's what has to take place to make things right for all of us."

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http://www.celiac.com/gluten-free/blog/1036/entry-1757-servers-ranking-of-wvw-in-guild-wars-2/

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Dev Tracker: Culling Update & Improvements

Thank you, Grit, for posting that link. It points to a post in which I describe the culling concern in a number of detail and discuss a few of the troubles involved with altering culling. An even more in depth explanation of what culling is can be identified here https://forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/pvp/wuvwuv/The-real-dilemma-here-is-invisible-enemies-Give-their-algorithms-time-to-match-servers-effectively/page/4#post356817 (make certain to read each that post plus the subsequent - my description exceeded the post size limit).

As you understand we've been working on this issue for a while yet what I think we haven't ever said before is that our objective is to remove culling completely from WvW. So that you can remove culling thoroughly we are obliged to address three troubles:

1) Bandwidth out of our servers/datacenter (traffic would grow without culling)
two) Bandwidth in to each client (traffic to each client would also boost without culling)

3) Client performance difficulties associated to rendering (potentially) all the players on a map at once. (Note that we base our performance requirements in this case on min-spec buyers. We don't want to cease anybody being able to play the game after all.)

Till all 3 of those difficulties have already been taken care of we cannot turn culling off due to the fact doing so would cause something to break or perform poorly.

Ok, now let's speak about what progress we've made!

Concern #1 was the easiest to deal with for the reason that we can actually just throw income at the circumstance. When we first began down the road toward removing culling from WvW I took a bunch of bandwidth measurements after which went to the executives & stated, basically, "Hey, if we disable culling our network traffic will boost by X%. Are we ok with that?". The answer I got was a clear & unambiguous "yes!" So situation #1 isn't a problem after all.
Concern #2 is a modest tougher. We have to ensure that folks with a min-spec network connection will not be overwhelmed by the facts we send them & we certainly can not just acquire a better connection for all of our players. So we put our heads together & came up with a plan to reduce the bandwidth required for WvW (and Gw2 in general) as much as attainable. Those alterations are in testing now & will be rolled out as soon as we're convinced that they're solid. Let's say we're able to get everything working the way we'd like (& I'm fairly confident that we will) then this will address concern #2.

So that leaves us with issue #3: client efficiency. A number of time ago the WvW team acquired an engine programmer who's focused 100% on this challenge (and he is being assisted by an additional engine programmer who is not officially on the WvW team). They are working on many honestly remarkable optimizations and engine modifications which we hope will allow even min-spec prospects to render all the gw2 gold players on a WvW map. We'll be talking in more detail concerning the distinct alterations they are making when points get just a little more nailed down, but I can say right now that I'm incredibly impressed with the work they've done already.

So that's where we're. Engine programmers are working their magic even now and we're assessing the networking changes that will be needed. I believe that our objective of removing culling from WvW is achievable and I'm looking forward to the day that I can announce to you all that we have pulled it off!