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Guild Wars 2 Patch Notes: 25th September 2012

September 26, 2012 by

Guild Wars 2 Patch NotesAnother big update from ArenaNet – kudos to them for the speed in which they’re getting a lot of these fixes in.

The full patch notes for you:

General
• Fixes to LOD on numerous objects in the world.
• Fixes to maps to prevent players from moving outside of the playable area.
• Fixed a bug that made pet footsteps excessively loud, especially in water.
• Fixed a bug with assists not working in keg brawl.
• Fixed numerous blocked events.
• Updated text and functionality when purchasing bank slots.
• Fixed loud sounds on portals to the Underworld in Godslost Swamp.
• Fixed several bugs that were preventing some skill challenges from resetting properly.
• All recipe items are now account bound. Many were previously soulbound.
• Updated Superior Rune of the Ogre Rock Dog so that it doesn’t summon when the player is underwater.
• Updated Sigil of Demon Summoning so that it doesn’t summon when the player is underwater.
• Summoned rock dogs and fleshreavers die when they enter water.
• Removed the lone 1 copper from city map completion rewards.
• Removed Mystic Forge recipes that were being used to reduce surplus supplies.
• Enemies in tutorial areas will no long drop loot. Instead, an award of 72 copper has been added to the rewards for completing the tutorial. This is to dissuade players from lingering in tutorial instances to farm the creatures in them.
• Obsidian Shards are now account bound.
• Box of Berserker’s Draconian Armor and Box of Rampager’s Draconian Armor now reward the proper items.
• Fixed various crash bugs.
• Added the rank 30-39 wolf finishing move.
• Fixed recipes for the Mystic Artifact, Mystic Barricade, and Mystic Trident.
• Fixed visible map completion percentage errors and the achievement not completing.
• Applied 10-second cooldown to Bowl of Saffron-scented Poultry Soup buff. This was done to keep elementalists from spamming condition removal with Signet of Restoration.

Black Lion Trading Company
• Added functionality and improvements to the Black Lion Chests, including a chance to receive new items like a permanent version of the Black Lion Trader Express.
• Black Lion Salvage Kits now properly display the correct percentages for rare materials.

Story
• Adjusted difficulty for the following story steps: “A Fragile Peace,” “Breaking the Bone Ship,” “Killing Fields,” “Political Homicide,” “Sabotage,” “Set to Blow,” “Stand By Your Krewe,” “The Ringmaster,” “The Stone Sheath,” “Track the Seraph,” “Unscheduled Delay,” “Unwelcome Visitors,” and “Welcome Home.”
• Fixed bugs in the following story steps: “A Fragile Peace,” “Against the Corruption,” “Bad Blood,” “Forging the Pact,” “Stand By Your Krewe,” and “Tower Down.”
• Fixed exploits in “The Sound of Psi-Lance.”
• End of Story Loot Bags:
o These have been improved to only give green or better gear of level 78 or higher.
o The number of bags received has been reduced from 5 to 3.
o More improvements will be made in coming weeks. Players who complete the story before the final update will be equally compensated once the new rewards are in.

Dungeons
General
• Updated vendors in the Ascalonian Catacombs and Caudecus’s Manor to sell level 80 versions of their unique skins rather than level 60 and 70. Players who purchased the level 60 and 70 versions will soon be given the opportunity to upgrade those to level 80 without having to use transmutation stones.
Citadel of Flame
• Fixed an exploit in Magg’s chain that was allowing players to skip the entire dungeon and still be rewarded.
• In Magg’s chain, if Magg happens to die in the lava field, he’ll teleport himself to the start of the area just outside it.
• In Magg’s chain, Magg must be much closer to things to draw their initial aggro. This only affects the escort to the magmacyte rock.
Caudecus’s Manor
• Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to skip content.
Honor of the Waves
• Fixed a bug in the Butcher’s chain that prevented a boss from spawning.
Arah
• Fixed a blocking issue.
Ascalonian Catacombs
• Fixed blocking bugs in Detha’s chain.

Dungeon Rewards
We’ve made some significant updates to dungeon rewards. I wanted to try and clarify them here. All of these changes have been the result of an original exploit which was letting players receive upwards of 20 levels by completing a single dungeon run. We initially closed this exploit, which caused some new problems. The result is this new system which should increase dungeon rewards for players who play though them normally but help curb inflation of rewards for those who are using exploitative methods to farm them.

1) Dungeon tokens are now rewarded at the end of an explorable chain. This was done to stop players from repeatedly entering a chain and farming the first boss that dropped tokens rather than playing the entire chain. At some point in the near future, we will make up for this by making dungeon tokens a rare drop so that even players who are not completing a chain can make partial progress toward the rewards.
2) Dungeons reward 20 tokens for completion and now reward an additional 40 tokens for the first time they are completed each day. This means that if players can complete all 3 chains of a dungeon in a day, they’ll receive a total of 180 tokens, which is enough to purchase some of the smaller rewards.
3) Dungeon tokens should be account bound. This will allow players to have a single character farm tokens for their other characters.
4) Last week, to limit the most extreme cases of dungeon speed-clearing, we introduced a system to limit rewards for rapidly repeating dungeon clears. However, a bug in that system caused it to impact more players than intended. This week, we’re updating the system to not impact clearing different chains of the same dungeon. We’ll continue to evaluate this system in coming weeks.

Professions
General
• Implemented a fix to make Heartseeker, Lightning Leap, Flame Leap, and Monarch’s Leap hit more reliably.

Elementalist
• Fixed bugs with Flamestrike and Ice Shards so they can’t be fired behind the player.
• Quick Glyphs: This Air Magic trait has been updated to apply 20% recharge reduction to the elite skill Glyph of Elementals.

Engineer
• Grenade Barrage: This Grenade Kit skill should now be usable underwater.
• Short Fuse: This trait is no longer overwritten by the Grenadier trait. Also, this trait now works with underwater grenades.
• Speedy Kits: Added a 5-second recharge to the trigger for this trait. This was to prevent players from exploiting it to gain vigor buffs of extreme duration.
• Invigorating Speed: Added a 5-second recharge to the trigger for this trait. This was to prevent players from exploiting it to gain vigor buffs of extreme duration.

Guardian
• Merciful Intervention: This skill has been updated to work with the Meditation Mastery trait. The tooltip for this skill has also been updated to display the healing amount when affected by traits.
• Elusive Power: This trait has been updated to not grant might when aegis was blocked.

Mesmer
• Fixed text on “readied” mantra buffs.
• Veil: This glamour skill has been updated to show the appropriate active duration when not affected by traits.

Necromancer
• Taste of Death: This skill’s healing fact has been updated.
• Spectral Wall: This skill has been updated to apply the correct amount of vulnerability (10).
• Vampiric: Fixed a bug with this trait so that it now functions with projectiles.
• Close to Death: This trait has been updated to provide its listed 20% boost instead of the previous (unlisted) 10% boost.
• Banshee’s Wail: This Curses trait has been updated to apply extra swiftness.
• Spectral Walk: This skill has been updated to be more active and to work properly with its recharge trait. Also, Sever Spectral Bond has been changed to Spectral Recall.
• Minion Master: This Death Magic trait has been updated to properly affect the elite skill Summon Flesh Golem.
• Putrid Mark: This skill has been fixed to make it properly unblockable with the Greater Marks trait.
• Mark of Evasion: This trait can now trigger the Soul Marks trait.
• Reaper’s Protection: This trait has been updated to properly work with a variety of crowd-control effects.
Thief
• Bountiful Theft: This strait has been fixed so that it doesn’t apply 15 seconds of vigor twice.

Races
Norn
• Call Wurm: Autocasting has been removed from this skill to prevent an exploit. Additionally, the skill may now be cast on the move.

Player versus Player
• Legacy of the Foefire: Fixed an exploit that was allowing players to teleport past one of the gates.

World versus World
• Experimental Rifle: This item is no longer usable in World versus World.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

Guild Wars 2 and Hackers: How To Secure Your Account

September 22, 2012 by

Mike O’Brien, who is GW2’s Executive Producer and who is also President of ArenaNet, has posted a nifty overview of account security.

It covers everything from:

– two-factor authentication (they were working on a mobile app but have chosen to change direction and go with Google Authenticator instead)
– password strength (surprise, surprise, people still set lame passwords)
– fighting hackers (they have 20+ million passwords on a blacklist that hackers have attempted to use with particular email addresses – you won’t be able to use these passwords if they are linked to an email that a hacker has tried. It’s reduced hacked acocunts from 1.5% to 0.1%)
– database breaches (they haven’t had any – yet)
– hitting the hackers where it hurts by not buying gold from third-party gold sellers

You can read the full post here – it’s not just for the noobs and has some interesting insights.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With: , ,

Guild Wars 2 For Mac Announced

September 19, 2012 by

Ok I have to admit this has come as a major surprise. ArenaNet have just announced that GW2 is ocming to the Mac and a beta version is already avilable for download.

Here’s the details:

Today we’re happy to announce another major milestone in the development of Guild Wars 2: going forward, ArenaNet will also be supporting the game on Apple’s Mac OS X. The Mac Beta client is available immediately for all Guild Wars 2 players. It shares the same features and connects to the same live game servers as the PC client. Anyone who purchases Guild Wars 2 can now play it on both PC and Mac.

Bringing Guild Wars 2 to the Mac is huge for us, because it introduces the game to an entire group of players who are often ignored by game developers. The ability to play together with your friends is one of the underlying principles of Guild Wars 2, and providing a Mac client means that friends and guildmates can play together regardless of what operating system they favor.

On top of it all, ArenaNet staffers are big fans of Macs. We offer them as part of our employee laptop subsidy program, and our president Mike O’Brien is rarely seen without his Mac laptop. We’re as excited as anyone to play Guild Wars 2 on OS X.

The Mac Beta is available to anyone who has purchased or purchases Guild Wars 2. All you need is an active Guild Wars 2 account to download the Mac Beta client. Just log in to account.guildwars2.com and click Download Client to get started. If you have any questions, check out our Mac FAQ.

Keep in mind as you play the Mac Beta that it is a beta product. Performance and system requirements aren’t finalized. Review the beta hardware specification, and understand that your overall experience will be better when we release the final version. Even though it’s a beta, the Mac client does connect to the same live environment that the PC client connects to.

To bring Guild Wars 2 to the Mac, ArenaNet worked with our partners at TransGaming, whose Cider technology allows us to mirror the game experience as closely as possible between the PC and Mac. This means that future updates to Guild Wars 2 will be available for both platforms simultaneously.

So whether you’re a PC or a Mac, or both, we’ll see you in-game!

The hardware specs mentioned in the post aren’t too harsh either:

  • Mac OS®X 10.7.X or later
  • Intel® Core™ i5 or better
  • 4 GB Ram or better
  • NVIDIA® GeForce® 320M, ATI Radeon™ HD 6630M, Intel HD 3000 or better
  • 25 GB available HDD space
  • Broadband Internet connection
  • Keyboard and mouse/equivalent

 

The Mac beta version of Guild Wars 2 runs well on the below machines or better. Your results may vary if you’ve upgraded or changed your Mac hardware or are running on lower hardware specifications.

  • iMac 21.5″, 27″ (Mid-2010)
  • iMac 21.5″, 27″ (Mid-2011)
  • MacBook Pro 15″, 17″ (Mid-2010)
  • MacBook Pro 13″, 15″, 17″ (Early and Late-2011)
  • MacBook Pro 13″, 15″, 17 (Mid-2012)
  • Mac Mini (Mid-2011)

So over to you: are you a Mac user that’s been waiting for this?

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

GW2 Patch Notes: 17th September 2012

September 18, 2012 by

The full patch notes for you from the latest GW2 game update – enjoy! :

General

  • Asuran players will now aim toward their targets when using a rifle.
  • Fixed various broken events and skill challenges.
  • Fixed various locations that allowed players to move outside the map.
  • Fixed various locations on maps where players could become stuck.
  • Discovery crafting may now use items directly from a player’s bank.
  • Fixed bugs in the Exploration achievement so players can now receive 100% map completion.
  • Added a system to limit the experience and gold that players can receive from speed-farming dungeons.

Story

  • Fixed bugs in “A Different Dream,” “A Fragile Peace,” “Dredging Up the Past,” “Forging the Pact,” “Pastkeeper,” “Ships of the Line,” “Stealing Secrets,” “The Priory Assailed,” and “The Source of Orr.”
  • Reduced the overall difficulty in “Dead of Winter.”

World-versus-World

  • Retaliation: This boon no longer reflects damage received from siege weapons.
  • The Experimental Rifle is no longer usable in World-versus-World.

Professions

Warrior

  • Smoldering Arrow: This skill’s casting time has been reduced.

Mesmer

  • The Prestige: This skill now requires full recharge if it’s interrupted at any time.

Thief

  • Descent of Shadows: This trait’s effect can now only trigger once every 8 seconds.

Engineer

  • Rocket Boots: This skill is no longer usable underwater. This is a temporary change until we can figure out why players can launch themselves into the sky using this skill.
  • Detonate Mine Field: This skill is no longer a blast finisher.
Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

GW2 Hits 2 Million Copies Sold: Just The Beginning?

September 17, 2012 by

For those (like me) that missed the press release, NCsoft have announced that sales of Guild Wars 2 has broken the 2-million mark. It’s a milestone for sure – some cynics say they’re surprised it took this long, but there’d have to be a great deal of happiness at NCsoft and ArenaNet on the achievement.

Predicting ongoing sales numbers is a bit like tea-leaf reading, but my feeling is that this is the first of many growth milestones for what is a very engaging game. What do you think?

The press release in full:

GUILD WARS® 2 SALES BREAK TWO MILLION UNITS
Critically-acclaimed online RPG quickly surpasses milestone after re-opening sales
NCsoft®, the world’s premier publisher and developer of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) and ArenaNet, developer of the renowned  Guild Wars franchise, has announced that the chart-topping MMO Guild Wars 2 has sold more than two million units. Despite temporarily halting first-party sales and replenishing retail stores to maintain an optimal player experience, Guild Wars 2surpassed the two million sales milestone shortly after turning sales back on.

Guild Wars 2, which launched just over two weeks ago, has captured the imagination of the gaming community around the world. With peak concurrency regularly exceeding 400,000 players and first week sales that placed it at the top of the All Formats charts across ten European territories, it’s clear that demand for the game remains high.

“Reactions from around the world justified the time and care we put into developing Guild Wars 2 and making it into the game it is today”, said Mike O’Brien, president and co-founder of ArenaNet. “And this is only the beginning. We’re continually fine-tuning the game to deliver the polished experience that our players expect, and we’re already working on new adventures and experiences to introduce into this truly dynamic online world.”

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

Guild Wars 2 Economy: Metrics Update

September 15, 2012 by

Click on image for full size

John Smith from the GW2 team has provided an interesting blog post on the state of play with the GW2 economy.

He covers off the Trading Post, supply and demand and economy exploits in some detail.

I found the most interesting bit to be the supply and demand issue, where John gives some insight on how interventionist ArenaNet are being:

We’ve noticed several markets that are clearly out of sync in terms of supply and demand. It isn’t interesting or fun to have a market flooded with items that contain very little value, so we’re making adjustments to the game every day. Players can expect to see these markets even out over time.

While adjusting the supply and demand will bring markets closer to non-vendor based equilibrium, there is still the matter of massive surplus of some items. To address the surplus, we’ve created some new, limited-time Mystic Forge recipes that use these items. These recipes create boxes that give chances for gold and some cool items.

Of course, all MMOs have interventions in their economy, but this seems to be some pretty formalised stuff. The graph you see above (click on it for the full size), shows the character gender spread in the game (roughly 60/40 to males), and the breakdown of professions, races and crafting. You can read the full blog post here.

Over to you: how are you finding the GW2 Trading Post so far? Have any tips to share?

Filed Under: Economy, General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

GW2 Game Status Update: 8th September 2012

September 8, 2012 by

Another day, another game update with a nice bunch of fixes, particularly with some storyline steps.

Interestingly, you can now also choose to not be prompted to join your home world if you’re wanting to play on overflow indefinitely.

The update in full:

 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Account Security
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!
When accounts are hacked and then used for botting or spamming ads for gold sales, we ban the accounts until we can return them to their rightful owner. If you login and see the message, “this account has been permanently banned for a violation of the User Agreement,” and if you’re not a gold seller, it’s likely that your account was hacked. Please contact customer support using the instructions below.
If you see email authentication messages in your inbox asking you to approve a login that you didn’t initiate and from someplace you don’t recognize, that’s a sign that a hacker knows your account name and password, and is only being prevented by the email authentication feature from accessing your account. You should immediately change your password to a new, unique password that you’ve never used anywhere else.
You can find more tips for keeping your Guild Wars 2 account secure in this article.
Customer Support
Our customer support team is still prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests.
Hacked accounts – If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions. Clearly state that it is a hacked account, and provide as much information as possible, including your account email address, your account display name or character names, and your 25-digit Guild Wars 2 serial code.
Email authentication – Email authentication allows you to approve or deny each login attempt from a new location, which can help protect your account even in the event a hacker discovers your password. However, some customers are finding email authentication messages are being filtered by their email provider or are otherwise having difficulty receiving these messages. You can now turn off email authentication by following these instructions. If you turn it off, be especially sure to use a unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else.
Password resets – If you’ve lost your password, you can now reset it by following these instructions.
Last Night’s Update
    • Fixed the issue with parties not staying together as they travel into dungeons.
    • Fixed issues with the storyline steps “A Light in the Darkness,” “Estate of Decay,” “Explosive Intellect,” “Rumors of Trouble,” “The Lost Chieftain’s Return,” and “Tribunes in Effigy.”
    • Added an option to stop queueing for your home world, for players who want to remain on an overflow server indefinitely without being asked.
Today’s Back-End Work
    • Fixed PvP tournament rewards.
Tonight’s Update
    • Will add the ability to report in-game mail.
    • Will reset monthly achievements for players who have been stuck at 100%, to help those whose achievements didn’t reset correctly on September 1. (Note that daily achievements reset each day at 00:00 GMT and monthly achievements reset on the first of each month at 00:00 GMT.)
    • Will include fixes for various blocked events and skill challenges.
Reporting exploits
If you discover an emergency game-breaking or economy-breaking bug, do not exploit it, but please notify us immediately at this email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. You may also use this email address to report suspected security vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who has sent reports. However, note that we cannot respond individually to emails to this address.
Worlds & Overflow
We’re increasing world capacity as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game.
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”. We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.
Next software updates

The next software update will be tonight at midnight Seattle time. We don’t expect significant downtime; however players may experience some connectivity issues at this time.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

GW2 Game Status Update: 6th September 2012

September 6, 2012 by

There’s another update on live issues for GW2.

Some are the ongoing account security / customer service areas, but there’s a range of stuff beyond that. The update is replicated in full for you below:

Account Security

Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts. To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!

Customer Support
Our customer support team is prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests.
Hacked accounts – If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions. We’re resolving prioritized hacked account tickets within 72 hours. If you have an older hacked account ticket that has not been resolved, it may not be properly prioritized, or the ticket may not contain enough information for us to address it quickly. Please update your existing ticket, clearly state that this is a hacked account ticket, and provide as much information as possible, including your account email address, your account display name or character names, and your 25-digit Guild Wars 2 serial code.
Email authentication – We will soon provide a secure method on our web site for customers who are having trouble with email authentication to disable it for their accounts. We ask that you use this new self-help system, and only submit a support ticket if that doesn’t work for you.
Password resets – We will soon provide a secure method on our web site for customers who have lost their passwords or whose passwords aren’t working to reset their passwords. We ask that you use this new self-help system, and only submit a support ticket if that doesn’t work for you.
Support forums – The official support forums are now online, and we have a new forum for players helping other players.
Trading Post
The Trading Post is now available to all players. Items and gold deliveries that have been delayed should arrive soon. Please check your “pick up” tab.
Parties & Guilds
We’re working on capacity constraints causing issues with parties and guild functionality, including symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working. We deployed fixes in last night’s update and will deploy additional fixes in tonight’s update.
Note that guild upgrades and guild influence are world-specific. If you move your account to a new world, you’ll see the upgrades and influence that your guild has on that new world, not the upgrades and influence you previously saw on the old world.
PvP Tournament rewards
We’re still working on the issue with missing PvP tournament rewards.
World v. World event rewards
Event rewards for Dolyak caravan escort events in World v. World will be disabled until further notice.
Storyline steps
In tonight’s software update we will fix issues with the storyline steps “Fury of the Dead”, “Grisly Shipment”, and “In The Ruins”.
Downed mode camera
In tonight’s software update we will improve the downed mode camera to maintain a more consistent distance taking race into account.
Reporting exploits
If you discover an emergency game-breaking or economy-breaking bug, do not exploit it, but please notify us immediately at this email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. You may also use this email address to report suspected security vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who has sent reports. However, note that we cannot respond individually to emails to this address.
Worlds & Overflow
We’re increasing world capacity as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game.
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”. We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.
Next software updates
We’ll perform a significant update tonight at midnight Seattle time, during which the game will be unavailable for approximately one hour.

We’ll perform maintenance on the Guild Wars 2 wiki tomorrow night, during which time the wiki will be unavailable for approximately one hour.

Filed Under: Dev Tracker, General News, Guild Wars 2, Support Tagged With:

GW2 Support Forums Now Live

September 6, 2012 by

In a gradual ramping up of its forums, Guild Wars 2 now at least has support forums live.

You can access them here.

ArenaNet state that more forums will be put live once “we’re satisfied with performance under load” (source).

It’s a start and if you’re wanting to get some issues communicated, you now have another way of doing so.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Support Tagged With:

GW2 Game Status Update: 3rd September 2012

September 4, 2012 by

ArenaNet remain on the front foot with the update on issues in-game. This update is larger than the last one and covers off in detail the email authentication issues, customer support, guilds, overflow servers and the dearth of official forums.

You can read it all right here:

 

Monday, September 3, 2012

Account Security
Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts.
To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!
Today a Guild Wars related fan site announced that its account database has been breached. That’s important but just one of many apparent breaches of other games and web sites that hackers have been collecting email addresses and passwords from. Protect yourself by using a unique password for each game and web site account you care about, and especially be sure to use a unique password for your Guild Wars 2 account.
Customer Support
Our customer support team is prioritizing hacked accounts and other blocking login issues over other types of support requests. If you submit a support ticket for a hacked account, ensure it is properly prioritized by following these instructions.
We have now completed prioritized requests submitted prior to Saturday, September 1. If you have an older ticket that has not been completed, that means it’s not correctly prioritized. Submit a new ticket using the above instructions, and in the title write, “Hacked Account – Ticket submitted August xx – Ticket number xxxxxx-xxxxxx” (fill in the date and ticket number of your existing ticket), and we will prioritize your existing ticket.
In the past 24 hours we helped 2,574 players with hacked accounts and 2,867 players with other blocking login issues get back into the game.
Email Authentication
Once you validate your account email address, we help protect you from attempted account hacking (even if the hacker guesses your password) by sending you an email every time you attempt to login from a new location, asking you to approve or deny the login attempt. Keep in mind, if you receive an email asking you to approve or deny a login attempt and you didn’t make that login attempt, that means a hacker knows your password. Change your password immediately.
Be sure not to flag an email authentication message as spam; if you do, your email provider may prevent future email authentication messages from reaching you.
If email authentication is preventing you from logging in, contact our customer support team following these instructions and we’ll disable it for your account.
Reset Password
We will leave “reset password” disabled until further notice. We don’t want to allow hackers who compromise an email account to use that email account to steal the associated Guild Wars 2 game account. If you forget your password, please contact customer support.
Network Connectivity Issues
We experienced network connectivity issues today between our North American and European data centers, which caused intermittent errors with login, character creation and deletion, and guild manipulation. These issues should now be resolved.
Parties & Guilds
We’ve made progress but still have capacity constraints causing issues with party and guild functionality, including symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, parties not staying together as they travel between maps or into dungeons, and guild manipulation not working. We’re working on a fix and will provide a further update tomorrow.
PvP Tournament Rewards
PvP tournament rewards are currently not functioning properly. We’re working on a fix and will provide a further update tomorrow.
Trading Post
We’ve been expanding the Trading Post’s capacity to handle the huge volume of requested trades. After our test yesterday, we’ve been working to resolve some issues reported by players. We expect to have the Trading Post online for all players this evening.
Storyline Steps
In last night’s update we fixed blocking issues with the storyline steps “Stealing Secrets” and “A Grisly Shipment”. We’re preparing to fix issues with “The Battle for Fort Trinity” and “Shell Shock” for tonight’s update.
Worlds & Overflow
We’re increasing world capacity as necessary to handle all the new players coming into the game.
During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. To play with a friend on a different overflow server, form a party together, then right-click on the friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”. We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.
Forums
Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.
Reporting exploits
If you discover an emergency game-breaking or economy-breaking bug, do not exploit it, but please notify us immediately at this email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net. You may also use this email address to report suspected security vulnerabilities. Thank you to everyone who has sent reports. However, note that we cannot respond individually to emails to this address.
Next software updates

We’re making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We’ll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.

Over to you: what do you think of the communication so far and how’s your playing experience been?

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

GW2 State Of The Game Update: 1st September 2012

September 2, 2012 by

ArenaNet have posted the first significant ‘State Of The Game’ update to the official Wiki. There’s a range of interesting stuff mentioned, replicated in full below.

It’s worth taking notice of the password and bot warning in particular. There’s a few bugs/glitches discussed as well, and I have to say I like the overall approach to fix these whilst minimising disruptions.

Here’s all the details:

This is the current status of the most important issues we’re tracking with Guild Wars 2 live service.

Account Security – Protect your account! We’ve seen hackers systematically scan email addresses and passwords harvested from other games, web sites, and trojans to see if they match Guild Wars 2 accounts. We’ve taken steps to protect our players from this, but we need your help too. Make sure that you use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else. For best security, use a unique email address too, and see our blog post for more tips.

Email authentication – We now have email authentication enabled for all players who have validated their email addresses. This feature sends an email whenever it detects a login attempt to your account from a location you haven’t played from before, asking you to allow or deny the login.

We’ve learned of an incompatibility between email authentication and older versions of Internet Explorer. We’re working on a fix, which we expect to deploy tomorrow.

If you’re not receiving account verification emails or account authentication emails, please check your junk/spam folders, and add noreply@guildwars2.com to your safe senders list.

Parties, guilds, etc. – We’ve made significant fixes to parties and guilds. However, you may still see intermittent outages. These outages cause symptoms such as party members not appearing on the map, party members not staying in the same overflow servers as they travel between maps, and guild invites not working.

Trading Post – Yesterday we opened the Trading Post for a random, rotating 50% of users. After gathering data from yesterday’s tests, we applied a number of fixes and performance improvements, and are preparing a larger-scale test today.

Tournament Rewards – We believe we’ve addressed the problem with tournament chests not appearing. Let us know if you still see any issues with this.

World v. World – We’re aware the world v. world matches have not been resetting properly. We’re preparing an update to fix this. Once the issue is fixed, we’ll start running 24-hour matches to balance servers.

Worlds – We added three new worlds in Europe yesterday, three new worlds in America today, and increased the population limits on all worlds.

Overflow – During this initial surge of high concurrency, and especially while most characters are low-level and thus playing in the same starting areas, it’s common for players to be directed to overflow servers. If you want to play with a friend, but you’re not on the same overflow servers, you can form a party together, then right-click on your friend’s portrait in the party list and click “join”.

We expect the use of overflow servers to naturally subside as players spread out more through the world.

Botting – We suspended accounts of 750 players running bots. We’re ramping up and will soon apply permanent bans for cases of substantial botting.

Exploits – If you discover an exploit in the game, do not exploit it or publicize it, but instead please notify us immediately at this new email address: exploits (at) arena (dot) net.

Forums – Our most important priority at the moment is to ensure that the game runs stably and flawlessly. So as to not create additional demand on our infrastructure and on our programming team, we made the decision not to open the forums until the initial mass influx of players has calmed down a bit.

Wiki – We increased wiki server capacity to address issues users are seeing. We plan to start posting these updates to the wiki, as long as the wiki can handle the traffic.

Next software updates – We’re making non-disruptive changes throughout the day. We’ll publish the next back-end server update tonight at midnight Seattle time. The game may be unavailable for approximately 20-60 minutes while we perform this update.

Over to you: are you still having a great GW2 playing experience, and are any frustrations covered off in the above info for you?

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2 Tagged With:

/gchat: Swings, Roundabouts and Blenders

August 28, 2012 by

/gchat is an ongoing column on guilds and the fun, conflicts, laughs and rage-quits they contain. If you have a topic you’d like covered, drop our guild guru Jemima Moore a line!

Raid Team Selection. Yep, I said it. It’s a dirty word. It’s an ugly word. Ok, it’s three words but I’m bringing them out of the closet and shining a light on the shabby, shameful, heart-wrenching world of raid team selection – no holds barred.

The oldest and arguably most maligned way to assemble a raid team is the Playground Panel.

It comes in many forms from “everyone be on at 7 and we’ll see who’s on” to “I’ll be picking teams based on class balance and gear” and is often characterised by a green wall of furtive questions around  7:15pm AEST: “Are we raiding tonight?” “What time is it starting?” “Have invites gone out yet?” It may seem harmless enough, but rest assured it’s all a euphemism for “I’m too lazy to care about anyone ‘cept me and mah boyz.”

It’s a bad system. Designed and perpetuated by a select few who want the maximum number of warm bodies to fill raid slots for the minimum effort. It promotes elitism, anxiety, dissent and disappointment as even the most seasoned raider can’t help feeling at least a momentary lump in the throat wondering whether they’ll get to go – and only the biggest narcissist will leave someone behind without at least a momentary twang of guilt. The best case scenario is you didn’t set aside an entire evening for nothing and the majority of the team made it through the selection process with enough confidence intact to actually perform.

Thankfully, this arcane system of selection has evolved and most guilds have moved on to more structured modes of selection. If yours hasn’t, I suggest you shop around.

The Rotating Roster with a Team Split Twist is the most common of these. Guilds divide their raiders into fixed, over-sized teams and schedule the extras on a rotating stand-by schedule.

It’s a much fairer method and provides a lot more flexibility in terms of attendance. Plus there’s an argument that sticking with the same people in the same roles makes progression easier and more efficient. There are some hidden drawbacks though.

Tanks and healers are typically not rotated as much as dps. If they are, it falls on a few members of the team to maintain two sets of gear and the skills to fill those roles on odd nights.

The counter-argument to easier and more efficient progression is reduced development of skills across the broader team which often makes the next fight harder. Plus, you’re back to wiping a few times on a boss you usually one-shot when that key taunter/runner/add collector isn’t around.

It sucks to have your standard rotation night come up just after you spent an entire evening wiping on a boss and know the team will kill him next raid without you. The only things that sucks worse is having it happen twice.

Unapologetic 1980’s reference foisted on this great post by the sentimental Editor

Then there’s the ‘guild killer’ that’s more insidious than cancer: the A-team / B-team split. One team due to subtle (or not so subtle) differences in make-up, happens to progress faster than the other. Maybe that team has an extra taunt, a speed boost or a min/maxing dps of a certain class that makes a hard boss just a little easier. The acquisition of gear and new skills they’re developing skyrocket them ahead of the other teams and A-grade egos develop in line with an A-team tag. As the gap in progression widens, so does the ability for players to interchange teams and, over time, the individual groups become insular and cliquey. A vicious circle ensues until one day someone wonders out loud why they’re tolerating the whiney/egotistical pack of QQers/l33t jerks on the other team at all. There’s usually casualties.

All too frequently, guilds with this make up can’t ride the ebbs and flows of raiding through multiple expansions and inevitably one team breaks away to form their own guild ready to start the cycle over again.

In order to overcome these problems, some guilds are now guaranteeing raid spots for players willing to commit to 100% attendance (or close to it) and are mixing raiders up from lock-out to lock-out. I call it “Will it Blend?” and Aftermath tried it this season. It’s not a perfect system by any stretch but it does engender whole-guild camaraderie, significantly reduces the drama surrounding kills and loot drops and that in turn develops both loyalty and pride in oneself and the guild. It also requires a team of skilled and committed raiders who show up every week ready to do anything but that’s kind of a chicken and egg thing. The downside is that without guilded raiders on stand-by, real life getting in the way becomes a huge issue. Assembling and balancing teams each week is no small issue and maintaining a wide and varied friends list to PUG from takes a lot of time.

As an aside, Murphy’s law holds true every time – a PuG will always win the /roll on set gear. And finally, when there’s no side door to nudge a lacklustre player to, it occasionally forces you to have conversations that are more honest than you’d like.

I can’t help but think there has to be a middle ground. On the one hand, it’s a game and requiring 100% attendance for a hobby is pretty hard core. On the other hand, less than 100% attendance when multiplied by the number of people in your raid team, means that somewhere between 7 and 24 people that set aside their evening are adversely affected to at least some degree every single raid.

In a good MMO, raids are hard enough that the individuals in the team need to work pretty hard on their class, their gear and their research to be there in the first place. Yet developers don’t allow any flexibility in raid size or balance for sickness, working late, someone’s 21st birthday, wife aggro or the Grand Final. Guilds and players are expected to somehow overcome real life and field a team of an exact size and class balance each and every week.  Working within these limited parameters, it’s hoped that Raid Leaders can minimise disappointment, inconvenience and drama while providing a fulfilling and satisfying group experience for a set of highly competitive and motivated individuals.

Anyone else think these mechanics are somewhat at odds?

What BioWare, as a developer, has done to help is make a point of supporting server communities.  On the Empire side of Dalborra end-game raiding guilds have embraced that. The GMs of Prophets of Agony, Tenacity, First Legion, Reach (now part of Violation) and Aftermath formed a network of guilds that “borrow” raiders from each other for the night or the week. We try and make sure all our raiders get a run through somewhere and we try our best to help each other out with any bodies we can muster when another team is short. There’s still a healthy dose of competition between the guilds, but there’s just as many woots and gratz in /1 Denova on Wednesday night.

Again, it’s not a perfect system but it is better than the sand-box shenanigans we suffered in primary school.

I’d love to hear your stories of the best and worse raid team selection techniques you’ve come across.

Filed Under: General News, Guild Wars 2, Guilds, SWTOR, The Secret World, WoW Tagged With: ,
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