User:Relyk/Game Newsletter

The happenings in the game, grouped by week.

Week of Sunday, 29 December 2024

Week of Sunday, 17 August 2014

• Kate Welch and Martin Kerstein leave ArenaNet. This hits hard on ArenaNet doing livestreams, as Kate was popular on Points of Interest and related content. Martin released a tweet during the GuildMag riots. This is likely due to internal politics on handling the reaction, where being the community manager means he had to deal with all the issues whether or not it was his fault.
• The servers for Guild Wars 2 and WildStar are DDoSed over 3 days. This follows a string of DDoS attack on a variety of sites. In one case, games being played by Kripparian are all being attacked.
• After community feedback, the cost of 300g per commander tag color was changed to be account-wide. ArenaNet directly stated that they had to bring people in over the weekend to make the change. The price of 300g per tag isn't unreasonable as most of the players who complained wouldn't actually be buying the tags and the people who do want the tags, namely commanders, can afford them or use their guild bank.
• The community exploded after a GuildMag interview. WoodenPotatoes has a great video summarizing the issue. Users took the transcript and extrapolated quotes from the interview to match their agenda on ArenaNet. the interview was standard as far as past interviews, but since the questions were vetted by the community, there was backlash. This is a result of unrest from players due to a lack of updates to most of the game content while Living World is developed.
• User:Relyk acquires a legendary (Kraitkin), financed in part by people's insatiable demand for Foxfire Clusters.

Week of Sunday, 27 July 2014

• Due to the influx of players gathering logs for Foxfire Clusters for The Dragon's Reach: Part 1, players have been banned for false positives as bots. ArenaNet asks anyone who got wrongfully banned to send in a support ticket. Players will receive an apology letter and compensation. You can see the ban take place on imnotdom's twitch stream.Response from Gaile: "Last night, we had a few false-positives that resulted in temporary account closures. This situation impacted an extremely small number of accounts, but for those who were impacted, we are very sorry that this took place. All accounts involved in this situation were reinstated within 4 hours, and all accounts should be good to go now."

Week of Sunday, 11 May 2014

• TTS gets guildbombed by Metavox and Nolan (reddit). Most of the reddit comments consist of the normal crap with everyone giving their opinion with no information about it. Guild Wars 2 is serious business.

Week of Sunday, 29 December 2013

• User:Lon-ami posts about the linen and jute farming bans and gets a response from ArenaNet. The most important part of the response is "the abuse of it was highly localized to a specific server and a specific timeframe". Unless no one sent in a bug report since the start of the game or the only players aware of the bug except for the specific server, it's unlikely ArenaNet was not aware of the exploit prior to introducing ascended armor. The exploit being localized to a specific server implies that people were guesting to that world instead of the their own world due to it being organized by players on the server. So while Chris claims a "rather large misconception", his posts provide fuel to suggest ArenaNet was baiting bots and players to exploit the bug with the introduction of ascended armor before fixing it. If it was not intentional, ArenaNet doesn't seem to be concerned with banning players unintentionally exploiting a bug rather than just farming materials for the massive amount required for ascended armor and spreading word-of-mouth that it's not an exploit and you likely wouldn't get banned. You can't throw around responses like "The Rules of Conduct clearly state the following" and "This was abuse of an obvious bug" when these exploits have happened before with similar results. ArenaNet still hasn't made clear to players what they can get banned for and whether a game mechanic or bug suddenly becomes an exploit is when ArenaNet decides to to a ban wave. This may be an effective strategy to remove exploiters from the game as a financial decision, but it seems like one step forward and two steps back with community initiatives.

Week of Sunday, 08 December 2013

• Wintersday brings a couple issues. The Tome of Knowledge could be exploited in WvW to rally the player, as seen in this Youtube video and related Reddit post. A bug with the gift dolyak in Defend the gift dolyak and Marcello DiGiacomo during their delivery causes it to stand still and poop out presents. ArenaNet didn't fix it in the patch and will likely ban people who spend all day farming presents.

Week of Sunday, 24 November 2013

• Dolyak farming spot was nerfed in the Fractured update.
• A day after the release, the set was removed from the Gem Store after player outcry over the similarity with the tier 3 human cultural armor. It will be redesigned as re-released at a later date. Players get the impression ArenaNet is testing the waters for what they can get away with. An easy comparison can be made towards Xbox One and their doing a 180 on their approach after consumer feedback. This is pretty discouraging with players becoming more discouraged with the Living World updates and the complete lack of armor skins not coming from the Gem Store.

Week of Sunday, 17 November 2013

• Information about agony changes for the Fractured release.

Week of Sunday, 03 November 2013

• A related bug for object interaction, players are having trouble with Krait Obelisk Shards for the achievement, resulting in preventing completion.
• A bug with object interaction occurs with bundles and certain interactions appears. weapon skills start working.
• An unscheduled maintenance was made for a game breaking chat bug. Leighwyn McClendon.9346 started a official forum thread on the issue and tracked its process with support. This might explain why my whispers to Minion were bugged.

Week of Sunday, 27 October 2013

• December 10 game release preview made available. Official post
• Cultural armor has some major updates. Reddit thread and post from Kristin Perry.
• Sorrow's Embrace path 3 patched in Game updates/2013-10-29. Reddit thread

Week of Sunday, 20 October 2013

• A bug with the daily events involving a duplicate of Daily Mists Camp Capturer occurred, likely due to messing with Halloween daily achievements, causing the client to allocate space for a duplicate when it couldn't. Reddit post and Official forum post

Week of Sunday, 15 September 2013

• This was from weeks ago. Update notes were leaked during the Anniversary Bash, see update notes. A October 15 preview was posted on the forums on September 12. Sacrx, a known player, posts a Youtube video ranting about sPvP and the state of World versus World.
• Desolation becomes the first EU server to defeat Tequatl. Youtube video of fight.
• Blackgate becomes the first to defeat Tequatl the Sunless after the Tequatl Rising release. Twitch VOD from flickky of the accomplishment.

Week of Sunday, 08 September 2013

• In the fallout of the World 2 issue, Josh's posting on the forums (Direct input from the developer for SAB instead of a diplomatic news article is like sex) was irritating other people at ArenaNet and forced him to curb back on forum posts. Reddit thread about an opinion on it. Josh's blog on the issue. Josh described the World 2 difficulty spike as a "perfect storm" and detailed the reasons why. The release of SAB was met with enthusiasm and increased retention rates, one of the reasons the project was encouraged. Josh concluded, have doing some metrics, the mistakes with World 2 raised hostilities with the community and did not have the same effectiveness. We may have had too much of a good thing.

Week of Sunday, 01 September 2013

• In the Spetember3 update, the difficulty in portions of World 2 were toned downed after many complaints and Josh agreeing the difficulty spikes on some parts were problematic. Fortunately, he has stood his ground on defending the World 2 for not being a gem sink for Infinite Super Coin, arguing this is how games worked in the past. Sadly, this still meant the launch flowers had to be fixed so people stopped flinging themselves off cliffs.
• The update came with a crafting exploit allowing players to level to 80 cheaply. You gain experience at 400 rating on crafting professions with 400 as maximum. You're not supposed to get experience for those. Reddit thread on post with dev responses, which was removed after being confirmed. Another response thread for the bug. The bug was cause by the ascended weapon update where players must craft to 500 to gain 10 levels instead of the previous 7 levels. This also scaled for other crafting professions that only go to 400. You could use Chef to cheaply craft Mango recipes to constantly gain experience at the 400 level. The game would award experience because it thought the cap was 500 instead of 400. This was fixed in the Spetember3 update.

Week of Sunday, 25 August 2013

• GW2Hub and Masively break embargo on Super Adventure Box: Back to School early, pointed out by dulfy and others. Turns out they received information that the embargo was on September 2, 6 am PDT, but the date was later changed (mentioned in the livestream) to September 3. No flaming or raging took place.
• With the Anniversary Bash over, blowout from the PvP tourney reaches the forums and drama ensues. Xephs, a prominent PvP player, uses this to give a poignant farewell speech criticizing the state of the game. The mods delete the thread as farewell threads aren't allowed. He reposted the thread focusing on just the criticism, which gets deleted because of his first post. This leads to leads to complaints of overmoderation and players posting "Respond to this" threads in protest.