Posts by Iaerah

  • We're looking for new Legacy moderators!

    Hello there!

    We've decided to start looking for some new moderators to join our team - for the first time since we started Legacy!

    If you are interested, feel free to apply by posting a thread here: https://guildwarslegacy.com/forum/thread-add/95/

    - Kevin

    (I also threw this into Gemini, it generated an awesome text, so I decided to paste it below):

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue

    One of the things I prefer in GW1 is the low level of different currencies. The constant adding of new currencies in GW2 is one of the things that brought me full circle to the original.

    It's the price to pay for having horizontal progression. The problem is that without those currencies, there would be no boundaries into just buying everything upon the release of something.
    That means that content becomes optional and only rewards more of the same, which means that next time over something new releases, people can just insta-buy it again.
    To avoid that, you introduce a new currency that you can only earn by doing specific content (aka the new content) and earn the rewards in this way. While GW1 has significantly less of these currencies, there are still quite some in the game (for example, Medals of Honor, Zaishen Coins, Armbraces, Hero Armor etc) and should the game have been in development for longer, we would probably have the same issue here. GW2 has been in development for over 12 years (after launch), whilst the active (with the exception of the Live Team) development of Guild Wars 1 after launch only was about 2.5 years long. Now, that has always been a terrible shame in my eyes, they should have increased the studio to support both GW1 and GW2 instead... but that is another story.

    But with horizontal progression, it's very hard to avoid introducing new currencies. And GW2 is the extreme in that, but they've finally started working on that (e.g. Unusual Coins being re-used in expansions, and when a new expansion drops the existing Unusual Coins become Ancient Coins). But, the same issue exists here: if they release new rewards, unless they want people to just instantly buy all of them, they're going to use a new currency for it.

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue

    not with GW3 in development

    While GW3 is most likely in early development, I highly doubt it has passed pre-production. From what I could gather from that investor meeting, it was a panic-induced reply and not really "GW3 is fully in development, going to release soon". I would expect that even if it is currently in development, it's still going to be 6-7 years before we see a release.
    While there was a gap of 5 years between GW1 stopping development and GW2 coming out, I highly doubt they would risk killing off the cash-cow that GW2 currently is (it's still one of their most profitable MMOs), so I would expect to see development on GW2 going on for many years.

    GW1 getting new content is out of the question, not on the table at all. But I still suspect some improvements might be coming still, as long as the effort required is small. Stephen loves the game as well and I have no doubts that he is going to make a lot of changes, but I think most of these will be behind the scenes. But I do expect something to happen at the 20th birthday.

    Best of all, Stephen getting to work almost fulltime on GW1 means that the servers aren't going to be shut down anytime soon.

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from PyroLobster

    You don't need super powers to identify bots. You need eyes and about 65IQ to get 99.9% accuracy and then let support deal with the 0.1%.

    The issue isn't really to identify bots, because those are extremely easily identified and banned. The issue is how quickly they come back and it in essence becomes a game of whack-a-mole: ban one and mere seconds another bot takes the place of the first one. It doesn't scale up.
    The other issue is that those botters will often contact support to try and get some accounts unbanned, which creates a load on support. If the support needs significantly more time to deal with these issues because of a huge ban wave, that also means that the costs for support rise up (and these things are being budgetted for - if the costs of support rise a lot, that ain't a good thing).

    I'm involved in helping run an old MMORPG and dealing with bots is hard - because it's an ongoing fight. It's easy to ban a lot of bots at once (tweak something small in game that the bots have automated, make the official client do it just a little bit different, like send an extra value in a packet, and you can flag thousands of bots at the same time). It's however hard to keep doing that and keep tweaking things, it is a fight that takes a ton of energy - and to be honest, I would much prefer to see that effort go into improving the game.

    I do think that the future brings a lot of cool things for bot detection though, especially for gold spamming. AI is at the point that you can just feed it a chat log and it can easily pick out goldsellers and flag them - but then botters will try and find a new way to outrun even that. To see how creative they are, this is the chatfilter that we're maintaining for Guild Wars: https://github.com/kevinpetit/leg…/ChatFilter.ini

    It's crazy to see how many variations of the same there are. Older tools make it hard to detect botting that does things like this, but AI can handle this quite well. Finally some good use for it?


    PS: a now banned user was harassing someone because of this thread. Have respect for each other, just because someone else has a different opinion doesn't mean that they are wrong (or even right). Have respect for each other.
    I won't tolerate harassment.

  • Economy Discussion

    Armbraces only have a value since we players have given a value to it - in game they're only useful for several cool weapons and items, but have no further use.

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    Because let's not forget that the code governing GW1 is a load of crap, either to modify or to add new content (and it's far from the only game in this case). This is one of the main reasons why development on this game was abandoned, especially after the NF code was implemented in the game (creating band-aids and banning players who accidentally find exploits left in the code is not a viable long-term technique)

    I don't agree with this. GW1 has barely any real technical issues (though, like any game of its scale, it has bugs and exploits), but compare it to other MMO's of its age and it is running remarkably.
    Should the code base be that bad, they also wouldn't have created another game based on this code.

    Once thing that was coming up and made continued development difficult is that they were nearing 4 GB of the gw.dat file, which was a serious limitation since GW1 is still 32-bits. However, not much is stopping them from moving GW1 to 64-bits (though it might not be very easy, it is do-able) which lifts that limit. But back in the day, in 2012, this was a serious concern. But they solved that issue for GW2, can't imagine they wouldn't be able to do it for GW1 should content development ever be started again.

    What is an issue though is that a lot of the development tools haven't been touched since 2010 and those need some serious love. But adding a vendor is peanuts for them.


    But, going back to Armbraces... if they really want to, they can absolutely fix the economy, but it won't be a popular change (but changes to an economy never are). In essence, it would mean replacing Armbraces with a different item and devalueing the current armbraces immensely.

    The main reason Armbraces are a thing is because our trade limits, bank limits and characters limits are too low. Raising those significantly will take away the need for armbraces.

    But, what I expect is that Armbraces are just going to be ignored, and if something new in terms of rewards eventually do get added, they will use new materials and items instead that are better protected against botting.
    Protecting a game against botting is a losing battle, unless you are fighting against it constantly, you'll never win. And that's just the reality in any game, with the exception of games where there is no sense or need for botting.

  • 3d printed and painted statues of Guild Wars 1 characters!

    I can't wait for Eve <3

  • 3d printed and painted statues of Guild Wars 1 characters!

    Quote from L'atelier d'Alex

    and someone from here also bought from me

    I feel called out :P but indeed, I got 3 beautiful statues from your Etsy shop! My personal favourites are the Grenth and Balthazar ones, but I particulary love - which isn't strange, as I'm a necromancer through and through - the statue of Grenth.

    It was extremely well packed as well. I also love the keychain and the profession badges that you gave me <3


    Really love them.

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from Pleikki
    Quote from Iaerah

    It would kinda be unreachable for 99.99% of the players though :p

    True, but the benefits from deflation of Arms would help everyone if there was a sink for currencies, and even more ppl Who would like to farm new things every week for ppl using the sink and gain wealth by selling them;)

    To be honest, I wouldn't like to see them add extra rewards in exchange for arms, but rather a new currency that is harder to bot instead. That way the arms still have their current use but a new currency is introduced with actually valuable rewards.

    What you could do is allow a limited conversion of arms to that other currency (limited weekly, like 5 arms in exchange for 1 of that currency) to offer regular players some profit of it, but make it wildly inefficient for bots to amass the new currency.

    They would need to make sure that that new currency is harder to bot, though, or monitor it heavily.

    I do agree that arms need to get a huge deflation, but the value given to it is just done by us players. If there is a better way to solve this, we'd probably move away from it (and leave botters with their huge supply of it that is rendered almost useless). Be it raising the gold limits that a user/account can have, or just an item that has a 10k value that is fixed and can be sold back for 10k.

    Something else they can do is to make Arms untradeable or add a way to get them for Zaishen Coins. Just make it not worth it anymore, there are many ways to do it though.

  • Key bindings

    Quote from Aliya05

    Hey guys, I'm new to the game. I downloaded some key bindings from rewasd that are ready but idk how I can import it to the game, does anyone know how to or if it is even possible?

    I think this page gives an overview how the triggers work, but to be honest, I don't know rewasd..

  • Economy Discussion

    Quote from Pleikki

    On topic i also agree some armbrace sink would be needed, but it would need to be someting that isnt "easy" obtain even for botters so it wouldnt completely change the market, like 1000a+ someting that changes every week like nick items :D

    It would kinda be unreachable for 99.99% of the players though :p

  • New ranks

    Since Guild Wars Legacy is now getting older and older, our users are getting more and more points... someone even managed to out-do our amazing moderator :mouse:  cosyfiep ... (looking at you, Pleikki !).

    A few new ranks have been added... once more people reach the 25k points, I'll consider adding some more ;)

    - Kevin

  • Daily activities API

    Hello everybody,

    Just a little QoL update that I pushed live - needed for some stuff I'm working on.
    I've added a simple endpoint that will print out the daily activities that are currently live, for example:

    You can access the endpoint by going to https://guildwarslegacy.com/activities.php, feel free to use this if you need it. This gets automatically updated and should be accurate with the game - if not, feel free to poke me.

    - Kevin

  • So, which song is on your mind today?

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    This song is just way too catchy :)

  • Sweet treats for the Guild Wars team - GoFundMe!

    Quote from Retlaw123

    Is it especially for Guild Wars 1 Developer or also for Guild wars 2 ones?

    Quote from Cottura9Minuti
    Quote from Retlaw123

    Is it especially for Guild Wars 1 Developer or also for Guild wars 2 ones?

    Since theres only one Guild Wars 1 dev Im sure you can guess the answer

    It's for the entire team - but most work from home these days. This was discussed with Stephen, who made it clear that he would feel bad if people were left out (so I'm following his wishes).

    There are also more people than you think that still work for/on Guild Wars 1. For example, Joe Kimmes created the new elite skills and weapons (but he is now, if I'm not mistaken, part of the Guild Wars 2 festival team). Bill worked on the storage updates, rarity borders and resizeable inventory window.
    Next to that, there is also a team of people that tests all of the changes to GW1 - how small they might be, so QA is also involved. The operations team also keeps an eye on the GW1 servers and performs maintenance.
    There are also people in the office making sure that everyone can do their job: people at the reception, cleaning staff, etc - why would we exclude them?

    So there's more than a single person working on GW1. Not all of those things are visible, though.

    However, for Joe, Stephen and Bill, a seperate box of chocolates will be ordered with their preferences of chocolates. The rest will be used for a variety of chocolates for the entire team, no matter what part of the team they are.

    By giving chocolates to the entire team - not just the GW1 team - we also make ourselves, as a community, a lot more visible and this might leave an impression. It certainly helps building good-will :)

  • Sweet treats for the Guild Wars team - GoFundMe!

    Hello everybody... remember the cupcakes from 6 years ago?
    Well, I'm doing it again, but with chocolates. I was going to post it here today, but we made our goal in less than 16 hours, which is amazing - but if you want to participate, you still can - the more sweets the merrier!

    This time around I have opted to not go for cupcakes - most of the ArenaNet staff are working from home these days and cupcakes don't keep that long, so people might miss out.
    So, that why with some searching, I opted to go for chocolates instead - the good stuff!

    For full information: here is the GoFundMe: https://www.gofundme.com/f/guild-wars-s…or-appreciation

    - Kev

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Kryth Vocans

    hi again, I don't know if I should be posting this here - but when I post a build with the gwbb wrap in the builds forum, it displays inaccurate (possibly older/imbalanced) values for skills. Say for example when I post a build that includes Blazing Spear with 12 Spear Mastery, the damage displayed in the forum is higher than the skill's actual damage.

    Is it because the forum is not up to date with the latest skill values or is there another reason for this?

    To make that work, we use https://github.com/arnapou/gwbbcode which hasn't been updated in a few years.

    So, I could probably fork that and fix it, but it's not the highest on my list of priorities.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Unholy

    A couple questions for ya. It doesn't look like spoilers within spoilers is an option anymore? Not a huge deal, but I did use it from time to time.

    Just tested it and it does work, but the editor doesn't allow you to add a second spoiler, but when you add the bb-tag [ spoiler ] (remove spaces) [ /spoiler ] it does work:

    Display Spoiler
    Display Spoiler

    Test

    Quote from Unholy

    Is there no way to hyperlink a URL as alternate text? I see the hyperlink option, but that only lets me plug in the URL itself, with no option to change was displays as the clickable text.

    The editor itself has changed with this release (before Redactor 2 was used, now it's using CKEditor). The previous versions of Redactor has been deprecated and support drops after this year, so the developers of the software had to replace it (and the other software that Redactor made to replace Redactor 2 is wildly un-useable for a forum). So changes in behaviour is normal due to this... this also explains why more spacing is added, it's simply the way the editor works and how it is set-up differently.
    It seems like previously, Redactor added a <br> when using enter, while CKEditor creates a new paragraph. Shift+enter is the way to still do a <br>/newline in this editor, which is actually the appropriate behaviour for an editor (as it allows for better styling/whitespace behind a paragraph, which is impossible to do with a <br>).
    I might adjust the whitespace after a new paragraph, but shift+enter mimics the old behaviour, as Marty Silverblade rightly pointed out.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Kryth Vocans

    Is it me or are people deliberately choosing lousy font colors against dark mode :p I have to highlight everything with mouse to be able to read the forum now :p

    Give people a choice and they will abuse it... that's actually one of the main reasons why the developers decided to disable this option in the first place, but it has some uses.

    I hope people will keep it in mind though, as soon as Legacy gets an official dark mode, which should be soon.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    In a further update I have updated all of our available themes/styles (you can pick one all the way down by using "Change Style").

    They are now all fluid up to a max size of 2200px (instead of 1100px before), which should help a lot for those with bigger screens.
    All of them got some extra tweaks as well.

    If you find a bug, feel free to let me know.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Just a small update, I've updated most of the pages on Guild Wars Legacy that had white boxes poking out where they shouldn't, like for example:

    That unneeded white background has now been removed. I might have missed some, so should you encounter any place where you can still see it, feel free to let me know so I can remove it.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Forty Second Rogue
    Quote from Iaerah

    Font-color is now back! It was an option to disable it, which was enabled by default in the new version. It had a quite cryptic naming so I didn't find it.

    But, font-coloring is now back on the table!

    NOTE: there is going to be a dark mode soon, so keep that in mind when choosing colors.

    Thank you, makes it easier to differentiate between the rarities, at least for me.

    No problem, glad to be able to solve it this quickly! :)
    Picking the font color is something which is quite necessairy in my opinion. It should also work for all existing posts as well.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Neutral_CH

    I don't know if this is recent or not, but how to change the background of: Custom User Title. Does it depend on a status or can it be customized with code or something?

    The color of these is decided by the title itself, and is hardcoded can't be changed by a user.

    It is dependent on the amount of points you've gathered on Legacy:

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Iaerah
    Quote from Red Fireball

    in the table I had used font colouring to indicate the respective values for the different rarities of staves. I tried to recreate it with my last two edits, but there is no purple font colouring option. so I can't do it. but at least you can see what Forty Second Rogue was referring to - thanks for pointing the issue out!

    I agree that this isn't a situation that works, I'll have to investigate if and how I can re-introduce a button to allow the picking of colors, not only highlighting the background.

    I'm going to raise this as a concern with the developers of the forum software, and look into a temporairy fix.

    Font-color is now back! It was an option to disable it, which was enabled by default in the new version. It had a quite cryptic naming so I didn't find it.

    But, font-coloring is now back on the table!

    NOTE: there is going to be a dark mode soon, so keep that in mind when choosing colors.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Red Fireball

    in the table I had used font colouring to indicate the respective values for the different rarities of staves. I tried to recreate it with my last two edits, but there is no purple font colouring option. so I can't do it. but at least you can see what Forty Second Rogue was referring to - thanks for pointing the issue out!

    I agree that this isn't a situation that works, I'll have to investigate if and how I can re-introduce a button to allow the picking of colors, not only highlighting the background.

    I'm going to raise this as a concern with the developers of the forum software, and look into a temporairy fix.

  • Feedback thread forum update

    Quote from Blind Was My Fury

    check if it's again that we have to reactivate them or if they officialy gone pls kev ?

    Unfortunately, they have been removed from the forum software itself.... I can't bring them back, I fear :(

    Quote from Hate Core
    Quote from Iaerah

    Glad to hear that you approve, Hate Core ;)

    No worries, Kev.

    Was a 10 hour marathon negotiation with the gwlegacy-supervisory board but in the end I convinced them that it would be in best interest of all shareholders to perform this critical maintenance update.

    We might increase your bonus for this year, thanks for your commitment!

    Glad to have you, Hate Core! I'm curious for the bonus ;)

    Quote from Blind Was My Fury

    Second thing is not having lines in main page to separate subjects / threads SUCKSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

    Hmm, I'm going to improve the look over the next few weeks, I'll probably add in some line.