Posts by Smoke Nightvogue

    HA has been reverted

    Of course, the backlash from Syncers were enough for Bill to hit the back pedal

    That's not what has happened, and thus, your assumption of linking it somehow to a certain kind of rule-breakers or their argumentation is incorrect. The change wasn't intended to be there in the first place and was simply a result of erroneous process during Live build's compilation. That's why it wasn't anyhow documented in the update notes initially posted on the Guild Wars Wiki.

    Yes, Gaile's investment to the cause of Guild Wars franchise's success has been truly invaluable, from the early E3 2003 days, when she managed communications with the press and issued articles related to game development on the ArenaNet website to the point of relaying miscellaneous inquiries from the players to the Guild Wars 2 Development Team on the official forum, hosting multiple community-unifying events along with delivering the episodes of Community Showcase Live.

    I have originally had the pleasure to start exchanging communication with her in the autumn of 2003, and through the next many years she was always attentive and helpful in resolving various issues corresponding to local community inquiries and prosperity. It's not like we can't exchange concerns anymore, but not seeing her on the leading communications role at ArenaNet is heavy disappointment.

    That assumption would be incorrect, as platinum and loot generation commands were never available to typical game testers on Live Server, and according to Michael O'Brien and Gaile Gray, the Dev Team also preferred having these abilities disabled for themselves on it as well, to avoid any possible suspicions of influence on game's economy. Thus, things as such cannot be done by any testers just "in seconds", unless they disposed the required amount of materials from actual activities they performed earlier.

    They actually are just basic concepts of which setups might be brought in order to increase the probability of winning an unfair, 16 vs 8 game. Or, defining it more precisely, they represent a simple indication of what kind of a few mandatory skills like Panic or Meteor Showers should be there.

    If I was personally intending to run that kind of configuration right now, I'd have gone for the replacement of H. Boon & LS backline with the regular HB & RC Monks carrying Channeling & Mantra of Flame, since a single rupt bot of the Yellow team is not likely to be able to shut down more than 60% of what your group's backline will be casting, even upon severe pressure.

    The important part behind the notion of arranging sustainable backline to counter 16 vs 8 is that a Rit (or an E/Rt) should always be there in party's layout & be largely focused on supporting the Fuse & the Prot, not doing stuff like running the relics or putting weapon on "Make Haste!" spammer. The team just has to defend well by rapidly booting henchway out, not letting it be dominant over their base.

    Hello to everyone who's reading that topic, which is, without a doubt, a very difficult one to contribute with a comment on, especially accounting a part of my own experience of trying to establish constructive environment in application of how the Guild Wars 1 project might be able to find its way of prospering in foreseeable future. :)

    First of all, I wanted to make a note of what served one of defining reasons of why I have gone for archiving the entire contents of Guild Wars Guru, the major part of which is still browsable as an element of this forum. It was its Game suggestions and Design section, which was truly valuable 10 years back and remains so up to this day, as considerable agglomeration of ideas expressed by the players in multiple years which reflected significant shortcomings and disadvantages they experienced and contained rational and easy-to-implement solutions of how to deal with these matters.

    There have been a lot of steps and multiple inquiries which I have personally done, some of them resulted in positive changes to the game, such as 7 henchmen for Heroes' Ascent and the addition of those into Codex Arena updates. Along with many other proposals which were raised simultaneously. And I have to say that more often than not, I have received direct answers from Mr. O'Brien in regards to brought up concerns.

    What I have got from these is that he still cares about the future and potential auspicious happenings within the original game's world, and at the same, I have acquired a clear impression that the company is seeking & looking forward to hiring talents who will be involved in working on the studio's future creations.

    And, accounting the recent video footages released by the studio, it seems more than obvious to me that this defined direction is the main one of where ArenaNet's development plan goes.

    Does it mean that there are absolutely zero chances that the Guild Wars 1 Live Team can be brought back? No, it doesn't appear as clear circumstance to me, neither does the fact that further game updates are too challenging to release.

    At the same time, I'd like to remind everyone that Guild Wars: Utopia has been canceled precisely 10 years ago, and even at that point in time, the studio's management has seen it as a vast investment of its disposable resources, which I'd value as ~ 6 million dollars if that campaign was scheduled to be released in 2020.

    What I did like is the fact that almost every one of us is thinking that it might be a positive undertaking for the studio to contemplate on the release of a new expansion, in parallel with this, I personally believe that it wasn't defined accurately-enough, to the point where we make it clear that the address is regarding Utopia campaign. Since otherwise, the spendings are expected to be ~ 1.3 times higher than in the already-elaborated and semi-existent plot. The profitability of the sales of which still remains in question, though...

    And, because of this, I've got a clear conviction that it might be much more likely to see perceived and complied the request to reinstate the moderate crew of the Guild Wars 1 Live Team than aiming straight away for the demand to release a new expansion, which is very challenging design-wise for a studio with at least a few more, majorly-prioritized production tasks.

    I wish there were still a few people around this board who could remember the times when character skills used to be bought from respective NPCs for 1 gold and the amount itself was considered a good drop, equivalent to approximately 5 platinum in the present currency. :) And half a year later, many of us also utilized these...

    Greetings for one more time, folks. :) I wanted to let everyone know that I've been extensively updating the small parts of what was supposed to increase the team's overall efficiency in application to running some of provided templates this week, and thus, if you have downloaded a copy of released setups in the past, now it would be the right time to acquire a renewed version of it.

    I see. :) Well, it might be easier to simply restrict a few skills related directly to these bugs, in my opinion. In case the devs will be reconsidering their previous decision & will be willing to re-enable the tournament. I'm not aware either of the exact flawed skills or how each of unjust advantages functioned and what the entire list might be, though.

    I don't want to start a long debate regarding 6 players HA, but, as one of probably less than 1500 players of that format who were involved in it at the times preceding the classical 4 Warriors, 2 Necroes / 2 Trappers IWAY meta, I'll simply share the observation that the 6 players format has never been as popular as the one constituting of 8. There's no necessity in making an already not too attractive thing the one which the majority of old-timers is simply going to avoid (Sadness: what you're thinking is serving the means of activity increase, will on the contrary drop it even further).

    I was pretty heavily involved in the decision to go back to 8v8 and was deeply involved in the HA community both as a player and a dev. The move to 6v6 was not a popular one for a variety of reasons. Ultimately, why we changed it back came down to game balance. The game was fundamentally balanced for 4 or 8 players, and 6 was creating some weird probably with builds. I think that argument is likely still a valid one, but I understand the desire to get this game type active again. I am willing to have a conversation with Izzy about it (he and I worked on 6v6 together back in the day), but I am not convinced this would be a healthy way to rebuild the game type.

    As for the application of Codex Arena's rule of weekly skill deck changes to Hero Battles, what's the ultimate benefit of it, if I understood you correctly, Motoko? Why limit skill choices available there to a lesser utility set? Considering the outlined terms of play are already implemented at the related outpost...

    Definitely the Shining Blade, since back to the autumn of 2004, me and a lot of ZoS members including Gaile and Andrew have had a really hard time trying to release Evennia out of her cell with absolutely no infusion applied to any of the armor pieces, as that remedy against Mursaat damage wasn't even fully implemented into the associated areas of the game.

    So, based on my remembrance, both Mursaat and White Mantle have been extremely annoying to cope with, and ballistas firing alike the one which was done by the Stone Summit in the mentioned encounter appeared as the most effective form of negotiation. :)

    Implementing a 3rd option easy peasy too, there are several basic options, from annihilation or person of interest (assassinate certain player from the team - if no one kills lord on time) or golden goal...

    I've amended that condition a little bit, to be better-suitable for the task: the team which has taken down more foes within 4 minutes time frame upon timer countdown, wins the match.

    As many of you might remember, the similar objective was previously featured on Broken Tower map of HA tournament.

    From what I recall, there were many MANY discussions on how to make VoD work. The problem came down to the fact that [iQ]'s strategy against [EvIL] promoted the type of play that encouraged defensive games that ultimately turned the game into a PvE fest by healing and nuking creeps at 30 minutes.

    The health decrease, the NPCs duking it out, Guild Lords waiting a few minutes to follow suite, the ability to be losing a match but pull off a Guild Lord gank to manage a win. All amazing concepts and strategies. I miss it. To bring that back and hope people play honorably is just not going to happen unfortunately. People have the chance to play fun builds and honorable builds, but you'll never be able to fully get rid of those who will die hard trying to win no matter how small the gain is.

    The solution to this problem consists of not executing the very last part of VoD script, that is, the movement of Guild Lord to the center of the map. :) I'd be happy to see VoD feature re-introduced back personally, but only if the mentioned adjustment is going to be taken into account.

    There's also no necessity to be doing anything about how victory condition through the amount of dealt Guild Lord damage is currently defined.

    On the global scope, one of the main difficulties with nowadays spamming reduction measures for Guild Wars 1 is that they have to be implemented or maintained by designated staff members, and that respectively means investing some of the company's budget into the process.

    I believe that the discussion with Mr. Clarke-Willson on the Guild Wars 1 Reddit board has assuredly been a positive one, however, if one will realistically look at the whole situation in its long-time perspective, he'll naturally find himself inclined towards the idea that spamming reduction process has to be so autonomous that in the end the availability or the absence of dedicated staff members must not reflect neither on its functioning nor availability.

    I have exchanged my outlook with Mr. Clarke-Willson privately, at the same time, as all of you are aware, Guild Wars 1 has been in maintenance mode for the last 5 years, and this heavily impacts the amount of measures which can be developed and put into effect.

    And yet, if some of you have got certain concerns regarding that subject, you're welcome to express them by leaving a comment on this article's talk page. It's the link of which at least two staff members of ArenaNet are aware about.

    Hi. From a technical standpoint, it might be possible if someone has already developed an application which is able to flip through all of the pages shown at this location whilst accounting different namespace categories. I haven't tried to find out if such utility is available, however, it would be rational to assume someone has attempted to archive an existing Wiki by employing this practice in the past.

    Good day. :) It's been a while since I posted anything lengthy on this forum, however, I thought some of you might be interested in taking a look at the renewed version of contents within the article I have published a few years ago at Guild Wars Guru, it contained a lot of information in regards of how the team could pick the right strategies at the last map in case the pressure is applied from more than just one side. The general recipe being a counter to that, like I've mentioned before, consists of introducing the multiple copies of instantly-cast MS along with the Panic Mes to negate the spellcasting of the henchs, at the same time, if we're talking of the builds like Hex-Cond pressure, the whole picture shifts into one that's a little bit more intricate.

    To ease the access to the builds for those of you who aren't using paw·ned² to browse through team setups, I've posted the references to most of my layouts at this page, along with having the same materials attached to the zip file at the end of this message, in which you'll also be able to find the original Guru thread with the outlook on 8 vs 16 strategies & generic squad setups.

    Hope some of the guilds with unfaded HA interest will deem the provided info useful in the light of the recently-commenced Double Fame event, and who knows, may be we'll even run something together, if you'll send a private message with the data of whom I should contact in-game or what IP address should be utilized to reach your guild's TS.

    Happy Wintersday to all who have taken a look at the expressed. :)

    The link to the full version of the attached file, since some technical difficulties seemed to exist with local downloads.

    I'd recommend purchasing Guild Wars Trilogy along with Eye of the North, that'll grant you the access to all of the existing content along with the possibility to make use of any desired PvP setups. And what's no less important, it'll give you the access to Kamadan, which is the central and only currently-active marketplace where you can trade goods with the others.

    I hope there'll be an opportunity to exchange that copy on a larger scale, not only with a few selected users. It still needs time to be finalized, though, as it's so far being downloaded and something will also have to be sorted out inside the archive's basic order of folders, so that it's not going to contain 15 unnecessary ones within its root (and that means more than 300,000 file changes to refer to varying image directories). At the same time, I'd like to notify everyone beforehand that chances are low it'll be available the next month, as I'm about to move out of town until the beginning of October, and the inbound and outbound traffic will be considerably limited for me on 4G connection.

    In fact, I've managed to archive about 95% of it and am saving the remaining 5% in the form of middle 2007 descending to year 2005 Sell section threads at the moment. The entire backup promises to weight about 20 gigabytes in the zipped form, but chances are high I might be able to temporarily share it with the other Legacy readers via a cloud, once it'll obtain the shape I initially had in mind for it to supply convenient reading. It should be expected to be done within a month or so. :)

    Should there still be some doubts left, after all supplied hints? It'll be good if it remains online until the end of this year.

    On the other hand, they have actually lent a considerably long time window for all those who were interested in compiling an offline version of the entire forum.


    The only downside about going f2p model it's that without active Game Masters on the game Gold Sellers and botters would have a fairly good life, cuz even if they were banned making another account would be a piece of cake.

    That's not exactly the case as it would greatly depend on the model used for the creation of F2P accounts. They can be limited in allowed features such as the ability to post in Local & Trade chat channels, the availability of trade function or the drop / pick something up interactions, etc.