Guildwars 2 Beta Thread

[GaiaHunter]

Me 2

 

[VashHT]

Bah I might be able to get in a couple hours tonight, I think I'll just play my warrior as much as I can in that time. I didn't even get to try all of their weapons last time, I need to find myself a two handed hammer and try that out it sounded like a lot of fun.

 

[GaiaHunter]

Bah I might be able to get in a couple hours tonight, I think I'll just play my warrior as much as I can in that time. I didn't even get to try all of their weapons last time, I need to find myself a two handed hammer and try that out it sounded like a lot of fun.

Just buy one from one of the weapon vendors.

 

[zinfamous]

Gogogo!

 

[Destiny]

Blizzard is notorious for hitting the mid-low end of graphics (to hit as many systems as possible) so it's an unfair comparison. For them it's about a particular style, but something that is not too taxing.

GW has always been in the "high-end" of MMO graphics--they strive for realistic, natural models and environments. GW2 is gorgeous, if you ask me. The screen has this photo-art paper type look to it (as if you're reading a well-illustrated fantasy tail)--I don't do that description justice, as it probably sounds more intrusive than it is (this is the top border/HUD and menus).

And if eye candy = buxom, half-naked broads with provocative dances, then, well, GW has that, too. (dances weren't working in the recent GW2 Beta, though)

LOL.... Eye Candy = Awesome graphics, because I usually get the second or top tier Graphics cards and if I'm going to spend hours a day on games might as well have something nice to look at (yes, they bounce?).. :sneaky:

When I played D3 beta I was disappointed, I thought graphics should at least be FFXIII... don't get me wrong I'm still going to get D3 to play with my friends...

 

[VashHT]

I thought the graphics in GW2 were great but some people didn't seem to like them very much. Technically I don't they're anything special but the engine combined with good art direction and execution made for a great looking game imo. Right now it's a pretty taxing game though, I got pretty good framerates most of the time but with heavy action it would drop pretty low.

 

[bamaaviator]

I cant handle this game. The choppiness is so bad its unreal. I watch the videos from Totalbiscuit and Yogscast etc and it seems just fine, but on my system it plays like garbage.

I have the 7970 card with a i7-950, so my computer isnt the issue. Prepaid for the game, very excited, and yet the game is so choppy that I cant handle playing it for more than 5 mins in the past 2 beta events 🙁

 

[zinfamous]

I cant handle this game. The choppiness is so bad its unreal. I watch the videos from Totalbiscuit and Yogscast etc and it seems just fine, but on my system it plays like garbage.

I have the 7970 card with a i7-950, so my computer isnt the issue. Prepaid for the game, very excited, and yet the game is so choppy that I cant handle playing it for more than 5 mins in the past 2 beta events 🙁

weird, I have not had this issue in the slightest, and I'm way underpowered in comparison. (5850, Phenom II 960).

probably server issues--but the majority of problems have occurred in huge groups--where frames go to die.



Anyone else notice the crazy increase in leveling rate? Also...I am suddenly not in a guild 🙁 it was up when I logged, and chat was working, but now the guild is gone. Or some heartless bastard kicked me 😀

 

[gothamhunter]

weird, I have not had this issue in the slightest, and I'm way underpowered in comparison. (5850, Phenom II 960).

probably server issues--but the majority of problems have occurred in huge groups--where frames go to die.



Anyone else notice the crazy increase in leveling rate? Also...I am suddenly not in a guild 🙁 it was up when I logged, and chat was working, but now the guild is gone. Or some heartless bastard kicked me 😀

Oh?

 

[aigomorla]

well i was able to log in for like 30 min to do the starting quests.

then it kicked me off the server... lucky for me i had to go, otherwise i think i would of canceled my appointment.. 😛

But yeah... the game looks really good... combat im still trying to get into.

BTW what server is everyone going to start there characters in?

 

[GaiaHunter]

Just finished GW2 for tonight 🙁.

I ran the game on a FX-6100@4.4GHz today vs a Phenom II X4@3.6GHz last BWE. The game ran better on this machine, before I could hardly get 20 fps, now I ranged from 20-60. GPU was in both occasions a 6850@875/1175 everything on max with the exception of depth of field that I disabled both times and this time I ran FXAA vs no FXAA the other time.

Additionally this time I only ran 4 GB ram since my 8GB kit has been sent for RMA.

In fact due to that RAM my gw2.dat file seems to be somewhat corrupted so I couldn't load in queendsdale and progress with my level 13 engineer (my GF loaded it fine in her PC but we aren't in the same place due to professional matter so I couldn't pinch her gw2.dat).

Other than this problem I crashed 3 or 4 times, but it might be to the fact I haven't extensively tested my overclock (just 1 hour linx and 1 hour prime, can't pass 10 minutes on AOD stability test).

I instead played with my charr warrior from level 6 to 13.

Warriors are fun with their multitude of weapons. Combat is challenging, especially melee and taking on 2 or more mobs on your own is asking to get your bum on the floor in no time.

I do find the level 1-6 area of the charr smaller and with less content compared to the norn and human areas and not providing enough xp without repetition. But maybe I just played the game differently and explored more with the norn and human chars.

Quest (read Dynamic events) are fun and varied, heart quests aren't so fun but you can do them while you walk along and explore so it is ok (if you instead insist on try to do them all one after the other, it might feel grindy).

People keep getting out of their way to help each other, they follow other people and grouping is spontaneous and even though people aren't overly chatty they are polite, exchanging "gg" and similar when some particular tough mob or task (like veteran mobs) are taken down and thanking when someone rez them.

And even though these groups aren't organized you see people using combo fields and people trying to catch and give buffs to as many people as hey can.

Great game play with thousands of possibilities between weapon skills, utility skills, traits and gear, with a fluid combat system.

They still need to optimize the game engine since performance isn't up to par and varies very wildly from machine to machine, even with similar specs or lower specs being faster than higher specs.

Otherwise, hours just disappeared and the game promises to drain thousands of hours of my life in the future.

Will be waiting for the next BWE.

 

[NoSoup4You]

I can't get past the choppy framerate and inconsistent server latency. Sometimes my skills fire immediately and sometimes there's a delay. It might be about 1 second but it's brutal and completely breaks the gameplay for me. I have a 25MB down and 2MB up connection, which isn't anything special, but I never have latency in the games I play. Most recently I've dumped over 40 hours into TERA starting with the Open Beta and I have not once ever encountered server latency on that game, but GW2 it happens every couple minutes...

I'm really on the fence with this, while there's lots to like I also keep finding reasons to stop playing the game during the beta events. The game has been in development for over 5 years, I don't have much faith in some miracle "optimization" coming along to fix the low fps in busy areas. If it happens I'll be thrilled, but I'm not holding my breath. And for the server latency, I saw this same issue sometimes with GW1, although there it was far less frequent. It makes playing a melee character pointlessly frustrating.

 

[GaiaHunter]

I can't get past the choppy framerate and inconsistent server latency. Sometimes my skills fire immediately and sometimes there's a delay. It might be about 1 second but it's brutal and completely breaks the gameplay for me. I have a 25MB down and 2MB up connection, which isn't anything special, but I never have latency in the games I play. Most recently I've dumped over 40 hours into TERA starting with the Open Beta and I have not once ever encountered server latency on that game, but GW2 it happens every couple minutes...

I'm really on the fence with this, while there's lots to like I also keep finding reasons to stop playing the game during the beta events. The game has been in development for over 5 years, I don't have much faith in some miracle "optimization" coming along to fix the low fps in busy areas. If it happens I'll be thrilled, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. And for the server latency, I saw this same issue sometimes with GW1, although there it was far less frequent. It makes playing a melee character pointlessly frustrating.

Optimization is one of the finals aspects of a game - there is no point in spending resources optimizing something that is subject to be changed.

I didn't note latency, just low performance.

Tera is a 1 year old game in korea, so no, using Tera beta as a standard isn't very productive.

Basically at this point the CPUs are doing work that is going to be shifted to GPUs - going from high to low yields very little performance improvement (pretty much any improvement is from the shadows) and a 5550 is just as fast as a 7970/GTX680.

Look at games like skyrim or SWTOR (in this case the AMD cards were much slower than NVIDIA cards just until release) to see some great performance improvements.

 

[gothamhunter]

Everyone realizes that it's a Stress Test, right? It's supposed to play terribly tonight.

 

[NoSoup4You]

Everyone realizes that it's a Stress Test, right? It's supposed to play terribly tonight.

This is the third time I've played GW2, it's been the same experience each time. The low fps I can tolerate to an extent, however the server latency makes the combat a chore with melee characters. The latency isn't constant, and when it isn't there the game is enjoybable. But the latency is never more than a couple minutes away during peak gameplay hours.

During the last BWE I woke up early one morning and played for hours without any server latency whatsoever, I'll attribute this to being off-peak hours. When I logged back in later that day during peak times the latency was dreadful.

 

[videogames101]

Latency tonight has been 1000x times worse than the past BWE, just as expected.

 

[VashHT]

Yeah latency has been really annoying, plus today i couldn't get into any storyline instances, has anyone else had that problem? It just loads to 95% really slowly then stops there.

 

[GaiaHunter]

So you guys are all on US servers while I'm the only one on EU severs?

Might explain the differences.

 

[zinfamous]

kicked several times trying to do the nasty foreman boss in southwest kessex hills. group would get his first phase down to about 20% health, then everyone is booted, relogs to overflow, but in event prior to boss spawn (take out the cannons).

that happened about 3 times. Then noticeable lag with a guildy buddy and myself on 2 occasions, very brief, and very little population in our area.

Other than that, no other hiccups really. Just got the unceremonious boot! 😀

GW has always had annoying lag issues, though. No hiding that. :\

 

[Worthington]

I had zero lag issues during this stress test. It was 100x better than the BWE ever was.

And, man they don't mess around. No server warning, no nothing. At 9:01 the game just crashed. Try to get back in and it says no beta event.

 

[aigomorla]

I had zero lag issues during this stress test. It was 100x better than the BWE ever was.

And, man they don't mess around. No server warning, no nothing. At 9:01 the game just crashed. Try to get back in and it says no beta event.

this was not a stress test.

i dont care what the hell arena calls it.
It was more like a experiment then a stress test.

Stress test does not happen when most of your bulk audience is at work, or at compulsive education... aka school.

:\

I was only able to get in about 20 min at most...
Because im not a NEET and actually have to work to make money.


Anyhow.. the 20 minutes of gameplay seemed fine.
I wasnt seeing these lags u guys are talking about.

i was kicked off the server once tho... which is why its only 20min.
After that i decided i had to goto work. :\

Anyhow i was doing fine on a 990X... i figure anyone on a overclocked sandy bridge or i7 should also do fine.

 

[VashHT]

Well like other people said this could have been more for EU servers, but still you would think they could have done it on saturday or something to truly stress all the servers.

What is a NEET anyway? I got to play for like an hour and a half and a lot of that time was waiting for story-line instances that never loaded, it sucked balls.

 

[aigomorla]

What is a NEET anyway?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neet

NEET is a government acronym for people currently "not in education, employment, or training".

 

[zinfamous]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neet

NEET is a government acronym for people currently "not in education, employment, or training".

oh....K.

I'm none of that, and I've got like 2 months of vacation/sick/personal days accrued, so I took a day off.

And I'm also not a soulless cube monkey (I'd much rather be a "NEET" than some useless mid-management cube prisoner. 😀)

You cool with that? 😛

Anyway, yeah, I think this was a bone to EU players. They had serious server issues during the previous weekend Beta. They always had very active servers in GW1, so it's good, I think, that ANet pays attention to them.

 

[GaiaHunter]

this was not a stress test.

i dont care what the hell arena calls it.
It was more like a experiment then a stress test.

Stress test does not happen when most of your bulk audience is at work, or at compulsive education... aka school.

:\

I was only able to get in about 20 min at most...
Because im not a NEET and actually have to work to make money.


Anyhow.. the 20 minutes of gameplay seemed fine.
I wasnt seeing these lags u guys are talking about.

i was kicked off the server once tho... which is why its only 20min.
After that i decided i had to goto work. :\

Anyhow i was doing fine on a 990X... i figure anyone on a overclocked sandy bridge or i7 should also do fine.

You realize Europe has actually been Anet biggest market?

The german GW community is really big.

For most Europe the stress test started at 20:00 (or 19:00 for UK and Portugal).