Guild Wars 2 uses an intelligent auto target system which you can selectively ignore. Tab targeting works great as a default aid but is by no means necessary.

Unless your ISP's settings are retentive, then Guild Wars 2 network traffic should not be getting confused with conventional torrents.

Disabling peer-to-peer/torrents in WoW only affects the update. It has no impact on connecting to the game servers unless your connection is being saturated by torrent connection requests.

With regards to the internet traffic report - it is entirely possible that what A-Net were perceiving to be the issue was correct. Routing outages happen all the time. The Internet is specifically designed to be able to deal with and route around these, although it can add significant overheads to connection speeds. High packet loss will also effectively cripple your ability to play games or connect to some services.

Unfortunately, these issues are extremely hard to correct when they do occur. By the time you can work out the root cause, the issue may already have corrected itself.

The real test will be to see if the same issue persists into the next beta weekend.

Out of curiosity, are you using a hardwired connection or wireless?

Elements of underwater combat will likely be required to complete the personal story. This also means that you will want to at least keep your equipment and skills updated to your character level.

Otherwise you are free to ignore the underwater aspects entirely although it will impact you ability complete all of the heart quests in a given zone.

Personally, I think you would be missing out by skipping this content. There is a lot to discover in the world of Tyria, and underwater combat is pretty fun.

Turret Engineer

I designed this primarily for WvW defense. It is not the highest DPS although it proves to be quite effective at holding off the enemies.

You are missing the obvious "I already purchased the game, you insensitive clod!" option.

The BWE only confirmed my choice to pre-purchase.

The best part was going around electrocuting the wildlife with my pistol.

Learn to dodge.

It helps, lots.

This is long and certainly not comprehensive... read at your own risk.

The Guild Wars saga is probably one of the best "MMOs" I have played (even though technically it isn't an MMO). It was (and still is) fun to play and not that grindy unless you want to grind. The PvP is probably one of the most balanced systems I have seen to date and it was extremely polished at launch. It is really three distinct games that interact in the same universe and an additional expansion.

I am definitely a fan.

The game(s) gripped me and didn't really let go until real life drama interfered. ArenaNet introduced and finessed a number of updates and modifications post launch which have served to improve game-play.

The only part I am not a fan of is the 'heroes' which were introduced with Nightfall. I feel it broke a lot of the co-operative elements that served so well in the first two episodes and made finding random groups a lot more difficult.

I was also developing another MMO during the time in which I played Guild Wars, working specifically on game balance. I understand a lot of the development and design decisions that went into Guild Wars and have been impressed with how far they have managed to push the original concept without breaking the theme.

That said:

I have been looking at Guild Wars 2 with eyes opened based on my personal experience in game design. One of the things that has most interested me are dynamic events. I have worked on and initiated the development of similar systems and even got so far as implementing and play-testing them on a beta environment. In themselves, they are not really any different from raids with a set number of stages that go from one extreme to another. You can add in a few branches, but more than a couple make it a mess to try and code or balance, so it works out best to just keep a simple chain.

The interesting stuff starts happening when you get multiple concurrent chained events that are designed individually and start interacting with each other in the same game area. We got to this point and then my girlfriend (now wife) and I started dating and I no longer had the free time to work on those systems. It also didn't help that our game servers couldn't really handle the additional load because when we ran them our servers would get swamped and usually end up crashing or bugging out (that's what you get for volunteer development), regardless, dynamic events when done right are insanely fun. Sadly, our game was limited by budget and I really wanted to see what a developer with the funds could do.

Thankfully ArenaNet had announced they were working on Guild Wars 2 with dynamic events.

After the beta weekend I am not disappointed. There was some lag because areas were insanely crowded, but it didn't make the game unplayable. I also couldn't find anything that was majorly broken and I looked quite hard.

The events scale well to the number of players. It is pretty scary when you are the only person initially and things are all going smoothly, then suddenly a group of other players turn up; the whole game changes into a mad fight for survival because that one enemy has suddenly called in a whole bunch of reinforcements, and guess who has the agro?

There was added fun when I started noticing the in-game event interactions. For example there are two bosses in the same area which usually won't spawn together because they are part of different chains. On their own they are tough and require a lot of work to beat but are never-the-less worth the reward. Problems started happening when both bosses were active at the same time. Apparently a group wiped leaving one guy running around when another group triggered the second boss. So now we had two bosses fighting individual groups which would be challenging alone... except the balance mechanism is counting the number of players fighting each boss as part of the difficulty for both so there are two 10-20 person groups attempting to kill bosses which are double the expected strength.

I think we spent about an hour attempting to beat them through various methods. We eventually ended up committing suicide on both bosses in the same area and the bosses started fighting each other instead - totally unexpected. This resulted an epic clash of the titans with players carefully managing damage so as not to pull them apart (it still happened a few times but we got there eventually).

This is a prime example of how a dynamic event system leads to some interesting and unpredictable game-play while forcing people to adapt on the fly and there are similar examples happening all the time throughout the game zones.

I knew it could be done, but actually seeing it in action is something else.

So, my honest opinions post beta.

The game looks like any other triple-A MMO on the market. The graphics are decent enough and performance wasn't actually as bad as I expected. My laptop held up pretty well and I even played on near-max settings for the last day.

The actual game-play and skill system takes getting used to and has a learning curve for anyone used to WoW, EQ, DAoC or that game type. The problem here is that it looks deceptively similar to Guild Wars and WoW at the same time and you can play in the same fashion up until about level 10 quite comfortably. It is by no means effortless, although pretty much anyone will get there eventually. Things start to change after level 10 though. It is subtle, but noticeable if you pay attention. You find yourself become much more aware of surroundings and how to use them, and making use of dodge abilities much more often. I thought I had a grip on the game until this started happening, next thing I know I am constantly dodging and rolling through combat and don't even notice until I sit back to take a breather. It see what you did there ArenaNet... VERY well done.

The events? Taken by themselves they are a little vanilla - it is hard to come up with truly original content. However, it is with the interactions between the events the magic starts to happen.

I won't even get into PvP – that is a whole other story.

Needless to say, I am sold.

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Originally posted by Jakard
I'm fairly sure this thread is no longer relevant. LOL

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#10058

Not that anyone will care, but DarkSpace is celebrating its 10th birthday today.

Go play or, or maybe don't. It's still an honor that many titles will sadly never achieve.

Congrats!

I started playing FE again now thats its free to play. Recovered my old characters and am having a decent amount of fun wondering about. The F2P limitations are not readily apparent and do not interefere with the actual gameplay. In all they FE has made a very smooth transition into the F2P market.

Much Kudos.

Sorry, but this had to be done....

My only criticism is why the game has not been released yet. I mean, I know they want to make they game as good as they can, but I want to play it already...

Bunch of slackers :-P

Go the the GameList, pick a random game and try it out for a few hours or days.

You will have some awesomely bad experiences, and you will also have some amazingly fun times. The key part is being able to enjoy the games together - it doesn't really matter what you play.

No way. I try to use a different email/password combination for every game account I have.

That just means I will have more free time to work on my own game...

A few days ago we released version 1.670 of DarkSpace.

This patch features a huge overhaul of the game balance, finally implementing the updated Dreadnought and Station Layouts and a major change to how repair affects ships.
There is also a noticeable improvement in the graphics engine due the addition of shader support.

Remember, DarkSpace is free to play, so join up today!

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Patch Log:
- Halved the damage and doubled the fire rate of all core weapons (Stellar Incinerator, QST, Ion Cannon) - effectively reduces single volley damage while keeping the overall DPS of these weapons. Ammo has been adjusted where applicable.
- New Cruiser layouts!
- Torpedo changes:
* Anti-Matter:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 480 gu.
* Speed: 60 gu/s.
* Splash: 10 gu.
* Proton:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 560 gu.
* Speed: 65 gu/s.
* Splash: 30 gu.
* Fusion:
* 10% damage increase.
* Range: 640 gu.
* Speed: 80 gu/s.
* Splash: 10 gu.
- [GCQL] Mutes can no longer be removed by reconnecting or changing channels.
- Muted players can no longer talk in-game via global channels (/yell, /team, and /faction).
- Added new drive flare effect for missiles - only available at medium or high detail setting
- New Utility Ship layouts (Transports, Engineers & Supplies)!
- Flux Wave now only affects enemies.
- Pulse Wave now only affects the enemy's projectiles and has a 65% chance of destroying each projectile it hits.
- All damage-orientated beams have had their damage and energy efficiency improved. Second tier beams have had their damage vastly improved.
- Stations have had their max speed lowered by about 45%.
- Missiles are more likely to aim for your ship now, rather than your shapely behind.
- New Dreadnought layouts!
- Fixed an exploit wherein you could initiate a jump and cloak.
- Fixed the issues with an Interdictor going through a Jump Gate and keeping ships dictored. Also fixed an issue with going through a gate to escape an Interdictor causing you to get stuck.
- Cloak will no longer display a faux cooldown when activated.
- Including %t in a message in-game will replace %t with whatever you are targetting.
- Reduced energy drain of Tier 2 and Tier 3 missiles, also increased AoE radius of Tier 1 missiles by ~90%, Tier 2 missiles by ~35%, and Tier 3 missiles by ~5%
- Armor rings now are colored depending on if you have shields or armor on the ship. Shields on defensive mode have an extra layer of white to indicate an arc in defensive mode (purely cosmetic)
- Swapped out old K'Luth psi/shredder missiles for new Psionic Missile and Shroud Missile.
* Psionic Missile: high energy drain - medium-high damage - payload scales with ship class - no ammo usage
* Shroud Missile: medium energy drain - medium damage - payload scales with ship class - uses ammo - high negative signature
- Fixed a bug with Ablative armor giving beam energy damage resistance, instead of kinetic energy.
- Tweaked energy drain values of the Psi Cannon and the Stellar Incinerator.
- Significantly increased the energy drain of all core weapons.
- Increased Planetary Siege Missile damage output significantly.
- Shield rotation will now charge shields at a rate of 20%, up from 10%.
- Reactive shields now have 20% resistance to all damage types except ELF and EMP, which have -20% resistance.
- Tweaked AHR to repair all ships' hull to full over 10 minutes. AHR gadget repair rate also changed to now require 5 minutes to fully repair all gadgets (not counting the ship's automatic single-gadget repair feature).
- Increased Ablative Armor's weakness to energy-based weapons.
- New layouts for all player-faction Stations!
- Planetary depots will now repair all ships within 500 gu, and have a 1-per-panet limit.
- Team chat is now coloured teal instead of gold.
- Supply Stations now have a repair field device similar to how depots function.
- Bump mapping has been applied to all ICC, UGTO and K'Luth ships.
- Medusa can now do Specular Hightlighting via shaders. This has been enabled in DarkSpace.
- Stations have lost one reload which has been replaced by an AHR-esque gadget named "Damage Control". This will repair the station and it's gadgets when the station is damaged.
- Planetary damage has been increased on all non-pd based defence bases.
- AHR and the new Damage Control can now only be reloaded by planets, depots, and platforms.
- HCL's and AD's cannot be used for PD now.
- Released: July 23rd, 2011
- HOTFIX: AHR and DC now repair armor, and costs ammo to do so. K'Luth Organic Armor regeneration rate lowered to compensate.
- HOTFIX: K'Luth stations have had their DC's replaced for a couple of weapons each.
- HOTFIX: Players getting their jumps aborted has been fixed.
- Released: TBC

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DarkSpace.

Nuff said.

I miss TR too, for all of its faults.