Game updates/20050608

Update - Wednesday, June 8, 2005

This week, as part of our in continuing promise to keep Guild Wars free of hacks, cheats, and other exploits, we closed the accounts of more than 100 users of bots. With today's update we are taking further steps to address the bot problem. New changes will improve our ability to identify and ban users of bots, rebalance mission areas that were highly exploited by bots, and reduce the overall effectiveness of bots, exploits, and other highly repetitive forms of gold and item farming. We are taking these steps to improve the game for all players, so that people using bots to farm gold cannot generate a huge influx of new gold into the economy, which increases prices for everyone and encourages other players to engage in repetitive farming just to keep up.

We know that some players currently engage in repetitive farming activities for the primary purpose of unlocking skills and items for PvP. Rather than preserving the effectiveness of farming for this purpose, it is our intention to address the larger issue of the need for farming by assessing how players acquire and unlock items, runes, and skills, and then by taking steps to ensure that players can acquire and unlock these things through normal gameplay. We believe that the most effective way to play the game should also be the most fun way to play the game. You can expect to see the first meaningful changes towards this goal next week.

This week's other improvements:

• Changed Signet of Capture so that it now targets dead boss monsters. When you use the signet, you are presented with a menu of all of the dead boss monster's skills, and can capture any skill of your choice. This eliminates the need to keep boss monsters alive while trying to capture their skills, and will substantially reduce the difficulty of capturing certain skills that are rarely cast by boss monsters.
• Added rune traders. Be aware that these traders specifically deal with already-identified runes, so runes you buy from them are for the purpose of wearing, not unlocking.
• Added traders for rare crafting materials.
• Added magical bonuses to a number of quest and collector items.
• Improved the guild matching system so that top-ranked guilds can find opponents more readily.
• Improved Tournament and Team Arenas so that if a player drops out during a mission, that player will be replaced by a henchman for the next mission.
• Improved drops of Obsidian Shards in The Fissure of Woe.
• Changed the way armor infusion quests work. The seer now infuses all of your currently worn pieces of armor, but the infusion effect is slightly reduced in power in order to preserve the intended challenge of the following missions.
• Fixed Henchmen AI to prevent Henchmen from running off after a party respawn.
• Fixed skills Vengeance and Unyielding Aura so that the effects after resurrection work properly again. These skills were inadvertently broken by last week's update.
• Fixed skill Enervating Charge to correctly deal armor piercing damage.
• Fixed skill Wild Blow so that it correctly ignores attempts to Block or Evade.
• Fixed skill Feral Lunge duration of bleeding effect.
• Added Dwarven Ale for sale on Dwarven Merchants.
• Added more storage agents to Droknar's Forge and Arena outposts.
• Added the option of attaching Collectors Edition account keys onto existing retail accounts to unlock the Divine Aura.
• Updated the user interface so that platinum pieces are clearly separated from gold. Previously various interface elements would incorrectly display "1000 gold pieces;" now they will display "1 platinum piece."
• Updated health bar positions on many monsters to more closely track the monster.
• Updated boss monsters Thul Boulderrain and Eater of Souls to use the correct glow color.
• Changed the appearance of collector NPCs in many Crystal Desert maps.
• Adjusted monster spawns in Talmark Wilderness, Ettin's Back, Ice Caves of Sorrow, Riverside Province, Sanctum Cay, Majesty's Rest, Stingray Strand, Nebo Terrace, The Arid Sea, Prophet's Path, The Scar, and rebalanced spawns of Caromi Tengu throughout Kryta.
• Increased reward for quest "The Villainy of Galrath" from 500 XP to 4000 XP.
• Fixed loot problems in quests "The Undead Hordes," "The Last Hog," and "White Mantle Wrath: A Helping Hand."
• Fixed quest drops in quest "Blood and Smoke."
• Fixed the countdown timer in Elona's Reach so that it now begins after the cinematic.
• Fixed fame in the Tomb of Primeval Kings so that it is granted starting from the first competitive victory.
• Fixed inability to trade bags. Unequipped bags can now be traded.
• Fixed an error that prevented characters from continuing to play after reaching level 15 in pre-searing Ascalon.
• Updated European and Korean translations.
• Made minor tweaks and improvements to a variety of NPC AI scripts.
• Fixed miscellaneous rare crash bugs.