User talk:Joe Kimmes/Archive March 2009

Hero Pathing

Hey Joe, is hero pathing something that can be worked on at all, or is that on the messy and touchy end of the spectrum? I have a few other questions to throw at you, but they all depend on the answer to this question. Cheers. — Jon Lupen 02:16, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Pathing is definitely a hard aspect of the game to change, since the effects can be so far-reaching, but I don't want to write it off as being impossible to change. Let's hear your other questions - there are definitely aspects of pathing that are easier to tweak, and it'd be useful to know if there are any particular problem spots that could be remedied. - Joe Kimmes 18:13, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I'll be sure to keep that in mind. Sounds like I have things easy in the ways of NPC pathing and such in the Oblivion CS XD.

Anyway, the biggest issues I have are flagging, and unflaging, especially with distance involved. If I unflag a hero at a far enough range, usually the close to the edge of the compas or beyond, they tend to run in the opposite direction as me. Another side is that Heros always take a strait-line path to their flagged destination, or back to the player when unflagged, and will often get stuck on terrian, walls, ect. How advanced can the hero AI be "trained" on object recognition and avoidance?

Another sticky situation comes from aggro avoidance. I often find myself squeezing between a tight gap between a wall and a mob, or two mobs, only to have my heros follow the strait-line and aggro one or both :P How complicated is the hero "follow player(s)" AI, and would it be possible for them to follow in the player's footsteps, rather than taking the strait-line? It would certainly help with object avoidance. While on the topic of following, how do heros choose their path when chasing someone down in melee or running from a melee baddy?

Also, on a somewhat different note, what criteria do heros use for determining skill chains and such?

I'm not sure how much of that is answerable, but if things are complicated, feel free to flesh it out in as mush detail as you need to fully explain it. The more that is explained, the more complicated I can theroize and fine-tune the details of questions and suggestion. — Jon Lupen 23:36, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

Can you also answer the question as to why heroes feel the need to Run off from where they are flaged to heal or do other stupid things that 99% of the time gets them killed because they were flagged for a reason? when i flag a hero i want it to stay at where i flagged it, and not really move that much expect for a little kyteing, so not to die in ms75.172.42.47 01:18, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I'll answer 75.172.42.47's question first. Heroes moving off of their flagged point for certain things is more or less intended behavior - if they didn't, I'd be answering the question "why don't my heroes move 2 feet to cast a heal spell and save my life?". I understand the desire to have your heroes obey orders, though - I'm interested to hear what situations you feel they shouldn't move in (ie, '99% of the time moving gets them killed', but why?).

As a stopgap solution, you might try setting your heroes to Passive mode when you need them to stay in one place - this won't stop all movement, but it should help.

Now, on to Jon's questions. I'll try to explain the current reasoning for GW's AI as best as I can here, although I will warn you that my experience with the hero AI is limited compared to some of the more experienced programmers.

Flagging: Removing a flag outside of compass range is a situation that the game is known to have trouble with. Heroes moving in the complete opposite direction of the player sounds like a serious bug though - are you able to reproduce this easily? I encourage you to contact QA about this if you have the time.

Heroes moving in a straight line to a destination and potentially getting stuck is a problem, but not a simple one to solve. Pathfinding, particularly around tricky terrain or over large distances, can take a decent chunk of computing time - this isn't usually a big deal for single player games, but with numerous players on a server, each pathfinding check adds up fast. There should be scenarios in which heroes are allowed to make a more expensive pathing check to reach their destination, though, so I'll look into this a little further when I get the chance.

Following: Following the player works via straight-line travel for similar reasons - keeping track of the player's path adds a certain amount of expense to something that's happening all the time in the game. There are also other considerations - heroes currently try to 'form up' around the player, which has beneficial effects like limiting AoE damage, keeping the group spread out when combat starts, etc. If your heroes followed you in a neat line, they could end up poorly positioned for more time than normal when the group was attacked, or worse, the last person in line (assuming they don't cluster up and start clipping into each other) could draw aggro from a moving enemy group.

Combat: Combat movement is generally simpler - heroes maneuver into range of an enemy or ally, or are kiting. The nice thing here is that there aren't many map obstacles involved in a fight, so pathfinding is either unneeded or cheap compared to long-distance navigation. I can't answer as to the particulars of the movement in combat, though; I do believe that in a perfect world, heroes who are kiting will try to lead enemies in a circle around the battle (don't take that as gospel though).

Skill Use: To greatly summarize the AI code, basically each Hero has a list of the participants in the current battle. They then check each of their skills - each skill has some simple conditions for determining how useful it is in the current situation. For example, Flare is always kind of good, and Glowing Gaze is great if the hero's target is on fire, and not great otherwise. So ideally, there isn't specific code saying "Cast Searing Flames and THEN cast Glowing Gaze" - it works automatically, because Glowing Gaze will only be more useful than Searing Flames after SF sets the target on fire. There are exceptions to this - some combos aren't easily handled by this sort of AI, such as Steady Stance before Drunken Blow, and when possible these combos have some specific AI. In the Steady Stance example, Steady Stance checks the skill bar for self-knockdown skills and increases its priority appropriately.

As I think I mentioned in another discussion, improving the Hero AI is tricky. If they get too smart, then they'll get used instead of players even more than they already are. If they're too dumb, then they're no good to players who prefer to play solo. And as mentioned up above, there are aspects of game AI, like pathfinding, that can quickly start to cost the server large amounts of resources if they're used without careful consideration. The AI has evolved a lot from player feedback, though, so I encourage you to send any problems you have to QA or ask me about them. Thanks for your questions, this was fun to explain. - Joe Kimmes 02:22, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

well its just in some farming situations a hero or hench will run off to heal you and im not talking just a little but off the flag but like 1-2 Agro circle off. i will take a screen and post it when it happens again but i have also noticed that henchmen run off it as well(to heal) and there is no passive setting for them sadly. and for the most part its for when i am trying to pull something from a group i have noticed it happening, but the dieing normally happens when i am farming and i have them bring a self heal that they can use to heal them self. on the note of forming up would there be a way to add formations? or just have the ability to set what kind of mode a henchmen is in? 75.172.42.47 03:18, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I think I've seen the heroes running too far to heal people bug happen. I'll investigate further, hopefully I can fix it sooner rather than later (although I make no promises until after the April build). Formations and henchmen modes are possible, but the trickiest thing is actually the user interface for selecting them; the UI is already crowded, and the designers are reluctant to shoehorn in more buttons. - Joe Kimmes 02:07, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Flagging: Yeah, I should be able to reproduce this, I'm gunna do some playing and see as to how reproducable it is, and at what ranges. Who in QA would be the best to get a hold of for this?

Pathing: One of the things I liked about working with the Oblivion CS was path griding. The entire game is layed over with a mapping resembling a grid that bends and twists and turns around walls and obsticles. Any NPC needs to get somewhere, they follow the lines of the pathing grid. Like you said, this may work well in a single player game, but could get extrenuous in a multiplayer game. Perhaps something akin to that could be worked out. Just some food for thought.

Following: Heros tend to konga line after a short enough distance. When you start to move, they try to stay in formation, but it soon breaks down, and they bunch, usualy lining up. This is also easily reproducable.

Skill Chaining: Just about any player knows how to effectively skill chain. Better AI for skill chaining and comboing would bring them up to the level of most players, and not so much above them. To use your SF and GG example, I'm imagining a que for heros of skills they plan to use. If say, they run upon GG, they should then search their bar for a skill that causes burning, add it to the que, and GG right behind it, or if no skill is present that fills it's requirement, they could make a quick scan of their target or nearby targets. An omnipotent hero is not good, but if I call IA on a target, the hero should be able to pick up on that and use GG on my target after IA goes off. Good combo AI should work every time it can, but I often see heros pass up a good combo. Their good with GG on a bar with multiple skills that cause burning, but not so much with only one, or Glowing Ice and Shatterstone, for example. If they pass over a skill in their bar that requires a second condition to be of most success, their bar should be searched for the skill that fills it, if there is one, they should be strapped together and thrown in the que together. If they run over something that has a negative, and their skill(s) that counter said negative is recharging, it should nto be added to the que. — Jon Lupen 04:50, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

For submitting bugs, there's a bug report page here - ArenaNet Portal, or you could try posting it to the talk page of one of our QA members - Kim Chase, Mike Z. QA loves reports that have a reliable way to reproduce the bug - it makes it significantly easier to track down the cause.

I can't vouch for whether the game uses a pathing grid 'under the hood', but as I was saying, the main issue is the expense of a pathing check. That said, I'd like to get things working better, so I appreciate hearing about pathing problems.

Skill chaining: Queuing up skills in the AI is a tricky proposition; the game state is constantly changing, and it can be hard to predict if you'll still have the energy/required condition/corpse/enemy target/etc. Many decisions, such as who to heal, need to be made as closely to the time of need as possible - if you queue up a heal, the target may be dead, or use their own heal effect before yours lands, wasting the skill use. I think that rather than implement a new system like this, the best thing is to optimize the existing skill AI - for example, Glowing Gaze originally had poor AI that resulted in the skill being frequently used when the target was not Burning; this was changed in I think September based on user input from the wiki. - Joe Kimmes 02:07, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Sorry it took me so long to get back to you on this, seeing as how I was severly injured while skiing ion Friday the 13th (irony right? XD)

QA: Thanks, I'll keep those pages in mind, do a bit of messing, and then hit them with my results.

Skill Chaining: Noted. Perhaps if there is a way for a hero to "link" two skills together, not so they don't always have to que them, but when one is called on for use, they will always remember the link, and all the skills involved in the combo, and the correct order to use them? — Jon Lupen 00:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Ouch, sorry to hear about your injury. Careful, there's another Friday the 13th in March. o_O;;

With skill chaining, that's an interesting idea, but it brings up the same issues as a queue, ie, do heroes re-evaluate the next skill in the link before using it, or risk the skill no longer being useful due to changing battle situations? And if they do re-evaluate it, is there an improvement compared to just adjusting the skill's individual AI? I think the best thing to do in the short term is to identify the skill combos that the AI doesn't use satisfactorily, and see if there's a solution with the existing AI that will make it work properly. - Joe Kimmes 02:14, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Recovering from the injury nicely, so far. There is a friday the 13th two months in a row? O.o

Skill Chaining: Perhaps re-work other skill AI to search for skills that exploit certain factors caused be skills, for example, a skill causes burning, search their bar for a skill that takes advantage of it, if one exists, have them take a shot at using it next. A two-way link. If heros have a two way, double headed search method for skills they can chain, it is more likely to pay off. If both skills in a combo can be used effectively individualy, perhaps if a hero would use one, but can't pull off the other, they should still be able to use it without having to chain every time. — Jon Lupen 04:50, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

What you're describing now is actually close to an existing part of the AI - to use an example I mentioned before, self-knockdown skills are specially noted as causing a self-knockdown, so that Steady Stance can have a piece of AI saying 'if I have self-knockdown skills, use this first'. This feature of the AI isn't implemented across all the skills that could use it, so again, the key is to identify the skills that aren't working. Frequently, all that's needed is small tweaks to the existing skill AI to get a skill working, but if needed, more specific-case AI like Steady Stance's check can be added. - Joe Kimmes 19:17, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, gotcha. I'll be sure to keep an eye out for skills that heros are none too good at comboing. Do skills that cause self-knockdown also have a bit that looks for skills that prevent knockdown, so self-knockdown can be countered with something other than steady stance, like say, balance stance or dolyak signet? Just trying to get my head all the way around some of the criteria heros use to looking for combos. — Jon Lupen 21:13, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes, checks like that can work both ways. I'm not 100% sure whether the self-knockdown example does, but it's possible to make skills do so. - Joe Kimmes 22:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, an update with hero pathing after having a chance to do some playing with it. Heroes always bunch up after traveling far enough, or for long enough, or if the player is moving faster than them for a short time. Also, on hero travel, I have not been able to reproduce the bug with them traveling the opposite way after unflagged, but there is another obstacle. If I unflag them and they have to travel a complex enough path, they will often take a wrong turn. They will start to travel what looks like the strait line, notice it's a dead end or leads the wrong way, then turn and take the correct route. The strait-line pathing tendency is causing snags again, and may result in more than one snag in a path. This can be corrected by flag guiding them back to you, but if someone where to just unflag them and let them find their own way, they could agro, hit a death trap or some other hindrance. I'm going to do a little more playing to see if there are any other replicateable bugs or flaws with hero AI and pathing, and then hand over my findings to QA. — Jon Lupen 21:44, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Excellent, I'm sure QA will appreciate the help. Part of what you describe is actually intended though, with heroes attempting a straight path, failing, then taking the correct path. As I mentioned above, this is an optimization to avoid making an expensive pathing check - most of the time, the straight path is actually the best one. If a hero attempts the straight path and it fails, then they take the additional time to compute a full path. As you say, this can cause issues, but unfortunately it's not something that can be changed. =\ - Joe Kimmes 22:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, no big deal on the wrong turns now and then. I'll just have to make a mental note to flag-lead heros on the correct path from time to time. They don't take the wrong turen for long, they usualy start of in that direction, and then quickly take a turn and head in the right direction. It's a little inconvient, but it can be hanbdled with a little micro management. I'm not sure what can be done about grouping tightly while traveling tho.

On a side note, it's interesting when you hit builds that exploit hero AI and end up being used more effectively than any human could. I've seen heros time some almost impossible ints, time skill use very well, ect. Sabway is another good example of builds that exploit hero AI, as well as Herosmite team builds used in HA and GvG. They are also very skilled in use of skills such ad discord. Heros may not have the best AI with most skills and builds, but if you expoit their strengths, you could very well end up with a hero that does better than most to just about every player with the same build, or better than most with a similar build. — Jon Lupen 23:16, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Something that has really been a bother to me with heroes is that they tend to get lost sometimes. What I mean by this: I was Vanquishing Anvil Rock and had a hard time finding the last mob, roving minotaurs. I flagged heroes to various places in hopes of them encountering the mob so I'd know where to go and then set off running around the map. When I unflagged the heroes, they went all over the place. I was in the south side of the area near the southern portal. Livia was flagged to the north east of the south east portal. Dunkoro was flagged up on the mountain in the center of the map. Gwen was flagged near the northeast exit. Upon unflagging, Livia wandered to the northwest corner of the map, a long journey from her flagged location, Dunkoro found a cliff and stood near it while Gwen traveled towards the northwest from the north east. Livia and Gwen traveled significant distances across the area. None of them headed south towards me even after i flagged them to my location (I was dead and could monitor them, which is how I know where they were). I tried to use their individual flags to guide them to me. Dunkoro was fine, he was the closest but didnt seem to understand what a corner was. Livia would run in the opposite direction from her flag if it was placed a good distance away from her but still in a straight line and Gwen was similar to this. 24.188.207.20 01:42, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I can tell you *exactly* how to replicate this "heroes run off in the opposite direction bug". Follow my simple steps! 1) Find an open area where you have approximately 2 compasses worth of space to work with. 2) If you're north of this space, flag your heroes as far south as you can. (Similarly, if you're west, flag them east, etc.) 3) Once they've run to the edge of your compass (maybe even a little off of it) ***they "remember" where you sent them from***. 4) Run WAY past them on the same compass line you started with. (Start N, Flag S, Run so far S that they're on the N side of your radar). 5) Drop your waypoint flags (click the X, don't re-assign). 6) Watch them run to your last known location BEFORE you flagged them. This only happens near the extremes of your compass range (think 2x aggro to out of range) and is more obvious the more extreme *your* initial point and cancel point are. I.E. If you run so that your two locations are 180 degrees from each other, it's super obvious, if you run so they're 90 degrees or less, not so bad. The confimation to this theory is that when they take off running, you can follow them (stay back so you can barely see them and they won't update to your new location) and they will keep running until they've hit the spot you started at initially. Once they reach this point, a re-evaluation of their pathing triggers and they find your correct location. The bug most likely looks like a for loop being terminated on a < instead of a <= or a sentinel based/declining index recursive function ending on 0 instead of -1, etc. Meaning: it will look correct except in these extreme circumstances and you realize you're off by a hair. I'll check back in the future in case there are more questions. 68.219.159.156 02:52, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Excellent, I'll give this a try as soon as I can. If it's doing what it sounds like, it's probably a fairly simple fix.

In the interest of full disclosure though, your theories about the code causing the bug are way off. =) - Joe Kimmes 17:45, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Of course my theories are off, you wouldn't (or shouldn't) be looping anything while that bug is happening. Just mentioning that the behavior acts in a similar manner as the situations I described. The better example (and probably a little closer to the truth) would be something that every newbie coder does when they first start out: have a function call that depends on variables that are scoped larger than they should be and the function assumes they are clean. I.E. Your last location was saved and the function expects it to be current, but it does not get updated while they are flagged. It does get correctly updated when the heroes arrive back where you started. 68.219.159.156 03:19, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Hero Energy Management

i understand that you recently made these changes to hero's energy management, but the effect it seems to have had is that monks don't heal enough. Before they would spam 5 eng skills, but now i have been doing hm stuff, and have 2 monk heros and none of them heal me at all, and they all have full bars of energy.75.172.42.47 03:18, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Can you supply the skill bars that they were using, the approximate energy pool that they had and the situation that they were in for this no-healing behaviour? -- WarBlade 22:34, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

What Warblade said; I don't think we recently changed hero energy management, so I'm interested to see if it's a specific skill set that's messing something up or has bad AI for the individual skills. - Joe Kimmes 02:08, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

joe didnt forget about this give me some time need to test stuff and life has been busy. same with the other topic i brought up75.172.46.207 10:25, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

Hero and Hench AI for Monk Players

→ moved from User_talk:Linsey_Murdock

my observation on playing my monk character is that, as a monk, basically you stay back and heal the tank and the other damage dealers including the rest of the party member H/H or human players.

but my concern is with the h/h, I don't know how this work before as I have not play a monk with H/H up until now.

so I made a group of 4 monks with tahlkora, ogden, and dunkoro, and i hire 2 henchmen at lion's arch, Little Thomp and Mr Stepahn, so we go out killing those little imps, at first I was using an axe, so everything its okay, until I switch to using a wand as we approach the "birdmen", now the tiny problem is every time I call a target, the 2 tank/warrior won't go ahead until i run into the mob.

this is fine for the other class/profession that i've played extensively, because they are tank/dmg dealers, like elementalist, or warrior or my ritualist and the rest of the profession except Monk, but I think its a little weird that your hero/hench tanks are waiting for the healer/support line, the monk to tank before they will attack. don't you think?

can this problem be solve? thanks PumpkinPie 12:16, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

The problem has already been largely taken care of with the hero flags under the compass. If you want to play a back line Monk with Heroes and Henchmen you might want to try flagging your melee Warrior front line so that they move forward ahead of you. The other thing to try is to take fewer Monks for you Heroes and use those slots for damage output instead. That way you can also use the Heroes more aggressively with some help from the priority target button in their Hero Panels. -- WarBlade 13:05, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Hey there WarBlade, :) thanks for the tips, but i don't think anyone can play the game running and flagging the hench ahead of them and trying to select target for kill, lol, you know how tiring that is? the monks heros are not for healings, they are smiters, :) its how I play the game, if I play ele, i'll go 3 eles 1 warrior or MM, if I play Warrior it always 3 warriors (4x knockdown warrior, basically render your foe useless) and 1 mm and Devona ) an interrupter 2 hench monks. (etc) I can very well use the sabway necros on all my characters, but where's the fun, I am making my own builds for all my characters in different area. and sometimes its just very irritating to adapt to this new way of how the AI reacts when I am playing my monk character. PumpkinPie 16:38, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

You might want to use smiting this way you can call targets and get 1 hero monk and 1 hench monk to do the healing/protecting.There are more monks doing this with heros/hench.Hope all works out.```

Age 17:53 ,28 November 2008 (UTC)

So the solution is to be forced to flag heroes (and in limited fashion, henchmen) and forget about playing the monks primary function? Brilliant.

-Kherec 17:58, 29 November 2008 (UTC)

I noticed this behaviour too. Which is highly annoying. And a reason I never am a healing monk when I'm with H/H. Or why I never bring heroes when I'm with a group of people unless I must. And I also noticed that Tahlkora (who is generally the protecting monk with me healing) wasn't even doing anything as I was hanging out on the edges of the fight, only moving in when somebody needed some healing. She had her whole energy bar full and no skills recharging the whole time. Only when I went in long enough, did she cast some skills. And flagging a monk in the middle of the melee is never a smart idea, imo. --Lady Rhonwyn 08:55, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I missed the time when melee hero/hench would actually advance outside the aggro bubble (!!) when you called a target for them. That was a godsend for almost any H/H veteran, most especially Monks. However, that change also caused the H/H to become overly aggressive, to the point that they would head out on their own with no provocation. That caused a lot of unnecessary and deadly aggro. So the change was reverted. :C I wish that would be fixed... Vili 09:03, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

I am surprised "healing monks" don't know how to wand. Wanding makes all your attackers, well, attack.Pika Fan 09:13, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

They're too busy admiring their Colossal Scimitars, tbh. (and anyway, having melee advance without you also grabbing aggro is quite favorable) Vili 09:16, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

You could wand, then run to the backline tbh. Use mms and use minions as walls. Also, VSpears are getting common, use them then.Pika Fan 09:29, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Voltaic Spears are ugly, though. :( Wanding and running to the backline is an option, but you'll still have aggro on you till you transfer it to teh minions or whatever. The point was that you avoid such potentially lethal unpleasantries if melee H/H would actually do their job as frontliners. Minions are not viable in every part of the game. (I don't hold the belief that PvE is hard, in case you are assuming that. The current system is workable. But if you've had a glimpse of an improvement, you don't easily forget. :) ) Vili 09:35, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

When i play healer with a Hero/Henchy group, i take a melee hero (usually warrior) and set him to aggresive (its a must for this to work) since in aggresive mode, heroes will attack and pursue anything that is up to around 1.5 of aggro bubble. So when im going to fight a group, i get to a distance so that group is at 1.5 of my aggro bubble and Lock the melee hero to the closest foe (preprot the hero as needed), he will run to attack that foe engaging the entire group of that foe into battle, and taking the first hits for you. Once the battle has started, u can unlock the hero and let the AI get their targets by itself (AI its been improved many times in that way). This works well or me. --FunnyUsername 10:41, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Problem about wanding: usually spellcasters don't want the whole mob attacking them (mainly when there are tankers in the party).

Healers would prefer to have teammates targeted (so they can be healed) and Nukers would prefer to not be target of heavy damage while using slow casting spells, for example. :P

But all these AI-issues can be solved by getting a full-human party. :P Yeah, latest PuG I joined were so... bad... that I preferred to stay with stupid Henchmen... they're slow, they don't initiate attacks, but at least they don't randomly change target, don't randomly run towards 5+ different mobs at once and don't kill themselves when hexed with Backfire ¬¬ --NIN37 10:25, 1 December 2008 (UTC)

Ctrl+space on a target, then do a step backwards (S key by default). It is a bit strange but works. -=-Koda Kumi 14:01, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

I don't work on AI, but I will pass this along to Joe. - Linsey talk 18:28, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Hey Joe, do you mind if I move AI questions from my talk page to here? :D I get lots... - Linsey talk 09:22, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Sure, no problem. If anyone's still following this discussion, the AI can get into a lot of trouble with aggro distances, so this is a tricky case. I understand the complaints though - I think moving back towards 'heroes and henchmen run outside of their normal aggro range, within reason, to engage called targets' would be the ideal scenario here. - Joe Kimmes 17:57, 20 February 2009 (UTC)

Hi Joe, is not so much a problem anymore, as I have grown accustom to controlling them by going into the aggro circle, then run out of harms way after getting the h/h engaged in battle. However it is still not 100% success, why, you wander. This is what I've come to observe, some of the funny h/h behaviors. I think, because h/h are program to follow the players character around closely/tightly within a certain perimeter, sometime they cannot make up their mind to stay in the engaged battle or to follow the player's character, which ended up with the melee h/h running back and forth between the player's character and the targeted foe. In other case, for instant, after carefully selecting a nice bottleneck area to AOE the foes, you run in for aggro (pulling), by the time you run back to safety, the h/h follow letting the foes run out of the "bottleneck" situation, and able to get to your casters which I have carefully place out of harms way before starting the pulling process. That's just a sample, there are many other situations where you are left fighting alone because the h/h can't make up their mind to fight or run towards the players character but not 100% of the time, I still can't pin point as to why sometime they would follow my character's every move and sometime, like Davona (mostly) sometime Jora will ignore your character totally and runs out of the group and pull back with her foes that you are not ready to fight. I hope you understand what I am talking about, as I don't think I did a very good job describing the scenario. Its not a major problem. But still not perfect AI if you ask me. Also I am not being picky and I understand the shorthanded situation at Arena Net at this time with 2 games going one side by side. Off course it would be great if it can be amended. But its not the most important thing, because AI is dead, and players can learn to adapt. I am just reporting some case/scenarios as to how the AI is doing and hope that will not be repeated in GW2. PS this Wiki format is kinda hard to read without the ability to paragraph the text. Anyway, Thanks for reading. Pumpkin pie 14:43, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Our alliance calls Jora "Aggro Babe" because she routinely ignores targets and aggro and runs out and aggros the world. -- Wyn 17:13, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

The main issue I had with the AI after the update to their active range was this: [1]. Typically this is a problem in Hero Battles when you have a hero on a shrine that's fighting a R/P with a pet. The pet will consistently chase the hero out of the shrine's range so that the ranger can cap it. Before the update this rarely happened, now it's only a matter of time. Other than that, a lot of top HB players dislike the fact that heroes no longer overextend when ordered to manually use a skill. This requires an additional step since you now have to flag the hero to a new location and then click the skill, otherwise they won't use the skill and simply do nothing. --Draikin 17:17, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

Interesting. It seems like the AI is definitely due for another hard look; aggro range ties into a lot of AI systems, causing some of these unintended behaviors.

I agree that heroes should ignore their flag to use a manually ordered skill; that was an unintended side effect of fixing another bug, I'm guessing.

Just to clarify, in this HB scenario, is any hero chased out of capping range by a pet, or is this particular to melee-weapon heroes/casters/rangers/anything specific? - Joe Kimmes 01:43, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

Well first of all it won't happen to a hero that is using a melee weapon, since that weapon will cause them not to kite when set to Guard. Any other weapon (a spear as well) will cause them to kite even when they're set to Attack or Guard, so the pet gradually chases them out of the shrine's range. Secondly, heroes that are set to Avoid will have less chance of running outside of the shrine's range since that reduces their "walking range" the same way it reduces their attack range. A good way to test this is to use a R/P with a pet versus a Caretaker's Charge Ritualist set to Guard. On the following image the blue dot shows Razah on Guard after one minute of fighting on a neutral center shrine against a R/P: [2]. The pet chased him towards the stairs which allowed the ranger to capture the shrine. This is just one of the reasons I hate pets in Hero Battles, another reason is how in a 1v1 the AI always ends up attacking the pet instead of the ranger. Since there's no death penalty in HB and R/P have Heal As One, attacking the pets is totally useless and it only gives more time for the ranger to destroy your hero with an overpowered condition spam build. You can target lock them to the ranger but with 3 pets and constantly changing positions this basically doubles the micro needed to control your team. Additionally, the constant bodyblocks on smaller shrines prevent your team from attacking/kiting while the rangers can just stand there and throw spears all day. If the AI stayed in range, didn't attack pets unless ordered to and pets couldn't bodyblock characters it would really make these 3 R/P builds less frustrating to play against. Regarding the heroes running out of shrine range, I wrote a more detailed view on the problem after the original update, you can read it on the AI bug report page here: [3]. Thanks for reading all this, I hope I'm not scaring you away from the wiki here :) --Draikin 00:03, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Interesting, thanks for providing these details. I didn't code the original hero AI, so hearing about how things work out ingame can shed a lot of light on things. Heroes kiting outside of shrine-cap range was definitely unintended, so I'd like to smooth that down when I have the time.

Regarding pets, I believe the AI considers pets to be a easy target like spirits or minions that it can put down quickly before moving to the pet's master, which frequently isn't the case with Heal As One in play. Scaling down the priority for attacking pets should be an easy fix, I'll add it to my to-do list. - Joe Kimmes 02:23, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I think this indent going too far right is too funny. Anyway, I hope Joe, that you are not planning on changing anything to the pets in relation to the Ranger profession. I play R/P, a Beastmaster with Heal As One in Alliance Battle. I do not think there is a need to change anything. The job of the R/P off course is to throw spears because that's what they come equip with, a spear and a shield, there are variation to this too, my Heal As One often uses a bow with Savage Shots and Disrupting Shot, However, if R/P are not throwing spear the whole time, something must be wrong. Now if someone want their Heros to not attack the Pet, use the Fix target on foe function in the Heros panel. Its what that function is for, setting priority for your heros to follow. Wanting to become a commander is what HB is all about, if you cannot control/command your heros not to run away from the shrine you intended for them to capture, or cannot control/command your heros to attack a certain target, then why be a commander at all? Also, if you know a R/P skill bar, it is very dependent on its Pet skills, not to mention getting black out everytime the pets is kill, the throwing of spears does not do a lot of damage at all, if the pets were to be tone down, the whole Beastmaster thing can very well be taken out of the game all together. If anything were to be change without any problem in the first place, then it would become unfair to the players who plays R/P with heal as one, the pet is their DMG dealers, if you tone that down, it will become unbalance, if a players can control their Heros to use the heros pet to cap a shrine, thats is their success at commanding their heros. how can it be tone down just because one players don't know how to use the Fix Target on foe command? Pumpkin pie 05:49, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the point of the request is that the R/P build, while great for the attacking team is terrible for the defending team and needs to be balanced out, and changing the way the AI prioritizes attacks vs pets would solve much of that inequity. -- Wyn 06:09, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

This tweak, if done, will be like helping the players who do not play R/P with Heal As One to have a Preset Priority Target Set Permanently for them every time they come against a R/P with Heal As One? While A Heal As One R/P will have all opponents they come against having a Preset Priority Target Set Permanently against them. You think that is Fair and balance? Not to mention a Ranger (range) has to sacrifice being up close (than normal) to their opponent with their low armors as R/P. PS: I think Heros AI, if not mistaken, is like the enemy AI in the way that they go for the one with the lowest Health first? Right Pumpkin pie

Of course not. At least with the heroes. Boro 07:24, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Pumkin Pie, you argue that you should just control your heroes, but have you considered how often you actually have to change target locks? And how much work this is while your opponent barely needs to micro R/P at all? Then your argument about how this tweak helps players that do not have heroes with pets? Of course, that's the whole point since people that use heroes with pets now have an unfair advantage: they force the opponent to change target lock on his/her hero while the player with a R/P doesn't have to target lock at all. Did I mention the situations where heroes are out of range and you can't even change target lock? The pets serves as a decoy that is instantly resurrected whenever it dies and without any death penalty. So yes this change would definitely make things more fair and balanced. I wasn't even talking about reducing the damage on pets so I don't know why you're complaining about that either.

Anyway thanks for considering a change for this Joe, I think AI changes like this are first reviewed by Izzy or someone else before they're actually implemented anyway right? I know you guys don't have a lot of time for changes like this so it's great to have them on someone's todo list (even if they never get resolved), the HB community already reported AI pet targeting problems like this two years ago but the reports never seemed to reach the developers. Over time I feel communication with Anet has improved considerably and the wiki definitely played a part in that. If it wasn't for most people working on GW 2 perhaps Hero Battles could have been repaired after all, but I understand that GW 2 has to be the priority for Anet now. Before I forget, I'd like to add that with heroes attacking spirits the situation is actually the other way around and heroes should prioritize them (arguably more often than they do now), so I'm not sure if it's possible to change the pet priority and leaving the rest alone? --Draikin 14:18, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Draikin, have you play R/P before? I play in Alliance Battle, I always micro manage my pet on one target while i attack another. I always have to target lock my pet, I am not good with HB, but I use 4 heros with pets before, not R/P, and I have to micro manage 7 other AI all at once, You think that's not doing target locking manually? How many players use R/P in HB to actually warrant a change? In the case of out of range heros: Do you expect your heros to be able to micro manage themselves? Heal as One also don't get to instantly ressurrect Pets, you are making like its the easiest thing to do. You think Ranger have energy pool like an ele? You think players don't interrupt when you try to use Heal As One? I will tell you now how to break a R/P with heal as one, i wont be using it in HB, you interrupt their Heal As One, once or twice and the whole build is gone. You only need them to not have their pets for a while and they are as good as gone, its not one of those build where you cannot break, its in fact so easy that if you change the AI, like I say before, it is as good as throwing away the whole Beastmaster category for the Ranger Profession Pumpkin pie 17:13, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Pumpkin, can you explain exactly how this change would have a negative impact for you? Because just I don't understand what exactly you have a problem with. I mean sure it would mean R/P builds in HB would get a "nerf", in the sense that they wouldn't automatically get an advantage just because they're using pets. Why would anyone that's not abusing this tactic in Hero Battles have a problem with that? --Draikin 19:23, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Draikin, because its not an abuse. If you play R/P you know, its not an over-powered build, that is all. But, hey, if Joe wants to nerf it, I can't stop him. I am merely presenting my point of view as someone who likes their R/P the way they are, because you make it sound like R/P just magically will win all game in all situations, and that is not the case. Pumpkin pie 13:42, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

The case: Heroes should have enough brain to target human opponents first. Boro 19:24, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

Pumpkin Pie, I'm confused about what you're worried about here. You mention your build for Alliance Battles a lot, but no one is proposing changing the pet AI, just changing the target priorities for Hero AI so that they aren't always attacking enemy pets over enemy heroes. This seems like a pretty benign change to me - it's currently possible to achieve this by target locking your heroes, so against any decent opponent, R/P builds in HB already have to deal with this. - Joe Kimmes 18:53, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Joe, would it be helpful if you had videos that show the AI issues? Here are two examples I uploaded to Youtube: Heroes and AoE and Heroes abandoning shrines (HD versions: [4] and [5]). --Draikin 21:19, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

The usefulness of videos varies; generally I would only need one if I didn't understand from a text description what the problem was, although QA might find them more useful. The best thing from my perspective is reproduction steps, ie 'flag the hero at exactly aggro distance from a target dummy, call it as a target and this problem always happens'. It's much easier to figure out where the problem lies when I can make the problem happen on my local machine, since I can immediately determine if a given change will fix the issue. This is trickier for multiple-player bugs (shrine capping), but still useful.

Somewhat contrary to what I just said, the Heroes and AoE video is interesting. Is the problem here always heroes getting caught on terrain while trying to avoid AoE? This might be fixable by using a more complex pathing check, but as I said in a different comment thread, pathing checks are expensive on the server. Ideally I'd get rid of the capture point's pillars, but then it's an artist time thing. -_-;; - Joe Kimmes 22:29, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Getting rid of the pillars always did seem like the easiest solution to me, especially on the NPC shrine on The Crossing and the Beachhead where there's just not enough space to avoid AoE attacks or avoid pets from blocking you. If there weren't any obstacles on the shrine it would make things much more manageable. The other issue with AoE attacks that I see is that heroes seem to prioritize getting out of it, even if that means not using skills to heal them. The ritualist in the video didn't use any of his healing skills but simply continued to bump into things and died. --Draikin 01:00, 3 March 2009 (UTC)

In answering Mr Kimmes, I am not worry that it would ruin my build at all. I am saying I play R/P and I know this build is not over-powered, it actually need a boost, most of the Beast Mastery skills for pets are crappy. What we have here is the failure to communicate :P~ joking, that song got stuck in my mind that every time I say what we have here.. bla bla.. Anyway, what we have here is Draikin thinking that this R/P build ruin Hero Battle Arena for him because heros are not programm to target players character first. I don't see how thats where the problem lies. If you change the heros AI to priority target the players character before the pet, in a Bodyblocking situation discuss above, what would happen? My guess: Draikin coming here complaining that the heros won't kill the pet when they are bodyblocked by pets to get to the R/P who is standing just a few feet away, because now the target has changed, they now want to kill the player character first, hence heros, if my PvE play can apply here, when they get bodyblocked, they won't do a thing but stand there like idiot*. Now you have heros standing like idiots when they get bodyblocked by pets in HB. Like I say before, in Hero Battle you are competing against another opponent on how well you can control your hero, right? Or at least that's part of what a players in Hero Battle need to know to do well and swiftly and be alert on whats happening to each of their heros and react to the situation. While you have a function to Fix Target and flag your heros to places you need them to be, these functions are ignored and players choose to complain that the AI is broken. My experience of playing on The Crossing Maps or the Beachhead is, even when you don't have pets on either side of the team, the heros will run outside of their designated flags area to run away from getting hit. Especially on the Beachhead, when you flag your heros to cap shrine thats out of view, once out of your view (you can't see your heros's dot on the map anymore) if a players character goes against these heros to cap the shrine, the hero will always run away from the shrine if your player character ignore getting hit and runs to stand at the center of the shrine instead of trying to kill the heros from outside the shrine, with or without a pet. Because I always flag my Heros in the middle shrine on Beachhead and capture the other 3 shrine on my player characters, hence I know this. and i stress with or without pets. The problem here is non-pet related at all. See what i mean? Sorry if my explanation is crappy, English not my first tongue. *In a PvE situation when a hero gets bodyblocked, they will simply do nothing if they can't get to the called target, I haven't time how long before they would start to hit the foe that is bodyblocking them, but i suspect its alway after I the original target has been eliminated. What causes this situation, you have say 5 foes, 4 of which are malee and archers, and one healers, enemy healers AI, they always come behind the melee, right, if you target healers, and if you are at a corner, then bodyblocking happens, the melee heros/hench will 99% gets stuck until you get rid of the healers or you quickly \ (back slash-closest for target) for your melee hero, before switching back to the healers enemy. I don't have a problem with this because I can use it to my advantage depending on the situation, I usually use this tactic when I am playing my ele to get enemy to clutter up in a corner to AoE them. Sometime I switch to the bodyblocking enemy, fix target for the necessary party and then switch back to taking care of the healers. And its all fine. Anyway hope that answer your question. Last question, aren't body blocking part of a Tactic use in PvP to your advantage? If so, how can you change this? Any player can use it to their advantage, its not R/P exclusive you know, I get body block by monk before, To Boro, AI don't have brian, players need to have one to order their AI effectively. PS: (edited) How about making the pets floating window not close on themself? ey ;)Pumpkin pie 03:47, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

One thing I greatly agree with here is that Beastmastery in general could use some help. I think the recent change to Strike As One was a move towards shaking things up and making Beastmastery more attractive for rangers, and I'd like to see more skills that make having a pet worthwhile.

That said, I want the AI to do the smart thing at least part of the time. The problem right now is that they _always_ attack the pet. Like you said, heroes always attacking a player isn't much better, because sometimes you want to kill the pet to stop their pet skills. In fact, before Heal As One was buffed to include a pet rez effect, killing the pet was the way to go versus Heal As One Beastmasters, if I recall. So ideally, I want the AI to recognize which target needs to be prioritized and go from there.

Remember, it used to be that rangers couldn't control their pets at all before the pet control UI was added. There were people who opposed adding the pet controls, because at the time, pets were basically balanced around not being able to control them. I don't like this sort of artificial balance though - Beastmastery should be a strong option for Rangers not because their pets can't be controlled and thus need to be stronger, or because their pets cause enemy AI to get confused and make poor targeting choices, but because they have useful, strong skills to make their pet pull its weight in combat. I don't want to nerf any classes by changing the AI; what I want is for classes to not be balanced based on the AI acting stupid. - Joe Kimmes 19:23, 4 March 2009 (UTC)

Now that you put it like that, Mr Kimmes, I don't think I need to worry at all, I think this AI is in good hand. Thanks for being patient and listen/read and explain things to me, much appreciated. Pumpkin Pie. (had to sign manually the thing is not working.)

Heket‎ and Strike as One

the Heket in the nightfall areas use it, (as you probably already know) and the pets don't know how to react after its been done to them. they just run away after the shadow step. so i don't know if this is a bug or what. but its funny regardless....75.172.46.207 11:14, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, the skill updates tend to play havoc with monster builds, unfortunately (see: assassins in Factions who lost their combo chain). I'll see if this is fixable, the change to Strike as One doesn't play well with a lot of the pet AI, so it's not surprising that monsters have trouble with it too. =\ - Joe Kimmes 18:55, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I think a group of people were compiling a nice list of monster builds that had been update-nerfed beyond use. Is this one on that list? If nothing else, it might be nice to keep everything in one place, even if you are the guy who fixes this stuff. Ashes Of Doom 01:27, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I can fix specific skills that are broken, but if the bar is broken (such as a dagger chain no longer working), that's something you should pass to Linsey. Basically, I can handle AI issues, but if the fix is to change out what skills are actually on the bar, that's the design department. - Joe Kimmes 01:31, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Chomp (monster skill)

What exactly dose the game define as a "lesser foe" is that anything that isnt a dino like the creature that uses it? is it a minion or a spirit? 75.172.46.207 11:28, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, I'm not sure I want to spoil the spirit of research here. There are specific rules for what Chomp can destroy, but I'll leave it as an exercise to the player to figure them out if they're really interested. - Joe Kimmes 18:58, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

I'd say minions. 000.00.00.00 07:20, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

HoM Request

Hi, Linsey suggested I bring this to you. When you add an item to a shrine in the HoM, such as a minipet, the camera pans nicely across the displayed minipets in a way that's just about impossible to do by adjusting camera angle manually. This animation nicely shows everything that's displayed on the shrine. This camera pan is only available when you add an item (again, thinking specifically of when you add a minipet). Would it be possible to have this added as an option when you "examine" any of the shrines? 24.188.207.20 21:00, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

It's possible - the camera pan is basically a mini-cinema that's timed to coordinate with the statue being added (you can skip the cinema to see the statue adding itself from a normal camera view). Is replaying the camera pan really that desirable a feature though? I'm not saying it's not worth adding, I'm just curious why you'd want to replay it. - Joe Kimmes 21:05, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

As a large part of the HoM is just a nice way to feel good about yourself (ego-booster ftw), it would be nice to have access to the cinematic so you can actually get a good look at your achievements - the camera is not really that easy to play with to get a nice angle, especially for screenshots and the like. This is mainly significant for the minipet statues, as they are so small and there are multiple rows, but potentially also for the weapons monument. Ashes Of Doom 01:07, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Fair enough; I'll see about getting a button to see the cinematic view of the monument added. - Joe Kimmes 01:15, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks Joe. It's nice to get a response from you guys that is pretty direct - beyond the "I'll ask someone who will ask someone who will ask someone" we got before we could directly bug a programmer =P. As a programmer myself, I understand that "I'll see" doesn't mean it will be possible, but I also know that as a programmer, you know more about this than anyone else we could ask, so I will trust your judgment. And from what I've seen of your uber-fast response to the death nova bug, I know you won't make us wait too long. Oh wait, the HoM update is next month anyway, so I guess you would try to throw it in then. Either way, thanks! Ashes Of Doom 01:24, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Seconded, Ashes pretty much stole the words out of my mouth, with the exception of me being a programmer, I'm still an intern, as I'm still in high school XD. Thanks for being available and answering our questions and such Joe. Also, the camera view would be nice if added, but not a big deal if it doesn't make it, besides being a tad bummed for a short bit. — Jon Lupen 02:04, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm still in High School too, but I do consider myself a programmer (I'm pretty fluent in C, C++, java, python, and a few others, so I'd say I'm a programmer, if not a professional one). I am currently taking a couple of classes in AI, so it's nice to see some real world applications - I was really interested to see Joe's discussion of skill bar AI mechanics a few sections back. It seems so obvious now that that would be a great way to do it, but I can't say I would have thought of doing it that way myself. Ashes Of Doom 15:52, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

My High School only has a two year java course open to students :P AI is an interesting thing, as it's often about HOW the AI does something and what direction you approach it from, and occassionaly not so much about what exactly said AI is doing. AI seems to fit the state of mind required for programming, as it's often a matter of what solution you chose, and not so much about whether or not you have one. — Jon Lupen 17:56, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, Joe! The mini camera pan is just a really nice way of seeing accomplishments from an outherwise unattianable angle. Especially when viewing someone else's HoM (or having others view mine), it's a cool way to view the shrines as the owner chose to display them. I really appreciate you looking into it and for the positive response this request has received from other Wiki users. 24.188.207.20 01:30, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

(reset indent) This is kinda-sorta related in that it's a request for the HoM... I know that it's probably much easier programming-wise to have the statues that one adds to the HoM cycle dependent upon what order they were entered in, but is it at all feasible to make a way to customise which items/statues display at once? Maybe make it like with heroes and have a drop-down box that lists all availible and then positions them depending on the order you select them in (kinda like how a hero can be hero 1, 2, or 3 simply depending on which was selected first)? Just a thought... I know that I, personally, have a core list of which heroes I would LOOOVE to have up there, but silly Koss keeps getting in the way along with Vekk and Animal Companion xD The same could be said of which titles I would like to display. I'm sure that there are others on hare who feel the same (at least, I hope there are xD), and so I implore you to see if this is at all possible. I completely understand if it doesn't work out - not everything is possible, after all, and sometimes we need to accept that. I'm totally just wondering if it even sounds like something that could work in the first place... <.<;; -- Timeoffire45 03:14, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

This is actually something that's been looked into for the upcoming HoM update, so rest assured that it's at least being considered. - Joe Kimmes 17:46, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Sweet! And I heard somewhere (<.<;; maybe here? I can't remember) that said HoM update would be part of the April Content Update (as opposed to the update that changes tonics, grants tourney reward points, etc), and I was wondering if this is true? Or can you not talk about it? ;-) Just wondering! -- Timeoffire45 02:18, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

That is from Arena Net, although memory escapes me on whether it was Kinsey or Regina that told us. — Jon Lupen 02:24, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I try to err on the side of not talking about things if I'm not certain if we've announced them. =) - Joe Kimmes 02:26, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

My memory could be mixing stuff though, I'll see if I can find the source, if not, don't quote me on that XD — Jon Lupen 02:28, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

That was a brain blender on my part, I'm sorry. I seem to have mixed together Linsey talking about the April update and work (Joe's work to be specific) on the account wide Hall of Monuments update :P I promise never again to fabricate facts out of statements said by others that do not make the facts themselves. — Jon Lupen 03:31, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks!

Hey Joe, I noticed you got a chance to tweak the hero AI for MM necromancers a little in the latest update. I haven't gotten a chance to test it yet, but I wanted to thank you for getting on that so quickly. It's nice to see a discussion on this page go from hopes and dreams to reality in such a short period of time, and I think we all really appreciate that you took the time to look into our request and fix it. And, of course, if anyone else was involved in the fix please pass on our thanks and appreciation to them as well. Cheers, (Satanael 19:45, 6 March 2009 (UTC))

As Linsey said, he is quite the ninja of a programmer :) Cheers. — Jon Lupen 20:03, 6 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem! I only got the chance to change Death Nova, but hopefully that'll help things a little. Generally when a problem can be boiled down to a single guilty skill or two, it's easy for me to make tweaks; the harder tasks are things like general combat behavior, aggro distance and such. I'll pass your thanks along to QA - even when it's an easy fix for me, they need to spend time testing every change to make sure nothing breaks. =) - Joe Kimmes 00:26, 7 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm happy to say that the update has made hero MMs much more effective at keeping up with the rest of the party. King Neoterikos 01:53, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

I have noticed that, despite the improvements, there is still a problem with the minions' aggroing. My Master of Whispers will happily stand there wanding the enemy, surrounded by his minions which are doing nothing. This seems like something more than an issue with the skills he is using, and more something to do with the minion AI mechanics. Ashes Of Doom 20:15, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes thank you! it has made some of my frustration at pve dissipate. i have heard of that ashes of doom, but never notice when it happens mainly because i dont care because the foes will start attacking them instead of me which i am grateful for.75.165.102.233 04:01, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I didn't expect that the aggro issue would be fixed; unfortunately that's a larger task, but it is one that hopefully will be fixed sooner rather than later. I'm glad to hear that the Death Nova change is working well! - Joe Kimmes 19:48, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

No problem Joe, the DN fix was the most important thing - I can live with the minions like that, I just need to be careful with my aggroing. Ashes Of Doom 21:15, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Character Section Screen

Linsey directed us your way for this topic. Any insight you can provide would be much appreciated. — Jon Lupen 01:02, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

Is it possible to make a button to switch back and forth the character selection screens (like the nightfall one, the original prophecies one...). If yes then I would really like it. EoTN gets me bored. Boro 08:23, 8 March 2009 (UTC)

agreed with boro, and i think its the Actual background that people want to revisit not the way in which characters are selected.75.165.102.233 03:54, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

The selection screen background request has been made many, many times, dating way back to shortly after nightfall if I am not mistaken. As I recall, Gaile looked into and was told it was not really possible, because it was bad juju or some such graphical insanity. Also, if any of you remember, the prophecies background only had room for 4 characters anyway, so that one would have to be totally redone. Too bad, I miss the factions background screen, with the crazy whale thing. (Satanael 17:23, 9 March 2009 (UTC))

As Satanael says, previous responses to this have all been that it's not possible. I haven't looked into it myself though, so I'll look into this and see if there's anything that can be done. I assume that it's the Prophecies screen that's the real sticking point, for the reasons mentioned. - Joe Kimmes 19:51, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I believe this is more of an inquarry into a few additional sorting options and features than the backgrounds. — Jon Lupen 21:17, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Apologies, I got sidetracked by the background question. It's presumably possible to add sorting options, but the character select screen notoriously doesn't know much about the characters you're selecting. It could probably sort by class; are there any other sort options aside from a manual sort that you'd want? - Joe Kimmes 22:20, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

(ec) yes John lupen it is.75.165.102.233 22:03, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

yes Age and Sex would be fantastic. tall to short would be nice but not needed. a manual sort would be the best but i bet i could start a tread on guru to have people brain storm ways they want there toons sorted75.165.102.233 22:38, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

It's all good Joe. I'm not sure as to which options people would like to see added for sort outside of manual, but I'll let them brain-storm :) — Jon Lupen 00:05, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

here is the tread i talked of so a few more ideas but you get the picture right? http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10360867 75.165.102.233 10:24, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

i know this is a different topic but it applies to the charictor selection screen, here is the thread:http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/showthread.php?t=10362160 . and has there been any up date on the other things that have been discussed?75.165.102.6 01:51, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I would add my voice to those wanting to both change the background (even if NF, Factions, and EotN are the only choices) and having some options for sorting characters; manual would be my first choice. Ghosst • Talk • 04:25, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

In regards to these suggestions, what about bringing back previous opening theme songs? Factions was my personal favorite. Mervil 02:33, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Kind of a roundabout way but you can edit GuildWars.ds yourself to change the opening song order. — Poki#3 08:59, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Archiving

Hi Joe! Your talk page was starting to get a bit big, so I archived the January and February topics for you. If you wish to organize your archives in any specific way, or need any assistance, please feel free to ask. -- Wyn 18:58, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks! - Joe Kimmes 19:52, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

On a side note, a snazzy looking signature (while not required) is always a plus :) — Jon Lupen 00:09, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Infuse Health

I have a tiny request to make on your busy schedule. Hero AI refuses to use Infuse Health, which can be (on the right bar) a very nice skill to have. Could you fix it? :) Also, Rampage as One, even with 16 expertise and a full energy bar they seem very hesitant to use it. I'm sure there are many others, maybe other users can chime in to fill you with a neverending list of defective Hero AI bugs (evil laugh). 189.33.73.155 19:01, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I took a quick look at the Infuse Health AI - it looks like the AI is set to use it only on allies below 25% health, which is a bit much. What's the optimal use for this, assuming you have an appropriate bar to support it? Obviously you want to make sure your own health is fairly high, but assuming that's fine, do you Infuse any hurt (90% health or less) ally?

Rampage As One seems to be being used purely as a run buff, so that's something that needs fixing. There's a talk page for AI issues here that I try to keep an eye on, if you want to put these issues up there. - Joe Kimmes 19:59, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Small note on Infuse Health, I often use it/see it used when people are hovering around 50% or less. — Jon Lupen 21:19, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

I think 75% or less is a good limit for using infuse, so they don't massively overheal on small damage, but use it frequently. Sidenote: The bar i'm thinkin of for using Infuse is an elementalist with ether renewal and enchants such as the newly boosted aura of restoration - it would make for a very effective healer as it is able to recoup the life and energy spent on Infuse rather quickly. Ty for your time, if I think of anything else i'll post it on the skill AI link. 189.33.73.155 21:26, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Infuse Health often sees play along side Healer's Boon on a high health monk for heals at 600-800+ for out-healing a spike and/or completely recooping someone pretty low. If someone is 60-75%+, I'll throw other heals at them over loosing half my health for vastly over doing it. Even without Healer's Boon, it's still only used on those of pretty low health, once again those of 50%-ish or lower. — Jon Lupen 21:31, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Whatever AI you have in place for Zaishen Healers to catch spikes with prot spirit, use that for infuse health. I've seen them catch some damn clean rspikes with a split-second pre prot. It's that kind of reaction time with ally-targeting and seeing the spike coming that will make infuse viable for heroes, not just a health percentage trigger (although for infuse on monk heroes, you should make it trigger about 20-25%, no higher or you're wasting hero energy and health). -Auron 21:40, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Auron, the AI is the same for all heroes, regardless of class, its been said before. The trigger must be high enough for them to use it properly on a bar designed to handle it. If you just take a random HB bar from pvxwiki and slap infuse on it, it will be badly used at any trigger. 25% is TOO LOW to catch a HM monster spike. I'd really prefer 75% so it can be abused, but i'd settle for 50% as a middle of the road. 189.33.73.155 21:51, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

The suggestion to give it Prot-Spirit style pre-proting AI is a good one though; I think that there can be a pretty good compromise here if the AI considers 25-50% or so to be a good health range to use Infuse, but factors in the battlefield situation (ie, is someone going to hit 50% by the time I finish casting this). - Joe Kimmes 22:05, 9 March 2009 (UTC)

Anon, the vast majority of people run infuse on monks. Making monks lose half their health to heal a target at 49% hp is silly. Your ether renewal bitch ele is a flimsy gimmick, and the AI triggers should not be based on how that specific bar will use it, since that specific bar has zero chance of running out of energy and very little chance of dying. Monks don't have that convenience, and after all, it is a monk skill that is primarily run on monks. Energy conservation must be a concern. -Auron 00:44, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

make hero AI better

replace players in pvp

????

profit --Cursed Angel 00:53, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Auron, I know you from a long time, so I know how ptless it is to argue with you. You and Skuld. Ugh. Bad memories. I'm off to do someth productive with my life :) Play nice on Joe's talk page though please. "ether renewal bitch ele" and "flimsy gimmick" is uncalled for, he's a professional with a big work load who takes the time to talk to players on the wiki. Being aggressive doesn't disqualify other ppl's arguments. Peace! 201.6.64.49 01:36, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Erm, bitch ele is a term for a char who is full utility. Bitch rits have pot/life/convert hexes, bitch eles have blinds/heals/draws (and in HA, make haste). It's just the accepted name for the role, there is nothing aggressive about it. Flimsy gimmick is similar - I've played around extensively with ether renewal. Between maintaining it, maintaining all the other enchantments required to keep it effective, and moving to keep up with the party, you barely have enough time to spend spamming infuse (and honestly, there are much better ways to powerheal anyway). In the end, I realized that flimsy gimmick is a very good description of ether renewal eles - they're very powerful in their own right, but as soon as enchant removal (or QZ, or an interrupt/KD) hits them, they fold completely.

If you have experience arguing with me in the past, you should know to target my argument instead of my character, since thinly veiled personal attacks and slander doesn't phase me in the least. You haven't really justified why making infuse trigger at 50-75% hp is worth it - since, as I pointed out, you're only using it on a single, incredibly specific niche bar instead of, y'know, on a monk, which is how the vast majority of players are going to be using it - so you're trying to ignore (or draw attention away from) the considerable downsides of making hero AI spam infuse too early and too often. -Auron 03:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I would say that 50% is a good compromise for heroes. If it's possible for them to anticipate how fast an ally would drop and cast it as they think it'll hit 50% it would be nice, but even a simple nudge to use it when the ally is below 50% would be good. Below 50% characters can make use of heals ranging between 250 - 350 (assuming health of 500 - 700 in general), so that would at least make it an ideal point to use the skill.

- Kherec 09:27, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Since people mentioned Protective Spirit, there's a reason it (and Spirit Bond) don't see any play in Hero Battles. The AI seems to use it the way they use Weapon of Shadow/Warding, but with the lower recharge they drain their energy way too fast which makes the skills unusable in PvP. That's something to keep in mind when setting a limit for Infuse Health, I personally wouldn't make them use it on allies who have more than 25% health. If I have to choose between heroes not catching every spike or my heroes being out of energy before the enemy even started a spike, then I'll go for the first option. That said, it would be nice to see the AI increase priority on protection skills when an ally is knocked down because currently that doesn't seem to be a factor for them. --Draikin 18:26, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Joe, ignore all of these ideas about improving infuse health. Way back when heroes first came out, infuse health behaved exactly as they are describing. The result: every HA team dropped their infuse monk for the r15+ heroes that saved 95% of the spikes. The AI was purposefully nerfed in the past. Overnerfed? Yes, just like every nerf ANet does. Does it need a buff? Absolutely not, let players carry other skills or manually cast if they want more efficiency. 68.219.159.156 03:02, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

Interesting; the AI for Infuse Health doesn't seem to have been changed since the release of Nightfall, perhaps changes were made to the base hero AI to handicap it. At any rate, you make a good point, and I'll take it into consideration. Since you speculate that the AI was overnerfed, though, wouldn't a minor buff that makes heroes actually use the skill more than once in a blue moon be acceptable? - Joe Kimmes 17:38, 12 March 2009 (UTC)

No action was ever taken (that I'm aware of) to nerf hero AI in PvP except for a Death Nova nerf (August 03, 2007). Hero monks never catched 95% of the spikes and they never will unless the delay between skill activations is reduced. With the current delay they can't be as consistent as a real player in catching spikes, and that's without considering that real players can watch the battlefield and predict incoming spikes before they happen. Since the AI was never changed, the only reason you're not seeing hero monks with Infuse in HA is quite simply because they're not good enough at using it. For the reasons I noted earlier just making them use it more often doesn't seem like it would be an improvement. They would actually have to calculate the amount of incoming damage on an ally and use Infuse when that amount exceeds a certain limit for them to use it correctly. --Draikin 00:28, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Well Draikin certainly seems to have a different memory of it from what I played against and with on numerous occasions. Maybe the code wasn't changed for that particular skill, but something certainly happened a few weeks after release that made heroes never want to touch infuse health (25% is already dead in the vast majority of cases). Trigger happy before, gun shy after. 68.219.159.156 03:26, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

If the time delay between hero skill activations was increased (perhaps the server couldn't keep up?) that could explain why they suddenly got worse at using Infuse even though the AI for the skill remained the same. Personally I didn't notice any change in hero reaction time back then. --Draikin 17:19, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Now that I can agree with. :-) 68.219.159.156 18:40, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

This seems consistent with my vague recollection - I wasn't in charge of the AI at the time, but I know there were changes made to decrease hero effectiveness at interrupts. At any rate, the AI for Infuse Health itself wasn't changed, so I think that it should be safe to cautiously improve it a little. - Joe Kimmes 18:52, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Speed at which heroes use their skills

I'm wondering if this is a problem more notably for assassins, or if it's a generic problem that I just see more clearly for my hero assassins ... but they are very slow utilizing combos. What I mean is that they seem to wait half a second or even a full second before continuing a chain (lead, dual attack, off-hand etc) despite all skills being recharged. Could you take a look at that? Most notably are setups with Moebius Strike, if that helps. - Kherec 09:32, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Generally this is unavoidable - the AI is set up to think about doing a skill every certain amount of time (I believe the time step is around 1 second), so there are times when it has a gap between skill executions. I'll take a look at it though, I would love to get Assassin heroes in particular working better, since right now Zenmai and Anton are basically permanent benchwarmers on my team. - Joe Kimmes 17:36, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

This is basically what is holding back melee heroes in HB. Things like "Coward!" assassin heroes and Warrior's Endurance heroes would be scary if it wasn't for the delay in their combo. --18:38, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

This brings up a good point, which is that if this delay was removed/mitigated, heroes could quickly start to outperform real players (they already do in some areas, which is bad enough). They already have a serious advantage by being effectively 0 ping, so changes like this have to be approached with a great deal of caution. - Joe Kimmes 18:42, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

I think the problem is that the delay isn't really a good "limit" on the hero AI since it different from the limit that a normal player has (ping + reaction time). The AI can react instantly at times and manage to interrupt an Infuse (although not nearly as often as people claim they do, last time I checked they only manage to interrupt 1/4 casts about 4% of the time), and the other time they're a whole lot slower than real players. The other issue is battlefield awareness, players don't have the ability to monitor 8 players at the same time and know which hexes are on them, heroes however are capable of that. Ideally the delay wouldn't exist but heroes would have an actual reaction time like real players do. --Draikin 19:21, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, cutting the whole second in half, to half a second wouldn't make them too overpowered (a human would still perform chains a couple of seconds faster than heroes). Oh, and I know many shun the poor assassins, but I use them a lot, so do a few others :)

- Kherec 20:20, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

To be fair my main character is an Assassin, so the bar for adding a second one to the group is pretty high ;). I agree that ideally the AI should try to factor in a human-like reaction time; unfortunately I'm not sure how feasible it is without recoding the AI from the ground up. I'll definitely be keeping this in mind next time I have the chance to make changes to the base AI; hopefully skill execution time can be improved without becoming overpowered. - Joe Kimmes 20:47, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

New way to go "away" in Friends List

Hi Joe! Don't know if this is the right position to propose a new "feature" (if not plz move this topic, thx): At present the only way to switch to "away" is to press "F" and click on "Away" in the pulldown menu. My idea: /afk starts sitting animation + switches to "Away". When the character moves again (or player uses /stand) the status automatically changes to "Online". Possibly a client change only, I think. Many players would appreciate this new chat command, I guess. Is this change implementable in the April or July update? BigBluetalk 19:14, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Sounds like a cool idea; I can't make any promises until after the April build (Linsey and QA have enough work on their plates already!) but I'll keep this in mind. - Joe Kimmes 20:50, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. :) BigBluetalk 21:04, 10 March 2009 (UTC)

thanks emote

I don't want to bother you with heaps of requests, but I'd like to suggest this anyway. There is one emote that I have always missed in GW and that is the /thanks (or /ty) emote. I recently thought of something though. Would it be possible to simply make the character bow when you write /thanks, but with a different text (something like: Character says: thank you)? Sorry if I am wasting your time here. 145.94.74.23 13:26, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

That's a neat idea; I'll pass it along. I've always felt like there are some missing emotes in GW; there are some barriers to adding more actual emotes (mainly art based) but repurposing some of the existing emotes to cover more bases could be cool. - Joe Kimmes 17:09, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I really missed that emote. On a side note, you think you could add aliases "/grats" and "/gz" to the "/congrats" emote? I don't know about the others, but my guild and alliance tends to congratulate every time a gold item, lockpick or rare item drops by typing "gz"... — Poki#3 19:12, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

The "gz" trend extends far beyond your guild, to a vast majority of the parties I've been in. — Jon Lupen 19:20, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Agreed. Even a simple text-only style change (I seriously doubt you could steal the animation folks from GW2 for something as trivial as this) would be awesome. Simple improvements like that are things we take for granted when we have them, but are a nice surprise when they pop up in a new update. I wouldn't want you to spend too much time on this though Joe, you do have more important things to work on. Like that update Regina swears isn't just you guys messing with us. =P Ashes Of Doom 22:07, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm still waiting for a /cry emote, theres so many times that emote can be applied, and comon; I know you want it to. "Bladed Aatxe drops a glob of ectoplasm for Super Shadowform Sin." x 6 consec..., everyone /cry's xD.--72.230.63.96 21:12, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

it would be cool if you could togle a /talk on and talk off emote where it would make your mouth move and make you do hand gestures like in a lot of the cutseens. also a /killself emote were every class has a different way of killing them selfs would be epic you could also replace kill self with knock out if you guys are too worried abut the stupid t rating. Also a /Time Emote that would make your toon look at its wrist and it would tell you the servers time, your personal time and the next time until a halls win. 75.165.105.191 23:00, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for passing it along. If I think of any other ways to re-use existing animations with new emotions, I'll be sure to let you know. 145.94.74.23 08:56, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

On a side note, @72, you could use the /moan emote for that. It's not 100% the same thing, but I suppose it's fitting for the situation. 145.94.74.23 08:57, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I always thought of the "/pout" emote as being closer to a /cry emote... but I agree: /cry is an emote that I actually reeeally wish existed, and I even find myself sometimes typing it by accident. What's more, You know how in the "/doh" emote, it says "<player name> smacked <appropriate posessive pronoun> head. Doh!"? What if cry was an emote "reskinned" and it instead said "<Player Name> cries softly in a corner. QQ" or something of the like xD just an idea, as I know the "Q.Q / QQ" face has become a common, quick, dirty way to represent crying...-- Timeoffire45 02:13, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Squad formation

Reading the first topic on this page about heroes not standing the flag due to some reasons, got me to thinking that there really should be a couple more buttons on the hero flag bar. And basically these two buttons just indicate what formation you want the h/h to be in. Standard formation (ie as it is currently), and Expanded formation. With the expanded formation the h/h keep a larger distance between themselves and the player (like 1/4 or 1/3rd aggro radius). The main idea is that the entire party should never be inside the zone of an AoE spell (like Sandstorm), so by being in the expanded formation hopefully less of the hench's will be caught in an AoE area, leading to slightly better team survivability. Likewise there will be times when you want the team together (shouts, or the Burning spirits in Sorrow's Furnace), so then you would use the Close (or standard) formation. 81.108.21.92 22:49, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Alternatively/in addition, a "Scatter" button to force the H/H to move away from each other temporarily would help a lot with AoE effects. Also, a way to override the basic "scatter from AoE after x damage/seconds/whatever" AI would be useful when the party ought to be staying in one spot - for example, when using wards and wells. Vili 01:52, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

I know there was some experimental formation work done (see the awesome Charr formations in Eye of the North!), so this may be feasible. Probably a longer-term project though unfortunately; AI changes can be one of the touchiest things to make since even if it's simple for me (often not the case), QA needs to check everything out and then we need to consider if it will change the balance of PvP and/or PvE. - Joe Kimmes 22:16, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Moon in Drok

Just a question - is the moon in the sky at Drok, the patterns on it, were they modelled after Earths moon? Pkohler01 00:27, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

I can't help you there; that's probably a question for an artist, not to mention that I was hired after Prophecies and Factions had shipped. =) - Joe Kimmes 00:34, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Different AI for PvP skills?

I was wondering if it's actually possible for heroes to differentiate between PvE/PvP versions of skills? Heroes currently use both version of Weapon of Warding in the same way (meaning they cast it on attacking allies even in PvP), which means the PvP version is no longer usable at the moment unless you disable it altogether. --Draikin 01:31, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Yes this should be done if it isnt already. and is the reason why the tease bot's skills dont need to be nerffed but the ai is what needs the nerf.75.165.105.191 22:41, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Weapon of Warding is supposed to have different AI for the two versions, apparently it isn't working. - Joe Kimmes 22:43, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

well the nerf to weapon of warding wasnt needed. what need to change is the fact that heroes can pre prot like no tomorrow.75.165.102.6 02:05, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

It was nerfed because of its usage in GvG, not because of heroway in HA. --Draikin 02:26, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

/sigh i know that.... but it still wasnt needed people just need to learn to bring skills that cant be blocked.75.165.102.6 03:13, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Just because something has a counter doesn't make it balanced mr. IP, especially when skills that can't be blocked are few and far between and most of them aren't very good for a reason (they go through prots but don't require as much skill as using prots does). People did use Magehunter's etc, but WoW before its nerf was basically close to the power level of an Elite skill. It was an unremovable longer lasting Guardian with a Mending, and the higher energy cost was negligible. Sucks we'll probably have to wait til April build for the WoW (PvP) AI fix, but hopefully it'll be out sooner rather than later. DarkNecrid 10:45, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Aggro

It's been theorized that character's with lower AL get targeted more by the AI, which makes SY! an even greater skill because the user will always have the lowest AL, is this correct? We still don't know how aggro in Guild Wars works per se outside of "AGGRO BUBBLE = AGGRO". I'm assuming it doesn't work like many MMORPG's out there with a threat system per point of healing/damage. Would you be able to shed any light on this? DarkNecrid 10:45, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

I actually don't know the inner workings of the aggro system, but I think you're right about Save Yourself having that intended side effect, so AL may indeed play a role. My guess would be that there's a lot of factors though, like class/weapon/HP, in addition to AL. It might be interesting to try to do some controlled tests - I bet you could easily get otherwise identical characters and try aggroing the Isle of the Nameless masters and see who they go after. - Joe Kimmes 22:12, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Could idea, I'll try to devise several tests and see if I can figure this out. Hopefully if I can, I can get back to you :) DarkNecrid 20:30, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Template interface question

→ moved from User_talk:Linsey_Murdock

Hi Linsey. Kind of a nitpick, but it's gotten on my nerves a bit: when you're out in the field, and say a guild or alliance mate is requesting a template, you can't "load" a template, obtain its Template Code, and send it to chat. (You'll have to tab out of GW and do some copypasta action on the template .txt itself.) Is it possible to put a Template Code button in the Manage Templates panel? This allows you to browse and transmit templates while not in town. Currently, while in the field or PvP, the only template you can quickly send to chat is your current skillbar. ~Seef II <◈|۞> 10:02, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Ah, a very convenient option indeed. --Arduinna 11:02, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Joe, Linsey directed this question your way. — Jon Lupen 21:57, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Seems like a reasonable request; I'll look into this.

Unfortunately I really can't promise much right now because things are getting busy with the April build, but I'll try to keep this in mind. - Joe Kimmes 22:07, 20 March 2009 (UTC)

Joe, one seemingly simple fix for this would be to enable the selection of the Load From Template dialog in explorable areas, and disable the actual Load button in the dialog when it's open. Once the dialog is open and a template is selected (even one not for your current profession), there's already a Template Code button. No extra buttons or artwork required. Alara 12:36, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Bonus Items

Hi Joe, I know you're busy with the April update so this is just something to stick in the back of your brain for a rainy day. I currently generate about 15-20 bonus items every time I type /bonus, and it is more than a little bit of a pain to delete them all once I have grabbed the one I want, especially if I want one of them more than once (like if I'm giving it to multiple heroes, for example). So, I'm wondering if there could be a better way to delete the bonus items out of one's inventory. I realize this could be one of those requests that seems simple but then the solution gets really complicated, in particular because any simple /deletebonus type command would have to ignore the fire imp summoning stone for characters under lvl 20, and I'm not sure if there is an easy way to make such a command differentiate between the bonus items, or at what level the character is when the command is entered. Anyway, just a thought. (Satanael 08:02, 21 March 2009 (UTC))

One solution that's been talked about is to have the bonus items appear in a box similar to the unclaimed items box. Then you could just remove the items you want, and close the box when you're finished.--Pyron Sy 11:11, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

That could work, or even a special tab in the Xunlai Chest or something like that. (Satanael 07:31, 22 March 2009 (UTC))

Oh yeah, I hate having to delete all the bonus items and I only generate 6 or so on my account. The unclaimed items box suggestion is an interesting one. I'll keep this in mind, thanks. - Joe Kimmes 23:48, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh, great idea! That would be a nice thing to have done. Pkohler01 05:44, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

Little request for Joe

Hello Joe, I have a little request. Would it be possible for you to add a little icon to your signature, like Linsey has ("green Ele icon"), because your post would be far easier to spot in the wall of text. That makes the work of "wiki watchers" easier. Gorani 07:46, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

May I suggest a little devourer icon, in honor of Joe? :> Vili 07:49, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

A Devourer Egg. Plans that have yet to hatch. -- WarBlade 12:39, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Good idea, Gorani - I had been thinking of the icons as a signature/vanity thing, but I can see it being a huge convenience when skimming pages. I'll see what I can do, I'm a total rookie at wikis though. - Joe Kimmes 23:45, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Well if you need any help, please just ask. If you are adding an image though please remember it will only be about 19px large, so it's best to keep the image relatively simple. As complex images tend to lose alot of detail when being minimised. -- Salome 23:58, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Alright, I think I've figured this out. - Joe Kimmes 03:23, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Looks cool, but, what is it? Looks kinda like the head of a transformer. If you say it's a dragon I'm going to be really embarassed... Satanael 03:29, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Haha, my suspicion is that no one will know what it is, but I'll give it a few days just in case. Bonus points for anyone who correctly guesses it though. - Joe Kimmes 03:34, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm going to say something relating to Gundam Wing and it's many spawn seasons, but it's hard to tell with such a low rez image. It also looks like it could be a Pokemon, but I would have no idea which one. Looks cool none the less, your next step is some snazzy font :) — Jon Lupen 03:38, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh, good point Jon, it does look like a Gundam suit head. Could also be an Eva or something out of Escaflowne or any number of other animated giant sword wielding suit things that fight in space and have some pilot inside doing a lot of screaming. Seriously, sometimes I think that if we don't evolve our technology someday to including giant fighting robots that use swords and can fly, the Japanese are going to self destruct in frustration.

Also, if it is Gundam, I totally get half Jon's bonus points for guessing transformers, that put him on the right track. Besides, Jon doesn't need anymore bonus points, he's already got so many he could probably buy the entire bonus shop already. Satanael 03:53, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, I've changed (hopefully) my avatar to avoid any license conflicts, but I award you both 1 Bonus Point for being in the proper genre. =) - Joe Kimmes 04:08, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Avatar of Dwayna

So, I was sitting in ToA with nothing better to do with my time (essentially, I was waiting for favor to end so I could see the Dwayna statue crumble, or see if it even does that in the first place... Hey! Don't look at me like that! I was bored!) when I picked up on something kinda out of place. When - back in the day when favor was HoH-based and REgion-based - I saw my first Avatar of Dwayna, I thought that it was kinda cool the way she had a cascade of sparkles that seemed to reach out in front of her at an angle: I thought it was sorta like her clearing a path to her "holiness". Again, don't look at me like that! xD I was a noob then! Anyway, so I was driven today by boredom to see if the extended arm of sparkles rotated with her, creating a firework-like mushroom effect in the sky above. Much to my surprise, when I rotated the Avatar, the sparkles did not actually swing around with her but instead swept up into the sky where they came to rest parallel to the ground. Intruiged, I tried various angles of talking to the avatar and found that - if one stands directly behind her relative to the position she spawns in - it is even possible to have the curoius motes of light go straight up into the sky. Now, here's my theory on what's going on - and I'm not even sure if it's anywhere close right, for the record, since I'm hardly a programmer. Imagine that, when the avatar spawns, an X,Y,Z-axis graph is set up with her shoulders aligned to the x-axis, her feet and head aligned with the y-axis, and her face and back aligned with the z-axis. As we, the characters, talk to her, she rotates her body about the y-axis through the z-plane in response to each query she gets; however, instead of following her actions, the sparkly-wonderful-goodness above her rotates about the x-axis through the z-plane. Something to that effect. I'm not sure if this belongs here, as I'm not 100% sure what kind of bug this is (if it's even a bug in the first place...), but this seemed like the most logical place...

Here's some screens I captured of this little "anomaly" in progress, the first being the way the avatar normally appears, the second being my talking to her at roughly a 45-degree angle, the third a 90-degree angle, and the fourth with her turned 180 degrees.

Thoughts? A valid bug? An oversight? Purposeful? Just me being anal-rententive? xD -- Timeoffire45 01:39, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Haha, that's definitely odd looking. You're probably right about what's happening there, but it looks like a bug in the art, not code. I encourage you to pass this along to QA. - Joe Kimmes 01:59, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Will do. 0.o Wow, but that was a fast response! I'm impressed! -- Timeoffire45 02:15, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

File:User Joe Kimmes Avatar.png

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I moved your Image to File:User Joe Kimmes Avatar.png. Also could you make sure that the Image is available under GFDL as I dont think it is. If it isnt it will get deleted soon. --SilentStorm 03:44, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Alright, thanks! - Joe Kimmes 03:46, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Joe, because of ArenaNet's copyright requirements for the wiki, it might be easier for you to choose a graphic from Guild Wars, (or other Anet copyright art). You can upload any new image over the old rather than renaming it. -- Wyn 03:49, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) Have a look here for any other signature guide lines you should know. As per linked policy, your image needs to redirect to either your user page or talk page. If you would like, just let us know which one, and I can take care of that for you. Sorry to bombard you if it feels like we are. — Jon Lupen 03:54, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Also, the wiki has some image caching issues, so it may take some time for a newly uploaded version of an image to display properly. — Jon Lupen 04:04, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Hmm, I've tried to change it to the Assassin class icon but it doesn't seem to have taken; maybe it's just a cache thing with the old icon on my end. Thanks for helping me through this folks, I'm sorry to be of trouble. (oh hey, I edit conflicted with Jon Lupen, he's no doubt correct about the caching, thanks) - Joe Kimmes 04:07, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Its a cache issue; it can take up to an hour for a new image to refresh. Cntrl + F5 will purge your own cache to see if the image uploaded correctly though. -- Wandering Traveler 04:09, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Since the upgrade a couple weeks ago it's been as much as 48 hrs (if ever). I'm hoping Emily can get the IT guys looking into it soon. -- Wyn 04:11, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Ok, I've set up the redirect to my talk page; assuming the image updates in the cache eventually, I think I should be in the clear regarding the wiki guidelines. Thanks again for being patient with my wiki-amateurness. - Joe Kimmes 04:21, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Happy to help, and glad I could be of some service. :) — Jon Lupen 04:30, 25 March 2009 (UTC)