dawnmist

Since we've had LOTS of posts in pretty much every forum each month from people expecting the reset to be at midnight in ArenaNet's timezone, I figured a reminder that it will reset at midnight GMT (4pm on the 30th November PST) would be worthwhile.

Time converter to work out when that is in your timezone:
http://www.timeandda...iso=20121201T00

Hopefully we'll have fewer upset people who thought they had one more evening to work on it this month.

I've been a bit surprised not to find any comments about this change anywhere.

In BWE3, the long-term buffs for guild influence were either moved to much higher tiers, toned down (e.g. 3 days reduced to 1 day), or both, and the early rewards were replaced by banners that could be spawned for guild members to "touch" to gain a 30 minute buff.

Did anyone test these banners during the BWE3? If so, I had a few questions about them:

• How long does the banner itself last after it's spawned? They take 4 hours to build, but the banner's duration wasn't listed in the tooltip (the buff's duration after touching the banner was).
  
• Where are you meant to spawn them? We don't have guild halls (not at launch, anyway), and players are split amongst 5 different starting zones with 5 different main towns, plus in WvW/PvP areas. Putting them in the PvP entrance so that people can access them using the Hero panel and then return to what they were doing easily is likely to be very annoying to everyone else on the server, and putting them in Lion's Arch means that they have increased travel time to and from the banner wasting part of the buff and needing to travel back to where they were (which may not be possible - e.g. jumping puzzles!) and still annoy everyone else on the server (unless the banner is hidden from non-guild members)...but putting them in a map somewhere means that people who can't access the map due to overflows can't get to the banner.
  
• Doesn't the need to return to the banner every 30 minutes to refresh the buff ruin gameplay flow? Or does the 4-hours-to-build banner last less than 30 minutes (in which case, why would you even bother building it for such a short duration buff that you have to actively ABANDON what you're doing to go and get)? If you're following a dynamic event chain, either you end up having to break off in the middle, or you miss out on any further benefit from the guild banner. What if you're doing something like a jump puzzle, where you can't just break-off mid challenge to go and refresh at the banner? Or in a dungeon - "hang on a sec everyone - I want to leave for a couple of minutes to retouch my guild banner and then come back"?

ArenaNet said:

Quote

I can see that everyone turning up at the banner initially would be a social gathering...but having to return every 30 minutes seems really awful (as would a 4 hour build for only 30 minutes of benefits, especially when you then take time to get to anywhere with something interesting happening after touching it, thus wasting part of that 30 minute buff), because it ruins the ability to explore and follow what's happening in the world.

I've tried everything I can see, but I can't seem to get Daily Digests for followed topics to work since the forum change.

I've got the topics set to "Send a Daily Digest" in the "Content you follow" page.

I've got "Notification method to use for replies to followed topics" set to "email" in the Notifications->Options page.

I'm receiving email notifications if someone quotes my posts using the notification setting email for "Notify me when someone quotes my posts" in the Notifications->Options page, but I haven't received a Digest since the forum change despite resubscribing to forum threads that I wanted to get digests for, or for any newer threads.

Am I missing a setting somewhere else, or is the Daily Digest currently broken?

Screenshots:
http://gw.dawnmist.n...bscriptions.png
http://gw.dawnmist.n...Preferences.png

Reading the "will you buy additional character slots on launch day" thread, it got me thinking about the management of those additional slots.

GW1's character selection screen is ok, but it's pretty limited in what it can do - and it's managed to randomise my characters so that my oldest that was created in my "first" slot is now buried somewhere in the middle (it's not sorted by name, or by age, or by pvp/pve status - it just got randomised a couple of years ago).

What display/sort options would you like to see for the character selection screen in GW2? Why?

I'd like to see (in addition to what GW1 currently has):

• Display character birthdate (i.e. in GW1 it shows name, class, level & location - add birthdate/age here)
  
• Display number of new/unread mails for that char (assuming there's a mail system)
  
• Display auction sales status
  
• Sort by age (character's date/datetime-of-birth)
  
• Sort by number of hours played
  
• Sort alphabetically (I can't remember if this one is already one of the GW1 sort options)
  
• Combination sorts - i.e. if you have 5 chars with the same birthday, sort within that group of 5 by number of hours played
  
• Sort by class or race
  
• Sort by character level
  
• Sort by a user-specified order
  
• Display a user-set character "note"

Birthdate, auction & mail status let you know from the character select screen if there's a reason to log into a particular character even if you were not necessarily intending to play them, and can save you just logging in to "check" them all the time.

Sorting options allows you to rearrange your characters into an order that makes sense to you - you know where to look for someone. While I'd love to be able to specify it manually, doing so would need an additional attribute/storage on the servers to hold the order, so I'd be surprised to see it.

The note field could be used for making a note saying "weapons storage" or "extra materials" so that it's easier to remember which character was your mule storage for a particular item, or it could hold a role-play bio for the character. It'd be a "nice to have", but definitely not a requirement. :)

So...what would you like to see?