Guild Chat - Episode 22

The following is an unofficial, player-written transcript of the episode. The accuracy of this transcription has not been verified by ArenaNet.
The 22nd episode of Guild Chat aired on November 13, 2015.
"Host Rubi Bayer is joined by Gameplay Programmers Trevor Bennett, Branden Gee and Jon Olson to talk about the Enhanced Squad UI that is coming to Guild Wars 2 on 11/17."
Transcription[edit]

Below is the raw unformatted transcript from Youtube.
hi welcome to guild chat i'm your host ruby
and today we are going to talk about next week's guild wars 2 game update
uh that's coming on tuesday it's bringing so much stuff we've got
bug fixes and updates the first round of new legendaries is coming spirit vale
the first wing of the raid is going to be here and
the enhanced squad ui is coming so i thought we'd give you a little
heads up preview today i don't want to spoil spirit veil for
you all we want to kind of let you experience that yourself
and discover everything and then next week we'll be talking all about that
after you guys have had a chance to see it
we're going to talk about the enhanced squad ui today because i know a lot of
you are going to want to jump in right away and
start playing with that and we figured we'd save you the time of figuring out
how it worked by showing you first though we have
a little update on fractals and excuse my cheat sheet
because we just got this information this morning if you haven't been to our
forums yet john corpening our game director of many
things including fractals posted an update on what we're bringing
we're going to be making some fractals changes coming in december
and the really abbreviated version is that we are going to be adjusting the
toughness toughness stat of creatures you try
saying it um to make damage builds a little more
viable we're going to increase the drop rate of ascended gear
from your fractal dailies uh fractals are now going to contribute
towards central terrain masteries yay and we are just giving some overall
better rewards and fractals john has a lot more details on that you
can check out our dungeons and fractals forum on the official guild wars 2
forums to see all of the details but i thought i'd let you guys know in
case you missed it that it's there and it's some new information for you so for
now though we have three of the gameplay programmers
who worked on the enhanced squad ui i'm trying to say
ascended squad ui now i'm not sure what that is but
it's now a thing um i'll let you guys i'll just start with you and i'll let
you guys go down the line and tell us who you are and what you've been working
on um i'm trevor bennett i've been working
on the enhanced squad ui uh mostly i've been working on a lot of
the back end stuff about how the um how the ui
connects to the the servers that manage your squad
uh brandon g um i worked a lot of the front end
uh squad ui john olsen uh i did a lot of the back end as well
although more on the user client side i guess awesome
all right well why don't we go ahead and jump right in and start
showing off what this does and what it's for right now we have the commander tag
functionality and you're kind of expanding on that right
yeah just making a lot more um what was the purpose of i mean how did you get
started on the enhanced squad ui project in the
first place where did you want to go with that
um so we have in our game kind of two two different ways to organize groups of
people parties and squads and parties had a lot of functionality
um but kind of the purpose of the party is to um have kind of a loose coalition
of players that are all on equal footing um and the squad is for
a single leader organizing a group of players
to do some tasks unfortunately we did not have a lot of tools for the
the leader to actually organize their squad
so for the purposes of worldview world and raids we needed
uh to give more tools to the squad leader
to get to accomplish goals that require organizations of large groups of people
okay so we kind of built off of that um you're already in a squad so i'll let
you kind of explain how you even get started i mean when i
update on tuesday and i'm ready to get in there and i want to go to spirit
valve right now what do i do so the first thing you're
going to want to do is make sure you have the commander
unlock that is the only way to get most of the features we're about to show to
you if you don't have that you can still
form a squad just for the purposes of getting into the raid
but if you want to actually have the suite of tools that we've been
working on you're going to need to have the commander unlock yeah so
oh sorry so if you don't have a commander tag you can still use this you
can still make a raid squad yeah it's just not as yeah it's limited
to 10 players uh it's stuck in invite only mode so
that people can't just join you um you have to invite every person that
you want to join the squad um did i already say it's limited to 10
players you did okay there's a lot to keep track of it's okay
and it's locked to um other players
can other all party members all squad members can invite other players to the
squad okay um but other than that
you are you can form up your ten person squad and jump right into the raid
um and you can do that by coming up to this button that's been here forever um
and in this menu just like it always has
been you can click the create squad button it'll now be available to
non-squad leaders though awesome people who don't have the
command or unlock okay to non-people not evil
that's totally where i was going with that um all right so even if you don't
have a commander tag you can still take advantage of that find the little
start your squad button and jump on in but if you do have a commander tag there
is so much stuff here i don't even know
where to begin um and that's what you're for
let's begin with the the fancy new ui um because it's beautiful yes it is
beautiful you have this um you have this new ui that that shows
everybody in your squad it's organized into subgroups
um you can see the total supply of each of your subgroups so
amongst all these people they're slackers and have only collected 40
supply oh my gosh you guys get on that the
second one apparently on top of things collectively
have 20 supply and mo down here has 10 supply
and then it also shows the supply of the entire squad
up at the top all right so that's that's your totaling you can kind of move
people around into how many subgroups can you have you
can have up to 15 subs and the squad max size is 50. so
no you can't put everyone in their own subgroup if you have all 50 people
we have 50 subgroups it's very important um but yeah so you can
just click and drag people around with a very simple click and drag
interface if you drag people down to this bottom section
uh you can make even more subgroups nice so i can root out who doesn't have
supply like sadness and lester well okay lester come on
lester's probably still tired from last weekend we'll give him a pass
but sadness is gonna need to talking to you afterwards yeah
all right so as you are organizing your groups like if you're in world versus
world and you want like okay you're my habit group we're gonna
pull you all in here yeah so you can just uh
drag them all together um if you are so this this click and drag
functionality um is for the commander so i can move
everybody around um but if you are not the commander you
can still drag yourself around um so if the commanders put you in some
sub group and you don't think you belong there and
rather than messaging the commander hey put me in a different subgroup you can
just move yourself okay um but only only the commander can
move everybody so you don't have 50 people just willy-nilly dragging people
all over the place and if the commander is super against
people moving themselves around they have the ability to lock specific
subgroups so say i have this is my uh havoc subgroup i can right click this
and lock it and now um nobody only i can move people
into that subgroup um i can if i also want to lock down the
entire squad i can come up here please don't accidentally
leave and i can lock all subgroups and this
just makes it so that uh no one can move themselves at all
and i also have that option in here okay nice so you get everybody organized in
there and what if you want to talk to them um so
for chat you have um you have squad chat just like before
so i can use slash d to chat with everyone
in the squad you can also use slash p just like party chat and uh
party chat is now overloaded to chat with just your subgroup
okay so only mo can hear this
additionally if you're the commander you have access to
broadcast so you can come up here to squad broadcast
and go team and broadcast will be broadcast to
everyone in the entire squad and also pop up on their screen
and then you can also broadcast to just your subgroup or any subgroup so if i
want to talk to subgroup one uh in the broadcast bar i can type slash
one and uh this is only
four one and so everyone else that's not in subgroup
one did not see that message okay and if all of the subgroups are
talking within their small subgroups just like party chat but
that's not coming in and flooding your incoming channel right
so if you are not in the same subgroup as the commander you can
totally trash talking while you want you can't see a thing
not recommended until he sneaks in he's like what are you guys saying about
me hey
that's amazing so you can see oh that works
i wish you guys could have seen that that was the best spelling of the word
about ever there's like nine letters in that word i
thought it was just me that did that stuff
okay so you're pulling everybody around you get
all of your groups set up what's the advantage of having these subgroups
aside from being able to talk to them um so and you guys can totally jump we're
having like a really good time over here you guys are just doing great uh it's
all good so what advantage of this is um just overall status of your group
um knowing what's going on yeah i can now see everyone's alive and at full
health it's pretty cool um so these uh slates for each player
show things oh yeah like monster types it in
uh you can see his health is going down stop dying
um if you're going to death shroud if you were to go into death shroud yes
trevor going to death
oh no save me all right but you can see in the you can see in the squad ui
that we can see that trevor is now bleeding to death
and someone needs to help it looks like the pet rock is helping you
that's fantastic my pet rock is flawed there we go
death round yeah so we maintain a lot of the same
health testings we showed before um it also uh you're able to see everyone
in your squad on your map yeah that's here
they're all right here though so yeah um this is
kind of nice but if they were running around in different places yep
you'd be able to take a look at that all right so i
i love that there's a character named feed me blood like waiting for you to
bleed to death again all right so what if you have you're
just covered in conditions and you want your squad leader to see
what's up squad leader can see that right um
unfortunately uh that's all information to show on these
slates um we spent a lot of time trying to discuss on how we could show things
like boons and conditions as yeah it was a lot of feedback we
received uh from the bwb3 event thank you guys seriously yeah
so we add this new feature we're calling a toggle squad
um it basically allows you to go to a civil party ui yeah
for your sub group okay so while you cannot see
the whole squad you can see your essentially your party yeah all right
so you can see again that trip seriously can i get you a band-aid or something
please stop bleeding to death all right so within your squad you can see
boots and conditions and yeah i'm going to keep saying squad and you
can just keep correcting me and reminding me that it is a subgroup
in fact we do it constantly as well there's a reason i don't command
um so yeah you can swap back and forth this view for
screen real estate purposes is limited to 10 players
so even if you have a massive sub group it's not going to scroll off the screen
i'm with that person i can't says feed me blood
um so yeah that's really fun i am like super distracted by all of everything
happening here and like over there and keep bleeding to death please that's
fantastic um we talked a little bit more about wounds
and conditions and i wanted to talk about how within your
subgroup see i said subgroup this time um handing out boons are prioritized so
it's like this was a cool thing that i wrote down because i wanted to remember
uh yeah um so uh within your subgroup um boons are the highest priority um
this also applies to parties and then um your your bones and
conditions will spread out to um to the squad
and then other players and then um your minions or uh
pets gadgets the turrets that kind of thing
um and then anyone else's minions pets yes they can see how i remembered um and
then uh finally anything else that happens to
also be able to take boons and conditions and stuff like that
specifically boons right uh let's share conversations please
don't give conditions to your subscribers
do i need to get out of your subgroup because you're handing out bleeding
you're completing all right so the whole ui i mean i feel like this had
the potential to be really really messy and you guys managed to keep it pretty
clean and easy to understand yeah that is mostly thanks to matthew
cox who designed thank you matthew thank you matthew the whole thing my
first pass on just throwing information on screen
looked horrendous um you might have seen a little taste of
that in the beta weekend um but we've been working with him to make
it not quite so hideous all right so what else can you do with
this that i'm missing there's so many more features um the
let's just look at this menu yeah go for it so i already showed you
lock all subgroups um i briefly mentioned allowing sub members
allowing members to send invites so if this is unchecked only the commander can
send out invites to join the squad if it's checked because you're just like a
world of world commander and you don't want to have to deal with that
you can allow anyone in your in your squad to send invites this drop down
allows you to swap from a raiding squad to a
full worldview world squad um a the only difference is the
the max number of members um so a rating squad is max is capped at 10 players and
you must be in a rating squad to enter a raid
okay so no sneaking extra players into the 10 man raid it is
designed around 10 people so we will block you from
anymore we're not going to let you into spirit veil if you try to go in with 50
world versus world players yeah it's not going to work out very well
this drop down you have three options for
organizing your squad by default it's in open join which means that anyone can
just apply to join your squad and be in it kind of like how squats currently
exist the next option is the closed squad
which people can apply to join your squad
but just like parties you then have to accept the application
and then finally there's the invite only squad which means that you won't even
um except for the commander you won't even appear to be in a squad to other
people and you must invite them in order for
them to end up in the squad all right so what happens if i'm in a
group say the four of us are grouped up and
we're running around and a commander invites me into
his squad what happens to you guys so if we're all in a party and a commander
invites you um it actually invites our entire party
um just to really streamline that process of getting
grouped up um to join a squad i have a plus three is that okay
yeah the additionally if you um if you if we're all in a party and
you apply to join a squad if it's an open squad
uh your application to the squad will automatically invite the rest of us
um and also if it's a closed squad you will apply to join the squad and then
the rest of us it will be suggested to join the squad okay and what
suggested means is that on our screen and on the commander's
screen it will pop up requesting a confirmation so if the
commander accepts the suggestion it will actually
invite us if we accept the suggestion we will apply
as long as both parties agree that they should be in the squad
you end up in the squad awesome all right sorry
carry on i wanted to ask about that though yeah uh that was a good portion
of the start of the development on this is getting
that whole flow worked out really yep another feature is the ready check
so if i click ready check it will request that everyone else
in the squad um readies up and i can keep track of who's ready
i can yell at them you know take a test of who's paying attention right now
um and slowly but surely they will ready up
i think we have some afk players so maybe i'll kick those it's like they're
working it's ridiculous cameron's like up there
playing with it yeah so i'm ready i'm not ready i'm
ready um once you receive a ready check uh you will get a
you'll get a pop-up on your screen to click yes or no
cameron's not ready um you'll get a pop-up on your screen to
to say whether you're ready or not you can click yes or no and then afterwards
you'll be able to come up to this menu here
to change your ready status or you can also just click um
on your button to change it i can't because i'm the commander or i can
i just canceled the entire range so that's good
that works forget it i'm mad but we're not going to do this
so that's the whole ready check system did i miss anything no it's that's a
you can ready you can not ready you can apparently yell and chat about how
you're not prepared for this i wish you guys could see chat this is
they're having way too much fun down there in the corner um what else
can i do uh so i'm the leader of the squad right
now and i can make other people the leaders of the squad oh
you should change that um by
appointing cameron is now the leader of the squad
i bet he's not prepared for that either
um so yeah now he's the commander he can assign it
back to me and we can have fights about leadership and and deferring it
so what if you just want to what if you really don't want to lead
this squad so you just leave uh so cameron can leave
jesus he is drunk with power
so um he literally just told camera to get out
so if cameron leaves the squad as i requested him
we will run around as a leaderless squad but now there's a power vacuum yes and
because i am able to lead the squad i have uh
commander unlocked i saw this pop-up on my screen and i can
come over here and click lead and i can become the leader again
so if your worldview world commander is just done for the day
and he decides to leave anyone else can step up that's already in a squad it
doesn't have to disband and reform okay so you have all of these people
here what if like 10 of them are drunk with power
and everybody hits the volunteer button at once um
so it is a race the first person to click the lead button and get that
message to our servers we'll become the new leader
if within that really tight time frame multiple people actually uh get the
message to the server at the same time um the person who has been in the squad
the longest will win nice all right it'll show your
dedication um i will invite cameron back as a peon
please please tell me you guys added a pee on option
i just i would take that rank in a heartbeat
uh is he going to come back is he going to forgive yes he's accepted
he's forgiven all right you can come back
all is forgiven um this is why we need to show this particular chat
thank you gracious leader all right so what else can you do um
what what
the ui resizes that's pretty cool um we realized
all the real estate so the whole thing shrinks down to a pretty tiny size
the smaller it is the less information it shows
mostly cutting out names because you run out of room
but yeah you can see um profession icons and specialization icons apparently
dragon hunter is a popular form of guardian oh hey
i've heard that once or twice all right so how hard was it getting
this whipped into shape the way you wanted it
please don't cry please don't cry it's been it's been a long road
yeah um i was working on it for a while by myself
and then it was not going to be ready so we
we pulled in a couple more people they've been very helpful
in this final final leg and it's not even done there's so much more
that we want to do that we're going gonna continue working
on yeah you guys have you guys have some more stuff
and it's not like okay we're gonna have all these things next week
yeah but you're still working it's not just like okay commander ui is done
we're walking away project is over i mean you mentioned to
me that you're working on like chat bubbles
which seems like such a simple thing but we were making the few lines of code
joke yesterday while we were talking about this
so there's a lot more that you want coming but for now this is
an enormous enormous improvement and gonna be incredibly helpful in spirit
veil and in world versus world yeah we hope you love it
yeah all right so that was your first run through
that should help you jump in a little bit faster and you guys can start taking
on gorsevall a little bit quicker thank you guys very
very much you can continue oh i thought you were saying i was like
you can continue trash talking but now he's just thanking them nicely
yes i do want to thank all of my volunteers like
we realized that we were on this live stream today and uh didn't have anyone
to join this type of squad so i desperately sent emails around to
my co-workers so thank you very much to all of them
for jumping in and being warm bodies yeah and thanks to
all of you who beat on this and broke it and helped
these guys make it better so all right thank you guys for coming
and running us through this hopefully this was helpful for you guys
for next tuesday and we will see you next friday on guild
chat where we'll be talking about spirit veil
bye guys
Guild Chat - Episode 22

Transcription[edit]

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