Guild Wars 2

Not sure what to call or where to put a post like this but:

Just a few things I’m sure a lot of us have noticed over the years. There are a few things that appear to be unintentional, which are pain in the butts. I cant think of them all off the top of my head and perhaps you guys know of 1-2 more. But for starters;

Experience scrolls dont stack- (I’m aware some are lvl 30 and some lvl 20, but there are at least 3 copies of the lvl 20 version)

Item boosters exist as rare and masterwork quality, they are identical and therefore cannot stack

somewhere along the lines the experience booster was changed to include pvp reward tacks, however the new version cannot be used with the “Enhancment boost powder”

Many collection items have no use at all, yet require you to type out the name in order to delete them, and cannot be sold to a vendor

There are more I’m sure but basically these are all quirks in the gw2 code that are a thorn in the side of many players. Perhaps its my OCD kicking in but there seems to be no reason to take up my bank space

It’s because of, most of the time, differing item ID parameters. The item boosters, however, dont stack because there’s two different DURATIONS available. Same with the experience boosters.

Why would they assign different IDs to items that are otherwise identical? The experience scrolls is a perfect example. There’s no reason why all level 20 scrolls shouldn’t stack together. They do the exact same thing.

kitten.4078:

Why would they assign different IDs to items that are otherwise identical? The experience scrolls is a perfect example. There’s no reason why all level 20 scrolls shouldn’t stack together. They do the exact same thing.

Because they worked differently when they were released (soulbound, acountbound, how you got them, etc.).

They are now working the same, but they forgot to adjust the item code.

Really people? You think it’s as simple as them “forgetting” to “clean” the code? Have you considered it’s an “UNABLE to ‘fix’” and not a “wont ‘fix’”? Besides, maybe they dont perceive it as a problem because players hoarding those things are an anomaly? It’s not an issue if people use them.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Really people? You think it’s as simple as them “forgetting” to “clean” the code? Have you considered it’s an “UNABLE to ‘fix’” and not a “wont ‘fix’”? Besides, maybe they dont perceive it as a problem because players hoarding those things are an anomaly? It’s not an issue if people use them.

If the devs are unable to fix different kinds of Lv20 scrolls existing, they should quit their jobs. (Before anyone jumps at me, I’m saying they’re definitely capable of fixing it, otherwise they wouldn’t be working on the game) Same with plenty of other fixes.
It’s just a priority matter, and those things really have no high priority.
As for the boosters, they have different durations and whatnot, so it’s expected that those don’t stack.

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

If the devs are unable to fix different kinds of Lv20 scrolls existing, they should quit their jobs. (Before anyone jumps at me, I’m saying they’re definitely capable of fixing it, otherwise they wouldn’t be working on the game) Same with plenty of other fixes.
It’s just a priority matter, and those things really have no high priority.
As for the boosters, they have different durations and whatnot, so it’s expected that those don’t stack.

Stuff that you think that is simple, may not be that easy to change.
Maybe retroactively change the ID of those items will make the track of how, when and who got those items desapear and that information may be used somewhere else and a cascade of issues and bugs happen because of that.

Resuming, just because you can doesn’t mean you should

They have converted items in the past. They could also add a vendor to exchange them if they really wanted to.

Belzebu.3912:

NovaanVerdiano.6174:

If the devs are unable to fix different kinds of Lv20 scrolls existing, they should quit their jobs. (Before anyone jumps at me, I’m saying they’re definitely capable of fixing it, otherwise they wouldn’t be working on the game) Same with plenty of other fixes.
It’s just a priority matter, and those things really have no high priority.
As for the boosters, they have different durations and whatnot, so it’s expected that those don’t stack.

Stuff that you think that is simple, may not be that easy to change.
Maybe retroactively change the ID of those items will make the track of how, when and who got those items desapear and that information may be used somewhere else and a cascade of issues and bugs happen because of that.

Resuming, just because you can doesn’t mean you should

It doesn’t even matter if it’s simple or not (besides, I never said that it’s simple), every coding related problem can be solved. If a dev working on an AAA game doesn’t know how to use the tools at their disposal to eventually find the issue, they’re lacking experience.
What I’ve been on about is that they definitely COULD do it (which was my whole point since the guy I originally quoted said they might simple not be capable of fixing it), but it is simply not worth the time/effort when looking at what is gained and the problems that can potentially pop up by going through with that change.

Everybody is either hoarding them or deleting them. Every character gets a level 20 at first and second birthday. (You can also get one from the Massive Achievement Chest every 5000 achievement points.) Whey I got my first birthday ones all 5 of my chars were already past level 20. If every character gets 2 but can only use one or less, you do the math… Plus there was the birthday gift bug so a lot of people got extras. How are people not going to have a surplus of these? I have 14 level 20s in two stacks. Then there’s the level 30 scrolls. I used 4 of the 5 i got from my original chars on the 4 new chars I got with HoT. That leaves me with one level 30. I’ll get two more level 20s and one more level 30 on each of those 4 new chars.

If I can delete the scrolls without causing any problems then it shouldn’t cause any problems to replace them. Maybe at some point they could do something like they did with the old wintersday gifts —

Double-click to consume.
Double-click to exchange this old, dusty Experience Scroll for a shiny, new Experience Scroll.

What would really be nice is if all of the level 20 scrolls were exchanged for level 30 scrolls that all stack together with the original level 30s.

I’m not saying this should be a priority, just saying it would be nice. There are plenty of similar things that would be nice to see improved.

I remember when they made it so you could consume all of your essences of luck in one action (well for one value anyway). That was a wonderful thing they did, and I am grateful. But you know, that could be done with other things too – like similar treasure containers (open 5 option?), or even Piles of Silky Sand from the Silverwastes. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a switch that lets us declare minor (and/or major) runes and sigils as “junk” that is to be sold when other junk is with the “Sell Junk” button, too?

I also noticed, as someone who hopes from guild hall to guild hall to harvest, that one can hop directly from Gilded Hollow to the Lost Precipice, and the reverse, but one cannot hop from one guild’s Gilded Hollow to another guild’s Gilded Hollow – but must instead spend loading screen time (twice) to get to the second Gilded Hollow. I assume the same is the case for Lost Precipice to Lost Precipice travel. Why are you mean like this, ANet?

ascended chests with the same name dont stack
The pvp match pop up interrupts chat
The entire preview system is a joke

This is just to name a few. It seems like the interface designers/coders don’t really like their jobs too much. I would like to preview the xera’s heavy mask skin in the gem store without my entire armour dissapearing but i guess that is too much to ask :/

As a software developer on something with way more daily users than GW2, I can assure that there is almost no relationship between how “obviously easy” something is to fix, and how actually easy it is to fix, at scale, in a live system with millions of users.

Remember, too, that things like item conversions have a cost. Over five million accounts, if one hundedth of one percent have a problem during conversion that causes data to be lost, that is still 500 support tickets to be triaged and fixed. That isn’t free (and, uh, doesn’t exactly make you popular when that happens.)

(and that’s doing this over way more than one DB server, so “use transactions”, etc, are really, really not as trivial as they sound here.)

So, yeah, it’s likely better to assume that if something isn’t fixed it is because “cost to fix” is greater than “value generated by fixing”, rather than that the devs hate you, or are incompetent.

It’s not just that cheeze, it’s also the fact that something these people perceive as “simple” like changing the id parameter of something, is likely far more complicated than they could realize. Especially when it can cascade into something faaaaaaaaar beyond what people originally thought. This can happen regardless of how “neat” and “proper” the coding is.

Since we have so many “experts” here, how difficult was it for them to change all of the old Wintersday Gifts to Dusty Wintersday Gifts? They pulled that off without a hitch. Four different items that didn’t stack together were converted to one single item that does stack.

All the stacking issues aside, I have about 30 Experience boosters rotting in my bank because XP is currently useless once you hit mastery cap and have all your toons lvl 80. This isnt an issue for new accounts, but for anyone who pvps a lot, Tomes of knowlege are easy to come by. The flavor text on enhancement powder reads that it can convert these but does not. This should be adressed in my opinion, especially since lvl increases post 80 no longer even provide spirit shards!?!

Also there are alot of items which require you to type the name to delete that have no purpose after recieving them for the collections. Im sure this is a flag in the coding to prompt us when deleting them that could be taken off… Im sick of typing “Ectoplasmic Residue” “3 Energy Crystals” “Energized Spirit Thread” “Mosquito Blood”and so on, just to clear my inventory. My gameplay has slowly turned more and more into load screens and inventory managment rather than exploring and combat.

kitten.4078:

Since we have so many “experts” here, how difficult was it for them to change all of the old Wintersday Gifts to Dusty Wintersday Gifts? They pulled that off without a hitch. Four different items that didn’t stack together were converted to one single item that does stack.

It looked easy, of course. That doesn’t mean they didn’t go through tons of labor to make it look simple.

The point is moot: there are always 142,501 different “simple” things to fix; there will never be enough dev time to fix them all. I know I disagree with their priorities, because it hurts me; I have no idea what they see that convinces them that they are making the right choices about what to address, what can wait for something related, and what probably will never get fixed.

I agree that there will always be little things that need fixed, and the dev time is better spent on other things such as new content. I was more or less asking the community on their thoughts. As i mentioned these are probably bugs that bother the “ocd” in us all. However lately i have found more and more of my time be occupied with inventory management. I was curious what newer players thoughts were on this. (my account is from release day). although these issues are pretty low on the important scale, it adds to the general game play experience, and player retention has always been an issue with gw2