Guild Wars 2

So a few weeks ago there was a highly increased chance to get permanent usables (merchant, trader, bank access…) from BL chests. I took advantage of the thereby lowered TP prices and bought all of them. However, i soon was disappointed, as i came across two issues with the personal trader and personal merchant ([&AgGIjAAA] and [&AgGJjAAA]):

Issue 1:
The single usage versions of these two items can be placed simultaneously – which makes perfect sense because often times you need both merchant and trader. However, the permanent versions cannot be placed at the same time (only one rentable NPC at a time)
For this issue, there really isn’t a whole lot to discuss. It’s just ridiculous that the single usage items are better than the permanent ones. Period.

Issue 2:
You cannot use either of the rentable NPCs (both permanent and single usage) more often than once every 5 minutes (assuming you don’t swap maps of course).
Now this is particulary annoying. Let’s say your sickle runs out of uses and you place your personal merchant to get a new one. A few minutes later you are harvesting lumber and your axe runs out of uses, but you can’t place the merchant.
You might say that this is pretty much a first world problem. After all, you could check wether any of your harvesting tools are running low when you buy the first one that is out of uses. And you are right. One could most definitely do that. However, the personal rentable NPCs are supposed to be the ultimate deluxe comfort items. You don’t spend 1k gold (or a load of gems/money on BL keys) just so you still have to remember this kind of stuff.
Also, it is not like this is costly to fix. Obviously players should not be able to just spam the map with thousands of NPCs, which means that whenever a player places a rentable NPC, any other rentable NPC of his has to get removed to keep server load down. This method already is implemented. Whenever you leave a map, your personal NPCs get removed. So we’re talking literally less than like 50 lines of code to add a method call whenever a rentable NPC is used or presumably the same effort to just teleport the existing NPC to your current position (for a solution that is pretty much negligible in terms of server load).

Am I failing to see some reasons against these changes here? Wouldn’t those improvements make personal NPCs more appealing to players and thus increase demand for BL keys? I would really love to hear a devs opinion on the issues!

Greetings from Germany
Dixon

1. The single uses arent better by a long shot in the overall scheme of things. The fact that I can place down both at the same time is hardly a point in the matter. Get over it.

2. Another non-issue. Easily resolved when you start getting in the habit of buying a SET of harvesting tools each time. Or do what every other person who spends several thousand gold on stuff does- buy permanent tools.

I’m afraid I can’t get past the ‘bought all of them’.

More OT: I suppose it would be …nice, but I’d rather the Devs spend their time/resources on more content. But, sure, after we have a glut of content, go for it!

Best of luck on the Dev response. =)

In reply to cedo: Just to clarify, i obviously didn’t buy “all” of them as in i bought out the market. I meant one of each of course

In reply to aidan: Really not helping here. Obviously you didn’t even read my entire post, otherwise you wouldn’t suggest the same workaround i have not only already mentioned, but already explained why it should not be necessary.

Unless they add another way of obtaining these items, they have to be seen as paid items (paid as in “bought for actual money”) and as such they should at least match their description. Certainly nothing about cooldowns or restrictions in there :/

@Aidan
1. It just sucks that these two NPCs share the same 5 min cooldown (except you leave the map or relog). There are situations where i’d like to spawn both at the same time. It shouldn’t be a problem at all (well it isn’t even a prob with the single use one, only with the permanent ones)
Solution: There is no need to spawn a NPC at all. It would awesome if they just open a new window (like Karmic Converter, Ley-Energy Matter Converter, Permanent Bank Access Express, Permanent Portable Provisioner, etc.)

2. In my opinion you will get no advantages at all, if using permanent harvesting tools. Only the Watchwork Mining Pick (bonus mats) and the Consortium Harvesting Sickle (speed upgrade) are useful. Everything else has just some appearance upgrades. So leave one set in Shared Inventory? – Nope.. there are better items to store in these slots.

@Inculpatus
Anet always says “we always want to improve the quality of life things for our community”. I think that these changes wouldn’t take so much time to fix.

The “Don’t Spawn an NPC at all – just bring up the sell/TP interface” is the best change I can imagine. Not only does it make using them more functional for the owners of such items, but it also completely eliminates the ability to troll the game with them.

Hedge Dixon.5816:

In reply to cedo: Just to clarify, i obviously didn’t buy “all” of them as in i bought out the market. I meant one of each of course

I’m with Inculpatus on this one, given that I can’t afford to buy just one of them even at the “low” prices they came down to. Believe me, it is possible for us to boggle at your buying all the varieties.

I do agree that they should be placeable at the same time in the same vicinity, however. Isn’t there a five minute cooldown for each and they vanish before you can place the next one so you can’t cover the landscape with them anyway?

Sartharina.3542:

The “Don’t Spawn an NPC at all – just bring up the sell/TP interface” is the best change I can imagine. Not only does it make using them more functional for the owners of such items, but it also completely eliminates the ability to troll the game with them.

This would be the best sollution, as the NPCs spawned by the permanent contracts can’t even be used by others anyway.

Duftpukie.3215:

Solution: There is no need to spawn a NPC at all. It would awesome if they just open a new window (like Karmic Converter, Ley-Energy Matter Converter, Permanent Bank Access Express, Permanent Portable Provisioner, etc.)

+1 The tech should basically already be there, so just take how those other items work and apply the current, already-made, Merchant/BLTC windows to them instead. Here is a list of some of the main resulting benefits of this implementation:

• Other players would no longer have to render something that they can’t even use.
• Other players would no longer be able to be “tricked” into trying to access the NPCs when they can’t.
• The NPCs would no longer be “trollable”, such as when someone places them on top of a resource node, chest, etc, making it difficult to gather from what the NPC is on top of. This is especially bad considering those other players can’t even access the NPC to begin with like the single use versions.

Unfortunately I wouldn’t hold my breath for these changes though, as I and several others have posted about this topic over the past 2+ years, and nothing has changed yet. Who knows though, maybe this issue was just on a low priority, and it’s time has finally come to be fixed.

Maybe it’s worth trying to report it as a bug directly via /support ingame… Seems like there isn’t a whole lot of staff at anet at all these days, just seems odd that they always try to push extremely time consuming new stuff instead of spending even the tiniest amount of time on very simple bug fixes. I mean, I would easily wait another month or two for LW season 3, but not having a properly working LFG tool or properly working usables really does start to get seriously annoying.

Hedge Dixon.5816:

Maybe it’s worth trying to report it as a bug directly via /support ingame… Seems like there isn’t a whole lot of staff at anet at all these days, just seems odd that they always try to push extremely time consuming new stuff instead of spending even the tiniest amount of time on very simple bug fixes. I mean, I would easily wait another month or two for LW season 3, but not having a properly working LFG tool or properly working usables really does start to get seriously annoying.

Perhaps, as some from the 300 or so Devs have repeatedly stated, the ‘very simple bug fixes’ aren’t so simple to fix, after all. Who knows?

You may want to wait an additional 1 or 2 months for new content, but I’m not sure how many would agree. I know I would rather have new content that the ability to put out more than one Personal Merchant at a time.