Guild Wars 2

i am having a problem where charr , human asura, and norn armor are not counting. for example i am at 17/18 for human, and no matter what i buy for armor on a human i can not get to 18. has any one had problems like this?

Nope, it worked correctly for me when I got my Sylvary cultural. Mind you though that you need to get unique pieces. If you buy the same item twice, it will not change the count twice, but only once.
So make sure you get all the unique items and check again.

A reminder : you cannot count 2 pieces that go in the same armor slot from the same tier i.e you cannot count Tier 1 heavy boots and Tier 1 medium boots, only 1 of them will go towards the title. (from the wiki)