Showing Posts For Akaji.1296:
To she’d some light, once a change requires text, the minimum turnaround is 4 weeks on translation alone.
Jon – could you please shed some light on why this trait has been broken for so long? There have been numerous threads on this topic that have had devs involved, including the Stickied Engineer Bugs Compilation thread since September 16, 2012!
It is very disappointing that a clearly broken (not simply bugged) trait has been completely ignored for so long.
There’s two roles [Engineers] cannot fulfill easily (without a crazy exploit build) and that’s burst DPS and CC because everything becomes immune if they are a champion or above.
You’re not playing the class right, then.
For starters, ‘crazy exploit build’ for burst? Many of our builds can do a great deal of burst damage, and none of them are crazy or use burst.
As for CC, we’re one of the best classes for it. We are one of the best classes for getting rid of Defiant stacks – we have a large number of abilities that hit Defiant because of our access to Kits, and a good portion of those have a much lower cooldown than comparable abilities for other classes.
Beyond that, we have easy access to Defiant-ignoring CC (immobilize) through the Net Turret and its toolbar skill, Bomb Kit, Rifle or offhand Pistol, etc. On any given Fractal or non-CoF run, it’s almost a guarantee that I’ll save someone’s kitten with a well-timed Net Shot.
I do want to mention that for the most part, all that someone sees in the game is your character name, and your display name here on the forums shouldn’t trouble you too much.
I think this is a bit misleading (or maybe misinformed?). I think that everyone can see your display name if you ever say anything within their hearing, e.g. if you’re talking in map chat. I know that they can see it in guild, in party, etc. Probably in whispers, mails..
Anyway, I’m with the OP on this. It wasn’t clear to me that my “display name” would be used anywhere other than the forums when I signed up for the game. I would undoubtedly have chosen a different display name if I had known that.
Actually the thing to do now is buy ori while the price is low and save them for a few weeks (or set high sell orders near the “usual” price) until the shiny wears off and people go back to their usual habits and aren’t mining every node on the map.
Even at a cost of 3s, selling at 3.6s nets you a mere 6c profit per Ore. Maybe if Ori dropped to 2.5s, or it could be expected to go up to ~4.2s, that would be worth it. For now there are far better investments elsewhere.
I have been having this issue as well, and my ballpark estimate for gold lost is approaching 50g. It seems to happen most often with high-frequency sales (which is a huge source of income for me), though I’ve seen it (i.e. tracked and confirmed that I never received payment) even on days where I sell only a few items.
I’ve also noticed that the game periodically “loses track” of the items you list. For example, say I list 1000 of a specific item at varying prices between 1.2s and 1.5s. Despite my 1.2s items never selling, I might find that listing at 1.5s does not state “items will be added to existing sale”, even when I’m certain that the current stack of items selling at 1.5s is much less than 250. I don’t know if this is related or not, but it’s certainly frustrating regardless.
Finally, it appears that server/character rollbacks, e.g. one that just happened on NSP (or maybe for multiple people, not just me), may result in lost gold. I had retrieved ~1.5g from the TP shortly before being booted due to the client’s inability to connect to the login server; when I logged back in, I was rolled back and no longer had that extra 1.5g in my inventory, but the money also does not show on the TP.
ANet: please consider implementing better validation for TP transactions. It’s unacceptable for transactions to fail to provide money, or for withdrawals to be lost due to login bugs.
Losing rating due to the glicko system isn’t going to motivate me. Look at tier 1. If BG lost by 100k or 10k, they are still in tier 1. They aren’t going anywhere. Why should I care if I lost 40 rating or 4? Besides, most players don’t look at the glicko. They look at the match score to make a determination on whether they are going to play. Hide the score so no one sees it and they are much more willing to play.
Players need more motivation that losing a few glicko points, especially when the tiers rarely change nowadays.
It’s funny you use tier 1 as your example. Tier 1 worlds aren’t going to drop to tier 2 any time soon, sure, but that tier is competitive as hell – they want first place (or want to keep it), so most WvW players certainly care if they lose 40 rating or 4 or even 0.4.
Regardless, you should care. You sound like you only care if your world is going to change positions right now, which is just stupid. If that’s your attitude, then you might as well just give up now – very, very few matchups will cause a ranking change, much less a tier change. The important part is the trend.
Here’s an example: Blackgate (#2) lost 14 points this week. Tarnished Coast (#4) gained 11.86. If they both averaged half that (-7 and +5.93 respectively), they would swap places in 11 weeks. This probably won’t happen unless Blackgate players become extremely discouraged and/or Tarnished Coast severely ramps up its efforts, but it could easily happen just on the efforts (or lack of effort in Blackgate’s case) of Wed. through Fri. players.
Everyone should read this (or at least the second tl;dr), unless you’re on HoD or SF, in which case reading this will give you face cancer. If you’re on NSP, read the tl;dr then get back to WvW!
necessary tl;dr – never give up, never surrender.
Slightly longer tl;dr – any change in score for any world affects your Glicko rating significantly, so don’t ever give up on a match just because you’re losing. The closer the scores, the more of a difference that change makes, so keep that in mind when choosing strategies – if 2nd place has 1000 more points than you, and 1st place has 20000, forget 1st place and focus on 2nd for the greatest improvement.
To give a real world example of the impact that score has, say you are losing to a team with 200,880 points, and you have 188,460 points (this is US Eredon Terrace v. Gates of Madness right now). It’s a Friday at 5 PM UTC, and you aren’t going to catch up, so you give up. So your opponent takes +300 (they don’t give up because, hey, they’re winning!), you go down to +150. There are 28 time periods left in the day (420 minutes left / 15 minutes per period), so the result is 209,280 to 192,660.
The formula for GW2’s Glicko score is
(sin((wXScore / (wXScore + wYScore) – 0.5) * Pi) + 1) * 0.5
and is calculated for each world independently, e.g. wA’s score is calculated for X = A, Y = B; wB’s score is calculated for X = B, Y = A. The results are asymmetric, i.e. they do not add up to 1.0.
As a result, the match up between you and the winning team results in Glicko scores of 0.402314 to their 0.437383.
Now say that you hadn’t given up. Instead, you push hard, and they are lax from having a clear win, so you average 300 and they average 150. The result would be 205,080 to 196,860. This would result in Glicko scores of 0.411842 (you) to 0.429195 (them).
This results in a decrease (i.e. good for you) to the relative rating change (compared to your opponent’s) of about 49.48% (difference Glicko 2 / difference Glicko 1 = 0.017353 / 0.035069 = 0.49482…) – for 7 hours of effort!
On top of that, your score isn’t only calculated against the winner’s. There are 6 scores calculated for each matchup – wA v wB, wA v wC; wB v wA, wB v wC; wC v wA, wC v wB. I showed the result of changing the wA v wB and wB v wA scores, but there are 4 more calculations that would affect the overall Glicko scores for this matchup.
(edited by Akaji.1296)
Score affects the magnitude of a world’s rating change – e.g. losing by 10,000 score will reduce your world’s rating more than losing by 1,000 score. Source.
The OP’s complaint is largely unfounded; score matters regardless of who wins.
That said, this does bring up a good point: information is not readily available for players in WvW. I’d like to see a tab in the new WvW window (which is an excellent addition!) called ‘Help’, ‘WvW Information’, or something similar. This tab should have
- general information about WvW – “What is it?”, “How do I participate?”, “Why are there 4 battlegrounds?”, an explanation of the user interface elements, etc.
- specific information about the battlefield – “What is a tower?”, “What is a keep?”, “What is a castle?”, “What are siege weapons?” etc., incl. point-per-period information.
- complex information about WvW – “How is a world’s rating calculated?”, “How does score affect a world’s rating?”, etc.
- (not necessary, but convenient) a list of world rankings.
(Yes, I’m aware that some of this information is available from the WvW training characters, but that isn’t very helpful – it isn’t accessible to fresh players who have never been to WvW and don’t know about it or how to get to it; it doesn’t provide a quick reference; and it lacks a lot of important information like score, rating, etc.)
What are the stats on the average ping? I get that some content is harder if you have a poor ping but if you are the minority I’m sorry but asking for content geared for those with a poor ping is quite selfish.
I’ll have to do some research. I’m sure there’s a bell curve and we can aim for the lump in the middle.
Yes, this. I was just about to suggest the median ping rather than the average.
Pedantic comment: a median is a type of average, as are mean (what most people mean by ‘average’) and mode.
Serious comment: with a data set as large as sampled pings over hundreds of thousands of players, and whose distribution will likely resemble a normal distribution (bell curve), the median and mean will likely be the same.
If there is a problem buffing the boss, maybe other/more mobs could spawn. Dangerous enough to force the players to stop attacking the boss and kill the adds. This would have the same general effect as buffing the boss.
Jormag is a good example of this – the Champions and buffed-up Veterans that spawn can be brutal, and short of a 75+ zerg they’ll need to be managed to some extent.
I also like that Jormag isn’t an auto-attack encounter (in fact, anyone standing on the ridge auto-attacking Jormag during phase 2 is a dirty filthy leecher). Instead of smacking him upside the head for 20 minutes, you need to deal with the Ice Pillars (and roaming Champions) in order to efficiently damage him.
I’d like to see encounters altered to have more elements like this. Here are some ideas off the top of my head that would make the fights at least somewhat more interesting. I didn’t give them much thought, so I’m not asking for this verbatim or anything silly like that…
- Great Jungle Wurm – lengthen the battle by increasing HP, adding 3 phases where the Wurm retreats mostly underground (taking 10% damage) and Vets/Champs (depending on scale) spawn and must be killed. Basically, turn it into what SB is now, but with Vets/Champs instead of portals and normals, and don’t ever make a boss invulnerable (that’s not a fun mechanic IMO, though Jormag’s wall is a good way of doing it in a less obvious manner).
- Shadow Behemoth – encourage players to spread out by having SB create Dark Altars (basically pillars) in a pentagon (SB = occult = pentacle) around him that greatly reduce damage taken, e.g. 5 altars with 20% damage reduction each (if all 5 are up, SB takes 0 damage). Scale altar spawn rate significantly with # of players, scale altar health to a smaller extent with # of players (don’t make them obnoxious 2 minute fights! It should be more of a “notice and kill” mechanic, not “notice and spend a lot of time whacking on it”).
- Frozen Maw – utilize the frozen waterfall behind the Shaman by giving him a second phase, e.g. he retreats (leaps or teleports) towards the waterfall and turns into a dragon or draconic creature. Scale phase 2 health a large amount, and add more dodge elements (e.g. falling ice shards, chilled ground, PBAoE ice spikes, etc.).
- tl;dr – basically anything that strongly encourages players to attack something other than the boss, but not necessarily things that prevent players from attacking the boss.
I don’t really understand people using one finger for dodge+jump. I find it much easier to use my pointer finger on ‘V’ (dodge) and thumb on ‘Space’ (jump); I have a nearly 100% success rate doing this. While I use ‘A’ as my move forward (ASZD instead of WASD), it should be possible to use your ring finger to press ‘W’ so that you can use pointer+thumb for dodge+jump.
While being able to bind it to one key would be convenient, I dislike the idea. Convenience and ease-of-use is one goal of user interface design, but it isn’t the only one. At times, it is a good idea to intentionally make certain parts of user interaction more difficult. Take, for example, Street Fighter II – if you only had to press one button to perform the most difficult moves, the game would be pointless. Obviously, GW2 isn’t a fighting game or a game that necessarily needs to have complex button sequences, but I think that the difficult of dodge-jumping is a Good Thing.
For the record I have it bound to 1 button on my Razer mouse. No delay needed, just Jump (down/up) then Dodge (down/up).
I found it was too iffy jump-dodging when it’s needed most, and accidentally rolling to my death is not fun.
This is explicitly against ANet’s macro policy.
P.S. Devon, can you give me a VALID reason to get rid of something like this? I’d appreciate it.
I can give you one. It gives one class an unfair advantage over another using something that shouldn’t be affecting it to begin with. Though I’d like for them to give immobilizing arrows to arrow carts as skill #4…would be nice.
Warriors are already at a severe disadvantage in large-scale WvW battles – we have extremely limited utility, even when specced heavily into it, and our DPS is bottom-of-the-pack at range (melee is suicide in large battles since we have so few escapes and condition removals). Is it fair to us to lose one of the very few advantages we have? I enjoy defending, and Leg Specialist is literally the only reason I take my Warrior into WvW instead of my venomshare Thief (or any other character).
I desperately hope that ANet will provide Warriors with much more utility, even if it means that 100b Power scaling or Forceful Greatsword (the primary reasons our PvE DPS is overpowered) get nerfed. If that happened, I’d be okay with Leg Specialist no longer affecting carts.
The forums white background gives me motion sickness.
Now that you mention it, I do notice some uneasiness with the stark white background.
An easy fix would be to get Greasemonkey – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/ – and write a simple script to set the background color to be slightly off-white. Here’s an example (you could use this as the script, or alter the ‘rgb()’ values as you like):
// ==UserScript==
// @name GW2 Forum Background Color Changer
// @description Makes GW2 forum stop burning my eyes out.
// @include http*://*.guildwars2.com/forum*
// ==/UserScript==
document.getElementById("content").backgroundcolor="rgb(250,250,250)";
Is it intended that the Karma Reward Boxes from doing the new Living Story missions be empty? It seems they do provide a Karma boost, but it’s confusing that there is nothing inside the box, and no indication that ‘consuming’ the box will provide Karma and nothing else.
Trust me your just better off using magic find boosts and/or food because when I had magic find gear with consumables it gave me about 150% and within 2 hours I got a bunch of claws and no corrupted lodestones. Then I farmed with my ranger who only had 80% from a magic find booster and omnomberry bar. After 2 hours I had 4 lodestones, I think the more magic find you build the game just cheats you.
This one time I had 0% Magic Find and I found a charged lodestone. Then this other time I had 50000% Magic Find and I didn’t find a charged lodestone! Obviously Magic Find is bugged and cheats you!
That’s not how statistics works.
I am not 100% sure, but I think John Smith dismissed the 0,9 ectos per try.
He did not. He has very consistently maintained his (and presumably ANet’s) policy of not providing information about specific game mechanics except in extenuating circumstances.
When asked for exact numbers, or to confirm ballpark numbers, or even to provide any semblance of information on if BLSK provides Ecto rates than other kits, he has stated that policy and provided no information.
Edit: he does sometimes provide information about the game (e.g. ‘can this happen?’: yes|no, ‘did this change?’: yes|no), and even gets a bit snarky, but it is his policy to not explain the specific mechanics of the game.
(edited by Akaji.1296)
It’s late so forgive me if I make any mistakes.
That is a very interesting argument. Here are my counter-points (abbreviating to EMH):
1. This is a big one, there are no efficient markets with EMH, the EMH doesn’t really hold up in reality. Ever seen the revenue a good high frequency trader makes, even in the most highly traded markets?
Seconding this. My father has spent >30 years working as an ORMS professor and business consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and rejects almost the entirety of the efficient-market hypothesis due to its premise that people can be rational (optimal) actors.
All of the research and consulting he has done has led him to conclude that not only are people not rational actors on average, but people are overwhelmingly and exceedingly irrational (suboptimal) actors on average – and that the standard deviation on most measures of irrationality across a population is very small (i.e. almost everyone acts irrationally almost all of the time).
My job isn’t necessarily to prevent swings, it’s to know what they will be ahead of time, and make sure the swings will be predictable and understandable.
Are there multiple people in charge of that, or that dedicate a significant amount of their work effort towards it? It seems like a lot to handle for a single individual (and IIRC you have many other responsibilities as well) given the market size and the relative difficulty of predicting human (i.e. usually irrational/sub-optimal, but sometimes brilliant) behavior.
(edited by Akaji.1296)
So this got really long…
TL;DR – you underestimate the TP. By ‘you’, I mean me, you, and everyone else. I bet even the devs most focused on the TP have trouble really grokking the scope of this beast.
You bring up a very good point, CassieGold. I think part of the issue here may be that it’s difficult to grasp just how much of an impact a server-independent marketplace has.
In WoW, it was common to see undercutting, commodity gaming, crafted items sell for less than the materials’ value, etc. Yet WoW’s Auction House was server-dependent – when I listed something for sale, only players on my server could see the item. In late 2008, WoW had about 9.1M players spread across 236 realms — an average of only 38,559 players per realm.
Contrast that with Guild Wars 2. Every single player has access to the exact same Trading Post. 3 months ago, ArenaNet announced a total sales figure of 3 million units.
Presumably that number has increased, but I will use that number for ease. Obviously, not every player is active; while the same could be true of WoW, the existence of a monthly fee for that game would seem to reduce the number of players that hold an active account but are inactive in play. For simplicity and a conservative estimate, let’s assume that only 20% of those who purchased GW2 are currently playing.
This results in 600,000 people having access to the TP at any given time. That’s 15.56x the average number of players per server in WoW. If 50% of GW2 sales have resulted in currently-active accounts, that number increases to 1,500,000 people – 38.9x WoW’s average server population! And this is using GW2 sales numbers that are 3 months old.
If an average of only 500 people (0.000833~% of 600,000) are farming Skritt bags at a rate of 1 bag/minute (low estimate?), that means that 720,000 Skritt bags enter the market per day on average. (Keep in mind that I’m talking about the average number of players – this figure doesn’t need 500 players doing this all day long, but only needs the total average to be 500, which is not very unreasonable).
Edit: I forgot to bring up another point I meant to put in here. The Trading Post in GW2 is extremely convenient.
In WoW (and other MMOs), you generally had to go to an Auction House person, do a fair bit of legwork to figure out current prices – in the beginning, you even had to calculate the price-per-unit from a stack (e.g. a stack of 20 items at 20c/ea. would list its price as “4s” and not give you the per-unit price).
In GW2, however, not only can all players access the TP from anywhere in the world and list items despite being nowhere near a Black Lion representative, the interface itself provides a lot of very useful information. First off, all items are ‘known’ quantities: the TP itself acts as a sort of visual database of all tradeable items in the game – you don’t have to do much guesswork.
On top of that, when looking at an item you can get a quick view of all buy orders and sell orders (in WoW, there were no buy orders, and it could take minutes to walk through the pages of sales for a single item to figure out where the ‘true’ market price point was).
All of this convenience almost definitely drives a lot more people to interact with the TP. I know I certainly do – in WoW I played the AH, but it was a pain and I didn’t do it much. In GW2, I struggle to get away from the TP some days because it’s easy and fascinating for me – as well as profitable. While it certainly could be even more intuitive (I’d like to see a full buy/sell list when you’re in the “list item” interface, and I think it’s imperative that the listing fee be deducted from the “expected profit” total – so many people don’t realize that it isn’t, and are screwed over as a result!), it’s an excellent system that draws people in.
tl;dr - the TP is craaaaaazy. Playing the TP really makes you realize this; you can leave an item alone for half a day and find that you’ve been undercut (or outbid) by hundreds or thousands of other players!
(P.S. if any ANet staff reads this comment, I’d love to see some real numbers if you’re able to share them! I’d really be interested in the overall TP trade volume per day – my guess is it’s in the tens or hundreds of millions.)
(edited by Akaji.1296)
It’s important to consider the effects of announcements and patches on the game’s economy.
In 10 days from January 17 to January 27, the price increased dramatically (3000c to 3800c). Why?
January 16:
- Announcement that world transfers will end, and the introduction of guesting. Result is transfer en masse, increased focus on WvWvW to ‘boost’ servers (lookin’ at you, Kaineng), reduced focus on PvE.
January 17/18: transcript of Jan. 17 developer interview which announced:
- Removal of rez rushing in dungeons. Players could expect reduced ability to obtain rares/exotics as a result of harder and more time-consuming dungeons.
- General AoE ability nerf. Also reduces drops due to reducing players’ ability to ‘tag’ tons of enemies and become eligible loot from all of them, e.g. from Cursed Shore farm train.
- Misc. comments about rebalancing, increasing dungeon difficulty, adding or improving alternative routes to get gear (presumably that gear would not require Ectos as that route has already been explored extensively).
Dev announcements and patches have a very noticeable impact on TP prices, and the trend that begins when an announcement/patch is made tends to become stable until the next announcement/patch is made.
This isn’t an issue of ‘returning to a previous price’ because the reasons aren’t the same – that it is currently about the same price is not due to a return to past conditions, but the introduction of new conditions that have a similar effect as past conditions did. That’s an important distinction because it shows that the changes they make (and imply) do impact the TP in a significant way.
Also – I’d argue that the pre-Jan. 17 price point was majorly impacted by market oversaturation due to Wintersday events (esp. Snowflake exploit) and that the Feb. price of ~3900c was the ‘real’ value of Ectos prior to the most recent patch that significantly increased Ecto acquisition rates.
Some days ago there was some sales in the bag expansion slots and bank expansion slots i bought 2 bag expansion slots and 1 bank expansion slots and i didnt get any of them i lost 22 of GOLD. Now everytime i login i do 1 bug report and i will do it until i get or my money back or the 3 expansion slots i bought so i hope you can do something arenanet!!!
Does this really belong here? Regardless, did you try clearing out your in-game mailbox?
@CassieGold
Witness the fact that they just ‘upped’ the loot tables. I’ve seen a lot of speculation about what that might mean for this or that market – I suspect it will have no effect at all, It just makes people feel better.
…
I’m speculating of course, based on what I would do if asked to create a trading game. Maybe I’m wrong – it really doesn’t matter, but Occam’s razor makes me suspect a ‘con’.
Ecto prices have dropped by approx. 24% since the patch (1 day avg. 3665.90c/ea on Feb. 24; 1 day avg. 2787.24c/ea on March 6), but are stabilizing. Most rares have dropped in the range of 10-50+%, but are still volatile.
The trend for Ectos is a small negative slope, and I expect them to stabilize at about or slightly above 2750c/ea. Ignoring future changes that affect Ecto supply/demand, I see no reason that this new price point would change significantly beyond normal trade fluctuation.
For reference, Ectos previously had a stable price point at around 3900c from Feb. 2 to ~Feb. 18, when news of improved drop rates for Rares created a rush to sell. The real trauma hit on Feb. 27-28 (the 2 days after the patch; note that the patch was late on Feb. 26, so Feb. 27 was the first full day for people to experience the new drop rates), when there was a so-far-permanent drop of 500c/ea.
Re: Occam’s Razor — you misunderstand the concept. Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate: “Plurality must never be posited without necessity”. Reasoned explanations – i.e. those with both evidence and simplicity – may be accepted for the sake of practice despite possible inaccuracies in the absence of necessity. However, when multiple reasoned explanations exist, it is a necessity to examine the plurality and obtain more evidence until it can be reasoned that a single explanation may be accepted for the sake of practical action. This is, of course, situation dependent: sometimes you need very high accuracy and must examine all theories extensively (e.g. launching a rocket to the moon); others, you need to act quickly on one theory, even at the cost of accuracy (e.g. time-sensitive military operations).
Occam’s Razor is not a proof, and does not lend weight to an argument. It lends weight to the practical acceptance (not truth) of a theory with evidence against theories without evidence (theories that do not necessitate examination).
OK, I’ll explain in detail.
This game is a computer program. It’s designed to simulate many aspects of reality. One of those aspects is a ‘market’. Players are presented with the illusion of a trading system and allowed to buy/sell goods apparently to each other.
…
It’s a lot easier and requires far less code, to simply use a set of RNGs to determine the supply of goods and prices. If I were asked to do it I would simply insert dummy trades into the game in order to source/sink goods and keep available the items that players need while quietly removing junk.
The obvious signs of something like that would be for example, the ready sales of scrap items and bags that sell on the market consistently for more than their content value. Again, the fact that exotic armour, weapons and trinkets are always available at prices less than the cost of crafting. (Before someone objects that you get XP ‘profit’ from crafting, I’ll just add that it’s across the board – EVERYTHING you need is available – even if nobody in their right mind would craft it.)
I don’t want to spoil the game of course – but it IS a game. Smoke and mirrors. :-)
PS 20 years a programmer. lol!
Amusing theory, but you’re mistaken and seem to have a poor understanding of market forces. Markets are not rational – people are, on the whole, really ‘dumb’ (irrational and easy to manipulate). I include myself in this statement, though being aware of certain sales tactics does help a person avoid being sucked in by them.
One of the most fundamental mistakes you can make about a market is to assume that its participants are rational beings.
If you put something on sale for 15% off, you’d expect people to be much more interested than if it were on sale for 9.97% off – but whoops, it turns out people take more notice of the 9.97% sale (due to overexposure — desensitization — to a common sale figure like 15%), and you end up both having a better margin and selling more product. And then you try putting some designer clothes on sale for 9.97% – and sales plummet for that item because a fashion-centric mindset despises ‘sale’ items as cheap or out-of-vogue. So you increase the sticker price of those clothes by 15% over the base price and you get more sales than you originally did!
Those are real-world examples, where something of much greater value than virtual gold is exchanged – i.e. physical cash or virtual money paid through a card or check (sidenote, people are generally much less willing to spend money when using cash as opposed to check, and check as opposed to card). If people are irrational with the item of basest value in their life (money), imagine how terrible gamers are with the essentially value-less gold that they have.
When it comes to individuals playing a game, the time-value of money is all but forgotten. Instead of investing in a long sale, players offload their items for below the ‘true’ market value of the item. Instead of putting in a buy order at a much lesser price, players are willing to pay inflated prices to get things now. Instead of being rational and investing their money in slow-but-certain gains, they’ll gamble on containers because they just might get lucky (combine that with my previous point and you have people wanting to gamble right now, leading to containers sometimes selling for more than they’re worth).
So where does all of this irrationality leave us? With no indication whatsoever that there is any TP-gaming code in the game. In fact, with my >10k purchases and >6k sales (according to the log) over just the past three weeks, I’d argue that there is almost definitively no TP-gaming code in the game. You mention that you think ‘needed’ goods will be kept at a reasonable price for players – having intentionally forced hundreds of those ‘needed’ goods from 5% above vendor price to over 600% above vendor price, and kept them that way for weeks while raking in money, I strongly disagree.
Source: 12 years a programmer. lol! It doesn’t matter for this topic.
Real source: father is a very respected ORMS professor and has been a business forecast consultant for Fortune 500 companies (Guidant/Boston Scientific, Medtronic, Best Buy, 3M, IBM, etc.) since before I was born. He’s taught me about forecasting, economics, management, and market forces since before I could walk, no matter how often I told him I wasn’t interested… and he got me interested as a result.
that’s a notification program, not a bot. a bot would go one step further: take those notifications and place bids for you. I expect it’s that human bidding component that makes that notification program legal.
According to ANet’s official statements, any 3rd party program that makes the game easier or allows you to do things faster isn’t allowed.
Of course, that line from them is really a catch-all: my mouse driver makes the game easier and lets me do things faster than people who don’t have mice (or whose driver isn’t as good). Pretty much anything running on your computer at any given time that affects the game in any way violates that rule, so it’ll be up to ANet’s whim whether or not that sort of thing leads to the banhammer.
Heck I play Necro and engineer as main, and they prolyl have the worse downed state in game.
Re: Necros – maybe in 1v1, but in large-scale fights I’ve found that my Necro has probably the best chance of getting himself back up or staying alive long enough to be revived. Having the #1 skill be a channeled lifesteal that outpaces the downed timer (and can often outpace enemies’ damage so long as they don’t focus on you – i.e. AoE damage) is pretty amazing, even despite the relatively lackluster #2 skill.
FWIW Josh, the existence of jumping puzzles and hard-to-reach vistas is awesome, and is part of what sets GW2 apart for me – optional challenges that don’t revolve around some silly gimmick (e.g. “I’m on a horse and I have to press ‘X’ at the right time, 10 times over, once per day for 20 days, to get a special reward – I’m having so much fun I can barely contain myself from jumping out of my seat and never coming back to this game!”) or just fighting some bad guys.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve gotten to a hard-to-reach place in other games, only to be completely disappointed because there’s nothing there. I love exploring, but few games give you an incentive to do it, so hurrah to you and everyone else involved!
I would flippin’ love to see a CCG-like minigame added to GW2. The card games (and rewards) were a huge part of why I liked FF8 and loved FF9.
Plus, it could tie into the Gem Store as a moneymaker for ANet (not that I want it to, but if they need a monetary incentive…) – let people earn points towards booster packs by winning games against people (with a limit on the number of points you can get against the same person), but also allow purchasing booster packs (limited per day to avoid pay-to-win?).
Warrior’s not the fastest (by far – no 25% speed signet), but I love throwing up Swiftness (warhorn skill) and then using the Greatsword’s 3 and 5 skills (Whirlwind Attack, Rush) to cover 2k+ distance in under 2 seconds.
(edited by Akaji.1296)
Somehow, its much harder to prove that you “can’t” rather than you “can” manipulate the market. Coming from a scientific perspective ofc. And ofc there will be some people who can’t resist the limelight and say that it can does work. :p
Hah – you just presented a dichotomy and then said that one side was easier to prove than the other, which is literally impossible. For any true dichotomy, i.e. “P XOR Q”, proving or disproving either operand disproves or proves the other.
To put it simply: proving that you can manipulate the market disproves the claim that you can’t manipulate the market, while proving that you can’t manipulate the market disproves the claim that you can manipulate the market. Proving either disproves the other, so there is no difference in difficulty between the two!
/logic!
P.S. any system relying primarily on human input can be manipulated, e.g. a free market system like the TP. What’s debatable is the degree.
/pedant!
(edited by Akaji.1296)
I’m having this issue at 1360×768/“Small” interface as well.
What’s particularly bad is that I almost need to have the interface size set at “Small”, otherwise the chat window is moved upwards to accommodate the skill bar. When it’s a good 1/4 of the way up the screen, it interferes with the party window and pretty much makes the left 1/4th of my screen opaque… I find myself swinging my view back and forth to make sure nothing’s approaching me from the left, and it’s a bit dizzying.
Edit: ANet, would it be possible to remove the TP window from the set of items that are scaled? That would provide at least a temporary fix for the issue.
I disagree with the OP. I just did a quick search on the interweb and I could not find one TP bot out there that can do the undercutting that is suspected.
The only bots out there are the run around ones that get the ask price on the TP when they are dumping mats/items.
So you are not seeing bots. You are seeing real live people that are undercutting you.
Not all bots are sold/publicly known (I’d guess that most aren’t).
It wouldn’t be difficult to write a bot that does what the OP is seeing. Given a couple weeks (and no responsibilities/FT job), I’m sure I could write something that not only mimics this behavior, but does it in a manner that isn’t nearly as transparent (e.g. not always making the same number of orders, emulating human-like response times, etc).
It wouldn’t even be particularly difficult to do it in a way that couldn’t be caught by any bot-detection software that isn’t particularly advanced (it would require some impressive pattern detection to find a bot that tries to emulate human behavior in a small, closed system like GW2’s trading post).
IMO, ANet probably ought to implement a simplified captcha system for TP transactions.
Not that I would EVER make such a bot, or encourage anyone to try to create their own (seriously, don’t – there’s a special place in hell reserved for people who bot/make bots, and you REALLY don’t want to be stuck in the same place as people who talk in theaters). Cheating ruins games for me, and only a complete kitten of a programmer would intentionally damage someone’s non-malicious product – especially a video game.
shouldn’t /taunt be the universal “let’s duel” lingo??? (I have seen that in a JP before)
I think that’s the universal “please grind my face into the dirt” signal.
I can give multiple reasons (some/all of which have been stated already) of why having a healer in GW2 is a bad idea. […]
- It is advertised as a game without distinct roles so to differ from that would cause legal cases (comics are still up displaying Anets view on Healers.)
I doubt that there would be any chance of a legal case being in any way successful against ANet (settlement or otherwise). Even if we don’t discuss law and court tradition on cases relating to art and artistic license, a lawsuit against a manufacturer would need to show fundamental deviation from the promised product, which that wouldn’t show. If they promised a video game and they gave you tax preparation software, then you’d have a case…
All I have to say to the OP is this: learn to dodge, learn when to stop attacking, learn when to back off. Most non-trivial encounters are designed in such a way that simply standing still and hacking away at the enemy will not work – and it’s not just that a boss will occasionally use his ‘gimmick’ and you need to deal with that (a la WoW), but that the entire fight is usually ripe with opportunities to avoid or reduce damage.
One poster mentioned that skills in GW1 were built “like a stack of cards”. I have to completely agree with him on that one, and I’m moderately disappointed by the relative lack of skill customization in GW2. That said, we should keep in mind that vanilla GW1 didn’t have nearly as many skills as it did after the expansions began coming out, and the options for truly unique builds weren’t very prevalent until then.
I do wish that the GW2 team would open up slots 6 and 10 for utility skills in addition to the ability to contain healing/elite skills. I’m also hopeful that the expansions will have a lot of new skills – and maybe even that we’ll see some new skills added in pre-expansion patches.
Simple solution to make everyone happy: level 80 legendaries don’t scale, but can be used as an optional component in the creating of level 90 legendaries to greatly reduce the investment required to make the level 90 legendary.
OR they could just stop adding anything to their game, because all people seem to be able to do is whine about everything that changes.
The title pretty much says it all – does ArenaNet tolerate some macro use, and if so what restrictions are there?
I am of course not talking about anything that automates the game for you, as that would constitute botting, which I know is not allowed (which is good).
Could we get some guidelines on what’s allowed, or a statement of what’s explicitly disallowed?
A few examples of things I’d like to macro (using AHK):
- Some elements of chat, e.g. a macro that types /say Revive me!
- Certain command sequences, e.g. target nearest, press key 1 (autoattack)
- Certain click sequences, e.g. click salvage kit, click slot X, click salvage kit, click slot X + 1, … (this might be pushing the limits of acceptability? I don’t know for certain, hence this thread)
Thanks in advance.