Guild Wars 2

Problem: Screen flickers to desktop during loading screens, most notably during initial loading. I found this video that demonstrates my issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgAImXHQil0. The flickering would also happen during ingame loading screens but it was much shorter and only had 1 – 2 flickers.

I think this started when I got the Windows 10 Creator’s Update a few months ago but I can’t remember exactly. I got a new graphics card a few days ago and updated the drivers, the problem existed on both my old card and the new one. Both Nvidia cards.

After reading an old thread today I changed the compatibility mode to Vista SP2 and the flickering stopped but the game was noticeably slower to reach the character select, but there was no significant difference between the in-game loading speeds at least.

Any other potential solutions that doesn’t compromise performance? I want to continue playing in full screen.

I have noticed that the creator’s update is causing issues in general (e.g the other annoying issue I have – not keeping colour profiles, so that when I alt tab out of a full screen game my display settings revert) so maybe these issues will resolve itself with the next major Windows update coming in a few months.

As someone who has started up Gw1 recently to get HoM, it’s ridiculously easy to get 10 HoM. I’d say the most off-putting thing for me personally was spending a non-insignificant amount of $$ to buy 10 year old games rather than the time spent.

As for not having people to play with, that’s clearly a personal preference thing – I thoroughly enjoy not having to rely on others for the actual gameplay content I need to do. Of course… its the opposite as far as trading goes.

Is someone attempting to fix this? Because over night all the listings + buy offers in my screenshot (even the low 1g ones) are gone and have been replaced by a single 1800g bid.

I made a thread a few weeks ago about this in the API subforum but I think the problem goes beyond the API so I’ll post it here too.

This item (Ghastly grinning shield, ID 36332 – the actual shield, not the skin) has been bugged for over a year now. It does not show up on the trading post unless you untick the “Only show available” filter despite there being shields available.

Here is a link to an imgur album showing the bug ingame in action.

The sell listings aren’t tracked by third party sites (comment courtesy of a redditor):

“the commerce API returns “no such id” for 36332. That is the reason they don’t show up on the sites you mentioned. According to the API it doesn’t exist.”

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/36332
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/36332-Ghastly-Grinning-Shield
https://www.gw2tp.com/item/36332-ghastly-grinning-shield

The rest of the halloween items are working as intended.

Ellieanna.5027:

Jysoul Qualik.9284:

Ping is 800 to 1600 (Australia)

No issue with local cable as performance with any other site or online game does not experience latency like GW2.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

You can use a program like Pingplotter to find out where the issue lies.

Good luck.

That’s great and all except 99/100 of the time it’s completely out of our control to do anything about it. It’s rarely our ISP, it’s rarely Anet’s servers, it’s some node just before Anet’s servers. This time for me its dallas1 level3 databank or some crap.

From Aus here, had 1.5k ping while raiding last night. It’s ridiculously unstable right now if you’re from my area and with Telstra ISP. Ping is 350 at a minimum during peak times (usually 198 – 220), and it jumping all over the place from anywhere between 350 – 1.5k.

They already brought them back several times. You can get them via the mystic toilet.

A comment on the reddit thread I made:

“39173 is the old PvP weapon so that is normal.

You might want to post this on https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/community/api since the commerce API returns “no such id” for 36332. That is the reason they don’t down up on the sites you mentioned. According to the API it doesn’t exist."

Actually, I just noticed that another ‘Ghastly Shield’ has item ID: 39173. Eg. https://www.gw2tp.com/item/39173-ghastly-grinning-shield

Is this part of the problem?
edit: seems that’s the old PVP skin?

Lawton Campbell.8517:

The vendor value of item 36332 is 0, which AFAIK makes the item implicitly untradeable. I believe the API is correct (and attempts to purchase it via the TP should fail, regardless of what the UI displays).

You canpurchase and sell it on the TP though. The item was re-released with other halloween weapon versions of skins such as Scythe Staff and Greatsaw and these skins work fine on the TP and on the API; they show up on the TP correctly and their history can be tracked accurately via API.

I feel like either this item has been given the wrong ID or the vendor value wasn’t updated when this item was put back into the game. Either way, its not working like the other halloween weapons despite being tradeable.

This album has a few pictures of the item ingame: http://imgur.com/a/d47Hr

First pic shows what happens when you search for ghastly shield with ‘only show available ticked’
Second pic shows the same but with ‘only show available’ unticked.
First pic shows that there are shields available, and yes, you can buy/sell.

This probably should be in the bug forum – but it has been bugged for a long time now and I don’t have great hopes posting it there.

I’m not sure if this is the right place or whether it’d be better suited to the bug forum.

Ever since this item was made available again through the forge though it hasn’t shown up on the TP or API as it should. This item has listings available, but none of the third party tools that track TP items show any correct information about the item, that is its history and its availability/sell listings.

It also does not show on the TP ingame though unless you untick ‘only show available items’ even though there are three listings of the item on the TP, which means this may need to be in the bug forum instead.

It seems like some IDs are messed up or something and that a lot of the third party sites are tracking a previous incarnation of this item.

TP tracking site links from the wiki for this item
http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/36332
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/36332-Ghastly-Grinning-Shield
https://www.gw2tp.com/item/36332-ghastly-grinning-shield

Good start for me, 5/10 placement matches had DCs (4 on my team, 1 on enemy). Won 1/4 of the DC matches, we were ahead on all 4 of them, confident we would have won 3/4 of them if no DCs.

Other highlights:
- Thief, Mes, Guard, Druid, Engi (Me) Comp. Nobody goes home, all go to mid. 4 end up going to far, 3 following 1 other there. Lost home, mid, but won far!
- Winning ~484 – 481. We own home, they own far, 3 of them capping mid, 3 of our guys dead and respawning. 1 other hanging between mid/far. Me on mid delay cap for as long as possible for respawns. I die at 492 – 489 making it 492 – 494. The 3 respawns (run right past home) + the 4th member ALL go far. Our home gets decapped, they get mid ofc, and we get far as the game ends. Lost 500 – 493. Those dopes were running 1by1 into mid all game.

I agree with:

- Removing the MF vendor items
- Adding the base grandmaster mark materials such as vabbian silk, carbonized ingot, etc as they are very similar to their deldrimor steel ingot, etc counterparts.

Everything else is fine as is. I disagree with the many tomes of knowledge requests – stick it in your bank, consume them on 80s, or use them on lowbies. A lot of us will already be gaining additional bank space from this update.

Chalk up another victim. Hard to get the IP of the map when we disconnect before we get onto it! As others have said, it’s occurring when changing characters onto the same map (but unsure if same IP) or a different map entirely. Just had a couple in a row prior to making this post. From Aus here, and I’ve had it in DR, LA and Bitterfrost.

I had this problem a couple of times almost a year ago. It is usually to do with a connection in your computer that is loose/faulty and is failing under stress. The buzzing sound from speakers usually indicates a hardware problem. I would try reseating the GPU and the RAM, but also clean the dust of your computer in particular your heatsinks.

For me, it was reseating my RAM that fixed the problem.

Any achievement hunters here keen to farm some of the achievements you can farm with 2 people? The game is pretty dead and most games are a joke these days unfortunately. Some of the achievements are also very difficult to get legitimately anyway.

Mainly looking at Interceptions, Fumbles Caused/Steals (Can do these both at once) and recoveries if we can get 3 people.

Preferably in the dead hours to reduce the impact on other players (not that they stay for long).

Hit me up.

Another bug introduced with the new patch somehow.

Now if I am the only person playing the game and I die, the game doesn’t end, it keeps going until the entire 15 minutes run out and I am left as a Mist Walker as if there is another player around still surviving, even though there isn’t. Up until before this patch the game would end if the only person playing died.

Even with other people the game is now not ending properly.

I’m posting this for a laugh more than anything because I know the chances of it getting fixed are lower than me getting a precursor today… but…

At the start of the game if you get killed immediately (which everyone likes to do – even after you’ve asked them to refrain from doing so because of this bug), you often won’t get any credit for games played. I’ve read some things about needing to be near the campfire at the start of the game for game credit to count – but there have been games where I’ve been killed, hit respawn to respawn at campfire, and even then been automatically respawned inside the camp near the campfire – and no game played credit. Other times you get respawned at the north or south camp – and no game played credit.

Extremely annoying and honestly everyone should be invulnerable until the game has actually started and the immobilised is removed.

Another Ghastly shield is up on the TP as of today. 1499g. Still need to untick ‘only show available’ to see it though.

Malediktus.3740:

They are more rare than precursors, at least a whole magnitude (eg at least 10 times more rare) of more rare. If that wouldnt be the case the price would have dropped to 100g or less alrady considering how many precursors get pulled out per day.

Well, while I think you’re exaggerating re: they’d drop to 100g, you could be right that they are much rarer. It’s hard to tell because regardless of rarity, the prices are going to conform to what their skin counterparts are. eg. compare greatsaw item being ~793g to scythe being ~3599g. That’s going to be the main factor in determining their price currently.

You’d have to think their drop rates aren’t equal and Anet carefully chose them based on their current prices and supply in the game (the skins) . Even considering the differences in demand, 793g vs 3599g and 12 supply vs 2 supply says different drop rates to me.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Just because two were put up for sales in the last couple months doesn’t prove they still drop from the forge.

Players do hold on to skins and then sell them later. I just sold, last week, some Holographic Dragon Wings I’ve been holding onto for years.

I’m guessing they haven’t been put back, yet.

That’s a good point you make but honestly I think it’s unlikely. I believe the various factors I’ve raised is enough to make sense of the very low supply. I could be wrong, there are aspects of the item that are buggy.

Roquen.5406:

How do you know if 2 were sold in the last few weeks if you can’t track it? I am aware that you can uncheck to show what has shown up on the TP but that doesn’t mean there are any actually on the TP. I’ve checked sporadically and as I said before I haven’t seen one since they were first “leaked”. And there were many showing up.

I’ve seen 2 posted and they were sold. The highest was 1195g. The other was ~1100g, not sure on exact prices. There were never ‘many showing up’ for the actual shield item. There were only ever a few on the TP at most. In fact I check it every day and I’ve only ever seen more than 1 listed at once.

Roquen.5406:

As for your other points…I find it highly unlikely that the reason it’s not showing up is because it’s broken on the API. Plenty of people forge every day, both shields, and four random weapons. Both of those would have a chance to spit out the shield.

You misunderstood. The reason it’s not showing up on third party sites is because of broken API; not why the item isn’t being posted on the TP.

As for plenty of people forging shields… to the same extent as GS and staffs? Well, this all conjecture, but I’m going to bet it’s not even close. Not even remotely close, actually. And four random weapons means a much larger pool of possible results. It’s probably as rare as a precursor, and is a weapon type that isn’t as regularly forged as others. Hence the rarity.

Roquen.5406:

In the 2 years since it’s been “added”, there haven’t been any since the that first week from what I can tell. Not to mention the fact that the ghastly grinning shield skin keeps going up. If there was a steady supply feeding in then it would stabilize at some point much like the other skins are.

This is why I question if it actually still drops. What you are saying and what we see on the trading post does not add up.

I’m not sure where you’re getting your 2 year number from. I think they did try to add them some time ago and it was buggy and then earlier this year in April they re-released them earlier than intended. The third party sites still attempt to track the original ghastly shield item rather than the re-released one, and even the re-released one is bugged because even when some are posted on the TP it shows the supply as 0 unless you actually click on the item.

Anyway you’re just repeating yourself now. There is no steady supply of them coming in, correct. The supply is very low; and and unless Anet buff the drop rate it will always be so low that it will not effect the shield skin price, due to the reasons stated above.

Yes, it still drops. Two were posted and sold within the last few months. Correcting my earlier ‘few weeks’, time flies. I think the 1195g one sold some time in September.

Roquen.5406:

Do you have proof of this? Before this change was made known tons of skins flooded the market. I’m talking about the one’s that are masterwork quality with stats, not just a skin. There are still greatsaw skins of that variety but there haven’t been any from the ghastly grinning in quite a while.

Two have sold in the last few weeks. The API for the shield item seems to be completely broken, you can’t track it on any third party site and on the trading post it doesn’t show up even when there are some posted. You have to untick ‘only show available’.

Roquen.5406:

Shortly after a dev acknowledged it was released earlier than intended, the supply seemed to dry up and has been ever since. In fact the regular skin is actually going up. If there was a steady supply I would think that would not be the case…

See above. The skin is available but the API is bugged and thus hidden from the wider community.

The other important fact is this: Not many people forge shields to try and get the shield precursor. The greatsaw and scythe staff have the big advantage of their respective weapon types having popular precursors. People forge greatswords and staffs all the time. Given this the actual Ghastly shield is probably much rarer than the skin itself and may well never have a significant impact on Ghastly shield skin item.

Not sure if this intended or not but now every time I close the client and reopen it my ‘recently viewed’ section on the TP is wiped. This used to only happen after patches previously. Bug or working as intended?

It’s still there it just seems every man and his dog misunderstand that they are 2 separate items. There is the Ghastly Grinning shield skin (H’ween item) and the Ghastly shield (actual shield, from the MF). As for why you can’t find it on the TP, that would be because you have “Only show available” ticked in search filters. There are none on the TP, there were two recently for ~700g and ~999g (can’t remember exactly prices).

It’s rare enough and combined with the fact barely anyone knows about the actual shield item from the MF itself (continually thinking the skin itself comes from the MF), its existence has barely impacted the prices at all since the mass panic dump.

Had this crash a couple of times in the last few weeks. One time was at the Unbound Guardian and the orange circles on the floor became multicoloured tori which was pretty interesting. The other I was alt-tabbed so I missed it.

OS: Windows10
Card: Nvida GTX760

Edit: Googling took me to this thread. I guess this is not only a problem for me, which is good to know..

Was this not done because the split would mean less players in the unranked queue?

It’s just annoying, some of us just want to play Capricorn and don’t give a stuff about playing the old maps that we’ve played 100s of times. As it stands right now, people (including myself) just close the client and do something else for 30 minutes if another map besides Capricorn pops up. Let’s be honest a lot of PVE casuals (also probably including myself) just want to get the achievements too which can make other unranked games frustrating.

It seems silly to have many separate games where 8/10 people vote Capricorn when the Capricorn enthusiasts could just be grouped together.

william dj.6953:

imo these are only half truths. One is it’s extremely easy to get more than an ample supply of keys with minimal farming. Providing the player knows what/how.

I can’t work out whether people are being dishonest about, or genuinely don’t understand, this point. I haven’t touched a pylon in months, why do people keep talking about needing to do pylons, ‘working’ for your keys, lol. Turn up when Challenges start, tag a few of the pre-events, do the meta, and you’ll end up with more currency than you started with even if you open 60 chests.

I found it highly humorous someone saying something to the effect of ’it’s not as bad as if people were opening several Teq chests on different maps’…. it’s basically exactly like that…. except Teq requires less effort and wouldn’t be quite as rewarding to your average player with say 10 or less characters (those chests only have a 5 min timer, I think? assuming for a moment they were lootable on alts).

Asa.3602:

Over a month of AB looting has proved in fact that AB multi map does not affect the economy nor does it break the game and neither is the ability to map hop a glitch. Seriously there is nothing negative about AB looting, IT IS LITERALLY THE SAME AS SILVERWASTE in terms of how it affects the economy. So all the people qq-ing about how AB is breaking the economy look again. Look at how the prices of items ingame has rised and dropped over the last month and you can see that AB is actually stabalizing the tp by generating needed mats such as ectos, the jeweled needed for HoT legendary AND it is providing tons of mithril, elder, and mats in general thus keeping the price nearly the same as it used to be a year ago. Look back on 4 months ago before AB was buffed, EVERYTHING was 2x more expensive than they are now. Legendary was at 4-5k average, and mithril/elder, t3 mat price was popping through the roof. You people might want to observe the economy before throwing random statements around like AB is breaking the economy.

The game is much, much, MUCH bigger than the AB multi farm. There are many other contributing factors to the economy besides this farm. Re a few months ago, correlation is cool and all but there is just so much more to the economy than this farm.

The post above mine… I’m not going to touch that one.

So after being fairly vocal about the issues I saw with this farm earlier in the thread, prior to even trying it but knowing a fair bit about it, I’ve since then been farming it fairly regularly.

The tl;dr version is: it doesn’t take a genius to work out why people farm this frequently get all uppity at the mere mention of possible ‘fixes’. It is very, very good $$/h or even per effort.

Zoltar MacRoth.7146:

That… sounds so much more tedious than I expected, and I was already expecting some tedium. Almost like that grind thing some people complain about. I think if someone’s willing to go through all that, they deserve the loot. Thanks for the investigation, EW.

It is really not tedious at all. It’s actually very basic, and people with an SSD/good connection/good comp (i tick 2/3 of these boxes) can loot many, many chests.

Ryan.6951:

The metas are not needed. You can show up late, cycle all vines, hit 200% for 7 free keys easily. The remainder buy from the vendor. Sure this costs aurilium and a couple of silver. Who cares? The aurilium in my coin wallet slowly increased even while buying keys.

Correct. Now that I’ve done it many times, it’s laughable thinking back to the people in this thread who tried to claim things like ‘but you need to keep doing Pylon events etc so you don’t run out of currency – people have to work for all those keys ‘. You get there when the challenges start, tag a few pre-events at whatever side you’re on, have a successful map, loot, and even if you open 50 chests you will probably end up with +-200 currency from where you started (dependent on what events exactly, + your choice out of that hero’s chest, + how many keys you had left over from last run etc etc). Just to further ram down this point I have approximately the same currency I did when I started, I’ve never done any Pylon events, I’ve done it maybe 30? times, at least 5 of those times I did not even participate in the Octo event, and on average I would say I open 40 grand chests.

The best part (and here is the biggest issue imo) is that I can turn up late and not even participate in the AB meta and loot a good 30 chests or so and not be down on currency overall in the grand scheme of things.

Ryan.6951:

People claiming upwards of 50+ ecto per run are overestimating. At best you can join a group with 8 instances and complete all 40 grands barely before time expires. 40e (avg 1 per rare) per run in a best case with 30e per run on avg, and sometimes less if instances fail or you’re not built for speed.

Incorrect. They are not overestimating, I get over 50 on average when done during the more active times, dependant on how many maps/my luck if I’m on the map that finished first. I’d say my overall average is 40 (I’m in Oceanic timezone) when I’m there on time.

The most grand chests I’ve opened is 69, which netted me 72 globs. 45 – 60 chests is usual for me with 40 – 60 globs. Keep in mind I am only ever in PUG squads, I do not have Excutioner’s axe and I’m only using one ‘fast’ mobile class in Thief, one quite mobile in Ele then a meh in Ranger.

Organised guild squads would most likely be opening a lot more than myself on average.

Ryan.6951:

So the design is that you do a 15-30 mins meta and get 5 guaranteed rares + scraps. You can get 25-35 more by map hopping. That is 6x to 8x as many as intended. If you did the regular meta 8x as fast as possible, 15 mins per run; it would take exactly 2 hours. This method produces the same wealth using 25% of the time, allowing you an advantage in time (90 mins between runs) to do other farms.

I think it actually qualifies as exploitative, so I’ll be stopping. But I do think until you lay it out in these terms it doesn’t really look on the surface like an exploit. Anet really needs to fix it asap though.

Despite my issues with it I still don’t think it’s an exploit, I just think in typical Anet fashion they went from one extreme to another; from being not rewarding enough to being too rewarding. An oversight at first perhaps, I’m not sure.

Oh well… I’m working on a new legendary so… don’t nerf it just yet k? /every other honest person in this thread.

Someone (or a few people) bought out 90 odd shield skins earlier today… I’m not sure why you’d bother, seems like a dumb investment to me. They were struggling to sell for 800g as it is.

I like the idea of a threshold system that Runescape and probably other games use for super rare drops. Basically, the drop rate increases marginally over time (or maybe at set thresholds – I can’t remember) as you open more and more chests. That requires tracking how many chests etc you open though which I’m not sure if Gw2 does currently or not.

eg. say the chance is 1/10000 or something even more ludicrous from opening 12 chests (t4 dailies). Say you open 14 days worth of these chests. the chance then becomes 1/5000. Say then another 2 weeks, 1/2500, and so on and so forth (not necessarily in linear fashion time wise or rate wise either) until it caps after x months/days at some fixed chance like 1/200 or something.

it’s basically meant to be a nice sort of compromise that says “oh look you did 429424912491 fractals and you still have a 1/bazillion chance at tonic, how about for all your hard work we greatly increase your chance of getting it in the future”

ImTasty.2163:

I would assume the reason is for the same reason you can loot noxious pods

but you can’t? Unless they changed this in the April patch, you’ve never been able to loot pods on an alt.

Ugh, it’s really frustrating when misinformation is spread (in both camps) whether unintentionally through ignorance or intentionally through dishonesty.

Harper.4173:

The only thing you are bypassing is the time gate. Instead of having to do another Tarir to get your keys used – you get more with one Tarir.
I honestly don’t see this as a problem. It’s about as bad as gathering mats in different maps.

It’s the same thing as chaining breaches in SW.

Where is the problem?

It’s very different to SW because in SW you still have to participate in any map’s breach/VW you want rewards from. This is a result of AB being on a timer and SW not being on one; you gain access to several map’s rewards that you did nothing to be rewarded for. The chests do not require participation in that map’s events to open. This is the complete opposite of how SW works. Now I know some people are making the argument of ‘you did work for the keys’… once again that is where the April update comes in; you now do considerably less work for much more currency and many more keys; this argument is silly and misleading. You only lose out on currency/keys if you get a particularly good (e.g more maps than usual) run.

SithFire.6193:

Shiyo.3578:

You do not have to do events to get keys. You get your key back per grand chest you open.

How many grand chests can you loot? The last time I did AB, I counted five.

The whole point of this farm is to loot those 5 chests over and over on alts and on different maps. If you’re looting the other chests, you’re doing it very wrong.

Harper.4173:

That aside – how is this an exploit? People are using keys that they earned to get those chests – it’s just that they’re doing it faster – opening more chests per tarir cycle. Nothing else changes.
If they open more – they’re going to run out of keys faster – and need to play more for keys. How is this a problem?

This argument would be valid prior to the April patch.

As a result of the April 19th patch it does not simply mean that you are just speeding up the use of keys. There is an over-abundance of keys and currency rewarded now. You’re not going to run out any time soon unless, as I mentioned earlier, in favourable circumstances. Even then just do 1 AB HP train and you’d cover the loss for many loot farms.

~~~

Someone raised a good point re: the DCing and not being able to loot chests if this were changed. I guess this would only be an issue if you were to DC and not be able to get back into the event before it finished. Honestly though… this is how every other single map works elsewhere in the game? So I’m not sure why AB has to be an outlier. I suppose how it works with the current AB meta is that you miss out on the vital currency and key rewards.

Banchou.5628:

AB was like that before the QoL, the amount of organization for do a successful map made most people avoid it like plague to a point that you depended on big guilds to do one, like TT. So we had a single good map and several fail maps – right now only Chak Gerent is like that since most people hate TD as a whole.

What? We honestly must play different games. Or at least at different times.

I finished the 100 AB meta achieve a couple of months ago and I never once depended on a guild to finish it, I failed maybe 2 – 3 (after the first couple of weeks where we were all learning the event) and a few maps were often successful during prime time. AB meta hasn’t been anything like gerent difficulty/organisation wise since maybe the first couple of weeks of HoT.

SkyShroud.2865:

Now, you extract the data out and highlight the area that interest only you. However, here’s the thing. Since you are looking at the trend itself, can you tell me exactly which point in the trend has a noticeable price increase, from there tell me what is the correlation between pricing and supplies.

Yeah, don’t you just hate it when people actually back up their argument with references and actual numbers instead of just vague guesses and estimations?

What noticeable price increase are you referring to? They’ve been rising steadily for quite some time now.

SkyShroud.2865:

The next Question is
Did you account for the timeline when AB farming becoming widespread? If AB farming were so well-known right from the patch, this post and similar should be there since then but surely, it isn’t.

I would argue the supply rising from 16k to 164k would have had something to do with the AB farm becoming ‘widespread’, two data points I mentioned in my earlier post. My argument, however is that this barely impacted the price at all, and that if the farm didn’t exist, there still would have been plenty of supply (as shown by early data points where the supply rose greatly over a week before the patch) coming in; that hikes in supply are not uncommon in the ecto market and that ultimately these ups and downs in supply don’t change the price of ectos as much as you think they do… clearly shown by looking at the ecto graph for a couple of minutes.

You also seem to be unable to make any sort of point on your own and relying on me to do any sort of research for you.

SkyShroud.2865:

Another question.
How many gw2 players do you think there are? If I say that because of the large gw2 population, supplies and demands can easily fluctuate in ten of thousands easily, do you agree?

You basically just repeated one of my points to me and then asked if I agree…

SkyShroud.2865:

Yet another question
Once you figure out the timeline of the AB widespread popularity, can you look at the trend again and tell me if you see any similar fluctuation like the past? Then, can you tell if it is really a drop in the ocean.

Correlation =/= causation. The AB meta farm is not the only ‘new’ factor in the ecto market right now. The April 19th patch was huge brought lots of players back to the game and introduced new sinks.

And yeah I can tell you a similar fluctuation because I already did. Do you think this AB meta farm was ‘widespread’ 8 days after the April patch? I don’t. Yet as I pointed out in my post, April 18th -> April 27th, supply increase of 97,000.

Here’s a question for you: How many people do you think are participating in this farm each meta? How many ectos per day extra do you think are being generated by this farm each meta compared to how many would have been generated previously by an AB meta. An extra how many per meta, how many per day? How many more do you think it is compared to if people stuck to previous farms such as fotm40/sw chest farm?

SkyShroud.2865:

Precedent. Can you name me some that has multi instance looting and was nerfed?

I was talking about the precedent of nerfing farms in general that Anet deem too much, toxic, or as a result of unintended gameplay. I’ve said previously that in fairness to the AB farm, it hardly creates any toxicity like embers, Queensdale champ train, or Maize Balm farms did. So it has that going for it. We can only speculate on the real reasons these farms were nerfed though. It could be a mixture of the reasons I suggested.

SkyShroud.2865:

Also, you seems to be rather oblivion about the ecto trend. Do you know that ecto supply was halved from 100k to 50k within a week and even drop to as low as 15k at some point before the wide publicity of this farm? You’ve totally overestimated how much ectos were pumped into the market before this farm. One can even argue that this amount of rares were intentionally allowed to prevent ecto from skyrocketing.

Okay, and now for some facts rather than approximating, guessing and going off vague memory.

https://www.gw2tp.com/item/19721-glob-of-ectoplasm
Take the month graph and move the slider down the bottom to include all of April. I think gw2tp takes into account your current timezone so i’ll refer to days only and not specific times.

April 6th 2016
Ecto supply is 27,345
39.94s bid.
47.57s sell.

April 11th 2016
Ecto supply is 100,024. (increased of 72,679 – 8 days prior to the April patch)
40.57s bid.
45.79s sell.

April 18th 2016
Ecto supply is 31,861. (decrease of 68,163 – 1 day prior to the April patch)
43.29s bid.
48.62s sell.

Note that despite there being an extra 4500 supply on April 18th, the bid price is up ~4s and the sell price up ~1s from April 6th. Mostly due to the upcoming April patch, players returning, speculation etc.

April 27th 2016
Ecto supply is 128,633. (supply is now 96,722 higher! over a week after the April patch)
44.16s bid.
48.87s sell.

So look, the supply is 96,722 higher than my last time point, yet the bid has increased by 1s and the sell is a little bit higher. Now obviously what this says is a huge, huge increase in demand as well as suppy, that the price could be still rising. But the next points are the kicker.

May 4th 2016
Ecto supply is 14,692 (the supply is a staggering 113,941 less – two weeks after the April patch)
45.80s bid.
50s sell.

So the ecto supply has dropped by ~114k, yet the bid price has only gone up 1.64s and sell 1.13s. And herein lies the point. The ecto supply is at its lowest it has been for a long time, less than 15k. It’s fluctuating like crazy at this point yet even with this super low supply… the price hasn’t gone nuts, it’s slowly increasing like every mat. To ram this point home..

May 16th 2016
Ecto supply is a whopping 170,149 (the supply is a staggering 155,457 more, rougly 1 month after the patch)
47.01s bid.
49.94s sell.

So a massive 155.46k increase in supply sees… the bid rise by 1.2s and the sell drop by… 6 copper.

The ectos being generated by this farm really are a drop in the ocean. The demand vs supply for such a highly traded item will not be greatly impacted by a niche farm done by a ridiculously small % of the community. The supply is much, much higher than it was prior to the April update yet the prices have still increased. The amount of ectos traded per day (https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/19721-Glob-of-Ectoplasm) is massive and is not impacted on a significant level by this farm. The other thing to remember is, say this farm is nerfed into the ground: people will just return to their old farms which generate ectos too, albeit at a slower rate. The enormous supply coming into the game will not simply disappear. It will decrease slightly, yes, but not anywhere near enough to rise the ecto price by any significant amount.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

My point is that it’s not urgent. I’m sure they’ll change it, but they don’t have to do it today.

Right. I agree with you then.

Oh right you were actually the person saying they’d be worth 1g with this farm. A moderator really needs to merge these two threads together as debating with multiple people (who turn out to be the same people) is a bit confusing.

Anyway if you think ectos would be 1g without this farm there is really no point in discussing any of this with you any further. Have a nice day.

SithFire.6193:

Amurond.4590:

And Anet certainly didn’t make the noxious pods in Dragon Stand unable to be looted by multiple characters across multiple maps, nope.

You are able to loot noxious pods across multiple maps. You forgot, a lot of pods spawn around the camps. So, you can jump across different IPs to loot these pods.

I’m sorry but this is just completely false. You cannot loot noxious pods unless you were on the map that completed the meta and participated.

SithFire.6193:

Amurond.4590:

Yeah people are really lazy/hysterical when labelling these things. It’s hardly an exploit, it’s more like unintended gameplay (no, I highly doubt it was Anet’s intention to make AB meta worth 30g+) arising from the changes in the major April patch.

You write about intention. So, was it Anet’s intention to
* sell Dungeons?
* sell SAB?
* do chest farms in SW?
* farm lvl 40 boss in fractals?
* have farm-maps in PvP?
* and so on…

Sell Dungeons/SAB – no, I don’t think it was ever their intention; they even said as much for the SAB one; which was an actual bug, so definitely not intentional. Selling dungeons/raids is probably not ideal but it’s also something much, much more difficult to fix I am sure.

Chest farm/FOTM 40 – both are considerably less gold than the AB meta farm. The old chest farm was nerfed. Note that these also require full participation; AB meta farm relies on looting chests from completed maps you had nothing to do with. That is probably my single biggest issue with it.

PVP farm map – not even in the same hemisphere as any of the aforementioned, but yes, they did try to nerf that too (changes to skyhammer, spirit watch, removal of certain dailies etc)

SithFire.6193:

No? Maybe you are right. But this is far away from being an exploit. And you also forgot: You have a timeframe to loot all these chests in AB.

I never once said this was an exploit and even in the post you quoted I said it wasn’t. I didn’t forget there is a time-frame to loot these chests, it’s hardly even relevant tbqh, the time-frame is long enough to get 30+gold worth.

SithFire.6193:

Btw.: It’s a design decision that every player on the map will have access to the chests when AB-Meta succeed. It is not an instance as in DS. You may like it or not but multiloot is legitimate.

It was a design decision originally, yes. But like others have said and like I have said (and am getting tired of repeating myself about it honestly), things when the April patch was released and made keys and currency awarded in abundance.

I don’t think instance is the right word. They’re both map instances. One is just timed, which I suppose does make it easier to code such designs as not being able to loot across DS maps.

SkyShroud.2865:

Amurond.4590:

SkyShroud.2865:

I suggest everyone to ignore this thread.

Haha oh the irony of this response. Just ignore this thread everyone because I don’t like it.

Right back at you dude. Just because you dislike the farm personally, you are complaining about it even when the farm is keeping ecto from raising even higher. Like others mentioned, you seems to get a lot of things wrong too. You really just complaining it out of personal reason.

I did the courtesy of actually reading your post, you could at least give me the same by reading mine.

It’s not that I dislike the farm it’s that the precedent has been set for nerfing these kind of farms. The sticking point for me though is being able to loot the chests on maps you did not participate in.

And I’m sorry but what ‘lot of things’ have I got wrong? One error was pointed out but unfortunately that person is 100% incorrect so I’m sorry but you’re wrong too.

As for getting things wrong, I highly doubt this farm is having any great impact on the ecto prices (lol at the person saying they’d be 1g without this farm), people underestimate how many ectos are traded and brought into the game on a daily basis by other means. Is it having an impact? Sure. Is it having a huge impact (let’s define huge as ectos rising 20+s if this farm was removed)? No. No, no, no.

There is a certain irony about people who are clearly cashing in off this farm (and I don’t blame you for doing so) denouncing this thread for having a different opinion then complaining themselves that people disagree with them. Even funnier when they’re factually incorrect about certain things like DS pods…

Just a flesh wound.3589:

You’re probably right about the liquidity, however I’m not sure the gw2efficiency is accurate right now. I’m getting some strange numbers. It’s showing (on my iPad at least) that I have over 5000 gems when I know I have about 3500. And the gold in my wallet isn’t showing correctly when I switch to a different filter. It shows correctly one place then less than half as much when I go to the leaderboard and set it for gold in wallet.

Might be a bit buggy but it’s also slow to update individual things like gems, gold, etc.

SkyShroud.2865:

without this farm, ecto will be 1g by now, well, i dont mind, i have many stacks of ecto in my personal bank waiting to be unleashed to the world at the right moment.

Lol the ectos generated by this farm are a drop in the ocean.

Skittish.4539:

They already let this easy exploit go unfixed for months. About 7 months, to be more specific. If keys aren’t a problem because the highest chests give you the currency to buy more keys, then this has been a problem since HoT was launched, not since the spring update. Which is weird, because I didn’t see anyone doing this (or complaining about this) before the spring update. Then we were given bucketloads of keys for doing the pre-events and started looking for the best way to use them all. As far as I know, the rewards in the chests weren’t increased, so could you let us know why the entire economy isn’t ruined already?

After reading your opening line I was about to comment and say that the Spring update is what clicked this into gear, but then I read the rest and see you kind of said that … but now I’m actually not really sure what your point is. But yeah this became a ‘problem’ (depending on your perspective) when keys and currency went from a bit of a grind to an Oprah style “you have a key, you have 100s of currency, we’ll all have 1000s of currency and 10s of keys!” in the April update.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

People are joking because it’s not all that serious. There’s still a time limit on how many chests you can open and there’s a currency limit on the number of keys people can get. One way or another, people have to play in order to open chests.

ANet will probably throttle the number of chests you can open somehow, but it’s hardly urgent.

There is a time limit however the currency limit really isn’t very limiting at all given how much currency and how many keys you get from simply doing the Octo event alone. Saying ‘people have to play’ is no different to saying that people still had to buy maize balm for the maize balm farm and well that eventually got nerfed into the ground too. In fairness, the maize balm farm was more toxic in the open world than the AB chest farm.

Anyway there’s a very simple fix and that is to make the AB meta chests like the noxious pods in Dragon Stand where you can’t loot them unless you participated in the event. I’d be happy for them to improve the number of Grand chests below (revamping the ratio between grand, great etc) as a compromise.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Gw2efficiency shows the top person they have on their listing as having:

741,257gold 85 silver
Played for 8,592 hours

Number 15 is listed as
217,085 gold 40 silver
Played for 3,718 hours

Edit: I misread it. That’s account value not raw gold.

Looks like highest liquid gold is
214,748 gold 36 silver
Played for 10,374 hours

Liquid gold is if you liquidated everything you could. The highest straight up gold is 120k or something.

It’s interesting to note over the last few weeks the guy on gw2efficiency with the most account value has gone up from ~520k to 700k+ without his hours played changing at all. Guess he has some nice stuff hoarded!

General Health.9678:

On the one hand you have anet’s design team, the balance team, the testing team.
On the other hand you have a couple of people on the forums who think it can’t possibly be meant to work like this.

Yes because Anet have never unintentionally introduced farms into the game and then nerfed them. No, never.

And Anet certainly didn’t make the noxious pods in Dragon Stand unable to be looted by multiple characters across multiple maps, nope.

JadOLantern.7142:

I’m sorry to say that the AB Farm is not an exploit. It’s been 3 weeks since ArenaNet mods start to monitor the meta event in ab and often they join the squads and participate the event. One of our friend in our squad invite the arenanet guy and explain the whole process of the farm and ask if it’s an exploit. And the answer he got from that person is that the whole farming process itself is not an exploit. And ArenaNet is already monitoring this particular farm and probably it will be nerfed so don’t worry.

Yeah people are really lazy/hysterical when labelling these things. It’s hardly an exploit, it’s more like unintended gameplay (no, I highly doubt it was Anet’s intention to make AB meta worth 30g+) arising from the changes in the major April patch.

SkyShroud.2865:

I suggest everyone to ignore this thread.

Haha oh the irony of this response. Just ignore this thread everyone because I don’t like it.

Other farms that produced much less gold/h than this one were nerfed into the ground, I’d find it weird if this one doesn’t suffer the same fate in the future. You can get well over 50 globs from a single meta plus all the exotics, champ bags etc that come along with it.

FTR, this farm became a big thing once the major April update hit meaning you could open plenty more of the Grand exalted chests while still breaking even on currency. That’s the sticking point for me imo; people who are saying “you still have to buy keys so I don’t see a problem” probably don’t realise you generally (not always, I know) get enough currency + keys from the meta to sustain each loot session.

A very simple fix is outlined in the OP, and it’s one that is already in place (since launch) for Dragon Stand so we know it’s easily doable: only allow players who were on the map on completion of the meta to loot the chests.

1. Join the AB guild
2. Make 40g+ from a single AB meta
3. Farm until it’s fixed like it should be

Anet realise they have a ‘show/hide bags’ option already, right?

Very annoying for those who liked it how it was. Although I guess the real annoying part is just having to rearrange my inventory on 10+ characters yet again; the actual appearance isn’t that bad.

Toggle Wars 2 plz.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

• Gold skins don’t drop for T1 or T2.

420 isn’t a huge sample size for something that could be very rare, especially considering the small number for T3 as well I think it’s likely T1/T2 drop them just very rarely; unless Anet have said otherwise.

I’ve received a gold skin since the revamp and before I was doing T3 fractals – but I can’t remember what chest it came from unfortunately (mostly because I spam open them), it may have come from one of the recommended dailies rather than a T1/T2 chest.

This is pretty funny.

Unfortunate from a gold making perspective though.

XYLUM.7286:

Yeah with the all the fact in front of us, something is DEFINITELY fishy. There was a finite number to begin with, they were a Halloween item available for 1 season, from black lion chests only… then a couple years later like 50 were given away in a drawing.

100 were raffled off.

XYLUM.7286:

There is and has been no other way to obtain them, prior to about 6 months ago there was seldom more the 15 or 20 for sale at any one time…

They started being sold off with HoT, this is not a coincidence. People were liquidating their assets in preparation for new items and new markets.

XYLUM.7286:

Around the time of last halloween or so, they were going for as much as 5000 gold… around christmas they had fallen to 1200 and the number listed was sky rocketing, now… the last time i looked there were like 300+ listed… for as low as 350 gold.

The highest amount of supply on the TP ever was 270. Some were listed as low as 150g. They were dumped to buy orders as low as 60g.

XYLUM.7286:

350 gold for one of the rarest, coolest and unobtainable skins in the game…

“Rarest” is an illusion created by mass hoarding. If you have an unobtainable, discontinued skin, several investors could create the impression that there is none of those items left in the game by buying the item out.

XYLUM.7286:

Sure, at first glance people might think someone has got to be duping them, but in reality if that was the case Anet would have been on them like ugly on a monkey before the first 100 made it to market.

Yes, I completely agree with you on this point. Anet have always been pretty quick to shut down this stuff. They’d be able to track it very easily as well.

XYLUM.7286:

What seems like a much more plausible scenario… is that Anet is intentionally flooding the market on these highest value items, quite simply to wipe out large chunks of wealth from those that sat on them for large profits.

Aaaaand you’ve lost me again. Hoarders dumping their stock because the bubble had burst is a much more likely scenario in my opinion and doesn’t require any Anet conspiracy.

XYLUM.7286:

<insert lots of Anet conspiracy stuff>

Yawn indeed.

XYLUM.7286:

The final straw was watching the whole ghastly shield market manipulation… it is clearly an inside job, no other explanation would really make any sense, unless we are to believe that they are completely oblivious to an ongoing rampant massive scale duping campaign being carried out for months on end, involving some of the most rare and valuable items in the game.

If you consider investors mass hoarding discontinued items as market manipulation then well… I agree with you, it was totally market manipulation.

I’ve said in my other posts on this topic that I am surprised at how many shields were hoarded and I still am. However the reality is that Gw2 (especially near launch) is a very large game with 100s of 1000s of players (at launch) and 1000s upon 1000s of shields would have come into the game during H’ween 2012. Lots of these would have become bound… lots obviously didn’t.

What appears on the trading post in terms of listings is only the tip of iceberg and really tells you nothing about how many were obtained but not posted, but more importantly how many were sold to bids.

If the major dumps** have stopped (looks more likely than ever before – and it’d make sense that the final major dump went as low as 60g as the hoarder(s) tried desperately to offload their last remaining stock with the mystic forge news) then really I think it’s just a case of everyone (including myself) underestimate the sheer scale of hoarding that went on with these skins.

**I expect there may be some smaller much less common dumps to buy orders in the future, depending on how high the price rises. Being highly interested in the market, as it crashed I saw many orders for 5 – 10 at low prices being filled. These guys will either list their shields at some point or depending how many they accumulated may just want to dump to buy orders when it reaches a price they’re happy with. Actually, just as I was posting this a small bunch 3 – 5 were sold to bids. There you go.

As an aside, I’m absolutely kicking myself I only bought 2 at 65 and 70 gold, even moreso that I sold the 70 gold one for under 200 for a quick 50+ gold profit >_> I’m thinking I may unlock the skin on the 65g one though, I suspect it’ll never be that low ever again.

I’ve reported this bug a few times ingame a couple of months ago but I was kind of surprised that it wasn’t fixed in the April patch, so I figure a report on the forum can’t hurt.

The Yassith Armour Recipe book item gives the choice of Yassith Armour recipes but Viper weapon recipes instead of Viper armour recipes.

I’m not sure if it’s the same for all ascended armour recipe books but I have a feeling it is. The ascended weapon recipe books work correctly.

DoomKnightMax.6592:

I invested 1k gold into both the GGS and GreatSaw, got banned for 3 weeks, and now they’re worth kitten. RIP investments. Wonder if holding on to them would do me more good than harm.

Depends on how much you paid for them and how long you’re willing to wait.

Assuming that there is actually a finite supply of these skins being dumped (aka there isn’t a dupe/exploit), the dumps will stop eventually and the price will go back up. It will have a much lower ceiling than previously though, which is dependant on how rare the new masterwork items are from the forge. Don’t expect them to ever get back above 1k.

Then again, I thought the dumps had stopped a month ago..