Guild Wars 2

Mavajo.5796:

A great majority of the gold that is purchased will be pumped into the community economy —

Of course it goes back into the economy, that IS the problem. If it were a dead end street, what you seem to think people are throwing out as a counter, it wouldn’t be a problem at all. Some subset of the player base would buy their gold, buy their cultural gear, get bored and leave. That would be comparatively awesome. The very problem is that it’s not a closed system.

You don’t even understand how the system works and you call my plainly obvious observation bogus? Good lords.

Mavajo.5796:

Lol five pages of commentary, and the solution is so simple:

Change the Gem:Gold ratio to undercut the gold sellers..

And destroy the economy in the process? Brilliant. You didn’t think this one through, did you? Gold is already less than $0.70/gold from the gold sellers – less than two hours work at the average US salary will net you 50 gold, how long do you think you’d have to farm legitimately to make that same 50 gold in game?

Gold has to have a value in the game or you wind up with stupid levels of inflation where the only way to afford something on the TP is to buy gold from gold farmers or ANet, and then you just threw the game in the crapper as it becomes a game where you either become a full time farmer yourself or you pay to play. To see how well players like this sort of design go look the general feeling of D3 players on their forums.

If you undercut their current price, they’ll just go lower. It’s a race to the bottom that leaves the price to buy gold so low that you create the problem where everybody feels the amount of gold they get by playing the game is ridiculously low when they can just take the money they made taking bathroom breaks at work and buy more gold then they could farming for a week. So then you raise the drop rate of currency, which can remove the feeling you need to buy gold temporarily, but then all the TP prices rise and you’re right back racing against the gold sellers.

ArenaNet has to have a basement for the official cash price for gold or the player based economy will have no solid basis – the bots will have all the rare drops on the TP and the players will all have to buy botted gold to afford the rare drops because of the huge discrepancy between time to farm gold legitimately vs. the time required to earn enough to buy gold. They can’t win against the gold sellers in terms of undercutting them.

I keep seeing a repeated suggestion in this thread: that ANet work to make the gem store more attractive to players…

Now, fine, I think most players would agree that the game itself would benefit from a more varied, more robustly designed gem shop, but what in the seven kittens would that do combat gold sales? It’s not exactly a secret that the “best” way to get gems is to buy gold from a gold seller (it’s currently down to about $1/gold) and buy gems with them on the exchange (it’s around 200 gems/gold) → $8 = 1600 gems (via gold seller) vs $10 = 800 gems (legit), hmm…

The gold sellers negatively affect cash sales of gems, which affects ANet’s bottom line. A better, more attractive gem shop isn’t going to change that, if anything it will make life even better for the gold sellers.

Hopefully, ANet is taking a long term strategy on this: data mine 100% of currency transactions for extending periods of time such that it’s clear who are the sellers, farmers, launderers, and buyers then ban permanently in one fell swoop and then start the process all over again. They’re never going to protect their bottom line nor “our” game without such a tactic, and with all currency transactions going through a single, united, servers wide hub, they can track and data mine it all… fingers crossed.

Even though I know for most of my characters that I’d be better off with a utility skill, I’d rather just see them fix elites. So, no, such a change would just be a band-aid when they need to revisit just what they were trying to do with the elites in this game.

Plague.5329:

Most builds would be vastly improved if you could not bring an elite and just put another secondary skill in the slot.

That’s been my reaction. Fine, it’s another skill I can use, but with the cooldowns they have crossed with just how kitten situational many are, I wind up not using them much. If you’re going to give me a skill that’s only active for a few seconds every few minutes, can it at least feel like it’s worth the wait?

I hope to see these things buffed a bit. Admittedly, not every elite in GW1 was amazing (and a lot were even bad), but there was still more than enough to find something that made you feel like you had something special on your skill bar. The elites here make me feel like I’ve got something that, on balance, is maybe 5% stronger than my other skills if I manage to remember I have it at the precise moment that extra 5% of oomph is going to make a difference.

No matter how low ANet goes on their price for selling gold, the gold sellers will always undercut it because gold is effectively in infinite, free supply for them. You have two competing forces controlling an infinite supply with negligible cost to produce. The only limiting factor for ANet is they can’t very well destroy the economy trying to race to the bottom versus people who have no such worries. If by some miracle the real money value of gold drops below the point it’s profitable for the botters and gold sellers, they’ll just switch their server space for running bot gold farmers for another game and never blink an eye while the economy in GW2 will be permanently in the toilet.

Nope, just ban buyers as well. You can’t ban them all, you likely can’t even ban a significant percentage of them, but you don’t need to. All you need is a regular series of reports of accounts being banned and your average schmoe isn’t going to bother because the risk is greater than any possible reward. Not even sure how people think otherwise – this isn’t some real world analogy, ANet can automate investigating 100% of currency transfers in this game and flag anything above some threshold from a suspected gold seller. Get their proof the gold was being sold on the RMT, get their proof your account accepted gold over some limit to avoid the FUD about randomly mailing out gold, and ban it all.

I’m much like the OP, only it’s 8 characters, about ~230 hours played, average level is 26, no one above 40. Spent too long playing GW1 to care about level, just run around, do what I want, play who I want, how I want. Maybe by Thanksgiving I’ll have an L80

With my friends even behind me due to too many RL demands, I’m in no hurry.

I’m not sure if the lack of more pro-active methods of dealing with this issue is because ANet didn’t ship the game with the sort of “god” GM accounts in place, or the lack of resources to have “god” GMs out there playing sheriff in the wild. With the lack of anything obvious by now, I’m hoping, as dumb as it might have been, that it’s lack of the former, because surely you could have deputized any number of people willing to take this one on.

Obviously, long term, it is better to have a reliable automated system in place, but short term, there needs to be some posse action going on where players can actually see the white hats riding into a zone and annihilating bot users permanently. Botters were probably equally bad in GW1, but we never saw it because of the all instance, all the time game design. With a persistent world you can’t leave so many bots up for days on end and expect people not to get fed up.

tolunart.2095:

So it appears that the dichotomy of MMO success is WoW/Dead with nothing in between. And when someone says a game is dying or dead, it means “I don’t play it anymore so it doesn’t matter to me.”

Pretty much this. So many forum denizens can’t seem to escape the sort of popularity wars that fueled cliques and drama in high school. If a game isn’t the game, well, it’s dead, it’s terrible, and I can’t believe that any of you are dumb enough to say anything nice about it, blah blah blah. Whether a game is profitable for the developers, whether it has a stable population who likes it, all irrelevant, it’s not the cool kid everyone wants to be around so lets just leave a steamer in its locker.

I wonder if all the GW1 vets who hate GW2 and seem particularly vehement in their pronouncements of a swift demise realize that GW1 is generally held to be a terribad, awful game that only a special needs rhesus monkey would play based on every general gaming forum I’ve been on over the years.

Numerically speaking, every single game out there is either outright disliked or ignored by the vast majority of gamers, even mega successes like WoW. Devs just have to do a good enough job to keep their jobs, and everything I’ve seen says ArenaNet has done just fine with yet another terribad, awful game that only special needs rhesus monkeys can possibly like

I know this SNRM has been loving the heck out of my daily gaming sessions for every single day since the headstart without any plans of stopping.

Never touched me, never will, can’t even begin to wrap my head around how this is a problem for anyone.

Played daily since the head start, over four hours a day, all eight professions, all crafting disciplines across the characters and LOVING it still.

Yes, annoying glitches with skill points and DEs abound, but this game is still going to keep me busy for a long time.

Saw a ranger named “Igopewpewpew”, juvenile yet made me smile and is still stuck in my head a few weeks later so the player must have done something right.

Sure, whatever that secret algorithm is, however it arrives at its magic values for exchanging gold and gems, the assumption here is that it’s about buying gold. Looked at as a way to buy gold, it is undoubtedly a horrible, nasty, no-good thing, but what if it’s not about buying gold but buying gem shop stuff?

Let’s flip it around and look at it from that perspective. One of the things that I have seen dev after dev on general game forums get roasted over a fire for is the perception of bleeding players dry with IAPs. And this game IS loaded with IAPs. $30 for playing all professions, over $50 to max bank storage, $5 per extra bag slot per character. You could easily find yourself paying more than triple the base price of the game if you unlocked all the account upgrades via buying gems directly… but what about viewing those upgrades as a gold sink as you get your characters all high level and are just looking for somewhere to spend your game currency…

Ta-da! You can finally finish unlocking the rest of your bank tabs and bag slots without spending a dime of your real money. At these exchange rates, ArenaNet gets to avoid the non-tinfoil hat wearing peasants with torches and pitchforks over the fact the game has over $200 of practical IAP upgrades built right in because at the general exchange of game currency to gems, that over $200 worth of IAP can be had on the exchange for under 100 gold (actually around 50 gold at current prices). Looked at in this way, you’ve got the perfect system: the impatient (or merely generous for supporting ANet) can buy gems outright for some or all of their account upgrades, the rest of the people can wait until they get enough game currency raised and do it for “free”.

I just don’t think this was ever meant to be a way for “legitimate” players to buy 120G for T3 gear, I think it’s a way to keep their tip jar from getting spit in.

Art.7628:

Please, reevaluate your argument and stop fighting with yourself.

That’s very impressive (me fighting with myself) considering that’s the first time I posted to this thread.

I’ll just put it like this: I played over 2500 hours of GW1 on and off over five years time. Averaged out, I played the game over an hour for every single day from the day I bought the GOTY edition of Prophecies. I was at max level with all my various characters with max stat gear for at least 90% of those over 2500 hours. The only things I was still improving at the end were ultra rare, ultra expensive to buy on the market, and ultra optional things like the quality of vigor runes I had on my heroes.

Now, if that’s not hardcore and motivated enough for you, I don’t know what I or anyone else can say that is going to convince you that, although you might not be the best fit for this game design, there is nothing wrong with skins and S&Gs for providing motivation.

Art.7628:

Actually, I think it is you who is missing the point. Unfortunately you derive your opinion and state statistics that do not exist. Such as “most players”.

No, it’s you that is missing he point.

If GW2 didn’t exist, ANet still has several million game sales and a persistent player base over seven years time with GW1, a game that was even more blunt with the “skins is all ye get!” design philosophy to understand exactly the whys and whats of what they’re doing with the carrotless endgame.

There was some stupid hard content in parts of that game that you were not going to be doing with heroes, were not going to be doing with just any old PUG, and were not going to be doing with just any old build. Yet, tons of people got the necessary teams and gear together, practiced, and mastered the stupid hard content essentially for skins.

So, they already know it works for a lot of people, but they also already know a lot of people aren’t motivated by it and get off their servers and stop costing them money. As long as those people feel like they got their money’s worth, they’ll be back when there’s new content, paid or otherwise.

They’ve provided a game that can entertain the right audience pretty much indefinitely with the same design philosophy that kept the servers up and running for over seven years with GW1, so long as the rest of the players go do something else feeling happy about their experience, it’s a win-win. If you think about it for even a little bit, you have to realize that there clearly never was any intention whatsoever to try and keep every person who buys this game occupied continuously for the next 18 (or even 6) months straight.

Approaching a straight up buy to play MMORPG that doesn’t even have enough universally appealing cash shop stuff to do much more than represent a four month subscription fee for a traditional MMO and then asking why they haven’t designed the game around the more widely appealing constant carrot mechanics to keep you playing non-stop shows a lack of deep thinking about how all the pieces fit together to make something like this actually work.

Borlis Pass Server, just a few minutes ago, Burrison the Blue’s text is appearing locally but no actual NPC so no way to do the skill challenge.

Straylight.7408:

I don’t understand how they can say “we couldn’t reproduce it”.
Just make a female slyvari and talk to Caithe right at the beginning-> missing audio
When you make a male sylvari and talk to Caithe right at the beginning-> no missing audio.

You might be onto something with that: I just realized that all the characters it’s been happening to are my female characters. Didn’t have any drop outs this weekend with my guardian, who’s male.

It’s not lag, it started very recently and it’s consistent for NPC voice overs for all personal story and scouts regardless of race, level or step. As others have noted it started with either the most recent update or the one before that. Prior to the update, everything always worked 100%, now I never hear whatever is the first line of NPC dialog and miss another 30% or so of additional lines. As others have said, just start a new character. I rolled a Sylvari Mesmer last night, probably 50% of the dialog in the “dream sequence” was missing – thankfully I’d heard it all properly before with my warrior – and the very first scout was completely silent. After I’d had key sequences for my engineer and ranger messed up earlier this weekend, that was the final straw. I’ve simply stopped doing all personal story for now, no sense when what sense of flair and immersion there was is completely gone with this bug. It just becomes the equivalent of skipping over the flavor text for quests, only its ArenaNet doing the skipping for me when I didn’t ask them to.

Add me to the “me toos”, been experiencing the bug for NPC voice overs, Asura and Sylvari for sure, don’t actually remember getting any drop outs with my Charr, but that could either be me not paying attention or dumb luck.

Definitely a recent thing as well.

Hi all, dude with a graduate degree in biology here :

For the record, plants take in CO2 by day when they photosynthesize to create sugars, but they take in O2 in darkness when they are breaking down those sugars for energy, just like us non-green things. Further, and closer related to this topic, unless adapted to absorb/disperse O2/CO2 into liquid, they do so across a moist membrane into a gaseous medium via tiny chambers in the leaves that the stomata open/close to regulate. There are aquatic plants, there are amphibious plants, and there are strictly terrestrial plants, being a plant in and of itself does not make you able to breathe underwater, sorry.

At any rate, any critter with their activity level is going to need to get most of their energy via breaking down consumed organic matter that, in turn, will require the sort of rapid, efficient respiration that us humans use, and since the Sylvari are terrestrial, that means whatever lung analog they have is going to only function efficiently via exchange into a gaseous medium (consider your own lungs, they can exchange O2 & CO2 into liquid, but you still drown in ordinary water because the physics driving the exchange across the membrane simply does’t work well enough to keep you alive).

Now, how they and all our other GW2 characters don their magical breathing apparatus so quickly and seamlessly is a mystery, but why they need such an apparatus is not.

Running around in Caledon with my norn I noticed that other player’s sylvari collecting resources are shown using the axe to mine, and the mining pick to chop wood.

Seconded – received one today. With only 10 messages, this is going to be a major PIA unless we can report these twits from the mail window.