Guild Wars 2

It is a real disappointment in a game which is considered to be an MMO that you cannot play with your friends. I wanted to play through the Wintersday events with my wife, to help out and have fun together, only to find that none of the events (except the dungeon) support this.
This is something that needs to be addressed as a priority because the reason we both own Guild Wars 2 is to play together and we originally met in GW1.

I wouldn’t surprised if the Karka turn out to be another aspect of the Titan’s under Primordius’s (or another Elder Dragons) control. Their mechanics are almost too close to that of the Titan’s to be co-incidence.

Lost Shores was awesome, however…

There were too many players.

We have seen already that the game engine has trouble dealing with a large numbers of players in the same area. This severely impacted the overall experience for everyone involved.

In future, I feel that it would be wiser to reduce the maximum map population for a given event zone in order to give a better overall experience to the end users. At many points the game was nearly unplayable even on higher end gaming systems. Unfortunately you can’t effectively fight invisible enemies and this was the leading cause of the mass wipes that many experienced.

Otherwise well done. I think valuable lessons will have been (and will be) learned from this event and I can’t wait to see what else you have planned for the future.

P.S. Perhaps you need to consider providing more opportunities to start the main event when it is a one time thing. Launching a new wave every hour for three to four hours would give more people the opportunity to take part in the full experience. You already have the technology for this in your server design. The tricky part would be locking players out from repeating once they have started, although this is (in theory) a simple matter of adding an event status flag to a players account. I believe something like this may have worked better for the first and last event phases and helped to ease some of the population issues.

Just because you can’t take on a particular build 1vs1 doesn’t mean the game is unbalanced. These builds cater to a specific type of play style and are easily defeated by not playing them at their own game. The spike counter is easy… don’t stand still. The bunker counter is just as easy – go around them, not through them.

I have had a LOT of success running around in sPvP and WvW with a ranger/spirit build using sword/torch and short bow and a ranger/traps build post patch.

Spirits are awesome if you intend to run around with the main zerg, whereas traps work better for going out objective capping with a partner.

In general I walk away with multiple top awards per map in sPvP, simply through intelligent play while using badly optimized builds. I don’t consider myself to be particularly good, yet this is a consistent result.

Don’t play the players, play the map.

I spent a good few hours playing this map on rotation last night. I love the new dynamic it adds to gameplay and the vertical tiers invite the use of a whole array of different tactics.

Be prepared to hotswap weapons on map load to take advatage of knockback abilities. They reign supreme here if used well.

@ Sprinks – Although that is a valid point, I wouldn’t recommend doing that unless you have a good feel for how the market flows for any given item.

If you follow the basic advice from my posting, you shouldn’t really make a loss unless the market really crashes in a given area. Any small losses should easily be offset by the profits you make.

Prophet.6954:

I noticed you didn’t add/factor in the hidden 10% tax for selling things?

That is factored in to the OP values. I just didn’t think to mention it.

I will update the OP.

I made the same mistakes. I see a lot of people just multiplying the buy price by 1.15 and reselling at that amount, not realizing that they are actually making a loss.

Making gold in GW2 is fairly easy once you get enough seed money. Ideally you will want to start out with about 1g before you want to consider making any trades. Once you have this seed money then you can start trading on the auction house by looking for items with enough of a difference between the buy price and the sell price for it to be worth your time.

If you are going to focus on reselling, you will need to multiple the buy price by 1.177 and round up to the nearest copper. This is the minimum price you will need to resell the item for to break even (BE). I prefer to multiple the item cost by at least 1.24 (T1).

The reasoning for this is that this is the lowest amount that will give you two opportunities to list that item for resale without making a loss; the auction house will cost you 5% of the listing price regardless of if the items actually sells. The auction house also takes a 10% cut from any successful trades from the seller. There is no charge for placing buy orders.

The first listing should therefore be at the higher T1 price, and then at the lower BE price if the market happens to drop. In an ideal world you would multiple the buy price by 1.306 (T2) as this will give you three opportunities for resale to at least break even and two opportunities for making profit.

As some general advice, if you are attempting to sell an item and other vendors drop it below the T2 price, immediately de-list and offer at the T1 price, if it continues to drop below that, again de-list and resell at BE, unless you are really confident that the market is going to recover. If you are just trying to make a quick profit, simply list it for the first time at the T1 price although this can actually act against your favor in forcing the normal market value down.

Quick reference guide:

Buy Price —-—— BE Price —-———— T1 Price/Profit —-——- T2 Price/Profit
6s —-————— 7.07 —-—————— 7.44/0.32 —-————- 7.84/0.66
7s —-————— 8.24 —-—————— 8.68/0.37 —-————- 9.15/0.77
8s —-————— 9.42 —-—————— 9.92/0.43 —-————- 10.45/0.88
9s —-————— 10.54 —-—————- 11.16/0.48 —-————- 11.76/0.99
10s —-—————11.77 —-————— 12.40/0.54 —-————- 13.06/1.10

BE = Break Even Resale
T1 = ~5.4% profit
T2 = ~11% profit
(Hopefully this shows as columns)

As you can see, reselling at 12.4s with a buy price of 10s will only net you a 54c profit which is hardly worthwhile unless you are dealing in bulk trades. You will want to be making about +10% of your buy price per sale (which means ideally reselling at just over 30% over buy price).

I hope this helps some of you, and please and feel welcome to let me know if I have made any errors in my calculations.

Additional tips:

As soon as part of any buy order is partially completed, immediately turn around and re-list the item for sale at the T1 or T2 price point (which ever is lower than the current Sell price). You are going to make most of your money through these rapid trades.
However, watch out for items with a lot of trader activity as it can sometimes pay off to only list 2-3 of that item at a time to avoid market saturation.

Cancel all buy orders once you are done with your trading session as you don’t want the market collapsing on you overnight. This is a really easy way to lose lots of gold.

Don’t make your buy orders too big. It works best to limit your buy orders to a maximum of ten units for any non-crafting materials, again this helps to prevent you holding too much stock in any item in the event of a market crash.

Choose maybe 5-10 different items that are providing a good margin and rapid turnover and focus on those exclusively. If a buy order is not fulfilled within 30 minutes then you will probably want to cancel that order and find something else.

Test each potential trade opportunity by first placing buy orders for 1-2 or that item and then seeing how long it takes to resell. Again, if you cant comfortable resell within 30 minutes then make a note. I would advise just re-listing at slightly above the BE value just to get your money back in these situations.

As dungeons are instanced, there is nothing preventing ArenaNet from introducing some form of Dungeon Finder that spans all Worlds, except where World bonuses are taken into account. Even this can be applied on a user by user basis.

Add to this a “Sidekick”-type achievement or title for aiding others in dungeon Story mode. You could gain one rank per dungeon for aiding others (to completion) 5 times.

Stand at the Trading Post area in the Charre starting town for about 10 mind… ughh!

Players should have the freedom to profit from their efforts, if they so choose to. I don’t see a problem with them being sold at the Trading Post.

I have been having a problem with dodge not triggering when trying to dodge backwards in melee. Very frustrating.

What happened? Combo fields rendered many of them obsolete, especially with anything related to fire.

I feel that too many of the traits in other trees affect the pet.
This should really stay in the domain of beast mastery with some spill-over into nature magic and wilderness survival for survivability.

Why does Marksmanship and Skirmishing have traits that have an affect primarily on pets? It doesn’t really seem to fit.

Meanwhile the Utility Skills do seem boring. It is hard to justify using spirits with how quickly they die and a lot of the other stuff just feels weak on it’s own. I understand they can get overpowered pretty quickly if you have a group of rangers synergizing, yet I feel that they get overly penalized in exploration mode because of this.

The Skill #1 chain locked got me nailed on my first run of AC storymode. Very frustrating trying to dodge back out of AoE and being able to do nothing to save myself.

Then again, for a Melee ranger I like 1h Sword, Torch, Healing Spring, Flame Trap, Viper Trap, Regen Sig (forgot the name) and the Fury elite (forgot this too). I have the +5/kill condition stack on the torch and 30% bleed on sword. It seems to work nicely in most situations. I swap out to Longbow if needed at any time.

I usually use a Spider for a pet. The ranged attacks usually keep them alive.

I kinda agree with this one. It would be nice to have more of a choice in what course of action to follow. Maybe say “no” and have the counterpart keep on his own course of action with you now having to try and stop them. It could still end the same way.

This is a small issue in fairness yet it is still something that may want to be addressed.

Scenario: You happen to be one of the many players who explore for a few levels (or more than a few) and then decide to go back and work on personal story. Except apart from the story itself there is little reward for doing it at this point.

I am not talking about experience – that element is fine. I am talking about the loot that you get at the end.

Would it be possible to change this to some form of token system instead of actual items? It fits in more with how the Karma and Dungeon rewards work and I am frankly surprised that something that seems counter to the primary system used in the rest of the game survived through all of the testing. It would be more internally consistent for the game to use tokens that could then be spent on equipment instead of how it currently works.

Mostly I am tired of getting junk that I have to destroy or sell.

My two cents.

Edit:
P.S. – I don’t know if anyone else has actually posted about this. I tried to take a quick look although I didn’t see anything that was obviously related.

I have to agree with this one.
Both my wife and I are only up to the level 25-ish point in our personal stories and there is SOO much running involved.

Complete story event, go back to the Grove for 30 second conversation then run BACK past where you were.

We both made the mistake of running through some DE content first so were level 33-ish before we started the stories. The waypoint costs for teleporting are very excessive, eating almost a silver at a time.

In fairness though, the waypoints are there for convenience and the running can help you to explore or discover new areas. It is the pointless short dialogues back at City X that really get to you, when there are plenty of locations within a zone that would make more sense to use as a local base. Why not use more emissaries?

It is a shame as the stories are actually pretty decent. This aspect, however, does make you want to not play and nearly everyone in my friend circle has a similar opinion.

You could always start introducing costs to transfer to high pop servers and leave transfers to low pop servers as free. I don’t think anyone would complain that much if you implemented this.

An alternative would be providing some form of reward for transferring to a low pop server, although something like this could easily be abused.

Maybe some kind of “underdog” achievement for earning points when on the lowest scoring server (per match) would work. This would have the benefit of potentially being one of the hardest achievements to obtain – thus carrying additional kudos.