Guild Wars 2

Obtena.7952:

Their motivation to release successively better P2W has nothing to do with pushing some boundary or precedents. It has everything to do with paying the bills. People better get accustomed to this fast if they don’t want to see the business model of the game change (i.e., monthly fees, restricted content, paid expansions)

So the only way to generate revenue is with vertical progression and “successively better P2W”. That is what you’re saying here? It’s apologist attitudes like this which facilitate such bland, ill conceived and blatantly lazy content being added to the game.

Will it generate some money from the bovine masses? Yes. Will it drive away other slightly more skeptical consumers? Yes. I could quite easily argue that this marketing strategy will lead to a loss of revenue over the long term once enough people start to lose faith as they realise they are just on another treadmill.

Gem store content should be worth buying because it is appealing, well designed content, not because it provides any kind of progression or pay to win advantage (your words, not mine). That is absolutely the laziest way to provide incentive to buy. It takes no designer skill, no imagination and no real effort. It absolutely pushes boundaries and sets precedents, because they are basically selling players an advantage to save themselves the time and effort create some content that would be desirable on it’s own merit. And that is sad, because there are some talented artists and designers working on this game.

Also, please stop with the “buying sprockets is a lot cheaper than buying the pick”. The pick shares the same functionality as previous picks which were sold purely for the sake of convenience.

mtpelion.4562:

All P2W arguments are exclusively about sprockets. Those people don’t understand that winning has nothing to do with sprockets, nor can sprockets help you win. I’m just humorously pointing that out there. You cannot pay to win in Guild Wars 2. Period.

I will take a moment point out that the most common form of pvp in Guild Wars 2 occurs in the form of making transactions on the trading post.

A pick which generates a resource at a rate which is vastly greater than any other source in the game allows users to monopolise supply of the resource. I am repeating myself now, but one can’t compare a pick which harvests sprockets 20% of the time from mining nodes to a time gated home instance sprocket node which isn’t even owned by all of the playerbase.

This pick has plenty of potential to be “pay to win” in terms of trading and the economy. The most dangerous aspect is the precedent which has been set, and indeed the vertical progression, but that doesn’t mean it is the only distasteful aspect of this scenario.

Whether sprockets are worthless or not is not the issue. They are an economic resource and the biggest portion of their supply has been placed into the hands of people who directly or indirectly paid money for the privilege.

CETheLucid.3964:

Your argument is akin to saying the money in your wallet right now isn’t really yours.

No; his argument is akin to saying converting gold to gems is akin to allowing someone to buy the item for you in exchange for your time. Which is entirely accurate.

A couple of things; buying gems with ingame gold directly benefits NCsoft by raising the gold -> gems ratio and encouraging people to purchase gems. Even if you never spent a single penny on ingame gems, converting your gold to gems indirectly benefits NCsoft by providing further incentive for others to pay money for gems.

Every single pick that gets sold on the gemstore goes towards generating more revenue for NCsoft, regardless of whether you paid ingame currency or otherwise. Try to see the bigger picture, rather than from a personal, singular perspective only. When you exchange gold for gems, you are accepting indirect payment from another player who spent real currency on gems, which they exchanged for your gold.

I am not sure about you, but I wouldn’t consider such a mindless and unrewarding task as grinding the pitiful rewards found in this game worth my time for what would be the equivalent of less than $1 per hour, but of course that is your prerogative.

Secondly, the suggestions that people who don’t like the pick should just “buy it if you want it so much” are missing the point. I don’t want the pick. I don’t want it to exist, I don’t believe it should be a part of the game. I object to it due to the implications for the ingame economy and the hypocritical change of heart anet appear to have had regarding vertical progression.

I could buy this pick for every character in my vault if I chose to, and I could do that with real life currency or gems purchased with gold ingame. This, for me personally, is not a factor at all to do with personal wealth, ingame or otherwise.

I respect the right to have a differing opinion to mine, but perhaps even those of you who do would admit that the lack of response to a serious concern shared by many paying customers is more than a little disturbing. In fact it’s downright insulting. This leaves me with no choice but to withdraw any further financial support; I am positive I won’t be alone in that, which does not bode well for the future of this game.

SallyStitches.4096:

The old tools are not obsolete by any means

Obsolete: adj. No longer produced or used; out of date.
synonyms: out of date, outdated, outmoded, old-fashioned.

If the old tools were put on sale alongside the new one, what percentage do you think would choose to buy them over the new one? How many people do you think will choose not to upgrade to the same functionality if anet allow the older tools to be upgraded? The old tools are obsolete. The new tool does everything the old ones do, plus more in addition. They are functionally superior in every aspect.

SallyStitches.4096:

Getting some Watchwork Sprockets from the new pick is hardly game-breaking. They’re worth what, a few copper a piece? The price will only drop as more people gather them with the new pick, it’s called supply and demand. If you check the spidy, they are dropping in price fast. These will most likely be the new Silk Cloth

Sorry, you’re arguing this is a good thing? That is actually economically “game breaking” for sprockets; you contradicted your own point.

SallyStitches.4096:

All I see is “wah wah wah”.

This doesn’t really add much credibility to your argument.

mtpelion.4562:

sprockets are fairly useless

I keep seeing this myopic argument crop up. Useless like the 4m+ silk scraps that were at or around vendor price until recently? Arguing that this is harmless because you don’t value sprockets assumes that demand (and thus value) isn’t dynamic, reactive and volatile (and entirely at the mercy of the anet economist, as was silk).

This also applies to those arguing that it is fine because “I now have a sprocket node in my personal instance”. If you can’t see the difference between a limited, time gated personal node, and a mining tool which generates sprockets whenever a resource node is mined on an unlimited basis, you really need to try and understand the concept of supply and why this is grossly inappropriate.

Well, if this item isn’t withdrawn I feel I will be unable to further support the gemstore with any future purchases. I’ll likely also have to seriously consider looking for a different game to play. I imagine I won’t be the only one.

I have just fallen through the platform to my death for the third time after successfully defeating the lane 5 warden without being hit by the Marionette. I have no idea why or how this is happening, my character simply clips through the floor.

To fight this warden and gain this achievement, a number of criteria must be met.

1. Lanes need to successfully defeat four wardens prior to this. This is not all that common an occurence on most servers as I undrstand.

2. All 5 platforms need to succeed in killing the warden and the power regulator sufficiently expediently. Needless to say, more often than not a platform wipes.

3. I need to make sure I’m not downed during the fight, the only non common factor here since I only have to rely on my own skill.

4. I need to hope I don’t suffer from a nonsensical bug and end up falling to my death, thus adding a further random fail condition to the aforementioned common occurrences.

May I suggest you think a little more carefully about achievement suitability and completion criteria in future events?

Currently these achievements encourage players to play ultra cautiously and with a massive focus on self preservation above all else, in an event which requires a measure of coordination, teamwork and focused application of dps. I find it more than a little silly that these achievements encourage players to play in a manner which is counterproductive to these aims.

Moreover I find it massively irritating that after achieveing what should be a success despite these various factors, I am denied by a ridiculous bug. Not once, not twice, but three times.

In my limited experience since the patch, wall of reflection doesn’t work the vast majority of the time on the scorpion wire. This is regardless of range or melee; I watched the wire pass straight through my wall over and over again. On some extremely rare occasions I saw the bomb being “reflected”. Again, I saw that both at range and in melee. Assuming feedback still works, it’s probably due to some weird trajectory issue.

It seems operative Belka has been fixed also, although I won’t complain about that; seems she can’t be afk’d anymore.

The waypoint removal only hurts people unfamiliar with the terrain/mob placement/where to run, along with classes with longer defensive cooldowns.

Alphard is still soloable in a “legit” manner, at least for my guardian. It is, however, utterly infuriating, especially considering the pull tell is obscured half the time behind vfx spam and/or damage floaters. What’s more, it’s still boring as hell.

Meanwhile, Lupicus can still be skipped; people can still go “swimming”, allowing them to activate any wp and afk kill any boss in the dungeon in total safety; there’s also the unofficial “arah jp’s” that are still, to my knowledge, fully functional. There are other, more nefarious practices which go on too.

So in summation (and I think robertul’s lampooning of the situation flew over most people’s heads) the only people which these changes hurt (belka aside) are noobs and soloers who refuse to exploit. One could be forgiven for thinking exploits were being encouraged over legit play.

I just did a level one fractal run as an introduction to a new player; he was level 52. He was correctly upscaled for the first two fractals, (Ascalon, Uncategorised). However, for the third fractal (Cliffside) he was not upscaled at all. The poor guy had a terrible experience being one shotted and had no idea why until we noticed. He tried relogging to no avail. We completed the fractal and progressed to the final boss fractal (Molten Alliance), whereby he was once again properly upscaled.

Just thought I would post to say, a guildmate of mine has been having this exact same problem. We were able to circumvent the crash issue somewhat; I jumped to the top of the section, dropped a mesmer portal and then dropped back town to my guildmate, who waited at the start. She was able to portal up and complete the dungeon. There were no crashing issues on subsequent jumping sections. It’s not ideal, but it’s an option for now, I guess.