Guild Wars 2

I just got kicked from all three guilds that I represent simultaneously for no apparent reason. I was completely cut off from guild chat, or viewing anything in the guild interface. When I logged out and logged back in, it was fine though.

Are people really complaining? I’ve ran it roughly 10 times (give or take) and I got a bunch of Halloween crafting mats, a dye pack, and a stack of Black Lion Salvage Kits. Absolutely no complaints here. Would I like an exotic or two? Yes, so I’ll run the instance a few more times. I just wished they had released it earlier because I would like another weekend to run it, but that’s not really a complaint about the loot tables.

Dragon Age: Origins did a pretty good job with this too. I loved the angry voice: “Can I get you a ladder… so you can get off my back?”

Would be pretty cool.

The voice actors themselves, are fantastic: Nolan North, Steve Blum, Jennifer Hale…. Honestly, I think those three just need to take a break (I’m getting all my bad***’s confused from various games cuz they’re all starting to sound alike). However, in these 2-person dialogues, I feel like their performance lacks direction or context. Even the animations of the characters during these cut-scenes seem kinda lifeless. This is one area where Anet should have taken a leaf out of Bioware’s book. Their quality of voice acting set a really high bar for the gaming industry, and Guild Wars 2 doesn’t quite reach it.

dragon tooth. 4 sec cast time, big red tooth falls out of the sky on your head that you can avoid.
FOUR.
the largest crit i have ever had on this ability was 3k
you would think an ability THAT SLOW , would have a risk vs reward

the problem is backstab can be done twice in a fight and hit upwards of 14k. AND THEN you can disappear after doing it.

You, sir, are just not playing your elementalist correctly… If you want to beat a thief, the trick is to GET AT THEIR LEVEL. You can’t catch them, you say? Try attuning to Air instead of Fire and then equipping double daggers. Stealth or no – you’ll be nigh un-catchable. Two can play at that game.

EDIT: Just thought I should note: My main is a ranger and I too got sick of getting kittened by thieves, so guess what? I rolled a thief alt to see what the class was about. Now I know what to look for. In fact, I learned so much that I decided to try it out with other classes and figure out how they tick. My suggestion to you is to take the time to roll some alts and learn in’s and out’s of their mechanics before you cry nerf.

Diviner.7405:

The problem with off market trades is that an extreme amount of trust come into play from one side of the trade in this game. Since there is no actual way to trade items at the same time outside the TP, one player is then forced to send the item first and then trust the other player to send their item.

This can obviously led to scams by players who do not have the item but claim they do (or even by players who do have the item) so the amount of people willing to do this becomes very limited.

Sure, if a player lost 1g or even 10g to a scam like this, it might not be a big deal. But pre-weapons go for over 100g in most cases and people generally do not like to gamble that money in something that can easily lead to a scam.

You know what? You’re absolutely right. In another mmo (The Old Republic – unfortunately I subscribed to this far longer than I should have), they had a mailing feature built in called CoD, or “Credit on Delivery,” that addresses this issue. Basically the seller would mail the item and set the expected amount of credits they expected to receive upon delivery. When the buyer opened the message with product, they could choose to accept the item and, by doing so, automatically pay the listed amount; or they could choose not to accept and the product would eventually be returned to the seller and the potential buyer keeps the money. I think Anet should implement something similar to deal with these trust issues.

In addition to the reasons listed above, the mechanic of mailing moneys is too integral to the system as a whole – but more to specifically PvE. How would you get the rewards for map completion of heart quests? The amount of restructuring involved would be ridiculous. Please take the time to think before you post.

Hey Anet, can we get a moderator in here and close this thread? I think it has “run its course.”

Seriously, if you want to be competitive in this market, it’s almost necessary to undercut when you sell your products (especially now with the FIFO mechanics). Just look at places like Walmart and Wegmans and compare how successful they are to your typical union-run grocery store. It’s a free-market, so adapt.

@Hippocampus – Thanks but I’ve moved on. Not that it matters at this point, but I don’t think either of us was using the word “significant” in the statistical sense. I just didn’t appreciate the way he was insulting the intelligence of the people in this discussion (He may not have done it intentionally, but it came off that way and I’ll even admit that my reaction was probably a poor one). And no, there’s no need to get defensive – I never accused anyone of botting just because they disagreed with me. That would be kind of shameless.

@Ageia – That’s an interesting point. Makes me wonder what the point of crafting is besides XP. And the cost of the mats I think far outstrips the gains in XP in my opinion. Maybe I should just buy the exotics from the suckers who actually did max out a crafting discipline. I’ll sell them the mats at a cost more than they can sell the finished products back to me. How’s that for profit?

@whiran – Fair enough. But none of us really have definitive, concrete way of proving that bots are having a substantially negative effect on the economy… So I guess we should all just disregard such assertions and let those exploitations continue?

I give up – I now lump myself as part of the “apathetic” group in the community. I guess we should just limit the discussion to the effects of human activity (since we’re making that distinction) on the economy and call it a day.

@displaceTitan – /sigh. I took an AP Stats class in high school and as a Computer Science major at Virginia Tech, I am required to take a course called STAT 4705 Statistics for Engineers in order to graduate. So I’d like to think I know a thing or two about “basic statistics” and “critical thinking.” Am I saying that I actually performed a test of significance and that my resulting p-value was lower than the significance level alpha, and therefore my null hypothesis was rejected? No… frankly I’m not because I do not have access to the data that allows me to use the word “significant” in the sense that he is supposedly using it. And frankly, I don’t think he has access to it either. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. In fact, I’d love to take a look at it some time.

I guess, in the end, it’s all a moot point because we can’t really prove anything. It’s all conjecture.

EDIT: And with that, I think I have effectively killed this thread…. However, feel free to continue b*-ing about how the gold flow is moving slower than molasses. At least that much we can agree on >.>

@Hippocampus – I am NOT saying that bots are the ONLY reason for the decreasing price of black market gold. You’re right – it’s still a living breathing economy, meaning there could be hundreds of factors involved in the decreasing price of black market gold. What I AM saying is that bots are ONE of those many factors, and YES – I’m going to go ahead and make the claim that it is a SIGNIFICANT FACTOR that needs to be addressed.

@Hippocampus – While there may be some spam that just steals your banking information, this particular site that I used as example does not. You’ll notice that all payments are process through PayPal, which securely encrypts such information – effectively hiding it from even the merchant you’re buying from. So you’re kind of missing the point. Unless these people are like MIT graduates that have managed to crack that system of encryption, the people buying into the spam aren’t really “falling” for anything. However, you are correct on one point: I have no concrete way of proving that the volume of people buying into this market is “substantial enough to have a significant impact on the economy.” But you can’t disprove it either because we, as players, don’t have access to those financial records. It doesn’t mean that this isn’t happening.

EDIT: Just so we’re all clear – I’m not denying that there is a risk factor involved when buying from third-party sites. And I’m not defending what these types of sites are doing.

To those who say that the bots do not have significant impact on the economy, here is my two cents:

You know those people who spam the chat in Lion’s Arch with that url of some third-party site that sells gold (example: gw2walmart.com)? I would encourage you to actually take a look at that site and open your eyes. Notice how you can get 10 gold for about 5 USD? If you were to purchase Gems through Anet, you would pay 20 USD for 1600 gems which could then be exchanged for roughly 6 gold (depending on the day of the week). Do the math and you’ll find that you’d be paying twice as much money for about half as much gold – a difference by a factor of 1/4. You see? They’re not just undercutting prices of crafting mats and exotics – they’re undercutting the entire system! Anet has much bigger problem than they realize. The bots and the spammers ARE THE SAME PEOPLE. They are running massive business across all servers. They have to bot in order to get quantities of gold fast enough to all fulfill the orders. And that’s why you see large groups of them running around. In fact, just yesterday, in a forest in the Harathi Hinterlands, I thought there was a dynamic event going on because I saw a what appeared to be a small army of brown bears rushing right past me (Yeah, I’m running this thing on intel’s integrated graphics so it takes longer for things to render – give me a break). But as I got closer, I noticed it was just a bunch of rangers running around in the exact same path attacking just about every mob in sight. Some of them were even naked. Yes, they were bots. And they’re just about everywhere. This business that they are running is so pervasive and destructive to the game’s economy, that a lot of people don’t want to acknowledge that it’s even happening. So this rant will probably be dismissed as nothing more than a “conspiracy theory” or the ravings of a mad player.

TLDR: Bots have business stretches across all servers and involves making real-life currency, and that’s why they don’t care about destroying the in-game economy. That’s why there are so many of them. And they are undermining the integrity of players that make legit gold by the traditional (but excruciatingly slow) grind.

EDIT: To answer the OP’s question of “What economy?”: It no longer exists as it once did or could have been. Rodarin made an excellent point. There aren’t too many markets on the TP that haven’t already been bought out.

I’m sure you will get flamed in the WvW forum due to the fact that people who main other classes will complain

I’ll be perfectly honest here: my main is a lvl 80 ranger, but I tried WvW with my lvl 30 alt thief. Gotta say I completely agree with the original poster. Yeah, thief is great for small skirmishes and raiding camps/checkpoints. But for laying a siege against a tower, a keep, or (god forbid) a castle… you might as well try slapping the gates with a wet fish for all the good your range will do you. I’m used to the longbow (great situational weapon for sieges) with the 1200 range auto-attack. Don’t get me wrong, I love my thief but not for WvW – think I’ll stick to PvE and structured PvP when it comes to my thief, and use my ranger for WvW.