Only a matter of time before ascended gear can be bought with karma
I am fine with this. It gives someone with a full set of karma exotics and 250k+ something to do DEs for.
bank tabs? meh, i want some good skins and character modification services… i just dont get it!! how come a micro-transaction based game lacks so much on the store
Because people are apparently willing to spend their life savings opening BL chests to get mystery tonics and black lion harvesting sickles.
Either way, they had better hurry up and do what they are going to do, Steam started its sale today and its already eaten up most of my monthly “waste money on videogames” budget.
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I like it as it is.
It’s nice and relaxing to farm in there, it’s not an overcrowded Orr.
I don’t know what server you play on, but on Anvil Rock Orr has at most 15 people in it.
P.S. If GW2 only retained 1 in 20 players after 3 months and after selling well over 2 million copies of the game world wide you can be sure that would be all over gaming news websites. That would be an absolutely unheard of decay rate for a top tier tripple A mmo like GW2, especially after only 3 months.
Why would it be? Its not like Anet puts out weekly updates on consecutive logins. The empirical evidence is actually quite convincing. The facts are that only a fraction of the September purchasers have kept playing, what fraction it is for Anet and NCsoft to know and us to speculate about.
Besides nearly every online game loses 1/2 to 3/4 of its population in the first six months. World of Warcraft was a freak aberration. After that some, like Eve online continue to very slowly grow over the years, while others die out.
Yeah but, 1 in 20? That’s more than half. That’s more than 3/4. And inside of 3 months? You’re saying more than 95% of the people who bought the game 3 months ago already quit. That’s absolutely unheard of.
Not even that Final Fantasy mmo had that kind of decay rate and that game was pretty much unplayable from what I remember reading about it.
Oh, I agree that 1 in 20 is probably nonsense. Internet forums are a hive of hyperbole, don’t let its liberal use detract from the core content of the message. You can not deny that a lot of people who played this game even just last month have quit.
theyll add more. relax nerd.
Doubtful, any new content expansion we see for the near future will be in the form of 15 minute vignette fractal dungeons. They require little time, effort and investment to make compared to a normal dungeon or zone and can be flashed in everyone’s face that they are adding new content.
Of course who knows. Anet might be so shaken by the backlash the forums have shown that they actually fix the broken shambles that their game is. But i doubt it. They will at most do one or two things, wave it in front of everyone’s nose like a stripper and exclaim that they are making things better.
P.S. If GW2 only retained 1 in 20 players after 3 months and after selling well over 2 million copies of the game world wide you can be sure that would be all over gaming news websites. That would be an absolutely unheard of decay rate for a top tier tripple A mmo like GW2, especially after only 3 months.
Why would it be? Its not like Anet puts out weekly updates on consecutive logins. The empirical evidence is actually quite convincing. The facts are that only a fraction of the September purchasers have kept playing, what fraction it is for Anet and NCsoft to know and us to speculate about.
Besides nearly every online game loses 1/2 to 3/4 of its population in the first six months. World of Warcraft was a freak aberration. After that some, like Eve online continue to very slowly grow over the years, while others die out.
I think that many forum readers over the last few days would find that announcement insulting. It has PR written all over it, with no reference to the controversy that the patch has introduced, so i think its clear that Ascended gear is here to stay and this obsession with their new fractals dungeon. There is nothing in that announcement to give me hope, and a lot to fill me with dread.
Oh please, like any company with half an ounce of sense would put out a survey that stated:
“Welp our last attempt at putting out content was an unmitigated failure, it lacked substance, was riddled with bugs to the point of unplayability and was unintentionally designed to alienate large swaths of the player base. Furthermore we failed to address major issues with nearly every aspect of the game in favour of making this half-baked waste of kilobytes.”
I mean, I would applaud their honesty if they did it.
I think that they are going down the wrong road with these changes. Half baked CCP style development that introduced new shiny content with the promise that it will be added to over time. A promise which is instantly dropped for the introduction of new shiny content to be introduced half baked again and again and again.
The Grind has also been scaling up slowly since launch. I could sort of accept it from the cultural tier armours and karma gear, but the grind to get ascended gear is too much for me. 12g in ecto alone for a back item? GW1 did have its grind I know, It was one of the reasons I quit it and played WoW for so long. Yes, it had a horrible RNG grind as well, but it was different grinding with 39 other people in MC than in GW1.
Maybe after a few months of continued population decline Anet will be forced to make some drastic changes. But I have to say, every day I log in to play, I see at least one or two bugs, broken events, unfinished content, poorly balanced skills, and many other things that make me think; “I wonder what it would be like to play a panda”
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If wow never existed we would all be playing Everquest 2.
I am looking forward to next year’s warrior, and guardian remake as well as the introduction of the monk class. I just can’t wait.
For the forum rage that is.
On the other hand, with the zone being relatively empty that means they can add more events there in the future without disrupting things too much. But yeah, if they just leave the zone like that for the rest of time it will be a huge waste.
It is unlikely that they will. Making brand new content and zones gets far more people playing than adding to old content. Anet could have put all the effort they put in to fractals and cursed shore in to fixing WvW, Spvp, and the under used dungeons and zones. However they did none of those things in favour of adding new half finished content.
This is a very common pattern with smaller studios Anet, CCP, Trion, all do the same thing.
Tbh they should tone down the loot reward and leave the event in game like the dragons.
As it stands now that whole new zone is a total waste of time. I feel sorry for the artists and designers that worked hard on it.
If you have a good guild and can run 3-6 fractals a day, after repair costs and averaging drops you can make 1-2g a day without much effort. In a month you can have your full set of T3 gear, two if you are unlucky with drops.
So, that means the Dark Armour can be found on Frostgorge Sound (70-80) right? Cause you said 70+
Or just gimme a link plz, realy want this armor^^
No apparently I confused it with heavy plate, it is bought from karma vendors in Fireheart and Cursed Shore. so select 60+ zones.
First one is Dark Armour, and you get it from karma vendors in 70+ zones iirc. check on Dulfy.
second one starting from the left:
Pit Fighter’s armour Lvl 15-25 zone karma
Mix of Nobleman’s armour from MC and vigil helm.
Knight’s armour, missing shoulder (don’t actually remember where you get it)
Nobleman’s armour full set.
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Its natural for long term games to lose population like this. I bet if you went and look at WoW’s xfire profile it would have a similar drop since the last expansion came out.
If you take a look at NCsoft’s stock over the last year, things are not looking super happy fantastic however. I expect a lot of pressure is going to be put on the Anet devs to produce profits as quickly as possible to stop their 4th quarter from being a total disaster.
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The problem with +heal is that with no tank classes and the spastic aggro model, mobs are forced to do very limited levels of damage so that any single player can self mitigate them regardless of class. Even a small increase to +heal scaling would greatly improve players survivability in all areas.
I would be amazed if we see guesting and paid transfers in 2012, I will be surprised if we see them in 2013, I will be unsurprised if we never see them.
Every ounce of damage free transfers could have done to the game, they have already done, so there really isn’t any immediate and desperate need for them to be stopped anymore. Players have also generally settled to where they will be permanently now, so guesting wont really have the effect on server population either. I just can’t see Anet, who a few weeks ago admitted that implementing these features was proving far more difficult than they imagined (iirc i read somewhere one of the devs admitting they didn’t actually know how they could do it, but i don’t have a quote).
It makes little sense for Anet to use its obviously limited development pool on this when there are more obvious pressing matters. And to be fair, If i were a NCsoft shareholder, I would be somewhat upset at Anet for failing to make use of a very profitable market when they had a chance.
well considering we have seen “This update changed no content” With obvious changes to content, I do not have much faith in Anet’s ability to be honest with the players anymore.
precursors should have just been left at being extremely rare, maybe a slight tweak to the RGN %s but giving people hundreds of gold in 1 day is just stupid.
They should have been a crafting recipe and nothing more. RNG based scarcity is the most aggravating mechanic in MMOS.
If you want to design something to be a grind, make it a grind don’t just reward people with good luck.
I am highly skeptical of these reports. There is no way you could just park your toon at the chest, and then instantly jump into an overflow (as if the worlds running these weren’t always full;
It worked. saw it myself. All you needed was someone still in your group to right click and join overflow. Since the event was done and people were looting the chest and leaving, the zones stopped being full.
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Anet/et all dropped the ball with their cash shop. They went for the Korean gambling model, which when you look at who they hired to do it is not surprising. Problem with that, is it does not work very well in the west. Next they will try and get us to rent things.
Yes, some people are willing to shell out an idiotic level of money to gamble on digital goods, but most are not. What most ARE willing to shell out money for is cosmetic goods. Riot Games makes a killing off of their cash shop and aside from a few boosters 90% of what they sell are just cosmetic items.
And you know what? I bet Riot makes more money for their masters than Anet does.
But, that other MMO is still making several hundred million dollars a month from its ‘outdated’ pay to play model.
Some people doesn’t play the game for fun, they just want better stuff…
Horrible..
For some people getting better stuff IS the fun of playing a game like this.
Either way, I know lots of people who had every alt they could get parked beside the chest, no precursors for them unfortunately.
Honestly the fundamental flaw in GW2 was trying to mesh GW1, WoW, and Korean Grind/FTP. You can only successfully mesh two of those.
Obvious plant is obvious?
People are complaining because they were unable to attend an event. They are complaining because they were not even given a reasonable opportunity to attend an event. They are complaining because they attended an event four hours and got nothing out of it. They are complaining because others attended the same event and got everything.
There needs to be a stop to these stop Fanboy/Obvious Anet Employee posts. It is distracting us from explaining to Arena that these sort of shenanigans are not acceptable and if they continue to do this everyone will leave for the next new shiny game, and will take all their shiny dollars with them.
Its just a tactic to forestall the growth of player wealth and extend player grind and therefore retention.
Do the devs not look to other games for ideas or problem solving? There are plenty of MMOs out there with working features regarding these issues, why must they exist in an MMO from ’12?
In a lot of ways it seems that GW2 was developed in a vacuum. Many things which are thought as essential to modern MMOs such as, but not limited to, LFG system, dungeon finding system, ability to make secured player trades.
If they actually released this without knowing the effects of disconnecting mid dungeon, than whoever is their test manager should be fired. It took me five minutes to find that problem.
However, it is much more likely that they knew about this from the start and decided not to fix it in favour of pushing fractals out on time. It could be a very difficult problem to solve.
Unfortunately that is not an excuse for pushing out half baked content.
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My guild stumbled on an entirely empty overflow and did it up until the steam vents with two groups. It went several times faster, and was actually quite a lot of fun. Its actually quite a shame that this was a one time only event. Its a lot of development work to just flush down the toilet.
Unfortunately it was getting late for us so the zerg was called to blitz through the last bit. Which was fortuitous as we were lucky enough to get it done before Anet shut us down.
Honestly, if Anet toned down the final loot drop to be dungeon level, and a couple of the spawns, they would have a very nice extra dungeon to put in.
The suspicious part of me expects it was to stop people from continuing to get the one time only event in overflows.
If i was a suspicious person I would think that Anet just reset everyone’s client to clear the bugged overflows.
I have one at steam vents PM me for invite
as of 11:30 EST Currently has 9 people
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I have to say, the more I play gw2 the more i just want to go back to wow and not deal with all the mechanics gw2 has against players having ‘fun’.
If you are so happy with the event why do you care that people want it redone so they have a chance to experience it like you did?
Because I can tell you the majority of GW2 players did not get the chance you had.
What fantasy land do you live in?
Fight was a lag filled mess of invisible mobs, disconnects, and 3 hours of mindless keyboard mashing.
To top it off, some people who did the event 3 times got nothing, while others managed to milk the overflow system to get multiple chests.
And lets not forget the people who weren’t able to even join in.
So no, Anet did not do a good thing. They need to drop this rubbish idea of one time only events and never pick it up again. The Halloween event was not as bad since it didn’t really award you anything, but giving out exotics bags etcetera is unacceptable.
Except you don’t. Consortium chests drop from monsters and are also tradable on the TP.
Pretty sure that the chests are account bound. But yes you can trade the skins on the TP.
I am not sure what point you are trying to make other than reinforcing the idea that paying money to the skin casino is a bad idea.
Just like Halloween I am not willing to pay money for random chance for a skin. Once again, Riot games will get any money I decide to waste on skins this month.
Trahearne would send a mayonnaise sandwich back for being too spicy.
Don’t believe the trolls that are stating they spent nothing and got six skins, or that they got two skins from one chest etc.
Sad that people have to troll like that but I guess it gets them off.
Well that just goes without saying on the internet.
Quick survey of my guild shows a total of $0 spent. Out of the 10 or so people in my guild who religiously ran MK and used keys/gems they had stockpiled when gems were selling for 300+ per gold, I think one got a skin.
Mad King has a backstory and history behind him in GW lore, whereas Headless is just a half-arsed idea lifted from something else, unsurprising laziness by Blizzard, to toss in as mostly an afterthought for Halloween.
To be fair, the Mad King is no more original than the Headless Horseman. However, playing both GW2 and the other mmo’s Halloween events, considering bugs/problems/bad design choices, I think they are a dead heat.
Yes the jumping puzzle was one of the few aspects of the Halloween event that I disagreed with the complainers. Looking forward to seeing it next year. Hopefully they will spend a little time on it and fix the couple of weird facings and other geometry sketchyness that send you flying off the map.
A little googling will probably find you innumerable clips of sheogorath saying nearly the same things. Not that he is any more origional than Mad King Thorn however.
The greatsaw is so incredibly rare that the effort put in to creating it was nearly a waste anyway. I saw a single one throughout the entire Halloween event, and it was in an overflow LA.
In the end the effort given to skins everyone was given free, the books/hat were sub par. The books float four feet away from the body on some characters, have clipping issues etcetra, and the hat, while a nice model is ruined by the bald head it creates.
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No gambling favors the player. That is why casinos can stay in business.
Seems like you are one of people I mentioned who has never gambled or been in a casino, did you know that craps odds are actually in the players favor? No? Yeah didn’t think so.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craps#Optimal_betting
Sorry, it is you who has no idea what they are talking about. No casino game favours the player, they all favour the house. However, they make the chances slim enough on some games for you to think that you have a chance to win, thus keeping you in the casino and your money flowing in to their vault.
Long term gambling in a casino favors the casino, short term gambling and knowing when to quite while you are ahead is in the players favor
No gambling favours the player. That is why casinos can stay in business.
Will halloween item skins be this year only? An official answer would be nice.
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I would expect so. They were very desirable so people spent a pretty penny on incredibly low chances to get them.
There are quite a few more holidays between now and then however, lots of time for Anet to change how they provide incentive to shell out money, so who knows what will happen.
If the skins had been on the gemstore, i would have bought them all. Because they weren’t and I am not going to waste money gambling for digital items I spent $0 on BL keys, used the ones i had to roll chests, got a few lvl 80 transmute stones which was nice i guess.
However, I DID spend money on skins in league. So i hope Anet is happy losing $20 to Riot.
Just type something in chat, it shows up right above your character. It helps you and hurts everyone else. It’s a win win situation.
The skins were basically priced out of the reach of casuals from the start. I hope in future events Anet decides to just put the skins on the gem store and build some customer good will instead of just lunging directly for their wallet.
But then again, this is a company which is under the impression that RNG grind based activities are fun.
In the end, I would have spent $10-20 getting the few skins I wanted from the event if i were given the chance to just flat out buy them from the gemstore. Anet will have to settle for the $0 they got from me.
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A good first effort. Not quite as good as some seasonal events in other MMOs however. The rough edges which tainted the event for many (skins from BL chests difficulty of some events etcetera) need to be smoothed out.
I didn’t experience any griefing. In fact, every last charr and norn player was happy to remove their armor when we asked.
In my experience few norn and charr actually make it past the first vertical gear.