Guild Wars 2

Geotherma.2395:

If H&R block ever stops screwing up taxes for people I’ll try and get a couple hundred boxes and do a test.

I’ll start with the obligatory, ‘your first mistake is letting H&R Block do your taxes.’

Okay, now on to the subject.

Here’s the results of your experiment; Anet just collected a bunch of cash for an extremely rare chance at weapon skin in a computer game. Hell, you probably just financed the entire cost to produce the asset.

As long as people continue to drops loads of $$ into Anets coffers for the BLTC gambling scam, then there is zero incentive for Anet to ever stop the practice.

It looks like they have made thousands just from the responders to this thread alone.

MikeRocks.9243:

John Smith.4610:

Gasoline.2570:

Let’s see what the average will be

Statistically inaccurate

Surveying forums leads to massive biases including Sample Bias and Response Bias. In this case there are at least 3 other biases not being accounted for off the top of my head.

This is very true. The only people likely to post are either those that have opened a lot of chests and received nothing, or those who’ve opened very few and received one.

Not even accounting for the MASSIVE player base that doesn’t even touch the forums.

And this is exactly why you can NEVER obtain accurate data from a survey. OP may not like to hear it, but John Smith is spot on.

You are assuming people do these strictly for the silver value. If that were the case, then you may have an arguement. Try to open your mind a bit more, there are actually other reasons to do these.

I was going to make a comment about the serious lack of reading comprehension exhibited by a lot of the posters in this thread, then I thought about the deplorable state of the US public education system, and that the current generation basically has the attention span of a squirrel on crack, and can’t be bothered to pay attention to more than 2 sentences in a row. So I’ll keep those comments to myself.

The OP isn’t asking for anything special, any handouts, or for anything to be made any easier. He wants equal rewards for equal effort, and I completely agree with him.

I put in two hours each day playing this game, so about 60 total hours per month. In that time, I have completed the monthly, played some WvW, completed some maps, did some farming, etc. Oh yeah, I also completed each daily. So I’m sitting on what, 40 laurels now?

OP, because of his profession, logs in each month for about two weeks. During those two weeks, he puts in about 60 hours playing. During that time, he completes the monthly, does some WvW, completed some maps, did some farming, etc. He has also completed each daily for a total of 14. So he is now sitting on 24 laurels.

Equal time played, equal effort, much less payback when it comes to laurels. Arguements centered around the ‘need’ for laurels, or how you will get them ‘eventually’ are completely moot. It is, in fact, less pay for equal work. OP is not being unreasonable here. I’m not the only one that agrees with him, Blizzard implimented the exact same system in WoW. They changed thier dungeon token dailys to weekly so you wouldn’t have to log in each and every day if you didn’t want to. You still had to put in the exact same amout of time to earn the tokens, but you could do the entire thing over the weekend if you wanted.

This helped out numerous players that could not, for whatever reason, log in to the game each and every day.

Same rewards for same effort. Sounds like a great idea.

Riiiiight. Because doing an event at Pent/Shelt with 10 other people and not being able to see a single mob until they are within one yard of you is playable. Because solo wandering in WvW and not seeing a small group of players until they have ran right past you is playable. You’re right, it’s just an ‘annoyance’.

Garbage. You are making excuses for a technical problem in a game that should have seen some form of fix or improvement over the past 7 months. There have been none.

Read the quote again, they aren’t fixing culling. They are turning it off. I can only imagine what that’s going to cause.

muylaetrix.2096:

talk is cheap, seeing is believing.

if true, Anet REALLY deserves respect.

They deserve respect in what way? That it took them 7 months to fix something that should never had made it out of beta? Culling is worse now than at release, and thier ‘minor fix patch’ actually made things worse.

There are parts of this game that are unplayable because of culling, and you want to bow down and kiss thier feet because they ‘might’ have an improvement after 7 months. Wow.

It’s the only game I’ve ever played that was this bad, and 6-7 months later, they haven’t even been able to improve it at all, let alone solve the issue. It is, in fact, worse now than at release. Realistically, this game should never have left beta.

My computer is fine, my internet connection is fine. It’s Anet and thier crew of ‘all stars’ that are seriously dropping the ball on this.

Jinks.2057:

RanchDressin.8210:

where da zerg @

Mag will be running it in NA primetime w/ CD running it while we all sleep.

Ebay will be the actual server here running tactics.

Either way i welcome the Mag players back b/c they do have a good roaming population

You will get our absolute top effort on reset night. We usually have a larger percentage of our regular NA prime players stay up later than normal for reset as well. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if, tonight at least, we hold our own. We won’t be able to compete during NA non-prime, and we won’t field as many players during the week as we do during the weekend. No secret there. You’ve all played us, you know what we are bringing. This isn’t a question of can we win in T3, it’s can we survive long enough to stay here longer than one week? Probably not.

We love equal competition as much as everyone else, and we’ve really been enjoying our fights with EB and CD this past couple of weeks, I just hope this week is at least entertaining. Everyone hates the steamroll, whether it’s happening to you or you are the ones doing it, the fights get booring.

But hey, at least we can keep the forum chatter civil, right? We do have control over that.

Best of luck to everyone! I know Yak’s will give it all we’ve got.

Each piece of armor can only have one rune, period. If you try to put a second one on, the first gets replaced. When you look at your armor, and you see the bonuses for 3 or 4 or more runes, that’s the total amount of that particular rune that you have on all of you armor pieces combined, not for that one peice.

Crowmeat, what you saw there was most likey an organized Fight Night. One on Ones and such. We like to do that on Thursday nights.

Did they teach you in this class, that all surveys are useless for providing any actionable information? They are completely pointless as you cannot come to any reasonable conclusion about anything by looking at the data. This is because surveys based on human provided answers cannot be verified, and thus cannot be considered actual data.

Sorry for the rant. I’m sure your teacher was just looking to provide the class some busywork. It just really irks me when people, especially the media, proclaims some sort of factual truth or evidence based on a survey. Again, data obtained in surveys cannot be verified, and therefore cannot be used to reach a conclusion.

Grats to all.
[/quote]

I think most of your point is sound. However, I disagree vis the ‘numbers’ issue.

Yaks isn’t winning because they’re ‘good.’ They’re winning because they can run multiple huge zergs for most of the day. They are, according to the population indicator (which I’ve been lead to believe accurately ranks by logged-in players) the 4th most populous server as I write this message (11:50AM, CST). Crystal Desert is 3rd.

SBI is 19th.

Both are at “Very High.” Later in the day, they will be ‘Full.’ We’ll make it to ‘Very High.’

So, this has been our day since the population migrations:

First comes the huge waves of Yak’s Benders. When the evening rolls around and we finally get some population, we take back. But then the huge CD zergs start showing up late at night. And we go out, 15 against 60 and die. And respawn. And die. And respawn. And die.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat. [/quote]

The server pop tells you absolutely nothing about WvW population. Yaks has a very heavy PvE population. I also love the assumption that if a server can field a zerg or two, that it is the zerg population for why we are winning, and there can’t possibly be any skill involved. Maybe it’s a zerg or two, thrown in with a bunch of smaller groups, and a bunch of people that hang back after the zerg to run supply, upgrade and drop seige? And maybe, just maybe there are some skilled players in there as well? Hmmmm?

There was, not too long ago, a sort of ‘global survey’ of what was the worst, most annoying sound that you could think of. Do you know what came in first? Whining.

Omniderad.2713:

so if u make it, do u keep the satchel to store the pieces in?

No, there is no actual satchel. It’s just an icon to represent the batch of armor.

If you take into account the materials required to get the recipe, plus the cost of making the actual item, it comes out to be MUCH cheaper to make the entire set piece by piece.

So yeah, the only reason I could think of to make these would be less storage space if you were making sets for alts.

0/10

not worthy of 15 chars

Kilrain, there is no monthly for people that WvW. There is a daily sPvP, is that what you are thinking about?

It also seems a bit hypocritical, to say that WvW kills do not ‘belong’ in the monthly. The monthly is not just for PvE players, it is supposed to be for everyone. You having to get WvW kills is EXACTLY the same as a WvW player having to run dungeons or fractals. Yet you don’t hear the PvP/WvW crowd whining about having to run dungeons, why is that?

The monthlys aren’t mandatory. As mush as I would love to finish one, I’m not looking forward to dungeon running. It isn’t my playstyle. But if I want the monthly, I need to dive in and try something outside of my comfort zone.

And I don’t care how bad you think you are at PvP, or WvW. You can get 50 kills in the same or less time than it takes to run 7 dungeons, so the time investment isn’t an arguement. You don’t want to spend time in WvW and I don’t want to spend time in dungeons. ANET can’t win, can they?

And my computer is eight years old, it runs WvW just fine.

Thrashbarg.9820:

The real issue here is being overlooked. The rate at which it is possible to earn laurels will tie you to doing these dailies for 6 months to get the gear currently available. If you have multiple characters, you’re looking at years to get what you could from fractals in a few days/weeks. It’s as much a slap in the face to open-world PvE players as it is to WvW players.

Grinding one particular dungeon is still, by far, the fastest way to gear up.

Please add ascended gear for badges and karma.

One amulet and two rings = 95 laurels
Three infusions = 15 laurels
Total expense = 110 laurels

At 30 laurels per month from dailys, plus 20 more for the monthly makes it just over 2 months. 2 months of playing the game for one hour each day, for three pieces of gear you don’t need, but want. How much more effort is it going to take you to get a legendary, that is only slightly better than ascended? Is that also then a slap in the face?

Oh, it’s a slap in the face because you can’t get a set of the best gear in the game within a week of minimal effort. Did I sum that up for you?

saiyr.3071:

Kuldred.2436:

Hey Emerge, don’t lose heart. We had great fights with you because we matched up pretty close with coverage, now we can’t hold a stick to you, so we can’t give you the challenge you are looking for. Jump up another tier or two, and you should run into servers that can match your new coverage, and hopefully make fights fun and challenging again.

Coverage isn’t what he’s looking for.

Never said it was. <confused>

kash.9213:

Kuldred.2436:

We really enjoyed the fights with Mag prior to the transfers, now not so much. Quite possible we are in for another week of the same with Kaineng, oh well. It will be nice when the dust finally settles from the free transfers and the tiers even back out again.

People should enjoy a match based on how much fun they have fighting with their servers community rather then who they’re fighting against. A solid server community, even when get wrecked in a match, is addictive. More people trickle in when they hear their guildies talking about the crazy stuff that happened in w3, and eventually word spreads across servers.

Wooosh! Way to miss the point entirely.

Hey Emerge, don’t lose heart. We had great fights with you because we matched up pretty close with coverage, now we can’t hold a stick to you, so we can’t give you the challenge you are looking for. Jump up another tier or two, and you should run into servers that can match your new coverage, and hopefully make fights fun and challenging again.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Good luck in your future endeavours IOJ and Yaks. Perhaps we will square off under better circumstances in the future.

We really enjoyed the fights with Mag prior to the transfers, now not so much. Quite possible we are in for another week of the same with Kaineng, oh well. It will be nice when the dust finally settles from the free transfers and the tiers even back out again.

Draygo.9473:

Awww I was hoping for dragonbrand…

Hopefully we can get a decent fight out of this matchup though.

You’ll get them soon enough.

Rodalli, the mortars can all be adjusted to hit the giants in front of them. The far right giant can be hit by the far right mortar. Takes maybe 5 miuntes.

Firegoth.6427:

Kuldred.2436:

moirweyn.9872:

Once I saw the effects and the skin on the bows – I gave up on Legendary weapons completely.

Freaking rainbows and unicorns…

The legendary pistol Quip not only looks horrible, it has less than ideal stats unless you PvP with it, and it shoots bubbles? Since I’m not a 12 year old girl, I’ll pass on the bubbles, rainbows and unicorn stuff, thanks.

The two pistols on that list both look awesome, and have better stats. 250 globs of ecto and 250 ori pistol frames is rediculous, but it’s a walk in the park compared to a legendary. This is definately the direction I’m taking.

And whats up with no mystic forge rifle?

Thanks for posting this list, I had forgotten about it. Awesome stuff!

It is crazy to not even consider getting that pistol!!!
I’ll gladly own my opponents with confetti and bubbles any day.

While my teenage daughter might appreciate the pistol effects, seeing bubbles and flowers coming from my main hand weapon makes me throw up a little. Cute for a gem store purchase item for those of you that like that kind of stuff (I won’t talk about that rediculous quaggan backback), but I’d rather have something a bit more ‘aggressive’ for the ludicrous amount of effort that goes into obtaining it.

To each his own.

The December culling ‘fix’ didn’t actually fix anything, you just made the culling different. It is/was still rediculously rampant.

So no actual fix or even progress on culling for the January update, got it.

Oh really? So night is 40 minutes every two hours. I didn’t realize that. Thanks for the info!

Sigil of the Night gives +10% damage at night. When exactly IS night? Anyone know this?

moirweyn.9872:

Once I saw the effects and the skin on the bows – I gave up on Legendary weapons completely.

Freaking rainbows and unicorns…

The legendary pistol Quip not only looks horrible, it has less than ideal stats unless you PvP with it, and it shoots bubbles? Since I’m not a 12 year old girl, I’ll pass on the bubbles, rainbows and unicorn stuff, thanks.

The two pistols on that list both look awesome, and have better stats. 250 globs of ecto and 250 ori pistol frames is rediculous, but it’s a walk in the park compared to a legendary. This is definately the direction I’m taking.

And whats up with no mystic forge rifle?

Thanks for posting this list, I had forgotten about it. Awesome stuff!

Paid transfers aren’t going to be a barrier for the individual, I don’t think. But for guilds, yeah, now is the time to really make a decision. Moving an entire guild might not be feasable, so they will have to ask themselves if they are really happy where they are.

Myself, my main PVE guild, and my WvW guild are all really happy where we are, so I’m feeling good about that. (Shameless plug time = Yaksbend.com)

I just hope guilds don’t find themselves less than satisfied with where they are, so they either dissolve because individual members head out looking for greener pastures, or they stop logging in so much. Paid transfers didn’t seem to kill WoW, even at 25$ per toon, so we’ll see.

Back on topic, everyone should check out that ‘Night before Xmas’ link. Pure gaming gold right there! Pretty rare these days.

Hey Nekos,

Servers never have enough people it seems. Yak’s prime time seems to be around 2pm-11pm server time. During that period there is usually a queue anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes for our borderland or EB. During off peak times there usually isn’t any wait.

You won’t be disappointed being on Yak’s. It’s got a pretty great WvW community, and we are pretty competitive every week. I have a really good time in WvW no matter what time I’m logging in. Come visit the forums, yaksbend.com.

Hey Kynoko, Yak’s Bend would be a comfortable fit for you IMO. We have several small group teams that roam together, with thier own Mumble channels as part of the Yak’s Bend Alliance. They tend to go where the immediate need is.

Anywho, great community, really amazing commanders, and a competitive server in a competitive tier. We have loads of fun pretty much every night. Come by our forums and take a looksee. Yaksbend.com

lisamee.2408:

The drop rate must be already nerfed in a specific place i was farming, because i only got one in 50 minutes, and the crowd that was there is no longer Just a few days ago i was getting 4-6 in 30 minutes.

Diminishing returns or bad RNG for the day, take your pick. You really think the most logical explanation is that ANet went in and adjusted the drop rate?

Victory.2879:

Nothing wrong with posting farm spots if you think you have found one and want to share it with the community.

There seems to be two types of people- those that want to try and help other people in the game and then there are those that post:

Why would you ruin the game and my farm spot by doing this.

Which shows they don’t care about anyone else they are just out for themselves and anyone revealing anything remotely helpful that might affect them should be treated as an act of high treason.

Welcome to real life types of people in an MMO.

The way GW2 works, if they were out for themselves, they would want MORE people out there, not less. Same concept as farming on Orr, the more people, the more mobs that spawn = more drops for everyone. Lower prices on T5-T6 bloods? So what! You go from 25s to 20s and you increase your drops by a dozen per hour. So yeah, your profit actually goes up. And please don’t drop the ‘lowered damand’ arguement. There will always be huge demand for T5 and T6 mats. Your conquest plan of the TP will still be intact.

And I hate to mention it, but this place has NEVER been a farming secret. Anyone that has spent an hour on that island knows it’s a great place for blood drops. And since 90%+ of the population headed out there for the karka events, that means we all already knew about it. There is not, and never has been a secret to keep out there.

I think being stuck in the same color starting area and being crushed week after week has got to be a fairly rare occurence. I’ve been on the same server through three different tiers, and most weeks we get a new starting position, making it pretty easy to get 100% map completion on all four maps within 4 weeks.

So for you what seems to be ‘bad bad bad design choice’ has actually worked really well for a bunch of other servers. So is it bad design, or your bad luck?

So far, server transfers are still free, and even full pop servers can be transferred to if you try it at really odd hours. If you truly are stuck in the third place starting area every single week, then yeah, a couple of well chosen transfers should get you what you need.

Even with all that effort, it’s still by far one of the easiest parts of the legendary requirement.

Olba.5376:

Or is it that you assume that everyone wants a GS precursor?

Of course they do. Do you know anyone who plays an Engineer, Thief, Elementalist or Necromancer? I sure don’t.

You obviously don’t WvW, because that’s 80% of what’s out there.

themaster, but you passed it, right? I mean, the tanks are bugged, but the quest itself is pretty kitten easy to finish if you use the mortars, even before the # of giants nerf.

Wispy.8679:

Just going to throw this out to Yaks Bend, all servers have exploiters, that’s unavoidable. But do you honestly believe that after what happened yesterday, and the amount of times you have been portalled into inner SM that DB has not been checking over and over and over every single place with Stonemist? Do you honestly believe that the mesmer has been going unavoided for hours on end? We literally have been keeping 10-20 people in SM inner constantly searching and waiting for the mesmer to portal you in.

I’m not here with any evidence of the mesmer himself wall exploiting, it’s the wrong place for it. But can you be so naive to think that he is legitimate? Please, stop accepting his portals hours after we have flipped SM. There is honestly no place we haven’t checked, we have found several exploiting in the walls, but I’m not here to report that mesmer. I am here asking you, as a server, stop accepting the portals of an exploiter.

Wispy, I invite you and anyone else for that matter, to go register at yaksbend.com and read our public forums concerning WvW. We do not tolerate cheating, hacks, exploits, whatever. You will find post after post of our commanders preaching to anyone that will listen, that this is not how we roll, and this is not the reputation that we want. We want to keep the play real, win or lose.

If you can provide a screenshot of anyone on Yaks Bend exploiting, cheating, or hacking, I can guarantee you they will be dealt with quickly.

We pride ourselves on being competitive, having a never-say-die attitude, great community, and a zero tolerance policy on cheating, or even something that would be considered ‘shady’. (ie, going into another servers voice chat and relaying to our commanders what they are doing.)

We can’t control everyone, and we do our best to let everyone know that this is not tolerated. If a Yak’s Bend player is seen cheating, we would actually welcome and encourage you to send us screenshots, preferably to yaksbend.com, so we can take action. I fully understand that getting screenshots can be difficult, but you have to understand that we can’t take action unless we have indisputable proof. Because, as has been pointed out already, as unlikely as you feel it is because of your extensive sweeps, there exists the possibility that someone has found an effective legit hidey-hole.

Having spent hours running with just about every commander on Yaks, I would find it extremely difficult to believe any of them would instruct anyone to utilize a portal created by a mesmer that knowingly exploited/hacked thier way into a building. As far as they knew, it was legit.

Just my 2 cents, take it for what it’s worth.

Just a reminder to everyone, you can’t use the tank, so kill the giants with the mortars. It isn’t hard, and it doesn’t take long. Don’t screw with the tank, it doesn’t work. Play with the mortars. Kill 6 giants = mission over.

If you are using grenades, you also need to use p/p or p/s to try to make up for the 30% damage reduction. ie, you need to run two sigils, which you cannot do by using a rifle.

What was the latest math on the current best combo? I think it was +5% damage on the off hand, and sigil of battle on the main, with swapping to get six stacks of might.

GuardianOMS.8067:

Kuldred.2436:

I came from playing WoW, spending a majority of my time doing the open world PvP (Wintergrasp, Tol Barad), and was especially excited about WvW in GW2. I am still to this day absolutely amazed at what I CAN’T see during the battles. No matter what video settings I run with, I can only see half the distance I could in WoW, and the fact that entire groups of enemy players can run right by me either invisible or without ID tags above thier heads is shocking.

I thought WoW was based on a much older engine, yet could handle this much better?

I know it’s only been a few months, but if we have another large content update with added ‘fluff’, new gem store stuff, new class tweaks and even new areas or stuff to do, and the culling STILL isn’t fixed, I’m going to have a hard time spending my free hours in WvW.

You’re really silly if you think comparing a graphically intensive game like GW2 is the same as WoW, a game that can literally run on toasters (LITERALLY). There are many things to consider when trying to explain the culling issue, the fact that WoW is not handling, sending, and receiving the same amount and weight of information to scores of players at once AND in a high resolution (regardless of your settings) is one of them.

Both games are not created equally or by the same minds. Don’t expect it work like it is. Not trying to sound snobby, just saying.

You completely missed my point, so I guess I did a poor job of explaining. You didn’t get culling in the WoW battles because it was done within the constraints of thier engine/system. I’m fully aware of the less graphics, textures, players, blah blah.

What I want to know is why ANET didn’t design WvW within the limits of thier system? What they have set up obviously cannot handle what is actually happening. I ran WoW on a GTX260, now I’m using a 560ti and have culling pretty much everywhere. So this is my computers fault?

I came from playing WoW, spending a majority of my time doing the open world PvP (Wintergrasp, Tol Barad), and was especially excited about WvW in GW2. I am still to this day absolutely amazed at what I CAN’T see during the battles. No matter what video settings I run with, I can only see half the distance I could in WoW, and the fact that entire groups of enemy players can run right by me either invisible or without ID tags above thier heads is shocking.

I thought WoW was based on a much older engine, yet could handle this much better?

I know it’s only been a few months, but if we have another large content update with added ‘fluff’, new gem store stuff, new class tweaks and even new areas or stuff to do, and the culling STILL isn’t fixed, I’m going to have a hard time spending my free hours in WvW.

Since I have not ever been asked to provide an authentication code for logging into the game or into the official forums from two different IP addresses, then it is obviously failing 100% to provide any security whatsoever.

Downloaded the app, and activated it on my account, and have confirmed that authentication for the account is active. It seems that my definition of ‘active’ is different than yours.

Give up? No, It’s January 2nd. We all went back to work. You’ll see us in a few hours, don’t worry.

Bunzy.8674:

Besetment.9187:

Logistically speaking it might be easier if you…transferred to Ehmry Bay?

That or petition Anet to create a new server called “Bunzy’s fight pit of fun”.

We are actually in the process of taking all the talent from Ebay to make Maguuma one big gank squad server.

So you can earn even less points for your server in a free-fall to T5. Although in T5 your gank squads might actually be worth something.

Zilm.8459:

I miss the mature attitude and civility of TC, FA and CD.

This soooo much. Can’t wait to get back to T3.

Archer.1658:

ITT: Everyone sucks but me. Yak would love to believe they are a well organized server, where as in reality, they really do just outnumber Maguuma and Ehmry Bay significantly sorry to say. Oh and don’t play the “your server just isn’t as organized as ours” please, people need to admit when their servers out man others.

If we outnumber everyone, why do we keep getting the undermanned buff while we take your BL keeps?

I just completed this last night. Just kill the giants with the mortars. You have to kill 5 or 6 of them. They keep respawning until you kill a half-dozen, then it ends. Actually pretty easy.

In some of the other threads started about this quest, it has been pointed out that you can complete the quest if you manage to kill all of the risen giants. Can be done on foot, or using the mortars. The mortar route seems the ‘easiest’.

I haven’t had time to try it out for myself, but I can confirm that you can ideed kill the giants with the mortars. How many giants do you need to kill? I’ve read 5, maybe 6.

Doing the quest this way makes it much more difficult, and it needs fixing, but it can still be done.

It was also pointed out that the giant kill count does not get reset when you die, so just keep coming back until you get them all. Will take too much time, and cost too much in repair bills, but you should be able to move on to the next quest.

I’m giving it another shot this weekend.

Flyfunner.2093:

Best way would be to go to a designated store and buy the gem cards. These are fixed rates so even when in game you’re paying more and more gold per gem daily, the cards stay at a rate printed on them. So buy the card, then buy a gem pack. Useless to convert gems to gold with the 30% tax.

The gems you buy with real $$ through the BLTP are also at a fixed rate. So why would you waste the time driving to a store to get a gem card?

Absolutely classic! Well done boss.