Guild Wars 2

Several minutes ago, I tested accessing guild favor at the Guild Requisitioner in the Guild Initiative Headquarters. With the permissions “Purchase Upgrades” and “Spend Claimable Upgrades” set to Off, I was unable to spend Guild Favor and got the expected error message. This is as intended; all to the good. However:

As far as I recall, Members have not had permission to “Purchase Upgrades” during my many months with the guild. I am not certain about the possibly-related “Spend Claimable Upgrades”, which is set by default to “On” for the Member Rank and if I recall correctly, is set to On for the Veteran rank.

I see a number of possible underlying issues with the permissions:

1. What the permissions control/allow/prohibit is unclear, and not well understood. The official wiki, so often a source of accurate and useful information, is virtually silent on this topic, and where there is discussion or posts, these are equivocal and uncertain. The function and effects of the murky “Spend Claimable Uprades” is particularly opaque, and the “just plain wrong” tooltip is no help : “Allowed to claim objectives.”

2. The interplay of permissions is not fully understood or documented, at least anywhere I can find. Some permissions seem to affect other permissions, and it’s possible these may cause unintended malfunctioning of the permissions system itself. My candidate for consideration is “Spend Claimable Upgrades” and I feel it should be looked at.

3. The permissions settings may not be “sticky”. Under certain conditions, the permission settings simply fail.

For context:
https://imgur.com/a/4Z798

I can confirm the guild panel bug is showing us at 50 favor instead of 6K+, despite our GH being at max level and full favor.

What a terrible idea.

Megaserver and the other related changes, such as the rigid scheduling and rotation of world events are dead giveaways – Anet has projections for the future player base and future income that do not look good.

Similarly, I think the Anet team ducks and deflects talk about expansions and new, permanent world areas opening up because they know the numbers. And the numbers tell them that this grand, (and it really is grand and lovely) open world they designed has not captured enough sustaining players or enough new ones.

They positioned this update as giving players a better game experience. For low population server, off-peak players, megaserver may provide a temporary benefit. For those of us with lively guilds and great servers, not so much. As many on this forum have said, showing up to a sort of dental appointment to spike down a champ with a horde of players I’ll never get to know, never chat with and certainly never game with in any real way is so underwhelming, words fail me.

Anet is laying the groundwork now to automate much of the game maintenance and content, and of course, consolidate the declining player base. This is akin to papering over the cracks in a wall – looks okay for a while but just hides the fact of it needing serious repairs.

Orr (especially Malchor’s Leap) is a mess right now under megaserver precisely because the zone and its major events are still dynamic and alive. Unlike the world events in the rest of Tyria, what the players do matters, even if the outcome is negative in terms of spawning the climactic boss or failing the event. This was always part the intended shape of the game, but it won’t be around much longer.

Anet is abandoning its original, creative vision of the game, quite early in its planned life cycle. I find this regrettable and well, I am sad. I had hoped I would have a longer time to enjoy the game and see it grow.

Are trinkets and backpieces included in the new scheme? The Anet post uses the term “gear” and talks about armor and weapons in the post, but does not specifically cite them. Traditionally, these pieces have been treated somewhat differently from armor and for that matter, weapons.

I’ve just had exactly the same problem Henke.4356 describes below. I too got no error message and no confirmation message when I tried to purchase Gems in-game a few minutes ago. (My support ticket is #121125-002581).

Just cleaning up loose ends and giving thanks. ANET’s major upgrade and fix of the in-game gem purchase mechanism worked flawlessly for me. Thanks to all who worked diligently to manage and resolve this very frustrating and significant customer service issue.