Guild Wars 2

I got my ROI less than a second after I mined my first node with it. I bought it as a toy, not to save gold. I think for many folks the unlimited part wasn’t about mining nodes, it was about being able to have the effect an unlimited number of times. Even if some ubernode is added that I can’t mine with it, I won’t be sad because it will still work on all the other nodes.

Let me preface this with saying that I really like a lot about GW2, and I actually like the idea of a"living world". I’m finding in practice however, that it’s making it difficult for me to get re-engaged with the game after taking a break.

I took a break for a while because work was crazy and I needed less involving games (like Android apps I can play for 5 minutes and put down). I’ve been sort of itching to come back now that things have calmed down a bit, but each time I’ve logged in, it’s been halfway through a living story event, and I’m so far behind on why things are actually happening (Who’s Scarlet again and why do we all hate her?) I’m just having trouble engaging with it.

I don’t care about the achievements and I can handle missing holiday or infrequent one time events just fine. Holidays will roll around again next year in some form and the one time events are easy to get up to speed on what happened and what changed. I think it’s the frequency of the living story content that’s putting me off.

It makes me feel like I have to pay way more attention to the game that I’ve got the bandwidth for, and runs counter to why I liked the game so much in the first place, which is that I could pick it up and do whatever I felt like doing, harvesting, crafting, jumping puzzles, dungeons, etc. and still feel that I was making progress. Now I feel pressured to do particular activities when I log in because if I don’t I won’t have another opportunity to experience them later on.

An example might express it better. The original Woodstock was a one time event that can never be recreated and significantly influenced the US. I can’t go back and experience it the same way the folks that were there experienced it, but I can watch video of it and listen to the music and get some idea of what it was like to be there. The living story events are gone completely once they’re over (or at least that’s my perception of it) and there’s no way to go back and experience the content even partially other than reading about it.

Yes I could ignore the living story entirely, but I would really rather not. I don’t want to feel pressured to play a particular way at a particular time. There’s a fine balance between encouraging players to be more active and pressuring them.

I don’t have a solution – just expressing my frustration a little bit. I’m probably more sensitive to it than most folks – I get really stubborn when I feel like someone is nagging me to do something lol. Although, maybe a cinematic summing things up at the end of each event would be enough now that I think about it. When I’m ready to get caught up, and can go through the cinematics and feel more connected to what’s going on.

Guardian.5142:

Its been said that the evidence of a thriving economy is a healthy middle class.

I don’t think defining “middle class” as a certain amount of gold in the bank makes any sense. For me having 100g in the bank is pointless – I would have bought other things I wanted long before I let it accrue that high. Unless you’re saving up for something why let it sit there? You don’t get interest on it.

I’m gold poor, but I have lots of nice stuff. I’ve got characters fully kitted out in gear that is effective for the things I like to do, I’ve got the skins I want on most of my characters and I’ve got the dyes I want. I even spent some gold (maybe too much) discovering every cooking recipe so that even when my collection tabs are full my discovery pane is empty (don’t laugh I had a lot of fun with that :P). I don’t feel poor even though I don’t have a big pile of gold. I feel solidly middle class.

You don’t need a big pile of gold to enjoy the game, any more than you need to be at the top of the leader boards. Some folks have the goal of having a lot of gold or making it to the top of the leader boards or of having multiple legendaries, which is fine, but that doesn’t mean it is the yardstick that should be used to measure the entire player population.

Poor/middle class/rich are “standard of living” concepts, not amounts of money concepts (even though the subdivisions are typically based on income). My understanding of it is that the classifications are really a function of what percentage of your income you have to spend on necessary things (food, shelter, transportation to your job) versus things that make life better (entertainment, conveniences, vacations) and what quality of those items you can afford (do you have to live in a slum, or do you live in a house in the suburbs).

Stand The Wall.6987:

Most people who PvE expect others to go into Power Precision Critical Damage to down mobs faster. If this isnt what you want then join a Role Playing guild.

I think you mean “most people that speed run dungeons in PUGs” not most people that PVE. And I’m sure the RP guilds would prefer folks that actually have an interest in role playing. Just because you don’t follow the lemmings doesn’t mean you are an RPer.

Build your characters however matches your play style and ignore the folks who insist that you have to be in full Berserker’s or you suck. I’ve got a high toughness ranger and she does just fine. She’s extremely useful in pulling aggro off of the folks in full Berserker’s who keep getting downed, and she can go mano-a-mano with a Champ and his minions and keep them busy long enough for the folks that can’t wrap their brains around anything but DPS to get rezzed.

Don’t get me wrong – a good player in full Berserker’s tears things up, but simply wearing a full set of Berserker’s gear does not immediately confer an aura of awesome on you.

I also have a high vitality Necro that plays differently, but is just as durable. I figured with Death Shroud it would make sense to go full kitten and focus my build around having a large life pool. My ranger uses more of a combination of toughness and evasion. Whichever way you go, just make sure that your build supports the path you’ve chosen and don’t emphasize one aspect to the exclusion of all others ( there are diminishing returns as someone mentioned earlier in the thread).

goldenwing.8473:

Sokar Rostau.7316:

(snip)I think at least part of the reason is that GW2 isn’t as… “masculine” as other games of the genre and has many “girly” elements to attract female gamers.

55 year old female gamer here who got her husband interested in MMO’s…. I play GW2 for two reasons:

1) dungeons are 5-man
2) game is not gear-centric (e.g. my “gear” does not play for me, the game permits me to use skill.)

One of the first MMO’s (outside of DAoC) in the last 13 years that I have really enjoyed for the “skill” aspect since I stopped playing FPS.

PS: Yes, my daughter and I both agree: Skritt are funny and Quaggans are too cutesy.

Skritt > Quaggans 3/3 females agree

I’m a 44 year old woman and I play GW2 for lots of reasons – but they all add up to one big reason, which is they fixed everything I hated about the many other MMOs I’ve played.

It’s not the overtly girly stuff that attracts me to games (it actually drives me away from games almost as fast as Anime style graphics). The idea that rainbows and unicorns attract women is sort of regressive. What attracts women to games has a lot more to do with play style I think. I don’t like to come home from work and get all hyped up and confrontational in my games. I like to compete, but only when it’s mostly my skill against your skill, and it’s more strategy than reflexes. I’m a fan of WvWvW, and not that into sPvP.

Here’s some of the reasons I like GW2 of the top of my head

• fluid combat that requires you to be situationally aware and conserve your resources for the right moment
• it’s not gear centric
• there’s no mob/node/xp stealing <- I think this appeals to a lot of women
• level-scaling so I can wander around where ever I feel like it instead of having to plan out my quest arcs so I don’t out-level them
• transmutation stones and the dye system let me wear the gear that fits my build without looking like I’ve been dumpster diving. (And that’s not a girl thing – my man seriously spends more time making sure his avatars look cool than I do on mine)

Nomin.5901:

I gave you an answer to your question, Pande, There is no need to tell me your life story or be a kitten. But if you dont have time to play the most casual MMO I know, than I dont think MMO gaming is for you.

I didn’t ask a question, I gave some feedback on my experience of the game. There’s no “answer” there’s just other folks’ opinions which I’m actually interested to hear whether they agree with me or not.

I love the casual aspects of GW2 and that’s why I’m still interested in playing it. The living story takes away the the casual aspect of GW2 for me and replaces it with pressure to log in at particular times and do particular things or miss content that actually changes the state of the world and leads into other content.

I’ve played pretty much every major MMO out there casual or not (except EVE – I stink at that one lol) I’m working my way through SWTOR again right now as a subscriber, and I’m not experiencing the same reluctance to log in even though I don’t have a lot of time, so I thought about why and gave ANet some feedback.

You said:

Nomin.5901:

Although, I dont how someone doesnt have >30min over the course of 2-4 weeks to do 1 story mission.

I explained, perhaps a little too specifically, how that was possible. The end of the year is always bad for us market data types so I’m grumpy. Sorry. Not sure how that’s more kittenish than implying that my feedback is unfounded because I should make time to play the game every 2-4 weeks. That’s my whole point – I shouldn’t have to prioritize a casual game into my schedule to be able to enjoy it.

What if I feel like playing something else that month? The Steam holiday sales have filled up my library with lots of games of various genres that I’ve been enjoying – The Typing of the Dead is remarkably fun even though it’s about as far from an MMO as you can get. Why does every MMO have to be the “one game to rule them all”?

I’m fine with never being able to own a legendary, and ascended gear isn’t even on my radar yet. Folks who invest more time should have rewards that I can’t get. I don’t even care that I miss the holiday events because they don’t change the game world permanently. But why does there have to be so much one time only content? At least with the GW1 expansions I could work through the content at my own pace.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Ursan.7846:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

But Ursan, there’s a couple of intangibles that isn’t accounted for in math. And that, my friend, is the fun of throwing stuff into the Forge, and that feeling of the anticipation of waiting for that precursor to pop on your screen. It’s like an addiction!

As someone who frequents Vegas, I wholeheartedly endorse this post.

The Mystic Forge is like Megabucks. I keep throwing Franklins at the machine, and praying that the icons line up. That feeling when two icons line up, and the third one stops half way down…

Now there’s an idea… What if Z-man gave us a spinning wheel of all the stuff he could give us before he sticks us with junk? And if someone does get a really rare item out of the forge, maybe some fireworks would be in order

Dad always made me drop a buck in the Wheel of Fortune machines when I went to Vegas for trade shows. Z-man could learn a lot from those casinos when it comes to emptying your wallet and still have you walk away smiling.

I love my ranger – she’s not top of the DPS charts but she’s got lots of tricks up her sleeve. You do no damage when you’re dead and she’s very good at staying alive. I’ve soloed certain group events with her – there are some champs she has trouble taking on, but I’m fairly happy with what she can do. You do have to understand how to use your pet though. I leave mine on passive and micromanage it in harder fights.

The engineer is also tons of fun, but folks like them better for groups because there is no pet to be mismanaged and they have group buffs/heals. Honestly I think most of the ranger hate is due to folks not understanding how to use their pets.

Forgive me for not reading all of the previous posts in the thread. If this has been said before, then here’s an extended +1.

I would love to have a PvE locker/wardrobe. I do think though that a transmutation stone should still be required to apply the skin to a piece of gear, and the only cost of stashing something in the wardrobe should be destroying the item. For me the advantage of the wardrobe is organizing the skins, and having a permanent copy that isn’t equipped by one of my characters.

I would buy a wardrobe from the gem store if it was available.

Yoroiookami.3485:

Behellagh.1468:

Yoroiookami.3485:

And here we are, few months later – 100 gems for 8 gold. This is getting a bit ridiculous…it’s not really encouraging me to buy gems for real money, but rather not buy anything at all.

If you only bought gems with gold then in ANet’s eyes your no different than someone who never bought gems either with gold or cash. They don’t make money when you buy something with gems, only when you buy those gems with cash.

I can understand where you’re coming from, but I don’t think company this big will have issues paying their employees just because they will lower a bit the price of gems for gold.

Being able to buy gems with gold is a feature that attracts folks to play the game. Folks that haven’t ever spent real money on gems are still supporting the game – they paid for the box copy, and MMOs need plenty of active players to be successful, so I don’t see the folks that don’t spend money in the gem store as somehow supporting ANet less than the folks that do, although it might be more difficult to measure their contribution to the bottom line.

The gold to gem conversion rate got to where it is because players are still buying gems with gold even at the current price – it wouldn’t go up otherwise. Yes it sucks that you can’t accrue gold fast enough to buy limited time items if you haven’t been saving up gems, but that’s the trade-off. Time for money. If you don’t believe the exchange rate of your time is worth what you get in return, whether that is having fun playing, or getting enough items and gold to buy things in the gem store, why continue to participate in a bad deal?

The underlying problem isn’t that the price of turning gold into gems is too high, it’s that not enough folks are turning gems into gold. The exchange is unbalanced and in my opinion the answer isn’t to lower the cost of gems in gold directly, it is to raise the amount of gold that you get from converting gems into gold. Because the gem price in real money doesn’t float, I think the algorithm had to make some assumptions about what the differential in desirability would be and in my opinion, I think the assumption missed the mark a little.

Look at how expensive a precursor is in real money even with the exchange rate being highly favorable to the folks converting gems into gold. Let’s say the rate is currently 6.5 G for $1.25. At around 40G that means that an Abyss dye is about $7.50. If Dawn is about 590 G, that’s about $113. I’d rather just earn the gold in game and spend my money on items in the gem store directly. The things I can buy for money in the gem store are far more attractive to me than the items I would need gold to buy, especially when I can play the game and potentially get any of those items dropped while I’m enjoying myself.

Gold is not nearly as valuable as gems, and the exchange rate reflects that.

Very interesting read – thanks for taking the time.

I’m not sure why so many rangers are unhappy. It’s possible that it’s an expectation problem – as a ranged profession with a pet, maybe some folks expected that they would be more insulated from the action parts of the combat.

I love my ranger, but I have to be on my toes in hard fights managing my pet, maneuvering, trying to get facing the right way after evading, remembering not to use my “jump back” skill when I’m on the edge of a cliff… sigh. I think the expectation problems are illustrated by folks thinking that the bear is the only worthwhile pet (they can soak up a lot of damage, so you don’t have to be as careful with them).

Folks that choose a thief pretty much have their expectations met – some stealth, big burst damage, little bit squishy. Warriors also meet expectations – heavy armor, melee monsters. Elementalists – I think that folks expected a nuker in exchange for being squishy, but you really have to understand your class to get the damage output. I found that if I don’t switch my attunements to take advantage of synergies, I don’t really feel all that powerful. So folks trying to play as a traditional mage might be disappointed.

I guess my definition of happiness in terms of games is getting close to what you expected.

Nomin.5901:

Although, I dont how someone doesnt have >30min over the course of 2-4 weeks to do 1 story mission.

Do you have a job or a career? If you’ve only ever worked a job, I can imagine you don’t really need to prioritize your time or energy. For me, any game that I have to make a commitment to play or fall behind is off my list. I’ve got too much other stuff to do that is far more important and demands my time unpredictably.

NASDAQ decides to change their symbology to make a couple of Google executives happy and guess who’s life it ties up for the next 4 to 6 weeks. And then they realize that it was stupid to try to make such a huge change and delay, which just gives all of us more time to argue about how we should be handling it and there’s another biweekly erosion of my time and energy.

On the other hand, I’ve got plenty of cash to spend on gems, so I really can’t complain too loudly, lol. My situation is different from a lot of folks I’m sure, but that doesn’t mean I can’t give ANet my feedback about my experience with the game.

If it does get added, I’d like to see it done in arenas like the one in the Black Citadel. That way the folks that are interested in dueling can find each other, and I don’t have to deal with folks dueling in the streets.

Death Reincarnated.3570:

‘Old Sledge Site’ Waypoint in ‘Mount Maelstrom’ has lots of bugs and frogs if you’re sick of knocking out bunnies dead cold.

It may be a bit ghoulish, but freezing bunnies makes me giggle. The death animation is priceless. And yeah, those bunnies are probably descendants of the evil GW1 bunnies and totally deserve it. They’re planning world domination while tricking us into thinking they’re harmless.

John Smith.4610:

I’ve already banned Martha Stewart, so we’re ahead of the game.

So did she lie, or was it more of a preemptive thing to keep her from encouraging players to decorate their home instances with shabby chic crafts made out of jute scraps and drops of magic glue?

Mythx.9847:

I am not really savvy on the background of Anet and where there roots are, but I have noticed that many companies seem to support “censorship” of certain conversations from taking place. I understand having rules that surround the use of clean words, but I think one of the most important parts to a successful business is criticized feedback. I am not sure where the line is drawn and how well Anet moderators handle this, but I would like to see more companies start allowing more “freedom of expression” within there products/services.

There’s a difference between constructive criticism and criticism. In my experience, the moderators aren’t quashing all negative feedback – they’re keeping the discussion civilized and removing posts that can have a bad impact on the game or players (accusations that players are scammers, exploit details, etc.)

ANet has an interest in the forums being a friendly place where most folks feel comfortable participating in the discussions. More feedback from more of the playerbase is definitely of more value than allowing an angry subset of the playerbase to rant unrestricted. I read the Battle.net forums, but I don’t post there because of the unfettered nastiness. I’d rather the moderation be a little too strict (yes, I’ve had posts moderated) than the forums turn into a free-for-all brawl.

Einlanzer.1627:

Regardless, if you use the average, players with lower MF ‘drag down’ the players with higher MF in the exact same way that players with lower combat stats ‘drag down’ players with higher combat stats. They would be ‘taking advantage’ of your MF in the exact same way you would be ‘taking advantage’ of their superior combat prowess.

This is exactly how it should work. I really am running out of ways to make it more clear.

I can quantify how much averaging MF across the group impacts me. You have nothing other than your perception that me having MF on my gear impacts my performance at all. You don’t know my build or my play style and I’m fairly confident I could change my MF significantly mid dungeon and you would never notice.

You should look at what behavior your solution encourages, not how it would work ideally. Folks would want everyone else to have high MF while they themselves had the highest DPS so they could get more damage contribution for drops and still have MF. Encouraging DPSers to take advantage of the MFers is not a solution.

A better solution is for like-minded folks to play together, as suggested by someone earlier where the team could decide to accept greater challenge in exchange for more MF.

Essence Snow.3194:

I undercut mainly b/c I dislike the tp. I will continue to do anything and everything I can to hinder those using it solely to gain wealth.

If you’re serious, the best way you can hinder the market is to vendor everything. By selling items too cheaply on the market, you’re providing a savvy trader an opportunity to buy up your cheap item and flip it for more money.

Panzen.4625:

The former game director of Diablo 3 seems to have admitted to their AH being a bad influence on the game. What is your thought on this?

I think that the D3 AH troubles are just a symptom of deeper game design issues and really doesn’t tell us anything about the TP in GW2.

I’m a Diablo fan girl – I’ve spent more hours than I can count playing Diablo, Hellfire, Diablo II, and Lord of Destruction. I pre-ordered D3 and desperately wanted it to succeed. I have to say that I got my $60 worth of enjoyment out of it and there were some awesome moments, but it rapidly became unfun because of design issues.

A huge change was allowed to happen during the later part of the beta – runes were changed from drops to bonuses you get by leveling up, apparently because itemizing that many different things is hard. That kind of fundamental change should not happen that late in development unless you’ve piddled away too much time with no direction.

That indicates to me that there really wasn’t enough thought put into the loot system and how adding an auction house was going impact that aspect of the design. That’s not a problem with the AH, that problem is laid right at the feet of the leader of that design team. Another indicator of not really thinking through the implications of your loot system on the economy: gems have no level requirement on them and it costs far too much to upgrade lower tier gems into higher tier gems given the drop rates. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it makes everything but the highest quality gems worthless. D3 is riddled with those kinds of problems.

By comparison, everywhere you look in GW2, the notion that players will be trading items in the game is designed in. For example, there are Mystic forge recipes that can upgrade low level materials into higher ones and the only way to get ectos is by salvaging high level rare items. It appears to me that a lot of thought went into creating a net of economic forces that would keep the economy fairly constrained. Is it perfect? Nope, systems that complex rarely are, but it is really well done in my opinion.

While the ANet folks are working on the disappearing quote/edit buttons, here is how I work around the problem.

1. Click on the permanent link for the post you want to quote, for example
   https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/forum/Some-threads-have-no-edit-quote-report-options/first#post128498
2. Edit the URL in your browser to remove first#post and append /quote :
   https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/forum/Some-threads-have-no-edit-quote-report-options/128498/quote
3. Hit enter to go the that URL

If that doesn’t work (it usually does for me) you can copy and paste what you want to quote and use BBCode:
{quote=128498;PosterName}pasted text{/quote}
Replace the braces with brackets – we can disable textile, but not BBCode it seems.

Low level ingredients can appear in high level recipes – take salt and pepper for example – it’s an ingredient in recipes from 0 to 400. If you add it to a recipe and the rating level is too high for you to make even though it wasn’t red in your discover tab, it just means you haven’t combined it with the correct ingredients to find the lower level recipe.

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

As I said in my Crafted cheaper than mats thread is that an armor piece shouldn’t be cheaper than the mats required to craft that armor, in other games this works fine or even they don’t even exist at the marketplace so you have to craft them.

Why shouldn’t a specific item be less expensive than materials that could be used to create any number of things? My husband just crafted his way from 25 to 75. He sold the things he made to recover some of the costs of buying the materials, but he didn’t care if he made a profit on items because he had already gotten some value out of them from the XP he gained by creating them.

GW2’s crafting has significant differences from crafting in other games. Everyone can gather crafting materials and lots of materials are gathered just by regular play. Everyone can do all of the crafts. Crafting and gathering gives a significant amount of XP, and is part of the dailies.

When you craft something in GW2, you don’t add much value to the materials you crafted it from. In some ways you actually make the materials less valuable, because you turn them into a specific item that appeals to fewer people than all the possible items that could be made from them, and they can’t be used to level up any more. It just isn’t that difficult to make the items for yourself, so most of the profit comes from providing convenience.

I’ve had better luck selling insignia and inscriptions than selling items made from them. A single insignia can be made into 18 different things (6 pieces of light, medium, or heavy armor) and I know a lot of folks that buy materials to give to their guild mates to get something specific crafted. The market is larger than it would be for say medium shoulders crafted from that insignia.

JustTrogdor.7892:

I’m not into lore but as a heads up if you want to do jumping puzzles I highly suggest avoiding huge Norn.

My main is a Norn female ranger and I wholeheartedly agree that you don’t want to do a lot of jumping puzzles with them. One of the puzzles in Lion’s Arch flipped my camera around so much due to collisions that I was motion sick after finishing it and had to log off. My Asura Engineer is my go-to girl for jumping puzzles now.

Other than that it is a matter of taste. My suggestions:

• Take a look at the Human racial skills and Norn racial skills and see which appeal to you more or fit better into the type of build you like to play.
• Spend some time customizing Norns and Humans before creating one to see if you can get a look you like. My husband could not get a male human that he was willing to play.
• Make a test character and listen to the voices. The Norn females have a pretty deep voice – it might bug you, it might not.
• Take a look around some of the armor galleries on dulfy.net The Norn male shoulders have a really different scale from the human shoulders – you might like it, or you might hate it.

Nefertiti.4652:

Kurow.6973:

Sounds like some of you just want revealing town clothes.

Not like there’s female/male versions of each armour or anything…right? So pretending like there isn’t, isn’t going to change that.

Not even close in the range of things. As a matter of fact the Armor choices are far more revealing then that of the clothing worn by the Npcs. I dont think its that far of a stretch to have the fashions of the NPCs available for players to purchase.

As someone who bought every single costume pack in COH, I’m with you on this one. I would like more town clothes options that look like leisure clothes appropriate to Tyria (i.e. not hoodies or ball caps). Yes I’m a dragon slaying hero when I’m outside the city, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to own a party dress.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

ixiduffixi.6384:

Yes because the map completion achievement is a server wide reward, not a personal one. It’s something that requires the help and cooperation of a large group of players for something they may or may not benefit from.

Are you trying to talk about WvW? If so, you can’t compare playing WvW competitively with willingly helping a single player cap a POI. All you have to do is play WvW as it’s meant to be played, and everyone benefits, including the player who wants Map Completion.

I think the WvW maps should be part of map completion, and that getting folks to poke their heads in and see what this WvW business is all about is a good thing, but forcing them to not just participate but to be successful at it is counter to encouraging more folks to get involved in WvW.

What would be the harm in moving the POIs for map completion outside of the keeps so that players don’t have to wait for their color to come around? What about those players that are stuck in a cycle where their server is always out matched or that play outside of prime time on their server? Those players would still experience the map and get exposed to WvW but they wouldn’t be as frustrated.

Himei.5379:

Sometimes it’s company that charges it. I know that Gamestop charge taxes on a Gem card when I buy it from them but Bestbuy doesnt at all. It’s not consistent enough, when it comes to Online, probably a different rule scheme.

If you’re getting charged sales tax on a gift card, it is most likely a mistake based on what I found poking around the Internet.

I’d like to see him recognized for his heorism, but it is a pretty big spoiler even if it’s specific to one order. Maybe something could be added to your home instance after you complete that arc. Maybe something already is… I have to admit I don’t go in there often

Jemmi.6058:

Vayne.8563:

The reason it shouldn’t be in the game is the same reason countries have gun laws.

You don’t give people the tools to commit crimes, unless you want them to commit crimes.

Vayne, I quite often agree with you, but this I cannot. It is a very poor analogy.

I agree that it’s a terrible analogy, but because it’s wrong, not because it’s emotionally charged. Guns are not tools to commit crimes, they are tools to put holes in things from far away. Crimes can be committed with knives, bats, bricks, cans of spray paint, etc. That doesn’t make them “tools to commit a crime”.

Defining inspect as a tool to be a jerk is wrong too. By that logic we shouldn’t have zone wide chat in the game – that’s a much more pervasive jerk enabling tool than inspect.

I think inspecting stats/builds would be bad for the game also. There are many stronger arguments in support of that than this one.

Simply looking at information is not an evil thing, it’s what you do with it. There is not much good that can come out of folks having access to inspect information without the player’s consent. Even if players can disable inspection, you run into the “well what are you hiding?” mentality that so many of the folks bent on eroding our privacy seem to have. It’s better that sharing your build or gear is a bit tedious than we have an environment where players are expected to expose all that information. Communities where privacy is respected and diversity is encouraged are nicer than ones where it is not.

I also have an entirely different argument about how dumb it is to select folks for your dungeon run based off of gear anyone could buy off the TP, but there’s no use going over that one again. See my signature:)

Danikat.8537:

Mungrul.9358

A friend has an owl pet called Hooters and a raven called Quoth.

Kitten, I thought I was the only one with a raven called Quoth. Except at least one other person used it in GW1 as well.

My raven is named “Nevermore”. My owl is named Hootie because I’ve never been able to get this homage to a Strigid Screech Owl out of my head.

I got a kick out of a Norn name my husband came up with for me – Nancy Brew. She’s teamed up with his Frank Zappya. Two guesses as to his profession.

I’ll chip in my two cents as an “old” person – well actually if you think anyone over 30 is old, I’m bordering on ancient. Let’s just say I’ve been gaming longer than some of your “old people” have been alive

Gaming is my hobby, I play lots of games of many varieties, and shortly before GW2 came out was completely burnt out on MMOs. I’ve tried all of the major ones and the only one that kept me around for any significant length of time was City of Heroes (RIP). Tons of aesthetics, easy to hop on, do a couple of missions and hop off, and really fun community on the RP server. I think the game design choices ANet made appeals to older folks without necessarily alienating all younger folks.

You don’t have to have dark or mature content to attract adults – look at Candy Crush Saga. It isn’t children spending tons of money on that game every week. You do however have to have a game that we ancients can enjoy after work without having to be hyper focused or commit huge blocks of time to do raids.

GW2 has fewer time sinks than any other MMO I’ve played. There is no waiting for the zeppelin, or having to have a mount to get around the world, or having to go back to a quest giver to complete your dailies. It was the first game that I hit the level cap before my man, because all of my wandering and crafting and side tracking to investigate something that looked interesting was actually a much more effective way to level than grinding. I was level 80 for a long time before I ever set foot in Orr, which I think is incredibly awesome.

I think that the difference in pace might be a reason that the community could be trending older. The younger folks with more time and energy might (in general) get bored sooner with a game that doesn’t have much of a gear treadmill pushing them forward to the next great thing. You hit the level cap pretty quickly, and from there on out the obvious goals tend to get longer term. The stereotypical old person likes to putter around where the stereotypical young person prefers to charge forward at full speed. Exceptions to every rule of course…

Latinkuro.9420:

Conclusion

A lot of people say Guild Wars 2 lacks this and that and whatever.
But I say to you, all those other games are missing a hell of a lot more
that we as GW2 players take for granted everyday.
I believe we have been spoiled so much by all the nice good features of GW2 that now we expect an even higher level of quality and polish

I have to agree that GW2 fixed a lot of things I really hated about MMOs.

(Edited to remove my impressions of Wildstar)

It made me appreciate a few things about GW2

The quest where a new character gets initiated into the world of Tyria is 1) fairly short and 2) action packed. You get to kill some boss-like enemies right off the bat – I love the robot in the Asura intro.

There is no quest log with objectives in different locations or quest givers to keep track of – you just wander around and get XP for pretty much anything you do – hearts, events, killing creatures, harvesting, exploring. You don’t have to finish the hearts if you want to go do something else – your progress will be there when you get back to it, and they don’t unlock other quests.

Teaming is so easy. You don’t have to worry about who gets the loot, or the harvesting node, or the kill credit. It just works.

You have lots of choices of where to go adventuring regardless of your level. All the capital cities are two portals away. No zepplins. No hair raising runs through higher level areas.

Deposit all collectibles(!) Mail available without having to be at a mailbox. I could go on an on but I’ll spare you

I do have some things I don’t like about GW2, but I have some faith that they will eventually get fixed or improved. I’ve seen so many changes over the past year that seem directly related to the feedback on the forums that I’m confident if enough folks are bugged by something, it will get reworked somehow.

Freeelancer.2860:

@OP and people sharing same thoughts: I missed dragon bash and aetherblade retreat parts of the living story. I simply stopped playing game at that time, but I don’t blame ANet for whatever happened in my life and my inability to play the game. Instead I read about what interested me about those releases and now I even have the chance to play some of the content I missed through fractals dungeon.

I don’t blame ANet for anything. I’m not even demanding that they change anything. All I’m saying is that the constant change is making it hard for me to engage with the game. I’m not opposed to living story stuff – it’s just too frequent and too short term for me.

My solution is to go play something else where I feel less pressured to do time limited content and don’t have to rely on incomplete, fan created summaries to get me re-oriented in the game world.

Someone else suggested a vault PIN a while back, which seems easier on folks than mobile authentication. Just don’t put the PIN in the MOTD

I like the idea of being able to set the number of items a particular rank can remove from the vault per day.

Fred Fargone.3127:

Well, I get why every guild leader is asking for this feature. (Was there anyone who isn’t a guild leader / officer above me?)

I’m just a rank and file member and I would like to see this column. If you’re worried about getting unfairly kicked for inactivity/not-representing, maybe you’re in the wrong style of guild?

Gray Fox.9178:

Metallic Primer
Best Value Cost: 7.69 Gold or $1.31
A food that costs more than 7.69 gold per 12 hours must be found to justify cost.

Basic Ore Node Pack
Cost: 58.56 Gold or $10
Justifiable cost is unthinkable. Waypoint cost alone makes the mind boggle.

Your first mistake is trying to equate the dollar cost with the gold cost. Your second mistake is not taking into account the time cost associated with acquiring gold and factoring in whether it is more efficient for someone to “farm” $10 rather than 60 gold. You’ll never be able to come up with a real answer to that however, because everyone values their time and money differently.

If an item in the Gem store doesn’t have a good value proposition for you, don’t buy it. If it’s overpriced for what it is, no one will buy it and maybe the price will drop.

I see some really stupid and overpriced products that I would never buy when I’m shopping IRL. I don’t understand why it would make me angry that they exist. It has absolutely no negative impact on me if other people like and buy them, but it could have a positive impact by keeping the shop in business.

Septemptus.7164:

That is why I said that bots are made better these days… So it saddens me they don’t check those reports as good as they should.

The bots have evolved, and it may make more sense for ANet to collect information about how to combat the new and improved bots and mass ban them, than to tip their hand by banning them the second they’re reported. I wouldn’t expect ANet to waste their time stomping each ant individually when they can take out the ant hill.

The crafting level requirement on an ingredient is the lowest level recipe it is used for, so if it’s red for your craft you won’t be able to use it.

I found GW2DB to be useful for figuring out what my tailor could make. You can put the minimum and maximum recipe level in, or you can put the minimum and maximum item level requirement in and it will show you all the recipes you can make in that range.

You can also search for the name of the insignia, and it will show you all of the recipes that it is an ingredient in.

Part of the problem that leads folks to think there is manipulation is that we don’t have any trade information; we only get to see bids and asks quotes. Did a precursor get bought and relisted or did someone buy the lowest sell order and now only the 900G one is left, or did someone buy the low priced one and a different person list the 900G one? There’s no way to tell with the information we have.

The timing of events tells us very little definitively.

Inspired.6730:

It’s not the gift card, it’s the “tangible” personal property part that determines taxability in many states. While software is widely considered tangible and thus would be taxed, subscriptions for example are not and thus aren’t taxed unless covered by another tax law. I don’t see why they’re classifying gems as tangible.

Well I quoted the Texas code to show how stupidly complicated it is. The taxable item clauses go out of their way to say that digital items are still taxable (there’s a whole list of services that are/aren’t taxable also), there’s a clause that only talks about gift cards and how they’re not taxable (unless they’re a pre-paid telephone card), and so on.

My point is that ANet has nothing to do with any of this – their lawyers dug through all this crap for all the states and figured out what they had to do to comply with the law. There’s nothing shady or wrong about that – the folks you should be miffed at are the politicians who came up with this mess. I’m sure that ANet would rather not have to deal with collecting tax.

After reading through other folks’ ideas and thinking about it for a bit, I remain convinced that the TP is unequivocally the best option. The only items most folks would be willing to go through the hassle of finding a buyer and broker for are so valuable that the temptation to take the money and run is just too great.

If the 15% fee is large enough to give you pause, just think how hard it is for folks to have 100% of the sale money AND the item in their hands and settle for a 1% broker fee. Especially when it is “just a game” and the victims aren’t going to have any serious or lasting harm done to them (although I imagine it would be devastating emotionally, you aren’t going to end up homeless or unable to send your kids to college). I think the risk-reward ratio falls squarely on the side of the dishonest person here.

On top of that, I think it would be really demoralizing for the folks that worked hard to put together an honest broker system to have a bunch of unethical jerks ruin it. While it’s an admirable idea, I just don’t think the effort and cost to make it work would be worth it. If this was Diablo 2 and there was no safe alternative, it would be worthwhile. I just don’t see how you could add enough value to make the broker service more attractive than the TP to a large number of people.

Fishbait.6723:

True there are lots of reposts, but have you tried the search function for this forum?
it is bloody awful.

Yes it has got to be the worst search utility I’ve ever encountered. The good news is that Google indexes the forums, so you don’t have to use it. Just use the parameter “site:forum-en.guildwars2.com”.

miniL.7361:

Pandemoniac.4739:

Even if some ubernode is added that I can’t mine with it, I won’t be sad because it will still work on all the other nodes.

In that case it should be upgraded for the ubernode just like legendaries should stay the best item obtainable in game

In fact it should be a legendary molten mining pick!

I expect it will be, but even if it isn’t, I’ve gotten my enjoyment out of it.

Lots of folks have lots of thoughts, but the topic of manipulation has been beaten to death, resurrected, and beaten back down a number of times. Here’s a few threads off the top of my head:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Precursor-prices-manipulated-badly/first#post1797653

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Storm-precursor-150g-overnight

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Prices-of-Ectos-being-controlled/first#post1641450

If you want the cliff notes version – there are more people trading on the market than you think there are, and because we only see the bids and asks and not the actual trades, there is no way to know the real price of an item.

Vol.5241:

John Smith mentioned this awhile back, and he said that constructing an infographic like that takes a lot of time and translation (not sure why that is so tough though)

Taking a snapshot of complex economy data and translating it into a visualization that will enlighten rather than mislead is actually way more work than it sounds like. There is a lot of expertise and thought required even for things that seem simple like whether to use a bar chart or a pie graph.

And then there’s the part where John probably has other work responsibilities that take up his time. If he really loved us though, he stop wasting all that time sleeping and interacting with his friends and family and give us some brightly colored charts to pick apart

Ohoni.6057:

I’m sure traders have made quite a bit of money from items I’ve sold them. I don’t have any angst over it, because I don’t really want to put the effort in that goes along with making a lot of money on the TP.

And that’s the situation I’d like to see changed. I don’t think that it should take any amount of effort to make money off the TP, or conversely that putting a lot of effort into the TP should make money. The TP is not something that should require skill or even interest to make the most of it, it should just be a tool for players to get rid of items they don’t want, or to find items that they do, not as a money engine for those that care to work it.

Lol, I would like for the job of professional athlete to not require so much skill and training so we could all have 10 million dollar a year contracts without having to put in the effort or have any talent. If wishes were horses… Oh well, if we all made 10 mil a year, I’d hate to think how expensive a hamburger would get.

The reality is that whenever there are limited resources, living things compete to get the greatest share of those resources. That’s how we lifted ourselves out of the primordial mud. Competition is the fairest way to allocate limited resources when those resources are not necessary to live. In a fair competition, the folks that put in the most effort or have the most skill get the most, and the folks who put in less effort get less. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

You can’t take the competition for money out of the TP and still have it function for the non-traders that you think you are making things better for.

I appreciate that y’all are organizing the threads; it helps those of us that search. It would be great if we could get a direct link to the thread, or part of the thread title, when we get the moved thread notice. With all the activity on the forums,the moved thread can be three or more pages away from the first page of the forum. If I had a hint of which thread it was that got moved, I could find it through my profile.

I wouldn’t mind having a filter on every vendor to filter out stuff I can’t use and stuff I can’t afford. I’d rather see more advanced searching on the TP first though.

I would put your suggestion over in the suggestions forum with a more descriptive title. It might get more attention that way.

Actually it’s not all bad, because as part of the decision the court affirmed the FCC’s authority to regulate broadband Internet in principle. The ruling just said because the FCC had classified Internet providers differently from phone service providers that it couldn’t do so in this particular case. That means they can rewrite the regulations and it could satisfy the court.

Also, Comcast supports the FCC’s Open Internet rules and has said they’ll stick to them for at least the next 6 years… It was Verizon that challenged them in court.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Just wanted to correct you. Coffee shops don’t offer free Wifi to draw people in. Customers will come in regardless, because they want the coffee. The free Wifi is a convenience for customers who decide to hang out. Why do I say this? Because nearly all coffee shops offer free Wifi.

Drawing folks in is different from differentiating. Almost all coffee shops offer free WiFi because it is profitable to do so. It probably affects sales on several fronts, but making the shop a place to hang out is an important aspect.

Restaurants seat folks by the windows first so the folks walking by see a bustling business and will be more interested than if they walked by an empty looking restaurant. Shops go out of their way have full shelves because things sell better than empty looking shelves. A good portion of my time in my younger days was spent “fronting” shelves, where you pull product forward and make a wall so customers don’t see the empty space in the depth of the shelf. They wouldn’t have paid me to do it if it didn’t make a difference. Not everyone is affected by those tactics of course, but enough that it makes it worthwhile to spend real money making sure that potential customers get the appearance of thriving, fully stocked businesses.

How many times have you seen complaints that the game was “empty and dying” because a certain area on a certain server was under-populated? It’s human nature to assume that if there are lots of people in a place, that place must be a desirable place to be. Why do you think some clubs keep a queue outside even though there’s plenty of room for those folks to go inside?

I bought one with cash. Gaming is my hobby and I spend less on it than my neighbor whose hobby is restoring old cars. I think the pick is fun – I’ve already got my $10 worth of enjoyment out of it, so I’m not particularly worried about it not being able to farm ubernodes in the far future, or how many nodes I have to mine to get 18G (which is the amount of gold I could have bought with $10 at the time I purchased the pick) worth of use out of it.

Not only is it good for ANet for folks to spend cash on gems, it’s good for the game that folks are converting their gold into gems. It takes gold out of the economy, which keeps prices down so the more casual folks can afford nice gear, and it makes the gem->gold conversion rate more attractive, which may encourage folks to spend cash on gems to convert them to gold.

Regardless of which way you do it, buying items from the gem store helps the game, so I don’t feel like somehow I did more than the next person by spending cash. I enjoy earning $10 more than I enjoy trying to get 26G together in game (and I can do it a lot faster!). I’d rather spend cash on what I want from the gem store and do whatever I feel like doing in the game instead of worrying about accumulating gold.