Guild Wars 2

L2 Workshop/Vendor did not resolve this issue

My 2 cents on this thread:
1) scribe crafting is insanely expensive –
2) Items for level advancement appear to be missing
3) No response from the devs.

My take is that this is all correct! Although done at the personal level, the profession itself is for the benefit of the guild, guild activities, and guild hall – with some of the items essentially becoming permanent additions to your and your guildies ‘instance’. As such I’m not surprised that these items and level advancement would deliberately be made expensive and difficult to obtain. My take is also that anet does not want to see L400 scribes anytime soon and the way to do that is by what I"ll call hidden gating with particular bottlenecks in production of items – and in turn – leveling.

If you notice – putting your mouse cursor over the reson in the production window tells you that * the shard is crafted by the scribe* yet you can’t (as of yet anyway) seem to craft or produce the shard. The resonating ‘sliver’ (which inuituvely should lead to production of the fragment) is not accepted in the discovery window nor is anet acknowledging any ‘error’.

So -if this is as it should be (which appears to be the case) some possible guesses here:
1) We need more resonating slivers – perhaps a lot of them – then a double-click will produce/ advance them (as was the case with the mordrem and evergreen slivers to make the respective shards/cores/lodestones)
2) As guild scribes advance – the system will ‘see’ that and award players slivers and/or shards with the guild mission completions
3) There are higher level vendors yet to be unlocked – Level 2 Vendor when I looked at the text I took note of the fact that it will sell some random items ‘related to crafting’. A further search did NOT let me see what those random crafting items might be.
4) The overall Guild level might have to reach some arbitrary level prior to a ‘recipe’ simply appearing for the scribe to use to produce the shards (after all – we are seeing other things tied to Guild level – AND I note that crafting for the scribe is limited to the guild hall .
5) There may be a recipe that needs to be unlocked/found at a vendor somewhere within the game that now carries that new recipe.
6) Does the fragment need production by some other means (ie: Mystic Forge)

I can go on with other ideas – and perhaps the scribe crafting is in fact bugged/ broken – BUT – if there is no response from the devs then I think that we need to take their non-answer AS an answer ( and my gut says that they are perversely enjoying the frustration that we see here!) – Good luck fellow scribes~

I was annoyed and disappointed with this particular mastery orb as I viewed obtaining it being gimmick rather than skill. I have no problem with reaching it being a difficult climb with a small footfall to interact with to reach it. Having to use a weapon or utility skill to ‘sort of’ reach it makes attaining it, imho, a ‘gimmick’ and not a ‘mastery’ of anything.

Re: Upgrade extractor on Trading Post. I don’t know what discussions have taken place regarding this item as nothing seems to come up when I do a forum search of this item so understand if I am repeating a topic that has already been discussed. Item is purchased in-game from Black Lion Trader for 250 Gems. This cost is rather high for this item, but more importantly, the description of the item is seriously incomplete. I finally had reason to purchase this item for use on an account bound item, so bought one. Upon use, I was lucky to read the fine read print of the extractors’ window (prior to using) which stated that any item placed in the extractor would become ‘SOULBOUND’ upon use of the extractor. I then looked at wiki which appears to state that items subjected to the extractor would be account bound. I then saw further discussion within a recent gw2 forum thread that the upon extraction the recovered component items were found to be account-bound and thus non-salable. So – not only is there confusion as to what the outcome of using the extractor would be with respect to the re-acquired component items (soulbound versus account-bound) but there is also the issue that the components recovered can’t be sold/traded. This information is missing from the description of the extractor in the trading post; imho this is a serious omission with respect to this item as it currently exists on the TP. This item (and it’s description) needs a serious re-work. At present there is an EXTREMELY limited use for this item. My intent was to see whether swapping out of a valuable component on an amulet was worthwhile – the risk of everything becoming soulbound and non-saleable defeated any possible use for me of this item. I filed a support ticket to try to recover the 250 Gems as I have zero use for this extractor as it currently exists.

I can now confirm that this mini is still within the drop table from the Halloween ToT bags. Opened 2-5K per day since the Halloween event and got my ghost hound drop at around 105K bags (also got a necklace drop along the way – also after the 100K mark). So – the drop remains available – just going to have to continue to be persistent with opening these bags . Good luck!

John – First, thank you for this thread. While I appreciate what has been posted here I have serious issues with this games RNG structure and its in-game behaviour. I understand what you have been told with respect to how the rng works for drops in-game for gw2 however, the possibility of ‘flaw’ still exists. The in-game observations of the player base, and the growing discord related to those observations, is speaking to the possibility that something is wrong – a question though is whether someone is listening and making an effort to evaluate these complaint/s, to examine their possible merit, or whether they are simply being dismissed outright.
A major problem in trying to analyze the rng is that a ‘prized’ drop outcome is itself an ‘outlier’ event statistically – this in turn makes a true/valid assessment of the in-game RNG and/or an individual account with respect to rng difficult – but not impossible.
I was able to look at the problem from a different angle mathematically. {Note that I am NOT going to openly post what I looked at or its math/statistics – BUT I will invite the dev here: John Smith.4610 to contact/PM me for the purpose of sharing that data with him}. I am being deliberately vague here due to possible issues related to the Guild Wars 2 EULA. I will state though that with respect to the GW2 in -game RNG – it is very easy to attribute what is seen for ‘reward drops’ as the rng factor simply being in play – BUT – if one never allows for the possibility that a flaw could exist then one will never find that flaw. ( and yes – there is a provable flaw)
Going back to the initial post in this thread (and based on the above) – option #2 – would, imho, be the best choice help to reduce/relieve ‘low-end outlier behavior inside of game design.’

Have a number of issues with this games’ RNG. At present- just finished unsuccessful attempt #12 at red for ‘fang’ (yes – using appropriate extractor and didn’t have similar issue at the other boss locations). Assuming that the drop rate for each item is similar (tendon/fang/toxin gland) then the odds of NOT getting the fang after 12 tries is 0.68% (if drop rate is not equal (ie: toxin gland seems to be a less frequent drop overall)then the above noted % would actually be even worse! ). Of course, the argument is that this is after all, RNG – however, this problem has not been isolated to just this event (I won’t be more specific as there are apparent EULA issues related to a detailed discussion).

Fort Aspenwood – confirmed

http://i.imgur.com/gLWWtCc.jpg

Gratz Aurora – FA also was successful (finally!) on the last event spawn

Will add my $0.02 for the drop rate.
40 chests open so far – zero tickets
1 – baby charr backpack

Deliberate issue or serious TP bug??
I have filed bug reports about the following issue, without response or correction by A-net.
Since the last update, I have noticed that the TP is not properly listing items placed up for purchase ( or accounting for them).
As an example, look at ‘Giant Eye’. As of this post the TP lists 106 of these as available with the highest priced listed at 70s-99c. If you try to buy 107 – you can’t – which means the TP ‘sees’ only 106 as available. HOWEVER – I have (and have had) multiple Giant Eye listings in the 1G area which are no longer appearing, or being recognized by the in-game TP. In addition, I just tried to place another one up for sale in the low 90s area. The sale was a ‘success’, my account was charged the 5% listing fee, BUT the item does NOT appear on the TP as an active item. The same is true for T6 Dust, and for Unid’d Dye. I don’t know just how many items are affected – but this is an ‘exploitable’ issue that I have made A-net aware of (unless this is deliberate) and which remains uncorrected.

Deliberate issue or serious TP bug??
I have filed bug reports about the following issue, without response or correction by
A-net.
Since the last update, I have noticed that the TP is not properly listing items placed up for purchase ( or accounting for them).
As an example, look at ‘Giant Eye’. As of this post the TP lists 106 of these as available with the highest priced listed at 70s-99c. If you try to buy 107 – you can’t – which means the TP ‘sees’ only 106 as available. HOWEVER – I have (and have had) multiple Giant Eye listings in the 1G area which are no longer appearing, or being recognized by the in-game TP. In addition, I just tried to place another one up for sale in the low 90s area. The sale was a ‘success’, my account was charged the 5% listing fee, BUT the item does NOT appear on the TP as an active item. The same is true for T6 Dust, and for Unid’d Dye. I don’t know just how many items are affected – but this is an ‘exploitable’ issue that I have made A-net aware of (unless this is deliberate) and which remains uncorrected.

Now – the fall-out. Instead of the people who were previously complaining – a single group – now there are multiple groups complaining. Some were locked-out, some, crashed-out, some didn’t know the event was occurring, some couldn’t attend, and some just didn’t get a precursor drop. The ‘haves’ were a minority before – as was intended. Now a more serious split between groups has been created. In addition, while prices for the precursors have indeed fallen – the entire trading post/GW2 economy will be affected. Prices of many materials will be in flux towards higher prices as players move towards attemping weapon construction. In the end, it may actually wind up being MORE expensive to constuct a Legendary than it would have been prior to the event (except perhaps for the 5 most expensive precursors). Some tiers of items will see a price crash as it isn’t worth purchasing them any longer because the end-item (precursor) no longer has the needed value. Given that there are in-game weapons that are even more expensive to produce AND where the extraordinary high price is driven more by GW2 than the players – I simply can not understand the decision, and its manner of execution, to make these precursors so widely available.
I can only hope that the dev’s think their actions through more thouroughly and avoid knee-jerk ‘fixes’ in the future.
Finally – Linsey – I was following your blog regularly regarding the precursor discussions. While I appreciate your availability, comments, and willingness to respond to questions from the player base – my opinion is that you were giving far too much away with your answers.

I was hoping that the developers of GW2 had learned valuable lessons from GW1 – based upon the ‘Lost Shores’ event – it appears they did not. Prior to the event, I had been watching the ongoing discussion regarding the difficulty for many to obtain Legendary precursor weapons via the Mystic Forge along with the complaint that they were too dear in price at the Trading Post. My view was that those who were complaining had some points with merit, but not many.
We were advised that these weapons were supposed to be hard to obtain. In addition, they required work in ALL areas of the game, save for sPVP, in order for them to be constructed. These were features that I thought were correctly thought out by the devs.
Then, a vocal contingent of players arose with complaints that the precursor was too random/difficult to obtain, that the grind was too difficult, that they were too expensive. Perhaps some – even all of the above – were true, but this was easily correctable by tweaks of the MF mechanism which generated the precursor weapons.
Rather than make the small correction that may/may not have been needed – the decision was made to make the precursor weapons widely available via the finale boss chest drops in the Lost Shores event. Whoever made this decision – very bad call.
{For the record – I will note that I was one who had success at the Mystic Forge in producing precursor weapons via a ‘pattern’ I used – not cheap, but productive – and I also did receive a precursor via the final event chest}.
Here are a couple of relative questions I would like answered – Volcanus – to produce the weapon requires over 450 Gold in materials + multiple dungeon runs to create. Why? Why are 100 Lodestones required to produce a component for the Legendary weapons – with each one costing 1 Gold – hence 100 Gold for this single component of the weapon production?? Note that in both cases the expense and difficulty were created by the devs. Clearly, these weapons WERE supposed to be expensive and not easy to obtain. AND – I had no problems with either – until this event.
In the Halloween event – I missed one event and was shut out from progression in the achievement chain. In Lost Shore – you could have missed EVERYTHING except the final event – you could even have just joined a group for the last few minute of the event and received a full share of the end-chest reward. Very poor design. INSTEAD – there should have been a measuring of a players overall event participation and/or time spent in the finale and/or work within some type of real scavenger hunt – and then the reward of a small % of players who had met some participation criteria with a precursor; this would have made a lot more sense, been far more palatable, and been far less destructive to the game as a whole.
We had been told – in this very forum – that there would be a scavenger-type hunt event with respect to acquiring the precursors? Well the so-called scavenger hunt was an absolute joke – yielding a 5 commendation reward which was good for?? Linsey – ??
I was disgusted when I heard and then saw the precursors dropping from that end chest. This was a slap in the face to every player who had worked and grinded actively to acquire and produce their Legendary weapons. This demeaned the value of the GW2 Legendary weapon concept- – supposedly the Holy Grail of the GW2 grind. Via a very bad decision, by giving in to a group of players, an end-game piece of GW2 was damaged – perhaps even destroyed.