I think it might also be related to the bug that causes weapon skills to flicker/reset when you harvest any node type.
It might also be related to them attempting to fix the Engi Kit bug I reported that, when harvesting with a kit equipped, the harvesting tool is overlayed by the kit skin and it looks… preposterous.Can anyone test that? Harvest something with Nightfury and see what happens to the bats? I am only about 30% into making mine so I cannot test that… this seems to happen even more so since I swapped to 64-bit client.
Which brings up ANET’s default response of “try the 64bit client”… does that do anything differently than the 32bit one?
To respond to your question about harvesting, I harvest all the time with it, and so far that action has never immediately caused the bats to disappear that I’ve noticed. Today I did, however, log in to Lion’s Arch and for the first time had the bats fail to appear at all (as opposed to appearing and then disappearing after a little time).
I had a situation happen that I think some others have mentioned, but I had not personally experienced until now – the bats can vanish while you are doing literally nothing. I was simply standing in one place, looking at my inventory, and when I looked back at my character, the bats were gone, so it was clearly not triggered by me moving or performing any action. There were other players nearby at the time, so it’s possible I might have received a boon from one of them without realizing it, and that was the trigger…or maybe some action that one of them performed within my field of view (behind my inventory window) did it. Or maybe it’s just completely random.
On a side note, I know the karka helm has the same problem, but what about the queen bee effect? I haven’t heard anyone complain about that one mysteriously vanishing.
I’ve been playing on my mesmer while using Nightfury lately, and noticed that contrary to what I heard people saying in other places, my clones DO seem to consistently spawn with the Nightfury effect visible, even when it has bugged out and vanished on my character. As far as I could tell, the clones spawned with it visible 100% of the time. Anybody else have a different experience?
Significant new observation that I don’t believe has been reported elsewhere yet: the bug appears to be triggered client-side, not server side.
Reason I believe this is the case: when playing in the same zone as my wife, I noticed that the nightfury effect had vanished from my character on my screen, yet on her screen my character still had it. There were times when I could see the effect and she couldn’t, as well. This suggests that each individual client is deciding for itself whether to display the effect, rather than the server dictating the same display status to all clients.
I’ll continue posting new observations about the behavior of this bug to hopefully help pin down exactly what’s causing it.
Today’s new observation: While running around Tangled Depths, I noticed the effect stayed visible for a surprisingly long time while I was fighting nothing but single enemies one at a time – I was able to cross pretty much the whole map without the effect vanishing. On the other hand, if I go into a fight that involves multiple players and multiple enemies, the effect is almost guaranteed to vanish quickly. Could it have something to do with the number of skill effects onscreen at once?
New observation to report – the effect vanished immediately upon carving a pumpkin in the labyrinth. This does not happen every single time I carve a pumpkin, but it’s one of the few cases where I saw the problem triggered by one single clear action – most of the time it happens in combat where it’s hard to tell exactly what action caused it.
I’ve also had this issue. It is somewhat unpredictable when the effect will disappear, but it pretty reliably vanishes after going into combat once or twice.
Some things will make the effect return – waypointing to another zone (but not within the same zone), using a tonic and transforming back, or clicking the show/unshow button for the shoulder piece. One thing that I would have expected to make the effect return, but does not, is necromancer death shroud: entering and leaving shroud does not make the effect come back if it’s gone.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32654414
More publicity than you could pay for if you tried, especially since it was referenced as “popular multi-player game Guild Wars 2.” Good work.
Just to correct, a perceived problem IS a PR problem, not necessarily a REAL one.
That’s exactly my point. In the business sense, it doesn’t matter whether the source of a customer’s dissatisfaction is “real” or “perceived,” you still have a dissatisfied customer, and telling them that they are just imagining things usually doesn’t make them any happier (even if it’s factually true).
Oh, but it does have a significant difference. If the problem is real, you can fix it, but if it’s only perceived, no amount of fixing will do, because there’s nothing to fix in the first place.
To take an extreme example, it doesn’t matter whether Brand X apples actually contain poison, or if people just mistakenly think that they do, the result is the same.
Again, it does matter – if the apples really contain poison, then you can act to remove it and announce it. If they don’t contain it, this won’t work. And if there were people thinking the poison was real, even when nothing actually suggested it, and didn’t believe any assertions that it wasn’t true, then no amount of proof would make them stop believing (because you cannot use reason to combat irrationality). And addressing those irrational fears beyond the very basic announcement that they are not true would not be a smart move, as it would only seem to give them validity.
You can still “fix” something that wasn’t a “real” problem in the first place to address PR concerns, and it happens all the time. To quote a famous example from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy, “The CDC and AAP reasoned that despite the lack of evidence of significant harm in the use of thiomersal in vaccines, the removal of this preservative would increase the public confidence in the safety of vaccines.”
Ultimately, perception matters more than fact.
Threads like these only show it’s a PERCEIVED problem, not an actual, provable, fixable, problem. Perceived =/= real.
On the contrary, when you are a business serving customers, a perceived problem is a real problem. It may not be a technical problem or a computing problem, but it is still real in the sense that something you are doing is making your customers vocally unhappy, and it is most definitely fixable.
Just to correct, a perceived problem IS a PR problem, not necessarily a REAL one.
That’s exactly my point. In the business sense, it doesn’t matter whether the source of a customer’s dissatisfaction is “real” or “perceived,” you still have a dissatisfied customer, and telling them that they are just imagining things usually doesn’t make them any happier (even if it’s factually true).
To take an extreme example, it doesn’t matter whether Brand X apples actually contain poison, or if people just mistakenly think that they do, the result is the same. In that example, Brand X would be sunk pretty quickly if the executives responded by thinking, “We know for a fact that our apples are perfectly healthy, so there’s no reason to respond to those who wrongly think they aren’t.”
So your saying that Anet should respond to the cries that RNG is broken, and that there are accounts who believe they are “flagged” to either get good loot, or not get good loot?
The problem is that they have. Several times. Repeatedly. But no one wants to listen. There have been many responses to the effect of “They are lying.” “They aren’t going to tell us if its broken.” "Anets version of “working as intended” means that they don’t care, and those accounts who are flagged is part of the design."
So what else are they supposed to do?
I think the reason the responses given so far haven’t been effective is the same reason a Brand X CEO from my earlier example saying, “Our apples are not poisonous” would not be effective. The customers are already looking at you from a position of mistrust, and you haven’t given them any additional reason to trust what you’re saying.
How do you win back trust? You have to publicly take the initiative, reach out to dissatisfied customers, and say, “we want to earn your trust, and we’re going to do something about it, not just talk.” You could even make it fun! For example, they could invite everyone to participate in a (voluntary) “Help Test Our Loot System” event, with all the data gathered during that event made public and also have some entertaining leaderboards for players, like “Most cotton salvaged” or “Most trash received” during the event. It wouldn’t even be that hard to tie in with some lore, and even the people who have no problem with the loot system could have some fun and feel like their play was helping to test an important game system.
Right now, people only feel there’s a problem
That, itself, is a problem. Even if there isn’t a true technical problem underlying it, and even if the solution isn’t to change any game mechanics, customers becoming dissatisfied and speaking up about it to other customers is something to be concerned about and address. Telling people they have no right to feel the way they do rarely makes them more inclined to agree with you.
Threads like these only show it’s a PERCEIVED problem, not an actual, provable, fixable, problem. Perceived =/= real.
On the contrary, when you are a business serving customers, a perceived problem is a real problem. It may not be a technical problem or a computing problem, but it is still real in the sense that something you are doing is making your customers vocally unhappy, and it is most definitely fixable.
Just to correct, a perceived problem IS a PR problem, not necessarily a REAL one.
That’s exactly my point. In the business sense, it doesn’t matter whether the source of a customer’s dissatisfaction is “real” or “perceived,” you still have a dissatisfied customer, and telling them that they are just imagining things usually doesn’t make them any happier (even if it’s factually true).
To take an extreme example, it doesn’t matter whether Brand X apples actually contain poison, or if people just mistakenly think that they do, the result is the same. In that example, Brand X would be sunk pretty quickly if the executives responded by thinking, “We know for a fact that our apples are perfectly healthy, so there’s no reason to respond to those who wrongly think they aren’t.”
Bravo for suggesting and taking action instead of making claims based on anecdotes or assumptions. Even if data from 10 accounts may not be enough, on its own, to support a particular claim about how the RNG system functions, it may well draw enough attention and get enough people interested in participating to create a sample size that is meaningful for a future experiment.
Threads like these only show it’s a PERCEIVED problem, not an actual, provable, fixable, problem. Perceived =/= real.
On the contrary, when you are a business serving customers, a perceived problem is a real problem. It may not be a technical problem or a computing problem, but it is still real in the sense that something you are doing is making your customers vocally unhappy, and it is most definitely fixable.
It’s obviously calculated off the base rate, not sequentially. If it were done sequentially, you would get a different result based on whether chill or alacrity were applied first, which makes no sense from a design perspective, especially since you can’t tell by looking at your active buffs and conditions which one was applied first.
Just like different sources of boon duration and condition duration stack additively rather than multiplicatively, in this case -66% + 66% = 0% would be calculated BEFORE being applied to the skill recharge time.
John’s response was completely appropriate. The OP made a claim that the company’s technology was malfunctioning based on the interpretation of some data. The response was that there is no malfunction, because the data being used was incorrect. Providing the real data was important in this case beyond the simple “working as intended” line, because the originally claimed data was so far outside expected values for a working as intended system.
No DR active on any given day, folks.
This is simply false, and very easy to test for yourself:
1) Get some Maize Balm
2) Find a spot to kill the elementals you spawn
3) In the beginning, each elemental has a 100% drop chance of a trick or treat bag. Not a single one will fail to yield a bag.
4) Keep killing them. Your mileage may vary, but after a certain amount of time, say 1 hour, the drop rate of trick or treat bags will fall to 0%. Not a single bag will drop no matter how many more elementals you kill.
This is far, far too extreme of a result to be cognitive bias.
When using the thief Ricochet trait that now also improves pistol range, it seems that vital shot (pistol 1, the autoattack skill) is the only pistol skill whose range is NOT increased by the trait. This is very easy to see – with a target selected, move toward it: the other pistol skills lose their “out of range” indicators first, while vital shot keeps its out of range indicator until you get within 900 range, instead of 1050 like the others.
I’m not against weapon changing animation slightly i.e. making it pink or fiery. But it minimalizes visibility of powerful cast. It’s like casting Earthshaker with Shield Stance animation.
It can change the visuals of throw casts, since they’re very similar. But Life Blast is something completly different and has to be unaffected by the weapon or given different color instead of ripping off whole projectile animation.
This game is based on visuals and such things are gamebreaking.
Again, I pretty much agree, but the issue is not exclusive to this one weapon, so if they were really going to address the visibility of skill animations as affected by items in PvP, it would take a lot more work than altering just this one skill.
For example, when using the Bifrost, all of an elementalist’s autoattack projectiles look like rainbows regardless of what elemental attunement they have active. Fire 1 on staff hits a lot harder than water 1, but since the rainbows make them look the same, you can’t necessarily tell the strength of the attack you’re about to get hit by just by looking.
At the other end of the spectrum, some changed animations can be too obtrusive due to their size or brightness, such as having too many sparkly unicorns from the Dreamer flying around and obstructing what you want to see.
So, this isn’t so much about one bugged skill that needs a fix, but an overall fairness/balance issue for PvP. It would be great if the incoming standardized enemy team models feature addressed this by standardizing all skill animations, but I don’t know if it will or not.
I believe this is intended, not a bug. Marjory’s Dagger also changes the projectile image of several elementalist skills, as well as necro dagger 4 skill. It would probably be difficult from a customer service standpoint to remove that animation from the weapon at this point, since it would be taking away a cosmetic feature from an item that people purchased exclusively for its cosmetics (it’s only a skin, after all) and would inevitably trigger a rash of refund requests.
But this kind of weapon’s behaviour is highly uncompetitive.
I’m playing Power necro in setup A/D+D/Wh. This kind of play has both weapon animations bugged (Deathly Swarm and Life Blast). In PvP, people cannot recognize the skill I’m using, heck they cannot see projectile at all because it’s so small and suddenly get hit for 4k.
I don’t want to exploit. That’s why I reported this as a bug and unintented design. This is very unfair advantage.
And I want it to be adressed.
In principle, I agree with you on the PvP front. And really, under that reasoning, to have the most level playing field, all weapons that change skill animations (legendaries are the most common offenders) should not do so in PvP. I suspect, though, that they do not currently have the technology to make a weapon only alter a skill animation in some game modes and not others. I would also guess that such a feature would be fairly low on the priority list.
The most cost-effective way to address the fairness aspect would simply be to make and enforce a banned skins list for officially sponsored tournaments (the kind where you actually win prizes, like the Tournament of Legends). For all lesser forms of PvP, I doubt they consider it a serious problem, or the weapons wouldn’t have been implemented that way from the start.
The continued official silence actually makes me slightly optimistic. One hopes it means there is some internal dialog going on about the easiest/best way to throw us some kind of bone, and they won’t say anything about it until they’ve settled on what to do. Even if they were just to turn the old levels back on, I’d still imagine it would take a few weeks to decide on doing so, make the code tweaks that would be necessary, and get it into testing before saying anything about it.
I believe this is intended, not a bug. Marjory’s Dagger also changes the projectile image of several elementalist skills, as well as necro dagger 4 skill. It would probably be difficult from a customer service standpoint to remove that animation from the weapon at this point, since it would be taking away a cosmetic feature from an item that people purchased exclusively for its cosmetics (it’s only a skin, after all) and would inevitably trigger a rash of refund requests.
I would hope that they learned something from the watchwork pick episode (people generally don’t like it when you sell something, then shortly thereafter offer a “better” version that you intentionally weren’t telling them about when offering the original version). The only way they could now make the upgraded version available without a big outcry is to have it require the original version that is currently on sale, and even then only if the original version is still available to get when the upgrade is revealed.
We’ve set a clear policy in the past year: we don’t talk speculatively about future development. We don’t want to string you along. Creating fun is an uncertain business: sometimes things work out and sometimes they don’t; sometimes we go back to the drawing board over and over before we get something right. If we make optimistic promises and then can’t deliver on them, everyone suffers. So when we attend a trade show or give an interview, we’re there to talk about what we’re getting ready to ship, not to speculate on what we might ship someday.
The big problem I see with this policy is that it isolates the development team from meaningful external feedback during the phase in development where that feedback can actually do some good. There’s a difference between promising something and then not delivering, and saying, “Hey, we think this might be a good idea in the future, what do you think?”
Under the current policy, development appears to occur in a black box, and you don’t find out whether players like the idea until it’s already finished, in which case you have to scramble to backpedal if they hate it (see the commander tag system changes). Luckily, the commander tag change only took two people a single weekend to put right. If it had required much more significant investment to fix, I can only the imagine the response would have been something closer to, “Sorry, we can’t afford to totally rework this feature we already built from scratch, so you’re stuck with it.”
Why not test the community waters with ideas during the concept phase, before investing significant resources in them, so they can be done right the first time? I’m not talking about a vague, open-ended CDI thread asking the community what they want to see, I’m talking about sharing what YOU want to see, and asking the community if they share that vision or not.
our only power is to refrain from spending.
That, and let other people know that you don’t think the game is worth spending on. You know, those people who have yet to purchase the box for the first time and are considering if they should play the game. I would certainly think twice about buying a game if its players started getting vocal about negative experiences with it.
Actually, if development on SAB is stopped for good, world 2’s difficulty and length are just fine for being the final zone of the SAB. The problem, at least as I saw it, was mostly one of expectations – “why is world 2 this long/difficult if there are going to be 4 total worlds, with each one presumably harder than the last?” But, if there are only 2 worlds in total, having the second be substantially longer and harder than the first is completely within reasonable expectations, because zone 2 is now the final and ultimate challenge of the SAB.
Yes please. Since they like metrics, I’m sure they’ll notice Rata Sum’s population increasing by 10000% over the usual.
That said, stuff like first person view and wider field of vision, aren’t in the game. They haven’t been in the game since launch. No one from Anet has ever implied they’re coming.
But they were in the beta, and to my knowledge, Anet has never been able to articulate a good (i.e. not self-contradictory, like the reasoning we just saw) reason why they didn’t make it from the beta to release in some form or another, even if it’s a limited form. It’s not a matter of people asking for features like this to be created out of the blue; the features exist, they just aren’t being used.
When they are willing to give answers so embarrassingly bad that they literally contradict themselves, I can only imagine that means that the truth is even more embarrassing, something like, “oops, we accidentally fired all the coders who understood this feature, and now we have no one capable of altering it and no budget to hire anyone else.” I completely understand why someone would rather make nonsensical statements than admit the truth if it’s anything like I imagine it to be.
They’re not in the game because a decent percentage of the player base would lock themselves into first person view, be unable to play the game, assume the game sucks and leaves. Which is good for no one. Even people who want it.
The ability to “lock themselves into first person view” would indeed be a silly feature. That is not the feature that is under discussion. It sounds like what people mostly care about is not having a semitransparent head filling your camera at maximum zoom, so that it’s possible to do things like look closely at art, examine another player’s outfit, see what’s ahead of you in a tightly confined space, or take an unobstructed screenshot. I don’t think a “lock me in first person view” setting would help with any of that.
Thanks for the sentiment OP, it’s nice to know not everybody subscribes to the philosophy that if they don’t personally like something it should die in a fire. A variety of content attracts a variety of players, not to mention more of them, so one would think that it would be in Anet’s best interests to keep the game as full of content as possible.
if you don’t like what they are saying, your power is to walk away and not support them.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Actually, you’re forgetting the “and tell all my friends that I’m walking away, and all the online communities I’m a part of, and anyone on this street corner who will listen, etc. etc.” part that comes after the walking away. Reputation is a huge part of business, and one (or many) extremely dissatisfied customer(s) can do a lot more to hurt it than one (or many) extremely satisfied customer(s) can do to help it.
That said, stuff like first person view and wider field of vision, aren’t in the game. They haven’t been in the game since launch. No one from Anet has ever implied they’re coming.
But they were in the beta, and to my knowledge, Anet has never been able to articulate a good (i.e. not self-contradictory, like the reasoning we just saw) reason why they didn’t make it from the beta to release in some form or another, even if it’s a limited form. It’s not a matter of people asking for features like this to be created out of the blue; the features exist, they just aren’t being used.
When they are willing to give answers so embarrassingly bad that they literally contradict themselves, I can only imagine that means that the truth is even more embarrassing, something like, “oops, we accidentally fired all the coders who understood this feature, and now we have no one capable of altering it and no budget to hire anyone else.” I completely understand why someone would rather make nonsensical statements than admit the truth if it’s anything like I imagine it to be.
Of the group that enjoyed SAB, most seemed to flood the forums with nothing but complaints about is so I think players brought this on themselves.
Look at any forum for any game sub-mode (PvP, WvW, activities when applicable) and you will find an endless string of complaints. Does that mean those modes should be removed? Hardly. No matter what content you create, in any game, some people will complain about it. There will also be some people who love that content. There may even be overlap between those groups. The fact that people complain about a game mode is really neither here nor there as far as a meaningful indicator about whether or not it should exist – it’s just an inevitable fact.
Thanks for investigating this issue, please continue to keep us posted about what customer service has to say on the topic.
Seems like the only logical course of action is to reactivate the old SAB content. This way, everyone wins:
1) People who like the SAB can play in it.
2) People who purchased the infinite coin would have no basis for requesting refunds, as it would still be usable.
3) No further development on it is required, and those resources can continue to be allocated wherever else they are needed.
4) Even for those who don’t care to play in it, having the SAB in the game makes it larger, and more content in general means more things for people to do, which keeps the game populated.
The alternative is letting countless hours of development energy go to waste and angering some portion (no idea how big) of the user base. Seems pretty obvious to me which is the better choice.
Sure, world 2 had some frustrating issues initially like buggy geyser hit detection, but these became less of an issue due to tweaks in subsequent patches. It was also a sharper difficulty ramp up from world 1 than I think many were expecting, since there were supposed to be 4 total worlds. But then again, I’ve seen complaints like these leveled against virtually every content release since launch (buggy, too hard, too easy, not rewarding, too rewarding), so I can’t really see them as justification for removing the content.
If they really had decided to never re-open SAB, why wouldn’t they simply outright state it?
Because, quite simply, they do not want to make a definitive statement that there is any chance might be somehow wrong in the future. As long as the game exists, there is a chance, however small, that whoever is in charge might decide that the SAB is a good idea again. If it did end up coming back, they would then be accused of lying (which would be technically true, if they said something would never happen, and then it happened). So, to avoid the possibility of lying, either intentionally or unintentionally, they will never entirely confirm or deny something like this, regardless of their current intentions.
Since the coin was advertised as working in future SAB releases, which is a portion of why people were willing to pay what they did for it, at least a partial refund is justifiable (I wouldn’t expect a full refund, because it was indeed useful during the time SAB was around, so no future SAB doesn’t render the original purchase totally valueless, only partially).
SAB or RIOT! =(
New Event Nearby: Riot in Rata Sum! Cause property damage and disrupt Asuran research until Moto activates his Super Adventure Box. Fails if counter-protesters cause more damage than you within the time limit.
Matt’s response to the question really points to the fact that SAB is something they might work on after they are happy with PvE, PvP, and WvW changes.
After two years and seeing how quickly such changes come, I think we can safely say that a time after being fully satisfied with PvE, PvP, and WvW changes is synonymous with “not during the lifetime of this game.” Of course, they would be foolish to make any definitive statement like “never,” because plans can always change, but I can sure hear that particular n-word echoing forlornly between the lines of that interview.
Very disappointed. We can disect the exact words of the statements all we want, but the overall tone was undeniably “this is something we expect you to be disappointed about,” which suggests we will not see the SAB again for a long, long time, if ever. Either that, or it’s the worst PR of all time, intentionally making fans mad for no reason only to say “haha, just kidding” a few days later. I mean, my faith in the Anet team may be fairly low at this point, but I’d still expect even them to have better sense than that.
The whole interview was pretty shameful. Just “no, no, no, probably not, maybe, I don’t know, cant’ talk about it, won’t talk about it, etc, etc.” Isn’t the point of an interview to convey information and make people want to play your game? This has done the exact opposite for me. Why develop content at all if you aren’t going to use it, even when people clearly want it? If you don’t want to spend MORE development resources on things like SAB, fine, that’s a business decision, but at least allow people to use the content you ALREADY MADE.
To the best of my memory, Southsun DOES count toward the Krytan Killer daily achievement.
Yes, it does seem like an oversight that Dry Top is not counted as part of Maguuma. It also seems strange that none of the vines or mordrem (both in world and in instances) are considered plants for Plant Slayer. Seems generally like they forgot to connect the new content to preexisting achievements.
I disagree John. That response shows you’re human, and makes you more approachable. Even If we were to disagree on aspects of the in-game economy, we prefer you add in some mild snark every now and then, over a “professor-like” attitude.
Edit – Heck, that’s the whole reason a lot of us like you over other Anet employees.
I have to side with John and his community team on this one. The conversations that go on here on the forums are not conversations between equals, and it looks bad when someone with power responds to someone without in a way that would quite possibly earn a post deletion/infraction if the roles were reversed. I don’t think it’s necessary to be caustic in order to appear human and approachable, and I suppose I differ from you in that I am less likely to engage with someone who acts that way, not more. At the very least, I think we can all be glad that John is taking the time to consider how his messages are perceived, and I can’t see how that could be anything but a good thing – Kudos John.
Ongoing thanks, John! Also, another one for you:
As part of your in-game economist duties, do you have any input into more “meta-economic” decisions, or things that will have ramifications for the in-game economy but aren’t always though of as being directly a part of it? For example, are you consulted on things such as when to offer a sale on the box price of the game (since an influx of new players surely shifts the supply and demand curves of the in-game economy), or is this solely the purview of other departments like marketing? In the same vein, are there other areas of the game that you consult on as an economist that you think would be non-obvious or surprising to the average player?
Thanks for all your responses, John. Even if you aren’t permitted to go into great detail, it’s reassuring to hear that there are carefully considered reasons for certain things behaving as they do, and that decisions made regarding them are not arbitrary or casually made.
On that note, I also have a question: is there any aspect/feature of the economy that you would have designed differently, but that was essentially baked in and no longer changeable before you started in your economy oversight role? Or were you part of the design process of the game from the ground up, so to speak? If you’d prefer to answer more abstractly, is there an economy-related feature you would be sure to include in your own personal dream MMO that we don’t (currently) have in GW2?
So that this opinion doesn’t get buried under RNG hate (and I have no love for RNG either), I want to express my support for rewards that are obtained through play, not through purchase. There are many, many things in game that can simply be bought, so it’s nice to see some additions to those that must be earned by participating in content. Now, the method by which play awards these things is a matter of debate, but personally it’s nice to see it happening in any form.
So, in sum:
Rewards from play, not purchase = good.
RNG as reward method = less good.
Generally pleased, and I haven’t experienced any bugs to report so far! That alone puts it head and shoulders above most releases from season 1. The part of the zone that is available so far (there looks to be more that is closed off at the moment) may not be huge, but there is lots of verticality, plenty of nooks and crannies to explore, and it feels unique as compared to all the preexisting maps.
If you look at the gold <→ gem conversion rate graph at http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem and expand the scope to cover the period from game launch to present, what you see is a fairly linear overall trend with some local fluctuations. On average, over 21 months, the cost to purchase 100 gems using gold has increased by about 50 silver per month. The amount of gold that can be purchased using 100 gems moves in lock step, so it shows similar behavior. If anything, the rate of increase has been a little greater in year 2 than in year 1, suggesting that going forward the rate will continue to climb at the same or slightly increasing rate.
Personally, I think this is a pure improvement over the old system, and have difficulty seeing what about it there could be to dislike.
Old system: If you logged in regularly, you got to play all the content for free, but only during the release period. After that, it was gone forever. If you did not log in regularly, you never got to play that content. Ever.
New system: If you log in regularly, you get to play all the content for free for as long as you want. It never goes away, even after the release period. If you don’t log in regularly, you have the option of paying to gain permanent access to the content you missed.
Both people who log in regularly and those who don’t are strictly better off under the new system, because both groups get more access to content/choices than they had before.