(edited by Zengetsu Heyda.4598)
Showing Posts For Zengetsu Heyda.4598:
I too had my fps tank after the “bugdate” (my endearing term for updates, since they always come with them). I went from ~60 to ~20, no matter what settings I chose. Updating the drivers for my Nvidia GTX970 to the most recent WHQL one on Nvidia’s site has me back around 60.
i7
32 gb DDR3
GTX 970
Glad updating the drivers worked for you, I’m currently running the most recent drivers for my card though and still having issues.
Love the slots, only have one real complaint. With the slots, it now doesn’t serve much purpose for me to have multiple infinite gathering tools.
Really wish I could gift a set of them to one of my buddies who isn’t likely to ever be able to purchase gems with cash. As it is, they’re probably just going to sit taking up a slot in my bank forever now.
Intel i7-3770
14 GB RAM
Geforce GTX 980
Hovering between 10-30 FPS regardless of settings. Something is seriously wrong.
Just wanted to make a small suggestion for the event chain leading up to the Great Jungle Wurm world boss.
I think a small delay would be appropriate between the completion of the "Dark and terrible creatures have emerged in Wychmire Swamp. Stem the tide! " events and the start of the “Destroy the Avatars of Blight” event.
As it is, the people who are taking the time to do the events needed to spawn the Wurm are often punished by missing out on one of the parts of the event chain with better loot drops. Even if there was just a 20 or 30 second delay between the completion of the event and the start of the next, that would give the people time to get in place to help take down the Avatar’s of Blight.
Here’s my question.
Why can’t they just like I dunno, talk with us before making decisions. I would have thought they would have learned by now that every time they make these design choices without consulting their player base something like this pops up. Generally when a person accidentally sticks their hand on a hot stove top they pull back before serious burns happen. Its like they stick their hands on the hot stove top, get burned, don’t learn anything, and then stick their hand on it again.
Have you read this forum? Did you read the post where the devs were called kitten? If this forum wants civil discussion, then it needs to be civil. Instead the people here immediately go into barbarian mode at the slightest hint of an infraction.
People are upset because they implemented first. The appropriate time to ask for community feedback on upcoming changes in generally before you roll it out to production. If you roll something out to production and then ask for feedback afterwards, that means the player base is stuck with whatever the bad decision is until it is patched.
Just because something can always be fixed later doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to get it right the first time, and in game development, that means at least having a bit of dialogue with your customer base. If they had come forward with a screenshot of the new system asking for any feedback or suggestions before roll out, I’m sure a ton of people would have commented about adding a custom amount feature.
And instead of blowing up, the entire thing would have been likely a complete and total non-issue.
Here’s an update for you:
It’s clear that quite a lot of you would like to have greater flexibility in using the Currency Exchange. Our intention when we designed the new interface was to streamline large volume purchases, which make up the majority of transactions.
In light of your feedback, we will update the Currency Exchange so that you can decide how you want to use it. We will keep the new streamlined system and also offer a new “Custom” button on the panel that you can use to exchange any increment of gems or gold.
We anticipate rolling this out soon. Stay tuned!
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Sorry for the delay in posting this, but out of respect to our international community, we wanted to be able to post in several forums at once.
Thanks for the update, I think this is all that most of us really wanted out of this exchange.
If I can make a suggestion though, in the future, if you guys are going to be making large alterations to the way your microcurrency is handled in the future. Just say something about it ahead of time. If you guys had just posted a screenshot of the upcoming changes before implementation and asked for some feedback then before rolling it out, a lot of this rage and PR could have been avoided. I know at my own job, it can be easy to get caught in the echo chamber of internal views and sometimes miss something that seems important to the customer.
Everyone here knows ANet and NCSoft need to make money. Most of us aren’t completely unreasonable. We want to see you guys be able to monetize without feeling like you’re just seeing us as giant talking wallets at the same time. It’s a symbiotic relationship. We want to see you succeed because it benefits us in the form of new content and a better game. You should want to see us happy and content so that we want to continue to play the game and to convince other people that it’s a game worth playing.
I can’t say I’m a fan. While the stated goal of making the conversion tool is easier is true to an extent, it was also not the only goal. The patch introduces some very bad “premium” style psychological manipulation into the game in an attempt to sell more gems and also brings up some concerns with the integrity of the gem market. I’m going to outline some of my concerns here.
1. The gems have to be sold/bought in specific sized batches.
This is further compounded by the fact that there are many things in the game that can be purchased for LESS than the smallest available batch purchase. This is, by now, a well known microtransactional technique that is intended to leave people with small amounts of unusable currency. Because you can no longer choose to sell just a single gem or buy just a single gem, your odds of being left with gems in your wallet is much higher, and the fact that you have some is known to encourage people to buy more. There is 0 reason to set the minimum buy/sell to anything other than one except as a psychological manipulation technique to try to convince your play base to purchase more microcurrency. This is probably my absolute largest concern, as its an early warning sign that the developer is considering unhealthy or manipulative relationships with their player base in order to monetize and is an absolutely massive step back from the old system.
2. How are prices going to be effected?
With the old system, the exchange rate is dictated by single gem price. It was relatively easy for people to buy small amounts of gems and build up to them. It was relatively easy for people to unload any excess gems they had and change it into currency. Now the barrier to entry for the Exchange is much harder. To even buy any gems now requires (at time of posting) a 76 1/2 gold investment. That’s a MASSIVE mark up from the old system to acquire some gems and is yet another attempt to discourage exchange and instead encourage people to buy currency.
On the other side of the market, the fewest amount of gems you can sell are 9 (at time of posting). That once again brings me back to my first point of saying that an alternate goal of this change is to force people to be stuck with some gems that they cannot offload easily. Since those people had been willing to pay before, those leftover gems are a manipulation attempt to get them to try to pay again.
3. Why completely remove the old system?
If the sole purpose was to make things easier, why not add this new interface on top of the old one? It gives players who were confused before a streamlined purchase menu, but doesn’t block out the ability for other users to use the more advanced feature if they wanted to. I can only think it’s because the actual purpose isn’t just streamlining the system (although it serves as a convenient explanation), but to introduce they barrier and psychological techniques outlined in my first two points.
Increased monetization through fairly unpopular (and it could be argued, somewhat unethical) were the actual desired goal of this change. Anything else that came out of it were at best additional goals, or at worst, secondary goals.
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I will be interested to see if this actually works in ANet’s favor though with increased gem purchases from whales and driving otherwise free-players to buy gems due to the insanely increased upfront cost to purchase, or whether the increased cost to buy gems with in game currency just results in fewer overall gems sales as demand for them plummets.
Edit:
And for the purpose of being constructive. Here’s what to do if you REALLY want to make it right with the community. Keep the current page, make it the default if you really want to. But add a tab or something along the top that allows players to sell or buy customs amounts of gems. You do that and everyone will be happy as a clam. You get to streamline purchases/sales for confused players (and probably make some extra cash from casual users who don’t know any better, like this seems to be intending!) and advanced players can still easily sell/purchase small gem amounts. No more rioting from the heavy users, everyone wins, although ANet has to accept a slightly more modest chunk of income than the current scheme forces the player base into.
(edited by Zengetsu Heyda.4598)