Guild Wars 2

Xocolatl, whenever I’ve fought a Mesmer in PvP I’ve thought that that would be a amazing spell for Mesmers to have.

When you look at eveything the Mesmer can do together with the general mechanics of the game, these elements combined practically demand that such a spell be made!

As a thief player, this is the answer to my queries I’ve been looking for after numerous google search attempts. Your research efforts are heartily appreciated!

I’m disappointed to hear your results are irregular.

Many more tests of this kind need to be made, so as to enrich the Wiki and enlighten the player base as a whole.

If we can’t create reproducible tests, however, we don’t have so much as a starting point.

With proper usage of mathematics you can predict quite well what the relative power of different options are.

In a diverse playfield where the different pieces rely on vastly divergent mechanisms of play, balance is in no way a straightforward thing to arrive at mathematically.

The system isn’t even linear.

The notion of “balance” always depends, to an amount, on unpredictable variables which are dictated by a metagame.

One day we will evolve a branch of combined mathematics and simulationary science that properly predicts the competitiveness of differing participants in a game, be it a video game or otherwise.

Games—games that sell, that is, and games other than chess—will be big enough, one day, to reward the expenses of serious research and accommodate the hefty salaries of high-end mathematicians.

Until then, however, the only working solution is using real, human players to simulate the game, as they happen to be remarkably good at this sort of stuff.

And oh, hello. That would be us.

Okay, first off, that’s impossible if they’re BS thieves.

Might I caution against using this kind of SPvP logic in WvWvW?

The write-up, as a primer against this kind of build, is excellent and deserves to be copied verbatim to some wiki somewhere (ahem… I could never guess which one).

But as a group of thieves roaming in WvWvW, prolonged stealth, speed and general roamability are more important than maximizing your build for a single, massive burst of damage.

Furthermore, these thieves are mostly waiting around for a suitable target, rather than actively trying to score points. WvWvW is a rather less urgent mode of play.

Also, the wide-open geometry changes the experience in a myriad of ways.

It’s entirely too easy to sight your foe far in the distance, manoeuvre to a suitable spot for lurking, and chain Shadow Refuge to move in front of your quarry while under complete concealment.

As long as the thieves finalize their efforts in a concentrated burst against an unsuspecting target, they get their prey.

I must now add that with the rise of the single-class Thieves Guild, you’re going to come across this sort of play a whole lot more often.

I love it, myself. Little by little, you receive the intelligence about a team of ambushers waylaying your soldiers and your supply trains in a specific part of the map, and organically a squad forms to take them on.

If you’re the lawbringers here, you feel righteous. If you’re the thieves, you feel truly hunted. Either way it’s massively immersive and seem like just the kind of believable war simulation WvWvW was designed for.

The other day I got spammed by 3 heartseekers in a row

Let’s have a good gloat about all the noob thieves we’ve destroyed.

I find that off-hand pistol’s Black Powder is especially good at taking out this kind of thief.

When in danger, just sit in your cloud of smoky sanctuary and let them spam away. Pulsing blind will take every one of them, consuming their initiative. Even to surprise your foe with two averted Heartseekers, before they wise up, is severely to reduce their resources.

It’s also brilliant to sit inside your cloud with impunity while the enemy stealths.

Comrades of the cloak and dagger…

Have you done any dungeons with all-thief groups yet?

You guys are crazy. It’s just a weapon skin.

You already have your formidable, impressive-looking highly sought-after weaponry—the most powerful in the game. They’re called Exotics.

A Legendary acquisition that is not based on pumping in a certain proportion of real, human life potential is the ideal. You have to engage real ingenuity to stay ahead of the pack, here, folks! Exploit the market and wait patiently for fluctuations in prices caused by changes in the metagame. Meanwhile, the decision of whether to ‘go for a legendary’ is a real one, and choosing not to be one of those players but to manipulate those players using the game’s trading system remains an option with comparable value.

If you only play because you feel forced to earn your legendary, you should consider not playing.

ANet are probably well aware that this is the most moral stance to take, but also a difficult one.

And it’s far from an invalid business model, but that’s another topic.

Personally, the egregious thing to me is how much of a headache, how awfully dull the Mystic Forge is to use.

It needs to be more in tune with the GW2 philosophy of dynamism.

To satisfy long-term forgers, designers should consider a reward increase that grows with long-term use and long-term play. But this buff should be reset to zero when a “legendary” forge item is gained.

These rewards should not only include legendary weapon precursors, but desirable items that support the dynamism of the game:

• Keys which unlock special paths through dungeons
• Account-bound extraplanar passes which grant a free waypoint / repair / blueprint / food buff once per day for a stretch of time (say, a month).
• A temporary portal to the Realm of Zommoros, a dynamically-generated zone that boasts high reward, but increases in danger the longer players spend in there.
• And anything you can think of!

A UI change could be in order, too.

The Mystic Forge would work just as well if you were able to dump all items in there without needing to think precisely about it.

Zommoros could then present recipes which could be created based on the backlog of items which have been thrown in there. The player would then be able to pick and choose, with Zommoros advising about the efficiency of the recipes.

It could be dynamic, too. Here’s one example of dynamic Forge interaction off the top of my head:

Every now and then, a server-wide event appears where Zommoros promises an extraordinary gift for the first player to input a particular (unknown) recipe. Then, after each forge usage, Zommoros divulges whether the recipe used was close or not to the extraordinary gift’s recipe. Players and guilds will have to consult and conspire with one another to discover the extraordinary reward before others do.

As per title.

I’d really like to do justice to the beauty of the forum layout by not posting huge slabs of text. Now, I’ve seen other users use horizontal rules to separate their text, but nothing I’ve tried has worked!

Sorry if this is not appropriate for this board—it seemed to be the most apt.

I suggested that dice equipment might be sold in the gem shop, but that message was deleted as it came off as a joke.

What I had in mind, which I tried to explain a little too subtly, was:

• dice rolls could be implemented as a game feature
• you could then buy cosmetic dice-related equipment which would improve the feature

The difference would be:

• typing /roll would make a dice roll appear in chat
• clicking on a dice item would make the dice roll appear in chat, but also your character would make a cute dice rolling animation, and roll a die on the game world map for all to see!

I’d like to add for the moderator and all viewing that suggestions for real money purchases in the gem store are important. It helps to show developers that there is real worth in listening to requests for cosmetic improvements, beyond appealing to a personal fancy!

And likewise, we participators must realize that real time, sweat and money goes into the content we are continually gifted with!

Thanks for listening!

I was surprised yesterday when I found an enormous temple in Mount Maelstrom, and it didn’t open into any kind of interior complex.

With the readiness the team have shown to introduce new jumping puzzles and mini-dungeons, I’d be surprised if a lot of structures weren’t placeholders for forthcoming new content.

They probably have a lot of such stuff ready-made and tucked away. Bringing it slowly into the game gives old-timers a bit of temptation to go back and explore, which is very important.

Oh, and rewards are being reworked continually! Dungeon and story rewards were mentioned for upcoming patches, but I’m sure the devs have considered chests as well.

I agree too. It reminds me of cute Japanese games like the Legend of Zelda and many others.

Changing it might get a bit silly. Imagine if you could force your character to say “I can outrun a centaur!” at will. Now imagine what the idiots will do with that.

That said, I wonder if character personality could effect things like emotes? Consider /cheer. You could have have a brazen, chest-beating roar for the Brutal archetype. Captivating characters could let out a courtly, slightly cooing patter of applause.

Olba

But I suppose it depends on the person. Some like carrying around two or three different armor sets, a ton of weapons, a ton of mining equipment and then some WvW stuff. But if you ask me, if you’re carrying around all this “What If?” stuff, you really do not have any right to complain about lack of inventory space.

That’s fine reasoning in terms of just desserts, however I’d like to point out that a Guild Wars which takes into account a player’s “what if?” apprehensions by allowing them to hot-switch into different favourite armour sets and builds would be one that massive alleviates the boredom a number of players have in this game.

Ah, I can only dream, can’t I?

And yes, I agree, this system doesn’t fit in with ANet’s philosophy of elegant design, or their belief that all drops should fit some purpose for the player. It would make far more sense in a more classic, more simulationary MMO where drops can only be looted by a single player!

Absolutely! The game would thrive on this.

The current miserable and static NPCs go absolutely against the game’s principles of dynamism.

I assumed the bottleneck was in server or client prowess here, and not a design oversight.

Or perhaps ANet’s animation team simply isn’t the quickest on the button? Or is undersized, underpayed, etc? I do worry about this, though it would fit in with the conservatism of the changes we have seen since release.

Fair point.

But oh, 2 things: The adds are animals, which you never end up having to fight anyway. They just get beat on by farmers and bots. It’d be swell having some forest guardian to stick up for them.

Other thing, the charm can be temporary! I left this out for purposes of cunning ambiguity.

Third thing, am I the only one who’d like a lot more fights that require taking on ‘adds’? The champions and events and such that spawn them mid-combat tend to be so much more interesting. Standard procedure for me at least when taking on adds tends to involve a lot of escaping, or at least de-aggroing the biggest of them, so fights which force you to stick around to take the group out are a lot different in dynamic, for me at least.

Anyway, Oakhearts shouldn’t get routinely beat up by the docile woodland wildlife, this much we can settle upon, surely?

Nearly every time I visit Lion’s Arch I have asked where I can find the true Thieves’ Guild.

Now I have found it, but I cannot join. I am to remain loyal to my home realm.

Nonetheless, I am determined to make this. It is my belief that there should not only be a thieves’ guild, but that every server should have its thieves’ guild.

I cannot lead into operations with full force for time is not something I have in abundance right now. I shall say this much, however: if you are a thief, and you are on the Seafarer’s Rest European world, then wait, and watch—watch for the whisperers.

Elsewise, maybe one day we can face off against one another in a gentlethiefly meeting of thieves.

Aberrant

This is a good example of why I stopped playing thief. Takes no skill to just gank some one in under 2 seconds.

Yeah, I know how you feel.

I picked up the thief for mindscrew (bear in mind it was weak during BWE). I never wanted to obliterate unconditionally.

Wreckdum

lol @ condition thieves making fun of BS thieves… Condition thief is more faceroll than backstab. You can remove everything from your screen except caltrops and your 3 key and still kill a group of people solo. ROFL

Oh God, it’s like a spear thief on land. Truly terrifying…

Meanwhile, in other news: Nobody has a clue what is going on. We simply lack the tools as a species to debate class balance accurately. It is more futile than talking about football.

Having read this debate, all I can say for sure is this: I am levelling a ranger.

A Heartseeker at 25% health for your condition thief is no less useless than a Heartseeker at 100% health for my direct damage thief.

Can we all agree that’s not entirely useless?

Heartseeker’s prowess as a gap closer is simply too strong to disregard. We’ve enough tools to get on top of someone, but the speed and surety of the Heartseeker really bring you the upper hand. It puts opponents on the defensive, acts as a guided missile during massive melees, and gets me out of a pickle whenever I withdraw into stupid places (all too often!)

It costs next to nothing, and it’s just there for you, on twitch, all the time.

Those low-damage Heartseekers are pretty uninspiring when you’re playing a well-controlled style, though.

I’d always wished for a more Five-Point-Exploding-Palm-Technique type of Heartseeker. Used early, it merely Seeks the Heart (applies Vulnerability) Only when it is found, with perfect precision, can the killing blow strike the heart. (that’s your direct damage, then).

I’ve been eager to hear more exciting ideas, but your idea gave me doubts about how it would interact with bleeds—until I considered how cool it would be with weapon swapping from pistol or shortbow. Also—just imagine if Backstab could be configured to deal bleed damage from the front. Backstab or Facestab. It’d really bring shape to the crazy condition / big damage mutant that is double dagger.

Cool, a thread in which nobody whinges and everybody gets creative!

Atomic Sharks, some of these skills are pretty natural progressions from what’s missing in classes.

Though I feel a couple are missing the elegance that ANet try to go for in their designs—while I’d love a trap that makes people drunk, they would never do it for all their e-sports aspirations! And an “assassination”-type big damage skill is a little difficult to do, because an Elite or Utility cannot predict the weapon a player character will have on hand. Having a from-stealth Elite is a cool idea, though.

Also, an undead army necro elite would be amazing, but it can’t function for minion masters only. How about having it (somehow) start spawning extra minions like crazy, as well as the overall minion boost?

Oh, and how could you resist naming your mesmer illusion army skill the “Phantasmal Phalanx” xD? It sounds terrible but look at those glorious Greek "PH"s. Also, since your warrior suicide charge is a shout, we’ve gotta think up some cool quotes to name it by? “No quarter!” or “Run them down!” perhaps? “Into the Valley of Death!”, har! Nah, those don’t work for me. And… this is an Elite, so it has to be especially epic.

I’m sure you all remember, like I do, the first time you tried to take on one of these majestic, prowling woodland guardians.

Thought I’d never be able to take one on. And I couldn’t. I died. Underlevelled, I was plucky enough and eager to master the early game that I felt I had a chance, but ultimately through my own stupidity I died—many times. I got trapped, time after time, in savagely damaging bramble attacks—whether by cluelessness, a lack of camera-fu obstructing my vision, outright bad timing or a sheer, inexorable stroke of lag. Eventually, fighting tooth and nail, dang near colliding against my desk with the force I pressed out those dodge rolls to escape its mighty attacks with, I was able, little by little to draw its health down ever closer toward the finish line of fatality.

Yet I still died. I think I ran into a pack of wolves or something. But then, I discovered a superweapon:

A lone and unassuming deer.

And I’m sure you’ve seen this. These Oakhearts, mighty stalwarts of the wood, tend to aggro everything with the radius of one astronomical unit, and what’s more, they’re very easily distracted. Every time I’ve fought one since my first encounter, they’ve gone off and tackled every nearby, seemingly peaceful woodland entity with a vengeance, leaving me with an easy, dumb target to whittle down with impunity.

A sad fate for some of the most impressive veterans in the game.

So, my suggestion is this:

Give oakhearts an ability to charm woodland animals and send them against the player! This is not dissimilar to many other veterans which summon creatures. And it creates an interesting, dynamic sort of challenge where every fight in a new locale will be something different! Even more so, trying to lure the beast out and attack in a position far from reinforcements will make for interesting strategic play.

The way it would flesh out, I imagine, would be for it to charm attacking woodland creatures almost on reaction, perhaps if gets too zergy then having a chance simply to make them neutral again. And also, rarely, usually at about half health or so, the oakheart will charm the nearest creature (with a fairly large range) and send that against the player!

It’d combo well with vines, maybe too well, but they could be nerfed a bit.

Oh, and only native, natural creatures will be affected. Only animals, mostly, perhaps plants, elementals and some more benign monsters.

And there you go! What do you think?

Excellent concept for a thread. Let’s try to keep this one up top.

I certainly don’t make any use of venoms unless I’m specifically specced to. They should be good enough that I can feel I can switch them onto my utility bar on occasion while roaming around the world, giving me the chance to gain real advantage at least in certain situations and to have a blast while doing so.

All of the tricks and deceptions are up there at the moment. Traps have their own issues.

I thought for a while about what I would do to venoms. I considered an instant effect with a short-duration proccing effect, and then I considered an instant effect with a chain skill effect. What’s very much appealing to me, is how you can even combine chain skills and proc effects:

Spider Venom/ Inflict poison with your next attack. Gain a 10% chance to inflict poison for 10 seconds.

—>Black Widow’s Kiss (chain)/ Expend your poison to create a poisonous cloud of gas.

I thought about the most memorable poison effects used in other games, as well as some of the interesting properties of poisons on real live bodies:

A popular dungeon crawling game features a rare type of poison dart that is coated in curare. In this game, curare inflicts drastic poison damage but also—and it intensifies with every impact—asphyxiation, which is another deadly threat even when hit point death is averted. No amount of antidote vials can save your character from that.

It’s very interesting to me how intensely you have to stack curare needles to get the second, more powerful effect, here.

Then, after dwelling on the properties of many real-world poisons, what especially struck me is how long they can take to wreak their full effect on the body. Few are immediately acting. They take hours, or days; there is even a compound that can lay dormant for months, before causing deadly nerve damage.

These design points in mind, I’d like to suggest my new double-acting venoms. They’re a bit necromancery in their condition-dependency, but really this kind of effect is as yet not commonplace to GW2.

Spider Venom/ Poison foes with your next three attacks
Poison: 6 seconds
—>Spider Fang Strike/On your next attack: Deal damage for each second of poison on your foe, removing poison from that foe. Cripple your foe for each second of poison.
Cripple: 1s per 3s poison

Of course, Spider Fang Strike and all the chain skills I am proposing would have a lovely, long telegraphed cast animation. It’s wicked and bursty, but it’s brainy burst. You have to time it right. You can even gear for condition damage and not feel bad about it.

Ice Drake Venom/ Inflict chilled with your next three attacks
Chilled: 1 second
—>Jaws of Winter/On your next attack: Daze your foe for each second of chilled, consuming the chilled effect. Leave your foe in a cloud of frozen air.
Daze: Up to three seconds

Devourer Venom/ Your next two attacks immobilize
Immobilize: 2 seconds
—>Stalker’s Opportunity/ While your foe is immobilized, stealth and shadowstep behind them.

Skale Venom/ Make foes weak and vulnerable with your next three attacks. This vulnerability stacks in time and duration.
Weakness: 3s Vulnerability: 3 seconds
—>Break the Weak/For 10 seconds, your attacks against a vulnerable target each remove a boon.

My belief is that these new venoms will bring to the battlefield that true horror reserved for the scoundrel who—in a world of knights and honour, steeped in the lore of skilled and highly refined sword combat—succumbs to such treacheries as to dip his weapons in deadly venom! Actual effects will not be that much above what is already present in game (especially here with the non-venom thief utilities), but as soon as those venom-laying animations flash before your foe’s eyes, you’ll see them do anything either to avoid being attacked, or to get that condition flushed at all costs. Thus we’ve moved far, far away from the pure cold lethality of the traditional rogue or assassin—here have the true epitome of the thief’s modus operandi: Deadly and underhand, but above all cruelly psychological!

Please critique and refine to the best of your ability. While the first set of ideas may not have appealed to all commentators, the original poster’s cause was a worthy one!

The Mesmer is a pet-based class that seems to be doing just fine. They may go by the name of Illusions, but the idea that they’re anything but confusingly-skinned pets is just another of their wicked wiles.

Also, my thief seems to be enjoying his pet skills very much, thank you. Thieves Guild is a feared elite and Ambush is the best trap, whether that says much of anything at all.

I don’t think anyone will begrudge the Necro and Ranger (and somewhat the Engie) their pleas for an urgent pet buff, though! Let’s hope the pet AI revolution is what’s kept the devs busy all through to the middle of November.

It’s exciting to build speed attributes, because their effect on your gameplay is so readily visible. This is most likely the very reason why ANet have chosen not to include such stats—because it will make the difference between underdeveloped characters and highly-geared characters too obvious, too ugly. Speeds have been thoroughly locked down in this design, which a hard cap on speed buffs (which do not stack) and only a very limited number of build options which improve cooldowns.

As for architecture, I share your dreams! Often there is a grandeur in the concept art that fails to make it into the finished modelling effort. Those hollow old skyscrapers in the Hoelbrak artwork, for example, and those lonely gantries, they were breathtakingly mysterious. There are a lot of things that are very big in Hoelbrak but very little of the truly mysterious.

Chronomancers, well, a time-themed expansion would work so well for this game. I’d never thought of it, but visiting old Orr would be the best such opportunity! It also gives a way for the world to move on with Asura and Charr creating new technologies to bend the time-stream to their will.

I have some designs for the Chronomancer myself which I shall post later on, more of a Doctor Who-type deal. They can wield longbows and pistols and go into Bullet Time!

I propose to have mini type or types polimok board that can perform both within the game and outside of it (on mobile devices).

im sorry, but no.

I don’t see what’s unlikely about this. The developers love minigames and are trying to expand their mobile and social media presence. They’ve already infiltrated real world stores with their gem cards. Something of the sort seems like the perfect next step.

385 points precisely?

You have bizarrely particular dreams.

But you also seem to have a real hankering to do some level design!

Major teams will never take pure maps from players, unless some kind of contest is on, or if an all-out modding attempt is taken on board the main client.

You would really have to suggest something that is different from everything that has gone before, and explain why it works!

On the other hand, I can think of many an indie / modding project that is desperate for maps. Would you care for advice on how to get on board?

I thought you were going to suggest a fashion contest!

Which I’d be totally behind, btw. I reckon that one day not only being able to craft your character’s cloth dress or mythril armour, but being able to design it from the basic shape through to the most minute details, will be a key part of many a successful MMO!

I thought the Halloween PvP was far from brainless, as the surest way truly to succeed was to ally with and to manipulate the players around you. Though there is only so much you can do—-and though I may be the odd one out in thinking this—a game where you can ensure survival is much less interesting than a game based around struggling to maximize survival. Looking at the Lunatic Inquisition, for example, unlike with other games’ Zombie modes where gameplay is often very much just brainless fun, this game included stealth and item collection which at least require careful thought to optimize. Their application in this game could have been rather more exciting, and the pacing needs definite work—but also it’s the lazy pace that allows you time to conspire with teammates.

Anyway—to risk a truism—better-measured incentivization is always good, but it should be considered that there are people on the design team at ANet who feel, in an absolute way, that not all of the content on GW2 should be experienced because people feel a “need” to experience it. And furthermore that distinguishing their product from the Infinite Skinner Engine that is WoW is important for their prestige. For example, they are obviously aware that achievements can be broadcast over chat channels, but made the choice to prune that particular aspect of the system, one presumes to foster a certain type of community.

And lastly, might I suggest that the attitude of GregT, as one of the “zerg swarm” of gamers that rampage after whatever Triple-A experience might be deemed the optimum at this precise moment in the evolution of video games, like some kind of thrill-seeking algorithm made living flesh… may not be the sort of spirit first considered by the designers of primarily casual content in an open-to-all kind of MMO. Though most of his suggestions are actually very solid… and though the shareholders might think differently altogether about the importance of this group of gamers!

Just as an aside, everything I said presupposes that I give a kittens’ whiskers about achievements (or about being there in the full of it for every theme park event I can enjoy just as much by watching on Youtube) which isn’t the case—it’s just that for me, that’s a case worth upholding for those who do!

I met a ton of people, roleplayed the hell out of my thief’s encounters with the mad king, and completely validated my passion in what only a week ago (and never again!) seemed to be a dubiously supported MMO. I saved real golds to buy a swell, super-spooky present for my friend’s necromancer on her birthday—and I thrashed the clock tower upwards of 20 times! All of which count for something, though I’ll never see achievement points for any of them.

It’s a vastly populated, wide-open world out there in Tyria. Playing thoroughly enriches your character. Playing creatively enriches the game itself, and the lives of everyone you meet within it!

No matter how much content you miss out on (and though it is awful) doing something special, something a bit different in-game, perhaps with the people you’d most want to share it with is always better than any gaudily-prepackaged, loudly-touted event. It’s just that the seasonal events do happen to be a good way to bring people together for such moments—but you can always make better, or just as good, with a bit of charm and a good helping of creative spirit.

Though my indignation is, I must admit, all but engulfed by the overwhelming satisfaction that this holiday event has been for me, I do feel just a bit, a teeny blip of indignation toward ANet for this single act of content-walling.

My reason is more specific than what’s been said already:

Having played to the end of but not beyond the Act II content, and facing time away from my gaming machine, I tried to gain whatever information I could about upcoming temporary events. I found this announcement:

Act 2 of the Guild Wars 2 Halloween event is live – enjoy the festivities! DO NOT MISS Act 3 of Shadow of the Mad King which kicks off at the lion statue in Lion’s Arch at noon Pacific (12:00 PM Pacific Time/19:00 GMT) on Sunday, Oct 28 with a very special, one-time only surprise!

Worried for what I would miss since I could not make the date, I searched a little to see what would be in store, only to find the resounding reassurance that a late show to Act III would in no way mean that any achievement for the event could not be completed. So then, what about the party promised by the “Attent the Party!” achievement? Now, that does sound like a one-time-only event. I googled some more, however, and only found reassurance that the party would be a continual event all players present on the 31st could visit.

This news was great! Clearly ANet are going out of their way to ensure that all content be available until the end of the event.

But when, after a long but unavoidable stretch away from my gaming machine, I was able to fend away my worldly travails for enough time to thoroughly salve my Guild Wars 2 withdrawal, the reassurances which I had taken so close to heart were swiftly dashed.

So, my request for the dev community in future, which I defy even the most stoical and cold-hearted among the forumgoers here to begrudge, is this:

[I stress my major points in capital letters because, according to the internet, upper case English lettering is the Language of Logic.]

When you release an update with missable content, and you go out of your way to advise players of this missable content… and THEN in other discussions you take pains to reassure that certain rewards like achievements which many players take pride in attaining will NOT be affected by such a missable event—please kindly would you not sneak into that self-same content patch any OTHER missable content which DOES affect a players’ gains without advertising it in the very same notices.