Guild Wars 2

Less than one day left to sign up for a chance at a 2000 gem card code!
Also, some of the other prizes are now decided:

Costume contest:
1st prize – choice of gem store costume or armor skin. (+ some surprise in-game goodies)
2-3 prize – choice of gem store skin up to 400 gems (+ some surprise in-game goodies)

Mini Race:
1st price – One Mini 3rd set pack (+ surprise in-game goodies)

“Strike a pose”:
1st price – Gem store Finisher of choice (+ surprise in-game goodies)

All participants in costume contest, mini race, strike a pose, and fan-art contest will receive a participation award.

Please help spread the word. We only turn 10 once, so are pulling out all the stops!

The Order Of Dii [Dii] wishes to invite all friends,
old and new, for a celebration of our 10th birthday
on Saturday November 8th!

We will have contests, prizes, a live DJ room and all kinds of shenanigans going on, so well worth the visit in-game and out!

Where?: The Grove on the North American data cluster (Jade Quarry is our home world).
When?: 10 PM – 12 AM UTC ( online event anouncement with time converter). Also, pro tip: the official Wiki uses UTC, as does the in-game server time.

So if you are in the mood to party, drop by and join the fun!

Schedule (approximate times. Make sure to activate the /say and /emote channels for the duration!):

10.00 PM – Welcome

10.10 PM – We will start off with a light Guild Wars universe quiz. Prizes for first correct answer!

10.40 PM – Mini Race! (Prizes TBA)

11.00 PM – Draw and announcement for the lottery.

11.10 PM – “Strike a pose” contest. (Prizes TBA)

11.45 PM – Fashion contest lineup and judging. (Prizes TBA)

12.00 AM – Group Photo op and Finale.

All the time:

• Simon says! (exact person “saying” TBA) This one should be a cakewalk for everyone with Halloween in fresh memory. But since we in Dii are nice people, we will not kill anyone, there will only be prizes. The first person to do an e-mote after a “Say” will receive a prize.
• Scavenger hunt. The first person to mail a certain item will receive a prize (if you are not the first person, you get your item(s) back).
• Sync dance! So bring your best dance shoes.
• Make sure to tune in to our DJ room http://plug.dj/dii for extra fun and party vibes.
• Open bar, candy and all manners of small party favors, including banners.

General rules:
All contests are kept in /say channel so stay close by. For some things “emote” channel is used too. So make sure to activate all channels!
Consumables and skills (but not costumes) are allowed for all races.

But wait, there is more!
If you are not able to join the in-game fun, you still have a chance of prices. We are running two forum contests too, as well as an in-game one:

1) 2000 Gem Card Grand Lottery!
Post in the birthday thread on our forums for a place in the Grand Lottery. Your posting order will be your lottery ticket number. One entry per person. The draw of the lottery will be conducted live during the celebrations. Deadline is the start of the events, i.e. November 8th 10PM UTC.

2) Win a Charr Plush!
Dii fanart competition. Post a piece of Dii-themed fanart in the celebration fanart thread at our forums for a chance at great prizes. Every entry gets a prize, but only one can win the adorable Charr Plushie. To allow for a bit more time to get some entries in, the deadline for the fanart competition is one month from now, i.e. December 1st 12AM UTC.

3) In-game mailbomb! Mail any of our leaders (a.k.a. “the prime evils”) something flattering about Dii to receive a small prize. The better and more specific the flatter, the better the prize! (one prize per person). All flatter will be transcribed and posted on our forums, and/or bragged about during the celebrations. Deadline is the end of the events, i.e. November 8th 12AM UTC

Fine print: Dii takes no responsibility if prizes are undeliverable for any reason. Make sure to include in-game name for delivery of in-game prizes. All contests listed here are open to any registered member at the Dii site.

So happy to see Horrorween thrive in GW2!

number 308 for the raffle please

IGN Bark N Mad

I missed the start of this thread, but thought I’d still summarize the QoL things I am missing with the current guild system. Not really huge things, but things that would help us out immensely all the same.

- Two separate message panes. One that is more static core guild info (showing stuff like guild wesbite, ts, etc) and one that is a true “Message of the day”, which is automatically sent in chat to every (representing) member as they log in (this is the important bit). This would be invaluable to spread information quickly without bogging down people’s mail boxes and whatnot. Downside could possibly be that members were annoyed by this message (although it never was a problem in GW1), solved by letting people opt out (as they can for emote chat messages)

- No mail suppression for intra-guild mail. Possible downside that guilds start spamming each other. Solved by making it a rank ability so can limit it if needed. Another downside is gold sellers using guilds to bypass message spam limits.

- Add to the “online last” feature to include “representing last” to help guild maintain an active roster. If possible also “% online representing”, although that might be stretching it a bit.

- Alliances. Does not have to be a lot, just a joint chat channel would be enough really. Would be neat if one could gift influence/merits to allies or share mission activations, although that might become some kind of market in itself, especially merits (since influence can already be purchased with gold).

- Being able to “blacklist” user names, so they are not accidentally invited (can override if confirmed). Sure can keep a shared spreadsheet, but would be so much better if there was an in-game block. Possible downside being greefing, but do not think it should be too bad.

- Achievements for Guild Missions. It is right there, so why not add achievements for it? (there are achievement for everything else! ;D). Possible downside that it could further disenfranchise small guilds.

- Date joined listed on roster. Again, can keep a separate spreadsheet, but would be nice to have in game. Can not think of any downside.. cramped roster listing?

- More Guild Missions. The ones we have are nice and all, but getting old now. Downside is development costs, but surely some things could be repurposed, like the Dolyak race or a scaled down marionette fight.

- More uses for merits. For medium-sized guilds that can reliably complete missions, the merits quickly max out but cannot be used because influence is gained way slower (all non-unlocks using merits use a lot of influence too). Merit-influence conversion would be best option imo. (say 100 merits to 10k influence or something).

- About Guild Halls I personally really only want somewhere to idle, hang out with guildies, and perform some basic features. Important that it is available from everywhere (like PvP or WvW) and if possible exempt from anti-idling rules. So for me the top three things a Guild Hall is really only one top thing; somewhere to hang out with guildies, a natural meeting place when not playing actively or when wanting to meet up to “show latest armor” or whatever. Instance or open world does not matter, as long as we can go there with a single zoning from everywhere (including WvW and PvP). Anything more than that is just gravy to me even though I know a lot of people want scrimmage arenas and stuff.

Thanks coglin! The name was taken from the game the guild’s founders first met in; Diablo II. They all played the GW1 betas together and liked it so much they started a guild.

With our 9th Birthday party around the corner, I thought I’d take this chance to update that we are still open for recruitment.

The Order Of Dii [Dii] wishes to invite all friends,
old and new, for a celebration of our 9th birthday
on Saturday December 7th!

There will be drinks,
there will be snacks,
there will be fireworks.
There will be games,
there will be races
there will be quizzes,
and yes there will be prizes!

The celebrations will be held in the Grove on Jade Quarry
Saturday December 7th 10 PM – 12 AM UTC.
Further details about the schedule, contests and prizes are found on our forums.

The Order of Dii [Dii] is looking for new friends both for Guild Missions, organized WvW and general PvE!

We:

A medium-smallish guild (50+ active members, peak concurrency of about 15-20), Dii is one of the oldest Guild Wars guilds still in existence, we turn 9 years old in November 2013. Yes that is from before Guild Wars 1 even went live. We are a generally friendly, and tight-knit bunch with a pretty flat hierarchy. If you join us you do not just gain guildies, you gain friends! We are very understanding of real-life obligations and do not have any requirements for activity, donations etc, although we do appreciate if our members interact on our forums as well as in-game. Both to spread important information and to build our guild’s community.

We are an international guild with members from all over the world, with a majority in the American and European time zones. Our core server is Jade Quarry. We try to play and support (with upgrades) all the game modes. We host weekly Guild Missions open to guests and members alike and have a small but growing WvW team.

You:

• Are a friendly 18+ person who likes to play PvP and/or PvE.
• Can be casual or hardcore (we have both types in the guild), as long as you have respect for other people’s play styles.
• Are willing to represent Dii at least 50% of your in game time.
• Like to regularly goof around at a forum (that would be dii.enjin.com) during your off hours talking about everything and nothing.
• Like a good laugh, are no stranger to the occasional dirty joke or crude language.
• Do not throw a hissy fit if your team “fails”.

Application process:

Applications are done by in game mail or, preferably, by filling in an application over on the dii.enjin.com site. Once you have accepted the invitation you will receive the “Quaggan” status in game as well as on our forums. There is no real difference between an “Quaggan” and a “Member” in game besides guild stash access, it is mostly a way for us to get a quick heads up on who are new so we can make sure to get know you a bit better. Site membership is not required for applicants, but strongly recommended for members to be able to participate in votes, guild contests etc.

As said above we do not have any strict activity requirements, nor do we demand that you represent us all the time, although we do ask that inductees try to be active in the guild community during the inductee period (in-game and if possible at the forum) so that we get to know you and you get to know us.

After ~two weeks, we will have a vote for full membership, which if successful (more than 2/3 votes “yes”) will earn you full in-game membership and access to our private forum. If not successful, you will be removed from the guild roster. However, especially if your vote was not successful due to no/low activity during the inductee period, we do encourage re-applications if or when your situation changes.

Please include the following information in your application:
Main character name:
Account tag:
Home World:
Peak timezone:
Short blurb about yourself: (this is the important bit!)

Please remember that Jinks does not talk for Kaineng. Neither does trolls in EB. Most people are genuinely sad to see WvW (and previous transfers) go and would very much like them to reconsider.

That said, it is human nature to have some people lash out when they are feeling like they are handed the kitten end of a stick. And even without that, immature kitten bags are a fact of life no matter where you go. I think people are kidding themselves if they think that this is different on any other server. That they are somehow immune. The only way to be immune to basic human nature is to be on an empty server.

Luckily adversity also bring out the best in people, and the last couple of weeks I have had the most amazing time ever playing WvW for Kaineng even though we haven’t had a chance actually winning any matches. People are really coming together, despite Anet’s insistence to match us up against much higher-ranking servers. I think we could use a week of playing a couple of tiers lower ranked servers next time…

Yes this match-up kind of blows for morale, but I think it is important to remember that even if Kaineng finishes dead last this week, we can still gain rating points here! We are not supposed to win this matchup, in fact every point we do take is a win.

Yes it might feel overwhelming to face TC with their superior numbers and so many of our old friends fighting on their side, but it is not a useless fight by any means. It is just time to whip out the Guerrilla tactics. Take that camp. Kill those Dolyaks. Spend this week training for future matches. Don’t look too closely on the overall score, focus on accomplishing the small things, and take pride in doing that.

I have heard of some seriously awesome fights so far this match, so it is really worth while logging in, even though the overall score looks kind of lop sided.

And I hope that everyone can get over the fact that we are now facing friends in the field. No one predicted this, so let’s make the best of the hand dealt. We in Dii also lost several of our core WvW-ers to TC, but you wont see us giving up or hating on the people who opted to leave Kaineng. Nor will you see any Dii-ers “spying” on Kaineng (or on TC), everyone is just playing to have fun and experience the game the best they can.

I would just like to update this to confirm that [Dii] is staying on Kaineng, and we are still open for applications. We are regularly playing WvW now, and are having a total blast!

We also have weekly Guild Bounty and Guild Trek runs (to be axpanded as we research the other guild mission types).

Alas I have no screenshot of this, but what happened was that my character leveled up (or gained a skill point really since he is level 80 already) at the exact same time as he would be downed (by an NPC in WvW if I recall correctly), which lead to something weird.

My character got the “insta maxed health” associated with the level up, but the game also seemed to consider him downed. I got frozen in place and could only use my first 4 skills, as if the game thought I had only the downed skills equipped even though I was looking at my normal skillbar. Naturally this lead to be getting downed “for real” (not defeated which should have been the case if it was only a display issue) in short order, and then I could use by downed skills normally again.

My wish list, from small tweaks to larger overhauls:

• Last online/last repped/rep%
• Confirmation for kicking/demoting etc (seriously, who decided that putting “kick” right next to “whisper”, with no confirmation dialogue, was a good idea?)
• Show people’s home server, not just where they currently are guesting to.
• Join date.
• A way to edit guild announcements. ATM it is a total PITA to change just a small thing.
• A static portion of the announcement (for stuff like forum address, vent login details etc.)
• Showing the guild announcement automatically in chat on log-in (if repping of course), just as in GW1.
• Being able to set automatic demote/promotes (like, having an "inactive " rank for people who have not been online for 1 month or whatever).
• Being able to make a “will” as in who should be made guild leader in case of emergency (ban, prolonged illness, death, quitting the game, stepping down) and set a time frame for when leadership should be inheritedif not actively stepping down .
• Guild Squad Leader. Like a commander, just with a different map symbol only viewable to guild members. (I would actually also like a way to denote someone a party leader, especially in WvW it would be handy to know which blue dot to follow lol).
• Ask when creating a new character if they want to represent a guild (I cannot count the number of people who didn’t know that new characters are not repping by defaut, they just thought the guild turned really really quiet..)

What he is talking about is how you in GW1 (and many other games) could see directly in the guild roster when the person was last logged into the game. Extremely useful for larger guilds with a membership spread over several time zones so might not run into each other in game all the time.

Right now, if someone is offline on your roster you have to way of telling if you just missed them, or if they been on a 2-month hiatus.

And yes, I would very much like this feature.

As for GW2, the feature should give not only “last online”, but also a “last rep” and maybe even “rep%”.

Aenaos.8160:

As you noticed, guesting was not a problem before the chests.
Which is another fact that proves that currently the guesting system is
being exploited by farmers and should be removed until the devs can
improve the system and make it farm proof.

The only facts you have is that there are a lot of overflows now, and there are (some undefined number of) guests doing chest events at the same time as a lot of home server players. Correlation is not causation though and you still have no proof that if there were no guests there would be no overflow.

Guesting is used for far more than just attending chest events, and you should not be so quick to throw it away just for your (percieved) farming convenience.

I really dont get it. So many people want to remove a wonderful feature that helps people playing together, and for what? And un-proven notion that guesting is responsible for an issue that only started showing up after the world chests were buffed. So keen to protect the free loot at any cost that pointing fingers at guesting becomes the easy answer. After all, not like it would hurt anyone important to destroy it, right? (as opposed to nerfing loot or making chests per account which might actually limit the farm itself in some way. Gasp.) Wrong!

Removing guesting completely, forcing people to move servers to play with friends in not an option. People have different circles of friends, and unless ANet could collapse the entire game into one single server there will always be people with friends on more than one server and who cannot move without abandoning people they care about.

Making all guesting invite-only is not an option. There are other valid reasons to guest aside from playing with specific friends. Just one example; attending community events (Pink day etc.). How would that work in an invite-only system?

Finally, shutting down all loot from guests is a bad option too. Especially if you want to allow for casual players to be able to enjoy content during their play time, which may not overlap perfectly with their servers’ peak time. Even more so leveling casuals. Sticking them in thinning beginner zones without any way to go to another server to team up with others (and still get loot to gear them up) or conscript help from other servers (without said help running a loss) seems like a very poor way to keep them playing.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

Let’s look at the actual problems here:

1. Being able to run the dragon chests on alts. This has always been possible since launch day. Clearly it has never caused an issue in the last 6 months. Not the core problem.

2. Guesting. Available for the previous two months. Overflow and lag problem didn’t exist in the previous 2 months. Not the core problem.

3. People exploiting and running multiple chests per character. This was possible since launch. People used to run the dragon chests 5-6 times a day before the patch, yet there was no lag or overflows. Not the core problem

4. Dragon loot increased. Immediate lag, overflow, crashing, disconnects and population problems.

Now that we know the facts, which one of these 4 things is the cause of overflow and lag problems. (hint: it isn’t 1, 2, or 3.)

As long as they isolate the good loot to small open world areas, they will be crowded, end of story.

You are both right and wrong here, Right in that giving easy access to good loot in open world areas will lead to loads of people going there. Wrong in that you are treating each in isolation and conclude that only the last thing added is to blame. Sure the easy fix would be to remove the increased loot, but it is also the right fix? Or is it just that adding loot was just a catalyst to revealing underlying problems with one or more of the other three?

Sahfur.5612:

I literally hate any person who is on Jade Quarry who is guesting recently because the droves of mindless sheep are running around like ants and ruining the actual server occupants ability to enjoy the events.

Come on. You are in the most populated server in the entire game. You honestly think that removing guests’ chest loot would do one smidgen of difference as to if chest events are overpopulated and pushed into overflow? Please. JQ has enough players to do that all by themselves, and then some.

Hebee.8460:

Keeping it per character would benefit all of us players. Some might not have alts now, but when you do get alts later down the line, you will be able to switch whenever you would like to get as many chests as u can manage to get more rares/exotics/chances at a pre-curser. Keeping it per character works for the player as it provides more bodies to get an event moving & completed, primarely the temple events. If majority of players complete an event, the minority will be left with trying to find ANYONE to come help complete said event (convincing others who already did their part for chest prolly wont feel any reward out of helping, sadly), making it much more of a hassle for the minority.

The issue like all have said is guesting itself. It definatly needs to be finely tuned on how it works. Possible ways of takeing care of it:

1 – Cap out servers to not allow guesting. If its already full, its ineligible for guesting on. (Only way to get on server would be friend invite)
2 – Players that have made “Home” to that server, have priority over guesters. Guesters will be put into overflow before a “Home” player is put into it.

I think making it account bound does not benifit us at all, and is a step in the wrong direction. Tweaking the guesting system is a benefit for all types of players, casual or not, and im casual.
(When selecting a server to guest, a lower population should always be favored anyways to avoid ability lag)

Keeping it per character provides too many bodies to get the event going and completed. If that was not the case, there would have been no complaints about overflows, lag etc. to begin with. Changing the guesting rules will however do very little to change this on higher population servers, the servers themselves have more than enough people to throw a boss event into overflow.

Nerfing guesting would just hurt people with limited play times, the people who do not have many hours to wait for even one boss to spawn, let alone all of them. Nerfing guesting while at the same time keeping the per-character loot-boosted chests, really is the worst possible solution for anyone remotely “casual” – giving huge rewards to those able to show up with different alts throughout the day while shutting out people with limited play times altogether.

And for those saying that the chests need to be per char due to having to gear up all the alts (and/or having alts suddenly becoming “useless” if they cannot each hit every chest every day), I respectfully disagree. There is a reason for the term “twink” as an extra challenge, and that is that a first character is always more work to gear. The second, third, etc, enjoy the spoils from the first character’s leveling making the whole process much easier. Simply put, no one “needs” to hit these chests on every single alt every day for gearing purposes. It is purely a money making farm that gets more effective the more alts you have.

Since the other thread was closed, I re-post my point here:

The problem is not guesting, it is that the chest are limited per character, not per account. Sure, guesting in its current form makes it possible to get the events on multible characters in a short time frame, but at the core it is a problem with the over-the-top farmability of these events, not guesting.

With a per character limit combined with the extremely buffed up chest rewards, “everyone” will do their very best to open the chests on as many alts as they can possibly manage. This means both guesting as well as everyone showing up for their own servers’ events. Even without guesting, the more populated servers would go into boss overflows due to all the alts hitting the chest several times during the day. Having it limited to once per boss per account (which is still a good number of chests!) would make things much more manageable.

The problem is not guesting, it is that the chest are limited per character, not per account.

With a per character limit combined with the extremely buffed up chest rewards, “everyone” will do their very best to open the chests on as many alts as they can possibly manage. This means both guesting as well as everyone showing up for their own servers events. Even without guesting, the more populated servers would go into boss overflows due to all the alts hitting the chest several times during the day. Having it limited to once per boss per account (which is still a good number of chests!) would make things much more manageable.

While I agree an in-game warning should have been in place, this is the way guilds have worked from the very start. And it really does put a hamper on all multi-world guilds. All influence is earned per world, and all upgrades are bound to that world. The only exception is (afaik) the guild emblem that is set globally, although each world must still pay for the emblem upgrade to be able to put it on guild armor etc.

Not even the guild stash is shared. Each world unlock the stash separately, and the content of the stash is also separate (so it is not like one would imagine a shared stash just unlocked per world). Which is kind of silly considering the shared TP and cross-world mail. This last point is especially important when swapping worlds as a guild, since you can lock yourself out of your guild’s stash holdings if you forget to clear your stash before moving..

Anyway, yes it sucks to have to rebuild everything, and personally I would want there to be a “move guild including upgrades” option available, but the current mechanics are well-known and documented at for instance the official wiki.

Regarding the issues of creating upgrades by “off-world” members, our guild has solved this by making an “ambassador” rank for everyone not on our primary world, with different privs suiting their situation. Not a perfect solution, but works well enough.

The Order of Dii [Dii] is open for applications!

You are:
A friendly 18+ person who likes to play PvP and/or PvE. You can be casual or hardcore (we have both types in the guild), as long as you have respect for other people’s play styles. You like a good laugh, are no stranger to the occasional dirty joke, and do not throw a hissy fit if your team “fails”.

You can be from any country, and play at any world in the North American data cluster, although if you want to WvW with the guild core team you would have to make your home on Kaineng, which is also Dii’s official home. We moved to Kaineng at the end of free transfers which put us back to square one in the guild upgrades department, but we have steadily progressed and now have both Bounties and Treks running weekly.

We are:
One of the oldest Guild Wars guilds in existence, 8 years old last November – yes that is from before Guild Wars 1 went live. We are a generally friendly and drama-free bunch with a pretty flat hierarchy. We are very understanding of real-life obligations and do not have any requirements for activity, donations etc, although we do appreciate if our members interact on the forums as well as in-game. Both to spread important information and to build our guild’s community.

We are an international guild with members from all over the world, with the largest groups being in NA and EU.

Dii’s home world is Kaineng (NA), although we do have members on half a dozen other worlds as well. We have a Vent server and a forum.

Application process:
Applications are accepted through the forums (here or GWOnline), or by in-game mail to Bark N Mad (lensor.9684)

All applicants recive the “Quaggan” status in game. There is no real difference between an “Quaggan” and a “Member” in game apart from stash access, it is mostly a way for us to get a quick heads up on who are new so we can make sure to get know you a bit better.

We do ask that inductees try to be active in the guild community during the inductee period (in-game and if possible at the forum) so that we get to know you and you get to know us.

Once you’ve been in the guild for two weeks, we will have a vote for full membership. If successful it will earn you access to our private forum and full membership status. And then you are ours!! Muhahaha! (Oh wait, one can be in several guilds in GW2 right? Darn ).

Finally, I would like to mention that we actively discourage inductees from donating to the guild. We will never directly or implicitly ask for donations (influence letters/guild stash etc) and any such donations will not be taken into consideration when voting. That is just the way we roll, and it has served us well so far.

Please format your application like so:
Character name(s):
Account tag:
Home World:
Peak timezone:
Short blurb about yourself:

Links:
Dii’s subforum at GWOnline (+ private subforum for voted-in members)
Direct link to the GWOnline application thread
ArenaNet’s Guild of the Week
Guild Spotlight at GWOnline
GWOnline Alliance of Friends (+ private alliance subforum)

Home World: Kaineng
Guild Name: The Order of Dii [Dii]
Guild Website: Guild forums at GWOnline
In-Game Contact: Bark N Mad (Lensor.9684)
Focus: PvX (mostly PvE atm)
Quick Notes:
You are a friendly 18+ person who likes to play PvP and/or PvE. You can be casual or hardcore (we have both types in the guild), as long as you have respect for other people’s play styles. You should not easilly throw hissy fits, and be no stranger to the occasional dirty joke. We are one of the oldest guilds in Guild Wars, started before GW1 beta and made our way into GW2 at release. We have members on several worlds, but our home world is Kaineng.

(Direct link to application thread at GWOnline . In-game applications also accepted).

There seems to be goldsellsers crawling your forums for active members to send goldspam PMs to. I got two such PMs just yesterday. One way to combat this could be making new members make a few posts in the forum before being able to send PMs. That way the mods can (hopefully) catch them before they send PMs (and thus also stop them from sending in-game goldselling spam mail), and if they dont at least the spammers are slowed down.

Also, I dont know if you have a PM send limit, or if people can send unlimited PMs with no time delays.

The problem is that ArenaNet does not seem to really care all that much about the community any more. They care about individual players. They care about the game itself. They care about the bottom line (they are a company after all). But they do not care about the community. The alliances, the guilds, the player-run events. They say that they do, but actions speak higher than words:

- no alliances, not even joint chat.
- no cross-regional guesting (which I admit may be “impossible”, as in not actually impossible but unfeasible under current conditions),
which leads to,
- standing idly by while international communities in their thousands put down roots, full knowing that the damage to those communities would be all the more devastating the longer they waited to announce no cross-region guesting.

The first two I can understand as a result of time and financial constraints, a reality for any company. The last one though… any company who cares about their community, who truly cares, would never in a million years put them through that. The fact that ArenaNet is not even apologizing for the effects this late announcement is having on their international communities speaks volumes.

OK, I am stunned.

From the elation of finally getting word of guesting being a reality, to the realization that it will be absolutely useless to me and most of my longtime friends. I’m in an international guild (and alliance) who carried over from GW1 and we have been hanging in there for months unable to play together on the promise that “guesting is coming”, and now this…

I don’t usually use these words, and never before in reference to a gaming company, but I feel betrayed.

ANet has taken the international communities who followed them to GW2, and stomped on them. Not happy, ANet. Not one little bit.

I am making this post for a guildie of mine who cannot post on the forums

He sent in a ticket on the 29:th of November
121129-001122

His account was suspended for “account issues” (nothing more specified) and his purchase refunded. He also gifted an account to a friend of his (using the same card), who is now permanently suspended for “fraud”. I am not 100% sure if the ticket number includes both accounts, or if there is a separate number for the friend.

In any case, we are of course all anxious to get this issue resolved, we really miss having him around in our guild!

(As an aside, you really should consider allowing guest posting on the Account Issues subforum. I mean, does it not pretty much defeat the point this section if people having issues with their accounts cannot even post?)

This unfortunately seems to be a common occurrence involving people who buy (legit) GW2 copies with (legit) credit cards, from some countries that are apparently blacklisted by ANet. You just dont see it much on the forum because they are quickly banned also from posting. A guildie of mine (who played GW1 for years just fine!) just got his purchase refunded out of the blue and his account suspended. After going through a gazillion hoops being able to buy the game in the first place since it is not sold directly in his country. He also gifted an account to a friend, and the friend’s account is now also permanently suspended due to fraud. You can imagine their feelings about ANet customer service right about now…

And with the holiday season coming up, it is only going to get worse. Imagine all those people gifting the game just to have their own and the gifted account permanently suspended for “fraud”. It is not going to be pretty.

Fine if they want to have extra proof of ownership from commonly fraudulent IP ranges, but to accept payment and then decide to kill the account? That is just.. wrong.

Looks like something happened with the official GW2 news feed https://www.guildwars2.com/en/feed/

The last entries there are back from Halloween. None of the newer news articles show up. Also, it is something wonky with the format too, because some readers seem to have problems getting anything at all.

If you want to kill the rather vibrant community event, erm, community that migrated to GW2 from GW1, the way to do it is taking away direct mail of gold/items. It is already hard enough to host giveaways and contests without the ability to do face-to-face trades, removing mailing as well would make it virtually impossible. Personally I do not think that is a sacrifice worth making just to inconvenience gold sellers.

Also, aforementioned families and friends using the mail to help each other out.

Erm… we got loads of costumes already. Pirate outfit, Cook’s outfit, Sunglasses etc. At least these are costumes to me. Non-stat things that you can wear just for fun. And they do not work as non-storage-hogging unlocks for the account, which was my complaint.

Also, being able to wear town clothes until the very second you take damage is hardly the same as being able to wear them all the time. But as as I said, this is not the main reason why they are not really convenient, and thus not as enticing as they could be.

It is actually really simple: Unlocks and usability.

In GW1 I could buy a costume set, which was then unlocked for the entire account, allowing infinite free respawns. I could have my entire account in Halloween clothes for Halloween without having to pay extra or sacrifice precious storage space to store the outfits ’till next year. This elicited the “gotta catch them all” response for me, and thus I bought all the costumes, even the ones I never even used, just to have them available. In GW2 on the other had, I have to weigh each purchase on a (literal) gold scale; only buying items I really want and that I deem worthy of the storage space they consume (which is at a premium already). No more buying items just in case, or for a bit of temporary holiday fun. And to the surprise of no one, I have yet to buy a single costume item.

Usability is of course the fact that so many of the items are only allowed as town clothes. Now I understand that it became a bit silly in GW1 with people running around in DoA in top hats and evening gowns (even though the line is blurry to some of the actual armor sets… :P), but I would still like to use my sunglasses everywhere, not only in town. If at least there was a way to set it so that town clothes were automatically loaded when entering a town it would be immensely better. But as is one has to make a conscious choice to activate town clothes every single time entering a town. So people just don’t bother (surprise!). Then of course the question becomes, why buy it in the first place?

The same basic principle of not offering items in a format most convenient and enticing for the customer (another example is random dyes only, not even sorted on hue apart from green and orange) goes for a lot of the GW2 Gem Store items, but where ANet really lost the money on me was the costumes.