Guild Wars 2

CDKeys buys keys from people who may or may not have gotten them legally. I imagine they have some sort of checks in place to try and mitigate illegal sales, since that’s bad for business. One of the legal methods for obtaining low priced keys, is distributors selling a stack of keys to merchants on the cheap so that they can meet a monthly quota. If you are unsure about the site, I would purchase PoF elsewhere. Unfortunately, that can be a lot more expensive.

You are right, those aren’t warriors. They are Daredevil Thieves, which is most OP spec in game. They can even glide while stealing. It’s stupid. Go to Thief forums to complain OP, they deserve it.

Yeah I’d report, but that’s because I remember when we didn’t pay people to record themselves playing computer games.

I dunno about personality traits necessarily being reflected in character choice, that seems a little far fetched. Although I’ve never bought into the “if ur gunna stare at an kitten all day” argument, there are all sorts of reasons people make male vs female characters. Personally, it’s simple aesthetics; male characters in GW2 have gigantic floatinh shoulder pads and it just puts me right off. Even thin male character proportions seem subtly wrong. In Warcraft, I used to play a Rogue and a Paladin who were both male.

Mel.3064:

I only make male characters, saying why would probably give infraction points for sexism lol

There is a definite lack of… interesting male attire

If the OP were any more thinly veiled, it’d simply be transparent. So let’s go right ahead and get this thread locked up nice and tight.

I main not one, not two, but three female characters. I’d have more males, but their bodies are so completely ridiculous – practically at He-man levels of sexism, that I just don’t find the fellas appealing to play as.

In the five years I’ve been playing, I’ve not had a single sexist remark thrown my way. No one has given me free stuff, no one has found out I’m a guy (honestly, I just assume all scantily clad female characters are guys, although mine are heavy armour wielders so have no skin showing), and no one has accused me of gender bending or of being misleading.

In all likelihood, this is because I don’t flirt with people in a video game. I save (well, used to, when I was a bachelor) that for real life, like normal people.

I’m quite excited about SB. When it was first revealed that dagger would be the new weapon, I was unsure. Afterall, why would a master of combat and front line damage mainhand a dagger? But then I gave it a go, albeit briefly, and I kind of saw what the designers were going for. My Warrior in WvW usually stacks knockdowns, and I play her as a control build designed to disrupt as many people as possible while the deeps do their jobs. SB seems like a logical extension of the playstyle I already enjoy. I’m feeling like some combination of dagger and hammer.

Prins Lionheart.3182:

I have red the above with interest. The biggest impact (positive) that I noticed is not mentioned at all. I have a clean 2012 iMac. Just macOs and one game (this one). The machine arrived with 8gb of Ram and just 1gb of Vram. It did not have an issue with running GW2. I managed between 30-60fps in full-screen. With the arrival of 64bit version I started monitoring the performance. Memory was hardly relevant. I have upped the system to 24gb, Not used. GW2 tops at 4gb. CPU was steady running at 180%. I assume two cores out of four. Flat-out. In line with above comments. Next I replaced the HDD with a SDD. That saved my day! The system is flying. Loading in seconds.
My bottle-neck was the HDD. Probably the design of the GW2 database causes lots of disk access. Latency is killing it. If the system updates itself during sign-on, it always shows an enormous number of files that is loaded in that single datafile. Apparently that single datafile is not (partly) loaded in memory but accessed continuously.

Literally a couple of posts above, where I mention IO :P But yes, when there’s a lot of data to stream into memory, especially when it’s fragmented (which is why I suspect it’s in one file – to try and mitigate that), is going to be a big bottleneck. Glad an SSD saved the day! The best I managed was moving the install to a disk that was not my OS, so at least all my windows services weren’t also competing for IO access.

To the guy talking about about needing lots of tools to monitor the game; system resource monitor is often enough. Just check out disk usage when zoning into LA.

Underwater combat just doesn’t work. It’s impossible to judge distance or to move with six degrees of freedom in a game ostensibly designed not to allow that. For a start, the third person camera would have to be adjusted to allow for full quaternion rotation, inatead of clamping the pitch to prevent gimbal lock. Ever tried moving about upside down? It takes practice. Now try adding any sort of sensation of gravity. Underwater combat is just too darn difficult to achieve in an enjoyable way. Blizzard tried, and the result was spectacularly ghastly.

Flatley.1620:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

Having a fast drive will help load times, surely?

You would expect it to yes. When people quote system performance and resource usage, they tend to forget about data transfer rates. It’s no good having oodles of RAM and a huge graphics card if your HDD is taking forever to read lots of little bits of data from all over your disk.

Reading these replies I get the feeling that people don’t understand computer infrastructure, even though they pretend that they do. I suppose that can cause frustration when their eight bajillion core turbosquid 9000 doesn’t run gw2 at $Infinity frames per second, but come on… The loading times will not be influenced by core count. That’s a file IO and network issue. Zoning into LA always takes ages for me, that’s not because ehrmahgherd!! DX9!!! It’s the sheer volume of players with all the data that describes their location, name, what they are wearing etc. If you are worried about loading times, I would look at your disk read/write speed and network latency, that might prove fruitful.

Seriously? You do realise that the core engine developers probably aren’t the ones designing commander icons right? I mean, if you are going to spout an opinion at least attempt to ground it in reality.

You mention technology, but wish to forego any discussion of it. Unfortunately the explanations for the game’s poor performance and the likelihood of it being addressed are technical, and there’s little point in having an opinion on a matter without understanding the situation, so I’m going to ignore your desire to ignore the explanation

DX9 is an old technology, and the game engine is heavily CPU bound. Upgrading to DX11 and offloading work to the GPU, or multithreading the game engine, are all herculean tasks. The sort that tend to require complete rewrites of game code. The game recently switched to 64 bit addressing, so machines with more than 4gb of RAM finally saw that memory being used, which did help with performance and killed a couple of nasty crash bugs when large amounts of players were present. In that respect, maybe we can hope for an engine overhaul in the future, but I think that’s unlikely since the game runs fine for most people that aren’t running it off of a toaster oven.

So, my opinion as someone who has an understanding of the technology is that the game engine is fine, runs without issues for the most part, and that incremental improvements to stability and performance would be reasonable to expect instead of an overhaul.

To be honest, unless you have motos red and blue auras, you probably shouldn’t even be allowed to open map chat. There are too many scrubs playing this game….

Did I do that right?

^ It would be nice to just be able to turn off gaudy backpacks. The option could have a little more granularity than simply on or off, for example: Disable backpacks? – “no, eye-sores, all”.

I recently looked at getting central Tyrian mastery points and yeah… Most of that stuff is just labourious, and I don’t fancy doing any of it. With that said, I think the purpose of mastery points was to get players out into the old zones to keep them alive, and to recycle old content. I’m not sure how buying mastery points from the store will play into that. Maybe we just need less horrible ways to acquire them.

Yeah gotta agree with the architecture of the new map, everything felt utterly by the bumbers, and no location stood out in any way in particular. It’s Silver Wastes with a Pyramid.

[Edit]
That was supposed to say “numbers” but holy hell is it a funny typo.

Mikali.9651:

Cerby.1069:

Mikali.9651:

Cerby.1069:

Blackwaltz.7156:

Ok.

Here’s the preliminary feedback for evening 1 of the demo weekend.

Spellbreaker is bland, boring, low mobility, low sustain and low damage spec.
All it can really do is remove boons, but that doesn’t stop the train of damage comming your way.
I am terribly disappointed. Especially when I looked to other specs like Deadeye.

Thank you ArenaNet for allowing us to have this demo weekend that way we can know weather to buy the expansion or not. And it’s the later for me.

LOL! Awww man. You actually cause a metaphorical tear to fall from eye with the contrast from ur OP. Felt like seeing a kid see his hero irl for the first time, and getting kittened on with every conceivable reality of the world.

I’d give you a hug if I could. I’d even put on a fluffy furry costume and give you a hug if it would help

Life leets you done sometimes, huh.

Holosmith srsly was swwwwwwweeeeeet tho when i tried it. It sucks we gotta relearn an entire new class and synergy but….its an option (so long as we get past the adventure box theme)!

why are you provoking other people?

I’m not? Why are you misinterpreting things in such a negative way?
Are you trying to provoke me? I srsly would feel inclined to give him/her a hug if I could…..the contrast and disappointment I felt between their posts really made me feel bad for them.

sry but I don’t think any word you have just written is honest. I do not like sarcasm for no reason. Keep civil discussion

I felt exactly the same as that guy when I saw the two posts. The first one is so optimistic, then the follow up’s like he’s been kicked in the teeth. Perhaps you simply misinterpreted the post, captain misery guts.

I played precisely five minutes today, in which I murderised an Engineer. Don’t really know what I’m doing at the moment, but I have to say that seeing my Warrior dancing about with daggers was…. Arousing. I think that Spellbreaker will at least be better than the spec for my other main – the poor, poor Revenant.

TheOrlyFactor.8341:

Stop playing this game for the story and you will save yourself a lot of headaches.

This 100%. Coming from a time when video games consisted of three lives and one for every fifty thousand points thereafter, I read a lot of books. Really good books. Most story in games is written by people who are not writers, or by people who pretend to be, but don’t really have a good grounding in the art. Guild Wars 2 is no exception. Some games, notably the Witcher series (as mentioned), have exquisitely crafted lore and story, MMOs tend not to fall into this category for a variety of reasons, none of which really dispell the notion that writers for MMOs tend to be drawn from the B-list pool of talent.

All this is to say, that Guild War’s story and lore is just about the most cliched tripe one could ever come across. You’re almost always better off entirely skipping lines of dialog so that you don’t hurt your brain.

Incidentally, when I was playing the PoF demo and Taimi’s irritating, high pitched voice came over my “comms”, my heart sank so low that I thought I had a hernia.

Please, ANet. Just stop.

Djinn.9245:

Vova.2640:

Why not just buy the game from the client…??
Seems the safest way…

Cause people are trying to save some money. This is understandable – they just don’t understand how the resellers can end up with some bad keys. And of course only a small number of the keys are bad, so a bunch of people are like “mine was fine”. I personally wouldn’t speak up for a company that had sold bad keys in the past. If someone purchased a key because I and other people spoke up for the company and then that person got their account banned, I would feel terrible.

Sometimes I get my car fixed at a third party repair shop. They usually do a good job. The dealership has free coffee, but holy cow those prices.

Except that’s not true at all, since jewelry is a physical object that’s taken, whereas a cd key is nothing more than a reproducable code. A better analogy would be if person A had their credit card stolen, and had cd keys purchased with the card…

The zone was quite boring in terms of design. Just more cliffs. Yay. The interesting bits were just beyond the demo boundaries, hopefully the architecture improves because HoT was a gigantic leap forward in terms of map design. Possibly ahead of its time given how bad many players apparently were at spacial awareness.

The mount was great, it had a heft to it that felt realistic. It’s attack was rubbish though, and didn’t ever seem to land right.

The mastery mini games were cool, good idea with those.

Hydra was neat but weak.

Legendary sand shark was incredibly annoying. Those spinning lasers are just a poor mechanic imo.

Choyas. Dear God. Why? First Rock Devils and now these guys? ANet master trolls.

Mount race was super fun!

In general, seemed good, but no verticality is meh. Zone did not have the same level of chaos and life as Verdant Brink. Hopefully the other areas get better in this regard.

You sure PoF includes HoT? I dunno. But this is the same for all games. Back when HoT came out, PoF didn’t exist. Veteran players have all that extra time played which they presumably found worth it.

I tried, and it’s just too ugly. GW2 is such a leap ahead in terms of, well, everything, that it may be more trouble than it’s worth.

Mesmer AI isn’t terrible. I think the problem is that a Charr legend that isn’t Rytlock simply blows. What did this chick do anyway? We should have had Eir, muahaha

Characters get birthday rewards each year, which get better. A vet player will have acrued more of those obviously. I can’t really think of anything else. Preorder bonuses maybe?

I do not believe HoT is free for PoF orders, at least not for the standard edition.

Rev elite looks miserable, they didn’t even know what to say about it on the intro video. “And the Revenant… Shoots arrows. Into portals. Yeeeah. Moving on!”

Warrior’s Spellbreaker looks like fun though!

Donari.5237:

The better reason not to buy from the site you listed (and likely you should edit it out, since you just gave them free advertising) is the probability that their keys are cheap because they are bought with stolen money/credit cards and accounts using said keys will rapidly be permabanned once the original purchase falls through.

What utter nonsense. I know plenty of people who have purchased from that site and never been banned. Frankly, you have no idea what you are talking about. That site buys cheap keys from distributors that need to meet a quota for units sold.

As for preorder bonuses, no you shouldn’t expect to get them. That’s fair enough; if you want those you will need to buy from Arena Net.

Looking forward to comboing blocks into counter attacks with the new malicious reprisal. Good changes all around. I expect the other classes got some hefty buffs too!

I feel like the OP would rather enjoy playing a Thief, also, I think they may have forgotten that there’s a “2” in the game’s name.

The trick is to cancel it in most cases I think. It’s far from a useless skill. The shield toss could be a little faster though.

With that said, I’ve rarely encountered groups that perform gear checks in my travels through the Fractals. Im at level 75 now, and what people desire most of all is for group members to understand social flipping awkwardness and break bars… You’d think that wouldn’t be a problem at this point…

Riiight. Because contributing efficiently to the team is such an investment of skill and resources :P If anything, being non-meta would require a player to play harder, since by definition, their build is sub-optimal in terms of performance. They have to make up for that with skill, or get kicked out. My impression from the OP is that they wanted to at least be given the chance to try, which seems fair enough.

To be honest, I vastly prefer that to groups that quit after the first couple of failures. Like I said, I understand why many players are in it to get whatever it is, done as efficiently as possible. But that’s not how I roll. I rarely, if ever quit a group because someone’s playstyle doesn’t reflect the current metagame, or because they are a bad player. Afterall, everyone was new once. In fact, most of the time when someone makes a mistake repeatedly it’s because they haven’t done that content before, but are too afraid to admit it. You’d be surprised at how quickly groups acclimate to the Social Akwardness debuff once you tell them what it actually does, for example.

Constantly, sure. But few people screw up constantly. At the end of that fight, although it took ages, a couple of people had a much better grasp on how to beat that fractal.

Mounts will be fine! They’ll give a 25% movement speed boost that does not stack with other movement boost effects. This way everyone will be pleased – the map size won’t be an issue, trivialising content won’t be an issue, and those with tiny reproductive organs can feel empowered upon their gigantic contraptions.

Khisanth.2948:

nosleepdemon.1368:

I was part of a swamp fractal group that took about an hour to kill Bloom Hunger the other week. We eventually took him down and it was quite the celebratory moment. I tend to enjoy overcoming ridiculous odds for the joy of it over loot, but I do understand the perspective of those who just want to get it done.

That seems to be missing an important point. Challenges presented by the game(developers) aren’t treated the same was as challenges as a result of lackluster teammates.

Have you killed Bloom Hunger? It’s not exactly taxing…

This is a human nature thing, which is a bit difficult to control as a game developer. It applies to both meta builds and loot systems.

As long as there is a goal or reward for an activity, there will be participants for whom the end is more important than the means.

I was part of a swamp fractal group that took about an hour to kill Bloom Hunger the other week. We eventually took him down and it was quite the celebratory moment. I tend to enjoy overcoming ridiculous odds for the joy of it over loot, but I do understand the perspective of those who just want to get it done.

My advice OP would be to start your own groups (where possible) and specifically advertise that non-meta builds are welcome. You’ll find players who want to have fun over anything else, and let’s face it: playing with those kinds of players tends to be worth the wait.

You should be able to whisper friends imo, but not anybody else. It should also be possible to respond to any whisper sent to you, since your offline buddy might want to chat with you without appearing online.

Psientist.6437:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Ubi.4136:

I would love for them to add a check when selling things on the Trading Post that allows the seller to say “Not for Resale”…so once bought it could not be relisted on the Trading Post.

And, I really would love to see the difference it would make removing the artificial inflation of people just buying and reselling at a higher cost.

I imagine there would be a decent drop in price for a lot of items since the flippers/TP Botters (artificial inflation) would not be able to control the market.

That would be interesting wouldn’t it? I think reselling is partly kept in check by the listing fee, so there needs to be some variance in price before that becomes profitable, but flippers will always have a lot of power with a centralized system like the TP. With a decentralized system, the exact value of goods would be slightly harder to determine, since players would additionally be weighing up the local price of the competition. It would also factor in the relative danger of transporting the good to that location. I expect it would work a lot better in a more dangerous and expansive environment.

I was tempted to give a well thought out response to your previous post but this post makes question your sincerity. Localized markets where it is more difficult to calculate the market value of an item offer more room for flipping, more advantages for experienced and established players.

I think this thread has run its course or at least my interest in it. The last thing I would add to it is this; a game’s economy, the tools it uses to maintain a marketplace, should resonate with the design intent. A game’s economy shouldn’t be judged by how well it mimics the real world unless mimicry of the real world is the design intent.

I once knew a guy on WoW who had gold capped several accounts. I didn’t believe him, so he showed me. He attempted to send one copper to a character and received an internal server error. He had single handidly destroyed the gem market on his server. The gem prices on his server were TEN TIMES the average rate on other servers. His tactic was to buyout all gems at a lower price than his own.

The question is: Is this single server an example of a local market dominated by one player (I suppose you would argue yes), or is it an end state for any singular, global market (I would argue yes)? My argument, which is the equivalent of anti-globalization, is that a series of local markets would be more resilient to the take over attempt of one or several allied players.

Ubi.4136:

I would love for them to add a check when selling things on the Trading Post that allows the seller to say “Not for Resale”…so once bought it could not be relisted on the Trading Post.

And, I really would love to see the difference it would make removing the artificial inflation of people just buying and reselling at a higher cost.

I imagine there would be a decent drop in price for a lot of items since the flippers/TP Botters (artificial inflation) would not be able to control the market.

That would be interesting wouldn’t it? I think reselling is partly kept in check by the listing fee, so there needs to be some variance in price before that becomes profitable, but flippers will always have a lot of power with a centralized system like the TP. With a decentralized system, the exact value of goods would be slightly harder to determine, since players would additionally be weighing up the local price of the competition. It would also factor in the relative danger of transporting the good to that location. I expect it would work a lot better in a more dangerous and expansive environment.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I’m unable to support the OP’s suggestion, which depends in large part upon a misunderstanding of this game’s economy.

nosleepdemon.1368:

Just lile with any Auction House implementation, it destroys a crucial part of the concept of supply and demand, in that global supply becomes the only kind of supply. In reality, this is obviously not the case,

I keep parsing this sentence trying to understand how someone would think that a healthy economy would distinguish between local & global supply. One of the worst things about economies in other MMOs is that the supply & demand on each world differs — this allows fewer people to control more markets.

In contrast, in GW2, we all share the same TP. This gives me a larger selection of potential customers for my unneeded loot and a larger selection of potential sellers for the things I want to buy. This is good for nearly everyone in the game, except people attempting to manipulate prices.

Ah sorry, I miss-wrote that. I’ve fixed it now.

Linken.6345:

Psientist.6437:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Regarding open markets, I’d argue that in an MMO there is a definite value to obtaining a good location for selling particular goods. For example, a merchant selling health or mana potions in a dangerous zone could reasonably increase their item price “above market value”, because there is value in not having to return to a town to purchase those items. This is something that the TP really mutes. I’d also say that access to a global market would create a high bar for entry, which is something that I think is also seen on the TP, where players with lots of supply have a global effect on the market. This is super convenient to manage, and may be necessary from the point of view of ANet and managing the game’s economy, but it’s also a bit gross.

Yes, the TP reduces the chance for profiteering or charging a premium based on location. The horror.

A global market reduces the threshold for entry and increases the threshold for market manipulation.

Game development is a group effort. If you are a developer and are fortunate enough to be lead on a game’s design, keep that in mind and hire an economist to help.

I thought gw2 have a economist and most players dont seem to like the changes he do at all so not sure hiring one would help tbh.

There’s a difference between what the vocal minority say, and what the majority of players actually do. I’d wager most people don’t post on these forums, so as a developer one would need to be careful about what opinions one takes to heart from anybody posting here. I imagine that most of the decisions made regarding the economy are based on statistics and not forum opinion.

Regarding economics, how does one argue that a global market reduces the cost of entry when the little guy is put in direct competition with established players?

Ascended armour is rather expensive to make, which is why Marauder’s suits me well, as like you my Warrior is also power based.

Regarding open markets, I’d argue that in an MMO there is a definite value to obtaining a good location for selling particular goods. For example, a merchant selling health or mana potions in a dangerous zone could reasonably increase their item price “above market value”, because there is value in not having to return to a town to purchase those items. This is something that the TP really mutes. I’d also say that access to a global market would create a high bar for entry, which is something that I think is also seen on the TP, where players with lots of supply have a global effect on the market. This is super convenient to manage, and may be necessary from the point of view of ANet and managing the game’s economy, but it’s also a bit gross.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

nosleepdemon.1368:

Faaris.8013:

demitel.1340:

Collect at least 100 Dragon Chests and open them all in a row, you are almost guaranteed to get Tequatl’s Hoard.

Is the random generator working differently if you open 100 chests in a row compared to opening one each day for 100 days?

Even then, it’s possible that the hoard is already in the first chest and you slay Tequatl another 99 times on 99 days to open it.

No it doesn’t, it’s just a ritual that people who don’t understand the whims of RNG perform.

On the contrary, opening 100 at a time is more than a ritual. If you open a chest every day and you get nothing, you might experience frustration 100 days in a row. If you open all 100 together, then at worst, you’d experience that frustration once.

I save up my chests (of all sorts) because (a) it’s more efficient in managing inventory and (b) I almost always get something fun. The odds might be the same, but my enjoyment of the experience is vastly different.

Sounds like a ritual to me!

Ashantara.8731:

Swagger.1459:

Thanks for the suggestion, but no thanks! Anet set things up perfectly so we are all good!

Take care!

Some of you people seem to be completely immune to sarcasm.

I found the OP hysterical — thanks for the laugh, nosleepdemon!

As a developer myself, I can only hope that someone at ANet slapped their forehead hard enough to cause a mild concussion upon reading my suggestion.

In a completely new game though, the idea of a Merchant class is fascinating. I’ve always felt like ANet has a few too many keys to the mansion in GW2 as far as the economy is concerned.

You should also consider that a global TP removes the value of logistical operations, which is not realistic either, which I sort of eluded to in my OP but I suppose I didn’t spell it out. I dunno man, the more I read your reply the more I feel that a) you won’t respond and at the very least b) it’s you that needs the 101 :p

Psientist.6437:

Just another bad idea based on 101ism. There isn’t an economist of merit willing to defend the position that global supply would destroy the real world economy. You are advocating for the addition of market inefficiency and barriers to free trade.

While my OP was somewhat tongue in cheek, I feel like in all seriousness, I may have misunderstood you here.

Are you implying for example, that the struggles faced by North American steel companies in competition with Chinese suppliers isn’t causing all sorts of problems?