Guild Wars 2

NilSatis.6720:

Nvidia drivers work fine on desktops which is what most people will be gaming on and therefore will reply about “theirs working fine” which is absolutely true but not relevant to your problem.

My desktop has frequent driver crashes (Nvidia, win 10, 64bit client) in just gw2. The newest driver (361.43) is virtually unplayable for anything more than casual mapping, while a November driver (358.91) gets hiccups, but is otherwise functional. I’d go back further if I knew one was specifically better.

The problem may be more common with the mobile gpu’s, it doesn’t seem limited to them.

Per the topic title, I’m a little frustrated/disappointed with how ready match making (ranked, if it’s notably relevant) is to pair me against teams when I solo queue. I understand that teams don’t instantly win, and that the current system is set up so that they don’t have to wait terrible lengths before being paired up, which is understandably desirable. I haven’t kept records, and I obviously can’t always know the teaming situation (a four man premade? or two sets of two buddies? post start party with someone else for easy chat separation?), but I believe about 75% of my recent matches (last week or so) have involved parties on the enemy team. A little annoying, but, again, they need matches too.

If that’s just anecdotal nonsense to you, that’s fine. What I can say, with absolute certainty, is that I recently clicked the “Compete” button and instantly (less than a second) received the match popup. I figured there must be a lot of people online (Friday evening and all that), chose my map, and loaded in… to a guild pre-made. So good for them for getting a game and all that, but I would rather wait a minute or two than get paired against a guild group. In my team’s defense, I was impressed with how long we kept the points close, but it was an uphill battle we didn’t win.

tl;dr: I would like it to not feel like match making considers me to be a one person team.

mtpelion.4562:

The majority of the cost of crafting for precursor attempts comes from the T5 (or T6, if crafting exotics) fine materials, not the basic crafting items (logs and ore).

If you made Mithril and Elder wood free you’d only be saving about 5s per rare (so 80s per forge attempt assuming 16 rares for one exotic).

Certainly, but 6s or so off is about 10% of the crafting cost, which I feel is enough that they wouldn’t worry about the prices going too low, but still affects the expected final cost of forging a precursor.

I’ll drop it, it was mostly something I considered when trying to figure out why trees.

Putting Foxfire Essences in elder wood trees has obviously added a large amount of elder wood to the market, but also, likely from proximity, led to more mithril. This has already had a noticeable effect in making level 80 rares cheaper to craft.

John Smith.4610:

1. All I will say about this is that any discussion about precursors, that I’m involved in, involves a discussion about the materials and markets involved.

Was putting Foxfire Clusters in t5 trees a deliberate attempt/experiment to lower the price of precursors without actually changing their method of acquisition?

I feel like everyone’s core complaint is that they haven’t received a precursor. Precursors are, to the best of my knowledge, the rarest open world drop (I’m under the impression that the Fractal Tonic is the rarest drop, but that may just be because it’s drop rate is time gated or something). This more or less translates to “I’m really disappointed that I haven’t found one of the rarest, most valuable and desirable drops in the game.” If it was an item that was required to compete, or even gave a slight advantage, then there would absolutely be a problem. Perhaps the population has changed enough that the drop rate should be slightly adjusted to reflect this, and I certainly have ideas how they could improve (in my opinion) the drop system (as a whole, not for precursors) while keeping RNG the core. But that too few players are receiving a prestigious cosmetic item that is used to make an even rarer prestigious cosmetic item (assuming they don’t just sell them), doesn’t sound like a good enough reason for their drop rate to be buffed.

I’ve noticed the phasing out of water combat as well. Hopefully they will figure out what they want to do with it, so they will be more comfortable adding a little in the future, though I don’t expect this to happen very soon.

I thought to check the map, and there is a little water North of Dry top, and quite a bit in the area South of Dry Top and North of Rata Sum, so hopefully there will be water areas introduced in this Living Story season, though there doesn’t seem to be anything notable in the Magus Falls area, which looks a bit more fleshed out than the rest of Maguuma.

Perhaps the worst part, if they continue to avoid water, is that so many area’s I’m really interested in have a lot of water. That massive lake in Northern Maguuma, the Tributary at Janthir Bay, and the area North of Janthir Bay (is that a volcano? I think what little we can see most cloesly resembles the Ring of Fire) are all of particular interest to me. And while we probably won’t see all of those, it would be a shame for none of them to be available on the fact that Anet decides to avoid water combat because some players don’t like it.

Some have already done speculation of this nature, but you got the gods off a little. For one, the reason that people ‘forget’ Dhuum is because Grenth outright usurped him, so he is no longer the god of death. (Menzies also exists, but, like Dhuum, is in some kind of godless/semi-divine state.) As for Dwayna ‘representing Tyria’, that feels a bit to me like trying to make everything fit as a divine. I think a better interpretation would be something like ‘each of the six gods is an intrinsical aspect/force of Tyria, and thus have a pseudo-symbiotic nature where either neither can exist without the other, or there they create a balance amongst themselves.’

Also, I would move Grenth to Zhaitan (since Grenth is the god of death), and Dwayna to Jormag. I’ll admit that Dwayna/Jormag isn’t the strongest of the pairing, at least in my eyes, but all the others fit pretty well, and Jormag may be a ‘Northern Wind’ type thing that pops up in multiple mythologies.

Edit: Internet went out for a bit there, appears others beat me to the punch while I waited.

What do you feel would be a fair price?

And on the topic of it being an exotic, I would like to point out that the most expensive exotic is not a precursor.
(And if we are calling a precursor a crafting material, I believe it’s also not the most expensive crafting material).

Booey Bubblehead.4890:

There is always so much chat in game about people wanting Cantha brought back to the game and I honestly have to say I don’t understand why.

In my opinion, in Guild Wars, the Canthan humans you could create were the least physically attractive in terms of their features which seemed to be over exaggerated. Of course this is personal taste as with everything in the game world.

Additionally, I did not care for the map areas of Cantha, especially the more urban type areas where one could get lost for hours and never make any progress except for going in circles and becoming really aggravated while doing so. I not so affectionately referred to these areas as the rooftops and it seemed I was forever lost in the rooftops not making any progress.

Guess I don’t personally see the attachment players have to Cantha.

I really only liked Cantha towards the beginning, when it was released, and the end, with Winds of Change. I certainly wouldn’t be opposed to it being released, but I would much prefer to see new areas of our current continent or Elona. Additionally, I feel it would be a bit odd for them to release Cantha anytime soon. I assume we will take care of Mordy soon, but that leaves the Norn with Jormag and the Charr with Kralk as somewhat immediate problems (and I suppose the Asura with Primordius, but I don’t really feel like they care about him right now).

They’ve talked about adding things like this, and if/when they do I doubt it will be a gemstore item. I think the most recent discussion is in the pvp forum, where this idea would be most useful.

I assume that they’ve checked the code for drops pretty closely, so anything that wasn’t very small would have been caught, and I would imagine it would be fairly simple for them to test that drops are working correctly.

If it’s your first character, don’t rush to 80. A lot of players have rushed to 80 expecting that to be needed for most content, only to realize that level 80s do the same stuff they could have been doing, plus they aren’t proficient with their character. As for leveling without rushing, events are very good, so I suggest working on world exploration and doing any event you come across. This gives solid, scaled exp, and puts you in a variety of positions to learn the mechanics.

Mystic.5934:

I think you can get exp from crafting deldrimor ingots, spiritwood planks, bloodstone bricks, etkittenil level 475? 480? something like that. It’s incredibly slow – would take around a month to get through it, but it is cheaper than exotics.
the other possibility is crafting potent superior sharpening stones. I forget the cutoff where they stop giving exp, but those are pretty profitable to craft (if you already have the recipe. if not, it’s kinda expensive and wouldn’t save you money for getting to 500)
I think from 450 to 500 requires discovering around 20 exotics (15 if you use crafting booster). So you can expect like 2 less than that.
http://www.gw2crafts.net/weaponcraft_400.html

I recently took my weaponsmithing from 425 to 500, and only used around 25 exotics, with almost no refining from 450-475, so I suspect 15 exotics should be about enough.

HHR LostProphet.4801:

Etienne.3049:

I can’t see this being a good idea. Adding costs to buy orders would mean they need to be even lower for people to make a profit which should increase the difference between buy and sell prices which seems undesireable to me.

His suggestion should limit the profit you could do out of the traiding post. And it does, because it basically means that you have to farm karma first to place buy orders. So the amount of money you could make is not only capped by the amount of gold you’re able to use but also by the amount of karma you have. This is a good idea in my mind, since any other activity in the game is capped by time instead of karma. Even karma farming is capped by time. So this change would basically mean that traiding post flipping would also be capped by time, as is any other activity in the game, that gives reward. Thus traiding post flipping would be brought in line with any other activity.

I strongly doubt it would be brought in line with other activities. In fact, while many flippers would be pushed out, flippers that do other content or have karma stockpiles would have greater margins and less competition.

Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal comes to mind. However, it would be interesting if this happened, as many of the more casual flippers would be pushed out, leaving the more serious market players (well, less casual). My biggest concern one of my biggest concerns is that without flippers there would be a larger price discrepancy between items, with these margins leading to
1) players with karma that have never played with the market being more tempted to, since it would be easier and
2) current flippers with massive stockpiles of karma using this to make a significant burst in their profits. They would, of course, run out eventually, but this assumes they don’t play much beyond flipping, while the karma piles suggest that they at least used to play a lot.

I was considering grabbing it to mix and match (specifically: depending on how it was partitioned, I wanted the chest piece), but if that’s not an option then I have no use for it. How it looks on others is dye dependent, but they lack a level of uniqueness.

Is there any difficult jumping, other than the optional jumping puzzle? If I remember correctly, outside of story instances you press 2 while facing a wall, then 2 again when on the other side, you then aoe target two different locations, and finally just make a couple larger than normal, but otherwise normal, no-precision required, jumps. The first story instance has no jumping, the second is a lite version what you did to get there, and the third has a hop and the final fight, which can be jumpy, but doesn’t have to be. Oh, and you need a couple of jumps to get to the third instance, the first of which I spam 1 while pressing forward, and the second of which is the same minus the spam.

While I could stand to see the circles be somewhat more subtle, I have difficulty distinguishing between the thin lines of my aoe circles and enemy aoe circles (and a lot of ground is brown or green, so sometimes the ground, but I’ll consider those player error). So toned down, perhaps, but I do like being able to see where aoe is.

What are players replacing it with? I see that it’s not as strong, thus less desirable, but is the difference enough that players are using something else?

Rather than adding them to the wallet, which would tell me I have 18300 dust (it’s around there), I would rather they make shards easier to get (karma buffs or an alternative method that’s easier than karma), or add additional ways for me to use it, so I feel like I have a legitimate resource.

The gold is inconsequential, but it also costs karma, and I missed the ‘karma is air’ phase. As of last night, I no longer need shards for crafting my first legendary, so I made sure to use what remaining shards/karma I had towards refining some ascended mats, but I’m sitting on around 90 stacks of ascended mats.

I’m under the impression that some attacks in PvE don’t show up in it either. There have been a few times when I have gone from almost full, taken a hit, and go down. It’s hard to imagine I nearly instantly received 10k damage worth of bleed.

pdavis.8031:

I wouldn’t mind seeing AR somewhere OTHER than fractals though. I can see and appreciate the issues have having it in a map, but maybe in a new dungeon path, or whole new dungeon, outside of fractals would be cool. Maybe something involving the mursaat and the white mantle (because thats where agony started) with LS Season 2.

Who knows? But I think having a use for that armor I so painstakinigly crafted outside of fractals would be nice.

This is about what I thought when I read your post (and partially something I had thought of before your post). I wouldn’t mind AR having a non-fractal use, but only if it’s in the way of a nice little bonus, that’s not really necessary. Perhaps the equivalent of a consumable buff against a very particular enemy….

Mystic.5934:

Also Good Stuff

Another good response! I appreciate that you defined some things, I wasn’t quite organized enough when I made the opening post to do so myself. Out of curiosity, how do you treat/view items you have listed, but have yet to sell (specifically items that take a while to move)?

Wanze.8410:

Good stuff.

Thanks for the reply! One thing I should have been clearer about, though, is I was mostly talking about items I stuck in my bank.

Do you aim to have a particular ratio of your net worth as investments? In addition to buying some items in the expectation they will eventually go up in value, I also have been collecting some items I’ve noticed are going up in value (with my own baseless speculation on possible situations for them to spike), have cyclical-value items I’m waiting to sell, and a handful of other random items I’m waiting to sell for one reason or another. I’ve realized that holding onto these is cutting into my available gold, as I am at about 75% of what I currently consider my minimum acceptable available gold.

So do you stockpile all the investments, regardless of what it does to your wallet? Do you aim to store a particular percentage of your wealth in items? Or perhaps any gold over a particular amount?

Yes, they changed it so that putting in 4 level 80 items has a chance of returning an item of a lower level (as low as 75?). We have no idea why they changed this, and it’s been a pretty much universally disliked change, but it was supposedly the first in a number of yet to be implemented changes that will improve the forge.

Yeah, the actual drop rates aren’t something they will likely release, but we have enough of a sample size to estimate some things, most notably Mystic Forge rates.

Amnariel.3659:

Yesterday I’ve done all the bosses from 15:00 until Karka queen and 1 Exotic and 5-6 yellows…Really?I was so close to delete Gw2 by anger…but there’s nothing better outside right now…I hope they not put hopes in that to keep the game alive…110% magic find and Banners at nearly every drop.

Worth pointing out that Magic Find only affects loot drops, not chests, bags, or anything else, so World Boss rewards aren’t affected.

Edit: For some reason I missed Mudbone’s response above me….

World bosses aren’t great gold, but they can give you something interesting to do for a couple hours with a guaranteed small return. Dungeons are probably your best bet, and if you are wanting more gold you could work on being able to do additional dungeon paths. Do not gamble with the forge until you can afford to lose money, and if you do touch that remember it’s not about getting lucky, it’s about the predictability of statistics and cost margins (where output is more valuable than the input).

My best advice for you, however, is not about gaining gold, but using it. Trying to get all the exotic armors, weapons, sigils, and runes for two characters at one time is a pretty big deal if you are just starting out. Break it into smaller goals. I would start with weapons, since they have a disproportionate effect on damage. Then I would probably move on to the armor, then sigils, and finally runes. Also, don’t be afraid to use a cheaper sigil or rune until you get the one(s) you want, especially if you come across it.

Randulf.7614:

I am only a fan of your third suggestion. In fact vanquishing with scaled up rewards would be a solution (as suggested elsehwre on the forums) for the countering of speed runs and encourage people to play the dungeons to their design.

Seconded. This game wasn’t set up for open world vanquishing, and I dislike the idea of creating instances just for parties. Dungeon vanquishing, however, or perhaps vanquishing something we don’t yet have, appeals to me.

I crafted celestial light armor. The time gate was brutal, not so much in that it limited how fast I could make it, but because if I couldn’t play or I didn’t get my 300 silk scraps in time I couldn’t make it up later. It took me about 2 months to make the set.

So far as I know, there is no timer. Each map will have them contested upon creation, and I assume the defend events are every X amount of time after being claimed, which means you could predict when an event would next trigger for a particular instance of a map, but couldn’t make any assumptions of the map in general or any reliable long term predictions.

I heard a couple players briefly say something that I interpreted as meaning that all the temples reset at the daily reset, but I have no idea if that’s true, and haven’t particularly felt like testing it.

I think something people often forget when they discuss RNG is the type of content players do. For instance, PvP players have relatively small sample size of loot, so a good drop is probably more unlikely than for a PvE player (though I believe they are affected by MF, so that changes things somewhat). Players who consider the world bosses to be a primary/major source of income (non-dungeon/fractal PvEers) have guaranteed rares + other drops, which may feel like a good chance at exotics or other good drops, but other than some consistency and a handful of champ bags from some of the events, doing that is fairly lackluster. WvW has the potential to give enough drops/bags that I would expect a player to get some nicer drops, but is very dependent on success, what you are doing, and a million other things.

catalystic.1074:

What would be nice is if Guild Wars actually worked. Every time I tried to log in, it would tell me that my password is incorrect, and support was no help. I think it’s a lost cause by now.

If your account is linked to gw2, use your gw2 password.

The basis for most of these probably comes down to low supply. A lot of players will automatically salvage/forge/merchant a lower level item like these, since they know level 80’s wont care and assume there is little to no demand in the lower levels. Additionally, if you have the ONLY copy of an item on the TP, you can set it anything you want. I’m sure some people, in that situation, try and see how much they can get, leading to starting values at 40g or whatever. And even if someone undercuts them, they could knock 20% off and still be over 30g. Finally you have players with disposable income leveling alts, who want the best gear at any given point. This is probably most notable at certain tiers (level 2 items for fresh characters, level 20 items for experience ticket characters, and whenever rares become available), but it can be felt throughout the levels (though I suspect ecto’s in rares+ at 68+ complicate things). This is probably doesn’t explain the ring, but it might explain the staff.

Firstly, that’s pretty much how RNG works, though it’s worth remembering that the extremes (multiple pre-cursors, zero-rares for a month, et cetera) are more likely to be brought up (bragging, complaining, atypical anecdotes treated as normal, et cetera) than all the people that are getting expected RNG results. Secondly, it’s worth considering that not all players have the same play experience, and that does affect drops, in some ways. Raw kills, magic find, and type of kill (champ, world boss, or regular mob) all affect the loot a player can expect to receive.

Talk to the historian in your server’s BL.

A lot of players want the bunny ears to return. As for tails, while they could add those, they would have to be either potions or toys, neither good options, and they would probably work very poorly with charr.

I’ve only done three or four key runs, but the occasion I chose orphanage went badly enough that I’ve decided to stick to the hospital for the foreseeable future. Using staff ele, if it makes a difference.

Lukyromero.6780:

Now that I’m left with 1 gift of mastery in my bank, and I need about another 300 plus obsidian shards, I’m in need of about another 600k karma. That’s going to take months at this rate! I’m considering leaving the game again because of this.

If you already have the Gift of Mastery, I’m not seeing where you got the number 300+. The only other thing obsidian is used for in legendaries are the mystic clovers, and 250 should be enough (expected amount is around 233). Just remember to do the one-at-a-time recipe to stay close to that expected quantity.

Thus far in my experience, effective TP flipping basically not only requires a million interweb tabs, but spreadsheets and/or other cost assessment methods. If you want to learn how to flip, a google search should show you one of a dozen websites that gives information on it, but the basic idea is to find an item that can be bought for around 80% or less of the value it can be sold.

Harny.6012:

serapheles.5409:

Yes, Legendaries have Ascended stats.

Ascended were added later, therefore Ascended have stats of Legendaries

But before Ascended items, Legendaries had exotic stats. They didn’t get the stats of ascended items until ascended items were out, so legendaries have the stats of ascended :p.

Yes, Legendaries have Ascended stats.

I actually really like the new Phoenix Staff Skin, but most staff skins are bleh. I understand that a staff is basically a long stick or pole, but compared to many other weapons in this game, the typical staff skin of a long stick with a small trinket glued to one end is fairly lackluster.

Does anyone think the Basic Ore Node Pack would have any effect? I doubt many people (relatively speaking) have it, but those players, especially if they have additional incentive to enter their home instance for watchwork sprockets, could have a supply that could limit how high silver and gold rise. Though, the more I type this, the less likely I feel this is….

Unrelated, but topics like this are very interesting to me, and I wish I saw more debates on expectations of the economy like this, though I feel that the official forum isn’t ideal because of the potential for players to read others say “I think X might go up”, then blindly buy X.

Last I saw, they were looking for interns. Not quite what you are suggesting, it’s somewhat relevant.

Eight Samurai.6840:

No I’m sorry accusing him of buying from gold sellers and having bad password were all wrong (he used upper, lower case, and symbols for his password and dungeons spammers don’t need gold sellers). All I’m saying is it’s possible for anyone to get hacked, and if it is there is nothing you have to protect yourself as a last resort. Even if they make a pin reset they can have a couple days for the new one to work which by then you can change all your passwords.

Luckily he’s being a good sport about losing his things for the most part because he doesn’t want too many things atm…

The case of characters in a password is often very secondary to other qualities, such as uniqueness and length. And 12 characters is pretty short, I don’t choose passwords that short unless I am willing to give my account away. However, having additional authentication measures is definitely something Anet should add.

By armored pets, do you mean purely visual differences, or actually pets with higher armor?

Crafting in GW2 is primarily a way for players to be able to acquire gear, not a source of profit. So if you do start crafting, you could probably make sure you have solid gear for your level, but financially speaking it’s probably better to stay away.

Psichologas.1063:

Game is really fun, but what about expansions? I mean new profession, new race, new weapons, something like that. I’m afraid that there will be nothing like that until 2015 or even at all, could it be true?

All these things you mentioned could be given in the living story.