Guild Wars 2

Will fixing minions create a substantial increase in gem purchases from users?

There’s your answer.

<3 the longbow. Have to thank Anet for that one. Now I don’t need a legendary. Saves me a lot of gold.

Interesting. I thought the counter play on these was to interrupt them.

January 2018
DevPost[Loot removed, all items in gemstore]
[we want flying mounts!]]
[12,000hours and still no precursor]
[no new animations since launch..]

Ashen.2907:

Necrotic.7820:

Okay, first of all I would like it if people making these kinds of “requests” would stop using that term.

Of course it is “legal” for them to be AFK farming, because if it were in fact illegal for them to do so then that would mean that there is a real penalty consisting of a fine and/or imprisonment by their local or federal law enforcement agency. Are you implying that you think these people should be arrested and face a fine or jail time? Are you saying that they do in whatever government jurisdiction you reside in?

Seriously, please stop using it as a way to describe action within the environment of a video game that you feel is a violation of the acceptable way of playing said game.

Why are you asking people to stop using a word correctly?

Among the dictionary definitions of the word illegal are:

in violation of an official rule.
breaking the rules of a game.

---

Among the dictionary definitions of law is:

A binding custom or practice of a community.

---

So, breaking Anet’s rules (binding practice here, official, are the rules of a game) is illegal.

Being pedantic is one thing, being incorrect in one’s pedantry is something else entirely.

He’s just trying to drive the thread off topic.

As for the AFK farming issue, I would like it if Anet stepped in and made some changes, as it is getting out of hand, and, in the long run, having an effect on the economy.

Vayne.8563:

ZudetGambeous.9573:

I’m surprised rift didn’t make the list. I’ve never played it, but i’ve heard its a pretty good game and its going f2p soon.

Not suprised at all that WoW wasn’t on there. It is literally hemorrhaging subs. It’s lost over a million since the expansion came out, and that’s when it was already down a couple million. It may be the greatest MMO of all time, but it isn’t great as a 2013 MMO.

If you read the comments on the thread, someone asked about it and there was a response. Apparently the Storm Legion upgrade wasn’t all that well received and Rift is pretty much a dead zone right now. That’s why they’re going F2P.

Rift has been a favorite of mine for a long time. GW2 was a game to play while taking a break.
That being said, my impression of Rift from this past week of playing again, is quite different from the “dead zone” you described. The Guardian side areas I was in (Sanctum, Silverwood, Gloamwood, Scarwood reach, etc.) were all much the same as they were from back in the first few months of launch. Lots of people in Sanctum/Silverwood, fewer in Gloamwood, and fewer again in Scarwood. But there were people there.
I compare Scarwood Reach (Three Springs server) in Rift to Timberline Falls (Yak’s Bend) in GW2 and I see GW2 as the game that has fewer players. I’ve roamed for an hour or so in Timberline Falls and seen no-one. Yet in Scarwood, I’ve never really had a problem getting help removing invaders (especially near Kain’s command post).

Perhaps it is an issue of server population, but, again, I have to disagree that Rift is a dead zone (at least on the Guardian side. Perhaps the Defiant side is suffering?)

I had to laugh at your comment earlier about Perfect World. I’ve played a character up to 62 in that game, and it is my personal opinion that GW2 beats them out for cash shop herding. The most money I spent in that game was on materials for crafting items, and it’s not that those materials weren’t available due to stupid RNG and DR mechanics, it was just that I didn’t care to spend hours at a spawn spot trying to beat bots to materials. In GW2 your options are: Grind CoF Path 1 for gold to buy mats, or pay cash to buy mats. Otherwise you are stuck running all over the map to avoid DR only to get about 2 needed drops every half hour, and nodes don’t respawn for a long time.

Just my opinion based on my experience.

Zoltan.3015:

They keep their twitter page updated on these issues every few minutes

edit:

https://twitter.com/guildwars2

Really silly that we have to rely on external sources for this stuff. How hard would it be to put the updates in this thread?

KyreneZA.8617:

Smells of an attempt to hide the “dirty laundry,” but hey, it’s their forums. We only post here as (barely tolerated) guests and must abide by their (increasingly draconian) rules:

1. ArenaNet can do no wrong.
2. See rule #1.

Yep. This sums it up for me.

Overall I’m somewhat more towards “I like” on this one, but there were a few things that really detracted from it.

Combat would be the lowest marks from me. It was challenging enough (I ran the story solo), but the mechanics could use some help.
Example 1: The ooze fight. I’m fighting off some oozes when the generator goes down, suddenly a wall drops, and there are a dozen oozes suddenly attacking me, doing damage, imobilizing….and I can’t do anything to them because they are on the other side of the “wall” that has gone down. My pet can’t attack them because of this now invisible barrier, and I can’t cross this border because I’m constantly being immobilized.
Example 2: Fighting the big modrem thrasher…. for 15minutes. Get his health 10% down, only to watch it regenerate because my pet was too close, or I failed to dodge. The crucial part is that through all the living story stuff it has never, in my opinion, been solidly defined that: White AoE will only help/assist you. Would much prefer the circles had been green, or at least tinted green to indicate “good”.
Example 3: Final fight. The boss mob had wiped out about 75% of his minions before I figured out that was what was happening. I know I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to game mechanics, but a single line comment from one of the characters remarking that the boss was killing his own minions in order to get to you would have made a difference there.

Of course all of this is moot now as pretty much everyone that likes to go into these things blind has now finished them and the mechanics of the fights are common knowledge.

Visually, I enjoyed all of it. The new zone is beautiful, and I am ecstatic to see some truly big trees. New versions of the mobs we are used to have some variation which mixes it up nicely.

Story-wise, it was great until we caught up with Braham. I’ve never liked him in the first place and this only solidifies my opinion of him. What I fear most is where the writers are going with it, because right now it is heading towards some obscenely cliche endings.

Out of 10? I’d say 6 of 10 overall.

I think the biggest imbalance that needs to be fixed is the loot-drop vs. gold-value issue.

If Anet wants a specific gold value for a given item, that’s fine. I can see how that is needed for the economy.

Where things completely stop making sense and float off into the Twilight Zone is when you would wind up making 10 or 12 times the amount of gold required to buy the item if you chose instead to farm until you got it as a drop.

That is where the problem is. Drop rates need to compliment desired trading post prices.

I went to farm for my T6 mats to make my legendary. By the time I was something like 25% done (after several months) with gathering them (including what I got from making 77 mystic clovers), I had enough gold to buy the rest and still have 100g left over (this would be like getting 25% map completion and then being able to just buy a “map completion” scroll for the rest. Quite “legendary”)

Optimally, the game would reward you for your effort in a manner that made spending gold only slightly more attractive. Currently the way things drop, gold is roughly the only option. In the long run, that is what armor, weapons, and everything else in GW2 boils down to: gold. The end game is gold, nothing more.

Fluffball.8307:

The internet is pretty much the worst thing to happen to humans, atrocities and disasters aside. I feel bad for anyone born after about 1985. Never got to experience nice people.

Truth right there. Absolute truth.

As for wanna-be “hardcore” players mocking commanders who don’t do things EXACTLY as their all knowing self would do.. report and block. The only thing they are good for is converting oxygen to CO2 for the plants to use. They are not worth your time or attention.

This lunacy with jumping/falling is pathetic. I just slid down the entrance to the Weyandt’s Revenge puzzle, went off the edge, landed in the water (alive), then fell off again, and hit a rock on the way down and died.
Is this some sort of sick joke Anet?

mtpelion.4562:

Neural.1824:

The drop rate is stupid. If the OP harvested over 500 corals, they should have gotten the required amount. The very idea that a player needs to have multiple characters parked or ready to harvest a single item is pathetic. I am not one of them, but there are people in game who like to play on just one character. Forcing them to create alts is just more typical Anet “content extension” and gem store sales psychology.

No one forced them to use alts. They OPTED to use alts in order to speed up a process that is INTENDED to be long.

You have the option to pay for convenience. No one is forcing you to do it.

Keep making excuses for them. You have no proof that this specific item was intended to be some convoluted stupidly long process. Stop making things up.

Anet can’t change the method of achievement for Gift of Battle. How else would they get people to want to play WvW?

Zelanard.5806:

Or, they could just remove the cap on how much the eater can consume… That’d give us all the sink we’d ever need…

This, a thousand times this.

The cap is stupid, and needs to be removed. Doing so will not cause some catastrophic failure of the economy, it will simply take the bump, and then move on.

The targeting system in this game is a complete mess. “target closest” works with about the same frequency as precursors drop.

Anet seems more concerned with messing with target priority than fixing the issues. Ever notice that in Silverwastes when fighting a group of mobs, hitting tab generally auto-targets the nearest non-Modrem? That, in my opinion, is malicious code, not error.

SoLsTicE oG.3097:

Thanks for all the answers guys i think i will be going for a more PvE.

If you are going to be doing primarily PvE, there are a few options. Some are solo, others need a group (dungeons, fractals).
As was previously mentioned, “world completion” is a lengthy task that has some benefits such as allowing you to get to any waypoint in the game at a moments notice (this is good for when you want to get to a zone boss fight, or catch up with guildmates, etc.). You also get some decent loot along the way as you finish zones.

As you go along you might want to look a bit more into how different stat combinations affect your gameplay. Learn why “zerker” is the “meta” and so on. A set of exotic armor and weapons is enough to get around without a problem, but eventually you’ll want to customize.

If you aren’t averse to it, you can start crafting as well. Work your way towards 500 in a crafting profession that benefits your character(s). The long term goal for crafting would be either a legendary, or crafting ascended items.

Other things you can do in PvE that take time and effort:
-Build Mawdrey
-complete all jumping puzzles
-find all the diving locations
-pick a champion and learn to solo it (note: with many this may be difficult as the mega-server tech looks to put lots of people into the same zone)
-Hop on the world boss train for a night and pick up some loot

There are a number of lore related things as well, but that’s not an area I go into, so I won’t comment there.

Rym.1469:

Don’t you worry!

If they bring back the original Queen’s Jubilee champtrain, everyone will move put from EotM.

Even a shade of last year’s Queen’s Arena train will be the most profitable source of income with endlessly respawning champs next to each other

I seriously doubt that they will bring back the Pavilion without making massive nerfs to the loot.

Saavedra.8912:

Buying each item separately was way too confusing. Thank you Arenanet for streamlining my Gemstore Experience !

^^^^^^
Only post in the entire thread that Anet will see.

aspirine.6852:

In the interview Colin gave to I think it was Eurogamer there was an interesting section. It went something like 350 people working at Anet and they cannot be all working on the LS, so an expansion is in the making there is no doubt there.

The rest are the monetization dept.

Minx.7521:

Please go and screenshot their promises of a new set of legendaries for HoT release. 90% chance Anet will try to remove those comments and pretend they never happened/were never promised.

Wouldn’t surprise me at all. They have no ethics at all. All that matters is gem sales.

This is a concept that needs to be floated about 3 years ago, when the game was still being developed.

You don’t just open a file and change a number from 80 to 20 and magically everything falls into place when you recompile the game.

What you want would require a massive amount of time and effort in both development and implementation, none of which would do anything but satisfy you and a few other customers.

The ROI would be the polar opposite of “income generation”.

Seera.5916:

Pandaman.4758:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Pandaman.4758:

Why are so many people assuming suspended accounts won’t get rolled back to the last backup made before Wintersday started? ANet removes gold from accounts that were purchased from gold sellers in addition to the suspension, it’s not going to be any different in this case.

Because he said this

Does this mean that if someone botted they get to keep everything?
Absolutely not, in most cases we are attempting to remove what we can before the player returns. However, there are just going to be some things we can’t remove.

If they rolled the account back they wouldn’t have to attempt to remove what they can and there wouldn’t be some things they can’t remove.

When he says that, I’m assuming he means they can’t remove the gifts/drinks and gold that have already been put into circulation rather than what the accounts still have in their inventory.

Might be hard for them to remove achievement points, skins, and other account related stuff without a rollback.

Personally I don’t give a kitten about their AP and such, I want confirmation that their inventory items gained through the hack were removed. If they are so kittening concerned about the economy in this game, the least they could do is act like it. Botting floods the market with ill gotten goods. Banning these accounts temporarily simply delays the botters ability to sell their goods for gold which will probably just be sold for cash anyway.
As for their yet-to-be-sourced “data” on how temp banning is good… Now that the info is openly known, botters will simply adjust, and your precious “data” about banning is now useless.

They spent dev time fixing that? good grief.

Arenanets clinical obsession with every last kitten copper.

This idea is pretty basic. On the mini-map, ore nodes have icons. When you mouse over them, it will tell you if it is a standard node or a rich node (this means that the markers have that data already associated with them).

Could the icon for rich nodes be different from normal nodes? Maybe outline it in cyan or something?

I’ve been into crafting for a long time, and in my time here in GW2 (since Oct 2012), I’ve gone through all the crafting professions up to 400 (working on 500 now), along with crafting a number of items in the Mystic Forge.

While crafting can be fun to create items for yourself, my advice is to only craft items for yourself. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can craft things in GW2 and make money at it. The reason behind this isn’t that there isn’t a big enough profit margin, nor is it about material prices, it’s the issue of undercutting. No, I don’t mean “undercutting” as in some guy comes in and sells his stuff for a copper less. I’m talking about people who have more money than brains going through on high value items and deliberately sell at a loss over the cost of the materials. You’ll find it’s not just one time events on this. These are people who systematically will place 5 to 10 items on the trading post below cost, and then lose even more money to make sure that their items are always 1 copper lower than anyone else. It’s tempting to out-copper them, but you’ll lose even more money in the abysmal listing fees and taxes. I currently have an item worth around 20gold in materials value, and have watched the price on the trading post for that item go from 21 down to 10, with multiple steps in between, always with the same person out-coppering everyone else. In the long run, I’m completely screwed on my investment in making the item because I bought some of the components for it.
Again, craft items for yourself or friends, but do not get settled on the idea of crafting for profit in this game. It simply is not possible on a casual basis, and there are plenty of people with thousands of gold to waste looking to prove it.

Blockhead Magee.3092:

Take it for what its worth. My wife and I spent yesterday in Silverwastes. I had a day off and it was crappy outside (decided to skip skiing for the day) and we decided why not grind out the items we need for the two new luminescent armor pieces. Literally stacks of keys used, dozens of breaches and between us, we got one – that’s right ONE – usable piece for those collections. We only stayed at it to see how long it would take for something to actually be worth a snot.

Also, between us we have several thousands of hours of play time. Neither of us has gotten a precursor drop or one from the forge.

RNG is a wall that prevents anyone from working towards a goal. We’re at the merci of other people’s luck and market demands (price) to get anything worth working for.

My wife and I have spent several. weekend days in Silverwastes with results that are equally as frustrating. She wants the carapace armor items. In all the hours we’ve spent playing, I’ve had 6 Carapace boot boxes drop, and one other carapace piece (can’t recall if it was shoulder or glove) drop. For her? It’s grind grind grind until you have enough stupid crests to go along with 1 gold to buy them.
This has brought up the severity of what happens when RNG gets tangled with account bound. I’ve got boxes piling up that I don’t care for, but she hasn’t had any drop at all, but because they are account bound, my only opinion is to destroy them.

The new Lion’s Arch is absolutely stunning. A beautiful work of art and virtual architecture. The way the ocean theme runs throughout the main buildings was coordinated really well, and it’s hard not to think of the sea when you are there.

However, just like a beautiful sculpture, it’s value sort of stops once you step outside the realm of appreciating it as a piece of art.

Divinity’s Reach, Rata Sum, and other locations put all the functionality in a much better configuration.

In the long run, LA is a beauitful work of art, but it’s just that. Art. I highly doubt it will see the same level of use it once had. I remember LA being a busy place even before Mega Servers came about to make everything look busy.
I don’t mind running between the bank, crafting, and TP areas, but it would seem a number of people do.
Every time I’m in LA, it’s not more than a few minutes near the forge before someone pops a TP guy nearby.
But then, perhaps, that is the end goal for Arenanet, as it usually is. Give the players incentive to spend money for convenience.

I have a complaint in general about the standard human female underwear (don’t know if this has been pointed out, but it’s worth repeating as it is).
When swimming, there is a very obvious problem that appears with certain dress/skirt types of armor. In short, it looks like my characters underwear is split. On one character with a dark purple color to her skirt, it shows up as a bright red line up the middle, however on my main character, it actually shows up as skin color.
My guess is that someone dropped the vertices on the UV seam right on the edge of the UV region, and anti-aliasing and such takes care of the rest when applying a texture to the UV. It really should be fixed because it simply looks sloppy if not inappropriate.

No, I’m not loading a screen shot pervs :P

xArches.6298:

I’m sure the developers are working as hard as they possibly can to fix it. Fixing bugs isn’t always the easiest task.

They could get a head start if they’d stop mucking with things that aren’t broken in the first place.

3500+ Exotic Essence and counting.

An Essence Gobbler would be nice, but I think there are some other things that could be implemented that could also work well.

Or if that’s too much work right now, add a recipe to let us craft exotic into Legendary. Requires 5 exotic, and results in 2 Legendary (this overcomes the issue of an exotic being 200 luck, and a legendary being 500).

Nighttime does need to be darker, even if things have a “full moon” illumination. I don’t even notice day/night in this game.

I support the OP’s request, but with a modification:

Any chance we can get more emotes FOR FREE?

Since they should have been in the game from the start.

I’d like to see Arenanet dedicate some of it’s devs to improving current legendaries as well as creating new ones, to the level of being able to present the playerbase with an improved model or a new model every single patch. Even if it’s a bug fix or a minor tweak, I’d challenge them to have something new for players in each new post of patch notes explaining what was done to improve one or more legendary weapons.
For a product that seems to be central to a game that is so focused on cosmetics, they are ignoring them completely. It’s as if they don’t have the knowledge on how to actually deal with them, and don’t care to pay the money to get the knowledge on what to do.

http://i.imgur.com/Pe7imz3.jpg

Dunno.. when comparing a photo found on google with the Frostgorge image, I don’t see any similarities at all cough

Vegeta.2563:

I really hope the map doesn’t die out because of this. I can already picture the event being less occupied once the patch releases. Maybe a few runs to test it out to see how it is after the change, but probably not much after that.

The majority will simply move to the next most profitable spot unless a new map is introduced. In which case the newest map will be busy for weeks, until people have the newest trinkets to show off, and will then go back to farming the next most profitable spot. This is what happens when you run your entire game on principle of scarcity.

Setting aside my own theories, why not add loot boxes to completed Dynamic Events?
Sure, they might need to reduce the respawn time of certain events (I’m looking at you Karst Plains), but adding box loot of various levels to the end event in a chain (including a small box for finishing non-chain events) would certainly encourage people to cover a lot more places. If done right it might also reduce the issue that some people see with champ trains.
To encourage diversity in the locations being farmed (because you know they will be), give the boxes something unique to drop, like a chance at a dungeon token for a nearby dungeon (i.e. if you are in Fireheart Rise, you might get a CoF token).
Or, gasp, add zone specific rewards or collectibles.

Basic no frills answer: Extra health and attacks for necromancers.

A little more info: Unlike your regular health, you have “life force” when in Death Shroud. It’s different in that it depletes while you are in death shroud. (think of going into death shroud like the necromancer takes on a spectral form).
You can lose life force faster if you are taking damage (note: you do not lose actual health HP when in death shroud, only life force). Some actions will regain life force (killing a foe for exmaple). You can regain life force while you are in death shroud, but also while you are not in death shroud.

As a necro, I used death shroud for it’s life syphon skills, and it’s auto attack. I also used is a last resort button when my actual health was getting really low.

The necromancer specialization “Reaper” has what is sometimes called Reaper Shroud. It is the same thing as death shroud, but has different skills.

Hope that explains it.

Back before all the “living story” stuff got kicked off, there were some phrases that I really enjoyed hearing my characters say.

Things like:
“All Shiny!”
and
“Sweet sweet loot!”

Now days I hear it all the time, because everything under the living-story sun is a yellow name item. Kite Fortunes, voting tokens, etc.

It’s bad enough that there were the plethora of crap seals or whatever they are called which are basically the trash loaded into the yellow loot table, but now the potential excitement of hearing those quotes is about zero.

It would be nice if Arenanet would bump the requirements up a notch. Let those phrases mean something again. Make them play for exotic loot or better, not the “rare” which is now commonplace.

The “punishment” for this has got to have these guys rolling on the floor laughing. It’s bad enough that Anet refers to some theory on psychology as a reason to not perma-ban people, but now when someone exploits/cheats on a specific game mode, they are allowed to go full steam ahead with the rest of the game and continue making gold, getting daily login rewards, etc.?

From a players perspective, not banning these people (permanently in some cases) is not benefiting the game at all. The EULA/TOS/UA/term-of-the-month needs to be enforced in game and not with kid gloves.

Most of these people are going to look at “dishonor” with pride, and take it as a trophy of how amazing they are. You’re literally rewarding their actions.

JustTrogdor.7892:

What they need to do is make a range around NPCs where it automatically dismounts, maybe something simple like 300 range. It doesn’t really make it harder to interact because you can always just use your interact key to access the NPC (some exceptions could be in areas like the Royal Terrace crafting areas where NPC and crafting benches are close together) but it certainly has the potential to be visually annoying if that is the goal of trolls.

This has been an issue for a long long time as well. There needs to be a zone around NPC’s that prevent use of mounts, boxes of fun, aviators boxes, and so on.

Considering that the earliest threads about this were well before Heart of Thorns, I suspect Anet will do nothing.

Gold coin is 24k, gold ore and the gold ingots are much lower quality (MUCH lower)

Note: this is choosing just one out of hundreds of reasons for both liking and hating this game.
Hate – Diminishing Returns
Like – Depositing collectables from anywhere

Really starting to get disgusted with how Anet seems to treat support as just another facade that makes them look important to potential customers.

I’ll bet that if someone has trouble buying gemstones, the response lightning fast with impeccable service though.

Legendary Crafter – for those who actually built one.

Ascended Leatherworker – reach 500 in Leatherworking
Ascended Armorosmith – reach 500 in Armorsmithing
…and so on for the various crafting professions (Dear Anet: I would like to have Ascended Jeweler too. HINT HINT)

No Mercy for the Weak – kill 100,000 ambient critters.

Pacifist – Complete all the hearts in an entire zone without killing any mobs for heart credit. Note: As I recall, someone did this with world completion at one point, and only had 5 or 6 things they actually had to battle, so it’s not impossible.

Legendary Spender – for those who paid gold for their legendary.

Edit: one more:
Favor of the Gods – received when you get a precursor drop

VidGhost.3215:

Dante.1508:

Not really if you like Gauntlet tickets and many green items then yes, outside of that no its still terrible RNG and mostly trash rewards.

Should have been guaranteed t6 and lodestones imo.

IT WAS!!! .. T6 and lodestones or cores.. BUT! they quickly passed through some updated to Nerf it back to T5+T6+junk and then nerf it again to Normal, Rare, Exotic bags lol

They were ALL exotic.. before the nerfs people were going CRAZY for them and T6 mats HALFED on the TP

Also there were on average 50 Champs ( mostly Champion centaurs ) in the arena .. now hardly any.

Somehow I am not surprised that this was the gimmick Anet would use for this patch. Make it seem amazing, then nerf the crap out of it. Make a change to loot, let the word get out “Anet brought loot back, come play again!”, then revert back to garbage.

Well folks, it’s been 6 months since “we are attempting to remove what we can before the player returns.”

Time to start watching the price on Eggnog, Spiced Apple Cider, and other Festive Imbiber related items.

Crimson Clouds.4853:

I agree, this game is a click-fest. Somebody made a post on reddit on how there’s 7-8 average clicks per bag (if you include salvaging, selling, depositing etc).

On the surface, GW2 is a popular MMO, but behind the scenes, GW2 is actually a pseudo-“open source” field test program for mouse manufacturers to test the performance of their products compared to their competitors. /conspiracy

6 years in, and the lyrics haven’t changed. lol.

player 1: “I want dueling”
player 2: “I don’t”
player 1: “why?”
player 2: -provides any one of a number of valid reasons ranging from personal experience to in game mechanics issues that would require a large amount of dev time and potentially be damaging to the game
player 1: resorts to behavior that is a perfect example of why most don’t want duels.