Guild Wars 2

Ratto.1572:

tell me when you collect 55k ores…

And I say that compensated

I collected 3 ores with a really cool lava effect… and I can do that for every ore node I see. I got what I paid for and am quite satisfied.

Vayne.8563:

Plenty of women love dark fantasy and science fiction and gaming. In fact, it’s gotten to a point at science fiction conventions where there are more women than men.

I think you’re so right about that… if you want to draw me to a game purely by graphics alone, you would make a Warhammer 40K Inquisition MMO. I loved Space Marine but I couldn’t play it because I kept stopping to watch my avatar stomp the heads off of orcs and ended up getting killed.

Actually I think women have it easier than guys in this regard. We can play Hello Kitty if we’re attracted to it, and we can play Space marine if we’re attracted to it and no-one will seriously question our sexuality. I feel for the guys that are attracted to things that have been labelled feminine. My man still insists that I make him watch Project Runway, even though he’s obviously straighter than a ruler.

Lol the kitten filter is Red Dwarf aware – that’s kittenging awesome!

So if a mob has 100 health, does it matter if you crit for 150 points of damage or for 200 points of damage? If I had to guess, I’d say the difference is to prevent one shotting mobs in lower level areas.

I’m not going to get too excited about theoretical numbers. I’ll wait to see evidence that it actually impacts player’s ability to do the content. And no I’m not going to cry if it means full zerker’s won’t let me steamroll everything in my path.

The real test would be to take a power based character and a crit based character and time them against a particular type of mob in a level 80 area, then time them against the same type of mob in a lower level area and see if there’s a discrepancy. And you should take a decent number of samples given the unpredictable nature of criticals.

There might be some merit to putting the really high end stuff like the legendaries into an auction type interface instead of the commodities interface. I know that D3 had a different interface for selling/buying gems because it made sense. Maybe the inverse would make sense in GW2 where there are a few items that aren’t treated like commodities.

On the other hand, auctions have their own problems especially in a cross server market as large as the one in GW2. If folks think it’s hard to get their buy order filled because of folks over-bidding by one copper the second they put one in, I shudder to think of the auction sniping angst we would see. The folks that have the time to sit and constantly monitor their bids will still have an advantage over the folks that don’t.

Guardian.5142:

Its the fact that the people in this game are allowed to avoid all playable content, sit in Div reach or Ebon and exploit the market at every turn, causing prices for everything to be inflated and moving the goalposts ever away from the casual gamers…

I think your perception of the effect that flippers have on a market is incorrect. They don’t inflate prices – the competition among the traders brings prices in line with what the item is really worth. High prices are actually good for the folks that generate the supply – players get more gold for the stuff they find when prices are high. The folks that really drive prices out of the reach of casuals are the hard core gold farmers. The more gold they generate, the less gold is worth, and the more gold it takes to represent the true value of something. The trader doesn’t make money unless someone buys what they’re selling. If no one had thousands of gold to spend on a legendary, they wouldn’t cost that much.

The problem is that while item X is worth say 10 hours of play for the hardcore farmers, that value in gold might represent 100 hours of play for someone more casual. That is going to happen in every game where there is a mix of hardcore and casual players. I think the real problem is that there aren’t many medium term goals (in terms of gear) for the casual players to work toward. Either it’s really easy to get something or it takes a prohibitive amount of time.

There is cultural armor of course, but that’s not to everyone’s taste. There’s the dungeon armor that you can get with tokens. There’s ascended accessories with Laurels. There’s karma armor, but the highest tier stuff is gated behind the temple events, and I was really disappointed that the skins were all the same.

Einlanzer.1627:

Nay, it’s an average so everyone always contributes. A party with 5 people running 50% MF has a party MF of 50%. A party of 5 with only 1 person running 50% has a party MF of 10% but better overall combat potency.

If you use an average, then won’t you run into the opposite problem of folks with no MF getting kicked because they’re bringing the group down?

Group sharing of MF from gear is a bad idea. Take the MF off the gear and make it a stacking buff you earn by killing challenging mobs. The faster you can take on challenging content, the quicker you reach the MF cap, and the more mobs you kill with max MF. Dying resets your personal buff stack back to zero. No need to sacrifice effectiveness or have multiple sets of gear. Good teams/players get rewarded, and you don’t need to farm gold/laurels/karma/whatever to buy a decent set of MF gear.

Chris Whiteside.6102:

Thanks for the suggestions and feedback i will make sure to do a summary and list actions on Monday.

I don’t want to derail the thread but i would also like to know how everyone would like the next topics to be chosen. Simply would you like to vote again or would you like us to pick the second topics on the respective lists?

I would like to see Anet choose the topics based on what y’all think would be the best use of everyone’s time to go into more detail on. Some feedback doesn’t need a lot of discussion, some topics can be settled in the nearer term, and some topics might need a lot of iteration to come up with a good solution. We don’t have visibility into the technical and business constraints so I think it would be best for y’all to prioritize the topics.

I realize that means a group of posters will be disgruntled when their issues aren’t addressed immediately even though they are popular, but is this a PR initiative or a development initiative?

JK Arrow.7102:

TP warriors will most likely always earn more than farmers. As a guildy once told me, I don’t farm mobs, I farm farmers. I’m not sure anyone here is saying this can be changed completely but the compromise is making general PvE rewards feel like it is a close comparison.

Well I think you’re assuming that farming mobs and making money on the TP requires the same amount of work and skill, which I don’t believe is true. Farmers can (and many do) increase their profits be being smart about what items they farm and when and for how much they sell them. The reason there’s a gap in earnings is not because TP investing is inherently better, it’s that the folks involved in it that do make a lot of money put effort into researching the best way to get the most value, whether they’re purely working in buy/sell orders or whether they’re selling the items they found by farming.

JK Arrow.7102:

The TP creates a dependence on other players to farm needed items for you rather than allowing a player to get them themselves. Anet loves to use stacks of 250 of something for recipes rather than more reasonable amounts. It would be good from an individual player’s perspective if it were a more difficult decision to either farm something or buy the items rather than the current state of having to buy them.

So, you want folks to feel more rewarded for farming, but you want to reduce the market for the items they’re farming? I understand that lots of folks would rather find items than earn gold, but I think what you’re missing is that buying things on the TP is basically trading the stuff you find that you don’t want to someone that wants it, and getting what you want from someone else who found it and didn’t want it.

Currency is a good thing because it frees you from having to find and make everything yourself. You’re looking for armored scales, but oops, an exotic weapon drops. Are you just going to toss it in the bin, or are you going to sell it and buy some armored scales? That one weapon drop could represent 10 armored scales dropping from one mob, but only if you turn it into gold.

JK Arrow.7102:

What if somehow achievement points were used to purchase high end rewards?

I actually think this is in the works, but I don’t remember where I saw that so take it with a grain of salt.

TheBlackLeech.9360:

Is there some overwhelming fear of constructive criticism about your build/runes/sigils/stat choices…. from your peers?

Are you afraid of the fact that there might be a more efficient way of doing something, and you are xenophobic to the point where you don’t want to change it to be better? …or maybe you just really like doing things inefficiently simply because it is more entertaining for you.

Constructive criticism only helps players.

It is only when players intentionally avoid the consensus on what is viable, do they begin to fear said criticism.

I don’t fear constructive criticism from my peers. However, the vast majority of the players in this game are A) not my peers, and B) not offering constructive criticism.

I choose not to be judged by random strangers who want to offer me unsolicited advice about a build they don’t understand. I put quite a bit of thought into my builds and my goal is almost never maximum DPS, which is what the the consensus has apparently decided is the only viable build.

The consensus not that long ago was that the world was flat. Just because there’s a consensus, doesn’t mean it’s correct in all situations. Unless you were trying to get from the far Western part of the world to the far Eastern part, assuming the world was flat was a fine approximation of the truth. If all you’re interested in is dungeon speed runs, maximum DPS may be the only viable build for that purpose, but it doesn’t make it the only viable build.

I respect the way you want to play, and you will never have to concern yourself with me and my unconventional builds trying to sneak onto your team. I don’t want to be on your team. You don’t want to be on mine. That’s perfectly fine.

However, gear inspection is not going to prevent the folks that want you to carry them to the end rewards from getting on your team. It actually makes it easier for them to get on the team. Get in a guild of like minded players where you can kick out the folks that are wasting your time regardless of the gear they’re wearing. There are lots and lots of players that want to play exactly the same way you do. How come y’all haven’t banded together yet?

D3 does have a magic find mechanic that works well, and it’s not a group-wide average. While you do get a flat bonus for being in a group and doing increased difficulty runs, there is also a buff you get for killing elite packs that gives a bonus to MF and XP.

I think that concept could fit into GW. You get up to a stack of 5 that lasts 30 minutes. There’s a cap on your maximum MF, so you feel less compelled to put it on your gear because that extra bonus is wasted once you’re at 5 of the buffs. Killing a champion, completing a group event, killing a boss in a dungeon, etc. adds 1 buff and resets the timer to 30 minutes.

I think with a little tweaking it could work in GW2. It’s a bit easier to “charge up” the buff in D3, so the ANet folks would have to figure some way around that. Maybe killing some of the mobs in dungeons on the way to the boss would give you a charge. I’m not sure about the implementation details, but it seems like the buff system would offer an incentive for folks to move through the content efficiently as a team if it was designed correctly.

I like the idea. I am often (embarrassingly) dead at the bottom of rocks-that-should-not-be-jumped-on-by-amateurs. I have no idea if there’s anyone in the area that might be detouring to rescue me and I usually just release because I tend to be in out of the way areas.

RebelYell.7132:

However, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss the OP just because he used the word “trinity”. There’s a legitimate issue here that needs addressing: professions have poorly defined roles on a team.

I like being able to choose a profession based on the class mechanic I find more interesting than having to choose based what role I’m going to play with that character. Yes, it is more difficult for folks that don’t want to dig into the details, but I really like being able to switch up my character’s role just by equipping different gear and changing up my skills and traits. It’s so much better than ending up on a PUG with a bad tank and not being able to progress. I can change my role to be more DPS or more support on the fly in the middle of a dungeon if I have to – you can’t do that in a game with strongly defined roles based on profession.

RebelYell.7132:

City of Heroes, a game I cannot go back to even if I wanted to, also did the “Damage/Support/Control” thing in a notable manner. Each “archetype” is designed for those in differing degrees. There were tanks and healers, but they were part of the grander scheme, and having done every type of content, from story arcs, to task forces, up through raiding, I never once encountered content that I needed a tank or healer to complete.

Any team of decent players could tackle any of the content in COH regardless of the team make-up, especially if they were co-ordinating over voice chat. I don’t think that COH is the best example of a game with strongly defined roles though. Certain classes were perceived to have strongly defined roles, but the roles were defined more by the power sets than the class. They were more defined than in GW2, but my best DPSer was a defender (perceived as a support archetype), and my blaster (perceived as a DPS archetype) was set up for support.

All that having roles strongly associated with a particular class accomplished was to encourage a bunch of terrible players to roll empathy defenders named healbot so they could get teams to carry them. It also made it really difficult for folks that thought outside the box to find teams.

Sovta.4719:

Zenyatoo.4059:

Complaining that you will be kicked by parties is honestly entitlement. You are demanding that parties take you because you perceive yourself to be just as strong/capable as people who have natural advantages over you due to their gear.

Finally someone who can think.
It’s not fair to inspect your gear, but it’s fair to make other 4 guys carry you.

The underlying problem with this argument is the assumption that somehow exotic gear or a particular set of gear can overcome poorly built or played characters in GW2. Don’t you think that the players that are there to leech off of other folks are going to put on the gear that gets them the most acceptance into a group?

There is no way to tell before you actually play with someone whether or not they can carry their weight, and gear inspections are just a way to exclude people without giving them a chance to explain why they don’t need the gear you think they do. If you’re looking for someone experienced with a particular dungeon path, you should be able to tell by talking with them if they know what it necessary to get it done quickly. You should also be able to tell in the first couple of fights whether someone is dead weight, and replace them before you waste too much time.

If someone asks me to link my gear without being concerned about my build, I just drop team and find another. Regardless of what people think, unless you’re running a straight cookie cutter build and gear template, there’s no way to tell from solely from your gear whether or not you’ll be successful on a team. And pushing people into cookie cutter builds stifles more creative builds that might be more efficient than the one that everyone has decided is the Best.

I get that people don’t want to take the time to build a team – they just want to run the dungeon fast and not have to babysit anyone. The answer to that problem is not gear inspections, it’s some sort of measurement of their experience with the dungeon in question.

Doggie.3184:

I don’t mind any class, but Rangers unfortunately get permanently stuck with pets, and these pets often mess up things in dungeons because you can’t stow them in combat. They need to learn how and when to tell them to return to them.

The problems with pets in dungeons is first that players don’t put them on passive and direct their attacks intelligently, second players don’t choose the right pets for the situation they’re heading into, and last that players don’t take full advantage of the ability to swap pets to keep them from getting killed.

I don’t understand why some rangers don’t want their pets out. You get two extra abilities you can control, additional combo fields/finishers (although you usually can’t control when they happen), plus you’re able to deal damage to two targets at once no matter how they’re positioned (the one you’re attacking and the one your pet is attacking).

I think that most players new to the game look at a ranged pet class and think it will be easy mode. They try to play it like a WoW hunter and are disappointed because their pets can’t tank, the CC abilities aren’t designed to keep things at range indefinitely (they’re more about interrupting attacks), and they don’t really understand the importance of the mobility skills.

My ranger is my most active class – I’m constantly moving, checking what my pet is doing, saving my situational skills for the right moment, looking for opportunities to interrupt big attacks, keeping an eye on my vigor for my dodging, swapping weapons and pets to give myself different boons, etc. I love it, but I think it is the opposite of what folks expect when they look at the class description.

I’m not a hot pants type myself, but I fully support you in expressing yourself.

Out of curiosity, how would you feel about cultural skins in the gem store? It seems to me like it might require a lot of work to make an outfit that fits all races. Would it be annoying to have more outfits available, but have some that only can be worn by a particular race?

I think it would be a good way to test how desirable an outfit is to the players by offering say, Sylvari only hot pants, and seeing how they sell and whether folks request a Charr version. I have no idea whether that makes sense from a technical perspective, but it seems like we would get more choices more quickly and help ANet focus their effort on what is popular.

Well John, you tried. Can we jump now?

Honestly, I’m having trouble following the argument, so I don’t have much to add. I can suggest that if you want a constructive discussion, you’d have better luck not painting ANet as corrupt profit mongers.

Bots flooded the market with gold, I got that part. Although from John’s response, it sounds like flooded is too strong a word. Endurance is upset that the ill gotten gains weren’t deleted. I got that part, although I’m not sure how technically feasible removing the “bad” gold from the market is…

Someone buys gold from a RMT and uses it to dump a thousand swords into the forge and sells a precursor to an innocent bystander, how do you take that gold out of the market? Do you take the money away from the thousand sword sellers or take away the precursor? Ok, let’s put a pin in that for a minute.

What’s the next part of the argument? How exactly does the price of gems come into it? Why would I buy gold to buy gems, when I can just buy them directly? I’m not being snarky, I’m trying to understand. The gold infusion by the bots would have spread out over the entire market, and after a little turbulence, settled out right? I’m not understanding the problem.

I know it isn’t correct, but it got stuck in my head as ore-RICK-ulum. I like it better than the correct way, so I’m keeping it. Texans have a propensity for doing that sort of thing :P

I have always been impressed with ANet’s attention to infrastructure. The hot patching is really an achievement in my opinion – it’s hard to imagine going back to a game with a regularly scheduled maintenance day. I imagine that their architecture was designed to be robust and handle all sorts of stresses.

The company I work for actually pays two different third parties to be on-call in the event of DDOS attacks and they filter the traffic to keep us up although at maybe a lower capacity than usual. We’re in financial services though, so the stakes are a bit higher if we’re inaccessible.

nastyjman.8207:

If you can’t afford the initial 5% seller’s fee, it would be best to save up the money for it or borrow money from a close friend that you see face-to-face on a daily or weekly basis.

You can always fill a buy order if you don’t have the cash up front. You might not make as much as you could, but if you’re strapped for cash and the buy order is reasonable, it’s an option. It also insulates you from the price of the item dropping before someone buys it and being stuck with an overpriced listing that is cost prohibitive to remove and re-list.

Alright this isn’t a solution, I was confusing GW2 with something else. Filling buy orders can be a good strategy, but you’re still going to have to have the listing fee up front.

MaRko.3165:

I installed TSW after I started getting bored here. A bit darker visually and story wise. There actually IS a story, everything seems to ‘mesh’ much more completely. I have not made it out of the ‘start area’ quite yet, still trying to milk my $$ worth out of GW2.

I bought TSW when it first came out, and I really like a lot of things about it – the setting, the “investigation” missions that involve going outside the game to get information, the classless system, et. al. The problem I had with it was that the combat was boring and clunky, and there was just way too much of it. I couldn’t do the parts of the game that I was interested in, without trudging through stuff I hated.

GW2 lets me do what I’m in the mood to do and there’s at least some reward for doing it, whether it’s exploring, crafting, gathering, WvW, running dungeons, or just cutting a swath through the risen to see if I can beat some heavy moldy bags out of them. And if I get bored of the jungle, I can head over the the Shiverpeaks for a change of scenery, and still get rewards commensurate with my level.

I want the dungeon armor skins, but I hate PVE. Why is Arena Net forcing me to do something I don’t wanna do just to get what I want?! It’s sooo unfair!

That’s basically the same argument as removing the WvW areas from world completion. It’s equivalent to wanting raid armor without wanting to participate in raids. The underlying assumption being made by the folks that want 100% world completion without having to experience 100% of the world is that Guild Wars is a PvE game with PvP added on. That simply isn’t the case. PvP is an integral part of Guild Wars, and there should be rewards that you can’t get unless you PvP.

Is it hard to take out 15 people camping a spot from a tactically superior position? Yes, it is. Is it impossible? No. I understand not wanting to PvP. What I don’t understand is wanting the rules changed so that you can get an accomplishment that other folks had to work a lot harder for.

I’m not a particularly hard core PvPer. I got 100% map completion in one of the borderlands running as a duo with my husband at um I think we were in our early 30s. We killed a group of 4 enemies trying to complete the centaur event on our way to one skill point, had a pair of enemies trip and fall off a cliff right in front of us on our way back out (yes, killed them too, it’s war after all), and that was the sum total of the PvP I was “forced” to do. I waited until our shard had control of the map because I wasn’t in the mood for a lot of fighting.

I didn’t buy it because it was cost effective. I bought it because it looks cool when I mine. If it had been limited uses, I wouldn’t have bought it because I would have felt the need to save the effect for a special occasion, and that would have pushed the value below the $10 threshold.

I totally get that it’s too expensive to be worth it for some folks. I see it as two fancy coffees (and maybe a cookie) from a cafe. I think I probably wouldn’t have spent the money if GW2 had a subscription, but as it is now, it’s a permanent item in a game I can pick up and play whenever I want. I also have a main character that I’ve been playing since early access, so the soul bound part didn’t pain me too much.

I think it’s a good idea. I usually get around the confusing/targeting mistake by mapping the stow weapon toggle to something convenient. It will interrupt your auto-attack. Besides I think some of my characters look cool when they’re walking with their weapons out during an escort

Ursan.7846:

M Ham.7509:

In your explanation someone buying Gems and converting them into gold has the potential to increase inflation. The “Precursor” for players adding more gold to the system via Gem purchases is the price of items in the TP.

It would be interesting to to see how much gold is added to the system vs. how much gold is converted to Gems.

Cost-Push Inflation… are Legendaries our Oil Crisis?

M.

You are right, and that is exactly why their Gems/Gold ratio is based on supply/demand. If more people convert Gold into Gems, the exchange rate (gold -> gems) increases.

Seeing as gold -> gem prices have been climbing steadily since launch, I’m pretty confident in saying more gold has been destroyed creating gems than other way around.

Disclaimer – I don’t believe that there is anything inflationary going on, these are just questions to firm up my understanding.

So, the easiest way for ANet to combat inflation is to keep adding desirable items to the gem store, correct? It seems like this is also a good way for them to generate revenue because some folks will convert gold to gems and some folks will just buy gems to get the new items. Doesn’t the gem-gold conversion track the introduction of new items fairly closely?

And I thought the oil crisis (at least in the US) was primarily caused by government interference with the prices to keep them artificially low. I don’t see legendaries as an essential item – I can do everything in the game without having a legendary. I actually can’t think of anything on the TP that I need and can’t afford. There of lots of things I’d like that I can’t afford, but they’re sort of the difference between buying a reliable used car versus a Silver Shadow… they’ll both get me to work, it’s just a matter of style.

Behellagh.1468:

Okay, different states, different tax laws (gift cards, internet/mail order purchases). However if ANet is charging sales tax when it doesn’t have to, something smells.

Just because a company doesn’t collect it doesn’t mean it isn’t owed. There are 45 states that have a use tax law that requires you to file forms to pay your state sales tax on out of state purchases. It’s basically unenforceable for small purchases, so the Senate passed a bill (The Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013) that requires companies to collect sales tax even for states where they have no business presence. I don’t think it’s made it through the House yet though and govtrack.us gives it a 28% chance of being enacted.

I think a lot of on-line retailers just set up their systems to collect the sales tax regardless because it’s easier than only collecting it for certain states, and that way they’re prepared for when they have to collect it by law. Too many states are too strapped for cash for them to let folks get away with not paying their taxes, even if it means forcing companies who have no vested interest in that state to bear the burden of enforcing their tax laws.

If they nerfed him, he wouldn’t be a champion any more. You should take it as a challenge to buff up your ability, not ask that champs be made easier.

If you can’t kill him solo, put a call out in map chat. It’s supposed to take more than one person to bring down a champion. It doesn’t always though, I’ve been able to kill a couple solo.

I would be happy if we could put them in collectible storage and they stacked a bit higher. Like at least high enough that one stack of them bought something worthwhile…

Because your forum login is the same as your game login, and it would not be a good idea to stick it in a cookie where it’s easily compromised?

Aviate.9457:

Oh well. Won’t be getting anymore of my money that’s for sure. Makes no sense to me why I can walk into Gamestop or purchase ONLINE at Amazon.com and not be taxed for it, yet trying to do it directly charges me a tax. Good Game, ANet.

It’s not ANet’s fault that the tax laws are ridiculously complicated and make no sense. Take it up with whoever it was you sent to your state legislature.

It also makes the gem→gold conversion rate more attractive which may encourage folks to spend money on gems they might not have otherwise spent.

Flissy.4093:

I’m not criticising the group I mentioned, simply stating that MMOs have never been catered to such players, and as a genre known for such deep character progression and development, methods should never be easily attainable by those with extremely limited time.

That’s a ridiculous overgeneralization of what an MMO is – MMOs were born as subscription games, and they needed time sinks as well as gold sinks for their business model to work. It has nothing to do with deep character progression – the single player games like Skyrim et. al. are know for that.

There’s absolutely no reason why a particular MMO shouldn’t fill a niche and be built for folks with less time to play. There is already a wide selection of MMOs that don’t cater to the more casual player, why would you begrudge those of us with careers and families the chance to play an MMO?

Spawn.7014:

Now I don’t care one way or the other I just though it was intrusting that a company would hire people for NA servers that can’t speak proper English.
I hope i dont get a ban for this

I think you meant interesting. And they weren’t speaking English, they were writing it. I think your bigotry will probably just be ignored and I doubt they’ll bother to ban you. If English is your first language, you should probably become more fluent in it before you criticize folks that are writing it as a second language.

I find it depressing that someone would focus on a couple of minor grammatical problems that are obviously due to English not being the writer’s first language instead of being appreciative that the forums have 24-7 moderators. The meaning of what the moderators wrote is clear.

OK, now I’m even more depressed that someone with a communication challenge like dyslexia can’t have some compassion for folks writing English as a second language.

Freeelancer.2860:

Pandemoniac.4739:

My solution is to go play something else where I feel less pressured to do time limited content and don’t have to rely on incomplete, fan created summaries to get me re-oriented in the game world.

There are also some official summaries of the LS available, for example this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBqw62AssWk

I don’t think I understand the purpose of this thread or your view.

That youtube video wasn’t posted by ANet so it’s hardly official. I’m not interested enough in the living story to try to patch together a recap by sorting through various fan posted stuff.

The purpose of the thread is simply to give feedback about my experience with the living story. I could have just stopped playing and not said anything, but I don’t think that helps anyone.

You can always get a good estimate from Spidy or guildwarstrade.com:

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/gems
http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

There’s a lot of volatility lately, so you won’t know for sure unless you log in and look.

Ra the Eternal.1635:

It would be great if we had the option to merge the chats for all of our guilds, so we don’t have to keep switching representation just to keep up on current events.

I would like to see the ability to formalize an alliance across guilds, and a separate “Alliance” chat channel. That would let guilds organize events together, but keep their private guild stuff private.

I’m in multiple guilds because one of my guilds is too large to fit in a single guild (alliance chat would solve a big problem there), a smaller guild of friends that I sometimes group up with and like to represent when we’re grouped so they get the bonus influence, and I’ve got a personal guild with my husband so we can stash overflow crafting mats and runes and such.

It makes life so much easier to be able to change my representation on the fly so I don’t have to swap characters just to get something out of the guild stash I share with my husband.

Nothing in this thread hasn’t already been said in Open world Duels [Merged]

I don’t understand why folks wouldn’t want to duel it in an easily accessible area like the arena in the Black Citadel. It would make it easier for duellers to find each other, and you wouldn’t have to spam challenge random strangers to find someone interested. Heck you could evolve it into a mini-game with betting, leaderboards, different duel types (disable healing for example) and all sorts of fun stuff.

I’m not opposed to there being a duelling option added, but I don’t want to have wade around folks duelling in the streets or have to fill up my ignore list with folks that won’t take no for an answer.

Farzo.8410:

Only thing that annoys me is that there has to be a book that wastes bag and bank space. They obviously did this to make our bags and bank more full so we have to buy more slots.

I don’t think that’s obvious. They already have a framework for toys that change your skills, so the book is probably the easiest way to implement “teaching” dances to a character. Why would they write a completely new system when that effort could be directed toward other fun things?

marnick.4305:

Pandemoniac.4739:

No-one “chose” the price. Friedrich Engels said “what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed.”

The price of precursors was set by the players answering these two questions :
How much gold would it take for you to part with a pre-cursor?
How much gold would you be willing to spend on a pre-cursor?

And the result was a price that neither side of the transaction is entirely happy with, but will accept.

I do not agree on that. On the bottom of every contract are 2 signatures. Both are needed to make a transaction happen. If you don’t agree with the transaction … don’t do it. Same goes for buying a house or getting a job. Don’t put your scribble under something you don’t support 100%. Everything has a correct market-driven pricepoint.

The only thing that pulls those two appart, and as such hurts sales, is taxation. The correct price can never be achieved by either party as long as people have to consider taxation. Since Engels was pretty much the first communist, I find that a bit funny.

Regardless of Engels political views, what he said is still true for a lot systems. Buyer and seller have opposing intentions, regardless of the tax. The buyer wants to buy an item as cheaply as possible, and the seller wants to sell the item as expensively as possible. The price where they meet in the middle isn’t the price either of them would set if they could – it’s a compromise that both can live with. That was the point of my two questions above – if you’re honest, the price that you come up with will be different for those two questions.

Market prices aren’t chosen – they emerge from a large number of individual buyers and sellers making decisions based on their particular situation. There is no “correct price” – there is only the price that the market will bear given the current state of everything – taxation, drop rate, supply, et. al. By each buyer and seller making an independent decision about what an item is worth, all of that information that each individual has about the current state of things gets aggregated into a general value, and that value changes as the situation changes and individuals make different decisions.

For this to really work though, you have to have a huge number of people participating in the market and they have to be making their buying and selling decisions based on how they want to allocate their resources, and not based on personal animosity or fear of being targeted as Lucas was proposing.

I like this suggestion. I have the “about face” option mapped, but I’ve never used the “look behind” camera option because it never really gave me what I expected to see. I think you’ve put your finger on why.

I like this tool for figuring out dye names: http://pendiongaming.com/gw2/dyesearch.php?h=f81e34

You can put in a color, or upload an image and it will try to pick out the colors dyes that match the predominant colors in the image (it’s a little finicky, but still fun). Don’t limit yourself to screenshots for the images – pick an image that has a color palette you like, regardless of the content. There are links to GW2Spidy so you can check the price history and make an informed buy offer on the rarer ones.

JETWING.2759:

But i agree with you, if this mechanism could be turned On or Off by the player, so that only himself have non English words filtered.

Actually it might be nice if a player could set their preferred language, so that the folks speaking Chinese could filter out English as well as the other way around.

This is my thought process when making my ranger build. It’s not going to result in the uberest damage or PvP pwnage, but I’ve soloed that group dynamic events and I do well in dungeons, so I’m happy with it.

So, when I’m doing a build, I think about three questions:

1. How am I going to survive?
2. How am I going to do damage?
3. How will I help my allies?

Survival
There are three aspects to survivability – avoiding damage (evasion and control), mitigating damage (debuffing enemies’ damage or speed/armoring yourself), and repairing damage (healing and condition removal). The ranger skills have lots of evasion, control, debuffing choices and a bit of healing.

Damage
Damage boils down to burst damage or sustained damage. I favor sustained damage, and the ranger has a lot of ways to do damage over time with various conditions. One thing that attracted me to a condition build is that I can put out three different types of conditions – bleeding, burning, and poison damage in one build fairly easily.

Team friendly
This is basically a catch-all for anything that helps your allies other than you keeping yourself alive and dealing damage.

So, looking through the skills, I pay attention to (in order of priority) anything that has a primary or secondary effect that increases my survivability, is compatible with sustained damage by conditions, and can benefit an ally. Then I do another pass and fill in gaps for certain situations.

For condition removal, you don’t get a lot of choices, so I settled this first. There’s the Signet of Renewal, Evasive Purity trait, and the brown bear special attack “Shake it off”. You can also send a projectile through a light combo field, but the ranger has no way of putting a light field down (not even with a pet, unless it’s a pet Guardian) I chose the bear because it it had more utility in my opinion than taking up a slot with the signet and the evasive purity was too high up a trait tree that didn’t interest me.

Putting down combo fields counts toward all three of my questions, so I looked at this next. I chose Healing Spring because it is an AOE heal, water combo field and condition removal for allies. I chose a torch for an off hand weapon for the fire combo field and the condition damage. I chose a jungle spider pet for the poison combo field, the immobilize, and the stun attack. I grabbed Frost Trap and Flame Trap to have some variety in the combo fields I can put down. I picked Viper’s Nest and Spike Trap to have some variety in condition damage. I swap the traps around often depending on what I’m fighting and who I’m fighting with.

I moved from combo fields to straight up survival skills. Lightning Reflexes was one of my first choices – damage, evade, stun breaker, and a Vigor boon, what’s not to like? I discounted all of the spirits pretty much immediately – too cumbersome to get much utility out of them.

I started looking for damage and situational skills next. I grabbed Sharpening Stone for even more conditional damage. I grabbed Search and Rescue for running dungeons.

Continued below…

Up-voting lets me indicate that I would have said exactly the same thing without making a “me too” post. If I disagree with a post but don’t say why, it has less value as feedback.

Deepcuts.9740:

Double checked. Killed the same mobs on the ground and from that place.
There is a Veteran there also. Same situation.
You can check for yourself instead of “maybe you hit critters” or just pay attention to the video.

You were across the line where you got down-leveled to 65. If you look at your pet’s level, it’s 65 when you’re running through a cave of 62s. When you cross the line, it goes up to 71. A 71 versus a 62 doesn’t seem like an entirely fair fight :P

I started looking for a main hand weapon to complement my torch. I used a sword in my main hand for a while. It had some nice mobility skills, a cripple, a poison, and a leap finisher. As much as I like having a leap finisher, I didn’t have the situational awareness to handle all the jumping around and ended up falling off ledges quite often. I really preferred being able to swap to either weapon set regardless of the terrain and maybe just lay off a particular skill. I ended up with an axe, which has a bleed, a chill + pet caused weakness, and an AOE that doesn’t need your enemies to be tightly grouped. The projectiles work well with all my combo fields.

My swap is a shortbow. It’s really hard not to choose the combination of range, mobility, condition damage, and a daze/stun. I put sigils of battle in both weapon swaps, so I get stacks of might which increases my power and condition damage. I have runes in my armor to increase the duration of might to leverage it a little bit more.

Wilderness survival was my first choice of traits – the toughness, condition damage, edurance regeneration, and protection on dodge looked helpful, but I was really interested in Hide in Plain Sight, Shared Anguish and Bark Skin. When I picked up the might and might duration on my gear, I decided to head down skirmishing for the fury and swiftness on weapon swapping, since I was likely to be doing it a lot to proc my sigils. Because I had trap skills for the combo fields, the ground targeting was attractive. I then picked up Marksmanship for the condition duration, Opening Strike, and Predator’s Instinct.

OK, this is getting long. Apparently I had more thoughts than I thought Let me know if I’ve completely baffled you with my stream of consciousness style. Those were my choices, and I hope by showing you how I got to them instead of just showing you what they were, it might help you make choices that suit your play style.

Maybe the changes to WvW have attracted some folks that are realizing that you have to be able to deal with conditions to survive? High toughness protects against direct damage, and condition duration helps against damage that bypasses your armor. Hoelbrak’s give you -20% duration, but no stun reduction or toughness, so Melandru’s is the more attractive option.

My husband’s Necromancer is a menace. You would not believe how many conditions he can drop on you in a couple seconds, and how long the bleeds last. Then he uses epidemic to spread them to all your nearby friends. He’s fun at parties

DarkSpirit.7046:

The problem with the TP though is the 15% total tax, which may not seem like a lot but if you are selling items that are really valuable, it makes a lot of difference!

For normal items, the TP is probably your best choice.

But it’s for the really valuable items that the TP is most useful. A 15% tax ensures that the seller gets the widest possible audience of interested buyers for their item, and protects both the buyer and the seller against getting scammed. Many auction houses in real life charge 30%.

Just factor the 15% into your pricing. In my opinion, it’s well worth the money to bypass the hassle of advertising it and the risk of dealing with an anonymous stranger without any recourse if they rip you off. Would you rather have the 130 gold or an e-mail from support explaining there is no way they can replace the 150 gold item that was stolen from you?

I think for a lot of things, if you used the time you would have spent finding a reputable buyer and negotiating the deal to farm a little, you’d make back most of the 15% fee and you wouldn’t have the risk of getting scammed.

Revenant.2691:

Orr and went back to explore the maps that I hadn’t been through yet, they were so easy that they bored the hell out of me.

If all you’re talking about is killing stuff, you’re right, low level areas are easy for down scaled 80s. If all you’re doing is fighting, I can see how it would be boring. I’m still finding it fun because I’m more interested in looking for hidden areas, talking to the NPCs and figuring out the story behind what’s going on, and helping out the other players in the area.

I don’t see how any game could provide infinite PvE end game content that was always challenging but not repetitive and boring, if you’re only interested in fighting mobs. PvP will always be the one thing that stays fresh combatwise, because humans are tricksy and computer AI is not.

The only way folks can get infinite replayability of a game without infinite content is if they’re playing it with other people, not just in the presence of other people. The RPers do this by using the game world as a room full of environments and props to create collaborative stories. Our guild does this by helping the lower level folks through dungeons, or setting up jumping puzzle night, or deciding that we’ve had enough of the wall phasing, flying cheaters on server X in WvW and we’re going to show them they don’t have free run of our borderlands.

If you aren’t the type to set your own goals and challenges, there will always come a point in every game where you have completed every measurable goal that the game has to offer. I think expecting it to be otherwise is unrealistic. PvE content can not be generated faster than people rushing through it can complete it.

Rising Dusk.2408:

But to go out of your way to try to get responses on the forum for a post that is literally “LOOK AT WHAT I GOT OH MAN”? I think that’s excessive, and definitely rubs up against bragging.

People are strange – everyone loves a little schadenfreude and most folks don’t seem to mind commiseration threads but so few people are willing to celebrate someone else’s good fortune. It’s not like the original poster’s luck makes it less likely that you’ll be lucky.

I’m not sure how you can brag about something that requires zero skill. He had a stroke of luck and he’s excited. I see it as confirmation that that stingy djinn does occasionally pay out, and it makes me smile to think about the feeling that the OP must have had when he saw Dawn pop up on the screen.

munkiman.3068:

John Smith.4610:

I see no current issues with the exchange, it’s functioning very well. Remember for every opinion on which way should be “favored” there is at least one opinion for the opposite.

PS please stop calling everything inflation, it’s driving me mad.

I mentioned this the other day in another thread, it bugs me too. The cost to play the game hasn’t changed one copper since release. The only thing that has increased is the desire to acquire those big screen tvs you guys are selling on the TP Too bad the parts to make them are scarce.

Inflation is awesome – it lets you live in a more expensive neighborhood without moving!

I pre-ordered so I’ve been playing since the head start and I’ve been pretty happy with how well my gold has retained its value. I’ve been entertaining myself by clicking the “all” button on Spidy, and it’s impressive really how quickly most items found their value and how little prices are rising in the long term. There are some exceptions, but we’re talking about inflation, so they aren’t relevant.