Guild Wars 2

Hmm I disagree with the article’s conclusion about hurting sales because people are stupid when it comes to probability.

“1 in 10 chance of getting x” → “I’ll just buy 10” → “Maybe one more …”

Guaranteed Wardrobe Unlock guarantee you’ll obtain a skin you don’t have yet. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a decent skin, just one that you haven’t unlocked.

Most people are saving them while obtaining all the basic, plain, cheap and uninteresting skins, so they could get something more valuable in the end.

I really like the idea of cool little hidden things in game like this and hope anet continues to add this sorta stuff in game.

I found the ring itself to be a nice little poignant nod to gw1 lore.

No matter what people in this thread say, I think this was clever and fun and would like to see more stuff like this released in future patches

Who overhyped it?

If Anet did not even tell players it was there they cannot, by definition, have hyped it, let alone over hyped it.

Therefore any hype must have come from players.

If it sounds/looks like an exploit, then it should be reported to the email address hornswroggle posted above. Make sure you send your video and any other proof you have. You should also delete the details of the exploit from this post; sharing how an exploit is done isn’t allowed on the forums.

If you want to inform ANet about such things you can

A) file a report ingame using the chat command “/bug”
or, the better option
B) Write a report to exploits@arena.net

Sky.7610:

This will drain some gold from the richer because the TP fees cant keep up inflation.

Sure they can. In fact they keep up with inflation by construction.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

No, it’s a terrible indicator. The gold:gem ratio has frequently gone up or down independently of the money supply.

In fact, it’s not an indicator at all. Gold:gem ratio is as much a measure of gold inflation as it is a measure of US dollar inflation or Euro inflation. The two are not completely unrelated, but the correlation is close to zero.

Gerrand.3085:

Evil idea which would force most people to diversify their farming habits – to ensure their wealth isn’t locked into an single currency they could be robbed of.

An idea which makes your ‘currencies’ no longer currencies. If you put something like that in the game people would store their wealth in ectos or powerful bloods or whatever the game does not consider a currency, as it would then be more of a currency than gold. You know, the situation in a huge number of MMOs with failed primary currencies.

It would also make the trading post largely unworkable, since holding gold is a liability…which would make just about everyone a whole lot poorer.

This sort of thing benefits long term, dedicated traders that understand the systems, but hurts the casual player that doesn’t have time to dig into the nuances of trade and just expect gold to work.

PopeUrban.2578:

I think he’s complaining that getting to high fractals doesn’t make your stats more uber.

Cedric, that’s the point. GW2 is a game where maximizing your stats is quick and easy, and the remainder of a character’s combat ability is down to personal skill, not gear.

The payoff for the thing in question, fractals, is higher monetary rewards for doing harder content. It’s not supposed to reward you better for making content easier. It’s supposed to reward you better because content is more difficult. Agony Resistance is a balancing lever put there to prevent even the most skilled players from advancing too quickly to the highest levels and immediately earning the most valuable rewards, so that there is a sense of progression.

Many of your complaints about GW2 stem from an assumption that the game should scale character power in a similar manner to other games. GW2 doesn’t do that. It’s deliberate and one of the main reasons people that enjoy this game continue to play it.

There’s nothing wrong with disliking that, but what you view as a negative, most of the community views as a positive.

I admire how calmly and rationally you’re answering the OP. Personally, I don’t believe Cedric is a real person anymore. I think he’s a focus group of uni psychology students who are conducting some kind of experiment on how groups in an anonymous medium respond to injections of irrationality into the group dynamic. Some of ‘his’ posts just seem too ..formulated to be incidental.

I personally don’t consider an outfit any more or less original than someone wearing a full set of one armor or a person who is wearing the whatever the current armor meta of the day is. While people come on the forums to bash outfits, they ignore all the copy cat armors and full set wearers when they say how unoriginal the outfits are and how wearers of outfits look like each other.

I like outfits myself. I don’t have all but I have a good number of them. The more ANet releases the more diversity you’ll see with outfits and the less people will look like each other when they wear one, as the possible outfit looks will be so many and spread out amongst the wearers. They have the advantage of allowing a quick change on a moments notice when I get tired of what that char is wearing. Switch out, dye, and off I go with a completely different look.

It’s all in what you like and I hope ANet continues to add plenty more outfits to the gemstore, as well as armors to the open world.

Supply is only one side of the equation. Without equal demand for each type, the price will be all over the place.

The notion that everybody should be able to get all their mats in a reasonable amount of time simply by farming zones eliminates the entire notion of an economy because everything will be in excess and prices will be so low you will eliminate the need for a TP. You will be selling everything for a few copper and silver because we will all be drowning in it.

Rentapest.6503:

Give the option to press a key and ‘ignore’ ley lines for gliding please!

You have that already. It’s your space bar.

I always assumed the armors released early in the gem shop had been created during the game’s development, then set aside so they could sell them. Rather than assuming they had been created after the game launched.

Day Trooper.3605:

I agree – I love the added challenge as well!
However, can you guys offer any tips to get around the 2nd ‘orb cap phase’ of the final boss? Last night we went at it numerous times but never could get past that part

Pretty sure you can jump above the red orbs (seemed to have worked for me), jump above the wave, you can see it coming because it comes in, you count 1 second and jump. dodge the orange circles and catch the blue orbs. Invulnerability works very well you will still cap the point. (If you’re an ele you can run mist form, it’s quite useful as a safe button).

“Also, please let more fractals get this challenge mote treatment.” YES!!!!! PLEASE DO!

Another possibility — one I’ve seen trip others up before — is that you are trying to charge at a communing mastery point. This will not work. You need a communing Hero Point. The easiest one imo is ne of the Pact Camp WP in VB — glide down to the flat area with the beetles and hop into the wallows for a quick port to an aggro-free HP commune.

Santa charr, santa charr. Does whatever a santa charr can

Which is claw people’s eyes out and give gifts; I know which one I want

I do enjoy the story. No it’s not great literature, or even the best storyline I’ve seen in an RPG. But I like multiple books and movies, not just the single best one I’ve ever read/watched, and similarly I can enjoy multiple games story lines even if I know others are better.

I like exploring the lore and both history and current events – which is mainly done by speaking to NPCs both inside story instances and outside of them. I like playing through the story multiple times on different characters to see the different versions. (Which mainly applies to the personal story which can be almost completely different based on your race and the choices you make, but the HoT and living stories have minor differences too.)

I also find a lot of the dialogue amusing, so even if I’m not that interested in the overarching plot at the time I can enjoy the way it’s presented.

I think the big problem with the Guild Wars 2 storyline is actually that it’s quite complicated. You need to pick up on and remember a lot of details in order to get the full experience (like characters who are introduced in one instance, won’t be seen for a while and then appear again periodically – the game assumes you know who they are from meeting them before but players may not remember). And that generally means either playing it multiple times so it sticks in your memory or playing it all in a short space of time which is not how it’s designed.

Which I think might be part of the OPs problem. The enemies that are attacking you usually do have something to do with the story and who and what they are and why they’re attacking you is explained. But if you see it as “kill some adds, something happens, kill some adds…” you’re not going to pick up on that. You need to follow the details.

Likewise Aurene is not a pet and they have not created an area specifically for you to play with her – it’s an instanced version of Tarir – the same place many earlier story chapters and open-world events take place, a city specifically created to house the baby dragon.

The purpose of having her in the story is not to give you a tamagochi to play with, that’s just one tiny part (which is why there’s not much to it), she’s going to be a reoccurring character who will literally grow as the story progresses and presumably will play a much bigger and more significant role once she’s not a newly hatched baby.

I’m not quite sure how you could have missed all of that but if you did I can understand how everything else would seem like a mess because you must be missing a lot of the details and reoccurring characters.

(I’m also a bit confused about these multiple dragon fights you mention in HoT and the living story. We’ve only fought 2 dragons so far – Zhaitan and Mordremoth. Any others bosses you’re thinking of are not dragons.)

Same again with intractables. If you assume that everything worth investigating is labelled and anything without a label can be ignored then you’re going to miss a lot, like objects which are deliberately hidden because they’re part of an easter egg or achievement, jumping puzzles (not story related I know), NPCs to speak to… And then yes, the maps will seem quite empty. (And this is assuming you are aware that the maps are designed to be played outside of story instances too. Many of the things which appear non-functional inside an instance are used outside of it, so again if you only do the story and then never go back there ever again you’re going to miss a lot.)

If you think quartz is “hard” to get now just wait until they remove the time gate on charged quartz. You will be crying about quartz price on TP.

Let me take a crack at it.

First none of us have any sense of the current break down of source of reported income (NOT PROFIT) for GW2. What percentage are game account keys Vs Gem Sales? Has it gone up or down since the game shipped relative to the number of active players? What percentage of active players buy gems in a month? What is the average amount purchased by those players? Has those amounts gone up or down? All of that is important as it determines the direction development goes. If active population is dropping, there would be a push to make the game more compelling to try and sell more licenses. If the cash spent per player in the Gem Shop is dropping, need more desirable items in the Gem Shop. Etc.

There is extremely limited data we can derive from the quarterly numbers (which don’t include China BTW) which are sales (again NOT PROFITS). Q4s tend to be higher as GW2 is a NA + EU game and that quarter encompasses the holiday season. The initial quarters when the game and the expansion came out are higher than the later quarters, as the bulk of game account sales are made during those times. And that’s about it. Everything this point on are tea leaves and entrails.

2Q14 till 3Q15, an 18 month period that includes the time after LWS1, includes LWS2 and the “content drought” that led up to the quarter HoT was released was actually fairly flat. Hype might have kept players playing through 1Q15 to 3Q15 "drought. Note that pre-purchase aren’t counted in the quarter that they are made but the quarter the game is shipped.

HoT sales weren’t out of this world. The ploy of providing a P4F version of the base game hoping for a game license sale didn’t pan out as well as they expected, as stated in a investor conference call. The lack of a less expensive expansion when they decided to bundle in the original game left a bad taste in players mouths. Even after tossing in the free character slot on pre-purchases by existing players only blunted the complaint, not eliminate. Those who sat on the fence until the game shipped weren’t encouraged by the laundry list of complaints of all the “gotchas” that came hand in hand with the hyped features. Guild Halls were expensive to build. Scribing was super expensive to level. Crafting precursors were expensive and time consuming. Elite Specializations required you to clear a fair chunk of HPs on the HoT maps. The four maps weren’t all that large, even when you take the multiple levels into account. Mastery system slowed your progress through the maps and story, etc. Some of these were fixed quickly. Some took until the Spring Update in 2Q16 to fix but by then many who hadn’t bought the expansion simply wrote off the game to pursue “newer” free MMOs. That’s my take on why we dropped from roughly $20 million a quarter before HoT to $15 million a quarter after the expansion.

(continues)

But let me look at something a little different than just GW2 sales.

Below I’ve included three charts. The first shows game income by region, as NCSOFT breaks them into. Note that after 1Q2014 they combined NA and EU sales which I think was do to the restructuring that created the NC West Holding company as well as NCSOFT licencing off day to day operation and localization of AION and Lineage 2 in Europe, shifting any income from those games to royalties than income to an NCSOFT subsidiary.

Notable dates on the region chart. AION came out in South Korea 4Q08 which is that surge. AION came out everywhere else 3Q09 which is the surge in NA+EU. Also as you can see before GW2, NA+EU wasn’t a strong region but after it became their 2nd largest region. The income bump 2Q14 in NA+EU was Wildstar being released, the bump in 1Q16 was partially due to HoT but primarily due to Blade &Soul being released in region.

This is illustrated in the 2nd and 3rd charts. Since reported GW2 income as well as Wildstar is limited to the NA+EU region, if you factor them out you can see how NCSOFT’s remaining games are doing in the region, which was roughly between $2.5-5 million a quarter until Blade & Soul was released. But, with very limited data, next quarter will tell, it looks as if B&S will follow AION’s boom-bust pattern in NA+EU. The last chart shows a percentage breakdown of income source from the region.

My point here is that in the big picture, NA+EU are very relevant in NCSOFT’s income and GW2 makes up the bulk of that. NCSOFT has had very limited success here until GW2. And if B&S burns out as I expect it to, GW2 will still be the cornerstone of it’s income from NA+EU. I don’t think they will interfere with their one very successful NA studio and game.

I fully expect 4Q16 to see GW2 to be once again above 70% of the source of NA+EU region’s income, bolstered by the game license sale, a returning population and B&S income continue to fall.

That’s my 2 copper.

Easy level guild treks can be solo’ed.
Medium level guild trek you’ll want two.
Hard level guild trek is doable with three but that can but a little close with the timer if you are unlucky.

Guild races can be done with other guilds.

Easy level guild bounties only have 3 possible targets(Brekabek, Trillia Midwell and Poobadoo) and they be solo’ed with a bit of effort or easily done with 2 but you can always ask map chat for a bit of help as well.

Unless you are gathering the other materials at a fairly brisk pace you generally won’t need to worry too much about favor. Just keep an eye out for guild treks and doing those would be enough to keep up most of the time.

Oh also make sure you have your mission preference set to PvE only if for no other reason than the fact that some of the WvW and PvP missions requires a minimum of 3 guild members to participate to get credit.

Yea, legendary is a function (color of the name) which won’t go away even if you transmute it.
You could technically have a legendary Iron Sword.

In retrospect, the Mystic forge also completely ignores the transmutations. If you throw in an iron sword, and transmute it Zap, you can’t craft the legendary sword with it.

Reading this thread, it would seem a lot of people need to take a look at there builds. The game is no way as hard as some of you are making out. Really take a good look at your traits and figure out where you are going wrong.

This is not really a “bug”, but a UI flaw which annoys me since I’m playing this game and I guess it’s there since the game was released.

If you rotate the camera by holding down the right mouse button, the cursor gets hidden. If you now want to zoom the camera by scrolling the mouse wheel, and the invisible cursor is actually “above” the minimap, it zooms the minimap instead of the game view. The same happens to lists – if the cursor is above one, the list gets scrolled. The camera zoom is not changed, which was the originally intended action.

Additionally funny is that the game somehow “knows” where the cursor is while rotating the camera, but if you release the right button, it appears where you originally started to hold it down, making the UI interaction even more “confusing”.

I don’t think I find anyone here who wants to interact with the UI using the mouse cursor while the mouse cursor is hidden. Also, camera rotation cannot be started with the cursor positioned over the minimap or a list on purpose, since the right click interacts with the minimap or list then.

Can there be a UI fix or at least an option to prevent the mouse wheel from interacting with the UI while the cursor is hidden (e.g. the camera being rotated)? I guess it should be possible for the UI to find out when the cursor is not visible and then just let the actions go “through” as if no UI component handled the scroll.

The answer is simple: inactivity timeout. There is a mechanic that if you don’t do any action while transformed during a certain time, you are kicked of the armor. What happens is that countdown kicks in even during the loading screen and the timer is very short (like 20 or 30 secs I think, or less) and then if the loading screen takes longer than that, poof you go.

I have noticed it a while back through the chat, after teleporting and being kicked out of armor, my chat would have several warnings about inactivity.

‘gold sink’ suggests your are putting more gold into an achievement than you feel comfortable doing. The answer is don’t do it unless you want to. Re limited incomes, your looking at it back to front, in GW2 all player has access to everything, even those with limited incomes – they get long term goals.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

Well, let’s see. You need 126 HoT Mastery Points to fulfill every HoT Mastery Track. There are 164 HoT Mastery Points available. Adventures give 30 Mastery Points total.

164 – 30 = 134. Looks like there are enough Mastery Points available to max out all tracks and never touch an Adventure.

Stop that. You’re using math and being rational. That isn’t allowed here.