Guild Wars 2

It’s annoying when there’s people purposefully AFK (if there’s anything to gain from it, I’m not sure if there is) It was particularly annoying at Amber Sandfall in the Silverwastes, but I realized all my time getting annoyed was time I could have been using to enjoy playing with everyone else. Now I just ignore the AFKs and put all my energy into the events and helping people who are interested in playing the map. We hit Verdant Brink T4 day/night twice yesterday and had a number of AFKs, it didn’t stop us.

I rather thought when they dropped from chests was RNG based. To get two intact tickets is one chance in fifty (or whatever they’ve set it to now) times one chance in 50 which equals to not very often.

Cost of Nevermore (Current prices):

Precursor: 881g
Mystic Tribute: 661g
Gift of Nevermore: 282g
Gift of Maguuma Mastery: 675g

Total Cost: 2499g

Old Legendary Weapons Crafting Cost: http://gw2legendary.com/
Bifrost: 2200g
Bolt: 2200g
Twlight: 2200g

Sources:
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/73239-Gift-of-Maguuma-Mastery
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/74300-Gift-of-Nevermore
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/74068-The-Raven-Staff
https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/71820-Mystic-Tribute

Prices seem to be tuned to exactly where Anet wants them. Very slightly above old generation legendary prices. If they magically reduce gemstone price, what do you suggest they replace the price with to keep them at the legendary level?

Or do you just want cheaper legendary weapons for no cost?

Major Domo.9250:

Edits: Random thought: Just noticed that the forum filter does NOT extend to the URL.

Doh!

It was adjusted because there are far more salvaging sources of leather than other mats, and because leather is used less in crafting recipies overall than cloth or metal.

Basically, leather was overly cheap to utilize, so they adjusted it. Time will tell if it was adjusted too far, but it’s still pretty darn cheap.

The OP is talking about 4th quarter 2016 estimates, which is 11+ months from now. So they predict that the sales will go back to mainly cash shop sales. No surprise here.

Also the other factors for NCSOFT missing KDB’s guess that the OP left out,

We expect NCSOFT to report slightly disappointing earnings for 4Q15, due to 1) weaker-than-projected sales of the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack, 2) a lower-than expected increase in revenue from Lineage I microtransaction events, and 3) higher
expenses related to marketing (G-Star trade show) and the company’s pro baseball
team …

KDB-Daewoo have been walking back their absurd prediction for months now. As you can see they were winging it as usual. They were the ones who suggested that 30 million would buy the expansion at $50 before we heard anything about a release date or a price. Once they heard that the core game was going P4F and the expansion wouldn’t need new players to buy two SKUs they freaked.

Here are the 4th quarter estimates in billions of Korean Won for GW2 over their last 8 reports.

4/15 – 74
5/15 – 95
7/15 – 120
8/15 – 122
10/15 – 76
11/15a – 66
11/15b – 57
1/16 – 51

Sorry, if stock analysts get within 20% of their predictions, they are doing great. These were the same people who thought NCSOFT stock was going to hit 600,000 KrW a share in 2012.

Next the company’s biggest money maker, a game that came out in 1998, wouldn’t be meet their growth predictions; then the big annual game trade show in South Korea; and lastly their baseball team.

At the end of the day, KDB’s only lowered the annual profit from 193 to 186 billion KrW and total sales from 843 to 837 billion KrW for 2015. They aren’t going out of business assuming these numbers are close to actual ones. Comparison, 2014 had net profits of 228 billion KrW on sales of 839 billion KrW.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Until gliders, nothing in this game actually flew so much as “walked high above the ground” or leaped/launched. Your flying pets don’t even really fly as you would think of it.

With that said, the birds are animated to appear to fly. The wyverns are not because the GW2 versions of them don’t fly for long. The wyvern battles are made to mostly take place on the ground. The wyvern pets are a copy of that, and therefore they also stick to the ground.

After 15 years using, moderating and administrating forums I much prefer it when they don’t show a post count, precisely because people like you too easily fall into the trap of believing the number of posts is an accurate reflection of the value of posts.

A high post count only means that person spends a lot of time on the forum. They could easily achieve that by posting variants of “lol yeah me too” in every single topic. Or endlessly re-posting the same handful of terrible suggestions and recycling arguments with the people who disagree. (Both real examples.)

It would be especially meaningless in this forum because in general time spent on the forum is time not spent playing the game, so some of the most experienced players may actually be ones who rarely, or never, post at all. (And I say this as someone who is on the forum a lot, even when I could be in-game.)

Likewise a reputation bar where forum members can up or down vote posts/posters only shows that someone is good at following the crowd, or making jokes, not that they’re actually saying anything worthwhile and it usually just encourages different cliques (which always exist on forums) to downvote each others posts so they can then use the low ranking as a way of dismissing everything else those people say.

It would be nice to have more customisation, like avatars and maybe pictures in signatures. But I have to admit another pet hate of mine is trying to read text on a page full of flicking gifs and gigantic images that stopped being funny after the first 50 times I saw them.

Is it only running into walls that makes you think they’re bots? Because I do that a lot as a result of turning on auto-run and then typing in guild chat or even switching to a different window. Since I’m not in any danger as a result of hitting a wall I don’t bother to correct it until I’ve finished what I’m doing. I can imagine a lot of other people doing the same thing.

Having said that if you suspect someone is a bot the best approach is to report them and let Anet decide. They have access to a lot more data and experience spotting bots.

I’m with the people who say you need to consider the source here – the type of people who are leaving these reviews and when they are leaving them. For the most part it’s people who have left, or are just about to leave, the company.

Maybe I have a different perspective though because I can easily compare it to my own situation, having recently left my first ever permanent full-time job. When I started at that place 4 years ago it was amazing – it was exactly the job I wanted and a brilliant opportunity to progress my career. By the time I left I was honestly glad to be out of there (and many of my co-workers who started at the same time as me are saying they wish they could leave too) and I admit I had some fairly major criticisms to make when they asked for feedback.

Now here’s the crazy part: the job and the organisation had not really changed at all in that time, and the changes they did make were mostly positive.

What changed was mostly me. A lot can happen in 4 years, especially when it’s your first 4 years with a permanent, full-time job. What was an amazing opportunity for someone just starting out in their career became a stifling environment where I was constantly frustrated by a lack of opportunity to really use and develop my skills. And having been with the organisation long-term I could see where things weren’t really working much more clearly than when I first started and it was more frustrating when I couldn’t change it.

I don’t regret working there at all, I’m genuinely proud of the work they did and that I did with them, and I’m confident they’re going to go on to do great things in future. It just doesn’t mesh with the things I want to do in the future any more.

But if I’d left one of these reviews when I left it would be very, very different to one from when I started, or even just before I decided I should leave. And I imagine the same will be true when I come to leave my current job.

Daharahj.1325:

Chronic understaffing, unreasonably ambitious schedules and product development cycles. Steady increase in number and scope of projects, and in quality expectations, but no increase in staff.

This seems to be the biggest offender, it’s also something that the community has been pointing out for a long time especially since HoT launch.

My interpretation of the communities complaints has been the complete opposite.

The most common complaints I’ve seen recently are that they should not have stopped the Living Story while developing HoT, there wasn’t enough content in HoT, they should make more armor and weapon skins to be available in-game, alongside the ones in the gem store, they should do balance patches much more frequently, they should fix all the bugs immediately (or at least before everything else), and they shouldn’t expect any more money (or any money at all) in return.

That sounds like expecting the staff to do a lot more work, in a shorter time frame, without funding for more staff.

It sounds like you just wanted to let off steam rather than ask for solutions, but here’s my thoughts anyway.

I don’t like achievements either. I thought they were a stupid idea when I first heard about them – an easy way to give Xbox players something even more arbitrary to brag about and I was genuinely surprised to see them catch on in so many games, especially RPGs which IMO already had a perfectly good quest system to cover any useful purpose achievements could have.

I still don’t particularly like them, I have no interest in collecting achievement points in any game and I’m not going to do something just because there’s an achievement for it. But I also don’t think it’s worth refusing to do something simply because there’s an achievement for it. Especially when in some games, GW2 included, that would make it impossible to play at all.

Based on that I think one thing that might help you is to try and shift how you’re thinking about it. Forget about the fact that mastery points are linked to achievements and just think of it as a checklist of things you can do to get mastery points. Like going on the wiki to find out which bosses have the elite skill you want in GW1, but in-game.

As for the actual activities involved I think the idea is they didn’t want people to be able to grind mastery points by doing just one thing over and over again. Partially because it’s supposed to be a long-term progression thing and partially because they don’t seem to like that design in general. So I think it’s highly unlikely they would make it possible to get them all through guild missions, or any other single activity. (In spite of the fact that in this case you actually seem to agree with the majority – who mainly way to complete masteries quickly and easily.)

But I’m pretty sure there are more mastery points available than you need, especially if you’re not worried about maxing out every single mastery, so it should be possible to choose the activities you like most (or hate least) to get them from and avoid things you really dislike doing.

There’s no way to know what happened, nor is it the business of these forums. But there’s an implication you said something nasty in gchat, screenshots were taken to log it, and this guy took umbrage right or wrong.

It’s not he-said-she-said if there’s proof of what was said and done, y’know. (My credentials: uncounted number of he-said-she-said defenses in trials over two decades. It always sucked when someone had videos etc to prove their version, if it was useful against my client …)

People can be so dramatic. I don’t see why private commander tags need to be a thing. If random wvw players join in then whats the problem exactly? If you’re trying to conduct a guild wvw event, then the more the merrier. If random players can interfere to an extent that you can’t complete your guild event, then that kind of interference (due to numbers) is a problem many would be glad to have. Its a recruitment opportunity for your guild.

If you have a problem using commander tag on your server, as it interferes with your server’s regular map commander, then its your server’s issue. They need to deal with it.

I run my guild’s wvw activities, and to this day I do not think any second of development time should be wasted towards developing private commander tag.

Could it be harmful? Of course. Guilds could decide to only put up a private commander tag, effectively forcing random players to join guilds to participate in wvw. That is a worse outcome than what we have at the moment.

Random players are not a negative reason to implement an enhancing feature. Thats the kind of elitist logic that I’m glad should not be entertained.

New to the Gem Store! A new backpack in the style of a cute Asura bride in her wedding dress!

Ok, so it’s not – it’s just my Asura, Spekka, who was sat down on a pedestal decoration, which got removed, and a Norn stood with his back to me, at just the right height to form a Spekka Backpack!!

Any chance of this coming to fruition though, ArenaNet?

You’re probably not going to get a great reaction to this since you’ve basically disguised one dead horse topic (player housing) as another (mounts). Either people won’t read the actual topic and will just react to the title with negative/sarcastic comments, or they will read the topic….and react with slightly different negative/sarcastic comments.

As for your actual idea this is pretty much what I thought they were going to do when, before release, they said our home instances would change as we progressed through the storyline. I imagined NPCs moving in, new things appearing, decorative mementos/trophies being available, either automatically or something we could choose to display like the Hall of Monuments in GW1.

Pretty much how I use my house in Elder Scrolls games – I’d hide useful stuff and/or stuff I was saving to sell when I had a better merchantile skill in chests and display random things like dragon bones, amusing books I’d found, musical instruments I’d stolen borrowed etc.

There is a bit of this, as NPCs from the storyline will appear, but the fact that they don’t really do anything or interact with you in any way makes it feel unfinished. Elli (the asura announcer/hologram fighter) just stands staring at a wall in the human instance and doesn’t react at all if you talk to her…it’s kind of creepy.

I’d like to see them build on it, but at this point it seems unlikely.

I would’ve bought them at 1000 gems per slot. It’s a huge convenience for altoholics.

Whether skipping is intended or not is meaningless.

We aren’t playing the game Anet intended to make; we’re playing the game Anet actually made. In the game Anet actually made it’s objectively better to skip anything that can be skipped.

Jia Shen.4217:

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but this is one skimpy slot that holds just one item? If so are people nuts, paying $9 to save yourself a few seconds each time you decide to play on a different character and want to transfer items to that character. I wouldn’t even spend $1 for just one of that. You do realize for 600 gems you can get a whole bank tab? And even at that price I feel it is overpaying for something that should be gained as a in game reward. I’m not normally one to cry price gouging but this item qualifies as a price gouge if I ever seen one.

It’s a pure conveniance item, you’re saying so yourself.

Is it expensive? Absolutely.

Is it mandatory? No.

Does it multiply the value of your other conveniance items? Yes, and that’s it’s main draw. People now can get 1 permanent tool, salvage-o-matic, royal pass, etc.

Pricing the item any lower than 700 gems would devalue multiple of those permanent items (most of them priced at 1,000 gems) even more.

You are forgetting the crowd of people who have:

- full bank tabs
- full material tab extenders
- salvage-o-matics
- royal access passes (any of them)
- more than 5 characters (most veterans are going on 10-20 at the moment)

To any one of these, the new shared slot is of quite high value. It even increases the usefulness of permanent access merchants. Permanent Bank access is now a god send and allows combined with 1 shared slot bank access on ALL your characters, everywhere.

EDIT: speaking of permanent bank access express, look which item just quadrupled in value https://www.gw2tp.com/item/35984-permanent-bank-access-contract

Charrbeque.8729:

Why does ArenaNet have to make things so complicated?

It should be simple.

Are you sure it would be simple..?

Where is the button?
How do I press the button?
Why do I have to press a button to get something?
What button?
Where is the bacon that comes when I press the button?
What do I do with bacon?
Why the bacon is not good enough?
Why do I have to press the button with every character?

Alga.6498:

Can’t wait for GW3!!

I’m mostly playing GW4 (because wvw is better there) until GW3 is released…

Because it’s much easier to worry about things you can’t have, then care about things you can get all the time.

They understand this all too well.

They’ll very likely send you back the infusion. Definitely open a support ticket.

If you want to stack, run with people who want to stack. If you want to do it normally, run with people who want to do it normally.

Good luck finding people who don’t want to stack now that it’s not even worth the time to rush through a dungeon though.

Everyone is complaining that this is a gold sink. Somehow, they’ve completely missed the very prominent purple triangle that’s attached to about every item being bought and consumed, every activity being run, and every bonus being posted by friendly guilds. This was a karma sink. With 6 days left on this, I figured it might be worthwhile to give some tips I noticed while doing this stuff.

• Every activity has a daily bonus in rewards (haven’t verified this with Toypacalypse or Mayhem). With Infinirarium, you get double the presents the first time you do it. With WW and Bells, you get a separate reward of ~6k karma for each of your first three successful completions (runs or songs), in addition to the usual 1.5k.

• You can buy presents with Karma. The same karma you do nothing else with the rest of the year. The same karma you get by the hundreds from events and by the thousands for doing Wintersday games. Presents get expensive fast; long time players already have millions stored up, but you can still rake in 100-200k in short order hanging around Divinity’s Reach doing Wintersday things.

• To accomplish this, take advantage of every karma boost available to you before setting out in DR. Karma food and utilities come from presents by the fistful. Pop a Winter’s Blessing and keep Minty Breath up from Candy Canes. Your guild bartender might have a 24h karma boost for you. Equip your karma infusion if you have it. Karma banners and bonfires are pretty easy to find in the Wintersday area. Finally, add a karma booster if you can’t find a bonfire.

My current daily:

• With Karma boosts active, run Donation Drive to all 30 orphans. You should net 35k+ karma from this (60k+ if you don’t have to buy gifts for the orphans).
• Visit all three trees in DR for your free presents. Get the daily one from Tixx, too.
• Do a full round of Bell Choir with karma boosts for 18 presents and 30k-42k karma.
• Do three runs through the infernal JP for 30 presents and 24k-36k karma.
• Do Infinirarium for 50 presents and ~6k karma.
• Do any dailies involving snow and not involving skritt.
• Buy as many presents as I think I can from the karma trader (50-90).
• Leave DR and pursue dailies everywhere else. Retain sanity.

Cedric Ambidexter.9174:

Okay,

So I think i’m officially ‘tired’ of the pvE game structure now. I noticed it about 3 days ago when I logged in and just found myself running between towns feeling extremely bored with the constant missions and aimless mob attacks to get points.

I have a level 62 mesmer. I’m no longer interested in levelling her up. I also have three low-level characters, a human revenant a norn warrior and norn ranger, but I won’t even bother with those either… I was interested in exploring the different lores of the races. It seemed like fun at first. But it’s just the same endless crap. And after buying a whole set of new armour for my mesmer I realized I don’t have the interest or patience to spend that much time in the store doing it again.

Also, one thing that got to me: I wanted to test out the crafting element of the game, so I bought enough ingredients and made half a greatsword. then I returned with more ingredients to make the rest as I ran out – only to find out that the crafting station was closed because of some stupid ‘failed experiment’ which had green creatures running around. If that’s an excuse to add diversity to the game, then my face is blank. REALLY?? So I finished the sword the following day when the ridiculous mission was over and crafted my sword!

It just seems pointless. I remember feeling this way with gw1 – the only difference was that that didn’t happen until about a year later. And from that point forward I only logged in to have fun in Random Arenas.

I think the core of the pve is still the same as the original game and that’s probably why I’m completely bored of the game now, and have no feel to play it, which is a shame.

a.) It takes about 48-72 hours of /played time to hit max level. That is without any bonus experience from crafting or other methods of advancing in pve levels. We are talking first character new to the game time required.

b.) There are crafting stations in every racial city. There are way points unlocked for every character in the starter Zone next to every racial city. Lions Arch has a Gate Way hub which interconnects every major city. Not having access to ac rafting station is not an issue.

c.) You get 10 levels per month for free just for loging in.

d.) Every 10 levels you get story missions worth about 2.5-3 levels worth of experience.

e.) Open the trading post -> select armor -> select chest -> configure options to show only blue/green/yellow items which are +/- 2 levels of you current level -> buy item -> select next armor slot -> buy item ->repeat process for every armor slot. Repeat process for weapons. Done. Takes no longer than maximum 1 minute.

Maybe, just maybe you are not that big of an expert at this game as you think you are.

The other poster wondering if you have been grinding enemys for experience was valid. You complain over so basic and simple processes which are streamlined and simple in GW2 that your complaint comes more off as you not actually knowing how to proceed.

Now you not enjoying the story or other aspects of the game is a possibility. Nothing of what you actually mentioned is the problem. If the game is not your deal, fine.

Cedric Ambidexter.9174:

They need to make this game more interesting and take away the demoralising mission/mob grinding as a pve mainstay. They suck.

Just my opinion. It’s what killed the fun for me, after what is just a few weeks.

I might log in occasionally to run around in WvW.

Any thoughts?

See above. My thought is, you have not even grasped the beginning of what GW2 is and have given up. Which is fine.

But your assessment and verdict are off by miles.

Or, here’s an idea:

Let people play the market, because they find it fun, and they aren’t actually breaking the market for anyone.

Market speculators don’t control prices in GW2, and they never have. There is no market cartel making your ingame life difficult. Those TP fees exist specifically because they are one of four gold sinks in the entire game, the other three being waypoints, salvage kits, and harvesting tools. Two of those four being completely avoidable with a gem store purchase. The cost of waypointing is purposely a near zero sum, and is not a meaningful sink. Most sinks in terms of ingame items acquired with raw currency are extremely cheap one time purchases. That leaves TP fees, a basic income tax that is the only reliable way for currency to leave the economy in perpetuity.

Without the TP fees, inflation would run stupidly rampant. I don’t think I need to explain to you why that’s bad.

John Smith and Anet control prices. Soft wood wasn’t up to ridiculous prices because of market speculators. It was up there because there was a sudden massive surge in demand without any corresponding surge in supply. The entire guild hall upgrade system, scribing, the wintersday karma bags, everything is built around a strictly managed system of supply and demand. People playing that market are working within that system, and with the region-wide trading post it’s virtually impossible to completely monopolize a given item market for any length of time. I can’t understand what your problem is, other than that you are trying to sell competitively in a competitive system, but you don’t seem willing to invest time and effort in to competing.

Furthermore, Anet has repeatedly gone out of its way to place many modes of acquisition and advancement outside of the market entirely through account and soulbound items. This is a tightly managed market specifically to stop market flippers from disrupting it too heavily. As a result, they don’t disrupt it too heavily.

I can’t think of any reason to disallow a form of play that many people find fun. Many many players play MMOs specifically to play the markets. That only becomes a problem when those players are permitted to monopolize item markets and jack up prices unreasonably. That just doesn’t seem to be a problem in GW2.

Adding gliding to the core game would add absolutely nothing to the core game, and require a significant amount of work to keep gliding from actually breaking many maps, JPs, and other content.

In stead of revamping old content for no other reason than because people want to glide, I’d rather see new content being developed.

For me it’s simple. I only buy items I really want. If it’s part of a bundle with items I don’t want, I don’t buy it. Conclusion: I’ve never bought a bundle and probably never will.

Swagger.1459:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Swagger.1459:

I have a better idea… Make a better game. Get professions out of alpha phase. Offer good stuff in the gem store that people want to buy.

Good thing that’s what ANet did:

• Lots of people really like HoT.
• Lots of people buy stuff in the gem shop.
• Lots of people like the new specs a lot.

Just because it might not be the direction you would like to see for the game, don’t assume that everyone feels the same. (I have no idea if “lots of” is “enough” that ANet feels HoT is successful.)

And yet gw2 still leaves a lot to be desired and completed and worked on and paid attention to.

And yet you cannot name one MMO that this is not true of. The only MMO forums where you don’t see a lot of asks for desired stuff, bugs fixed, content provided, profession worked on, etc. are the ones no one posts on because they no longer care. I’d guess that if Anet doubled its productivity, there would still be as many complaints.