Guild Wars 2

From Colin’s earlier post

“We’d also like to add more value and use to blue/green items, so things like killing vets feels more rewarding when those type of items drop when doing those events in Orr as well.”

Anyone care to speculate on what this could involve and the repercussions on the economy?

My first thought was that they would increase the vendor value – but that’s silly because that would only result in inflation, and in the long-run it won’t make a difference (if they adjusted npc prices)

Then I realized that they could actually use blues/greens as a conversion system to address a problem that will arise in a month or two – supply of t6 mats.

Right now t6 mats come from very few places and can only be yielded in large quantities through forge promotions. But I think the rate at which they are being created by the game is far lower than the rate of consumption at the forge.

This can be solved by including T6 mats in the salvage loot table of blues/greens.

i.e. a blue weapon/armor will have the same loot table as a moldy bag, while a green weapon/armor will yield a random t6 mat, plus a small chance at a lodestone

Anyone else care to share some potential ideas on what they are going to do?

(meanwhile I’m going to sell my +3000 pieces of sacs/totems)

Eventually, there will be new legendaries, but they want to revamp how precursors are acquired first. The first new legendaries are expected to be for the current silly ones (they pointed out the pistol) so that something more legendary is available.

They first mentioned new legendary skins months ago. Don’t expect this to happen anytime soon. Probably not even within 6 months. They’ll probably come with something major, since legendaries shouldn’t just casually be thrown into the game.

Well to be fair there is a giant dragon zombie making tons of zombie minions, so if you really want to get into the RP element you could just actually consider recently killed mobs zombies.

The problem with the story isn’t the fact that they had to give credit of slaying Zhaitan to another lore character.
The problem is that that they did it in the worst possible way.

The existence of Trahearne just isn’t necessary. There were way better candidates for doing everything he achieved by a character or characters who actually makes more sense.

Let me explain why.
The pact doesn’t need a marshal to begin with. It could very easily be 3 completely autonomous orders fighting for same goal with an agreement of co-belligerence as every order already has a leader to begin with.
Every order gets attacked by Zhaitan at one point + the claw island incident, after that the threat should be enough to motivate all 3 sides to sign at least a co-belligerence pact, if not a even an alliance.
You could still shovel everybody to Orr AND your order would still maintain its identity, as it’s still being led by it’s original leader. (not to mention the focus of the personal story could still be kept on you)

Now to the next point.
The cleansing of Orr
It could have been easily done with Destiny’s Edge and it would have made more sense in lore standpoint.

Well known band of heroes, introduced to every player at very early stage in posession of not 1, but 2 Legendary human swords having divine power in them performing the cleansing of Orr, a human holy land?

Absolutely no reason to invent a new character to perform this as the Destiny’s Edge is quite clearly the more sensible choice.

Why does Trahearne exist? The only real qualifications he has is to become an advisor and even then there are people who have studied the subject longer than his entire race has existed.

There simply is no other reason for the existence of Trahearne, except the fact that somebody fell in love with their own character so much that he thought “You know what? screw the other characters, this is about this guy now.” They literally shove him to your face and expect you to think that he is the next best thing since sex, despite never been given a single reason to like the person.

The real kick in the teeth is the fact that every NPC constantly praises him like he is some sort of holy man and how with him they finally have a chance. Completely disregarding the fact that whenever he goes to fight ANY enemy 1 on 1, he dies.

EVERY SINGLE TIME

Rather then uprooting him, and changing the personal storyline dramatically, add another part where we learn a lot more about him, we make him our friend and confidant and him us, and allow us to like him a lot more then people obviously do. Make him personable and a leader that was truely thrust into the position and does an outstanding job with it.. don’t just add a character we barely know to be the leader of the free races, without a background and have us blindly follow the guy through thick or thin.. make us love him, make us respect him. Thats what should be done, that way when we see him take up the mantle of responsibility we see exactly the internal choices he makes and respect him all the more for making it and being thrust into it.

Because there are a zillion games out there, and X number of hours in the day. Because people have real lives that take time. Because people are frustrated with some of the bugs and don’t have patience for bug fixes (they think ten months is a long time in programming terms). Because some people exhausted all the content. Because some people like other games better. Because some people stopped gaming. Because some people have friends that play other games. Because other MMOs have gone free to play. Because new MMOs have come out and they want to try them.

I’ve seen a number of people leave the game and I’ve seen quite a few return to the game as well.

In the end, people leave for all different reasons, not just one.

It’s entirely possible this is a niche game and those who find this niche stay and those who don’t like this niche go to find another one.

I’d say with the possible exception of WoW, every single other MMO is a niche game. There are bigger niches and smaller niches. Guild Wars 2 is actually a bigger niche because it offers an experience most other games don’t. Other games tend to be smaller niches, because they’re all trying to appeal to the exact same type of player.

But you don’t need 10 million people to have a successful MMO. Eve is successful and has half a million.

The days of 10 million player MMOs are pretty much gone, at least until a decent MMO comes out for consoles (because so many people play console games).

Truly good players don’t advertise…. they ‘show’ it by simply playing. Jumping in and helping people out that are losing a fight, offering their assistance to someone asking for help with no expectation of any type of repayment. They are humble, and most will tell you (if asked) that they aren’t good players.

People that shout that they are ‘good players’, ‘have skillz’, or advertise ‘pro x’ usually tend to be jackkittens that (in fact) aren’t good players.

The price is doing as it is expected to do.

Normally when new content is released there is a segment of the population that has to have the new shiny NOW. These people drive the price up rapidly. In a day or two the price will fall and the item will establish at normal price.

This is the reason I sold all my mini’s at 1g50s or above as soon as I got them yesterday. I encouraged all my guild members to sell and wait for the price to drop and rebuy.

Understanding basic human behavior can help when you are looking at how an items price fluctuates over time. The mini will continue to drop in price until near the end of the patch, jump in price suddenly, refall back down, then slowly climb in price as long as the item is not made available again.

Arenanet is very sorry for all the inconvenience it caused to people who were selling Crystalline Dust for profit. It was thoughtless of them to make a rare item easier to get for people who do not spend hours a day in Orr, without considering the fact that Dust-selling is the only way to earn good gold in this game.

That having been said, the others are correct when they say this can AND DOES happen in real life. The price of a commodity can rise drastically if its source suffers some sort of disaster (natural or otherwise) that brings production to a near or complete halt. Conversely, the discovery of a new source of a rare good can drop its price greatly – and the discovery of something that does the same thing, but better, can cause the old good to become nearly worthless. All in a very short time period.

And this doesn’t even have to be a result of supply and demand. This CAN be artificially induced – governments have passed legislatures regulating upper limits to which prices can be made, if a market for a necessary item becomes so competitive that consumers cannot pay the prices being asked. (Profitmongering on food stores during a famine, for example.)

As these are completely fictitious items bought with fictitious currency*, trying to make prices based on the rises and falls of such a market sounds very much like speculative venturing to me, and that has proven twice that it is perfectly capable of falling very fast. In recent(-ish) years, we had the “dot-com crash”, where people learned the hard way that investing into Internet business ventures is NOT a “sure thing”. But more famously, the entire stock market had the famous crash of 1929, which crippled the global economy for years afterward. (Yes, global: crashes hit both the U.S. market AND the European markets at nearly the same time, and the combined effects shook the financial world.) Similar to the modern, online crash, the people of the 1920s were firm in the belief that the high values in the stock market were a “sure thing”, and that they would only continue to rise, and rise, and rise.

• (Never mind the fact that the fictitious currency can be indirectly bought with real currency; the GW2 economy is not, itself, based on real currency, but on in-game gold, because that gold cannot be turned BACK into real money, ever.)

Fundamentally, this is not one whit different from people who play the Trading Post. It’s more of a speculative commodities market than a stock exchange, but the fundamental principles are the same for both (especially since these commodities are not “real”).

Arenanet has said from the beginning that they have someone whose JOB is to keep an eye on the game’s economy. If they feel that an item is becoming too highly priced for its in-game purpose (or too low!), they will introduce measures to adjust it. As things go, I think that it’s better they introduce it with a method like “ectos salvage for dust now” than to simply change the numbers directly (OK, everyone, half price on all Crystalline Dust entries).

Further to Nashiri and KrazyKorean’s posts – we are also looking for more in the Oceanic time zones. Our numbers are growing and it would be fantastic to have new people join us not just for pve but for wvw and pvp as well.

Whatever your play style, hours, casual or ‘hard core’ you will find a guild that suits you. Come on in and shout g’day.

Fun the SBI way begins now

OP, notice that your problems started not with a shift in design goals or game mechanics, but with a shift in the way the community consumed content. I agree that certain recent additions to the game have felt….well, not quite up to par, but these changes strike me as reactionary.

*People complain about no endgame progression: add Fractals.
*People complain about no reason to go back to old areas: Add rewards for dailies in those areas.
*People complain about missing out on the big one time events: change to month long mini-events.
*People complain about there not being enough armor and weapon sets, and seeing them all all the time because they are so easy to get: add new weapon skins with each update that are temporary and hard to get, keeping them rare.

I agree with you that Arena Net has strayed from the path we all hoped it would follow, but I disagree that it was due to greed. No; I think it was due to necessity. A necessity that we created.

2000hrs / 10months
2000hrs ingame from total 7200
if you sleep at least 8hours/day – you were in game 2/5 of your all free time!
After that I wouldnt just dislike one game, but I would hate all games lol.
Which reminds me – South Park S10E08 =)

2000 hours…. Take a break man, play some other games. Sounds like burnout

And while they are at it, please work on removing the tag of a completely downed player from the oppositions viewpoint. It gets real messy in large fights.

Just because something is nerfed doesn’t mean you can’t farm it still. Stop crying.

Tired of hearing these casual vs hardcore debates.

Casuals make up a majority of the player base, buy the fluff on the gem store, and pay for the bulk of new updates.

Hardcores push the content, force developers to make and develope new content, and are more proactive in identifying game issues.

A successful game needs both sets of players.

Catering to the hardcore is ruining this game. This is supposed to be the alternative to all the boring, repetitive, Skinner Box nonsense in the MMO genre. If you want endgame like in WoW/Rift/SWTOR then go play WoW/Rift/SWTOR; this game isn’t meant for you.

The answer to this question during beta (when they made the band-aid fix of loot bags, since originally it was the same as PvE, you had to find the corpse….) was that the game engine itself needed a major overhaul to accomplish the loot——>inventory transition, as apparently it wasn’t possible to code into the current way the engine handles loot.

tl;dr
Engine needs major overhaul to “fix” this issue.