Guild Wars 2

Blackmoon.6837:

Then again, I don’t play just for loot… so I guess my opinion is irrelevant. =P Come on peeps, where’s your sense of adventure? Didn’t you ever have those childhood days where you could get completely lost in games like ‘The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time’ or some FFVII? Just by comparison on graphics and content, GW2 is enormous and yet you fly by it without batting an eyelash.

The sense of adventure is a great point to bring up. Despite your criticisms of loot and the meta, GW was great about making that adventure last even through the same content. To really have a sense of adventure you need danger and rewards (rewards covering multiple philosophies). In GW: UW, FoW and the HM EoTn dungeons, Vanquishes, and Cartography were always dangerous. Even with experienced speed clear groups, one mistake could be disastrous to hours of effort.

For me, a lot of that sense of adventure is lost because you never really have the danger of failure. Even the most challenging content can be brute forced by waypointing and running in to it over and over again. “Best” loot is really subjective because of the stat plateau, but to give a direct example: after a long hard fight through Underworld and satisfying victory over Dhuum, you knew you would get some neat weapon skins, valuable mats, a novelty summoning stone that would come in handy eventually and maybe, just maybe, a gangster kittening scythe or bad kitten rare miniature. In the new dungeons you can count on vendor trash and tokens to buy something with after you do the dungeon at least three more times.

I don’t feel challenged, I don’t feel there is any danger, I don’t feel I was rewarded for overcoming significant obstacles. And that’s something I could never say about GW.

There is something to be said about the adventure in discovery, but you can only discover the same thing so many times. And it trivializes the discovery when there was nothing to challenge the path. The view from the top of a mountain is appreciated more by the person that climbed it than by the person that got a free ride to the top. In GW there were very few free rides, while GW2 gives you mobs that get disinterested in defending their territory after chasing you for ten yards and the waypoint express if you screw up. The latter isn’t adventure. Its tourism.

Edit: Let me reiterate, I am still not hating on the game. I didn’t put in hundreds of hours over four months because I couldn’t find things to enjoy. But I am still of the opinion this game is a sequel in name and fiction alone and doesn’t feel like a successor, spiritual or otherwise, to the game aspect and principles of the original. I don’t see the things GW1 players, by a large, loved and am not surprised to see some older fans not getting hooked by it like they did the first series.

I can’t share the sentiment for Dark Souls. But I have sort of had the same feeling about GW2. Im not sure what O’Brien meant when he said “We took everything you loved about GW1…”, because the history is pretty much the only thing that has carried over.

Perhaps Anet did not really understand what people actually loved about GW1 and what kept them playing for seven years.

And this is coming from a huge fan. Over 900 hours in GW2 already, thousands of hours logged in on GW, and who knows how much money I’ve thrown at them.

I don’t think its a bad game by any means. But I do think design decisions were catered towards more mass market appeal and speedy/low impact content generation than they were to fans of the franchise.

GW2 did some innovative things within the mmo genre, it extends the story of Guild Wars, but it doesn’t feel anything like an evolution of its predecessor.

Just out of curiosity has the OP considered that the game just recently hit being more than four months old?

In that time we have seen Fractals, a new sPvP map, orbs removed from WvW and breakout mechanics, new recipes, a ton of new dynamic events (mind you, its hard to tell on a new character was is new, or what you just missed before), new mini dungeons, titles, achievements, Lost Shores (for better or worse it was a free zone added), jumping puzzles, the Modus Sceleris and the Skritt Burglar to hunt for. And that was in addition to the Halloween and Wintersday events and temporary content they both added.

So far we have gotten updates that didn’t just modify, but added new things to the game almost every month since its launch. For a game that could be considered still in it’s infancy (out for less than two quarters), I think thats pretty impressive. And just as the game hits six months old we will be getting huge free content update.

Losing interest in the game because you got bored, burnt out, something else piqued your interest, or maybe it doesn’t scratch a particular itch in your gaming needs…ok, I get that. Happens to everyone with some game at some point. But losing interest because the game doesn’t appear to be being supported or getting new stuff? That’s way off the mark.

Heinel.6548:

It’s actually not a new idea from Anet. EVE had something like this since a long long time ago.

As far as I knew the EVE app didn’t let you chat with your guild and friends list, manage guild, and see player locations and activities on the map in real time, and was more of a market tool and skill calculator. At least before 2009, when GW announced the extended experience would do exactly all those things and showed a working demo at a convention.

But I could very well be mistaken.

Since then the plan changed to instead release an API that would allow fans to hook in to some of the games systems and create our own apps and tools.

Lots of people are eagerly waiting for that to see what we can come up with.

But that info was some time in September, so maybe the plan has changed again. They have gone dark on the API, mobile stuff, and web interfaces that Kate Welch was talking about in interviews last February.

For all we know, it’s all been scrapped.

It really is a shame we have none of that stuff since that was a key selling point and a unique aspect of Guild Wars 2 and its social features. Not long after the announcements of those things, other existing MMOs jumped on the train and released apps to do similar things. So now older games have the stuff we were supposed to have, inspired by Anet, and we are still waiting for some shreds of info.

You can make any emote you like. It wont have an animation, but everyone sees it all the same.

Type /me action, and it will pop up.

Example: /me purrs
displays: Kismet purrs

Little piece of advice…check out the “things I wish I knew when I started” stickied thread in the players helping players section of the forums. It has lots of little tricks that newer players miss.

Also, look in to the traits system. Starting at level 11 you get one point per level and spend them on the hero screen. That’s where the meat and potatoes of your character is really at and how you tailor it to your play style. It may seem like a “durr” thing to most people reading, but I’ve known more than a few players that didn’t have a clue about traits or what to do with the books from the trainers until they were way past level 11. You can go to the mists pvp area, which unlocks all skills and trait points, to experiment with different things before investing the skill/trait points in PvE. It lets you find a build and flesh out your character so you know what direction you want to go in as you level.

I have the hat. But…do you have the white t-shirt with red logo? Do you? O.O

Keiran.1896:

Throwing rares is actually stupid.

When you throw 4 rares, you have like 5% chance to get an exotic.
When you throw 4 exotic, you are guaranted to get an exotic.

So your chance to get a precursor, whatever they are, are divided by 20 whenever you use rares. Are exotics 20x more expensive than rares? No. Conclusion: it’s much cheaper to use exotics.

Also, when you use the 4 cheaper exotics of the TP, (ex: worth 2g/ea), you have a chance to get an exotic that worth much more. Like 5 gold. So in the end, it will only cost you 3 gold.

Someone else posted a good trick a while back that was confirmed by others to work. Just tried searching but couldn’t find it, maybe someone here remembers…

It was something along the lines of being able to use three level 70 rares (which were significantly cheaper since they are below the ecto salvage min) and one level 80 exotic could make precursors and was significantly cheaper than buying four level 75+ exotics or rares.

Mind you, that might not have been the exact trick, but it was close to that so I’m hoping it sparks someones memory that can recall more accurately or remembers the name of the thread.

Knowing that there are changes coming soon to legendary crafting and ascended crafting and how pre-cursors are obtained, it’s sort of silly to be wasting time and resources on making one now.

I’d recommend holding off on it until at least Feb to see if the changes go live then. Could end up saving you hundreds of gold and freeing up the time to work on some other things.

Mungrul.9358:

-snip-

That is ridiculous. Once again you are stuck in the mindset that raids require a gear-grind and are super elitist content and development vacuums.

Did you play GW? If you did then you know the two party co-op missions in Factions were a blast. Urgoz was a great dungeon. Underworld and Fissure of Woe were done well enough to stay relevant for over half a decade.

And unless you were trying to get on to a very very specific speed farming group, then anyone could do that content. If you wanted to get in to those speed clears eventually, practice groups were constantly being run.

You should stop trying to pigeon hole the simple idea in to something identically done in many other games. Especially when Anet has done this already before and done it well.

Edit:
Arah is really the only dungeon that is long, difficult and open enough for this situation to apply, but lets say Arah was an 8 man-party instance, how would that change anything or how would any of your concerns apply to it? They wouldn’t. The only thing that would change would be that guilds and friends could play it in a larger group and people that would otherwise never have the chance will get to complete it.

That very simple concept is what people are talking about here. Instances along the lines of Arah in terms of length, with the difficulty adjusted for larger groups, so there are more things to do with more people.

No one is trying to apply the idea of traditional raid content and raid end-game and raid tiers to GW2, except for you in your criticisms.

Why is this in suggestions now? The OP was a question, and we are discussing the merits and issues with larger party, instanced PvE content and it’s impact on “end-game” perceptions. Besides some hypothetical solutions to convey an idea, this wasn’t a suggestion thread, so why condemn it to the abyss?

Sylv.5324:

No. It wouldn’t. The problem isn’t the word, it’s that you want a special tier that only certain guilds can reliably complete.

What in the world makes you think that? Did anyone ever say there should be a sign on the dungeon door that didn’t let anyone in unless every party member had the same guild tag?

Pugs can still complete hard content, pugs can still use voice chat.

If there were 8,10,12 man group events and challenges you would still be having people make groups for it in LA just like anything else. And you have the choice to be in multiple guilds if you don’t want to pug, and would like to be on a roster considered for that type of content because your guild doesn’t dig on it.

It sounds like you are worried you wouldn’t be able to find a group to do something of that nature, and rather than accept there are other possibilities you would just prefer no one at all has the option.

If you don’t remember, at launch there was a huge amount of noise about how the dungeons would only be able to be done by guilds because they were sooooo hard and mobs did sooooo much damage. Colin said to wait and see how players adapt, and look at them now? Pug groups everywhere for every dungeon. But that doens’t mean anything should be “reliable to complete”. It’s a game not a movie, there shouldn’t be a pay-off for just sitting there long enough looking at the screen.

Would it make some of you feel better to just remove the word “raid”, and change it to “larger, challenging, group focused PvE activities that require team coordination”?

We don’t have that now. World bosses are massive zergs where the other players might as well be NPCs for all they effect you. An occasional boon, maybe a res if you screw up. They don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know what they are doing, and it really doesn’t matter. Might as well be playing with 30 Trehearnes.

Dungeons (with minor exception) are rote and can be done with no communication other than the occasional “skip this”, “ill run this”, " ::ping lucky drop in /p ::". Even Fractals are straight forward enough that parties don’t need to communicate.

In GW, over the course of seven years, you could have done Underworld or Fissure of Woe hundreds of time with other people that have also done it hundreds of times, but you would all still have to chat, plan, ping mobs, doodle approaches on the map. And when you failed, you failed hard. It was brilliant.

That’s what people are asking for, all stigmas of a “raid” removed, we want to play with larger groups of people through content that demands more and challenges us as players and as a cooperative, cohesive, highly functional group.

MrMacAndCheese.3907:

In Spearhead Bane, the grave of Kilroy Stonekin, “known for blindly charging into battle”. Reference to Leeroy Jenkins.

Kilroy Stoneskin was actually a character in GW:Prophecies that would run in to mobs in Sorrows Furnace (now Sorrow’s Embrace) screaming “Kiiiiiiiilllrroooooy”.

So the grave itself is more of a tribute to a character in the original game that was a reference to Leeroy Jenkins.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Kilroy

Mayam.8976:

-snip-

Just copy this in to its own post, really.

It should be its own discussion.

The problem though, that I foresee, is that the people that already consider the type of things you mentioned in your post will be the ones that actually read it, and the ones that should read it and consider their content will just say “tl;dr” and jump to the first controversial topic they can to rage a little more.

I have to agree with needing raids. And there was a time I was on Anet’s side to not have them. I think, like a lot of other people though I was associating raids with gear-grind, lockouts and long waits to organize.

But they really don’t need to be like that. Larger dungeons with a higher player cap (similar to Urgoz for GW1 vets) would suffice just as well.

The bottom line is there needs to be PvE content for larger groups of players that requires communication and planning. It would do worlds to improve guild interaction.

WvW guilds do really well and have a tighter member base because they can form together in a squad, get on voice chat, strategize and take on challenging objectives that are large or small against other players.

There is nothing in PvE that calls for that. So PvE guilds end up with players that solo most of the time while maybe having a dungeon group or two going that they are cycling people in and out of to try and involve everyone.

Even the dungeons, with exception to Arah and one of the CoF paths can be done with an entire pug group that never has to say one word to one another.

Give us a 12 man underworld that is hard as balls with the Fractal death system and you will have more pVe players more involved with each other and an actual in game reason to interact with your guildmates.

Hell, even just extend the party size for Arah to eight. It will make the explorable paths a bit easier and faster, but they are already unapproachable to most players as is. You would have more people experiencing the content, with a larger group of their friends, doing something in a reasonable amount of time, that is still challenging and requires players interacting with each other instead of a small group of players now that just use terrain glitching for chest farming.

GW2 needs an Urgoz. Or the dual party instances from factions. Something.

Edit:
This post is made understanding entirely that the game is just barely over four months old. In software development four months is barely any time at all in regard to producing something worthwhile. The design process alone for the type of thing we are discussing could take a month, and the art could take longer. Modifying the tools to allow for raids would probably take less time (because programmers are more efficient than artists :p ). The live team actually did amazing turning out the holiday events in as little time as they had.

I hope everyone keeps that in mind when considering these types of things. Anet was against raids and wanted to keep party sizes at 5. Now that they have seen the game in the wild, how people are playing, how it is received, and the state of PvE and guilds I hope they reconsider some of those original intentions.

evo.8640:

Not only that, but ecto prices would have gone well past the 1.2g per. Seeing as how there is only roughly 3,000 all under 1g. Prices never went above 29s per.

Barring the fact I already admitted the dude may have been lying and there is no way I can prove otherwise even though I personally think he wasn’t since all this guy did was fractals or sit in front of the TP for 13 hours a day, I think its more likely he knew something you dont…

I’m curious at how you think an increase in ecto in the market would have made the price increase? The supply was increasing, sellers were undercutting each other to quickly turn a profit on the materials they essentially got for free. So the price drops. Which it did.

There was no reason for the exploiters to buy up ecto. They could propagate it. Now i’m not an economics major, but I cant get where you are getting the idea that supply would drop and prices would rise because of an influx of the material.

evo.8640:

As someone who routinely produces 100g an hour playing the TP, and I’m well aware gross income levels from manipulation, I simply don’t believe your friend made 4.2k gold in 4 hours.

Mathematically, he would have had to drilled out between 15-16,000 ectos to come out with that much money. Not only was it physically (in-game) impossible to do that in that amount of time, but he and others like him would have fulfilled the supply of ectos so high, that the current buy orders for them would have been in the 1.2g a piece range. They never went above 29s during the entire holiday event.

Your story = false.

Never said it was my friend. Just a player I knew, have done fractals with a few times and talk to casually in LA /m.

And you are talking about just ecto. You aren’t accounting for generating a stack of ectos for virtually free, selling them on the tp for 100% profit, buying a stack or more of rares and playing the mf for precursors to sell back. Or Unidentified dyes. Or any of another dozen or so possibilities.

Also, flooding the market with ectos to flip lowers, not raises the price because the crafters were undercutting each other. Ecto were over 35s, I believe, before the event. Because the recipe generated more of the material than it used.

But it’s not my place to prove or disprove it. You and others will think what you want to. The guy was a filthy exploiter, so he could well have been lying. but since the interaction started with him wondering whether or not he should go until he could buy Twilight, I doubt it.

Time Warp. It turns you into a clone factory and is amazing for dps on melee allies and emergency reviving.

Valmarius.4150:

AcidicVision.5498:

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

Those are crazy numbers. I’d take 100 gold an hour to be an obvious exploit, never mind 1,000.

yeah, thats where people are generally kittening up. They seem to think this was just a few gold and that you could get comparable results other ways and that the people banned may not have known that it wasn’t intended.

We aren’t talking about the people that might have turned 100g or only done the recipe 5-10 times before realizing something was up. We are talking about people that crafted and salvaged for hours straight earning in the thousands. Enough to casually buy precursors and legendaries to try to flip.

They were in the process of crashing the market for one of the rarest materials in the game. That is not a small scale issue caused by typical crafting. For that type of change to happen in two days on a supply from 24+ collective servers, there was some serious exploitation occurring. I’d like to see ectos drop over 10s in price in less than 48 hours from people crafting/salvaging pauldrons. It would never happen.

mrstealth.6701:

If the line between legit and exploit gets any muddier people are going to prevent themselves from crossing it by simply not playing this game anymore. Maybe we need an offical post on what amount of gold earned per hour is considered acceptable. :\

I know someone, who has since been banned, that made over 4,000 gold in less than four hours from the snowflake recipe. Now tell me if you consider over a 1,000 gold an hour from a novelty recipe to be acceptable or legit.

Edit: I thought I had a screencap but I couldn’t find it. The number was somewhere along the lines of 4,195.

Edit: There is a bug on the forums that mark you as infracted if your post was edited to remove a quote from someone that was. If it’s hard to find the context to some of my comments, its because the person’s posts I was replying to have been wiped away. And this post edited to remove their quotes.

Minor fluctuations are not consistent or reliable. The servers change from higher population during peak times to lower populations in the early morning hours. Consistently. Every night. Since the game launched. There is one conclusion to be drawn from that.

That is not minor. It’s not wrong. An observation made on a phenomenon that is as reliable as the sunrise is not an assumption. It is a 100% logical assessment more reliable and less prone to conjecture than a cm post. And someone doesn’t need to be an authority to notice the obvious trend. You can search the forums for all of the people asking how to transfer to full servers, see all of the suggestions they wait until 3am or later, and see all of the people that did exactly that and succeeded.

Or better yet, you could just look for yourself. One time, coincidence. Twice, okay that’s reasonable and could be random. Do it for as long as it takes you to come to terms with the fact. Heres something to help you get started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

TWMagimay.9057:

So, from your answers….you are all exploiters. You also think it’s perfectly ok, because it’s “not a big deal”. What happened to that ToS you were talking about? Because it doesn’t say “huge game changing exploits”. It says “exploits”. Period. And you agreed to it, didn’t you? And then you keep saying how exploits are inexcusable, yet there are a few posts excusing exploits. How does that work? You should pick a story and stick to it instead of changing it the second you realise you are also guilty of the crime and then coming up with lame excuses for your own actions while dismissing the excuses of others for theirs. There is a reason a lot of games don’t have a ban policy when it comes to exploiting.

There are various degrees to exploitation. Does every crime get you life in prison? Does every write up at work get you fired and unhirable? Every infraction in school get you expelled? Get real dude.

It comes down to this:
(b) If You violate the Rules of Conduct, then NCsoft may, in its sole and absolute discretion, terminate Your Account under Section 3(b)

Their discretion doesn’t mean its for you or me to decide. It means its for them to decide. And they made the decision that breaching the code of conduct on such a level that it could impact the entire game was a ban worthy offense.

You agreed to it by playing the game. You agreed to it by using these forums. If you disagree with it now, then Im all for your account actually being reset so you have to agree to it again if you want to continue playing or participating in the community. If you don’t agree with the ToS and CoC I honestly don’t see any business for you to be here.

Euler.3259:

Say that as many times as you want. However, this is the reason I am sad I got gems for Christmas.

Looks like you got…gembal locked. Buh-dum-tish

(I really hope you are a math guy that can appreciate that, or it will be totally lost)

@Kuruptz, you should consider wiping your last few posts. You are starting to get rage-y and sound irrational. I could also see your typing degrading with your patience and its making it hard to read.

You may end up regretting them later, so friendly advice…delete them before they get quoted all over the place.

TWMagimay.9057:

You honestly believe that exploiting is inexcusable, players’ fault and deserves a perma ban, right? So how about this list:
- Hitting the last seal in fotm with a character skill
- Standing in the safe spot in Arah p3
- Jumping the dredge fractal
- Using EA prior to the fix
- Using stealth in WvWvW to cause perma invisibility due to culling
- Taking shortcut in a JP(from a stone in the middle to special skills that blink you through holes)
- Using a mesmer portal in a JP
- Pulling the champ karka to where it gets “stuck” to pick the ori node safely
- Using various skills to go through walls(WvWvW and dungeons in particular)
Do I have to go on or are you already in the list of people you want to see banned?

oh goody, lets get started…

1.) saves maybe 15 seconds on the entire run, does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

2.) actually takes longer to complete because you are stationary and limited, but saves you a few respawns, does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

3.) saves the party a few minutes on the run at the cost of drops from the trash, does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

4.) I am not positive what EA stands for here, but ill just make a wild assumption and (correct me if I am wrong), does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

5.) Using class mechanics and utilities that are a core part of the profession and build with no control over if you will cull out or not or even knowledge of when you or opponents are culled is not an intentional exploit annnnnnnnnd does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

6.) Mesmer portals in jumping puzzles are creative problem solving. Working as intended. I’m surprised more Mesmers don’t sell portals. JP rewards are lackluster, done mainly for the achievement and challenge, if you decide to cheat your way out of that, then whatever buuuuuuut it does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

7.) Saves a few minutes, can be done with portals, or shadow refuge, or stuns and haste. Most people just let someone kite it around while everyone else mines anyways. Pathfinding bug that will likely be fixed, but the ori is still obtainable in the same amount of time and thusly does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

8.) I know someone personally that was banned for being a kitten-head and exploiting wall glitches in WvW. So that happens already and is sort of moot. And even though that sucks….does not detrimentally effect the entire economy and every player in the game.

That’s was fun. We can do more if you want.

Kuruptz.4782:

you knew this was an Exploit there is NO EXCUSES 0 Nada ZERO 0 Not 1 Can be found!

There are excuses. They are just all neutralization tactics used to make the offenders appear to be innocent or to shift blame elsewhere.

There are no legitimate excuses. But that won’t stop people from making Anet out to be the villains.

Dantos.1065:

Ah yes, the WHOLE guild should be penalized for what a few did. How very enlightened of you.

Birds of a feather.

Soul.5947:

actually i havent been playing the game since the lost shores update but i want to stand beside the community on this subject because it’s not the 1st time they have done this and i would like it to be the last. it is not a players fault for bad game design, so if anyone has to be punished it should be their incompetent qa team and not the players.

What you are saying is the equivalent to saying in a crime of opportunity, the criminal is innocent and the victims deserve the consequence because they put themselves in that position. Let that sink in for a bit so you get how totally kittened up the idea is.

LumAnth.5124:

morrolan.9608:

Naqaj.6219:

Anise, obviously.

Think of it, she’s a master Mesmer. Clones & Phantasms …

Definitely Anise

Lol, just think of having a Mesmer as a partner….

Menage a tr—-….

omg….so much joke potential…so many infractions. It’s like having a perfect “that’s what she said” moment at work and can’t say it! grrrr….

I think i’d prefer Jora over Eir.

/sigh (._.) I think I just miss the GW heroes and NPCs.

Koss has Logan beat hands down. I’d take Livia any day over Caithe (I know different races, but Livia’s prestige armor looked…sylvari like).

I think the only ones that come out on top are Zojja over Vekk and Rytlock over Pyre. And Im not so sure either of them really fit in to the “hottest” character category.

Alipius.4783:

Who cares anyway? You can look down on everybody as much as you want

I do. I care about my fellow man. I also get embarrassed for other people. So when someone is blatantly wrong, and then publicly blasts how misinformed they are to the entire internet and community, I get embarrassed for them.

I’m that stranger that will tell you at a fancy event that your fly is down when no one else will, because I feel bad everyone is snickering that you look like a fool.

Now, admittedly, I don’t have the patience of a saint. So I get frustrated when I have to tell the same kittening people the same kittening thing over and over again. But on the bright side, when they finally catch on, they have learned something they will never be wrong about and embarrass themselves with it again.

I am a humanitarian!

The ghost of Evennia. I’m also sure Livia and Eve have achieved immorality and we just haven’t found them yet. Hrm…that’s a really tough decision. This can only be settled via pillow fight!

Actually on topic now that that other mess has been straightened out (for at least a week, until someone copies that Eva post and tries to make a point with it again), I am on my fourth character on the Dragonbrand server. 80 Thief, 80 Guardian, 60 Mesmer, 50 Necro.

I have noticed fewer people in a lot of zones as opposed to the first month or so. But thats expected as players hit 80. They either play their main characters or rush through areas on an alt and don’t interact with much.

The population also has an ebb and flow because of the free to play nature. Whenever a new mmo or highly anticipated game is coming out, or during play-off season, or between school breaks, you will see a population drop. There isn’t a subscription to guilt people in to logging on constantly.

Personally, I have always found enough people in an area to complete events. With exception the the Fire elemental in Metrica once. And there were plenty of people, they just weren’t high enough level yet. Not only that, but people are communicating more which is nice. A few months ago you just ran from DE to DE and jumped in the zerg. Now people are posting things like events, rich node locations, helping each other with jumping puzzles more and the like. It got less busy, but more social.

I prefer a smaller social experience to the silent zerg, but that might be a personal preference.

The only areas I notice that are pretty much abandoned are the ones with no huge lore connections, world events, or personal story tie-ins. Players tend to stick to the critical path laid out by their story or to the dragon areas. So the secondary leveling zones for the range they are in just get forgotten about except by a few here and there that sprint through them for map completion.

If you are in a critical path zone and cant seem to find anyone to chat and play with, you might want to look at your server. Some servers are really hardcore PvP/WvW and don’t PvE much or do very specific things when they do. Others might have a heavy EU, Aussie, or Coastal population that doesn’t match up with your play times. Unless you have ties to that server that make leaving difficult, just try one or two others to find a place you like better.

Namu.5712:

No need to be mean about it really.

Just from what I have seen it has been different however I realize now it was an error on my part.

You have to completely close the game and reopen it to get a server update closing the world select window doesn’t refresh it, as one would expect it to.

Just reopened the game SoS is very high from full.

So I stand corrected.

OMG! This is what I have been trying to get through to you for hours! So how about that signature change now huh? I thought we had a gentlemen’s agreement.

Now we just need to lead Kakeru to the path of truth and light. Maybe your revelation will help him along.

Edit: i’ll also throw in a blanket apology for coming off as condescending occasionally, but this particular bit of misinformation that goes around based on the CC post particularly gets on my nerves because its something everyone can check for themselves by simply opening the game at two different times a day (peak time/off time). It is honestly like two people looking at a red pen and one of them arguing it’s blue because that’s what they heard somewhere. The pen is red! Look at it!

I’m sure there is some sort of social commentary in here that a grad student could right a paper on. Blindly following a bit of information on the internet and vehemently arguing its validity instead of taking a fraction of that time and effort to discover the truth of the issue.

So for those I lost my patience and got snarky with, sorry.

Kakeru.2873:

What you both seem to forget is that people have the ability to change their home server…………… and have been doing constantly since release due to WvWvW………

No one is forgetting that. If people were moving then the Full population servers would just be shifting. What you are not comprehending is there is no population shift.

When 20/24 servers are showing full during peak hours and then in the AM only 6 or so of the 24 servers are showing full (servers with high Aussie and EU pops), that does not indicate transfers.

If server A and B are full and server C is high, then you have two full servers. If some from A transfer to C until it is full then you still have two full servers. Likewise with B. The only way to end up with three high servers is that if by some miraculous coincidence, server C needed exactly the amount of players to register as full that A and B combined needed to drop to high and exactly that amount of players transferred from both. Improbable, not impossible. But we are talking about that happening every night and after ever patch. And that is impossible.

The explanation for servers A , B , and C to all change from full to high, every day, during the same block of time, is that people are signing off.

I have a white board handy. I can draw a diagram. Or even example that uses buckets of water if its still confusing.

Regarding server’s listed population –
I really don’t care what a CC has to say about it. I can see, with my own two eyes, on a daily basis, that the US servers drop from Full to High capacity between the hours of 4am and 10am EST.

Come on people, put on your thinking caps. What does this tell us? Are hundreds or thousands of players silently cancelling their accounts in the wee hours of the morning, and hundreds or thousands of new players buying the game everyday to make nearly every server jump back to full…or is the server population reflecting that a huge portion of the country and players have gone to bed? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor

There’s no point in even citing previous posts from ANet or anyone else. This is empirical evidence. There could be an argument made that the listed population is a mixture of both accounts bound to a server and concurrent users online. But users online at any given time have a 100% observable, real-time effect on the server lists that can be witnessed by every single person on a US server every single day.

Another way to prove it, check the server list directly after a big update. Most servers will show as High capacity because a large portion of players are still downloading the update. Wait about ten minutes and check the server list again. Most servers will now be full because most people have had time to get the patch and start playing.

Man, it gets frustrating that people keep citing that same ’ol post and disregarding what they can see for themselves. Sometimes I think some users would be sure-fire convinced the sky was green if some authoritative figure told them so.

Kanthor.2094:

AcidicVision.5498:

The message is that if something is obviously a bug…

It wasn’t obvious.

AcidicVision.5498:

An item, that when crafted and salvaged duplicates one of the most valuable crafting materials in the game and can propagate itself along with a profit, there is obviously a problem. That goes well beyond making a profit from crafting.

Infinite loops never result in an increased price of the inputs. Both snowflakes and mithril ore went up in price because this was NOT an infinite loop. Just because a couple ANet employees who are bad at logic and/or math say it’s an infinite loop doesn’t make it so.

It was obvious. There is not a single thing in the game that you craft for 1 ecto and its principle component and then salvage for three ecto and get the principle component back with a high degree of reliability. With one snowflake you could turn 1 ecto into 9 with three crafts. That is obviously a problem for anyone with a shred of common sense.

The biggest perishable was mithril and the cost was trivial when the profit from selling one of those nine ecto gained could buy enough mithril for five more attempts, which would likely net between four and fifteen more ectoplasm. At least until the exploiters burned through the supply of reasonably priced mithril and got into the stacks left deep down the list by long forgotten gold farmers.

How some people can not see an obvious issue with that is mind blowing.

Sky.7610:

Why? Well, the message sent by ANet is “You made profit from salvaging a crafting item, therefore it is a exploit.” Do you not understand how much destructive power this interpretation of “exploit” is?

That’s not the message that is being sent. That is actually condemnation of the condemners and is totally denying actuality.

The message is that if something is obviously a bug (a bug being unintended results by a program do to typo or logical error), and you egregiously exploit that bug instead of responsibly reporting it, then you will be banned according to the readily available terms of service and code of conduct.

When an item, that when crafted and salvaged duplicates one of the most valuable crafting materials in the game and can propagate itself along with a profit, there is obviously a problem. That goes well beyond simply making a profit from crafting typical crafting activities.

Oxe.6142:

ArenaNet perma banning anyone for an error in their programming is theft, plain and simple. Anet is stealing from the people that paid to play their game. Fix the bug, take away whatever resulted from the bug and call it done. Ending their license is theft.

“17. You will not exploit any bug in Guild Wars 2 and you will not communicate the existence of any such exploitable bug (bugs that grant the user unnatural or unintended benefits) either directly or through public posting, to any other user of Guild Wars 2.”
- Rules of conduct
https://www.guildwars2.com/en-gb/legal/guild-wars-2-rules-of-conduct

“If You violate the Rules of Conduct, then NCsoft may, in its sole and absolute discretion, terminate Your Account under Section 3”
- User agreement
https://www.guildwars2.com/en/legal/guild-wars-2-user-agreement/

No theft there. Just holding people accountable for what they agreed to when playing the game.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Not sure how it affects everyone in game, when everyone could have done it. If you say that most people didn’t know about it and they were taken advantage of, I’d like to say the same thing for this recipe. Who was supposed to know that it wasn’t intended if they were someone new to rpgs and didn’t understand the concept of losing money when crafting

So are you trying to say if someone breaks some rules that affect other people but they don’t know enough to realize why things suddenly changed, then it doesn’t matter someone broke the rules? Its ok for exploiters to just have their way with the population and economy until everyone catches on?

As far as crafting and losing money, you didn’t get to jewel level 400 without knowing how crafting works. And you pretty much understand that if you make something for 25s and then salvage it for over 75s in one of the rarer mats in the game, that there is some sort of bug. That is obviously not functioning as intended. Hence bug, which goes back to CoC and ToS.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

It’s not a bug or a glitch. They wrote down a recipe that they didn’t think much about. And it doesn’t give a player an advantage over anyone else. The only advantage they get is more money to what…buy nice stuff? It’s not like they stole money from players directly. Again, you say ban, and I’m not disagreeing with you, but perma banning is totally not cool. I feel like everyone one should get a second chance, not just the people who had the first round of exploiting.

“An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or glitches, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc.”

I bolded the catch all for you because it looks like you missed it the first time you read it.

Yes, the advantage came from having more money and inflating the cost of mats for everyone else in the game. Check out the reddit links to gw spidy that demonstrate the effects this had on the mats used.

And those are only immediate effects of people discovering the recipe and buying the surplus to convert into more ecto or hope to resell at an inflated price. The effects of that extra gold then reach out further to buying rare items or materials to again manipulate the value or flip into precursors to ironfist that entire market like we seen after the godskull incident.

Botters and farmers cause market prices to crash. Exploiters cause market prices to inflate beyond the means of most players. And that is bad for everyone. Hence the extreme punishment. If you participate in an activity that affects players en masse and that can take weeks if not months to naturally recover from, then you don’t need to be playing with other people.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

…No. You do not know what the words mean at all. And quit acting like you are superior, I’m talking on an even level here. But fyi,

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define%3A+cheating
…
Please don’t talk to me about definitions and stay on topic.

“An exploit, in video games, is the use of a bug or glitches, rates, hit boxes, or speed, etc. by a player to their advantage in a manner not intended by the game’s designers.¹ It is often colloquially abbreviated sploit. Exploits have been classified as a form of cheating” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploit_

Hard to stay on topic when the OP isn’t clear what the topic is even about. An exploit is cheating. Exploiting and cheating are bannable offences. And thats all there is to it.

Fortunately, after the second chance that Karma exploiters were given on the goodwill condition they toss everything they earned from it, which most didn’t adhere to…these guys will likely not be given a reprieve.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

There’s a difference between exploiting and cheating.

No. There isn’t a difference at all. Exploiting is cheating. And therein lies the problem and why you cannot be reasoned with. For whatever reason you think there is some philosophical difference between exploiting and cheating. But an exploiter is a cheater, plain and simple. They are using the exploit to cheat the system in place.

The two go hand in hand. Exploit a slot machine in Vegas and try telling the pit boss it doesn’t count as cheating. You’ll end up with a lot of broken fingers.

But as long as you actually believe that, there is no reason to discuss it anymore because you are willfully incapable of understanding.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

I don’t remember Bungie calling me to return my Halo 4 disc because I exploited something in multiplayer. It’s called patching. It’s called roll-backs. It’s called warnings. It’s called having some game admin etiquette and being the good cop, not the bad cop.

No, they wont call you for the disc back. they will just ban your console/PC/account and IP from playing online. Like they did here…
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-05-26-bungie-bans-halo-reach-afk-exploiters-article

and here….
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/1600-Hackers-Cheaters-Exploiters-Banned-From-Modern-Warfare-3-37163.html

and here…
http://www.gamespot.com/news/blizzard-bans-several-thousand-diablo-iii-users-6401766

’nuff said.

Valandil Dragonhart.2371:

AcidicVision.5498:

Exploiters ’gonna Exploit.

Sounds to me like you’re actually condoning the lack of forethought, testing and inaction on the developer’s half. Yes people will try to exploit what they can to give them an edge over the others and the game mechanics, but by the developers actually ENABLING them to do it, who is actually in the wrong?

If you are checking out in a grocery store and the cashier looks away with the register open, who’s fault is it if you grab all the money and run? Who is going to jail, you for making a poor decision or the cashier for enabling you by not closing the drawer?

This is a game with millions of lines of code. That thousands of people put a load on at any given moment and that 150 people are probably individually working on. No software of game in the history of computers has been bug and exploit free. It’s impossible and unreasonable to expect perfection from a developer. Now that’s not an excuse for buggy, shoddy nonsense (looking at you Bethesda), but its a reality of the medium. It’s more realistic to hold users to the terms of service that they agree to and the number of posts all over the place by Anet advising players to report issues they find and not to repeatedly take advantage of them.

ArcTheFallen.7682:

Or how about something we call a “warning”? You know…the kind of thing that gives people a chance? I’m surprised that arenanet has 0 tolerance for people who play their game and enjoy it; exploit or not exploit because exploits aren’t floating around everyday.

The warning was in the terms of service. The thing everyone agrees to. The onus isn’t on Anet for people that didn’t read it. Bans were also doled out for the karma exploit and the peppers exploit, which were the exact same thing as this. And most of those people were given a second chance.

Anet shouldnt have to issue a statement every few weeks reminding people to read what they click to agree to, or to exert a bit of common since if they come across something that can be egregiously exploited to the detriment of every player that isnt doing the same thing.

My opinion on it pretty much echoes the sentiment of the reddit post. If people did this to an extent to get banned then they did it enough to know it wasn’t intended. And they didn’t care. They didn’t care that the ectos and gold flooding the market would have a negative impact on the vast majority of players throughout the entire game.

You can’t just strip the account of someone with that mentality. They will just do it again. I’d wager everything I own that the same people that used the karma weapon exploit and were given another chance, also did the godskull and snowflake exploits.

Exploiters ’gonna Exploit. Best to just get rid of them. In the real world when inconsideration costs you real money, it tends to make you actually think about your actions. Most of the time.

A+ Now make them for the rest of the legendaries. Make sure you tag or watermark the images. They will be on every GW2 fansite that exists within two hours. You’ll be famous.

Phaseman, it sounds to me like you just need to find someone willing to spend an hour or so with you on a voice chat program like Mumble, Teamspeak or Ventrilo (think Skype but for games, runs in the background while you play so you can talk to team-mates) while playing that can explain things as you go along. I think that would be less frustrating for you and much quicker in showing you the ropes of mmo/online RPGs.

It’s not much to worry about. Everyone has been there at some point or another in some game.

Mirm.5249:

When we are at the final boss (of fractals or other instance) we always ask if he is wearing MF or if we see SoL during instance, if they said yes, they are instantly kicked ( Yeah we are 3 team mate).

That is considered legitimate griefing and Anet has asked people to report parties that kick them on the final boss or before rewards. Guess that’s cool if you think your agenda is worth a 72 hour ban.

I don’t believe this is written by a person using MF at all. The self-deprecating things he says about the system and how if effects himself in the party are verbatim the diatribe you hear from anti-mf folks on Reddit and the forums.

If I had the time I could probably pick sentences out of the posts of three specific users on here and fully construct that confession.

People will have an issue with this as long as they think someone else is benefiting from their word or impeding their progress. More often than not it’s the players that struggle with the dungeon to begin with and need every single trait they can get that want other players to be able to more effectively carry them.

Plain and simple its a “But I need that extra 17 points in toughness, if he doesn’t then he must be doing it wrong and is making it harder for me” thought process that is chalk full of fallacy.

As always, MF only makes a difference when you have five people of the exact same skill, using the same quality gear, with the exact same knowledge of their profession and the dungeon. And that will never happen. So you can never prove the MF user is a weak link. Maybe the guy in Berserker gear has higher DPS potential, but cant properly capitalize.

That is all those numbers mean on the level of margin between MF and non. Just like its all they currently mean between exotic/ascended. Potential. Just because you have a gear set that makes yours higher, doesn’t mean you know what to do with it or how to make the most of it. Yet alone four other people in the party. For all you know the guy in MF could actually be outperforming half of the group.