Guild Wars 2

Stephane Lo Presti.7258:

The Feature Pack announcements will continue next week and some of them will definitely contain information that’s relevant to those of you who’ve been playing the game for long. We won’t tell you about them until the articles are live though, to keep the element of surprise!

Stephane, I support Guild Wars since 2005, and was very happy when i read a french guy was hired by Anet. I know you’ve done a very good job, but could you explain your colleagues at Anet, that if you don’t know what’s the players wants you should avoid surprises.
The announcement of this feature pack was such a disaster. Do you really think you had enough content for 3 weeks anouncement ? I read the posts every day and every day i think, i should not read it tomorrow, i’ll be dispointed again. Annoucing “A fresh start” for the second birthday was a really bad move to all veterans who come back to open their birthday gifts. Do you think in your 3 weeks annoucement, it was the best thing to announce today ? The best thing to get all thoses veterans at play again ?

How do you plan your communication ? Is it something like :
A/ How can we make this annoucement the most effective ?
or is it more :
B/ How can we avoid to be instant-killed by all raging players ?

I’m pretty sure at Anet most of you think the early annoucement of the precursor quests was your biggest mistake. It wasn’t. The silence after it was. You should know the first rule of communication : YOU CAN NOT NOT COMMUNICATE. Even if you don’t say a word you are already communicating. So telling us about the precursors was not a bad moove, but you should have explained that to implement it you need more time and that you need to implement some other things before. That’s why we won’t see it soon, and instead we’ll see many other things coming. But at some point we will have it. You could event have made a special webpage, with a progression bar and some annoucement, like :“The bar won’t progress for a few months because we have some important things to do…” or “We got 1% today, not a big leap, but a step in the good direction”. This way, we have no idea when it will be ready (because you probably don’t either), but we know you are working on it. Slowly because it’s a big project, but you are aware of it, and someday it’ll show up.

I know you can’t be fully transparent in your developpement timeline, because it just doesn’t work that way. I know that from a developper point of view (or from anyone who has worked in any company’s point of view), this progress bar i was talking about is absurd. But from a communication perspective it’s a good way to be honest with players. “We can’t do miracles, but we are working kitten it”. We know that’s what you do, but we just need to hear it.

I mean sometimes it’s better to hear, “hey guys we have bad news…” than “don’t worry, we can’t say anythnig, but you’ll be very happy”. Because we know that you can’t make all of us “very happy” in one moove. So we know you are lying to us, and it’s very frightening, because usually when someone lies to you, something bad is coming, and you don’t know what !

So please reconsider your way of communicating. Because yes it’s good to hear you, but when we realize you are lying, we are scarried. Remember that when i say you lie, i talk about “we can’t tell anything but you will like it”.
1. Yes you could say something because you know something
2. You have no idea if i will really like it, do you ? I mean when i read your words i am alone, i am not a community, you know that. So you have no idea what i like.
I can’t think anything else than “I can’t trust him”.

Despite what i said at the begining of this post, I know you know what your players (i mean the community, not individually) want. After all you did this great game, so you knew what we want before us. It just seems your fear of miscommunicating is misleading you.

That and maybe some issues with economy. I know John Smith will come and explain everything is working as intended, and that we have to prove something is wrong, but we can’t because he has all the data, he could share it with us, but he doesn’t have time…. He seems to be a nice guy, but you can’t argue with him lol. But seriously, 300gold per color for commander tag, what did you think ? I have to say that changing your plans after the anoucement and listening to your players was a really good move. That and the very high presence of all of you guys here on forums, give us hope, a lot more than “we can’t say anything but you will like it”. We really need to get rid of this policy. That’s what we fear to read when we see a Moderator tag. Please, i beg you, stop it now.

PS: Sorry for my franglish, i hope your eyes didn’t bleed too much, i did my best.

Yes, it’s always nice to have official informations, and on a more general note, thanks for listening about the commander tag. It’s good to see you there, and it’s good to see you are listening.

The problem is not the event, the problem is the players. Most of them are poorly minded manichean who believe to hold the truth.
Some of them are convinced they know the ONLY way the game should be played and see themself as justiciars or prophets, they are proud of their trolling.
Some others are convinced they know the BEST way to farm gold, and should be allowed to work like a chineese bot (no offense toward chineeses or robots, i love them both).
Some people could argue it’s a matter of age, and the game should be sold to adult only, but a lot of “adult” are very childish. Look at all theses people who tell you : You should’nt eat meat, it’s not healthy, vegetables are the only way to go. You should’nt drink alcohol, you should’nt smoke, you shouldn’t have sex with more than one person (in your life or at a time, it depends on people). You know why you should’nt do all theses thnigs ? Because I know for sure how you should live, and I’m kind enough to tell you.
The fact is the only solution is to pass an examination of philosophy before each session play. Something like : “Explain why a society needs different minds and points of view to survive ?”
Edit: If someone has better english skills than me, please be kind to help me correct my mistakes

The Goldsink is not the commander tag, it’s the announcement.
How many people buy the commander tag usually ? 2% of players ? maybe less….
With this weird announcement, how many players will buy the 100G tag just in case they would need it one day ? How many players will buy more tags to have a refund and select color at discount prices ?
Hard to estimate but i think many people will buy a tag before the 9/9, maybe 20 or 25% ? That’s a huge Goldsink !
I’m pretty confident we will see more ways to gain thoses colours. IMHO, that would made a way more logic rewards for PvP/WvW tournament rather than an exclusive armor.

3000 AP you pick a pair of gloves (Hellfire or radiant)
6000 AP you pick a mantle (Hellfire or radiant)
9000 AP you pick a helm (Hellfire or radiant)
12000 AP you get the pair of gloves you didn’t pick at 3000
15000 AP you get the mantle you didn’t pick at 6000
18000 AP you get the helm you didn’t pick at 9000
21000 AP you pick shoes (Hellfire or Dadiant)
24000 AP you get the shoes you didn’t pick at 21000

Arcadio.6875:

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/September_2014_Feature_Pack

An admin on the wiki edited the page and included this, “Players who have unlocked four or more tags, can contact support to get another color of their choice.” He went to gamescom.

I don’t have any tags but if i buy 4 tags now, i will have 2 colours for 400G instead of 600G ?

Mesket.5728:

Acinonyx Rex.8609:

Commander Tag should be free for all. It’s a very usefull tool and anyone should be able to use it.
Here’s how things should be (IMHO) :
Introduce a new item “Tag coin” available for 1000 badges of honor or as a PvP reward track.
Blue Tag should be free for everyone.
Green Tag should cost 100Gold + 1 Tag coin
Yellow Tag should cost 200Gold + 2 Tag coins
Orange Tag should cost 500Gold + 5 Tag coins
Red Tag should cost 1000Gold + 10 Tag coins
Limit Tags to 10 per maps.
If there is already 10 Blue Tags When a Green Tag want to activate, the latest Blue Tag is desactivated.

It should require a minimun pvp rank to wear first of all.

Commander Tags can be used on PvE Open World Map, I don’t see why PvP should be required for that. You can earn Badge of honor with achievment points so anyone can earn Badge of Honor but nobody can buy them. Seems to be the best compromise.

Commander Tag should be free for all. It’s a very usefull tool and anyone should be able to use it.
Here’s how things should be (IMHO) :
Introduce a new item “Tag coin” available for 1000 badges of honor or as a PvP reward track.
Blue Tag should be free for everyone.
Green Tag should cost 100Gold + 1 Tag coin
Yellow Tag should cost 200Gold + 2 Tag coins
Orange Tag should cost 500Gold + 5 Tag coins
Red Tag should cost 1000Gold + 10 Tag coins
Limit Tags to 10 per maps.
If there is already 10 Blue Tags When a Green Tag want to activate, the latest Blue Tag is desactivated.

Mini Pale Tree would make more sense after Queen Jennah
Edit: At second thought, yeah Phlunt could do it too…

As previously said, the 20-lvl-scroll should be usable at any level, the booster is fine, and for the mini we could have 5 new minis. For every character reaching 2 years you get a mini from the ones you don’t have yet. Everybody has at least 5 slots so everybody should have all of them at some point.

BlitzX.4039:

Well, i ask because one of my guildies said about his friend who has friend (:D) with 800k+ gold but he can’t have more than 450k gold on one account…

Astral Projections.7320:

ANet has never said and If there is, it’s probably pretty high. No one has come to the forum to complain about hitting a gold limit and there are many people who are rich, at this point in the game some must be very rich.

This answer from a year ago was talking about karma limits per account but it could also be applied to gold limits. thread

Xystus.3241:

Since it is a 32-bit application, the largest unsigned number that can be used is 2^32 or 4,294,967,295 (0 counts are the first number). If it is less than that, a cap has been placed on it.

4.294.967.295 = 429 496 Gold 72 Silver 95 Copper

Maybe that’s the Gold limit ?

hannah mee.7925:

Only 1 year terms? But then they’d do nothing but campaign while in office. Need to at least give them 2 years so they work for 1 year and then spend the next year campaigning.

InGame’s time has a factor 12, so a year lasts 4380 days (2Hours IRL is 24H IG, but 1 year IRL is 1 year IG). That’s plenty of time for campaigning.

Dommmmmmmmmm.6984:

sorudo.9054:

they payed for the game, they have every right to keep their name.
sorry to burst your bubble but how would you feel if you return to give it another try and be forced to rename all your character, i bet you’ll be kittened.

Wrong. If I took a year+ break I would not feel entitled to keep my names. I stopped playing the game, I made that decision. I stopped being a member of the GW2 community. I stopped contributing to the growth of GW2. If they gave my names away to players who actually you know… played the game and funded them I would not be upset in the least, what kind of person would I be if I felt entitled to keep them. The above post regarding sending them a 2 week email notice to log in and save the names seems like the best idea I’ve read so far. In fact that email could motivate people to relog and check out the game again. Where in other situations they most likely would not even bother updating the latest patch.

Utterly wrong !
I can have a break of one year or more and want to keep my names. Someone who relly want to quit this game can delete all his characters, that’s should be the only way to recover a name. Until someone has delete all his chracters he should be considered as a gw2 player.

Wanze.8410:

What does the Xunlai Electrum Ingot have to do with an account bag?

Xunlai was the Guild providing account bank service in GW1, and electrum sounds like an Asuran technology. For what such a material should be used ? → an account bag.

Anet adds a lot of items in gemstore which i’d like to buy but their implementation restrain me to do it. Home Portal Stone, Infinite gathering tools are account bound but untransferable between alt characters (Account Bank storage is not an option for items that have to be transfered pretty much everytime you load a character).
So we need an “account bag slot” for a bag which shares his content amongst all characters equiped with such a bag. Xunlai Electrum Lingot seems to be clue that Anet will add this feature with level 500 jewelcrafting.
When this feature will be added I’ll have to buy a lot of things :
- 900gems for Home Portal Stone
- 3000gems for all three infinite gathering tools
- 800gems for Copper-Fed Salvage-o-Matic
That’s 4700gems and maybe more for Banker Golem and Captain Air ship Pass.
The question is how much time do we have to earn all thoses gems ?

Khal Drogo.9631:

If anything, this highlights the deficiencies of the loot and reward system of GW2. Maybe the economic system needs a great leap forward?

Actually i think Foxfire cluster are the best move they’ve made for economy since launch. It’s a tax on rich people, one of the best way to redistribute wealth from rich players who can’t wait 2 weeks for their back armor, to casual players who earn a lot by selling their loot.

A relly good move in my opinion but the BLTP tax should be inverted to be paid by the buyers to be fully effective. Maybe you could make the tax paid by buyers for items introduced since less than 2 weeks ? Edit: And let the tax paid by sellers for older items.

Actually there is a reason why in the past, lefthanded people where forced to become righthanded. If you have a lefthanded soldier who hold his sword in left hand and shield in right hand, he can’t fight with a righthanded soldier, because it’s sword versus sword and shield versus shield. That’s why everyone has to hold his sword in righthand, and shield in lefthand.
I can understand your concern about achievment points, but maybe it’s something like Dolyak slayer in WwW, we’re not supposed to have it now, it’s a long term goal….

Edit: Torch in main hand could be very cool for Ele. It could give an Indiana Jones style to any medium-weight class, and engineers really need new weapons.

Michael Henninger.7451:

Olba.5376:

On Windows, there is a mouse option that you can turn on that will make a visible circle appear around your cursor when you press ctrl. Works while in GW2 as well.

I’m not a designer so I can’t speak as to why or why not the mouse cursor is as it is, but this tip just saved me. Thank you, Olba!!

If I were Arena’s Director of communication i would tell you to not use an official account for this kind of post. You’re an Anera’s employee, you noticed the same issue as we did, you have no idea why it is so, and don’t seems to be willing to find a solution. All you say is this ugly tips, which ruins GW2 UI and immersion, saved you ? Do you think that’s kind of answer we’re waiting from the “Game Support Lead” ?

I’m sorry, I don’t want to be rude with you, but when you use an official account, how hard is it to add a word like : “Im going to have a talk with the designers about that” ? Event if it’s not true, that’s the kind of “official answer” we’re looking for…..

I want to add that If we had more official answers on our requests/suggestions, your post would never had such reaction, so you’re not the one to blame.

Oh and if you are Game Support Lead, i have to tell you that every time i had to deal with your team, they did great work and were very nice, so thumbs up for that !

There is already way too much items available on TP, we need more account bound weapons. Maybe be we need more ways to obtain them….

mrauls.6519:

I like being called boss… I really enjoy ANet’s story telling techniques and missions

This. Nice improvments on story telling.

And to the OP, WE absolutly DON’T want to hear our characters voices. It’s time and ressources consuming, we want content to play (skins, maps, ….), not cinematics, we have netflix for that.

Edit: improving RNG loot could be a good idea.

Countries with rectangular boudaries are usually former colonies like Africa or America, where frontiers have been drawn on a map by a few people. Countries with an older history like European or Asian countries tend to have more natural frontiers. Inhabitants have fought for years and in many cases, natural broders like mountain or rivers have stoped invasions.
Maybe it’s more acceptable for people living in America or Africa to have rectangular shapes on maps. As an european (my english is bad but that’s another point) i tend to be annoyed by this rectangular shape when i look at the full uncovered map, but when i play this feeling disapear. They have made a great job for immersion.
Maybe they could have made the maps less rectangular by adding more space beetween maps but we would have lost a lot of playable content. So i prefer the way they did it, i think it’s the best alternative we could have.

Arena’s support is really good, actually one of the best i’ve ever seen, but direct song should be avoided at all cost.
I’ve bought GW1 soundtrack from direct song, but I learned something very important : Never trust any company that use DRM.

Hi Anet I have 4x[250 Essence of Luck (exotic)], Can I use them by clicking only 4 times instead of ONE THOUSAND CLICKS!!!?

Make it like in GW1 where you could take your alts as heroes (or at least the skin of your alt with their equipment). That would be a real incentive to equip fancy gear on all your alt, and could maybe rise even more gemshop sales…..

1. Tengu
2. Larguos
3. Kodan

Jahroots.6791:

Khairiya.7240:

What the others said. It takes 3 minutes per charge by map completion, so no matter how expensive these things may be in the gem shop they’re fairly easy to come by.

Wait, what? Where are these three minute maps? Even The Grove takes a bit more than 3 minutes to complete. PvE maps easily take upwards of an hour. That approach presumes the player has a bunch of alts that haven’t already mapped the easy zones.

Right now I think PvP reward tracks are the best method of obtaining these outside of straight up buying them. There’s lots of other goodies in the chests, as well as a decent bit of AP to earn along the way. Also helps you to improve your combat skills.

1/ Buy a character slot
2/ Create a character, map every towns and collect 6 transmutation charges (1 per city ?)
3/ Delete your character
4/ got to 2/
= Infinite transmutation charges….

OK, i’ll try to help OP understand why it’s good as it is.
Player A : Old gamer, 25K AP : 15K AP from permanent content (pretty much everything done), 7K AP from daily and 3K AP from monthly. ==> Obtainable AP per day : more or less 10 AP and that’s all !!
Player B : New Gamer, 200AP : 150AP from permanent content 60 AP from daily and 40 from monthly. ==> Obtainable AP per day : pretty much infinite as you have many point to earn in permanent content.
In current state Player B can catch up with Player A, now suppose we try your suggestions:
Player A and Player B can earn infinite AP each day, in this case, Player B will never catch up with Player A.

I hale loads of useless items like :
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Aetherblade_Code_Fragment
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Flames_of_Kryta
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Golden_Fortune_Scrap
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Investigation_Kit
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Candy-Powered_Matter_Meter
and so on..
It takes so much spaces in my inventory and that would be really obnoxious to delete them, no one should have to do that… ever !
So please Anet stop adding Living Story updates and all this content, please stop it now !

Khisanth.2948:

That sounds like a bug.
Should be 2 piece of equipment. 1 gemstore item. 1 “stack” of crafting material with the exact amount depending on the type of materials

I got the 2 piece of equipment, 40 leather, but no “gemstore item” except this support token.

I did 2 map completion and get a support token for each, is Zephyr Sanctum comming back ?

My favorite Greatsword :
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Kymswarden

Aidan Savage.2078:

No. Not even you would approve of this kind of change once you start realizing how expensive top-tier gear is. I’ve already spent roughly 250 gold on JUST the insignia required for my guardian’s ascended set. Not to mention I’ve gone through at least that much more gold on the other materials required. And this is for a heavy set. A light set is going to be nightmarishly expensive compared to it.

You made a good point, but numbers are not fixed in stone, it could be a tax based on quantity of items, when you buy more than 1000 items in a month.

With the introduction of Megaserver, Way Point costs will become a real issue, as many of them will be contested by default until we are in the same map. that will forces us to reteleport and increase costs. Gold sink are a good way to fight inflation prices but it penalizes only explorers and most PvE players.

Inflation has 2 main factors, the increase of gold in game and speculation.
To reduce the amount of gold ingame, Gold sinks are good, but there are many of them (crafting, Gem buying, Mystic Forge,…)
To fight against speculation, taxes are good, but right now, taxes are only paid by sellers. Buyers should start to pay a tax when they invest more than 100 Gold per month on the Trading Post. A double-tax could be implemented when you reach 500 Gold invested per month. On every first day of the month, the counter resets.

With this new tax in place, we could get rid of Way Point Costs and that would be facilitating playing with friends. On a side effect, that would make spikes in prices on short term less frequent which is always good for economy and players.

Would you approve this kind of change ?

Ok, let’s say you’re in front of 20 guys, and you have the choice between two weapons, a sniper riffle or a flamethrower. What’s your choice ?
Smart choice should be awarded more loot….

Slots bags should stay on a character basis yes. But i would love to be able to craft a bag (with Xunlai Electrum Ingot ?) which is shared accros all characters. Equip one of theses bags on each of your character and everything you put in it is available to all characters. That would be fantastic for unlimited gathering tools and infinite royal pass and so on. I’m sur many players who didn’t yet would start to buy this kind of items. For now they are account bound but you can’t really use them for all your characters.

Olvendred.3027:

…
There is a huge tax on the tp.

The tax allows speculation on too much items, so the tax needs to be increased… Speculation is what hurts economy, not players travelling.

Tax could rise when you buy more than a stack (250) of an item

Phadde.7362:

Unloveableone.6082:

Is there a reason you can’t afford such a small fee to travel…?
It’s like a few silver at most >.>

This. But more importantly, the fee encourages you to run and view the landscape and perhaps explore something new.

If there where no fee it would take some enjoyment out of the game for me. The fee is also very small, so why bother complaining about it.

I have a good news for you, if one day they remove that fee, you can send it to me by mail, i’ll accept all your silvers to help you keep enjoying the game.

I would prefer a huge tax on TP, which could benefit a lot to enconomy, than a tax on people traveling to help friends….

Yes the game needs some gold sinks, but i think they could be more balanced. Armor repair is very frequent in PvP or WvW, but less common on PvE. On the other hand, there is no waypoint cost in PvP or WvW, but is very present in PvE.
Events and Champ bags nerfing hurts everyone (PvE and WvW) but Gold sinks remains only on PvE…

Making everything too easy is not a good solution, but there is such a gap in difficulty between this jump and every ohter jumps. IMHO this jump should have his own achievment. On completion of 37 first “easy” jumps you should gain Dive Master title and unlock Dive Grandmaster track which would contain Aetherblade, Karka, Zephyrite (please make this map come back) and all 3 Edge of the Mists (and maybe some new ones…)

DeWolfe.2174:

ok, I know I’m just waking up and all but, what is “hom”?

Hall Of Monuments
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hall_of_Monuments

It’s a special place which links GW1 and GW2 accounts.

It seems Anet made a real good job against mail spaming, but now gold sellers are using private messages, black listing them can’t be a solution as they change names too often.

I would really love to make the HoM a kind of “Account Home Instance” where you could unlock services like merchant, bank, black lion tranding and so on…
HoM would be available to all players (but rewards reserved for gw1 players) and services could be unlocked via quests or activities.
We could build monuments to display our achievements like beating Tequall or Great Wurms.

Behellagh.1468:

The advantage is not needing to buy tools and kits in the field.

Sorry i don’t see where the advantage is. By “in the field”, you mean on open world maps ? I don’t need to buy them on open world map, i buy them at the merchant near the bank, just like you take the unlimited tool at your bank. For me it’s same, so it’s not an advantage at all, especially not worth 1000 gems per tools (but as it is now i’m not sure i would buy it even at 100 gems per tools)

Behellagh.1468:

The bank in DR is a free WP away and it drops you off just outside it.

It bugs me that making a convenience item account bound instead of soul bound isn’t enough for some players. That the minor inconvenience of parking your characters at or near a bank to allow you to swap these items is considered a deal breaker.

shakes head

Near every bank you can find a merchant with gathering tools and salvage kits. If i had to park my characters at the bank/merchant, i could just buy limited ones, no need for unilimited ones, so yes that’s a deal breaker.

i really want all theses items (unlimited gathering tools, royal passes, Salvage-O-Matic…) but i won’t buy any of them until we have something really convenient like this “account bag”. And i would certainly use real money for that, so instead of loosing sales they could gain some…

Edit: Xunlai Electrum Ingot would make a perfect material to craft this “account bag”