Guild Wars 2

Can’t be easy if they don’t want to price to crash back to NPC.

I think his horcruxes aspects are like a RAID array, don’t need them all to fully restore him, but the rebuild process might take a while to complete. :p

EdgarMTanaka.7291:

I could be wrong but… Are not these numbers all regions combined? Korea has the most and to my understanding GW2 is not as popular over there for reasons I do not know.

I just figure that the other games put more energy in the Korean market than what GW2 does. But sure, everyone does not think like me.

Many other more non-korean MMO-games does not give half as much content for free as what Anet gives GW2. Sure maby their expansions are bigger and cheaper but you will have to wait one or two years before you can play the next story. Between that they may put in one or two dungeons with a few features and bug-fixes. But it is not better than the ammount of GW2 updates.

( I may be biased as I havent had the time to play other MMO’s for over a year, so it may have changed since )

Guild Wars 2 isn’t marketed in Asia other than the third party running the game in China. And yes those numbers are all regions EXCEPT regions where a game is run by a 3rd party where the income shows up in royalties which isn’t broken out by game.

http://www.seattlepi.com/aboutus/article/Let-it-snow-Winter-storm-leaves-W-Wash-10911254.php

And that’s early Monday morning.

Well this is a little early.

Doesn’t surprise me. I imagine account key sales aren’t significant at all at the moment even with a 1/2 price sale before episode 3 launched, which was mid quarter. Down only 3% from the previous quarter isn’t all that bad. Of course comparing it YoY with the quarter that HoT launched makes it look a lot worse.

Of course the real loser is WildStar as it doesn’t even get called out anymore and gets lumped into “other”.

One way to spin it, ANet significantly slowed the hemorrhaging with three relatively flat quarters.

As for their sPvP e-Sports plus P4F strategy, believe it or not it’s “cheap” advertising. I don’t have a problem with it.

Somebody tweeted this from the scene.

I’ve always picked the 20 laurels.

They’ve never said what time patches drop, ever. Now from collective experience we know they try first thing once a sanity check is done when they get in, so usually 9p PDT/PST (depending on DST). Now obviously with ArenaNet not having power for at least part, if not the whole day on Monday that their usual SOP got thrown for a loop.

I don’t blame them for hoping they could pull it off. But on the other hand, anybody who follows any ANet dev would have heard about the snow issues for this morning (Seattle isn’t use to snow and what they got, which doesn’t seem all that bad for some of us in snowier areas of the country, not only amplified the horrible traffic problem Seattle has on a good day, but also the loss of power to 60-100K in the greater Seattle area. Knowing this it didn’t surprise me that it didn’t drop at noon.

Could they have announced a delay Monday evening? Maybe. Would that have been enough time for competitive Raid groups to not call in sick? Don’t know. The angry people are “kids on Christmas morning” wanting to unwrap their new toys and find out, due to weather elsewhere, Amazon 2-day shipping wasn’t.

The only downside was players staying in game waiting rather than go off and do other stuff, play other games. Actually it was one of the most enjoyable times with all the impromptu release day parties.

ANet was closed, at least partially for the day, due to a power outage. Normally they have a prep day before a major patch. They need to do last minute checks as well as a possible tweak to recipes IF there was some TP shenanigans over the weekend.

It’s coming. But due to circumstances beyond their control there’s a delay.

You must learn patience Ed Gruberman.

fluffdragon.1523:

To everyone going on how it’s “cheaper to buy from the TP,” don’t forget that to craft max-level or even ascended gear, you have to grind up to the rank necessary to do so, which requires many low-level components.

Didn’t forget but it’s craft over territory. You don’t linger there. You do what’s minimal to get by those levels to get to 400 and then to 500.

On the other hand I farmed and sold 3000 rugged leather over the course last week. This new leather farm is going to hurt what has been a primary source of income for me over the last year.

• ANet created patches to suck up T5 and T6 leather sections that had a glut on the TP.
• Every patch requires 4 bolts and 10 squares of the same tier as the patch.

Thing is it’s always been cheaper to buy gear from TP than craft it. Crafting in GW2 has rarely been about saving money or crafting for profit. It’s merely a stepping stone to max level crafting.

First define “endgame”. I’ve always seen GW2 as a rather self directed game in terms of goals rather than predetermined.

Depends on how you define “best”. I personally suck at PvP so crafting was the “best” way for me.

Then why are people talking about the attack is being from the west side of DR and saying the body of water over there is Lake Doric?

Crinn.7864:

Behellagh.1468:

That would put the catapult on the East side of DR, not the west side which was the Lake Doric map.

No, the angle is clear in the shot. It’s definitely north northwest.

No look at this picture. The “castle” is to the right of the dome and since the “castle” is the northern most part of DR, that means it’s coming from the right side DR.

People forget there’s a kitten ext to CM as well.

Svarty.8019:

TexZero.7910:

WvW has been and will be dead for a looooooooong time until the devs decide to actually take some initiative and redesign how worlds work and what they actually want it to be useful for.

If I read the post from Stephen Clarke-Willson (11 mothns ago, it’s now 1st Feb 2017) correctly, they’ve redesigned the whole of WvW, but gave up implementing it after a few small patches:

SCWPhD

We got into a pattern where we wanted the WvW update to be super awesome, a “2.0” version, and it kept growing in size and complexity, which took longer, and fans were waiting, and so we wanted it to be more awesome, and rinse, repeat… As Mo said, we need to clear out the log jam, so we’re going to focus on ship-able pieces, even if that means we do some rework later. And we’ll get each piece onto the Live servers as soon as possible.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/

How did you get “gave up implementing it after a few small patches” from “so we’re going to focus on ship-able pieces, even if that means we do some rework later”? I read that as not waiting until the whole thing can be dropped in all at once to shipping what’s already done while they are finishing up the rest, even if that means going back and tweaking to make the whole consistent.

Lahmia.2193:

circuitnerd.5863:

After going frame by frame with the video, it appears that the assault on DR is not from Queensdale but from an area we haven’t explored yet. It looks to be directly north of CM judging by the terrain, angle of the mountains facing DR and the fact that centaurs are charging in, in one shot. Since centaur homeland is in Harathi and it’s directly next to that space above CM…. well I think that’s a pretty good chance it is. The new area may even extend all the way around DR to the north and west. So it seems at least a small part of the Woodland Cascade is being explored.

Its the area that Lake Doric was. Notice the shot at 0:52 of the bloodstone catapult firing. The glass dome of the central plaza is visable as well as the royal palace to the right of it and kormir high road the the left.

That would put the catapult on the East side of DR, not the west side which was the Lake Doric map.

From episode one of LWS3, we learn that the White Mantle’s work with the fragment they had was not only growing, quickly but have sprouted formations of bloodstone crystal outside of the main piece. The explosion then scattered pieces all over the world thus infecting the bloodstone crazed critters.

Only one I ever did of those was daily dodger and healer (if you mean daily rez). As it is now, dailies are meant to get players to do certain activities and visit certain maps, not perform certain mechanics.

Don’t worry, the Chronomancers will Doctor Strange the damage away.

I wouldn’t expect a discount, maybe some vet reward(s) for those who own HoT.

Well next episode is dropping next week along with the next raid (announcement on MassivelyOP). So no later than that.

Randulf.7614:

Which is fair enough, although the exatc words were;

" I agree with everyone who expressed opinions in the past that it’s very helpful to know the extent of a festival, and it’s my belief we’ll be more forthcoming about end dates in the future"

It seems reasonable to conclude lunar would fall under that imo.

That’s a “good idea, maybe we should do this in the future” than a promise.

It sounds like it keeps Win 10 from starting up it’s own housekeeping services if the GPU is highly engaged even though the CPU and HD isn’t.

Last two times it was two weeks. But ANet likes the flexibility of festival end dates it seems to cover slippage in schedule. PvP season 5 ends Feb 6th so maybe then?

Makes me wonder if Mike’s announcement of the next LWS3 episode will definitely be in February is preemptive reassurance because of a schedule slip? Pure speculation on my part for sure.

On the other hand Mike has been giving us a heads-up on changes that affect gameplay for previous updates. Haven’t bothered seeing how many days/weeks he gives us on average.

A new race is a HUGE investment of developer time, a limited resource. They don’t have the war coffers like Blizzard. Rather have those resources spent opening up a new (or old) area of Tyria for exploration and story.

There is base refinement, sections to squares, scraps to bolts, etc. IMO this is the only place they can “fine tune”. Above that there should be consistency as in all patch or insignia or leather boot upper recipes regardless of tier. For instance all tier leather boot uppers, including ascended, require 2 leather squares of the appropriate tier to craft. That is what I mean by consistent. By trying to keep those recipes consistent leaves only refinement to be different for tuning purposes. And this includes the refined ascended materials. That was my point.

But the complaint is T6 patches which like Tier 1 to Tier 5 patches, use 4 bolts and 10 squares. I was sensing an argument from some to tune certain tier patches so overall sections needed was less for the T6 patch in comparison to the other tier raw material requirements.

Problem is bumping 2 to 3 or 3 to 4 are huge shifts in raw mats. But on occasion the crafting system does produce multiple outputs from a set inputs which could provide better tuning. 13 sections producing 5 squares for 2.6 sections per square on average for instance. And since refined mats also go into material storage, a few extra aren’t a problem. But ANet use this ability rarely and I’ve never seen them tweak a refinement other than whole numbers of raw mats.

The earliest I we hear anything IMO is PAX West since it’s also in Seattle and would cost a lot less than any of the other PAX’s or Gamescon. Now whenever they announce it I would wager the wait between announcement and shipping will be a lot less than with HoT. The prolonged delay for HoT I think hurt the game more than building the hype.

Actually no, the first stage refinement is pretty much the only place it’s okay to be different since all raw mats must be refined first before use in any other recipe. Yes I’m ignoring the tonics and MF promotion recipes. Scraps get turned into bolts, sections into squares, ore into ingots, logs into planks. From there those refined mats are the raw materials for armor and weapons.

Sure Damask needs twice the number of refined mats than Elonian squares or Deldrimor ingots, and players were not happy about that since it contributed to the extreme cost of Damask before ABMulti. Now with that going away, expect the new silk glut to start to decay and the price go up.

Dungeons, Fractals (dungeon like content) and PvP are 5 man team and Raids are 10 man team content. Pretty much everything else can be soloed. Now some open world events in game are difficult to do solo but often those become flash mobs with swords and no formal teaming is required. In PvE you only need a relative low level of participation to get full XP and loot drop (no splitting of XP or loot in this game).

To be fair it’s difficult to fine tune starting from 2 or 3. And ANet does strive for recipe consistency across tiers, the 4 bolts and 10 squares for a patch so it’s unlikely they would tweak the T6 patch recipe so reduce the overall number of sections needed.

Odin the exiled.5764:

I wouldnt even call these skill updates, they’re just minor tweaks for most part, changing aftercast/recharge/casting time. Rarely do we get to see a GW1 skill update, where they actually change a useless skill into something else. Sometimes for the better sometimes not. ie glimmering mark or double dragon Players started to actually use them once they got changed and brought in with a skill update. The same thing can be done in gw2 with many of their unused utility skills and even the racial ones too. I know myself i love playing a norn, chose them to invoke and change into a bear or wolf but those elites are really bad and too long of recharge for pve fun mode. So to me changing a skill or a functionality like shadowstep/teleport is a skill update, but changing aftercast/cast/recharge by .3 seconds is not and that’s what most of their skill updates are changing things that don’t matter to 80% or more of the gaming population

Because the devs learned from GW that balancing was a shear nightmare. As a player you may have found it fun to find the next broken combination of traits and skills which forced a complete re-balance but the devs didn’t. That’s why GW2 has a much simpler skill and trait system to make balancing easier. And easier means tweaking not overhauling.

Linken.6345:

That and people complained that the only new armor in the begining was released in the gem shop.

So anet said they would release outfits in gem shop and armor in game.

After that we have hardly seen any armors in game and a metric ton of outfits in the gem shop.

That was the player side reason ANet presented rather than a business side. But if selling them at 800 gems wasn’t that profitable, giving them away is even less of an incentive to do them, unless it’s marketed as something in an expansion to drive account key sales. But still we have gotten one off armor skin pieces as rewards as well as gem shop items since the change.

The real problem are players who love some piece (or pieces) on an outfit and now desperately want them for their mix and match armor. I know a lot of people who would love Countess Anise’s top to be an armor skin on light armor but alas it’s part of an outfit.

ThomasC.1056:

• Elite specs : a good idea, but frequency is ridiculous. Moreover, people complain about them that they caused the power creep, and the lack of diversity because they’re supposed to be mandatory in most builds. A rationale explanation is ANet wants people to buy HoT and so made vanillia average. I’m not discussing whether this is true or false, but I’m just underlining it’s not a compliment.

That is the presumption of players, especially those in PvP and WvW who had no concept how to counter the new sub professions. Plus it takes a while to balance something new Vs something that’s been around for 3 years. Pretty sure it was never ANet’s intention to supplant the core professions from PvP and WvW as it smacks of P2W.

• Desert Borderland : the whole ruckus last summer about removing it plainly from WvW speaks for itself.

The original version of the DB map were horrible in terms of travel and the periodic capture the flag mega cannon event which one shot all loser keep gates simply wasn’t enjoyable. ANet introduced the current DB map just before they were swapped out, for a while, which significantly improved the ease of travel across the map. I think the current 1 DB, 2AB maps is helping to ease WvW players into the newer DB map since the original is often pointed at as a primary cause of the drop off of WvW game play.

I’ve been calling it the Diablo GW2 cow level.

I would be disappointed if it’s like AB and is simply a treasure room but full of leather synthesizers or chests full of hides.

For me, too many take PvP and sometimes WvW WAY to seriously which leads to a toxic atmosphere for those who simply want to play for fun. I do WvW but I’m a roamer who capture camps and take down dolyaks. But I’m under no misconception that I can go one on one, much less one on many, with anybody who’s into competitive PvP or WvW.

Same is also true with dungeons and fractals with the presumption that this is the 1000th time everyone is doing it and everyone is well versed in tactics to clear it as fast as possible. There is no room for newbs 95% of the time to even learn the ropes.

Again from the top.

The gem shop is the primary source of income for game development 4+ years in as new account key sales drop off rapidly over time after launch. Changes done to the cash shop must be done with minimal costs so sales quickly go toward paying development. This is why we see

• Bundles
• Sales
• Items being removed and returning for a limited time

because all of those things cost virtually nothing yet drive additional sales.

As for new items, development cost must either be at a minimum or the price must be large. It’s been stated repeatedly that at 800 gems, the break even point for armor is too high relative to 700 gem outfits.

Now since the moratorium on new armor in the gem shop, ANet has chosen to keep supporting Fashion Wars with outfits rather than have nothing new at all OR 2000+ gem armor sets. Essentially just like the “Legendary Journeys” for new precursors, a constant flow of new armor sets simply became unsustainable as a source of income.

Pifil.5193:

Those complaints were over the cost of silk and the other cloth tiers required to make Damask. The situation there wasn’t improved by making all ascended armour more expensive (by needing leather too) but rather by ArenaNet giving other sources of lower tier materials and by leaving Silk salvage alone.

Also T6 leather is the real problem here (as in it’s the one that’s ridiculously expensive compared to the other T6 mats) and that’s barely used in Ascended crafting.

I think that reducing the leather required per square and also the amount you need per insignia would reduce the price, not crash it and might make crafting exotic armour affordable again, a single berserker gossamer insignia costs over 13g at time of writing, most of that cost is the cost of the leather, the other insignias are maybe 12g or so.

Would there be an outcry if they reverted some changes? Maybe. But from what I’ve seen these outcries tend to be a handful of people posting in circles. Personally, I crafted a set of ascended cloth armour (as well as a heavy set and possibly my medium set, not sure there) during HoT and I’d be delighted if they dropped the leather requirements back a little. It’d encourage me to craft another set, probably another medium set.

Yes and why did silk become more expensive? Why did the supply glut vanish? Because of ascended armor crafting and altering the cost to refine silk scraps into bolts of silk, which were then used to make bolts of damask. The side effect of that was light ascended armor cost way more than either medium, which used leather that was also in a glut situation, and heavy which used easily farmable metal.

So HoT “fixed” the glut with leather with the creation of the “patch” in insignia crafting which required leather squares as well as cloth bolts. And they also changed the cost to refine T5 and T6 leather squares. Sure enough, just like silk, the supply on the TP for T5 sections dropped 90% and T6 by 95% which moved the price off of NPC minimums. The side effect was to increase the cost of medium and heavy ascended armor, so light was no longer 50-100% more expensive than medium or heavy.

However T6 insignia crafting isn’t just used in the creation of T7 insignia but altering ascended armor stats as well. Which probably dovetails into the discussion of obtaining more spirit shards if you change your armor stats frequently.

TL;DR Just like silk, changes to refinement costs of thick and hardened refinement plus a new source of demand was done to eliminate a glut of supply on the TP and make those items worth more than NPC prices. And just like silk ANet over compensated.

My feeling is once LA got blown up at the conclusion of LWS1, it stopped being the default central meeting place due to the proximity of the bank/MF/TP.

Aesthetically LA 1.0 reused ships and rough stonework had more character than the Mediterranean theme park look and that probably put some players off. Plus with the addition of Guild Halls, I can see many players using that as a meet up location.

But prior to HoT, the forums were full of complaints on how a light ascended armor set cost so much more than medium or heavy due to the amount of Bolts of Damask required on light, both for the insignia and component armor pieces. Also a glut of T5 and T6 leather kept the price of those two grades near or at NPC vendor prices.

ANet’s solution was to alter the insignia recipe to use the new patch item comprised of both bolts and squares rather than just bolts. For ascended this meant 18 Elonian Leather Squares were added to each weight of a full ascended armor set.

Now between than and the changes to T5/T6 square recipes wiped out the glut in a matter of months. Of course this also meant the cost to craft all ascended armor weights became more costly and while light is still more expensive, the relative (percentage) difference in cost is not as pronounce between light and medium.

Now rolling back the section to square change would seem logical to some but the outcry from those who crafted ascended armor post HoT isn’t something ANet would want so the “cow level” group farm. If it was too easy, T5 and T6 leather would once again become worthless due to “Tragedy of the Commons” excessive farming. ANet wants a reduction in price, not a crash in price.

I’m all for improvements to MF crafting but I never felt standard crafting was slow or annoying. I guess it depends on how much raw/intermediate mats you have to process but if you doing something in bulk like that it should take some amount of time to make.

Endless Soul.5178:

Mike O Brien.4613:

Hi all,

This release will include the promised fix to AB multi-looting. The fix is simple: you can loot each of the great and grand chests once each time you complete the meta, once per map cycle.

This release will also include a new, challenging group-farming spot for leather.

Mo

Both of these are good news to me, but now I’m wondering what the leather farming spot is. Kill a champion dolyak?

Diablo GW2 cow level confirmed.

PlatinumMember.5274:

Behellagh.1468:

PlatinumMember.5274:

EDIT: I mean look at where all those previous Arena net developers ended. They are working on that kittenty Breakaway game.

Actually they are working on a different game for Amazon Game Studios, Crucible.

“Crucible is a battle to the last survivor on a hostile alien world. Players choose and customize heroes, making alliances and betraying allies on their path to victory. An additional player heightens the drama by triggering events, live-streaming the battles, and interacting with viewers.”

Really?

https://forums.playbreakaway.com/topic/19/should-players-in-twitch-chat-be-able-to-impact-gameplay-in-any-way/15

So I guess there must be a second Colin. I guess Amazon studios has two Colin’s with the exact same name.

Note he said “Head of the Stream+ team here.” Stream+ is Amazon’s integrated with Twitch (which they own) group of games which three were announced at the last Twitchcon. Breakaway is simply the furthest along and being in alpha/beta has a message board. The other two are Crucible, a 12 player (I think), last man standing arena game and New World, an MMO. All three games integrate tightly with Twitch to encourage streaming and viewer involvement. You can read about them here.

https://games.amazon.com/games

PlatinumMember.5274:

EDIT: I mean look at where all those previous Arena net developers ended. They are working on that kittenty Breakaway game.

Actually they are working on a different game for Amazon Game Studios, Crucible.

“Crucible is a battle to the last survivor on a hostile alien world. Players choose and customize heroes, making alliances and betraying allies on their path to victory. An additional player heightens the drama by triggering events, live-streaming the battles, and interacting with viewers.”

Adry.7512:

Drakz.7051:

But if you look at their style since HoT release they are going more in the way of selling more Cs outfits and weapon skins plus gliders.

The game has alot of variety but that was on original release, their focus has now shifted from making armour skins to outfits, they said they would bring armour skins out with expacs but as our only example as of now being HoT well look what we got

About 3 – 4 full armour sets and tons of Cs outfits, and the armours with HoT are not up to the same standard as the outfits they sell on the Cs now.

Well this shift is what has helped maintain 15mil per quarter. also they stopped making armor skins because that can be considered unfair. Costumes replaced it. Costumes doesnt take away value from the wardrobe system. Let’s see if they add more variety in armor with Xpac 2, im sure they will, they had almost two years to create armors on the side for the next Xpac.

No, they stopped making armor skins, for sale in the gem store, because it “costs” too much relative to the income they make from one. It’s not a sense of fairness to players.

Vukorep.3081:

this is just my oppinion but:

1) Theres no need to do these kinds of posts…
2) Take a look at other games, lineage “profits” the most but…yeah
3) Ive seen nothing wrong with the new “direction” they are going, in fact they improved many areas of the game and mechanics.
4) Gw2 adds more cosmetic outfits and gliders…and that bothers some people how?

You can’t look at Lineage’s profits because NCSOFT don’t report profits, NCSOFT report income. And since most of Lineage’s income is from Korea plus the game being Korea’s WoW, being nearly 20 years old, it’s business model is very different than GW2.

I simply check Dulfy as to where they are and what mastery skills I need.

Well some achievements do reward achievement points for each tier.

People almost never look at the convenience of such an item. I have both the copper fed and silver fed in shared slots (another pricey convenience item) and now I never worry about running out of salvage kits on any character every again. You don’t buy convenience to save money, you buy it to save time.

I’ve made money on most days but I’m opening them with 320+% magic find. Earlier I got it over 450% due to banners and a bonfire. Worse loss was 4 silver.

Earliest announcement would be, guessing here, PAX West.

It may be two years for the announcement but the expansion is only 15 months old and we really don’t want another 9 month announcement to release. Six months at most, 3 months better. Extended hype, lack of specifics and lack of content before drop hurt HoT and GW2 IMO.