Guild Wars 2

Xenon.4537:

I would rather they make us pay upfront for the content and give the rewards free for completing the content. That means the priority for making money goes to the quality and quantity of the content.

Instead we have black lion weapons and gem store armors. Pay for the rewards up front and play the content later for free. Where is the incentive for the content to be fun? The only incentive here is to make the gem store skins as pretty as possible.

Of course, pretty sells.

And I think you turned it on it’s head. Rewards in of themselves shouldn’t define if content is fun to do or not. It’s like asking to be paid to go play ring toss at an amusement park. Can’t players simply take on the challenge and enjoy beating it unless they dangle something in front of them?

You can’t deprioritize because the Gem Shop is the primary source of operating income. The mass layoffs might as well begin if that was done. The OPs tone implies that monetization has been ramped up which I don’t think it has. I think it’s just that more players are noticing now than before.

Galen Grey.4709:

When are people going to realize an MMO is a game intended for a wide spectrum of people.

MMOs are like movies. Not all of them are targeting everybody therefore each one doesn’t need to cater to everyone. And if they are doing well enough with the target group the DEVS were targeting, then it’s successful. They do not need to be all things to all people.

The problem with GW2 for one group of upset players is that it’s called Guild Wars 2. Yes it’s set in Tyria. But due to the time skip and due to making it more like other MMOs in structure, it’s not a true sequel to Guild Wars in terms of game mechanics. It would be like buying a Civ game and finding it’s an RTS with squad level content throughout the ages. Add to that the lack of an expansion model like the original GW and you have a bunch who feel liked they were sold a bill of goods because their expectations didn’t match the actual game.

Then there are the traditional MMO player (read WoW and clones) that expect the standard MMO trinity mechanic and raids. To them this game doesn’t conform to “the right way” an MMO is meant to be played. And with no factions outside of WvW, there is no player conflict within PvE, even optional ones like dueling. How can you stroke your ego in front of as many other players as possible without showing how outclassed they are. We don’t even have mounts much less tricked out ones showing how elite you are.

These two groups have been irritated by this game since it went live and after two years thinking their voices would change ANet’s vision they won’t accept that the core of this game will not change. It’s like expecting a movie to be reedited and released as a better version than the first one we got because you complain enough.

Not … going … to … happen.

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

Despite the fact that the players posting here have generally been against the idea, this post from Gaile shows us that this is a done deal. Anet doing stuff that players clearly don’t want, yet again. Business as usual.

I imagine in the EU or elsewhere, an unpaid volunteer with no benefits including the ban on near term potential employment is illegal. But it’s not in the US.

Mine is usually upconverting mats. I try to be conservative in my estimates, well below Mystic’s yet yesterday for instance I was only getting maybe 80% of my estimate for output. That big of a difference in output is more than enough to flip a fair profit to a loss.

Sometimes I think the MF is karma neutral since over the weekend I make a killing in promoting Soft Wood Planks. As of now those who jumped on the bandwagon late have wiped out any profit by asking way too much for green logs.

Remember the Norn hero Altdrag Splitstack.

The problem with the term “white knight” being tossed around is that most people who get labeled with it aren’t saying the game is perfect, just not as much of a mess as others believe it to be. And since that person doesn’t agree 100% with the negative portrayal they get labeled as a white knight.

saalle.4623:

Anet made some really big mistakes with NPE where they sort of declared us as kittens that dont know how to press 1 button and dodge.

NPE wasn’t for vets but newcomers. The problem is that they didn’t implement a way for vets to skip all the restrictions they set up for new players like they said they would. Other MMOs allowed you to skip the Tutorial. Here we didn’t have a tutorial at all until NPE dropped. It’s like going skiing and now everyone must first qualify on the bunny slopes before you get to go up to any of the trails every weekend.

I just bugged this in game, I don’t know if anyone reported it yet here.

If you are manually entering a value when buying, the first digit you enter may be altered if it’s below the minimum value. For instance I was trying to enter a bid for Tiny Fangs at 17c, it’s minimum is 5c. When I type in the 1, it’s changed to kitten when I then type a 7 the value is 57c which then is the maximum price to buy from existing sellers. But I wanted to enter a bid for 17c so I was surprised, because I didn’t see the 57c that my order got immediately filled by items priced above 17c.

Now I haven’t try buying items that have a minimum above 99c.

So when entering a bid on low cost mats than only cost a few copper, double check you aren’t actually buying from seller at a much higher price before you click buy.

Harper.4173:

Simpler compared to games let’s say 10 years ago.

Compare GW1 to GW2.

In GW1 there were a million ways in which you could fail and get punished for it. From dying and getting kicked out of instances to simply being unable to build a proper character.

If you were bad and didn’t put in the time to get good the game punished you. You couldn’t perform.

Look at GW2 – it’s nearly impossible to be ineffective since stats are tied into gear, weapons come with skills built into them and there’s no penalty for wiping on bosses at all.

Look at other games – in the popular FPS games of old the skill gap was so wide a very good player could completely dominate and wreck a mediocre player any day of the week.

Look at FPS games today. Crutches upon crutches. Massive piles of crutches on which the average/bad player can lean on in order to nearly match people who spend thousands of hours on the game.

The “fail proof it for the bads” trend in video games has become dangerously prevalent.

Well as cost for game development increased, the need to find a broader market so the game is more likely to break even has become increasingly necessary. Which is easier, getting 10% of a small group of potential players or 1% of a player pool 10x larger?

IMO GW2 has always been about being a friendly to new players kind of MMO that’s more sophisticated than most F2P MMOs and doesn’t need the time commitment of older more “serious” MMOs. You can’t go casual in EVE or WoW unless you are willing to be a player that is left out of some content. Couple that with a subscription fee and it practically eliminates casual play unless the subscription fee is trivial to you.

This game’s PvE experience is built around a co-op belief where helping is encouraged and competitive play, ie rushes to tag critters first and nabbing a mat node, has mostly been eliminated. PvP everyone is put on an even threshold and only skill matters, not uber rare gear.

GW2 has always been a wading pool and not a rough sea. The sooner that you except that, the clearer the vision and purpose of this game becomes.

The general TP market is too volatile to invest in anything that would retain value guaranteed. A new recipe or new item drop can radically alter the price equilibrium of any item or mat.

Gems for the long term have consistently risen, on average, over time but it has a built in 27.75% loss going from gold to gem back to gold. Over the last year the rate has increased roughly 6% per month but this last month has been fairly steady.

I don’t see a safe haven for gold in this game.

Not sure if you realize but buying gems with gold finances the buying gold with gems. Also this is the alternative to the primary way of buying gems, cash.

Gem shop is a cash shop and the cash shop pays ANet’s bills because new account sales is considerably smaller two plus years after launch than in the first 6 months. The purpose of the exchange is to blunt 3rd party RMT sites with a legitimate path to buying gold. And to keep that from inflating the money supply the gold that is sold came from players buying gems with it.

It’s a lovely bit of clockwork.

Patches would be the only problem but playing, the bandwidth needed is quite low with boss events and WvW zerging being the highest. Hanging around the TP/Bank in DR for instance is only 3KB/s

Edit: Checked during Maw and got around 30KB/s.

eisberg.2379:

MrIllusion.5304:

Spawne.3128:

Aarean.5398:

Can we stop bringing up wow as a competitive example. The game is at 10 years now and still runs a crappy unengaging combat system where you spend 80% of the time staring at a hotbar. Gw2 doesnt need big revamps because the gameplay is extremely well structured as is. Thank god they dont have major class balance changes every couple of months like wow.

On top of this the content gw brings is a building journey, it doesnt release all the way to the climax like expansions in other games. You have to wait for big fights like the scarlet raid which beat the hell out of wows lame tank and spank raids with some specific boss mechanics to be aware of, which the addon system ruins by trivialising anyway.

Close the thread as its just devolving to a match of who can whine the loudest.

Stop bringing wow up as a competitive example? It has more regular players then GW2 has AND its 10 years old. If that doesn’t set the standard by which to be judged, I don’t know what does. The only thing WoW’s longevity proves is that blizzard knows how to build an MMO and keep it running, where as Anet does not.

In 2011 WoW had over 12 million ACTIVE subscribers, GW2 barely broke 450k in august of 2013 and hasnt even sold half of what WoW has in active subscriptions in overall copies sold.

Many MMOs have tried to copy WoW’s model but failed. GW2 is one of the few MMOs released in recent times that didn’t have to go through any major changes to payment model like LOTRO or DCUO did.

Even Blizzard’s next big MMO Project Titan got canned.

At this stage, WoW is more likely a fluke than a winning model.

I remember years ago, professional industry analysts said the same thing, that WoW success is a fluke, and that no other game will ever come close to match it. It was the right game to come out at the right time. If WoW didn’t exist right now, but was to release right now, it would not see the same success as it did when it released 10 years ago.

WoW was the natural progression of Fantasy MMOs after Everquest. It was produced by a company that had a lot of good will built up in other gaming genres, especially RTS games as well as it’s own limited fantasy series Diablo.

“Your Diablo got in my Warcraft. Your Warcraft got in my Diablo.”

It’s only competition for tired Everquest players was Everquest 2 which launched two or three weeks before. It was the right game for the right time by a company that was well known for putting out high quality games. And since it came out in the era where subscriptions were still all the rage it was subscription based and because it’s popularity never truly waned, it didn’t have a reason to go F2P like so many MMOs that came after (as well as before).

But that era is gone. ESO and Wildstar’s struggles prove that subscriptions no longer work. SWTOR proves that even a wildly popular IP isn’t enough of a draw to make subscriptions work.

ArenaNet always looked at the MMO market as no different than any other PC title. Buy once, play forever, maybe buy an expansion. Since the founders came from Blizzard pre WoW this was the same methodology that worked for Warcraft series, Starcraft and Diablo/Diablo II. But that method doesn’t work with a true open MMO as oppose to a hub/instance model that GW had. They needed a monthly income stream, not yearly spikes so they went with a toned down version of the cash shop stocked with convenience and cosmetic items rather than cash gated content.

So today the only games that rely solely on subscriptions are older games that are 1) still successful and 2) have always been subscriptions or games that were subscription based and now have content restricted cash shops with optional VIP (re: subscription) options. Or there’s us.

Subscriptions. Expansions. A GW2 player craves not these things.

Sychros.6720:

6. Putting your mouse on the quantity box auto selects that box, it’s not helpful…

But it’s consistent. Onepoint about UI design is that the same set of actions occurs with each identical element, in this case an input field. Doesn’t matter if it’s quantity or each coin type. Hover the mouse over the field, it gets focus for the mouse wheel.

Why do I have a sneaking suspicion that this custom forum software is write only, meaning it’s a convoluted mess that nobody wants to get near enough to puzzle out how it works and then figure out a way to make it less dodgy while retaining it’s unique look.

Only thing a PTR will bring is more bored players who already ran the content on the PTR and are hoarding the exploits to themselves until a day or two after the content goes live.

A PTR would be good for testing UI and QoL changes but actual content will just produced more threads complaining about a lack of new content.

If you are going to divide the board based on type of activity then crafting, BLTP, fractals and dungeons (yes I know you changed your mind on the last two) are just as important to segments of the community as PvE, PvP and WvW.

Also while I’m at it Mac users present different tech problems than PC users and as long as you are going to say you have beta Mac support, then you should have a dedicated board to them. Not to many of the IT crowd on the tech board are “bilingual”.

The impression I’m getting is you are trying to consolidate/remove boards that don’t get a lot of new posts, probably thinking since few post and start new threads, that there isn’t interest in them. But consolidating them into general discussion is a death sentence because the current speed of posts there would quickly bury any post to page 5 and beyond in a day if not hours. They needed there own board so those interested in that topic can find posts on them easily and with the lack of a functionally useful search you might as well as lock them and stick them into the archive of closed boards then.

And like other recent decisions, this seems to be primarily for your convenience and not your players. You may think this reorg makes it easier and simpler but it’s going to make it more confusing with GW2 Discussion becoming an even bigger mess than it already is.

@Josh – this all boils down to your as well as others’ belief that LS isn’t real content so you dismiss it as well as the annual events, since they mostly repeat, and declare the game has no new content.

What you overlook is a lot of players are playing it because it’s free month to month. I was seriously hooked on a subscription game for 8 years for well over $1000 and to date I’ve spent all of $75 in two years on this game and at that price I feel I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Easily up there with any Civ/4X game I’ve played in terms of total hours.

Now if I’ve been paying monthly, then yes GW2 wouldn’t be a good value due to it’s lightweight content additions via LS but we aren’t paying monthly and trying to compare the two, a buy once to a play game versus a buy game then pay monthly and also pay box expansions is like comparing a Piper Cub to a Gulfstream G5. Yes both are personal planes but you get what you pay off.

EnemyCrusher.7324:

I have two questions…

Are there any benefits?

Many of us already answer people’s questions, link to existing information, any generally try to share our knowledge where it can help. How would participating in this program be any different?

Basically they are asking those of us who “live” here to summarize the current topics of concern, the pulse of the board in our “specialty”. Of course the drawback is that they will be the ones players will throw food at when something isn’t “fixed” to their liking. They will likely be labeled white knights since I truly doubt that someone who repeatedly lambaste the game, the devs, those white knights, will be able to get a position.

This is the opposite of better communications. There is a reason encyclopedias come in organize volumes rather than one book with no index and a short table of contents.

munkiman.3068:

Gaile Gray.6029:

munkiman.3068:

Could you please break down the roles you are looking for? While the 2 examples are fine, I think some of us interested would like to know the breakdown of section you’re interested in. For example is a “Forum Specialist – Guild Wars 2 Discussion” a specialist group?

We’re looking for someone with a less general view, someone who has a particular area in which s/he has developed expertise. It might be a specific profession, dungeons, PvP, crafting… we would not be looking for someone to serve as a generalist.

That leaves me out then. This is kind of sad, especially since general discussions is one of the more communication areas that gets a lot of feedback. Oh well, good luck!

Except since general discussions is a catch all, having specialists is various areas within it is needed, especially with all the current boards being merged into that one.

Who watches the watchers?

We are being lumped in with General Discussion because a few topics get crossposted there, like new and returning items or listing TP bugs in the Bug board.

2 weeks when Winterday shows up.

The biggest drawback with consolidation is the speed new threads are created. The General Discussion thread already fills at lightning speed.

The loss of the TP board is major IMO and folding it into the general discussion board will shatter the community their as topics quickly vanish to page X in a matter of hours. Merging with Player helping Player, which moves a lot slower would be better but I still think it deserves it’s own community board.

Merging Account and Technical will be a nightmare. I sort of understand the logic lumping “game doesn’t work, why?” posts together but issues you have sole control over like accounts mixed with issues that the tech savvy can also help could upset and confuse players wondering why their account issue isn’t being helped like players with simple tech issues.

Lastly the player mods concern me. I hope they will be watched and a mechanism in place to report irregularities by them to ANet. There’s always a chance that power will go to someone’s head and that power corrupts.

sirsquishy.8531:

Ikaros.5730:

Well if it’s practical I wanted one hard drive for the os and all my programs and I wanted the second hard drive as a back up and also a place to store music and pictures. But would it be better to put that on a single hard drive? Also I have no clue what RAID 0 is.

RAID0 is where you take many Drives and span them into one giant drive. the issue with this, if you lose one drive the entire RAID group is done.

Since you were thinking one drive for the OS and one for backup/music, I would suggest a single 240G SSD (840evo or Mx100 or M500), and then a cheaper 2TB HDD for your bigger data. To me that makes the most sense.

Bit of an overkill on CPU cooler IMO and please don’t tell me you are configuring that pair of SSDs as RAID 0.

Also for Video Card is a tad weak. The GTX 750 Ti is great if you don’t have a PSU with a PCIe power connector but unless you always bat GREEN over RED, the R9 270x is a lot faster for a similar price. Downside is you are going to need a bit more power PSU wise for an R9 270x and one with two PCIe power connectors.

Sounds like the DNS cache in windows got a bad entry.

Bring up a command prompt and type ipconfig /flushdns. You may need admin privilege to do this.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc781949%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

It’s a checkbox to apply them over your current armor once you choose which outfit to equip. It’s off your Hero screen, equipment tab (first) and in there the outfit tab.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/File:September_2014_Feature_Pack_Outfits_Panel.jpg

The one you select will then be in the lone outfit fix to the upper left of your character, with the checkbox enabling it or not. Now as for disabling the outfits helm/hat/mask, you will need to uncheck your head piece on your equipment screen.

This is the problem with a player driven economy when you first establish tiers of quality first. Yes T6 should be more expensive than T5 and T5 than T4 etc but unless you later choose to tune supply to better match actual demand (or create a greater demand to match supply) Tiers become mere suggestions of value.

It’s not defending, it’s stating this isn’t new behavior. It’s just with the denomination list on the default exchange screen it’s now obvious where before you had to experiment entering different denominations, especially small ones, to notice.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00K2R6EGA/?tag=pcpapi-20

But you need to define “decent” but you rarely go wrong with Asus. Oh and your original link doesn’t work so I have no idea what you were looking at.

Unless you want a Shuttle like system due to space issues, a micro ATX platform is a bit more affordable.

Agree, they need to reduce the glow a bit. It is better than blinking the new items.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Setting the amount, by hovering over the amount + scroll up/down to change amount is no longer possible. You have to manually one click up arrow/down arrow, or hold mouse. This is really wonky.

Scroll wheel works if you first click in the field you wish to change.

Huzzah! New income stream!

And they will gem us to death with this new “toy”.

I figured. It’s almost SOP to have a key sale and then the next major content update to add a “special” to BLCs.

Transmutation happened before the introduction of the Wardrobe. But before the wardrobe you would have to purchase armor multiple times if you wanted it on multiple characters.

Devildoc.6721:

finally a bank tab sale

Rash.6514:

Mystic.5934:

unfortunately, I think not enough people are outraged over this for them to change their scamming ways (you may notice all of these are rounding against you; I’m sure that is very intentional).

Yes, you are right, that is the issue. They know most of their players wouldn’t bother doing the math and realize they are being “scammed”. Actually, this is what happens everywhere with scam. They count on the fact that people wouldn’t bother checking the math.

You are also right that the 1g->9gems and 100g->762gems are rounding errors. But what the hell is that 9 rounding from? Who is doing the math behind the scenes? Certainly not C++ or your CPU. I mean, come on, if ANet’s system knows the “real conversion” value between gems and gold and put that on a real math library it would never round to that. I remember I had also checked 1000g which was something like 7624. So let’s for a moment consider this number.

Python: round(7624/1000) = 8
C: 8
C++: 8
OS X calculator: 8

I would even accept rounding 7.1 to 8. But 9? So that is what kittened me off the most. They ARE hiding it behind the scenes. And this new “all integer” system just helps them get something with every transaction.

By the way, thank you the moderator who changed the topic’s name. I tried to, but I couldn’t.
Second, the only reason I am still posting here is because I CARE. I could just turn by back and take my money some place else. But I really enjoyed this game.

For the Nth time, the exchange has always been non-linear when buying or selling low quantity of gems. I know because I routinely by 20-30 gems a day for the past 18 months and it’s not a rounding or truncation issue but looks more like a sliding fee if we are buying or selling less than 100 gems at a time.

Sorry, I really tried staying away and not posting this but every time I see the thread’s title all I can think of is …

I disagree with the notion that GW2 in 2nd in terms of popularity in terms of number of active/paying players. Top 10 I’m sure but with EVE, FF whatever, SWTOR even Lineage are competitive in terms of active numbers. And certainly in terms of income GW2 isn’t number 2, as last quarter we were number 4 after Lineage, AION and B&S (excluding China) within NCSOFT.

Pure F2P MMOs are also likely to have huge player numbers as well, many that we haven’t heard of in NA/EU.

So saying GW2 is #2 is first highly doubtful and depends on metrics we can’t possibly have and second doesn’t really matter. What matters is if you enjoy it or not. And due to it’s B2P nature it’s no different than buying some other non-MMO AAA PC game that you may burn out over the following months or regretted buying in the first place.

It only cost me $75 over two years. I spend more buying a family size bag of chips/crisps at the market than this game has cost me monthly to play. And the bag of chips doesn’t last a month.

The sale is on Incarnate, Rampart and Strider’s. Strider is nice, if you ignore the shoulders and mask.

I just converted a ton of green planks into dowels when I meant to create green planks from logs to promote to soft planks.

I swear the crafting recipes in the crafting screen get randomize every session. Why put green dowels at the bottom after green planks? You need planks to get dowels, and every other green wood item.

Grrr.

Drow.2081:

Daily is easy but if your PvE and *****HATE JUMPING PUZZLES****** then monthly is to hard to get.

http://s4.postimg.org/nk9ukq3tp/gw001.jpg

Dude, you need 18 more dynamic events, which is trivial and either 39 champs or 370 salvage. What have you been doing with your blues and greens item drops all month? And if you do only boss/group events then 18 of the 39 champs you need are taken care of.

And there are a number of events that are champs, outside of the starting zones. In Diessa Plateau there are four that come up at least once an hour, champ wurm by Butcher’s block, champ giant in Nageling, champ separatist by the Breached Wall and the champ spider by the spider caverns, midway along the north edge of the map. There’s also the periodic port to fight Rhendak.

DarcShriek.5829:

Where’s Admiral Ackbar when you need him?

penelopehannibal.8947:

This month (November) you had at least five you could complete in PvE and you only need four:

Monthly Completionist (4 Dailies)
Monthly Salvage Kits (500 Salvage)
Monthly Champion Slayer
Monthly Successful Events
Monthly Skillpoint Amasser

You can do any of these PvE monthlies without the Puzzle Jumper! What more do you need? xD

This.

Very doable purely soloing PvE. I can usually get the first four done in under two weeks with the Skillpoint one taking a bit more than 3 weeks. And that’s doing my normal circuit of activities.

500 salvaging sounds a lot but I easily get 30-40 items a night, mostly blue and green. Of course I have a copper-fed kit for those so I don’t run out of salvage kits in the field.

Except an Auction House is a very different structure to selling goods with sellers at most having the ability to set a minimum price, it’s then up to buyers to set the “best” price by out bidding each other for it.

In a Trading Post the seller sets the one price he’s willing to accept and then the first buyer willing to meet the price gets the item.

As for what is “better”, the assumption is for the player to get, or hold on to in the case of buying, more coin. Secondary, and I’m not sure if Ohoni would think this is secondary, it would dry up the flipping market by eliminating the money players are leaving on the table by selling at high bid and buying at low sale price.

Since they’ve started selling items that go into your home instance, it’s too late to drop it.