Guild Wars 2

Ishtar.6457:

they are still milking the last drop from us by releasing the delaqua blade and all that shiztons of discount during this hot mess time and put a 3 days only to buy it. fun fun!

Not a problem now buying gems, you can now buy the exact number of gems you need for an exact amount of coin. The problems that are left are on the Gem selling side, not Gem buying.

Plus exchange rate conversion fees.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

Blame Crystin Cox. Amazing she hasn’t done a video, after her weird last game. I think she wants to stay incognito. Not that it works btw, google ftw.

I don’t disagree that it’s much better than earlier today even. But before we paid the exact amount for the gems we got, we just couldn’t ask for a particular amount of gems. But if you sold Gems you got the exact amount of coin those gems were worth. Now it gets truncated to the amount of gold you asked for. It’s like buying from a merchant who doesn’t give out the part of change that’s less than a dollar.

“Well that will be $4.53 … out of $10 … here’s your $5 in change.”

Gaile Gray.6029:

Here’s the interface for exchanging gems for gold.

Hopefully someone can explain what they feel is wrong about this, because in both cases the amount is carefully parsed to the smallest denominator that I can see.

Are you concerned that you cannot buy 512 gold, 4 silver, and 93 copper? Well, that’s true, it’s not possible. But there’s no “cash grab” that I can see, and I’m trying to understand what your concerns are.

No, it’s not that we can’t buy 512 gold, 4 silver and 93 copper (I see that Oxford comma) for 3932 gems. It’s that before, assuming same exchange rate, the old exchange would give us 512 gold, 4 silver and 93 copper for those 3932 gems and now it just gives us 512 gold, keeping the 4 silver and 93 copper. That’s a distant waypoint hop at level 80. That’s the posting fee for a somewhat popular rare greatsword.

I understand that in this example 3932 gems is required to get at least 512 gold. But what’s the issue where we look to buy 512 gold and we get the 512 gold and a wee bit more for the exact value of those gems? If we buy 1000 gems, we have to pay down to the exact copper, why don’t we get paid down to the exact copper when we sell gems? That’s the issue. Your own documented API has a function the lists the exact amount of coin for whatever amount of gems.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/API:2/commerce/exchange/gems

So why is it that when you convert the desired gold into the minimum required gems that you then can’t determine the exact amount of coin those gems are worth? Yes, over time it’s only 1/2 the average cost of a single gem we aren’t getting but we lose out every time we convert gems to gold. Sure it’s not a lot but how would you feel if you bought something and the merchant won’t give you the exact change and keeps anything under a dollar? Especially when they use to give exact change?

That’s the point here. Not that we can’t buy an exact amount of coin but that for the amount of gems we are exchanging, we should be getting those few extra silver and copper that the API says we should be getting.

And please don’t have them change the API to no longer reflect the “change”. That would be right up there with the time someone miscalculated the sale price on keys and instead of fixing the sale price, altered the original presale prices, just during the sale, so the wrong sale prices were now “right”. A move like that will likely reignite the forums.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Palador.2170:

locoman.1974:

According to Gaile, they’re doing their best to have it implemented before halloween ends, but no promises:

It’s up, but even the new stuff is keeping the change when you turn gems into gold, so those of us that liked to do that are still worse off than before.

And yes, a few silver isn’t much, but it can still make a difference.

Cash grab is the only possible explanation. They’re rounding it like this on purpose. Rip a few silver off of each player and it ends up being a lot of gold.

Which does what exactly? All that gold that isn’t being doled out a couple silver at a time (less than the value of a single gem)? If it stays sequestered at the exchange then rates drop minutely slower when gold is bought. Sure, if you buy 100 g, one gold at a time you lose more than a single purchase of 100 g. Not to mention the non-linear exchange rate when buying/selling only 10 gems is at a significantly worse rate than 1000 gems.

The analogy I think of when talking about the game engine in GW2 along with player’s rigs is uneven gravel roads and you have a Ferrari. Sure your car can do 140 MPH with ease on a well maintained modern road but not on these roads.

There are issues and decisions made during design where FPS wasn’t the number one goal. The game was in development for quite a while before it was released in 2012. Scuttlebutt says the core engine is a modified version of the one found in Guild Wars which came out in 2005, no idea when that engine was developed but it did go from Dx8 to Dx9 and single core to dual core required for GW2.

The selling point of Umbra Occlusion Culling software, which is used in game, is to not burdened the artists with making culling easier by baking in hints or placing hard limits on the map. Dx9 is not a thread safe API meaning all rendering calls must be done by a single thread. Dx11 is thread safe so a rendering engine could divide the work across multiple cores/threads.

The WoW engine was redesigned several times over the years to incorporate Dx11 support, 64-bit memory support and this latest expansion, improved textures and models for characters. WoW in the beginning had very low requirements because of the low polygon count of their characters and objects in the game world.

FPS games are built on game engines where maximizing FPS is job one. This is due to the somewhat incestuous relationship between GPU manufacturers and FPS game engine developers where performance of the game Vs various GPUs are often a feature in a FPS game’s review and those games are then used as benchmarks to review GPUs as well as being a selling point for the game engine. Because of that those game engines are optimized in such a way that at very high or maximum game settings it’s entirely limited by the GPU and choice of CPU doesn’t matter as much. In these cases I’m sure your FX-8320 is more than enough to do the job. But in this game, a lot of slow cores is trumped by fewer faster ones. And unlike an eight-thread Intel i7, the FX-8xxx thread execution speed doesn’t significantly improve when you have only a few active threads.

Your FX-8320 is certainly less expensive that Intel’s least expensive Haswell i5 or i7 but it’s strength is when a program can properly use it’s plethora of cores but when it’s running software that only has a few active threads, it’s not even a competition, Intel just crushes it. It’s the nature of the two very different CPU architectures.

In short there isn’t some magic “AMD optimization” that can be done. It’s not an issue with the compiled code running slower on an AMD other than AMD CPUs are inherently slower than Intel’s. To improve this the game engine would need to be totally redesigned to support a thread safe version of APIs so the engine can take advantage of additional cores.

GW had PvP tournaments. So nothing new really.

http://www.guildwars.com/competitive/gwwc/

No it isn’t. Before we entered gold we wish to exchange for gems or enter gems to exchange of coin. Now we enter what we want out and not what we are willing to put in.

Selling gems got you the exact amount it was worth down to the copper while buying gems only took the exact amount needed (so no loss of coin).

Lord Kuru.3685:

LOL at the really tiny “custom exchange” box at the bottom of the interface, the default 400 gems already entered for you, and the fact you can no longer say, “I want to trade 30g into gems.”

Or 2000 gems from this new Gem Card into gold.

• Still can’t enter # of gems you want to sell, only gold received. If you are selling your 2000 gems from a Gem Card, you have to home in on the amount of gold closest to 2000 gems.

• You don’t get “exact change” when buying gold, meaning buying 100 g will give you 100 g and not 100 g and a few silver and copper. We still have to pay exact change to buy gems so why not the reverse?

And point now moot as the new exchange is up. We still don’t get exact change when selling Gems and we can’t specify the number of Gems we want to sell, only gold we want back, but for buying Gems, it’s “fixed”. Still not the original interface but it’ll work for me.

Well fix is out.

One last little niggling problem. While we pay exact change to buy gems with gold, we don’t get back exact change when selling gold. For instance if you enter 150 g into the buying gold calculator, it may tell you that it’ll cost 1154 gems but using the API it shows you should be getting 150.0843 g but alas we only get 150 g with the change truncated. I know, with rates being about 13s per gem, that’s as close as you can get for 150 g but before we did get the change and now we don’t.

Or at least that’s what I’m told. I personally don’t sell gems.

Braham’s, Rox’s, Kasmeer’s and Marjory’s weapon skins are back in the TP. Also Belinda’s greatsword skin.

i7-4790s isn’t a bad CPU, but one designed for a lower power/thermal requirements. Sounds like a small system, narrow with a tiny power supply.

Behellagh.1468:

ANet choose to put items on sale rather than offering extra proxy currency when bought in bulk.

And I checked my Target yesterday and they still had plenty of Gem cards ($25) and copies of the game on the shelves. So it could be a local phenomenon with your Target. I have two “local” Targets (within 20 miles), I’ll check the other one tomorrow.

As I promised, checked the other Target near me today and it too had both Gem Cards and copies of the game in stock.

You’re welcome. Glad to see the upgrade went well.

Well unless you have the code in front of you, you don’t know if it’s a one line change now do you?

Any worse than bear photobombs?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/my-account-perm-block-for-using-battleping/first#post4523519

Goatjugsoup.8637:

if you must go with the silver fed theme why not silver ore?

Because ore needs to be mined or bought off the TP (mined by others) plus the price varies. Salvage kits are fixed cost per use. Now a half-silver makes a bit more sense as that undercuts a master kit cost by roughly the same amount as the copper fed does compared to the basic kit. Of course I would raise the gem price for it to match the copper fed kit.

I have it up and this is what I’m seeing

250 g – 2163 gems
100 g – 866 gems
50 g – 433 gems
10 g – 88 gems
1 g – 10 gems

Now I quickly used the API to pull the following data selling gems.

2200 gems – 254.3879 g (2163 gems – 250.1096 g – 11.5631 g per 100 gems)
875 gems – 101.1141 g (866 gems – 100.0741 g – 11.5559 g per 100 gems)
450 gems – 51.9956 g (433 gems – 50.0313 g – 11.5546 g per 100 gems)
90 gems – 10.3427 g (88 gems – 10.1129 g – 11.4919 g per 100 gems)
10 gems – 1.0885 g (10.8850 g per 100 gems)

There are two things going on, first is gem granularity. It’ll never be exact. Second is the exchange is non-linear. Small amount of gems or gold traded will be below the 100 gem rate. I had been trading in under 5 gold when buying gems for quite a while, this isn’t new. This also applies to large amounts as well. 2000 gems (note time has passed since I started writing this so the rates have changed from those above) according to the API is worth 232.7090 g while 20000 gems is worth 2312.5831 g.

Also did you actually exchange gems for gold? If you didn’t then the amount you get might be that amount of gold, plus change, as in the correct amount. Now I’ve been told by a dev when buying gems you don’t need to figure out the exact amount to prevent from overpaying when buying gems, that the exchange will only take the exact value to for those gems. Meaning if you had tried to exchange 5 gold for 40 gems but 40 gems only costs 4.9 gold, the exchange only takes 4.9 gold and not 5 gold. I see no reason why the other side wouldn’t give you the exact amount.

Gaile Gray.6029:

Soooo sorry! I asked about this and forgot to post!

Some time ago, it was noticed and reported as a “bug” that during cinematics, the “fidget” animations continued. So you’re seeing this exciting story bit about a dragon attack and, behind the scenes, your character is yawning and toeing the sand. It just didn’t fit.

So the animations were temporarily removed to be worked on and reincorporated in a way that allowed them to perform normally in the game but to stop (or maybe change) during cinematics. But getting to a place where the animations could be configured on a more fine-grained basis took more time than anticipated.

From what I understand, the team has the tools to reconfigure and re-enable the animations, but the team lead told me that naturally they’ll need to figure out when someone (or maybe more than one person) can be assigned the task. As it turns out, each animation bit needs to be reconfigured individually.

TL;dr: This change is coming, as soon as it can be scheduled and prioritized. Naturally, some matters that are higher on the priority list but this project will be scheduled as appropriate.

Clear communications. All we were asking for. Thanks.

No, usually kicks off at midnight PST/PDT. Except for major server patches. Previous sale will end but at midnight PST/PDT but new items won’t appear until after the patch.

Gaile Gray.6029:

I saw the test of the new interface today and it looks solid to me. (I also happen to think it’s very attractive, but maybe that’s just me. )

The interface and Custom option move into testing now, and the text is already headed to Localization.

The dev team is keenly aware that there are Halloween items available only during a specific period (through November 4) and therefore they intend to do their darnedest to offer the new options in the next few days but certainly in advance of November 4th if humanly possible. (I have confidence this will happen.)

;) In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum …

So did players become savvier? At least those putting in bids. Did the 17.6% change in minimal price Vs +1c broke the market? Did the shift to profession weighted drops flood some markets?

I personally salvage blues and greens for luck and mats. Haven’t sold any since EoL became a thing.

It shouldn’t. The GT 635M is roughly twice as powerful as the Intel HD 4000 in your CPU. As to why it currently isn’t? Heat causing throttling? Issue with the laptop’s ability to properly switch to it?

Don’t know, which is why I hate laptops.

ANet choose to put items on sale rather than offering extra proxy currency when bought in bulk.

And I checked my Target yesterday and they still had plenty of Gem cards ($25) and copies of the game on the shelves. So it could be a local phenomenon with your Target. I have two “local” Targets (within 20 miles), I’ll check the other one tomorrow.

Tyger.1637:

City of Heroes had a problem with RNG too. Single-use Recipes for crafting enhancements dropped at the end of every Taskforce but the problem was the table was filled with recipes and more often than not people ended up with a rather lame slow or immobilise recipe (or worse; a confusion recipe of which only five powers in-game could slot for). After beating the tough enemies in the Statesman Taskforce; getting a Pacing of the Turtle (slow) recipe was basically “I beat Lord Recluse the supervillain and all I got was this lousy enhancement recipe”.

They changed it by giving out reward merits at the end of each Taskforce and giving players the choice to roll on the reward table for less merits and risk getting another ‘junk’ recipe OR saving up and buying the recipe they wanted at a larger cost. This also meant that if one particular TF was easily farmable they could lower the awarded merits without immediate change to the TF itself until a change could be implemented or boost merits on TFs that took longer to complete. And each recipe would have a tailored cost based on its rarity so uncommon recipes would be 50-75 merits compared to 125-275 for rare recipes depending on the stats they boosted and if they were a chance-for-boost enhancement.

The primary reason for that change was due to speed runners so they could balance “risk vs reward” so a TF that could be run in 10 minutes wouldn’t award the same as one that took 30 minutes. Players optimized for ROT and some TFs languished since they couldn’t be done as quickly as others.

And yes they also realized that players favored certain “items” (to use GW2 parlance) over others so they skewed the costs so unfavorable ones cost less tokens than popular ones.

$300 is gems is worth roughly 2980g. That’s nearly legendary weapon territory.

All of them … if you don’t leave.

Romek.4201:

demand is sinking

players leave the game -> not enough buyers

Or everyone is doing Halloween content and aren’t buying their normal amount of items/mats.

Cerpin.9152:

Halloween is a nightmare without fluffy bunny ears !

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Lets-talk-about-the-new-Gem-conversion-Merged/4512464

The G3258 is better than whatever i3 due to it’s unlock clock nature. In practical terms, all that HT gets you can be achieved with a slight overclock. And since that’s the difference between the G3258 and an i3-4xxx CPU, when discussing gaming, the G3258 is more than adequate. That said a true quad core i5 “is leagues higher” but so is the price as we are talking about going from $70 USD for a G3258 to $188 for a i5-4460 (same 3.2GHz clock speed).

It’s not about trying to “beat the system”, it’s about controlling how much you are willing to buy and sell at one time. The “new” system takes that away and says you can only buy and sell specific amounts. So ANet took away control from the players and presented options they thought were reasonable. The way parents curate their kids Halloween haul.

Now ANet has said that they are modifying this new exchange to allow players to once again have control as well as having predetermined exchange choices and according to a recent post from Gaile, it will be reasonably quick. My anger has subsided and now I’m simply biding time until control is once again returned to me.

Ohoni.6057:

if it’s pricey, i don’t think that is a problem; it is simply supply and demand. the same can be said for ANY item that is highly sought after but very very few supplies. Say Mini Karka, they don’t even do anything.

And I’ll say for the millionth time that “Supply and demand is NEVER an excuse for anything in a game where the developers are capable of adjusting both supply AND demand as they see fit.”

Devs can’t change demand for certain precursors, since they are tied to player preferred weapons. New recipes, collections can increase demand for some items but precursors are pretty much one trick ponies, a necessary step for a legendary.

Remember that the last two sets, I think, had their own torch and pitchfork moments. First was the modified Human Cultural Light Armor for Flamekissed and then their was the Zodiac which had some taste questions and in turn a small tweak caused blow back from players who already had it.

They can’t win from losing. Throw in complaints about clipping caused by mixing armors and Charr tails, armor is a lot more of a hassle than an outfit.

Condutas.3580:

No point in discussing a lot of the past comments here, I just want too see a simple question answered here:

Can I expect too buy the number of gems I want in game (not 400 gems or 400 increments) before the halloween patch is over? If yes, then I can somehow apologize this behavior from Arenanet. If not… then I surely know what too expect in the future from this company and I can be sure I move my money too better “dry waters”

First this has nothing to do with money unless you are saying you don’t have enough gold to buy 400 gems and your only recourse is buying even more gems with cash when you only need very few.

Second, considering that the next phase of LS2 is starting November 4th, less than two weeks away, I doubt any fix will be coming by then. Most people don’t understand that software development takes time, especially if there’s a proper Q&A component to it. I wouldn’t even expect it on November 4th because you don’t drop a small change into a much larger release at the last minute. Even though this is isolated to the Gem Shop/TP portion of the game and doesn’t interact with the rest of the game directly, I can see the build team be hesitant.

It doesn’t mean I can’t be pleasantly surprised and see this sooner than later but my experience in software development tells me I would doubt it will be released before the Halloween event is over. My opinion, hope I’m wrong.

It is a staple of the fantasy genre. And there are a lot more not as revealing.

Not that difficult. I have one bookmarked for quite some time now. It was more useful than the one provided by the old exchange. Spidy was better but that broke mid August when the reported rates drifted away from their actual values.

https://www.gw2tp.com/gems

SlayForPie.9018:

So guys do you think they will add the fix to the Currency Exchange which will allow us to buy as many gems as we want during halloween?
Bacsue i really want to get that Phantom’s Hood and i dont want to pay 70g+ for 400gems while i dont need them all

No. After all last year’s Halloween had a glaring bug in one of the events that went unfixed and it ran twice as long as this year’s Halloween.

Heck, I would be surprised if we saw it fixed by the Wintersday event. After all a “new” custom screen needs to be created and added into the interface. While their dev tools for such a thing is quite powerful, I imagine the number of cooks needed to approve, test, iterate and repeat will delay a speedy rollout.

Just because your video card has a bucket load of memory doesn’t mean a game will use it, especially one coded in Dx9 where memory management is handled not by DirectX but by the developer. Just like having a ton of cores doesn’t mean a piece of software will utilize them all or in the case of a 32-bit app, more than 4GB.

Honestly, who checks under skirts and dresses?

Why do I sense they they made this decision with the wrong analysis of Gem Exchange conversions. As a percentage of total Gems acquired through gold conversion, I could see that lots 400 gems or greater would be significant. But I think what they needed to look at was in terms of unique player conversion habits where I think they would find the percent slewed to show a much lower percentage of players buying in bulk.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

The fact that this jump was 10x more than any previous jump associated with any patch I’m going to say this was price manipulation (or a bug) introduced with the changing of the gem conversion UI.

There is simply no other reasonable explanation. There was no big hype or super awesome items introduced in this patch to explain such a spike. Even the beloved SAB didn’t introduce half as big a spike, and the population is certainly much smaller now.

Really? It was roughly a 30.2% surge over 3 hours. When the anniversary sale hit at the end of August the surge was 24.8% in 3 hours. It’s not unheard of.

ANet is owned by NCSOFT. However there’s been murmurs that NCSOFT can’t close ANet, only divest it and in that case ANet keeps the Guild Wars IP. Also ANet does seem to exercise a greater degree of control than other NCSOFT entities. Things like striking it’s own deal for a distributor in China, hiring it’s own PR firm for the GW2 launch and publicly correcting the mothership every time an expansion was brought up in an investor’s conference call.

NCSOFT’s problem overall is they have been using “puffery” over the last 5 plus years whenever they talked about income growth. First that Blade & Soul was going to be the next AION, it wasn’t. That licencing in China was going to be a significant new source of income, it hasn’t. And finally enough disillusioned investors had enough and that has led to it’s stock price collapse. Stock price doesn’t hurt a company directly and it’s market value is still in the billions (~3 billion USD).

Now in that mess comes ANet with GW2. It had a huge roll out and it’s annual income is 2nd in terms of percentage for NCSOFT. The western developed MMOs NCSOFT closed over the years had earnings that were a fraction of what GW2 is currently making.

Now if you want to analyze the new Gem Exchange for nefarious motives, it may be that players didn’t keep a significant Gem balance, converting just enough for their needs at the time and therefore not sinking as much gold as they could. The hot dog/bun structure of item prices and purchase sizes virtually guaranteed players would have left over gems, which are worthless in the Gem Shop because it’s not enough and worthless in exchanging it back into gold because of the asymmetric exchange rate. And there’s a bonus that cumulative excess of extra gems being purchased spikes the exchange rate up so more gold is sequestered while the price of gold becomes more attractive.

But no more if this tin foil hat conspiracy that these changes were demanded by NCSOFT or Nexon or the Gnomes of Zurich.

Preyar.6783:

I haven’t seen this being mentioned in any recent post, so I’ll just put it here. In the Halloween patch notes this is written:
“Clarification: An error in previous release notes regarding the Permanent Hair Stylist Contract has been amended. The Permanent Hair Stylist Contract continues to be a very rare drop from the Black Lion Chest.”

So nice that they took weeks to officially acknowledge this.

This is what we mean by timely communications ANet. How many players may have lost coin on posting fees because they wrongly believed that new supply was over and priced accordingly? Hmmm.

Shylark.4951:

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Lets-talk-about-the-new-Gem-conversion-Merged/first

This thread is more about the spike and it’s causes than discussing the new exchange. Yes the two are tightly coupled but we will be getting a resolution to the design oversight sometime in the near™ future.

Wanze.8410:

Arantheal.7396:

I have no idea what happened, but this increase, happing parallel to the remove of the graph-display ingame, smells fishy.
I’d like to get a official response to why this spike occurred just now and in such intensity.

This spike occurred because lots of people bought gems with gold, which is quite common, when a new patch goes live.

And on top of it they likely had to buy more than they needed due to the new exchange. We all know the more gems are bought, the quicker the rate goes up. Another lovely side effect brought to you by Exchange 2.0™, more severe spikes.

Bright side, if there is one, the spike was big enough to recover your gold if you bought before the patch hit. Not so much anymore as the rate is recovering.

You don’t. But you can edit the OP and altered the Title to indicate it’s solved.