Guild Wars 2

Gaile Gray.6029:

Ok, guys. Some of you are unhappy about this change, I can see that. BUT… quite honestly, most of you are sort of (I hate to use the word) ranting (sorry!) instead of offering suggestions.

I assure you, the team leader told me not 15 minutes ago, they will listen to suggestions.

• Does that mean you get everything you want? Probably not.
• Does that mean you should suggest something? Yes, of course! Because they’re expecting player input.

So you want lower increments? Think it through and present a suggestion! You want XYZ in the interface? Post that idea. You would rather see something else? Post what you think about that other thing. Please don’t get into the whole “I’m going to kick the devs and their little dogs, too” because it’s not doing you or us any good at all.

I’m not here to apologize. I’m here to communicate and right now, the communication is coming in without a whole lot of substance. Over to you for suggestions and constructive input!

Gaile, you wanted suggestion.

Option 1

Add a check box/button to allow Advance/Expert/Manual mode that brings up an interface for entering exact values of either output (gems wanted/gold wanted) and/or input (gold to convert/gems to convert). Many pieces of software have such a check box/switch, even Windows.

Option 2

Several players pointed out there is a reason currency comes in the denominations they do, to reduce the number of coins/bills needed to exchange for something. Here it’s the number of transactions required to get what we want. So the 1/2/5/10 ratio is better than what you have for buying gems. And by that I mean 100/200/500/1000 gems and NOT 400/800/2000/4000.

Also an option when selling to enter the amount of gems we want to sell. As it is now it’s impossible to buy gems with cash and convert the lot to gold and it requires multiple transactions. In the end the player has a few gems left that can’t be used in the Gem Stop as well as not being able to cash them in.

Option 3

Total protonic reversal, aka putting it back the way it was.

Deli.1302:

Also, why did you intentionally increase gem->gold price by ~25%? That’s a pretty hefty spike for just a new outfit and finisher and it happened immediately after the patch so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t player driven.

They didn’t. But because players are now forced to buy extra gems due to the package sizes, the number of gems purchased with gold is up sharply and the exchange is wired so more gems bought, higher the exchange rate goes. And since players can only sell gems for certain gold amounts, I imagine the opposite is also true, fewer gems are being sold to counter the spike. It’s now virtually impossible for a player to buy $25/2000 gems with cash and convert the total amount into gold.

Of course, you just can’t use BL tickets to buy anymore from the skin vendor.

Tyger.1637:

Gaile Gray.6029:

Hey there,

Here are a few tidbits from the team:

• A lot of newer players had trouble with the interface. That doesn’t apply to you, you’re veterans who have been around the conversion block a time or two. But newer players will benefit from the updated system.
• The goal was to make the Gem Store more like other shopping experiences, and if you think about it, there is more of that feel to it now.
• You may be surprised to know this (I know I was) but very few people bought gems at smaller denominations than the first one offered in the new system. That’s not to say they never did, nor that there wouldn’t be the desire to do so. But overall, the current options were selected based on player purchases in the past.
• The team is going to listen to your feedback and, if and when it’s practical and desirable, they can look towards adjusting the new system to better meet your needs.

So please keep your thoughts coming on the new system. Feel free to make suggestions but please, keeping them constructive would be very much appreciated.

Let’s tackle each point in order:

* A lot of newer players had trouble with the interface. That doesn’t apply to you, you’re veterans who have been around the conversion block a time or two. But newer players will benefit from the updated system.
Okay, fine. New players have a hard time with it but it should not have removed the “veteran” option of being able to convert as-is. GW2 is only my second most played MMO and the first I’ve played with a cash conversion. I figured out pretty quick that converting x amount of gold yielded y gems at least once I’d got past the wildly different playstyle compared to City of Heroes.

* The goal was to make the Gem Store more like other shopping experiences, and if you think about it, there is more of that feel to it now.
It feels more like a voucher/reward card system by only allowing certain amounts. Or like the old Microsoft points system for Xbox Live (which they’ve abandoned for precise money amounts).

I’d prefer something like the Steam wallet. That gives you options to put in prefixed amounts OR the exact amount of your purchase. But that’s obviously a basket system where purchases get lined up before exchange.

* You may be surprised to know this (I know I was) but very few people bought gems at smaller denominations than the first one offered in the new system. That’s not to say they never did, nor that there wouldn’t be the desire to do so. But overall, the current options were selected based on player purchases in the past.
Actually that was me. One of my first gem purchase were the khaki shorts. After gathering up about 15-20 gold I converted 12ish of it to gems just to buy them. I later went for the Layered Vest and Casual Hoodie in an as-and-when. When permanent tools came out I decided to buy a gemcard, bypassing the conversion altogether. But I appreciated having the option available to convert back and forth in particular amounts.

* The team is going to listen to your feedback and, if and when it’s practical and desirable, they can look towards adjusting the new system to better meet your needs.
Just add a custom amount option at the bottom and put ‘advanced’ or ‘veteran’ or some other suitable warning. Best of both worlds then. Vets still have a full custom option and newbies can pick bulk packs.

I’m also someone who bought gems in small chunks. I bought a small amount of gems every day, a variation on cost averaging encouraged with 401Ks. It allowed me to save up gems at a better price than the post patch spike when everyone run to the exchange to purchase gems for that new or returning item at the Gem Shop. With the current changes, if I buy it’s more likely that it will be at an unfavorable time and with a significant percentage of my current bank at the 400 gem level.

And if I don’t have the gems to buy something I like because I’m stuck at buying 400 gem chunks, it’s not like I’ll go pay cash for gems. I’ll simply go without. Of course not being able to get the item on my terms means my opinion of this game is going to drop some. Because I’m not going to alter my play style simply to earn enough gold to meet your minimum purchase size. Others may and if that means they are “forced” to play a style they don’t enjoy, well that’s where all the talk about “grind” comes from. Doing stuff you don’t enjoy simply to meet some forced requirement, in this case enough gold for 400 gems.

Official thread

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

Official Thread

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

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

Didn’t see this thread, just the handful in the BLTC forum.

If you insist on this please add an option to sell all gems at once, rather than force us to sell piecemeal and end up with leftovers. Also add an option to allow us to buy a specific amount of gems. I’m willing to accept increments of 100 gems. 400 gems is a rather high bar for a lot of players to buy at one time, in terms of gold, and that was before this spike to 20g per 100.

I don’t know how you expected us to react over this but it nobody there should have expected anything but outrage. While players had asked for the ability to buy a specific amount of gems for whatever gold was required rather than guessing consecutively, this isn’t what they were asking for.

I was concerned that perhaps you were using Vista.

And yes, the 2nd PCIe x16 slot, counting out from the CPU, is electrically an x4 slot. The video card really should be in first slot.

You should check what version BIOS you have. I notice in the BIOS section of the downloads that V 1.9 lists “improved VGA compatability” and the latest version of the BIOS is 1.A.

Please, start another rather than join the plethora of threads on this very subject.

At the very least the ability to sell all our gems. As for buying I could settle for manual buying in increments of 100 gems.

While “monetization optimization” is all well and good but this will end up pushing players into doing content that delivers the most gold possible in the time a player has to play and away from content they may want to play, thus annoying if not alienating them. If they want to push out moderate play time players out of the game, this is an effective way.

Ygdrad.7839:

To all of you saying it’s some NCSoft ploy, it’s not. NEXON is in charge of the gem store. They’re the cash shop kings.

Please, not this again.

Why for heck’s sake is it a money grab. We are talking about in game currency not cash and the minimum is half of the minimum number of gems when paying with cash. If they needed 100-300 gems to buy that item and had enough gold for that but not for 400, they most likely aren’t going to fork over real money just to get it. I would be so POed that I would never spend another dime of real money.

By adding these fixed tiers, they are simply going to increase the drive to “beat the system” by forcing players into play styles that aren’t fun, but a means to simply generate as much gold as possible to reach the next tier. And those who can’t, will simply stop playing rather than be “forced” to fork over cash.

When players suggested to make the game less casual, this isn’t what they meant.

First how is this making more money for ANet since we are talking about exchanging game currency for Gems.

Second the minimum purchase size for gems in gold is half what it is with cash.

That said it’s still stupid. Yes some players requested a means to buy an exact amount of gems without playing guessing games but it’s easy enough to do the calculation based on what they wanted to buy, not limited tiers. And we can’t even sell the exact amount of gems we have.

You want to offer tiers, fine but give us an “advance trade” button to get to the old interface or one where we can specify the amount of gems we want to buy or sell as well.

Listen, players did ask for a way to buy an exact about of gems with gold. Sadly they perverted this request into the tiered mess we got today. Hopefully they can fix this.

They’ve admitted that last year the candy corn requirements were seriously out of whack.

Imperatora.7654:

how many new players are rolling 75g that they can blow on gems?

Maybe once a week. But I was buying 4-5g worth of gems every day and 5x that twice a week. I was trying to be smart and stock up on gems between when items I want show up at the Gem Shop. I can’t do that anymore, except buying a much larger chunk, once a week.

Players were asking for a means to enter the amount of gems they want and click Okay if they had the gold to cover it as well as the original method of entering gold. Instead you set it up like buying gems with cash.

What? Did player who paid cash complain that it was unfair that they were forced to buy more than they needed so you needed to introduce some false equivalency to the exchange?

I’ll state this again. ANet Devs have been acting like Djinns of legend and warp players wishes into some unrecognizable result that only hinted at what players were asking for. You did this with trait hunting, the commander badge’s (but mostly fixed that), aspects of the new and “improved” TP and now the exchange. Why is it that adding method B means original method A must go out the window? Why?

Just saw this.

My GOD devs, quit throwing out the baby with the bath water. Players have asked for ways to buy a specific number of gems but in addition to the previous method of specifying an amount of gold to convert. NOT one over the other.

For the longest time I’ve bought a tiny amount of gems every day with more on Monday and Thursday nights in anticipation of a spike if something good comes out on a Tuesday or Friday, now I can’t do that anymore because it was normally in the 30 to 150 gem range. Now that’s gone for me.

You are punishing players like me who save a little everyday in gems to avoid the inevitable rate spikes. Now I’m forced to buy gems in bulk. How did the old method harm you? Too many players “querying” the system in an attempt to buy an exact amount of gems? It seems you are intentionally trying to limit us in buying gems with gold by only allowing us to by these fixed amounts.

Are you so desperate to herd us to spend cash that you are trying to eliminate the convenience of the Gem Exchange? Wasn’t the increase in rates not doing it for you?

It’s as if you are channeling a Djinn and take what seems on the surface to be reasonable QoL fixes and suggestions and twist them into something nobody was asking for.

1st of all it’s normally the x16 slot physically closest to the CPU. But that’s probably not it. The OP, while overly protective of his system’s stats, seems competent enough to install a new video card, connect the external power connector and do a proper flush of the old driver and installing the current WGHL driver for that card.

Now he’s also not chosen to share the OS he is using. Perhaps that may be an issue with a modern video card. We are talking about going from a GTS 250/9800 GTX to a GTX 760. That’s quite the leap in computer years.

bri.2359:

John Smith.4610:

There’s virtually no DR active on any given day.

John Smith.4610:

Magic find makes a huge difference.

You don’t actually play this game, do you …

On the individual player level, DR is alive and well. It kicks in approx 20-30min after killing the same mobs in a localised area. Even your own devs admitted DR exists. It is not the perception issue you alluded to. I am sure many would be happy to document this for you.

As for MF …
Again, on the individual player level, the effects of MF are none to miniscule. MF does not even impact the major source of player loot, namely chests and champ bags.

I never used MF before EoL was introduced. Because I salvage a lot, my account MF is now 193%. The only thing I noticed going from MF 0% to 193% was the proportion of green item drops increased over blue items. That is it.

You definition of " huge difference" is significantly different than mine

First point, you have to remember that JS is talking game wide that there is virtually no DR. If a player farms one location of course they will experience but most players don’t hang around one area long enough for DR to kick in.

Second point, that’s how you play. You chose to specialize in content you think should give you better loot rather than ordinary content where MF kicks in, which is why you don’t see it. I imagine that there are loads more critters killed where MF kicks in on a daily basis than the few associated around boss chests. Spend time doing ordinary DEs or sweep a map rather than riding the boss train every quarter hour, then you’ll see MF in action.

Did you select Buy first?

Which only works for players who have the time to do the prelim event X times and be around for the new extra-hard event. What prevents slackers from hanging around like we now see at boss events only looking to auto attack for a chest than doing the prelim events? At the two low level boss events I do every night, Maw and Fire Elemental, at least 2/3rds of the players don’t bother with any of the events that lead up to the boss fights and then port to the next one as soon as it’s over. I don’t see how this is any different other than needing players to commit for hours for one meta event.

Okay, I’ll grant you it’s trolling but in a more creative way than the usual “A better than B” or “Everyone knows X is true (or false)”.

But precursor pricing is a lot like mount threads as they crop up with alarming regularity. The primary reason that certain precursor prices are high is the combination of low drop rates, high demand and a portion of the player base with lots of gold competing for those few that are put up for sale. But players starting those don’t want to hear those reasons. They think they should have gotten one at least after X hours of play.

And the reason we go to the TP for them is because the drop rate is so low and RNG does not guarantee a drop in some large number of hours of play and if you are lucky enough to get one, fair odds it’s not the one you want so off to the TP.

Now John Smith has started a thread on RNG problems and possible solutions for extremely rare item drops, the fact that some players feel that it’s impossible to ever get the game to reward the player with those items. Now that discussion is a better use of player’s forum time than deriding the devs over their reward system or blaming flippers or the Gem Shop or Nexon or sunspots for either the TP price or lack of getting one from a drop (or Forge).

Did you try the Mac sub forum or submit a ticket to support?

Satire is not trolling.

At the very least this topic was to counter the insensate wailing of some players that precursors were priced out of the range they could afford and thus was totally unfair. The thread at it’s most basic shows that demand is behind the high price of certain precursors but if demand isn’t there, prices are allot more reasonable. If anything it encourages players not to use such a broad brush when they say a whole group of items are not affordable.

Ignoring posters saying they weren’t talking about these inexpensive ones were either ignored or countered in the same manner when players post on the complaint threads when they inform why or suggest ways to get the gold to buy them. Thus satire.

If you find this thread annoying just understand the feeling some of us get when we defend the TP and economy.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

juno.1840:

Behellagh.1468:

ipan.4356:

Look CIG (Star Citizen) if you want an example of a company ought to communicate with it’s players.

Well that’s because it’s also a continuing sales pitch. I don’t think a week goes by without another “Star Citizen has now raised +1 million more” announcement. More hype equals more donors.

And GW2 doesn’t need money?

CIG communicates regularly because they are crowd funded. In a sense all games are crowd funded — the difference is when.

ANet really isn’t running the show imho — NCSoft is. That’s why I think we’re in this boat. If ANet was the ANet of the GW1 era, you’d see a different product at this point.

I’m not sure I understand this line of thought. NCSoft owned ArenaNet during Guild Wars (One) as well. No changes as far as ownership goes. Why are they ‘running the show’ now, and were not then?

That’s because back during GW, NCSOFT wasn’t controlled by F2P giant Nexon who are secretly controlled by The Gnomes of Zurich.

If you are using an i5-660/661 then it’s a dual core with hyper threading and not the same thing as a true quad core. Plus it’s a fairly old Intel core design. The dual core Pentium G3258 is 10% faster overall (just to indicate what 3 generations wrought) while the the i3-4360 is 50% faster (same 2 cores/4 threads makeup).

The game really wants 3 or more real cores.

Game isn’t GPU bound meaning a noticeably better GPU past a certain point has very little impact on FPS. CPU is the bigger factor especially around any number of players.

Right now the gold to gem rate is roughly 14.59g while Spidey reports it as 15.16g. Gem to Gold is 10.5g while Spidey reports it as 10g. The two tracking lines should never move in opposite directions and they did between Aug 11th and Aug 14th and since then the rates have been wrong.

It happened after an outage on the exchange chart.

Except GW2Spidey’s Gem prices have been wrong since mid August with no indication if it will ever be fixed. The Gold to Gem price is too high and Gem to Gold price is too low. It still shows relative movement but don’t rely on it for actual rates.

TPMN.1483:

I need to see 10000 listings not 1000 or 200.

Well then son, you’ve got a condition.

If you look at “Berzerkers Iron Greatsword of the Geomancer,” a lvl 80 masterword Greatsword you will see that the item typically has buy orders of 2-3 silver and sell orders of 3-4 silver. However, if you look at actual listings… You will see hundreds and hundreds listed for 6-10 silver. So if you were able to buy the item for 3 silver and list it for 8 silver… That’s a 226% profit.

Unless they are all mad and/or wishful thinking. Checking out the chart, I use gw2tp.com, someone comes along every so often and buys up a bunch at the 3-4s which leaves ones listing in the 6-7s range. If someone comes along at that point to sell one themselves and are not aware of this, they will undercut the current low bid by a copper or two, adding to those high listings. Eventually others come along and restore the price to it’s normal trading range of 3-4s while the 6-7s ones languish. Rince and repeat every 3-5 hours.

http://www.gw2tp.com/item/27535-berserkers-iron-greatsword-of-the-geomancer

No. Anyway you can’t really flip because flipping relies on players not willing or caring to maximize their earnings or minimize their spending thus leaving coin on the table. The exchange is the only buyer and seller and it makes sure it gets the most for it’s Gems and pay least when buying Gems.

As Astral points out, there’s a 28% loss buying gems and selling them back right away. You would have to wait until the exchange rate rise about 40% just to break even and that can take multiple months for that to happen (or a major Gem Shop sale driving the rates up can shorten that time).

Shylark.4951:

I traded 250 gems and got like 26.6 gold last night… It varies only way to know what you will get is just do it… Wish I could give better advise but really the in game chart is about the best we have….

And if you aren’t near a computer with the game installed, use the API.

https://api.guildwars2.com/v2/commerce/exchange/gems?quantity=100

Use in the number of gems you are looking to convert instead of 100 in the above link and get a real time result of the amount of gold you will get by selling them. Just remember the exchange fluctuates constantly.

For example 2000 gems at this moment is about 207.5g.

Essence Snow.3194:

Trying to make the TP as a sink more efficient.

Stick it to those evil TP flippers. EVIL FLIPPERS!!

Walmart staff never knows anything. Their PC game area, at least at the stores near me, is a hot mess.

ipan.4356:

Look CIG (Star Citizen) if you want an example of a company ought to communicate with it’s players.

Well that’s because it’s also a continuing sales pitch. I don’t think a week goes by without another “Star Citizen has now raised +1 million more” announcement. More hype equals more donors.

I agree with LadyRhonwyn. The old City of Heroes forum used vBulletin and while I know some site masters who detest it we could filter searches by poster’s name, date range, exact phrases/all works/any words, in title or title and body, select multiple sub forums, etc. as long as the words were 3 or more characters.

And there were still players who wouldn’t use it.

FXAA is “cheap” in terms of impacting framerate. Yes it smudges but just about any other AA method that isn’t a post process filter will take a much larger bite out of what framerates we are getting, I can understand that isn’t a huge priority.

juno.1840:

juno.1840:

My suggestion is one I made over a year ago — add a small listing fee to buy orders. This punishes abusive behavior while minimally impacting desired behaviors.

The list fee does not need to be a percentage… although the price of the item could dictate a “bracket” from which the fee is taken. Or the fee could be capped percentage to keep it reasonable for higher priced goods.

The list fee could be dynamic based upon how many times you’ve place a buy order on the same item in a short time frame — again something that would not impact desired behavior but punish abusive behavior.

You want a deterrent that only punishes abusive behaviors while leaving the market generally unaffected for normal players.

This is only limited by the creativity of the designers and the limitations of the software development process.

Other suggestions that came to mind:

• New buy orders cannot be cancelled for TBD minutes (anti-spam)
• New buy orders on the same item cannot be created until TBD minutes have elapsed (although we shouldn’t punish players who are trying to buy more than 250 of something)
• Fee to cancel a buy order (no fees to place a buy order)

Sorry, if I’m crafting/forging, I buy in bulk in multiple chunks of 250. If I’m salvaging for ectos via items, I buy a little at a time but I would restock my order when I put up the ones I got. Sometimes that’s rather quick between bids.

They were instock a few weeks ago when I walked through their game department, along with copies of the game. Sure the PC game section is shrinking quickly leaving only Blizzard and Sims games as the bulk of games you can buy off the shelf but the game card section is tiny relatively speaking. I’m wondering if they got misplaced as the reorg for the holiday shopping season.

Iason Evan.3806:

I have a few questions.

• Are Black Lion Weapon skins considered a form of a reward?

• Are Gem Shop armor skins and costumes also considered a form of a reward?

I ask because it has been discussed many times on these forums. One person will say, "The rewards need to be better in this game. We don’t get enough new skins. What they mean is; They don’t think we get enough new skins as rewards in PvE as compared with the amount of new skins we get in the gem shop. It’s valid for someone to say, “Well, you can go play the game, earn gold, and then buy what you want on the BLTC.” I totally concur. You can do that.

There is an issue though when converting gold you earn to gems to buy what you want on the gem shop: Inflation. The amount of playing I have to do now as opposed to a year ago has increased a lot. I don’t know the actual percentages but it feels like gems purchased with gold have gone up 100%. I used to buy 5 Black Lion Keys with 25-35g. That felt reasonable when I looked at my play time and gold earned and then converting that to 450 gems. It’s now usually in the 55-65g range. 800 gems for an armor set now when using gold is asinine. The reward no longer fits the cost as a reasonable thing. This is fine if you are still adding armor skins to earn in PvE. This totally leads to players feeling that the game is not as rewarding to play as it used to be. Couple that with rewards being lessened in seasonal events like Halloween and The Pavilion and farming materials being more rewarding than actual rewards players can use and it has lead to a frustrating experience.

If Gold:Gem conversion is going to inflate so much and Gem Shop Armor and Weapon skins are considered rewards, maybe make those purchases a little sweeter.

I for one know I don’t like having to earn twice as much gold due to inflation to get the same type of thing on the gem shop that I got last year. It’s understandable that this is one of many causes for the game feeling less rewarding along with RNG being so skewed toward the house.

I call BS on the whole Gem Shop armor argument. Take a look at your wardrobe. Just look at chest pieces for one weight. How many of those are Gem Shop Only? How many are not? Problem is players simply discount the ones you can get from content. How many of those, ones from content or crafting, don’t you (general you) have unlocked yet? Now I would agree that nearly all new skins show up at the Gem Shop rather than in content.

As for the Gem Shop and the exchange rate. First the shop’s purpose is cash first. I know some players hate microtransactions but welcome to 21st century gaming. Second the ever increasing exchange rate of gold to gems does suck excess gold out of the game economy, even if the bulk is only temporary (selling gems for gold). Less gold out in the world means less general inflation overall.

More taters Mister Frodo.

2.5 is my pick as well if all we can do in this thread is pick an option.

The GPU in Intel and AMD APU processors are Dx11 rated. Doesn’t mean they will play a game great.

Plus using only one Dx11 specific call constitutes Dx11 use.

As for LOTRO, Turbine has multiple MMOs using the same engine so it’s an aggregate of income. True it’s still no where near WoW but they can develop the engine for a new MMO and back port it to their other titles. I know DDO has a Dx10/11 path.

I can’t think of any for a couple of reasons.

First, ANet can through introduction make Item A no longer desirable which would likely cause the price of Item A to collapse. Or as in the case of Elder Wood Logs, they added a new random drop for new content which makes the item oversupplied. This is buying current high demand strategy.

Second, betting on really cheap and over supplied in hopes there will be a change in demand or supply to drain the over supply so prices rise, like what happen with silk scraps, may never happen. This is buying the low demand strategy.

Third, Gems may sound like a good idea but due to the dissimilar exchange rates you need a 40% climb in value simply to break even. As this seems like a good bet, the exchange rate is up 200% over the last year but only 64% over the last 6 months. And once converted back the question becomes how well it did against inflation on the TP? In theory someday the exchange will hit parity and the rates will stabilize or at least slow their rise.

Any method to hedge is a gamble. Maybe you should considered a diversified strategy?

ZaxanRazor.6235:

Behellagh.1468:

ZaxanRazor.6235:

dekou.6012:

Implementing DX11 by itself wouldn’t do much good. It could be a tiny performance upgrade, but that’s about it. People often think DX upgrades are some miracle patches that make games look better, but that’s far from the truth. In fact, The Witcher 2 – still one of the best-looking games out there – is a DX9 game.

First – you can’t compare a game like Witcher 2 to GW2. Witcher 2 is a single player, somewhat linear game with closed environments. It looks kitten pretty, but it’s nowhere near as complex as GW2 in terms of map size or character interaction.

Second – DX11 would be a big improvement as it specifically allows for the use of multi-threading in a way that DX9 just doesn’t. It allows threading to scale with the number of cores available on the CPU. DX9 has a specific number of threads regardless of the computer its running on. It would also allow for the use of DirectCompute to further enhance performance.

Yes but the engine would need to also be recoded to be more multithreaded than it currently is to get the most out of a Dx11 port.

It would take some work, but it’s not unheard of. WoW has added DX11 support, as did Lord of the Rings Online.

WoW had income over $1 billion a year for a few years there, they could afford to devote a small building of devs with game engine development experience to recoding it. GW2 is only in the $80-100 million income range.

@Ohoni – Well if you can remember back before EoL from blues and greens, most blues didn’t even have bids for them and greens a few didn’t have bids. And NPC vendor was something at least and depending on mat prices they may not even been worth salvaging vs vending them. Of course that means getting to an NPC vendor to dump them.

If that’s the case with exotics, do you know of a cheat sheet for all of them somewhere or do we have to look each one up in the wiki? Well at least there’s a cause/effect relationship of mod type and reward, even if the chance is low. I also understand certain armor/weapon skins from certain areas upon salvage as well if you are a skin collector.

Well that’s macabre sounding.

ZaxanRazor.6235:

dekou.6012:

Implementing DX11 by itself wouldn’t do much good. It could be a tiny performance upgrade, but that’s about it. People often think DX upgrades are some miracle patches that make games look better, but that’s far from the truth. In fact, The Witcher 2 – still one of the best-looking games out there – is a DX9 game.

First – you can’t compare a game like Witcher 2 to GW2. Witcher 2 is a single player, somewhat linear game with closed environments. It looks kitten pretty, but it’s nowhere near as complex as GW2 in terms of map size or character interaction.

Second – DX11 would be a big improvement as it specifically allows for the use of multi-threading in a way that DX9 just doesn’t. It allows threading to scale with the number of cores available on the CPU. DX9 has a specific number of threads regardless of the computer its running on. It would also allow for the use of DirectCompute to further enhance performance.

Yes but the engine would need to also be recoded to be more multithreaded than it currently is to get the most out of a Dx11 port.

Is this suppose to be a discussion on fixing “unlucky” players without messing up the aggregate drop rate too much or coming up with something that isn’t as RNG based? I’m asking because it’s been 9+ hours and not one comment positive or negative about my suggestion. I’ve been conditioned to have at least some shots fired at me.

If you want to look at this from 100,000 ft, it’s a problem with having so many possible drops from everything and how with RNG it drives players to the TP which helps sink gold from the economy as players sell what they don’t want to buy what they do.

Let’s look as swords, and these are just the ones on the TP.

GW2TP lists 562.
38 white
183 blue
148 green
109 rare
83 exotic
1 legendary

Breaking them down by level ranges.
0: 5
1-10: 23
11-20: 43
21-30: 35
31-40: 58
41-50: 58
51-60: 53
61-70: 86
71-80: 201

Lets breakdown of the 201 level 71-80 swords.
White: 6
Blue: 34
Green: 44
Rare: 49
Exotic: 67
Legendary: 1

The pool is simply too large and too meaningless for players to be considered a reward, and this is just swords. Level 71-80 weapons, all types, all quality levels, consist of 3,707 items, 21 legendary, 1170 exotic, which 20 are precursors.

I’ve been here 22 months, with 20 playing level 80 characters. Want to know how many exotic weapons I’ve gotten from drops during that time? Probably less than 5, no more than 10 and I think I got a dup once. Out of 1170. Drop rate requires a microscope.

If you toss in Level 71-80 armor (2085/603 exotic) and trinkets (617/104 exotic) numbers nearly 7000 items. Now a fair chunk be craft only and aren’t on the drop tables (crafters need to make money somehow, not that it’s easy to do) but the pool is enormous to select from. How many players with level 71-80 characters are excited over blues? or even green? I think I’m safe to say nobody. They are merely salvage fodder for EoL and a handful of T5 and the occasional T6 mat and maybe a minor sigil/rune. Or they are forge fodder.

And that’s part of the problem with RNG. Table of drops are too large and most are “junk” to a level 80 character. If they aren’t junk then there’s a fair chance that they aren’t usable by the character or the character already has better gear. It may not be junk, just a helm shaped bag of coins from selling it on the TP.

Maybe I’m not playing the “right” content as I rarely do dungeons and haven’t done fractals, due to the PUG snobs to who you must play their formula builds or not get on a team.

TL/DR version

Nobody commented one my suggestion to provide guarantee drops. RNG is needed due to the shear number of possible drops. And even though a very large number of possible items are exotic, the drop rate is minuscule in basic PvE meaning it’s TP or nothing.