The only thing consoles have going for them in terms of development is their uniformity. All <console model/brand> are the same. Identical hardware, software and no funny other bits of 3rd party software running on them at the same time.
We have identified a bug with the free banker and are working on a fix.
Woo! Thank you! I really appreciate the occasional freebie from the gem store <3
Thank you very much for the clarification and resolution of the issue.
I also strongly second khani’s statement of appreciation for such generous promotions.
As a note to others that are unaware, the timer on the banker golem does not begin until you retrieve the item from the mailbox. If you have no need for it right now, you can leave it in your mail until you have need of it and have it for 2 weeks from that point.
One fundamental problem with this that I have is that according to Anet they surveyed people that stopped playing the game and based their changes on the leveling system based on their answers. But did they survey the players that are actually still playing the game? Don’t our opinions count for something?
If I made a movie, showed it to 500 people, and 20 of them walked out angry, I wouldn’t change the movie to suit them, because 480 people seemed to enjoy it. It’s not a perfect comparison but you get the point.
Why didn’t they do a CDI on the leveling experience?
Why isn’t there an in-game survey system that periodically asks me questions about in-game features? Wouldn’t that be super helpful if you’re interested in what your player-base thinks? (which, admittedly, Anet definitely seems to).
These forums are full of amazing ideas, but it’s no secret that we’re only a small part of the GW2 population. An in-game survey system would reach 100% of your current player-base and would provide an amazingly accurate idea of what your players want. And I know that personally I wouldn’t mind answering a few questions here and there in order to make the game better. There would also be a great opportunity to link directly to the CDI’s on these forums from inside the game. Collaboration is a great thing, but I feel like 80% of the player-base is upset with the new changes and that is not good.
You’re assuming a 96% retention rate with those numbers. I haven’t seen the metrics and not being a game designer, I don’t know what retention rate is considered superior. However, my guess is it’s no where near that high. It may even be sub 50%. Either way, what I would surmise is more people buy and quit the game than stay and play it and that is expected. But, it seems the current percentage simply isn’t high enough for the company’s standards. We’re falling into the trap of thinking that “we stayed so obviously everything is fine,” but do we know what percentage of activated accounts we are?
Really, not rhetorically, does anyone have those numbers?
But he talking about the “infant mortality” end of the failure curve. Players who don’t return after X hours of play on their 1st character. The longer someones plays, the more likely they will get tired of it and leave, if only for a while.
I convert a very little bit of gold into gems every day, more on Monday’s and Thursday evening play sessions since items tend to be added, return or go on sale Tuesday’s and the Weekend starting Friday.
This way if an item shows up that you want, you either have all or a substantial part of the price already converted at pre-spike prices and then need less gold. I’ve converted gold over the 21 months into 7-8 thousand gems I reckon. And it’s not all my gold and I don’t grind paths or do the major bosses.
And since converting Gems to Gold is at such a disadvantage, this method is perfect as a Gem Shop savings plan. But you have to do it every day, stick with it and not kneejerk buying of every little thing they push out.
They said it would be an increase favoring your profession but not exclusive to your profession and in a post on the forum they said it skews less at upper levels.
If you are talking about data being received, MMOs while playing doesn’t use a lot a bandwidth. Especially if you are just moving through a zone taking one the occasional critter in your path. Boss events and WvW zerg clashes uses a lot more but 80KB/s (kilobytes per second) sounds about right.
But we didn’t know the exact contents of collections until a day or two before the patch drop (even then the collection list wasn’t comprehensive). The price move started well before that.
Just so people aren’t misled. GW2 being ‘neck and neck’ FF14 is misleading.
It’s ‘neck and neck’ with the PC version of FF14, however FF14 is on PS3/PS4, which obviously do not register on Xfire/Raptr.
Then there’s Wildstar, where people estimated it only sold under 500k at launch, based on NCSoft’s 2Q 2014 financials.
And here’s the Raptr ranking for Wildstar’s launch compared to GW2 (rank 6 vs rank 18, with a relative difference of ~3 times for hours played). http://caas.raptr.com/most-played-pc-games-june-2014-wildstar-on-the-rise-steam-summer-sale-aftermath/
You are right. GW2 is a successful MMO, but it’s hardly as successful as some people on these forums think it is.
But GW2 is hardly the failure as some people on these forums think it is either.
You are always paying the posting price even if you are selling everything to the highest bidder.
And in cases where you were overselling to the high bidder, in a high trading volume environment, that now really low sale order gets snapped up rather quickly so you might not have noticed by the time you went to pick up your cash at a TP.
No it’s a fix number of entries that get downloaded. For instance I have a 8 day or so sell history but barely a day’s worth of buy history because I buy mats in bulk and they are normally fulfilled in numerous small batches.
I think the list length in transactions is 200 entries in each of the four categories.
That’s false info. Anyone can harvest nodes. The “problem” is that nodes aren’t visible on the mini map until some level. But if you know what they look like and bought the tools, then you can harvest them.
Because right now the priority is getting the NPE in order for, if reddit diving is right, there is a free trial at the end of the month to pull in new players. Assuming you’ve and others have bugged it rather than just post about it will be scheduled to be fixed at some point.
It may have to do with anticipation that the “drops skewed to your profession” would impact the cloth market since everyone “must run a zerk warrior” mentality. I assume it’s mainly speculation driven with players hoarding silk for the day the silk supply dries up.
I run a thief and haven’t noticed a major shift in cloth salvage.
I tend to get all the non-PvP/WvW ones done in a 1 1/2 to 2 hour play session without focusing on doing them. A couple of boss meta-events usually take care of the event requirement. The Kills one happens on it’s own, including vets and champs. I tend to play a bit in all four regions so that usually covers kills in a specific zone. Conditional damage is handled by my abilities during all those kills. I admit I can’t get skill interrupter except by accident. Always do a jump puzzle or two every night. Other than burning a skill point scroll to get to three and remembering to visit the Laurel Vendor if that’s out, they simply happen during normal play.
Right one is nice and fancy. Left one has a silly sized hilt.
Love the boots. I’m making a Sylvari soon, once the initial adjustments to the NPE are finished. Can’t seem to find them on argos, could you tell me what they are?
This isn’t a fix. I’m even more disappointed they didn’t revert now… as it seems they are only slowly moving towards the goal. If you can make the goggles account bound, make all these account bound after your first character… or hell your first 2… I wouldn’t mind going through this system once or twice and never having to deal with it again, but your forcing us to deal with it indefinitely and there is no reason for that… there really isn’t.
This was a change that should have been done at release or not at all… especially not after 2 years.
Don’t you get that they aren’t ever going to revert this. Tweak it here and there but it’s never going back to the way it was no matter how much noise some of you make. This was done to retain new players who in the past left only after a few weeks because they felt they were dropped into the deep end and told to swim. Doesn’t matter if games like Wildstar is 10x worse in terms of complexity dropped on the player, but this is was the result of play testing in both the US AND China and not just China.
There may be more tweaks to come with the LS but reversal isn’t happening. The forum equivalent of pouting, holding your breath, stamping your feet isn’t going to change it. You’ve seen how well that’s worked with protesting the new trait system.
Too many people complained that the game was too “easy”. Some asked for traits to be discovered as they were in GW. Gee, not that easy anymore with most of the traits locked up now right?
They’re not working on an expansion, they’re working on the Living Story as a focus for putting out new story content.
Between the Fractured release (Nov 26, 2013) and the Origins of Madness (January 21, 2014) there is no Living Story content. 2 Month break.
Between the Battle for Lion’s Arch (March 4th, 2014) and the Gates of Maguuma (July 1st, 2014) there is no Living Story content. 3 Month break.
Between Dragon’s Reach Prt 2 (August 12th, 2014) and the return of Living Story Season 2 (November 4th, 2014), we have nearly another full 3 months of break.
There has legitimately been more waiting for story than actual story(though I will say the Season 2 story is leagues better than Season 1). Yes, they are working on other things like the feature updates sure but I can’t play a feature update. I can’t be thrilled and wowed by the gripping story that is another generic week of World Vs World. I can’t be excited by all the gripping changes that have been made to the leveling process considering I’ve 8 lv 80s and no new classes have come out since launch.
I’ve played the game since pre release. I have played the content that is available. Living Story releases give me something to do. Lets take a look at those gaps that I listed earlier. Between the Battle for Lion’s Arch and the Gates of Maguuma release, I hardly played the game. When we had the Dragon’s Reach prt 2 and they said there’d be no new releases until Sept Feature Pack I took a break and came back to find out there’d be no story for another 2 months..
I want to play your game Anet, please give me something to do, and Skritt Shinies are not it.
Shouldn’t use start dates as end dates of the LS arcs. Add 2 weeks.
So Dec 10th to Jan 20st. That’s a month and a half, or less really (1.38), only 0.66 months in 2014.
April 1st to June 30th. That’s three months.
Aug 26th to Nov 3th. That’s two and 1/3 months.
There is always going to be rehashed but tweaked seasonal events. And while you aren’t counting the feature packs as content, it’s not like they didn’t give us any new, At least for the serial complainers.
So yes. In roughly 8.55 months, we have had 4.14 months of new LS. 2.07 months of rehashed but tweaked content and since you don’t want to count the feature packs or the fact that LS 2 doesn’t really go away, 2.34 months so far of no content at all, new or rehashed but tweaked. Since I don’t know when Halloween or Wintersday (more rehashed and likely tweaked content) I’m going to say we will have had new content for 1/2 the year.
But you can’t really ignore the fact that LS2 is repeatable for all characters, including ones made after LS 2 started.
Jan 21 – Apr 14: End of LS1
Apr 15: First Feature Pack
May 20th – Jun 30th: Festival of the Four Winds
Jul 1 – Aug 26+: LS2 Part 1
Sept 9: Feature Pack 2
You really shouldn’t make up stuff that can be so easily disputed. 3 month breaks? 4 to 5 months between living story?
They just need to activate the chess boards for vets and maybe if when you reached some level. There’s at least one board still there. You just couldn’t do anything.
A suggestion that I’ve made before, that continues to be relevant with the NPE level gating. With things like utility skills (engineer) and downed skills being level gated to slowly introduce them to players, why not add these skills to the weapon skills and/or utility page on the Hero window so people can read the descriptions at their leisure? The underwater skills are already there, which is nice, but it has boggled my mind since launch that the downed skills aren’t there to read outside of frantic combat where you might not have time to hover over each skill and read them.
Yes I truly don’t see the problem in expressing how much we dislike something. I don’t want to sugar coat it… I absolutely hate all the gated content added, and it was already noted how much we hated the trait system and they clearly didn’t get the message. I want them to know that I feel its unacceptable to keep any of the gated changes and level locking story content. It’s unnecessary and limiting what we can do in the game.
But all of these changes aren’t about us. It’s about the new customer, one that may have never played an MMO before. I personally don’t have that much of a problem with the level gating IF play time it takes to get to 40 is the same as it was to get to 30 before. I’m all for removing info blocks for vets. Things like the map not having mat nodes or vistas.
But we as vets already know where to go to get find an actual TP NPC or buy gathering tools and salvage kits assuming we didn’t transfer the permanent ones over to the new character.
But stamping your feet every hour of every day isn’t going to get the bugs they’ve said they have found fixed and tweaks done any faster.
I thought all veterans should have lvl20 scrolls(or at least most of them should have enough). That is why I’m complaining and many others too, because we dont’ actually get benefit from lvl1-15 being faster.
That being said, if the developer intent to juts ignore us, and continue with it, posting more about it may be nonconstructive.
I obviously understand the developer have lots of pressure to retain new players, and keep china customer and publisher happy. I think some of this changed happen, because the chinese publisher may some how suggest some system may come to us too.
Honestly I would have as a software designer made the various restrictions and level locks to be read from a file added to the build back when I was doing the China version. This way the build between China and NA/EU could have been customized with greater ease.
I would have also added phasing tech, which they sort of use with nodes, to make NPC vendors like the TP NPC to be visible to some players but not to others (read newbies) or have the NPC simply say to a new player to come back once they’ve gotten a bit more experience rather than eliminating them. Filter out the gathering tools and salvage kits from vendors instead of simply removing them.
Maybe it was done to encourage players to go into their race’s main city. My first character was a Norn and I didn’t take them to Hoelbrak until they was in their teens. I didn’t know what was on the other side of that swirly thing. The map was a blur. Not like we could see a big city from there like in Queensdale.
Yes I truly don’t see the problem in expressing how much we dislike something. I don’t want to sugar coat it… I absolutely hate all the gated content added, and it was already noted how much we hated the trait system and they clearly didn’t get the message. I want them to know that I feel its unacceptable to keep any of the gated changes and level locking story content. It’s unnecessary and limiting what we can do in the game.
But all of these changes aren’t about us. It’s about the new customer, one that may have never played an MMO before. I personally don’t have that much of a problem with the level gating IF play time it takes to get to 40 is the same as it was to get to 30 before. I’m all for removing info blocks for vets. Things like the map not having mat nodes or vistas.
But we as vets already know where to go to get find an actual TP NPC or buy gathering tools and salvage kits assuming we didn’t transfer the permanent ones over to the new character.
But stamping your feet every hour of every day isn’t going to get the bugs they’ve said they have found fixed and tweaks done any faster.
It’s Tuesday. Tuesday is always Gem Shop day. Something new, something returning, something on sale. If this still surprises you, the collective you, after two years then you really have short attention spans.
Funny, I’ve always heard that players under level 80 and not kitted out with exotics if not better are entirely worthless in dungeons and WvW. At least that’s the attitude I’ve seen.
It’s NPE and not all changes planned will result from or cause a CDI to be started. It’s their game not ours. They appreciate our input but there are other sources of input such as their usability testing for new players which we can’t really provide because we aren’t new players anymore.
Replacing the missing profession mechanics UI for the Elementalist, Engineer, and Guardian professions
Offhand weapon not unlocking until level 7
Weapon Swapping not unlocking until level 15
Utilities 7, 8, 9, and 0 not unlocking until levels 13, 24, 35, and 40 respectively
Underwater combat not unlocking until level 8, underwater skill 5 not unlocking until level 23
Most juvenile pets missing from starting zones
Mechanics of many early heart quests reduced to make them more boring.
Apples missing from apple orchard
I may still be missing a few, but fixing those need to be a priority as well.
Good luck with that list, the level unlocks are the core of NPE, not bugs.
A lot of people are expecting some kind of legacy feature. Where veterans don’t have to go through the same gating that new players do.
I would expect the info suppression like hiding vistas, nodes and the like from mini and main maps to be removed for vets but not the level gating. XP curve has been adjusted to compensate for the new unlocks.
The new leveling system is a joke, all that needed to happen was to add a little more tutorial to tell people what was going on….that was it.
“I swung a sword, I swung a sword again….Heyyyy I swung it again”
This is now the weapon skills unlock system for the NPE.
“In most games…you go out and have really fun tasks occasionally”
This is now the entire early leveling experience, Press F on everything, whack mobs, with an occasional interesting event.
“and the rest of the game is this boring grind to get to the fun stuff”
This is now the entire level 1-80 experience. 1-40 you will never have your entire skill set unlocked, 40-80 you can never actually use a Grandmaster trait until you have finished the leveling curve…
I don’t know about you, but the NPE and trait changes seem like a giant slap in the face, not allowing players to play how they want and artificially extend the leveling experience to feel different.
I would go as far to say that the game is being converted into something designed for people who have never played a game before. I understand that some people don’t have a ton of time, or just aren’t that good at some games, but this is not how you teach people things. You cannot try and teach a person to draw, by never giving them a pencil. Just as much as players will not learn to play, if they aren’t given the tools and skills.
Like playing monopoly, and having dice rolling unlocked 30 minutes in, then unlocked the ability to collect 200 by passing Go! at 1 hour, having the ability to buy/trade unlocked 2 hours in.
Play how you want in terms of available, broad activities but you’ve always had to play within the confines of their rules.
I’m surprised by the rehashing of the trait changes from April. They have shown by lack of any meaningful response that those changes aren’t going to be rolled back. Continuing to cry foul about it is a waste of your time. Maybe, just maybe they would be willing to alter some of the missions that unlock specific traits but honestly it’s been 5 months and all we’ve gotten was a “yah, well saw the thread”.
NPE it seems they are willing to discuss some of the issues.
They’ve made it clear in the past that their tools can spot macro activity and that they don’t distinguish the difference between convenience applications like EoL consumption or instrument playing and more nefarious uses.
You used macros to do more than one action, ban hammer.
Auto-play was so you didn’t have to hit play after login. If it did everything before I would have considered that a bug. Now adding -autologin to gw2.exe’s command line along with checking auto-play should do what you are asking.
I think they took their cues from commerce sites with similar filter/bug (I think that’s what they are called, those little filter critters on top that you can kill individually, other than the first one) UIs.
I think it’s because not every “category” has the same filter options so switching options delete all of them rather than ignore the ones that don’t make sense.
Anyone know if there is a way around this situation?
Lots of buy offers for mithril ore at 37c
30 mithril ore at 38c available
Want to put offer in for 200 mith ore at 38c.
Will only let me put a buy offer in for 37c (with the other several thousand) or buy the 30 mith ore at 38c maximum.
All you can do is clear out the existing listings that are offering the price you want to pay, then you will be allowed to put the rest in on buy order.
So if you see qty. 30 @ 38c and the next entry in the list is qty. 1524 @ 39c, you have to buy the 30 units, then you can place the buy order for the other 170 you wanted at 38c.
Sadly, or not, the game no longer roles over excess buy or sell orders into bids or sale orders. Just like you are required to increase you max price if you want to buy a quantity beyond the first seller as oppose to auto selecting multiple sellers. I think the logic is to make the user aware of these former automatic systems and take direct action to get a similar result.
Before a player could want 10 of something and while there was 2 @ 2s, the next 8 could be at 10s and the player may not have noticed that he wasn’t getting all 10 @ 2s. So now they would have to either select a range of sellers or up their max amount per unit to increase the quantity available.
Same with selling to a high bidder when the bidder doesn’t want all the player is selling. The player would end up with a sell order at the previous high bid for the remainder. Now they have to enter the bid manually or, and I haven’t been able to test this, select multiple buyers or lower their minimum per unit price. I simply don’t have anything in large quantity that there’s a buyer who couldn’t take the entire amount to properly test. I’m simply assuming symmetry from the buyers side.
An in-game mail check might be in order.
