Guild Wars 2

You can level in any zone other than the 6 major cities. Even though the game will down level you to make any zone challenging, you will still receive XP that’s relative to your actual level. You could level to 80 in the starter zones, although you would be missing out a fair chunk of the world.

Sounds like you are taking the portal to Fields of Ruins and end up in Ebonhawke, so you are in Divinity’s Reach. So go into Queensdale and head to the gate near the south west corner that’ll take you to Kessex Hills.

Here is the wiki article on zones and their level ranges.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Zone

Buy or use 4 minor runes to MF.

Well if you read the fine print it’s TTM (trailing twelve months) ending 1Q14, which was 112,077 million South Korean Won. That’s roughly $100 million dollars. So to be $3.88 per player per year, which is what they said it was, the average monthly number of players playing GW2 from April 2013 to March 2014 was 26.25 million.

Wait, sanity check says that’s wrong so lets say $3.88 per month per player. That drops it to a bit over 2 million active players per month during that time. That number makes more sense as ANet announced in August 2013 that they had sold 3.5 million copies.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/

So $3.88 per month is about $46.50 per active player per year.

Hmm.

Last year I came to like the Wntersday jumping puzzle. Over and over and over …

But Wintersday does have more stuff to do than Halloween.

No idea then. I’m getting faster on worse hardware and higher settings.

Oh wait, you posted the GPU Tab, notice that the card is running with a x1 bandwidth. Right column, about halfway down, “Bus Interface” after the @. That’s your problem.

How to fix it, no idea as long as it’s in a proper x16 slot, usually the one closest to the CPU.

Devata.6589:

Mostly the same. As you know I always talked about the cash-shop focus, how that would turn things into grind because items would be mainly available by grinding gold instead of having a nice journey to hunt for those items. How that would burn out people overtime and so in the longer term they would walk away.

That’s only for players too cheap to buy gems. The magnanimous nature of ANet providing the exchange made some believe that gold to gems is the proper way to buy from the gem shop. Of course this belief has caused the exchange rate to shoot up which then makes the gold “grind” more of an issue. So it’s a self-inflicted wound that keeps on wounding.

At least lately the exchange rate, outside of Gem Shop sales or new cool items, has been around 25-27g per 100 gems.

Because I somehow manufactured a Tom’s Hardware graph in a few minutes. Okay fine. Plus the i5-650, even at 3.2GHz, is slower due to generational differences. Even the i3-2100 (a Sandy Bridge core used in the test) is 10% faster at 3.1GHz.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

And no, that GPU-Z sensor log doesn’t show anything because it’s not clear when the game is running.

This is old but Tom’s Hardware’s original review showed number of cores does make a difference and there is a big difference between dual core with HT and a true quad core.

maddoctor.2738:

Shouldn’t the sales of the China version be included for the overall health of the game? Anet should be making money from the China version which I don’t think is included in those charts. Unless the China version is dead

NCSOFT lumps all their royalties together so we can’t tell how much is from what game or from what region. So unless they call out specifics in their quarterly report or conference call, there isn’t any consistent information.

One could say the exchange is mainly a gold sponge, holding gold being used to buy gems to pay those selling them. There is still a rather hefty sink involved as a cut is take both buying and selling gems.

The i5-650 would be called an i3 today, it’s a dual core HT CPU. The game will use more than 50% CPU in a true quad core so by the 650’s very nature, a dual core will hurt performance. But that much?

Post a screen shot of the first tab of GPU-Z while the game is running in Windowed Fullscreen. I’m wondering if the GPU is “waking up” properly.

Short form, old guild banks were Grandfathered in when HoT came out. But to upgrade them you need to build a Guild Hall.

Drarnor Kunoram.5180:

Then there are the T5 Fine crafting mats (especially fangs, totems, and venom sacs) that rain from enemies in HoT maps. They only make a couple copper a piece on the TP.

Of course they rain, they only drop from high level critters and since HoT and LWS3 is level 80 and their zones are populated with high level critters … guess what happens. Nobody wants to use them at level 80 so high supply, low demand and that equals a low price. Law of supply and demand in action.

Well T6 leather is dropping because MO said during the last AMA that they will provide a means to farm leather.

As for other mats the most recent drop may be a rebound created when Episode 3 came out and players abandoned their usual play en masse which reduced new supply flowing into the TP which caused the price to rise. Now two weeks later players have returned to their usual haunts and new supply is flowing again which cause those prices to drop. An higher than normal price may have encouraged others to “farm” which the increases the supply flowing in and lowers the price.

People will always believe the “best” content is at max level due to how other MMOs are designed and the old outleveling of zones. While raids and LWS3 are level 80 content, if you are starting at level 1 and own HoT, there is no rush.

The other is that there are so many games out there that to play them all you need to rush to the end and move onto the next. Burn through any new content and swap. It’s the nature of gaming now.

@gameprofreak – while the game is running fullscreen window mode, fire up GPU-Z and see if the video card is “waking up” and is using the x16 PCIe connection as x16 or if it’s stuck at x1. Rightmost column of GPU-Z’s first tab, half way down after the @ will tell you PCIe mode and bus width being used, before the @ is the max.

The Wiki is your friend. It’s also what passes for a help system in game.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dynamic_event

But lack of traditional quests was a selling point, I just recently watched the Gamescon presentation from 2010. As for seamless zones, that’s a day 1 design decision on both the server and client side.

And like I said, the gem shop package deal for LWS2 is a good deal.

ProtoGunner.4953:

Well, everything shows the same. Sinking revenue, sinking interest (big game sites like Gamespot not even tested HoT – imagine that…). Popularity is down to nothingness, on Twitch GW2 is behind almost all major competitors. They usually get 20 views, compare that to WoW – 10 years old – with tens of thousands of viewers…

No, they misconcepted it right after release not going for expansions but living story and then decided to actually make an expansion, but only half-baked which was clearly initially though as living story releases. Then we get the expansion with only 4 maps and a high price tag. Bam! That’s why people leave. That’s why they do now everything to change that and I really, really hope they will release the next expansion next year. Otherwise even less people are returning.

Looking at Twitch right now, None EST. WoW – 15,700; Runescape – 6,100; Black Desert – 1,400;; Lineage II – 1,200; SWTOR – 750; Elder Scrolls – 530; Guild Wars 2 – 510

So we have MMOs that are old and have millions of players and ones that came out F2P this year in NA/EU. Also Twitch viewer ship for a game is very caster based as 40% of the viewers for any particular game listed above are from a single caster. If a caster’s following was built playing a particular game, of course they will continue to play that game. Also Twitch is international so games more popular outside of the NA, for instance nearly all Lineage II streams aren’t in English reflecting the fact that Lineage II isn’t popular in NA.

Same here with the key farm.

Having unlocked all of season 3, I’m not sure if you can buy them like you can buy Season 2 (which is cheaper buying the pro-rated discounted package in the Gem Shop rather than one at a time from the Story page). But you could find someone willing to replay those chapters, including the first two episodes of season 3. You won’t get story rewards but you can see the story.

Of course season 3 is gated behind HoT so you have to own the expansion.

And I’ve always contented Devata that during the extended development of GW2 ANet realized that a paid “box” B2P business model similar to GW couldn’t support the size of the team required to meet such a release schedule. Especially if you expected a similar amount of content for each expansion following the model set by GW’s campaign releases.

Now you are going to scoff at that but you only have to look at how fast ANet is delivering content in the last four years and honestly ask yourself if they could pull off a Cantha or Elona GW like expansion. The latest AMA stated it takes each of the LWS3 teams 6 months for each episode. Content that takes less than 6 hours to do the story and how long to get all the achievements and grow tired of the area? And you think that all the content creation groups except a “live team” could create another core Tyria size, level 1-80 MMO in 12 to 18 months? It’s going to take two years to see another HoT sized expansion. Blizzard still relies on monthly subs to provide the cash flow for their expansion release schedule and you think ANet could do it on just game sales which exponentially drop off over time? Right.

It’s clear that to maintain ANet’s “buy once, play forever” philosophy, no subscriptions or even the “voluntary” subscription approach with a monthly VIP level would be allowed. That left a cash shop or winning Powerball when it’s over $500 million every few years.

I think I mentioned a couple of months back of a 3D print company, Eucl3d, who looks to be offering custom prints from a various of games.

https://eucl3d.com/

However this is a big time necrothread.

But let me look at something a little different than just GW2 sales.

Below I’ve included three charts. The first shows game income by region, as NCSOFT breaks them into. Note that after 1Q2014 they combined NA and EU sales which I think was do to the restructuring that created the NC West Holding company as well as NCSOFT licencing off day to day operation and localization of AION and Lineage 2 in Europe, shifting any income from those games to royalties than income to an NCSOFT subsidiary.

Notable dates on the region chart. AION came out in South Korea 4Q08 which is that surge. AION came out everywhere else 3Q09 which is the surge in NA+EU. Also as you can see before GW2, NA+EU wasn’t a strong region but after it became their 2nd largest region. The income bump 2Q14 in NA+EU was Wildstar being released, the bump in 1Q16 was partially due to HoT but primarily due to Blade &Soul being released in region.

This is illustrated in the 2nd and 3rd charts. Since reported GW2 income as well as Wildstar is limited to the NA+EU region, if you factor them out you can see how NCSOFT’s remaining games are doing in the region, which was roughly between $2.5-5 million a quarter until Blade & Soul was released. But, with very limited data, next quarter will tell, it looks as if B&S will follow AION’s boom-bust pattern in NA+EU. The last chart shows a percentage breakdown of income source from the region.

My point here is that in the big picture, NA+EU are very relevant in NCSOFT’s income and GW2 makes up the bulk of that. NCSOFT has had very limited success here until GW2. And if B&S burns out as I expect it to, GW2 will still be the cornerstone of it’s income from NA+EU. I don’t think they will interfere with their one very successful NA studio and game.

I fully expect 4Q16 to see GW2 to be once again above 70% of the source of NA+EU region’s income, bolstered by the game license sale, a returning population and B&S income continue to fall.

That’s my 2 copper.

Let me take a crack at it.

First none of us have any sense of the current break down of source of reported income (NOT PROFIT) for GW2. What percentage are game account keys Vs Gem Sales? Has it gone up or down since the game shipped relative to the number of active players? What percentage of active players buy gems in a month? What is the average amount purchased by those players? Has those amounts gone up or down? All of that is important as it determines the direction development goes. If active population is dropping, there would be a push to make the game more compelling to try and sell more licenses. If the cash spent per player in the Gem Shop is dropping, need more desirable items in the Gem Shop. Etc.

There is extremely limited data we can derive from the quarterly numbers (which don’t include China BTW) which are sales (again NOT PROFITS). Q4s tend to be higher as GW2 is a NA + EU game and that quarter encompasses the holiday season. The initial quarters when the game and the expansion came out are higher than the later quarters, as the bulk of game account sales are made during those times. And that’s about it. Everything this point on are tea leaves and entrails.

2Q14 till 3Q15, an 18 month period that includes the time after LWS1, includes LWS2 and the “content drought” that led up to the quarter HoT was released was actually fairly flat. Hype might have kept players playing through 1Q15 to 3Q15 "drought. Note that pre-purchase aren’t counted in the quarter that they are made but the quarter the game is shipped.

HoT sales weren’t out of this world. The ploy of providing a P4F version of the base game hoping for a game license sale didn’t pan out as well as they expected, as stated in a investor conference call. The lack of a less expensive expansion when they decided to bundle in the original game left a bad taste in players mouths. Even after tossing in the free character slot on pre-purchases by existing players only blunted the complaint, not eliminate. Those who sat on the fence until the game shipped weren’t encouraged by the laundry list of complaints of all the “gotchas” that came hand in hand with the hyped features. Guild Halls were expensive to build. Scribing was super expensive to level. Crafting precursors were expensive and time consuming. Elite Specializations required you to clear a fair chunk of HPs on the HoT maps. The four maps weren’t all that large, even when you take the multiple levels into account. Mastery system slowed your progress through the maps and story, etc. Some of these were fixed quickly. Some took until the Spring Update in 2Q16 to fix but by then many who hadn’t bought the expansion simply wrote off the game to pursue “newer” free MMOs. That’s my take on why we dropped from roughly $20 million a quarter before HoT to $15 million a quarter after the expansion.

(continues)

I’m amused that some are using games whose roots go back to arcade game genres from the 1970s, when the user interface was a joystick and a button, sometimes TWO buttons, as an example of games with “autoloot”.

As for the genre of MMO, it maybe a feature that’s been evolving over time, like death penalties, as time delays become less needed in purely F2P/B2P than subscription based games where you wanted players to buy the next month. But this game came out in 2012 with development starting in 2007, you have to take history into account and what the existing MMO scene was like when game systems like looting were being designed. ANet likes to be different, break the mold but you can’t change EVERYTHING to be different because games that do that, usually end up as discussion topics in game design school or an episode of Extra Credits.

The Mastery System is … interesting.

First of all it’s leveling without adding levels. Every MP requires an amount of XP equivalent to the XP needed to “level” once you were Level 80. To unlock all the Mastery tracks that were available day 1 of HoT, you need nearly 8 1/2 fully leveled 80 character’s worth of XP. Which isn’t all that bad since they are account unlocks.

However HoT also used the Mastery System as map unlocks. Back when LWS2 was going on, both Dry Top and Silverwaste maps were revealed incrementally as the episodes came out. Today of course it’s not at thing but back then it was used to gate exploration of the new zones. It’s my belief that one aspect of the Mastery system was to do the same with zones in HoT, gate exploration and slow progression through zones in HoT. You don’t need to unlock all of them but don’t expect map complete without all of the ones from the track(s) that zone’s entry unlocked.

As for Adventure MPs, they aren’t required, just another way to earn them.

Sorry, GW2 didn’t even have AoE looting until months after launch. You had to run from downed critter to downed critter spamming F. AoE looting did helped a lot.

So when masteries for Core Tyria was being looked at there isn’t a lot of “unique” things they would file under a catch all mastery, as the other two are crafting older precursors and fractals.

Plus it’s a pretty big carrot.

Now they have made and sold individual pieces, buy it and get all three weights. They tend to be limited to head, shoulders, gloves and boots.

EKAN.4051:

Tenrai Senshi.2017:

This is a recurring, often discussed topic. You’ll get answers like “because outfits are cheaper/faster to make” or “they can do things with outfits they can’t do with armor” or “outfits sell better”.

Whether you accept those answers is another matter.

Anet saying that or the community? I’m one of those that never used an outfit becouse it kills the “unique look” or my own kinda “setup” sort of speech. Tho in theori I I think thats the answer why we get the outfits and not new “armor sets” must been years since last armor set in gemstore?

Mike O’Brien has stated that a full armor set takes 9 months of time (assuming for a single person) and outfits take 1/10th that time.

Since armor sells for 800 gems while outfits sell for 700 gems, and gem sales are their primary source of income, paying off development time faster for a gem store item means sooner that sales of that item goes toward paying for all the other development.

They have tried swapping a few between norn and human. There of course was some blow back about “cultural appropriation” and about reduced “uniqueness” of the two races.

I don’t see an issue. Hair, clothing, etc are always exchanged when two different cultures start interacting with each other.

Without the flood of rares onto the market, or their salvaged components, ectos, runes/sigils, T5 mats that you can’t mine in great quantity all may be good long term investments.

But honestly I hate tying up capital for longer than 24 hours so what do I know about speculating? I still have all my unidyes from the wardrobe roll out.

50 chests and not even 10 ticket scraps, that’s a rather bad run of luck. I also assume on Wardrobe unlocks or any of the current BL skins that are rare/super rare drops.

They would have to create every bitmap element in game at a larger resolution. That includes every skill and TP item icon in game. It it not a small task. That’s assuming of course that you don’t simply want a x2 rescale of one of the existing sizes.

However ANet doesn’t strike me as a company that is willing to intentionally do a half-kitten job for a quick and dirty “fix”.

I consider MPs in HoT and LWS3 easy MPs compared to what has to be done to earn them in core Tyria.

Also don’t forget Hero Points around the maps, they can help you a lot by not being solely dependent on the Hero Points you get from leveling. Since everything gives XP, explore everywhere, map complete, gather all nodes, rez all fallen, and target critters off the beaten path as they gain XP the longer they’ve “lived” since spawning. Any food gives +5% XP.

Hesacon.8735:

Behellagh.1468:

They are looking seriously into it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-s-Missing-from-Material-Storage/6377056

They are seriously looking into it, but added more clutter like berries anyway.

Because of the rule that new level 80 maps need their own keys/currency so participation is required to get the unique items remains in effect.

That and the collectible/wallet expansion project is independent of the Living Story groups. Once it’s done, hopefully those groups will be able to add in those items before the new map is launched.

The sad thing is it use to be better. Not sure if the changes are the result of “Action Cam” or a mistakenly placed “if” in the targeting code when something else was being tweaked. I don’t think it’s Action Cam’s fault because targeting went to pot well after it’s introduction. However I wouldn’t be surprised that a later change to it is what messed it up.

I would use a combination of sites.

GW2Spidy can show you the most profitable items to craft in each profession. I would then check those items against their listing in GW2BLTC and see the estimated number sold in the last 24 hours. It doesn’t matter if something is very profitable, based on low ask Vs crafting cost of raw mats, if nobody is buying them.

Be aware that GW2Spidy refreshes the profitable list at a much slower rate with current sale prices so that’s another reason to crosscheck with GW2BLTC.

Also word of advice, make an amount relative to the amount that is selling. That is don’t flood the market, that tends to cause rapid undercutting.

I really hate to use the term “entitled” but it fits those who believe they should continue to get something once they’ve level/mastery capped their character. I’ve never played an MMO that did anything like that and while this game did until they rolled out the expansion (well eliminated just before) I saw it as a nice bonus but nothing that would keep me from playing if I wasn’t getting it.

To me this is declaring you’re never coming back to a restaurant because they stopped giving out little mints when you’re given the check.

https://help.guildwars2.com/hc/en-us/articles/230165307-Account-types-Free-Core-HoT

It’s a demo without a level cap or class/story restrictions of the original game.

The starter map/race city level 10 restriction is trivial as you can waypoint to any of the starter maps for more content at the start. The WvW restriction unlocks account wide when you get one character to 60.

They are looking seriously into it.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/What-s-Missing-from-Material-Storage/6377056

Linken.6345:

Behellagh.1468:

GW internally is a very different kind of game than GW2. The pace of expansion that GW had is just not possible in a true open world MMO vs a lobby/instance MMO.

As for the next one. I wouldn’t expect it for at least 9 months but with the current content release schedule, I won’t be too upset if we don’t see it until 2017.

You mean 2018 right? since 9 months from now 2017 is almost gone.

Yep, year hand on my chronometer was off. Fixed.

GW internally is a very different kind of game than GW2. The pace of expansion that GW had is just not possible in a true open world MMO vs a lobby/instance MMO.

As for the next one. I wouldn’t expect it for at least 9 months but with the current content release schedule, I won’t be too upset if we don’t see it until 2018.

Shareholders listen to the analysts and the analysts listen to NCSOFT. Stock price is down because the China strategy didn’t live up to hype as well as mobile and the next Lineage and MxM has yet to hit. And everything is waning except for Lineage.

Every NCSoft game I’ve seen released in NA/EU that is run by NCSoft only support English, Spanish, French and German. Now I’ve seen other languages supported but only when NCSoft licenses the game to 3rd parties.

And a number of items got revamped when this patch came out. Not just talking the seasonal item but different BL weapon skin sets, shuffling of the makeover and hair kit from uncommon to rare, swapping out the dye kit, swapping out the home instance node drop and adding a 2nd one to the list of possibilities. They also added added the raven mail carrier as a rare? That’s the huh? change to the BLC.

Braham felt ignored by Eir. Once he resolved his feelings for her he gets to see her die and was powerless to stop it. His kill them all, kill them again and kill them one more time just to be sure, is now his mindset. He was never the sharpest icicle on the roof.

Logan was just hot for his barefoot Queen, chose her when she was in danger over his guild and has been paying that price ever since. Most of all, getting friend zoned.

Braham is now a crude weapon you point at the elder dragons. It’ll probably not end well for him.

I’m all for armors. Would love to mix and match but I’m also a realist. Without cash flow the game ceases production. Cash flow in this game is generated by the cash shop. To keep the cash shop “fresh” they introduce new items and bring back items that were rotated out as well as having sales. This gets people to buy gems which fund continued development without resorting to selling power. These items have to be “cheap” to produce.

If you hate outfits, don’t buy outfits. No one is forcing you to but realize that new items like outfits, keys, dye kits, gliders and minis are keeping the lights on.