Guild Wars 2

No, I like your suggestions Orpheal, I’m just saying the cities aren’t as deserted as you claim.

Vayne, buddy, take it easy.

NCSOFT has announced expansions twice before and was denied. KDB Daewoo once again doesn’t mention it in any of the four reports they released after the one you linked.

Those other two articles were from May 2013.

Do I think they have a race and/or a profession or two ready to pull out in case of a dire turn of income, sure. It’ll be stupid not to think they have a group working on such a contingency. But the professions can’t come out of nowhere. There has to be a story element involved.

Honestly, calm down, they’re just baiting you.

LordByron.8369:

I would ask how do you call a system where despite gold production gets nerfed, prices of useful/sought after things keep steadily rising, while money value and rewards plummets.

Because they are useful/sought after things as to why they rise. If gold production gets nerfed as you say then it can’t be a case too much money chasing after too few goods. So either you’re wrong and the amount of rewards is still significant relative to the general money supply or nobody is gathering or crafting or getting drops of those high demand items.

First, alts.

Second, don’t care, I park my character in a city every night to use the TP/Bank and all those things you don’t care about. I personally hated LA as it was a lag fest and I couldn’t do my business there without a bunch of hyperactive players who just had to make as much noise as possible. I like my city because the crowds are smaller and show a bit more self control.

Then be my guest and post the results as well as the links you pulled them from.

Honestly contact support. All you will get here are other players 99.999% of the time.

See the link labeled support at the top of the page? Click it. On that page is a link in the upper right labeled “Submit a request”. Click it. Choose “Technical Issue” and fill out the request and wait for an email reply. The first will acknowledge the request, the next should start the support process.

Why? Because that’s where the TP, bank and crafting stations are. Why? Because I need to visit for map completion. Why? Because it’s the easiest locals to farm for transmutation charges.

Do I like your reasons. Yea. But it’s not like there aren’t reasons already.

It forces you to visit the TP. No you can’t stay in the field forever selling your drops and getting your coin for it.

Kurrilino.2706:

Glory.1493:

Kurrilino.2706:

Ok.. here is some break down from someone who comes from the financial sector.

A downgrade from 30 to 25 million is not slight downgrade.
It is a little under 5%

For people who don’t care it is not looking too much.
But if we keep in mind that the chinese launch created at least 6 million more accounts
this number is devastating.
I don’t know how many of them are really active but the fact that GW2 accounts almost doubled and create 5 million $ less is a horrible sign for the financial
aspect of the game and raises red flags.

I agree with most poster here who say the Gem Store items are incredible bad
and even if you want to spend money you can’t find something you like.
The game taking the opposite direction to what the fans want isn’t helping either.

if u check the report again u will find the chinese launch does not account in the 25million of Q2, its account for loyalty fee which is prepaid to ncsoft maybe in 2013.and report did say thanks to Wildstar in EU/NA and gw2 launch in china blah blah blah.there is a growth in whole of gw2 for ncsoft but not in the 25million cuz it doesnt make sense if they put china release into 25million and said thanks to it we get 25million from gw2 and it help us increase revenue but its not as much as it sold in Q1

Wait a minute… maybe i haven’t been clear.

This report DOESN’T include Chinas box sales.
But it includes all transactions made at the Gem Store.
And that also includes chinese accounts buying there.

So it’s not ajust a slight drop in gem store sales, it’s also dropping wiht having more active accounts.
That is what i tried to point out.
And if the number who are rumored are correct and NC-Soft just sold 1 million
accounts in china we are in trouble.
I expected at least around 6 millions

It’s a royalty situation. KongZhong has licensed the game from ANet. ANet simply gets a cut off KongZhong’s GW2 income which includes both CD key and gem sales. That’s it. It may even be a cut of the net and not gross. What ever the amount, it gets booked on NCSOFT’s quarterly reports as royalty income and not in the income attributed to GW2, that’s purely NA/EU at the moment.

I don’t know why you expected 6 million accounts in China. The game was marketed as buy first which is unheard of in China’s F2P MMO marketplace. Nobody ponies up money first for an MMO there. It was a hard sell. They gave away cars. They got a big name Chinese pop star for the launch and music video. KongZhong attributes lower earnings last quarter due to all the marketing costs for GW2 and World of Planes. Read the darn transcript of the conference call I linked to earlier.

It’s like you are going out of your way to say the wrong things intentionally so when corrected you can act all shocked and panicky so you can say “see, GW2 is in trouble”.

nexxe.7081:

Is it safe to say, that GW2’s gem sales went to fund Wildstar? If so, is it also safe to say that it totally sucks because Wildstar is failing hard, and we GW2 players got shafted because of it?

No it’s not for a number of reasons.

First ArenaNet is a wholly own subsidiary. That means it is essentially it’s own company with all income and profits held by them. It’s just that NCSOFT can include that income and costs in it’s own. That said I assume that NCSOFT fronted them the money during development and that money needed to be paid back. Handled similarly to a royalty advance or even a bank loan. It’s likely that ANet still “pays” NCSOFT for hosting the game as well as some consideration for being their money guys.

Second is that Carbine Studios was purchased outright by NCSOFT in 2007. A full 5 years before GW2 made any money at all. Pretty sure they ramped up manpower well before GW2 went live.

City of Heroes had a holiday winter resort with both a slalom run and a “luge/bobsled” run for achievements based on completion times. It was an enjoyable side venture.

Of course it was in it’s own pocket dimension along with the nightclub and caged space monkey fights.

Yes it was wrong to assume. JS’s job is to to keep the entire economy from going out of control. The same thing happened when dyes went to account bound so the reaction was quite predictable. Only difference is we didn’t have the same kind of heads up that some of us had with dyes.

The funny thing is nothing has happened supply side. Tradeable mini’s are only available through gem shop purchases, directly or indirectly from BLC/Keys. You convert one into a wardrobe item and trade the others. I’m guessing players are assuming that minis from the gem shop will automagically become wardrobe items but they didn’t say that. As a matter of fact it would be a pain to prevent dups so dups must still be tradeable. I see it as how dyes are handled. You get a mini item, that you can still trade, and have to double click to move it to your wardrobe.

phys.7689:

the info i was looking for is how ncsoft specifically defines their quarters, different companies use different dates, and foreign companies also use different dates sometimes.
Any body knows?

Standard calendar quarters. Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec.

But he’s a negative Nelly laokoko.

1) Don’t know what slide you are looking at. Obviously the total reported income for NCSOFT includes China’s income. But it’s included in royalties, chart that lists individual game incomes (note the excluding royalties note above the chart).

2) Grant you that. Down 23% in terms of KrW. Haven’t bothered converting those numbers to USD using the exchange rate for those periods. Actually that’s rather easy. 2nd quarter 2013 would be between $24.93 – $26.93 million and 3rd quarter 2014 would be between $20.96 – $22.21. So 15.9% if you take the highest exchange rate in those periods to 17.5% if you use the lowest. Not as bad in dollars as KrW but still down.

3. Would you buy a game for $60 that stops after 30 days in this day and age? That to continue playing you need to pony up another $15? I thought it was a silly model when I beta tested UO and that was 17 years ago and only $10 a month. Who knew there were so many suckers.

4. Well it’s unclear if the 1 million number includes the 1/2 million they sold during the OBT. The quote from the conference call transcript was “we sold or activated over 1 million CD-Keys since the OBT” which sounds like after the OBT so a million more than the 1/2 million sold for the OBT.

Feature packs aren’t content. SAB is content. All the devs have said was that they didn’t see a new SAB expansion fitting into the current LS2. It’s my opinion that it should have always been open with all of it’s content and rewards intact. It’s certainly more engaging than say Costume Brawl is. It may have been too engaging.

As former members of Blizzard, Guild Wars followed the same model as Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft. Inital game followed on a year later with an expansion pack. Online play was free. Yes they later added a cash shop with exclusive skins and convenience items. But GW was more of a hub/instance model than a traditional MMO like UO and Everquest. It was more like Phantasy Star Online.

GW2 was going to be more like EQ, WoW and the MMOs that have come after. A world where all players can interact with one another with few instanced areas, unlike City of Heroes which you could be free to roam the world but “quest” wise was mostly instanced play.

Now “real” MMOs were subscription based but ANet didn’t want to give up on the buy once model but still wanted to add on to the game so they compromised. The box purchased essentially paid for the development cost but due to the more complex nature of the game, they couldn’t quickly do expansions like they did with GW. So they went with the successful F2P model of funding MMOs. But they drew the line at pay 2 win. So the vast majority of items are convenience and appearance only. Yes they have various boosters and a lock box like most F2P MMOs offer but they haven’t offered actual items of power to the store.

So far this has done okay in terms of income. So far other than the initial price reduction from $60 to $50, store boxes haven’t ended up in the bargain bin. And online sales, well even at 1/2 off I would guess they end up with as much money as they get from store bought boxes once all the various costs and cuts get factored in. Same can be said from online gem sales Vs gem cards.

I think one of chief complaints is coming from one the more clever things they did was the gem exchange.

We have now reached the point where players who what gem store merch for nothing have now realized that it’s becoming an impossibility from pure play. I’m not saying learning to make money from flipping but I know I make a lot more coin from supplying mats, upconverting mats, selling items not to the high bidder, etc. It’s being TP/economic savvy. ANet isn’t going to up the coin drop rate because that’s truly inflationary. So it’s up to the players to supply other players with their needs as a way to earn coin in the game. And there is a lot of push back to that. There is a contingent of players who yearn for a reward system where they earn usable loot directly rather than “work” as adventurers who sell to other players to earn coin that then they can spend to buy the loot they want. It’s a little too real world.

We’ll never get any definitive info on ESO as Zenimax is a private company. Wildstar however will have published income figures to track.

laokoko.7403:

you mean like VIP system China have. I’m sure many people will be outrageous if GW2 start to add that.

you also need to decide weather it should be possible to buy premium subscription with in game gold. Some of the games you can’t buy gems like in GW2.

Yes but that’s China and I’m opposed to VIP anything. If they offered an optional “subscription” I’m gone.

A “loyalty” or gem frequent buyer reward, like how Mr. Sparkles was handled that’s different. It won’t be popular with the gems for gold crowd but I don’t have a problem with that.

Let me quote a few things here from the article.

In TERA’s case, nothing is off-limits (at least in terms of things that matter – only aesthetic things are released in a shop-only way).

You mean like how most new skins here are shop-only?

Interestingly enough, both Rift and TERA give daily gifts to their players to keep them coming back day after day. Both games come with these for all players, and with TERA there is another gift given each day for those that are on the Elite (subscription) status.

As interesting as it would be to get a free tchotchke every day I log on, like a random booster, the big thing to note is TERA’s optional “subscription”. Let me be the first to say no to that.

A big part of what plagues some F2P games is that you either throw money into the game or you can’t get the cool cash shop items. Both TERA and Rift handle this properly by allowing people to trade these items, and (in the case of Rift) even trade the credits directly so others can save up and buy the things they want most.

Well that’s somewhat true here as well with ticket skins and dyes from the gem shop. True it’s not everything but we do offer gold to gem conversion for gem shop purchases. Until very recently all my gem shop purchases came from gold converted to gems. Several thousand gems worth and I’m not a speed runner or flipper. I got 2 character slots, 3 bank slots, pick, royal pass, way too many keys, full makeover kit, a kite, the rescue pack and Jory’s dagger skin (well two before the wardrobe).

We have a lot of the same things with the exception of a VIP level like subscription and daily tchotchke.

I think the 20%/1% for scraps and tickets are pretty spot on. You were just unlucky OP.

That doesn’t change the fact that if you buy keys to try to cash in on ticket skins is a waste of time. You get more gold from converting cash bought gems than using those gems to buy keys to get tickets and selling the skin. And it takes more gold to buy keys than buying the skin outright. That’s the whole reason key farming is popular.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

You play the game for a few months and you hit level 80. In another month of very casual play you have a full set of exotic armor. Now there are really only two things left to do, either you make ascended armor and weapons, you make a legendary weapon or both. None of the other materials in the game really matter to a level 80 player who has exotic armor. Their primary interest in those items is to sell it to other players or speculators.

Or you roll another character.

Glory.1493:

ncsoft released its 2014Q2 financial report(http://www.ncsoft.net/global/ir/earnings.aspx)
gw2 generate about 25million dollars in last 3month,and alittle bit downed compare to Q1(30million)which almost the same to 2013Q4,i dont have early figures about the whole 2013 fiscal year but here i can come up with some financial status about gw2.yes it remain stable.and probably gonna reach 100million dollar at the end of 2014, i know its alittle bit going down YoY2013 .but if u take look at other major mmo on the market(swtor,wildstar,eso,ff14),i have done some reserch on these mmo(each game forum,3rd party figures from mmorpg.com)every figure i got told me gw2 sure has the largest player base among those mmo, but nearly get the lowest revenue(swtor get 150million in2013 which has the smallest player base among those mmo above) .here are some thoughts why it gone this way.one thing must be the b2p model,gw2 is the only b2p game here, this surely wont get as much as p2w and p2p at the start,but whats comes after is the gemstore. as gw2 is not a p2w game, anet cant stats related stuff on gemstore like other mmo. but they sure can sell good looking skins which they didnt. u cant say black lion weapon is awesome nor armor skin from “style” on gemstore, some of them are even ugly.i believe this is the only mmo that i complain compay dont sell enough on their real money in game market.this is weird,if i work as a product manager who devs very little products that wont match the needs of customer, i probably get fired many times already.and from the fiscal report we can see most revenue anet got was from gemstore sells and new player.(china launch is not included in 25million cuz its break down to loyalty revenue) .both of them are actually same thing cuz ppl buy stuff from gemsotre no matter they r new or vets. summarized as this,above all the mmo the mentioned b4 .gw2 has largest player base while make lowest revenue(its still stable after 2years launch which is good).anet u reallly need to reconsider the stuff on gemstore and decide what to do next.do it quickly

“Excuse me stewardess, I read stream of thought.”

As someone who has followed NCSOFT for the past 8+ years, let me point out a few things.

First only income that comes from the parent and subsidiaries are broken down by game. Income from 3rd party companies that are running their game comes in as royalties. So GW2 China income is in Royalties and is not included in the GW2 break out of game income. Same is true with B&S China. That was his point about “loyalty revenue”, is was a simple typing error.

The OP thinks that the projected $100 million in annual sales is rather low for a MMO of our size and ANet needs to increase this by some means such as putting “prettier” armor and weapon skins in the Gem Shop, skins people would want to buy.

As for a point other people brought up, there hasn’t been any announcement about the number of GW2 accounts in China other than the 1/2 million early access copies sold. The 3.8 million number reported was refuted by ANet itself saying that was may just be characters created.

https://twitter.com/GuildWars2/status/487745928137154560

Edit: Correction, KongZwong’s conference call states they’ve sold over 1 million keys since the OBT which I think the original 1/2 million were sold for so that’s 1.5 million keys overall. They are going to do a free trial in September to draw in more players. What was more interesting was their statement about pushing the PvP aspect of the game.

http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/18/180513/KZ-Transcript-2014-08-27T23_30.pdf

Since the 270x is around 50% faster than the 260x, I would lean toward the 270x setup up. Sure the FX cores aren’t anywhere near as fast as Intel’s but I think you would be happier, at least when playing other modern games, with the 270×.

Seven Star Stalker.1740:

I’m sorry but that list shouldn’t count considering many, many, many of the skins and items were temporary.

I’m growing sick and tired of the argument that if content isn’t permanent then it isn’t content.

Did players who earned those skins loose them because the LS chapter than offered them disappeared? No. Then they count.

Well a dev in the main thread told me that the new default price to sell an item at is lowest sell order and not highest bid. That should be interesting to see.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Trading-Post-2-0-Last-Feature-pack-Arcticle/4369694

I leave this here again as a future mystic forge outcome.

I was surprised when I got one from a drop a month or so ago. It is infrequent, at least for me, to see a key drop in the open world like that.

See the support link at the top of the page? Click on it. On that page on the top right there’s a link called “Submit a request”. Click on that. Select account issue and fill in the form to the best of your ability, be clear as to what happened and hit submit. You should get an e-mail acknowledging the ticket submission within the hour if not immediately and you should get a proper reply within 3 days.

As a side note and for similar problems in the future, this should have been posted to the account board and not the BLTC board.

But prices going up may have nothing to do with “classic inflation” and I mean in terms of excess currency. More players at a specific level increases demand. Value of salvage of that item. Popularity even. Their was a time when Sentinel armor was the thing and the price of an exotic level 80 heavy chest piece was over 100g. It’s now under 12g. A similar Berserker piece crashed last December from 7g to under 3g. Sure in that case it’s recovered to the 6-7g range and if you started last Christmas is certainly looks like inflation to you but that’s a single item market that got shocked and recovered.

If an individual item’s price is increasing steadily it’s usually caused by a swing in popularity, ie Berserker. On the forum everyone crows about how Berserker is the way to go. Accepting the popular view then Berserker demand will drive up it’s price compared to say Settler’s where the price has been essentially flat.

Prices are all supply and demand driven and if there is a shock on supply or a marked increase in real demand then the price will shoot up. Increasing coin rewards simply feeds actual inflation. And increasing supply, assuming the items can’t be crafted but only found, decreases the uniqueness of having such an item which may be the reason so many want one. If it’s no longer unique, demand drops and the price crashes. You can afford it now but one of the reasons for wanting one may be gone.

“When everyone’s super … then no one will be.”

But how do people misunderstood the term unique if they hadn’t been exposed to a version that didn’t actually mean unique? Unique isn’t a SAT word. It’s dictionary definition is pretty clear. Yet people still buy multiple “unique” copies of a single item and think they can equip all.

The most common excuse was in GW unique was a type of quality like rare or exotic is in GW2.

And this shouldn’t be in the account forum but likely Player Helping Player.

Depends on what they meant by “sell limit” in the PoI video. Someone asked if the sell limit was gone and they said no, because they don’t want bots to take over the game. Some people think that means “Error attempting to sell”, I originally thought it was placing an order larger than 250. A later more specific question confirmed the 250 stack cap on ordering.

We’ll see on Tuesday.

Gems are an entirely different market working under an entirely different mechanism to determine price. We could have zero inflation on the TP and Gems would still be going up.

Well they answered this question on today’s PoI Twitch cast and the answer is yes, they will break. However they are contacting some of them to inform them what needs to be done.

It may be just me but I don’t pick my CPU on OCing luck.

You just missed it. It was back from Aug 24th to Sept 1st.

For me I understood what they were going for with projected profit. It was to inform the player that even though they are selling something at 10s, they will only get 9.9s at pick up time. Profit is the wrong word be considering the space available, there aren’t a lot of alternatives.

“Projected” because of how the sales tax is calculated on each sale and not the bulk amount. Depending on the price and the lot sizes of purchaces, you can end up paying a bit more in tax. Let’s say you are selling 120 something at 47c. The tax if the full 120 is bought together is 5.64s. However if they are bought in 24 lots of 5 each, you pay 5.76s in total sales tax while 20 lots of 6 each you only pay 5.6s. Rounding is a … female dog.

Pphhtt, it’s “official” but not 100% “official”. It’s old Google Beta. Yes it’s available and you can use it but if it gets a bit wonky, it would be a very low priority fix. At least that’s what I got out of the video.

Curtis Johnson.8456:

Sell on new tp defaults to matching lowest seller so we’re actually reducing this risk and encouraging a more true supply competition.

Instant vs Order is entirely price controlled and the warning message / submit button text changes intelligently depending which listing you match or where your proposed price falls inbetween existing listings.

Thank you for the answer.

I know it’ll be answered when we get it next week but do we still have the same ability as we do now on the sell screen to choose match low sale price rather than high bid price. The “Sell Instantly” button concerns me because I assume this matches the high bid price and the screen shot doesn’t have any items being sold so I don’t see the mechanism for quick switching other than typing it in.

The reason it bothers me because encouraging to sell to highest bidder leaves money on the table that a player could earn. One of the major complaints that players voice is the lack of money in game yet the way the TP defaults, players may unknowingly be throwing money that they could earn away. And if you are making it more difficult to match the low seller price, this gap could widen even further. That’s good news for player merchants (aka flippers) but I don’t like the notion that less savvy players may be stuck with an Idiot Tax or Not Paying Attention Tax.

http://youtu.be/04P2u-QOMHA?t=3m38s

Thanks and excuse the lack of grammar. Much too often my brain gets ahead of my typing ability.

This works because I’m not driven to buy everything new that goes up weekly but pick and choose my battles. I did “cheat” during this sale and bought gems for the first time, a $25 gem card, my first post purchase support of the game since I bought it 21 months ago. While I enjoy this game and don’t see the cash shop as “Evil”, my anger at NCSOFT still runs deep and wide.

Well I just finished watching the Points of Interest on this. While the speed seems impressive you do have to say it’s connected to a dev marketplace and internal network Vs an active player marketplace over the Internet. But the UI is very responsive. Sadly nobody asked the questions I had but I did notice they had the UI set to small and the TP was very readable.

And yes the 3rd party sites will break but they just started reaching out to them with updated info. That may upset the marketplace more than any other change in the short term because the handy 3rd party sites that track price history over time or point out which mystic forge or crafting recipes are profitable currently is relied on by many without the skills who didn’t set up their own private system.

I can’t wait to try it out.

Where did this “frightening” phrase come from in the first place? Confusing, surprising, yes but frightening? Unless you were traumatized by death penalties in past MMOs it’s not frightening. As used in this thread it’s a term of derision.

It’s not a bot stopper. Geez. Trading bots have the advantage of being relentless, they don’t have to be fast.

It’s either a legitimate time out from the DB or a limiter put on so everyone has equal use of the TP in terms of volume of transactions per minute or a limiter put on so at peak use the TP doesn’t collapse under the strain of worst case usage.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Behellagh.1468:

I hardly call a couple of art devs “a lot of resources” to knock out a few skins every few weeks.

If you have 3 art devs specializing in armor, then “a couple” would be nearly all of them. And it probably takes more time than any of us think to “knock out a few skins:” besides the actual design, you also have to animate them (wind, different skill effects, etc), QA them against existing skins (armor & weapons) for conflicts (not just clipping), and I’m sure plenty of other stuff I have no idea about because I’m not an expert.

Or to put it in simpler terms, since ANet realizes how much a core group of players is willing to spend to get new skins every few weeks, don’t we think they’d be all over this if it were as easy as suggested? Why would they waste a perfectly good (and easy) way to rake in some more cash?

Their been quoted as having over 350 working there. Assuming 20% is administrative and other non-dev personal, that’s 280 left. I would say at least 50-60% are involved in asset creation, aka art devs. I would be floored if there was more than 50 who actually code, as in writing software. TP skins are probably tossed at the newbie art grads.

I never got enough rare items to drop on me during a play session that I couldn’t simply save until I got back to a city. It’s not worth the cost of even a master kit use on green or below items so they get copper-fed and the mats mailed home.

Or upconvert in the MF for profit. It was a viable market once.

My gem buying habits is similar but it’s difficult to time local minimum without constantly watching the exchange rate. And with the rate listed on GW2Spidy being wrong for nearly a month the other external source is gw2tp which only updates hourly.

I took a page out of 401K retirement by doing cost averaging, sort of. I use 1% of my bank every day and convert into gems. Also Mondays and Thursdays I convert 5% instead of 1%, in the off chance some highly desired item gets posted the next day and the ensuing rush to buy gems cranks the exchange rate up.

Yes that means I convert 15% of my bank weekly into gems. Roughly 65% a month yet the actual amount in my bank is still going up week to week, month to month.

Here’s the thing. Unique appears in the area of the popup dedicated to limitations such as soul bound and account bound and not in the quality area like rare or exotic. The problem stems from ANet changing it from a quality descriptor in GW to it’s “proper” definition. Since I never played GW and my last MMO used unique as “only have one of equiped on your character”, I haven’t been bitten by this and initially scratched my head how people couldn’t understand that unique meant unique.