Guild Wars 2

The problem I see is currently is that after level 30, all we get are skill points and trait points. You don’t really feel like your character is getting more powerful other than getting/buying better gear. Sure you can unlock all the other skills you don’t initially take and of course we now have traits starting then.

Slot 7 unlocks at level 5
Weapon swap unlock at 7
Slot 8 unlocks at level 10
Slot 9 unlocks at level 20
Slot 0 unlocks at level 30

So on one hand I can understand wanting to feel like your character is becoming more powerful over time but the drawback of spreading it out it weakens how your character feels at lower levels. It’s a balancing act. Moving the weapon swap later in leveling will be annoying.

Telling players what bonuses they get each level helps defeat the perception of nothing changing is good. The rewards will likely be as good as the personal story, which is not a lot.

Removing the down state for the first four levels is so-so. I agree that the first time it appeared without explanation for me and I didn’t realize 4 was heal. It’s not like there was a lot of time to read the tooltips for what each button does while your downed HP is dropping. I just pounded on 1 until I or the critter hitting me died.

Of course it’s in the Gem Shop starting today.

Crude for white and blues.
Basic for greens.
Master/Mystic for gold.
BLSK (I get one to two dropped on me for free per month) for orange.

Good luck with that.

AlexEBT.7240:

“One of our first changes is the content direction system. This system simplifies the UI in the top-right side of the game window, providing one clear suggested location (and an arrow providing general direction) to guide players to exciting content. This system will also help guide players to content areas of appropriate level difficulty, even to the next map so they have a better idea of where to go when advancing their character.”

Delightful…you know how ppl loved the freedom that came to levelling in pve? well no more, now we’ll “nudge” you to follow a linear path each and every time. How fantastic.

The 2nd half I left out since it wasn’t for new players.

Players who don’t need direction can ignore this system and go exploring in any direction they want, do content in any order, and play any content they want exactly as they can currently in Guild Wars 2 as it’s available today.

There are advanced settings in the options menu for more experienced players that will allow you to change the functionality of the content direction system. You can select to disable it if you like the way the game UI functions now, or you can select “world complete” mode, which will focus only on providing direction to areas for world completion.

Honestly don’t people read anymore?

DarksunG.9537:

Behellagh.1468:

I’ve seen numerous posts in PHP board where newcomers from other MMOs have no idea what to do because they aren’t pushed from one traditional quest giver to another. Also seen new players confused doing the personal story because it contains level gaps and they have no idea what to do to level.

It’s too bad these changes don’t address that at all. In fact, you could argue it makes it worse, because if they use the Chinese model, you won’t get any story until level 10. As for gaps.. How the heck does this fix any gaps? all it does is move the gaps to different places.
You’ll get a chunk of story, then once you complete that, you’ll have to level till you get to the next chunk. There are still gaps… they are actually bigger, but more spread out. And it certainly doesn’t address what you said about “what to do”. In fact you’ll start with 10 levels of no story. The only thing it does for sure(if it follows the China model) is kill key farming.

I’ve always disliked the gaps in the Personal Story, and have poked fun at it here on the forums more than once, so naturally I think fixing those gaps is not a bad thing. The only problem I have with it is, that’s one less thing for me to poke fun at. I’ll get over it, though. Eventually.

Since it doesn’t actually remove gaps, i’m not sure what you’re talking about. What do you mean?

First, that second quote isn’t from me. Now from the blog post.

One of our first changes is the content direction system. This system simplifies the UI in the top-right side of the game window, providing one clear suggested location (and an arrow providing general direction) to guide players to exciting content. This system will also help guide players to content areas of appropriate level difficulty, even to the next map so they have a better idea of where to go when advancing their character.

Funny, sounds like it’s designed to lead new players from zone to zone.

As another addition with the level-up guide, we’re updating the personal story steps using our new Story Journal so they come in story chunks that unlock all at once per chapter. When a story chapter is unlocked as a level-up reward, you’ll be able to play straight through the entire chapter from start to finish and not have any awkward starts and stops that throw off the storyline.

At the very least the chapter sounds like it unlocks when you can do all of it. Currently you are always pointed to the next mission regardless if you are an appropriate level or not.

Yes but it’s expensive.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Upgrade_Extractor

Because it’s easier than fixing it the right way and figure out who gets a refund.

Boo ANet, Boo!

You get XP. What do you want a medal? Key to the city? A parade?

Remember, golden rule.

Don’t forget the made the lower level zones easier when the new trait system came into being. It’s more than likely they didn’t adjust the downleveling code to compensate for this.

That last screenshot shows his CPU at 43% or around 3.4 cores worth of work. Threads aren’t slaved to particular cores. They do move about. Process Explorer shows thread percentages not core percentages. The OS scheduler does try to spread the load since he disabled quiet and cool/core parking.

No I expect prices will return to the original normal after the sale. It was simply easier to raise the price to match 30% off than figure out who paid too much. You were still getting a break on the price of 5 and 25, just not 30%.

Well that’s one way to cover your backside.

No need to boycott, it’s lousy all on it’s own.

So far I haven’t seen any pay to win features yet.

Well I can see drop rate weighting based on profession percentages. Great Sword is used by four professions while rifle is used by two. Or a deeper data mine based on what weapons are equip by level 80s and periodically adjust the weights accordingly.

If you accept it as a convenience item only, ignoring the gem cost, then the copper-fed salvage kit is fine. It’s like rationalizing the non-sprocket gathering tools. They are a convenience only and if you want to pay gems for convenience fine.

Problem here is you pay for convenience with gems and continue to pay for convenience with coin. When you charge 62.7% more per salvage on top of 500 gems for the convenience to never be without a master kit, yea, argument for convenience doesn’t hold.

pdavis.8031:

Nightshade.5924

pdavis.8031:

@nightshade

John Smith.4610:

For anything regarding the currency exchange….

John Smith.4610:

As far as other ideas like the GW2 economy has rampant inflation….

John Smith.4610:

The gold to gem rate on the exchange is not a measure of inflation. If you consider how the exchange works…

John Smith.4610:

wwwes.1398:

Is the reason you say inflation isn’t a problem simply that the items with crazy high prices are the only things with a price rising so rapidly?

When looking at inflation I use a large bundle of common goods…. I never use super-rare items or anything involving gems.

John Smith.4610:

LordByron.8369:

Question:
Do you care/will do something about the fact game economy is really perceived as broken?
Or if you instead think its well perceived… There were many threads about how important economy perception is in a videogame.

If by “really perceived” you mean that you mistakenly perceive a fantastic and functioning system as broken, then no… I don’t care.

John Smith:
1. Inflation is increasing prices drastically and causing a series of negative outcomes.
A. This simply isn’t true. Inflation is very, very well controlled in gw2.
(link not working: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/Golds-from-dungeon-is-killing-the-economy/page/4#post4141549)

These are just SOME of the responses from John Smith.. 1) Inflation is not happening and 2) The gem exchange is not a sign of inflation. It never has been and never will be.
So unless John Smith is completely wrong… Any arguement that the gem exchange is a proof of inflation is incorrect. I have tried to explain it to you, but for whatever reason you can’t accept it. So maybe the words of John Smith will help educate you.

to pdavis… go look at a REAL world exchange. Real world exchanges are ALL ABOUT the relative buying power of one nation’s economy as compared to another. That is expressed in the relative value of one nation’s CURRENCY in regards to another. Like say, GEMS and GOLD.

And please learn MATH. With all due respect to Mr. Smith, a more famous Smith once wrote a very important book on this whole topic. I had to read parts of it once upon a time. It’s the sort of thing that gives you a new perspective. You might try it.

My point being again… EIGHT POINT FIVE TIMES the gold cost of 18 months ago. That’s an increase of 100% base Two gold cost about every two months. TEXT BOOK INFLATION. Gems are fixed good, w/ a fixed buying price in the shop. I don’t care what Mr. Smith is SAYING, the MATH is SCREAMING something quite different.

Put yet another way… IF a year ago you went to the store and bought a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk for a dollar, and then TODAY you went to that SAME store, bought the SAME type of milk and bread, but NOW had to pay EIGHT AND A HALF DOLLARS FOR IT, what would YOU, pdavis, call that? What would you be saying?

I really would like to know.

My apologies for the length of this one. Cheers.

I’m getting the impression that you do not understand how the gem exchange works. I’ll try to break it down.
There is a set amount of gold, and a set amount of gems in the exchange. Everytime you use gold for gems, you add gold to the pool and remove gems, creating an imbalance. The more people use gold for gems, the greater the imbalance, thus higher prices for gems. The amount of gems you can buy with cash has always remained constant. $1.25 for 100 gems. When you use gems to convert to gold, you add gems into the pool and subtract gold. Doing so decreases the imbalance and shifts it the other direction. (i.e. lowering the price.) The only reason the prices are the way they are is that many players use gold to get gems, which creates a greater imbalance between gold and gems in the exchange, and higher prices. This is NOT inflation. This is a byproduct of players wanting to get gems for “free”.

He doesn’t care. It’s been explained to him numerous times yet he believes what he believes. You can’t debate with someone like him because if you don’t agree then you’re wrong, plain and simple.

Then he gets disparaging. “Do you have a college degree?” pphhtt. Yes I do, and a minor in economics in my case but if you can’t tell the difference between an exchange and an open economy there is no point in discussing it other than to repeatedly prove your beliefs wrong so you don’t drag anyone else along with you.

Ravion Hawk.4736:

Behellagh.1468:

But I do believe there are alternate motivations however. Eliminating key farming by delaying the PS and altering their rewards.

ANet officially blessed that farm.

It is changes like this that shows they want us to buy from the gem store instead of earning things.

We can’t even coordinate the whole community to stop buying keys for one month in protest to the poor RNG of the BLC.

Doesn’t mean they haven’t changed their minds about it. And this gives them the perfect cover to do so.

I’ve seen numerous posts in PHP board where newcomers from other MMOs have no idea what to do because they aren’t pushed from one traditional quest giver to another. Also seen new players confused doing the personal story because it contains level gaps and they have no idea what to do to level.

That’s the downside of total freedom to play. Everyone is use to looking for the big blinking arrows/question marks instead of talking to scouts or simply wandering around. And leveling is a non-event other than your hero tab getting highlighted because you have skill points you can spend.

But I do believe there are alternate motivations however. Eliminating key farming by delaying the PS and altering their rewards.

Problem is dropping it too much, then higher level players have less reason to tromp through low level zones. And I actually enjoy one shot low level critters on a crit but I can still be taken down if I’m overwhelmed.

City of Heroes weakened high level players to the point where lower level characters they were teaming with had higher bonuses in some cases.

When I hear profession specific, I hear weapons and armor. So lets say the double the weighted chance of items our profession can use Vs those we can’t. So for armor instead of 1/3 of a chance to get a piece the right weight it’s now 50% (one of three to two of four). Even tripling the chance only moves it up to 60% (three of five). Impact on weapons would be even less. Weapons wouldn’t be as slewed since there are a number or professions that can use each and there’s a lot more weapon types.

The problem if any will come from profession imbalance. More players playing one profession over another so the items that are class specific for those classes would drop, overall, less.

Lets say the player breakdown for each armor weight is 50/30/20; heavy, medium, light. Even if the distribution is modified so it’s doubled, 2/3rds your weight, 1/6th each of the other two, let’s see what happens.

So for heavy it’s 10/30; 5/60; 5/60.
Medium it’s 3/60; 6/30; 3/60.
Light it’s 2/60; 2/60; 4/30

Sum it up with common denominators 25/60; 19/60; 16/60 Vs 20/60 across the board. And that requires favoring appropriate weight 4 times as each of the other two. Only a difference range of 25% more to 20% less overall.

Now I don’t know the distribution of professions across the player base. So this is a SWAG. Now unwanted ones thrown on the TP will impact supply but most prices there have more to do with value of salvaged mats, crafting cost and forge fodder than actual supply and demand.

Shaders go blank for me as well on occasion when switching between performance and best.

Honestly sirsquishy I have to disagree with you here. Nearly everything you listed is GPU bound features and an R9 270x shouldn’t even blink at those settings you recommend him changing except for character model limit and quality. But in WvW you need model limit on highest so you don’t get ganked by the invisible enemy who normally isn’t invisible.

My antiquated A8-3820, quad core, 2.5GHz, K10 based with integrated 400 SP HD 5xxx based GPU gets better frame rates than he’s reporting at high settings with the exception of having best texturing and depth blur off and I do that because I know that being coupled to DDR3-1333 system memory for graphics is a huge limiting factor for those types of operations (and easily shown by toggling it on and off). But a card with GDDR5 memory? Shouldn’t even blink, no more than a frame or two at worse.

No there’s something else we aren’t seeing here.

I’m sensing that ANet doesn’t want to deal with two codebases in terms of major differences how the game works.

That said it’s dumb. Doesn’t matter if the first 10 levels are relatively quick in terms of playing time. What it smells like to a lot of players is a way to neutralize key farming.

We have gathering tools we never need to replace and take no inventory slots yet that’s not good enough? It’s too much trouble to park you alts at a bank to swap them in? I know why don’t we just have a button so you can gather up all the mats in the zone at once because it’s obvious we have become to lazy to move our characters.

I believe they wanted to make it’s use simple, 1 silver = 1 salvage. Now if it was 1/2 a silver or it had slightly better stats than a master/mystic kit but still nowhere near as good as a BLSK it would be fine.

So something like Somoe’s B.

Buttercup.5871:

I know Tolunart but there comes a point where that’s not good enough anymore. I’d say we are well beyond that point after waiting more than 1,5 years and still knowing absolutely nothing on where matters stand now.

More like 5 months.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/crafting/gw2-precursor-recipe-scavanger-hunt-news/3780700

@kta – But it’s a waste of time to discuss a topic that they have no interest or ability in ever implementing. I mean why waste time on mounts, duels, raids, trinity, etc. if it violates their vision or would require a large amount of coding to implement. The devs know the code base. The designers know what features violate their philosophy. So instead of wasting time on topics that will never come to pass, it’s better to talk about what they are willing to do.

Copper Fed was 800 gems while Silver Fed is 500 gems. I guess they think the “adjustment” in price will make fools of us all.

And of course for some reason, Keys are a big seller as well.

But as long as you treat keys like lottery tickets for fun, that’s OK. But if you think you’ll get lucky and make big bucks opening chests, I would reconsider that line of thought.

Well I think it’s going down because the last couple of days didn’t have anything in demand and we’ve tapped out a lot of excess gold those first few days.

But it’s 30 gems down to 24 gems normally so 21 gems is still a discount, just not was promised/implied.

Anyone else remember the days that game devs, not this game but decade plus ago, had a .plan file you could look at to see what they were working on?

Next would be looking at CPU temps and clocks. PCIe link is reasonably correct and GPU clocks and temps look okay.

They are mainly used by players as skins and not for the it’s stats. And the achievement. After all it’s only Level 80 Rare. Charr gets Berserker.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Racial_armor#Attributes

I think it’ll be a linear increase across the board. The only problem with AMD CPUs is their cores are individually slower than Intel’s. Unless they altered the code to scale with # of cores which I doubt.

We’ll see in two weeks.

I guess he burned through his backlog of unidyes. Or he became accustom to finding them in plant gathering. I buy dyes I want off the TP and the prices have all pretty much returned to the pre-April feature pack prices. Some still cheaper. Dyes can still be crafted.

It’s still free just as much as the first season of the LS was. You missed it, you’ve missed it for good. It’s just this time around, if you are willing to pay, you can play the episodes you missed. But if you don’t pay, same as it was last season for you.

Character model quality. Setting it to low will eliminate all the other player’s actual avatars with generic ones may help a bit.

That said big zergs stresses the CPU and even though it has eight cores, the FX CPU series have slower cores. Up side the lastest blog post about the Feature patch is they supposedly made some breakthrough in boss and WvW player zergs that improve performance.

What now?

We die.

Sorry, what Astral and Inculpatus suggests is right on the money. But it’s a straight line I can’t pass up.

I think there is some current popular food booster(s) that uses Chili Peppers and/or Lemongrass to help in the LS. Item becomes popular, it gets crafted more, supply drops, bidding war on components.

Nope, there is nothing wrong there.

Guess what, people make mistakes. Whatever intern or low level person who got the job goofed it up. This time it’s just not in our favor.

Last March during the daily sale, Keys were suppose to be 15% off. And they were for 1 and 25 keys but for the 5 pack, instead of 383 gems it was 292 gems, a tad over 35% off. Someone’s fingers were a little off on the keypad that day. Oops.

This time whoever got the job simply scaled up the 5 pack without noticing/realizing that the 10 and 25 pack had different prices. Oops. I’m sure they will get a nice stern talking to after doing a half-butt job of this relatively simple task.

Problem is it’s unlikely to change now because tracking who bought what when and for how much is a time consuming task that I’m sure they wish to avoid.

So buyer beware. It’s still cheaper, just not as much of a savings in bulk.

But that doesn’t show the link type and width, that’s on the 1st page of GPU-Z.

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

I can’t find the post anymore, when will the new CDI begin? And it’s about changing the policy/communication?

Don’t know and no.

We’ll ram that wall when we come to it. But the issue of tying the instance to a particular player was a problem/dumb. There are four other player involved and they shouldn’t have to be at the mercy of either chance or an “owner” who decides unilaterally to pick up their toys and go home either.

This change is only to fix the problem with the dungeon instance derezing of the “owner”, determined solely by who entered the instance first according to the server, drops or quits.

Everything else being discussed here has nothing to do with that. An improved kick system, instanced “ownership” is entirely a separate set of issues. Yes this change may snap the problems some of us seen with instances being hijacked into sharp focus for ANet because I can see that kind of abuse increasing, but that’s not the reason for this change.

For players who do get along and do instances, this was an annoying problem. They fixed that. Fixing social issues dealing with casual Vs uber players when it comes to instance content, entirely different problem.

TheFamster.7806:

Well now instead of joing a “help needed at lupi” party, people will join in and kick those in need and continue the dungeon. Oh joy

They do this already. They just need to enter the dungeon first. This change isn’t a fix for that.

I would love transparency too but as long as they have their " we don’t talk speculatively about future development" in place, devs can only talk about generalities, what they have done or do the forum version of going “hmm, interesting argument”. They may be able to state an opinion but it would have to be clearly marked as one so it’s not thrown back into ANet’s face.

That’s the point of CDI club. We can discuss things under the auspice that there isn’t any kind of promise involved. It’s opinions on possibilities.

The guild bank, as it has been discussed repeatedly, isn’t something that can’t be restored. Every. Likely because there is no backup for it.

What ANet has “said” with this change is that there is no single owner of an instance. That before the owner was the first in the instance was wrong and their departure shouldn’t cause the instance to derez.

Issues about “owning” and kicking others is an entirely different discussion over this bug fix.