Guild Wars 2

I’m guessing the ax, haven’t seen those recently.

Well he has to wait until the ticket is resolved. He should at least gotten an acknowledgement email when he submitted his ticket.

@Nightshade

Gems are only created when bought with cash or were seeded in the exchange when the game went live and destroyed only when used to buy something from the Gem Shop. Gold only comes from various activities in the game as rewards. The exchange creates neither Gold nor Gems.

Gold=>Gems have one purpose and that’s buying items from the Gem Shop. Buying Gems with cash however has two purposes, either buying items or act as an intermediary step to buy gold, that was already in the game, with cash.

The two exchange rates are locket at 72.25%. That’s 85% squared. This implies the exchange sinks 15% of the gold going in and coming out of the exchange. It’s no different than the TP, 15% off the top of every completed transaction. The gap also discourages the use of gems as short term storage of wealth as well as discourages attempts to manipulate the rates. This percentage gap was always there, back when you could buy 100 gems for 1 gold, 5 gold, 10 gold, etc. it was ever present.

The exchange in theory is simple. There are two vaults, one holding gold, one holding gems. They were seeded at the start of the game such that there was a lot of gems but very little gold. Now the two vaults are always of equal value. As gold is added and gems remove it makes the remaining gems worth more. Add gems and remove gold, gems are worth less. It’s that simple. And simply more players are adding gold and removing gems than the other way since the game started.

The only way ANet affects prices is adjusting what’s in the Gem Shop. The rest of the time it’s the notion we can get something for nothing that drives players to dump their gold into the exchange for gems to get that new/returning/on sale item. The current surge in the rate is solely due to long missing but desired items returning and the rush of players wanting to get them for “free”.

Why would any one want to convert cash to gold via gems? Because if you have money but not tons of time to spend in game, a $25 gem card buys you 200+g right now. This isn’t new gold but gold other players game up to buy gems, gems that are now refilled with this exchange. True that you could get more going to “dealers” but this way you won’t get banned, cheated or your account stolen.

And you know what? At midnight PDT when the next set of sale items hit, there will be another surge, depending what returning or items put on sale are added. As long as players have the gold sitting around that could be converted and as long as there’s something at the shop they want, the rate will keep ratcheting up ever higher over the next 10 days.

But if you mean your display name Dirkjr, no.

Ashen.2907:

Crise.9401:

ipan.4356:

Why would they have to retract them in the first place?

Example: long long time ago, ArenaNet made a statement about alternative methods to acquire precursors. Going so far as to say that there was a designer working on such system at a high level.

Now unless that designer has been working on said system for the past year without getting anywhere (which means they have some problems to address in their management of of their development resources) then they really ought to address that old statement in some way other than evading the subject whenever it is brought up.

They did, earlier this year.

It just wasn’t front page like the original statement. Which meant most everyone missed it.

Colin, I suggest that the upper management watch this old Twilight Zone episode and realize keeping people in the dark due to lack of communication is only making things much worse than backtracking on statements when an idea doesn’t pan out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street

Without communication, those who are unhappy start spinning the most fantastic stories about your priorities with no way for those who enjoy the game’s more relaxed pace a way to disprove them. You are isolating your supporters while letting your critics run open loop.

And just like that episode, your policy of silence about development is rapidly becoming your own worse enemy.

We don’t mind disappointment if you are straightforward, honest and timely with us. We simply don’t like being strung along only to be surprised that the features we were hoping for were long since canceled early in the development stage and we are just finding out about it now. That causes genuine player rage, even among the so called “white knights” on the forum.

Nobody likes to be treated like mushrooms.

Thank you Chris.

The gem exchange rate is based entirely on the cumulative amount of gems bought and sold on the exchange. The more out of balance it is, the higher the rate gets in an attempt to lure players into selling gems to it, hopefully cash bought gems because the discount between the two rates is quite high. As such it has very little to do with traditional inflation.

The primary purpose of the Gold for Gems side of the exchange is to provide the gold used to pay player who are doing the opposite, selling Gems for Gold. It’s also a gold sink and sequester mechanism to decrease the amount of gold circulating in the game.

It is and never was a way for a player to avoid buying Gems with cash to get every item they desire out of the game’s cash shop. I know that is difficult to grasp for some but the game runs on cash purchases of gems. There is nothing in the cash shop that can give your character a distinct long term advantage in playing the game, mainly short term boosts, cosmetic skins, additional slots and a few convenience items. The price of items in terms of cash bought gems has not changed since the game’s launch or the item’s introduction (unless the item was modified).

China is on their own server cluster, their TP economy is not intermixed in ours.

The main problem is for those who steadfastly refuse to buy gems with cash is that the exchange rate is a positive feedback loop. The more gems bought with gold, the more gold you will need next time for the same amount of gems unless other players sell gems back to the exchange. As long as there is this imbalance, the rate will continue to rise and players who believe that bypassing spending cash to get the items they want at the cash shop will simply dig themselves further into a hole until there is no way for them to earn enough gold for the cash shop items they want.

You are a stubborn bunch. So my suggestion to you all is to, either buy a few gems each day every day and save them until something you want returns or goes on sale (called cost averaging). Or temper your desire for items at the store. Or crack open your wallets.

The game is only free in terms of a monthly subscription.

Welcome

First, this is not Guild Wars 1, other than being on the same planet/fictional universe. This is a very different game.

On top of that this is a very different MMO compared to WoW and the games it spawned.

First it’s designed to virtually eliminate accidentally screwing over another player. All resource nodes and instanced, low threshold for full XP and loot roll, everyone can rez, etc. There is no “guild wars” only server wars in World vs World.

Second there is no traditional MMO Triad. The differences and roles of each profession are less exaggerated to the extreme. Everyone has a self heal. Everyone has both melee and range skills. Everyone has some party support ability.

This game is probably more suited to explorers and those that take the content slower than rushing to max level. The lack of a monthly fee means you can slow down and take your time but I’m afraid the industry raises a generation of players who rush to the “end”.

There are a few sticky threads at the top of the Player helping Player board that can help with the basics and tips of the trade. The game’s wiki is the official in game help as well.

Enjoy your return to Tyria but temper your GW memories, this game is entirely a different beast.

Click on the support link and then click on “submit a request” (top right). You explain what happened, file the ticket and you should eventually here back from them.

Note you should get a “we got it” reply almost immediately, if not your spam filter may be a bit overenthusiastic and you may want to look into that.

Well it removes a bit and sequesters the rest for Gem for Gold buyers.

neneza.6954:

To much fanboyism here… Ok. guys, the game is perfect, there is nothing to fix. There is no grind, nothing like in other “generic” mmorpgs like WOW or so. This is the best mmorpg ever made.

Nobody who replied said that either. There’s plenty to fix but what most people don’t understand is how long it takes for something to get done, that they have to pick their battles on what to do in a particular timeframe and sometimes you don’t know if something is going to work they way you hope.

I’m not giving them a blanket excuse, I just understand that in software development, it never goes quite as fast as the customers want and most will feel that an update didn’t addressed the issues they had.

FourthVariety.5463:

gamescom is all about optimistic promises. Closed room sessions of games which later get canceled, even public demos of games which get canceled (Prey 2, anyone?). Not to speak of the graveyard of promised features. I can understand Mike O Brien’s reluctance to join this illustrious club, but hardly any publisher ever really suffered. Bethesda is still Bethesda, EA has an entire morgue of dead games in their basement and those failures are the least of those companies’ problems.

But in those cases, it wasn’t their only game with a development team. ANet is all about GW2 now. That’s it. While NCSOFT has a stable of games to fall back on when one stumbles, GW2 is it for ANet.

This is a “did you stop beating your wife” kind of question. If they are straightforward with us about plans and are forced to backtrack, we call them liers. If they don’t say anything until they are sure they have something, we berate them for not allowing us to have more feedback during development. If they don’t say anything at all, we complain that they don’t communicate.

They can’t win. So they choose option 3, hide in their castle by the sea while we crash again the walls like ocean waves from a storm. It does make your development life easier if you aren’t pestered by your customers every working moment. But the downside is usually a lot more disappointed customers because they didn’t get their 2 cent opinions included. It’s a “too many cooks” problem.

It wasn’t until the Queen’s Jubilee a year ago before I broke 100g, that’s after 9 months of playing. Since then I’ve realized all the activities that can earn me gold yet not force me into the “usual” suggestions of speedruns, farming and mindless gathering on Orr.

The Gold for Gems was never a prominently advertised feature of this game. It’s not on the box or website blurb about the game. The fact that some feel that the game should be totally free, even though the cash shop has always been a prominent feature. The Gold for Gems is there to fund the Gems for Gold aspect of the cash shop, not replace 100% of all gem purchases with gold. Fake gold doesn’t pay the bills.

Currently is roughly 8.8g per dollar. A year ago it was only 2.8g per dollar.

10g per dollar would mean a gold to gem rate of 17.3g for 100 gems. We haven’t broke that yet.

All permanent gathering tools sold are account bound since they changed them from soul bound and hiked the price from 800 to 1000 gems.

OnyX.9027:

rgraze.5169:

I think a lot of people here hit the nail on the head. The problem being is that it is more profitable to fail than succeed. This should not be the case.

BINGO!

This guy gets the situation in 1 post

People would farm events by succeeding IF the reward was better than it is to fail the event

time/effort vs reward is always going to be the playstyle of most people in an MMO who want to get what they perceive of as the best of items/goods/loot

yes this doesn’t interest others, but farmers will always look to the min/max scenario and a-net only ever seems to hurriedly fix anything that involves farming (yet you see other bugs still present after 2 years :/ )

But it is already. What failing does is let you rerun it after an abbreviated cool down letting you earn all the loot you got by running it, failure or not. Don’t you get that. You are comparing the rewards of a single run with success to multiple runs on failure.

As others have pointed out, the prices was stable for many months prior to (Sept 13 to Feb 14) the 1st feature patch (wardrobe) and only since then there’s been a steep rise in price. Note their was a price drop between Feb 14 and the 1st feature patch.

Mystic Forge with Watchwork Sprockets.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blade_Shard

Mystic.5934:

not a bad idea at all.
decimal places might make it tricky (buying a 40s ecto for 1 gem). I’m guessing it would just give you the difference as money in your bank like how buyiny/selling gems currently does. (if you say you want to buy 1g worth of gems, you might get 6 gems, but you’ll also only spend 97s50c)

I imagine it would be exchange minimum amount of gems to cover purchase price with the change going into your bank.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Warband_armor_

Tyyphoon.5301:

DeWolfe.2174:

What was going to be an obvious outcome, the players known to me as griever’ish, are no longer in Cursed Shore. Every day this week, from afternoon to evening, they had one of their accounts sitting at Shelters Gates to prevent the Blix event. Now, they are elsewhere in game. So much for how they cared about doing Blix or any Cursed Shore event.

OMG!! What?? I was hoping they would take advantage of the fact that they have Cursed Shore all to themselves so they can FINALLY complete their beloved Blix instance. Awww, and they cried oh so much, I literally felt pity upon them that they could not finish their little instance because big, bad farmers were getting in their way!

What a shame!!

And when devs talk about toxicity …

I guess someone is expecting something special is being added to them soon. Of course it actually doesn’t matter when you get the chest.

Maybe he’s making a fort.

Since it sales daily sale, I would expect that you will miss out.

Items associated with the 10 day sale which started today are daily sales. The returned skins since the first warning about them going away is up, I surmise will be gone Tuesday. The character slot may be only for the weekend or for a week.

Always check to status by going to the promotions tab in the gem shop daily to see if there’s a count down to departure for an item that returned or goes on sale.

No, lately these sales have been either weekend, week long, two week long sales that either start on a Tuesday or a Friday. March daily sales was an exception.

At the time I posted there wasn’t any word about the 10 day anniversary sale yet, just the character slot went on sale at 3am my time.

Probably not a good time to have matches at this time until it passes.

Phoebe Ascension.8437:

The 40% off is almost completely nulified by the gem price increase. That is if you buy them with gold. So funny. At least i have backup gems.

Except I buy gems every day, 5 times more on Monday and Thursday before a possible spike. I’m all set.

Is there currently a 24hr countdown timer on it under promotions? If not then not today.

I know. I was planning on buying another expander while it’s on sale and the staff skin but then … 40% off. Sure I only have 3 characters right now but … 40% off.

NIC – Network Interface Controller. Thing is during play, the data rate is so low that I don’t see that as a problem. It looks as if the laptop is only a year or two old tops. So I don’t think it’s an issue with network chip in your laptop failing.

If the game files are on the 5400RPM hard drive rather than the SSD, turning may be an on the fly loading issue from that drive, especially if the game’s data file is heavily fragmented.

Now the question is do you upgrade to a Z97 MB and a K class, unlocked CPU with the money you saved?

There are much cheaper coolers than the UH-D15 that are still much better than the default Intel one. You were looking to put the high performance, ultra low profile racing tires on your stock Honda civic.

The Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo is more than enough at less than half the price (and weight).

Didn’t even notice it was the H97, thus single x16 slot and no unlock OCing. So never mind about the K version of the CPU or the 2nd video card in the future.

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Z97-vs-H97-What-is-the-Difference-562/

I would split the difference on the PSU and go with a 600-650 watt.

It’s not shabby.

Do you mean the i5-4690 or the unlocked i5-4690K. I think you want the K version.

For this game, 16GB and an R9-280 is a bit of overkill. 860 watt PSU is a tad large as well unless you are planning a 2nd R9-280 in your future.

But as a general PC gaming rig it looks fine.

Edit: See follow up post.

saventis.1485:

did my post just get deleted?

Look at your post history. Thread has gotten big.

Essence Snow.3194:

They could very easily make them boxes like ascended boxes where you can choose the weapon that you wanted.

Actually that might work. My initial thought was player choice would be unbalanced, lots of greatswords, few foci or torches and even fewer underwater ones, if any. But if the intention of the choice is to sell them for profit, the flood of supply could level out, to a degree, the cost of precursors. Assuming you’re still allow to sell them.

The 12’s? Don’t know the reference.

azizul.8469:

agree with the part where “legendary should not be tradable”.

it is a personal accomplishment, and i don’t see why someone who didn’t accomplish all the aspect required to craft a legendary weapon should be able to equip it.

I understand why they did it. It goes back the the RNG of drops.

Look you got a precursor from a drop. It’s not for a weapon you can or do use. So your choices are selling it to buy the precursor you want, which may still require a pile of gold to make up a difference, or craft the legendary your precursor is for and sell that, then buy the precursor you want and regather the mats for a new legendary.

Hayashi.3416:

Why in the first place is failing an event ever rewarded more than succeeding an event?

All that’s needed is to ramp up the rewards for completion of events in general, and decrease the drops of mobs within events, and all of this nonsense will end with equal or better loot per hour for repeated event completion.

Nerfing Blix doesn’t solve the issue here. Blix is not the only event that is farmed in this fashion. The general idea behind it is in error.

But it’s not.

During the “action” phase failing or succeeding gives you the same mob of critters to kill and loot. The difference is succeeding gives you a reward while failing lets you rerun it again in short order. Something you can’t do if you succeed.

So failing simply means you get to rerun the event over and over and over again until you are bored or your packs are full. Success gives you a bonus and moves you onto the next event in the meta chain.

So for a single run of the event, you might actually earn more succeeding but by failing you get to do start over and run it again.

I can understand why the fail timer is so short because it’s a meta chain link and if a group did fail the entire chain isn’t thwarted because nobody is going to hang around for 20 minutes or whatever it’s now changed to, simply to try it again.

Remember, we weren’t all zerk equiped carbon copy Godlings when we first did this, some of these events were actually hard but now with nearly two years of experience, a honest chance of failure is slim to none.

Tachenon.5270:

There is only one MMO that will usurp WoW and truly be the TRUE Golden Child (truly) of MMOs now and forever! And all it needs is someone to make it!

Days of Our Lives Online!

Only if they have an Amnesiac Evil Twin class.

The Wiki is your friend. It’s also the official help system.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Main_Page

Reminds me of a passage from Asimov’s Foundation.

“That,” replied Hardin, “is the interesting thing. The analysis was the most difficult of the three by all odds. When Holk, after two days of steady work, succeeded in eliminating meaningless statements, vague gibberish, useless qualifications – in short, all the goo and dribble – he found he had nothing left. Everything canceled out.”

“Lord Dorwin, gentlemen, in five days of discussion didn’t say one kitten ed thing, and said it so you never noticed. There are the assurances you had from your precious Empire.”

Apparently Mr. O’Brien some see you statement along those same lines. This is a game of high adventure, we are folk of deeds not words.

126 gold will only buy you around 950 gems. That’s only 1 of the returned weapon skins which I do expect to vanish again in a few weeks. So if any strike your fancy you may want to consider buying one now or be frustrated for months.

Haishao.6851:

SolviteSekai.9816:

If arena-net added easy farming options I wouldnt care.

I just personally inherently disagree with abusing event mechanics to get easy loot.

idgaf how fast you get money. I just expect events to work as intended, and for the players to respect their intended function.

Events have 4 states. in Waiting, in Action, in Success or in Failure. Two of those states have a reward attached to them. All states are part of the system and they are all as legitimate as the other.
Telling people they are exploiting because they think it’s more profitable to fail an event that to succeed it is the same as saying you’re exploiting because you think succeeding an event is more profitable than letting it fail.

Failed State IS an intended function. When it is not, it vanish. Like all the events in Dry Top for example.

Failure is one of two outcomes but striving to fail is the problem here. Nobody expects someone playing a game, is striving to fail. Unless you are playing a game with a child.

Note the reason failure is better than success is because you get to repeat the “action” phase where a lot of loot is dropped. Success merely rewards a bonus.

Now if this was a standalone event that didn’t impact a meta it probably would be left alone, at least for now. But as it stood it was equivalent to blocking the road so you and your friends can play road hockey, in terms of inconvenience.

Well I feel that ANet considers farming a variation of grinding and they didn’t want this to be a game about grinding. They wanted players to keep moving and experience a variety of events rather than putting down stakes and doing one thing all play session.

If you use the amusement park analogy for this MMO, the devs don’t want players getting off the coaster and just getting back in line again because that increases the delay for someone new to enjoy the attraction.

I think that’s one of the reasons farming is nerfed via DR, daily account limits or outright altering of an event that proves to be very farmable.

You all have to remember that to ANet, this is a game where everyone co-ops and nobody’s play style is really wrong unless they become unfriendly toward other players fits that narrative.

First the forums can be a toxic place. It’s full of people who believe passionately about their position and “debate” can get quite heated. Don’t let them deter you.

1) This may be a slight problem for you because GW2 is more of an Action Combat game than other MMOs. Here the best defense is a well executed dodge, default V key. The classes, or professions as they are called here, aren’t as specialized to the extreme as other MMOs where one class can act as a meat shield while other is a healer while a third lays on the damage. Everyone is a little bit of everything and while some professions have better hit points or can do more damage it’s not as distinct. Same goes with range vs melee, everyone can do both but some better than others. All I can suggest is read the wiki on the professions and their various skills and then ask some specific questions as to which of two or three would be better. Everyone has favorites and not everyone have played all of them.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Profession

2) Good question. Again no real easy answer. The most heavily populated servers tend to track with WvW rankings.

http://mos.millenium.org/na/matchups/

But since the introduction of the Megaserver tech in PvE which eliminated zones for each server favoring only enough instances of each zone to keep a zone’s population high, there isn’t a lot a difference between them other than which server has a guild’s bank, as guilds are cross server but you only get guild boons and bank access from your server’s guild outpost.

3) A lot of players role a human first and the human city has a rather nice density of player services (the trading post, bank, crafting stations, etc). Some races are more compact, some more spread out. Lion’s Arch’s destruction has resulted in it’s services spread out when it was once very compact but LA is not a race city but the game’s Capital.

There are a lot of variation on the early personal stories in terms of story. Again it will be tough to have a fair comparison because few if any players actually done all of them. I only have a norn and a human and both cases did not do them until I was a higher level. The personal story is entirely optional and is the closest thing this game has to a traditional quest chain.

4) No. There is no content that is guild specific, but there are special guild events that a guild can trigger just for guild members. Note by doing the Personal Story you will be asked to pick an order which is entirely separate from guilds.

5) There is a dominate player philosophy that they aren’t important, that direct damage rules the game. For soloing however while fighting powerful single or multiple average critters I find them very useful. Note that these affects tend to be very short lived, as little as a few seconds to rarely more than 15 seconds. There is very little content that can’t be soloed as long as you don’t Leroy into a crowd of critters shouting “Come at me”. One downside of conditionals is a stacking limit so large crowds can’t “nibble to death” some big boss.

Boons on the other hand in group situations are very desirable. Some result from direct use of a skill or combo of skills from yourself or you and a other player impacting both of you.

From what I see playing the two professions that are the most helpful in group combat with boons and conditionals are Elementalists, Guardians and Engineers. But they all can be rather complected as a first character. Warriors, Rangers and Thieves are a bit more straight forward stabby kill.

That’s my two coppers, enjoy the game.

jebo.2461:

Absconditus.6804:

which does not have a subscription fee, does not force-bait you into the cash shop

We must be playing different games then.

In mine we got a MICROSCOPIC bank (shared with all the 5 character slots available) where I can’t even store two full different sets of gear without having to cough up money.

Honestly, don’t be a pack rat. It was close to a year before I chose to add a bank tab (sale). Other than the backlog of ascended mats or BLTC chest drops, what are you using your bank to store? Especially when every character can cheaply have 80 slots. And that’s not counting the “cheap” 50 slots for non bound items you can have in a personal guild.

Vodyara.4608:

The ones crying about the Blix “exploit” are the arrogant rich players who want to keep their dominance. They have exploited enough previous events to last them for years, but god forbid the little man tries to come close.

Just pathetic nerds thinking purposely finishing the event, leaving over a hundred players waiting for another one, is somehow related to “justice”.

Ah yes, the old “it’s the Man/1%/TP flippers holding us working class folk down” conspiracy theory rant.