Guild Wars 2

Traveller.7496:

The fact is that you guys at ANet still didn’t learn from your mistakes and made failing the event more worthwhile than completing it. Just fix the rewards for event completion instead of nerfing the event timer. Then we could all happily farm together without “toxic environment” or trolling event completion.

This is the same argument MMO players have used since time immemorial about class balance. Don’t nerf my class, buff the others.

Referring back to my ramblings in my last post, event completion rewards, like all rewards, inject new items and coin into the game world and to prevent massive inflation or deflation, depending on your point of view, it has to be limited.

The problem here is a confluence of game mechanics which on their own seem perfectly reasonable.

- Short cool down after failure.
- Scaling based on number of players at an event
- Low threshold to qualify for full loot drop from spawned mobs

Now if a group was doing the event in earnest and failed, it makes total sense to restart it quickly because who wants to wait around for 10-20 minutes.

The game has two/three types of scaling, push hit points of the boss through the roof so it takes roughly the same amount of time to defeat with 10 or 50 players participating. Or increase the number of lesser critters that spawn based on the number of players participating. This may also result in critter class promotion so instead of ton of regular you get a vet, elite or champ ones mixed in so it doesn’t take forever to finish.

Lastly the low threshold of damage done to receive the loot drop. Which means for normal critters one or two hits qualify you.

Individually none of these things are by themselves bad. But because of the large amount of loot you get doing this event due to scaling combined with the quick event respawn on failure, simply no success reward can ever hope to equal that. Especially when the value of drops is determined by the demand for and supply of the items that are dropped. If it dropped T6 dust or venom sacs we wouldn’t be discussing this. But T6 blood is over 60s each and T5 blood can still be MF into T6 blood for a profit because T6 dust is cheap, relatively.

So it’s not ANet intentionally designing an event where failure pays better. That is simply a side effect of the various game mechanics that work well everywhere else, pushed to the extreme combined with the now disproved notion that players would actually play to win.

So once the patch hits, all that the Blix exploiters have accomplished is to make failure on Blix annoying because of the cool down on failure for those trying to do the meta chain, making the game less friendly.

Makes perfect sense to prevent CS from mucking with database in terms of removing a penalty. If they allowed it then every PvP player who disconnects will claim local ISP outage, power failure, cat ate the Cat 5 cable, etc. as the reason they disconnected. Easiest way to stop that from happening is to not allow anyone access to that flag.

The only reason it’s more rewarding for failing than succeeding is how the various game mechanisms interact with each other and the recent run on T6 mats since the introduction of the wardrobe and the megaserver melding of server zones. Without the increased demand and throttling of supply sources, the Level 500 crafting additions the incentive to play for fail wouldn’t be as attractive.

It all folds back to the reward system. 1st, no sharing of a common loot pool. Great for helping other players without being flamed for kill stealing. 2nd, number of critters scaling with zerg size. Either more critters or higher ranking critters which give better rewards. 3rd, the pathological desire for gold because nearly all item drops are random. 4th, the short cool down of the event in case of failure. Because you don’t want to wait too long on a reset on the assumption that the failure wasn’t intentional.

Normally more players means less loot for everyone per critter but that’s defeated by game mechanism that let the vast majority get full loot even with only inflicting a minor amount of damage. Now combine that with my 2nd point and the rewards scale linearly with group size because number of critters during the event scales with group size. You now get a lot from critter drops. But why restrict yourself to one pass through the tunnel with my 4th point that the cool down time is considerably less on failure than success. Now you can repeat that forever, or until you run out of places to hold your pile of loot.

And the reason why players are willing to do this is because of random drops for just about all items, you have to have gold to buy what you want off the TP. ANet likely set up the reward system this way to funnel everyone to the TP gold sink. And I think that the TP does a marvelous job keeping inflation to a dull roar. I’ve been in an MMO where inflation resembled Zimbabwe, this isn’t inflation but I digress.

Because players feel that normal gold accumulation in the game isn’t fast enough, it’s low since those rewards are created out of thin air, to buy that item at the TP soon or the new offering at the Gem Shop for free, that players are now doing the one thing that ANet didn’t want players to have to do and that is grind only the most profitable content day in and day out until it’s mind numbing.

ANet expected, I imagine, that due to the lack of a subscription fee that players could feel relaxed and take a leisurely pace doing content they enjoy doing to earn the gold needed for the items they want. Why the rush, game will still be there next month, enjoy yourself. But this is the instant gratification generation who get their content RIGHT NOW over Steam, iTunes, Amazon Prime, etc. They’ve been conditioned by MMOs over the last decade to rush to max level ASAP and then it’s a relatively short nightly grind of raid content to earn their BIS items and then jump game until an expansion comes out. It’s Cannonball Run across America instead of the leisurely Sunday drive in the countryside that I think the devs were trying to achieve.

Orpheal.8263:

Such exploits need to get fixed in the future much sooner, before already everyone and their moms have abused it for half an eternity to the point, that it seriously affects the game economy…

Why get such things always first fixed, when its way tooo late?
Why must always first someone write someone about these exploits in the forum, before some actions are being made against such kind of exploits

However, thanks that this gets fixed now, even it its already too late.
At least take a look it it now, who exploits this now extremely more in the moments before it gets fixed, so that those people which keep on exploiting this further, get punished…

Just increasing only the respawn timer alone doesn#t fix everything!!
You have to look also at the event design self, that failing intentionally an event shouldn’t stop countless other events at this map to appear.
Events need to be independent from each other!
If 1 event fails, then there should appear other alternative events which could be done to lead to the point, that an event chain doesn’t get broken, only because of one event failing.
Thats what is beign meant with real dynamic events. There is nothing dynamic about it, if you can bring forcefully an event chain to break, if just one event fails.
Dynamic it would be, if you can continue your event chain, but failing one quest means, you have to do next an alternative different event, than that, what would normally have to be done next, if the previous quest would have been done successfully.

Thats the way, how real dynamic event chains have to work. An event chain should never be breakable!.

Well the devs gave players too much credit that they would try to achieve the goal of the meta rather than fail it midway intentionally simply to get more loot.

It’s very ornate. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

To late for the devs who are armor artists to visit the Higgins Armor Museum in Worcester, MA next time they’re in New England. Went their with friends once, back when we were doing the whole 20 somethings weekend getaway thing. Ah to be young again. But some of the collection is now shown at the Worcester Art Museum.

http://www.worcesterart.org/Exhibitions/knights/

Merged into a few or locked for not being constructive.

But leveling here is extremely quick and the leveling curve flattens once you are out of your early levels which go quickly (and hence key farming is doable with 20-25 minutes).

Relshdan.6854:

Stampede.5308:

Better be careful with this fixes. Anet continuosly nerf drop, nerf rewards, nerf loot… We are earning every day less money/drops than the previous and the prices continue to rise.
1g = 5 gems (WTF, a year ago 1g = 100 gems)
But this is the gemstore, i can stand it
62s = 1 powerful vial of blood (5 months ago 28s = 1 powerful vial of blood)
1300g Spark (march 2014 525g = spark. April 2014 715g = spark)

The prices are rising of more than 100% and the loot and rewards are getting worse and worse.
The ridicolous thing is that fail events and repeat them is more rewarding that succed in them.

agree….most events simply aren’t worth doing from a gold-time efficiency standpoint.
outside of a large group doing dwayna and melandru chains, or small group doing the Frostgorge champ train, there aren’t really any events more rewarding than just killing mobs and mining nodes.

events really shouldn’t be more rewarding to fail than win….i’m just not sure how to fix this outside of more high-level “defend an area events” that spawn champs and/or tons of loot-dropping mobs. that way, increasing the respawn of failing events doesn’t kill the farmer….they just move on to the next “rewarding” event.

What are we? Efficiency experts or heroes?

Berelious.3290:

Wanderer.3248:

If people would take decent care of their machines DDOS wouldn’t happen.

Don’t let your machine become infected with viruses and become a zombie. And fix your Mothers machine while you’re at it, it’s probably already a zombie.

Support ISPs that block infected machines from flooding the net.

A DDoS attack has absolutely nothing to do with viruses. Basically some idiot in his mother’s basement takes it upon himself to use a program to bombard the servers with information till the server can’t handle anymore, which will cause said server to crash. There is no way to block it or prepare for it.

He’s talking about zombie machines used to DDOS. Those are the ones that have been virused/malwared, not the server cluster.

Really how do you switch instances? For me if I leave a map and return, it’s the same map, according to how the mat nodes are laid out and farmed already. If you are suggesting that there is an instance of CS where farming isn’t happening, I simply shake my head because it’s happening on all of them. And since it’s become a well known farm, players are coming from all over which simply keeps creating instance for more farmers.

Same data center where WildStar is hosted from. This could be an attack on that game and we are collateral damage.

Wildstar and EVE uses player bought monthly subscription vouchers to trade for in game currency on a player market. And while in EVE a PLEX can be converted to their proxy currency at a fixed rate, you can’t directly convert their proxy currency back into a PLEX or in game currency.

GW2 is gold or cash into gems and gems into either gem shop items or gold, at a reduced rate.

WildStar is cash into CREED into either a month’s subscription or in-game currency on a player traded market.

EVE is cash into PLEX into either a month’s subscription, player service, in-game currency on a player traded market or the proxy currency at a fix rate for their item shop. And while items in their item shop can be sold for in-game currency, once you transform a PLEX into their proxy currency, there isn’t a direct way to go back.

It’s almost as if people don’t even look at the posts on the front page before starting a new thread.

Dagraan.2854:

the farming community is actually pretty nice, its like a pool of gasoline running a machine.
but then the matches(anti farmers rich elites) come along and light the gasoline and guess what kitten explodes.

the toxic players aren’t the farmers who just want to make money and not have to be some TP warrior who drive the prices up of goods for their own gain so they don’t have to farm to pay for the increased prices of goods.
the toxic players are the ones preventing people from making money and having a good time.
what do you think happens when you stop a farm? people go do other events? no they sit around and wait or go find something else to farm.
ending farms just kill the map and bring it back it its regular dead self.

They don’t need to be rich.

Sorry, I thought that was a feature of the PVP Access Kit.

Appears to be another DDOS.

The end is near so everyone to Cursed Shore while there is still money to be made.

Oh, BTW what is the chief item that everyone is making their money on from there? I’m looking for a good investment now so to harvest the spike when supply dries up.

But to an MMO company, they want you to take time. Even in a game without a subscription, your continued presence in the game leveling is a feature they can sell by showing an active world. Plus the longer you play, the greater the chance you will plunk down hard cash for an item in the gem shop or a load of gold.

In the original GW you could buy the ability to go directly to max level, most likely for PvP. Here both PvP and WvW you are auto promoted to max level so no need for such a feature.

Nothing. However if they are willing to act upon input from their customers, shouldn’t they at least get it close to what was being asked for rather than a crazy gold sink they first created?

“Hi, we at ArenaNet has listen to you WvW players and are providing you this QoL feature your requested, at only 300g per color! Isn’t that great! Ah … what’s with all the torches and pitchforks?”

Faereilos.5106:

Behellagh.1468:

The goal of the event is to succeed. Intentionally failing it is subverting the intended game play the developers created.

Right, so let ANet handle it. The self-appointed GW police force isn’t needed.

So how do you tell “the self-appointed GW police force” apart from someone simply wanting to complete the event?

Shivan.9438:

Cries Of Sorrow.5864:

i’ve taken some time to research this exploit and was succesful in disrupting the exploit and make gameplay continue as normal.
it was fun, i had a couple laughs we were all on the spot and went down.
as you can see the chat was very happy with the work i delivered so they decided to thank me with most of their gratitude.

Wow, how mature.

If anyone deserves to get banned, it’s players like you who go out of their way to start trouble. Just hope you never decide to farm, because if you do, better make room for lots of crow to stuff down.

On the contrary. I put Blix exploiters in the same class as people who shoot at first responders because the want the house/building to burn down. The goal of the event is to succeed. Intentionally failing it is subverting the intended game play the developers created.

Ayrilana.1396:

Behellagh.1468:

I think the point the op is making is the feedback from players to devs and vice versa is currently one way. The commander tag mess up is the obvious example here.

How they could take the requests for account bound and color choice and turn it into what they presented in Germany without running it by someone in the WvW community first is ridiculous. It would have saved them from the uproar and two guys their weekend “fixing” the whole color thing if they simply asked their WvW beta group of players “is this what you wanted?”

To be that tone deaf to your community is as frightening as the likely reason they didn’t was to orchestrate a three week PR campaign about the changes. By dragging it out every MMO blog will post every day about each change as they are announced. The ultimate in cheap marketing, social media.

It is time-consuming to do that about every change. If not every change, then they’d have to pick and choose what they want to get feedback about and could still be in the same situation as what recently occurred. Even then, you’d likely still see the same reaction from the people complaining including the posts with insults such as “armchair devs”.

If it was important enough to both announce it at a con in Europe and devote a day on it for building the hype about this feature patch, it should have been important enough to sanity check it with their beta testers before the design was coded up. Not asking for every bug fix but since this is a bullet point for the feature pack, it’s important enough to make sure you are delivering what was being asked.

I’m simply saying don’t pester support now as the refund policy is likely to have changed since there is no reason now with an account bound tag whose color we can change at will to have more than one on your account.

Esplen.3940:

JayDako.1739:

Esplen, everything I have seen says a transfer costs 1800 gems and therefore not free. Also I don’t want to play where other players are just -there- and not an actual community or roleplaying.

If you have no characters, you can world transfer for free. That feature is and has been around since the release of this game.

But you can only transfer, paid or free, once every seven days, so choose wisely.

Difference between random sampling and self reporting. The forum is self reporting.

But that might have changed along with the now free ability to change color. And whatever the policy is it’s contacting support after the patch drops, not before.

I think the point the op is making is the feedback from players to devs and vice versa is currently one way. The commander tag mess up is the obvious example here.

How they could take the requests for account bound and color choice and turn it into what they presented in Germany without running it by someone in the WvW community first is ridiculous. It would have saved them from the uproar and two guys their weekend “fixing” the whole color thing if they simply asked their WvW beta group of players “is this what you wanted?”

To be that tone deaf to your community is as frightening as the likely reason they didn’t was to orchestrate a three week PR campaign about the changes. By dragging it out every MMO blog will post every day about each change as they are announced. The ultimate in cheap marketing, social media.

They do sometimes listen.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Commander-Tag-Changes-Feedback-merged/page/10#post4313965

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Commander-Tag-Changes-Feedback-merged/page/10#post4314033

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/wuv/wuv/Commander-Tag-Changes-Feedback-merged/page/10#post4314087

Tag this as a time when ANet listened.

You quoted your own post there, just edit out the first quote and last /quote.

Just enough for each race.

But it was a really BIG mosquito.

Sure, just don’t underestimate your opponents and be wary of your surroundings so you don’t get attacked by more than one thing at a time.

Katana’s are traditionally wielded two handed. Only two handed sword animation in the game are for greatswords. Therefore it became a greatsword and therefore it’s length becoming an odachi.

If they allowed a version to be wielded one handed, there be a players complaining that it’s being wielded wrong.

Why not. There’s a asura tech next to the gate in Hoelbrak talking about a retro-encabulator.

Extra slots are 800 gems or $10 worth. They occasionally go on sale.

Guhracie.3419:

Wwefan.4982:

Afro PvP is getting an overhaul through the feature patch which has nothing to do with the living world content and so what if SAB doesn’t fit with the LS it can come back as a festival like wintersday or Halloween people just have to grow up and stop crying about stuff like this as if Anet have said we aren’t doing anymore SAB its a game and its a game that gives the community what they want lets not forget Anet have gave us the account wallet, LFG tool, the Wardrobe system and permanent LS content so give them a break and just enjoy the game and if your only playing it just to cry about stuff like SAB then don’t play nobody will miss you.

This is factually incorrect.

The best kind of incorrect.

Another point. While we are customers, so is KongZhong. And while ANet wants to keep content synced between the two versions, some internal changes for KongZhong which will never impact our game play may be eating some of their development time. It’s possible that the plethora of outfits vs pieces on the Gem Store is a result of that. Maybe mix and match or the cost of transmutations in China is driving the push for outfits both here and there.

In the end it’s

1) A business
2) It follows the creator’s vision unless it conflicts with 1.
3) Player input is welcome unless it conflicts with 1 or 2.

Yea, it’s very Asimov 3 rules but you get my point. They provide an entertainment product. It’s up to us as consumers to choose to embrace or reject it. As long as income and whatever metric they are using to determine “ratings” stay within expected limits, don’t expect major changes to conform with existing MMO tropes the game went out of it’s way to reject.

/age is the only thing we have. Hours played and days since it was created (IIRC).

Mystic.5934:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

awesomium.

is that element #120? please tell me it’s element #120. tell me now.

I know you are trying a funny but for those that really don’t know.

http://www.awesomium.com/

That’s a lot tougher. There are a few sites dedicated to this, at least to get an idea about the color.

First the wiki.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dyes

Then Dulfy
http://dulfy.net/2013/12/24/gw2-dye-gallery/

Finally this place
http://www.dboo.net/gw2_colors.html

But you can also go into the trading post and preview a dye across your entire outfit.

Ayrilana.1396:

It’s a long term goal and 500 hours isn’t really a lot. With that said, 500 hours at 5 gold an hour is 2,500 gold which is just enough to buy the materials off the TP and craft it.

500 hours of playing an level 80 perhaps, but for a player simply leveling for the first time to 80 could take 150 hours to accomplish. And it took me a while to understand which events and activities paid well. If the player got into the money pit of crafting, which rarely becomes profitable until the highest levels on certain items, he may not be acquiring a net amount of gold all that quickly. He may be the type to grind for gold but rather simply play in the world doing DEs and the occasional boss event every night.

Not everyone is willing to farm Orr for T6 mats or do the dungeon path rotation or ride the boss train every 15 minutes their entire play session. That’s min/max thinking as oppose to playing a game because you enjoy it. I’m sure it wasn’t ANet’s plan that players should adopt such degenerate play styles but rather hoped that players would simply play in the world.

Labjax.2465:

Behellagh.1468:

My point is what we are seeing is there interpretation of what players were asking about a year ago and nothing more recent than that because it takes that long to formalize the idea, develop the schedule and assign the personal to implement it.

You have a good point, though when it comes to the tags specifically, the most time-consuming part was probably the account-bound thing. With the right assets and tools on hand, the color variation part could take all of an hour, if that.

Probably spend more time testing the new colors than making them.

But that task had to be scheduled along with the rest of the tasks needing to be done. And since we don’t know the tool chain used in UI development, I doubt they are knocking out basic UI API calls or even have their own framework, or if there are other scheduled changes in the UI that would require some degree of coordination between multiple developers. Obviously there’s a database modifying filter to be coded and run on the player database but even though the player side change may seem trivial, it’s still part of a schedule. And regardless of the outcry, they will have to schedule a fix on something that may have been checked off as done and tested months ago.

I think they have a more traditional development environment than an “agile” team that can “pivot” on demand.

Yea, search here is more of a concept than useful tool on this forum. I’m not asking for regular expressions but a simple concept of quotes for exact phrase, AND and OR for combination of words would be fantastic. And a date range feature as well.

I don’t think most players understand the lead time and inertia a large software project needs and generates. They can’t turn on a dime once things are set in motion. The LS development likely started six months ago and the feature packs even longer.

I too believe that sometimes ANet simply doesn’t “get it”. Commander tags for instance. Couldn’t simply add a customization feature with a half a dozen different colors and shapes to choose from for those who already have a tag. Had to turn it into a collectible gold sink. That is NOT QoL. You missed the broad side of the barn there ANet. Maybe the request wasn’t communicated properly from the CDI. Or after a cycle of tossing ideas around you lost the actually reason for the request, organization, and decided tags were just another cosmetic element since only gold was involved as oppose to a minimum WvW level and gold.

My point is what we are seeing is there interpretation of what players were asking about a year ago and nothing more recent than that because it takes that long to formalize the idea, develop the schedule and assign the personal to implement it.

(chainsaw sound) My have the mods been aggressive.

I think the problem is with the notion that by the time a player collects the rest of the materials needed, they would have had a precursor dropped on them. Again it’s an issue with the perception of probability. And while using the mystic slot machine to forge one is one way to supplement the drop rate and remove the glut of lesser items, it’s as expensive as purchasing one off the TP. Without selling your unwanted precursor that dropped on you, buying one is out reach except by the most dedicated players devoted to wealth acquisition or quite a lot of disposable income than your average student.

We aren’t quite at 10g per dollar but the gem to gold rate is getting close with this latest Gem Shop restock of skins. 8000 gems, $100, is roughly 880g.

The long and short of it is precursors aren’t dropping at a rate that would give a player playing 500 hours (example) toward crafting a legendary a 50/50 chance of having one dropped on them.

I would assume it’s for a limited time like other signature NPC weapons. I would assume two weeks but it may be as little as until the next Tuesday update.

Other than losing your graphic settings and remembered login/password.

Beldin.5498:

Behellagh.1468:

Buying gems it’s over 15g per 100 gems.

Ouch

So it was good that i bought at least 2000 in the last 2 weeks for around 12,5g ^^

Nearly broke 16g per 100 before it pulled back a bit. I expect to jump up again as each time zone logs in to play and notices the items for sale followed by a pull back.

Open it with the old or last content during the September feature patch, close it when the LS 2 kicks off again.