Guild Wars 2

And I stated this before. Because, according to MO, they can make 10 outfits in the time to make one “set” (three weights) of armor, armor is too cost prohibited as a gem store item. That that’s because anything developed exclusively for the gem store has to not only pay for it’s development but have to contribute to the rest of the game’s development. And since outfits are 700 gems and armors are 800 gems, it’s not rocket surgery to see why.

At the end of the day, it’s a business. They decided that a cash shop was the way to go and that means “new” stuff has to keep showing up to keep the spice cash flowing. Sorry, that’s the reality. If you have to keep new items showing up in the cash stop, it needs to be “cheap” in terms of resources to make and that’s what outfits are.

Now if can get the other wings to flap.

Hero points are what you spend to unlock skills and traits/specialization. You gain them as you level and by the time you reach 80, you will have enough to unlock all them. However if you want to unlock them earlier you can earn hero points from hero challenges.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero_point

Hero challenges are marked on the map and appear when you unveil previously unexplored territory.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hero_challenge#Map_icons

I “mined” as an experiment Hardened Leather Sections for an hour or so on the TP and the end price was only 4 1/2s each from the TP. Pretty big savings.

Well latest episode hasn’t dropped yet but you forgot episode 2, yeah, now is your last chance.

Djinn.9245:

Kruhljak.2705:

Felahr.9830:

I have always easily made my money back. getting expensive dyes, BL weapons skins, minis, etc, i have yet to buy keys and NOT come out ahead. totally worth it.

I hate to make assumptions: but not even close to likely. A single key via gems right now is the rough equivalent of 21G-31G depending on how many you buy at a time.

For a single key? That sounds pretty high but then I never trade gems for gold. Can someone show the numbers on this?

Going to the exchange in game, 25 keys at the gem shop is 2100 gems, you can buy 2100 gems for around 586-587 gold at the moment, so around 23.5g each. A single key is 125 gems and that will cost you about 35 gold.

We only know the day, not the time.

Living World Season One was an attempt at having a world with time that actually moved. Those episodes were available to play for a limited time and once over was gone. Anyone who joined after couldn’t play them. They came out every two weeks and lasted four. This was a way to keep players returning to play.

Because of the blow black Season Two was designed as a side story that was repeatable and persistent once unlocked. Again to keep players returning the carrot/stick was if you logged in while it was active, you got it for free, if you didn’t you will need to pay a modest sum of 200 gems. They later added a package deal of 20% off of all the episodes you don’t have to the gem shop for 1280 gems for all 8 episodes.

However you can play the missions if you party with someone who has them unlocked. There are certain rewards you won’t be eligible for but if you want the story, which ties back to season one’s villain, you can experience it at least. I didn’t think it was bad and provided a bit of lore. It’s a bridge between the events of Season One and Heart of Thorns. It had it’s moments.

As for the egg, why Caithe let it be taken away or why we the commander want to take it away? Some of those questions are answered in Season Two, others in Heart of Thorns.

I love it how the same topic comes in waves. Think this is the third thread on time gated mats focusing on quartz, within two days and are still active.

I going to assume that there is some rumor that Celestial is going to be the new meta.

OriOri has the most reasonable solution.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Behellagh.1468:

Quartz crystals, lore wise, are tied to the Zephyrites. They were the sole source and their ship crashed in Dry Top so now quartz is only found in Dry Top, other than what was sold to player’s for their home instance when they were at the Labyrinthine Cliffs. That’s why they are in little pots rather than outcroppings like other ore.

I think that lore is an insufficient justification for mechanics that lead to frustrated gamers. There’s no particular reason why the developers can’t figure out a way for Quartz to pop up somewhere else (the easiest I can think of: Skritt stealing Quartz crystals from the Zephyrite crash site and dropping them near some bloodstone dust, which goes splode-ee-ode-nodey).

However, there are economic implications of adding new quartz supplies and that might be why ANet is content with the status quo.

Without lore you don’t have world building. Sure, someday we may go to the crystal desert and find fields of quartz to satiate everybody’s desire, but it’s simply a mineral not found around these parts.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Behellagh.1468:

We should thank ANet for giving us a clear picture of what drops so we can now look at that and make an informed decision, rather than rely on anecdotal reports as to what dropped and their frequency.

We can’t really make an informed decision, since drop rates are still anecdotal — we’d need data on at least 1000 keys to get a reasonable idea of the approximate rates.

What we do know (and we’ve always known) is that the most likely drops are junk, with a small chance of worth-mentioning-to-guildies, and virtually no chance of getting something awesome.

I meant in general. The most common super rare item is rarer than the rarest item in rare; the most common in rare is rarer than the rarest in uncommon and all three of those pools only fall from a fourth slot. Now yes, anecdotally it appears that happens around 1 in 6 on average. Also within those classifications we don’t know how each item is weighted. But NOBODY should expect any of those in the two common slots period.

Quartz crystals, lore wise, are tied to the Zephyrites. They were the sole source and their ship crashed in Dry Top so now quartz is only found in Dry Top, other than what was sold to player’s for their home instance when they were at the Labyrinthine Cliffs. That’s why they are in little pots rather than outcroppings like other ore.

Danikat.8537:

Behellagh.1468:

Depended what you were after. In the early days (2012), back when keys dropped more either in the wild, as map completion or as a seemingly frequent drop, the chests were a nice way to get a cross-sample of smaller items from the gems shop, as it still is today. It let the players experience boosters, express items and the like. And if they liked the convenience or usefulness of some of those items, they could buy those directly from the gem shop.

Then they started to add claim tickets into them and I guess that spurred sales when it went from a single weapon skin claim ticket to the current scrap/full ticket system we have today. Farming keys were profitable back in those days, not buying them. At some point players confused the two.

Chests were like a pack of Magic cards, the excitement is in opening them to see if you got anything new or useful not the cash value of the cards you got.

Did keys drop more often in the early days?

I’ve been playing since day 1 of the headstart weekend and I didn’t get a key as a drop at all for about the first 2 years. Then I got 1 from a champion in Orr. Since then I’ve had another 2, one from a random level 9 bandit when I was playing a level 12 character, and one I’m not actually sure where it came from, I just found it in my bag and I certainly didn’t complete a map, do a story chapter that awards one or buy it so it must have been a drop.

1 account is obviously an absurdly small sample size, but my understanding is the rate of keys dropping has always been the same and always been incredibly low. But maybe people thought it was a bigger deal early on and tended to talk about it more.

Keys from map completion are more common, and in my experience the rate of getting those has been fairly consistent.

Also I think your last point is a big factor in different opinions. I don’t see anything exciting about opening a packet if there’s a very high chance that what’s inside it will be worth far less than I paid. (And this is allowing for the fact that worth is subjective – I’m not just talking about cash value here.)

Sure when I go to open a chest I have that moment of wondering if I’ll finally get something I want, or something valuable I can sell for a lot of money, but that’s offset by the knowledge that every other time that hasn’t been the case, and it only lasts for a second or so until I open it and have it confirmed that this time was also a let down. Then the best I can say for it is I’m glad I never, ever buy keys and only ever use free ones.

It seemed to me. I started in December 2012 and I remember getting keys from unexpected sources, not map completes or from the chests themselves. There were times back then when I ended up opening three chests with one key because they dropped from the chest at a higher rate. That chance was significantly reduced once they started putting claim tickets in them.

Worth is debatable but gem value, it was fairly on par with a price of a key. Now it’s much tougher to see if the gem value is roughly equivalent, how do you price a wardrobe unlock when most items in there aren’t bought with gems?

Some items lose their “worth” as an account matures. Who needs tomes if you aren’t leveling anymore? Yes you can trade them for one spirit shard but if you never use spirit shards.

If you aren’t into fashion wars then transmutation charges, hair and total makeover kits are “worthless”.

I’m ignoring the drops you can sell because gold value turns into a discussion about the exchange rate.

We should thank ANet for giving us a clear picture of what drops so we can now look at that and make an informed decision, rather than rely on anecdotal reports as to what dropped and their frequency.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Inoki.6048:

it would be nice of them to reconsider what does make somewhat sense to be gated, but take into account the stuff (like this), that makes little to no sense.

I would like to see them do some sort of annual review of things like this:

• Time gates, whether by crafting or something else.
• Binding, e.g. soul-, account-, or unbound.
• Vendor price or lack thereof.
• ‘Type Name to Delete’ protection
• Description, especially for items that are only used for Collections.
• Icons: these seem to get periodic review, except for the well-used Mystic Salvage Kit, which still looks like a Crude Kit.

Gods, reserve a week because the shear number of items the game has. It’ll only be manageable IF you are only talking about removing restrictions.

And I agree that the Mystic Salvage Kit icon needs some loving. ANet did tweak the BLTC contract icons so maybe it’ll be on someone’s list. Maybe something as simple as a master kit icon but with a different color or an “aura” around the bag (in the icon, not talking about making the icon glow).

We’ll see about Zen when it gets benched by everyone. I would imagine AMD to set the price to slot a bit below the existing price performance curve of Intel. I still don’t see AMD being straight up competitive in price/power/performance or both single, multicore and gaming benchmarks. If it is then great but Intel is sitting on their next CPU waiting to one up AMD as soon as Zen is broadly released. The same way nVidia waits on AMD GPUs before going “tada”.

Time gated mats require players to plan ahead. I know many raiders who are gathering the mats they know, so far, that they will need to start crafting their ascended armor once they are allowed to.

Extend that train of thought to “lesser” grade gear like ascended, celestial or anything that a quick check of the wiki tells you that you need charged quartz … plan ahead?

It’s true that originally the time gate was there when they introduced celestial gear so the rich didn’t just stroll in the new zone and have a full set by tossing money at it. I do believe that experience led them to include a 2nd tradable tier of ascended mats as well as the decision to use zone specific keys and currencies as a participation gate to new zone rewards.

Problem is as soon as they remove one time gate players will demand all the time gates to be gone. Slippery slope.

Inoki.6048:

“Unspecified security reasons my kitten ".

Now the question is, since I believe there are many amongst them who bought gems, how does NC plan to proceed? Or just use the ban hammer and “thanks for all the fish”?

This unbelievably cancerous company called NCSoft and their impositions… ANet needs to separate from them, ASAP.

Tough to do since NCSOFT owns ANet by owning NCWest Holdings, their creation, which owns ANet.

ANet wanted to tie participation on any of the new maps, going back to Dry Top and the Silverwastes if not before, to what was sold exclusively on those maps. Eventually the straight up unique currency was added to the wallet but we also got items, essentially keys, to open up unique chests there which yielded map unique mats. ANet simply did not want those with lots of gold to simply waltz in, visit vendors and be done with the zone. You want it, you had to play the content.

LWS2 gave us two new zones. HoT gave us four. LWS3 looks like we will now have three. So how about this, if you aren’t planing on playing on particular maps that need particular “keys” or tools, leave them in your bank before going out. Do you pack snow gear for a vacation in the Bahamas just in case you decide to detour to Aspen on the way home? Any reason to take these items into fractals? WvW? PvP?

Since most loot fall into the two blue and a green category, bring salvage kits and periodically salvage and send to collection. Sadly your bags will be full of runes and sigils but a quick visit to any vendor can resolve that or right click sell the ones actually being traded?

Lumber cores are scribe crafting material that hasn’t found a tab yet in collections and they are looking into updating. I’m old. I’m use to the requirement to return to town to sell sell you loot frequently so I don’t see an issue. If the various ways the game already has to manage inventory while out in the field isn’t helping , then maybe, just maybe, you need to return to an outpost or use the waypoint system.

Also one question, is this, the lack of inventory space, because of AB multiloot? If so don’t hold your breath. It’s only not an exploit because they can’t stop that from happening. Side effect of sticking their metas on timers and allowing players to move from map to map if their party gets divided by the megaservers. But it doesn’t mean the devs have to help you unbalance the economy even more than it already is because you want to loot more chests.

Depended what you were after. In the early days (2012), back when keys dropped more either in the wild, as map completion or as a seemingly frequent drop, the chests were a nice way to get a cross-sample of smaller items from the gems shop, as it still is today. It let the players experience boosters, express items and the like. And if they liked the convenience or usefulness of some of those items, they could buy those directly from the gem shop.

Then they started to add claim tickets into them and I guess that spurred sales when it went from a single weapon skin claim ticket to the current scrap/full ticket system we have today. Farming keys were profitable back in those days, not buying them. At some point players confused the two.

Chests were like a pack of Magic cards, the excitement is in opening them to see if you got anything new or useful not the cash value of the cards you got.

Machy.1986:

@Serios7083 Are you refering to the Amazon Game Studio`s BREAKAWAY , if so it was one of the insiprations of this post… i saw it played on twitch once and couldnt stop watching for hours… i had no ideea it was made by former ANET developers.. Cool !

Most of those ex-ANet employees are working on Crucible, not Breakaway or New World. We haven’t seen Crucible yet.

NCSOFT properties in Russia has always been, like China, run by a “local” 3rd party company for royalties.

This ban is because of the CIS invasion of the Ukraine in 2014. So for these last few months of the Obama administration, they are enforcing the sanctions with the EU for reals. That’s why it was a mistake having Ukraine on the list as they are the victim, not the aggressor.

I think it was due to the 17,000, mostly tiny files. Downloading and applying them are not an asynchronous process. Like how rotational and head latency torpedoes random read rates on conventional hard drives, the overhead of applying each file simply floored the running download rate average that’s displayed. The large files in the patch are downloaded at a pretty good clip but when it gets to the small files, poof.

I wouldn’t put it past some ISPs to see lots of tiny downloads as some kind of torrent and “shape” the transfer rate.

Evon Skyfyre.9673:

It was Taimi

Spenser filters more than death magic.

Large number of tiny files. Every file is applied as they are downloaded and the fix overhead of patching process drops the 1 second average download rate though the floor as the download and applying the patch are not asynchronous processes (download file … apply patch … download file … apply patch …).

Also players didn’t expect it to be large (by the number of files impacted) and simply thought it was another minor patch which affects perception.

I don’t see it happening because of all the asset overhead (armors, cultural gear, race city) that needs to be done as well story elements like their personal story. Yes the Tengu, from my understanding, use the same animation rig as Charr. But it’s a lot of work for potentially little payoff, payoff is defined as new paying players. Taking the devs who would work on a new race and use them for a larger expansion would make better use their talents.

FrizzFreston.5290:

The post saying that “currently” mystic coins are being made more than consumed is 6 months old though. Not saying that it’s not the case still, but holding on to that statement like some golden truth is not THAT reliable in an ever changing environment. There has been a new legendary, rumours of more coming, statements on the economic state of the game. If there’s anything to note, it’s that an economy is ever changing.

Other than that, most goals using mystic coins generally involve a long time investment (on the average player), which might just skew the whole statement made on a short amount of time. It would be interesting to know how much is consumed and made over a year.

But yeah, the statement that more are generated doesn’t really give any great insight into what the problem really is, nor does it mean that there’s no problem.
Probably leaning towards that making a legendary right now is harder (or costier) than it was before. Not even thinking about additional goals that also require mystic coins. (hello guild halls, mystic forge weapons, and achievements that involve those )

True but this was after the change from daily/monthly to login rewards. Unless there’s been a major decrease in players logging in or an uptick in players needing MC, that analysis will still hold true. More so now that they’ve added the event that rewards one MC daily.

I find WvW dailies fairly easy as long as you don’t care if you get ganked by a mob as you round a blind corner.

Either the 4690 or 6600 are fine. 6600 with it’s DDR4 support is more “future proof” as well as socket 1151 motherboards would likely have more recent revs of various standards like USB 3 and M.2.

I suggest https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/ .

Better to just tell us or make a public wish list and link that from newegg.

It’s also estimated by GW2BLTC that in the last 24 hours that 6000 were bought immediately (from asks) and 4000 were sold immediately (to bids).

https://www.gw2bltc.com/en/item/19976-Mystic-Coin

No, the devs said they would like to have a new map for every Season 3 episode. They are giving themselves an out if push comes to shove.

Got to give ANet a few days for post patch patches before the go on holiday.

Wintersday drops mid December. There is a likelihood that Episode 3 will drop next week or the week after. Considering there’s now a 1/2 price sale that ends the 22nd, that lends to the likelihood that Episode 3 is soon.

Well … for the start they’ve stopped quarterly when they started Season 3 of Living world. Last episode came out 55 days ago, which is less than 3 months.

Forgot the “micro” in “microtransactions”. 12000 gems is $150.

Buying currency that you only get from logging in regularly? Sorry.

Buying ascended gear for $100 an item? 8000 gems will buy you over 1300 gold. More than enough to level an armor or weapon crafting to 500 and buy the mats needed to craft an ascended item.

There’s nothing in that list that’s reasonable.

MrThompson.8347:

From exploring these links and such I feel Mystic Forging stuff is for the most part, too much of a hassle to ensure profits.
Instead, courtesy of the link Behellagh, I’ll be giving TP flipping a try, thanks ya’ll for the links and thank you Illconcieved for some tips and tricks in case I ever do attempt Forge again

Funny, I didn’t link anything about TP flipping.

I find it interesting that the complaint is not the loss of the booster but the gain of a permanent seasonal item.

Originally black and white wings were only backpack skins. They became the combo set when HoT was launched and you visited an NPC at the crash site who rewarded you the glider skin. Since they cost more than just a glider skin or a backpack skin it makes sense it is considered a two skins bundle at the Gem Shop.

Ok I Did It.2854:

OP, feel free to post your thoughts on the cap in this topic

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Poll-to-remove-Daily-Achivement-Cap/first

You are not alone in hitting the cap, and not alone in the sense there is no point in logging in anymore many of us feel the same way.

Exaggerate much? No point to log in if you can’t get 10 AP from doing dailies. So the whole point of the game now for you is accumulating AP? Nothing else interests you? I will never understand the “cut off your nose to spite your face” attitude I’m seeing everywhere nowadays.

CMM.6712:

Thus eliminating me ever buying a key again. Sad how people just “take it”

All we lost was the booster slot. The seasonal slot use to be occasional but now permanent. Uncommon and rarer items now have their own slot that has a fix chance of showing up, in theory the same aggregate drop rate as before, just presented differently.

If you loved boosters, yes, you have all right to be annoyed. If you thought they were just junk that accumulated in your bank or you were forced to delete to save space, you don’t miss them. And it seems like the average scrap drop rate per chest may actually be higher now.

Frenchtoastersticks.8061:

considering how devoted to skins and customization this game is, you would think they would spend more time on it.

THEY’RE EXPENSIVE TO MAKE.

ANet would have to sell 9 times as much armor simply to pay off the cost of development versus outfits. It’s simple math. The Gem Shop pays for the game’s continued development. They can’t have a new item take forever to pay off it’s development, it’s income needs to feed the rest of development. That’s why they are holding off full armor sets to paid expansions.

They can’t change the math.

And there’s this

http://www.gw2shinies.com/shard-alchemy

and this

https://gw2efficiency.com/currencies/spirit-shards

Ragion.2831:

Behellagh.1468:

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

Yea because of the number of objects the game is CPU intense, but i find it hard to believe that that is the reason why fps still drops below 30 on the lowest settings when running specs years better than gw2’s minimum. If its not the GPU and its not the CPU then it can only be one other thing

When you are in a mob of players, the thread that manages that takes longer per frame than the thread that handles talking to the GPU.

Reddit AMA from March.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/48zlyd/im_mike_obrien_here_with_gw2_dev_team_ama/d0o34v3/?context=3

Ragion.2831:

the optimization on gw2 is ridiculous. Im not entirely sure if there is a single card set up that can maintain 60fps.

Since the game is CPU and not GPU bound, GPU performance beyond the point the game isn’t waiting on the GPU anymore, simply can’t affect performance.

MO has stated that it takes roughly 10 times the man hours to create a mix and match armor set, really 3 sets one for each weight.

With an outfit costing 700 gems while each of the three weights cost 800 gems. It’s easy to see at those prices that they need to sell fewer outfits to pay off the development costs than the three armor skins. The sooner it’s development is paid off, the sooner ANet profits from developing that new item.

Swagger.1459:

I personally feel…

1- Anet needs to hire more people so they can get more done in every area of the game. This also allows them to pump out those xpacs at a faster rate.

2- Communicate current projects, and what might be in the works, to really jazz up players and improve retention rates.

3- Start offering a lot of cool stuff and conveniences on the gem store so players want, or are more willing, to spend money.

• Can’t hire more people without taking another developer advance from NCSOFT. I believe the distancing themselves from NCSOFT around the time of HoT was them trying to support themselves and reduce opertunities for NCSOFT to take a cut off the top before it ends up in ANet’s coffers.
• They tried that with HoT. Didn’t work out well.
• Like what exactly?

Still see them at Target and BestBuy, their online stores might carry them. Could check out these as well.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/retailers

Actually looking back on the previous 2Q to 3Q numbers in previous years, the fact this year was nearly flat after adjusting for the average exchange rate that quarter, is actually a positive turn.

In the conference call they indicated that GW2 royalties from China are down and that ANet is working on the next expansion.

Last time it was around was the end of April this year. You just have to by your time and wait for it to return.