Guild Wars 2

Does the phrase “rarer than hens teeth” have any meaning to you all? And you thought tickets are rare.

Wanze.8410:

… for 2 weeks only from Black Lion Chests.

This is why i dont trade in high value items.

Get your chests and fill those 3500g buy orders!

Fudge. I bought the rescue kit last night and opened 15 chests.

Rouven.7409:

Depending on what type of content you play you will be lvl 80 in under 14 hours played time.

What content are you running? I’ve seen an hour a level as a rule of thumb. Sure starting from level 1 the first dozen or so levels are much faster than that but 80 levels in 14 hours?

All trains in 1-15 zones have been “fixed” by turning most of the champs into vets. I believe it was to insure new players to the game didn’t think running trains were the way everybody played this game. Also to prevent any blow back onto them if they accidentally interrupted a train. Some players are wound a wee to tight.

And I’ve said it countless times, NCSoft owned ArenaNet years before Guild Wars came out, not Guild Wars 2, the original Guild Wars. So sorry if that negates your argument about NCSoft’s involvement with ArenaNet.

And people wonder why I though GW was an PvP only game.

See, I don’t give a mouse’s backside about PvP. To me all PvP players are ego driven, energy drink fueled twitch monkeys screaming profanities into their head sets that would get them seriously pummeled if they every said those things to another human being face to face. Fortunately here they stuck all of them off to their own little world where the rest of us don’t have to be bothered with their machinations.

I like moving while “casting”. I never considered it a “tactical” decision on my part when playing other MMOs but rather a game engine limitation. It’s simpler to do a “cast” animation if the player was rooted. It was the lazy programmer way out of a problem. Note: I’m a programmer by profession and we are a lazy bunch by trade. Clever but lazy.

I like that the best way to mitigate damage is to avoid being hit instead of conceptualizing “armor” as the primary means to reduce damage or avoid being hit.

The combination of the previous two features makes the game feel more like a fight scene in an action flick than playing Rock-em Sock-em Robots.

But everyone has their own opinion and have the ability to stop playing a game they dislike so. Remember, every feature you dislike Karla was decided by ArenaNet to be a better way of designing an MMO. You can disagree all day but if the previous two years are any indication, most of those decisions are here to stay. Try to hold back the tide as much as you want but in the end it’s coming in if you want it or not.

Just once I’d like one of these threads to not get swarmed by Occupy Wall street types who believes that by purchasing the game they are entitled to any item in the game regardless of the inherent rarity the developers assigned to the item at design time.

Once.

If you add a non-RNG way for a reward, it becomes farmable. ANet doesn’t want “special” items to be farmable.

The longer the game runs, the more wealth is accumulated.

The more wealth is accumulated, the greater the spread between the rich and the poor.

Any highly desirable item with a minuscule drop rate like precursors will be sold to the most wealthy players wanting one first. Doesn’t matter if player trading is like what we have or a traditional auction, those with the most money will get it first.

Because of that, the “inflation” of precursor prices doesn’t reflect traditional inflation in goods as much as a widening gap in player wealth.

They do, there is a movement penalty when you have your weapons drawn. Guess ANet favors fight over flight.

Ill, he’s talking about adding another payment processor. I was confused myself but it should be no different than when they added additional methods in the past. The processor handles the exchange rate, etc. It’s “I want 20 dollars/euros of gems but I’m paying in Bitcoin”. ANet gets their money, minus fees, in a currency they accept while the customer pays with Bitcoin. No different than if someone in Brazil is paying with an accepted bank card. He sees the transaction in Reals, ANet gets dollars/euros/pounds.

So, have you stopped beating your wife?

That’s how the OP phrased his topic so is it even worth the effort to sway him? Are we just feeding an under the bridge dweller, playing into his hands?

No, that’s a but with the forum. Last post on a page will show you no page.

1) Just about all activities in PvE generate XP. Exploration, rezing fallen NPCs and players, harvesting materials, crafting and of course bobbing things on the head. Minor hint, critters off the beaten path have bonus XP the longer they’ve been around since they spawned, it’s another benefit from exploring.

2) Buy gathering tools and mine, harvest and chop down mat node on the way from Point A to Point B. Everyone has their own copy of the node so no rush to get there first. Sell the stuff you harvest on the TP. Note you can flush materials to the bank by doing a deposit to collections in the inventory screen, 1st selection IIRC when you right click the gear icon in the upper right. You can pick them up later at a bank (found in the major cities) or a bank outpost (little money bag on map).

Sell what drops that you don’t want/can’t use on the Trading Post (O key from anywhere). Pick up is only available at Trading Pose vendors, little balance scales on the map. Prices tend to be better than NPC. It costs 5% of the price you are trying to sell your item for (not refundable) so you do need a little bit of coin to post an item for sale. You will only get 90% of what you listed the item at (10% tax) when it sells. You ckittene salvage kits to break an item down into base materials that you can sell as well. The TP is all servers in both NA and the EU but not China, they have their own.

3) Do what’s enjoyable to you. Personally I find map completion, as in finding all the way points, points of interest, vistas and skill point challenges a fun goal if I don’t know what to do next. You may end up finding a Dynamic Event, which can be fun. Think flash mob with swords.

While normal DEs are soloable, when starting off Group DEs really need another player or two. Note you don’t have to formally party. Everyone gets the same XP and loot rolls as long as you do some minimal amount of damage.

4) Don’t know about PvP, don’t do it myself. WvW I barely notice the chat beyond my world’s channel. Even though you’ll be set to level 80 in those areas, gear in WvW will still be your PvE gear so real level 80s fully kitted out will be more effective than you against other players.

5) Crafting is a mixed bag here. It can be a costly affair and often you get better drops than what you can craft in terms of weapons and armor. If you spend a lot of time collecting materials, then it might be worth it.

Thuggernaut.1250:

you all made a big mistake replying to someone that (1) doesn’t speak English properly and (2) doesn’t understand basic economic principles.

as long as people like OP refuse to understand that (1) Anet controls the supply of desirable items and that (2) Anet continues to pursue inflationary economic practices, jealousy and irrationality will continue to run rampant.

What inflationary economic practices?

There was a huge thread about this when the wardrobe came out. And those who had committed high price upgrades to unsalvageable armor still post about this. But it’s been over three months, nearly seven since they added extractors to the Gem Shop and pulled most city only clothes (they knew what was coming).

Taygus.4571:

Behellagh.1468:

Taygus.4571:

One of the biggest things that bothers people about the pre, is WHY should they pay 1000g to someone who just got lucky.

Because you and nearly everybody else who wants one wasn’t lucky, that’s why it’s 1000g.

I don’t care tbh, I’m busy on my ascended crafting.

but the point still stands, people wouldn’t be bothered so much if they could go to npc and hand over 1000g for a pre, it’s paying others your hard in cash because they were lucky.

Sorry, my reply wasn’t just directed at you but to anyone who ask that question.

The devs want to limit supply. Easiest way to do that with any type of accuracy is to make it a random drop. While pseudo RNG isn’t truly random, it does pass the 1st test of even distribution across the entire range of outputs given enough samples. Therefore if they only want 1% of exotic weapons dropped to be precursors, they are relatively certain that over a large enough sample, it will be 1%. And since the drop is entirely random, the player receiving it may no want it so like any “junk” drop they look to sell it to buy one they would want. Which is why it’s not bound, because it’s a random drop, and why it’s priced similarly to other precursors.

Unless you think players should be getting IOUs as drops so they can trade to a precursor merchant for the weapon of their choice?

Malediktus.9250:

still looking for an offical response

Then you will be waiting for a very long time. There is rarely anything official ever coming from a dev onto this board. John Smith is answering broad questions about MMO economics but something like this, which should have been placed in the suggestion thread about what we would like to see in the Gem Shop, rather than it’s own thread.

Taygus.4571:

One of the biggest things that bothers people about the pre, is WHY should they pay 1000g to someone who just got lucky.

Because you and nearly everybody else who wants one wasn’t lucky, that’s why it’s 1000g.

The misunderstanding was partially my fault. I thought the OP’s request was for ANet to accept Bitcoin up front and then ANet could use a Bitcoin service themselves to convert to dollars post transaction. In that case ANet would have had to keep up with the Bitcoin exchange rate so when they then used a service to convert the Bitcoin in their wallet into one of the currencies they can book.

It wasn’t until your example of using foreign currencies that ANet doesn’t accept to buy gems, with the payment provider doing the currency exchange that I understood what was being suggested.

The question becomes is there an Bitcoin payment service than is “big” enough, “stable” enough, for corporations to use the way they use bank cards and Paypal? How many years before places other than eBay users accepted Paypal? It wasn’t until Paypal got big enough and been around long enough for others to start, tentatively, accepting it. BitPay is the service that’s being suggested but that isn’t the one Dell decided to use which is Coinbase which Overstock also uses. Both are less than two years old and are barely beyond venture capital financing, which is like one step up from crowdfunded (okay I exaggerated).

My point with WoW and EVE is if Activision-Blizzard, a much larger company than NCSOFT, doesn’t feel secure enough to accept Bitcoin and EVE, a game that has a similar size income to GW2 but doesn’t have to fear shareholders have yet to accept it, why would NCSOFT? And yes, it would likely be NCSOFT’s decision to let ANet accept it or not. NCSOFT is a public company. It’s stock is languishing. Probably not to time to take a bold step into the world of a crypto-currency. Dell’s a private company now, it doesn’t have to answer to anybody other than themselves.

It’s a chicken/egg problem. No large corporation wants to go first. They don’t want to be the one that could get burned if Bitcoin fraud suddenly rears it’s ugly head or if the payment processor goes belly up before they pay their last payment to the corporation using them or the US or other governments bans it, taxes it or otherwise makes it’s use difficult.

I said in another thread, or maybe this one, it all goes back to the ancient Dungeon Master Guide for AD&D back in the late 70s, early 80s. There are a series of tables for determining drops, including having bonuses which shifts reward tables, etc. And that was a few hundred items. Taking quality, level, 8 parts for armor, 19 types for weapons, upgrades, higher quality mats, etc, there are thousands if not tens of thousands of items that can be dropped. RNG is the only practical way to make sure there isn’t a flood of a single type of item due to farming.

I use to think that they should award a precursor if you complete your personal story until I heard that people were creating characters simply to get a free key. It wouldn’t take long until some group figured out the optimal way to get a character to level 80 just to complete the personal story if a precursor was the reward.

You can discourage that by binding the award to either the character or account but then you better be sure the player is getting a reward they are interested in otherwise it’s just junk.

Yeah someone mentioned it here already, Mt Gox. Part of the problem is a bug/vulnerability during a DDoS which allowed someone to double dip a withdrawal yet it only registered one or something like that.

Alt drag, you will then be prompted for the amount of one stack when you release the stack.

Yalon.6812:

Behellagh.1468:

But that’s not ANet’s doing, that’s your bank card’s doing. They are the ones converting your currency into either Dollars, Euros or Pounds not ANet. ANet only accepts Dollars, Euros or Pounds.

Just like when using a Bitcoin payment processor you may choose to accept Dollars, Euros or Pounds. They arrive to your bank account just like they do when you receive a payment with a credit/debit card.

Behellagh.1468:

Now if you have a bank card that ANet accepts that will convert Bitcoins into the currency that ANet accepts, you’re all set.

Which misses the whole point (lower fees and fraud, faster settlement and less restrictions on the user’s country of residence and so on). That’s like saying that in order to pay to a US merchant I should take my Euro-denomianted card to an ATM, withdraw cash and pay with cash.

Furthermore, you switched your argument in the middle. Originally, you claimed that the problem is with quoting prices, now you argue that the problem is with the API compatibility. These are two entirely different arguments.

Behellagh.1468:

If I go to England and buy some fish and chips and pay with my American Visa card, I will see the charge in Dollars not Pounds. If I go to Tokyo and buy some sweet replica of a Silver Horn Trident, I will pay in Yen but the charge will show me dollars. It’s not the merchant accepting Dollars, he’s accepting Yen. Visa is doing the foreign exchange.

On newer POS systems, the merchant may allow you to choose whether you want his acquirer or VISA to do the conversion, but he does not quote himself, the POS machine does the quote. On older POS systems, you get charged in the local currency. Same with ATMs. And same with Bitcoin.

Your arguments make no sense. With respect to price quoting, for a merchant there is no difference between Bitcoin and a credit card, as both can be, if so desired, provided by a payment processor.

You were the one that used the example that you can buy gems now via your bank card in a currency other than Dollars, Euros or Pounds at the current exchange rate into those currencies. Not Yen or Reals or Pesos or Canadian/Australian Dollars or Swiss Francs. I simply followed your example. ANet isn’t accepting your currency, your payment method is handling the currency exchange from yours to one of the ones ANet accepts.

If you can point their processing service to an outfit that would convert bitcoin to a currency they accept with the same safeguards that other payment services have then great. Otherwise this is the same argument that can be found on WoW or EVE or likely any number of MMO forums. If the 800lbs Gorilla of MMOs won’t accept it, why do you think our little, in comparison MMO would?

But my other argument still holds true, you can have more than one reason they don’t. ANet has not adjusted there exchange rate for gems relative to Dollars, Euros or Pounds. It is still $10€ or £8.50 per 800 gems regardless how those currencies fluctuated against each other. I saw the original request was to add Bitcoin to the currencies they directly accept and since they don’t adjust their rates with those, why would they do it for a currency as volatile as Bitcoin in terms of exchange rate. As I’ve said, Bitcoin is now worth 100x more than it was when the game was launched.

I later figured out I could do that to, just I missed the first time so I went up higher. When I went to take the screen shot there were a few players also doing that Vista and they had a mix success rate on that first jump while moving.

But that’s not ANet’s doing, that’s your bank card’s doing. They are the ones converting your currency into either Dollars, Euros or Pounds not ANet. ANet only accepts Dollars, Euros or Pounds.

Now if you have a bank card that ANet accepts that will convert Bitcoins into the currency that ANet accepts, you’re all set.

If I go to England and buy some fish and chips and pay with my American Visa card, I will see the charge in Dollars not Pounds. If I go to Tokyo and buy some sweet replica of a Silver Horn Trident, I will pay in Yen but the charge will show me dollars. It’s not the merchant accepting Dollars, he’s accepting Yen. Visa is doing the foreign exchange.

The first one hands down. Both faster CPU and GPU.

Doesn’t care about your hex core (the other 6 HT cores are phantoms and best case in practice does the same thing as a mild overclock would) the game barely 3 cores of processing power.

Doesn’t care about dual video cards. GPU performance isn’t the limiting factor in this game.

Doesn’t care about 32gb of system memory. It’s a 32-bit app and while on a 64-bit OS it could use 4GB, I rarely see it above 2GB.

The game engine isn’t built to maximize frame rate and it’s likely 6 year old already. So comparing it to modern FPS games is pretty pointless.

But what you are describing is straight forward lag in which case you need to talk to actual support rather than players. Click on the support link and then click on the submit a request link found on the top right.

Otherwise this will just be another of a series of threads with players complaining about lag but aren’t willing to do anything to help solve the problem.

It all depends if you can accept low fps (<20) while in the midst of a zerg on zerg battle. If you can, then yes. If you can’t, then no. WvW zerg combat is one of the most stressful parts of this game on a system and it’s all on the CPU as the reason for poor framerates.

I’m going to sound like an echo here but.

ANet doesn’t dynamically adjust the price of Gems for Euros or the British Pound.

They set their value once, back in 2012, and it has stayed there every since even though both the Euro and British Pound is now worth 8% more than the US Dollar today, which means it’s cheaper to buy gems with Dollars than with Euros and Pounds (ignoring the VAT added for those two currencies).

If they aren’t going to do it themselves with the Euro and Pound, they aren’t going to do it with Bitcoin.

ANet’s or NCSOFT’s choice of acceptable currencies and payment methods are to cover their butts both financially and legally as much as it providing convenience to their customers.

So until Bitcoin is tied to one of the current payment systems they accept, and they get paid in one of their three accepted currencies, it’s not going to happen.

I wish people would stop using GW2Spidy to illustrate short term change, it’s sampling rate of the market is infrequent where gw2tp.com’s is every 5 minutes or so. Look at the day chart.

http://www.gw2tp.com/item/29176-storm

Storm’s supply dropped to 0 for about 3 hours which allows the first seller to set a new price point. And like the 2000g Dusk, in a day or three we should see prices drop off considerably from this 300g hike. It’s already down to 900g with a supply of 4.

Considering bids are up by 50-60g now I don’t expect the price do drop much below 750g in the next two to three days. The high price might shake a few more Storms loose from stockpiles but the rate of new supply is low enough that the price won’t be able to correct as quickly as a high supply volume item.

Edit: Also to expand on Ayrilana’s point, with a high price, limited supply item like precursors, the current low sell may only be an indicator of the price it’s not selling at. It’s just the lowest sell price of the current supply on the market.

In reality a lot more are traded at a price below that. Every so often gw2tp.com will catch a precursor priced way below the going rate for one maybe two updates at most only for the price to return to it’s previous “low sell” price. These aren’t even detected on GW2Spidy. The question becomes how many does gw2tp.com miss with it’s 5 minute sampling.

There is a lot of information we don’t see on these third party charts that are simply not available to us. How many are sold in a day? At what prices? These two pieces of information alone could change a lot of people’s beliefs about markets like precursors.

You don’t need a speed buff. I just went to see what the trick was and let me preface that I’m not the most coordinated jumper in the world, I get tripped up on minor ledges that you should be able to hop onto, and the jump is easy as long as you start in the right place, which is the trick.

You have to be on the top most block, the very narrow one, go right to the edge and do a simple forward jump. No chance at under or over shooting as long as you are moving forward during the jump. The landing zone is quite wide. You just need to above your landing zone when you start. But it’s easy to think you are high enough and you will always fail if you aren’t. And yes I do a standing jump. It’s too easy to jump early if you are moving.

Strangely I’m making more money in the last three months than the six months before that. I credit that to a firmer grasp on where money can be made in the open world. And strangely enough I could be making more if I didn’t roll the dice salvaging rares, for ectos/runes/sigils, and masterwork for luck.

And I could have enough for a precursor by now if I didn’t spend most of my daily earnings on gems. I’ve become more efficient with my time in game and that’s without resorting to repeating the same content during my play session or farming for a particular mat. And I still have time to play in Dry Top now and then. Bright side of LS 2 is you aren’t rushed to complete it and you can keep revisiting it indefinitely.

Yalon.6812:

My wife is a hardcore GW2 player and I bought gems for her with Bitcoin several times already. There are gem resellers on the web that accept Bitcoin.

How is that possible since you can’t trade gems? Buying gem card serial codes would be the only way I would think this is possible.

Again, ANet and possibly NCSOFT, does not float the value of their proxy currency against real currencies. They set an exchange rate and stick with it regardless how unbalanced it becomes between them. bitcoin is merely the most volatile of them changing by 10000% since the game launched. By comparison the Euro and British Pound by only change by 8% relative to the dollar.

Again, it’s not a matter of how easy or hard it is, it’s that they simply don’t float their gem conversion rate at all.

Agree eithinan. He reminds me of the diplomat in Foundation whose conversation was analyzed with symbolic logic and it proved he spent 5 days saying absolutely nothing. phys’s use of flowery vocabulary and word play reminds me of how a psychiatrist would prompt a patient to discuss something while appearing not to lead the conversation.

For example he turned my simply yes/no questions about exploitation into a discussion about intent and believe. If you believe you are charging or buying an item of what you think is fair value then there is no exploitation. Which means two people offering the same price for an item, one can be exploiting while the other isn’t which changes it from a black/white issue to gray. And if the answer is gray then there is no right or wrong. Thus turning the question back at the questioner.

phys would make a kitten fine black hat on a TV series. Ranks right up there with Raymond Reddington.

Edit: Inserted source of the first paragraph

Player driven, as in prices are settled on by them with minimum intervention by the game developers (other than +1c over vendor price with the vendor price set by the devs). Sure the devs can control supply sources and tweak demand though new uses for raw materials but the going rate for each item is determined entirely by players through their trades.

greatwolf.1758:

Behellagh.1468:

But as I’ve pointed out in my original post here, ANet set the cost once for each currency and has not “floated” the price of Gems against any since. So 800 Gems would be about 1.6 BC back in 2012 would now be over $1000. Seems a little pricey.

A simple solution is to just pull the current spot market price from various exchanges and average the going rate; that is one possible solution. This could obviously be automated so this should not make it any more troublesome.

Knocking out a script to do this is trivial, I would know since I’ve done it; shouldn’t take more than a day.

But they haven’t done it with more established currencies like the Euro and British Pound so why would you think they would make an exception for bitcoin?

Nothing’s wrong with the way you play. My complaint is your way has become the dominate way.

Not everyone started doing dungeons on day one. Or run them so often that it’s old hat for them. My concern is players like me who have not run dungeons so many times that I know what’s around the next corner, new players or players who never got around to do dungeons are feeling bullied, unintentionally in some cases, and excluded by players like yourself.

I’m not asking to play with you, I’m asking for you to acknowledge that there are players like me, casual (as in not taking it overly seriously) players. We’ve turned from a coop game to a “pay me for my time and only then I’ll party with you” mentality that I’m rallying against.

When I see threads that openly state that if you aren’t playing with X gear, then you aren’t allowed to play this content. When I see threads asking for ways to make it easier to discriminate against players because they don’t measure up to your requirements it’s a thorn in my side. In a genre where you are first encouraged to be unique and that there is no one way to play, it’s like getting a thousand papercuts everytime I see the push to conform to a single way of play.

Play they way you want but as soon as you start telling other people to play your way or go home is when I’m going to stand up and rally against that. We were all newbs once with this game.

Note: the use of you and your refers to the elite crowd who are pushing for more exclusiveness.

Usually it’s one from every three whacks on average. Not counting the sprockets I get from my sprocket generator, I’m getting around 30-35 a night. Less on Fridays, more on Thursdays due to the WvW bonus whacks.

It’s never been clear to what phys’s problem is with the economy.

Is it the TP defaults to a passive player mode with sell to the highest bidder, buy from the lowest seller thus allowing players who take an active approach to earn more money from those players?

Is it the wealth disparity that keeps highly sought after items at an ever increasing price?

Is it the RNG reward system that all but pushes players onto the TP to get the items they want?

Is it the lack of certainty that doing X will yield Y (or an item suited to your character) as a reward?

It’s all generalities. It’s Morpheus from the Matrix with him.

“You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Before the April patch, I had around 220-250 gold. Now I have around 340 gold. Every week I spend 10-15% of my gold to buy gems. In the last 15 or so weeks I’ve spent around 500-700g buying gems. And my bank still went up 100g.

I only play two hours a night, do two minor boss events, a half a dozen champs and the rest of the time exploring, gathering, rezing, doing events I come across, etc. I do all the meta-events leading up to the boss events I do and not simply park myself waiting for the boss to pop up. Selling what I find on the TP with sell orders, not selling to the highest bidder. Sometimes I salvage the rares and exotics I find for mats, sometimes I sell them intact. I’m not grinding dungeon paths or fractals or riding the boss event train for hours every night.

I use the laurels I’m getting from daily and monthly to convert into gold (do I really need more than 500 laurels in the bank?). I use the level or two I get nightly, well the skill points from that, to upconvert mats for a profit. Buying the raw material with bids on the TP that I place at the start of my play session and convert when they eventually come in.

It is not difficult to make money in this game if you open yourself up to the possibilities while still not resorting to grind the same thing for hours every night.

The laurel merchant is just one way of several ways to get the same merchandise depending on what you happen to have an excess of. If you have a lot of gold and not a lot of laurels or you are saving them up, buy that item with gold then. If you are short on gold and have a ton of laurels, buy with laurels. The choice is yours.

SkyFallsInThunder.8257:

Wow, this is hillarious. So everyone else should change to accomodate you? And why is that? Is their right to play as they choose and with whom they want any less than yours? It sure seems that way to you. All you do is whine and whine because apparently not many choose to play like you want. Are you sure you tried finding other like-minded people? The LFG tool is there for a reason, you know, the days of making parties in front of dungeons are long past.

I’m not asking for people to accommodate me. I’m asking why is there a need to be exclusionary vs inclusive. Everywhere else in the PvE world there isn’t a need to craft the same type of min/max character to play the game’s content. There isn’t a need to prep for an encounter by memorizing somebody else’s battle plan. There is zero need to party anywhere in the PvE world except for Dungeons. But instead of being inclusive, everyone is welcome to play as it is in the rest of the world it has turned into an exclusive experience where the pressure to conform to a particular build and play style eliminates any sense of individuality and self expression. It’s the attitude of “if you aren’t taking this seriously then you shouldn’t be playing” that I’m objecting to.

This is a game. It’s meant to have fun, blow off steam, a way to relax after a hard day. What ever happen to doing a dungeon for fun and if you wipe, no biggie, we’ll do better next time. Now it’s a profanity laced tirade that you didn’t execute the combo perfectly or you were a little to far forward and because of that the dungeon took two minutes longer to do. Chill, mellow, we’re all just people killing time here. It’s not like we are being paid to be elite super players. This is suppose to be a happy, pretendy, fun time game.

What’s wrong in wanting to figure out how to do a dungeon from scratch? What’s wrong with watching the in-game cinematics at least once. What’s wrong with exploring the whole place? What’s wrong with kiting/ambush through the whole dungeon?

My complaint is the when I’ve used LFM/G feature for dungeons, I’ve encountered considerably more players who have a very rigid view on how to play and who can play than those that are open to a random PUG of all comers that includes a real risk of a failure, but we are going to have a fun time doing it anyway.

Biohazard.7523:

How can they detect me?
Are people reporting players for doing that ?
Did anyone notice any manipulation on the market ?

Because you are using a system that they set up which logs every single transaction so it can be undone/rolled back in case of the TP glitching out? The TP may be anonymous to players, as to who is selling and buying, but not to ANet.

As I said earlier, the game has two types of players. Active players who use the TP to place sell orders and bids to sell and buy items and passive players who use the TP to sell to the high bidder and buy from the low seller as if the TP was just another NPC vendor but with better prices and selection.

You can’t have just passive players because there wouldn’t be any bids or sale orders on the TP (no supply or demand numbers). And without a history, history charts are 3rd party creations, there wouldn’t be any idea what an item is worth. So you need active players to provide guidance to passive players or they would just buy and sell from NPC vendors or be forced into an active roll and throwing numbers out there.

When an active player assumes the role of a middleman to provide numerous bids and items for immediate sale, they are called flippers and are considered by some as opportunistic scavengers rather than the players who grease the wheels for passive players to use the TP. Without them there wouldn’t be enough active players to fill the TP with items and bids to satisfy the passive players.

DrMcAwEsOmE.2839:

Invalid argument. Let me say first, though, I could not care any less about Season 1 being temporary. Yes, I missed it. But I do not care.

Anyway, “Welcome to TV before reruns, syndication, streaming, DVRs and box sets. Now we have a DVR. Maybe we’ll get a box set for season 1 someday.” is an asinine argument. This is 2014, not 1999.

Actually I was shooting for the mid 70s but people may not recognize the term VCR so I used DVR.

Living story is episodic content. It arrives for a while and then leaves. That is how they provided content for a dynamic world. It’s like going to college and when you come home for the summer you find out your favorite hang out closed/burn down/became a biker bar. You can’t recapture what it was before. It’s gone. That was my point. You may disagree that a LS episode is content because it has limited permanence but for those who did play it, it most certainly was content. And just like an old time movie serial it was short and we didn’t have to wait long for the next but if you missed it there was no going back. Again like TV before DVR/VCR, you missed your show, too bad.

With LS2 we now can access episodes we missed, like having a show recorded on a DVR (or VCR) while you were out looking for a new hangout. But it’s more like On Demand with a charge if you missed the chance to log in when it was the current episode.

It’s just one more way the devs made this MMO different than those that came before it. Other games had free content updates but the time gap was 2 to 9 months.

And the general revamping of sigils and runes. There also was a lot of attempts of upgrading in the forge that depressed supply.

Gold you get from selling gems is gold paid into the exchange for gems and thus was from the game’s economy in the first place (except for the gold the exchange was seeded with on day one). Therefore the buying of gold has no impact to the game’s economy.

MystF.5186:

In any way, 2 arrow carts per laurel is a joke.

Also, this likely comes from the very first design of the game, where tier 6 material was considered cheaper than blueprint.

They probably figured like most MMOs the character population would all be hanging in level 80 zones so T6 mats would be plentiful. As oppose to what happened which was you do Orr once for each character, if you are going for map complete, and never go back there again.

Because there is a strong belief that certain rewards should only come from completing certain content. Dungeon and WvW armor for instance. LS episodes have also had skins and items only been available from LS content. And there is a push by some to make this more common place.

dodgycookies.4562:

Could it be better? Yes. But compared to the competition mmos around at the time, performance was pretty similar

1) Fps games cant be compared for a lot of reasons. The closest comparisons are Aion which used cryengine, Tera with unreal, SWTOR with hero, Warhammer with gamebryo. But have you actually played those games? Culling is very severe, and you still get massive frame drops in large scale combat or in towns because they still are on dx9 despite using “good” engines. This was when dx10 was limited to vista and all gamers refused to use it, so until the wide adoption of win7 in 2010 most games that started their development cycles earlier were done in dx9. The only mmo that i can think of that has updated the engine is WoW and EvE (which still has issues with large scale combat after upgrade)

2)Again i point to the context of the development cycle. I am sure anet would have liked to dev a new engine too, but dev started in 2007 on architecture with graphics starting in mid to late 2008. And guess what happened, global credit freeze/recession. NCsoft and anet did everything to conserve cash and lower their burn rate. Which means use what you have rather than spending money licensing a new engine plus spending all that time on training devs on new engine.

3) the game ran somewhat better at launch in zergs due to the culling that was forced and more severe. But then they disabled it and made it a player option due to outcry.

4) I believe they thought they had a fine engine until they put more than 10 players in view and watched fps plummet and that is what led to the original severe server side culling of players visible that launched with the games.

Player side culling may by user adjustable but brings the overhead of determining who is currently making the display cut or not and those that are displayed and then who makes the actual vs generic player model cut and then those who now need their actual player model generated if they were rocking a generic during the last player culling pass.