Guild Wars 2

Because it’s harder to get Blade Shards than Watchwork Sprockets.

Here’s the problem. Since a guild could have upgrades on every server they are on, your suggestion would allow a guild to have multiple bonuses in effect if they have upgrades running on multiple servers. You would counter that they could just “merge” all the same ones to determine which one will last the longest and then only reward one but may not be as easy to do as it sounds.

So until they can come up with a solution to unify all guild upgrades across all individual servers, which they do in China but since China was new, they didn’t have the opportunity to create multiple copies of guilds across servers.

Guild Vault is the biggest problem in a merge. Upward limits on a vault is 250 slots. I imagine there are more than a few of the large guilds that have that many slots on multiple servers. Everything else is just a big logical or with only the question if influence from the now duplicated upgrades would be credited or not.

Now that you mentioned it, I’ve noticed in cities that if I choose a waypoint nearest to an exit into another zone, I’m always facing in away from the exit.

Problem is no matter what direction they choose, it will likely be wrong for some players. But I would think that they might be able to data mine some info about direction traveled from a waypoint to “tune” them better.

It’s true that so far they are only used to make that back piece in all it’s variations. And you need nearly 900 to craft the ascended version of it.

Of course once you have it you don’t need any more Blade Shards. Sort of like all that ascended crafting mats that keep dropping.

SONL.6371:

I got the biggest lagg since 2 months ago (mostly skill lag, no rubber banding.) I posted this around 100000000 topics but no1 ever answered whatsoever. I’m actually done with this now. :S

Wow 8 posts in 6 threads in two weeks is a 100 million now. Must be the new math.

You do realize if everyone was experiencing large amounts of lag there would be more than just these few posts.

The sources of lag are, their servers, the Internet, your machine. Other than Kebabpower, who is seeing 900 ms latency in the EU, none of you have provided any info here and likely nobody has contacted support and provided it to them either on the subject. Complaining to the playerbase doesn’t help you other than finding a sympathetic ear.

Depending where you are and the path of the traffic, everybody can have different experiences.

Only suggestion I can provide beyond contacting support and follow their instructions to gather info that they can then troubleshoot, is to defrag whatever drive you have the game installed on (unless it’s on an SSD). Major updates do a number on the data file in terms of fragmentation which could significantly slow the game if it’s waiting on assets to be loaded. Even worse on most laptops since those drives tend to be even slower than desktop ones. Not sure how good the default Win 7 or 8 built in defrag utility is, I use Auslogics free version of DiskDefrag where you can target a single file, a folder or then entire drive.

You should know that /ip in the chat window will list the server’s address that you are currently on which you can then ping, I use the free version of pingplotter, which can show if the delay is along the way or up against the NCSoft server wall. Note that not all hops will provide ping times, it depends on how those routers are configured.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Dark_Templar_armor

It goes by lots of names. Dark is the WvW name.

The TP, on one hand, is the direct result of a RNG reward system. Since there isn’t specific content that drops a specific set of items, you either have to be lucky or have to buy it from someone who doesn’t want it. Assuming of course it can’t be crafted by yourself.

By pushing players to the TP to satisfy their item needs, it also turns the TP into a prime gold sink since so much of the stuff dropped on you is unwanted. Who wants Level 80 fine armor to equip, ever? No, it’s salvage or forge material.

So the RNG aspect of the reward system turns the TP into something other than a crafting supply or crafted goods market into something every player has to use, especially if they want more than the token sale price from an NPC vendor.

BLTC have always been Whitman Samplers. You can’t return just the chocolates you don’t like for cash.

An item on sale or available for a limited time drives more immediate sales than an item that is always at a lower price or perpetually available. It’s to easy to put off a purchase until “later”, when ever that will be. It’s better for a retailer’s bottom line to get people to “hurry up and buy now” that later.

In the real world JC Penny, a department store in the US for you EU readers, tried switching to a permanent sale price model and sales plummeted. Shoppers have been trained for decades to wait for sales and if you have no sales, they go to your competitors with the sales.

Also I’m sure ANet’s masters check the books monthly for income and grumble when it’s below their expectations or projections.

Belenwyn.8674:

Based on other CDI topics we know that major changes can take six months and more before implementation.

Common sense should suggest that “major changes can take six months and more before implementation”. Outright game breaking bugs, yeah, they take priority but everything else is scheduled months in advance and once the ball is rolling you can’t radically change anything that was decided before the ball was pushed. What was it again? Six, eight week development cycles on just the already planned out living story segments?

Once LS2 started, they became committed to finish it, no matter how many episodes they’ve planned out.

Cameirus.8407:

I dont go to any, I’ll bow to your superiour knowledge in that matter, what I was doing was using hyperbole….

And hyperbole has no place in a constructive thread on female armour. But since this isn’t one and just you venting, proceed away.

Since it was never in this game, how does one “bring it back”?

Just because the OP can do all of the LS in a single day doesn’t mean everyone can. I’m still doing the 1st episode and getting my butt kicked (there are NPCs to fight stop aggroing on just me!).

At least now I don’t feel like I have a gun to my head to get it done in 14 days or else.

LotRO started as a Subscription based game, including a lifetime subscription, and went the the Hybrid F2P model some 3+ years later. Most Hybrid models are set up so if you don’t want to be nickel and dime for every little thing you were use to having, you continue to pay for VIP/Gold membership. The hope is by making a game F2P that some who try will choose to upgrade to VIP/Gold for a while, still have some access to the game when their not which will remind them why VIP/Gold is a good deal in the first place.

You must not go to the right strip clubs if you think this shows more skin.

Pot luck. They pop up once in a while and recently they cycled through all 9(?) at one a week so I wouldn’t expect them back around for a while.

The game server you are on is likely with one with the 167ms ping. A 1/6th of a second isn’t bad. Complain when it’s over a 1/3rd of a second, then you see some serious activation lag.

I was wondering where that chart came from in the now closed thread.

In 2013 most if not all of Lineage 1 and Blade & Soul’s income was from South Korea. Aion is around 2/3rds and Lineage 2 around 40% from just South Korea. I should note that all of these games include a cash shop where a chunk of income comes in from, especially Lineage 1. So “worldwide” doesn’t necessarily mean available in multiple countries.

And nexxe, how is that chart misleading? It only lists income and there is no mention of profitability at all. It’s the top 10 Subscription MMOs ranked by reported income. You aren’t going to find us or Nexon on that list because we and they have no P2P monthly option.

And if you want to link to something, link to this list which does include us. From April.

http://www.superdataresearch.com/blog/mmo-arpu/

I use to be able to find them on YY.com, China’s YouTube but not anymore. That might just be me not being able to enter the games name in Chinese into the search box.

John, does Anet ever take an active role on the TP buy purchasing items that are in excess to bolster prices or does it only add new sinks for those materials and let nature take it’s course, so to speak?

Does it take an active role on the Gem Exchange either through tweaking the gold or gem amounts or by modifying the algorithm that determines the exchange rate?

proviticus.4183:

I perfectly understand the logic of the listing fee, as highlighted in this thread…. until you realize you must pay the listing fee even when matching highest buyer. That seems strange to me, and unnecessary.

Not having it might give a 5% advantage to buy orders, which actually could be good for the economy and the TP in general (though absolutely would be open for debate and worthy of thought).

At the least the listing fee could be directly taken from the profits, so you don’t have situations where noobs get precursors and can’t even sell them, not even to the highest buyer.

Because in reality you aren’t selling to the highest buyer, simply entering a sell order at the price of the highest buyer when you brought up the sell screen. That buyer may be gone by the time you hit sell. Once the sell order is generated it then checks to see if there are any buyers interested at your price. If the found buyer isn’t interested in all that you are selling, you will still have a sell order of the remaining at that price, likely just above the new current high bid. That’s how you get all those sell price spikes down to the the bid price when you look at the daily charts on GW2TP.COM.

greatwolf.1758:

Looks like Dell is now accepting bitcoins as a method of payment. Just putting it out there.

Via Coinbase as the intermediary. 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.

Mac.3872:

Xar.6185:

They really should just sticky a thread about

• Mounts
• Duels
• Cantha
• Elona
• New Race
• New Class
• New Legendarys
• Precursors (Crafting & Scavenger Hunt)
• Guild Vs Guild
• Guild Halls
• Player Housing

After that just merge all the threads that pop up about those topics into the corresponding one or delete the new thread while giving the “A discussion already exists about <InsertTopicHere> post your thoughts / concerns here <ProvideLink>”

Or..

They could start developing the stuff that their customers are asking for?

Why? Do you go into a Chinese restaurant and suggest they should start serving Mexican or Italian? At least Italian and Chinese both have noodles in some entries, why not do both?

Yes, that’s sarcasm. While I agree that a game’s developer needs to be sympathetic to the desires of the customer, it stop if it goes against the developer’s design philosophy for the game. And mounts, duels, GvG either never were to be or dropped during development for reasons they don’t have to tell us. Remember PvE is happy, pretendy, fun-time land were all races get alone and where we all help one another and nobody can grief anyone else (so no GvG or duels in PvE), in a world littered with enough Asuran Way Points to be within a 15-30 second jog to anything of interest, once you find them.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Mounts? OK, but only if they look like this!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9nXfffeAIU

Good. But does it beat this?

Thank you for engaging us.

http://youtu.be/KSQyW_l8OgE?t=47s

At least I use paragraphs. Better than some walls of text.

storiessave.3807:

Am I really the only one that thinks of this when I see this hairstyle?

Only if it was also available to Asura.

Which is why I was surprised that the Watchwork Pick even came back. Having it as a one time blip is one thing, having it as a reoccurring phenomenon simply causes other unlimited picks sales to be suppressed except for players who don’t know it’s coming.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Nerelith.7360:

<snip>

<snip>

Calling it a draw.

I blame the DMG (Dungeon Master’s Guide) loot tables. That method has been used in computer games since the first Gold Box RPGs. Scale up to thousands of items the chance of getting the “one” you want is shocking slim and even after thousands upon thousands of rolls, stats say the chance is still fairly slim for an individual. Across the entire game population those items drop daily. Just not you. And that’s one reason for the TP, to acquire it from some lucky sole who doesn’t want it however it’s price is dictated by the number of players like you who do want it.

Since I know people who worked on the Bulldozer at the time, I think I might have a little more insight on it’s development than you do. And yes I’ve read those analysis. But I’m not going to bullet point them to an audience who haven’t taken a course on CPU design theory. It’s hard enough simplifying how multitheading works on modern OSes in a crowd that may still believe that you can compare clock speed (vs IPC) or “more cores = better” at all things.

You are right it does take years laying out the groundwork for a new CPU architecture. Refining it, a lot less time. Feature reduction buys you more than lower power and higher clockrates., it’s gives you the space to fix glaring problems like the L1 instruction cache in an FX Module for one.

And yes, depending on the data flow and instruction mix HT can have a negative impact on performance. Then again it can have a 45% boost in certain operations which is why I conservatively stated “Most times they can squeeze an additional 10%” rather than stating the high outlier.

Intel’s big leap in performance (IPC doubled) was when they went from Netburst architecture (Pentium 4/D) to Core architecture, which evolved from the Pentium III. But since then Intel gains roughly 10% performance per generation since.

Same can be said with AMD. The K10 (Athlon II/Phenom II) cores were only 25% faster than the K8 and had an IPC similar to the 1st gen of the Core 2, Intel was just able to cycle refinements faster. Between the 1st gen of the Core 2 to Sandy Bridge Intel was able to improve IPC by 35% while AMD, to customers, stood still with the K10. And since Sandy Bridge Intel boosted IPC roughly 10% with Ivy Bridge and another 10% with Haswell.

Then AMD came out with the Bulldozer, which had a worse IPC than the K10, it’s saving grace was it could run at a higher (eventually with Piledriver) clock speed. Show me an independent article that didn’t think the FX-8150 was a huge disappointment.

So we aren’t going to see another major leap in IPC performance from Intel as we did with Pentium D to Core 2. But after 6 generations of small iterative improvements, not counting improved clock speed due to manufacturing improvements, they don’t need to.

I am routing for AMD. I want the competition. We may not have gotten the Core 2 if it wasn’t for AMD owning Intel during the first half of the 00s with the K8 (Athlon 64).

And while it will take time for programmers become verse with proper multithreaded design, not all applications can scale linearly with multithreading. Games will always be limited by time it takes to load resources off of mass storage and pushing all draws through a single interface (it’s the graphics driver than handles multiple GPUs, not the root application).

And as interesting to pontificate on a scalable rendering engine supporting Dx11/12/Mantle and 64-bit native mode, that has nothing to do with the state of the game today. The game today rarely goes beyond 3 cores of workload (not saying it only uses 3 cores or it has only 3 threads, I’m saying it’s total workload rarely gets above 75% on a quadcore, 50% on a hex core, 38% on an octocore). And it’s because of that and how the performance tradeoff between more slower cores Vs fewer faster cores is why AMD isn’t a good choice for this game over Intel.

Charr discover mousse. End of Charr civilization as we know it.

And you don’t sound like someone who actually do development.

I would rather see a column based on total volume of transactions for items. Bids and Supply on the TP can be informative but seeing how many of one item is sold during a day I think is even more informative.

Ponytails are moe.

But I’m don’t have a glasses fetish.

phys you are overestimating how long it takes to fill or sell a stack of orders even on high volume items. Sure you can interleave multiple items so there is always a stack ready to be posted but then you aren’t doing anything else other than camp on the TP. What works when trying to flip one item isn’t necessarily scalable across many.

Also a great many items that have a high volume, aren’t profitable at all flipping. Gathered or farmed materials that have a high supply volume are all losses when you take the 15% fee/tax into account. And those that have a reasonable spread are crafted mats which cost more to make than the cost of raw materials so it’s more profitable if you gathered the raw mats yourself to sell them rather than craft and sell the finish good. If nobody is selling, flippers don’t have a supply of them that they can get stacks of “quickly” to turn around.

It all goes back to how AMD was going to match Intel’s performance on the i7 in multithreaded performance. The Phenom II, the fixed K10 architecture, wasn’t cutting it. The Phenom II 955 was still 25% slower than the i7-950 (both mid 2009) and the 965 was 15% slower than the more affordable i7-860 a few months later.

So the tried a two prong attack, one short term, one long term. For the short term they tried the hex core, turbo boosted Phenom IIs. And that was a good stop gap right up until Intel released the Sandy Bridge i7-2600. AMD was once again behind and their only way to compete was in the price/performance analysis so they ax the price of their CPUs.

For the long term they were developing the Bulldozer Architecture or what we call the FX series. Their goal was to beat the performance of an Intel Nehalem (i7-9xx) HT core.

Now the way Intel’s HyperTreading (HT) works is that since Intel’s integer core is so overbuilt with duplicate internal functionality, they could raise the overall efficiency by assigning two threads to a single core. Most times they can squeeze an additional 10% of performance out of each core.

Now whether or not it was due to patents and the like, AMD took a different tact. They decided to design what they call a “Module” that contains two simpler, lower performing integer cores, one for each thread, along with a single floating point core that would be shared. But that was no difference that what was in an Intel HT core when it was running two threads sharing it’s FPU.

And when the FX-8150 came out it could match the i7-975. But Intel just released the i7-2700K so that celebration was short lived. So AMD took a 2nd crack at the architecture, tweaked some of the internals of each core and came out with Piledriver. It had a higher clockrate and a slight performance per cycle improvement and now the FX-8350 could match the i7-2600K in multithreaded benchmarks. But Intel had the i7-3770K out for almost six months at that point which was 10-15% faster, again.

Now while AMD was so fixated on multithreaded benchmarks, their design had one glaring problem. When you were running an application that didn’t use 8 threads stressing the CPU to it’s maximum performance, the FX architecture was seriously inferior. Because when an Intel core isn’t running two threads, the single thread now runs roughly 80% faster than when two threads were running while an FX module’s performance only went up 25%. Starting with Sandy Bridge cores, the Intel under low thread loads ran 50% faster than an FX and now after multiple additional generations from Intel that gap as widen even further.

Now of course if you are running a game built around a modern FPS game engine, cranking the pretty and resolution up then GPU performance overwhelms CPU performance and in that case CPU performance isn’t a limiting factor other than dual Vs quad and higher and CPU age/era.

But in a game where the GPU workload isn’t the limiting factor, then you notice CPU performance. And you find that in spades with GW2. A game engine which was started 7 years ago based on an even older game engine, both designed in house. Not necessarily designed to maximize framerate so it could be used as a benchmark for video cards but provide “good enough” framerate for a character on foot jogging.

The problem appears to be that the additional work to render the actions of fellow players around you gums up the renderer leading to an overall slower framerate.

Edit: Kitten filter problem.

Yes, and a Pentium 4, well D, isn’t on the minimum list now.

You can’t stop flippers unless you seriously curtail some aspect of the TP which will impact everyone. Examples.

- Limit number of bids you can have. But this can impact salvagers, forgers and crafters. Likely to cause shortages of buyers on the TP in relation to supply flow which could cause prices to fall to vendor + 1c.

- Account bind bought items. Well you better really want that item, or that number of items then. Implementation problem to denote which items came from the TP and which were gathered/rewarded. Remember NPC vendor add coin to the global economy while the TP only removes some while transferring the rest.

Flipping is a direct result of players willing to leave money “on the table” when selling an item as well as their unwillingness to trade time for acquiring an item at a better price. When multiplied by the thousands of transactions done daily it can amount to a fair chunk of change.

A flipper “farms” the player base, using them as his suppliers as well as his consumers, preying on their unwillingness to wait or that any savings from bidding and selling themselves is “meaningless”, to them. In practice there is no way an individual player can be rewarded as much “new” wealth from doing activities in the game Versus being paid to be a smart middleman in the overall game economy.

If you can earn an exceptional amount of money standing at a corner with a tip jar quoting the classics, why is that looked down on? (Yes that’s a reference to The Man with the Twisted Lip).

I think that’s a side effect of telling people that the exchange contains a finite amount of gems and they aren’t created when you buy them with gold.

Buying with cash creates them.
Using them in the Gem Shop destroys them.
The game was launched with a finite amount in the Exchange (more likely a fixed amount per account added to the exchange when the account is opened).

The content updates in the past are episodic in nature. If you miss it, you missed it. The world and story moved on without you. They are fixing that sort of with Living Story 2. If you bother to log in once every two weeks to unlock that episode or if you miss it pay a small fee to unlock it, you can then replay it forever.

ViolaVoila, now you have permanent content.

Svetli.4276:

in wow you get ban for flipping items
here you get a f medal

No you don’t. Either WoW or here. Just checked the WoW official forums and there is at least on thread discussing flipping from 2 days ago, not to mention all the other threads on making money using the AH there.

And I’m pretty sure ANet doesn’t hand out medals.

First don’t forget that GW2’s game engine is built on the one in GW. A system with continuously loading terrain to prevent a “loading” screen is something that the entire rendering system is built around, it’s not something that can be added on later, at least easily. Size of our zones are likely dictated by number of polygons that define the area. Dense in detail areas like cities and forests tend to be smaller zones while empty plains tend to be larger. It maybe tied to their use of the Umbra Occlusion engine to thin out the geometry that’s needed to be passed to the video card.

That field lists 2 sets of numbers. First is what the interface is and the second is what the card is actually using.

AMD marketing strikes again because the Phenom II 840 doesn’t have an L3 cache so it’s just a faster Athlon II quad core. But since AMD marketing drew a line at clockspeed vs performance features it’s a “Phenom” and not an “Athlon” initially. Six months later it got rebadged as an Athlon II 650. /rant

If the 10fps you are seeing are during boss events or other activities around a large crowd of players then that’s a CPU performance problem (or game engine problem depending if you are seeking a solution or blame).

Having people use something, since there’s no alternative, doesn’t invalidate the fact that the TP is “broken, buggy and clunky”.

Clunky – There isn’t an easy way to check on the current high bid order on items you have a bid in for. It takes three or four clicks on each item. Then there are the missing sort options. Ever try to list Sigil on the TP by selecting Upgrade/Weapon? Do you get sigils? I don’t. How about back items?

Buggy – Every right click to “sell on tp” from your inventory and you don’t get the sell screen for that item? I do, often enough to be annoying during my end of session sell off of loot. And when it happens even clicking on the item on the TP screen doesn’t bring up the sell screen the 1st time.

Broken – The shear number of times players post here, the Tech section or even the account section that the TP doesn’t come up at all. A fair chunk is fixed if they delete the game’s browser cache but why isn’t that part of the startup or shutdown of the game? I’m sure StinVec doesn’t mind me tossing a link to his “Things to try to fix your TP problem on the PC” post but this has been around forever. Mac version has it’s own problem but if the TP interface is such an integral part of the game then why isn’t this “easy” fix been done yet? And lets not talk about the failures when buying Gems with cash. I understand it could be a security problem/bank problem but it is the only way to buy gems with cash short of buying a gem card. There is no outside of the game way to buy gems for your account, unlike just about every other MMO out there.

This isn’t even asking for armor weights or profession filters, this is about stuff in the game since the beginning that simply working right on the TP. Of course there’s been billions of trades on the TP. Doesn’t mean it’s a paragon of functionality but it’s not 5 9s, not even 2 9s IMO. But it works well enough so why “fix” it for those oversights?

It’s not about solving a problem that doesn’t exist. It’s about convincing some that flippers are playing the game as well since they would need to play to place large amounts (in terms of price) of buy orders.

There are those that believe flippers play the TP 16 hours a day (or just an hour depending how easy they think flipping is), raking in 1000s of gold of day which they use to manipulate the price of luxury items, raise the price of everything with their buy and sell orders and/or convert said gold into gems and thus raising the gem price for EVERYONE else which then “forces” players to grind for gold just so they can buy the new tchotchke or armor skin introduced at the Gem Store this week.

It’s theater at best.

At worse it drives out those who are scraping by flipping and favoring those who only need to put an hour in a day while still participating in the game. It could actually reduce competition for the better flippers which could lead to the abuses that players have been imagining all along. Yes it’s a little tin-foil hatty/conspiracy theory take on the idea but if this was implemented and essentially nothing changes in prices or halting the rise in the gold→gem rate, this would be the kind of theory trotted out to explain why.

Conventional wisdom of PC video gaming, where the GPU is everything, doesn’t apply here. The game’s performance is bottlenecked by single core performance, not that it uses a single core but because there are only three threads with any significant CPU usage.

It’s not “broken”. Nobody is selling any. If nobody is selling any but players desire it, bids go up in an attempt to lure one out.

Yes, it’s called breaking out a calculator and looking at the buy orders yourself. The TP lists up to the top 20 bids based on price.