Guild Wars 2

Well most subscription based games that went F2P still have subscriptions available as VIP/Gold Club membership level that still gives you all the benefits you had when subscribing without all the paywalls they added for F2P. They still have cash shops, it’s just as a “VIP” you get a minor stipend of proxy currency for the cash shop. Just enough to be almost useful.

The three sticky threads that have replies at the top of the Player helping Player board are full of very useful info.

One common problem with loot drop in any MMO is as you level up, more of the loot table becomes “junk” to the player, only worth selling to others, salvage or sacrifice to the mystic slot machine. After your first 80 everything is junk as you quickly twink your next characters into great armor (and weapons) you simply buy off the TP until you hit 80 and then switch to exotics and reskin at your pleasure.

With your first, anything that drops that’s better than you have is a great drop. You don’t have the coin to buy something good right away so you depend on drops and karma armor from Heart vendors. And if you do accumulate enough coin to buy off the TP, you probably don’t have enough to get really great stuff, both armor and weapons. Anything that drops can be new and shinny as the game is still new to you.

Once you are experienced, then it seems that everything that drops is junk short of an exotic or a precursor. Pretty sure most of us have been playing at least a year and have two or more characters at 80. The game has lost it’s new MMO smell. And after doing the same boss fight/dungeon path/fractal/jump puzzle for the 100th time we’ve all have become somewhat jaded. It’s routine now. So overly familiar gameplay plus perceived junk loot equals “why am I’m playing this” which is understandable. But since devs in any MMO can’t create new content faster than the majority of players can consume and grow bored of it, it’s really up to each player to find a reason to log in and play.

The exchange doesn’t add more gold to the economy as it’s paid with gold others used to buy gems. Actually the exchange sinks gold twice, once going in and once going out which is why the gold exchange rate is 72.25% (or 85% squared) of the gem exchange rate.

New gold only comes from drops, vendors and achievement chests (and a small chance from BL Chests).

Or players are doing something now that they weren’t doing before that also provided mats.

Did demand increase? supply drop? or a combo of both?

morrolan.9608:

20% inflation practically overnight.

Not inflation, gouging due to supply shortage. One did sell at 1337g (leet, cute) about 12 hours ago.

Nice C2 wallpaper.

There are a lot of UniDye hoarders out there waiting for that mythical 1g price. At some point some may get impatient and start selling a few which will keep the price in check.

John Smith.4610:

.

He’s being more Kosh than usual.

City of Heroes did have exclusive skins in their cash shop. Older ones that originally bought as “DLC” before the game went F2P. True if you were a long time subscriber, you could get the new costume items with tokens which you got one per month of play after it went F2P and you still paid monthly.

Then there was the costume set in our version of a BL Chest but the odds were published, higher and the more of the set you got the better the chance on the remainder (they were account unlocks and not sellable so you got piece A, piece A gets removed from the reward table). But the real rare item from that was a non-combat pet. We didn’t have anything near the selection GW2 has so it was a big thing.

Mirta.5029:

It’s so that people would buy gems and convert them to gold. This is on one of their official advertisement pages.

There posting that because it’s a viable option now. Don’t forget this is on the post advertising what to spend gems on. It’s been ANet’s viewpoint that you spend cash on gems. That side of the exchange, the gold to gem side, is a necessary evil to pay for the gem to gold side.

Romek.4201:

lol – i dont think this has anything to do with eternity
someone who would spend 2k for an precursor could just spend 3,5k for complete eternity on tradepost^^

people stopped crafting precursors in mystic forge cause they thought soon will be cheap t5 mats from crown pavilion – thats all

My point was Dusk sold out because Eternity changes leaving a clean slate to hike the price as first seller. There looks to be a run on Dawn with it’s supply dropping and price rising back to the point when it’s price was reset because it was bought out.

Since I’m not seeing this trend with other precursors in the last few days I chalk the run on supply of both weapons to those making Eternity.

It’s a supply issue. As long as supplies are low enough that it can go to zero allowing the first seller to set the price with subsequent sellers undercutting that conservatively, coupled with high bids greater than the previous low selling price, guarantees the new pricing level.

And as always these price surges occur with the supply drops to zero and the first person supplying sets the new starting price that everyone then undercuts. And since Eternity is now sexier, the precursors that are needed to make the two legendaries that are needed to make Eternity have gone up because there’s a run on them.

Only problem with a player run pawn shop is EVE style embezzlement.

Champ train was devolved or degenerate gameplay. It was a gaming style that wasn’t foreseen by the devs when they “fixed” the champ reward problem. Champ reward + champ respawn times + number of champs in zone + waypoints = Choo Choo. Just like Zerk stats weren’t intended to be “the” way to equip. They recognized that they accidentally created a monster and they had to fix it before people started writing that the game was only about fighting the same 6 guys in the starting zone over and over and over again.

Flashing back to City of Heroes. The devs created a way for players to generate their own content and offer it to others to play. It was a nice creative tool and when used that way some of the stories you could play were as good or better dev developed content. Problem, only 5% of those who used the system used it that way, the other 95% quickly found ways to create content for rapid and easy leveling. Not something you want in a game you charge monthly for. Every patch after had some nerf being applied because someone found some other way to use it in a way the devs didn’t intend to be used.

Honestly, we had a flood of max level characters whose players had no idea how to play outside of our “(not so) danger room”. They didn’t know how to travel to other zones, didn’t know where the vendors or trainers were, couldn’t fight anything other than the powder puffs they faced in these rapid leveling player written scenarios. Wonderful idea, a way to get new content between releases, horribly exploited by those who had a very narrow outlook on playing an MMO, level to max ASAP, farm loot ASAP. While it’s good to have a goal, things like the train or speed runs can take pursuing that goal with laser like precision a little to far.

When “your way” adversely affects the game as a whole, “your way” loses.

If you haven’t heard, eBay got hit and suggest you change your password. Now if they do get into your eBay account it will likely have your email address. And if you recycle passwords … well you might be in trouble if not here but maybe in other places.

It wasn’t until recently that the Gem to Gold rate reached an acceptable level to bother advertising it in the Tuesday Evon post that’s all.

Champ trains still run outside of the starter zones.

I think they realized they opened up the gold spigot a little two much last year during the Jubilee and now they’ve finally closed it up. Unfortunately we’ve now been conditioned to that level of reward, resulting in degenerated play styles like the champ train.

So “Austerity” has come to Tyria.

LiewKW.6410:

Get More Gold!

Remember that you can exchange gems and gold at our currency exchange on the second tab of the Black Lion Trading Company! Currently, you can get 1 gold for about 15 gems and 50 gold for about 670 gems!

There is no temporary boost from gem to gold conversion promo going on, is it?

You’re late to the complaint train.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Get-More-Gold

And my response.

Behellagh.1468:

Again, it doesn’t take a team of 300 to crank out an item a week, bring back something popular or put something on sale. Real content takes months to create. What we are seeing is the work of a couple of artists and in the case of the armor they are releasing it slowly over weeks at two items at a time and we knew that 4 minis were coming over four weeks.

And for those who aren’t enticed by items may be enticed by gold for gems.

Don’t forget the game depends on cash sales of gems for it’s continued development. So we will see announcements twice a week, Tuesday and Friday, every week and you all should not be surprised and shocked any more.

They have a purpose and all the ones I have came from BL chests or daily rewards (think I’m up to 20 or so) and each of my characters carry one JIC I get an exotic with an expensive upgrade. That has happen only twice in a year and a half.

But asking for an infinite one? That’s going to have to price priced out of this world or be an ultra rare drop from a BL chest like the various permanent contracts.

My first character was able to get temple exotic armor with karma doing nothing but exploring the whole world and back then the occasional daily. I didn’t use Karma boosters, I didn’t revisit content, I did a few of the LS changes but primarily I simply went for map complete, doing DEs along the way.

Now after my first character I do repeat content simply because I’m familiar with it. But I don’t consider it grind because I don’t have a particular goal I’m going for. I don’t feel I’m being pushed to do something I don’t want to do.

How difficult is it to choose not go for the “carrot”? Do you really need the “carrot”?

What would you pay for it? In Gems. Right now it’s 12 gems per charge or 300 gems for a 25 charge kit.

Even the endless basic salvage kit still costs 3g on top of the 800 gem cost.

Most expensive item at the Gem Shop ever was 25 Transmutation Splitters for 6000 gems ($75). I would imagine something as useful in extracting upgrades would easily be 8000 gems or higher.

You can farm champs. Just not in the 1-15 areas.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/updates/Game-Update-Notes-May-20-2014

Are there no champ trains in the next higher level zone?

And now he has 8 wolfs and drops T1 mats and blues/greens.

Oh well.

And people wonder why they don’t talk to us.

Normally when they first come out they are only 1 ticket until their LS expires.

It’s not a good sign that AMD marketing starts counting GNC units as “cores” in the lastest APUs. The A10-7850K’s 4 color glossy says it has 12 “compute cores”, 4 CPU and 8 GPU. Stuff like that gets AMD in trouble with people who don’t read/understand what AMD is trying to do. GPU compute hasn’t taken off the way AMD would like.

AMD marketing also glosses over the whole module/core concept. The CPU designers for Bulldozer and it’s siblings were tasked to match performance of an Intel HT core running two threads. They came up with the two thread core module found in the FX. Now they didn’t do a half bad job at it, when running two threads. But when running one thread per AMD FX Module Vs Intel’ kitten core, it loses badly.

AMD bet on a future with heavily multithreaded programs and with APUs, GPU compute threads. That hasn’t come to pass. On top of that at one time they had a performance/watt lead on Intel, important for massive servers but not anymore.

What a lovely derail.

I always love it when a player suggests the alternative to a nerf of one thing is boosting everything else.

Was it challenging because it was challenging or because it’s new and you haven’t run it 1000 times already?

They tried it on one item. Next two items didn’t have any special mat chance. I don’t think they are going to change it because that’ll be yet another round of “I want a gem rebate”, they aren’t done on this round yet.

Algreg.3629:

PS: What is it with this Wowstar nonsense? If anything, WS combat is closer to GW2 or maybe TSW/TERA and could not be further from WoW.

Looks, not mechanics. Very stylized, “cartoon like” world and races.

Currently NCSOFT has a market cap of 4 Billion dollars US.

In the last four quarters Guild Wars 2 had income that represents 15% of NCSOFT’s total income.

That comes out to be around 600 million dollars.

I had the trailing 12 months of GW2 being 112,077 million KrW and the total income of NCSOFT during the same TTM as 749,927 million KrW. These are from NCSOFT’s own reports.

That was last year’s 1Q data you linked to via GamesIndustry.

Since Wildstar was developed by members of the original WoW team, art style is not surprising.

The only cash shop item is a 1 month subscription that you can sell on the player marketplace. The drawback is it costs $20 for a $15 monthly subscription. So it’s PLEX like in purpose but is bought at a premium.

My biggest problem is rooting. After virtually no rooting in GW2 it’s jarring that I can’t attack on the move. It might be a limitation with the class I was running, Psi, I didn’t notice with a warrior since you are in melee, only moving with the telegraph suggests it.

In a world of a zillion fantasy MMOs, maybe a WoW looking SciFi MMO with a subscription will work. I will not be an early adopter, waiting to see the launch kinks get worked out as well as more definite info on things like the player market.

I’m not advocating camping him exclusively. I just hit him up when I’m in the area. Rarely, even now I see players camping for him. The only times I do him twice is when I don’t get a champ box from Maw.

Axialbloom.8109:

So the people advocating buying gold instead are basically saying BLCs are useless, right?

Except without the BLC, there is no supply of skins.

So we have a problem. Skins are 1/2 off or less in terms of gem converted gold than the cost in gems, on average, to acquire from BLC. And with the exchange rate ever increasing, it’ll just get worse. If you are lucky, and you buy a skin when it costs only 1 ticket, and hold it until supply is scarce, then maybe you will make a little coin.

I can understand why key farming is a thing.

Wolfmaster pops up every 10-15 minutes and with a small group can be defeated within a minute. Longer with a smaller group or with a group that isn’t down leveled 80s. He is a “cheap” champ compared to the Svanir champ on the dome in terms of time needed to defeat.

Plus he spawns right next to a waypoint so if you do a map chat alert, in 30 seconds you can have quite the crowd.

Not comparatively.

http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

Mantle does help on lower core performance CPUs, like AMD’s APUs, but is of limited effectiveness on higher end CPUs.

http://www.techspot.com/review/793-thief-battlefield-4-mantle-performance/page2.html

Let’s not turn this into another one of your Mantle thread de-rails Bee.

You would thing that mat prices dropping would be a good thing? I looked at the fine (Bone, Scale, Claw, etc) T5 and T6 today on GW2Spidy and two things stick out.

First, most prices are bouncing back and second, at the lowest in the dip, prices were about the same as a month ago. That means prices inflated for most of the month and the dip coincided with a spike in supply, which makes sense.

Why the price uptick? Don’t know. Maybe players thinking China would be getting on our TP stocked up and once it became clear that wasn’t the case dumped their hoard?

I enjoy watching these market moves. Watching speculation balloons pop. So how’s that cornering of the dye market working out for some?

Well they missed one (hype for the festival of the four winds on the release page) cause the bosses are in China but it is in the news section. And State of the Game tends to be once a year on the anniversary unless some milestone in sales was reached.

I have a feeling they are trying not to drop the ball on the first LS content China will see.

As been suggested in numerous other tuning threads, reducing both shadows and reflections in the game settings helps a bit as these additionally load down the CPU more than one would think.

Making sure that cores are unparked or your energy profile is set to performance and if you are running Win 7 then the two FX CPU patches to the OS might help slightly.

Also in events or WvW, adjusting the character (other character) model quality to lowest will make everyone else generic models which also helps.

As for why AMD is bad. GW2 doesn’t need more than 3 to 4 cores, often somewhere 2-3 cores of “work”. Coupled with each FX core (Phenom as well) has relatively low performance when compared with a non-HT Intel core.

Now games that aren’t CPU bound but rather GPU bound like BF4, AMD FX is fine and dandy.

I buy keys for a hoot. Got 25 during the last sale and used 20. Got 9 ticket scraps.

Lucky? Yeah. But I buy blind box toys and MTG booster packs IRL. The fun is getting that thing you don’t have. Here it’s just game currency and not real money. Every night I spend 1% of my bank plus value of items on the TP selling and buying, on gems.

Since everything you get in the chest has some value, maybe not to you, it’s not gambling per se. Most have either a gem or gold value associated with them. Everyone’s a “winner”, just some lucky players may get something worth considerably more.

It’s just sadly since the introduction of skin tickets, the lure is too great for some. Doesn’t matter what the odds are.

I believe the op wants the game in a window, not a fullscreen borderless window, at a particular resolution.

Solidbeatz.8571:

Behellagh.1468:

I hardly call a 10% drop in T6 prices as “crashing”. But supply is going up and I think that’s because T6 is now clearly the best conversion of Laurels to Gold since they raised the price of UniDye by 10×.

It is when you got a very large batch of items on the tp, just to find out prices have dropped more then 1 silver per item.

Someday I will get into the habit of reading the OP and not just the title.

So 24 hour dip?

Using GW2Spidy’s 24hr moving average. Last day.

Ancient Bone: 35.61s to 35.19s
Vicious Claw: 36.92s – 37.10s
Crystalline Dust: 17.75s – 17.87s
Vicious Fang: 34.85s – 34.76s
Armored Scale: 38.54s – 40.40s
Elaborate Totem: 26.04s – 27.97s
Powerful Venom Sac: 31.36s – 32.37s
Powerful Blood: 45.17s – 45.79s

Yeah, that’s a huge dropoff there, NOT. You do realize the price fluctuates quite a bit daily right?

It’s likely you looked after someone sold to highest bidder more mats than the bidder was looking to buy which drops the low sale price to the previous high bid for the remainder.

I hardly call a 10% drop in T6 prices as “crashing”. But supply is going up and I think that’s because T6 is now clearly the best conversion of Laurels to Gold since they raised the price of UniDye by 10×.

Game is CPU limited not GPU limited in large events. It also uses a fairly old version of Direct X API, Dx9, which limits leveraging additional cores for rendering purposes.

According to Reddit.

It was probably delayed to coordinate release in China as future content.

But it is human nature to try to get something for nothing, which is how ANet “finances” their Gem to Gold system by offering the Gold to Gem system.

Just as it is human nature to cause “tragedy of the commons” by the overuse of the Gold to Gem system leading to an increase cost of using the Gold to Gem system.

This in turn helps drive the notion that the game is too grindy and the rewards to low (price of precursors, skins and legendaries on the TP being the other).