Guild Wars 2

Shockwave.1230:

This chart is very interesting. It shows that Aion has performed better than GW2, over a 6 quarter period so far. I’m not sure if the chart even takes inflation into account, so it could be performing even better than what is appearing. One thing that I’m noticing is up until 2012 Aion had been releasing expansions every year or so, then when the new round of AAA MMOs hit, it tapers off, even though they did an expansion in 2013, which seems to have given them a boost.

With how much revenue GW2’s gemshop/box sales has been bringing in since launch, it might make sense for ANet to hold off on expansions, so that they’re wider intervals. If they can get some major overhauls and additions into their expansions (like the next directx?, new contenents?), maybe it’ll be like a release of an entirely new game with huge revenue spikes similar to launch. That’s all speculation, of course, but it’d be interesting to see if it could turn out that way nonetheless.

You overlook that the 1st 4 quarters of AION, it was a Korean/China/Japan game only. It’s peak in 4Q09 was when it went international and it was downhill from then. And it followed the traditional P2P box plus subscription model until it went F2P in the west during 1Q12. 2Q12 shows a huge fall in earnings. The expansions were free and the first one was already folded in when the game had it’s western release. But the expansions let them re-release a box edition here. This last quarter 78.8% of AION’s direct income is from Korea, compared with 94.1% for Lineage, 46.6% for Lineage II and 100% for Blade & Soul (China’s income comes in as royalties, as always).

Non-Asia sales always pale in comparison with Asia sales for NCSOFT’s games that were first released in the Asia. The reverse is also true with non-Asia released games doing poorly in Asia. There is obviously some cultural differences that prove difficult to cross. Which is why it will be interesting to see how GW2 does in Asia. The original GW did have a following in Asia leading to at least one International PvP competition (held in Taiwan I think).

Devata.6589:

Well how about the fact that everything is a gold-grind. The fact that getting an mini or many skins are not behind specific content but in the cash-shop or / and require gold-grind? how about temporary stuff?

All stuff that might not bother you personally. The watchwork pick is not something that effected me personally. It all depends on what game-play you personally prefer the best.

It’s only a gold grind if you want to by Gem Shop items with gold. Gem Shop is a cash shop and they “finance” their RMT Gems to Gold with Gold to Gems.

If this was a subscription game players would have dumped some $240 (at the $12/month yearly discount) to $300 to play. Of course you all will counter that nobody would be still subscribing based on your dislike of LS content, TP meta game, etc.

Crossfire and SLi work at boosting frame rate only when the CPU is waiting for the GPU to accept additional work. GPU1 is working at finishing it’s frame while GPU2 starts working on the next frame.

With this game, times of poor framerate is caused by the CPU not feeding commands fast enough for the GPU. The GPU is waiting on the CPU and not the other way around.

I will point out that this quarter still has more income that the last 2 1/2 years of reported GW income (since they stopped breaking out it’s numbers when GW2 came out).

I don’t disagree with the notion that there are income spikes from expansions. I’m just saying the numbers don’t show a pressing need for one. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a major content patch, expansion or LS, for this holiday season.

I have no problem with Player to Player trading as long as it’s secure and also removes 15% of the gold just as the TP does. Of course you will have to understand that someone who uses P2P trading excessively may be scrutinized closely as a RMT mule.

This is what happens when I crash “early” without checking NCSOFT’s site.

Two things jump out at me that I’m pretty sure haven’t been talked about among the doom and gloom.

First, royalties are the largest single source of income, beating out even Lineage. This is the result of Blade and Soul’s success in China.

Second, GW2 is still 2nd in terms of direct income from a named game, behind Lineage and in front of Aion which looks stable for now.

Now I’m not counseling that “all is well” …

… but it’s not the doom and gloom some always read into these quarterly reports.

Yes, year over year the game’s revenue for 1Q is off by 30.9%, which isn’t all that bad considering the game is 19 months old at the end of 1Q14.

The downturn in Europe is disturbing while the upturn here is curious.

Overall, here is the chart of income per game according to NCSOFT’s quarterly reports going back to 1Q05.

Convenience item. Never need to run out of basic salvage kits ever again.

Belenwyn.8674:

Arenabet

Holy Freudian Slip Batman.

There are email address/password lists from places that were hacked that are in circulation among blackhats.

Didn’t ask if your new e-mail was with a new provider. I ask if it’s with any of the big 3 free (hotmail/gmail/yahoo) or major ISP provider (cable/telco)? And the more obscure/absurd the account name the better. Proper RL name variation is just to kitten easy to guess.

Is it on a major e-mail network? Did you use a similar account name but new provider?

The algorithm may be just a simple ratio of the two “depositories” within the exchange, one for gold, one for gems, and a 15% sink applied to when gold comes in and goes out.

Simple long division isn’t normally considered an “algorithm”.

slamb.4781:

Bumping this as it needs to be addressed be Anet!

No it doesn’t if you take their month silence on the issue as “working as attended”. They don’t even owe us an explanation as to why since any explanation would simply create even more vocal, upset players.

IIRC it’s normally only 20% off as you remembered.

Remember ANet doesn’t care what the price is in gold converted to gems. They are priced based on actual cash value of gems.

or simply realizing that the Order of Whispers are really good at hiding their secret base.

Azrael.4960:

Larynx.2453:

Azrael.4960:

Myst.5783:

“Their excrement is something like mulch.”

So, since they’re a plant, are they eating plants to produce mulch? in which case, isn’t that a form of cannibalism? Also, if they excrete mulch, could they just sit in the poop and re-absorb the nutrients from the mulch?

I might be looking too deeply into this

Is eating a cow cannibalism?
Can you eat your own poop to reabsorb the nutrients?

Think through what you just said. No, eating a cow is not cannibalism. Yes, you can eat your own poop, though it’ll be very nutrient-poor.

I don’t think you’re thinking deeply on this at all.

You might want to think about your plant and animal biology somewhat before speaking next time. Plants can absorb nutrients from the break down of mulch through their roots. An animal could sit in its own poop all day without getting any nutritional benefit, thought they’ll definitely have an aromatic “benefit”.

Would you rather have them meat eaters. Like Triffids.

They also have the insight of the prices of those items on our TP and are speculating.

I’m pretty sure he or someone else from ANet answered it before as well. And I like that he confirmed a few posts before that the 5000g Dusk never happened there. Simply rumors to cause fear and panic.

Of course they went right back up, the Bazaar ended, the sink was gone but the constant flow of supply of those mats weren’t. Ascended mat crafting is what keeping silk in check nowadays.

Make sure it’s in a real x16 slot (the slot closest to the CPU usually) and not one that simply looks like it. You can use GPU-Z to check as well.

Make sure you plugged in the power connector.

No, NC Interactive is in Austin and that’s who “owns” that IP block and that’s their address. The EU game servers are located in Frankfort.

Aedil.1296:

Vol.7601:

This questions gets asked multiple times.

If so, Forum Search filter should be improved couse couldn’t fine any post about it.
Thank you.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/China-version-and-trading-post/first#post3703089

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/China-Release-Shared-Trading-Post/first#post3711148

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/shared-economy-with-china/first#post3821064

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Influx-of-new-players/first#post3946447

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/US-and-EU-TP-share-with-chinese-TP/first#post3978019

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Will-the-TP-in-China-be-shared-with-ours/first#post2804293

Those are just a few. And I agree, Search is useless on the forum that’s why most use Google or Bing to do forum searches.

Axialbloom.8109:

Yeah, last year’s exchange actually failed to do anything with the excess mats really, because there was just no incentive there. People just dumped the mats they had bought back on the trading post, after finding out how bad the things in the boxes were.

First time the bazaar came to town

Silk scrap went from having 5.1 million in supply to 970K in 36 hours.
Hard leather section went from having 9.8 million to 700K in 36 hours.

In both cases it was the first time in memory that the TP price budged off of vendor plus 1c. Hard leather sections are back to those levels, well was, 2.5 million (1750g) were bought up on the announcement so now there’s only 5.5 million on the TP.

Except different mats are oversupplied now than then (as well as a different spread in prices) so I wouldn’t be surprised by new exchange rates.

Buttercup.5871:

I’m more concerned with the singling out of Anet employees in a thread I created. If there’s going to be more of that I would ask the moderators to please close my thread or purge it.

This comes from the Nexon controlling NCSOFT who told ArenaNet to hire the employee in question conspiracy theory.

Of course it’s all Tin Foil hat territory simply because someone wants something for free and it isn’t.

Actually is US or Germany are where the game servers are located. The account and TP servers are also in the US.

Astralporing.1957:

Skeletonwitch.3280:

Before all champions dropped loot bags, trains did not exist in QD (at least not on my server).

They did. They started a month or two after launch. They just weren’t as intense – and people didn’t feel need to derail them yet.

And those running the trains didn’t feel the need to ream out anybody who interrupted the train by accident.

Graphics is very weak. Minimum gameplay settings at best. Hard drive issues could also be a problem, there is a lot of assets read off the drive during the first minute of zoning into the game the first time as well as between zones.

XFlyingBeeX.2836:

But they should implement new API already.
Right know they have a chance to try out AMD mantle.

Yes it is very weird to use DX9 in 2014. Finally AMD support low level API while INTEL doesnt care. By their fault some games still use DX9.

Yep they make superior CPU but i really wish that AMD defeat them.

GW2 is really great game but it is unplayable for everyone when 100 people fights.
Like i said imagin other well optimized games on DX9.

It is much cheaper for us to change windows then change i5 2400 to i5 4670K + great mobo + great cpu cooler. Also dont see much improvement and games is still unplayable in big fights

Imagine playing this game at steady 60 FPS when your in combat with 100 players around. Wouldnt be amazing?

Have you seen a game, from a company that doesn’t also sell it’s game engine to third party’s, who doesn’t make a billion dollars a year from subscriptions, radically updated it’s product either by making it scale to additional cores or update to a better graphics API?

WoW is that billion dollar annual game.
DICE with Battlefield 4 sells the Frostbite engine to others.
PlanetSide 2 is Sony and they plan to leverage their game engine to additional MMOs like Everquest Next.

ArenaNet, a company that had roughly only $200 million in income from Guild Wars in it’s 7+ years. And $260 million from Guild Wars 2, with only $110 million over the last year, doesn’t have the resources to rebuild the game’s engine every few years.

I don’t disagree with the notion that a game where large multiserver “wars” taking place was a feature that the target performance requires the player to turn down all the beauty they put into their world as well as having a top, top end machine to get such mediocre 30fps should be a flashing sign that something went horribly wrong in the engine’s design. That they caught it too late in the development, to close to release to fix the problem.

But once an MMO is out it’s all about keeping the content fresh. Yes there are those that don’t believe that a “living” world where events happen and are then over, is content in the traditional sense but GW2 was never a traditional MMO in the image of EverQuest or WoW. It rides the edge between F2P and P2P by never (so far) putting gameplay or races or professions behind a toll gate or give us 12-18 months of no content updates until an expansion.

And who knows, maybe they have been looking into ways to fix performance including a core redesign of the renderer. We don’t know. They don’t want to tell us because they don’t want to establish a delivery date that we would hold them too. One simple line on a Facebook post that said they would “look into” Dx11 was already waved in their face as a promise to provide a Dx11 port.

Too many people are throwing around words like Dx11/12 or Mantle or 64-bit executable but don’t know what each of those “things” solve and whether any of them will solve the problem the game is having. Grasping at straws saying if X game has those things and they don’t have severe performance issues with lots of players on screen then it must be able to help us. Many who never programmed a multi-threaded application or one using Direct X or a client/server system with tens of thousands of simultaneous users in their lives. It’s always “easy” and “obvious” when you are outside looking in. Monday morning quarterbacking.

Making a list of things to get.

Kite
Dreamcatcher back skin
Quartz Node

E3 is more of a retailer event to spread the word about new console games and gaming accesories that will be sold at GameStop, Walmart, etc. for the holidays. The media will show up and take pictures of booth babes and reprint press releases. It’s not for “fans”. You can’t walk off the street and buy admission and a 3 day pass is $800-1000.

And cons with fans like PAX, ANet will only attend if it’s local and only for panels unless there’s a paid expansion.

And don’t get too bent out of shape. Blizzard (WoW), XL Games (Archeage) and Zenimax (TESO) aren’t there either. CCP (EVE) will be but that’s an excuse to get out of Iceland. :p

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.

There is something wrong Gaile if this keeps getting fixed and then breaks again and ends up once again freaking out the customer base who bother checking the security page. I think this is the third or fourth time it started to pop up regularly with fixes in between.

But this way they can take the development of a single armor look and drag it out 6 weeks.

… sigh …

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Can-t-acces-Gem-store/first#post3751657

Over 50 as well. First MMO was UO beta. Second was City of Heroes until NCSOFT killed it.

I need a kite. Already have a balloon.

Blude.6812:

lordkrall.7241:

And here we have it: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/prepare-for-the-festival-of-the-four-winds/

Happy now? ^^

Not really—seems to be another recycle.

What a surprise. Annual events occur annually.

[sarcasm]

What? How dare they! Only new permanent content is true content. We demand all annual events to occur at all times! Wintersday, Halloween, Dragon Bash, the Bazaar everything should occur at all times.

[/sarcasm]

Always a spike during EU AM and Oceania PM when a desirable item returns, in this case the Witch’s outfit. And right after a key sale too.

Also 6g for $1.

Slaving off a couple of art types to crank out an armor set they sell off 2 parts at a time is a minor allocation of resources. Bringing back old items or putting items on sale takes virtually no allocation of resources.

So ask yourself, what are they spending their 300 person team on during this interlude? And it’s not all or even mostly China (I estimate at this point, maybe 20%). It’s getting the groundwork laid out for the next round of the LS. It’s the same how comic artists get a couple a week buffer done in case life or artist block crops up. If they are going back to their 4 teams, 2 week schedule then new common critters need to be created, new changes to existing zones or (gasp) a new zone. Maybe they are working on several iterations of Lion’s Arch being rebuilt.

Regardless, a staff that size isn’t sitting on their hands and they aren’t all off in China and they aren’t all doing tchotchkes for the Gem Shop. That leaves content development. Have some faith.

Experience has a large part in choosing what APIs to use. When the project was started in 2007, there was already Dx9 was already 5 years old, 3 if you only dealt with the latest version. It was well known and tricks and gotchas of developing with it were fairly well known.

Dx11 did come out with Win 7 but it was still an API whose best practices were not well known. And you do not code your project based on a “new” API just because it suppose to be better. Not the single project that your company’s future is leveraged on.

Of course you would have to design the renderer to be scalable across multiple threads/cores for best Dx11 support while not significantly adding significant overhead if you are using a single thread for Dx9. And then there were the rumors that the game was suppose to be out in 2010 and then 2011.

The people who embraced Dx11 early were the game engine manufacturers (it’s a competitive feature) and developers leveraged their games off of that infrastructure.

And when developing software, very early on during the process you fix your specs on what tools you are using and what APIs you are supporting. If those things change mid project, you are royally screwed as a developer.

If you do a whois on the Tx IP it shows it belongs to NCSOFT. The other three are likely yours.

http://whois.arin.net/rest/net/NET-64-25-32-0-1/pft

I don’t think that day where gold to gems and gems to gold will even out.

It’s because the “I want gem shop stuff for free” crowd is getting more and more frustrated that they can’t. This is why we have loads of threads about drop nerfs or how the TP is unfair or that ANet is directly ratcheting up the price. At some point they will start leaving in droves.

Ascended is too much of a grind to get. All the new shiny skins are at the Gem Shop and although this game doesn’t have a monthly fee, many players feel that they shouldn’t have to pay anything as if this was just another F2P MMO. Have they not ever played a F2P MMO? Don’t they realize that so much more of pain it is to have just about everything behind a paywall? They want the items and content of a P2P at the price of an F2P. Never going to happen.

Katz.5143:

When you are leveling crafting, you try and get as much xp as possible through discovering new recipes. In order to do that you have to craft the components needed to make the item. Your goal is to level crafting.

When you sell an item on the trading post it is at the mercy of supply and demand. You can’t sell it for what it would cost in materials most of the time because the demand for the finished item is just not there. People can use armor or weapons they get from adventuring instead of crafted items.

The harvested materials have more value for the most part because people use them to level crafting and not because they use them to craft specific items.

The demand isn’t the problem (as much), it’s oversupply because EVERYONE leveling their crafting discover the same things to get the crafting XP and then try to sell it. Doesn’t matter if it’s useful to other players or not. Doesn’t matter you can’t make a profit on it. What matters to you the crafter is leveling crafting as quickly as possible.

laokoko.7403:

it’s kind of like the quartz crystal. in the beginning people are hoarding them, which push the price up. and from time to time, some of the hoarder get impatient, and start dumping them, and other’s saw it and start dumping themself too and crash the price.

Just like real life.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

It has nothing to do with how many gems or gold is “out there” among the general population. All that matters is the number of gems and amount of gold in the exchange. That’s it. A simple ratio between the two, nudged up and down 15% based on the direction of the exchange so gold is sunk twice.

Want gem shop items for free, then you are stuck driving the mechanism that raises the price for those that want gem shop items for free. Want to reverse the trend? Buy gems with cash and convert them to gold. It’s not rocket surgery.

In the last week we’ve seen how wonky the TP can get when it’s DB slips a cog. I will still maintain that this error is not to limit bots but to ease performance and sync issues with the TP. There’s simply more bookkeeping with putting an item up for sale than putting in an order, searching for items or picking up purchases. And it’s not something you want to drop the ball on.

anzenketh.3759:

I think it is fair however I don’t think some of the items in the Gem Store are worth their value in gold to gem conversion. Nor do I think they are worth their value in hard earned IRL cash.

Example of these items are:

Boosters
Upgrade extractor.
Black Lion Keys(Due to the RNG involved.)

That’s because the prices are set based on cash value, not gold. As long as the cash value are in line with other game’s cash shops then everything is right as rain.

If you think they’re overpriced based on an every increasing gold price, don’t buy those items. If you think 1680 gems for 25 keys, that’s $21 worth of gems, isn’t worth 166g so be it.

zerohunter.3196:

So i needed to complete my weaponsmith crafting, so i salvaged every exo and rare. I needed rifle, so i buy it form commendations, and found a nic skin for it, that was like month ago. Today i noticed, i salvaged PRECURSOR WORTH 800G!

kill me pls

In good jest

@Morrigan – it launches June 6th. This 10 day open beta is a shake down of existing mission bugs and what not. I’m not expecting any major changes between now and the 6th.