Guild Wars 2

I’m 52, semi-retired software dev.

The problem with persistent content is while it allows new players to play events that long time players have already experience months or years ago, to those long time players that content is stale. One way to fix that is to provide an alternate area to start and level up a character in for older players while newer players can play in the old content.

The problem with that of course is diluting the playerbase across more zones. New players would choose the join the older players because that’s where everyone is. Now the persistent old zones are dead. And if so few players go to them then why keep them around? or persistent?

You pick a vision and stick with it. After 4 months of a rather static game with traditional “holiday” events, the devs decided to tell a grand adventure using their world as a canvas. Yes, it’s terrible if you missed out on some event that have unique awards that are now long gone. But for those who do commit to showing up at least weekly they are presented a constant stream of every changing content.

ANet needs players who show up every day or week. Everytime they log in ANet can wave some new Gem Shop item in front of them to see if they bite. And I’m not talking about this month’s daily sale. It’s “Buy Now! Available for a Limited Time!” and some of those players that go for it will spend cash on the gems they need to buy it.

It all boils down to DPS Vs Burst income model. They’re trying DPS this time around.

More pixels means more work when it comes to shaders which can run on every pixel. True number of polys don’t change, much, when it comes to resolution but at lower resolutions some polys may scale into 0 pixels and are simply discarded from the remainder of the rendering pipeline.

If resolution doesn’t make a difference, then why do games like Metro: Last Light lose over 1/3 of their frame rate going from 1080p to 2560×1600 on a GTX 780Ti? It certainly isn’t low end hardware.

Check out the Exchange rate charts on GW2Spidy and see if you can spot a pattern with the rate is lowest during the day. Separate weekends and holidays from Monday-Thursday periods.

Problem right now is the daily sales. If something desirable goes on sale or returns, the price will spike up hard. At the very least checking out the daily chart will give you an idea if the current rate is above or below the running 24 hour average.

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Is the world outside your window persistent, never changing? Are you living in the Fringe altverse where the twin towers are still standing? No. Then stuff happens and its over never to return. Certain patterns may form and repeat. Untimely drug deaths of notable actors, badly behaving former teen star, politician caught in a scandalous affair but it’s hopefully different people every time.

Stuff happens, it gets resolved, new stuff happens. The alternative to that is adding more levels that go hand in hand with new previously undiscovered landmasses so the X year old content remains unchanged. But didn’t WoW have some big dragon event that completely redid the original areas? So it’s not persistent there either.

On one hand players complain about DEs as not changing anything but when the devs add content that has a permanent resolution players complain that the world isn’t persistent.

Devs can’t win, so why should they try to please anyone other their own sense of story telling.

Chests have and always will be a Whitman Sampler of Gem Store items. That and that alone is their primary purpose. The fact that “chance to enter to win $1 million” sticker is now on all the boxes is meaningless because you are buying a box a chocolates. You can’t just collect the entry forms and return the box of chocolate.

Saw these a few days ago.

I won’t accept so large bulky plate armor as “light”. But sometimes light vs medium armor isn’t as apparent. In reality it’s cloth vs leather vs metal. However some light armor is a lot of cloth while some medium is barely any leather. So it’s weight of the material used and not the weight of the outfit.

Like I said, they are like scratch tickets. Once in a while you would drop a fiver for five and if your lucky then great and if not, the suspense as you scratch hoping for something good is satisfying. I wouldn’t drop $100 on 100 of them though.

I only buy keys when they were on sale and lets face it, at 35% off for five at the beginning of the month it was darn attractive. But I still only bought 5.

There is a daily sale all month. They may return before the month is over. But you need to check every day.

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

Im Mudbone.1437:

Deimos Tel Arin.7391:

What do You people think?
i think the living story concept is working well and is profitable for them, so it better that they keep on using the living story platform to distribute new expansion content.

Do You also hate LS as I do?
no. i love the living story concept.

Do you also think it is detrminetal for this game?
no. i think it makes the game better.

How many of You would like to see expansion instead?
not me.

i want to see expansion content delivered via living story updates.
this is what they promised earlier.

98% of LS introductions is TEMPORARY content, I can say with a likely 99% certainty that the community would prefer PERMANENT content retail expansions.

that was the 1st year of the living story that we experienced.

i am looking forward to more permanent content introduced to us in the 2nd year of the living story updates.

patience, do you not have it?

Yeah, yeah, patience. How long will that take?

Odd you aren’t running with hires character textures in that setup. The card has 2GB and it barely goes over 1GB when I have textures on hires.

Did you OC the CPU at all?

First, the whole VIP issue in the western version was disproven within hours of the reddit post when it first came up. Second, this type of feature is expected in Chinese MMOs.

Nothing to see hear that affects us.

http://www.warcry.com/news/view/73583-The9-alters-WoW-to-appease-Chinese-censors

Diessa Plateau starting from the Black Citadel gate. Farm around the town and then move east to the town that always has the Giant in it. Should find plenty.

gillius.2856:

Donari.5237:

Chaotic Storm.2815:

/get his Charrzooka out. “Mines bigger”

Should have said “You call that a gun? Now this, this is a GUN.” In an Australian accent.

Nah… dont need a gun… i got a DONK..!!

Further investigation indicates it was seeing bones in the undead. As long as you don’t expose bone, you’re OK.

It’s not just single use, you can transfer that skin to your next armor with transmutation stones (1 to 79) and crystals (at 80).

But if you are looking for skins like the ones we get from the achievement chests, I don’t think so.

Also asking ANet directly for a response is a no-no.

Honestly sometimes I wished I could lock myself out of posting just before crashing. I might have read the OP and understood he didn’t want an upgrade of his current system. Sorry.

http://techreport.com/review/26082/tr-february-2014-system-guide/9

This goes through various parts and the reason for their choices, I linked you directly to the sample configurations. They are without a copy of the OS, which costs about $100 on top of that.

The i5-4440 in dodgycookies parts list would be better than the i3-4130 of course, four cores Vs two cores plus two fake cores.

Pretty sure the 5 bags was in addition to the normal 3 items per chest.

Not laws as much as cultural.

Fine. Layman’s terms, your screwed. Computer technology ages faster than dogs. That PC uses a CPU Socket that was abandoned over 5 years ago and a memory standard that’s just as old.

According to the specs (Google “Compaq Presario SR5710y”, the specs are at HP support for those interested) you have the 3 MB of DDR2-800 memory, the fastest speed supported. Your CPU runs at 2.3 GHz but the fastest support by that system board runs at 2.5GHz, so not much of an increase. And good luck finding a 5+ year old CPU. It can’t be fitted with a quad core, none were available for that socket and the power requirement is beyond that system board.

That system comes with a 250 watt power supply. That’s woefully minimalistic. That extremely limits what video cards can be used. It is important to note that the PCIe spec supported on that system board is V1.0. Maybe a GT 630 could replace the 9400GT you think you have without blowing up the power supply. It is several times faster than a 9400GT and in theory using the same amount of power.

But that’s it. You can’t go to quad core, you can’t go beyond 4GB of memory (only two slots with 2GB maximum per slot) and without a power supply transplant you are very limited in what video cards you can use.

This isn’t Overhauling, simply technology has bypassed you and you would be better off saving up $500-600 and then look at a basic modern system, which would likely blow away what you currently have while allowing an easier upgrade path for the next few years.

Sorry.

Still have the old computer? Simply copy the Guild Wars 2 directory to the new machine and make a new shortcut. Easy if you’re two rigs are on the same network. Easier if you have a 32GB USB key formatted to NTFS (data file to large for FAT32).

Undead thing bad there. Blizzard had to redo an entire add-on for China. I wouldn’t be surprised they rewrote what’s crawling around Orr to be not-undead.

So Asus PBZ77-V LE

Yes, that black slot is only a PCIe x4 V2 slot, on it’s best days.

The blue slot is the one you should have been using. Why it’s not working, don’t know but that’s where your video card is suppose to go.

Assuming your native language is English, here is a link to download the PDF manual, assuming you don’t have it.

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA1155/P8Z77-V_LE/E7505-P8Z77-V_LE.pdf

The point is every time they had been available you either didn’t notice or delayed buying it immediately only to notice after it leaves the store. No matter how many places mention it was temporary or the countdown timer.

Inevitably people keep missing out on these limited time items and immediately asking when they will be back. I think people have gotten a little to use to the “On Demand” nature of today’s society. Forcing them to act within a particular time period to get/watch something is becoming more and more of a rarity. Stores open 24/7. Instant viewing of movies or TV shows when “you” want to watch them rather than carve out the time to watch it live on TV or when they are in the theater.

Thieves can wield double pistols. But melee still delivers more damage. This game doesn’t have a pure spike damage range character.

Honestly whenever working on the guts of your PC, pull the power cord and then cycle the rig’s power so the caps in the PSU and the motherboard are emptied first.

So what motherboard do you have and is the video card in the x16 slot closest to the CPU because way to often x16 slots are used on slots that are wired with only x1, x2 or x4 PCIe lanes. Just because in looks like a full size x16 slot, doesn’t mean it is.

Player to player trades are discouraged for this reason. I’m not sure anyone should be punished if you fell for a con that’s older than me (over 50). Especially one you volunteered for, going in with both eyes open.

“Hey buddy, want to buy a watch? opens coat Genuine Rolex.”

Who do you think you are, Serpico?

echo.2053:

Thing about broken game is that it remains broken.

Store all valuables in bank. Delete all characters and pay 0 gems to go what ever server you want. They hand out level up to 20, level scrolls out like candy and there’s always a vast amount of xp boosters available

If you made a lot of characters that are a year old then yes, you get a lot of level up to 20 scrolls. Me, I have only have two, still unused because I haven’t rolled another character of the the profession yet.

locx.6412:

sirsquishy.8531:

locx.6412:

In that test they always add another stick tho, so the amount increases as well. I’d like to see how 1×8 vs 2×4 vs 4×2 from the same manufacturer with the same timings would perform.

Buying pairs is of course the safest solutions, but I don’t see too much going wrong if you happen to find an identical stick. Also on my old board I did have one Kingston 2GB and 2×1GB OCZ sticks with different timings and it worked, but hey, miracles do happen!

Your talking Parallel ram using the same memory foot print between them.

But that is really illogical due to how Dual/Tri/Quad channel works

RW requests hit each bank of memory at the same time, in parallel. So even if you have 8GB modules in a 3way setup, your 2-3GB software foot print will be evenly across all Memory Modules.

Its the same way multi-threading applications work, but for memory. You add physical memory hardware to increase the memory bus speed. This can sometimes add latency if your memory timings are not that great though (such as a dual pair of 1333mhz CL11).

So there are a few things to consider for this topic really.

But how is it illogical?

Do you think 1×8 vs 2×8 is more apples to apples than 1×8 vs 2×4? I know it doesn’t make that much of a difference when the amount is high to begin with, I guess it would if the total amount was 2-4 GB.

RAM is a funny thing. You see it requires a relatively long period of time to set up a read or write in terms of cycles but once setup it can blast a number of consecutive reads or writes. I think DDR3 it’s 8 in 4 cycles. Then you have to set up for the next. With multiple banks you can alternate through them so while reading one bank you are already partially done with the set up in the next. More banks, closer you can get to maximum throughput of the RAM.

Fortunately with multiple levels of cache and a memory controller that guesses when to start reading in more data from RAM, the advantage of multiple banks aren’t as important as it was in the P4 days. But that depends on the app. Something that marches through a large amount of data may require more frequent fetches from RAM at which point multiple banks do make a difference.

Well EATX are few and far between. Usually for the very rich to put together a dual socket 2011 system. I don’t think that’ll be a problem here.

As for video cards. I run something equivalent to an HD 5570 (a HD 6550D integrated).

At 1600×900 using default settings on high (with DoF and max filtering toggle off), I can get 23-27 fps looking out over the frozen wastes of Wayfarer Foothills. The GPUs the OP were looking at are many times faster. The HD 7770 is about 3x as fast. The R9 270 /HD 7870 about 6x as fast. So bumping resolution to 1080p I think the same local will give you over 60fps easily even with an HD 7770, assuming you aren’t maxing out the render thread in a core.

Zergs are a different story but if reports of those watching both their CPU and GPU usage, GPU on higher level cards aren’t close to maxing, unlike when they are alone in the wilderness. But an i5-4430/4440 is about twice as fast as my CPU. So couple the two, twice as fast CPU with a 3-6x video card boost, I’m SWAGging that 30fps is doable if you crank down character quality to get only generic models (maybe turning down/off reflections and shadows as well).

I believe you can hire mercs to fill out a party if need be. You could always peruse the Guild Wars wiki.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Main_Page

Shameless bump.

Korossive.7085:

A R W E N sadly I will be the only person in this thread to back you up. You have named it quit good: TP Wars 2, and it is.

You can run around picking ore through maps, or flip inscriptions with 2 clicks and buy a stack of that ore. Yes, the end game requires gold. Be it for gems to customize you character’s armor that goes nicely with Kasmere’s staff, or having a Dreamthistle Sword on your Sylvari to complete your style. This is TP Wars 2.

All the hypocrites before me tried to put you down with “why do you need gold at all?” instead of saying the truth: Almost anything you want to get is gold.

Take it from an Eternity holder. And no, I don’t need to apologize to anyone for wanting and holding that sword.

I also dislike the fact that an immersive fantasy MMO is degraded to TP, but this is the design and it will not change in GW2. In that respect, if you leave to give it time and return to check in the farther future – then leave and don’t return sadly.

- Korossive

Drop some cash and buy some gems cheapskate. Cut back on the energy drink, Starbucks coffee, or whatever expensive vice you’re addicted to and put that money into gems if you want a skin so badly.

A R W E N.6895:

medohgeuh.4650:

What else did you expect? You’re approach a game by a rule set that it doesn’t and will never follow.

No wonder you’re disappointed.

I don’t understand what you just said :S

Your assumption that top end gear and skins drop from critters. That never was the case. While leveling up you do occasionally get a drop you can use but BIS? What did you think, this was WoW? This is anti-WoW.

The closest thing you get is an extremely rare chance for a precursor, you can buy exotic temple armor for Karma and some Ascended trinkets from Fractals. They intentionally made Ascended armor and weapons a grind fest, their interpretation of running the same raid over and over and over and over again for a chance of getting a BIS item in WoW. Isn’t that what the vertical progression people wanted, the boring grind to slowly assemble your BIS items?

If you are annoyed that it costs to much to buy skins with in game gold, is that surprising? The Gem Shop is primarily a cash shop, as in real money. If you want skins fork over $25 for 2000 gems every couple of months if you don’t have the time to grind bosses, dungeon paths and fractals for gold.

I’ve been playing for about 15 months. I have roughly 250 gold. I spend 60-80g a month on gems and stay at 250 gold. I’m not going to buy a legendary weapon, ever. I would rather craft it and I knew it would take me years to do so.

But go ahead, blame TP flippers for taking everyone’s hard earn gold. Please tell me how you didn’t contribute to their earnings by selling everything to highest bid and buying from lowest sell price on the TP.

I personally blame the speed runners of CoF1 in the first six months, or the ones that thought up champ trains last summer, both cases that had so much new gold entering the system that their rewards were nerfed.

As long as you aren’t OCD for BIS, you can enjoy the game. But if you feel compelled to get BIS, you will simply descend into the grinder and learn to hate it.

“Doctor! Doctor! It hurts when I do this.”
“Then stop doing that.”

Got to inflate the price of major runes somehow.

I don’t know why you want vast sums of in game currency. Scarce vanity items or as a free source of gems for the gem shop?

But I know this was just a venting rant but I’m curious since IMO there are very few items that I think are worth saving up a lot of gold for.

At least with minor runes => major runes, I get plenty of “normal” runes out if I feed 3 “normal” with one soulbound. And I did get a sellable superior a couple of times feeding in only soulbound majors. Just not all are worth the conversion.

All together now

Chantry of Secrets!!

Create Guild, costs 1s

Earn or buy influence. 20c per point.

Research Architecture Level 1 for 500 influence + 16 hours to complete.

Research Architecture Level 2 for 1000 influence + 32 hours to complete.

Build Guild Stash, 50 slots, for 1000 influence + 2 days to complete.

Enjoy.

Funny, I thought the cap on conditional damage as to prevent bosses from being “nibbled to death by cats”.

http://youtu.be/PZ66wHRhe2U?t=18s

Go to the Players Helping Players forum and check the last three sticky threads. Full of advice and links to other resources.

There is one other thread for new players that haven’t reached sticky status yet.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/GW2-Ultimate-Newb-Guide/first

WPing all day is a wonderful way to waste money. So is dying frequently so you have to pay for repair. Big red rings, don’t stand in them.

You can’t plant yourself and wail on them and hope to survive. Most nasty things will telegraph a major attack even if the attack doesn’t have red rings. Avoid them.

Don’t use the TP as a vendor. Spend a moment or two of time and put up a sales order, you make more money that way, even if all you do is split the difference or simply undercut by a few copper.

Sounds like you are simply spending most of the money you get from events on getting to and patching up after those events. I’m soloing and making a couple gold an hour from gathering, doing DEs, the occasional champ (not a train) simply being smart about selling on the TP.

Motherboards have sizes associated with them. ATX, microATX and ITX (decreasing in size) are the three current popular sizes. Cases list what motherboard sizes they take. You may have to go the manufacturer’s site to be sure. Case specs at the manufacturer’s site can also list the maximum length of a video card that can be installed. Normally a problem only with the highest end/multi-GPU cards.

As the motherboard decreases in size the primary difference is the number of card slots but as you get really small then number of RAM slots and internal headers are likely to decrease. Then again people put small motherboards in small cases where you don’t need, can’t use, 8 SATA ports or two double wide video cards.

As for the video card, the game’s performance limitations are normally due to an underpowered CPU and not an underpowered video card.

This should give you a ballpark estimate about how powerful the R9 270 is relative to other cards in the market.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/R9_270_Direct_Cu_II_OC/26.html

You don’t think the reset affected those doing the LA event or those doing Fractals or Dungeons? It messes with everybody but it’s that Vs busted game play. Yes it was to fix featured PvE content. And sorry to point it out but PvE is the majority of the game and the event is for a limited time and this content concludes a story arc that started over a year ago.

So when would you rather have a reset caused by a patch? A few hours in sounds loads better than after a couple of days. Also remember that ANet work during Pacific Coast time and that it was more important to fix the problem for the current event before the weekend, when nobody wants to work.

Sorry but Jojo you do come off as someone who thinks WvW is more important than the non WvW game that the majority of players are playing. It’s unfortunate that your progress was reset but as I stated at the beginning, so was other non-event content.

Jabberwock.9014:

What are you on about? I was talking about the random January release of the Royal Terrace Pass, not the March Sale.

Thought you were complaining about not knowing about the March sales.

As for the original lifetime Royal Pass, yeah, it and two other items went up for sale, one day each, the first weekend in January. But I make it a habit to check the Gem Store promotions every time I log in to see what’s going away. Saw the pass, saw it was account bound and snapped it up.

I swore there was a mention in the News section but it’s not there now.

Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Jabberwock.9014:

What the hell? I didn’t even know this existed. Really unfair move putting this item in the gem shop for such a short time with little to no notice. I agree they should bring it back… I have the airship pass but those loading screens are annoying as hell.

It’s on the launcher. It’s on the web site. There have been multiple threads about it with one tracking the items on a daily basis, updated soon after the item goes up.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/march-daily-sales-in-the-gem-store/

Apple … Orange. Who cares about Fractals we are talking server moves.

Kidding, slightly. That was poorly handled. Same with rolling back crafting levels. But at least with crafting the reason for doing it was added at the same time. Have they actually implemented whatever the reason for the rollback for Fractals yet?

Im Mudbone.1437:

They would be one of the very few that doesn’t do this, every other online game I have played does this, the most recent of those that I play(-cough-Rift) has done this and was even sent an email by them of it being done.

How many of those games are subscription or were going through “server consolidation”?

If you move players against their will it causes all sorts of problems with guilds and private guild banks, which are all tied to the server. And to do this just to make a few disgruntled WvW players happy because they don’t want to pay the premium transfer price? Because they want to join the WvW Tier 1 servers?

Bet they would then complain how they are always on overflow for events.

You never close an inactive account.

You never move an inactive account to another server.

Period.

ANet have no idea why it went inactive. ANet have no idea when or if they will be back. If they do return, you do not want to have done anything to tick them off so they do leave permanently. Every player represents a chance of someone buying Gems with cash. If a person plays infrequently then it might mean there’s a higher chance that they would be interested in buying Gems with cash.

The sense of entitlement is strong here. “I want to go to X server but it’s expensive because it’s full. There must be players there ANet can kick somewhere else so I can play there (as well as pay less for the transfer).”

As far as we know server population levels, in terms of how full they are, are dynamic and based on the last X days of player logins or WvW participation. And these number vary day to day.