Guild Wars 2

Depends on what you mean as “manageable”.

Here, peruse at your leisure.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/index.html

Limited availability and limited time sales have always been effective in driving people off the fence to actually spend cash. I’m talking retail not just the gem store. Slap limited edition or President’s Day sale always tick up sales.

That’s what JC Penney’s learned when they stopped having sales an marked up items and simply offered the product permanently at the old sale price. Nobody was interested at a fair price, customers wanted the false satisfaction of saving money even if the new permanent price was the same as the old sale price. So they went back to raising the prices and have periodic sales, it was better for business.

The just started 2nd round of beta Jan 26th with Humans, Norns and Charr. 1st round had Humans, Syvari and Asura. I expect 3rd round will have all races and open up the higher level areas. Then open beta with gem shop leading into it going live which isn’t much different from open beta. Plus they are recruiting for the voice over work.

That’s the way Blade & Soul is rolling out in China. 1.5 million simultaneous players in the “beta” but a fully functioning cash shop.

Elmo Benchwarmer.3025:

No more increase of stats, level or anything else. Bigger numbers don’t add nothing to the game.

Why don’t you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

These go to eleven.

The forum and customer support isn’t 911 (or 112 or 999). All you can do is try to document it and have your friend prepare to change their email account and all of their passwords if the account gets restored.

Eviscera.9703:

This game needs world PvP for people who enjoy it. What do you guys think?

I call it the mystic slot machine.

sorudo.9054:

you know, the problem is that you make the exact same mistake as allot of other ppl, you assume there are only 2 kinds of player.

• players who are poor but have plenty of time
• players who don’t have much time but have plenty of cash to burn

what you (and many others) fail to realize is that there is a 3rd kind, the kind that is poor and barely has time to play games.
answer me this since you’re sooo smart, how do you solve that problem huh?

Then they “die”. Game can’t cater to everyone.

Before they added tickets/scraps or any other “chance for” lure the BLCs were the Whitman Sampler of Gem Store items. And they always will be. It’s just now there’s a “Chance to enter drawing for $1 million dollars” sticker on the box.

They didn’t get more expensive. They still have, for the most part, the same selection of items, most you don’t care about. But too many people have convinced themselves it’s worth the expense to buy a “sampler of chocolates, most which you don’t like” just for that chance. On top of that the random nature and questionable odds hides the true price of ticket skins. Eve players got into a tizzy over an $80 costume item, here we are talking $100s just to get a popular skin.

locx.6412:

FXAA – turn it off
Reflections – turn it to terrain & sky at most
Shadows – turn it to low at most
Postprocessing – turn it off
CharQuality – turn it to medium at most
CharLimit – turn it low at most

FXAA is a GPU only function. It’s a post process filter that has extremely little impact on framerate or CPU usage. Turn it off because you don’t like the side effects but it doesn’t bog down the CPU.

An index showing which patch is which by title would eliminate flipping back to the LS page and checking dates.

Please start your own thread Arienn. Just because it crashes doesn’t mean it’s the same cause.

Ebonhawke is off of a free waypoint cross town. The various orders only have waypoints to and from the front line in Orr.

You mean The Grove? Well I’ve found multi-level areas can be a problem. And The Grove with it’t organic and bioluminescent nature is probably more complex than say Divinity’s Reach.

Teriyaki beef on a sword.

Roybe.5896:

Short answer: Never.

Agreed. If ANet truly wants to limit vertical progression then they’ll never raise the level cap.

Just don’t bring it to Meatoberfest.

“Hey, who ate my sword?”

XFlyingBeeX.2836:

Jaguar x4 2.0Ghz = 1.99 cb
Fx 4300 2.0Ghz = 1.7 cb
that is my benchmark

You didn’t say same clock speed. Of course the FX is worse, the IPC (instructions per clock) is terrible on the Bulldozer/Piledriver/Steamroller architecture. Why else does a 3.2GHz Phenom II 955 beat a 3.8GHz FX-4300 by a couple percent in CineBench?

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/88?vs=700

This is a flashback to Intel where you needed a 30% boost in clockspeed on the Pentium IV to get the same result on the Pentium III.

If you going to make bold statements at least define the parameters of the comparison first.

Tom’s has to do another one of these architecture reviews, one core, no turbo, same clock speed. Really shows off the IPC.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/processor-architecture-benchmark,2974-15.html

Not to sound flippy but that’s what character bound means. You can’t move it to another character. You can strip the skin and put it on a generic white armor and move that but you lose the stats.

The thing about HT on an Intel core is you are trading multitasking two threads at full speed for simultaneous execution at possibly faster than half speed. I don’t know how well Intel’s HyperThreading efficiency improves with Corel Painter. It could be less than 10% or over 30%. And how much gain can be attributed to HT versus the slight clock bump and 2MB additional L3 cache isn’t clear either.

But if this rig isn’t just gaming and you can afford the extra $100, get the 4770K.

Three things. First assuming the game isn’t on an SSD, defrag the drive with the game on it. After a month there are a lot of patches.

Second, grab GPU-Z and check to make sure the PCIe bus initialized correctly and the video card has a x16 connection. I think CPU-Z can show this as well.

Third, make sure Windows Update didn’t “help” and download a new graphics driver that Microsoft thinks are newer Vs the latest on AMD’s site.

The game prefers more than two cores and the GT 240 is quite weak. A 64-bit OS will help a bit but other than avoiding paging and caching more of the game files, it’s impact in the big scheme of things shouldn’t be that significant.

At no time I’ve ever thought to myself “What I need now in the middle of nowhere is a MF”. Heck I don’t even use the remote TP and Bank items and I got them for free.

Tree, Kabini is a particular core’s name. Jaguar is the architecture name.

The A6-5200 is a quad core Jaguar (Kabini) at 2.0GHz.

However this review doesn’t show it’s performance in Cinemark even close to either an older 3.0GHz K10 or 4.1GHz Steamroller APU quads. The PS4 and XBone uses 8 Jaguar cores at roughly 1.6GHz.

http://adrenaline.uol.com.br/biblioteca/analise/784/amd-a6-5200-kabini.html?pg=03

I don’t disagree with the point that multiple cores are better. But it’s only better if the app takes advantage of it, or if multiple apps are running. XBox 360 had 3 cores and the PS3 had one main core and eight simpler cores. Multicores isn’t a new thing for either of those console manufacturers.

But to embrace Dx11 or Mantle, this game’s renderer will need to be reorganized to divide and balance the load across multiple threads to get the most advantage out of these APIs. Just using them doesn’t automatically make the game faster, that’s the point we’re making.

Personally I’ve been ignoring the LS. It has gotten too team oriented/huge event for me. I prefer LS segments where I can accomplish most of the achievements without being forced to play with a bunch of control freaks (aka Commanders) or those who’ve played the content 24/7 since it’s introduction and gets upset that you didn’t read the guides or watch the YouTube videos so you know what to do.

I can understand that ANet wanted a “raid” style event that forces more structured play but the vast majority of the game isn’t that. The arcs introduced Scarlett and the Clockwork Nightmares was the last LS I really participated in. Everything since then was just annoying.

It’s ok. Prefer more info like time active, in or out of window for the major events.

I now remember those. Distract, grab, rez.

Depends on where you aren’t getting 60fps.

The game chokes when there are a lot of other players around and it’s a CPU side problem rather than GPU. So gathering spots in cities, WvW zergs and boss events will drag the frame rate down.

Now if it’s a problem when you aren’t in a crowd of players, then turn down or off reflections and consider dialing shadows back. Both of those are more CPU than GPU bound. FXAA isn’t a problem performance wise, just clarity wise (eliminates jaggies while adding blur in some textures).

But if you are getting 45fps running at max settings without any tweaks then congrats, you are ahead of the game.

You bought a skin, they don’t necessarily comes with stats. You have to transmute it onto existing armor of your choice. 1st time is free, after that you have to use Transmutation Stones up to level 79 armor (one for each of the six pieces) or Transmutation Crystals for level 80 armor.

As Donari points out stones are easy to come by, crystals are sold in the Gem store and are very rare drops.

If you are patching, then that speed is a problem.

If you are playing then that is normal. People always underestimate the amount of data actually being exchanged with the servers per second while playing.

Attack of the 1c buy orders followed by purchase or removal of the few available and posting 1 at an enormous price. Likely end the same way as all previous attempts at low supply items with no minimum bid.

Like any company designing a new tech device both Sony and Microsoft put out a bid of what they wanted. Whoever had to meet performance, price, power and cooling requirements and had to be in production in quantity x months ahead of the console’s launch. Sony dug a hole with the PS3 CPU thinking it could have been used elsewhere and wasn’t. Even built a costly chip fab to make it. Microsoft understood that maybe embracing and x86 based CPU could help with getting a jump on game development as well as porting to or from the PC plus they used AMD graphics in the 360.

Both happen to like AMD’s combo of 8 lite-weight x86 cores (1.6GHz Kabini core is about as fast as a downclocked to 1.6GHz original Core 2 core; it’s not using the FX architecture) coupled with AMD’s current graphics architecture over anything Intel or nVidia had available at the time of the console’s design. One chip is cheaper than two.

Yes, phishing. See the phishing thread.

@Avelos – Mantle is an API to the AMD GCN video cards. Has nothing directly to do with the CPU. It helps AMD CPU performance more than Intel because AMD is slower. By reducing the CPU overhead in the API and driver code a slower processor can communicate all the info to render the frame in a shorter amount of time, but it still needs the card to render that data into a frame. Intel is so much quicker to begin with that the CPU overhead in terms of elapse time was smaller to begin with. So going from 10t CPU/40t GPU per frame to 5t CPU/40t GPU isn’t as much of a boost as going from 30t CPU/40t GPU to 15t/40t GPU (t is some time unit, didn’t want to use an actual unit here).

@XFlyingBeeX – Starswarm isn’t a real game yet, but a tech demo. Just like Unigine is used just to show off tessellation. All Starswarm shows is the possibilities that Mantle can provide. That said various site’s benchmark on BF4 using Mantle have come up way short compared to the press release from AMD. I chalk that to marketing department hype and the selective filtering of marketing people’s hearing.

Consoles are an entirely different can of worms. They know at an OS level exactly what hardware is in the system. This means you do not have to abstract from from API to driver to hardware. That can provide an enormous advantage when talking to hardware in terms of performance. Mantle drivers still have to adapt to a wide range of similar hardware so it’s not quite as good as a console in terms of eliminating CPU overhead. The CPU utilization is higher because it can loop through the renderer faster without all the translation between abstraction layers. It was taking so long in Dx11 that the rest of the Starswarm demo was waiting on the renderer.

Right now this game uses Dx9. Dx9 is not thread safe so you can’t have multiple threads calling the Dx9 API and expect it to work properly. That is the current limiting factor in this game, the renderer must be, at the point of calling Dx9 routines, a single thread. And it’s because of this that FX class CPUs aren’t the best at this game as their performance of a single core in a multi-threaded program just isn’t as fast as Intel’s.

And don’t bring streaming into this. That’s like comparing 0-60 times between cars but only when they are towing an RV. The rest of us are talking about performance just playing the game. Not the game and some other CPU intensive task.

Sina.9208:

Behellagh.1468:

And the price. $10 versus 100+g.

I don’t see how. Gold -> Gem conversion makes them pretty much the same.

You really haven’t looked have you?

$10 or 800 gems right now will get you about 60 gold. Back when Flamekissed first went on sale, after the spike it was 46+ gold. And if you converting gold to gems? Only 64+ gold was needed then. Both cases well short of the 119 gold for a T3 set.

I understand why they did it. It was a means of getting the gold used to pay for gems without mucking up the economy. It’s also a way to try to take a bite out of 3rd party RMT groups that in reality use it as a means to get access to account and credit card/paypal info, which is never good for an MMO to have their customers preyed upon.

Devata.6589:

timidobserver.7925:

Wow, some of you guys are really tagging the heck out of that cash shop. They are making an insane amount of money.

Not everybody is able to handle money. Anet uses some tactics to get people to buy gems. Make everything a grind to get people to buy gems and put items in the cash-shop temporary so they buy it before it’s gone, RNG for those with gambling problems.

Just marketing tricks and some people easily fall for it.

It’s only a grind because ANet lets players convert in game coin into gems. The question that we will never know is how well would the game have done if that wasn’t an option.

People may interpret what I’m saying as bashing AMD but I’m not. But I’m not going to sit on the side lines when someone says the FX-8350 is only as fast as an i3 either without saying “in this game”. The charts I linked to earlier does show the FX-8350 performing fine in other games. It all depends how many compute intensive threads the game can use. GW2 simply doesn’t have many so all those extra cores and modules simply doesn’t help.

I’ve also always contended that people have underestimated the advantage that Intel CPUs have with the PCIe controller for the graphics card so tightly integrated into the rest of the CPU where AMD still uses there hypertransport bus to talk to not only the PCIe controller in the NB but all other peripherals in the SB.

Swoo.5079:

morrolan.9608:

Swoo.5079:

Are official numbers enough for you or do you prefer unofficial studies from entities that pop up from thin air?

There’s no break up there to do a like for like analysis, plus there’s the issue of currency conversion. If the numbers are dramatically wrong why hasn’t there been any sort of response?

And besides the numbers quoted by the OP wouldn’t put GW2 into the top 10 anyway so there probably isn’t any conflict.

Because it is just a study with no legal value.

The Chinese government doesn’t let the RMB to change its value much against the dollar – for the last 12 months the CNY/USD low:0.16007, high:0.16575.

That doesn’t explain the difference between $1.7Bn that Crossfire+LoL generated in the study vs the $3.3Bn that Tencent generated in their online games – they have to have another 14 games all selling $100M.

But there is more discrepancies.
Lineage 1 is not a free to play game (unless I’m quite mistaken). But according to that study it generated $251M of microtransactions revenue. But in NCSoft report Lineage 1 generated $271M total revenue, including subscriptions.

First, 95.2% of Lineage 1 sales is just from South Korea. Second any sales run by a third party like it is in China is lumped in with Royalties and isn’t assigned to the particular game. Third, since it’s run by Tencent, they can run the game as F2P, just like every other of their licensed games. Just to be clear, Lineage is NOT F2P in South Korea.

Yeah I jumped the gun there. It doesn’t hurt that GW2 has a tie in to GW in keeping GW alive.

Swoo.5079:

Behellagh.1468:

EverythingXen.1835:

As an NCSoft property, those profits need to be considerably higher to avoid shuttering and closure.

I hope the upcoming Asian release picks up the slack.

There are no profits listed, these are income numbers, ie sales. So bringing in 1/6th of NCSOFT’s total income isn’t enough to avoid shuttering. Then what about Aion, Blade & Soul and Lineage II which is bringing in less sales than GW2?

What about Guild Wars 1?

I’m not sure profits or lack of them is the only reason NCSoft close games.
Asian culture is a bit different than our western culture – it isn’t all about profits (they are surely important) but also about loyalty and commitment.
If an Asian company think/believes you aren’t doing your best, they will stop doing business with you, even if you bring profits.

They didn’t shutter Guild Wars 1, it’s still alive and well. It’s just it’s income is now lumped into the “other” category when GW2 came out.

That’s why I use a 20% markup as a rule of thumb. It’s easy to do in your head and has a tiny profit of 2%.

EverythingXen.1835:

As an NCSoft property, those profits need to be considerably higher to avoid shuttering and closure.

I hope the upcoming Asian release picks up the slack.

There are no profits listed, these are income numbers, ie sales. So bringing in 1/6th of NCSOFT’s total income isn’t enough to avoid shuttering. Then what about Aion, Blade & Soul and Lineage II which is bringing in less sales than GW2?

DeathMetal.8264:

Any news how Gw2 is being received in China?

Still in Beta.

I posted some links in a now defunk thread, let me repost them here. You will either need to read Chinese or use a web page language translator.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/news/20131212/1083.html
http://gw2.kongzhong.com/news/20131114/1045.html

But those are old, here is their news/announcements page.

http://gw2.kongzhong.com/latest/

Edit: Digging around some more it looks like a new Beta started up Jan 23rd and includes just Humans, Norns and Char. The previous one just had Humans, Sylvari and Asura. Interesting how they are testing in chunks.

Also they are also looking for voice talent so the game must only have text translated so far.

Neurophen.9738:

I noticed something interesting today, somebody’s placed moderate size buy orders (~160) for 4s for pretty much every type of major rune. For some of the runes this nearly 75c more then the next highest bid.

I’m curious as to why somebody might do that, does anyone have any theories? My theory is that perhaps the market is small enough that this could result in price rises across the board and whoever placed those buy orders is hoping that all those buy orders will never actually fulfilled (because somebody else will eventually bid 1c higher) and they’ll be able to sell a bunch of runes at a higher price than normal.

Someone is doing the same with minor runes. 1000 orders at the current or 1c higher price on every low price minor rune, every day. No idea what they are doing with all of them. Takes a while to MF even 500 of them.

Gibson.4036:

Minos.5168:

Gold-to-Gem conversions do not make ArenaNet any money.

More people buy gems with gold, the price of gems goes up.

The price of gems goes up, more people buy gems to trade for gold.

ArenaNet makes money.

Yes, that’s the theory. Not sure how true it is yet.

And the price. $10 versus 100+g.

To eliminate money bags from simply buying a set. Same reason as some of the components are time gated. You want it, vertical progression, make it yourself.

But as an expansion it really was the same game engine with a different set of art assets and professions. True set in the same world but you didn’t need to own the first to play the second or third. True if you owned both (or all) they dove tail together to a degree but they were three much smaller MMO-lite games. In GW2 they tried to expand the world of the original game while eliminating the hub-instance model of GW which limited party size.