It is pretty clear that ML is becoming a real cancer in this game. It should have been removed a long time ago but for some reason they let it continue. Hopefully they will remove it soon before the damage is long lasting.
It is pretty obvious that getting 60 rares in 20 minutes is over the top.
And what is your reasoning for this aside from “muh feels” and/or “Muh ecto hoard value”?
Ectos are a central commodity in the GW2 economy. A substantial change in their value affects the value of nearly everything else. Ascended gear, legendaries, unique skins. You name it and ectos are involved. The devs have said multiple times over the years that they try to keep the value of ectos stable and high to keep items in the game from becoming worthless. If ectos dip much further items with prestige and long term goals will evaporate and the long term stability of the game will suffer.
So “muh feels” it is.
Worthless is also a subjective term. What someone with 5 digits of gold in their wallet and tens of thousands in assets thinks is “worthless” is a far cry from what the average normie thinks is worthless. Even 15s ecto would still present a large effort on their part and they make up the vast majority of players and people who actually buy gems with money and not gold.
There is also this
From the June 2013 patch notes:
“Globs of ectoplasm can now be salvaged into Piles of Crystalline Dust. This change should help Globs of Ectoplasm maintain a strong value in the economy and lower the cost of Crystalline Dust.”
In which they put in a way to salvage ectos. Thus lowering the supply of ectos that are on the trading post and keeping the price up.
As well as provide a “minable” source of T6 dust which was in very short supply. Went from under 5k @ 39s to 20k @ 14s in a day. The bump in ecto price, 18 to 21s, was gone in two weeks. Significant ecto price movement didn’t happen that year until the last 3 weeks of August when the price doubled.
Zoning into high player populated areas takes longer. Plus LA is very open so more of the map needs to be loaded to render since there’s limited opportunities to occlude coupled with a high poly count. Monitoring the apps use of the drive during loading shows a lot of data being read so maybe, if the game isn’t on an SSD, to give the disk (or just the game folder) a nice defrag to reduce any excess head moves on the disk, a real throughput killer.
I’ve also noticed an impact on load times with your connection speed. Likely state data related to the zone’s NPCs.
The inflection point was around the time the 3rd raid wing and WvW reward tracks (out of beta) including the change for Gift of Battle, came out (June 14th). Could just be coincidence or a contributor.
I just do the easier dailies as they reward 250 extra points toward a 20K point reward track. 500 for the harder dailies, which really aren’t that hard, I do capture two camps.
Several dailies you can double, even triple up on. And then there are the normal participation points you get rewarded every 5 minutes. As long as you can accept you will be killed frequently, it’s not that bad.
The issue is multiple instances of a map close out around the same time after some major event is over. But since the close at different times, you may end up going to one that others are leaving from and that map gets dinged to close.
My solution is not to exit when first offered. You can get the buff anytime before you are forced out.
Ecto’s value is primarily set by requiring their use in crafting rare and exotic gear as well as that gear being the primary source from salvaging them. Since HoT they were also needed in large amounts for GH upgrades. Because of the gear aspect they are the cornerstone of the game’s economy as they help set the minimum price of gear on the TP which influences the price of MF created precursors. Salvaging also creates mats that can’t be easily farmed from the environment although the new cloth and leather nodes in GH and WvW are creating an impact in supply and thus price, once supply is satiated.
Now I think ANet is happier with 25-30 silver price for them than anything lower.
This boils down to some guilds fearing “leechers”. Sorry, that’s going to happen anyway. Players are going to rep, mine the nodes, get the free boosts, leave and unrep.
So it’s up to the guild leadership to make it attractive to stay repped, not find ways to punish those that may unrep for a few hours to rep say a streamer’s guild when you go to content with them on stream. Or a guild that raids but is relaxed enough that they are raiding for “fun” and learning and not for maximum efficiency. Or one that helps those who have never, run dungeons and fractals with out the fear of being pressed to “move on to the next” before they are able to get the reward or worse kicked before reward cause LOL.
You want them to help the guild, make you running of guild missions enjoyable. So it’s up to the attitude of the guild that should make guild members stay repped. Not some carrot beyond what a GH provides while repped.
Anet could also consider to nerf the ecto salvage rate from 0.9 to 0.7 per salvage
That would be bad. There was a time when I made my money from salvaging and selling ectos. All dropping the salvage rate will do is depress the rare item market because a factor in their current price is their worth in salvage. It’ll take time for the ecto supply to drain enough for it’s price to recover.
It’s tied to the same reason rare runes are virtually at vendor price,
The bulk of rare runes is priced at 4 times the vendor value of 30c or higher.
Major runes you get from salvaging armor bought off the TP vend at 1.08s. Major runes you craft are vend at 30s but you can’t get them from armor on the TP. Due to TP fees and taxes, the 1.08s major runes can’t be priced less than 1.28s. Right now those are hovering around 1.29 to 1.31s.
It’s tied to the same reason rare runes are virtually at vendor price, too much rare armor is being dropped plus it’s very easy to salvage quickly now resulting in lots of runes, ectos and a bit of mats.
Plus it’s not an all time low, just a local minima. Since the start of June we’ve gone from a TP supply of ectos at 27K and they’re now over 700K. That helped drive the price down from 55s to around 30s each.
Spirit shards drop, a lot. I went below 1000 when I was crafting my ascended armor and weapons a few months a go and now I’m over 1100 again. And that’s after spending the 3 I get from doing my dailies, every day, on mat promotions. Don’t really notice from where.
Currently in Gw2 if you want something you grind the gold for it then you buy it. These range from outfits, gliders, weapon skins and so on. I would love to see rewards gated behind the in-game content. For example, with the release of Ember bay, we could have had specific armor, weapons, and glider gated behind the hearts by making it so you have to complete the 5 hearts for 30 days in a row then you unlock a vendor who sells those specific items. The specialisation collections is another example of a great way to reward players but it seems like it stopped with the specialisation weapons. If gliders and weapon/armor skins were gated behind collections it would encourage players to do more than just the next best farm for gold, they will actually go out and play the games content. It makes old content relevant which is like adding new content to the game and it also gives players a reason to explore the world once more.
If half the outfits,weapon skins, and gliders that come out on the gem shop were put in-game there would be MUCH MUCH more content to look forward to do. Rewards are what make people go back to areas that they out lvled or are no longer relevant. Rewards are what give content longevity.
You guys think we need a overhaul on the reward system or are you guys happy the way it is?
Cheers.
Except you overlook the fact that the gem shop is the primary means of cash flow for game development, remember no monthly subscription. This means there has to be a constant flow of new skins and items into the gem shop to give long time players yet another item that they may buy gems, with real money, to get. Without a stream of new stuff, long time players will eventually buy everything that ever interested them and they will no longer be a source of cash flow for the company.
Also remember that the gems you bought with gold were once bought with cash and sold for gold. And the exchange rate goes up if more players buy gems with gold than sell gems for gold and goes down when the reverse is true. So at the end of the day, somebody paid cash for gems even if it wasn’t you.
That said I agree that it would be nice to earn an skins or items from events in game rather than just the gem shop.
Both the i5 and i7 desktop CPUs are quad cores (excluding the Socket 2011 V3 i7 CPUs which are 6 and 8 core). The major differences are the i7 has the ability to have two threads run on a single core (hyperthreading), additional L3 cache and a higher out of box clock speed when comparing top end i5 to top end i7 (currently the i5-6600K and i7-6700K).
Now this sounds great, the i7 can run 8 threads at the same time while the i5 can only run 4 but it’s not that simple. WARNING: TECHNOBABBLE Intel cores are overbuilt with more duplicate internal resources than needed on average when executing a single thread. However with hyperthreading, they can improve the overall utilization of all those internal resources thus squeezing a higher instruction per cycle out of the same core. Depending on the type of threads, it can a quite a bit or in some instances worse performance. The drawback HT has is the i5 and i7 has the same size L1 and L2 memory caches and running two threads at the same time will increase cache misses in the i7 which can cause the CPU to stall, which is why the L3 cache is 33% larger on the i7 trying to mitigate that. END TECHNOBABBLE
The benchmarks I’ve seen say that HT gives you an average 5-10% improved performance at the same clock speed. Games historically don’t show much of an advantage with HT, some gamers will disable it in BIOS.
Basically it’s a value call. Spend an additional $100 or so for slightly better per clock performance if both are overclocked to the same speed; or spend that money on a better video card; or pocket it.
As for the ancient i7 vs modern i5 … yes quite a bit faster, like 40-60% faster with the new i5s.
The issue the OP is asking about is also one on my mind as well. Last Halloween wasn’t the only time a recurring festival had what many saw to be a major bug but are told it’s too late or too dangerous to fix it mid festival and it’ll be addressed for the next festival. We simply want ANet to follow through rather than the feeling some of us get that a statement like that was issued just to placate the masses with the issue promptly forgotten.
How many bugs remain in existing content only for ANet to sound surprised if there’s a concerted effort to inform them. In the last AMA they seemed surprised to hear that there are bugs in the last raid wing. It only takes someone to watch a streamed Raid to see the frustration players are having. And it just gets to a point where reporting doesn’t seem to go anywhere. As a software developer I can understand the difficulty in reproducing a bug in something as dynamic as a Raid but to declare Raids are bug free is simply sticking their head in the sand.
As for “incoming”, MO addressed this in the recent AMA when asked about the following statements in NCSOFT’s conference call;
What we are planning to do going forward is that we are going to shorten the span for the next launch of the expansion pack. So right now we are in the phase for preparing for the 2nd expansion pack we ae going to shorten the launch timing between the different boxes that we launch to create more momentum.
MO’s response
Remember, NCSOFT is our parent company, but decisions about GW2 come from us. Don’t read too much into a one-off statement like that. Someday we’ll have a lot to talk about regarding the next expansion pack, but not today, and not any time soon.
Most likely that message is only seen when they’ve limited generation of instances. For a while earlier you simply got a network error message. I’m going to make a wild guess and say something was amiss with the megaserver “supervisor” that spawns/despawns instances so they temporarily placed a cap and what we then got was a message we normally don’t ever see. It’s a SWAG, could have also been a hardware issue at the data center.
Who knows, maybe they found a limit on instance spawning with too many people wanting in on Ember Bay?
Well Gift of Battle can only be gotten in WvW so yes, it does force people to participate like 6 to 8 hours in WvW to earn it from it’s track. This is a relatively recent change as in the past you could simply buy it with Badges of Honor which you could have gotten from other non-WvW activities. So that complaint is valid.
Simple Mikuchan, PvE areas are suppose to be, according to ANet, someplace where you never worry about seeing another player.
Why do you want to sully this “safe” mode of the game with players fighting other players anywhere on any map? I know that if I’m at an NPC like bank, tp, or crafting station I don’t want a fight to wander into it. Costume brawl is annoying enough and it’s not an effect laden combat.
Is it about having other players witnessing the fight that wants you not to do it in the designated game modes or areas?
I see a lot of recommendations about starting up a new character and play them enough to get a hang on all the systems and how they may have changed since you were last here.
Biggest thing now are the trait rework into specializations. It’s important to note here that upon level 80, you will have enough hero points (formerly skill points) to unlock every base specialization traits and every skill on your character. You can always get there quicker by doing the hero point challenges through out the maps but it will never be a case where you don’t have enough to unlock everything upon hitting 80.
Our goal for Guild Wars 2 has always been to deliver a beautiful fantasy world that runs on a wide range of hardware configurations. We have therefore focused on DirectX 9, because it is more common and we want our game reach as many fans as possible.
If and when DirectX 11 comes to Guild Wars 2, the team will decide after the release.
There was also this post quoted in a thread at a 3rd party site
For those of you who have been asking about DX11 support for Guild Wars 2, our goal with GW2 has always been to provide a gorgeous fantasy world while at the same time running on a wide range of gaming PCs.
Focusing on DX9 allows us to do this, as it’s a much wider supported graphics API than DX11 is and we wanted our game to reach as many of our fans as possible.
We will be evaluating supporting DX11 post launch. ~RB2
I can’t imagine less than 1/2 price on the official web site. Box editions in official retail or online stores might go for less during the holidays. But $15. Try two years out when the next expansion is ready to drop.
No, I think Taimi is being used as the stand in for the player when it comes to questions and complaints. This time it’s the name of the Deep Sea Dragon and Rytlok “Zipper Lips” Brimstone’s story with what happened to him in the mist. In HoT it was Rox asking the questions players wanted to know the answers to..
Read my last paragraph again, and respond accordingly. Patch notes don’t equal story recap. That’s what the release page is for.
I did and my response is the same. The major part of this patch is the LS3 content and after part of the first sentence you can always stop reading that paragraph and skip down to the other portions like I did (because it looked to be a recap of episode 1).
