Guild Wars 2

Zacchary.6183:

They should just reduce the gem price of everything and then remove the gem conversion. That kind of stuff can be bad for an MMO anyways.

That’s not going to happen because the cost in gems is set in reference to the 80 gems per dollar/euro (0.85 pounds). Don’t forget it’s buying gems for cash is what keeps the game running. Why would they decide to reduce their only source of long term income?

killcannon.2576:

As always, depends on who you ask.

Current rate shows that not as many people are buying gems and turning them to gold as there were in the early stages of the game. Might see a dip in price as X-mas season comes and goes with new players coming in and gem cards given as gifts. Or not…who knows.

The reason it was less in the early stages of the game is because there were more gems and less gold in the exchange than there are now. It’s the ratio between the two that set the rates. As you buy gems you are adding gold and removing gems, thus making gems worth more gold. When you sell gems to get gold the reverse is true. Both transactions take a 15% cut of the gold which creates the gap between the two rates.

Gems are not created from scratch when you use the exchange, neither is gold. You are simply withdrawing or depositing into the two pools that are there. When the game started the exchange was seeded when an enormous amount of gems and a bit of gold which is why the rate was so low back then.

And yes, in theory the exchange can run out of gems but the price before that happens would skyrocket and thus encourage gems being bought with cash and exchanged for gold which would push the rate back down.

Well you’ll have a slew of new games to be disappointed in in 2014. Good luck with that.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

To each his own. Some time turn based RPGs. Some like FPS. Some time real time strategy. Some like action games. Some like sports based games.

If you love MMOs, you should play this game. If you hate MMOs, you should definitely play this game.

Saw what you did there.

I believe the game can use all available resolutions your monitor supports as long as your graphics module supports it as well.

As for performance you are pushing 30% more pixels and I believe you will have a wider field of vision so more polys to process per frame.

I would suggest you look for CrossFireX/SLi threads about performance, I remember a few here.

I don’t disagree that it’s a pricey item but there must be both interest in one and evidence that players would pay that much for it.

Creeper.9360:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

Why would they waste resources on an app when the game is doing poorly?

how is it doing poorly?

He’s said so. Someday he’ll be right, just hedging his bets.

I’ve found them in Walmart, Target and Best Buy in their video game area but I’m East Coast.

You’re ignoring the fact the item is also kept intact. After all right now you can use a BLSK to recover the sigil/rune at the loss of the item. That’s only 12 gems (per salvage) if you don’t have a pile of them like everyone I know. Plus it recovers infusions if that’s what you want to save.

If you define this as an exploit what about gifting 1 key and buying the 25 bulk key item at 40% off for yourself.

Actually it peaked at 9.75g per 100 for a short time when a patch went live on the 3rd. Forgot what the gem store carrot was that day but interest was short lived. Probably all the Mr Sparkles fans cashing in their 4000 gems drove the rate back down.

But why should ANet change the way the gem exchange works? Because you (collective you) think it’s too expensive now? It’s right where it needs to be to start attracting gold buyers.

Well file a support ticket and ask them. It’s obvious that none of us have an idea how to fix it.

Likely at some point. They’ve done so with many items put they will be up for a much shorter time period so you will need to keep a look out for them.

There was two people. The reporter and the GM/CS person that reviewed it.

Sometimes you get a bad streak. I did 97 a day or two ago and got only 64 Higher than normal misses, lower than normal doubles/triples but pretty spot on for singles.

Lord Kuru.3685:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

Lord Kuru.3685:

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

(And let’s face it folks, ascended armor and weapons are not necessities, even in WvW)

Ascended gear, especially weapons do make a difference in WvW. Just the damage numbers from weapons make a HUGE difference if you have zerker gear; power, crit chance, and crit damage come together to make seemingly small numbers quite significant.

In PvE these numbers add up even more as full zerker gear is much more prevalent.

Here’s an interesting thought:

A group that does more damage due to Ascended gear finishes dungeons faster, so does more dungeon runs, and thus makes more gold than they did when they wore exotics. So more gold is entering the economy than before, raising prices in the TP. But that gold is not uniformly distributed. Those with Ascended get more of it, so those with exotics are left with rising prices, but the same income as before. Of course this is rough and theoretical, but I think it’s something to think about.

I did not say that they did not make a ‘difference.’ I said they are not necessities. There is a difference.

If you’re falling behind gold-wise or are far underpowered in WvW, it gets closer to being a necessity.

Not if you don’t play or care about WvW. Or care about running min/max FotM builds to be “optimal”. For instance, I run with level 79 exotic armor because it’s cheaper for me to re-skin repeatedly. Gasp, but you aren’t running level 80, you’re at such a disadvantage. But I don’t care. If I get ganked in WvW it’s usually by a crew versus just me and that outcome is preordained. BIS gear won’t save me when it’s 5 on 1. And if I’m in a middle of a zerg crashing at the walls it doesn’t matter a whole lot there either that I’m not in BIS gear. I’m not proficient enough in PvP style fighting for it to make any difference.

So in my case, why should I bother to grind for BIS when it would make a difference? Legendary weapon, sure but they are cool looking. Who doesn’t want a Greatsword that shows space when you swing it about? But armor for just a few stat points? No reason for me to get it.

And that’s going to be the make or break of the Steam platform. AMD and nVidia doing a decently optimized OpenGL/CL driver. I expect AMD would rather focus on Mantle for the platform and simply write an OpenGL wrapper for it.

Which brings me to my tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. What I hate is how the game development/GPU manufacturer has gotten into this dance where the later will provide the former with hand optimized shaders so the game scores better on the benchmarks websites use to rate video cards then spend the time writing a better shader compiler so everyone benefits, not just the big FPS games. Or you could align yourself with one of the two who will help you write your shader code so it does compile better on that manufacturers GPU rather than the other guys. And God forbid if your game isn’t one of the ones that are popular enough to use as a benchmark. Good luck to you in getting the best performance out of your shader. There’s a reason people that the drivers are over 150MB in size. There’s a reason why this beta driver suddenly makes new sexy game 30% faster and it has nothing to do with creating a better driver.

Tinfoil hat off.

They don’t price a Gem Store item in relation to the gem exchange rate, only the cash value.

However taking the gold cost for those gems is a valid argument why it’s pointless to use such an item to save a pricey but still not as expensive as the extractor. Of course if you have plenty of disposable income, which is what the market is aiming at, then it may be worthwhile.

Remember, a lot of the “helpful” items at the shop is for those players who don’t have the time to play as much as the “hard core”. Therefore items like the extractor or selling gems for gold is there.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Smooth Penguin.5294:

I had no idea that coding an MMO was as easy as simply switching out a few scripts.

For something like wiping your story progress to zero, it absolutely should be that easy…

Unless you have very poor programming practices … which is unfortunately, possible — witness Anet’s inability to match skill descriptions with their actual functionality; for example the slayer potions bug where you take x% more damage from the listed foe instead of x% less.

Trust me, you don’t want programmers to write the descriptions. That’s what the tech writers are for.

So collectors are never going to spend either gold or gems ever again? Yeah, I don’t think so.

Hmmm. Report it in the bug forum as well as in game. The game is targeted for release in China during the 1st half of 2014 so I would expect that they have this locked down by now.

Aza.2105:

Behellagh.1468:

Grebcol.5984:

problem is gw 2 doenst have good mutlicore support and there is the main problem.i think when this game use 2-3 cores it will run a lot smoother than now.

It already uses 2-3 cores, it just doesn’t scale past that. The game is multithreaded, it has over 40 threads running but only 8 or so are using 20% or more of a core each with two at around 50% and one using above 75%. The performance of that lone 75% thread determines overall performance which is why people keep referring to single thread performance. The faster the CPU, the faster that thread can run and the higher the frame rate.

A faster GPU doesn’t help because it’s binding on the CPU side of the renderer, setting up all the calls to the driver. The game uses Dx9 so the renderer can’t be multithreaded easily if at all.

Reflections and shadows are both CPU intensive, turning down those options will improve your frame rate.

Its making poor use of multi core cpus. Lineage 2 uses 2 cores as well and it still runs at 20fps on todays machines. Do not try to make excuses for the optimization in this game, by no means does this game genuinely take advantage of multi threading.

Well Lineage 2 is using Unreal Engine 2.5. I’m sure if NCSOFT rolled their own engine for it as oppose to adapting to a FPS engine their performance wouldn’t be so hot either.

Yes but the renderer is in it’s own thread and it’s synced with the driver thread. Multithreading I/O is problematic if all the threads are vying for the same resource like drive access in which case the threads queue up for access and wait their turn. True the main thread could continue but at some point it’s going to want that data and have to wait itself.

I hate that a core hardware upgrade is required to “fix” a problem.

Sounds more like a problem with Windows since I suspect the game merely uses whatever language support the OS provides them as input. Does the correct characters come out in say Notepad?

All Valve is doing is suggesting Steam OS be a standard PC gaming OS. Streamline it for gaming and media center functions ala consoles but have the system’s hardware upgradable unlike consoles which require total replacement every N years and no backward compatibility. Make driver updates as automatic as game updates via Steam and make PC hardware as easy to use as a console.

It helps that consoles, by going to hard drives or flash storage over the last two generations help train gamers about day zero patches, which was starting to be an embarrassment to PC games.

There is a TP downside with expanding collections. Without a small limit players will hoard and not sell excess mats and a constant stream of supply is what makes the TP work.

Grind is when you need to do something you don’t like to get the thing you want. It could be gold, XP, items, mats, 10 rat quests, etc. And that’s the problem, everyone defines it differently because everyone’s goal playing is different.

The devs put out a bunch of carrots to steer players into certain activities to keep them busy much the way you have a scavenger hunt for a child’s birthday party. You can try to do some of them, all of them or none of them, that’s up to you. You have to decide if the carrot is worth the “grind” of doing X of whatever or X different things.

Anasurimbor.5763:

Behellagh.1468:

Welcome to Monday were speculators come out to play anticipating Tuesday’s patch.

I suppose so, but they’ve sat at 8c for months, with no buy orders, and just the change today has been bananas.

Seems odd, is all.

http://www.gw2tp.com/item/19729-thick-leather-section

http://www.gw2spidy.com:8080/item/19729

AHHH, do i dump some now or wait. always the fun question

Well looking at the month chart it appears the hording started back on the 4th, but it takes a while to eliminate 8 million items posted at 8c.

The fact that tab had always been called collections and I would say most of us didn’t notice or care, thing it’a all just part of the bank made it so easy to misunderstand what the expanders were for and how they would work. This language barrier is always a problem between developers and users in software. So something that was obvious to them what it’s purpose was turned out to be not so obvious to numerous players. It goes back to the first Reddit rumors about this months ago and the speculation that it would affect all places that had a 250 unit limit.

I blame the lack of documentation/in your face tutorials that clearly tells you what things are so we all have the same basic working knowledge of what things are called. Even if the description for the expander used the phrase “collections tab” then it would have been much clearer that only those slots are affected.

Welcome to Monday when speculators come out to play anticipating Tuesday’s patch.

chemiclord.3978:

Nike.2631:

Dark Catalyst.1028:

What did people do in GW1 once they reached max level?

Started playing the game.

Really. That’s how horizontal progression schemes work.

It’s how ANY MMO has worked. The “real game” doesn’t start until max level, the “endgame.”

It’s one of the ways that GW2 tried to be different that was outright rejected by the player base. Even now, players only tend to fill the lower level zones if they’re pretty much drug there by the nose (via living story or farming).

And that concept, that the game doesn’t start until max level needs to die in fire. That attitude makes any content below max level merely “level over” country as everyone speed levels to max. What’s the point of those areas or quests if they are nothing but filler. What about a rich story and the hero’s journey?

MMOs were suppose to be just like single player RPGs but with other people who can join you on your adventures and it degenerated into a rush to max level, acquiring BIS gear, min/maxing your traits based on established builds and mechanical raids where you get to be a fix gear in a massive machine whose goal every night is the defeat of the same end boss. A linear leveling path as much on rails as a modern FPS game. And if you want to do some other action during that besides your limited and fix roll, you will be hammered down or expelled. And that’s what you are advocating?

The heart of GW2 is built around coop play. No punishment for helping others. Limited times where a “leader” can force their will upon others to do his bidding. No pigeonholed rolls that your character can’t break out of. A world where you don’t visit an area once as you level up and never again because it’s beneath you but one you can return to again and again.

That’s was the goal of GW2 and they did a pretty good job pulling that off. It’s those players who can’t handle that kind of freedom, not having a spelled out linear path of progression to max level with endless raiding for BIS that can’t adapt. The success of WoW and the clones that modeled their game play off of WoW have created a legion of players who know no other way of play and that’s what sad.

What happened to the sense of adventure found in classic RPGs? It’s now window dressing. You’re an elf, a mutant, a Jedi, doesn’t matter, setting doesn’t matter, story doesn’t matter, just level to max, get best gear, raid until bored. Someone needs to come up with an equivalent picture for what happened to MMOs the way this illustrates what happened to FPS.

Some players insisted on vertical progression in items, which wasn’t part of the original game design. So the Devs added it and but made it a grind. If you don’t like the grind then maybe you should reconsider your instance on vertical progression.

There are lots of players who don’t bother with it because it’s a grind or are willing to let it come naturally rather than specifically grinding. Each there own.

It may not be true but if your goal is to acquire that mini, then that’s the only way. But those with that logic can’t ignore the fact they are still getting gems that they can spend or trade for gold.

bOgz.7263:

Septemptus.7164:

Yeah… O really want the rarity change on my Salvage-o-Matic.
Making it masterwork I thought that finally the item is great and worth the money you spend to buy it. No it goes back to being boring old almost useless item.

The change to yellow made it finally in line with other unlimited tools that are in long term kinda great investment and now it pains me to see they reverted the change :/.

As I said in the post concerning this kit, this was a Dirty Marketing strategy.

Before the sale, they changed the rarity to Rare and the kit salvages like that of Rare/Mystic kit although description is that of Basic kit. This change would entice players to buy the discounted kit.

I believe that thread was also made by Anet for advertisement. A proof is not needed as they choose to be silent (ya, silence means yes, this was a marketing tactic).

No.

It’s my belief that there are major performance improvements in the CPU portion of the renderer that are independent of the graphics API.

Did you buy the retail copy in a store or a digital copy online? Difference being what’s on the disks from the retail copy is 15+ months old and there are a lot of updates since then. See this all the time in MMOs.

Which OS are your using? You don’t say where you are getting 20fps. In a city? Standing on a mountaintop? Middle of a WvW zerg? It matters as some areas and conditions (lots of other players around you) make a significant impact on performance.

You can try to use the free version of Ping Plotter to see if any of the hops are a problem.

http://www.pingplotter.com/freeware.html

In game use the /ip command to see the server ip you are currently connected to, note every zone is it’s own ip.

Plug that IP into ping plotter and give it a few minutes to get a fair picture. Note that ping is filterable so not every hop will report back and this includes the game servers, but you should be able to see if along the way the ping times turn ugly.

Oh and I’m on DSL in the US and my ISP also assigns me a dynamic IP.

That’s if it’s server lag, everyone seeing it. Sounds more like the problem is in one or more of the hops between you and the server and probably closer to you than them if it’s affecting only a few.

I’m guessing you are on an EU server since you’re in Turkey.

Grebcol.5984:

problem is gw 2 doenst have good mutlicore support and there is the main problem.i think when this game use 2-3 cores it will run a lot smoother than now.

It already uses 2-3 cores, it just doesn’t scale past that. The game is multithreaded, it has over 40 threads running but only 8 or so are using 20% or more of a core each with two at around 50% and one using above 75%. The performance of that lone 75% thread determines overall performance which is why people keep referring to single thread performance. The faster the CPU, the faster that thread can run and the higher the frame rate.

A faster GPU doesn’t help because it’s binding on the CPU side of the renderer, setting up all the calls to the driver. The game uses Dx9 so the renderer can’t be multithreaded easily if at all.

Reflections and shadows are both CPU intensive, turning down those options will improve your frame rate.

You want a plushy tank?

The frame limiter has been acting a bit wonky as of late. Driver issue? I’m running 13.4, have a much weaker system than yours and I’m sure I would be getting better frame rate at that local than you.

And the Sensors tab on GPU-Z will show your GPU load.

And it’s an HD 6950 based on the GPU-Z data, hate it that AMD only tags their card with “series” rather than a specific model GPU.

CMstorm.8679:

Grevender.9235:

HE wins hands down

+1!

Don’t get the reference.

No.

Only if you buy the same booster for yourself. Note that the discount is still applied regardless of which size quantity you buy. That means if you buy a single booster as a gift for one player, you can buy the 5 pack version for yourself at 40% off (or gift a key and buy the 25 key pack for yourself).

Gift a 2nd item, you qualify for another discount.

No it’s three days and post in a specific thread. This one.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-and-older-merged

List your ticket number and problem there.

I think this is what you are looking for. It’s the TP cache, which is a web browser.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/TP-Empty-Not-loading/first#post3247980

The “future” isn’t here yet.

Normally a first offender gets a warning and a forced rename. Now if this is truly the first name violation, then you can submit a ticket to support.

As for offensive that’s in the eye of the beholder. You were reported, the GM who reviewed the report agreed.