If everyone who has ever received a spam whisper from gold sellers noticed, everyone of them seems to have 17 AP. I can’t think of one that I’ve seen that ever had more than that in the last 4 years. Maybe there is a way to restrict whispers based on something like that.
Or they simply get more AP. 20 AP is like two days of dailies? Any kind of filter you pick, it would be a minor inconvenience to them but a larger and larger burden on legit players.
There’s a couple of minor items that certainly seem to overbid rather quickly or reset the bid to be +1 of the next highest if bids below it are removed (tired of playing).
Very few are “demanding blood”. Most just want an even playing field which would be very easy for Arenanet to do.
And while I’m not against a public early dissemination of recipe and new source changes, the motivation is still punitive as the only guaranteed result is denying those currently taking advantage from taking advantage and instead giving the advantage to an entirely different “elite” group, those online and in game at the moment the patch notes drop with the fastest machines, the fastest connection and the ability to speed parse the notes, not to mention the liquid gold to start buying up everything.
So the result will be taking it away from partners and friends of partners and giving it squarely to the TP mavens.
It will be taking it away from people that didn’t do anything to earn it in the first place and giving it to people who actually work towards obtaining said advantage.
It would be giving it to whomever wants to take it – instead of these “select few” that just receive hand-outs at this point.
Now as much as I’m hate the argument that was presented on Reddit, I’m going to use it here because I object to your comment.
So you are saying that ANet’s partners, those who make all those YouTube videos and do weekly streams promoting the game “don’t do anything to earn it”? It’s not like they are on the payroll. At best they get commissions on sales IF their viewers choose to use their referral links.
Plus we are talking only a few thousand gold, which is worth currently around $65-70 per 1000 gold from the gem shop. But before you go “we are talking 100s of thousands of gold” we aren’t. About 13K Stabilizing Matrices were drawn down from the TP in the days before the patch. At the peak you might be able to make 20 silver profit on each. That’s a total of 2,600 gold. Even if they were vacuuming up two or three times as much as other players sold off, it’s still under 10K gold, $700 in value split among those who leveraged the info. And because of the price increase, there’s now three times as much on the TP now than before, but at a 50% markup.
Very few are “demanding blood”. Most just want an even playing field which would be very easy for Arenanet to do.
And while I’m not against a public early dissemination of recipe and new source changes, the motivation is still punitive as the only guaranteed result is denying those currently taking advantage from taking advantage and instead giving the advantage to an entirely different “elite” group, those online and in game at the moment the patch notes drop with the fastest machines, the fastest connection and the ability to speed parse the notes, not to mention the liquid gold to start buying up everything.
So the result will be taking it away from partners and friends of partners and giving it squarely to the TP mavens.
Got a few since Friday’s reset but they now go directly into your wallet so you might not notice them. I remember seeing them cause I was in my world’s borderland which is desert this week when opening my WvW chests.
They don’t have to track anyone down, or give out bans. All they gotta do is release the patch notes to the public, at the same time that they are given to their “media partners”.
Thats it. It requires Arena Net to do the most crippling thing they have been unable to do up until this point: Effectively communicate to their audience, at the right time.
EDIT: The rest of your comments are a cross of fandom brainwashing, and making excuses for a company not bold enough to create their own.
Ah the classic “that’s not an explanation, that’s an excuse”. As soon as someone takes that position there is no chance for meaningful discussion.
And there are people in this thread and on reddit demanding blood. You may not.
The thing is I don’t see a huge crowd with pitchforks upset about this, just a few who are out for blood for a perceived wrong to them, which is they didn’t get a chance to profit off of it.
Actually, quite the opposite, had you bothered to read the entire thread. I benefited from it, when the Halloween 2013 skins dropped drastically in price. I had 5 ascended sets already done and created prior to posting, and 2 legendaries crafted. I wasn’t burnt by the market, nor am i out for blood.
As i’ve stated previously, and as i believe currently, i simply want to see the release of market-affecting information provided to ALL players at the same time, instead of the info being given to the promoters first, and then 2-4 weeks later, the rest of the playerbase. More importantly, i want all these ‘shady’ practices that ANet does, to simply stop.
Oh, I’ve read the entire thread here and Reddit. My points are still the following.
Yes, people shouldn’t take advantage of information they gleaned from getting the patch notes or test server access before a change that will affect one or more items on the TP method of supply or usefulness in a significant way.
There is no way to stop such information from “leaking”. As The Pierces say in their song, “Two can keep a secret if one of them is dead”. Developers talk and they may disclose something they worked on months ago, forgetting it hadn’t gone live yet.
ANet grants access to their media partners days before it goes live and simply NOT having the exact client/server software running on test is madness. And while ANet can sanitize early preview patch notes, doing the same to the test server is asking for an oops. Balls get dropped all the time, that’s why we get multiple patches on patch day.
Expending the manpower to hunt down and punish the culprits is problematic. There is no way ANet would sanction a major MMO news site, game reviewer, streamer/YouTuber or owner of a popular player resource. It would be shooting themselves in their own foot. ANet needs goodwill from them and making a large site their enemy wouldn’t help the game at all. Therefore sanctioning the “little guy” is then problematic because then “justice” isn’t being mete out fairly to all guilty parties.
NCSOFT still owns ANet (although slightly more indirectly). They may consider this as acceptable quid pro quo for “free” advertising. So it’s possible that “corporate” is preventing/discouraging any action, not wanting any retribution blow back onto their other games.
Unless a player notices the drop in supply or price in the days leading up to a patch, most will be unaware as the market will still settle at the new price points no matter when the info becomes known. An item will still be more expensive or their hoard will be worth noticeably less a day out from patch day.
In the end this topic, while legitimate, is a tempest in a teapot. ANet simply won’t expend any significant manpower to track down the “culprits” or future proof their pre-patch day access with a custom build. All they can do is issue a strong reminder not to and maybe cut off the next preview from EVERYONE.
All that does is shift who and when one group takes advantage of the information.
That would be all there is to it if people were economically literate, which they aren’t. There’s a perceptual issue; we have a bunch of Bernie Bros with pitchforks furious about a perceived injustice, and whether or not there’s any sense to it, it still creates a PR problem. Really minor gestures like previewing economy changes would build a lot of goodwill with those players and costs them basically nothing.
Fact of the matter is that economically the party that ‘deserves’ the gains from revealing the economic changes is…the devs themselves, which clearly shouldn’t happen because agency issues. So instead someone else gets to capture those rents, and they don’t ‘deserve’ them in any sense; no one does, so it’s just a cash grab with no good, known social solution.
So I just say screw it, make players happy, because it doesn’t matter and you can get some free goodwill out of it.
The thing is I don’t see a huge crowd with pitchforks upset about this, just a few who are out for blood for a perceived wrong to them, which is they didn’t get a chance to profit off of it. It’s jealousy, plain and simple. They simply couch it as a noble cause.
And just like shifting who profits if the information is released publicly for all to see , the players complaining will also shift to those who will say it’s unfair that some region of the world gets the info during their “prime time” rather than the region of the world the complainers are located. I saw this frequently in MMOs with scheduled weekly down time. “Why do you keep taking the servers down during MY prime time?”. This will be no different. You will simply placate one group while another rises to take it’s place.
I would lean toward the likelihood of that. HoT would be over a year old and the holiday season is always a good time to entice new players to try out/upgrade the game. We just had a 50% off sale at the end of July (20-27) at the official store. The box edition is currently 20% off at Amazon.
The only way to fix this with out attacking those mentioned above is too get the information out there way before it ever goes live on servers. They won’t do that though.
It would be worthwhile for them to do a dev chat / reddit post on big rewards changes a week before the patch hits (and a couple days before media partners get access to the stage servers). The media pre-release is when it goes from being information leaks that can be traded upon to an information torrent that shakes the market. I think just a couple minutes during one of their media events would go a long way.
All that does is shift who and when one group takes advantage of the information. Those who can’t take immediate advantage of the information are in the exact same predicament as they are with a few getting “insider information”. Either something they have been hording drops significantly in value or something they should have been hording goes up significantly in value. The changes to the market still happens and some small fortunate group still makes bank.
IIRC, Laurels were added to allow non-fractal playing players to acquire ascended trinkets/accessories. And before the current method it was completing the daily and monthly achievements. Now it’s simply logging in for a few moments everyday.
Last armor set added to the gem shop was Incarnate/Strider/Rampart armor April 15, 2014 so almost 2 1/2 years now. Now between game launch and that date there, 20 months, we had only 6 armor “sets” added to the gem shop. And by set I mean 3 weights even if, like the April 15th 2014 release, they were named differently.
Carapace/Luminescent was introduced during second half of LWS2 when Silverwastes was added through November 2014. Guild, leystone, bladed and pre legendary precursor in HoT. Mistward isn’t a full set. And that was end of October 2015.
Now miscellaneous armor pieces were added to the store. Mainly head, glove and shoulder pieces but they were weight neutral and obviously not a full set.
There were several points of time where the price of mystic coins changed. The first was Dec 10, 2014 which accompanied a drop of supply from 356K down to 191K in a day. It recovered slightly until HoT was announced at PAX South. The price spiked everytime the TP supply hit a new all time low, followed by a recovery, followed by another draw down to a new low.
Actually the launch of HoT didn’t spike the price but actually went down for a few weeks after launch from 12s to 10s. As the price climbed people bought down the supply and hoarded any they got from the dailies/login rewards. Saving them in case they ever needed them. Now with TP supply at only 25-28K, it’s a sellers market. With the price now over 80s, the hoarding urge is even greater. It also looks as if at least 15K are sold everyday at those prices.
Your comment and example are about town clothes. Town clothes did have seams and were divided into pieces like armor is.
Outfits however are designed differently. They are designed as single piece with no seams.
are you taking crazy pills?!
Mad King’s set is an OUTFIT now,
that is an OUTFIT that is in PARTS.
Witches, Bloody Prince, Mad King, Pirate, these are all outfits that are in separate parts.
outfits ARE NOT a single piece, they are already in sections.
They STARTED as parts and turned into an outfit. It doesn’t mean that NEW outfits are built as parts.
The post has been updated again. Arenanet, will you respond? Why does no one from Arenanet respond? I don’t understand. They respond to all the silly things that get posted, but not to something so vital to their community?
As I said before, just like any other CS action against a player, they will never state the action taken against any other player unless that player (or those players) protest on reddit or this forum and then ANet would trot out the evidence.
Clipping – just because some do doesn’t mean they don’t try to prevent it.
Visual Weight Classes – those are both outfits and thus designed and animated as a single cohesive entity.
What you don’t get that with the exception of the head, outfits aren’t made of individual pieces riding over the same framework that armor pieces attach to. That they can cheat with outfits the same way they cheat with NPC looks. Just like the wholesale character model replacement done when you crank character quality down.
You’re naive if you think that if they ever cut up outfits that they won’t be assigned an armor weight. Outfits are essentially a glamour, an illusion over the player character and not armor, since you can not be wearing any armor yet the outfit still appears. They AREN"T armor.
The Mystic forge daily is roughly 1 in 6 dailies. You get 20 from the 28 day reward rotation. That translates into around 320 a year. Now there was a glut and HoT made sure that they would be wiped out with crafting precursors and building Guild Halls.
Perhaps ANet once again over compensated on a sink. But end level stuff should be expensive to make.
Now I would laugh at an Asura dressed up as a Charr cub to study their society … as long as the adult Charr acknowledge it’s an Asura and they are letting him get away with the charade because they think it’s funny.
Except they were town clothes which only mix matched with other town clothes and not armor.
and why does that matter?
i’ve already debunked the “clipping” argument, the “different cut off points” argument and the “visual weight classes” argument.
some town clothes head pieces have already been converted to armour skins so it isn’t like it is impossible…
honestly its like you guys are simply trying to make excuses for not having a massive heap of extra customisation options, or arguing for arguing sake, the thing i don’t get is why?
You didn’t debunked anything, you simply ignored it. Hand waved it away as not important. Next you would be asking for mix and matching of armor pieces of different weights since you think they can.
And town clothes head pieces that don’t interact, as in touch, with a chest piece like hats and glasses obviously don’t have a potential clipping problem so of course they could be turned into armor.
We aren’t making excuses, we are explaining what ANet said was the manpower requirements in making an outfit Vs making three armor sets, one for each weight that can be mixed and matched. You don’t want to believe them, fine.
But ask yourself this, if it would be such a big cash influx and it’s as easy as you think it is, wouldn’t they be devoting the manpower? Businesses don’t ignore potential income as long as a reasonable profit is to be made and as long as it doesn’t adversely impact the core business.
To switch between P/P and D/P, all you need to do is to leave the offhand weapon slot in your 2nd set blank. This way when you swap, you swap only the one handed weapon while keeping the off hand weapon equipped.
It seems to me that there already are biracial NPCs. The Delaqua sisters are of Canthan decent however the surname doesn’t seem to be so it’s very likely that they aren’t “pure” (I hate using that) Canthan.
The people of Kryta seem to cover a range of skin tone and features we associate here in the real world as European, African and Asian. Now as for people with a common heritage clustering together, again in the real world it’s common place to see this occur as well.
The question is do we need to hang a hat on it? To point it out rather than simply show it in the faces of the people of Kryta?
Armor sets cost 800 gems per weight. Outfits cost 700 gems for all weights (exception wedding outfit which is 1000 gems as there are race specific looks).
Another MO comment was armor sets take 10 times longer to make than outfits. The key difference is not needing to design three weights, race variant (usually) looks and not worrying about cross armor set clipping Vs one look regardless of race or weight.
Wow, is it Thursday already? There is only 30+ threads on this subject, not that anyone can find them with this forum’s search, and basically they decided quite a while ago that full armor sets will only appear in game while outfits, which require far less resources in terms of dev-hours to create, will be gem shop only. As long as outfits keep selling as well or better than full armor sets, why spend all the extra dev-hours on an armor set that could be used toward the next living story chapter or expansion.
Hate to trot this out again.
Armor sets are by far the most expensive reward we can make. A full set includes heavy, medium, light, times five races, times two sexes, so it’s like developing 30 sets. It takes nine months to develop. (That’s for a normal armor set — legendary is much longer.) It’s not something we can do for Living World episodes. Individual pieces are good rewards for Living World episodes; full sets are more something for expansion packs.
I’m not a huge fan of JP and they are more difficult for me when there’s a crowd or if I’m taking someone through one I can easily do, alone.
And please think of your fellow players at JPs. Turn off your minis, pets, hide you backpacks (such as wings). It’s crowded enough on small platforms as it is without bears, wyverns or moas joining in.
You can use the trading post (O) and select the bottom tab of the three. In there you can search for armor, limiting it to class, level, rarity (exotic for example) as well as up to three stats that armor affects. Externally to the game you could use websites like GW2BLTC, select Trading Post and through options to narrow it down.
I just don’t want to use the copper fed on rares/exotics :sssss
The Silver-Fed Salvage Kit is normally priced at 500 gems (sale price wsa 400 gems), costs 60c per use and is equivalent to a Master or Mystic salvage kit. To my mind 60c is too much to spend on white/blue/green items. There is also the Copper-Fed Salvage Kit for 800 gems that cost 3c per use and is the same as the basic kit.
The Silver-Fed doesn’t hang around for long when it returns, it’s simply not as popular as the Copper-Fed which is in the store for 800 gems.
Honestly it makes a lot of sense to have the “gift” that’s tied to WvW be earned via a reward track than badges once badges started to drop from other activities.
There won’t ever be an investigation but if they were transparent so it wasn’t just a few people with the information then this would be much less of an issue. The issue lies in the secrecy.
So let’s say they release it to everyone at the same time. Then the people who can’t get online for whatever reason, say sleep, work, eating, school, the moment the notes drop won’t be able to act upon it. Those players still miss out from acting on the info. After all something that significantly shifts the value of something on the TP takes less than an hour, sometimes less than 15 minutes depending on the static supply.
The preferred voltage range that Skylake can officially take for DDR3L, from the CPU’s datasheet, is 1.35V +/- 5%. Sure, standard 1.5 volt DDR3 memory may work fine, but you are exceeding the voltage range that Intel guarantees that it will work and do no harm to the rest of the silicon. YMMV.
They had 24 hour countdown timers on everything starting Sunday. Since they were added to the store during the sale, it’s only logical they were leaving when the sale was over, the date and time which they stated when the sale first started in a blog post. You can’t claim ignorance other than willful.
They went up on the 23rd at noon and ran for 6 days. The anniversary sale is ALWAYS in the 2nd half of August so most people plan for it and buy gems ahead of time, especially if they are buying them with gold since once a popular item hits the store the exchange rate will spike as everyone who wants it and is sitting on a pile of gold will first exchange gold from gems rather than pay cold hard cash.
They are only two things they can do to “investigate”.
First check the TP records of the “known” accounts of people who received an official heads up about the patch and see if they conducted any trading on items outlined in the patch notes.
Second is identity the accounts of players who did buy certain items ahead of the patch and see if they is an obvious relationship to anyone who got the patch notes ahead of time.
They can’t see any interaction between players outside of the in game communication channels so unless someone was being very, very dumb, there will be no smoking gun to act upon. End of story.
You all want blood and you aren’t going to get it because if any action is taken, ANet isn’t going to be the one talking about it unless challenged in the forums by the parties that had action taken on them. You yell as much as you want, a “we’ll look into it” is likely the only communication you will ever get.
You get on average 1 scrap every 3 chests and 1 full ticket every 50. And as ridiculous you may think it is, players still buy BLT skins with scraps and put them on the TP.
And keys do drop infrequently in the open world plus the personal story. You can key farm once a week still, not a plentiful free source of keys but … gift horse and all.
As for the skin, it’s likely because this is the first time it and the outfit are unbundled from the Bandit Snipers Appearance Pack. Since it’s not a regular TP item they may have forgotten to tag it. Or it tagging it would cause an issue at their end.
