Guild Wars 2

There isn’t any. The game is what it is and in area around a lot of players the game’s performance suffers. Play with the culling, former WvW, settings. Adjusting other player’s quality settings down will improve frame rate by avoiding custom avatar creation in large crowds and improve rendering by using common placeholder avatars repeatedly.

But do you need 60fps in Lion’s Arch between the TP, the forge, the crafting area and the bank? I can understand wanting decent frame rates in WvW but in the safety of a city? Anything hostile in city happens in an instance or it’s own zone.

You might have better luck with GoF’s suggestion about using the -forwardrenderer command line flag than I did. Someone suggested -nosound flag but that was before the sound engine fix a few weeks back. I told my antivirus to ignore all disk reads and writes from gw2.exe and that bought me a minor improvement in Lion’s Arch with the constant disk reads as players flit in and out of your quality Avatar setting range.

And for giggles post a screenshot of your current game graphic settings. It might reveal something to someone who is running a similar system and they may have an idea or two.

Is it wrong that I think of a Tequila Sunrise every time this dragon is mentioned?

I finally got around to try this and I didn’t see a difference other than shadows are off. Frame rate stayed the same but CPU and GPU usage was lower.

Need more white space.

Well the wiki says it’s group 1. Not a mini collector myself.

How about a mini Logan then.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/20125-mini-logan-thackeray

Also stupid redirector mulching links so they don’t come up right at GuildWarsTrade.

Talonblaze.3175:

Source?
/msg2short

A pack of three group 1 minis are 300 Gems or 100 Gems each. 100 Gems cost 4.86g at 8:58p EDT. Using the filter at GuildWarsTrade.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/search?sort=sell_price&category=11&sellmin=48600

Only 2 pages at 20 per page maximum is less than 40. But possible (likely) that not all are Group 1 minis.

As for price spiking due to the impending shortage of supply.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/20157-mini-vampire-bat

You are starting to go all tin-foil hat here Espionage.

The whole Intel AMD debacle was years ago and only had to do with specialized math library routines like FFTs which I’m sure the WoW or WinRAR isn’t using and isn’t the reason behind the 40-50% performance difference in those two benchmarks. And WoW doesn’t use PhysX at all.

You’re grasping at straws here.

Roll a new character, unlock all the slot skills as soon as they’re available.

How does removing a purely cosmetic item “effects the game in a bad way”. It doesn’t affect game play at all. It merely encourages players who want them to act now. It’s no different than any other limited time offer like the mini hippo calf or the infinite gathering tools. Here’s your window of opportunity, act now or regret not acting later.

There is less than 40 minis when I last look that are priced higher than the cost in gold for 100 Gems. I haven’t bothered to see how many of those are Pack 1. No idea how quick the remaining ones will go up in prices. We have a month or so to find out.

Is it that worse than the single 400 gem miniatures they sold like the mini hippo calf or white kitten? So 500 Gems for the first three and 500 Gems for the “forged” one. Makes the four cost only 250 gems apiece, much less than 400 gems for a Moa Chick.

So $7.50 for 30 common slots is a lot?

DDO is $5.95 for 20 and that’s during double bonus points buying $200 worth of points. Otherwise it’ll be on the order of $12.44 if you bought a $20 point package with normal bonus points.

Tried to find other prices in other games but few list prices outside of the game itself.

It is weak in comparison to Intel’s i5 line of quads.

Fastest X4 vs slowest Sandy Bridge quad, 3.7GHz Phenom II 980BE Vs 3.1GHz I5-2400.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/362?vs=363

I’m not being pro Intel just presenting the facts when one manufacturer’s top end is 20-30% slower than another’s slowest (or one of the slowest that wasn’t a “low power” model), 2 generation old quad core, the first manufacturer’s CPU is “weak”.

Of course once you factor in price for performance then AMD is more reasonable but you can not say that in straight up performance across multiple benchmarks that AMD is competitive with Intel’s current offering. The era where AMD pwnd Intel went away when the Pentium D did in 2006.

As I said when I talked about the 2nd pet set, likely the income from the first set has slowed considerably thus the 2nd set.

And now by sunsetting the 1st set they 1) “introduce” a now limited time item to encourage those still collecting them to hurry up and 2) encourage the idea that they are an investment to sell on the TP to those players who didn’t hurry up enough. Either way it’ll boost sales and likely cash for gems in a mad scramble to “catch ’em all”/stock up.

As it is right now there are less than 40 minis that are worth more than price in gold for 100 Gems however prices are starting to rise on all group 1 minis.

It’s beanie babies all over again!!

No he did say ESO in the paragraph before, I simply didn’t see it. Sorry there.

Anyone else notice an improvement in this patch. I was getting 10-11 in LA and now I’m getting 13-14. The Bank/TP patio in DR is also a few FPS higher. Haven’t tried the open world yet.

Also notice the game broke 80% CPU usage on my quad, normally the game is 65-70%. I assume they found something that they could multithread more efficiently, fewer block/sync issues.

Well they use a Cash Shop model for continuing income but the game doesn’t have all the travesty for a pure F2P game like MapleStory. We aren’t excessively short changed by inventory space or even outfits (although that is arguable) and the quests aren’t excessive grinding. We grind for other reasons but not to just complete the quests. Areas or classes aren’t gated off as they are in some games that moved from subscription to hybrid F2P. We have it quite good here.

But the game does need to bring in a relatively constant stream of income. So it’s only natural that things that sell well once will have “sequels”. It could be a new armor set that related to a LW arc or simply more pets. And isn’t it better to have a separate item for new pets than simply add it to the drop table for old ones? You have all the old ones, you aren’t interested in getting more of those, just the new ones.

Your point Devata seems more in line with the pro expansion/anti Living World crowd rather than pro or anti cash shop crowd, but I can see how one can overlap the two.

sorudo.9054:

the current rate of dollar-euro is 1 to 0,74, the price with 20% VAT is 8,988
so even with VAT, it’s €9,- when rounding it up.

Yes but when they set their rates, even if it was back when the game went live the exchange rate, according to XE, was 0.7959315059 Euro per Dollar making a 10 dollars with a 20% VAT 9.55 Euros rounded to 10. That ignores whatever fee the credit card companies charge and I’m sure they don’t use the most advantageous exchange rate.

They aren’t going to adjust their prices to keep up with the conversion rates. They printed and distributed Gem cards at Retail using that 1 to 1 or 1 to 0.85 in the case of Pounds rate and ANet doesn’t get face value from those due to the retail cut and the card processing costs.

And I just pointed out that it’s a gaming industry standard, at least for this year, pricing to equate US Dollars to Euros. Rage all you want it’s not going to change anything. ANet aren’t going to dynamically adjust their online prices according to exchange rates and they aren’t going to reissue new Gem Cards to match those new rates.

You pick a rate and pray that the rates don’t radically change for the duration beyond whatever worst case you built into your pricing.

All those games you listed are not MMOs and the ones that are multiplayer you simply don’t have as many players on the same size map at the same time.

It’s like comparing your family car to a top fuel dragster or a mega dump truck and saying your car is crap because it can’t break 200MPH is 4 seconds or haul 100 tons of material at a time.

tolunart.2095:

Behellagh.1468:

The did it because, in all likelihood, that the sale of the first pet set dropped off as the majority of hard core pet collectors who started in the first few months of the game have collected them all. So to keep the money coming in they introduced the 2nd set.

Why do you think manufacturers of cars, cel phones, computers etc. keep coming out with new models? That’s the way a business works, if they don’t come up with new things to sell you, most will go out of business.

Exactly my point. What? Did you think I’m on the side of everything should be free?

And the Extra Credits video did show that ANet did do a lot of things right.

- They let us buy cash shop currency with in game currency
- They don’t sell power

Now where they strayed is when they turned the BLTC into a lottery ticket when they introduced tokens for PvE armor and weapon skins (or is it just weapon skins, haven’t bothered to notice). It changed the BLTC from a Whitman Sampler of mostly low end boosters and what not from the cash shop to a scratch lottery ticket that comes with low end boosters and what not from the cash shop.

They are obfuscating the fact that some of these skins would cost in the order of $100s of dollars. Now imagine the PR nightmare from putting up those skins for direct purchase at 15-25K gems each? It’ll make the monocle debacle in EVE look like a tempest in a teapot. Yes, they are purely for show and do nothing to alter how the game is played. It’s a luxury item like a Gucci purse or a Rolex watch but only a few who are lucky or have lots of free income can get it and that splits the player base between haves and have nots and that was on the “not do” list in the EC video for microtransactions. We are talking about over 1,200 gold converted to gems and that isn’t even guaranteed to get you one due to the nature of RNG. Yea gold had been flowing into the game lately with the champ changes and the invasions but I would safely say that the majority of players haven’t accumulated 200g in their bank yet for the Golden title.

But the general prices in the store. For the most part they seem fair to me.

It just took a little time after he woke up to be fully awake. He slept for how many years now?

Maybe it took all this time to brew him a big enough cup of coffee to get going in the “morning”.

The did it because, in all likelihood, that the sale of the first pet set dropped off as the majority of hard core pet collectors who started in the first few months of the game have collected them all. So to keep the money coming in they introduced the 2nd set.

Game is more CPU bounded than GPU when loads of players are around.

Login servers are located in the US, so even if you are EU you bounce there first for confirmation.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Constant-attempts-to-hack/first#post2844255

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/My-recent-connections/first#post2848669

Trotting out the post yet again

That’s basically the ratio that everyone uses. Just check out the prices for the next gen consoles.
XBox One – $499.99, £429.99, €499.99 – 1 to 0.86 to 1
PS4 – $399, £349, €399 – 1 to 0.875 to 1
GW2 – $50, £42.50, €50 – 1 to 0.85 to 1
It’s to cover VAT, exchange rate fees and currency fluctuation. If anything GW2 favors the UK more than Microsoft or Sony.

NCSoft operates out of the UK in Europe so the VAT they use is 20%.

I know it’s random, I was just showing the results of random of small samples. The greater the number you do, the more the CI converges on the expected value. But in small samples, the variation can be quite large leading to the “OMG they nerfed salvaging Ectos again!” threads.

At some point I will attempt to track the number of none, 1, 2 and 3 ectos drop from each salvage because if master kits average out to around 0.9 per I suspect the actual chance of getting none is a lot higher than the average player with no exposure to prob&stats would expect with a 0.9 average. High enough to discourage salvaging the few you may get as drops if you are trying to maximize coinage. Or at least show the approximate odds so players can make an informed decision about rolling the dice.

It’s simple really. We use PvE equipement in WvW. Therefore if you can use a Legendary weapon in WvW, then WvW zone clears are required to get one.

Or something like that.

Honestly it’s not as bad as you might think. Just pay attention to what “color” your world is every week and pop in to cycle through that section of the four maps that week then wait till the color changes. Biggest problem would be if you play on a server that doesn’t participate in WvW much and ends up evicted from your starting areas in short order and if your world rarely captures the center castle on EB.

Immensus.9732:

Yeah thats why Im thinking to buy i7 instead of i5. Thank you.

Game seems to generate about three cores worth of work. The i7 really has just as many cores as the i5, it just does a little hand waving to get the OS to think it’s 8 which just makes, most of the time, the 4 actual cores a tad more efficient allowing them to do a bit more work.

I’m all for getting the K version of the i5 (or i7 if you have the extra $100 over the cost of an i5) and look into overclocking, as long as you get a nice 3rd party CPU cooler.

Honestly if you want to spend more money, which is what you would be doing with an i7, spend it on the video card like the GTX 650 Ti Boost. Just make sure it comes with a power supply that can handle the extra wattage draw of those cards (the GTX 650 is only a 65-70 watt card).

And if it’s account wide then bag slot = 20 slots per character Vs 30 slot bank tab shared by all making it a steal. So no then.

I assume you meant 1600 for memory.

GTX 650 is a tad on the low side but shouldn’t be a problem with GW2 as right now it’s more CPU bound than GPU during all the interesting activities.

But that is standard automatic managed settings for the page file, the 16MB minimum that is. Mine is minimum 16MB, recommended 11499MB, currently 7666MB and I’m running with 8GB of system memory. I have plenty of drive space so no reason not to let Windows manage it.

Don’t fret, soon there will be a LFG tool in game and hopefully you will be able to avoid the idiots who insist that everyone play the same way, spec the same things, have the same armor, etc. simply to minimize run times in dungeons.

There is little reason to grind a character to max level as quickly as possible in this game. You tend to miss out little nuances in the profession. Combinations of traits with weapon and slot skills that can add to a party rather than solo play.

Haters will hate. Nothing you can do about it.

There is only one TP, everyone uses it.

Considering the unexpected down time I’m seeing a storage problem on the database, probably one or more raid units are reporting a bad drive and are rebuilding or are simply dropping off the internal storage network. It’ll be done when it’s done, let the IT and DB group do their work.

At least I can still pick up gold that was waiting for me.

Wanze.8410:

Pibriamal.8719:

Buttercup.5871:

Wanze.8410:

Khisanth.2948:

(so that means more ectos being salvaged for dark matter).

I hope you are not salvaging your ectos to get dark matter.

Could you explain whether there is any other way? Don’t get me wrong, I’m swimming in these globs of dark matter, but I wasn’t aware there is another way to acquire them?

You get those from salvaging exotics…not ectos. Salvaging ectos results in luck for Magic Find.

This.

and T6 dust.

I also found a minor performance fix. I exclude the gw2.dat file from the real time AV scanner. No need to keep inspecting all the reads while I’m playing and I trust ANet that they aren’t going to put anything nasty in there. I gained a frame or two in heavy player areas like around the MF in LA, the game reading and building player avatars as they flit in and out of the area. I also improved zoning times by a fair margin.

I’m using Avira, not sure if this will work for other AV software as well.

Lighten up there Hoss. People have told you what they are used for and I merely pointed you to a wiki page that has all the details including a link to training manuals.

And what was your question again? Lets see.

I got trait points without buying an Adept Training Manual.

You start getting them, one per level starting at Level 11. At level 80 you have 70 of them.

I then bought one under the impression that I’d be unlocking 10 more trait points to use. I’ve clicked and double clicked and everything else and all I get is a little sound. No trait points, no trait reset, nothing.

You were mistaken or misinformed. They are used to unlock traits you can spend the points on. No additional points.

A couple people said that you use the manuals to respec, but that makes no sense.

When you use a higher level manual, besides unlocking additional trait levels it removes all of your assigned points so you can select again. So it is a respec of a sort but it’s primary purpose is to unlock the additional higher level traits.

There is a dialogue option when you talk to your trainer to reallocate your trait points… Sooo…. what exactly are these manuals used for? So far, I know they don’t work for respecs, and I know they don’t unlock spendable trait points.

So here we are again.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Training_Manual

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Traits

It’s easier to point players to the answer than paraphrase all the details here.

Perhaps you are mixing up Traits with Slot Skills. There is no respec on slot skills and skill points. But skill points are unlimited, you get one every level and then there are the challenges around the maps and the occasional skill scroll.

Except if it was “simple” they would have by now.

Yesterday or two days ago for a BLSK with a daily (or maybe that was the monthly). I was surprised regardless.

BLSK are 300 gems so right now it’s around 14.8g per kit if you by gems with gold. But it is still and always as been $3.75.

Spidy’s gem page has been broken for a long time now. Try this one.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/gems

It’s 4g93s per 100 gems as I post this so 6.17g rounded up.

But it is such an extreme behavior for so little gain. When chests dropped nothing exciting there wasn’t a lot of interest but since they’ve added a slight chance to acquire a skin, it’s crazy.

And it doesn’t mean they won’t change their minds if the metrics tell them so.

covenn.7165:

Behellagh.1468:

They price items based on cash never the Gold to Gem rate. A single MF is $1.88, five pack is $1.38 each.

No real value there. Why spend money to only augment a small fraction of monthly play time? I would rather pay a subscription fee and get real value from a game company actually making improvements to the portion of the game I like to play.

Because you want to make the most of the playtime you have. You think people who play 90 or more hours a month buy these, no it’s the person with the spouse and children and a lawn with forced overtime in the office who is lucky to play 15 hours a month who buy boosters. Or buy a stack of keys because curiosity gets the better of them. Or buy gems with cash to convert into gold.

It was getting a bit sluggish late late last night. I guess it finally gave up the ghost.

The TP uses the 3rd party tool Awesomium as the browser to the TP. Everything below the top border and right of the left border of the TP screen is nothing more than a window that Awesomium uses that is then scaled into the space between those two borders.

I assume the problem has to do with layout when the size is different from the default and the simplest but fugly solution was to simply “zoom” the default window into the space provided rather than getting it to look right in all possible sizes.

Also, nice necropost.

Posting my results here as well.

Okay. Just finished salvaging 150 rares with master kits.

137 Ectos for a 0.9133 average.
121 Runes for a 80.37% rate (80% with master kits).

120 Silk Scraps
74 Thick Leather Sections
79 Mithril Ore
6 Gossamer Scraps
6 Hardened Leather Sections
7 Orichalcum Ore

I did notice something interesting early on the salvaging cycle. The first 10 items produced 15 Ectos, the next 10 only 3. At 100 I had 88 Ectos. So sometimes the streaks can be extreme in the short run.

Okay. Just finished salvaging 150 rares with master kits.

137 Ectos for a 0.9133 average (0.9 per is expected).
121 Runes for a 80.37% rate (80% with master kits).

120 Silk Scraps
74 Thick Leather Sections
79 Mithril Ore
6 Gossamer Scraps
6 Hardened Leather Sections
7 Orichalcum Ore

I did notice something interesting early on the salvaging cycle. The first 10 items produced 15 Ectos, the next 10 only 3. At 100 I had 88 Ectos. So sometimes the streaks can be extreme in the short run.

Edit: Made it clear that what I got very close to what I expected. Also made about 10g profit on a 30g investment.

As you said “barely manage to keep 10 at a time!” Well first don’t spend it like it’s burning a hole in your bank. What the heck are you spending it on? Let me guess, gems. Or maybe crafting a legendary or other costly item.

Second find an activity that you can earn gold faster than you seem to spend it. Dungeon speed runs, champ zerg loops, TP niche to exploit.

Nice necropost.

Are you running Windows 8? On a laptop?

The Eternal Grace.3157:

I recently upgraded my GPU to a Radeon HD 7950. It’s awesome, runs games at max settings, 50-60fps…Tomb Raider, Far Cry 3, Crysis 3, etc….just about any game…except Guild Wars 2…So here’s a few questions:

1) Why is Guild Wars 2 so difficult for my pc to run? Is this game that poorly optimized? I was playing Elder Scrolls: Online beta, with 100+ people on my screen, max settings, absolutely beautiful…50-60fps. So why is Guild Wars 2 different with a little worse graphics?

2) Should I upgrade my processor? I have what my computer came with when I bought it…it’s an AMD A8-3820 APU Radeon HD 2.5 GHz (Quad-core). Like I said, it runs everything else fine, but Guild Wars 2 brings this thing to its knees. I was using CPU and GPU monitors while sitting in Lion’s Arch, max settings…shadows ultra, supersample, etc. My GPU was under about 30-40% load, while my CPU was under 75-85% load. There really isn’t any change in framerate between native or supersample, either, so I’m assuming my CPU is bottlenecking my GPU in Guild Wars 2.

3) If I should upgrade my processor, what is a good one to upgrade to? I don’t really want to upgrade unless I will be getting 50-60fps anywhere in Guild Wars 2, because it doesn’t really do anything to my other games. At the same time, however, I don’t want to invest too much in a CPU because, as I said, it runs everything else nearly perfectly.

Thank you for your help; much appreciated!

Edit: I have 8GB of RAM if that makes any difference in answers.

Hmm. Sounds like an HP rig. A P7-1225 maybe?

Yes the game is CPU bound. Sometimes very badly. The Shadows and Reflections settings are more CPU intensive than the other graphic options so don’t run Shadows on Ultra and consider if you can live without reflections in the water or just take it down a notch.

Sadly any CPU upgrade will require a motherboard replacement as the A8-3820 is a socket FM1 CPU and the only thing faster is the A8-3850 and good luck finding one. All the newer A series CPUs (APUs as AMD calls them) are socket FM2. And even 16% faster, the A8-3850 is still no where near the performance of a two generation old i5-2400.

Neural.1824:

Behellagh.1468:

Yes but then ALL the heavy salvagers were seeing it and ecto supply dropped off sharply.

And Anet jumped on the RNG bandwagon right off the bat, knowing they had made the changes. There is absolutely no reason what-ever to trust them to not tinker with the numbers again in order to change their financial numbers.

Yes and no. Anet did jump on the RNG bandwagon and then they acknowledge a bug was introduced, because John Smith researched the problem and proved it wasn’t the RNG, and Anet fixed it in short order.

I’ll probably do another run tonight and see what I get.

There is part of me thinking that at some point they will nerf this because it’s an aberrant play style.