Guild Wars 2

Well let’s see. Prices from NewEgg, I tend to ignore sales and rebates since they can change day to day.

$60 – 500GB WD Blue drive.
$110 – 120GB Samsung 840

So it’s true, only $50 more. But what does $50 buy you CPU/GPU wise in a low budget build. Lets assume you put around 20% of your $1000 budget toward each component. What does an extra $50 buy.

$200 – i5-4570 3.2GHz quad core
$250 – i5-4570K 3.2GHz quad core unlocked overclocking

$200 – FX-8350 4.0GHz octo core
got nothing

Video cards

$200 – GTX 660
$250 – GTX 760 about 20-25% faster

I’ll make an exception on sale prices with AMD cards simply because AMD just slashed prices on the HD 79xx line and when this happens with either nVidia or AMD, NewEgg puts their existing stock on “sale” until they restock at the new price.

HD 7950 falls in the $210-260 price range depending on default clock speed, OC ability and cooling option. In some cases it means they are now cheaper than HD 7870s. HD 7950s were between $270-320.

So you are right about CPUs on a $1000 rig budget. You get OCing and if you aren’t into OCing, big whoop.

But GPU side, $50 can buy you a nice chunk of performance with nVidia. May not help as much in GW2 but in PC gaming in general it will.

But what do you get with a 120GB SSD? Once you throw on the OS and basic utilities you are down 35-40GB leaving you with just 80-85GB for your stuff. GW2 is around 17GB so one MMO equals almost 20% of your remaining drive. If you have a Steam habit watch out, either play a few of your library at a time, deleting and redownloading what you feel like playing that day and go cold turkey every time there’s a big sale. I only have 5 games from Steam and they range from 2GB to 19GB totaling about 40GB. My “games” folder is 100GB in size and I don’t have that many games loaded.

So what do you get when you choose to “live” in the equivalent of a one room apartment. Boot, program startup and game level loading in half the time. We’re talking only a couple handfuls of seconds. So you get a couple of extra minutes per hour of playing versus stretching, taking a swig of whatever quenches your thirst or pondering your revenge against whatever sent you to a waypoint.

So fast load times while living in a “teeny tiny living space” Vs higher frame rates or improved visual quality?

Second, the “but it’s only $50 more” is a slippery slope my friend. That’s a salesman tactic. If you have an extra $110 sure, toss in a 120GB SSD as well as your HD. But if you are a gamer then tossing away 75% of your storage space for faster loading times is a really bad trade off that you are going to regret rather quickly.

Ryuujin.8236:

Kirschwasser.3972:

… Nexon?

Can’t tell if troll.

Nexon owns a large share in NCSoft, and GW2’s lead monetisation person is from Nexon. Not trolling.

I don’t find it strange that ANet, designing GW2 to use a cash shop for a continuing revenue stream, hires someone from the company that makes over $1.4 BILLION dollars in sales through cash shops, to run their cash shop.

She was hired in March 2012, the stock sale was done in June 2012.

Agree with white, blue, green.

If yellow from drop, < Level 68 sell.
> Level 68, depends if I need the coin. I have really bad luck master salvaging only two or three yellows at a time and only got basic t5 material, no ectos, no runes. This happens enough times to just let someone else try it.

Trajan.4953:

IndigoSundown.5419:

Vayne.8563:

Ashen.2907:

Vayne.8563:

The real issue here is those that choose to define grind by it’s “modern” definition as opposed to its original definition

Are we now supposed to believe that the dev was referring to crushing or pulverizing ?

No, but since there’s zero in the manifesto to say he was talking about gear grind, I don’t know why anyone would choose to believe that’s the case. There’s simply nothing in the language to support that conclusion.

From the:

“Guild Wars 2 Design Manifesto
by Mike O’Brien on April 27, 2010

It all gets back to our basic design philosophy. Our games aren’t about preparing to have fun, or about grinding for a future fun reward. Our games are designed to be fun from moment to moment.

- Mike O’Brien"

So, what future fun reward is this referring to? The optional rewards like titles and achievements all required a ton of grind in GW. Most of the unique skins were gated behind RNG so severe that most people who tried to farm them devised solo farming builds to remove the chances someone else might get the drop. The only exception came with the chests implemented in EotN and added to UW and FoW, and those were still low chance RNG. Mini-pets? Those were time gated in GW. By extension, one can infer that “our games aren’t about grinding for a future fun reward” cannot be referring to any of the above.

What do other games offer as fun rewards that people grind for? What are people going to think of when they read this paragraph? What could he be referring to if it’s not better gear?

I think, and I may be wrong, but that A-Net is trying to design their game around the actual experience of the game to get to the reward. The problem, inherently is that most MMO players have been trained that the reward, and only the reward, is what’s important, and the best way to get said reward is by the fastest most efficient means possible.

jmho.

I agree with that take.

I always thought it was 20% chance. It’s just if you strike out 4 times you have the 4 greens from the failed upgrade to try one more time.

Last two days, due to all the greens dropping from balloon towers I got 2 or 3 converts to yellow which seems about right.

Realize that crafting is not a money making profession unless you gather all the materials yourself and even then you would likely make more money selling the raw materials. To level in crafting you need crafting XP. Items that grant you a lot of XP are done by discovering their recipe, that every crafter before you has already done and made oodles of them. And it turns out relatively few players are interested in them so supply outstrips demand and the price is below cost.

GW2Spidy is excellent for knowing what is and isn’t profitable plus it does the work to show you the cheapest way to craft an item if you are buying all your materials. For instance some crafted materials are cheaper to buy made than buying the raw material and crafting that material yourself. Sometimes by a lot. GW2Spidy also has an extensive trade history of highest bids and lowest sell price for every item so you can pick an idea what a good price would be. Sadly their Gem exchange database is off line, it was the best at seeing daily trends in exchange rate fluctuations.

GuildWarsTrade provides a better interface with filters to limit total number of items. Want to see which items have more than 1000 bids but less than 1000 items for sale at less than 8s50c each, you can with their filters.

I think the females are modeled so the weapons appear to have heft/weight/mass to them while the males are modeled as if the weight of the weapon seems like nothing to them.

Also depends on Rob’s schooling. US English novels the ratio is like 30:1 while English in nonUS novels is like 8:1 between among and amongst. So having a commonwealth education or a teacher/professor that did would likely affect his choice of words.

But no, amongst isn’t a problem.

Now irregardless …

It’s not the salvaging that takes time, it’s the selling of all the runes and sigils. 4 clicks per item can be done in 1 to 2 seconds. The sell rate timer limiter slows you if you are simply dumping. Actually you can over lap the two to be more time efficient and delay the sell time out.

No discussion. 10% tax on sale, 5% non-refundable to post. Unless that gold sink destroys more gold than is entering the game I don’t see it changing anytime soon.

Well not everybody have RL friends who play MMOs, play this MMO and play this MMO at the same time of day.

The earliest date I can find for the manifesto is Aug 10, 2010. The clarification on the blog was Aug 13, 2010. So why do people keep claiming that the manifesto means one thing when those points were clarified only 3 days later nearly 3 years ago as to what they meant?

It’s like the trailer to Iron Man 3. Wow Warren Ellis’s Extremis and The Mandarin in one movie. It’ll be AWESOME! And a mighty Nelson Ha ha! to you all. So we ended up with a movie that had very little to do with what we thought it was going to be like. And who’s fault was that? US for assuming anything other than the Extremis story as nothing but an outline and let’s not even go there with what was done to The Mandarin. While I’m at it the new X-Men movie will not be as epic as the comic arc and the Superman/Batman movie won’t be as epic as The Dark Night Returns.

Your problem is taking a piece of edited down marketing fluff and interpret it though your wants and desires and then become angry when reality disagrees with your fantasy.

Not as much hoard than not spend. Got a puppy. Got some rare or exotic armor when I was poor. I know I have over 100, less than 200 now.

Khisanth.2948:

You can also mine it from another player’s home instance if they have node unlocked.

So teamed with somebody in their character’s home city. Yea that happens like never. All the teams I’ve been on break up within a minute of a dungeon path completion unless they plan to run another one right away. Make it all the way back to a city teamed? Maybe if their family or RL friends but guild mates or pugs, never.

This is a “I bought something on Craigslist that I could have gotten cheaper at Walmart if I bothered to check first” post.

Not to pile on here but I can’t help it. Hey OP, interested in buying a bridge?

Just tossing out ideas. So he still has the same e-mail account he registered the game under and he check the junk mail/spam folder for ANet’s email. Just making sure.

The next obvious step is to go through support. Of course he’ll need the serial number of the his copy to help confirm that they are talking to the right individual and straighten to problem out.

This game is all about player cooperation. There’s no tagging of critters or kill stealing. No fighting for loot or resource nodes. Everyone can rez a fallen player. Most activities are flash mobs rather than formal parties. If you see someone in trouble or simply fighting in your path, help.

I imagine they are gone from the drops when 4 winds was over.

I didn’t need to get on your case SolarNova, it’s just I see too many threads here and in other game’s tech sections where an OP asks for a system with a $1000 budget only to get responses in the $1200-1500 range or ask what kind of upgrade they could do with $200 and get responses in the $500 range.

It’s like the insistence of some to put SSDs in every configuration regardless of budget. I guess it’s the new “SLi/Crossfire” or “liquid cooling” in every budget range you use to see in in PC gaming magazine ads.

Didn’t realize it was a meta achievement. Boo. So it’s only for players who can do jump puzzles and fractals.

I just laugh at the title. The OP has no idea how bad “Asia-Grind” can be.

Talindra.4958:

I was pretty proud of myself to assembled my second desktop
Following is my current setup.
Intel core i7 4770k Haswell
Asus Maximus VI hero z87
Corsair 16GB (2×8GB) vengeance ddr3 1600Mhz
Antec 620W PSU
Antec 1100 case
128GB SSD
Western digi 3T Sata HD
corsair Hydro H60 cpu cooler (love it & its really easy to install n look cool for me xD)

It cost me at that time Australian$1600ish it should be cheaper now

Nice cabling job, very professional looking.

Before this patch I would transition into a new zone full of name tags on no character models or sounds for several seconds. Just maybe they now wait until those assets are fully loaded before dumping you out of the load screen because I’ve noticed both sound and all characters, player and NPC, present when I leave the load screen.

Flatley.1620:

1.6ghz is really slow by today’s standards – are you sure that’s it’s speed?

It maybe 1.6 GHz but it outperforms a 2.4GHz Core 2 E6600 desktop.

Here’s the thing, hyperthreading acts like an overclock and that’s it. Going from an i5 to an i7 on the desktop isn’t giving you 4 more cores. You still only have four cores it’s just that each core can be a bit more efficient when a core is running two threads simultaneously. It simply uses “mirrors” to convince the OS that you have 8 cores.

The improved efficiency varies greatly depending on the apps being run. In general going from an i5 to an i7 is around $100 for maybe 20% better overall performance, 40% in some specific benchmarks but you rarely see even 10% in games.

Yes Haswell (ix-4xxx) is 15-20% faster than Sandy Bridge (ix-2xxx) at the same clock. But going to an Ivy Bridge i5-3xxx doesn’t need a motherboard transplant. I don’t know why some people believe that dropping another $150 on an upgrade is a trivial matter for most people.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Wallet-and-World-Transfers-Official-Info/first#post2571107

Poledo.3256:

Was there a need for a third thread on this?

Well it’s not like the forum search function is useful and most people don’t know about the site: command on Google.

With it I quickly found 6 others but none recent.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Color-blindness-support-options – 8 months ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Color-Blind-Disability-Assist – 5 to 4 months ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/dungeons/GL-and-colorblindness – 4 months ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/This-is-what-color-blindness-looks-like – 9 months ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Color-Blindness – 10 months ago

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Color-Blindness-Accommodations – 10 to 8 months ago

So what’s better, a new topic or necroposting one of the old ones? I would say with gaps like that a new post.

Yes, there’s a complaint thread in Tech Support board about it.

Personally I think they’re waiting now until all the local player and NPC models as well as local sounds are loaded so they are rendered and heard right away. Before I would zone in and just see name tags and hear nothing for a few seconds as my hard drive continued to churn.

But I seem to be in the minority with that opinion.

Sounds like Windows is crashing and Automatic restart is on. In Win 7 the setting is in System Properties→Advanced (tab) about half way down. I believe Automatically restart is checked by default.

Or your power supply falters after 5 minutes of load and a power dip reboots the computer.

If all 4 cores are at 95-100% then there is something else running on your system chewing up a core’s worth of CPU power.

Ivy Bridge is about a 10% faster than Sandy Bridge at the same clock speed.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Wallet-and-World-Transfers-Official-Info/first#post2571107

Jinx

Sadly usability issues like this are overlooked by devs until it’s brought to their attention or someone in their organization is color blind and they nag the staff every day.

I did some timings tonight.

Loading character into DR (bank/tp waypoint area) from selection screen after start up. – 68 seconds, however I noticed there was no culling or popup rendering of player characters and NPCs all were fully rendered, and quite the crowd. Most other travel cases had culling upon arrival along with various sounds being delayed.

Asura Gate from DR to LA – 33 seconds
LA to DR – 34s

LA to Hoelbrek – 25s
WP travel across Hoelbrek – 17s
Hoelbrek to Wayfarer Twinspur Haven WP – 22s

DR to Queensdale using zone gate – 13s

Now most of these times I don’t consider bad. It didn’t “feel” slower or much slower at least.

I have 1TB 7200RPM drive that benchmarks at 100MB/s on average hooked to SATA II controller, 3Mb/s max. Drive is less than 25% full. It’s also the system drive. I have 8GB of system memory.

One of each type of piece from Tier 1, 2 and 3. Buying Tier 2 twice doesn’t count twice.

Supply plummeted. Either the players who use to get them have stopped to do the new content and/or there is a recipe for an item made with that and that item is currently popular with this new content.

Looks like that latter as Orrian Truffle and Meat Stew, both bowel and pot both have a similar price spike (6 to 16s for bowl, 60 to 87s for pot).

100% chance to gain might when you dodge.
+40% to your Endurance refill rate.
+10 Experience from kills.

Certainly sounds like something useful in the Queen’s Gauntlet against one of the bosses.

It’s six zones where you can constantly farm level 80 vets. T6 fine mats are falling like rain. Supply of items that require those mats are increasing so prices fall as demand gets filled.

The Wallet my have facilitated the creation of various Gifts required to make Legendaries when players saw they had enough X dungeon tokens to make the gift or a prereq to make that gift.

Then there is popular food item buffs for the Queen’s Gauntlet. That could put pressure on certain ingredients.

Coasters?

Because when the game first came out the files there were more right than wrong. Now they are basically mostly wrong. However depending how intelligent the patching software is, a compressed binary patch file is still likely smaller than a full install.

His IP address changed or he unauthorized that address.

Did he change ISPs? Move? Return home from college or vice versa? That’s why they would have sent him an e-mail with a return link to the e-mail address on file. If that changed, he wouldn’t have gotten of course. Also some popular free web e-mail services have ANet e-mails funneled into spam unless you tell it otherwise so if he hasn’t changed his e-mail address, tell him to look for it there.

Most people don’t realize that DSL for instance is dynamic IPs that can change when they are renewed based on a timer set up by the DSL service. Now you may get the same one back or you may not. I’m on DSL and fortunately the OK from me has set aside an entire block of possible IP addresses for me. However I do remember needing to reauthorize at my parents house more than once.

True, it’s likely server side.

But SSDs were brought up and I only suffered long load times gating to DR for the 1st time and I don’t have an SSD. And I didn’t notice any delay right after the original update went live. So I tried to think of reasons why an SSD would be a problem.

Didn’t even notice the chest the first time I got to the top, it was a fairly large crowd of players.

Then report it and see if they nuke the thread.

Personally cam sites are so 90s. This is “Jenny plays video games cam”.

And yes, only two posts from her are here. Somebody is making the forum rounds.

kisangyal.1796:

I still cant log in. I tried this port forwarding solution but did not work. I had no problem before this last patch but now I can not even connect to the log-in server. I guess I just stop playing this game until they fix this issue.

It is pointless to mess with the PC when it was working before patch.

Dear A.net, do something.

Wrong thread?

Or they are very competitive and what to be the one who sells it regardless the cost.

Be nice boys. Some people just like to share.

Galen Gray – “Acquisition was designed to take est 15 days each”
Dog – “Time gated content discriminates against players who can’t play daily”

And they will continue to talk past each other till the end of time.

Lesson here, when you introduce new items that you want acquisition take time, have both a time-gated currency and a random drop from every critter currency (like kite fortune scraps). Then you make the items cost either X time gated currency or y drop based currency. Toss in the possibility to convert one into the other at some unfriendly but better than nothing rate and everybody’s catered to.

Tasslehoff.5738:

@Behellagh doesn’t matter if half full. I have the same free space on ssd like before patch.

Of course it reports the same amount of space. But all that free space may not be quickly usable until the drive’s garbage collection function runs in the background.

Since the game was patched, including the primary, I think 4 times in the last 24 hours, there could be a load of flash cells that need a proper erasing at some point to be usable again. I was pondering if GC running at the same time as a butt load of read requests could somehow affect read performance.

The little arena areas have loads of Level 80 critters that constantly respawn. These include destroyers and fire legion.

Note the supply spike.

Well first you didn’t say if you confirmed that the game was running on the 650M just that’s what you told it to use. A utility like GPU-Z could confirm it.

You didn’t mention in the list of things tried included setting the game’s graphic settings to minimum to see how they affected performance in those regions. I would imagine not a whole lot unless you are in a relatively quiet area.

Ilithis did point out that in those areas the game becomes very CPU than GPU dependent. You seem to ignore that piece of news.

Your CPU is a dual core with HT and the game does get a significant boost in performance with a true 3rd core. HT only gives a dual core 10-20% performance boost on average over a non HT dual core in thread heavy tasks. Thus my “acts like an overclocked dual core” comment.

Assuming the game is installed on the traditional HD rather than the tiny SSD, defrag your HD. Especially as that drive files up. The game has a 16GB data file, I can’t imagine what would happen to performance if that was chopped up into lots of little pieces all over the hard drive.

So it doesn’t surprise me if that’s what you are seeing. It’s not a issue of GPU performance but a CPU one.

The only noticeable one I had was when I first logged in to a player parked in Divinity’s Reach. And yes it took a very long time. However traveling to other zones, LA, even within DR was fairly normal. And after the patch and forced restart tonight it was relatively quick starting up in DR (which I attribute to the process of patching meant a chunk of the game’s dat file is in the OS’s drive cache).

The fact that players with SSDs are having this problem is odd indeed. Are your SSDs more than half full? Maybe it’s a side effect of GC? Drive erasing cells while you are trying large reads at the same time? Don’t know.

Can you see the staff on the sale screen?

If not, is the staff soulbound? You can’t sell soulbound items on the TP. If the staff isn’t soulbound then it may be in an invisible box/bag/pouch. Move it in inventory to a not invisible box/bag/pouch. Also the item can’t be equipped but I didn’t think I needed to mention it but you sound new hear.