Guild Wars 2

Well there could be a lemming effect.

“The supply is dropping, there must be a reason, I have to get in on it before it’s too late.”

And as for the high peak price on the insignia, the supply may have been tapped so much that the ones left up for sale could have been posted the very first day or week of the game when nobody knew what to price something at.

Upgrading the PSU will allow you to use say the 6800K and most GPUs without fear of burning out your current PSU and possibly your system and upgrading those will help your performance issues.

Certainly upgrading your graphics will help your frame rate and visuals in non-crunch situations.

As for not upgrading your PSU, I will need the HP model number to make sure, but most of those systems use a 300 watt PSU with only 15 to 19 amps at 12 volts which is tight with an AMD CPU/MB setup. And that’s the upgrade problem in a nutshell. The HD 7850 is an 130 watts max card, nearly all of it at 12 volts which means about 11 amps. That’s on top of whatever 12 volt amps the CPU is using. Then toss in fans, drives, misc. electronics and yea you will have likely exceeded 19 amps.

Sure it will hold together browsing but as soon as you start GW2, BOOM!. Maybe not a boom today, boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom tomorrow. Boom. Sooner or later. BOOM! (yes paraphrasing Ivanova from B5). Even an HD 7750 needs 55 watts max and even that is likely to push that PSU close to failure.

So something as “small” as the Corsiar CX430 would be a huge improvement with 32 amps or 380 watts available at 12 volts, big step up from 180-230 watts of a default HP 300 watt PSU. Assuming of course that’s what you have. Model number will help to verify the size.

If the 2.5 million represents logins per week and we assume the average player logs in once, plays and leaves then that’s 357 thousand active players.

508,428 hours a day means roughly 10 hours a week per player. Fairly believable. Not everyone plays daily or in long stretches.

Supply floored. It went from 3,700-3,900 with 16,000 demand going for 60c to under 100 supply and peaked at nearly 15s. I suspect this triggered a lot of crafting and supply recovered while the price is now drifting back to where it was.

Why the rush on supply? Evil market manipulators? Someone having fun at the MF. Who knows. Only took 9 1/2 hours. I suspect a rumor here or another site about them.

And it’s July not June.

A better processor is going to be a problem since it’s a socket FM2 motherboard. Not a lot faster, A10-5800K, A10-6700, A10-6800K. And we aren’t talking HUGE amounts here, 8%, 15%, 20% roughly. And the 5800K and 6800K use more power which may be a problem.

Video we can do, it’s just adding a video card. The HD 7660D is great when you compare it to Intel’s integrated graphics but it’s still low end and dependent of system memory speed. Only problem is that it sounds like you have an HP box which doesn’t have a large power supply or one that supplies a lot of power at 12 volts which limits video cards a lot.

That CPU, 370K is an AMD A6-6xxx without the graphics part. While it’s roughly 60% faster than your current CPU, it’s still two cores and GW2 works a lot better with 3 or more cores. Plus it’s a different socket. The nVidia GT 610 is a joke, your current card is likely much faster.

The X3 450 is an older K10 CPU and is only 25% or so faster but it does have a third core so you should see more than a 25% gain you would get from a K10 based duel core like the 7450 running at the same clock rate as the X3 450 like the X2 260. Also enabling the extra core isn’t a guaranteed thing, sometimes it’s disabled for a good reason.

The HD 6570 should be much better than your card and I don’t think you would need more at that resolution and targeted frame rate. But still WvW and large events with lots of players are going to stress the CPU more than the video card so those events will still suffer somewhat.

In computer graphics, it’s the removal of an object before it is passed down the rendering pipeline. No need to do any rendering work on something that won’t ever be visible to you. No reason to texture a surface that’s facing away from you or is behind another object.

Here it’s generally refers to not drawing player/NPC models to reduce rendering workload, sometimes because those models aren’t loaded yet into memory or because they are simply too many of them. Rather than pausing the renderer to wait for these models to be loaded or all of them to be drawn, they are culled from the view. You run into the TP or bank in LA and you see nobody but name tags for 5-15 seconds, well their models are culled until they are loaded/created.

Nick.6972:

Here’s a question.
Excuse me for generalization, but, Chinese players are known for liking “hardcore”/strategic games.
How will arena net keep their interest?
I’m afraid LS wont work.

Sounds like WvW to me. I’m going to bet that they are less zerg like and more organized hierarchy of squads and platoons. I would also imagine having specific players as siege engineers and players whose job is simply shuttle supplies to the siege construction.

Khal Drogo.9631:

Real Life GW2 “Backpack”:

http://www.kongzhong.com/chinajoy2013/showimg/20130727/10894.html

Oh boy, a backpack made out of corrugated fiberboard. I thought it was going to be a RL Quaggan or Charr backpack.

You could get your photo taken with ingame characters.

Latest Steam survey shows 4.7% of people with Dx10/11 hardware but not running a version of Windows that support Dx10 or Dx11. 3.4% aren’t running Dx10/11 hardware at all. Combined that’s about 1 in 12.

I normally chat in guild. Why would anyone have anything to say on say or map in LA? RPers I suppose. But I tend to pass through LA in minutes. Only time I stay longer is if I’m using the various services in which case I’m not interested in chat.

When you go to the mall in the real world do you start conversations with random strangers? People may be talking but they are talking to their friends present or on the phone or to store staff. But in an MMO that can be done directly or at least not in a channel that everyone can “hear”. And I haven’t included those who are using some type of VOIP program to chat.

Honestly the “what you love about GW” is so vague it’s meaningless. Was there a survey? Market research? Or the dev’s own opinions from colleagues and friends. It’s so dependent on who you ask and how you ask it.

I use double tab all the time. Sucks if you forget and leave it on during a jump puzzle.

Well since you have an AM3+ motherboard and 64-bit Win 7 then 8GB of memory should be a good relatively cheap upgrade. 2, 4GB sticks of fast DDR3 are in the $70 price range. More than enough for gameplay, OS and utilities running at the same time.

Totally forgot that this line of CPUs have both DDR2 and DDR3 memory controllers.

CPU, that’s a lot tougher. The FX-4350 or FX-6350 are under $140 at NewEgg ($130 for the 4 core FX-4350, $140 for the slower 6 cores FX-6350) and will improve performance compared to the Athlon X2 7450 because either are faster on a per core basis and they both have more cores. They can handle up to DDR3-1866 memory. However they both require more power than your current CPU which brings the question on power supply back into the picture. Also more power means more heat so both CPU and case cooling are important.

Nilgrow is right about his recommendations. Even at NewEgg the price of an FX-4350, 2×4GB sticks of DDR3-1600 Cas 9 memory and an HD 7750 with GDDR5 is under $300 before rebate. As long as you have a power supply with enough 12 volt wattage to feed the CPU and video card (they will use around 60 more 12 volt watts than your current setup, guessing an HD 4550) you should be blown away by the upgrade, and then soon to be craving for more.

LA is the hub city of the game, since it is neutral to all races.

That implies that other races aren’t welcome in a race’s home city, which is untrue. My Norn explored Black Citadel long before she set foot in Hoelbrek. I didn’t see a lot of players there, including Charr. It’s just I see a greater diversity of race as well as number of players in Divinity’s Reach than the other home cities.

As for OS stats, StatCounter can show OS breakdown per country and part of world, based on info passed by your browser. June 2013 stats has XP kitten.9% and Win 7 at 36.6% in China. In South Korea XP is 27.4% and in Japan 14.6%. Compare that to 11.9% in the US and 15% in Germany, 13.5% in France and 10.5% in the UK.

Of course any PC including crappy ones can go browsing on the web, it doesn’t say anything about gaming systems.

Also Dx11 doesn’t guarantee faster frame rate. That entirely depends on the port. Remember Lost Planet’s Dx10 port, the game became slower because the devs couldn’t help themselves with all the new “features” Dx10 had and by including all of them resulted in a much prettier yet slower game than the Dx9 renderer.

In the west MMOs are all about the expression of the individual. Thus we get the disaffected teens and young 20 somethings gathering and emerging in Tyria as a variety of characters.

In Asia MMOs are more team oriented therefore they get scenes of armies forming to fight off the forces of evil and quite a bit of WvW gameplay. GuildWars was popular in Asia as an e-sport so the trailer also has a number of PvP gameplay moments.

Yes the opening is beautiful and the art style in the game meshes well with Chinese/Asia watercolor style art. They seem to have changed the risen a bit but that’s understandable due to the cultural taboo on undead.

Overall it wasn’t bad. Different due to the audience it’s catering to.

I play both (level 80), they are very different with my thief being in your face, unless you are a champ while the mesmer hangs back all the time (greatsword) and only resorts to melee when pressed (sword/focus).

Still haven’t gotten a hang of the thief’s combo field effects.

Last time I did a dust conversion, a few days ago, 91 ectos yielded 147 dust with master salvage kits. That basically covered the cost of the 105 rares and the 8 master kits to do all the salvage with my profits being from the runes and materials.

Problem is as others pointed out is at the most basic level your system is just to old. Asking what to upgrade in a socket AM2 system is like asking to upgrade an Intel socket 775.

AM2 means it uses DDR2 memory (I seem to remember a few AM2+ MBs that had DDR2 and DDR3 memory slots but since you didn’t go into detail I’ll assume the most common denominator.

- So socket AM3 or AM3+ motherboards are not compatible to Socket AM2 CPUs.
- DDR2 memory is not compatible to socket AM3 or AM3+ motherboards.

So if you are going to do an upgrade you will need to change out the entire core of the system. That brings up other potential problems as well such as PATA based drives, which are no longer supported on most motherboards. Then there’s the shift in power supply requirements where 12 volt amperage is the most important.

Due to the age something as simple as a memory upgrade will cost more (50-60%) relative to current memory prices due to the reduced production now. The only quad cores available for that socket was the 1st generation Phenoms and they weren’t fast.

I guess you could get a more modern video card since that’s independent of the core 3 components and thus reusable in a future system. But power supply requirements could come into play.

Basically we your options are very limited if you want to go piecemeal and we would need a bit more information to help with our recommendations.

I park my Norn in The Grove because I find the Crafting/TP/Bank distances reasonably short. Some prefer Rata Sum for that but in The Grove all crafting is in one area while Rata Sum has is divided in 3 different directions.

Particle effects. They need a way to cap/prioritize which ones are displayed first and allow the player to adjust the cap. That can go a long way to “fix” some of the frame rate problems we have in this game.

You need the fee on you. Bank doesn’t count.

Living story is basically a quest chain where you are given choices periodically about doing quest A or B (and sometimes C) and it allows your character to have a slightly different experience than another player of the same race. In the end we all end up in the same place on Orr, to fight the dragon Zhaitan.

There’s always a fair number of players around the TP/Bank/Gate to LA in Divinity’s Reach. Can’t say the same for The Grove, Rata Sum, Black Citadel or Hoelbrak. Little reason to stay there after zone completion other than being the closest location of a TP, bank or crafting area from where you are at the moment.

I’m guessing Divinity’s Reach still has some players about because humans are a popular race selection.

And it’s not like it lost all it’s value. Worse case he got once T6 dust. That’s like an 8s loss.

Oops, beaten by Psychol.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/Refund-on-Flute/2482863

Where’s my jet pack? Where’s my flying car?

Oh sorry, I thought this was the thread where we complain about what was promised us someday. Sure we don’t have nuclear reactors in our homes and Pan-Am isn’t flying rocket planes to a space station so we can get a connecting flight to the Moon. But there are practical (as well as social and political) reasons that didn’t pan out.

As for ArenaNet, they came reasonably close. They did away with 99% of the force party requirements, the tyrany of the triad and the mostly linear quest format found in most MMOs. It’s not a sandbox like EVE, where player driven/evolved content is as important as dev generated but it does provide a degree of freedom I didn’t find in other MMOs. And from that point of view I think the manifest came pretty close to the goals they stated.

Blissified.8369:

Most people like me want dx11 for the increased performance as this game runs like crap for how it should run on high end computers, plus it doesn’t use as much gpu power as it should (on high end cards)

arn’t all cards dx11 ready? ( I should know this, embarrasing coming from a computer technician)

edit my 7950 certaintly is.right?

i thought all cards are capable of using dx11 as long as you have windows 7 and up (stupid microsoft scam)

AMD HD 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series are only Dx10

nVidia 8xxx, 9xxx and GT/GTS/GTX 2xx series are Dx10

Yes these are “old” GPU cards but according to the Steam Survey Dx10 cards account for 32.8% of the cards out there.

Scoobaniec.9561:

Ill leave it just here.. Second ss show the ultra amazing quality of textures in GW2. Next 2 ss coming from Crysis 3.

Should i mention that i have highter FPS in Crysis 3 than in GW2?

And exactly how many other people are playing with you at the same time in Crysis 3?

Oh, and I can run Dx11 thank you very much. But I’ve seen too many games where the Dx10 or Dx11 option significantly reduces framerate over the Dx9 version. Sure they can look better but should I lose 10% or more of my framerate for doing nothing but enabling Dx10/Dx11 rendering?

Yea I get to use this again. Copy and pasting.

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.

Tessellation is great making really pretty demos and impressive screen shots. But when you are in a middle of an Ogre mob will you notice the deep wrinkles in it’s skin or how much better his knuckles are formed as you are spamming your attacks?

As for the EVE demo. One ship, 500 million triangles, most less than a pixel or two in size (only 3.7 million pixels at 2560×1440). This is one ship in space, using displacement mapping with tessellation instead of bump mapping. Relatively simply lighting. No particle effects.

Let me show you another case of tessellation overkill. Crysis 2 added a Dx11 patch, game was originally Dx9.

http://techreport.com/review/21404/crysis-2-tessellation-too-much-of-a-good-thing

It’s that kind of overkill that’s all to common in Dx11 tessellation (see EVE demo). Here’s a tree trunk with 100,000 triangles. Here is a single leaf with 5,000. Now here’s a forest made up of those trees covered in those leaves. Crap, 99.9999% of all triangles are under one pixel in size, except the tree you are right next to. What realistic looking bark. What the tessallator gives you the scaler takes away.

It’s like one of my points against about DoF effects. You are going to supersample a texture with 4x/8x/16x AF and then smooth the edges with 4xMSAA and then using the depth map do a blur pass so the carefully, textured object that the hardware just rendered looks like a smudge because it’s far enough away.

I assume your problem is price or you don’t like nVidia.

Order of stock clock performance at 1920×1080, 4xAA if available, slowest to fastest according to TechPowerUP. Relative performance to stock clock GTX 760. Only models between $200-$300 at NewEgg.

GTX 660 – 81
HD 7870 – 82
HD 7950 – 92
GTX 660 Ti – 95
GTX 760 – 100

Hope that helps a bit.

The two big things in Dx11 that I can think of are tessellation (dynamic mesh based on distance, allows smoother more detailed model up close) and the ability to multithread the rendering loop “easily”.

Personally I think that tessellation is oversold as a “feature”.

Nuka Cola.8520:

Lévis.5489:

Guild Wars 1 w3as originally a DX8 game . Took them until Factions’ release to make the game DX9 .

No DX11 is a crime against any computers built after 2009 .

MMO or not, not having DX11 support in a PC EXCLUSIVE title released in 2012 is a joke especially when games run better in dx11.

Except they do have a Mac version in permanent Beta using an Dx9/Windows SDK emulator. At least I’m pretty sure it’s not a native OS X version.

Anyways since the game will Soon™ be released in Asia and Asia (re: China) still has a sizable XP population, I don’t see them working on a Dx 11 version any time soon.

Gotten only three duplicates so far, one worth next to nothing, under 2s, one selling for around 10s and one earlier in the week I sold for 1g (now 80-90s).

Nobody wants to be first. If you price it low, you will kick yourself in a week when you see you could have gotten X more and if you price it high it’ll get undercut continuously so it never sells meaning you will have to eat a 2nd post fee if you want it to sell at all.

Never easy being first.

Same would hold true, save Customer Support time, if they made TP purchases not count toward personal e-mail or modify the e-mail window so game, personal and TP mail is on separate tabs.

Heck DOS use to have a ramdisk program. The fact MSI includes a custom branded commercial version of this. Problem is you need the RAM and since the dat file for GW2 is over 16GB in size, you are going to need that much memory on top of the memory your OS, utilities and game uses for it to be of any use.

RAMDisk official site.

Then you have the people who got the thing you want when it was offered and you have people crying over the fact they didn’t get one when they were available (or they are new).

If it specific for a particular holiday, I expect we will see them again the next time those holiday’s come around.

If it specific for a particular enemy group I expect future events will be based around those groups and once again those items will be available again.

Patience (How long is that going to take?)

Why don’t you just make Gem Store deliveries NOT count as personal email, they get deleted as soon as you claim the item you bought. Maybe even tabbing the e-mail box between event, personal and store?

Then there is your RAM limitation due to OS Ace. XP SP3 is almost officially dead. Microsoft disavows it next April. That will likely mean nVidia and AMD will not be porting any newer drivers for that OS beyond that point and will allow software companies not to worry about backwards compatibility to it. You may want to start thinking about upgrading.

Oh, and that Micro Center deal is very good. Sadly not everyone lives near to one. And socket 1155 is still alive and well, until Intel introduces the Haswell based desktop i3s, Pentiums and Celerons.

And my point in comparing it to the prices of similar items at another MMO’s cash shop shows they cost less in GW2 than Turbine games. Didn’t look at PWE or Nexon pricing.

As Intel has gotten the power use down on their top end CPUs, their overclocking overhead has also decreased since the temperature increase when you overvolt and overclock becomes extremely problematic. It was true going from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge and again from Ivy Bridge to Haswell. Some of it has to do with how Intel changed how the heat spreader is bonded to the die between Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Then there’s the density of the die due to the smaller surface area, 32nm in the i7-2600K to 22nm in the i7-3770K and i7-4770K. Just can’t get the heat sucked away quick enough, first to the heat spreader and then from there either with air or liquid cooling (ignoring impractical extreme overclocking cooling methods).

It’s a way to level the playing field between those with a lot of gold and/or free time and those who don’t. Otherwise it would be a matter of days after it’s introduction that some “Richie Rich” player would be sporting all Celestial gear and waving it in everyone’s face. This way collecting 25 quartz and “refining” it requires little time, little cost and everyone can do it.

Sorry if I scared you in your other thread. It’s not that the FX-6300 is bad, it’s just that a true Intel quad core is better but if you can’t afford it’s no big thing. It’s as good or better than a Phenom II X4 965 or Phenom II X6 1100T.

On one hand of course the i5-3470 should perform better, it costs 65% more than an FX-6300 . AMD and Intel do try to price their CPUs on relative performance.

By posing the question in your other thread you knew, at least subconsciously what the answer would be. Deep down you want to be talked into the i5 but if your budget for a new system was already at it’s max and we are talking food on the table or rent paid on time or prescriptions refilled then it’s not worth it, we’re talking about a computer to play games on. It’s a luxury item.

I use dagger/pistol and use 3, Shadow Shot, to blind and shadowstep to them and simply gut them with 1 and 2. My alternative set is pistol/dagger which also allows me to easily outside of battle to switch them up to pistol/pistol and dagger/dagger.

I’m not a good thief either.

You might be past the point where old CPUs are no longer cheap because people like you, who are looking to upgrade their old hardware are buying up the limited remaining stock, including used.

And yes, the i5-655K isn’t 4 cores, it’s 2 cores with HT. An upgrade would be a proper 4 core like an i5-7xx (750/760) or an i7-8xx (860/870/875K/880). Note that for some reason Intel has disabled the AES encryption instructions from those CPUs.

Chrome reads German.

This is their home away from eBay.

http://www.anlauf-computer.de/

======== Translation ========

Your advantage with us:

• This system is delivered completely assembled

• before delivering a 24 burn-in test is performed

• mapped housing is also supplied

• We use our PCs exclusively coordinated brand parts

• We provide the PCs basically not overclocked processors

=> Processor – 3350P Intel Core i5 (4x 3100MHz) Quad Core
=> Processor fan – Intel boxed cooler or quieter fans at
=> Motherboard – Asrock H61M-DGS with 1x PCI-Express (16x), 1x PCI-X (1X), 1.000MBit LAN DSL ready, 4x Serial ATA II, dual channel
=> Sound Card – 5.1 Channel High Definition onboard
=> Memory – 8GB DDR 3 RAM 1333 Dual Channel memory brand!
=> Hard Drive – without hard drive
=> DVD burner – without a DVD drive
=> Housing – Silver black design casing (see photo) with front USB + Audio (Total 8 USB)
=> Power Supply – ECO 750W ATX Power Supply with 12cm big fan laufruhigem and active PFC power saving function
=> Graphics Card – AMD Radeon HD 7870 2GB HDMI, Dual DVI, PCI-Express
=> Accessories – Power cord, Manual, Driver CD

============

So no optical or hard drive and therefore no OS either. So “not” a functional computer out of the box.

Your budget seems to restrict you to AMD CPUs so not a lot of options. The only other possible alternative (putting on fire suit) is to go with something like a 3.3GHz i3-3220 or 3.4GHz i3-3240 for now. It’s a dice roll and it depends how much you believe in the article on Tom’s Hardware about various configurations and GW2.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/guild-wars-2-performance-benchmark,3268-7.html

The core scaling chart that show an i3 clocked at 3GHz out performing an FX hex core at 3GHz. Of course the FX-6300 is running at 3.5GHz while the i3-3220 is at 3.3GHz and this was back when the game first came out.

Tom’s also published this piece on $200 and under CPUs for gaming.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-processor-frame-rate-performance,3427-9.html

i3-3220 and the FX-6300 were pretty close overall. The one major difference was the FX-6300 was able to deliver a more consistent frame rate in the games tested even though it might be a little slower.

Crawford.4135:

You really need to avoid buying an i5 for a gaming system.

i5’s are business PCs as they are cheaper for companies to purchase in bulk vs i7’s.

More L2/L3 CACHE means better performance for gaming. Yes it really does make a difference, and has for over a decade.

The player’s on a budget, even the i5 is stretching it and you tell him to spend another $100 for maybe a 5% gain in performance on average between the i5-3570 and the i5-3770? Now offset the 3% gain do to clock speed. Not a whole lot of difference for a whole lot of money.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i5-ivy-bridge_7.html#sect0

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/701?vs=551

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-comparison,3370-16.html

So where’s your proof that they are sooooo much better and worth the money (40-45% markup over an i5)?