Guild Wars 2

I have little or no skill with JPs. So I was able to get 4 caches without problems but that was it. I gave up trying to to Vexx’s after 2 hours, at one point Vexx’s instanced crashed and everyone inside ended up at the entrance to the cave.

Vexx’s was the only cache in Ascalon (but 3 in Maguuma) and since the holo projectors weren’t even close to 50/50 spitting out Aethers to fight farming was the only option and since I couldn’t get far enough into Vexx’s, those two achievements were unreachable as well.

Please, not all of us have grown up playing platformers, please don’t one chunk of achievements behind JPs and nearly all the rest in a Dungeon. At least Southsun and Dragon Bash were doable without the need of reflexes of youth.

So in the end I had only 9 of the 12 to get the pet prize. Good thing I’m not a pet collector or I would have felt shortchanged.

Yes we don’t know. Then again it isn’t out yet and since the game doesn’t have 1st person mode I would lean toward no, unless you disable head tracking because head tracking in 3rd person mode is a quick way to get motion sick as inner ear and visual perception violently disagree.

Cured thick leather sections are starting to move upwards as it’s supply starts to drop.

Bolts of silk, give it time, eventually supply will start to drop. But if crafters get enough cheap/free silk scrap for their personal use from opened bags and salvaged armor drops, it may take a while to make a dent in the supply of bolts of silk.

I don’t see that causing a rush to go out and buy keys. Not at a 1 or 2 hour leveling rate the game has Vs the likelihood of actually finding one of these in a chest.

Now that it costs so much more to craft those refined goods yourself, that supply will start to drop and at some point prices will start to rise. It took 80% of the silk scrap supply to be depleted before that price started to rise.

Did someone put a gun to your head and make you go to Dulfy and check out all her articles on it? No. Then what’s the problem? If you don’t want to know, don’t go there.

You’re like the people who freak out if they glimpse 4 seconds of a trailer for a film they want to see. Oh no the movie is now ruined for me!

If not Dulfy then within the day of the patch there will be 10 guides up and a half a dozen YouTube videos showing all the new content. So the secret to getting the secret toy surprise for the event is safe for at most a day.

Assyrian.4827:

The fact is that GW2 is turning into a mix of B2P/F2P.
And GW2 is going F2Pwith the release of new MMOs (my opinion).
F2P games are just not that good. And there is a reason why
CASH SHOP

It’s not turning into a mix of B2P/F2P. It’s always been BTP with a cash shop from day one. And now that the bulk of game sales is over for now, baring a steep price cut, the game’s primary income source is the Cash Shop. It’s not like they ever hid that fact from us. Gem cards were out in stores in the US within a month of the game’s arrival. Buying Gems at the Cash Shop essentially the same time the Cash Shop went up.

It’s just now players are starting to see cool stuff added to the Cash Shop or sales every week or two. Stuff they are interested in buying. Except everything there is entirely optional. Character/Bank/Inventory slots is pretty standard fair, Guild Wars had them for sale. Armor and weapon skins, Guild Wars had those too. So how is anything they are doing now is so different than what they did in Guild Wars? Besides adding more stuff every other week?

Well Dulfy’s post, judging by the age of the first comment was between 9-10am EDT. Looking at the supply of Silk Scraps, it was steady at a bit above 5.1 million until a bit after 10am EDT. Prices didn’t move up until about 2:30pm EDT.

So it didn’t look as if too many if any got the word before the word got out via Dulfy or any other sites. Also players who had access during the morning/afternoon on the East Coast and morning on the West Coast of the US or afternoon in Europe had something like 4 hours to cash in before prices shifted.

Sure if you work in the US during the day and sleep at night in Oceania, you got shafted. But somebody somewhere will always get shafted on market news/movement.

Rule of thumb is pricing at least 20% higher than cost to make a profit.

Devata.6589:

Not sure what the first part has to do with anything. Even if they only need 10% to pay they still need to try and make them pay and the other 90% is then not so important so that seems totally irrelevant.

And no the decaffeinated brands taste horrible.

Because in a F2P/Cash shop model getting more people playing, because the entry cost to play is non-existent, translates into a larger pool of potential cash shop users. Also having a lot of people playing, again because the entry cost to play is non-existent, is a different form of MMO content. That’s the reason for guilds/friend lists, a means to structure the social content.

After all, it’s disheartening to play an MMO when it looks as it nobody is around, so other players are a form of MMO content, probably on of the cheapest. So Nexon doesn’t really mind the 90% that aren’t interested in paying that month to help defray the costs because their presence helps to keep the 10% who are paying excited because there are all these other players to play with.

What dell do you have now, so we have an idea what you have (curious to know what “shouldn’t” have been able to play GW2) so we have an idea what to exceed.

To my knowledge there isn’t a way to know how many you have, how fast they are removed or how many you need to get a temp ban. If they did some clever troublemaker could dance at the edge of a temp ban.

The living story and boss chests at certain DE now give players stuff to do outside of farming Orr. Of course players still go to Orr to get their exotic Karma armor at the temples.

Don’t be a doofus, F2P and B2P income models require only some, but not all, players to buy from a cash shop to keep a game in business. Nexon states (who has over a billion dollars in sales with this model) publicly that they only need roughly 10% of the active game population spending on average $15 a month for a game to be considered successful. Doesn’t have to be the same 10% every month. Could be 5% spending $30 a month or 50% spending $3 a month. That amount needs to support the monthly expenses as well as initial and continuing development costs and of course sweet, sweet profit.

Now with B2P, the number of players who have the game is smaller but the initial development cost is paid off at the moment of purchase. A smaller player base likely means that a larger percentage needs to buy from the cash shop (or the same amount but spending more).

Guild Wars 2 is unique as far as I can tell because it’s B2P but it doesn’t have a premium subscription tier since it was never subscription based. It relies only on it’s cash shop and any future paid expansions.

And Devata – and I am only saying this because I care – there are a lot of decaffeinated brands on the market today that are just as tasty as the real thing.

But once “stolen” players reject these new games, as you seem to suggest will happen, they can always return here as if nothing happened.

WoW and EVE are both subscription games. A number of former subscription only games that have gone F2P still have a “premium” subscription tier. Pure F2P games like the ones from Nexon are designed to have enough inconveniences that the cash shop is only optional for masochistic players with patience of Job. Or some Chinese F2P games that are in reality P2W.

You missed the point everyone is making. ANet takes no responsibility if you choose to trade outside of the TP. You did, you lost, too bad.

Embrace this experience as an important life lesson.

I know this is bait but … the game doesn’t store anything in the registry.

1) Delete the game folder.
2) Delete the Guild Wars 2 folder in your Documents folder (it’s where is saves screenshots)
3) Run Disk Cleanup in your accessories directory to cleanup any temp files created by the TP browser from your User Temp folder.
4) Never come back to the forum and try to convince others that the game sucks and they too should leave. Oops, fell for the bait.

I think I covered everything.

Avatara.1042:

Bag and bank space should be bought with gold, not gems. A player at launch buys their space for 1 gold, while a new player has to spend 20. Evidently new players are not supposed to hold onto anything, or take things like cooking…

Since inventory expansion is the bread and butter of cash shops, ah, no to the gold Vs gems. Anyway you can buy them with gold by buying gems with gold first. See problem solved.

I’m level 62 I think and I’m still doing Caledon. It’s not the friendliest of low level zones. Which is also probably a reason it’s empty. If I ever started in the grove I think, knowing what I know now, will head to Lion’s Arch and so do any another race’s starting area.

Then again I remember my first character and how long it took me to get use to how the game works. Now it’s 2nd nature.

Unlike most other MMOs, GW2 mainly uses a very informal teaming method for most of the game’s content. It’s more flash mob like rather than LFG style formal teams. That doesn’t mean that you and a bunch of friends can’t team for the evening but more often than not it’s a group of strangers who happen to be going in the same direction taking on things that get in their way until you part company because they turn left and you want to go right.

Yes it’s very strange compared to traditional MMOs.

ArcheAge was boom and bust in Korea, I expect the same in the west.

TESO. The way people are talking about I’m betting they are once again setting themselves up to be disappointed by the actual implementation. Just as GW1 fans are loudly disappointed by GW2. Plus it’s going into the already crowded “swords and sorcery” genre.

Wildstar. It looks to blend the art style of WoW with a modern dynamic combat system plus going into the fairly sparse SciFi MMO genre, it looks to have promise.

You can define Buy 2 Play any way you want but for the industry Buy 2 Play means you must pay for the game and then you can play for free.

Free to Play means you don’t need to pay for anything to play. It may not be enjoyable to play. You may be highly restricted with a very tiny inventory, limited class and race selection and limited access to advance content. All of which can be alleviated with cash shop purchases.

It’s simple. Can you play the game (not a demo of the game) with out paying any money (playing someone else’s doesn’t count)? If you can it’s F2P, if not it’s either B2P or subscription based.

If anyone is playing loose and fast with definitions you are Devata.

ilr.9675:

Behellagh.1468:

And again if the Q1 2013 sales were from a standard $15 a month subscription MMO, we’re would be looking at an MMO with over 1/2 million players. There are very few that have reached those numbers. EVE just recently did.

That’s not a proper chart you attached. Lineage games had sevral Million players each.
GW2 sold 3 million copies its first year here.

Not sure where you got it but you should have just linked to http://mmodata.blogspot.com/ instead…

Daily Logins & peak daily pops are about as useful as Steam Data :p

Sorry Jai, my bad, that chart represents NCSOFT game sales as reported by their quarterly report, now noted that in my post. My 1/2 a million number wasn’t saying that’s how many is playing, it was to say if this was a subscription based game then it would take 1/2 million paying monthly for sales to be $30 million for a quarter. This is very, very good for an MMO.

Jae.5138:

Granted, the sales number was expected to drop. Obviously a game cannot continue its success since the first day and maintain or increase its sales, but it can do better than half the number.

I’m not quite sure why you’d be comparing the sales of GW2 to GW1. NCSoft would be pressuring ANet to start closing down the servers and wrap this disaster up if their sequel couldn’t even live up to the first game in terms of sales. I guess I see where you’re coming from in that yes, at least the game didn’t hit rock bottom, but that’s hardly the bright side, is it?

The expansion into Asia is definitely something to look forward to. But as an NCSoft stockholder and a player of this game, it’s actually not something that’s as exciting as you think. Yes, the initial hype and the sales are always great. But the retention of playerbase should always be the concern. You say that GW1’s done well for a western MMO, but you’re forgetting that there are other genres occupying the field that ANet would have to penetrate into, like LoL.

The game was out for four months before the first quarter started. Essentially any pent up demand and peer pressure from friends to buy a copy to play is pretty much tapped out. Sure someone bored with their current MMO may pick up a copy since it’s subscription free but the majority of new game sales, even at the lower $50 price is over. So that $30+ million or so the game made first quarter is mostly from the Cash shop, which is pretty darn good IMO.

Guild Wars 2 has sales through the 1st quarter, 7 months, that is greater than Guild Wars sales including all their campaigns and expansion in 86 months. The game is a financial success. The comparison to Guild Wars was to illustrate that even this “lousy” quarter in Guild Wars 2 is nearly twice as good as Guild Wars’s best. So it’s still clobbering the original. Also this “lousy” quarter still makes GW2 1st quarter NCSOFT’s 2nd highest game in sales for that quarter.

While I don’t expect a huge surge of income from the Asia market, the original Guild Wars does have traction in Asia. Sure the whole MMO scene in Asia as changed a lot since 2007 but I can still see GW2 holding it’s own, maybe not as a top 5 or even a top 10 MMO but enough sales to warrant continued presence in the region.

Everytime their is a patch I have to re-allow the game past my firewall because it’s version has changed. Now I get a little popup that asks me (I use ZoneAlarm). Now it’s possible that for some reason the game isn’t being allowed to connect to the Internet now and so it will just sit there.

So I would suggest checking out firewall permissions or any other Internet security software or hardware you have. Also if you haven’t yet, open up a ticket with support.

Mirta.5029:

Erasculio.2914:

I’m simply not naive enough to take MMORPG’s developers claims of “30 million registered players” at face value, considering how most of those have left their games. Although I guess people gullible enough to believe grind is a good thing are going to fall for anything.

They have to present numbers of box sales, of active subscribers and of gem store sales. They can’t go out there and claim, because every MMO developer has to answer to investors.
The fact that we DO see an increased amount of MMOs alone shows that the genre is profitable enough to develop for. If it was suicide for the company nobody would do it.

Score is kept for the investors by sales. Dollars and cents or in this case South Korean Won. As long as those numbers stay high, the game is a success if it has 10,000 active players or a million because continuing income is based on Cash shop sales not active players. And since the game is B2P, it doesn’t matter if players leave and never return, NCSOFT/ANet has already booked the game sale.

And yes everyone and their grandma is making an MMO so there is money out there. However how many make $30 million in a quarter? How many release monthly story content?

As for the whole manifesto says this/no it didn’t. First everyone sees what they want to see. Therefore of course people get disappointed when they see the final product. Just look at Iron Man 3, WWZ or any Hollywood movie that’s based on a popular novel but diverges greatly from that work. I’m not saying that it can’t still be entertaining but it’s not what fans expected.

GW1 fans were expecting GW2 to be GW1 but bigger, they were disappointed. Gamers who only dabbled in MMOs but hated the linear and grindy nature were mostly satisfied by how GW2 ended up. GW1 fans (and NCSOFT investors) want big paid expansions every year because that’s what GW1 did. ANet decided they want to tell new stories in their world every month and rely on Cash Shop sales rather than expansion box sales.

So GW1 players walk away yet return to the forums every week to lament how anyone can still be playing this game. Sort of like sports fan who hold a grudge against team management for trading away the fan’s favorite player and calls into sports talk radio every night to complain about it.

What annoys me more than anything is my belief that these rejected players are actively coming back to post a continuing stream of criticism in an attempt to drive away new players in hope the game fails or that ANet management will overhaul the game to make it more GW1 in an attempt to save it (well that’s a bit of a run on sentence).

Jae.5138:

One thing that shocked me was that the team was so confident that the game can sustain itself without any expansions.

The sales dropped by more than half according to this year’s Q1 report. Where is that confidence coming from? As a game whose income solely depends on the box sales and microtransactions, announcement dismissing expansion + the rate of items being introduced into microtransaction + dropping box sales = headed for disaster

Of course sales drop from Q4 2012, when the game is still new plus the holiday season means a lot of game sales Vs Q1 2013 when new game sales in general fall post holiday and the game’s income moves mainly to Cash shop. Even Q1 sales is about doubled GW1’s best quarter.

On top of that the game has still not been released in Asia where GW1 did very well for a western game. NCSOFT is hoping for a China release in the fourth quarter for GW2.

And again if the Q1 2013 sales were from a standard $15 a month subscription MMO, we’re would be looking at an MMO with over 1/2 million players. There are very few that have reached those numbers. EVE just recently did.

Edit: Following chart is NCSOFT sales numbers for their games as reported in their quarterly reports. Vertical axis is in million South Korean Won (roughly 1100 to 1 USD). Sorry if I didn’t make that clear.

You mean just like Microsoft and Sony then. Copy and pasting from the last time this was complained about.

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.

Lily Miranda.5407:

Julie Yann.5379:

Why anyone would waste money on rich dragon coffers is beyond me.

To sell them after the event ends of course!

Hopefully at hugely inflated prices.

But, aren’t rich dragon coffers account bound and therefore can’t be sold?

I will assume the height range they chose for humans fall within the 95% of the population. For men that’s 5’4" to 6’5" and for women 4’11" to 5’9". Yes the max heights listed here are about the average for guards in men’s and women’s college basketball.

First the gaming press is generally about up and coming and new games. E3 just happen, a lot of the gaming news is about new titles and the new consoles. PC gaming in general is sadly relegated to “just another platform”.

Now I read Massively and they had 27 articles exclusively about or mentioning GW2 in the last month (includes their screenshots of the week articles). That is one advantage about ANet’s living world update strategy, always something new the press can write about.

But this game didn’t start with a subscription, lifetime or otherwise.

Games that offer lifetime subscriptions usually are looking for a quick way to pay off development costs. Games tend to go from subscription to a hybrid model where players can become premium players and still pay a subscription fee but are able to access more features than a F2P player and those premium players also get a Cash Shop stipend or discount. That is why a lifetime subscriber gets a Cash Shop stipend or discount, they are also now premium players but for life.

Funcom, Cryptic, Turbine all the same with their conversion to F2P/B2P.

What we know is in the 1st quarter of 2013 the game had sales income of around $32 million USD according to NCSOFT financials. We don’t know how much of that is Cash Shop versus game sales. An stock analyst published a report (pdf) July 1st suggesting that GW2 will have $26 million in sales 2nd quarter and around $100 million for the entirety of 2013.

$100 million would be the equivalent of over 500,000 old style $15 monthly subscriptions.

Take that number and split it up however you will between Cash Shop and game sales. It’s still shows a successful product.

You keep people playing in an MMO by having something new to do all the time. An expansion would last exactly how long before the most rabid players here would have finished it and be posting here “is that all, what a ripoff”. A week at most?

I’m pretty sure the OP was asking about berserker gear.

Since you’ve told us almost nothing about your system, make/model, CPU, memory, video card, there is nothing we can recommend.

And why would you think increasing the capacity of your hard drive would affect the performance of a game? Retailers must love you.

Note however if the game thinks you are in melee, you will slow down slightly until you are no longer pursued.

Use CPU-Z to tell us about your system and GPU-Z to tell us about the video card. Just post a screen shot of both of these running on your desktop and then we’ll at least have a starting point for a discussion.

They send purchases via in-game e-mail that counts toward your 10 personal e-mail limit (why I don’t know). You need to delete some of those so it will appear. Don’t forget e-mail sent by finishing Heart contacts come with money, so pick it up before deleting those.

Ursan.7846:

This is a false assumption. drastic price change has happened in the past without any in-game changes.

Well it’s better to say it will be easy to spot with a sudden downward change in market supply, since ectos are supplied by salvaging. True the introduction of the ecto to T6 dust through salvage also caused a run on ecto supply it was very short term.

Interestingly ecto prices have returned to the pre dust conversion level. Guess there’s enough T6 dust now.

Coffers will always give you candy. It’s just there’s a chance it can give you a 2nd item like a ticket, mini, food, fireworks, etc. The chance is much higher on the paid with gem chests both for the 2nd item and for the more desirable of those items.

I opened 100 last night and got 3 minis a bunch of random food, some fireworks and 2 tonics.

Only has a Intel® HD Graphics 4000 graphics so performance will be poor.

I can only make 25-35% profit on a very limited number of items that meet my strict cost limits. Somedays it’s 30g worth of raw materials, somedays it’s 3g worth but as others pointed out not scalable to infinity.

Marketing psychology. People are less likely to put of a purchase of something they are considering to buy if the item is available (or on sale) for a limited time. It’s all about getting them to pull the purchase trigger now.

If your case can fit an H100i then great but not all cases can mount a 2×120mm radiator.

@Legacy – Yes you should get a nice kick in areas with lots of players due to the CPU upgrade. But unless you already have single 8GB DDR3-1600 memory stick laying around buy 2, 4GB DDR3-1600 Cas 9 sticks. Memory controllers in desktops have been dual channel for a decade now. Always go with two identical memory sticks over one.

Viking Jorun.5413:

I’d wear my GW2 shirt. — "I’m not here alone --- My friends are still culling."

2 weeks isn’t a problem. You do that by having multiple teams working on content, staggered so each have deadline two weeks apart. I’m sure Dragon Bask and the Sky Pirates started being worked on while we were still playing Frost and Flame.

Edit: Oops, just read the article. Well at least I’m right about the staggered teams.

They are talking about higher tier salvage. Getting Orichalcum Vs Mithril or Gossamer Vs Silk for example. Ectos are an additional drop when a rare or higher item is level 68 or higher.

Experimentation a while back seems to have settle on 0.9 ectos per rare (68 or higher) with a Master Salvage Kit. 1.25 ectos per rare for a Black Lion’s Salvage Kit.

Apologies for the following comment but it was the first thing that jumped to mind when I read the thread’s title.

So we can have hot girls dressed in plants.

There’s probably a botanists with plant girls fetish out there that this will service. Rule 34 and all.

Except azizul that number is not for ectos. We’ve gone over this time and time again.

I now spend 5-10% of my net worth of gold in gems Monday evening, rather than my usual 1%, before a rumored hot item or sale at the Gem shop.

For the most part that’s correct.

Under the OS, a Core i7 is seen as having 8 cores even though it only has four. This is because of Hyper Threading. Now AMD’s goal was to make their 8 core CPU to be able to multitask as well as Intel’s Core i7 when fully loaded down. They sort of achieved that goal by catching up to the i7-2600 with their FX-8350. But any time other than that, 8 cores running fully, Intel i7-2600 wins.

AMD changed there sockets primarily related to memory since the Athlon 64.

Socket 754 was single channel DDR
Socket 939/940 was dual channel DDR
Socket AM2 was dual channel DDR2
Socket AM3 was dual channel DDR3

Now they also tried to maintain some backward compatibility with older AM2 CPUs with the AM2+ when they introduced the Phenom and with AM3 CPUs with the AM3+ when they introduce the FX.

Intel was stable for quite some time until they started to include the memory controller and primary PCIe interface on their CPUs. Socket 1366 and 2011 exist due to the triple and quad channel memory design. Socket 1156, 1155 and 1150 exist to make sure key voltage and clocking changes won’t fry the CPU, a problem that they had with Socket 775 when they went from Pentium 4/D to Core 2.

Now as SolarNova said, only when a game isn’t bound by performance of the video card does the CPU choice really makes a difference. Let me trot out this piece at AnandTech which compared CPUs running games at 2560×1440 with all the settings turned up.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6985/choosing-a-gaming-cpu-at-1440p-adding-in-haswell-

Not surprisingly when using only a single HD 7970 or a GTX 580, it showed little if any difference in performance between CPUs in the four games they ran. It isn’t until there is enough GPU power available to show off the differences in CPUs.

This test is opposite of testing CPUs by running games at low resolution and game settings while using a single high end video card. However in the end the ordering of the results are similar. One problem with this review is the GTX 580 isn’t on par with the HD 7970 so multicard configurations don’t separate CPUs as well with the GTX 580 as it does with the HD 7970.

Moore’s law simply says the number of transistors etched onto a single chip doubles every two years. Since more transistors mean more complicated CPUs it gets wrongly translated into CPU performance doubles every two year.

Problem today is that it’s difficult for a programmer to think about dividing their apps in a way to take advantage of multicore CPUs. Some tasks are easier and multithreading comes naturally, like video and file compression (each core does a frame or file for example).

Anyways we went multicore in PCs because instantaneous performance is more important to the general public than overall performance. Having a spare core or two means the UI is more responsive or an app launches faster or one app isn’t being bogged down by another that’s running. Also remember that the OS is also an app that’s always running.

I hand calculate to determine my price point when buying rares to salvage into ectos and then maybe into dust. Since the price of ectos and runes vary day to day long term records really doesn’t help in my case.