Guild Wars 2

Looking at VAT for the big countries in the EU.

Germany 19%
France 19.6%
UK – 20%
Ireland – 23%
Italy – 21%
Spain – 21%

Then you have to understand those exchange rate calculators you see, is between global banks. Individuals and businesses don’t quite get as favorable an exchange rate. Then you have to understand they don’t want to reset the price every day/month/year plus rounding to an amount for the lowest purchase so in the end, yes you are paying more than the US is.

You’ve never noticed that the list price of a game console is the same in $, euros or pounds before?

Edit: Oh look, Microsoft revealed the price of the XBox One today. $499, €499, or £429. Let’s see, what’s the cost of 40,000 Gems? $500, €500, or £425.

It’s a conspiracy I tell ya!

Swordbreaker.2581:

I’d say get a single gtx780. The reason I say that is the 780 is built off the gk110 that the titan uses. The titan gets about 80% of the performance as two gtx680s and the 780 gets about 10% less performance than the titan so its a great GPU for close to sli performance without the screen tearing associated with sli setups.

But is the extra 20-30% performance worth the extra 60% in price? That’s a personal call and for me would be no, even if that 20% is the difference between sub 30fps or not.

The OP asked for not super expensive but didn’t define that for us. Obviously Titan is at $1000 and compared to that the GTX 780 is a bargain at $650, costing only 10% of your fps in games like WoW or Bioshock Infinite at this 4MP resolution.

The GT 610MX is a very minimal GPU so I would hazard a guess and say you wouldn’t like the fps in PvE even at maximum performance settings.

And honestly nothing does WvW 40 on 40 well short of a desktop with a monster CPU and a $250+ video card, and even then the drop in fps is painful.

But that’s my 2 copper.

@banglo – You didn’t answer Ilisthis’s question. At what resolution (it’s important as higher resolutions will lower frame rate), what FPS you are looking for (30, 60) and at what game graphic setting (best performance, auto-detect, best appearance).

On top of that you’ve told us everything but the CPU as it makes a difference as well.

Also the answer changes if you are talking about standing along on a mountain top or plain than next to the Mystic Fountain in LA when MF is a daily.

It all matters because at 1280×720 at best performance it’s an easy answer. But if you are expecting 60fps at best appearance at 1920×1080 then the answer is no.

It’s a matter of matching your expectations but if you don’t give us all the qualifiers we won’t be able to give you an educated guess.

Lastly let me trot out the Tom’s Hardware GW2 hardware article. It’s old but should still be relevant.

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

Q: Doctor, doctor it hurts when I do this!

A: Then don’t do it.

Honestly a GTX 780 doesn’t give a lot for that $200+ premium over the GTX 770, maybe 20% which is not much for a 60% increase in price.

SLi requires more power and produces more heat that you then will have to get rid off. Problem is even with SLi there isn’t a solution that’ll cost less than a GTX 780 and give anything but marginally better performance.

A pair of 3GB GTX 660Ti’s cost about the same as a GTX 780 and might have 5% better performance.

A pair of GTX 670’s will run you $750 but at least added performance beats the added cost to the GTX 780. But at that point you should just buy a pair of GTX 770s for $800.

It’s a slippery slope but by choosing a 4MP display for gaming, you sort of have to pay the piper for gaming performance at that resolution, and it’s not cheap.

It may not be as bad as you think. Biggest obstacle would be a third party library they are using that doesn’t have a 64-bit equivalent.

The only upside would be able to cache more graphics and audio data in program than needing to stream it off disk as needed due to the smaller memory limit of a 32-bit app. No idea how much that would speed it up. Using memory mapped files and the OS using excess memory as a large drive buffer the performance gain may be minimal.

Certainly general performance of the code would not improve much at all, it’s primarily a data management issue.

Next on “When well we have?”, Dx11 option for graphics. Let the debate between people who never coded for either begin!

Ensign.2189:

Golf sickle is hilarious, I liek it a lot.

Golfcycles

No, they have never include the list fee in the “projected profit”. The “projected profit” is what you will see when you pick up your earnings from the sale. So when you post something for 1g you know ahead of time you will only be picking up 90s. That’s why the listing fee is listed separately, you’ve already paid that ahead of time. Simply subtract it from the “projected profit” to get the actual sales income.

If you don’t want to whip out a calculator every time, you need to charge at least 20% over the cost of whatever you are selling to break even, well actually a trivial 2% profit (1.20 × 0.85 = 1.02).

Ah the old “have you dusted your heatsink lately” solution.

Sadly I have to agree with SonicTHI here. You need to use something like Process Explorer to see that while GW2 has 40 or more threads, the bulk of CPU usage is on 3 with 2 of them essentially synced with each other thus effectively splitting a single core while the third is occupying a core’s worth of CPU cycles.

What I disagree with SonicTHI is whether or not the game could be structured any better in regard the ability to scale to total available cores. I don’t. Thus when push comes to shove it’s single core performance that is the limiting factor. In which case his OCing suggestion makes sense as a way to boost performance.

But you want them to buy gems with cash and this way they show no favoritism since both sides get penalized from the true rate.

Believe me loseridoit I know all about them.

Most of the time on computationally heavy (so ignoring tasks that read files or rely of GPU performance) and are multithreaded, Piledriver can squeeze a 4-7% performance gain, in rare cases nearly 15%. Nothing to sneeze at, it’s a similar gain that Haswell has over Ivy Bridge. But largely the fundamental design is unchanged.

And the core concept to that design was to make a “module’s” performance running two threads, one on each of it’s junior cores, equivalent to an Intel core when that core is processing two threads (ie using Hyper Threading). Sadly that means that a “module” running one thread is at a serious disadvantage compared to an Intel core running one thread. Also unlike the Intel design where two threads running simultaneously actually improves the overall efficiency of the core, running two threads on a “module” actually reduces the overall efficiency of the module. Piledriver made some improvements but that fact still stands. And sadly that still means that loading up modules first so you could park used modules and then dynamically overclock the remaining ones, is still a losing proposition and not a feature. At least not on the desktop and most certainly not playing games.

More often than not any significant performance improvement between Bulldozer and Piledriver is due to the clock speed change. If you run the FX-8350 at the same speed as the FX-8150, you simply aren’t going to see that much of an improvement.

The 2nd problem AMD has with gaming today is that Intel’s current gen of CPUs have internal PCIe controllers for graphics that have a huge amount of bandwidth to the CPU where AMD still keeps the primary PCIe controller in the NorthBridge limited to the speed of the Hyper Transport bus which has a lot less bandwidth. It’s my contention that difference means that video cards aren’t getting the data as fast as they would on today’s Intel platform. Not a problem if a game is GPU bound but still affects a lot of games.

People keep thinking that more cores is somehow magical. If you can’t break a software task into parts that can be run in parallel with out blocking one another over some common resource then the number of cores you have available means squat.

Routinely it boils down to the portion of code that is in charge of rendering the scene and the portion of code that handles interactions from the player and the server. And the rendering code is usually two threads, one game, one driver and they tend to be tightly coupled meaning they can’t take advantage of being run in parallel.

So in this regard it’s single core performance that rules the day and right now Intel does that best. But as soon as a game is GPU bound, it really doesn’t matter. Our problem is in environments where there are a lot of other players about, then the game becomes CPU bound. That’s why LA or boss events or WvW performance suffers.

As for AMD’s Bulldozer and Piledriver CPUs, they were designed to compete with Intel in a fully loaded server environment and be price/performance competitive. Doesn’t help that too many reviewers refuse to compare similarly priced models against one another or understand that a FX-4000 is targeted against an i3 and not an i5 or i7 and then benchmark the two in a single threaded app like iTunes.

CoreTemp is the way to go if you want to see your CPU temps.

But since we don’t know for sure, that his MB is Socket AM3+, it would be negligent on our part to recommend it.

Also if he does go as far as upgrading his MB then the obvious choice is Intel simply because if a game is CPU bound, Intel’s cpus simply perform better.

Here’s the Tom’s Hardware article on GW2 performance across CPUs and GPUs. Note they aren’t testing zergs or boss events. Plus this was back when the game was new.

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

NibriAyid.3680:

Yep I got a character slot as well, from my stockpile of gems I got by putting about half my TP profits into gold->gems. (Thanks to whoever’s forum post I saw a month ago talking about this idea.)

It seems EVERYTHING in the BLTC is about exploiting the impatient, including the gem exchange.

The whole “science” of marketing is based on manipulating and exploiting human nature.

I don’t see a whole lot you can do there other than moving up from a GTX 550 Ti. A GTX 650 Ti Boost (yes that’s the name) is about twice as fast. $170 at NewEgg for the 2GB version. Triple plus performance comes in at $420 with a GTX 770 and possibly a PSU upgrade. And at some point before that you will likely be CPU bound anyways.

I’m sure someone will chime it and recommend gutting the whole system for an OC Haswell based one with dual Titan cards and it’s own power plant complete with cooling towers and miniature climate change protesters picketing around the base.

Edit: Yes you could upgrade your CPU from the 2.8GHz 1055T hex core to a 3.4GHz 965 quad core. If you were doing a lot of video compression or raytracing or any other application that could take advantage of those two additional cores, you will lose performance in those apps. However the 20% boost in clock speed will help gaming performance as long as the game isn’t being limited by an older video card.

In the big scheme of things, all the various frame buffers and what not is relatively tiny even at 2560×1600, maybe 100MB in total. A problem back in the day of 1/2 GB cards but with 2 and 3 GB cards, not really.

Right now the GTX 770 gives you slightly better GTX 680 performance at slightly less cost around $400-425 at NewEgg. I consider that the borderline of super expensive.

CPU wise an OC-able i7-x770K model with a well liked third party heat sink. You don’t need to go nuts with a hex core or anything like that. If you are press for cash because of the video card, an i5-3570K or i5-4670K can save you $100 over their i7 big brother to be used toward something else.

It’s a scythe and yes you swing it similarly to a golf club. Once they made the handle long for the pickaxe animation it was no longing a sickle but a scythe and now it has animation closer to that.

ChuckUFarley.1637:

How can people complain about profanity, when there’s a profanity filter built into the game! If they don’t like it, they should use the kitten filter!!

Not to open a debate on this issue again but profanity is against the rules of conduct and is punishable offense. The purpose of the filter is so the game can get a Teen/PEGI-12 rating.

Zero.5307:

In my opinion many people are misunderstanding one very simple thing about finances.

If you have gold and don’t spend it you will have more gold in total once you earn more.

If you have a large enough amount of gold and their is a limited supply of X item for sale you can buy it and jack up the price. The trick then is to have saved enough gold to buy any of that item that is posted cheaper than yours and flip it to your price. This will leave you controlling an item which people may need, meaning in theory you can gain greater profit.

The reason economist players can buy legendaries and flip them for more gold is simply because they have more gold than you, and as long as they do they can jack up prices.

To a certain degree this isn’t always bad (remember when black dye went for over150g?) because less valuable item prices often drop, but as a consequence limited items are flipped to higher prices.

Eventually it will reach a point that the people who have lots of gold will be flipping items all the time without you noticing, and Some people play MMO’s just for the economy.

The only way to remedy this is to increase the variety and rate of limited drops, Which will encourage not the loss of wealth to those already set for gold, but rather increase the amount of gold (assuming the rare drops are sold) in the hands of someone who is likely to spend it on items that the non-economist type players are selling.

Lol everyone get that?

And what you are not seeing that more people with more gold will simply keep the price going up.

Flipping only works if you have buyers for what you are flipping, otherwise you are sitting on a pile of stuff that few if anyone can afford to buy. What flippers do is find the price that’s reflected by “real” demand. Players who are actually buying and not simply putting in an order at a price which that item was never sold that cheaply. I’ll pay 10g for a precursor. That isn’t real demand, just like someone selling copper ore for 1g each isn’t real supply. Yes it’s for sale but nobody in their right mind will ever pay that much so it’s not even worth counting as supply.

Flippers help find the right price where there is a balance between new supply entering the market is finding buyers who can afford to purchase it. A balance between true supply and true demand that maximizes the price. Eco 101.

If more players get more gold the price will just rise until that balance point is reached again. And across the entire market, that’s what is called inflation.

It’s not gambling because you always get something. The problem here is you want the item that’s described as “rare” and are upset that they didn’t lie about the fact that it’s rare, as in infrequent, slight chance, seldom occurring.

This is just like blind-box and capsule toys throughout Asia.

Been waiting for this sale.

So who’s laughing at my “buy a few gems every day” philosophy now?

Zaxares.5419:

I don’t know if we are at equilibrium right now. The exchange rate is still slowly moving upwards. It spikes whenever new gem store items are announced, then subsides, but never quite back to the level it was previously.

It depends how you define equilibrium. I contend that the difference in gold between buying and selling the same number of gems acts as a natural upward pressure to the exchange rate and in reality the only way to stabilize the exchange rate is the sell more gems to the market than are bought. Otherwise the rate will continue to creep up encouraging Gem to Gold transactions.

Of course my opinion is likely in the minority.

And the GFX card is only one sink for 12 volts. If you OC your CPU and kick the voltage it needs to be stable, you can double the wattage required by the CPU which also comes from 12 volts. Toss in water coolers, LED case fans, interior lighting, fan control, sound card, smart NIC, etc that some gamers insist are necessities and it can add up.

But if all you have is a simple setup with a non-OC CPU, yes a modern 550 watt 80Plus class PSU should easily have enough power for a single 660Ti. Heck nVidia themselves list a 450 watt as the minimum.

randomfightfan.4091:

Behellagh.1468:

perche.3215:

bad is make a offer of 25000 items at 89c, when the previous offer is 81c and force to people to buy at 90+, same thing happen with iron , ore, iron ore etc.

pure manipulation.

He’s offering to BUY 25,000 @ 89c. Sellers win. Flippers lose. That’s what I call a “Win – Win”. Plus it’s costing him (assuming one person) 200+g to do something like that.

You are forgetting that “playing the market” is a form of PvP with profit as the way to keep score. I dare say most players buy immediately and sell immediately or at worse over/under cut by a few coppers for one of something and they don’t even notice things like this.

How do you not understand what happened there? He bought a ton at 81 then made a ton of tiny buy orders up to 89 until other people stacked buy orders with his. It’s countless other people who made 25000 buy orders at 89. That’s flippers win, buyers lose.

The buyer may be paying a bit more but he is still saving money putting in orders rather than paying sellers. Plus as I said sellers who want to sell now are better off. And worse case the player who is now been overcut can pull his order at no cost to reconsider and try again.

Unless of course you were trying to flip rather than buy personal items or stacks of crafting material you were planning to use and the profit margin you were looking for is now non-existent. Then I can understand you being upset.

The presumption the masses have that any program can be broken into parts to effectively take advantage of as many cores as possible is fundamentally wrong. Certain tasks certainly such as ray trace rendering or video compression but games are a totally different matter.

What’s usually done is separating user and network I/O main loop code, that assembles a snap shot of the current state of happenings around you and that snap shot of state data is passed to a rendering thread which communicates to the graphics driver which is a third thread. Other threads to handle streaming audio data, the TP interface, prefetching texture data, physics engine, etc. can be created but actually are intermittent and don’t require a dedicated core.

In the end what limits you is how fast rendering a frame is and how fast a single nonturbo core performance is.

And of course the sticky “OMG if you only knew this” as the top of this board.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/players/OMG-If-you-only-knew-this-tips-for-new-players

perche.3215:

bad is make a offer of 25000 items at 89c, when the previous offer is 81c and force to people to buy at 90+, same thing happen with iron , ore, iron ore etc.

pure manipulation.

He’s offering to BUY 25,000 @ 89c. Sellers win. Flippers lose. That’s what I call a “Win – Win”. Plus it’s costing him (assuming one person) 200+g to do something like that.

You are forgetting that “playing the market” is a form of PvP with profit as the way to keep score. I dare say most players buy immediately and sell immediately or at worse over/under cut by a few coppers for one of something and they don’t even notice things like this.

Anything with less than a 20% gap between buy and sell now prices or when supply is much greater than demand.

perche.3215:

manipulation market , naaaa

Are you implying that offering more for an item is bad? Is are you just being sarcastic?

Stormcrow.7513:

Off topic but still relevant:
Anyone been looking at the recent “performance patches” to see if they are using more threads and/or what anet is doing?

A process has to be able to be the kind that can be paralleled to take advantage of additional cores. Currently there’s the main event loop as one thread and the renderer taking two (one GW2, one graphics driver). There really isn’t a lot of other things that can be sub divided still and at some point the renderer needs to touch base with the main thread so you still have conditions where one is waiting on the other.

This isn’t video compression software or ray trace engine where you can parallel the work with ease.

Overkillengine.6084:

/jranger

I salute you sir. Never thought I would see that again.

Zaxares.5419:

“We’re pleased to inform you that no critters were harmed in the making of these hats.”

What? Then who have I been selling all those bear pelts to?? O.o

That’s not what I heard.

Actually no. The exchange was stocked with a fixed number of gems and gold when the game went live. Sell gems for gold, gems are added and gold removed. Sell gold for gems, gold is added and gems removed. The internal ratio of gems and gold in the exchange sets the price. Gems are only created when you buy them with cash and are destroyed when you spend them.

John Smith has told us multiple times this. Let me see if I can find his post on this.

Edit: Here’s his post on the workings of the exchange.

DeathMetal.8264:

2) Anet changing G2G conversion (gold to gem, and vice versa) without clear formula on how this works – yeah, I have seen the inflation. And an ordinary player can’t keep up with how Anet calculate those, when the changes will happen, and what is affecting them. I can speculate that the rate is change based on how many in-game gold is flowing in the whole game region (i.e. EU vs NA) and that Anet is curbing the inflation, adding the G2G conversion as a cash sink. But even then, unless you make watching the G2G as a career or this is your hobby or this is your work in real life, it will be very hard to catch up.

Except I don’t see that. John Smith described how the exchange works, its just that the exchange haters don’t believe it. All of the surges happened when some new and desirable item is introduced or an old and desirable item goes on sale. And the influx of gold to gems for items is driving that. Once the surge goes away we remain at that level or decline over the next week or two because the basis of the exchange rate, the ratio between internal pools of gems and gold at the exchange stays about where it was.

There’s no magic. No secret ANet governing board setting rates to drive more players to buy gems with cakitten’s us baby. Only us and our innate sense of being cheap that is driving the exchange rate up until it isn’t anymore.

Honestly sometimes I think the forums would have been better off without the exchange. 1) We eliminate all the exchange conspiracy threads. 2) We reduce the RNG threads because fewer players would be willing to spend real money on a rare chance at something but don’t have 2nd thoughts with gold. 3) It eliminates one of the major reasons to accumulate large quantities of gold, the other being Legendary weapons which means the farm nerf outcry threads should also be reduced. Of course forum posters are a resourceful lot and would likely find something else to fixate on.

Me, I fixate on threads where someone thinks the game is unfair because they can’t get something now in the easiest way possible, but that’s me.

I ignore my personal story unless it’s a daily. I explore all the zones, working my way up. I ignore the zone’s level or “land”. I have no problem taking my human to the lands of Charr, Assura, Norn or Sylvari. That doesn’t mean I ignore my “home”, just that I don’t feel tied to it.

Green and up soulbound, MF fodder.

ilr.9675:

OP forgot to mention Transmutation Crystals.

There’s No way to obtain them in-game besides from farming Lion keys through story-mode re-rolls…. and then playing a lottery that Drop-research suggests only have a 3.5% chance of obtaining them through.

Well other than buying Gems with Gold and then buying them outright at the shop. That path is there for a reason just like how Transmutation Crystals are one of the few consumables at the Gem shop that may be a big draw.

Remember Gems for cash keeps the lights on despite what Dontain says.

Well it was a bit crazy, way too easy to aggro 4-6 which is death if you can’t run away, especially if one’s a vet.

There are plenty of overclocking guides dealing with Ivy Bridge CPUs. Just don’t shoot for the moon at first, check to make sure the machine is stable at this new clock speed before playing and watch your CPU temps since OC can overtax the default Intel cooler quite easily.

It broke earlier today and was taken down for several hours for repair. It looks to be up again. Don’t know if that fixed what you were seeing or not.

Well the cheapest and most obvious thing to upgrade is the graphics card. That’s your limiting factor at the moment.

Salvaged 24, same type of as my previous post, got 23 ectos. So my previous run was a spot of bad luck.

Guild Wars 2 is a 32-bit app so 2GB is the limit for the app side. A bug that isn’t releasing memory could cause that limit to be exceeded which will throw an error message.

Your math is off. Game went live at the end of August so we’re a lot closer to 3 months than 2.

That’s fine. But you aren’t going to be able to fix anything with a $100 USD budget. And any real improvement in WvW will seem minor. And if you aren’t comfortable doing things like changing the CPU, there’s really not much we can recommend hardware wise. Sorry.

Join smaller zergs and go for supply camps, caravans and sentries. Hang back and use siege or range weapons in larger battles.

RunForItMarty.6875:

Do the pictures have to be at the bottom of the post? Any way to put them in the middle? If not, can I link an image from another site and have it show up in my post? There is an example of doing that in the FAQ (it shows how to use bbcode img tags) .

They can only be attached which means they always display at the bottom. Sorry IMG tags don’t work and I wouldn’t put any large size or animated pictures in your post. I think I was infracted once for that (although they didn’t say why the post was “bad”, that’s the only thing I could imagine).

Seems fine to me.

EDIT

Okay, just did 26 rare armors with runes, Level 68-80 with a Master Kit. Only got 14 ectos. Number of runes seem okay (25 of 26). I was getting multiple ectos but large runs of striking out. Random is Random but could be a first flag. However no patch on our end so I lean toward very unlucky.

Now last night I did 75 and did alrightish, 20/21/22 in 3 batches of 25, overall a a touch low but well within reason.