Guild Wars 2

The G630 is a dual core CPU, the game does get a nice kick with more real cores (none of this HT BS).

The HD 6750 isn’t the quickest GPU in the shed but as long as you aren’t over taxing it (turn everything to max at 1080p for instance) it’s reasonable.

WvW brings the best rigs to their knees during large zerg battles. Lots of animation, lots of particle effects. You can see this as well at boss chest events in PvE. As of now the client software doesn’t scale well in large crowds like that outside of just standing around and chatting.

And TinkTinkPOOF is right, without a better overview of what you have any recommendations are pure guesswork.

You need more exclamation points. Here.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Unless it’s network lag, the problem is on either end of the connection. Either the server can’t handle tracking all the incoming traffic for the battle or the client can’t handle rendering all the effects that are happening in the midst of battle.

I vote for the later. Not saying it’s your rig, just that the combination of the rig and client software simply can’t handle the load and skill responsiveness is the 2nd thing to go after framerate.

At one level this allows the player to see that there is “friction” between the races, an uneasy alliance against a greater foe without getting bogged down in a cutscene narrative. Same can be said with the various “rebel” factions within each race with their comments.

No idea mate, I rolled a thief like two weeks ago and she’s level 29 already. I just explore, do DEs when I find them.

I get mine, it may take a while or fail every so often. If you honestly don’t have it anymore then it’s possible that they only keep the last x days/weeks/months around.

Gems are always 80 for 1 USD or Euro

Gold price for Gems vary based on players buying and selling gems for gold.

The question that only you can answer is right now what is easiest for you, buying gems with gold or with actual currency. If you have 100s of gold, earning gold is easy for you and if you can part with some of it then great, pay with gold. If you have some extra cash in your pocket you can part with, buy gems with it.

It’s all up to you.

Iruwen.3164:

Behellagh.1468:

Bugs happen, nobody died, move along.

I’m not talking about gold, this was about real money. And if it was only 10c, it’s still real money. I never asked them to compensate for the gold I used to buy the rares or the time I spent on getting the other rares I salvaged that day. Absolutely no need to defend them. Anyway, they’ve taken the right step.

Did someone hold a gun to your head to buy a BL salvage kit to do a test and post about it? No you volunteered to test it yourself. Thank you for doing so but you should have known that decision and it’s consequences, paying real money, was all on you.

IMO nobody should expect/demand to be compensated for “helping out”. Nice if it happens but shouldn’t be expected, all I’m saying.

At NewEgg in the US I’m seeing $50-90 USDfor a 500 watt PSU that can deliver upwards of 400 watts or more at 12 volts (the CPU also draws a lot of power from 12 volts). Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, XFX all have reasonably priced PSUs that could support a GTX 660 or higher. But it is an added expense and then it becomes “why not buy a 600-700 watt one in case one day you want to drop $400+ USD on some high end video card … blah, blah blah”.

So no sticker visible on the power supply at all. So not even a manufacturer and model number? Did you build your rig or was it a standard model from someone like HP or Dell or is it a custom rig from some boutique shp?

Im Mudbone.1437:

Behellagh.1468:

@Iruwen

The BL kits are still good and do return more ectos than the master. If you knew the problem was being investigated then why buy BL kits or use the ones you were saving? Couldn’t go a day or two without breaking down your supply of rares?

He was running tests to help determine if they were also affecting the Black Lion Salvage Kits. Please read more than one post by that poster to determine this.

And I lost 3g doing tests myself, to post in this thread to sway the non-believers as well as providing details for whoever was reading the thread but that was my decision, I knew I would lose money on it. You don’t see me asking for reparations. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot but to me that’s 4-5% of my account’s net worth in gold. That’s on top of the 4-5g I loss attempting to outrun what I first thought was a long string of bad luck.

Bugs happen, nobody died, move along.

Now that that’s fixed the pitchfork and torch side of me wonders how the original original pickaxe style animation along with the extended gathering time ever made it pass the design phase. Did they just lob the task to the newbie in the dev pit with no guidance other than “just look what was done with the molten pickaxe”?

As a software developer myself I’m not a fan of overly detailed design guidelines but it’s as if the person or persons who worked on it never gathered with a sickle before in game or looked up how a scythe is used.

My working hypothesis is the original animation was done up as a placeholder and nobody ever circled back to do it right.

Ursan.7846:

tigirius.9014:

Let me give you this link, it will explain some things about statistics.

Large data sets aren’t necessary

Large data sets aren’t necessary?

In a roll where certain events can happen 1/1,000 of the time (Source: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Lost_Orrian_Jewelry_Box/Drop_rate. All the lodestone are 0.1% or lower) you think 83 rolls is enough to get an accurate distribution? Are you serious?

But with CI testing you can confirm whether or not what you got or didn’t at least fits withing observed data. Of course with such a low observed percentage you can only tell something is off if you got more than one of them with such a small sample.

Yes you will need 5% of the list price, on you, not in your bank, to post anything at the TP.

@Iruwen

The BL kits are still good and do return more ectos than the master. If you knew the problem was being investigated then why buy BL kits or use the ones you were saving? Couldn’t go a day or two without breaking down your supply of rares?

They may not start out buying gold with gems but say you buy a 2000 gem card at say Target, apply it to your account, buy that limited time pet or sickle and then they decide to take the left over gems and convert those into gold.

Not sure how much a graphics card can help with that rig but here goes.

First $65 isn’t enough to do what you are asking for. Best card you can get for $65 is the HD 6670. It should potentially run rings around an HD 3600 but low system memory plus a weak dual core CPU is likely to drag it down from it’s maximum potential.

Now only if there was a place where they listed that information where all can find it.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/last-stand-at-southsun/

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/info/news/Game-Update-Notes-May-28-2013/2105689

Ace.1726:

Behellagh.1468:

Usually these are found in the tech section.

First what is your power supply, size and model. You may have to upgrade it as well if it’s not up to snuff.

I will say the GTX 660Ti if you don’t need to buy a PSU, a GTX 660 if you do as a good quality PSU in the 500-600 watt range will set you back $60-90 USD.

And still on XP? Really?

I don’t know what model it is but I do know that it has 500 watts.

I’ll check out the 660ti now.

Yeah I get that a lot about xp, I like it better than the later versions.

Can a mod move this to the tech section?

Now here’s the problem. Not all 500 watt PSUs are equal. When it comes to having the power to support a $300 class video card, what’s important is the amount of watts it can deliver on the 12 volt part of the supply. Store bought PCs and very inexpensive power supplies that are often bundled with cases, even 500 watt ones, simply can’t deliver a reasonable chunk of it’s total power output at 12 volts. That’s my concern here. You may want to crack open the rig to take a look see. What you are looking for the sticker on the PSU and see if they list total wattage or amperage at 12 volts (watts@12v = amps@12v x 12).

As to performance difference between the GTX 660 and GTX 660Ti I can only point you at this chart from TechPowerUP.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/GeForce_GTX_660_Direct_Cu_II/27.html

So stock clock 660 vs 660Ti is about 15%.

Lord Kuru.3685:

anyone checked to see if the rate is back to normal?

Yep, salvaged 90 and got a touch better than 0.9 ectos on average with a Master kit.

If something is screwing with the economy, he’s all over it.

Usually these are found in the tech section.

First what is your power supply, size and model. You may have to upgrade it as well if it’s not up to snuff.

I will say the GTX 660Ti if you don’t need to buy a PSU, a GTX 660 if you do as a good quality PSU in the 500-600 watt range will set you back $60-90 USD.

And still on XP? Really?

AndrewSX.3794:

No, is that the “Salvagin bug” has been fixed.

So the ecto rate from rares is back to normal levels.

Ah, yes. What Zaxares was talking about was that the rise was not due to speculators driving up the price but due to the supply plummeting due to the salvage bug, therefore the term “supply shock” as in a sudden shortage drives up the price.

As for those who want compensation. Suck it up folks. I was burned too but at what point did you not notice something amiss? Even a sampling of 25 is enough to show that something was off. True it took me 75 to really accept it and I did another 10 after one patch to see if was fixed and then another 75 as documented test cases for the unbelievers out there. Still at 160 I probably lost around 10 gold overall including profit I would have had. Sure my profits are small compared to the big boys but that’s still like 15% of my current net worth.

So if you do 100s upon 100s and not notice something was amiss, too bad. Learn to monitor your production rate and when it derails STOP.

Regina Buenaobra.6193:

Changes to important things like salvage rates would be listed in the update notes if they have changed. If it’s not in the update notes, then no changes have been made by the development team.

Well Regina was right, if it was intentional there would have been a patch note. No patch note so wasn’t intentional. All she was missing the word intentional after “no” and before “changes”. She wasn’t blowing us off as much as confirming that it wasn’t by design. But some people will always misconstrue the worse.

Ah, VAT’s roughly 20%. So $10 US + 20% would be roughly €9.20. So they rounded up to an even number, sue them.

Thank you John.

Glad I wasn’t just some crazy market manipulator.

Just ran a new batch.

25, level 80 armors with runes using a Master Salvage Kit

Cost of rares and the MSK, 4g21s66c

Runes recovered: 22
T6 Salvage: 6
T5 Salvage: 36
Ectos: 11 – no 2 or 3

Probabilities with a 95% CI

Runes: 70-96%
T6: 12-44%
Ecto: 27-63%

So the same as what I was seeing before. Loss – 1g13s60c

Combining my two data sets. (previous one)

75, Level 80 rare armors (only 73 with runes)

Runes recovered: 60
T6 Salvage: 9
T5 Salvage: 130
Ectos: 38 – no 2 or 3

Probabilities with CI of 95%

Runes: 72-89%
T6 Salvage: 6-21%
Ectos: 40-62%

I really can’t afford to do this kind of testing again until we are officially told one way or another how things are. 3g loss is around 5% of my net worth.

Well someone unleash some kind of computer worm to nuke that video off of YouTube and anywhere else it’s hiding on the Internet. Please. He’s as bad as birthers and truthers.

Search Dontain on the forums to see all the discussions we’ve already had debunking this guy’s opinion on the cash shop, the conference call and the fact ArenaNet as said once again that NCSOFT isn’t speaking for them about an expansion.

I don’t know about nVidia problems. Your budget is tiny. Not even sure you could get your present card at that price (well looking at aria you can). On the AMD side that budget will get you an HD 7770 and on the nVidia side a GTX 650 (not Ti, not Ti Boost) and neither of those I would call an upgrade worth spending money on (well to be fair the HD 7770 does have around a 25% improvement over the HD 7750, I guess that could be considered worth the money).

Edit: Well if you can push your budget a bit higher then the 1GB HD 7790 is in the £115-125 range. It’s like 60% faster than the HD 7750.

Gaiyeerishima Cat.1082:

Also, nice lottery story. I love those kind of stories, where people use mathematics to cheat gambling. Too bad I couldn’t do that here :P

It’s not cheating. They didn’t do anything other than spend enough money to cover enough of the numbers to hit enough times on the weeks when the payoff is substantially higher. Now all the state did then was limit the number of tickets sold at each dealer for that event per day at a threshold that doesn’t impact day to day sales but impact these groups who are buying 100,000 tickets. The same amount of money is still rewarded, just unlikely to end up at these “companies”.

Erasculio.2914:

Herr der Friedhoefe.2490:

I did not get even one single Ecto.

Oh go ahead, nerf the game some more.

Yes, ArenaNet has just nerfed ecto drop rate.

Just like this time.

And this time.

And here, too.

And that other time.

And of course here.

People should read this. Those complaints about having nerfed the salvage rate of ectos is proof that the GW2 community is not reliable when it’s a matter of talking about drop rates.

Fine, investigate it yourself. Go buy 25, 50, 100 level 68-80 RARE armor/weapon/trinkets (except back items), grab some MASTER salvage kits and tell us what you are getting.

This goes to all the naysayers as well. It’s so easy to dismiss this as standard nerf paranoia but you can easily test it yourself for under 5-7 gold per 25 items. You should be able to get 60-70% of that back by selling off the parts (well at least with armor).

Problem is the BLTC is really a web browser displaying a fixed formated page and the only solution for smaller text is sampling a higher resolution image into a smaller one. Blame the AwesomeProcess lite weight browser and it’s lack of proper font scaling.

Ursan.7846:

Behellagh.1468:

Well it’s obvious looking at the ecto market that something has changed since the patch went live Tuesday. Buy orders went from 17.7s to nearly 23s as supply fell sharply.

I want to re-iterate this point, but the ecto market changing is not a indicator of any change. An example is when Anet announced the fact that world boss chests were account-bound instead of character bound. Ecto prices jumped from 25s to 30s, despite there being no changes in-game, due to sheer speculation. This current jump can very well be a result of speculation caused by this thread as well.

Which is why I listed all the things they need to first eliminate with datamining. Or are you suggesting that once they establish that the rate of ecto creation is way down that it’s because the majority of salvagers saw this thread and simply didn’t bother to try anymore thus becoming self-fulfilling? Interesting premise.

In your example, it was Anet’s news on the chests that cause the surge with supply dropping over 50% in a few hour only to rebound to only being down 35% a few hours later. Here the decline in supply was only 15-20% with it still declining more than a day later.

Well it’s obvious looking at the ecto market that something has changed since the patch went live Tuesday. Buy orders went from 17.7s to nearly 23s as supply fell sharply.

So the question is why did supply fall? Were items pulled and not reposted? Or did a steady flow of new “for sale” listings slow to a crawl? Why did it slow to a crawl? Are players now using them? hording them? or simply no longer creating them through salvage?

He’s peeling an onion here. Datamine to eliminate all the potentially normal reasons and what you have left is less ectos being created though salvage. Once you prove that then you can get a programmer scheduled to look into what might have happened in the code.

EDIT: it is true that, if the jackpot is high enough, you can, theoretically, earn more money than you spent, but no rational person is going to sponsor a lottery like that.

Well …

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/massachusetts-lottery-loophole-closed-investors-win-big/story?id=14213887#.Uab4bkCsiSo

Patch notes are always difficult. It’s easy to list all the big scheduled changes as well as the official bug fixes but inevitably fixes will be done simply because a dev was changing that block of code for something else and it got fixed (or something else getting broken). This means they don’t get tested extensively because it was an unscheduled fix.

City of Heroes had a terrible time with that as well. They tried to get better at it but stuff still snuck through unannounced.

As for overzealous marketing firms. It’s well know that marketing folk are one step beneath tabloid journalists because they don’t even have to acknowledge facts at all. Frequently that just gets in their way. Then we get the reinterpretation and amplification from the international gaming press about a buzzword, overhyped press release and we end up with “more content than an expansion’s worth” comment bouncing around the forum.

I don’t really think it’s a problem with marketing but a problem with one audience, the gaming press, interpreting what is said to Korean investors and analysts. Now in Korea, NCSOFT’s MMOs are essentially subscription based. Either by hours a month or even by the minute. Cash shops supplement income from the subscriptions, not be the sole source after initial game sale.

Now Guild Wars kept the income flowing with additional box sets while the cash shop didn’t really feature traditional F2P cash shop items like XP and other various boosters as well as small miscellaneous items. So obviously the analysts and investors are concerned with a game that relies on a cash shop to pay the bills. It doesn’t help that their MMOs (Lineage II and Aion) in the west are marketed as F2P and their income in the west isn’t all that impressive. But for those MMOs that’s OK because the sales in Asia is the bulk of those games overall sales. Guild Wars 2 isn’t in Asia yet and until it is, those on the other end of the conference call will keep asking about additional box sales as oppose to depending on the cash shop.

So is it NCSOFT’s fault to keep their CC attendees satisfied by suggesting that the game is obviously doing well enough to support an expansion. Then that gets relayed by the western gaming press as confirmation of an expansion and ArenaNet then is forced to walk that assumption back without sounding to contradictory.

At least that’s my take on it.

John Smith.4610:

Hello everyone, I’ll look into this and get back to you.

Thank you John.

John Smith.4610:

Just a quick update, I want to be thorough, so it will be a couple more hours before I have anything to say.

Take you time.

Every consider that the highest ranks are never meant to be attained? This way ANet won’t have to add new ones.

Bugs creep in. Unintended consequences and code interactions happen. I’m simply suggesting that something is up and should be looked at rather than dismissed as WAI.

And I’m only talking master kits. BL kits seems to be working the same as before. It’s possible that the chance for 2 and 3 ectos with the master kit has been turned way down. I never looked at the distribution of 0 vs non-0, just the number I ended up with at the end relative to the number of items I salvaged. So the 0 vs non-0 may actually be the same, just chance on multiples significantly reduced.

I’m more lamenting my loss of an easy TP income source that I used to buy a 20 or so gems a day. In general with the loss of this, rares will be more difficult to sell because players like me were buying so many of them. Upside, prices on them should go down in an attempt to reduce any glut that happens. Also the supply of runes should go down as high volume daily salvaging stops. At least I haven’t been adding to the T5 cloth and leather glut, selling to a vendor instead.

Just did 50 Level 80 rare armor bought off the TP. 48 contained runes. None bought for more than 16s.

Using Master Salvage Kits.

Runes recovered: 38
T6 Salvage: 3
T5 Salvage: 94
Ectos: 27

No more than 1 ecto in any salvage. Chance of Ecto, 95% CI, 40-67%
Chance of Rune, 95% CI, 66-88%
Chance of T6, 95% CI, 2-16%

So T6 seems off but I don’t believe I ever saw anything near 25% before. Runes are pretty much spot on. Ectos, something seems off.

As I said, pre-patch I easily got at least 9 ectos out of every 10 rare salvage over a multiple 100 sample size. Made, for my standards, a nice bit of coin. I’m happy when I pull 60-80s out of 25 master kit salvages with bought rares. With an ecto return rate this low with master kits, that side business is done.

Final loss: 1.73g.

Mystic.5934:

that does bring up another point (sorry to off-track the topic a tad):
master salvage kits are supposed to have “25% chance of rarer materials”
25% of 25 is 6.25, not 3. sure, small sample size, but I have been noticing this. does anyone have any larger numbers showing rarer materials’ chance to drop?
one possibility: ectos kinda count as a rarer material. like, the internal mechanic might be something like a 77.5% chance to drop an ecto, then a 25% chance to drop either an ecto or ori (if this succeeds, 50% chance to ecto, 50% chance to ori), then if it wasn’t an ori it drops mithril.

But 3 it does fall within 2 standard deviations (actually within 1.3 sd) it’s not to out of sorts.

Then you are lucky or a number of us are extremely unlucky because I bought 85 high level rares off the TP and only got a total of 48 ectos using a master kit.

I’ve done 85 with a master kit since the patch. I never got more than 1 ecto at a time, 48 ectos in total. Now if the 90% ectos was still holding the chance of getting only 48 ectos out of that sample size is near 0. I think it’s the lack of the 2 and 3 drops that is messing with the average.

Geotherma I prefer using GuildWarsTrade to see the a more frequent sampling with less averaging.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/19721-glob-of-ectoplasm

Well the change is having an effect. Supply has plummeted. The 18k at 20s was blown through and the price is, as of the time I’m writing this, is 21s28c, up from 18s20c at noon EDT.

This is why I like gathering large samples of random events to establish a baseline so when it changes we can either see a stealth nerf or if it was unintentional, point out how it behavior has changed and have data to back up the claim.

I don’t know why you thought I thought it wouldn’t sell well? My $5 comment was more about perception that they phoned it in and eventually poor perception will eventually impact the gem shop whether it’s RNG skins in boxes or knock off pets or gathering animations.

Waiting for the tiger cub and the inevitable white tiger cub.

I admit my 27 out of 25 was high and due to a run of 2 or 3 ectos per that made up for the misses but if this really has changed then it wipes out my daily income source. No way rares will drop to under 12 when ectos are in the mid 19s range, which is where it would be profitable. I guess people can always buy rares just for the MF.

Yes but there are threads popping up upset about the lack of original animation with the kitten. Plus that it’s freakishly big for a kitten. Not looking for a 4 week old ball of fur kitten but a kitten that implies that when fully grown it’s as big of a medium size dog … ?

I just did 75 rares (level 68 or higher of course) and hit maybe 60% of that in ectos. Pre-patch I actually got 27 out of 25 rares. I’m using the master kit in all cases. I thought I was having just a run of bad luck.

His point was they were lazy about it just like what they did with the sickle. If they want us to spend $5 at least show a little effort when it comes to animating them.

Yea, using a scythe like a pickaxe, really showing original thought there.

If you want better than 15 minute resolution try GuildWarsTrade, it’s 5 minutes for the near term.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/35985-permanent-black-lion-merchant-contract