Guild Wars 2

Stormcrow.7513:

Interesting, maybe a corrupted file somewhere? If it really bothers you, you could try to repair the client but in all honesty I have no idea what would cause that on your end.

True, there’s the chance the language portion of the data file dropped a byte or three and now it’s grabbing from one of the Asian character sets in windows. Since I don’t read Chinese or any Asian language I have no idea if that’s a legitimate translation or just random characters.

Ah the old solo Vs required group in MMO debate.

Some of us play at odd times so our guild, who we see on weekends, aren’t on so we can’t team with them and hanging out at a dungeon entrance wearing a LFG sign doesn’t lead to the best teams, often teams who only speedrun (so watching the cut scenes for the first time are out) and aren’t interested in doing the story portion. The game needs NPC mercs for hire at these times.

One of the problem is that everywhere else in this game, teams/parties, aren’t required. It’s a loose band of players in the area collectively participating in an event, no need for a formal team. That’s addictive because I can go and do what I want and still “team” to take down bigger critters. With dungeon stories I’m forced to find 4 other like minded individuals and that’s tough in a world of speedruns for loot and gold.

Maybe they should have a 2nd enterance for Dungeon Stories so like minded players can find others who are looking to do the story rather than trying to sort through the chaff of speedrunners.

Seras.5702:

Like most players, most of my “city time” is spent in LA. However, I prefer Rata Sum for the fact that the bank & TP are right next to each other, and the crafting areas are close. The Grove and DR have TPs & banks that are near each other, but the crafting stations aren’t conveniently located.

I prefer Rata Sum for functionality, but Divinity’s Reach is by far the nicest city. The Grove has great beauty, but DR is an epic sweeping city that you can actually picture lots of humans living in. I can’t wait till Anet adds some city fun. Pub brawls and that musical machine and polymock, etc.

I disagree about The Grove, crafting stations are just as far as Rata Sum but they are all in one place as oppose to three. Yes the organic nature of the Grove does play havoc with the framerate on lower powered systems but it’s not like it matters much in a city.

Well I’m on Jade Quarry and we don’t rotate out either.

Always “number one”, always green and only once I saw that we controlled all of the EB (when I wasn’t doing WvW). EB is the last place where I’m missing a few POIs and Vistas and I don’t think I will ever get them until JQ drops to 2nd or 3rd so we start in those sections of the map.

BL Salvage Kits are on sale as well.

Well the games benchmarks for CPUs at AnandTech shows a 25% or more improvement when played on a high end video card at lower settings (done to remove the video card from the performance equation). So it should be an upgrade.

Looks more Chinese than Korean. Their, China’s, first closed beta is starting next month. Are you playing from Asia? Is your login page different, as in another flag other than the four we normally get? Maybe one of the language files for the China release got mixed up in the last build/patch.

I love the Grove. That and Rata Sum are my two favorite cities and I started with a Norn. The Black Citadel and Divinity’s Reach can be a bit confusing. Lion’s Arch is annoying due to it’s size. Hoelbrak is just annoying if you are crafting and are running from there to the BLTC to pick up supplies.

I would just like to be able to go between the various “tabs” without losing my search results.

Brutallyk.1250:

Whenever I log in, I find something I want to do whether it is doing a dungeon or searching the dyes or weapons to get a better look or a superior build that crashes everything and getting the gear/profession for that build.

The game is evolving, but some mechanics are the same since day 1 and these turn the game into non-fun.
I just wanted progress towards precursor. The other stuff you need for legendary accumulates slowly but precursor doesn’t. Getting 77 Mystic Clovers can be difficult but I see them growing in my inventory, this gives me power and will to continue.

Why doesn’t Zommoros award me with a special coin for every attempt for precursor? And I can get a precursor for 100 coins for example? There is progress here. This is what I want. Not dumping all of my hard earned gold into nothing.

Randomness doesn’t favor. It’s not predictable and actual outcome vs odds are only true with very large sampling numbers. I’m sure for instance the percentage of fused skins vs the number of BLTC Keys uses since the skins introductions are very, very close to the designed percentage. Of course that is little consolation if you bought 200 keys and still didn’t get any.

Same thing is true of legendary precursors. First, it’s legendary or ultra rare as a better description. If EVERYBODY gets one, then it’s no longer special. Sorry everyone can’t have a +5 Holy Avenger. We are all not special snowflakes even though are personal stories say we are.

Edit: added the post this was referencing

Here’s the chart, select “all”

http://www.gw2spidy.com/gem

Gold->Gems rate is roughly 38.4% higher than the Gems->Gold rate. Right now you will lose roughly 83-84s converting Gold->Gems->Gold.

They don’t want players doing daily arbitrage on the currency exchange.

Make sure that Windows Update didn’t update your video driver. There was a new patch that went out today. Other than that I don’t know. Heat issue? Left some other task running, a browser tab with videos streaming?

Taking guesses.

Problem is 1) everyone is mindlessly selling them to the TP for a loss over what they could get at an NPC merchant and 2) it’s a common salvage from armor rares. Of course players who are cracking open rares looking for gooey globs of ectoplasm and runes don’t sweat the small stuff like a 1 or 2c loss.

Of course you could help by either not selling those at the TP or buy a bunch at 8c and then sell them for 7c. Sure it’s at a loss but even if you are willing to “lose” 1g that’s 10,000 less silk or thick leather on the market.

Kurow.6973:

Behellagh.1468:

I measure my gold production by the week (which is like 3 or 4, maybe). What part of the word game is about making an income?

The part where it’s required to get the items you desire…or may desire in the future.

Maybe I have a different concept of fun and relaxation.

What pray tell requires 100s if not 1000s of gold in this game per month? Playing the Mystic slot machine for precursors? Refusing to buy gems with real money? T3 cultural armor for every character?

Mystic.5934:

an example of flipping:
search for level 68 to 80 rares, sort by price ascending. the first few to show up will likely have low buy orders, which you place several buy orders for. when they fill, salvage those rares and sell the ecto. check the price of ecto before hand, know the return for each salvage, then calculate the max you can pay for each rare to still get a profit.
current ecto price = 23.07s
after TP tax = 19.6s
MSK gives 0.9 ecto/rare = 17.64
so if you can buy your rares for less than 17.64s, you make a profit. not even including the mithril/leather/silk you also get.

patience is the key that leads to profit. waiting for your buy orders to be filled saves a bunch, waiting on your sell orders to sell gets more profit.

That’s not flipping, that’s running a scrap materials business at a junk yard.

Paraphrasing the words of Ted Danson from his role as a zombie risen from the ocean in Creepshow

“You can’t kill us, we’re already dead”

Strangely I found them easier to kill in the water than on land. It depends on the weapons used, how many swarm you and where you spent your skill points. My two sets are Greatsword for range attacks and Sword/Focus for melee.

I measure my gold production by the week (which is like 3 or 4, maybe). What part of the word game is about making an income?

Honestly I was in Queensdale yesterday looking to do events and couldn’t find any, well I found two that I did twice only because I couldn’t find any others. There’s a number of “gather X” events that simply got descended on by mobs so quickly that they were over in seconds. “The rabbits are eating the waterm … oh never mind.” At least in Shiverpeaks there’s always something going on all over the map (well the snowbound portion).

With non-rooting attacks, the dodge mechanic and the lack the classic MMO defined roles, combat is a heck of a lot more exciting than standing still and just swinging your sword while it’s someone else’s job to heal you up.

It’s the dynamic vs static/role fighting style that I believe Colin was alluding to. After all in a fantasy setting MMO, swinging the sword is the traditional way to defeat a critter or did you expect we would be hugging it out?

Tallis.5607:

Behellagh.1468:

Sure early adopters got it cheap compared to today (also wasn’t a lot of gold in play at that point either)

You can turn it any way you want, but in the end the problem is very simple: casual players cannot buy gems with gold, plain and simple. And ANet allows this because that is how they make money: by selling gems for dollars.

I know that alot of people have warm and fuzzy feelings about gaming companies, loving their products and what they do.

But these companies have shareholders that need money every 3 months.
These companies have marketing departements to take every penny from your pocket.
And these companies have spin-doctors trying to convince you that they are not after your money but that YOU are in control.
I don’t know if ANet goes as far as -say- Apple and hire people to pretend to be customers.

But companies focus on making money.

High gem prices are a part of that.

Behellagh.1468:

They aren’t actively manipulating the exchange rate other than releasing items into the store that a lot of (cheap/poor) people want. We do the rest.

And you knows this because… ?

You know how they calculate prices? You are sure that they did not pick a mechanism that drives gem prices higher and higher?

How exactly do you know? Please tell me, I would like to know what information ANet ever released that makes you think that their price mechanism isn’t designed to raise the gem prices over time.

Wrong because I’m a casual player and I buy gems for gold all the time. A little every week. And it suffices because I don’t buy a lot of stuff at the Gem store. I’m saving up for extra character slots.

And you completely ignored my comment that they didn’t have to provide that at all and just have a straight up cash shop like most non-subscription MMOs.

And yes Gem sales are ArenaNet’s only source of income after game sale right now. So what, you thought the game is going to keep running on Facebook likes and retweets? Gem cards/proxy currency are meant for casual gamers. Can’t afford $15 a month, buy only when you need it. The gold to gem method is for either “hard core” players farming dungeons and established market mavens OR for some of us who convert a bit of our savings into gems every week.

And John Smith has described in broad strokes the workings of the exchange. Two pools, one stocked with a extremely large quantity of gems, one with gold when the game went live. The ratio between the two is used to set the exchange rates. As gold is converted to gems, the gem pool decreases while the gold pool increases and the ratio of gold to gems increases. Gems are only created in game via cash purchase and are destroyed at the gem store.

Yes this means that the exchange can run out of gems. Of course it also means that the price will go astronomical when that happens which should drive players to buy gems for cash to convert them to gold so the rate falls. We simply haven’t reached equilibrium yet.

As for inflation, well assuming the difference in the exchange rates doesn’t destroy gold like the BLTC fees do, then the gold pool will increase during parity exchanges and the rate will edge up.

Honestly you should be getting better than that AOLCraig.

Tallis.5607:

People that ask for lower gem prices clearly miss the point of the gem store.

ANet will defend extreem high gem prices because THAT IS HOW THEY MAKE MONEY.

They hide this very well, ofcourse, claiming that players determine the price.
This is nonsense: ANet decided on the price mechanism, not the players.
- ANet sells all the gems that players buy and ANet sets the price for this. you can’t choice the price to sell gems, ANet will tell you what the price is.
- ANet did not put in buy and sell orders.
- ANet wrote the rules on gem prices, not the players.
- ANet never made their pricing formula public.

High gem prices are in ANet’s advantage. The higher the gem price in gold, the more people will pay with dollars. And in the end, that is what ANet want. ANet makes more money with high gem prices. They will not allow them to go down.

It’s basic economy.

It’s the Gnomes of Zurich controlling ArenaNet through their Orbital Mind Control Lasers I’m telling you! Get your tin foil hats on, it’s your only chance!

You are missing the point that ArenaNet didn’t need to provide a means to get Gems with in game currency at all. Sure early adopters got it cheap compared to today (also wasn’t a lot of gold in play at that point either) but as the exchange rate increases, more players will buy Gems as a way to generate Gold and not just for buying items in the store.

They aren’t actively manipulating the exchange rate other than releasing items into the store that a lot of (cheap/poor) people want. We do the rest.

Sabertooth is a gamer gimmick motherboard (which will draw some ire from those who went with it). It’s $240 at NewEgg. It’s selling point is it looks cool in a case with a window.

Well what they did was litter the motherboard with a few more temperature sensors, add a plate just above the components that has a dedicated mini fan to cool them plus another mini fan that funnels air in from the back of the case to blow across the CPU/RAM voltage regulator blocks (but reviews seem to indicate it doesn’t work well, hence my gimmick comment). They also say they used more expensive military spec components to toughen it up the overall motherboard. It’s also a legacy free motherboard, no old style PS/2 keyboard/mouse port, no PCI slots. No loss really unless you are still using a keyboard or mouse that’s not USB or have some really old expansion card you aren’t willing to give up.

The -V is a very nice board. It comes with a dedicated wi-fi card that fits into it’s own slot (which may be an issue if it goes POOF one day) and it’s $60+ cheaper.

Both support two videocards fully, either CrossfireX or SLi.

Since all the codes are published, half the time I think someone lists an exotic armor or precursor when an event is over just to stir the pot and drive people to magic find/RNG threads.

Gasoline.2570:

John Smith.4610:

I see no current issues with the exchange, it’s functioning very well. Remember for every opinion on which way should be “favored” there is at least one opinion for the opposite.

PS please stop calling everything inflation, it’s driving me mad.

The inflations aren’t user based, the spikes are way too straight for that to be the case, literally. Someone at anet/nexon pushes a button and gem prices go where they want them to go. So what you see is a set price, all the time, instead of this gimmicky reply of “users dictate it”.

PS please stop posting and go back to work… on whatever you do, which I don’t know if is anything.

Pps. my name is john doe

The button they push is called “popular item only available at Gem Store”. Fuse skins, BLC keys. Before that, bank and bag slots. Right now, the pick of infinite swings. Then you had the sale all March of different things in the store, that spiked the price a few times.

Each time moves more gold into the exchanges coffers while emptying the Gem reserves. It’s the ratio between those two piles at the exchange that sets the price.

It’s only a 5% listing fee. An additional 10% “tax” is applied when it sells.

danbuter.2314:

8 pm eastern daylight time.

Fixed

Okay, it seems we have a bit of a language problem here. What exactly are you looking for in a motherboard? As in features. Do you want CrossfireX (AMD dual video card) support? Do you want SLi (nVidia dual video card) support. Do you need a lot of SATA III connectors (how many hard drives)? Are you planning to overclock the CPU at all? moderately? or push it to the max? What’s your price range?

All those Asus motherboards are fine. Since the link I provide up top gets kittenfied by the profanity filter I’ll manually list the differences between the -LK and the -LE.

-V-LK
2 SATA III and 4 SATA II drive ports
2 PCIex16 V3 slots and 1 PCIex16 V2 slot (but really only x4 actually x2 if you enable the 2 PCIex1 slots)
Supports full CrossfireX and SLi at x8
4 phase CPU power

-V-LE
3 SATA III, 1 ESATA III, 4 SATA II drive ports
1 PCIex16 V3 slot and 1 PCex16 V2 slot (but really only x4 actually x2 if you enable the 2 PCIex1 slots)
Supports degraded CrossfireX with one at x16 and the other at x4 or x2 and NO SLi support
6 phase CPU power plus “intelligent” automatic power management for easier overclocking

Those are the differences between the two talked about here. If you are planning to ever only use one video card but you want to overclock the CPU to it’s maximum, then choose the LE. If you want to leave the door open to use two video cards and it’s alright to not reach peak overclocking then pick the LK. Otherwise both motherboards are fine.

Yes, I don’t have my puppy yet.

http://www.worldtimeserver.com/current_time_in_UTC.aspx

For those who don’t know how to figure it out.

Personally I was quite accepting at $1 per gold when I started in December. Of course due to the changes of the exchange rate it’s now better than that at $0.62 per gold.

At $20 for 100g or $0.20 per gold you are talking about a Gem to Gold exchange rate of 100 Gems for 6.25g which would put the Gold to Gem rate at around 8.65g per 100 Gems.

1) In theory at some point it will be equally attractive to buy gems for cash to convert into gold as to take gold and convert them into gems. Right now there is more of the second than the first so up goes the exchange rates.

2) There are a lot of gold destruction already in the game. Currently new gold is only created in small amounts directly via drops or relatively small amounts by selling to vendors. Remember selling to another player isn’t creating any gold but destroying some while moving the rest between players. We have outright item destruction with salvage and the MF slot machine. Then there’s armor repair, waypoint transit fees and certain crafting materials available only through vendors, which destroys gold.

Note that Gems to Gold and Gold to Gems don’t create or destroy gold, it simply moves it to and from the exchanges coffers into or out of general circulation.

Solfan.7531:

by the way guys, so for the MOBO i`m aiming for an Asus P8Z77-V which costs 180$ then -50$ from Microcenter`s discount.
What`s the Digital CPU, Power Design, improves CPU power or something?

also for Graphic Card, should I go with an AMD Radeon 7950, or Nvidia one, but i dont know which, can you suggest me some?

I`m mainly planning to to play GW2 and WOW sometimes.

If you overclock your CPU, it will need to run at a higher voltage. The actual amount of power it uses scales linearly with clock speed but square of the voltage. That means if you can overclock the CPU by 20% without needing to increase the voltage to keep it stable, it will use 20% more power. However if you need to up the voltage by 10% to keep it stable, it will use 1.2 × 1.1 × 1.1 or 45% more power.

Top end overclocking can require a rather large percentage voltage increase. So to provide stable power in these situations, the voltage regulator on the mother board, the parts around the CPU socket that are heat sinked usually that converts 12 volts down to the voltage the CPU uses, needs to be more complex. The degree of complexity is reported as phases. The more phases, the more stable the amount of power it can provide. The downside is the more phases, the less efficient it is as well as cost and overall complexity.

Hard core overclockers will gravitate toward motherboards that have a very high number of phases. It’s unclear when enough is enough however. There is a lot of MORE BETTER philosophy out there. But if you aren’t trying to eek out every last cycle per second out of a CPU, then it’s not needed.

Of course the other end of this is more power used means more heat the CPU generates so you need an ever increasingly large and/or expensive CPU cooler to dissipate that heat.

http://www.guildwarstrade.com/item/20159-mini-jack-a-lop

Set it to the week graph.

What happen was the last one was sold at around 200g. The next one that was put up for sale was posted at 500g. Unless they were tracking the previous price the wouldn’t have known what the previous sale price was.

Who mines just 7 nodes a day? It’s not all about the daily. And then orichalcum picks are only really needed for orichalcum which is only found in the highest zoned areas and it’s pretty rare there.

When I first started I mined every darn outcropping in the zone that I could find. I battled vets to get at the one rich ore outcropping they guarded (ice imps, hate em).

chowie.4278:

“I probably should have stated in the first message that we live in the UK, don’t know how all of you managed to miss the .co.uk ebay link and the fact the price was in pounds, but either way both our mistake. I don’t know where you’re getting these mad numbers from, 800$ which roughly £550 give or take is more than enough for a barebone PC. I run GW2 on a Acer Aspire 5560G which can run it fine on medium settings and that roughly set me back £350 which is a laptop, generally more expsensive than desk tops.”

I noticed the .uk

It doesn’t change the facts. The first one doesn’t have a even moderately decent video card while the second one does (relatively speaking) but is memory poor and has no OS. Both have serious problems.

I’m not familiar with UK based parts suppliers or boutique PC vendors to point you to a better rig.

Lets break it down a bit further.

The 1st rig is sporting two single core Pentium 4 based Xeon CPUs and 4GB DDR2 memory while the 2nd is sporting an Athlon II dual core at 3.0GHz and 2GB DDR3 memory. 2nd system wins on the CPU front but only 2GB of memory will be a problem when running this game.

1st rig is running an HD 5450 graphics card while the 2nd is running an HD 6570. No contest the 2nd system wins.

1st rig has a 500GB HD with a copy of Win 7 64-bits while the 2nd has a 80GB hard drive and no OS. So out of the box the 1st rig is bootable at least.

So the 2nd system is better, CPU and GPU wise but only if you get it a realistically sized hard drive, another 2GB of memory (you will need to replace the two 1GB sticks with two 2GB sticks, the motherboard appears to have only two memory slots) and a copy of Win 7 64-bit.

hoegarden.4287:

It will run GW2, but it looks like some people here have set the standards to ’ if it doesn’t run the game with high setting at 60fps in WvW then it is garbage’.

You will have to lower some settings, but you will be able to run the game without lag

Excuse me? It’s a GT 630! Sure if they run with performance settings at a low enough resolution and stay away from large events it’s fine but 9 times out of 10 those restrictions will chafe at them badly. “Oh I thought this game is suppose to look good” “Oh it’s laggy (low fps) at 1920×1080” “Oh WvW turns into a slide show”.

So for those that want to run at the native resolution of their monitor with the settings turned up and doing large player events like the dragons, the maw or WvW then the GT 630 is lousy.

Vayne.8563:

You make comments about what you think NCsoft wants to or doesn’t want to do. Have you looked at the NCsoft quarterly report. Guild Wars 2 was their most profitable title.

Not most profitable, most sales. They’ve never released numbers on profits or loses for particular games. Only sales, overall and excluding their overseas subsidiaries (so just Korea).

And yes, B&S didn’t do as well as they expected and appeared to eat into their existing playerbase of their other big three rather than expanding it. Oops.

It’s paintball without the welts. How is it not fun?

I go see if the Keeper of the Waves is up in Gauntlet Gulch in Mount Maelstrom. It’s a vet and defeating it opens a portal to Dierdre’s Steps which has a few Vet Earth Elementals there.

If the Keeper isn’t up then there are a couple of Vet Jungle Spiders with their posses roaming near where the Keeper would have roamed as well as a vet mossheart (I don’t go after them since they are neutral but sometimes they accidentally get caught up in my AoEs and if they are going to attack me anyway…).

Not good at all. Lousy graphics.

As the exchange rate increases, due entirely to player actions, it becomes more and more attractive to buy gems for cash. This is desirable to ANet, and us, because that’s how the game stays open.

New content isn’t free. Bug fixes aren’t free. Servers and bandwidth are not free.

I’m currently a cheap kitten like some of you and have yet to buy gems with cash. However if this keeps going, it’ll soon reach a point where I put my money where my character is or go back to single player gaming.

Players buying gems with real money does not affect the exchange rate at all. The exchange rate is only affected by players converting gold to gems and vice versa.

And for those who are confused, players buy gems with real money and convert them into gold, not players first converting gold to gems and then back again (unless they’ve held onto those gems for a very long time).

As long as more players are converting gold into Gems than players buying Gems with real cash to convert into gold, the exchange rate will continue to rise. Right now a $25 Gem card will buy you around 40g. A month ago it would only be around 28g.

Because why make one motherboard when you can make a dozen each just a little different than the other, all at different price points. Here’s how they differ.

Clear as mud right?

http://event.asus.com/2012/mb/P8Z77_Series_Motherboards/page7_AvailableModelkittenm

(Edit: The profanity filter kittened the URL. It’s _AvailableModels followed by .htm)

The -V-LK supports both CrossfireX and SLi but doesn’t have the extra SATA III or improved voltage regulator bank that the more expensive -V-LE Plus has.

Neither are great or even good.

The first one doesn’t have a decent video card (well neither do but the HD 6570 is a lot better than a HD 5450).

But the second one doesn’t have an OS, only 2GB of memory and a tiny hard drive.

http://www.youtube.com/user/WorldCyberGames/videos?view=0

I remember years ago when ESPN showekittenG match. However esports in Korea is big business.

I don’t care about real money, that doesn’t affect the exchange rate.

And I carry one extra pick (actually whole set of gathering tools) around with me. I don’t think I would ever burn through two of them between seeing a vendor who could sell me a replacement in my travels. And since Orichalcum is so infrequent even if you are spending all your time in the high level zones that 9 out of 10 times a mithral pick is just fine and just switch over when you find an Orichalcum outcropping and then switch back.

Please let this not be for the 800 gem pick of infinite uses. If players are converting gold to Gems for this at the pre-spike rate of 2g35s per 100 Gems that’s 18g80s or 470 Orichalcum picks.

I’m guessing it’s for the dye kits with the “exclusive” colors.

For a laptop, either of these look okay.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834152377

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834215660

The MSI has the slightly faster quad CPU, GPU and a lower native resolution (1366×768 yuck) which should mean better performance than the Acer’s physically larger (17.3" vs 15.6") 1600×900 resolution display.

I’ve always told people that it’s not about saving money. That’s tough to do with the Microsoft tax. It’s about being selective with parts. Quite often store built rigs (I’m talking at BestBuy and the like) tend to short change you on PSUs making it tough to add a decent video card but will throw in an absurd amount of memory or enormous hard drive.

Places like iBUYPOWER and CyberPowerPC is a happy medium if you are terrified handling a $200 part the size of a Triscuit or have the fine motor skills of a two year old. Just research the parts they have available. Start with a configuration closest to what you are looking for and configure away. And don’t forget the OS (aka the Microsoft Tax).