Guild Wars 2

I think you can still buy the missing LS2 chapters in bulk at a 20% discount.

I think WvW is great currently. The new track system encourages players who stop through for the quick dailies to stay and participate IMO. The server “teams” help low WvW pop servers to actually play with a crowd.

I already own the glider and am currently maining an ele so yes.

Ascended weapons like armor requires you for the most part craft them and it can be a long on costly process, although there are a few places and events where chests containing them drop, primarily Fractals.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_weapon
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Ascended_armor

As for legendary weapons (armor is not quite in the game yet beyond back pieces), it revolves around lucky drop, buying off the TP for a lot of gold or a longish process to acquire a precursor followed by a few additional bars to jump to craft one. Or you could spend even more gold on the TP and get one someone else made.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Legendary_weapon

Can’t really answer number two. But when all else fails, the wiki is your friend.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Currency

And my point is that the devs working on the content aren’t the kind of devs that work on game engines. Devs, a broad range of professions including animation, 3D modeling, audio as well as programming (and not all programmers have the same skill sets), and the bulk of those 300 devs aren’t the ones you would ever let near game engine code.

Well a specialized team would need to rewrite this. Those people aren’t the ones creating content, different skill sets.

The question is what does it buy ANet, beyond some good will from some players who get bent out of shape because frame rate drops below some arbitrary number that they rarely see on their rig in other games. They aren’t going to sell that many more copies by advertising “now frame rate doesn’t suck in crowds”.

And as far as the Wikipedia knows, the original Guild Wars engine was totally proprietary and not some variant on a old version of UE. Perhaps a very early version of GW that was shown off at an event was UE based for demo purposes but I don’t think it ever shipped.

Don’t have a problem with that either. It’s just not as easy as adding Dx11/12 but a revamp of the management thread that’s limiting performance.

But people are reading articles on Dx12 and not understanding what it actually does and how it goes about impacting performance. They are also ignoring or writing off the game engine dev who stated the thing that is primarily limiting performance isn’t where the game is calling Direct X.

Dx12 is not some silver bullet that would automagically fix the game’s performance issues or let you get 120 fps if you drop a GTX 1080 into your system.

This game engine did not start as a First Person Shooter game engine where frames per second is all that matters. Those engines are very dependent on GPU performance and you can significantly improve performance with a faster GPU or by adopting a multithreading friendly, CPU optimized graphics API which will help on systems with lower performing CPUs. That’s why GPU cards use them for benchmarking and why those game engines, and 3D APIs, use GPU cards to benchmark against one another.

I think this is being driven by the report that Mystic Coin prices are being ratcheted up by flippers. Most of that is simply hype in the hopes of pumping up the price so those doing the hyping can dump them for big profit.

Currently it’s under 70 silver after it’s Reddit screen shot showing it around 1 gold. Welcome to the power of the market.

Amazing what happens when the TP restocks some 20K mystic coins in 14 hours or so. Currently 68 silver each.

But remember “Invest Now Before It Hits 10 Gold”.

First you say best way, then you say quickest. Best way is however you like to play because just about everything in PvE gives XP.

Quickest, well there’s always crafting. Plus WvW does drop a good number of leveling tomes on you assuming you are participating. And to be honest, leveling is quite quick in PvE.

Forum Bug, she’s on it.

And how much of this “talk” is pushing the prices up? Is Mystic Coins Tyria’s version of “invest in gold”?

How much of the spike is being caused by players now hording or even buying up MC as they enter the TP thus keeping supply low because they hear that MC prices are/will be going through the roof?

I’m always skeptical about “<item> on TP price is out of control” threads. Smells too much like an attempt at market manipulation to me.

Thrice nothing (well infinitesimal), still nothing.

penelopehannibal.8947:

Behellagh.1468:

What does repping buy the guild post HoT? Repping gives the player access to GH services and bonuses but right now it’s favor from doing guild missions and material support for upgrades are what’s important to the guild. Or am I missing something?

I think it’s more about repping for longer periods, compared to repping here and there. For example, before HoT, the guild you repped would get influence for the events you do, the PvP kills you do etc as long as you repped for that guild.

Now, you only have to rep for a few minutes at the most for the services you’re pointing out, meaning you can equally help more than one guild each day now.

That’s what I’m getting at. Before guilds may have demanded 100% rep because influence from the masses was their primary currency for upgrading and buying guild wide bonuses. But now that isn’t a thing anymore. Any guild that demands 100% rep are dinosaurs who don’t accept the new guild paradigm. Members aren’t a resource the guild mines daily any longer. Guilds are resources for their members.

And I believe it comes up in combat chat as the golem drops every 25% in HP.

What does repping buy the guild post HoT? Repping gives the player access to GH services and bonuses but right now it’s favor from doing guild missions and material support for upgrades are what’s important to the guild. Or am I missing something?

ZudetGambeous.9573:

They tried that VIP thing with the China launch. It caused the game to tank so hard that I don’t even know if China is still running GW2 or not.

I don’t have a problem with some small stuff in principle for a monthly fee, but it always gets out of hand, the devs can never keep their greed in check and ultimately it would destroy the game. As such I would have to strongly recommend against something like this.

No, ANet didn’t try in China, the company that runs it there, who run other games all with VIP systems tried it and expanded on it to well outside the game. They sold exclusive skins and weapons for straight up cash, not gems. They had rewards based on who charged their account with cash to later buy proxy currency. What was done there would instantly be rejected in the west on any game.

This made those who knew how the game’s cash shop worked outside of China to publicly cry about the blatant cash grab by KongZHong by circumventing the game’s own cash shop for their own “contests”.

Allanon.9072:

Did you ever heard of Megaserver ? If not google and you will see why there are always ppl around .

Except megaservers happened years ago and the OP is talking about the now. I certainly see a lot more people playing in prime time in my region.

It’s been on a 1g per week increase since about two weeks after they introduced the two gold daily reward and the 8 path dungeon gold reward. Maybe it took that long for players to return. May have been university finals keeping the influx at bay.

There was a surge in prices of crafting mats when the patch dropped but that was due to someone(s) buy a large amount of mats just before. Now over a month later it looks as if prices and supply of those mats have returned to levels around where they were.

They need a watchdog on events so if they stall they will auto reset.

Oh lord please. We don’t even have a clap emote. I came from a game that at launch had nearly 3x as much and they added more over the years. Want to lean against a wall, we had an emote for that. Want to sit, really sit, we had four depending what the final position was. Thumbs up, down, talk to the hand, wait, oh so many.

Sure RPers loved but many non-RPers used it when their character was AFK for a bit for RL issues.

What Level 53 does is get you access to items that salvage into T3/4 mats which are in high demand and short supply, because it’s so easy to level right past these to the level cap and that drops scale to your actual level, not the level you are playing in.

Biggest change is the revamp skill and trait system and to a lesser extent the leveling experience. As for rewards the daily/monthly system was replaced with a login/daily system.

Of course there’s been loads of re-balancing among profession skills around the PvP meta, since skills work the same regardless of game mode (PvE, PvP, WvW).

Just wiki these topics and that should be a fair starting point for your next set of questions.

There are a lot of faux-Maws where the Shaman doesn’t appear but there isn’t a real failure path that causes the actual event to respawn quickly. It’s failed events that respawn quickly that players have in the past milked the initial spawns for loot, not that the event failing rewards more.

Only thing I can think of with Maw is take your time so portals spit out more minions or delay killing the totem so the spawns get close enough to attack but I’m not even sure those drop anything.

Babai.7531:

List of all fine brown dyes.
You can evaluate flipping profit that way
profit = A x B x 0.85 – C
where A current price for brown pigment
B average amount pigment salvaged from dye ( 3 for a fine dyes)
0.85 trade post fines
C – price for dye
example
rawhide dye
12.079s =15.49s*3*0.85-27.42s

And for my example this morning. Bought 10 fine blue dyes imediately for 48.45 silver. Salvage them and got 36 (good RNG rolls) blue pigments which I sold at the ridiculous low price of 4.14s each (5 copper under the going rate cause I’m crazy or ants in my eyes) for 1.4904g. In the end after fees and taxes I made 78.23s. Even if I hit average yield of 3 I would have made 57.12s. Adjust so the costs are the same I made 32.32s with blue Vs 12.08s with brown.

That also assume someone would sell you that rawhide dye immediately rather than them putting it up for sale at roughly 10s more. Could I make more with bids and not just undercutting for a copper, sure, but markets like this I like to get in and out of quickly. Go for the quick strike and run away until the prices are excessively favorable again rather than the long term investing that has to deal with the constant over bidding on a valuable commodity like brown dyes because players are looking at the profit per item rather than ROI.

Two different approaches.

Babai.7531:

If you want to craft brown dyes then somewhat more efficient will be crafting masterworks.
25 potatoes + 25 portobello mushrooms+ nutmeg for karma. While chance to get masterwork not that high if you craft in bulk you will get more then 4 pigments in average.

Well with a little basic 8th grade algebra and the knowledge that masterwork dyes yield 6.5 pigments while fine dyes yield 3 on average, an average of 4 would mean there’s a 2 in 7 chance for a masterwork dye. Since I never saw anyone who I normally follow for such research do the homework in establishing that number, I’ll take your word for it.

Portobello’s are cheapish on the TP, compared to Potatoes at least. Still you are comparing the value of selling the ingredients, which is 49.75s for 62.72s in brown pigments, if you hit average. Which is why you would need to do it in bulk to minimize coming in under average (law of large numbers). More than 20% under average is a loss vs just selling the ingredients which is a sure thing.

And by bulk I mean more than a stack of potatoes and portobellos and 1,400 karma for nutmeg. Crafting only 10 (a stack) with the first RNG to get quality and then the 2nd RNG from salvaging to get the number of pouches, it may not go … well. Or may go too well so you go nuts to try to get that windfall again.

And to repeat this, yet again, for this game, it’s NOT the DirectX API overhead that is impacting performance at times when performance is at it’s worse.

You seem to not to be able to acknowledge that even when a dev who works on the game engine said so.

You are the armchair car guy who insists that what the car needs to perform better is low profile racing tires and a spoiler while ignoring the limitations in the existing drive train.

DaikonSamurai.6714:

I think a subscription that allows people who already buy monthly gems to simply automate their purchasing of gems would be fine. But anything that makes a subbed player stand out or make a subbed player more valuable for guild recruitment or any game mode should never be implemented. Let’s not give Sneetches stars to put upon thars.

Most of us aren’t making a “VIP” player attractive to a guild. Instead of the 800 gems for $10 it’s 400 gems and 400-ish gems worth of gem shop minor merch. What is in the gem shop that would make a player valuable for a guild?

It’s to attract players who aren’t whales buying $10-25 of gems a week.

And there’s nothing that would divide the player base that isn’t already happening because of the gem shop.

I undercut by more than a copper on the TP.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Error_code

But more money is more money. Yes they don’t need to do this right now for the reasons you listed @The Hematologist but it’s an interesting thought experiment and the responses are equally interesting.

For the 9 months of virtually no content pre-HoT plus the issues with HoT we lived with for 6 months did shrink the community.

I think the April update fixed a lot of the issues with HoT as well as reverse some decisions they unilaterally made. And I think we are seeing a lot of players returning.

Plus HoT gave us gliding in core Tyria which is AWESOME!!

Rhyse.8179:

Ashen.2907:

Hmm, how about:

For $10 per month you get $10 worth of gems.

There seems to be a misunderstanding in this thread of what a VIP sub is for and what kind of customer would be interested in it.

The FTP business model (in general; I obviously don’t know GW2’s demographics) tend to rely heavily on “fat cat” players, who are willing to drop large amounts of money at once. People that buy gems to fund legendaries, who gamble with BL keys, etc. It’s a business model that’s notorious for killing games by incentivizing cashable development instead of core gameplay development (although, to be fair, GW2 has been impacted by this less then normal).

Long term, dedicated players who just play the game an hour or two per day tend to get left out of such a system, since they don’t feel there’s anything of value (to them; see my sig) to buy. They typically don’t want to drop large amounts of money on “just a game” but have no problem flinging some cash at a service they appreciate. These are the customers that a VIP subscription is marketed to. This is of value to the game, since it expands their market to include their most reliable customers, and if properly done it won’t affect either the Fat Cat customers or gameplay. This gives Anet a reliable income stream that doesn’t rely on constantly marketing new goodies for the gem store and encourages development of gameplay instead, so having a well done VIP sub is of value to the player community as well.

Sub bonuses should therefore be consistent, minor additions that are always valuable no matter what the state of the game is. And of course, have no effect at all on active gameplay.

With that in mind, these are my suggestions:
1) $10.00 or $15.00 monthly
2) 800 Gems per month ($10 value)
3) No waypoint costs
4) Unlimited Hair Style change NPC
5) 10 free Transmute charges per month.
6) Service NPC’s appear in your home instance.
7) Personal Banker Golem for all characters

Notes and justifications:
1 and 2) This will depend on whether Anet wants to offer the full value of the sub as gems, and just use the extra incentives to encourage customer loyalty, or whether they think the incentives are worth money on their own.

3) +1 to the guy that suggested it. It’s economically trivial, but gives the feeling of convenience, exactly what a VIP sub should be.

4) This will be controversial since it’s a gem store item, but it has some advantages. It’s a popular service and makes a good draw to the sub, it doesn’t affect gameplay at all, and tweaking their character’s appearance more often may encourage people to buy the Full Makeover Kit.

5) Another economically trivial bonus that doubles as marketing for other services. Xmogs are already dropped in game, so another 10 per month just encourages more tweaking of ppl’s character, which in turn encourages skin/outfit collecting and may bring people to the gem store.

6) This is meant to give a “personal” feel to the game, which tends to be exactly what long term casual players want. NPC’s that offer various services like bank, TP, vendor, etc, plus the Hair Style vendor from #4, and maybe even a Buff Bot NPC that offers to cast various Black Lion Boosts on you for free (no magic find / damage boosts, since that’s gameplay related).

7) Convenience is the the #1 marketable feature that doesn’t affect gameplay.

4) Isn’t just a gem store item but a huge TP item as all the contracts are. It would be like giving away a legendary greatsword.

Don’t really have a problem with anything else other than the amount of gems for the stipend. Industry standard is around 1/2 of the VIP cost. Honestly 400 gems and a 10% gem shop discount (half of the normal sale discount). This way if the “subscriber” wants to take advantage of the discount in any serious way, they will likely need to buy more gems at full cost.

Additional small perks. Like one BL Key a month to go along with the transmutation charges.

Artificial rarity improves sales so get use to it. It forces people to make a decision rather than putting it off for another day.

Most VIP plans provide a proxy currency stipend and a minor discount at the cash shop. Free waypoint costs also doesn’t significantly affect the game world or economy.

Key thing is to not to include anything that can be seen as Pay 2 Win or gut some item price on the TP. So no free access to anything that is currently a perma-contract. I wouldn’t include unlimited transmutations but I can see X amount of charges per month.

Honestly free expansions, nope economically unsound. Player Housing, nope they aren’t going to devote a team to make something new just to include it to VIP.

You all are going to have to first look at other VIP pseudo-subscriptions and see what’s actually industry standard ideas instead of some of these blue moon ideas.

Redfeather.6401:

Hopefully once the gem store has a lot of selection, the gem store prices can be lowered.

I barely make gem store purchases as the prices are too high, and the selection is too weak.
Boy, that sounds like the death-knell of any retail establishment. XD

Prices have been the same since game launch, 80 gems for $1€ and except for very rare cases, item gem costs have been unchanged since launch except for sales.

Well several of the new legendaries need spirit wood and the recipe for insignia changed requiring both cloth and leather now. So the mid tier wood and leather mats are now in demand as much as silk and linen were.

Surprise? No.

Bet he owns Gwen’s outfit.

only 90K, so I’m a newb at this.

khani.4786:

And since brown pigments are still the most expensive pigment, remember they’re really easy to craft: 25 potatoes & 100 nutmeg with your chef. Park a character or two at one of the two potato farms or just visit them daily to get your potatoes for the low low cost of whatever time you spend. Provided you have karma for the nutmeg and a few minutes to gather potatoes you can either fund your own scribing or sell for profit.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Unidentified_Brown_Dye

Here’s the thing about that. You could sell your 25 potatoes for, at the moment matching low sell, 39s. For the cost of a salvage plus 140 karma for the nutmeg you will get on average 3 brown pigments that you can sell for 48.69s.

You just have to be aware of the pigment and potato price because earlier in the week you could earn more selling the potatoes. Also doesn’t take into consideration that the salvage may yield only 2 pigments for a “loss” but there is also a chance you could get 4 pigments for a “windfall”.

I undercut by more than one not to sell quicker but to do my tiny part in making scribing slightly more affordable to others. After all, I’m “taking” money they could have earned themselves if they just thought about it for a moment.

Crinn.7864:

Behellagh.1468:

BrotherBelial.3094:

Is this a ligit thread? I mean one game of PvP can be all it takes some days, other days it’s like what? View a vista, gather, do some events, and a JP. How is that not casual friendly?

Not everyone is willing to play PvP. Not everyone have a character of every profession, or enough to cover the requested “win with X”.

The point of the daily system is to get people to try things that they might not otherwise do.

It’s a incentive to get players past their natural inertia.

For me I hate PvP. In all games. The toxic environment of PvP has put me off it entirely. Don’t know what it’s like here but those three letters to me is an automatic disqualification of a game mode. And that was before my recent health ailments reduced my keyboarding skills. It’s simply not a mode I’m willing to play.

I don’t mind WvW because it’s not an ultra competitive team activity and there is a PvE aspect defeating NPC guards. That I can do.

Babai.7531:

That is correct if we have unlimited dye supply. Then profit percentage beats coin profit. But with pigments we have limited supply per day. Because of that 100 fine dyes priced at 10s with 50% profit percentage will give us 5g profit. And 100 fine brown dyes even with lesser % will gave us 10-15g.
Also sell rates for non brown dyes much slower and their supply usually 2-3x times more then browns.

True but you need a larger stake to start with. As I said, if you have X amount you can spend buying dyes, then profit percentage is the key. I’m looking right now and the most profitable dye to brown pigment is a rare dye that’s roughly 95s – 1g buy order that will yield 40-45 silver profit. I can take that 95s -1g, buy immediately a range of 20 or so fine dyes that yield pigments in colors other than brown and double that 95s – 1g after TP fees.

And I’m going to do that right now.

EDIT: bought immediately a total of 22 fine dyes, 11 different color dyes for 1g6s67c. Cost 66c to salvage into a total of 64 pouches of pigments of two different colors and place sell bids well under the current low bid for each that will yield 2g6s8c after posting fees and tax for a total profit of 98s75c or 92% of my investment. I could make more if I was a little more selective with the dyes I bought and not undercut the current low sell price by as much as I did.

Not bad for a couple of minutes and twice the amount a similar capital investment in the most profitable dye that yields brown pigments.

I’m liking the Charr slippers idea. But if you thought you had surplus inventory issues with just t-shirts, shoes are a whole different ball of wax.

I just thought of car window decals. Imagine the “family” decal being an outline of Destiny’s Edge or whatever we have in HoT. Or just the logo.

But JPs are generally in the last two daily slots which are suppose to be harder. And yes, JPs are terrible for me due to my current disability but I am willing to try them.

nottsgman.8206:

the ‘Upgrade to Heart of Thorns’ thing isn’t actually needed, buying just the core game, and doing the SMS verification will unlock the account fully after 5 days.

not sure why it says to upgrade to HoT, but you can ignore it.

Cause ANet doesn’t officially sell the core game anymore. Sure you might be able to find some online retailers selling codes or boxes cheap but from ANet’s PoV, there is only HoT available for purchase.

I find most players don’t have a clue how much gold they are throwing away buy selling to the highest bidder on the TP. Ignorance is bliss for me and others like me who use these players as our farmers.

This way I don’t have to spend all my game time doing Silverwastes or deal with Dungeon/Fractal Speedrunners and play where I want doing activities that aren’t selected for their gold per hour rate.

As much as I dislike them, these dailies are at least letting me know of ones I never knew existed or long since forgot. I now at least try more of them and if I get frustrated, someone will likely toss a portal down, but I try for at least 15 minutes first on the tougher ones that I think are within my ability to do. Impossible ones I don’t even bother, portal or no.

Hexinx.1872:

Moyayuki.3619:

….
I know, you were mentioning WvW achievements, but the NPC part reminded me of the struggle I had doing maps.

Absolutely. But most dailies do not force players to cross the entire map to complete, as the old map completion required (on all borderlands). That was a tough time for casual players who required map completion back then. Especially if you needed the green keep vista in EB, and were not one of the top servers. Now to make it more casual, they took out that requirement altogether.

With dailies however, they tend to be based around your starting area… typical dailies are … kill a sentry, or kill a yak, or kill 5 guards, or capture 2 camps. All of these are based around the corner of your starting area, and while you may run into another enemy player, most days I have done it – I see a friendly who is also doing their daily. Of course, this is off putting for those who won’t even enter the zone. I understand that, just wanted to note that it is not nearly as time consuming or challenging as map completion was for the average casual.

I think Anet could then compromise and give 50/50 split between pve and pvp. Whether or not players chose to do them is there own prerogative.

I was originally very hesitant about WvW dailies but it turns out that many are quite easy to solo or tagging along with one other. Only reason it took a while for me last night was I kept getting to a enemy supply camp seconds after my server killed the dolyaks I needed (easiest to kill them in or as they leave a supply camp). Most times it’s like five minutes to do the easiest two. Everyone done gives you 10 badges which if you save them gives you what you need when the daily is spend 25 badges worth of stuff which you get 10 back for doing.