It’s not like your gems will go bad if you don’t spend them this time around.
And in the past the sale always meant reduction in price of current or return of items not currently available items at full price.
Now the cynics may point out this is being done to inflate income at the end of the quarter and the daily nature to encourage regular daily logins to inflate active player metrics. And that may be the case but that’s what sales normally do in brick and mortar businesses and flash sales in the online marketplace, ie Amazon. Heck Amazon did hourly sales.
You can say dungeons are unrewarding in your opinion but not unprofitable unless you can show me the gold you are spending to just do them isn’t equal to the amount you can get from them, including selling off all the loot you don’t care of.
Now looking at raising the liquid gold amount in dungeons is probably due to two things, one a decrease in the active players who only showed up for dungeons; and two, because gold is draining faster than it’s being replenished by the active players because of GH and items that require both coin and non-tradable event tokens.
the way people figure dungeons as unprofitable is by efficiency
if i could earn x amount of gold doing dungeons for an hour but can earn x + 5g for doing fractals for an hour then by spending that hour on dungeons i would be ‘losing’ that 5g
That’s not profitability, that’s efficiency. Two different concepts. It’s not unprofitable, it’s inefficient compared to other activities or compared to the way it was before.
Current dungeon rewards aren’t bad, just not absurdly heads and tails above just about everything else in game in terms of gold generation including drops.
If you just want to change hair there’s a separate slightly cheaper self style hair kit for 250 gems. But anything that changes anything other than hair during character creation uses the full total makeover kit for 350 gems.
The game is subscription free and ANet needs to pay the bills so cosmetic items are cash shop but the game does allow you to convert in game gold to gems. Depending on the time of day a total makeover kit will currently run you 63 to 74 gold, hair only kit 45 to 52 gold. I admit it’s not a pittance but throwing $10€ at ANet for 800 gems is the quick way.
You can say dungeons are unrewarding in your opinion but not unprofitable unless you can show me the gold you are spending to just do them isn’t equal to the amount you can get from them, including selling off all the loot you don’t care of.
Now looking at raising the liquid gold amount in dungeons is probably due to two things, one a decrease in the active players who only showed up for dungeons; and two, because gold is draining faster than it’s being replenished by the active players because of GH and items that require both coin and non-tradable event tokens.
Agree with Qugi, we don’t have a RP server and most of the player base are old MMO hands so it’s all about the technical and not lore and story so an RP guild would be your best shot. Don’t know how you would find one.
The Royal Terrace and the Air Ship were meant to be compact versions of Lion’s Arch lite. You travel to LA to do your banking, crafting, TP, MF, etc., you don’t get a round trip ticket back.
Only colors, all shades of blond to brown. It’s like they sent an intern down to the local pharmacy and buy one of each available color so they could see what was missing.
Now you need a guild hall to be able to earn Guild Commendations or Guild Merits which you get from doing Guild Missions which requires you to have or belong to a guild with a Guild Hall at least level 4. I also believe that banner availability is tied to Guild Hall level.
And if you read the AMA @Jordo, the raid team is only 6 or so devs. Raids are being talked about simply because it was done and being released and the development plan went back to HoT so those release dates were planned ahead.
They are busy working on other things as well, again if you read the AMA. But no, it’s OMG they put out content you don’t care about while all these other things are being ignored (they’re not) so get it out of your system, it’s cathartic, and wait to see what’s coming in another two weeks.
I find it curious that Anet has this big “sale every day” promotion going on. With hints that they might bring back much anticipated items. Convenient that this massive “sale” is happening right at the end of the first quarter.
They’ve been saving gem store items away so they could trot them out when they needed a financial boost to make their numbers look better.
No holds barred, so long as the numbers look good. Fools the investors every time.
This is SOP. I think last March had a similar one day sale all month.
As I stated earlier, the audited report will likely come out in a few weeks if previous years are any indication, but it will be in Korean as the last English one is a year behind.
Also since the creation of NC West Holding, ArenaNet’s profit as a subsidiary is no longer reported individually but is folded into NC West Holding’s numbers. NC West Holding includes Carbine and NC Interactive. But it’s possible with ArenaNet’s decision to handle publishing and distribution themselves that they will once again be broken out, but I doubt it. The last time ArenaNet’s profit was listed was for 2012.
This is the page with the audited reports, all PDFs in Korean from 2004-2014
Some of the versions came with Gems, and it’s highly likely many who upgraded temporarily spent less on Gems in that period, and they still made higher profits. That’s not a fail, it’s a simple factor of opportunity costs and a little bit of market cannibalism, as the upgrade likely ate some of the gem sales.
Who cares, though, only people (ignorantly) abusing these numbers are out for ill gain. If you don’t like the game then quit. If you do, but want to improve it, give useful suggestions and stay vigilant and non-toxic in discussion. Otherwise you’re doing no good for anyone and proving at least some amount of ignorance.
I figure the packages with 1/2 price gems reduced gem sales but that’s “offset” buy the deluxe part of the price, so a wash in the end.
What investors would or would not do with stock in Anet is irrelevant because they’re a wholly owned subsidiary of NCSoft so there isn’t any stock to buy or sell. They can invest in NCSoft of course, but that would be based on how the company is doing as a whole, not Anet on their own.
And because they’re privately owned we don’t know anything about how much money NCSoft puts into Anet. For all we know the reported profits seem low because the full cost of running the company, including developing new products, is taken out first and what NCSoft sees is pure profit.
But as far as I’m concerned all of this is irrelevant to us as players. The more important info is in the AMA: they have 250 developers, split into various teams and they’re working on a whole variety of projects including changes to HoT, a new expansion and new living story and something for WvW. Whether any of that is any good (and therefore according to some people whether it counts as new content or can be dismissed because they personally don’t enjoy playing it) is of course up for debate but we’ll argue that one when we come to it.
Gods! The game numbers in the quarterly reports are income NOT profits. The ONLY profit listed is for NCSOFT as a whole.
As it is not NC West Holdings own 100% of ArenaNet stock and NCSOFT owns 100% of NC West Holdings (which includes Carbine and NC Interactive).
The financial results for 4! 2015 have been prepared on an unaudited basis, and may be subject to change during independent auditing process."
-pg. 2
The report isn’t even worth reading if not actually audited. Is there an audited version?
The last one in English was in 2013. The Korean site has 2014. The last time ArenaNet was broken out on it’s own was 2012, after that their income is folded into the NC West Holding numbers. NC West includes Carbine and NC Interactive as well as ArenaNet.
I’ve been following NCSOFT since 2004 and I’ve only seen the numbers change once from their initial values but not in terms of game sales, just expenses. So yes, it could change, but that damages the company’s stock value if they have to reissue so for the most part they are on point.
As for when the 2015 audited numbers come out, it appears late March is when it’s normally released. But like I said, they no longer break out ArenaNet from NC West Holdings numbers. But who knows, the NC West run ncsoft.com no longer lists Guild Wars 2 in their games pull down but GW2 is still listed at the bottom of the page menu.
No other company should be able to come in and say if an expansion was a success or failure because what they guessed was wrong.
Well Hallmark is privately owned so there wouldn’t be anyone publicly guessing on how sales would be. But it’s pretty much SOP for publicly traded companies.
I don’t think Daewoo has ever taken NCSOFT off a Buy recommendation so naturally to get their clients to buy NCSOFT the outlook is always spun as cotton candy and unicorns if not this upcoming quarter then the quarter after which makes the current downturn in stock price a buying opportunity.
Thanks to the poster in the pvp thread that supplied the link to this.
(all units in KRW MN)
Figures show that GW2 total revenue for Q4 was 37,000.
When compared to the (average) 20,000 a quarter in gem sales the game has consistently been generating , we can logically assume that HOT (a $50 expansion pack) generated a mere 17,000 in additional revenue.
Now lets compare those figures to a Q3 and Q4 estimate published last year:
Now although ‘not an official source’ (NC doesn’t publish forecasts) – you can clearly see that the forecast revenues for Q3 (the assumed release date for HOT) was 94,000 – Significantly higher than the paltry 17,000 HOT actually generated.
Others may come to a different conclusion, but my interpretation of these figures is that HOT has been a massive financial flop – generating LESS in its first quarter than GW2 generates vie gems store sales
Frankly, I’m not too surprised, The marketing was a complete debacle, The product was overpriced and it would appear that many like me, were not fooled into thinking that HOT was anything other than a quickly cobbled together means of boosting sales made up (mostly) of the already developed content that was ready to go for LS3.
First of all the reported quarters align with the standard year so 3rd quarter is July to September and 4th quarter is October to December and the reports on each quarter comes out roughly 6 weeks later. Also all the pre-purchase income is booked in the quarter the game is shipped. So 3rd quarter is mostly cash shop income.
The figures reported for GW2 are NA/EU gross sales income and not China. China’s numbers are reported under Royalty along with all of NCSOFT’s properties being run by 3rd party companies, which includes AION and Lineage II in the EU.
Now the roughly $17 million US year over year income change in the 4th quarter is around 300,000+ copies, in theory. I would can that a reasonable number compared to estimates of the active player base based on gem shop sales.
There was one analyst during the conference call asked about what he saw as disappointing sales of the expansion and was told by NCSOFT that was due to a lower upgrade rate from P4F accounts, not existing ones. Other than that they praised GW2 both in NA/EU and China.
Also, the forums already had this conversation weeks ago when the numbers first came out.
Isn’t Daewoo the same company that claimed Anet was going to release an expansion within 6 months of the game coming out, which would add all the “essential features” players wanted to turn it into a WoW clone, and massively over-estimated predicted profits every single quarter since then?
Pretty much. They also thought BnS was going to be HUGE in 2012, like AION huge when that game came out. They thought the stock would shoot to 600,000 KrW a share then (stock currently at 247,000). They also thought the expansion would sell 2 million copies and come out 3rd quarter.
BLTC are not an income source unless you have a whole mess of free keys or you are incredibly lucky. You might be able to get a 5 key pack when it’s on sale for under 400 gems.
I do not believe this for one moment. There are too many instances of lucky people. Even in our guild we have two that get so many precursors, we pool our rares in the guild bank and let them do the turn ins for us. One person has had over 30 precursors since the games launch and has made every legendary (up to and including nevermore-is working on the other new ones), even underwater ones because, why not. Deny all you want, but your system is broken.
When you have an entire guild feeding one person items/money, your little system is no longer a random model.
No, that’s your guild being conned into feeding one person items/money because they believe it.
A 500 watt 80+ PSU should easily support a GTX 960. Current generation of nVidia GPUs give you a much higher performance/watt than AMD GPUs. So if you aren’t looking to upgrade the PSU to the 650 watt range for plenty of head room, the 960 is a reasonable option.
Any current gen GPU will give if a significant improvement in visuals along with some improvement to frame rate. Just remember that the game does have CPU bottleneck issues and you are using a dual core (in all practical purposes) with a game that does perform better with at least one more real core. You will still have lower than desired frame rates at boss events or middle of zergs and that’s on the CPU.
When i’m playing with everything on low, i have like 20 fps while i’m fighting against 2, 3 mobs, ins’t normaly.
I bought this PC 3 months ago, especially to play this game on high or atleast without frames and now is worse than my old PC, which was way under this one
Something else is going on here, it shouldn’t be that low. It appears the PCIe bus is working as best as it can on an FX- motherboard. More than enough GPU for the job. The CPU isn’t so terrible that you would be stuck at 20 FPS in Caledon Forest.
13 pages and people still think the api is the issue…
It is … DX9 doesn’t support hyperthreading and that’s why GW2 won’t ever use more than 50% of my CPU. with DX11, client would be able to use 100% of CPU and GPU, so that would increase FPS.
I get it that this game is CPU hungry, but it’s dumb that it can only use 50% of my CPU.
For i7/xenon CPU users that would bring nice amount of performance.
True, but to quote back to the dev post from that reddit thread, many of the game’s internal data structures aren’t thread safe which in itself prevents multi-threading.
Also coding for Dx10 and beyond is very different than before Dx10. Microsoft has a fairly significant list of issues when developing for Dx10 from 9, unlike those for Dx11 from 10 or 12 from 11.
The CPU is “all right” but not great. You didn’t define what “very low” means to you. Are we talking under 60 fps? 30? single digits? And doing what?
The reason for the CPU “hate” is this game unlike many other games is a lot more CPU performance limited rather than GPU. The AMD FX- series have relatively low per core performance. Not saying the game is using only one core but it can only run as fast as the main thread which can’t, like any thread, exceed the performance of a single core.
You lighten the overall workload by playing with the shadow and reflection settings as well as the character model limit (number of other players visible around you) as these seem to be more CPU dependent.
Actually designing a customizable UI is a crap ton of work. Don’t undersell it.
Actually it’s not, especially if you already have a pre-existing platform to work on. I’ve seen old mmos from ’03 – ’04 with UI that offer infinite flexibility when compared to GW2.
Like someone already said “When” is perfectly valid question. I’m still waiting for “hide personal story” checkbox to actually hide it.
I’m not saying it couldn’t be done, I’m saying it’s unlikely it can be done with just tweaking the code currently in place. So it would be a rewrite of the entire 2D UI code. Rewrites are never “simple”.
It appears that the UI is designed as a series of fix size images, tied to the UI scale setting, each with code that handles clicking within them. The limitations may possibly be tied to the tool used to build the client side UI at the time.
They may have wanted a clean, standard UI rather than a screen of plethora of windows as we’ve recently seen in MMOs like BnS and BDO. Remember they wanted a simpler, cleaner MMO experience with GW2 so customization was never a requirement.
Again, if they choose not, that’s fine, you are for sure correct. Look at the NPE changes because people couldn’t figure out this game mechanics. These are the people that Anet seems to cater to in this game. They are the same ones that may not be able to figure out UI customization depending on the difficulty. Just because it’s something you or I could breeze through, doesn’t mean everyone who plays could. Hence, if everyone cant figure it out, then those who can may get an advantage. So, if you can’t recognize that, then there is no point in further discussing this.
Other games…
Click options…
Click edit UI…
Move things where you want them…
Resize individual boxes to what you like…
Click save…
This is not rocket science. You don’t need to have a degree in programming to do it.
Currently we can only resize things, not move them.
Actually designing a customizable UI is a crap ton of work. Don’t undersell it.
The 8 for living story is doing all the achievements for each chapter. Some of which you can’t get unless you redo that chapter from scratch if you weren’t aware of them when you did the chapter initially.
I can’t get anybody to do the Skritt Queen, everyone who shows up just want the rich quartz node. Plus it’s only open 10 minutes every hour.
If a new source of shields, even something with a minuscule drop rate have appeared there would be players crowing about getting it as a drop either here or reddit.
So check to see what GW2 news was rumored or confirmed right after the Jan 12th patch because that’s when the fire sale started.
It would be nice, but it would wreck havoc with prices
I agree. Anet could add a cost for repeating, something based on the recipe you want to repeat. For example: t5 -> t6 material upgrade: 2s, core -> lodestone: 5s etc.
At least don’t clear a slot if the entire stack in it isn’t consumed. It would save so many clicks.
Yes, a lot are tied up in the personal stories, LW2, Dry Top and Silverwaste collections. I’m at a point where every track is waiting for points that will take me months even to get. 2000 gold for all the culture outfits? A near impossible JP? Teq and the TTW?
Yeah, not fun nor easy to obtain. Certainly not as easy as some in HoT.
Google reshade which combines the various filters from SweetFX/GemFX. The easiest way to get this to work is via Overwolf according to Wooden Potatoes. Here’s his vid on it.
