Guild Wars 2

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

It’s also in the Patch Notes.

God forbid anyone reads those. No we all need personal phone calls from Mike O’Brien about such changes. That’s why they wanted everyone’s phone number isn’kitten /sarcasm

FlamingFoxx.1305:

That’s not at all what I’m saying. I agree that just because the change isn’t important or doesn’t impact me doesn’t mean it shouldn’t still be changed, and I’ve said as much. Perhaps if you read my post earlier in the thread you would have a complete understanding of what I was saying?

What I was pointing out in that post is that I take issue with Arenanet making a change based purely on the happenings/rantings of a twitch streamer. People are continually bringing up issues and quality of life changes that would help the game, so it seems really strange to me that in a sea of really great suggestions one of the few that gets attention and action is because of a single player?

Obviously it is important for Arenanet to listen to their players and make changes based on feedback. The fact that they made this particular change in such an unobtrusive way is great! I absolutely support they way they did that. It just makes me wary when the only people who seem to have voices are the ones who aren’t actually representing the majority of the playerbase.

That video was simply a catalyst that generated a lot of comments about this on Twitch, YouTube, Reddit and these forums over a very short span of time. So its not ANet listening to the streamer but to the discussion that streamer’s video generated on the topic.

Next question is who determines which people represent the majority of the playerbase? It’s not like we have an elected advisory body of players like EVE has.

Doesn’t anybody remember Colin referring to Gorseval as the “tongue boss guy” at PAX South? So now we have a different face part. Soon we will have ear and eye guys.

IndigoSundown.5419:

More fun with numbers.

All numbers are rough, but ought to be good enough for discussion.

The Q4 2015 revenues were in excess of 37,000 Mn Korean Won. That’s 37,000,000,000. The Korean Won is currently converting at 1000 KW to $0.84. That means that GW2 revenue in dollars is actually ~$31,000,000.

But wait a minute. Recent Gem store sales have been bouncing around north of 20,000 and south of 23,000 MN KW per quarter. Say we set a generous (i.e, low) rough median for recent quarter sales via gem store of 21,000 Mn KW, or $17,600,000. Subtract that out and HoT sales are about 13,400,000. I’m comfortable with that assumption because the report cites stability in other GW 2 revenue.

Divide that $13.4M by the $50 minimal price tag and you get about 268,000 copies sold. Now, that’s not going to be exact. Some people bought the $75 and some the $100 bundle, but retail establishments paid the wholesale price. My guess is that retail sales trumped the more expensive bundles and actual sales numbers may be in excess of 300,000, but probably not by that much.

Very rough, but enough to evaluate the relative success of the product. For one thing, the number, whatever it actually is, is nowhere near (20+%) of the 1.5M monthly logins claimed in the recent Fortune article, and that’s not excluding any PFF adopters. I can certainly believe that the powers-that-be at NCSoft and ANet are not delighted.

How many of those monthly, meaning unique accounts that logged in at least once during the month were P4F? If you were only logging in a couple times a month, would you drop $50 on the expansion cause you might not have even finished the core game yet. Based on they previous primarily gem sale quarters I’ve always put their regular player base at 400-600 thousand in NA/EU.

And it wasn’t ANet but an analyst that called out those numbers.

“Guild Wars 2 has proven pretty resilient historically, with about 1.5 million monthly actives,” SuperData Research CEO Joost van Dreunen says. “Since it switched to free-to-play in late August, Guild Wars 2’s monthly active user base has doubled to 3.1 million (October 2015). By entering the ESL Pro League, ArenaNet is leveraging its player-versus-player style game play, and is trying to offer a broader experience.”
Warman says Guild Wars 2 has remained a Top 20 game streamed on Twitch with spikes around big announcements like the recent Heart of Thorns expansion.

Neither ArenaNet or NCSOFT release those numbers anymore since they always pale in comparison the WoW. Plus due to the prevalence of cash shops rather than subscriptions, head count has little meaning anymore.

Search? On this forum? Hahahaha! Ow, my sides.

Seriously it’s fairly broken so it’s been suggested by ANet themselves to use google and the site:<URL> keyword. So to search for traps in the Guardian board you would do this in google

traps site:forum-en.guildwars2.com/forum/professions/guardian

I’m sure other search engines have something equivalent to the “site:” keyword.

There is roughly a 35-40% chance that each salvaged rare above level 68 will drop ZERO ectos. Now over a large enough sample size it averages to roughly 0.85-0.90 ectos per rare but that’s because of the 2 or 3 ectos that can drop but in the end it’s a distribution with 0.85-0.9 is the peak.

Mika.6174:

Whats the point of selecting this from the options menu? Whats the rationale/idea behind it?

Sorry I just don’t see the difference between where it is if I leave it and what happens if I select the option to move it.

Long story short, regular GW2 twitch streamer posted an excerpt of a stream on YouTube where they go off on a purposely over the top rant after they missed and hit compact. Someone then posted it to reddit and then someone linked the reddit thread here. Now from the comments on the twitcher’s stream, youtube, reddit and here caught the eye of ANet’s Guild Chat host Rubi who for curiosity sake asked how difficult it would be to separate the send to collections and compact selections in the dropdown, found out it was easy and announced on that Friday’s Guild Chat that something would be done about it. That was roughly 3 weeks ago.

Now the twitch streamer who’s video rant kicked this off was aghast that ANet took their passive/aggressive rant seriously since those options were always next to each other since launch or before and asked them not to shaft others who use the proximity to double tap send/compact. So instead of not doing it at all after announcing they would or moving the compact down for everyone, they took a page from the cute little Ortega girl and said “why not both”.

It’s a minor QoL issue solved, solved quickly once it was very publicly brought to their attention (I think the official GuildWars2 twitch channel was hosting the streamer when the incident originally happened) and anybody or programs for a living knows that was really a trivial change that wouldn’t impact anything longterm they were working on at the time.

It still ticked people off, like yourself it seems, with some trying to equate the work required for that “fix” to as the same as a slew of much more complex issues like adding Dx12 support to the game engine or any one of a thousand personal crusades.

In the end it’s there, default means nothing changed, if it’s an issue for someone, they now have a check box to make it a non issue.

Honestly, why does it matter to you. Nothing changed on the drop down. Talk about looking for a fish to fry.

There was only if you pre-purchased the expansion before it went live in October and owned the core game before the expansion was announced in January. Then you got an extra character slot. If you bought the core game after the January announcement, you got a refund on the price.

But once the expansion dropped, that all went away.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/pre-purchase-community-address/

Beldin.5498:

What did they expected when turning the game from a casual into a hardcore game
and removed everything that so much people loved .. like play the way you want
and no raids .. especially when replacing visual outfits / armor skins with costumes and
more useless armor stats ?

My guild has mostly died since HoT and myself i only login for daily rewards
now since 45 days

I wonder really if ANet has ever heared of the fact that people in the forums don’t
represent the ingame population.

And sadly that’s the issue with level 80 only areas. Where are the crowds in Orr? Southsun Cove on non-daily days or Karka Queen time? Dry Top? Silverwastes are only busy due to the loot that you can get there.

I don’t mind a tougher area but you have to be able to enjoy it and tough doesn’t mean punishing. The lack of waypoints reminds me of corpse runs in other games to get back to where I was when I died. We have adventures you can do repeatedly but they aren’t available at all times and there is no way in game to know unless you get there, or it closes too soon because you got there toward the end of it’s window. Map wide meta events that count everyone who’s in the zone for scaling purposes. Wonderful new mechanics which unfortunately can gate your progression within that map if you haven’t unlocked them yet. Virtually zero areas where you could go AFK safely while you cross a map. Sometimes nature calls, sometimes the spouse or children. An area where formal teaming is nearly a requirement where the original game was exceedingly soloable.

It’s death of a thousand paper cuts. Gliding isn’t enough to justify so many core changes that it feels like a different game. I got the expansion just before it went live. I’m running a daredevil now. I’ve unlocked Gliding I. But that’s it. I can no longer play the way I enjoy playing in core Tyria, it’s too abusive. When you don’t bat an eye fighting vets in core Tyria and get repeatedly owned by them in HoT, it’s a distasteful shift in terms of play.

Tigaseye.2047:

I’ve said all this before, but what it all boils down to, IMO, is devs listening to the wrong type of people and/or being the wrong type of people themselves.

Not just Anet devs, but most games devs, frankly.

By “the wrong type” I mean non-representative of the (typically silent, or at least quiet) majority of players and incapable and/or unwilling to cater to them fairly.

Inevitably, this “We know what’s good for you.” approach of devs, stubbornly doing only what they feel like doing and/or what the vocal minority demand and ignoring (or even treating with outright disdain and disrespect, frankly) the majority, will lead to not just slight deviations in game direction, but complete missteps.

GW2 has a lot of potential, but like many other games, it will never even get close to reaching that full potential while this is happening.

It’s a shame, but people have tried to point this out to devs (of various games) for ages and they just don’t seem to care…

I would never risk investing in the games industry, under these circumstances, frankly.

I’m amazed anyone does.

Other industries are not perfect, either, but never before have I witnessed the complete lack of respect and disdain many devs/games companies seem to have for their customers.

Cowboy builders and other dishonest tradesmen would probably be the closest…

Obviously, this is a huge generalisation – I’m sure there are some good, emotionally intelligent, fair minded devs and hardcore players, as well, but still.

It continues to be a problem.

The same can be said about anybody creating content for others. You either deliver what you believe others enjoy or what you enjoy. Then that gets “adjusted” to meet the need to make a profit but this isn’t always possible. Which is why we have starving artists and defunct game companies.

The question becomes do you build something and attract people who enjoy it as much as you or do you set aside your convictions and cater to the unwashed masses? Steve Jobs was noted as saying never listen to a focus group because they don’t know what they want but think they do. And sadly he’s right, most people when asked will ask for a version of that “other” thing but with a twist because they don’t know what they need, just what they want.

ArenaNet has always been about bucking the industry trends. We often don’t appreciate what they’ve done until we go off and play some other MMO and recently that’s been BnS, another MMO originally released in 2012. Just about everything ANet said they were trying to avoid in GW2 is gloriously on display in BnS. Quests that require you to crisscross the map. Mobs you need to defeat who just stand around waiting to be farmed even though you’re told they are terrorizing the area. First tag owns the mob for the count as well as XP. Loot in instances needing to be divided up using a variety of methods rather than loot for all.

So here’s the thing, if you can’t stand the game because it doesn’t meet up to your expectations and you think the developers are taking the game to a place you can’t support. Find another game. This one is obviously not for you, anymore. It’s for people who do enjoy this kind of game. And if in the end there’s not enough of them to keep the world up and running, it’ll close, you can gloat but you won’t be here sending out all those negative waves Moriarty to those that find this game enjoyable.

A business isn’t always about catering to the capricious will of it’s loudest customers, re: Carbine Studios.

Because not everyone enjoys PvP.

Lineage was shut down in NA back in 2011. The Diablo II/UO perspective didn’t really fly in NA post Everquest. Lineage came to NA in July of 2001.

When asked about income estimated for Lineage in 2016, they mentioned they are having some kind of Vintage 17th Anniversary ad campaign. Here’s a commercial for it.

Look, we are all cool attractive people.

No, three years because of the original release year of BnS and GW2. Is there even a NA PC release of the FF MMO or is it just Playstation? I honestly don’t know, I’ve always assume it was a PS3 game and I simply ignore MMOs on consoles. PSO was fun back in the day on Dreamcast but that was a long time ago.

slamfunction.7462:

crussell.8504:

Question is, why do people care so much about how much profit NCSoft makes or doesn’t make?

Because the game has/had so much promise that is being completely spoiled by latent development cycles and in-game poor economics (amongst a HUGE list of other things). So, those of us who are snide about the earnings, are more hoping that sales go absolutely terrible, so that ANet addresses these long-standing issues.

F2P will keep this game afloat for a while, but people do grow up and get jobs, and at that point, a free MMO isn’t much more than a Korean grindfest with that carrot on the stick never closer.

Just from experience, i think the market is learning how good sub’d MMOs are, compared to F2P MMOs, but there are those few, like GW2, that are cashing in on any given 16 yr old’s allowance. So there ya go.

Really? Name a subscription MMO that came out in the last three years that didn’t go F2P. After a decade of WoW or any sub MMO that got closed after many years, players aren’t willing to make that kind of financial commitment to one game anymore. It’s churn and burn through an endless stream of F2P.

And you do realize that wishing for lower GW2 income will more likely start a death spiral than evoke some kind of 180 degree change in development. And you think P4F is paying the bills? Free must mean something different to you. The free version isn’t restrictive enough to induce players to spend money on the full game. Maybe a few skins or character slots.

Wardrobe costs nearly 2K gold. TTW and Karka Queen are on boss timers so it’s a matter of checking when on playing then. I’m not much of a story person so most of the story Mastery Points I’ve not gotten in the 3 years I’ve played. And I’ve started LS 2 only a month or so before HoT dropped. And if you waited until doing LS 2 before going into Dry Top and Silverwaste, you don’t have those MP either. The Dry Top one. Really, last 10 minutes of the sandstorm with favor is at least tier 4, and when it opens 90% of the players camping are only there for the rich quartz node and aren’t interested in getting the MP. Fun times.

Belenwyn.8674:

jheryn.8390:

None of us truly know when HoT pre sales were booked. It depends on how they define their revenue.

We know when the HoT sales were booked:
“We believe 4Q15 will be NCsoft’s best quarter of the year. Revenue should grow sharply in 4Q, driven by the Guild Wars 2 expansion pack, which went on presale on June 16th in the US and Europe.

The company will begin booking the game’s revenue on a per copy basis after its official launch. We expect the company to sell around 2mn copies (including pre-orders) by year-end at around US$50 per copy. "

https://www.kdbdw.com/bbs/download/198711.pdf?attachmentId=198711

I laughed so hard at that prediction. Another indication that analysts in Asia not understanding the MMO player in NA/EU. Believing that 60% of the game’s original buyers (as this was published before P4F) would still be playing much less be interested in an expansion, no matter how big the Colin hype train is.

And with those unrealistic expectations, even walked back over the next four months, of course it’s a disappointment. Which is why, I believe, NCSOFT was hoping that P4F going live six-seven weeks before HoT dropped would kick up active players who may buy the expansion. But there’s a problem with that notion. Players play “free” MMOs because they don’t want to spend money. And there’s always another “free” MMO right over the horizon to burn through.

Look at BnS. It’s out for around three weeks and a significant number of players are level cap, if it wasn’t for PvP the game would be a wasteland in NA/EU. Plus replay-ability of PvE in BnS story makes GW2’s seem like Tolstoy. But that’s due to BnS’s tour bus nature of the story Vs GW2’s let the kids loose in the amusement park and tell them to meet up at the gate at closing. Unless BnS have quarterly content updates, NA/EU will cause it to have a great 1Q16 but then drop off. My prediction. “Look, I’m an analyst.”

bladex.9502:

So, Blade and Soul made about as much as GW2 even tho BnS is free to play and GW2 just released a 60$ expansion?
Gj I guess NCsoft

BnS has been out for nearly 4 years with expanding into new territories every year or so. China, Nov 2013 (but that income is reflected in the royalties). Japan, May 2014. Taiwan, Nov 2014. Plus VIP pseudo subscriptions are more popular in Asia so you can keep up with everyone else. GW2 is only, in terms of reported income, NA/EU since launch.

Also remember, this report covers 2015 income and specifically the last 3 months of 2015. So NA/EU BnS isn’t in this. We’ll see those numbers in 3 months.

Like I’ve been saying, this is a website that one selection will show you which bids and items you are selling are no longer the highest or lowest. It also tells you how many behind you currently behind at that price (ex: I bid 2.37s, high bid is 2.41s and there are 137 items currently above your bid).

Now to take advantage of that I need to alt tab between the browser and the TP in game to find the entries I’m told are no longer in the lead, update the bid and if I want pull my original bid.

That is nearly identical to using a site’s more advance TP search tool to identify potential profitable items to invest in and again, alt-tab between the browser and the game to put in the bids. There is still quite a bit of manual work required.

Obviously tools that could bot the TP directly are illegal. So in my eyes as long as a person is needed to take advantage of information from a sophisticated search and analysis tool, there is nothing wrong with it. As soon as a player isn’t required, the “Does this program allow someone to ‘play’ when he/she is not at the computer?” clause from Gaile’s post, then it’s illegal. Simply being better informed is not a “crime”.

Milkshake.4038:

Behellagh.1468:

Yes, it does give me and anybody who use it an advantage. Just like knowing what the trading range of an item via a chart can give someone an advantage in terms of setting a sale price gives me an advantage. Since we don’t get item price history in game do you think these charts are also illegal? After all not everybody is aware of sites like GW2TP, GW2Spidy or GW2Shinies which provides historical charts. How about sites that give near real time estimates of profits from various activities like the Mystic Forge or salvaging or crafting or if you should open bags and sell their contents or just sell the bag? Is using that knowledge illegal in your mind as well since it gives those who use it an advantage over those who don’t?

How about if GW2BLTC didn’t reload my current bid page every five minutes but required a manual reload to see which bids have been outbid or not? Would it be illegal then because you don’t have to click on every item while remembering the price your bid was at to see if you’ve been outbid? That’s a lot of grunt work eliminated if I only have to click 20% of my bids to update them on the TP.

So where do you draw the line in your mind between legal and illegal advantage based on information exposed by the API ANet provided?

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Policy-3rd-Party-Programs-Multi-Boxing-Macros/first

An automated outbid alerting system is a 3rd party program that gives you advantage. Based on the linked policy, I think this shouldn’t be allowed.

In my opinion as long as you have to do things manually it is fine. For example if Gw2efficiency alerts you to make charged lodestones now, because profit is good -> it’s a no. If you browse the site and you decide to make it -> it’s ok. Or if you check a historical chart you can decide to flip or not to flip -> it is fine. But if the website alerts you to flip it is not ok.

I agree that there is only a little difference, but if you allow it then you can ask: if it alerts me to update bids, can it also copy the item name to the clipboard? Can it also alt-tab back into the game? Can it make a macro (1 key 1 action) to open the trading post, click on the search bar and then paste the item name there? You can bind every movement, every click to a key. And you can just type qwertyui and you outbid your competitor with 1 copper. You repeat it 10000x times and you are rich.

I would like to hear your opinion about it: where is the line between legal and illegal?

Except that policy is in reference to injectors, plug ins, overlays that ride on top of the game and by advantage in play they mean PvP/WvW. This is a website that anyone with a browser and their API key can use.

And you should at least look at what it can do before you come up with ideas about what it could do before you embellish it with God like powers because you are spinning some wild notions there about it controlling the TP interface in game.

But who came up with those guesses of expansion revenue, analysts not associated with NCSOFT. And they feed on each other. Remember ANet announced around 2 million P4F accounts. The question becomes what is a good conversion rate? Every 10% translates into 10 billion KrW.

And since P4F is essentially an unlimited, nearly nonrestrictive trial that people have played for 3 years, was 2 months enough time for these players to say “sure let me drop some money” or “I got months of play for free still before I think about the expansion”.

morrolan.9608:

Ayrilana.1396:

I just read the earnings report and nothing in there stated that it performed poorly. I know that some people are disappointed with the expansion but there’s no need to twist the earnings report towards a direction that itself doesn’t even support.

NCSoft state it in the earnings call.

Actually no, I just listened to the conference call. They never said it performed poorly. They said exactly what was in the slides. GW2 sales surged due to the expansion pack. It’s a main revenue driver. And improved sales in China is reflected in the royalties for the quarter being higher than the previous. They also mentioned that there were some increase marketing costs due to all the game cons that ANet attended last year but that’s normal when you are launching a new game or expansion.

Now at the 34 minute mark there was a question from a JP Morgan analyst which asked since the sales of HoT seems to be weaker than expected, his words, what are the plans to boost GW2 income, does something need to be done to the cash shop. NCSOFT’s reply was in their eyes the issue centers on conversion of P4F players to B2P and that rate is below expectations. Also the income from the Gem Shop relative to active players is fine where it is so nothing needs to change there. So to improve converting non-HoT owners to HoT owners, they are looking at ways to tease them with systems only available in HoT. (Core Tyria gliding anyone?) Another method they are looking into is more frequent content updates that only expansion owners can access.

That’s all that was said. Here’s the URL (copy/paste it) if you want to download the conference call, it’s an hour and is in both Korean and English. Click on the arrow to download, it’s a zip file containing a wma audio file.

www.calltogether.co.kr:8080/down/down_ncsoft.jsp

NCSOFT doesn’t publish profit numbers on individual games or subsidiaries so talking about if the game is or isn’t profitable is kind of pointless because we don’t know.

Milkshake.4038:

Behellagh.1468:

Milkshake.4038:

Behellagh.1468:

Now I know when I’m being out bid by using gw2bltc which beeps at me when any of my bids are no longer the leading one and I’ve always assume that or similar websites are the way other players realize they got outbid. None that I know off will notify them that their high bid is now more than one copper higher. I never saw this before.

The bold part allows you to “play” when you are afk. I would like to see a response from anet: is it legal or not?

For me, it seems to be too much and unfair as it gives you an advantage over other players who don’t use it.

Website uses the API and your API key to look at your current TP bids (or items for sale or history of bought or sold). So it’s totally legal. It does nothing but makes a sound if I have my bids up when I’m logged into their website. It’s not like I can buy or sell.

If I create a bot using the API it won’t make it legal. This automated alerting system gives you advantage, because you don’t have to check dozens of orders every few hours manually. You can work/cook/clean your room and when you hear a ding you just update your order.

Yes, it does give me and anybody who use it an advantage. Just like knowing what the trading range of an item via a chart can give someone an advantage in terms of setting a sale price gives me an advantage. Since we don’t get item price history in game do you think these charts are also illegal? After all not everybody is aware of sites like GW2TP, GW2Spidy or GW2Shinies which provides historical charts. How about sites that give near real time estimates of profits from various activities like the Mystic Forge or salvaging or crafting or if you should open bags and sell their contents or just sell the bag? Is using that knowledge illegal in your mind as well since it gives those who use it an advantage over those who don’t?

How about if GW2BLTC didn’t reload my current bid page every five minutes but required a manual reload to see which bids have been outbid or not? Would it be illegal then because you don’t have to click on every item while remembering the price your bid was at to see if you’ve been outbid? That’s a lot of grunt work eliminated if I only have to click 20% of my bids to update them on the TP.

So where do you draw the line in your mind between legal and illegal advantage based on information exposed by the API ANet provided?

Because it’s a horrible activity?

Take it you don’t like the minor runes/sigils being dropped from your greens.

Milkshake.4038:

Behellagh.1468:

Now I know when I’m being out bid by using gw2bltc which beeps at me when any of my bids are no longer the leading one and I’ve always assume that or similar websites are the way other players realize they got outbid. None that I know off will notify them that their high bid is now more than one copper higher. I never saw this before.

The bold part allows you to “play” when you are afk. I would like to see a response from anet: is it legal or not?

For me, it seems to be too much and unfair as it gives you an advantage over other players who don’t use it.

Website uses the API and your API key to look at your current TP bids (or items for sale or history of bought or sold). So it’s totally legal. It does nothing but makes a sound if I have my bids up when I’m logged into their website. It’s not like I can buy or sell.

AysonCurrax.3254:

Behellagh.1468:

1) The jump pad from where you spawn is iffy at best. I’m often stuck not getting vertical enough to get out before it sticks me somewhere surrounded by the opposing team. Don’t really have an issue with the other jump pads.

2) Funny, I get rewarded for participating. But there are times when players “check out” but I’ve never seen a mass quit. And since I’ve been added to matches in progress as long as there are players queuing it’s rarely a lopsided match up of players.

3) I think it’s great. It’s the ultimate equalizer, everyone is the same, no pre-made teams, it’s all about reading the situation and playing.

I sense the OP wants hyper-competative play to win rather than play cause it’s fun.

no. I am just not going to sugar coat bad, half-baked content overflowing with design flaws, when its basically the only “festive” content the lunar new year event brings with it.
i highly doubt you get rewarded for participating. I dont get anything for playing a match, and the only thing i get for a win is a +1 for the champion achievement. if you do actually get some sort of loot for participating, that only further proves what a buggy mess this is.

also, there is literally NOTHING fun about losing the only progress or reward you can actually get in there because the entire enemy team ragequit and you get teamswitched as a result, volunteered or not.

I do believe we get at least one lowest level red envelope for each of the two matches a day achievement. Don’t know beyond that because it wasn’t important to keep playing. The reward for winning 10 matches is a token that will let you buy up to 10 high tier red envelopes for 10 gold and even boosting my magic find to over 450% still was a 2-3% gold loss opening all my envelopes.

I must play at a different time because I never had a team rage quit while we were losing by a wide margin. Go AFK in the open so it’s over quicker sure but leave while the match is going on, didn’t see it. Like I said, there is no reason to be hyper-competitive. You win some games, you lose some games. It’s all happy pretendy fun time games. Didn’t matter to me if we won or loss as a team, as long as I didn’t embarrass myself in number of kills for the match.

I’m starting to believe as well. Now I’m accustom to having my bids getting ratcheted up by a copper but after a battle with another I decided I wasn’t going to win and since my bid is now 10c higher than the next highest I would drop them back to be one copper above the 3rd place. My bidding nemesis did the same almost immediately.

Now I know when I’m being out bid by using gw2bltc which beeps at me when any of my bids are no longer the leading one and I’ve always assume that or similar websites are the way other players realize they got outbid. None that I know off will notify them that their high bid is now more than one copper higher. I never saw this before.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Behellagh.1468:

Define “a while”.

BogOtter has a series of videos for returning players. I would start with the last and work backward until you reached a date that you last played.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMgOinWh2Y7FbZyBhlqgHoPI2w8_76_1w

Are those videos that helpful though?
They don’t cover any of the changes made with HoT/post HoT. You also don’t know what time period the videos cover until you start watching them, but that’s a minor issue.

OP definitely needs to give a time frame of when they left the game.

The videos are dated. And yes, they don’t deal with HoT but the last does deal with the new trait/skill system.

Define “a while”.

BogOtter has a series of videos for returning players. I would start with the last and work backward until you reached a date that you last played.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMgOinWh2Y7FbZyBhlqgHoPI2w8_76_1w

1) The jump pad from where you spawn is iffy at best. I’m often stuck not getting vertical enough to get out before it sticks me somewhere surrounded by the opposing team. Don’t really have an issue with the other jump pads.

2) Funny, I get rewarded for participating. But there are times when players “check out” but I’ve never seen a mass quit. And since I’ve been added to matches in progress as long as there are players queuing it’s rarely a lopsided match up of players.

3) I think it’s great. It’s the ultimate equalizer, everyone is the same, no pre-made teams, it’s all about reading the situation and playing.

I sense the OP wants hyper-competative play to win rather than play cause it’s fun.

Commune points are an item you buy for your home instance.

Yes it has a trading post.

mauried.5608:

The TP isnt fair because of flipping or any other mechanism which allows players to make gold from the TP by simply buying and selling items.
Where do you think the gold that these players are making is coming from?

I assume your definition of “flipper” includes anyone who isn’t intending to use the item bought as is. Because I buy loads of items off the TP, with bids, with the intent of salvaging them and selling the mats. It can be more lucrative than “flipping”.

But it boils down to players who treat the TP like an NPC vendor and always go for the “sell immediate” option and freely accepting coppers on the silver for the immediacy. They want to keep short changing themselves because they can’t take any time to pick up the coin they freely leave behind, it’s not my place to complain. And while they B&M about how poor they are I’m going to keep farming the items they don’t realize the value of, because they are unwilling to learn.

20 gold a day for a 1/2 an hour of work if that.

Where does that gold come from? Ignorant or lazy or in a rush or simply don’t care players, both selling and buying.

The devs did try once to get players to place sell orders and bids by default and the player base rioted because of the extra couple of clicks needed to switch to sell now and buy now rather than enter a value. If they don’t want to spend the time, for whatever reason, it’s their choice to give me their coin. When I buy something I pay more than the next guy for it and when I sell it’s lower than the next guy, otherwise it’s not sold to or bought from me.

Mystic is cheapest only if you have a load of mystic forge stones. Silver-Fed is slightly cheaper than Master but the selling point of all the infinite use items is never running out in the field or needing to carry several thus stealing space from your inventory.

Now I only use silver-fed on rares and frankly unless I’m farming them on the TP, I’m not getting that many per play session to be concern ever running out away from a vendor that sell master kits. That said I do own one and it along with my royal terrace pass and copper-fed are in my shared inventory slots so no character is never without access.

The Royal Terrace Pass puts you in DR, which gives you free waypoint access to your home instance if you have gathering upgrades there and the Asura Gate to Ebonhawke in Fields of Ruin. Also several festivals are held in that area of DR.

You meet there for guild missions, farm nodes, get boosts. Why hang around?

First of all it’s not a controversial business model for an MMO. Not when you want players to be able to play together and not force new player to buy all the previous editions just to play the expansion. This isn’t the old campaign model of GW1.

Second, don’t you think ANet realizes the negative consequences of establishing this bundling of previous with releasing expansions too quickly. You want players to buy the current version for as long as possible. So they will be building on what HoT laid the groundwork for to make HoT more attractive to those who didn’t bite.

Third, “working toward the next expansion” doesn’t mean all hands on deck. As a matter of fact the whole gist of their post was about a balance approach to developing because it was obvious to everybody that the last year and a half was all about the expansion or aspects of the expansion like specializations getting pushed out before the expansion. So they are starting the ground work for the next expansion. Like establishing a better story, ideas for new masteries and specializations. What kind of new critters you could find? And while that is going on we’ll be getting new raids, new legendaries, new LS, return of annual events, possibly new events.

But your post came off as “Don’t Buy HoT” which would hurt ANet. And the only reason someone has for hurting ANet is that you don’t like something they did. So yes, it’s a post to induce controversy by starting a rumor to keep players who have yet to upgrade or buy HoT outright. This isn’t about discussing, this is trying to punch ANet in the wallet because you are unhappy. Unhappy about the folding in of the core game or some change that HoT imposed but you are trying to slap the game down.

Map complete the cities.

RNGesus again. There is a 20% chance for a quality upgrade. That doesn’t mean you will get one every five times.

Plus the instructions are wrong. Commander’s Rings are level 53. Lowest level exotic is 62. Promoting in the MF will produce an item 3-12 levels higher. So level 60 rare will promote to a level 58-67. That gives you only half the chance a promotion would even be an exotic, assuming an even distribution among the level range. And since the entire range is below level 68, you can’t even get ectos so the rares you get will tend to be not worth much to salvagers.

So in the end it’s now possibly a one in 10 chance. I would stick with the karma to linen conversion. Or start using level 77 and up weapons instead of 60. But that’ll cost a lot more in the long run but you will need fewer trips to the MF.

The only site I think you missed is gw2bltc.com. Yes it’s another TP site but it not only tries to guesstimate volume of sales over 24 hours, it can also generate reports on purchases and sales as well as notifying you when your current TP bids and sale orders are over/under cut (updates roughly every 5 minutes and of course needs an API key).

I also find the charts on gw2tp.com it be the best around as well as their dynamic updating of pricing data minute to minute.

That’s one problem, we don’t have a comprehensive TP site yet.

So, I routinely do Bosses in the lower level zones. Just wait until you kit out your character in exotic gear with superior runes and sigils.

It all depends what you are looking for in an MMO. BnS is an MMO built around a 3D fighting game engine with blocks and combos. Sadly the story is extremely linear, feels like you are on a ride that shuttles you from one area to the next where you do a bunch of side quests to earn gear and loot so you can progress on the main story quest. I found it to be “retro” compared to the free form PvE play of GW2.

I think those who played it to the cap in three weeks are done for now since I haven’t seen a queue in F2P in days.

Now I enjoy the relax play of GW2. The lack of PvE competing for mats or critters and shared loot. Now some don’t care for that. Some want open world PvP where gear might matter.

Now I’ve played a few other current F2P MMOs, most that were once subscription and are now have VIP “subscriptions” that allows those paying to ignore all the F2P walls erected when the game went F2P. They all feel like those coin operated binoculars whose timers are a little to short. You can “see” the game but you feel like you aren’t experiencing it as a F2P. And frankly I can’t afford to pay for multiple MMOs, even B2P.

For me GW2 is an oversized comfortable sweater. Sure the arms are a little long and you won’t be wearing it out of the house other than getting the mail but it would be something you would pack because it reminds you of home. As long as you aren’t going out somewhere.

John Smith’s candy dish … in Bali.

What people said about 64-bit was it wouldn’t speed things up, only make the OOM issue less of an issue. And that turned out to be true. Surprise.

But for Dx12 to rock we first need a Dx11 multi-threaded renderer. To get that to work the data objects in the game that the renderer references needs to be thread-safe and according to the ANet Engine Dev, that’s an issue that is being worked on/looked at.

Of course he also said that when the game’s performance suffers it is rarely the render thread but the main thread being bogged down. But since nobody seems to believe him when he says that, these threads will keep popping up.

Content guide is your friend finding events once you tell it to lay off the Personal Story. But if you are in proximity to a bugged event it tends to point toward that. But there are loads of events beside the Quaggan ambassador. I did most of them in the upper right portion of the map other than the one escort mid map with fighting off the Jotun.

Well the correct answer is the TP is the game’s primary currency sink and that doesn’t do any good if players can safely trade around it.

Plus it prevents chat channels from filling with sell spam. Even if the game provided a specific trade chat channel, people will still spam on map.

Also if the question becomes “what about a warning?”, that’s the 3 days suspension.

Actually the first warning is in the Rules of Conduct in the Legal Documentation section at the bottom of the page.

Doesn’t matter Ansau. GW2’s nature is that it uses very few CPU intensive threads and that it boils down to the main processing thread that’s the limitation in maximizing frame rate. Player crowds really slows this down. That means the higher IPS of a core rules the day and AMD’s Bulldozer architecture will always lose to Intel’s i3/i5/i7 cores since the 2xxx series CPU.

Now Tom’s review is a little disingenuous showing performance at the same clock speed because the Bulldozer architecture is designed for a high clock rate while Intel’s can do more work per clock and therefore a lower clock rate isn’t the way to compare performance.

But that’s one side of the coin, the other is the renderer and video card performance and when the other thread isn’t being bogged down in players in your vicinity then GPU performance does make a difference.

nVidia and AMD have competing methods to dynamically adjust the refresh rate of a monitor to help to eliminate issues caused by the monitor updating at a fixed rate while the game is completing frames at a variable rate. They aren’t compatible to each other, the AMD is cheaper and IIRC monitors that feature them do have a high refresh rate. It prevents tearing like VSync does but also provides, if the system is capable, a higher frame rate.

Now if you want great color reproduction, well that’s what IPS panels are known for as well as a wide field of view. You would see graphic artists picking IPS panels.

LED tends to mean that the backlight of the monitor is provided by LEDs rather than florescent bulb (which they may designate as LCD which is a misnomer because short of having a monitor that uses Organic LED tech, they are all LCD panels). Some larger more expensive ones may use and array of LEDs behind the panel and selectively dim them to provide a much wider contrast than a monitor that doesn’t do that.

It boils down to money and manpower. Blizzard pulled in more income in one year than this game has made in it’s lifetime. With resources like that they could through an entire building of experience game engine developers at the problem. Also it was only the demo in 2001 that ran on a modified WC3 engine. By the time the game was released, the engine had been rewritten.

Turbine uses the same engine on multiple platforms so adding Dx10, which was done while their games were still subscription base, had multiple income streams. The Dx11 upgrade was trivial and virtually unnoticeable unless you knew exactly what you were looking for.