Guild Wars 2

While the core game is Play for Free, it does have a number of slightly inconvenient restrictions. There is still box stock of the original game out there, NCSOFT/ANet isn’t going to buy back old inventory.

Now of course if players buying these versions want to upgrade later, those people will end up spending more. If a player wants other accounts to say milk the login award, provide additional storage via “loot” characters, etc.

Forum bug, she’s on it.

Pride.1734:

@Behellagh
So you are basicly trolling because you don’t like the way i phrased my statement? plz kid grow up.

Not the phrasing, the falsehood. Sorry I called you out on it but you didn’t need to create a “fact” to support your point, your point was valid all on it’s own. And I’ll continue to call out posters when they are intentionally presenting inaccurate information.

And thanks for calling me kid but the odds are better that I’m at least twice as old as you than not.

Yeah but Blude it’s like having an “are you sure” dialog popping up, people quickly learn to ignore it because 99% of the time it’s okay. A dancing, pulsing “this isn’t from ANet” would just get mentally filtered out especially if a player gets a lot of email from other players.

Tao.1234:

Behellagh.1468:

Tao.1234:

Rich node gives you 1 or 2 ores per swing + bonus swings.

Same with normal nodes.

It’s random.

And Sprocket is a bonus just like Jewels.

But doesn’t replace jewels as some players have suggested over the years.

I didn’t say it does replace, I only said it’s a bonus like Jewels are.

Just like from trees you can get Hidden stash and Walnut at the same time.

I know you didn’t, I was simply stating that this test shows that rumor wasn’t true.

Beldin.5498:

Behellagh.1468:

Actually Dx10 and beyond provides memory management for graphic assets between system and video memory where in Dx9 and before it’s left that in the hands of the game’s developer. That’s why in Vista (Dx10) and beyond can list the amount of video memory you have as greater than the amount your video card actually has.

But all of that has nothing to do with 64-bit code.

Also we talk about system RAM and not video memory.

And btw. since Vista and beyond Direct-X uses more RAM. That was very good
visible when AION was constantly crashing OOM after release because the
CrySystem.dll was not compiled with Large Memory Aware. People with XP
had very seldom crashes, mostly those with Vista or Win7 were affected.

And zondabmw brought up Dx9 and the use of system memory. I was simply clarifying the fact that it wasn’t until Dx10 that memory management between video and system was handled by DirectX. What do you think a fair chunk of the system memory is being used for? It’s caching object geometry and textures that aren’t in video card memory.

Addressing the general public now.

The increase in usage between the 32 and 64 bit client is due to, for the non-programmer, what’s called a pointer. It “points” to a location in memory. In a 32-bit client a pointer is only 4 bytes, 32-bits in size. Pretty sure you can figure out where this is going.

Programming uses a lot of pointers, especially an application developed in the language C++. Not necessarily explicitly but once you look at the code the compiler generates, it’s a plethora of pointers. Objects (data) are loaded with them. Therefore going from 32-bit to 64-bit, the data being manipulated by the client grows in size but not necessarily double, since not everything in your block of data are pointers.

So while you have access to a greater amount of space to store your data, your data also grows. But the key thing is not getting an OOM error due to a failed heap allocation because you hit a hard 4GB limit.

Now running out of system memory and needing the swap file because the working set is too large, that’s a different issue.

Jasper Defthand.3018:

Tigaseye.2047:

Arius.7031:

Tigaseye.2047:

Maybe it’s more like they’re acting like it’s not making them enough money?

Which, of course, is even more unacceptable, if it actually is.

In what way have they acted like they’re not making enough money?

Just a lack of everything.

They don’t work on things that need work, because they aren’t a “priority” for them.

Even this forum, with all its problems (including the notorious forum bug) is an example of that.

They reduce the rewards from existing content (which they haven’t provided a direct replacement for), so if people want to buy something they are more likely to have to spend real money.

All this seems like penny-pinching, to me.

Penny pinching gives the impression of either a genuine lack of cash, or (perhaps falsely) pleading poverty, to most people.

I honestly think its that they just don’t make enough money, I looked up the earnings reports for NC Soft for the past 2 quarters of 2015 and Gw2 is one of there lowest earning titles. To put it into perspective, Lineage 1 is there biggest earner by far earning the company around 40% of its total revenue while gw2 earning them roughly 25% of what lineage earns which means that gw2 only brings in roughly 10% of this MMO giants paycheck. Arena net should have started out with the subscription based MMO so that they could afford to keep bringing us new content and ensure that existing content is kept clean and well tuned.

And I honestly think that some posters either can’t read or ignore facts that don’t fit their narrative.

Over the last 4 quarters GW2 is only behind Lineage and Blade & Soul in income which means we are ahead of AION and Lineage II. That is insanely better than any other western game in NCSOFT’s stable, ever.

Ignoring royalty income, since we don’t know which games are earning how much of that, GW2 brought in 11% behind B&S’s 14.4% and Lineage’s whopping 44.2%. To be complete, AION is 10.6%, Lineage 2’s 8.3% and all the other games they don’t list individually, which is a lot of mobile games, 9.7%.

Oops, forgot WildStar’s 1.8%. My bad.

Yes, Lineage is their WoW/UO/Evercrack. But the next four percentages are 14.4/11.0/10.6/8.3. It’s not that big of an issue that we only contributed 11%.

And ANet, rule one from day one was no subscription to play. It’s founded on B2P when subscriptions roamed the Earth. So they never would have even considered subscriptions.

Hannelore.8153:

ArchonWing.9480:

Hannelore.8153:

Lots of people in this thread who didn’t do their reseach. There’s test data out there that shows the watchwork pick offers little to no monetary gain because it sacrifices ore pieces in order to harvest sprockets from the node…

Its only good on Mithril, Silver, and Gold Ore.

Sounds interesting. Source?

Its easy enough to test yourself with several characters, a list of rich iron nodes, and a watchwork and normal orichalcum pick. Tests showed that whenever the pick would get a sprocket from the node, the bonus ore was lost.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/1wfp5r/watchwork_pick_looking_for_data/

I quote from the thread:
Just tracked 120 swings of the watchwork pick on plat ore nodes.
Platinum Ore: 69
Platinum Ore + Watchwork Sprocket: 37
Platinum Ore + Jewel Shard: 8
Platinum Ore + Watchwork Sprocket + Jewel Shard: 6
Platinum Ore + Platinum Ore: 0

Just tracked 120 swings of the Orichalcum Mining Pick on plat ore nodes.
Platinum Ore: 112
Platinum Ore + Jewel Shard: 8
Platinum Ore + Platinum Ore: 0

Even for such a small test sample… 69 vs 112 speaks for itself. So this pick offers very little profit on valuable nodes like iron (currently 2.7s/ore on TP).

So with, 120 ore, 14 jewel shards, 43 sprockets vs 120 ore, 8 jewel shards.

Hmmm, I know what I want to use.

Tao.1234:

Rich node gives you 1 or 2 ores per swing + bonus swings.

Same with normal nodes.

It’s random.

And Sprocket is a bonus just like Jewels.

But doesn’t replace jewels as some players have suggested over the years.

At least stick it in a folder and not the root.

Yeah, I was expecting MP to be the XP bar reward and not this duo requirement.

Kormeg.2469:

Behellagh.1468:

Did you expect another 150 in the expansion that was developed in considerably less time than the core game was developed in? Of course you can.

Next, content X wasn’t worth the $50 and I don’t care about content U, V, W, Y and Z so don’t bring it up.

Please do not presume to know what my unstated thoughts and intentions are. If you feel a certain way about something, cool. Say what you want and make an argument. Do not mindlessly denigrate someone else and then assume you know what theyre about.

I don’t expect 150 skins, but i sure as hell didn’t expect 13. Whats worse is based on historic evidence, we probably aren’t going to ever get that many more until the next expansion.

The point of of my post was to highlight disparity. for some reason you translated that into something else.

When you toss out a big number and compare it to a little number and say nothing else, you are leaving the reader to draw that conclusion, that the two should have been nearly equivalent. It’s just another fallacy tactic to gin up a position.

Watchwork Pick was a misstep they decided not to repeat but they didn’t want to take it away from players who had bought them and it would be unfair if they simply stopped selling it, this means players need to choose cosmetic/theme over income.

I made 22.5 gold in the last 30 days from sprockets, after TP fees and taxes. It’s not a lot and I haven’t been strip mining zones as frequently as I once did but every little bit counts.

Did you expect another 150 in the expansion that was developed in considerably less time than the core game was developed in? Of course you can.

Next, content X wasn’t worth the $50 and I don’t care about content U, V, W, Y and Z so don’t bring it up.

Hi. Have you read the wiki article on Mastery yet?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mastery

Mastery requires two things, Master Points which you earn and a full XP bar for the track you want to train in. Once you have both you can spend the points to unlock that track. It sounds like you simply haven’t found the mastery points in central Tyria.

Pride.1734:

@Behellagh.1468

You are obviously missing the gist here.

If you want to count the outfit that was released on haloween or not doesn’t matter one bit. Or if you want to count each armor class as a set or not doesnt matter either. (Then you just count all armors in gw2 the same as a comparison.) If you want to count the little bits and pieces we got for rev and elite specs doesnt matter either. All of those do not excuse the severe lack of content here.

What matters is that when i look at the wardrobe of my mesmer there are 65 possible chest pieces i could select. 3 of those are from HoT. That is less than 5%! You gotta realize that this isn’t a free update but that people actually paid for this. The point is that the amount of armors we got in the expansion is in no way adequate for what an expansion should give.

All the added shop outfits just make this more sour than it already is.

@Pride

If you said just that, that there are very few armor skins introduced in HoT I wouldn’t have had a problem. But you decided to use hyperbole by declaring, falsely, that there were more outfits introduced since the time HoT dropped, than armor sets with HoT. That is what I have a problem with. You have a perfectly valid point, you didn’t need to gin up the argument with exaggeration. It weakens your point.

Players wanted more skins obtainable in game. They announced that this will be the case with only outfits offered in the Gem Shop from now on back in May. The downside of this is players have removed the financial incentive to make armor sets. I think we can agree that an armor set that is meant to be mixed and matched takes more time to develop and test than an outfit. When released in the Gem Shop, an armor set is sold by each weight, unlike an outfit. How many players have bought a set because of it’s looks and find out that it can’t be used on their character because it’s the wrong armor weight?

Now back in the day of crystals and stones, crystals were plentiful, we got three per map complete, so it was “cheap” to customize our armor’s look as we leveled since we get a hodge podge of usable armor drops as we level. Without transmutations we all end up looking like we got dressed in a dark room. You might have stumbled onto an interesting combination but often it’s an eyesore. Then they removed crystals and stones during the wardrobe patch. Upside you don’t have to buy the same skin twice from the shop anymore if you wanted two characters to wear it but we lost cheap lower level transmutation. That’s where outfits come in. Yes I have a handful of outfits, nearly all from sales except for the free ones and they are a godsend when leveling. Hate most of their headgear and wish we could use our own but nothing is perfect.

I do have a lot of in game skins but I don’t have Gem Shop armor sets mainly because I hate paying for a theme three times. If armor sets came like outfits, one purchase gives you skins for all weights, I would gladly drop gems on them. But they’re not and so I don’t.

TL;DR – I wasn’t arguing your point, just the hyperbole you used to make it. Your argument is stronger without the exaggeration.

Letter of Commendation – 1000 Guild Influence. Two for 16 laurels.

Actually Dx10 and beyond provides memory management for graphic assets between system and video memory where in Dx9 and before it’s left that in the hands of the game’s developer. That’s why in Vista (Dx10) and beyond can list the amount of video memory you have as greater than the amount your video card actually has.

But all of that has nothing to do with 64-bit code.

I not arguing for less skins, I’m disagreeing with Pride’s assessment that there’s been more outfits introduced since the launch of HoT compared to the armor sets you can earn in game. By all means give us more armor to mix and match.

A lot of the in-game armor from core Tyria were tied to drops based on your level or from crafting. In HoT we are all level 80 already. So here’s 3/4/10 sets, depending on how you count for the expansion.

I think it’s kind of wrong headed to think we were going to get a lot of sets initially from an expansion that took only 30% of the time to develop but alongside the live game that for a while still had regular updates via LW Season 2?

I do believe we will see new sets, when LW Season 3 hits. After all new skins in the gem store were tied to LW chapters. Plus it’s likely we will be encountering races that actually wear armor there rather than mostly naked frogs and magical energy beings we’ve run into in the expansion so far.

Paulytnz.7619:

It would be nice however if they just have the new skins be both outfits AND Armour skins. Similar to how they are selling glider/wing combos. This would please everybody I should imagine. The mix and matchers can have their options and low lvls and new alts can still enjoy outfits in their full without having to waste transmute stones.

Problem solved.

Armor skins take a lot longer to make than outfits to test and deal with clipping issues from the shear number of combinations across all races.

Maximillian Greil.1965:

Behellagh.1468:

Maximillian Greil.1965:

Not everyone is arguing about bugs. Some people have problems with the direction of the content.

And that’s something players have little control over as direction is dictated by ANet’s vision for the game.

True, players can rail, plead and on rare occasion present a cogent and well written argument as to why something should be changed but at the end of the day we’ve signed up to be led by the devs through their vision of the game.

A B2P game has more in common with a movie than a restaurant. If you don’t like the restaurant you can choose not to go back. If you don’t like the movie you paid for, oh well, that’s two hours you aren’t going to get back.

Well, talking about it on a forum that they read might have them take a second look at their direction for the future.

Yes but it’s a no win for them. They do nothing and they aren’t listening to their players. If they do something and change direction they are once again abandoning some portion of the game. But the majority of the complaints I’ve seen on these forums are “I want to do X as soon as I bought the game” or “you moved my cheese”. Now X could be fully unlocked elite specializations, completed masteries, crafted precursors, map complete, etc.

And moving cheese, yeah, big end rewards were trimmed back and redistributed across dynamic event rewards, hero challenges, etc. instead if a very visible “big chunk of currency”. Nobody likes it when their printing press removed.

Sorry, the new Halloween outfit doesn’t count, we would have gotten it if HoT launched that day or not.

Lets see, Crystal Arbiter and Lyssa’s.

Wow, what universe is 2 less than, by your count, 3 (but really 4, Blade, Leystone, Guild and Mistward )?

And starting next week we’ll can start to earn the now Legendary armor with their skins.

And I don’t have a lot of armor skins in my wardrobe, certainly not gem shop ones except one from the deluxe pack. I am working on getting all the in-game ones but I don’t play in certain areas enough to encounter them all or have the crafting professions to craft others. Then there the dungeon, fractal and WvW skins that I haven’t bothered to buy.

Xillllix.3485:

Mac gaming is not going well, even Blizzard cancelled Overwatch’s Mac version.
If they wanted a realy Mac client they would have to get it ported by professionals.

Well the word on the cancellation was “Macs couldn’t handle it.” Well the actual quote is …

“Currently with the technology behind Macs and the way Overwatch runs it’s just too challenging for us at this point to support it.”

Pride.1734:

If we had indeed gotten 10 sets, then this topic wouldn’t exist.

In the past they sold gem shop armor separately by weight. So yes, if these were in the gem shop there is a fair chance they would have been 10 sets, 3 light, 3 medium, 4 heavy.

But they didn’t. They are available in game in HoT.

They made it clear a while back that the Gem Shop will now be outfits only and not armor sets.

Because it gives the player a sense they are working toward their choice of precursor.

So here is a way to “earn” your precursor by playing the game, the whole game, “on an epic quest” and while on it, gather all the mats you need. For long running players they may already have a fair chunk of the mats needed. The devs were never looking at the “cost” of this method over the others, just the reliability of getting what you want.

Of course some players don’t really care about all that. They look at the price on the TP, and realize that if they sell off those materials they need to gather and/or craft along the way their precursor, they could simply buy the one they want now as the price has crashed. Of course some of that crash is recovering as more players realize that crafting a precursor isn’t going to be cheap and easy.

This is like the question about why some players craft their own gear rather than buy superior ones off the TP for less than the material costs (excluding ascended gear of course). Some players want to use what they make or find while others go to Evon-Mart.

They announced a while back that armor sets are now in game earnable only and that means needing the HoT expansion and the Gem Shop will be outfits only. Back pieces are not considered to be armor for whatever reason. And neither are glider skins.

The whole point of the 64-bit client is to unleash all the memory.

Maximillian Greil.1965:

Not everyone is arguing about bugs. Some people have problems with the direction of the content.

And that’s something players have little control over as direction is dictated by ANet’s vision for the game.

True, players can rail, plead and on rare occasion present a cogent and well written argument as to why something should be changed but at the end of the day we’ve signed up to be led by the devs through their vision of the game.

A B2P game has more in common with a movie than a restaurant. If you don’t like the restaurant you can choose not to go back. If you don’t like the movie you paid for, oh well, that’s two hours you aren’t going to get back.

They did, for a day, last anniversary sale. There’s also a themed discount bundle that comes around once in a while.

Kraggy.4169:

Loli Ruri.8307:

Chris Cleary.8017:

Hey all,

We have been fairly relaxed since launch on players purchasing wealth from “Real Money Traders”, but that stops now. We will be taking a very active stance against RMT buyers from here on out.

Why would you take a relaxed stance against crime? RMT is not acceptable in any game.

Likely they clamped down when Anet started selling gold via the thinly-disguised TP exchange mechanism and they didn’t want any competition.

Do they seriously expect the gold people buy for gems comes from other players?

You mean since the exchange started back in Sept 2012? Because buying gold with gems started the same time you could start buying gems with gold.

Kraggy.4169:

I know that’s the line Anet spin with their resident ‘economist’, I frankly don’t believe it, never have. It’s fine for Anet to sell gold, they should have the courage to admit that’s what this is about.

Pride.1734:

Hello guys i want to discuss the fact that HoT has already added as many cash shop armorsets as actual in game armors.

What Gem Shop armor skins since HoT? We got a glider skin, two if you count the bundle, and a couple of back skins. They added a few outfits but that’s not mix and match armor skins.

On the other hand we got all of these pieces you get in HoT and that’s not the Legendary Armor.

http://dulfy.net/2015/11/08/gw2-hot-weapons-armor-and-backpieces-guide/

Three sets for all weights, one that’s heavy only and 9 pieces, one for each sub-profession.

That’s the nature of MMOs. Everyone needs to be on the same version of software which needs to a varying degree the updated assets to even launch.

If this is a laptop I suggest the local public library?

Just a flesh wound.3589:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Behellagh.1468:

But that’s been known for years. If you aren’t interested in the non-tickets, chests aren’t for you.

However I did get my 2nd open world key drop since they “improved” the drop rate. Probably got 50 chests in the same period of time.

^

The black lion chests and their contents have literally been known for years. The subject had been on the forums (repeatedly) and the drop rates are easily googled. Either buy, and accept that you’re not likely to get great drops, or farm and accept the same. If you do get something good then you lucked out.

Actually, 5 scraps in 10 chests isn’t bad, if you get it by key running. It’s the buying part that’s problematic. You can usually buy 2 of the newest weapon skins with 180 gold.

Meh… maybe 1 to 1 and a half… most skins start at 100-120 unless its an ugly, unpopular skin set… Look at the TP and see what skins sell for less then 100, then compare how they look. the only caviat to that is ugly skins you cant get anymore, those might top out at 200-300 gold. But looks are subjective so…

Actually, as a key runner I keep tabs on this sort of thing. The newest weapon skins are almost always in the 90 gold range while they are selling for one ticket.

As an example, the newest weapons: Glittering weapons skins

Word.

https://www.gw2tp.com/search?name=glittering+skin&sort=sell_price

Celtic Lady.3729:

PyrateSilly.4710:

gold is coming in faster than I can spend it

Of course, this all depends on what you want to spend it on. If you only want to buy a couple of inexpensive items now and again, then yeah, there’s plenty.

But most people are not making money “faster than they can spend it.” lol

But what are people spending it on? Buying gems? Shortcutting time gating ascended armor/weapon creation? Filing out your mini collection/dyes/armor skins on the TP?

What happen to being selective in what you buy. Not everything needs to be purchased the moment it’s available. You don’t get points for being the first person on the block with new insect gathering tools.

I think it’s all due to RL prevalence of credit cards. Let me put on my old man pants. Back in my day if you wanted a new color TV, you had to budget and save up to buy one and that could take months. Forget how long you needed to get that down payment together for a car …

But that’s been known for years. If you aren’t interested in the non-tickets, chests aren’t for you.

However I did get my 2nd open world key drop since they “improved” the drop rate. Probably got 50 chests in the same period of time.

They revamped this back in June. Yes I know you are returning but unlike us who had to experiment with the new system to find what works, you benefit from published build guides using the new system.

The new system is here to stay for at least until the PvP tournament seasons are over and there will be balance changes during that time, supposedly every quarter.

BLC aren’t meant to be profitable. But look up, you did get 5 scraps which is better than average.

Masteries are account wide and were meant to be a long term goal, long term meaning months not days. It’s only grindy for players trying to unlock them all in a relatively few days. It’s like players who grind for achievement points. I’ve lived three years without a legendary weapon, what’s another couple of months on one or more of my 80s.

UnitedChaos.8364:

Woodenpotatoes recently did a video going over HoT in general. He highlighted what ANET did well, what they did poorly, and his general thoughts on the expansion. I, for one, think that EVERYONE at ANET needs to watch this video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL-8bSUothk

It is so thought out and highlights things I didn’t even think about. Things like poor masteries, lack-luster lore, and more.

What do you guys think? Do you agree with some of his major points?

That’s primarily a review of the story and not the systems added to the expansion.

The problem isn’t RNG when looked at the player base at large. The variance due to the RNG is small relative to what players can cause by choosing to or not to try MFing a particular weapon precursor. Then you have the secondary impact from the players who got one whether or not to place them immediately on the TP or hold on to them until the price rises.

Paranoid much? It’s there so it’s less likely you’ll get your account swiped.

I send used or crafted stuff to friends.

Zeivu.3615:

BlankHearts.8216:

Sadly its still asking me to redownload the game, I guess I’m gonna have to.

It makes me do it too if I select the 64-exe. The only way I figured out how to do it without re-downloading was to drag the 64-exe over the 32-exe in the gw2 folder. There has got to be a way to make this automatic.

Edited: I noticed if I disabled the Read Only settings to the entire gw2 file, it began to work automatically.

Oh how horrible, you have to follow the instructions and move the file from one folder to another. Oh the humanity!

Doggie.3184:

Not only is the Dungeon nerf sad but I’m disappointed HoT area doesn’t have any new 5man dungeons to do for XP, Tokens, etc. They coulda just lowered reward for super easy dungeon paths and upped the ones for harder if they needed to do anything. I generally didn’t farm the same paths all the time and did them for fun way to get money, xp and tokens when I was bored of SW and etc. I find myself in HoT zones getting bored of events after doing them so many times and wish there was a Dungeon I could do for XP there.

Gods it was like two years ago when they said there will be no new dungeons. How could you still be disappointed?

This has only been posted a zillion times. Thanks for leaving the URL visible on that email that you are warning others not to go to (being sarcastic here).

You may have good intentions but posting a screen shot for all to see helps them by giving them a feature the game doesn’t have, mass mailing.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/support/Common-Phishing-Attempts-E-mails-In-Game-Mails/first#post5229743

Nope. It’s actually a challenge now to wander through the world.

And dogma isn’t a reason? It’s like why we don’t have dueling. PvE, according to their dogma, is meant to be a place where seeing another player isn’t a bad thing. There isn’t anything wrong with having a dogma for your game’s design.

It’s too small if you are playing on your couch. But 28" a foot or three from your eyeholes? YMMV. They simply didn’t anticipate 4K when they developed the UI elements for the game, but now some drivers can con games into thinking they’re playing at 4K but only displaying 2K, the number of players this could affect has gone up.

As for pushing pixels out, remember the game is more CPU than GPU bound and with a 980 Ti, don’t think that’s going to be an issue for you.

I think that was shown during the HoT launch Twitch.

http://www.twitch.tv/aurora_peachy/v/22071510

Einlanzer.1627:

There are no valid reasons why mounts shouldn’t be in the game, and several reasons why they should be – mostly as a very interesting collectible that would generate more revenue than they would cost.

Want a valid reason, ANet doesn’t think they are necessary. Their game, their beliefs, their rules. That’s all the “excuse” they need.

You are going into an Italian restaurant and try to convince them that they should add burgers and fries on the menu because other restaurants have it. Mounts aren’t a “thing” with ANet. Instead we have a waypoint system to cross distances quickly. True you have to make it there first to activate it for you but that part of the whole “exploring” the world.