Guild Wars 2

Every other day. Didn’t get any yesterday, got some the day before.

Well to be fair, cranking the graphics of any game to 11 tends to make the game GPU bound over everything else. You can read the generational games charts in that article and find that the i7-6700K isn’t any or just fractionally better than an i7-2600K for single GPU gaming. So does that mean you shouldn’t bother upgrading from a Sandy or Ivy Bridge?

But this isn’t affecting just the Jennifer Hales and Nolan Norths but the lesser known VAs.

As for vocal stress, that’s one of the reasons that it takes a small miracle and a pile of money to get Mark Hamill to do the Joker in games. It destroyed his voice doing it for the animated Batman series for all those years. Peter Cullen doing Optimus is another case. They are looking for the same guarantees and protections they get for VA in shows for VA in games.

And yes, it’s common for the VA to also do the mocap if mocap is required. Asking for a stunt coordinator to oversee a mocap session to look out for the actor isn’t outrageous.

Only games comparison I can find looking at RAM type.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/8

Did anybody bother to read what they want?

http://www.sagaftra.org/interactive/what-we-stand-for

Ha! RIDkitten.

Didn’t want to say anything about The Corpse Grove.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Behellagh.1468:

I think we are talking about two slightly different things here.

I’m talking about them determining the rate it would be rewarded so it didn’t impact new players and you are talking about the reason why they chose to limit it.

I know that key farming was a sore subject with ANet. They couldn’t simply ban it because that key drop was important to introduce players to Chests and the items from the Gem Shop they contained. ANet already knew how many keys were going for free and how a fair portion was going to a tiny, but growing portion of the playerbase. Due to the lack of new content more and more players were giving key farming a spin as something different to try. With HoT coming, this was the time to nerf the farm on purpose but how to nerf it without affecting the “normal” player? Well they knew the how, just not what was a fair time interval.

I’m not talking about the reason why, though I mentioned it. I’m saying I think 5 million accounts and 3 years is sufficient data to inform their metrics. The game hasn’t changed so radically since f2p was put in that that information would be different enough that they would need it to decide.

I’m saying I think they when made their decision they had all the information they needed already with the 3 years and 5 million accounts to set the time frame and the f2p is coincidental. It’s possible they didn’t even use f2p accounts as f2p players with just 2 char slots might play differently than the people who pay and have 5 slots to use.

P4F didn’t change it, it and new accounts from the HoT prepurchase simply gave them a starting point with new players that ANet could observe.

Experience players would be the wrong group to look at. Even not trying to key farm or trying to level quickly most of us could get to 10 (without direct PLing) and do the 1st chapter of the personal story in what, 6-8 hours? The question ANet wanted answered was how fast do new players create alts and rerun the PS? Would a limit of once a week hurt the vast majority of them?

SkiTz.4590:

Behellagh.1468:

SkiTz.4590:

Black lion key is not something you farm. Its something you stumble upon accidently.
same as a precursor.

Its purely an RNG item, its not even an actual reward.

Not only is the chance for a BL key worse than awful, the chance you even get something useful out of the black lion chest is probably even smaller lol.

When you have system that is RNG (black lion chest goodies) WITHIN ANOTHER SYSTEM OF RNG (getting the black lion key drop) , you have something that is UTTERLY and HILARIOUSLY greedy….

What was anet’s motive for the black lion key change? they don’t like farmers. PERIOD.

They want ppl in the gemstore buying the black lion key with real $$, they don’t want ppl farming the key through drops or story completion. That is a fact.

Oh yea anet increased the chances alright.

going from .0005% drop rate to .0010% drop rate is still laughable.

If you think this MMORPG has a good loot system in place where players can farm items they want, you are delusional.

all you do is farm gold at the best rate possible (silverwastes/daily dung speed run/ and chest/champ train) than buy whatever it is you are looking for. You don’t actually go out and have this hope of getting real loot, real drops…

Except BL Keys are primarily acquire via the Gem Shop. It’s an occasional reward as other Gem Shop items are from other activities and included as a very rare random drop in PvE.

You make it sound like drops are the primary method of getting them.

BL keys were primarily acquired from the key run…..(making a new character and getting it to the personal story step for the free key, deleting the character and repeating… ~20 min run after you get experienced with it)

Anet just killed that for obvious reasons (they want users spending $$$ for the keys instead of the farming run)..

I’m talking about how it was designed from ANet’s perspective, not how they are in reality. ANet expected players to pay.

I think we are talking about two slightly different things here.

I’m talking about them determining the rate it would be rewarded so it didn’t impact new players and you are talking about the reason why they chose to limit it.

I know that key farming was a sore subject with ANet. They couldn’t simply ban it because that key drop was important to introduce players to Chests and the items from the Gem Shop they contained. ANet already knew how many keys were going for free and how a fair portion was going to a tiny, but growing portion of the playerbase. Due to the lack of new content more and more players were giving key farming a spin as something different to try. With HoT coming, this was the time to nerf the farm on purpose but how to nerf it without affecting the “normal” player? Well they knew the how, just not what was a fair time interval.

Problem with big data is that there is a lot of it. Also since “the begining” there has been a lot of changes for starting players.

If the key reward from the personal story was targeted at new players, as I believe, as a way to introduce them to what you can get from the Gem Shop as well as the chests, gathering current data on how new players act was paramount.

It’s also possible that they just didn’t have that exact data historically and this tracker was new, starting with HoT pre-purchases creating new accounts as well as the influx of P4F.

There are others. This character from the Sylvari Personal Story for instance.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Malyck

Plus the history of the Pale Tree indicated it was one of many seeds.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Pale_Tree#History

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Behellagh.1468:

Lord Kuru.3685:

Not an exploit, but they clearly did not like it.

It’s just that now with free accounts, they have an excuse (flimsy as it is) to kill key farming off — just look at all the posts in this thread that claim free accounts farming keys would have caused problems… people actually believe it.

Except if it was P4F accounts, they could have just place the limit on those. No I think P4F simply gave them the metrics to determine how often a new player completes the first chapter of the personal story and with that they can feel confident to place the time limit they did knowing it affects few if any non-key farming players.

??

So, you think they couldn’t tell beforehand how many char that were created, got the key and were deleted versus how many were created, got the key and continued leveling?

I doubt there was any tie to f2p and it was merely coincidental that the 2 changes to the game happened near each other,

No I’m saying they didn’t have data on how often new players completed the first chapter of the personal story since NPE and Traits 3.0. P4F gave them an opportunity to start with a clean slate and gather the data needed to rationalize that once a week wouldn’t affect a new player.

How many keys being farmed was immaterial other than recognizing the extent of the “problem”. They wanted data that they would assure them they wouldn’t be punishing new players who hadn’t picked up that activity yet.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Not an exploit, but they clearly did not like it.

It’s just that now with free accounts, they have an excuse (flimsy as it is) to kill key farming off — just look at all the posts in this thread that claim free accounts farming keys would have caused problems… people actually believe it.

Except if it was P4F accounts, they could have just place the limit on those. No I think P4F simply gave them the metrics to determine how often a new player completes the first chapter of the personal story and with that they can feel confident to place the time limit they did knowing it affects few if any non-key farming players.

It was intended to be a reward for completing the first chapter of the personal story. ANet never expected players would be farmed by creating new characters repetitively just to acquire them. But the key does have a purpose for new players and that’s introducing them to BLCs and their content which is nominally Gem Store items so ANet wouldn’t want to remove it.

They also said the change caused by the NPE wasn’t to halt key farming, that’s not an endorsement either, that’s merely answering a question.

If a police officer chooses to ignore someone doing a minor traffic violation, that’s not an endorsement either. That just means he would rather spend is time stopping major violations. Key farming up to now was simply tolerated but something changed, possibly expecting an influx of new players with the release of HoT, and ANet now want to limit it because they would rather new players not learn to do this as a way to circumvent buying keys from the gem shop.

Basically Key farming became too popular and too well known to let it continue unrestricted while leaving the reward of a key in there for new players.

FXAA – Fast Approximate Anti-Aliasing
SMAA – Subpixel Morphological Anti Aliasing

http://www.iryoku.com/smaa/

Both are post process shaders which looks at the completed frame, “guess” where edges are and then blur the pixels along them. SMAA is about 25-200% slower than FXAA but is still many times faster than MSAA (multi-sample anti-aliasing).

SMAA does a much better job with the guessing and therefore you are less likely to see textures blur which is the primary issue with FXAA. SMAA High is better but slower than SMAA Low is better but slower than FXAA.

The link above includes a link to a paper on the subject. Just look at the pictures and tables on performance (from back in 2012) in the supplementary materials.

Or you can check out the demo video which shows examples in motion.

Bomber.3872:

Miss Lana Too.5794:

Bomber.3872:

Anyhow, I want anet to make it easier to farm keys instead of harder.

They literally just did the opposite of what you want. Why would they go back on that? It’s not something that they wanted to encourage, as it affects their revenue. The NPE was put in place to try and hinder players from key farming. We found a workaround. Now the weekly limit is put in place. We might find a workaround. Who knows?

tl;dr what you want is the exact opposite of what Anet wants.

Anet did officially allow key farm and they especially allowed and agreed to it during the npe update.

No. They said it wasn’t an exploit. That’s very different than endorsing it.

SkiTz.4590:

Black lion key is not something you farm. Its something you stumble upon accidently.
same as a precursor.

Its purely an RNG item, its not even an actual reward.

Not only is the chance for a BL key worse than awful, the chance you even get something useful out of the black lion chest is probably even smaller lol.

When you have system that is RNG (black lion chest goodies) WITHIN ANOTHER SYSTEM OF RNG (getting the black lion key drop) , you have something that is UTTERLY and HILARIOUSLY greedy….

What was anet’s motive for the black lion key change? they don’t like farmers. PERIOD.

They want ppl in the gemstore buying the black lion key with real $$, they don’t want ppl farming the key through drops or story completion. That is a fact.

Oh yea anet increased the chances alright.

going from .0005% drop rate to .0010% drop rate is still laughable.

If you think this MMORPG has a good loot system in place where players can farm items they want, you are delusional.

all you do is farm gold at the best rate possible (silverwastes/daily dung speed run/ and chest/champ train) than buy whatever it is you are looking for. You don’t actually go out and have this hope of getting real loot, real drops…

Except BL Keys are primarily acquire via the Gem Shop. It’s an occasional reward as other Gem Shop items are from other activities and included as a very rare random drop in PvE.

You make it sound like drops are the primary method of getting them.

All new full accounts have this restriction had have had it well before P4F came out. I believe there’s probably a timer on Gem Purchases as well, even if you had bought some already on your P4F. These are one of a number of things that are in place to make life a little more annoying/difficult for RMT account owners.

I’m with you about the truncation. Sure let us ask for X gold but give us the change as well, we pay exact change when we buy gems.

Steam has search tools? I always have to resort to external sites to narrow it down by more than price or genre.

I said this before but the Style section needs to have sub tabs for Armor Sets, Armor Pieces, Outfits, Weapons.

I’ve gotten an exotic within the last week and I only play infrequently, doing boss events only when they are dailies.

Ithilwen.1529:

Despite your sarcasm, two noobs have gotten precursor drops in the same party ahead of me. One on his first dungeon run with me guiding. At the same time I’m getting pure junk with 192%+ magic find.

The odds are against that. So, I want to know why. Does magic find actually work? Did I offend some dev?

Yes, it could be pure chance… but seeing a smart kittened noob with an attitude walk away with the precursor I have been looking for for years has me a bit kittened.

You make it sound like they cut the line. Random is random, I know people hate hearing that but one person could get it on the very first time they have a chance to get it or the millionth. Probability is a fickle thing.

LanfearShadowflame.3189:

I’d say just buy it if it’s something you want. There is always a chance it will come back, but who knows when (or if). Hell, just take a look at those that are still waiting for the bunny ears to come back…

BUNNY EARS WERE NEVER SOLD AS AN ARMOR SKIN!!!!!

They have yet been offered as a Gem Shop item as an armor skin, when it vanished it vanished with every other piece of town clothes months before the wardrobe came out. Players who had it as a piece of town clothes headgear had them retroactively converted to an armor skin as part of the wardrobe update. They were never offered as an armor skin post wardrobe.

Honestly, and I’ll likely be proven wrong after posting this, I can’t think of an armor skin that was sold as an armor skin, for gems from the Gem Shop, not return after it was temporarily pulled. Original Flamekissed Light Armor doesn’t count.

Rauderi.8706:

Behellagh.1468:

And it’s not about value to the players but as a means to provide a more steady income to ANet.

Not about value to the players? The players are the ones who need enticing to spend money. ANet offers, we buy. If we don’t like what’s offered, either because it’s too expensive (perceived low value) or because it simply doesn’t fit our aesthetic sensibilities, we don’t buy.

But the reason I highlight the specific statement is because that’s the drive to be unethical. Or, at least, inhumane. Treating the customer like moneymeat to strain a few dollars out of them. I’m all for paying the designers and the company. I do. I’m a “whale” (albeit a small one :P).

But good will is a long-term strategy for customer retention that many companies merely don’t grasp. And that’s sad when it comes to games. We need more companies to focus on humane design, which GW2 is fairly good about as a game, except in a few regards to rewards for time and actual money invested.

My statement may have been harsh but it’s the distilled truth. The customer is there to generate income for a company. It’s in the company’s best interest to keep the customer happy but not to the point of losing money in the long haul. They make more money by removing stale merchandise with low sales for a while and bring them back six months later than leaving it on “the shelves”.

And while a player benefits from buying an item off the cash shop, they benefit more by playing a game with no subscription fees, no pay for power from the cash shop and the option to buy the cash shop’s proxy currency with in-game currency.

Don’t you want to keep playing the game with no subscription or at all? I don’t see why ANet enhancing their revenue stream by rotating merch through the gem shop is bad.

And “inhumane”? No “inhumane” is raising the cost of a basic item needed for survival by 5000%. It’s charging $10 for bottle water at a disaster site full of thirsty people. It’s not removing poorly selling items from a store for a time.

I know, other than it proves it’s still there and the rumor that it broke due to an updated physics engine is likely false.

There was this story last week.

http://massivelyop.com/2015/09/17/guild-wars-2-player-finds-himself-trapped-in-the-super-adventure-box/

There was a rather large thread about this that has drifted several pages away. I’m dumbfounded that they didn’t handle this better. If you kept your Karma Boosters they weren’t removed but because they altered the Enchanted Booster to include the new XP booster, they chose then to also remove Karma because you couldn’t get the stand alone ones anymore. Would have been better to introduce a new Enchanted Booster without the Karma and with the new XP booster while keeping the older one as well and maybe provide a trade in option at the some vendor that converted the booster for 10s.

But 20/20 hindsight.

Edit: Found it on page 8.
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/And-poof-There-go-my-Karma-boosts

Dashingsteel.3410:

If they introduced more armor I would spend.

So you aren’t interested in any of the armor they are removing then, right? Or you have it already, right? You aren’t just fence sitting and waiting for a sale or when you have some surplus cash you wouldn’t miss, right? Then this doesn’t impact you.

No and define “decent frame rate”. Also the game’s biggest limitation, when there’s a lot of players present, is CPU more so than GPU. GPU helps, up to a point and then you’re limited by CPU performance.

The AMD HD 8570D is the integrated GPU with the CPU, AMD marketing calls this combo an APU (cause marketing). As such it uses system memory rather than dedicated and is roughly the same as the R5 240, that is a very low end GPU..

CPU wise the A8-6600 is roughly the same as an i3-4130. Again AMD marketing calls it a quad core when it’s closer to an Intel HT dual core.

Now about your graphics card question is this card to be added to your existing or this new one? An important and often ignored part of this question is can the current power supply handle even a £150 video card. According to uk.pcpartpicket that might get you a GTX 960, more likely the 950 or 750Ti from nVidia and the R9 270 and maybe an R9 270X.

I could see that. Or as direct PvP rewards.

However while all the finishers currently in the store are disappearing, there are still a good number not currently there that are in the Finisher Panel on our Hero screen that can appear. So I don’t think it’s a shift on how you can get them, rather this is simply a way to refresh what’s available.

Actually what B2P does is remove the need for the cash shop to also pay off the advance used in creating the game in the first place. They don’t need to hold out their hand at every opportunity if the cost of the initial development gets paid for by game sales. Cash shop then becomes less about collecting tolls and more about useful conveniences rather than virtual mandatory ones.

You were saying that techniques that are proven to drive cash sales are unethical.

And you are against the gold->gem exchange. That funds the gem->gold side of the exchange as well as being a double gold sink, as well as attempting to give an outlet to those who would end up at a RMT.

So how else do you increase sales on an ever aging series of items? And it’s not about value to the players but as a means to provide a more steady income to ANet.

Aqua Mirrage.3961:

its kinda old hehe n i dont even remember how i wound up there but for the past few days even ive been seein various things about people thinking a game needs to be free and essentialy anything that makes ya pay any amount of money needs to be perfect in every sense :P

June this year is old here?

There are people still posting videos two years before the game was launched as if it was breaking news.

Angus.5961:

F2P players definitely could help to maintain the game without spending a dime, if Anet allowed them to buy gems with gold.

More demand for gems means the price goes up and more people buy gems with cash in order to sell them for gold.

Except that ticks off the established player base with an increase to the exchange rate. As it is P4F players can only lower the exchange rate. And of course they can fix this by paying for the game. In both cases, buying gems with cash or buying the game, it favors ANet. Players get more players to people into the game with P4F. It’s a win/win there.

It’s been three weeks since P4F became a thing and the “dogs and cats living together … mass hysteria” has yet come to pass. Well maybe the hysteria from the P4F naysayers who are trying to lay blame for any changes since then on the necks of P4F players, like the change to the key farm.

Rauderi.8706:

coso.9173:

Why do them even remove things from the gem store? Why take away options from paying players?

To make them buy it faster.
There’s also removing a lot of low-selling clutter, so that new options are prominent.

It’s pretty shoddy ethics, but there we are.

So now it’s not ethical for the developers to get paid?

Belzebu.3912:

There is no GW2 Linux client, so even if you have Linux you would need to install a copy of Windows in a virtual machine to be able to play.

Or try to set up Wine to handle it. I think I’ve seen a few people saying they got it up and running under Wine.

I agree that the style section needs to be sub-sectioned. Preview needs zoom for headgear.

But I disagree with frequent sales because it trains your entire player base to only buy on sales. It’s as bad a leaving an item in the shop forever. Why buy anything not on sale then? Which is the same reason they won’t let anyone upgrade Hot to the Ultimate Edition because the Ultimate over the Deluxe is nothing more than a gem sale. That is a path they do not want to ever go down. Gems have a known, questionably unfair for EU, price in RW currency. If Gems ever go on sale, the end is nigh.

Sales do drive cash sales of gems either directly, buying gems for items, or transferring a chunk of gold from players not willing to buy gems for cash to players who are willing to buy gems for cash. The exchange rate has returned to a rate fairly close to what it was just before the sale started which indicates balance between gems flowing into and out of the exchange.

But players selling gold need to build up enough to not feel disenfranchised when a sale happens. Otherwise to them it seems that it’s only for the gold or cash rich. Also the exchange rate won’t spike as much and therefore not necessarily drive gem to gold exchanges.

nexxe.7081:

They didn’t even offer a sale for them. That’s shady and low of them. So much for steering away from temporary things.

Of course not. It’s all about getting players to BUY GEMS WITH CASH because that’s how ANet gets income other than account/expansion purchases. Now players have to decide, in less than a week, if it’s worth real money to get the skins or finishers they want before they are gone.

If these were selling well or frequently, they would hang around but I would wager their sales are less than stellar over the last 90 days so bye for now.

Also if HoT does bring in a lot of new players, reintroducing them will look like brand new items for that crowd.

Guaranteed swiftness for 30 minutes? Other consumables offer an increasing chance, on a kill, to gain a whole 10 seconds of swiftness.

Yes, Wooden Potatoes slashdotted GW2 Experience and the hosting company took action over the surge in traffic, according to the reddit thread on the subject.

I wonder how many know the term “slashdotted”.

No, they said “style items”. While old armor sets can return I’m expecting more outfits and singular armor pieces since the shift from the gem store only said no new armor sets.

Also weapon skins are “style items”.

Absconditus.6804:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

People keep saying that the only reason to remove stuff is to sell more of them. Me? I prefer them to throw out the old and introduce new stuff. The longer stuff stays in the shop, the more we take it for granted and the less special it feels. I prefer they only bring it back for anniversary/nostalgia sales.

ArenaNet turned exceptionally greedy over the years. That much is obvious to me. This is the sole purpose of the removal, greed. To create a false sense of urgency, because it’s going “out of stock”. I miss the old ArenaNet, who weren’t seemingly all about money, but very much about their players too. I don’t honestly get that feeling from them anymore. Especially after that horrible event they threw together recently. I honestly wish they’d relocate or fire whoever is their Gem Store lead (not that he/she is related to the event being so bad). I believe they used to work for “that Korean F2P company”—most people should be familiar with them, it both starts and ends on N—which explains a whole lot why we get treated like dirt when it comes to money transactions. I get it, ArenaNet is a business, they need and want money. They’re not our friends. But they’ve done some exceptionally stupid things over the past 3 years that’s made me spend less money in their store. And they used to be our friends. With Guild Wars they were absolutely in touch with their community.

You do realize the person whose name you are not saying worked for ANet for several years immediately before going to work for “that Korean F2P company” before returning to ANet. And that back in May a feature write up was done on them which listed them working on the mastery system and seems to be no longer part of the “commerce team” since the time LS2 was going on.

What do you suggest then as a means to stimulate actual cash purchases from the Gem Shop? That don’t involve paying for power or advantage or locking normal content? The two existing mechanisms they have is artificial scarcity, pulling items and returning them for a limited time; and sales that drain excess gold and gems from player inventories so cash purchased gems is all that’s left for them.

You can only depend on whales for so long before they have everything at which time they cease being your sugar daddy. You need to get normal players to spend cash on gems. Keeping an item in the Gem Shop means a player could save up enough gold to buy it. That doesn’t pay ANet’s bills.

As for finishers, I believe that there is an elite specialization that uses one in normal PvE content, implying that some critters may get recovery and heals from their kind. Seems like a perfect opportunity to rerelease these during HoT.

Sirius.4510:

My impression is that the tendency to favor Direct3D for PC games is mostly due to historical reasons (there is an enlightening summary here, although I can’t entirely warrant its accuracy: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055). Guild Wars 1 was developed and released at a time when OpenGL just wasn’t really happening in gaming, and GW2, if the stories are true, was built from that same codebase. So it used Direct3D.

Of course, these days – when cross-platform game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine run half of everything, and there are so many things being built for phones and consoles that… I think usually run OpenGL or some proprietary extension thereof – it’s much more likely for new built-from-scratch games to be more portable than that. So if ArenaNet decides to go build GW3 when 2020 rolls around, and they decide their current engine really can’t scale to what they plan to do (which is increasingly likely; it already has a few detrimental effects on GW2’s performance), they quite likely might build it using technologies that make it easier to port to Mac (properly) and Linux. And maybe iOS/Android if it makes sense at the time.

Until then, though, it’s likely just too expensive to build an OpenGL pipeline into the existing engine.

OpenGL was popular once on the PCs, a long time ago when DirectX wasn’t as mature, as an example, id Software loved it. Eventually Microsoft evolved DirectX and with their market dominance, working closely with ATI and nVidia at the time, DirectX driver development quickly became dominant. Game developers followed because why swim up stream when it’s easier to leverage the industry experience developing for DirectX. Didn’t matter if it was superior or platform independent, OpenGL’s strength for many years,

Hell City of Heroes used OpenGL and I can tell you as someone who lived on their support forum helping on driver issues, it was probably a mistake in the long run. OpenGL compliance was an afterthought from ATI/AMD and nVidia. When some new hot FPS came out the beta drivers put out by both companies to provide the best frame rate for benchmarking, often broke previously working OpenGL drivers because they were never tested or an older buggier version was included than what’s found in the WHQL driver. So players were forced to choose between their MMO working or a better experience with the game they just bought.

When that game moved from OpenGL 2.x to 3.x there were more problems since driver development/deployment is normally dropped for older hardware and newer OpenGL support would never come and players had to upgrade hardware. Sure AMD and nVidia had descent support for OpenGL in their professional graphic card products but those drivers weren’t optimized for gaming, but rendering 3D CAD models and even though GPUs were shared between the two products, the driver software was locked based on the bios on the card.

No, PC gaming is going to be stuck on DirectX forever. If push came to shove I can see Microsoft opening up DirectX to multiple platforms before IHV support for other API standards would get equal resources.

Turbotef.9203:

I still don’t understand why they get rid of stuff to begin with. TERA and a few other MMOs leave just about everything on the store so I can go back later and get it whenever I want.

This game does some super silly stuff tbh.

Because removing it and then bringing it for a limited time spikes sales. If forces players to buy on ANet’s schedule. I catches players with not enough gold to convert to gems to buy item X which forces them to buy gems with cash, which pays the bills.

The game may not have a subscription but a predictable monthly cashflow is still desirable.

Yep, storms do blow through all the Shiverpeaks zones.

At lest change it if you have HoT. Of course a HoT centric patcher is a constant reminder to upgrade.

Good point. It is interesting that it was just on sale (1/2 price which is when I bought it) along with the Shadow Assassin one.

I wonder what threshold in sales they use to decide it’s time to pull items from the shop so demand builds up again.

Interesting. Note this is being done post anniversary and pirate day sale when players are depleted of gold and gems on hand. Might as well put up a flashing Buy More Gems sign next to them.

Interesting it’s not ALL armor and outfits, just “old” ones. Finishers surprise me, not that I collect them. I thought they were popular among the PvP/WvW crowd. However one elite specialization now has a skill that can end in a finisher.

Should have bought the eyepatch on Saturday’s sale. Arrrgg.

Not a bad Asuna.

I use Argos Soft armor site to get an idea. At least you can select race, gender and armor weight as well as black/white color scheme to get an idea of the color zones.

http://argos-soft.net/GW2/ArmorGallery/

Hitting every Heart NPC in game for any karma skins or recipes I don’t have yet.