I get 10 stacks and stay around to help finish events for other people. I still rez. I’ll get what I want at the end of 4 days and you know, if I don’t get that stuff, my life will somehow continue.
Rewards in a game? The stakes are too low to change who I am for that.
I hate that attitude. It’s a GAME. Helping people does not equal altruism in real life. If you want to help the world get off your sanctimonious attitude and go help the world in real life. Helping people in game does not make you a good person. Just like PvPing does not make you a murderer.
You’re spending your time on entertainment like the rest of us. Roleplaying a good character does not actually make you a good human being. That’s just a hilarious notion.
This.
Some believe that personal character is reflected in everything you do. You can’t be altruistic just sometimes if you are altruistic. This maybe a game but that doesn’t mean you can simply chuck your personal beliefs out the window and act entirely contrary to it. If you can then that wasn’t your personal beliefs but a mask you wear to hide your true self from others.
Not at half price gems. Don’t you get that. They will never, unless the game is truly faltering, offer half price gems. Now if the OP wants to work through support and get a hold of someone who would let them, and this may only work if they just bought their copy of HoT from ANet directly and use the excuse that they bought the wrong item.
But generally offer an upgrade?. Not going to happen because it looks like you are selling gems at a steep discount. That’s a slippery slope. We have players already who wait for items on the shop to go on sale, imagine players hold back their cash purchases of gems because they might go on “sale” again, “like that upgrade”. It’ll be a bad business decision and they know it and that’s why they were clear about it on day 1 of the pre-purchase announcement.
I’m sure but what will happen is players will forget about this, spend all or most of the blooms they have and when ANet makes good will cry about how if they knew they were going to get X more they wouldn’t have bought all those Cases of Sand.
If this is true that is really not too customer friendly. I would imagine it’d be easy to accommodate such ‘secondary purchases’ pfft
They clearly stated from day one that there will be no upgrade to ultimate and it’s obvious why. Deluxe to Ultimate is simply 1/2 price gems. They do not want to set as a precedence offering just gems at a heavy real currency discount. UK gets a bigger break, £42.50 of gems for only £20.
Also the in game upgrade from base to deluxe is $30€/£25.50 in gems and not the $25/30€/£25 pre-purchase difference.
No one crafts for other players because it is not profitable unless you gather the mats yourself and then that takes time. Only a few higher level items are profitable to the crafter. They aren’t charities, they has to be something in it for them beyond leveling crafting skill and XP (and once you reach 80, XP currently is useless). So if players do craft, it’s for themselves.
Crafting and giving stuff away for free? If you are coin or mat rich, I can see it but most players are hoarding their coin for gems or some very high priced item.
Play for Free, as ANet prefers, has to have restrictions in things like mail and chat to limit the damage a RMT outfit opening up a bunch of free accounts. The limits on the TP is also there so someone can’t manipulate low supply items with a pile of accounts. Not sure if as you level you get access to masterwork and rare gear on the TP. The tease by showing P4F accounts what they could have access to buy off the TP is a less annoying way to encourage upgrading to a paid account than say the usual content or class restrictions that F2P accounts on other MMOs have.
P4F accounts can receive mail. So feel free to twink your friends with better gear.
The step reward scale is annoying. Last night I kept not quite getting 10 events done. That one event cost me 5 blooms. Today I was doing better but once I got 10 and there was only a few minutes left I stopped and waited out the timer. No way I was going to reach the next step.
Ah, last night I repeated was able to only clear 9 events so only 5 blooms from each. Couldn’t quite get that 10th event done in time. It was aggravating. I can’t imagine anyone getting 15 blooms each event constantly without tagging which is what a player would need to do to get 450 in 4 days with only 10 hours of play. And actually that still isn’t enough for 450 (4 x (60 + 45) = 420).
Individually, the three methods to defeat each occurrence, isn’t bad. Only problem that some may have is if you get players who don’t get the Catapult on the Catapult one.
I had problems where the mini map showed loads of events going on but going full scale map seemed to show few. Made it difficult to determine if they actually exist or is there an issue with the full map or the mini map.
I also had problems, and I’ll try to “fix” this the next time by significantly reducing my graphic options, that the Mordrem spawn tossed at us were invisible for a fair portion of each occurance. My system couldn’t keep up with loading the area I just WP to, plus the crowds of players (on medium/medium) AND see all the Mordrem being deployed. Not fun taking damage from something you can’t see and since they also die quickly sometimes I never see them other than the name badge if I hold control down.
Because it’s likely when tested in house that they played as they thought players would/should play, till they finished off each one, rather than try to game the reward mechanism by running around and tagging each.
When this was data-mined I was hoping there would finally be an alternative to running Fractals for the Bloodstone feeder, but nope (assuming that list is accurate), it’s just a cheap bag of Silverwastes crap.
If this event was meant to introduce new players, P4F or otherwise, a taste of such events, the rewards offered aren’t that useful to a new player.
The Crate of Sand and Arid Dusty Satchel gives rewards that are only useful in the Maguma Wastes.
50 Luck for 10 blooms and 2+ silver. Salvage green drops and you can get one with less effort.
Memories of Scarlet Box is actually useful at 20 and 25 silver. But how often can you buy what gets dropped for less than 25 silver. Yes you can get blade shards. And I’ve only opened three from map completes but nothing I would be willing to spend 25 silver on.
Mysterious Key Pouch. Now if they know they need to pick one of each, can access LA and figure out where the chest is, it might be worth the 45 silver and 75 blooms.
Figuring out the worth of a bloom based on the UniDye? About 2 silver each.
Bag of Rare Gear uses RNG to determine what you get and there’s a chance for an exotic. Probably not a high enough of a chance to make it worth the RNG rolls.
Also unlike veteran players, new players are coin poor. So charging them on top of not offering many items that are immediately useful isn’t really a reward.
As for the top tier rewards, the skins and potions are very expensive relative to the average blooms from each map event, informal poll among teammates is 15. At 900 for all the skins or both potions would require a player to 4 rotations through all 3 maps every day. That’s 15 hours! A day! Drops to 11 hours if they average 20 per map. That’s insane and you know ANet that there are players who will feel compelled to do it because we as players have no idea when these items will ever return. And if they return before the end of the year there will be players very upset from burning themselves out on this weekend to get it.
TL;DR Low end rewards aren’t as useful for new players and drains the little coin they have, high end rewards require play during every waking hour for four days.
Even token amounts of silver to offset the waypoint costs would have been appreciated.
I can understand not giving champs special rewards because we remember how Scarlet’s Invasions turned out, players simply farming champs Vs winning the event.
Having the spawn locations in the same area as other group events like the toxic offshoots. It adds a needless complication to an already chaotic environment.
Instead of a 1 shield per completion, make the number based on level of participation. 1 for bronze, 5 for silver, 10 for gold and adjust the totals needed for reward. Or something dropped if you stayed (chest). That would discourage the tag and run players.
They didn’t expect players to figure out the minimal work required to count as “helping” at each event. They should have tied it to medal level as well (bronze/silver/gold is 1/3/5 or 1/5/10) and then set up the reward scale appropriately.
Problem with in house testing is everyone will play it as intended and not “how do I game the reward mechanism?”.
Thanks for admitting that there is a problem. That’s sort of a change from business as usual. You normally crash dive and run silent if a lot of players complain about an unannounced change (ie previously enchanted boosters losing karma as a choice).
Edit: To be clearer. The game doesn’t scale much beyond 3 cores so an 8 core isn’t going to buy you a lot. And actually the fact it’s only 3.0GHz hurts. Having a fast video card isn’t as important as the game is more CPU bound than GPU, and not because of the render thread but the main thread that handles most everything else.
The game engine really bogs down in areas where there are a lot of players present.
I don’t know why, just did the event for the first time and got 25 blooms and a vine cover chest. Got killed once, downed a few times, built a lot of catapults and blasted anything that was red. I maybe did eight to ten instances. Was on a team with 4 others.
Or he posted without approval. Or he thought he had approval. Or was told to get some comments from ANet and didn’t. Who knows. Article went live, editor took it down. That’s all we know.
You must have been playing SAB wrong. It took me around 15 mins or less for 250 bauble bubbles, just memorize all the locations and farm them… Also, for the last Halloween event you could get hundreds of candy corn every several minutes not to mention you could buy them from the TP.
Both of those were reasonable (except the ghost dog mini, which was RNG) this is event just insanity… I might not even bother with it.
Note, you said memorize all the locations, that requires you to play enough and note where the drops were. I went in and after a half an hour of play took my reward over to Moto and saw how much and simply chose to quit. Maybe you have greater fortitude to keep trying but I couldn’t even get to the end of the first level in that time.
And doing what on Halloween? And what’s 100s vs needing 1000s. And buying candy corn is sort of cheating and only doable if you aren’t strapped for in-game coin. When your net worth is under 100 gold, a couple of gold for a novelty item rather than useful gear is an extravagance.
Right click on the drive letter in File Explorer, pick properties, select the tools tab and you will find defrag in there. However Windows defrag will not do exceptionally large files.
There are also so third party defraggers that allow you to defrag a particular folder or file. I use Auslogics DiskDefrag. There is also Pirform’s (people who do CCleaner) Defraggler.
Seeing as the people working for the site refuses to actually tell people what happened, I would say we most likely don’t have the full story. Even when outright asked if they where forced to take it down they simply spun it around and refused to answer.
that gives you your answer right there… if they cannot be open and say what happened, then it is likely Anet forced them to remove it.
on second thought it could be the employee was fired for posting something he was directed not to….
Or maybe his editor thought it was a shoddy article and had it taken down and the original writer doesn’t want to talk about it because he is embarrassed or furious at his editor.
Many people, even the ones who agree with him on the general idea, felt the article was shoddy in many ways, and his editor could very well be someone who believes as such as well.
And it’s also possible he posted it before getting his editor’s approval. Maybe because it wasn’t clearly stated as his opinion piece.
His reddit responses seem to indicate he got read the riot act and can only say his editor took it down.
Wow. You are naive.
TTH get lots of access and exclusives, then one of thier writers posts a critical opinion piece, and it gets pulled. Hmmm.
It’s not hard to connect the dots. I’ll be interested if any other sites cover this. I bet they don’t.
And you don’t seem to understand that editors run things at any publication.
Normally the editorial staff and business operations have a Chinese wall between them and if the editor had supported the writer and was told by the suits to pull it there would be a lot more noise about this on other game news sites that do have a wall in place.
The Gem Store is not a 100% cash-only shop. You can convert gold to gems, thereby getting items without paying real money. That has always been the entire premise of GW2’s Gem Store. The items have never been exclusive to those willing to part with real cash.
And yet here they’ve introduced a way to get the items without money… and people are up in arms about it.
What’s the difference between “do an event to get an item” or “grind some gold, convert to gems, get item”?
But… there are people who HAVE had spent real money on these items. How do you not understand?
I didn’t spend real money on those items when they were in the gemstore but I can understand their displeasure about it.
But are they displeased that you got them without spending real money? This still requires gold and a lot of events to afford them, and unless the bloom reward is increased, a player can’t get them all, maybe even one, without playing 24 hour a day while the event is live.
Never did Tower of Nightmares, being burned out by the clockwork invasion. And you can’t blame ANet if the player base chooses not to do the event because they become obsessively focused on rewards rather than winning the event?
So we now get events where rewards are only dropped at the end. Now whose fault is that?
I am very unhappy about this also. it feels like I wasted gems
You had the skins for over a year, that’s what your gems bought you.
That probably cost you less than what the grind required to earn enough blooms plus the gold to buy them now.
I only bought them for collection purposes and not used them :p
And collection stuff gets devalued by discounts and alternative ways to aquire them. If anything this stuff should get more expensive over time to reward early buyers instead of punishing them.
And this is a case of ANet will always tick off some portion of the player base whatever they do.
Seeing as the people working for the site refuses to actually tell people what happened, I would say we most likely don’t have the full story. Even when outright asked if they where forced to take it down they simply spun it around and refused to answer.
that gives you your answer right there… if they cannot be open and say what happened, then it is likely Anet forced them to remove it.
on second thought it could be the employee was fired for posting something he was directed not to….
Or maybe his editor thought it was a shoddy article and had it taken down and the original writer doesn’t want to talk about it because he is embarrassed or furious at his editor.
Many people, even the ones who agree with him on the general idea, felt the article was shoddy in many ways, and his editor could very well be someone who believes as such as well.
And it’s also possible he posted it before getting his editor’s approval. Maybe because it wasn’t clearly stated as his opinion piece.
His reddit responses seem to indicate he got read the riot act and can only say his editor took it down.
Special events have special currencies. When the event is over there is no way to get more and while they keep the NPC around to cash them in the left over are game tokens found in your junk drawer from a long dead arcade.
What I would like is some notification as to if these left over reward tokens will ever be used again so I can flush them or not. I ended up tossing a tri-key only to find out they dropped the chest into the new Lion’s Arch. Gee, thanks. Now I don’t want to get rid of anything anymore.
From my perspective this is no different from the reward structure that SAB or Halloween or other events with the exception that you don’t have to turn a large number of drop X into the currency the vendor will take first.
I remember SAB clearly. 250 baubles to make a bauble bubble, 50 bauble bubbles for a weapon skin or 20 for a mini. I spent an hour playing and got 30 baubles. I need 12,500 for a skin, 5,000 for a mini. Well back to normal adventuring.
Same with Halloween. Mini needed 12,000 candy corn and I can get only a handful at a time every hour. Stuff that, back to normal adventuring.
I might be wrong, but i remember SAB and Halloween to be around for more then four days?
If this event was around for, lets say two weeks. Then i guess everything would be a little bit more O.K.
But playing two weeks exclusively to earn enough to get one reward isn’t … rewarding.
I can understand where ANet is coming from with the lack of normal loot, they are looking to avoid what happen with the clockwork invasion where many players said stuff the event, lets just spawn and fight champs.
Elite was a poor choice to describe what they wanted to do here. They wanted to start to offer specialization lines that you can only choose one of that will make the profession play a little bit differently.
They needed a descriptor for these “unique” specialization lines and they settled on “Elite”. Honestly “Unique” is already defined in game can only have one of equipped but “Unique” implies the limitation but not the scope of changes that using one grants.
But equally true that “Elite” doesn’t mean superior which is how most everyone will read that as. And they already used up the word specialization when it replaced Trait Line.
From my perspective this is no different from the reward structure that SAB or Halloween or other events with the exception that you don’t have to turn a large number of drop X into the currency the vendor will take first.
I remember SAB clearly. 250 baubles to make a bauble bubble, 50 bauble bubbles for a weapon skin or 20 for a mini. I spent an hour playing and got 30 baubles. I need 12,500 for a skin, 5,000 for a mini. Well back to normal adventuring.
Same with Halloween. Mini needed 12,000 candy corn and I can get only a handful at a time every hour. Stuff that, back to normal adventuring.
Mordrem are invading Central Tyria and we need your help to stop them! To keep you stocked for their assault the Black Lion Trading Company is extending the Anniversary Sale through the weekend. Check in every day during the Mordrem Invasion Event for new sales!
Weapon Skins that hadn’t returned yet (chain sword)
The armor sets they pulled a while back.
Rehash of all the previous sales.
Edit: Well that’s disappointing. Crafting Licenses (30% off), Tradesmen’s Package (80% off limit 10) on sale and Bone Pick returns (didn’t know it was missing).
