Guild Wars 2

I disagree with your notion that rare and super-rare items drop more frequently than uncommon. The BLTC is clearly delineated and I’m put gold on it that the worse drop rate for the uncommon items is better then the best drop rate of rare. Same is true when comparing rare with super rare.

For $20 you can buy 17 keys, for $35 you can buy 32 keys. The question for ANet is what the percentage of players purchasing X keys NOT get the seasonal exclusive uncommon item. With that they can determine the odds for that item. If they want a 50% chance on 17 keys, the overall odds should be 1 in 25, which isn’t bad for something that’s an “uncommon” drop.

And that brings us to the problem of what players think what “uncommon” means and how many tries should give a player a high confidence (95% change) of getting an item. Both of these are likely considerably higher and fewer than reality.

The other side is ANet recognizing that not all uncommon items, or ever rare and super rare, are equally desirable. That gating an exclusive event skin behind an RNG paywall (gold or cash) upsets the player base if they choose to participate and don’t get it or choose not to participate at all for reasons.

RNG is RNG.

First you need to get a 4th slot from a BLTC, say that’s 1 in 10 chance. Then you need to roll on the uncommon table, say that’s 2 in 3 chance. Then lets be generous and say there’s a 1 in 2 chance to get the skin from the uncommon table. All together that’s 1 in 30. With 25 chests, there’s a 1 in 2.7 chance of not getting it. With 100 chests there’s a 1 in 30 chance of not getting one. That’s simply the math talking.

This has been true since collectible cards introduced foil back limited edition. How many kids end up with a lot of stale bubblegum trying to get that one player’s card?

RNG … great to give players a variety of drops. Great to limit game wide the number of a particular items released. Terrible from a player perspective when wanting a particular drop.

Let’s say that the drop rate for a 4th slot from a BLTC is 10%. Then say the chance of rolling from the uncommon table is 66% and the sword has a 50% chance (that’s on the high side) from that table. All together that’s roughly a one in 30 chance.

At those odds, 1 in every 30 (coincidence) players opening 100 chests won’t get it. That is the ugly truth about the math. That’s why probability is always taught with statistics in college. With just 25 chests, the chance of not getting it shoots up to over 1 in 3.

When you are spending money in the hope of getting one of these, standard binomial distribution isn’t comforting when you don’t get it. Opening 100 chests and not getting it is just rage inducing. Makes that $90 monocle rage in EVE seem like small potatoes.

Since item codes are public knowledge, I never believe any item being pinged in chat. Players have been trolling precursors since the earliest days of the game. Teq is no different.

1) The megaserver system fills PvE maps with players from all servers, this keeps maps busy. More so if there is an event going on that map. Right now with SAB festival is back, players are over in Rata Sum doing that content.

2) Same old same old. What ever your favorite profession has been nerfed to oblivion while all other professions have been buffed to godhood. You know, standard MMO drama.

3) If you don’t have a level 80 character yet, then you don’t need HoT yet. If you have an 80, then even outside of the HoT story and areas it unlocks the “elite specialization” for each professions, lets you unlock the post 80 mastery system which lets you earn account wide abilities like gliding, and of course access to Living World Season 3 areas.

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Again, that’s what happens when you ask your designers and programmers to focus more on an expansion.

Cuts have to come from somewhere.

True enough. What is more important, additional content in a game mode that’s only around for 3 weeks out of the year or work targeting Fractals, LWS3 and a future expansion? It’s about priorities.

First only very lazy sites mix up simultaneous thread count with core count.

Second the Windows scheduler understands when assigning threads to cores to assign them to unused cores first before doubling them up if the CPU has HT/SMT.

Third, the thread scheduler in Windows already assigns a thread to an idle core on an HT/SMT CPU before assigning a second thread to an busy core.

Fourth, setting affinity for an application doesn’t prevent the thread scheduler from assigning threads from other applications to non-idle cores, if there’s no idle cores available.

Affinity doesn’t buy you performance on a system when you have other apps running at the same time as the game. Physical cores don’t have one logical core that performs better than the other. The only thing that affects performance when it comes to HT/SMT cores is the overall workload for the CPU in terms of active threads system wide be low enough that doubling up threads per core is held at a minimum.

Actually limiting the number of available logical cores to half may actually hurt performance as GW2 does have, as I see it on my system, 35 threads. True only 3 take up the 70% of the total CPU cycles GW2 uses but that doesn’t mean only four or less threads ever want to run at the same time. If a logical core becomes available but a thread’s affinity mask prohibits running on that logical core, that thread has to continue to wait even if it’s the next one in the queue wanting to run.

Except command line arguments simply pass commands onto the executable. Hex editing is altering the executable. Altering the executable itself is against terms of service. Violation of the terms of service is punishable by loss of account.

It’s rather black and white.

Hi there. If you have questions, the Player Helping Player section would be better.

Basically everything you’re accustom to in WoW or other fantasy MMOs is likely different here. First, no RP or PvP only servers. PvP is a game mode and RP is “around”.

Mostly the standard MMO Trinity of Tank/DPS/Healer is de-emphasized. Some professions are better at one than other but not to the extreme you see in other MMOs (other than the Ranger elite). And tanking is a bit different here, it’s not being a hit point sponge but more about leading a target around.

You don’t split a drop or XP, each involved gets the full reward. Everyone gets a copy of a material node to harvest. The base design philosophy from ArenaNet was a player in PvE should never be worried about seeing another player. Everyone can rez a fallen player or NPC. Most healing is done by yourself on yourself.

Few skills root, combat system is about movement and attacking. Facetanking is difficult as armor doesn’t mitigate damage enough, self-healing isn’t enough and HP is low enough relative to damage being done. Surviving is about NOT being hit, not withstanding it.

Have fun.

Xenesis.6389:

I dunno why there’s 14 pages of arguments over this. They added raids to the game to cater to those type of players, something which was not in the game for 4 years, that’s a change of identity of the original game concept.

They’re adding legendary armors just to those raids as a reward just like the legendary back pieces that require fractals or spvp, legendary weapons involved a little of all parts of the game but you did not require a group of 10 people to complete, that’s also a change to the original concept of legendaries.

Things change for games all the time, things get added or removed, what’s important is that game stays true to the original audience it was designed for. That game identity created from day one is what players bought the game for, if you turn around and try to cater for a different type of player that the game wasn’t even designed for, obviously not all your current players would be happy about it.

The first 8 months of the expansion was basically dedicated to the raids, the last 8 months have been for living story. In that you can see they’re creating content for both types of players, but other areas of the game suffers because anet does not multi task very well, hi wvw. Why weren’t both raids and living world done at the same time if the raid team is so small?

It’s obvious with the amount of work going into building legendary armors that raids are now a big part of gw2 going forward. I mean they won’t even make separate armor pieces for the gem store anymore, it’s all outfits they shove in there, but raid legendaries are going to be individual pieces and animated.

The original identity of gw2 has been chipped away at for a while now. But they’re heading down the direction of every other game with raids, you raid you get the coolest stuff in the game. If that’s the way they want to go for their end game, so be it, but I didn’t come to gw2 for raids, I left a game that had much more better options for raids to come play gw2 for wvw (one of those original audiences of gw2 being ignored).

Raids and their release schedule was a planed part of the expansion. The time they took to “fix” some of the issues of HoT with the Spring April 2016 update likely impacted the release of LWS3 by 3 months at least.

As for WvW they’ve been doing updates to WvW for quite some time. Players keep insisting they want a major revamp to make the game mode all shinny and new again. They did get one, with HoT. Gee, that didn’t work out so well did it? And since then they’ve tried to repair the damage done as well as tweaking aspects of scoring and adding new mechanics. But all I see often repeated on the forums is “ANet has ignored WvW”. Same thing can be said about Fractals, easy for some to discount all the work they’ve done because they are revamps and not a steady stream of new ones.

Ley line anomaly pops up 20 minutes after the hour on even server hours. Only one per day per account.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Defeat_the_Ley-Line_Anomaly_to_disperse_its_destructive_energy_before_it_overloads

Silent The Gray.3091:

Mitern.1563:

I seen many threads where players discuss at length whether Guild Wars 2 is too easy or not hard enough, which tells me it’s pretty well balanced.

That being said, would it require a lot of work for Arenanet to offer various modes of play? I am not very computer literate so I am just curious.

Here is my idea:

Easy Mode: Players must purchase an Easy Mode package from the TP. They must create a new character(s) that can only play by themselves (all of Easy Mode is an instance) and have access to their Easy Mode bank which is separate from Regular Mode bank. No TP, No Ascended or Legendary but they can buy from the store with cash (bank slots, bag slots, skins for looks etc. )

Regular Mode: Stays the same. It’s a great balance, like I said.

Difficult Mode: Players must purchase an Difficult Mode package from the TP. Again, it is an instance but everything is harder but players can invite other players who purchased the Difficult Mode package to play in Difficult Instances. Player would have access to everything in Regular mode. The players can receive Titles and special rewards if this is feasible.

I am not that good at computer stuff. Is this easily done or would it require too much time and work for Arenanet to profit from it? I am thinking that some people that search for a new video game experience might base their choice on whether it is easy or a challenge.

I can appreciate this idea, and here’s my take:

GW1 had a Hard Mode system, which I would love to see brought back, I’m not even sure most of the people working at Anet currently are aware such a system existed, but basically for all of your maps you had a hard mode option you could toggle on and off before leaving into your instance. For dungeons, fractals, elite areas, raids, this would be a great feature, increased reward for increased difficulty and for the love of god, DO NOT put diminishing returns on it, everything in this game has diminishing returns already, I’m sick of that being the go to development option, it’s ill-conceived and Anet knows it.

But GW1 was instanced content. It was you and your party and that’s it. That kind of system is “easier” to have difficulty levels than the open world maps of GW2.

Tough to do in an open world map as players wander by and join in. Instanced missions are a lot easier.

Part of me will always think it’s Kirk.

Why? Do other MMOs reward XP past level cap? None that I’ve played.

Sure, GW2 use to reward skill points, then spirit shards and then nothing unless you maxed out mastery tracks.

But the notion that without this there is no reason to play your level 80 without a cookie is ridiculous.

SkyShroud.2865:

gw2 is single core performance dependent while ryzen excel in multi core.

It’s not written for a single core. The game uses multiple threads and three threads use a fair share of cycles each. Performance is limited by the thread that takes most of the cycles. A thread’s maximum performance is limited by a core’s performance. That’s why a core performance is the limiting factor.

Every app is limited by it’s slowest thread.

WARIORSCHARGEING.2637:

moonstarmac.4603:

The biggest drawback to Ryzen right now is the Windows Scheduling conflicts with SMT. I have seen users posting videos out where they are keeping 15+ FPS in world events like Teq and Claw without issue.

The second drawback is the lack of support AMD gave MB Manufacturers when it comes to hardware compatibility (ie: RAM Speed limitations and other faults that lie with the BIOS intergration).

Once these are addressed, I believe the Ryzen with be a viable option for GW2.

not really at all giving 2 things first the game its self will never support it fully and only 15 fps during teq is not much at all .

and secondly and far more important ryzen can only go to Max Turbo Frequency 4.00 GHz

topps !! hell my amd fx 8350 4.0 over clocked to 4.3 if i want to can still beat it . and get

120 fps to boot !!! it is just fact this game will never support high end cpu or graphics cards ever . and stay stuck on DX9 for ever till the game is dead , it just does not take a
rocket maker to understand that .

That’s the old Gigahertz Myth. That’s judging performance of a car engine by which one revs the highest. Clock speed is only half the equation, instructions per cycle is the second half. Ryzen’s IPS is more than 50% faster than the FX Bulldozer architecture. Heck the Phenom II had a higher IPS than the FX series.

A 4GHz 8 core FX-8370 had a multicore Cinebench score of 644.5. A Ryzen 1700 OC to 4GHz with SMT off, so only the 8 cores, scored 1252.5.

moonstarmac.4603:

The biggest drawback to Ryzen right now is the Windows Scheduling conflicts with SMT. I have seen users posting videos out where they are keeping 15+ FPS in world events like Teq and Claw without issue.

The second drawback is the lack of support AMD gave MB Manufacturers when it comes to hardware compatibility (ie: RAM Speed limitations and other faults that lie with the BIOS intergration).

Once these are addressed, I believe the Ryzen with be a viable option for GW2.

Nope. I’ve now satisfied with the tests I’ve seen that AMD wasn’t spinning when they said they were happy with the Win 10 scheduler, it appears to be working properly. The logical processors are enumerated correctly, evens are physical, odds are logical, 0-7 is one CCX and 8-15 is the other. Threads are assigned to physical cores first, within a single CCX first then the other, and only when all physical cores are busy will addition threads be assigned to already busy physical cores. Under light loads threads stay within a single CCX.

Now there is an issue with OS power management controlling speed/power states, the Ryzen can do this better on it’s own which is why they say set the power profile to performance vs balance. There is some tweaks for that coming from Microsoft.

I think the issue isn’t the scheduler but issues with certain apps instruction+data mixes, SMT and the split nature of the L3 cache on Ryzen that’s causing a bottleneck. Don’t forget, this is AMD’s first SMT CPU, Intel has been doing this since the very first Core i3 (well Pentium 4/D but that was an entirely different CPU architecture) and has had years to refine the implementation.

Armor repair costs were removed because they didn’t want to charge a dead player twice, once to waypoint and once to repair. However without a death penalty then what to encourage players to not face plant?

Moonyeti.3296:

I wasn’t trying to derail the thread or dismiss the points you raised. I feel it is germane to the topic at hand, because this thread is about if GW2 has lost it’s identity. A person’s perception of that identity is formed from many things, including the title of the game. The perception may be based on incorrect assumptions, like the title implying that guilds can fight each other when it has never been the case (in GW2). That can leave a person with the impression that the game has shifted in a direction that shows it has lost it’s way, when in reality it is moving along more or less like it always has since launch.

No the thread is about the identity of GW2 when it was launched and what it is now. Since GvG was never part of GW2, it’s not pertinent to the thread.

Wanze.8410:

Sartharina.3542:

Wanze.8410:

OriOri.8724:

@Wanze – I linked silk to the high price of leather, not just T6 leather. T5 leather is still expensive for a T5 mat, and its a ridiculously high % of the cost of crafting anything, which drives people away from crafting, which lowers the demand for silk, which lowers the price of silk.

You are the one who made it only about T6, not me.

The topic title made it about t6, not me.

And even for t5, your theory isnt true because silk rose in value simultaneously to t5 leather since mid february, so the high price of t5 doesnt really stop players consuming silk.

This is a merged thread about leather prices in general.

Frankly, I think the imbalance in crafting is a blight on the game, and it’s having a strongly adverse effect on the economy. Sure, it’s ‘stable’ – but so is the guy on life support in the ICU.

What imbalance in crafting?

I believe he’s referencing differences in refinement ratios between different types of materials.

Every time someone calls the devs lazy for not supporting 4K, 4K support is moved to the bottom of the pile.

I know I felt pretty left out. That has changed somewhat now with the new zones, but raids were there for 9 months as the only thing being released for PvE.

During that time, people defined what they believed HoT was about.

True … ish. The raid release schedule was already predetermined during HoT development since it was a major feature. PvP is independent of PvE content delivery.

The delay in PvE content post HoT was the triage work that was done on HoT that we finally got with the Spring 2016 update nearly a year ago. That in turn pushed back the start of Season 3 of the living story to end of July.

And while we got the usual special events, SAB returned, They revamped the Shatterer. Allowed gliding in core Tyria (great advertising for HoT IMO). So it’s more like six months before we saw a significant update to PvE. Yes, nothing really “new” but remodeled with some of the sharp edges taken off.

But the biggest thing for me was MO stepping up and talking to us. Yes it was on reddit but it was a big step up from the hype train pre-HoT. Giving us an indication of when we will see major patches. A very plain delivery Vs pie-in-the-sky somewhat vague descriptions that HoT had.

And that’s how they sold raids from day one. Learn through getting your party smashed. Video gaming of old where failure in timing results in starting again. That was their definition of “challenging”.

https://youtu.be/JLlCOrd-xQg?t=12m50s

And there is nothing wrong with that.

2Q14 to 3Q15 – average sales 20.6 billion KwN
2Q16 to 4Q16 – average sales 15.4 billion KwN

All the things crossed.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

DeWolfe.2174:

Uvirith.9573:

DeWolfe.2174:

Price of T6 leather sections since farm released…..

You are fake news

That’s usually what’s screamed when faced with facts today. The graph is exactly from the day the “farm” was released til to time I posted it. Prices went up! Which shows the “farm” is ineffectual at driving down prices.

Here’s another fact, T5 leather increased over 60% prior to the farm til now!

You keep ignoring that prices dropped drastically when the farm was announced. That’s just as relevant.

The price going up is people reacting to the farm not being the top gold maker (which some people unreasonably expected).

DeWolfe does have a bit of a point here. Before the farm announcement T5 sections were in the 1s70c to 2s00c range. Before the APIs went down the price was in the 2s20c to 2s40c range. That’s a 25% increase over the previous steady range.

And again, unless those running the farm choose to sell the sections they get (rather than the hides) on the TP, the price won’t be going down anywhere soon.

Since LWS2, ANet tied unique items from NPCs on that map to the map’s unique currency as a way to enforce participation on that map. That then provides a reason to stay on/return to the map once the story there is finished and it keeps the population up on that map, at least for a while. This design philosophy was also carried over to the HoT and LWS3 maps.

Yes it’s different from core Tyria where gold and karma is the currency of choice and doesn’t matter where it’s farmed. It’s just different, no better or worse.

Vayne.8563:

OniGiri.9461:

Vayne.8563:

@OniGiri.9461

This makes no sense at all. Those guildies that are dissatisfied now, were satisfied before the expansion (and many of them are still satisified. But yes, HoT is massively different from Orr before the patch for a lot of reasons.

There was nothing in Orr like pocket raptors. The big problem with Orr before the initial nerfs were pulls and stuns. Maybe some conditions.

There were no creatures in Orr that stealthed. There were no normal mobs in Orr that could one shot you. There were no areas of Orr that I can remember where you had something like two frogs, one who was harder to melee and one who was harder to range. Orr was annoying but I don’t ever remember dying there.

There was nothing like a smoke scale. There weren’t groups of enemies, that included guys that tormented you, because torment didn’t exist. There were no break bars to think about. The maps were much simpler as well.

You may not have seen a big difference in the jungle and Orr but that doesn’t mean that difference doesn’t exist….because it’s huge. And Orr got nerfed for complaints and since the nerf it’s certainly much easier.

Beyond that, let’s pretend someone liked the game the way it was, and bought something for $50 that was different from what it was. Those people spent $50 on something they don’t enjoy playing. That is to say they put the same amount of money into the game as you did, but got a product that they considered significantly different from the product they were enjoying.

Do you really think those people are interested in buying gems and throwing more money at this game? Do you not see that monthly income is down? Because I’m sure Anet sees it.

It’s up to Anet to decide the cause of that, but I don’t think adding raids made them a ton of money, or driving away their most casual players. Not to say all casual players feel this way but there’s obviously an issue,. because people are talking about an issue.

Your response is basically I didn’t find it hard, so it’s not hard. I’m not sure how helpful that response is.

I didn’t say the new HoT maps weren’t hard. But i don’t think they were so much harderer then the old level 80 maps that its reasonable to cause a dropping off of “casual” players.

Dont panic about the numbers – you are reading too much into it.
The numbers were in a very similar state before they announced the expansion.

Actually they’re not. They’re about half that level. That is to say the last three quarters have been the lowest this game has ever earned. That situation hasn’t existed until now. I’m not really concerned about the numbers, because now that the game has moved to an expansion model, that will be the norm. Drops between expansions and more money during the expansion.

But I do hope the next expansion is better received than HoT was.

Average income in the last 3 quarters are roughly 25-30% per quarter lower from the average income in the 6 quarters before HoT. There is a two quarter bump in between where HoT account sales also reside.

The GW2 game engine is still very limited in terms of being able to use threads which means core performance is quiet important. XBone and PS4 have 8 low performance cores. Each of those cores have roughly 1/3rd the performance of a core from an Intel i5-2500K. The game engine would need a complete redesign.

Those other MMOs use game engines that have a version optimized for those platforms. In the case of Tera which was announced earlier this month, the Unreal Engine 3.

Donari.5237:

It’s been brought up many times, though ANet has not commented on it that I know of so I fear that hoping they are only avoiding it due to coding issues and time constraints is likely only wishful thinking.

I would love this to happen. My bank space (which is maxed, they can’t sell me any more of it) is clogged with unlocked skins that I have not yet found the right use for. Yet the gem value of the amount of charges I’d have to use is huge enough I don’t want to delete the one-free-use (not that I ever directly buy transmute charges, but I do tend to hoard them so I never would have to buy them if I wanted to change an armor or weapon look, and converting all my unlocked one-use skins to fungible charges would be awesome).

Functionally, these skins are transmute charges. Why not let us turn them into charges rather than having to use bank space against future wardrobe changes? If we “burn” them on skins that aren’t the specific skin, what harm is there?

Locked skins that are still tradeable should of course be exempted, but once the only thing we can do with an unlocked skin already in our Wardrobe is apply it to our own gear, it would be major QoL to get it the heck out of our inventory.

That’s why I think post Wardrobe System they should have let us salvage the transmutation charge out of it. The skin is now in the wardrobe and these one time application skins are simply cluttering the bank or for me a character slot for an armor skin with charge mule character.

And it’s been my opinion that base refinement costs should be the only place it’s tweaked. But providing finer grain ratios such kitten into 2 or 7 into 3 instead of just X into 1. Hardened squares had the number of sections required increase by 50%; thick by 33%.

I am totally for identically ratio recipes for the same item regardless of tier, other than ascended, or with armor by weight. We shouldn’t be micromanaging recipes at the high level. The doubling of the basic mat requirements for Damask over Elonian for example shouldn’t exist.

Except you tag short term peaks and troughs to determine the general trendline. Not just the peaks.

Yannir.4132:

Hardened leather prices are a bit ridiculous atm. A square costs over a 1 g, whereas you can get an Orichalcum Ingot for a bit under 6 s. So they cost about 20x more. I don’t think they were even this expensive before, so what happened? We got a leather farm and the prices went up?

And what’s with Gossamer Patches requiring 10 Hardened Leather Sections but only 4 Bolts of Gossamer? That should really be the other way around, as they are GOSSAMER Patches. Not Leather Patches.

Well Tier 1 to Tier 6 patch tiers use the same ratio, 4 cloth bolts + 10 leather squares. Sadly the changes ANet did to help reduce the glut of T5 and T6 leather but that adversely drove T6 leather prices into deep space (200x).

What did players expect? ALL T6 mats are rarer than T5. ANet said they were adding a leather farm … NOT exclusively a T6 one. Doing it once and quitting because RNGesus didn’t give you as much T6 mats as you wanted is sad.

Did you even look for all the strongboxes or did you just grabbed the 3 at the end? There are over a dozen more.

Time to make isn’t a valid comparison, dev hours are. It’s unlikely the same number and types of devs are involved in making an armor set Vs a fractal.

The issue with armor skins is testing them with the other existing sets, not really an issue with weapon sets.

DeWolfe.2174:

Ok I Did It.2854:

DeWolfe.2174:

idk, the leather farm did nothing and isn’t very good. Think I’ll spend today farming and see what can be done about leather.

This is not true, the leather farm works great, the problem is ppl still want things handed to them, and don’t want to put any effort into farming themselves, they want Anet to step in and nerf it.

Price of T6 leather sections since farm released…..

Nice cherry picking of the graph. Here’s a better one.

Fear grips casual hoarders who sell to speculators. “Word” spreads that the farm is “too hard” and “isn’t worth it” so prices slowly recover back to where they were after a few weeks. Speculators win!

No, we’ll probably get a bauble bubble as the seasonal item. Only need 35 for a skin.

It would be lame if it’s just a continue coin.

They did fix it by providing a farm. It’s up to players now to use it and sell any excess on the TP to drive down price. But I can see a Mystic Coin situation for a while where players will simply hoard any excess.

So far they change on Living Story and Special Events. I believe SAB is next in terms of Special Events so good odds then.

All I see is “real class balance” being defined as “buff my profession so it’s included in the current raid meta”. Not sure if I want my characters “balanced” based on raids for my PvE and WvW play.

How about finding a raid group that allows you to play whatever character you want. I’ve watched a group on Twitch that took over 15 hours (over multiple nights) to take down Deimos and they didn’t use anything close to that profession breakdown that the OP listed. They had a blast but the streamer had to keep telling the drive bys that the group wasn’t interested with what the meta was.

NCSOFT does document a game’s direct income outside of China, where it’s a royalty and is merged with other royalty payments from other games and simply listed as royalties in NCSOFT’s quarterly reports.

GW2 generates the majority of income from the NA/EU region, which is the only region it’s officially available. World wide, it’s dead last of the five games NCSOFT currently breaks out in their quarterly report (they just stopped reporting WildStar income). However that’s understandable as the other four games are available in Korea, Japan and Taiwan and those regions make up 89% of NCSOFT’s direct game income.

There were “issues” with the HoT roll out that adversely impacted WvW and PvP.

In PvP the HoT elite specializations quickly became the current meta requirements which many saw as being forced to buy the expansion to remain competitive. They’ve been adjusting the PvP ranking system every season as creative players show how it could be gamed.

In WvW the new desert borderlands were full of choke points that significantly slowed movement compared to the older alpine maps. The perodic Skyhammer like meta event that allowed the winner to instantly smash down keep gates of the losing servers forced servers to fall back to the borderlands to participate or retake if they lost. The population drop in WvW led to servers with low WvW populations teamed up with higher populated ones which reduced server pride a bit IMO.

However ANet have been making progress in cleaning up the mess starting last April. But it’s piecemeal, getting a little bit better with every WvW specific patch but that might not be fast enough for those remaining. The desert maps were adjusted to remove most of the needless choke points and the meta was removed. One desert map and two alpine maps are now used instead of just desert with servers rotated though the desert map every three weeks. They’ve been experimenting with the scoring system so night capping isn’t as much of an issue. But the damage done may have been too great to see a return to higher WvW populations and the unbundling of servers.

Populations in PvE are fine but that’s due to the megaserver system of not having a map instance per server but map instances base on population with “rules” about which instance you get dumped in based on party/squad, current guild or server. Allowing the gliding mastery to be used in the core Tyria (non-HoT) maps has made some of the zones feel fresh again.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

@Danikat

I checked before I posted. The march one day sale item does not have a timer. And I can assure you that the march madness daily items do not have a timer when posted each morning, as I check. They only have the “Sale ending soon” note in red above the item.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t change over to a count down timer as it nears removal.

Fremtid.3528:

The prices went from 20s to 35s a section its insane literally insane.

But first it went from 33s to 24s when MO announced a leather farm, it drifted down to 20s on launch day for the episode.

I guess after that the scuttlebutt laughed off the “so call farm” as too hard or not rewarding enough and since nothing really changed, the price returned to it’s previous range. But it took nearly a month to do so.

SlippyCheeze.5483:

Behellagh.1468:

If the Ryzen can’t reveal which core is part of which CCX to the OS, then there isn’t any fix. Your choice as a company is to either say their isn’t anything that can be done or say it’s say it’s working as expected. Which answer would you choose?

Yeah, I’m sure you are right. It’s not like there is any way that Windows understands multiple processors at the level you are talking about.

…whatever, though, honestly. It’ll come out in the wash.

Now you are just being difficult. And all that does is allow a user process to choose which logical processors that application can run on.

I’m talking about OS scheduler awareness so every thread started doesn’t wander out of it’s CCX as it moves between logical cores during the course of it’s life. But I can see in some cases that may also be as bad as needing to access the other CCX’s L3 cache across the “infinity fabric” bus in other cases.

And my concern over oddly arranged hex and quad core Ryzens has been dispelled as AMD at the R5 announcement assured people that the hex core will only be in a 3+3 configuration and the quad 2+2 . Still unclear if the R3 will be a new die with a single CCX or just more lemonade making (or brain damaging) of the same die the rest of the Ryzen series uses.

If you are talking about the raw raw materials like bloodstone dust, dragonite ore and empyreal fragments, well that’s what the various gobblers are for.

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Converter

Ayrilana.1396:

The living story inched ahead and even more so when you account for everything released since HoT. I wouldn’t focus too much on rewards since counting them doesn’t mean all that much as we don’t know how much time went into them.

The bulk of the unique rewards for raids are the weapon skins. I guess you could ask how many resources are spent on weapon skins but then we typically don’t get them in PvE anyway but though the BLTC chests. I haven’t seen any new BLTC weapon skins for some time so perhaps one could argue the raid weapon skins were developed by whoever did those skins. That would mean that PvE in the rest of the game didn’t really lose anything. there are some difference but I don’t know if they’re substantial enough to matter.

Just since the start of Season 3.

July 26, 2016 – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Embellished_weapon_skins
August 23, 2016 – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Bloodstone_weapon_skins
October 18, 2016 – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gargoyle_weapon_skins
December 13, 2016 – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Frostforged_weapon_skins
February 8, 2016 – https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Devoted_weapon_skins

Average gap, about 7 weeks. Since the last one, 37 days.

Your definition of “in some time” is much shorter than mine.

Adjusting supply is a delicate process. Too much, the price plummets to NPC value on the TP as supply soars, too little and not much happens. I believe John Smith said in the last Reddit release thread (or maybe here) that they are comfortable keeping the rate of new supply entering the world (not the TP) around 10% above the rate that’s being removed.

If the 10% excess ends up in the bank, on the TP or used by the gatherer is entirely player driven. Obviously anything other than ending up on the TP isn’t going to affect its price. And it’s the forces of supply and demand with how that relates to the price that ANet wants to see push the price down, a more organic solution rather than frequent adjusting of the supply knob based on how a mat’s flow of creation/destruction is on a weekly or monthly basis.

As for PvP and Fractal Ascended gear impacting. Neither use T6 which I thought was the primary complaint as that’s the only one that’s fairly expensive.

Justine.6351:

I checked my t5-6 leather and I have over 150g worth. That’s from predominately playing wvw, and after I made several armor sets worth of insignia for converting ascended gear, over the past 2 months.

I don’t understand how people are not getting enough leather to do sane amounts of crafting.

I know right. I “farm” T2-T4 leather, some 50K sections in total during the last 30 days. I think it’s a bit too competitive to “farm” T5-T6. Not worth the effort.

TorsoReaper.8530:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

I agree with SlippyCheeze. People had unrealistic expectations of what the farm would do. It’s going to take a while for any farm to affect the global demand for a high-volume mat like leather.

It’s definitely not the most lucrative gold/hour farm, but it is very efficient for those who want to ‘gather’ their own leather.

Do you realize the “long term” effect of leather has been zero impact? Just pull up a price chart.

Prices for T5-T6 leather has actually gone up since the farm episode 4. But I think that’s due to players expecting a price collapse that didn’t happen and tried to unload their supply. Post balance changes has caused a lot of volatility in T4.