Guild Wars 2

The BLTC forum got merged into the General Discussion one for some stupid reason a long time ago (early December last year so welcome back).

You aren’t buying a bag slot for every character you will ever make, you are buying one bag slot to apply to one character. So yes if one character has hit their max then you would have to apply these to another character.

Now bank slots are account oriented and I guess yes, you can end up not being able to use them at all if you already hit the limit. Solution then is don’t buy this kit if you maxed out your bank slots already.

Once identified they are ordinary dyes that you can trade.

Test.8734:

Behellagh.1468:

Sorry, $6.8 million.

[deadpan] Oh no the sky is falling. [/deadpan]

Not really, but someone’s math is failling.

It’s $ 6.261.640,00.

Behellagh.1468:

That would be more than SWG or EQ at their peak.

Oh wow, SWG is such a success story!!!

…Not.

Behellagh.1468:

That’s why you have to forget about WoW because they are an order of magnitude larger than any other MMO out there in terms of income, ever.

Which is why I mentioned the other NCSoft MMORPGs. How do you feel about GW2 doing worse than Lineage 1 and Blade & Soul? Or doing nearly as bad as Aion? And that already factoring the beginning of HoT’s prerelease?

First you are using the current exchange rate, not the exchange rate during that quarter. The average exchange rate from Apr 1st to Jun 30th was 1096 KrW per USD. If I reversed the situation and use your exchange rate for against the correct dollar estimate, the quarter numbers would be 9% higher or roughly 24,500 million KrW.

Lineage closed in the US, it simply didn’t fly here.

However it’s an insane success in South Korea but it’s income is highly dependent on micro-transaction driven events which started 4th quarter 2009 that doubled the game’s income from the previous quarter. In 2008 Lineage had 112,602 million KrW annual income, 2014 that ballooned to 263,128 million KrW. That’s more than Lineage 2, Blade & Soul and AION’s 2014 income combined. And guess what? GW2 had more income that year than Lineage 2 or Blade & Soul. [gasp!]

So are you proposing we should have a super heavy cash shop based gaming experience to match Lineage’s growth? And if you are about to suggest we already have it you really don’t know what the MMO scene is like in Asia or what they offer as MT in Lineage.

I’ve been following South Korea’s game industry closely and NCSOFT especially for the last 15 years so you can’t beat me about the head and shoulders with their numbers or using out of reporting period currency conversion rates. Nice try though.

SWG was a big thing right up to the point they shot themselves repeatedly in the foot with NGE. It was as big as EQ which made a lot of companies look seriously at doing an MMO.

Test.8734:

Vayne.8563:

As for people saying the game isn’t making money, I’d say 7 million a month is up there in the MMO arena. I think people who think this game isn’t making money haven’t been following the reports.

Really, Vayne? Is that what you are claiming now?

Per NCSoft’s finantial report, we can see the GW2 earnings. GW2 made 22.470.000.000 Korean won in the second quarter of 2015, or 7.490.000.000 Korean won per month… And that’s not 7 million US dollars.

Sorry, $6.8 million.

[deadpan] Oh no the sky is falling. [/deadpan]

That would be equivalent to 450-570K monthly subscription players which puts it the same size income bucket as EVE. That would be more than SWG or EQ at their peak. Or the subscription size of any of Turbine’s MMOs before they went F2P. That’s the reported population size of ESO at it’s peak and FF XIV currently.

Some reason people think that level of income is bad. That’s why you have to forget about WoW because they are an order of magnitude larger than any other MMO out there in terms of income, ever.

ANet and NCSOFT always had a special relationship going back to when a fledgling NCSOFT bought them back in 2002. South Korea was going nuts over Starcraft and here a one hit wonder hires via buyout some of the developers behind Blizzard’s biggest hits.

There is a rather persistent rumor that NCSOFT can’t close ArenaNet, that they can only sell it and the Guild Wars IP off with the founders having the first crack at it.

ArenaNet used a different 3rd party company for GW2 in China than who NCSOFT uses for the rest of their stable of MMOs. ArenaNet hired it’s own PR firm for the launch of GW2 in 2012 and not use the one that NCSOFT had used previously for NA/EU releases. ArenaNet publicly corrected the reported expansion plans announced in two NCSOFT investor conference calls in 2012 and 2013. So they seem from the outside as rather independent from Seoul.

So no, the separation has always been there. The realization that their Asian developed games don’t do well in the West while their Western developed games don’t do well in Asia may have led NCSOFT to create the holding company which now owns Carbine, ArenaNet and their NCSOFT NA and EU group that handles distribution in the west, which then NCSOFT owns. It does make all it’s western operations a single entity on the corporate flowchart. The holding company is run by NCSOFT’s CEO’s wife, who is a very impressive woman.

Except if you are coming in from an MMO where skinning is free, it can be a bit of an issue.

Frame rate is pretty much unchanged but for me it doesn’t lag at times as often as it did in Win 7. Things like full screen map pops up faster right after zoning in for instance. Also the lag from spinning to the left in Nolan after coming in from Black Citadel is a lot less.

Sometimes it’s really responsive and other times it’s really, really slow. I’m on AMD so I think it’s a TP server issue rather than a client issue.

And I had the same issues in Win 7.

Yet that is what they did the previous years.

CureForLiving.5360:

Behellagh.1468:

The skinning system in game is meant to be an income source, even with commonly available in-game skins. That’s the purpose of the transmutation charges. Sure there are multiple ways to get them for free and they are one if not the cheapest items you can buy from the Gem Shop. But they are still a Gem Shop item.

So like a lazy tax?

Only for those who don’t get enough charges from the free sources to satisfy their customization needs. I have over 100 mostly free ones so far from login rewards, map clears and achievement chests. And I have only two active characters and I only have map complete on one. But because I have so few, I am very careful about using them.

So yes it’a s tax, one I choose not to pay if I can avoid it.

Not if you were waiting for those skins to return.

They didn’t do anything for the first two anniversaries other than a Gem Shop event, why would anyone think it’ll be different this time? Don’t care what they did in GW, I never played GW but I’ve been here long enough to experience the previous anniversaries.

If this was such and issue then why wasn’t there some huge outcry during those two? I don’t remember seeing the hate that this one seems to be generating. The only difference is both times the LS was going on to distract the player base from the lack of a celebration.

ANet enjoys experimenting with the MMO genre. GW having no monthly fees in an era that every MMO had a subscription is the prime example.

For GW2 they tried to change up the notion of content expansion by having a world where events happened for a limited time and then was over. To give the player the feeling that they are involved in world shaping events.

And here was the problem. In GW those kind of events were told in instances that every player could do at their own pace. But GW2 was an open world that all players co-existed in. That takes the control of doing that story out of the hands of each player. Now players who want to crunch through the story as fast as possible couldn’t because it had to paced for the slower more casual players. Also new players end up coming in someway in the middle. And if RL meant you couldn’t play for a period of time you missed out the story entirely.

Living Story is a neat idea on paper, a world that changes around the player based on events occurring in the world but players didn’t like that they had no control of the pace.

Season 2 was better by putting the story back into instances but it still paced out the delivery over months than having a single content drop of the entire story or an entire zone. The it’s free if you log in during the chapter’s first two weeks was also a mix bag. Yes the barrier is very low, a login, but the $2.50 unlock cost for a handful of instances and a slow map reveal, no. Again it hurt new players and players who for whatever reason couldn’t play when the chapter was free.

As for the silly notion that the game is a financial disaster. Moving from new account sales to gem shop sales was always going to cause a steep drop off in income from the first few quarters of the game to a more steady state income. Players seem to overlook that GW2 is still earning $80 million a year which places it 2nd or 3rd, depending how the previous 12 months went, in NCSOFT’s stable of MMOs, easily the best performing western MMO NCSOFT ever had by a large margin. And if we were back in the era of subscription MMOs, $80 million a year would put the game population between 440,000 to 550,000 paying players which isn’t too shabby even now.

We are hitting a content drought as the Dev team is pushing to get HoT out by this holiday season. I will guess it’s taking longer than planned. The player base is bored and somewhat angry, but there’s always some faction of players angry over one thing or another.

• The un-telegraphed karma change with enchanted boosters gut punched one group who used them almost exclusively as karma boosters.
• The revamp trait skill system once again knocked over the apple cart on some player’s favorite overpowered builds.
• The one week WvW golem event to attract players who never played WvW ticked off the WvW faithful.
• The push for 2FA before an influx of new players due to HoT is generally a good thing but there seems to be issue with pestering long time players when the announcement said that for them, the system would not be mandatory.

It’s annoyance by a thousand paper cuts. Since way more players go to a forum to complain than praise, the boards have gone fairly negative. Some of it is justified. Some players are reaching for any annoyance as a reason they are upset (such as the annual Anniversary Sale).

Oh well. The end isn’t nigh, it’s just more players are more disgruntled than normal.

Every system in the PvE part of the game is designed around benefiting the casual player. Making a system benefit a non-casual more, other than a non-casual can do it more often, is against that philosophy.

It’s tough to design a good crafting system. If better items drop than can be crafted, it’s a waste of time so why bother which is bad if you enjoy crafting. If crafted items are inherently superior then it becomes mandatory which is bad if you hate crafting.

Allowing crafted items to be traded helps those that hate crafting but then it’s market forces that determine price.

I think the new kits are generally well designed, targeting the new player but still being attractive to vets. It does give players help especially with the XP Boosters but it also exposes them to two systems that may encourage them to spend more money at the Gem Shop.

First transmutation charges lets them play with the skinning system outside of buying a Gem Shop skin which has the first transmutation built in. And this goes alongside the dyes they get as well.

Second of course are Black Lion Treasure Chests. With 5 keys will likely to get one scrap, which is useless but may encourage their collection which means more key sales, as well as the BLTC true purpose as a Gem Shop sampler. They’ll get some other boosters, maybe a makeover kit, some dyes, a mini, a backpack skin, etc.

Always remember that the game’s monthly income comes from cash gem purchases so that’s why these sales at the Gem Shop are so important.

The skinning system in game is meant to be an income source, even with commonly available in-game skins. That’s the purpose of the transmutation charges. Sure there are multiple ways to get them for free and they are one if not the cheapest items you can buy from the Gem Shop. But they are still a Gem Shop item.

Could one day we see it go the way of other nussance fees like armor repair and trait respec fees, maybe but those use in game coin and not gems. I guess it matters on how many have been bought from the Gem Shop. Considering they are found in the new Account starter kits, I doubt it will be anytime soon. They are just too good of an item to bundle in kits and rewards. They don’t lose too much giving them away and they are useful enough that the player receiving them are unlikely to not think of them as a reward.

Just like it’s been the last two times they’ve done this. Don’t remember this many complainers either of those times.

Low voltage DDR3 support, ie DDR3L. Standard DDR3 found in most desktops is unlikely to be compatible with Skylake.

As an aside, nVidia released the GTX 950 Friday. It’s a cut down GTX 960 with 3/4s of the CUDA cores and texture units. Significantly faster than the GTX 750Ti but more power hungry and a higher staring price. It fills the performance gap between the 750Ti and the 960 and occupies the same price point as the R9 270x or R7 370

You are total right. 95% is way too high. I totally forgot about 3rd party game engines such as Unreal, Source, Unity, id Tech supporting native OS X versions.

But other than Bungie back in the day and Blizzard today with their dragon hoard of cash, I can’t think of a AAA studio that developed a native version of their Windows game for OS X from scratch. The barrier to entry needs to be low in terms of additional development costs, so if you can get it through your licensed game engine then that leaves using Cider as an imperfect but low cost way to support the OS X.

The close nature of the Mac platform should be a positive for game development, like how it is for consoles, but Apple’s use of mid to low end laptop GPUs kneecaps performance with no option to upgrade later. This isn’t fanboyism, I don’t think that laptops in general are not viable gamer platform because their performance is significantly lower with limited or no upgrade path. Doesn’t matter if it’s Windows, OS X or Linux.

Oh, EVE also uses Cider.

https://www.transgaming.com/cider/games?page=3

Anyways here are the published Mac requirements from the HoT page. Note that it still says Mac beta version, nearly 3 years after it’s release.

Mac OS®X 10.8.X or later
Intel® Core™ i5 or better
4 GB RAM or better
NVIDIA® GeForce® 320m, ATI Radeon™ HD 6630M, Intel HD 3000 or better
35 GB available HDD space
Broadband Internet connection
Keyboard and mouse/equivalent

The Mac beta version of Guild Wars 2 runs well on the below machines or better. Your results may vary if you’ve upgraded or changed your Mac hardware or are running on lower hardware specifications.

iMac 21.5", 27" (Mid-2010)
iMac 21.5", 27" (Mid-2011)
MacBook Pro 15", 17" (Mid-2010)
MacBook Pro 13", 15", 17" (Early and Late-2011)
MacBook Pro 13", 15" (Mid-2012)
Mac Mini (Mid-2011)

Due to potential changes, system requirements may change over time, and you may be required to upgrade your current system (or obtain a new system) to continue to play the game.
——————————

It’s likely an issue with Cider emulation so there’s nothing ANet can do. You can accept that and move on or not.

Edit: Hate it when I forget to put the no/not in a post. By brain gets ahead of my typing speed.

You bought “beta” Mac support. It will always be “beta” due to it’s dependence on the Cider wrapper. Very few game developers will support Mac natively unless they were first Mac game shops, or they always supported both platforms or they are using a multiplatform game engine that facilitates the creation of a native Mac port.

Otherwise 95% of the games that do run on a Mac is under the Cider emulator. Blame Apple for dismissing game developers for all those years with their underwhelming choice of graphics hardware on their sealed, no upgrades allowed PCs.

Yes, it’s like taking a tour of Rome in a Formula 1 racer. Sure you finish faster but what do you remember about the sights?

@Mortifer

Then don’t buy gems when there isn’t anything you like at the shop. If there isn’t anything good, convert them to gold as you can always buy more gems when something comes up.

Edited to clarify who I was replying to.

ANet pays their bills with new account sales and cash bought gems. Items at the shop are based on cash value, never gold, and their shop policy on item availability and sales all boil down to what causes players to spend actual money on gems.

A returning item has pent up demand for it. The knowledge that it’s around for a limited time encourages fence sitters to buy now. That immediate need to buy may result in a cash purchase of gems. If an item was always around, why rush to buy it? Take time to save up enough gold to buy it via gems from the exchange. That won’t keep the lights on.

Same is true with sales. The knowledge that sales will happen will also build up demand. And as far as I know there hasn’t been a moratorium on bank tab/bag slot sales, there just hasn’t been one recently. And it’s not like they went on sale regularly.

And how many of those gems on your account you paid for with cash?

Edit: wrong there/their

Juclesia Elcritian.8410:

ON SALE = Discount
FOR SALE = Items being sold

People need to learn English.

Arenanet never said it’s “on sale”. They just said Anniversary Sale. This is ambiguous enough to mean both discounts and no discounts.

Ambiguous hell, the announcement states that the anniversary sale will include discounts, returning items and new items. But I guess everyone stopped reading when they read the word “discounts”.

ZudetGambeous.9573:

It is important to remember that if you bought HoT your sale counts TWICE. This is why they included the base game in the HoT purchase.

You bought the full game at launch (1 sale) and the full game again when you purchased HoT (another sale) so everyone that bought the expansion gets double counted.

They did a similar thing with GW1.

This is not what most other MMO’s do since most other popular MMO’s are sub based. Games like WoW count the number of active subs, not the number of sales, so you know how many people are actually playing the game.

That’s why they need to clarify if these numbers are account activation and not just sale. Yes NCSOFT claimed GW sold 7 million units without noting that they were counting box sales. It’s hype for their investors.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Ardenwolfe.8590:

Board warring is serious business, Flesh!

My goodness. I guess so. If I make a mistake all he has to do is point out where I’m wrong and not do the rant of the week.

Sorry you got the brunt of that but the rhetoric that started up again because of the sale is like nails on a chalk board to me. The assertion that ANet gets what NCSOFT chooses to let them have has just the last straw over the last few days.

I came off strongly because normally simply describing how this works in the real world will get dismissed and the meme will persist. I removing the rant about the other memes oft repeated here from that post, you didn’t deserve to have that in a reply.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Johje Holan.4607:

So… not to put a damper on this thread but…

If they’ve sold so many copies and we’re supposed to congratulate them then why do they not have enough resources to do much improvement in the game? I mean there excuse is always that they don’t have enough resources…

Well hire some people with those 1.5 million sales!

Considering they are owned by ncsoft, the money probably goes to them first and ANet gets a set amount back. They aren’t the owners of the profit they make.

No it doesn’t. All NCSOFT gets is the ability to claim ANet Sales and Costs as their own. ANet had to pay off the development advance of course and NCSOFT likely gets a direct cut of box and gem card sales as their publisher/retail distributor. But that’s it.

Certainly all the money doesn’t flow first to the mothership in South Korea and NCSOFT decides what ANet gets as an allowance. This is an often repeated notion that simply wrong.

Edited: to remove extraneous rant.

WinAuth seems to work with Win 10. It’s spitting out the same numbers as Google Authenticator.

https://winauth.com/

Hmm. I wonder if they are doing two phases of 10 day accumulations and then the last day have a blow out of all 20 days of items?

Just musing.

Dinks.2478:

Where is the discount though? I see full priced Caithe and Kasmeer weapons. That isn’t a discount.

Commas people, it’s discounts, returning items and new items. All three will be part of the sale but we aren’t getting all three every day.

The ONLY major difference between this and previous Anniversary Sales is it’s length. The first two ran 10 days each from Friday to a Monday. This year it’s 21 days.

That may be due to the number of things they could rotate back into the shop or providing a longer opportunity for new players to pick up limited available items/skins. It could also be in response to those who go to PAX and miss out.

What some who spin the tail about boosting their login metrics seem to ignore is unlike the month of one day sales we had one time, anniversary sales are cumulative so the last day of the sale everything they ever discounted, introduced or returned during the sale will be there.

The reason they want players to log in daily to check is the hope they see something the day and impulse buy. Those sales will drain their gold and gems with the hope that when something comes out later those now gold/gem poor players will drop some real money on gems.

But to be fair Vayne we had the 4th chapter of LW 2 as distraction.

Did they do anything during last year’s aniversary other than a sale? I remember a lot of press about the various parts of Feature Pack 2 being talked about. We still had LW 2 going so maybe that’s why and this year without any distraction it’s so obvious.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

Behellagh.1468:

CorrynnStarr.7942:

my personal favorite is the black lion pack on sale from 2000 gems down to 1600 gems… at a reported 44% off discount……………… maths not they strong suit I guess

Nope, that was 2880 down to 1600 so it was 44%. Since the before price has a strike though, the 8s looked very much like a 0. But you see the 8 is narrower than the 0.

hah! all this time hehehe touché! my bad then, it always looked like 2000 gems on my screen… was always like “wtf… its been a year and they still haven’t fixed that?” lol man I feel silly!

Plus the wiki states the “normal” price is 2,880 but your first one is only 1,600.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Black_Lion_Introductory_Package

Kreejaffa.3682:

And for the record, I sadly was never able to acquire any zat replicas. I could never justify the price for a non-functioning weapon.

I do have a PS90 though…

Love the top transparent clip, bottom ejector, ambidextrous design and compact size. It’s a lovely carbine.

CorrynnStarr.7942:

my personal favorite is the black lion pack on sale from 2000 gems down to 1600 gems… at a reported 44% off discount……………… maths not they strong suit I guess

Nope, that was 2880 down to 1600 so it was 44%. Since the before price has a strike though, the 8s looked very much like a 0. But you see the 8 is narrower than the 0.

Nobody gives a kitten about login metrics anymore. As long as the spice cash flows it doesn’t matter.

I’m also betting keys will go on sale, since they always go on sale during these events. Maybe a sale on outfits or armor sets that have stuck around.

fixit.7189:

When in doubt, drive up gem sales ftw. Why reward people who have been loyal for a long time when you can try to get MORE money from them instead? Sadly, many you will fall for it and encourage more greed like this.

You’re looking for a longevity reward because I’m assuming you wouldn’t want to reward players who started last week. Closest thing we have for that are birthday presents for characters.

Of course you could hope they could do some complicated filter of players who did content of at least 1/2 hour per day and sum up the number of those days and draw a line and those above get something. Yeah. Be happy with B-day gifts.

They should have a least thrown a bash under the Jellyfish in LA full of real good Food Boosts for free. Show up, snag a bite, run off to the portals.

How would that benefit ANet. Ideally you would drain your gold and gem supplies first and only then something you really what will come out so you will feel obligated to spend the cash for more gems.

Anywho, I believe this is a cumulative sale as oppose to one day only. And it’s a 21 day sale, not 10.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Zalladi.4652:

Why would they discount a returning item that was previously unavailable to purchase in the store? Surely making the item available again would be considered a “sale” on its own?

I would only expect there to be discounts on items that are already currently available to purchase. This is how ArenaNet’s anniversary sales have worked in the past, and it is how they will work for the present and future.

Regardless. The phrase, “check in every day for big discounts” strongly suggests that there will be big discounts, every day. To open up the Anniversary sale with no discounts at all is making that phrase look like click bait.

Only if you choose to stop reading at the comma.

Check in every day for 21 days for

• big discounts (and/or)
• returning old favorites (and/or)
• exciting new items!

And since I believe this sale is additive and not one day only, by the time we get to the last day, all three of those categories will be well represented.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

Big discounts?
Caithe’s Bloom and Kasmer’s Staff were always 600 gems weren’t they?
I know the dagger was 600 at least.
A whole whopping 0% off sale!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited to see them bringing some stuff back and adding new stuff. But I hope stuff being full price isn’t going to be the norm here.

“for 21 days for big discounts, returning old favorites, and exciting new items”

They list three things there. Obviously Caithe and Kasmer’s stuff falls under “returning old favorites”. Just as obvious we will have a key sale and maybe bank tab/bag slots/character slot/collection expansion sales. It’s the exciting new items that may prove interesting.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Behellagh.1468:

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Vesuvius.9874:

Arietta The Broken.1875:

Apologies if someone else has mentioned this..

So are we only getting to pay anet more money to celebrate that the game has been out 3 years?
No new content//events//even drops.. would be nice to have even birthday cupcakes drop from every mob.. that gave a temporary stat boost :v?

Just going to leave this here..

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Special_event

I’d rather they be working on the expansion than on silly distractions like birthday cupcakes.

Was that the reason why there wasn’t a birthday celebration on year one and year two. I was wondering. Too bad it’s not like Guild Wars 1 where they had celebrations even when they were working on an expansion.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/welcome-to-the-anniversary-sale/

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/welcome-to-the-second-anniversary-10-day-sale/

Lol. I’m not counting gemstore sales as a celebration. A celebration is towns decorated. New events. New drops such as birthday cupcakes. Not items being sold to us, reduced prices or not.

It’s a sad day indeed when Guild Wars 1 and 2 players think buying something is the same as a celebration.

Sorry, I quickly misread that as more of the false narrative that the sale was a cash grab by ANet that they had never ever done an anniversary sale before. Apologies.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Vesuvius.9874:

Arietta The Broken.1875:

Apologies if someone else has mentioned this..

So are we only getting to pay anet more money to celebrate that the game has been out 3 years?
No new content//events//even drops.. would be nice to have even birthday cupcakes drop from every mob.. that gave a temporary stat boost :v?

Just going to leave this here..

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Special_event

I’d rather they be working on the expansion than on silly distractions like birthday cupcakes.

Was that the reason why there wasn’t a birthday celebration on year one and year two. I was wondering. Too bad it’s not like Guild Wars 1 where they had celebrations even when they were working on an expansion.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/welcome-to-the-anniversary-sale/

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/welcome-to-the-second-anniversary-10-day-sale/

Post expansion they are introducing a mastery that will unlock special vendors selling currently unavailable recipes for karma.

But right now, primarily it’s Temple Exotic armor.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Temple_armor

Laurels were originally a currency to get Ascended accessories without doing Fractals. They’ve added a lot more things you can get since Laurel Vendors were introduced. If you want to turn laurels into gold Tier 6 mat bags for 1 laurel each is roughly 80-90 silver post fees and taxes.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Laurel_Merchant
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Laurel_Merchant_

We had a sale like this last year. They are going to bring back stuff and players are going to empty their gold reserve and maybe new players might drop some coin on gems to buy it. The only “new” thing is it’s twice as long and that’s probably have more to do with the current lack of Shop updates.

As for the rate spike, last year it was roughly 33% but there’s been a spike already when the account kits came out Tuesday. Of course the spike goes both ways so cash rich players may keep the spike in check with converting bought gems into gold.

So nothing to see here really other than the angry few complaining that ANet has the audacity of trying to make money.

Yesterday I salvage 5 and got 2. Just now I salvage 5 and got 6. 8 out of 10 when 8 or 9 is “average”. Law of Large Numbers etc.

.

Diovid.9506:

IndigoSundown.5419:

The real reason the QDale champ train was killed was some players not being able to shake the idea that they were entitled to those champs and entitled to spew resentment towards anyone who happened to slow them down.

That’s hardly the ‘real reason’ because that problem still exists, for example in Frostgorge where people can behave very toxic.

The problem is the combination of that behavior and the low level of the area (and thus the presence of new players).

Except Frostgorge isn’t full of new players. Champ Trains were an unintended side effect of the introduction of Champ Bags because Champs were being ignored and their respawn rate. It didn’t take long for someone to figure out the best order to do them in so they spawn just before the train returned.

So they nerfed Champ Bags but they were still good enough if you ride the train for a couple of hours. The catalyst was the shear number of harassment reports and threads about this. So Champs in low level areas became Vets so much easier to kill with less loot to boot.

Any parent knows if two groups of kids are fighting over the same toy, you take away the toy because they weren’t mature enough to share. And we still see these attitudes in various events (preventing a story chain from moving on or doing the Silverwaste event) and higher level trains (Frostgorge).

Some players need to learn to be excellent to one another.

FearedbytheGods.8617:

Behellagh.1468:

snip

Not sure why you would try and oversimplify when there’s a great conversation going on above you.

Because I was responding to his original post claiming manipulation to lower the price, thus messing with his market niche rather than the more obvious cause, a new source of masterwork dyes have appeared.

• It doesn’t take a great deal of research to see that supplies of masterwork dyes all started to increase about the same time of day.
• This also corresponds to the time the spike in the Gem Exchange rate started.
• Spikes like this on a Tuesday suggests an item returning or a new item appearing at the Gem Shop that is popular thus getting players to exchange gold for gems to get it.
• The change in the Gem Shop are the two “new” Account kits.
• These kits contain a number of unidentified dyes that can’t be traded so you must double click on them.

Therefore the logical conclusion in this case is the flood of new masterwork grade dyes is the result of these new Gem Shop items and not an organized plot to force him out of his TP niche.

But I didn’t feel like typing that much originally. And while Wanze is a fount of knowledge when it comes to TP strategies to make large amounts of gold over the long term, there is a much simpler explanation this time.