See my above post… You would be wrong and misinformed as most of the country is about how those laws work. Most people don’t know things like business law because they don’t have to. Pretty funny thing about law, you usually have 0 understanding about a topic unless it affects you.
Thank you for being able to recognize it as a deceptive tactic and business practice.
I’ve read the entire thread, and I see that you keep claiming that all US law applies to all virtual currency. I did some research on FindLaw before posting, and I couldn’t find any court cases verifying that. If you provide some citations backing up that assertion, I’ll grant that it’s a valid argument and that, on those grounds, ANet had better fix this pronto.
It’s a very important point that while you can buy gems with USD and convert them into gold, you cannot then convert the gold back into USD through any means. Gold is not therefore a currency that can be translated back and forth from USD. When you buy gems, you are paying ANet for a virtual service, not performing a currency exchange.
Until you can provide citations specific and relevant to this situation, I’m still taking the stance that it’s deceptive and dishonest, but not strictly illegal.
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Yes, it would be possible. But it wouldn’t be cheap, nor easy. Please do consider all the various hairstyles in the game. Now picture them all in your head (or those you can remember). How many different shapes and sizes do you get? A human female with a mohawk surely would look different than a human female with shoulder-long hair, when wearing the same hat. There’s a hairstyle, also from the human female, that is much more wild and flowing (which a lot of people have chosen in fact), that is “filling” (both higher, long and broader(?)) a lot more than let’s say the shoulder-long haircut. Hence why they would need to implement new animations for every hairstyle for every hat.
That’s massively over-complicating the issue. This could be addressed comparatively simply by implementing 2-3 possibilities when equipping a head-slot item.
1: Character is bald/mohawked: use current system.
2: Character has short hair: apply short hair below/around helm.
(3): Character has long hair: apply long hair below/around helm. Alternatively, revert to option 2.
Now, as for how to add the necessary new textures in game. GW2 obviously does not use a “1 head piece per head” system as people have pointed out here, because many light armor helms take the form of circlets or gemstones, and still render your character’s hair. But, for the moment, lets assume that for technical reasons, we have to essentially pick between a hat and a hairdo.
Find a short hair style that is simple and clean in the back/sides area. Cut of the top of that mesh, and stick the back/sides onto every helm. Assuming that it’s either technically impossible for the helm to detect your hair color, or the devs are just lazy, make the hair area a dye slot on the gear item.
Repeat for long hair, or don’t. It would be a lot more difficult, as many head slot items would need different long hair attachments from one another, and, as you pointed out, you’d need to move the skeleton points for animations. So you could simply use short hair here. I know plenty of people with long hair who tuck their hair into a hat when performing physical activities. I’d be satisfied with short hair, and I suspect that many others would.
It’s certainly a time-intensive task, but it’s frankly a pretty easy one. It’s something I wish they had done before launch, because this does not seem likely to be added ex post facto.
Deceptive – tending or having power to deceive : misleading
Deceive – to practice deceit; also : to give a false impressionNot listing all fees and charges associated with a sale is commonly referred to by the FTC as a Deceptive Practice, I would go further to quote Washington State and King County (ANet is in King County) Law for its legal definition but it is besides the point. It is something not being listed and made aware to the consumer using a service.
Arguments about real-life taxation aside (they simply don’t apply here, because the law specifically regulates United States Dollars, not fictional forms of non-legal tender), this is clearly deceptive. Look, for example, at the automatic protection that kicks in when a buy order is less than the vendor value of an item.
The Trading Post won’t accept buy orders less than the vendor value of an item, allegedly as a form of protection for players. However, the trading post will accept a buy order at or a few copper above the vendor value of an item, resulting in a projected profit substantially below (up to 10%, of course) vendor value.
Many players I’ve spoken to aren’t aware of this, and sell many of their gear drops on the trading post. They assumed that they were making equivalent or better profit than they would be selling it to vendors, because of the buy order protection system. And this isn’t an issue that comes into play under extreme circumstances in a handful of markets – the vast majority of gear below level 75 has TP values at or pennies above vendor value. Over the 1-80 lifetime of a character, that adds up to very substantial losses.
TL;DR: The automatic buy order vs. vendor value protection system pretends that the 10% tax doesn’t exist, deceiving players and resulting in significant losses.
I was personally very happy to see these changes. I only wish we didn’t have to wait till end of January to see them put into game.
All I can say is, they better not put a Fractals component into the January monthly. Two monthlies already of funneling players into broken content is absurd. Even fixing the disconnect issue probably won’t help with players randomly leaving mid-run without saying anything and never coming back – which happens a lot more in Fractals than in any other dungeon, in my experience.
Put them on the vendor to be purchased with fractal fragments or something. I can’t even make the first stage back piece yet and that is just completely ridiculous considering how much time i’ve invested in fractal dungeons, not to even mention the amount of essence required to upgrade ascended pieces.
Would love to hear from a developer on this issue.
While I am obviously not an ANet representative, I believe that their stance on the subject is that there’s already a way to obtain ascended back gear without relying on RNG – the Prototype Fractal Capacitors attainable for Fractal Relics.
I agree that essences should be available for Fractal Relics (even if it means making them available for an obscene amount of them…), but I suspect that it’s not in the pipeline.
This seems like the most appropriate thread for this issue.
In addition to the teleporting nodehack bots, I’ve been seeing a lot of bots which log out the moment a player gets too close. I was able to trap one where every time it logged in, it logged right back out due to my presence. It appears that they log out as soon as a player gets within targeting range – meaning that they can sometimes be visible at a distance, but not targetable to right-click and report. You can’t access their player portraits either.
Amusingly enough, when they attempt to log back in, they detect players in proximity before they even visibly display in the world – you’ll see their bears pop into existence, and then vanish almost immediately, but you never see the player.
@CC Eva and/or any other ANet representatives – Any tips on how to report this one? The standard reporting feature is unusable in this case, and screenshots are equally problematic.
From my point of view, that’s just the issue of you wanting to be able to stay in touch with everything at once. Even with multi-guild chat, there’s a chance you don’t notice an announcement because you’re busy talking to a squad or dungeon-party.
Just gotta accept that as persons we have a limited amount of attention to throw around. :P
True, but if I’m so busy with my current squad or am currently in a dungeon, the notification was irrelevant anyway. I already use multiple tabs to sort input by what is relevant at the moment, so I can handle a lot more chat than the game currently allows me to receive.
In other words, it’s a valid point, but it’s not a reason not to implement a cross-guild chat feature.
And I’d like to see contacts chat as well! And the ability to create global chat channels. These are features common to AAA MMOs, and so pretty reasonable expectations.
But the OP is specifically looking for a way to receive guild chat regardless of active representation, so I’m addressing my focus at that in particular.
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It’s not only the looks, it’s the stats too, if they made karma account bound you could equip your lower levels always with the best karma gear.
Except for the level restriction. The best karma weapons/armor are level 80 weapons/armor, so could only be used by a level 80. In the (previously proposed) example of transmutation to break the soulbinding, you’d be transmuting worse stats onto the gear. Even if a low-level character had access to account-bound karma, he wouldn’t be able to use anything inappropriate. Low-level (below 40) karma gear is only obtainable from heart vendors anyway, so that player would have already earned some karma in the completion of hearts/events in the area.
That said, I don’t think the suggestion at large is necessary. As other players have pointed out, jugs of karma are already account-bound rather than soulbound. I’m an altoholic myself, and I keep a stockpile of karma jugs in my bank. I only use them when I need them for a specific purpose. Non-jug karma earnings are lesser and, as others have indicated, character-bound for a reason.
@BlueShield: You’re moving in a better direction, but coalitions are dependent on your guild leaders – Not you. :/
I think the best and simplest (to the player) solution is to open up chat access to all guilds one has membership in, regardless of representation, though.
Coalition chat was my second choice. Since guild coalitions have utility and merit beyond simple chat channels, it seems like a potential feature down the road.
A restatement of my “first choice” proposal follows.
Replace the “Guild” channel with multiple new channels, each labeled “[Guild Name]”. Give players access to chat in all guild channels for which they are a member.
Contacts chat would be nice, but addresses different functionality – for example, if my dungeon-running guild is looking for people to run something and I’m representing my WvW guild, contacts chat won’t make me aware that I might be needed somewhere unless a specific player notifies me.
Don’t get me wrong, I think contacts chat should also be implemented, but not at the expense of multi-guild chat, which has a much wider range of utility.
Given that ANet seems to have virtually no programmers on payroll, it’s not surprising (though it’s very disappointing) that this isn’t in yet.
I’m eagerly anticipating the implementation of this feature, but if their programming staff is as limited as it seems (based particularly on the astoundingly long implementation time of, for example, a fix for the game-breaking FotM disconnection bug), I’m not surprised that this would be a lower-priority issue.
I think a better solution would be allowing access to guild chat for all guilds which a player is a member of, regardless of representation. When I’m representing a WvW guild while on the Battlegrounds, 100% of my influence earned goes to that guild, which can then be used for WvW purposes. While I’d like to have access to my dungeon-running guild’s chat at all times, I don’t want to be siphoning earned influence towards a guild that I’m not actively running content with.
Another possible answer is guild “Coalitions;” cooperative multi-guild groups, with a coalition-wide chat. This could accomplish much the same cross-guild communication you’re seeking without changing the representation system.
I think the best and simplest (to the player) solution is to open up chat access to all guilds one has membership in, regardless of representation, though.
I definitely second this, jumping puzzles suck in 3rd person view
I completely agree, though I somewhat wonder if jumping puzzles are the exact reason we don’t have a first-person camera in GW2 (a feature, by the way, in just about every AAA MMO). Some of them are pretty dang easy once you know where you have to jump and don’t have to look through your own back for the landing spots.
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Bring back the preview, clipping bugs or not.
Agreed, clipping issues for armor that you can’t possibly wear anyway aren’t issues at all.
There’s already a mega-thread about this in the dungeons section, here. It’s a known issue which has been posted about by ANet staff several times in the aforementioned thread. Please use the search function before creating new threads in the future.
On topic: There is literally no reason as to why waypoints to Lion’s Arch (and the other capitals) shouldn’t be free.
I concur.
This is especially problematic during the level 20-39 story questlines, in which each individual quest takes place in a zone at least two load screens and one entire zone outside of the player’s racial city, but each quest completion requires that the player return to the racial city. The result is that the entire monetary reward for the quest is lost on the fast travel to and from the turn-in point – and that’s just if you run the quest at the level of the quest. If you’ve outleveled your storyline, you actually lose money running those quests (not counting loot drops).
I realize that ANet is very, very concerned about economic inflation and accordingly have copious money sinks, but in this particular case, this is a huge slap in the face.
The only thing I can definitely verify is posting the same message into the same chat channel without any changes – doing so 3 times suppresses you, apparently regardless of the amount of time between messages. I posted the same LFM message once every five minutes, and was suppressed at that point.
I would intuitively assume that there’s an additional suppression factor based on number of posts in a short timeframe regardless of message content. Then again, I would have intuitively assumed that posting something once every five minutes is not excessive messaging…
http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/14saks/i_just_understood_fractal_dcs_and_fractal_levels/
This might be an interesting read for those complaining about it being easy to fix, If Fractuals do work that way
Regardless of how difficult a fix it is, with an entire team not working on new content and a month to work, there’s no reason we shouldn’t have seen any progress.
True, though I’d imagine that as a leader of the group, he would simply kick anyone who disagreed with him or his own gear selection.
That might be the case if GW2 utilized a “group leader” system, but as it stands there’s effectively no “leader.” All it takes to kick someone is a vote-caller and a second, therefore he remains equally susceptible to gear scrutiny, except in the very specific scenario where he’s only seeking one unknown player – the remaining ones being members of a static group, guild, etc. If he regularly ran with a static group, he wouldn’t be concerned about gear inspection in the first place.
Sadly, this already seems to be the case on the server I’m on. In LA last night there were a couple of people wanting to run a dungeon who were specifically asking for Guardians and healer builds. Unsurprisingly, other players mocked them.
That’s unfortunate to hear, and quite silly. Regardless, the problem either emerges or becomes worse with gear inspection.
It’s probably one of the reasons why I’m all for scalable/soloable dungeons to be honest. I stopped doing dungeon runs long before the arrival of Fractals because of the number of prima donnas who joined my group and insisted on doing things their way (speedrun, exploration mode only, no MF) and ended up dropping out of the group anyway because the rest of us actually wanted to enjoy the exploration.
Unfortunately there will always be people who expect the rest of the population to do things their way. Guild Wars 2 has done a good job of preventing those people from dominating the dungeoneering scene so far, so I’m confident that an inspection system is unlikely.
My suggestion is a simple change to Stealth animation and appearance. I suggest altering stealth to something similar to Mass Effect 3’s Tactical Cloak. For those who don’t know what this looks like, I have some footage of it here;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=S9CVyRLnxNg#t=153s
This would make stealth more balanced, as the thief would be very difficult to spot, but not impossible. It would also require a thief to use stealth more intelligently, instead of reapplying it willy nilly. For PvE, stealthing would still drop enemy aggro. For PvP, stealth would also still drop targeting, but now opposing players have a chance to spot the thief and respond accordingly.
Please try and keep this civil. Remain polite, and intelligent in your responses. Thank you.
While I appreciate the attempt you’ve made to keep this fair, it’s simply not necessary. Stealth does not protect the thief from area-of-effect skills, nor from being hit by ordinary single-target skills. There are plenty of ways to counter thieves currently, available across classes.
More specifically, it seems as though you’re proposing with the “tactical cloak” that it initially drop aggro, but that the thief remain rendered and therefore manually targeted (i.e., not tab-targeted) afterward. This would be comparable to removing stealth altogether, because a prepared player would simply re-target the thief immediately upon stealth, before the thief moved. Additionally, though their use would be a violation of the CoC, it would be easy for a third-party addon to indicate the location of a still-rendered player.
I’m against this for all the reasons runeblade mentioned above, though it seems that he himself is one of those “parasites and leechers” because he expects a full party composed of exotics and ascended wearers to carry him through.
That seems counter-intuitive, because he would be subject to equal scrutiny with an inspections system.
In any event, expecting maximized stats is absurd and too easy to take to extremes. “That guy’s statted as a glass cannon? Kick.” Pretty soon you see the trinity returning.
Fractals are bad enough with ostensibly progression-limiting gear tied to a RNG and the show-stopping disconnection issue. Throw in the ability to screen players for the exact gear tied to RNG and you’ve got an awfully ugly picture.
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That was actually a separate team that did our Wintersday content. Our team’s programmers are working on the DC issue. A majority of the fixes that went into this patch are content design related (things I can do), and require no programmer time. We have dedicated programmers working hard on the problem.
Thank you for the reply, Robert. I realize that you have separate teams, but the hard fact of the matter here is that it’s been a month. If, as you indicate, the majority of the Dec. 14 patch did not require programmer time, this begs the question of what the heck the programmers are doing? One of the later replies sums up my concern here:
Is there any reason why you can’t just slap on the Explorable Dungeon method the same way you Slapped on the Story Dungeon method?
It just seems like after the vast amount of time which has transpired, the programming team would have had enough time to if nothing else, apply the system used in every single dungeon except for Fractals to Fractals. I know we’re not talking about a copy-and-paste situation, but it’s been a month. As I said, I know that Fractals has additional anti-exploit measures built in, but utilizing the tried-and-true dungeon instancing system as a temporary measure seems to be in order.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in this field, but this just doesn’t seem like the kind of problem that takes 4+ weeks to fix. Some of us are very concerned by this, especially the sudden, unexplained withdrawal from a “fix in the next patch” status of two weeks ago.
Then do it in the morning.
You know, not 2 hours after WvW reset.
Either way you look at it, it’s either the main bulk of the patch in the evening, as we saw, or the bulk of it in the morning and a smaller one in the evening. There’s no way to have no patch in the evening. I for one would rather let the content team have the work hours to finish/polish.
It’s a seasonal event, extraordinary circumstances. You were given more than adequate warning that the event would transpire. It’s unreasonable on your part to assume that the event would somehow launch patchless.
Their damage was decreased by 30%, period. What upgrade you have doesn’t come into play. The reasoning behind the nerf was counteraction of sigils.
We are still working on the fractals reconnect issue.
I’m honestly very confused about how this can still be a fix-in-progress situation. Your team evidently found time to create an event from start to (presumably) finish, and in over a month they still haven’t figured out how to modify this dungeon to use the same system which others use?
Seriously? I realize that Fractals was intended to be less exploitable than other dungeons (invite Guildmates for final boss and payoff, etc). But if you were going to leave Fractals broken for this long, it simply cannot have been that difficult to roll the “normal” dungeon instancing system over to this one in particular.
If you haven’t fixed this by January, I seriously hope that Fractals are no longer a part of the Monthly. It’s unreasonable to require players to continue running content with show-stopping bugs.
Would probably make more sense to just make the limit per player (ex., 15 stacks per player, with no max limit).
I’m fairly certain that this would be considerably more effort than increasing the maximum stack size. I agree that stack size should be virtually unlimited against boss-type enemies – the short duration of conditions, even when duration is maximized by the player, prevents this from getting out of hand.
A thread on this topic already exists. I’d recommending putting your two cents there.
Today’s patch launched an event. Pretty hard to implement/activate the event features without a patch.
I am all for this, this is a great tool for kicking people.
Don’t have ascended rings with enough infusion? Kick.
Don’t have full exotics? kick.
Using magic find? kick.
Yep, I really want to kick the parasites and leechers.
I’m pretty sure that people like you are exactly the reason this hasn’t been implemented. ANet has stated that they don’t want GW2 to be a gear-grind for players; so disallowing inspection prevents people like you from imposing your requirements on other players.
This isn’t a necessary feature. Players can link their equipment to others if they feel like sharing it. The current state provides casual players some protection against gear-elitists.
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I agree, previewing was perfectly fine before. (Aside from not being able to preview on the trading post.) This is an unnecessary and highly inconvenient change, and should be returned. The only thing that shouldn’t be allowed, in my opinion, is buying soulbound items that you cannot use. But previewing should always be possible.
I completely agree. Previewing has always been too restrictive (specifically the inability to preview items on the TP), which forces players to use out-of-game tools such as the wiki and item databases to examine most armour appearances. This escalates a moderate inconvenience into a severe one.
Consider, in particular, the case of Cultural Armour. A significant factor in character creation (for myself and no doubt some others) is the selection of armours which will be available. This unnecessary removal of a feature requires that a player have three characters of each race in order to examine all of the Cultural Armour options – and (s)he will have to constantly switch through those characters.
In short, this is a completely asinine change. Features which have no negative impact on gameplay should never be removed. In the case of previewing, we need fewer restrictions, not more.
About the clipping problem, I guess people are smart enough to choose armor pieces that goes well togheter.
I agree, but ANet obviously doesn’t think so – the only developer justifications I’ve heard for the removal of capes (a planned feature) during beta was “clipping issues,” so evidently it’s pretty high on their list of concerns. Plus, mixing pieces across tiers generally just doesn’t look good.
An idea would be that the light armor give less protection but higher buffs (like healing power, precision, ect), and heavy armor the opposite, so it would also give the player a bigger range of stats on the armors, yet being able to transmute “light” stats on a heavy armor and vice versa.
Currently the three armour tiers provide equal attribute bonuses but unequal defense. Changing anything statwise from the current scenario is going to get backlash, because it would be unnecessarily nerfing two-thirds of the users. This would also most likely result in the majority of stat-concerned players being “forced” into one armour class by the necessities of min/max statting – it would be a pretty boring game world if everyone in the game wore medium armour.
From an in-universe perspective, it wouldn’t make a lot of sense for light armour to trump all statwise, either. There’s no possible explanation as to how a robe grants more Toughness than plate mail.
If this stands any chance of getting implemented (and I highly doubt it does) transmutation cross-armour classes would have to be cosmetic only.
Agreed, a “three times, you’re out” system only makes an iota of sense if it’s applied as three identical posts within a set (and very small) amount of time. Posting LFM messages in LA for an FotM team, I’ve been locked for messaging the same text three times with a full five-minute increment. The same message three times in 15 minutes is very clearly not spamming.
I think they should have separated the servers by Lions Arch. That’s like the only place that is always full. Every other zone should be thrown in a server until it’s full then another one starts to fill.
So every single zone will appear to be full at all times.
So basically if your from Gates of Madness and I’m from Jade Quarry and we both go to Gendarrin Fields we end up in the same server if no one in the entire game is playing in that zone. As more people come in they all get added to our server as it fills. Solves so many problems. When we go to Lions Arch which is the typical gather place for LFG WvW FotM and most likely every future event (except Wintersday, sort of).
This would make the game appear full at ALL times.
So in other words, essentially have the game be mostly instance-based rather than server-based? I could see how it would cause some problems for WvW – that player you teamed with for a random dungeon or world event would never be able to join you in WvW – but it would certainly address a lot of issues, not the least of which is how dead PvE zones feel on some servers. The market’s already cross-servers, so you wouldn’t even have to worry much about economic ramifications.
An interesting thought, but unfortunately it seems like far too radical a change from the system currently in place to be seriously considered. Which is a shame.
You cannot cram an infinite number of people onto the same server and provide a quality experience. Creating more overflows just inconveniences those that are already on the server. TC is no longer TC if everytime you log in you get put on an overflow. If you think I’m being patronizing toward you, what do you think you are being towards Anet’s network engineers?
Nobody’s proposing cramming infinite numbers of people into the same server. Let’s re-examine the issue, shall we?
According to the server transfer menu, all of the American servers are consistently reading at “High” or “Full” population, all the time, regardless of peak hours. Some of the “Full” ones drop to “High,” but this is largely the extent of the variation. Therefore, the current server system as it is implemented is insufficient to accommodate the total population of the game.
Currently, players are being forced to take unreasonable means to attain access to certain types of content. That content might consist of server-specific community factors, such as Tarnished Coast being the unofficial RP server, or Sea of Sorrows having earned the top rating in WvW for the prior bracket. That content might also consist of team play – this thread was created by a player who cannot play GW2 with a friend due to population throttling.
It isn’t patronizing or unreasonable to ask that ANet address this, because it is an issue when players are barred from content arbitrarily. I’ve suggested a workaround which shouldn’t cause the population to run rampant on the highest servers – but if all of the servers are as full as the transfer menu indicates, then yes, it’s probably time for ANet to consider hardware optimization or acquisition.
They specifically stated they implemented a reduction in the Unidentified Dye drop rate after making a mistake and accidentally making the drop rate much higher.
I have to assume that you didn’t read any of the remaining content in the post. I’ll put it in bullet-point format for you.
1) Supply has been drastically reduced through multiple factors.
2) Unidentified Dye prices directly determine the value of products crafted using them.
3) Those products are now accordingly valued vastly higher than other, comparable items.
4) I trust the devs to examine the metrics and adjust accordingly. It’s still worth bringing up here though.
I got 3 of them yesterday, including 2 in WvW. They are more expensive on the TP due to the crackdown on bots. This is much to do about nothing.
The developers have specifically stated that they implemented a reduction in Unidentified Dye drop rate. Combine that with the botting crackdown and you end up with a severely stifled supply with no significant effect on demand. This is a definite concern, because what we’re seeing right now is drastically out of alignment with the rest of the economy.
Hopefully the devs are tracking the metrics on this one and will compensate accordingly. I highly doubt they intended for Unidentified Dye supply to be as tight as it is now. More than 750g to craft a weapon, even a legendary, doesn’t seem like the intended economic situation.
Agreed, this kind of feature is definitely a no-brainer and I was a bit surprised to find that nothing like this was already in place.
Sorry about your current situation. I’ve found myself in a similarly derailed guild in MMOs in the past, so I know how much that sucks.
I am new to the guild wars community. It seems that “kitten” is a term used for, well, lots of things, on these forums. For those in the know, what is the true meaning of “kitten”?
The forum’s profanity filter automatically swaps out profanities (often cuss words, sometimes others) with “kitten.”
I understand you wanting to be on an RP server, but think about it in terms of your hard drive. Once you fill it up, you can’t save anymore data to it. You can only add more hard drives. Those other hard drives, in Anet terms, are called servers. I don’t know what you expect them to do.
PS. And before you say get a bigger hard drive, how do we know they don’t have the biggest one current technology offers?
Please don’t be patronizing, I understand how server population works.
Currently, when a server is listed as “Full” on the transfer menu, it still allows players already bound to the server to log in and play through the use of overflow hardware. Therefore one possible solution would be allowing people to transfer servers even when overflow is in use. However, let’s assume that the current “Full” system is in place specifically in order to throttle population levels. In that case, a possible solution would be to implement a server transfer “queue” whereby the game automatically attempts to transfer you at such a time as the server is no longer “Full.”
As for finding a bigger hard drive, that’s not how servers work. If one box is at capacity (and is the best that current technology offers), you don’t have to swap the first box for a second, bigger one. Instead you can add a second running in parallel. This is presumably how they already handle overflow.
There are ways around this issue. Hypothesizing that there aren’t isn’t helpful.
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Why is your guild picking TC when you know it’s already a full server? Pick a different one, have your split guild members already on TC transfer to it so you can all be together again. Problem solved.
TC is the only American server with a significant RP community, and we shouldn’t be forced to not pick servers based on arbitrary factors like the current non-overflow population. Additionally, guild members already on TC would have to either wait a week until they can transfer again free of charge or spend money to do so.
Ignoring the symptoms is not solving the problem.
The problem is actually bigger then that. Originally there wasn’t supposed to be server separation problems like this because of a technology called guesting. It was supposed to be introduced just after launch. STILL have not seen a single thing.
Guesting is in, but it is only applicable in the case of dungeons. If you wanted to do this with a friend on another server, try it – it works. However, for people actively leveling, running story content, doing events, participating in WvW, and RPing, guesting is useless.
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Either way, 100% of the American servers are reporting at “High” or “Full” population essentially all the time. In the past 48 hours of checking regularly I have yet to see any of them drop to medium. Their hardware limits are throttling what players can and can’t do – in this case, disallowing a guild member from playing with his guild. That’s a situation which needs to be resolved somehow.
How about quit complaining about the ori and concern ourselves with the fact that everything on theBLTC is inflated.
Agreed. Needlessly focusing on one comparatively minor aspect of the economy (even an increase in potential supply of 100% is minor when it only effects a single commodity) is non-productive. The economy on the whole is what matters.
I agree, there should be a queuing system for server transfers.
My guild is in the process of trying to switch servers, and currently half of our active players are on the destination server while the other half remain locked out, still on our prior server.
It is intensely frustrating to have to keep checking back and hoping that we’ll get lucky. This needs to be addressed.
I agree that this is a serious problem. My guild is in the process of attempting to transfer to TC, and our luck has been horrendous. Many of us work during US working hours, and those who do not have reported that even at what should be extreme-low population times of day (5AM Eastern, 9AM Eastern, Noon Eastern, etc…) the server reports “Full.”
It’s a serious problem, because at very random times, sometimes even during peak hours, a member will find that TC is reporting as “High” and transfer over immediately. Our active players are now split halfway between two servers.
This obviously needs to be addressed – players shouldn’t have to forgo sleeping or working in order to execute a server swap.
We’ve had official dev responses that it is indeed the number of players active. Multiple responses, I think.
You don’t see lots of people right near you because:
1) Most people are in LA
2) Also, dungeons, or crafting, etc
3) Some zones are populated, some aren’t. So how many players you see depends on what zone you’re in
4) Players are in the zone, they just aren’t near you. Zones are large. I’ve seen this plenty on Henge, where someone will complain in map chat about no one else being there, and players will pipe up, even in the middle of the day.
5) Some players aren’t chatty. I’ve done events with other players, none of us spoke, we all wandered off afterward. To someone who wasn’t there, map chat would be empty and the zone would seem like a ghost town, but that doesn’t mean it is.I’m on Henge too, and I never feel like there’s no one around. Some zones are noticeably emptier than others, and some times are going to be empty, but people are there.
I do think we should have some kind of option to show players on the minimap, but people are playing the game even if they aren’t near you.
Can you cite a source for this? I’ve searched around and haven’t found any dev posts or interviews specifically covering this subject.
I’m aware of factors such as what zone I’m in and the size of zones. I was specifically roaming about looking for other players, and failing to find them. Yes, obviously there were people in Lion’s Arch. During peak hours, one encounters noticeably more players wandering throughout the world than one does during non-peak hours.
Without a /who command it’s very hard to verify, and I’m aware that at the moment a sizable chunk of the population is likely to be tucked away in FotM instances, but I simply cannot believe that the servers’ active, online populations are classifiable as “High” at all times.
As I indicated in the OP, my guild has been checking the server transfer menu around the clock, and we never see any significant deviation. This does not sync up with observations done in-game – peak hours are noticeably more active.
It’s worth noting here that the transfer menu uses a different system from the login menu – a server listed as “Full,” for example, does not necessarily have a queue to enter.
If, however, server populations (for the specific purpose of the transfer menu) are determined by the number of online players, then ANet seriously needs to consider hardware upgrades. Players are being barred from joining a significant chunk of the server list around the clock.
I’ve never known a single MMO to list actual concurrent users online. It’s always some arbitrary scale they devise that I’m sure is locked away in a safe somewhere.
I’m not asking for precise details here, just the broad strokes – for example, is it determined by currently online users or based on total accounts with allegiance to the server, as proposed here. The latter seems unlikely, but the former doesn’t add up with observations.
(edited by Blueshield.6291)
If the conversation is going to remain on this little math error, then at discuss the issue raised and not an ever further tangent. If someone is undercutting their Ori sales by 0.5-1 silver, they are giving up 15%-50% of their profits on those Ori sales.
Simply because you fail to see the relevance does not mean it was not present. If someone chooses to charge any amount of money less for their Orichalcum, that’s still a competitive market working as intended.
In the hypothetical scenario, the “losses” in profit by undercutting by a factor of 20 copper is essentially negligible when you consider the methods of making money currently in game. The point in my post was that “losses” in the range proposed by the hypothetical scenario are easily made up with little to no effort.
Additionally, referring to them as “losses” or “leakage” is entirely subjective. Since the item in question is a pre-processed material, its value is determined solely by the player selling it and the player buying it. If I choose to sell it for less than you, I haven’t lost money and I stand a better chance at attracting customers. Competitive markets are all about undercutting.
Does anyone in this thread seriously believe that ANet is not paying close attention to the economy? The recent adjustment in rarity of dyes and the introduction of new back slot items which require bulk amounts of Tier 6 fine crafting materials have caused the values of some goods to skyrocket. The introduction of a reliable Rich Orichalcum node at the same time has almost certainly been weighted against the other major economic factors in play here.
(edited by Blueshield.6291)
I’m curious as to how server populations are determined, specifically with regard to the server transfer menu. My guild has been trying (fruitlessly) to transfer to Tarnished Coast, but every time we check the transfer menu, TC (along with the rest of the top 6-8 servers) reads as “Full.” In fact, all of the American servers are listed as “High” or “Full” population every time we check, which has so far included increments no greater than every six hours.
These population figures are clearly not based on the number of players online at a given time – at 9AM Eastern time today (Thursday 11.29) Henge of Denravi was listed as “High” despite being essentially a ghost town – little to no player activity in city hubs such as Divinity’s Reach, Black Citadel, etc., and no perceptible activity whatsoever in many standard PvE zones.
If the population counts are determined by the total number of players – online or offline, active or inactive – who have set their affiliation to the server, I’m curious as to why ANet has set up a system where players can get locked out of the “prime” servers by accounts which might not be in use whatsoever.
I’ve recently noticed food buffs being dropped upon downed/death outside of FotM. I’m fairly certain that this has not always been the case.
I can, however, definitely state that consumable buffs don’t drop on map change, outside of Fractals (tested specifically upon zoning from Lion’s Arch into surrounding zones, and from Queensdale zone into CM instance). If it’s definitely a map change causing this in FotM, it’s a bug.
edit: just as a clarification, I don’t mean that one of them should be “capture and defend stonemist castle x times” I mean, “capture or defend any supply camp, a tower, a keep, or the castle, x times”
Ah, I thought you were proposing specific objectives at each “tier” of capture point. The way you’ve proposed it would still at least be possible on low-WvW turnout servers.
I’m interested in possible solutions to this as well. If TC is maxed out during AM hours in U.S. time zones (I tried most recently at about 9AM Eastern), then it’s pretty effectively at the limit of what ANet’s population caps can handle. I’d like to see either the few max-population servers get a hardware boost to handle demand, or a second unofficial RP server be “established.”
Unfortunately trying to log in during non-peak hours isn’t really a solution, especially when 1) it doesn’t work, and 2) some people have jobs and can’t be trying to server-swap during work hours.
This raises some serious questions about how servers’ current capacities are determined, because at the time of this writing (early PM US time, still very much in working hours) all of the American servers are listed as “High” or “Full” capacity. We’re very much out of peak hours, and my current server (Henge of Denravi) is pretty much a ghost town. There’s no way it’s at “high” capacity.
(edited by Blueshield.6291)
Ok, yeah. I will admit to borking the conversion there. Was using dollars/dime/cents that is natural to me. But I still would maintain when you leak money, even in small increments, it does add up over time.
It adds up over time?
When you finally got your maths sorted you should have released that we’re talking about around 60 silver per month. The amount of “leakage” we’re talking about here is easily rectified by, for example, running at least 0.4 dungeons per month.
Yes, you’re correct that small losses will add up over time. Extending your scenario, in a decade you will have leaked 73 gold. So as long as you sell at least 0.33 legendary weapons per 10 years, you’ll be okay.