Guild Wars 2

My theory is that this is “throw away” content to set up a larger story line to follow. The “election” is a distraction from ANet’s actual intent (to increase BLC key demand) and the “results” will generate a conflict point that will last for months of content to come.

How do you know they aren’t rigging the counter if there was one….?

I get that the illusion of transparency calms your nerves, but if you are suspicious of the results, it makes no sense to ask for a rolling count.

aspirine.6852:

Caldon forest is pretty easy with a friend. And also on a ranger with permanent speed boost.

Wich ones do you still need for the 16/16. I imagine you have the 8 infused crytsals one by now?

How does a friend help? If you fall into the lava, do they jump down there and revive you? Now if you are talking about Mes ports, that’s different.

Tip for that JP: Take off all your armor before starting and you’ll save some money.

I really don’t mean to be ungrateful (as I have lots of respect for Anet and their artwork), but this has to be the lamest game reward I have ever gotten. Even if the video WAS HD, just make it a freakin’ VISTA on the ship somewhere and give us something that is useful and does not just waste a bank storage slot….

You SHOULD find that email and save the code as you COULD be asked for it when resolving certain issues by support (or even retrieving a lost password).

I see several of these each day. Is anyone looking into some sort of alert on the mail icon to tell players to empty their email? I would think this could save a lot of support costs as it seems to be the most common yet easily correctable issue I see in here.

Psychol.5783:

kitten!? it’s just a stupid excuse so you’ll buy more keys for money. Anet are scumbags.
I noticed a log time ago that they reduced amount of bl keys drop, at the beginning of playing I’ve been receiving keys pretty oftens from mobs, they deleted gems reward from tournaments now they are reducing bl from chests pff.

Don’t disagree that they have made some changes designed to put money in their pockets, but calling them “scumbags” because they are trying to make money (in a game where that is there ONLY source of income to keep the game going), is a very narrow minded and selfish view. You complaint seems to be directed at changes that no longer provide you with freebies and not any changes that REQUIRE you to spend RL money in continue playing.

Anet is in total control of who wins and what the outcome will be. The “Election” is part of a story that can easily be guided to allow for a corrupt outcome that leads to further conflicts in the story. The possibility exists that the actual vote casting will have absolutely NO bearing on the actual outcome.

Those players that realize this see all this discussion, analysis and quibbling over what rewards are better as quite amusing. Just farm the Achievement points and see what Anet has up their sleeve (so far they have been quite successful at distracting the majority of players from the fact that their BLC key sales must be going thru the roof….quite a brilliant plan).

Bubi.7942:

I hope you are joking here. By this logic serial killers, rapists, drug dealers and psychopaths should be in charge everywhere.

The fact that you missed the point is exactly why elected officials are often chosen so badly by “the masses”. The general voter is not that hard to fool and manipulate.

It’s very difficult for anyone to live their lives and not do SOMETHING stupid and regrettable that will haunt them. It’s easy to claim you have changed and / or hide some deep hidden agenda until in a position of power to put it in place. Individuals also have the ability to change (for better or worse) for a variety of reasons.

Power corrupts absolutely and very few can resist that corruption (those that do usually don’t live long enough to eventually succumb to it). History is always written by the victor, yet even the most beloved and virtuous leaders have left proof of various questionable and scandalous practices during their prominence. This fact is usually why politics attract less than moral individuals (or destroys the morals of those that decided to join the fray).

LumAnth.5124:

Did you forget this is a FRACTAL?

All of them are inaccurately based on past events. You certainly will not be getting some of the answers you asked in this thread!

Same goes for Thaumanova!

DING!! DING!! DING!!!!

Give this man a prize!!!

Blissified.8369:

gw2 is becoming almost like p2win because for some winning in gw2 means having the nicest look gear that u could have for your character. same as in gw1, cept gw2 makes it s o you have to buy the new cool armor with real cash, ontop of that you have to pay atleasrt 50 bucks for one new peice because of their rng assure people spend atleast 40 – 50 bucks

It’s P2Bling! as it has no bearing on “winning” (and you pointed that out…sort of). I’d rather ANet make their money off some other sucker that wants to look kewl than me…. I do buy some gems for storage and additional char slots, but I don’t buy digital dress up items.

I think this qualifies as a verbal tantrum…..nice.

Exactly what part of the game can you not play without this skin?

I entirely agree that this content is geared toward ANet making money, but it doesn’t HAVE To be your money they make.

I think this has been an issue with multiple pieces of that armor set of quite a while. I don’t have details as I only ran into the issue while researching possibly obtaining the armor. It appears that there was a LONG period of time when this was kind of a random thing that happened to some players and it was finally corrected and then one of the recent LS updates reintroduced it…..

There is a thread dating back to Winters Day festival in this forum somewhere….

Any item that does not actually effect your stats should be FAIR game and requires no regulation.

How these items are “generated” can be regulated to control their “rarity” within the game world.

ALL vanity items should not be easily available to everyone (at least not at first).

Now in this particular instance it is worrying that these new skins are “buy” items with an unknown price tag…..but you can’t blame Anet for wanting to make money.

The use of Exit Polling and media “projections” of results should NOT be a common practice and should be made illegal. While it’s nearly impossible to prove they make a difference one way or another, nobody can deny that if they did not happen they definitely COULD NOT effect the outcome (in fact that’s the only way to make sure they do not). Only official count numbers should ever be reported (after ALL polling places close).

The entire control of how this “election” turns out is in ANet’s hands so I for one am not considering it a valid vote by an stretch of the imagination. The fact that so many players ARE seeing that way is slightly amusing to me.

In terms of making RL money, whom do you THINK ANet will support (i.e. make sure wins)?

If I was a conspiracy theory nut, I might think this entire content update was an intentional distraction to do nothing more than increase the sales BLC keys (and a brilliant one that seems to be working quite well).

I tend to think MF will INCREASE on food (old and new recipes) when it is removed from gear.

There are no bank slots for armor or weapon parts either…..

I’m definitely an ALTaholic (have one of each except Necro….will likely start that soon).

I see that what the OP is stating is that he can’t “gear up” all 8 of his characters as fast as someone that has only 1 main or a few ALTs.

This is not about TOTAL playing time, but how much time you spend on EACH character. You are NOT being punished for playing more characters……it’s going to take 8 times longer for you to progress ALL your characters to the same extent as someone playing only 1 character.

I fail to see how THAT situation is singling out any type of player differently than any other. Now is time gating content unfair to everyone? That can certainly be debated (and IS on plenty of threads all over this forum).

I get that you and plenty of others here don’t LIKE the time gated content, but how many characters you have chosen to “gear up” is NOT something that should be considered as an overall factor in the discussion (you chose to lie in 8 beds…deal with it).

If you have a LVL 80 character, then you have an option.

None of my characters are LVL 80 yet, so I do NOT. I’ll just hold onto the recipes until I can use them. I don’t disagree that this limitation on the recipes seems excessive, but it seems to be intended (not a bug).

BTW, it takes less than an hour to buy materials and craft to 400 (tho there is the material costs….), so time is not the limiting factor for you LVL 80.

The value of Dungeon armor has ALWAYS been in question….it only has value to the person buying it…i.e. a vanity item.

If you are asking if you should wait until you can SEE what the new armors look like, that may not be a bad idea. However, keep in mind it will likely be several months before you CAN see them and then it could be month(s) before you can obtain all the items to craft a full set (time gated account bound materials required). You could be using your Dungeon armor during that time….

Carrots (in LARGE quantities) are use in DYE recipes….. mystery solved.

The solution is THIS:

In short, buy the Bowl of Red Meat Stock for your own crafting and sell your carrots.

Balthazar Deep Dish Pizza!
Abaddonian Black and Blue Burger!

etc….

Certainly an interesting question and concept, but what new (and obviously better) buffs are they going to generate?

They limited the source and time gated the useful items for a reason. To preserve the rarity of this set for some period of time. I’m not saying I love the idea, but seeing how everyone and their brother’s pet (including myself) is running around with Celestial Weapons right now, I’m not sure it’s such a bad idea….

I think many here are jumping the gun on getting all “oh noes!!!”, about this.

I tend to think the Celestial crafting is something ANet is using to ‘test the water’ with this type of content rather than it being a ’ shape of things to come’ carved in stone kind of issue. They are testing with Celestial because it is not going to be a highly popular item set, being a jack-of-all trades stat wise.

With that theory in mind (I get that I could be COMPLETELY wrong in thinking the above) , voice your opinion, make suggestions (they ARE going to time gate this in some manner to make these crafting items more rare, so get used to that idea) and try to keep a positive attitude as these changes can benefit everyone if done reasonably (obviously if you consider “I WANT IT NOW” to be reasonable, you are going to be highly disappointed with the new items and how they are made available).

I sell them all as soon as I get them….very decent income for absolutely no work. Far too easy to spend a few laurels on a stack of 10 when I think I need a different dye or I go buy the color I want from the TP (very few colors are more than what you get for a single UID dye). Never buy the expensive high demand dyes as there is ALWAYS something very similar for less.

DaShi.1368:

Or add CAPTCHAs.

Only method I can think of to disallow image recognition type automated TP usage….it would be a PitA for humans, but would both slow down the TP a tad and thwart automated trading (until someone figured out how to get around it…I doubt it’s impossible).

Morpeth.5318:

I agree. I hate jumping puzzles (as does everyone in my guild actually) and while the city looked nice — it was basically all fluff imo. I appreciate their effort to give us more content, but this wasn’t what I was hoping for.

Don’t disagree it was fluff, but I really enjoyed this content as a change of pace. You know what they say about opinions….

Kal Spiro.9745:

Except that chonologically everything that happens in the updates is occuring after Zaitan has been defeated. Therefore they can do anything they want without having to worry about the main story.

I totally disagree. The entire Living Story line makes NO mention or assumptions about the status of Zaitan (that I have head or read) for exactly the reason of NOT entangling them with the main game story. Players start new characters, new players join the game, some players are just freakin’ slow (like me) and the Devs can’t alienate or confuse players by making any assumptions about where players are in their story line.

If you can find a reference that supports your claim of chronology, post it and I’ll admit to lore idiocy and beg forgiveness.

Her pictures DO have gem costs next to them…..so they appear to have been available for purchase at some point.

Guessing they were only available during the Living Story Event…..

Items that do not have an unlimited source (very small RNG chances are not really “unlimited”) and are in high demand are the only items that COULD be manipulated as described. Yes, precursors do fall into that category (but not many other items do).

In general, I do not consider “flipping” what Mr. Erasculio describes. That is called “cornering” the market and has actually been successfully done in the real commodities market quite a number of times.

The Hunts brothers (yes….the Tomato empire guys) were busted with control of about 50% of the worlds deliverable Silver in early 1980. They had driven the price from $11 / ounce to almost $50 / ounce. The reversal and price drop that resulted changed several commodities trading rules and is still known as “Silver Thursday rules”.

I don’t think the skills are the CAUSE of the lag (the high population in the zone is likely the CAUSE) but the skills seem to be very sensitive to lag due to the fact that they are fast-movement skills. GW2 has an inherant issue with fast movement skills lagging badly under specific network / connection issues (I tend to think it has to do with client UPLOAD speeds and extreme distances to the world server being played on).

Airwolf.7382:

Would i care if they never made the item? No i never thought about such item. Did i want it would i know it was coming? Yes.

For the record, I now do own a kite that I bought from the gem store.

Somewhere ANet employees are ACTUALLY rolling on the floor laughing……

I systematically buy a small quantity of gems every month to avoid being the odd man out in these freebies. Just makes sense if I’m going to buy some anyway.

It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that something similar to this (some sort of combat) may evolve from this content.

THEORY: “Voting” is just an activity Anet is putting forward with this content, there will be no true winner as the story will evolve with one side (either Evon or Human Separatists) rigging the election and claiming the victory. Player Hero will of course, investigate the rumors of the rigged election, find evidence and present it to the Council. The results will be a huge rift that could result in something similar to the OPs suggestion…..100% speculation.

The fact that players are actually thinking this is a genuine “election” and role playing it to this degree is cute…..

Marcus Greythorne.6843:

well saying no to Abaddon would equal telling Anet: “I don’t care about Guild Wars 1 lore” which would lead to a decreasing chance of ever setting foot on Cantha, Elona etc.

That’s some REALLY FUBAR logic right there…..

Yeah, I get the “make a point” part, but there is a small “conspiracy theory” part of me that does not believe Anet will pass up the chance to make piles of cash (the selection of Fractal source material for each candidate for example). Hell, they could write the story so that Evon rigs the election and the player base couldn’t really do anything about it.

Trying to make this “election” to be some "cause’ against RNG is laughable. First, the number of players willing to base their decision completely on RNG hate is quite small and secondly, this “election” appears to me to be an elaborate content filler that in the end will allow ANet to make tons of cash will garnering good will from the player base……it’s just brilliant!

Then again, I could be wrong and the election is 100% legit and RNG is absolutely the real issue to be decided…..

I think players latching onto the RNG factor of this is missing the REAL WORLD point in all this. The fact of the matter is, there is only one outcome that is going to potentially earn more REAL money for ANet.

I have absolutely NO problem with ANet making money (I’ve never bought a BLC key and can’t say I ever will) but I find it astonishing that there are players that have convinced themselves that since the price of BLC keys is being halfed, ANet will make LESS and is actually sacrificing profits for this to benefit the player base. I’n not saying it might not benefit some players, but if you seriously think that half price BLC keys for a month is going to loose ANet money, you are not considering how MANY keys they are likely to sell (a product that has NO associate cost nor lack of supply (unless they run out of 1s and 0s somehow)).

Frankly, the more I think about this, the more astonishingly brilliant this is likely to turn out for ANet.

Yes, RNG is an issue, but it’s an issue that most players accept and don’t even think about (until they are hinging all their GW2 goals on it).

So they make very little profit on the keys but can cut the price in half for a month?

Sure, that makes sense. < sarcasm

ANet must be loving that they actually have players actively promoting this half price keys idea for them…..they are gonna make so much REAL money over this (brilliant strategy on their part).

I see no reason to go for an i7 over an i5 for a mid range gaming rig (especially a laptop). That difference alone should allow for a better video or an SSD within budget (or both).

You are paying a LOT of money for less than a 10% performance gain with the i7.

If you can get to any HTTP web page, port 80 IS NOT blocked. Like Nitro stated, they are likely blocking port 80 requests inbound to your IP address (so you can’t host a website). That is not unusual and most ISPs disallow such activity in their terms of use.

If port blocking was causing our problems it would NOT be random or intermittent.

Until an ANet employee comes out and absolutely states that the loosing side Fractal will NEVER, EVAR be released, I don’t consider the choice to be anything more than picking one to be put in place first…. That is certainly a decision, but since I don’t do Fractals at the moment (certainly might in the future), that decision is much less of a factor than how much gold I have right now. Even a month of a potential economic benefit is a higher consideration than content I do not access at the present.

EDIT: I see where ANet is claiming no work has been done on either Fractal and won’t until after the selection….I do know which selection (not the Fractal) would benefit ANet most, so I will be astonished beyond belief if Evon doesn’t win.

How exactly could anyone outside ANet verify a vote count on something like this (not that it really matters as part of the story could be Evon (or Human Seperatists) rigging the election).

The more I consider the possible outcomes, the more brilliant this entire tangent to the story is for ANet… The absolute control they have over this while presenting the illusion that the player base holds the tiller is very,,,,,,interesting…..

Also random from Kite Basket Supply bags. I’ve got about half a dozen in my bank from just opening Kite Baskets (can’t use them yet…no toon with LVL 80 or 400 craft yet).

Airwolf.7382:

Meh. its more like this

BRAT: I want! I want! I want one mom!

Mother: No son, you asked to late.

BRAT: Cries.

Fixed this for you to use the actual in-game name of the character (so you can get the full effect of the irony here).

I am enjoying the content, but I agree 100% that the reward was totally useless. Then again, the only challenge in obtaining the reward was obtaining a connection that allowed the Lighting Pull skill to function properly. Remains to be seen if the Quartz node will actually prove useful in the long run (that reward does require some effort).

I tend to think they should have reversed the Kite and Model rewards (give the Kite to everyone and then the model as a little “thanks” for buying gems).

Omen.1879:

snip

That’s unacceptable

snip

I tend to think the general attitude of this post is unacceptable (and overly entitled with a smattering of unmitigated gall…..). This appears to be the result of a complete loss of any kind of manners in our society and players “expecting” free stuff around every corner. Nobody is trying to stop constructive criticism, but being polite and asking nicely is likely to get you farther than being rude and demanding.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

panzer.6034:

I have a feeling that people that have played GW1 and know about abaddon are a minority. I wouldn’t be surprised if the rest of the populace votes Kiel, simply because of how Evon has been portrayed in game so far.

Minority? You may want to recheck your poll numbers, or the unnamed sources of your information.

So YOU have direct numbers on what the percentage of the current playerbase played GW1? I’ve never seen them, but unless they played Nighfall, they have no idea who Abadon is (beyond a possible reference here and there).

Some of the people on this forum need to understand that the regulars and even visitors to these forums are a VERY small portion of the player base. Opinions and comments voiced here are likely a minority view in general.

And based on the percentage of dungeon (and to a lesser percentage, fractal) players in the player base, choosing a fractal to be added is going to have MUCH less of an impact than many here seem to think.

Most players are much more aware of Waypoint and BLC key costs….even if the changes are temporary.

If you want an ulterior motive (real or imaged), look at the potential revenue increase that half priced BL chest keys could produce in a month. One could generate REAL money for ANet while the other is a reduction in an already lackluster gold sink.

This is so transparent a fix that I suspect there is some twist / tie in we have not been made aware of yet.

I’d like to see the percentage of players that have actually BOUGHT these keys. I never have and never will….

Everyone uses waypoints….but the cost is negligible at a certain point.

Then there are those Fractal farmers who are convinced that Evon is a lock because he offers an Abadon based dungeon (that 70% of the player base could care less about).