Guild Wars 2

This is not the first account bound tool. New tools were made account bound (and increased to 1000 gems from 800) in November I think. Old tools can be traded in at no cost for an account bound version of the same thing, so if you have an old tool you effectively save 200 gems over new purchasers.

Behellagh.1468:

No ascended gear has to be a person journey to get and NOT something you can simply buy for a huge pile of gold. What’s the point then having time gated refinement and account bound mats if at the end of all that you can simply buy it. It would mean it’s a limitation on the craftsman and not the owner.

Sorry if you can spend enough time in the game to become Scrooge McDuck swimming in your vault of gold you can spend the time to craft your own “ultimate” armor.

You could say the same thing about legendaries, as they require Gift of Exploration, Mystic Clovers, etc. Yet you can buy those, and those are “legendary”.

I couldn’t give a crap about “prestige”. I want to look cool, and that is enough; I mix and match armors and having a piece I need for a look gated in some way is incredibly annoying. In real life I don’t have to slay a dragon to buy a nice coat, I just see a coat that looks nice and I buy the thing. Same goes for the game. I’m also not wearing ugly stuff just because it shows off supposed skill.

Think a legendary is prestigious? Last I checked you can buy them.

Luckily (for me) the majority of things that have been gated by killing the big boss things thus far are hideous in my view and I have no want for them whatsoever. Wearing wurm gear (for example) means that you not only beat the thing but more importantly you won against RNG – why does your having it make you better than someone who has beat the thing twice as much and never gotten that drop. A good many supposed “prestige” items are gated by RNG.

Dungeon gear is gated by tokens but that has no prestige attached to it either with the existence of path selling.

I think if you want to show how awesome you are there are titles for that like “The Sunbringer”, “Great Jungle Wurm Slayer”, etc. That shows more about your skill/dedication than happening to luck out on a RNG gear drop that you could have gotten on your first attempt with a group that knows what they are doing. As an example, I do not have the Teq title because I could count the times I have done that battle on one hand. However, on my second try at it the overall group won even though I had no idea what I was doing. If I had managed to get a Sunless weapon in the chest – which I didn’t, but for the sake of argument – would having that have said anything about my skill level at fighting Teq? Nope. It would have been through sheer luck and being carried by a group that had way more skill then me.

mtpelion.4562:

AtriustheGod.6785:

On the other hand, Cinnamon sticks are used exclusively for cooking, and pretty much only in early recipes. Once you surpass that level of cooking, your need for cinnamon as a player disappears forever. They have almost no value because they have no late-game use.

Which is a darn shame, because I put cinnamon on tons of level 80 food in real life.

I can think of one case where cinnamon is used in high level cooking. It is used in making pumpkin pie spice, which is in turn used to make sweet and spicy butternut squash soup (a 1hr level 80 +100 Power +10% Critical Damage food, takes a recipe and chef 400).

I circumvent it by just using the standard gate to LA from DR, but that kind of defeats the point of having a gate in the convenience area. The area the terrace gate drops you in is just outside Traders Forum, the same location you used to be dropped out at from the Obsidian Sanctum exit and when leaving the Mad King’s Realm. At the moment that’s kind of pointless as LA is a post-disaster ghost town.

Having an activity NPC at the Royal Terrace instead of having to go to Vigil Keep would be perfect (as the alternate-area-but-same-concept airship has one included even though there’s another publicly accessable one right near its exit), but I primarily enjoyed the convenience of reaching the Ft. Trinity gate easily for hopping down to Orr for my lemongrass and cayenne pepper runs. Heck, it was easier to hop asura gates to get to Orr from the terrace during the attack after everything was redirected to Vigil Keep than before LA was wrecked as you used to have to waypoint after entering LA to get to an order HQ unless you felt like walking. I don’t expect that “feature” of using a gate to LA to be permanent, but it’s nice while it lasts.

It sounds kind of petty, but I paid 1000 gems for convenience and making the gate less convenient than the free LA gates so I need to hop a waypoint to get to one seems kind of… backwards.

I’m small potatoes compared to some of the traders out there, but atm I have about 480g in liquid assets and a lot of ore hoarded for the potential of JC500. No legendaries (none of the ones that can be used by my main fit the look I was going for at all, so it’d be a wasted effort as far as I’m concerned), but as far as nonsellable soulbound weapons that have a decent value go I have Immobulus, Vison of the Mists, and two Tormented skinned weapons. I care more about what the weapon looks like than its value, especially since a soulbounded item can’t be sold, so I have a few lesser value ones like Mystic Pistol, King’s Remembrance, and two Bonetti’s Rapiers. I have one piece of ascended armor I got from a drop; the rest of my armors (6 sets on one character) are just exotic. I have a Light of Dwayna backpiece I made during Wintersday.

I don’t do a whole lot as far as flipping goes other than the occasional speculation; most of my income besides loot drops and general farming comes in slow but steady by cooking profitable recipes and burning excess skill points on material promotion. I have also made decent amounts off of buying tons of goods and salvaging, but that is dependent on market forces so I only do it when it is worthwhile.

I’ve gotten burned by the TP as well as made a nice chunk of change off of it. Live and learn. I treat it almost like a minigame and employ multiple strategies so it doesn’t get boring. While it is fun to just watch numbers go up, I mostly like having a gold buffer to buy the occasional expensive thing I think is cool and not have to sweat it.

I honestly don’t care about what they meant in GW1, because they don’t mean that in GW2. It’s a different game. In GW1 it was a trophy, in GW2 it’s a cool skin that costs 60-80g or a BL ticket. If you don’t like the fact that I barely played any GW1 and have a tormented weapon (2 in fact) not because they were uber leet GW1 weapons but because I think they go well with my mesmer’s colors you will just have to deal with the fact that GW2 is not GW1.

It’d be like complaining that you start Shadow Hearts II at level 1 with no abilities unlocked just because you may have been uber in Shadow Hearts and the main character is the same. It’s a DIFFERENT GAME. Same lore, DIFFERENT GAME. The HoM stuff that is already in the game is just a carrot to old GW players to pick up GW2, and honestly it makes more sense from an Anet perspective to get people to buy keys or trade for the skins than to expect them to buy a copy of GW1 and complete the endgame stuff to get it. GW1 is no longer being developed and any sales they get now are just gravy; they want people in GW2 and using the gem store, not playing an old game.

That being said, it would have been a nice gesture to old players that did have tormented weapons in GW1 to get access to the skins in GW2 as account bound unlockable HoM items as well as being tradeable BL skins, but it is what it is.

There are some truly annoying achieves in this patch, but this wasn’t one of them for me. At least on HoD the time I attempted the spider for the first time I got the achieve. It looked like the whole group at the spider knew what they were doing and cocoons melted in seconds. Every time one appeared map and local chat would light up with multiple notifications that there was a cocoon that needed taking out.

It was part of an achievement train because a commander was going from champ to champ and notes on what to do to not fail each achieve (stuff like not getting hit by lasers etc.) were filling map chat before we got to each one; I managed to get every LA champ achieve that way. I don’t go into LA much now other than to grab heirlooms, but this type of activity seems to still be going on HoD at least.

From what I gather, P2W is a common feature in Chinese MMOs and those that do not have that kind of feature are doomed to fail. It’s catering to the customer base in order to actually sell the game. The same tactics don’t sell games in the west, and as such the western GW2 and Chinese GW2 are not really the same game.

Whatever the Chinese version does has nothing to do with the game we play, so it’s a moot point.

I have barely played any GW1, so the weapons’ looks have no meaning to me. That being said, I was extremely happy to finally see another purple flame torch in the game besides the spiky looking TA one, which I dislike. The flame’s hue goes very well with the color of mesmer abilities.

I loved the last patch. Escape from LA was awesome and a lot of fun. I spent probably 90% of my time in GW those two weeks in LA.

Battle for LA? I got all the achieves I felt were worth spending the time on the first three days, and at this point I spend maybe 30 minutes a day in LA doing heirloom runs because I just don’t really care about the knight fights anymore. Even if it has been mostly fixed, those three days of fights and getting absolutely jack for the effort soured me on even caring about this patch. I’ll actually be glad when it’s over.

The latest fix patch not only apparently removed loot (not that I got any before the patch either), but it didn’t even fix the bugs it was intended to fix. Checking the patch notes, I see this: “Fixed the description on the Assault Knight Power Cores to correctly reference Crystalline Dust instead of Incandescent Dust.” I just checked the tooltip on the cores available on the TP and it still has the old note saying incandescent dust.

Just killed all three knights again in an overflow. No loot. Other people in map chat said the same thing. This makes my loot haul from the knight events thus far a big fat zero.

Unless this bug is fixed I’m done wasting my time in LA on the event.

For as much as I complained in other threads on some other aspects of this update, I have to agree. The ending cinematic looked pretty awesome.

The sad part about all this is I actually liked the cutscene, and the ending was pretty neat. The first time. Congratulations, the waste of time on repeated attempts to get this achievement (which I still have not been able to get, despite almost having it twice) due to the unskippable cutscene and the fact that I have yet to get a single loot drop from the knights – but that’s another issue altogether – have driven me to really hate this update despite enjoying the last one. I have no issue with trying for an achievement over and over if I screw it up, but having to sit through that cutscene EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. for a 10 second attempt is beyond frustrating. I’m about to just say to heck with doing any of the rest of the new content out of sheer annoyance. That’s not a good place to put a player in when it’s your big finale; I was invested but now I almost don’t even care because it just feels like a big waste of time with a severe lack of fun.

Say what you will about loot being the end-all-be-all to the game, but I personally enjoy getting it and it’s where a lot of my fun in the game comes from. I’ve done the knight fight several times at this point and not gotten a single drop of ANYTHING. I have no interest in spending time beating on a huge HP sponge with nothing to show for it but an armor repair cost if I go down ankitten ot enthused about doing the fight again if this remains the case. I’ve seen people get several deluxe gear boxes and those power cores from a single fight, but I’m not one of them. If an event’s large boss monster gives loot at all, it needs to be guaranteed loot to all participants (even if it’s crap loot it’s still SOMETHING) because otherwise it breeds resentment towards other players who did get drops and causes people to not even want to do the event.

I don’t even care if it’s “two blues and a green”, having something in your bags after a fight is a psychological motivator to do the event again in hopes for that big payoff. Having nothing to show for it just sours people on even attempting it because it feels like a waste of time.

I actually liked the cutscene before I had to sit through it dozens of times. Make it skippable.

Some mystic forge recipes can almost directly remove money from the supply, however. The material promotion recipes for lodestones as an example use Elonian wine which is consumed in the forging, and this is 25s4c per bottle to purchase as it is only (originally) available from the mystic forge merchant. Any recipe involving wine eats money.

The best gold sinks are the ones that players will happily partake in because the costs overall seem small. TP fees and waypoints are inconsequential to most, but they soak up excess money. The Mystic Forge eats a lot of wealth, but people keep playing it despite the odds because there is that chance of hitting a jackpot. Making costs onerous like jacking up waypoint costs to ridiculous levels not only would make players balk but it would not even be as effective anymore as the cheaper wp system due to people who would choose to walk instead (and gather more mats and kill mobs for loot along the way, creating yet more items and money that may otherwise have been ignored).

Like mtpelion said, if you want to look to what causes inflation in an economy it is the creation of money that in turn devalues the worth of the money itself. Any loot drop is a creation of money that did not exist before. Without a check that removes currency from circulation, the value will continue to decrease; this is inflation. A small, steady rate of inflation is NOT a bad thing, but checks must be in place to avoid hyperinflation. TP fees are one way of removing this currency, another is the Mystic Forge as less value is returned from the forge overall than is put into it as it is designed as a lottery and the house always wins.

Preventing sales more than once would stagnate the market horribly and would wreck the in-game economy. Good luck selling much of anything if buyers can’t resell the things they don’t need, and those TP flippers you hate so much are a good many of your customers. I hope you like sitting on a bank’s worth of loot that you can’t sell anymore not because it was already sold once, but because no one wants to buy it.

I just rewatched Escape from New York a couple days ago and had to make this animated GIF.

I like this event, I really do. However I’m a little sour on this overflow problem. Last night I got to sit in an overflow that failed badly clicking on “Join in Lornar’s Pass” for 20 minutes while staring at my wife’s screen where she was on the main server and they managed to take out the marionette. I couldn’t even feel happy about the thing going down because I couldn’t even get in with my party the time it gets taken out. Left me in a bad mood for the rest of the night.