Guild Wars 2

GW2 really needs some properly designed long term goals.

GW1 had titles(1 year after release of the game) and it had the aspect of trying to make money for expensive gear(20 or so sets of “presige” armor, a lot of really expensive cool looking weapons, obsidian armor, chaos gloves). And of course PvP.

GW2 is weak in all the areas GW1 is really strong. Achievements lack long term goals to actively work towards. Prestige armor from dungeons you can get in a week so that’s really short-term. Everything else requires money, and making money is a joke in this game because making money in this game is about dumb luck, winning the lottery can’t take the place of long term goals. Entering your CC info isn’t a long term goal either. PvP is a bust because the game doesn’t have a competitive PvP format(GW1 launched with GvG ladders and Hall of Heroes)

You can, the gift of exploration for 100% map is account bound, this means that you can make as many legendaries as you want as long as you get a new character with 100% map completion for every 2nd legendary.

7000 hours of fun in GW1, and I think I’ll get the same out of GW2 in a few years, I’m up to 700+ already

I agree a lot of things are really really broken, some things should never have been like the way they are. There are some things I can hardly believe aren’t fixed.

But despite that I’m still having fun with the things that aren’t broken.

TWMagimay.9057:

Cerise.9045:

TWMagimay.9057:

Lastly, if they were to make precursors really easy to get, that still doesn’t make the whole weapon fast food(I was looking at The Bifrost just yesterday….almost choked when I saw the list of “total needed”, The Legend is the least of my problems….).

That’s funny because bifrost is the cheapest legendary.

Do you have, say, a point? Maybe in your other pocket?

The point is that legendaries are expensive.

TWMagimay.9057:

Lastly, if they were to make precursors really easy to get, that still doesn’t make the whole weapon fast food(I was looking at The Bifrost just yesterday….almost choked when I saw the list of “total needed”, The Legend is the least of my problems….).

That’s funny because bifrost is the cheapest legendary.

I think legendary weapons are special because they all use all the different gifts and they have special effects like auras footprints and spell effects. They also have a lot more detail on them. Mjolnir etc may be expensive but they are the same model as the elementalist conjured weapons so it doesn’t really have a unique thing to it so it doesn’t get to be a legendary.

People stop acting like getting a base weapon means a legendary weapon is mailed to you.

The idea behind lodestones is that even though you need 100 lodestone for whatever reason, there are 99 other people doing the same dungeons killing the same monsters who DON’T need the lodestones AT ALL. But they’re getting lodestones at the same speed you are.

You’re not supposed to farm for lodestones, you’re supposed to get lodestones from the 99 other people who are getting them but don’t need them.

The “bad design” aspect of this is that they are so rare that people don’t really get a whole lot of them at all and it’s too easy for speculators to drive the prices up because the market moves too slow for supply and demand to stabilize it.

Usually in statistics you treat outliers as outliers.

Yes you can salvage 10 rares in a row and get 0 ecto

But if you see this happen it means you already salvaged 200+ rares and if you include the other 190+ the ecto you got evens out.

Dungeons are probably safe, just avoid CM because there are a lot of bots in Queensdale, avoid HotW because it’s near the only place in the game to farm corrupted lodestones and there are always bots there.

I’m scared to go out of LA now… I don’t want to be separated from my ingame friends again.

The reason off-hand weapons don’t have an aura or footprints is… well imagine what happens if you have 2 different legendaries.

But they have other effects to compensate for it, some legendaries without auras/footprints have changed skill animations(think the dreamer shooting rainbows)

The only time I was near bots in the last few weeks was when I was running to the honor of the waves dungeon in Frostgorge Sound and I ended up running past a swarm of 20 of them.

I reported all of them, and they’re gone now.

Are you suggesting I got banned because I was near the bots when I reported them???? That’s scary.

Olba.5376:

Cerise.9045:

Olba.5376:

Cerise.9045:

Olba.5376:

So what I’m trying to get at with this post is, Give people a way to get a precursor that does not involve mass amounts of money that are unrealistic to obtain for most people or pure luck.

Legendaries aren’t supposed to be something that most people have.

And let’s be honest, if there was any guaranteed way to get it, then most people would get it. Heck, the current way is already pretty much guaranteed, if you’re willing to buy the precursor from the TP.

Also, there’s no such thing as luck. But that’s a philosophical discussion.

You do realize that getting a base weapon doesn’t get you a legendary mailed to you automatically right?

I do. Originally I wasn’t going to post anything because the topic title spoke only of precursors, but then I bothered to read the OP again and I noted that it begun with:

I am aware that legendaries should take a lot of hard work to get and currently they do require a good deal of effort and I feel this should remain so. But I think the money involved to gain one is currently unrealistic and I’m in disagreement especially with the only alternative, Luck.

And let’s be honest, most people are having trouble with the precursors rather than anything else that goes into getting a Legendary. And you don’t see people complaining about the other stuff that it takes to get a Legendary, just the precursor.

Alright just making sure.

Do you think it would be better if base weapons were 30G and you needed twice as many icy runestones?

Same effort in money.

And how would you make Precursors into 30g? Currently the prices are high because of the low odds of the Mystic Forge. But if you made the odds higher, you would run into the risk of people using the Mystic Forge itself as a means of profit. And obviously you should never put the Precursors sold by an NPC or such.

Same way ANet made the halloween weapons 20-30G

Olba.5376:

Cerise.9045:

Olba.5376:

So what I’m trying to get at with this post is, Give people a way to get a precursor that does not involve mass amounts of money that are unrealistic to obtain for most people or pure luck.

Legendaries aren’t supposed to be something that most people have.

And let’s be honest, if there was any guaranteed way to get it, then most people would get it. Heck, the current way is already pretty much guaranteed, if you’re willing to buy the precursor from the TP.

Also, there’s no such thing as luck. But that’s a philosophical discussion.

You do realize that getting a base weapon doesn’t get you a legendary mailed to you automatically right?

I do. Originally I wasn’t going to post anything because the topic title spoke only of precursors, but then I bothered to read the OP again and I noted that it begun with:

I am aware that legendaries should take a lot of hard work to get and currently they do require a good deal of effort and I feel this should remain so. But I think the money involved to gain one is currently unrealistic and I’m in disagreement especially with the only alternative, Luck.

And let’s be honest, most people are having trouble with the precursors rather than anything else that goes into getting a Legendary. And you don’t see people complaining about the other stuff that it takes to get a Legendary, just the precursor.

Alright just making sure.

Do you think it would be better if base weapons were 30G and you needed twice as many icy runestones?

Same effort in money.

Tempest.8726:

I do not. When people start crying legitimately about not being able to acquire enough gold to forge Legendary after 6 months, then perhaps the game should look into ways of making it easier.

The time required to get a base weapon isn’t the only issue, it’s also RMT companies and other illegal practitioners benefiting enormously from items like this being so expensive.

wicket.2485:

I think any change to the way we acquire a precursor is a good change. I feel like the other parts of the legendary-making process require enough farming/time/effort. I hope there is some kind of quest chain that is really hard or something that is totally different from farming, but any change is a good change at this point. Of course, people who are trying to sell precursors are mad because they may lose out on alot of profit. However, the luck-system or farming 300g to get precursor needed to be changed because some players don’t want to farm 300g after farming 400g for every other legendary component. Therefore, we were left with playing with the Mystic Forge where some people got more than one precursor in less than 100 tries and others got no precursor in thousands of tries.

tl;dr: Any change is a good change. “Lucky” precursor-sellers mad. Legendary holders got “lucky” with a precursor and are now mad because they may not feel special. We don’t even know what the change is yet so chill. I <3 you Anet.

I’m a legendary weapon owner with 700G in assets to spare and I support this post.

Death Aggro.9602:

Cerise.9045:

tyu.9470:

i bought mine for 250g other for 80g and other for 50g (i like getting precursors) only own legendary hammer ..lets see.. 380g right there oh wait hammer costs around the same.

Stop generalising just cause you can’t achive something.

I got my legendary weapon 6 or 8 weeks ago but I don’t see what that has to do with anything?

Hahahahahahaha so you got your legendary 4 days after launch huh. The crazy talk on this thread kills me.

The only difficult part of the legendary is the precursor. Its is insanely over priced and complete RNG otherwise. They need to do something along the lines of FOW armor in gw1. Except in gw1 you could make money. This game is about taking money. Not making it. Never in any MMO “I” have played have i had such a difficult time accumulating wealth. For those of us that have a job and families we dont have the time to play 12 hrs a day. ( i get 2 if im lucky and 4 on my days off) i farm cursed shore and chests there. I feel like my progress is next to 0 towards my legendary. As far as acquiring gold i need to make the rng items and buy the lodestones etc. And i refuse to spend rlm on digital currency. Thats silly and means you didnt earn that legendary. you bought it. I guarantee if ppl werent buying gold from anet there would be next to no one with a legendary. Those of you saying gold is ez to make, plz share with the rest of us how your doing it by farming. B/c i dont seem to be making much gold with max MF and all my free time farming in cursed shore. I would love to know what the more experienced players suggest.

I use the trading post to make money so I can spend my time playing the game in WvW having fun instead of pressing tab, 1, tab 1, tab 1 for hours in cursed shore.

Still think you’re missing the point, I didn’t say anything about luck.

tyu.9470:

Cerise.9045:

tyu.9470:

i bought mine for 250g other for 80g and other for 50g (i like getting precursors) only own legendary hammer ..lets see.. 380g right there oh wait hammer costs around the same.

Stop generalising just cause you can’t achive something.

I got my legendary weapon 6 or 8 weeks ago but I don’t see what that has to do with anything?

Have you read what i quoted? people generalise that legendary owners dont farm or pay the 300-400g and all are lucky people and/or got their precursors early in game. Which is totally false.

I think you just misunderstood the point of the post.

The issue is that a lot of people assume that having cheaper base weapons means suddenly having a legendary weapon isn’t legendary anymore. Some are even posting under the assumption that getting a legendary base weapon means you automatically get a legendary weapon.

Of course none of this is true.

The message the post was conveying is that even if base weapons are cheaper, legendaries are still legendary and are still hard to get, it doesn’t diminish their value at all. Or should everyone who got their base weapon cheaper get their legendary taken away? Maybe we should take away legendaries from people who got donations from others to get a legendary too? That’ll get rid of the first 10 or so legendaries ever made.

tyu.9470:

i bought mine for 250g other for 80g and other for 50g (i like getting precursors) only own legendary hammer ..lets see.. 380g right there oh wait hammer costs around the same.

Stop generalising just cause you can’t achive something.

I got my legendary weapon 6 or 8 weeks ago but I don’t see what that has to do with anything?

Tempest.8726:

I see plenty of people on my server with Legendary weapons and it’s only about 2-3 months into the game. I’d say that’s anything but legendary. Instead of crying about how expensive precursors are how about thinking of ways to earn the gold to get it. There are lots of ways, if you can’t think of one you’re just not resourceful enough or just too lazy. If Anet made legendary weapons easier to get what else is left in the game to do. From day 1 of playing this game, I’ve never been in a need for gold. The game provides, you just have to pay attention. “Oh a few people have legendary weapons, I want one too but I don’t have enough gold so the game should make it easier and cheaper” When did we become communist? It’s a fancy skin with the same stats as every other weapon of it’s class, it just has pretty light effects, don’t have what it takes for vanity, live with it.

So it would be fine if base weapons were 30G each but you needed 200 icy runestones for a legendary, right? It would be the same amount of work, but would prevent RMT companies from further driving the whole economy of the game into the ground.

tyu.9470:

Nooo..this is sad news. Why do arenanet only listen to casual people whining about everything that is a tiny bit hard?

If you are willing to make legendaries even a tiny bit easier than it already is what is left legendary about them? Just remove their legendary color and make them named exotics with the patch.

Most people who actually have a legendary weapon got their base weapon early on when they sold for 15-20G.

So it’s not like it really matters.

Olba.5376:

So what I’m trying to get at with this post is, Give people a way to get a precursor that does not involve mass amounts of money that are unrealistic to obtain for most people or pure luck.

Legendaries aren’t supposed to be something that most people have.

And let’s be honest, if there was any guaranteed way to get it, then most people would get it. Heck, the current way is already pretty much guaranteed, if you’re willing to buy the precursor from the TP.

Also, there’s no such thing as luck. But that’s a philosophical discussion.

You do realize that getting a base weapon doesn’t get you a legendary mailed to you automatically right?

“Unfair” was a poor choice of words.

A better choice would be bad game design

Practically 100% of long term goals in the game are based around nothing but money.

You can get a full dungeon armor set in a week, so it’s not really long term.
The only exception here is PvP, but that’s not so much a goal as it is a fun activity.

But are things involving money really long term goals if random people can get their name drawn out of a hat through nothing but dumb luck and make 500G?

If you can get 500G in 10 minutes by killing a world boss and getting a dusk to drop then getting money is a 10 minute goal not a long term goal.

Which means the game stops having long term goals.

Trading Post should also get a mention because it’s the second best way to make money, aside from getting a 300+ gold weapon to drop. And using the trading post doesn’t even involve playing the game.

If you actually want to play the game you’re out of luck, because you’ll be poor forever.

And that’s bad game design.

oZii.2864:

That doesn’t fix the problem and it does damage the economy. If you make it 40g thats alot of people with Dawn right. What happens to charged lodestones? They skyrocket. The market is a free market hate it or love it. If they make precursors like your suggestion then someone with enough assets will buy the lodestones up and charge even more for them.

I’d like to see a (soulbound?) version of lodestones that you can get with dungeon tokens, gives people something to use their tokens on after they get a full set of armor in a week, and this takes a lot of power away from market manipulators.

Either way you’re right, lodestones are way too rare, but I think 80s-1G is good price for them considering how rare they are currently. If they were more accessible, 40 silver would be a fair price, but lower than that and it would trivialize them.

I got all of the component for the legendary that don’t involve money in less than a week.

I already have the karma/badges/other non-money junk for a 2nd legendary laying around, and I didn’t do any farming for those at all. The karma is extremely easy with the karma from dungeons and dailies/monthlies.

I’m strongly considering making a second legendary and selling it now.

People being able to sell base weapons for 300+ gold also results in people being able to control this market and make enormous amounts of profit because many of them have a profit margin of 50+ gold. I have seen evidence that trading in these base weapons is one of the ways RMT companies use to make money to sell to players illegally. But ANet is probably well aware of this as well.

Being able to make 50 gold just by buying and selling one item on the TP is completely insane. I’ve done it myself so I know how effective it is, in fact it’s by far the best way in this game to make money at all.

A better price that the base weapons should be around is 30 gold. This prevents a few people from controlling this market and making hundreds of gold each day.

And before people cry “but then everyone will run around with a legendary” or “you want free legendaries!?!?!” Think about it for a second.

You’re still dropping 140G on NPC items and 200+ G on lodestones, 100+G on ecto, and whatever else you need for the materials, so legendarily will still be expensive and hard to get.

The problem with this is, unless there is a a way for everyone to get a cheaper base weapon, for example with a mystic forge recipe, the horrible scenario I described on the first page will occur, and the market will become even more damage.

My suggestion:
Add a new temporary mystic forge recipe that requires

• 100 elonian wine
• whatever(ecto or something, not too much because the price is high enough)
• whatever(mystic coins, again not too much because the price for these should be stable, if the price for this skyrockets again it will allow speculators to again make hundreds of god and damage the economy)
• whatever(eldricht scroll? a different exotic weapon)

This will set the price for base weapons at around 40 gold WITHOUT DAMAGING THE MARKET BY LETTING PEOPLE GET 300+ GOLD THROUGH A RANDOM DROP

In case anyone is wondering why I want this changed so much even though I make a lot of money out of this, it’s pretty simple. I want this game to be a good as it can be, and this broken system is reducing the quality of the game. The money I make is just going to sit in my bank until the GW3 hall of monuments comes out and I use my money to buy my friends GW3 HoM points so they get cool things in GW3. The quality of the game is more important to me than making an extra 100G.

Hopefully getting a legendary base will be tied into some kind of accomplishment, rather than just making them more common for lucky people. And if it’s still going to be something like that, I hope at least the precursors are made soulbound.

Here’s what’s going to happen if they make the same mistake they did with halloween

1. Base weapons now made a more common drop, but you can only get 1 chance per day or whatever
2. A random 1% of the playerbase gets a base weapon to drop for them and they instantly put it on the trading post
3. That random 1% of the playerbase is now 200-400 gold richer, which is more money than 98% of the playerbase will have even after thousands of hours of playing, just from dumb luck.
4. The 98% of the playerbase that didn’t get their name picked out of a hat is now even further separated from the people who did, and have to work even harder to catch up if they ever want to participate in the economy, but they probably never will

Base weapons are one of the most broken aspects of the ecnomy right now. Partially because of the “21 karma” exploit putting a lot of money in the hands of a few people(many RMT companies were involved with this), another reason is because getting a base weapon right now is a factor of dumb luck and nothing else. Compare this to Diablo 3 where you have to somehow earn milions of gold before you can start getting the best items in the game because otherwise everything will kill you. Diablo 3 is a horrible example because the game is completely broken on every level and it costs about $5 to get millions of gold using the real money AH, but it’s an example of how the price of things correlates with the difficulty of getting one instead of just nothing but dumb luck.

With GW2, you just need to be like level 75 and you can randomly get your name drawn out of a hat to become one of the top percentile richest people in the game. This reminds me more of games like Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Your “success” in this games is based entirely on how many times you get a good dice roll. The problem with this is is that the “success” becomes completely meaningless.

There are a lot of fun things in the game, but for me the main two aspects of the game I view with a “lasting appeal” are PvP and making accumulating currency. And if the money making aspect is reduced to “if your name is drawn out of a hat you win GW2” then it kinda loses its appeal for me and then all that’s left is PvP. It would really suck to see that happen.

GW1 might have been a better example. The people who played that game for PvE were mostly in it to get titles and to get expensive gear. A lot of people aimed for things like being able to buy obsidian armor, and being able to buy chaos gloves. This system works every well and still seems far superior to GW2 to me.

The way I feel it works in GW2 is like Chaos Gloves being a random drop you can get with a 0.1% chance once per character after killing the lich in prophecies as a replacement for the droknar’s key. Having that in place would have completely trivialized Chaos Gloves as a goal people pursue in the game.

GW1 did have a very good example of having a bad implementation of RNG though, the miniature Jingle Bear. If you get a mini jingle bear you instantly become richer than 99.9% of the GW1 players and completely trivialize every other way of trying to get expensive stuff in the game. The only part that prevented this from destroying the entire economy is that it only dropped if you farmed 2 very specific locations in the game, so only a few people who were actually insane enough to try to farm it actually had a chance to get it, sane people didn’t have to have any interaction with the mini.

MasterFhyl.3014:

Right, so.. I got my account back, but ANet so committed to this “your account was compromised” coverstory (I am 100% positive my account was never compromised) My best guess is they have either a faulty auto-ban program (even if they claim not to use such a program at all) or incompetent employees, and they realize that if it gets out, they’re going do have probably hundreds if people clamoring for some sort of compensation, and at very least think if they can convince us they were “saving” our accounts from being compromised we won’t be as angry… Even though it’s pretty obvious from their original “You are permanantly banned” message, that’s not the case.

I’m not that mad, but I do not like being lied to… So ANet, please do not tell me that YOUR error was a mistake on MY end when my password was both unique to this game and statistically uncrackable. (And ironically, the one I had to end up changing it to because they insisted I do so, is relatively less secure)

I sent in 2 more ticket updates asking for clarification. The first time I asked why they thought my account was compromised, the second time I asked if there was any way to be sure if it was compromised. I also said I was extremely relieved because to me it looked like nobody else was ever on my account.

Both times I got a reply saying “we cannot restore any lost gold etc”(I didn’t lose any gold) and “here’s how you increase your password security”(while I have no reason to believe my password was compromised). So that wasn’t really helpful. The second reply said “we understand that you’re frustrated someone hacked your account” even though I just said it doesn’t look like anyone went on my account and that was a huge relief?

I’m debating if I should update again and ask the same questions again but it seems pretty unlikely that they’ll give an answer. And it doesn’t really matter anyway because the issue is gone(I hope) and I don’t want to bother support clogging up the system any more than I really have to.

I got unbanned yesterday and finally got a good night of sleep.

My feelings about what happened are descried in a post that ended up on page 17 as I write this because of the deleted posts I can’t link to it.

I’ll keep supporting GW2 no matter what because the game is really amazing.

But I repeat the request to those at ANet who care about their fans to invest some time into looking over and improving the aspects of the support system that are lacking right now. Because a better support would make the game even more enjoyable for everyone than it is now, and a lot less frustrating.

Gilosean.3805:

Cerise.9045:

Gilosean.3805:

Gaile Gray.6028:

We do not terminate accounts based on the use of hardware, unless that also involves third-party programs that give an advantage to a player. A single one-to-one bind is fine. Binding 11 different skills to one press of a key isn’t so fine.

So – is there are hard limit on skill bindings? Any guidelines people can follow to avoid being a false positive while trying to prevent RSI from all the button mashing?

If WoW can support all the rebindings and combos and macros people want and still control bots, and GW2 can’t, that says some things about GW2’s engine.

WoW macros don’t let the game play by itself while you’re AFK. Some keyboard software can be set up to play for you while AFK, that’s a huuuge difference.

Right. But Gaile’s post says that even just setting up a skill combo is potentially risky. WoW lets you set up skill combos. And given the number of people who are reporting that they were banned falsely for botting I’m a bit worried about false positives. Any new system has kinks to shake out, and ANet probably thought false positives were better than false negatives.

Setting up skill combos within WoW lets you do it while staying in the game though. Setting up skill combos on 1 button with GW2 requires you to use an external program, and the same program can be used to make your game play while you’re AFK.

So the general advice is “don’t use a program that has functionality built in that can make the game play while you’re AFK”.

But for 7 years in GW1 I used my keyboard software to type “/rank” and “/dance” in <0.1 seconds for me at the press of one button, and that never caused any problems, so you don’t have to be too paranoid.

The warning to not use those macro programs is there so you can’t use “but Gaile said it was ok to use them!!!” as an excuse if something happens.

Still no response here(3 days)

There are people who are sitting on something like 10-20 legendary base weapons from that “mistake”.

They go for 300+ gold each

15 of them = 4500 gold

Ever wonder why RMT companies can control the economy so easily? That is why.
I used to actively try to work against these companies and even reported names of people who I knew were involved, including a screenshot of someone holding several legendary base weapons involved with this. My reward was a ban… so I don’t try to stop them anymore, I just avoid them.

Way too late to do something about it now anyway.

3 days of being unable to play and having no idea why exactly

121107-000890

edit: got my account back but still no answer to why it was banned in the first place, I’ve sent in 2 tickets to ask why and all they respond with it “please change your password, and we cannot restore lost gold” even though nobody else accessed my account and I didn’t lose anything :/

PetricaKerempuh.7958:

Ashlar.2519:

I am not letting the bots win, it’s a war and the players will be the victors with ArenaNet’s help in clearing them out. I will continue to report botting when I see it, giving notice in /say that the reporting is about to happen. I also will continue to farm in Orr on occasion. I don’t do it every day, as I do have multiple goals I would like to reach. However, when going into one of the zones, I party up with a could of guild mates or friends. If there is room in the group for a couple of others, we usually put up in /say that we have x spots available for the events. I know it’s frustrating, but don’t let them win. The Support Team is working as hard as they can to get through the tickets and restore as many people as possible. Try to be patient and understanding – and don’t let the bots win by quitting.

do its ppl like you that are so diligent about reporting boting that got many of us here. and you talk about patience and dnt letting bots win… if it weren’t tragic it would be comic. how about this: person that reported another person who then turns out not to be bot, gets same amount of ban time!?

We need to hope that ANet learns from this and make sure they exercise a lot more care before deciding to ban someone.

tolunart.2095:

What level of accuracy to you expect, if >99% is not good enough?

There are a lot of things about this situation that aren’t handled anywhere close to how well they should be handled.

tolunart.2095:

Cerise.9045:

tolunart.2095:

I’m not making any such claims. I have no investment, emotional or financial, in Arenanet or Guild Wars 2. I bought the game and play it casually, that is all.

I’d say I have a pretty big investment in it because I want GW2 to be as good as it can be.

Not everyone has your enthusiasm. It’s a game, not the Civil Rights Movement. If the servers shut down tomorrow I’d say “oh, what a shame,” and play something else.

Then why do you get so upset when you see people asking for improvements?

Believe it or not there are a LOT developers at ANet that care equally about the quality of the game as I do, probably even more. You may not care about feedback, but they do.

tolunart.2095:

I’m not making any such claims. I have no investment, emotional or financial, in Arenanet or Guild Wars 2. I bought the game and play it casually, that is all.

I’d say I have a pretty big investment in it because I want GW2 to be as good as it can be.

tolunart.2095:

Arenanet is erring on the side of caution – if it looks like a bot, they stopped the account until they can sort out who is and who isn’t. It’s not for me to tell them how to do their jobs. The only reason why I am posting here is because people allow rumors and wild speculation to run out of control, I’m trying to encourage reason and patience instead of demands and insults.

This doesn’t seem to be what’s happening at all, they’ve stated in several places that they carefully check everyone that was reported for botting to see if they’re really a bot or not. In my case, if they had really spent more than 2 seconds looking over how I play the game it should be obvious there is no botting involved.

tolunart.2095:

You are welcome to your opinion. I believe that these issues involve an extremely small sample of the players and that they are doing the best they can with what they have to work with.

It sounds like you’re trying to deny that other companies are doing a far better job with customer support, but that’s simply not true. Or you’re choosing to ignore that other companies are doing much better. Why? Don’t you want GW2 to live up to its potential?

If you don’t want to use a comparison, just look at the quality as an absolute value rather than a relative one. Right now the quality of the support is far below where it could be if they put more effort into it, hired more competent people, gave them better training, and most importantly changed their policies. The quality of the support would be much higher and it would make the game more enjoyable because of it.

tolunart.2095:

You are reading things into my post that are not there.

What you are saying is that when something bad happens, we should all cover our eyes and ears and just accept it instead of trying to get it improved. If so many other companies can do this properly, why should ANet be one of the bad ones instead of the ones that do it properly?

Ashlar.2519:

I know people are upset at having their game suspended, but we also want the bots removed from game. I wonder, though, how people would go about removing access for accounts known to be botting while still leaving non-botting accounts active? Especially when there is evidence that an account has quite possibly been compromised by another party and then used without the account holders knowledge to bot-farm?

It’s a sticky situation for ArenaNet. We want the bots gone. It also appears that there are a number of cases happening here where accounts have in fact been compromised, even though the account holder sees no evidence of that. How would you handle that if you were on ArenaNet’s end?

I believe that they are doing the right thing here in suspending the account so that the bot cannot function and then working with the account holder to secure and restore the account. In the end, it’s my opinion that it is better to suspend a compromised account – especially when the account holder was not aware of the compromise.

If they were able to log in without showing up on the logins in the security tab on my account details, despite there being an authenticator attached to the account, then there is something ANet is doing wrong with their security.

If they were able to bot without any of my characters leaving the Heart of the Mists then they deserve to have the account… because that would be really impressive.

Furthermore, ANet/Gaile Gray have said on multiple occasions that there are people manually checking each report of botting. It’s not some automated process that can go wrong because it’s not fine tuned enough, there are real people responsible for deciding who should be banned and who shouldn’t. This means those people royally messed up. If they think someone who doesn’t do anything but SPvP is somehow a bot.

Gilosean.3805:

Gaile Gray.6028:

We do not terminate accounts based on the use of hardware, unless that also involves third-party programs that give an advantage to a player. A single one-to-one bind is fine. Binding 11 different skills to one press of a key isn’t so fine.

So – is there are hard limit on skill bindings? Any guidelines people can follow to avoid being a false positive while trying to prevent RSI from all the button mashing?

If WoW can support all the rebindings and combos and macros people want and still control bots, and GW2 can’t, that says some things about GW2’s engine.

WoW macros don’t let the game play by itself while you’re AFK. Some keyboard software can be set up to play for you while AFK, that’s a huuuge difference.

MasterFhyl.3014:

I would also like to say that 2-3 days isn’t necessarily a terrible turnaround time for fixing reported problems. I’m used to dealing with Nexon support staff, and it is not at all uncommon to have to wait WEEKS for a response from their “customer service” department, and when you do get a response from them they usually dont even end up fixing the problem.
I won’t be too upset if i get my account back in the next 2 days or so (it’s already been over 24 hours) But… and this is important… If it ever happens again, I do not think I will be able to forgive ANET.

Nexon is probably the most hated MMO company in the world. So if ANet decides to look somewhere to compare their support to, it should be the last one they look at, unless they want to end up in the same boat.

This is the 4th time I’ve been the victim of a mistake caused by arenenet that prevented me from playing GW2 properly. And the past few posters bring up good points.

It seems like the people directing these decisions just think “We’re just a company and it doesn’t matter what we do to our customers as long as we can fix it in a few weeks”. Or maybe some just think “well it’s just a game so who cares if you get called a botter and a cheater, who cares if you get banned, who cares if you get insulted, it’s only a game”.

But to many of us, Guild Wars is a lot more than a game. We’re not just emotionless consumers. For a lot of us, a game like this is our life.

So what happens after this? We get unbanned and pretend it never happened… I guess. Will it happen a 5th time? A 6th? Is this really what GW2 is supposed to be?

I’ve been playing Guild Wars for 7 years and I’ll keep playing it.
I’ve been supporting ArenaNet on forums and outside the internet with good advertisement for 7 years and I’ll keep doing it.
I’ve been supporting ArenaNet with micro transactions in the stores for 5 years and I’ll keep doing that.
I’ve been supporting ArenNet with feedback to improve the game since E34E and I’ll keep doing that if we get more chances to do this.

All I ask Gaile Gray and the other people at ANet who really care about their fans is to take a good look at their support system and how their fans are being treated, then look at how they can really make this system as excellent as they imagine it to be. Hell, look at the dozens of other games which do not have shoddy customer support and use them for inspiration if you have to, because it’s been done right plenty of times before, there’s no reason ANet has to be stuck doing it wrong.

I hope that this mistake if fixed quickly and I can go back to playing the game I love(it’s been 3 days since I was banned now), but I also hope I don’t have to play in fear of this happening again, and being stuck in the shoddy support system again.

My ticket was just updated asking for more account information, a few hours after my reason for being banned was changed to unauthorized access.

Fortunately I checked and nobody was on my account since I was last logged onto it, my last played character is still in the zone I left it.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

For many korean MMOs having a low latency from the game servers to the VPN makes a huge different for the player. For these games it doesn’t matter if you still have a larger latency from your PC to the VPN because the game will run far more smoothly from the VPN being closer to the server.

But this is because those games have horrendous netcode.

I don’t think this is the case in GW2 because GW2 used client side prediction which removes the benefit for the VPN being close to the server.

Unless maybe your latency is so high that it’s causing you to disconnect.

48 hours after getting banned for a false positive and still no response from support

wouldn’t really refer to this kind of support as “excellent”

I still don’t believe the people who “carefully investigate each report of botting” are doing what you say they’re doing. I have never done anything that even remotely looks like botting. I’m always at my PC, I’m always talking with people while playing, I’m always running around randomly doing different things. And this is when I even do PvE. 90% of my time spent in this game is PvP…. bots do not spend 90% of their time doing PvP

Anyone who looked at my account for more than 5 seconds would be able to see that there wasn’t any botting involved with anything I do.

The entire game is the end-game.

So if yo say like the end-game, it’s the same as saying you like the entire game.

I think bots have gotten too smart for this.

They learned to avoid taking mesmer portals, and don’t pick up fireworks anymore either.

It was funny while it lasted though, I used to mesmer portal whole droves of bots into champions etc.

I wasn’t able to participate in WvW because of this ban.

So I feel my server should be given a 50k point bonus to compensate for not having me there.