Guild Wars 2

Morfedel.4165:

What he posted isn’t old news; the announcement was for revenant testing, not beta testing as a whole, and that stuff looked to encompass non-revenant items.

I wasn’t really being entirely serious… though most of that could very well apply to the Revenant test. Or it could not, we are missing some details (such as will Revenants created on Friday be insta 80 or not, I think they will but that is just my opinion). If our open world test characters will be insta 80, however, those beta boxes are likely to be available (or at least we can be hopeful of it).

This has always been possible… though it doesn’t happen on a normal disconnect.

As far as I am aware, this can happen only if the map you were on crashed (ie. the server running it crashed or failed somehow) before the changes in your character had been saved elsewhere in their final place on your account data.

The delay exists likely to prevent the maps from flooding the account/character server from existence (basically they don’t want to ddos themselves, so they have some sort of delayed update propagation from maps to account data).

You already have it, check their official FAQ’s on the support side of the site. The portal was only for that one event.

Crell.6401:

Will we be gaining currency and things for our live account? or will these still be ENTIRELY walled off characters?

Inb4 the first, “I had <insert precursor of choice> drop on my Revenant…” topic pops up on Friday.

Ayrilana.1396:

Crise.9401:

Ayrilana.1396:

Beta info datamined.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3cfv9o/datamining_upcoming_features_from_the_july_7/

Bah, old news… we already have news post on the official site about beta event :P

Oh. The only thing I saw was for Stronghold.

Read it, revenants in the old world for next weekend… proper expansion betas coming soon™.

It won’t go too crazy, unless people are stupid, since vendor golems are only 1g

Flop Sweat.3456:

Does anyone know if the deluxe will hit Black Lion Trading company after HoT drops?

That all I really want to know.

I can already see it up there, 2400 gems if memory serves… you have to have pre-purchased the standard edition though. Note: it is unlikely HoT itself deluxe or otherwise will be purchasable using gems only for a long long time, if ever.

Ayrilana.1396:

Beta info datamined.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3cfv9o/datamining_upcoming_features_from_the_july_7/

Bah, old news… we already have news post on the official site about beta event :P

Randulf.7614:

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/announcing-the-guild-wars-2-revenant-and-stronghold-test-weekend/

Happy to see that the random dev tease or revenant in LA actually was more than someone slacking at work (though I don’t think they would have been found out easily, if that had been it).

Here is the million dollar question, what will happen too loots gained as the beta character, I don’t really care personally. Will still try it out… but I can guarantee if they don’t address this and people get a precursor drops there will be salty people on the forums if they don’t get to keep that.

I mean the progress in the beta maps would obviously be lost and the character itself eventually… but this is a bit different in my mind at least. It is after all stuff we could have played using regular character.

Swizzle.7982:

Crise.9401:

Please pay attention, I said most will be, not most are… as in in the future,

I am paying attention, it would be odd if you had said “most are” because none are. Because HoT isn’t out. So all “will be”, you didn’t bother specifying between the ones anet have said exist and the one’s you imagined.

Except that I didn’t imagine anything, sure I don’t know how often they will be created but they did say this specifically: “Additional Mist Champions will become available in future live content releases and will also require Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns”

XxTAFxX.6741:

So we buy Pre Purchase Edition for beta access,but anet is just putting up stress tests instead.
Another stress test on the 9th wvw.
What’s the point in buying Pre Purchase Edition then.

Do it before July 31st and you may get a free character slot (see if this applies to your account), regardless of the edition you buy. Other than that, for existing players not a whole lot at the moment.

If you are not applicable for that character slot, there is really no reason not to wait until they announce the first beta weekend. Does the WvW stress test thing suck, yes of course, but if you read what they have said they will likely only set up three special servers for it which means three maps (+ EB) each with a hard cap on players so the space is limited by server capacity from the get go.

Also since it uses special servers there is a chance that either special accounts will have to be created, or their accounts manually flagged, for the people involved so it is also a matter of logistics as well.

There are probably technical reasons why they are doing the test this way, either they can not integrate it into the live client like with the PvE betas (for any number of reasons, leaderboards, server rankings etc.), or they don’t want to because that would unintended side effects for the live game. It could also be because those special servers will be running some sort of special analytics or diagnostic code specific to this stress test.

Swizzle.7982:

Crise.9401:

Except that this argument stopped being waterproof when most “Mist Champions” will be gated by HoT.

There are three mist champions. One is exclusive to people who own HoT. Please explain how 1 out of 3 is “most”.

Please pay attention, I said most will be, not most are… as in in the future, ie. champions that we either do not know of yet or don’t exist yet. Since there is no incentive for them to release any champions available in the core game after HoT is out. If you want to think that the updates that were announced with it and are clearly prerequisites or in preparation for HoT as not part of it, feel free to then also think all content updates after HoT to be part of it then even if we don’t know of them yet.

ArenaNet has zero incentive to provide any content updates for people with only the base game after HoT, so in practice balance patches, bug fixes gem store and probably PvP maps, if any, will be all coming in there (few festivals too of course, but if last year is anything to go by that will be recycled). The trend here is obvious., they will have every reason to add more value to the expansion pack no reason to do the same for the base game without requiring said expansion pack.

I actually like this suggestion, but I think you should have titled the topic differently to avoid this kind immediate response and potential merge into the very same topic you were hoping to avoid.

I mean if you really take the re-levelling (aka reincarnation, new game +, prestige… a rose by any other name) system to its full potential it can also cover profession changes.

Let’s face it most people interested in these sort of things probably have easy access to tomes (I know I already have my Revenant covered and then some for a long while), unless they want to change race/profession within their first 10-20 levels in the game, in which case it is not a huge loss to re-roll yet. So I don’t even think keeping levels would be that important personally but it would be a nice choice.

Palador.2170:

It still doesn’t change the fact that the WvW and PvP changes are not actually included in HoT. They’re separate, and free to all players.

Except that this argument stopped being waterproof when most “Mist Champions” will be gated by HoT. I wouldn’t be surprised if they come up with something similar for WvW. For example through how guilds and guild halls interact with it in particular. Base game players could get reduced experience just as they get reduced experience of the new specialization system (by not having access to elite specializations).

You are right I do not know if Stronghold and Desert Borderlands, or even core specializations, would’ve come without HoT. But it is wrong to think they weren’t affected by its existence, hence why I wasn’t at all surprised when the Mist Champions popped up. Frankly ArenaNet seemed almost bit too generous with the freebies coming with HoT.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if part of the reason we now have mist champions is because of all the price controversy about HoT :P In other words because they felt pressure to add more value to the expansion or realized how much of the content they announced as part of it they were giving away for free.

Mystic.5934:

Crise.9401:

Re: Aether Path, how would you get < level 15 loot in there, no upscaling in dungeons. So I doubt it would give you level appropriate loot for those enemies either, and even if it did how did you plan to get credit as such low level player, without at least being upscaled.

aetherblade path /in fotm/, not the TA dungeon. you used to be able to go into fotm at any level and it would uplevel you to 80. I think that’s no longer the case… uh, just tried it on a level 5 (was level 2 a few minutes ago :P) and it worked perfectly. let me in there, upleveled to 80. would likely get tiny bags if we got the aetherblade path.

Heh, I edited my post after I realized you wrote fotm, using the word path in your post just made me assume regular dungeon and I somehow skipped over the fractals mention in your post.

ScribeTheMad.7614:

What about the level of the Aetherblade in the JP in Gendarran?

Too high Gendarran is 25+ is it not.

Mystic.5934:

it works!
a level 2 killing aetherblades in the middle of eotm can give tiny bags of booty
one of the problems is that you can’t, you know’, kill them :P

Certainly explains the market, Scarlets invasions weren’t happening in starter zones either so there really never was a reliable open world source for these that we know of. Also, I too realized the futility of trying to get these in EoTM really fast… perhaps if you made a farming party of 5, boost magic find to high heavens and bring along a friendly 80 for DPS you might be able to rig some sort of farm up. Also, starting at level two is crazy because of both no downstate and no off hand. So any setup would probably rely on the lowbies to be between 6-15 in levels to be realistic, you are so kitten as level two anything.

There is upscaling in Fractals, certainly not dungeons afaik… news to me.

Edit: also, now that this topic exists, if someone is crazy enough to farm these from EoTM or FoTM the market should quickly become more sensible, however, please someone tell me why would anyone put buy orders for these bags… they give the same stuff as the lowbie bandit bags most likely.

Mystic.5934:

https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Container
bandits drop pinched
pirates drop booty
ohhhhh. aetherblades also drop booty.
just based on how slow the market for these bags are, I’m assuming you don’t just find them in the open world, it’s a highly unusual situation.
like what happened with small bag of skritt shinies, where the only way to get them was to take a level 16-25 character to the top-left corner of wvw borderlands and farm the skritt there.
there are no pirates in wvw as far as I know. ohhh! but there are aetherblades in eotm. all those people that fast-level their characters. that’s one possible source. I’m gonna test it now

I need to test this… EoTM seems most likely, considering you get level appropriate loot when upscaled I think.

RoseofGilead.8907:

Yeah, Bandits drop Stolen/pinched goods. I’ve never seen 1-15 level pirates. Maybe there was a personal story that had them?

Unless I read the gw2spidy graph wrong there is still some new listings on the TP rarely, which would imply they are still around somewhere. Personal Story was also the first guess of the few people I asked about this.

So looking through old 1-10 and 10-15 story steps will likely give the OP their answer, based on 15 seconds with the TP graphs I would focus on the ones below 15 or rather now level 10 chapter.

Randulf.7614:

Just south of Queensdale from the Behe exit, is the low level Gendarren bandits. Do they not drop the same bags? Gendarren is level 15-25

You are talking about Kessex Hills and those guys drop “Bag of Pinched Goods”.

Guhracie.3419:

I don’t care if it’s not illegal, it’s absolutely shameful to deny refunds to people who bought the infinite continue coin, at this point. When they sold it, it had been released twice in a 5 month period, so it had the expectation of happening at least once or even twice a year. In 3 months, it’ll be 2 years since the last time SAB closed.

While you have my sympathies, if you have (recently) tried to get a refund and they said no then your options are quite limited. You can try making your case again, being nice but persistent often helps even when you don’t feel like being nice, but if that doesn’t work your only option is to look into your local legislation about consumer protection, specifically in regards to digital sales.

I have no insights for US in this regard, but for EU your best bets are laws originating from the European Union or laws that have parallels in the UK in particular as European sales are handled by NCSoft in the UK.

Therodin.2970:

If only there were some way to change anets priorities about sab :/

There honestly probably isn’t, it is quite probable that when it comes back it will likely be in the same boat as it was when it initially released.

In other words, it will likely have to make its case again to guarantee further development as Colin was very careful in his recent statement to not make any commitments beyond the things we have already seen of SAB, aside from some potential reworks for rewards and W2. This of course doesn’t touch on the matter of availability, because since they sold the Infinite Continue Coin that created much controversy at the time, it is in their best interests to make SAB at least scheduled recurring, if not permanent (one can hope, right?), content even if no future worlds will be developed for it, if it happens to “tank” again.

Just being realistic here.

Palador.2170:

And before you (or anyone else) claims that it IS a part of HoT, I would remind you that even non-HoT players will be on that map when it goes live. ANet may want us to think of it as HoT content, but it’s really not. It’s a long overdue WvW improvement (we hope) that they’re just releasing in tandem with HoT.

Simply the fact that ArenaNets announcement trailer for HoT at PAX listed it as part of HoT does make it part of HoT. Or do you have a source that this map would be coming our way without HoT, does not rely on any tech developed specifically for HoT etc. It may be free content, but it is content that as far as we know exists because of HoT, ergo it is part of HoT. The fact that it trickles through to the base game is happy accident, caused by their desire not to fragment the player base and likely some technical limitations.

Besides nothing is saying that they won’t incentivize HoT purchase through it, see the recent metamorphosis or Stronghold heroes into mist Champions for example. All the above points also apply to Stronghold btw.

Now whether you, or even most players perceive the Desert Borderlands as part of HoT is a whole different angle on this, however, anything included in the announcement trailers for HoT can factually be said to be part of it because it can be considered content enabled (probably both in terms of tech and costs) by HoT.

Norrag.8756:

All im getting from those interviews is ’’it’s possible.’’

From Steven’s comment you can almost hear the perhaps not this year creeping in there. It seems almost like a cautious no without actually saying so. Then Dave is like, we’d want it but then doesn’t really make it seem any more or less likely for this coming Halloween but that the city was rebuilt with events in mind (see the, thankfully rejected “Festival Plaza” for Lion’s Court as its new name).

This is actually a good point with LA all different, they’d have to redecorate it at the very least.

If they are cheap about it they can always dump few decorations in the Crown Pavilion area of DR and call it a day like they did for Wintersday last time around. I hope they don’t though. Also would be kinda nice to get something fresher than having to redo the same “halloween story” for a third time. Halloween was kind of big deal due to its ongoing story elements before.

Wanze.8410:

Rare mats cant be salvaged though.

Well by rare I meant what salvage kits refer to as “chance to salvage rarer materials” obviously in this context.

skowcia.8257:

Mysterious Tablet solved. Someone caught real revenant in LA, a dev messing up with us.
http://imgur.com/u7VByur

She was definitely taunting us, seems legit :P

Though this seems strange, I doubt they would do this without permission… I mean sure Revenant is technically in our clients at this moment but I would think something like this you couldn’t just do on a whim in case something goes wrong. It is still unfinished content after all.

I recall all dev actions on live are logged and require authorization (something they said around when Scarlets invasions were brand new and they were showing them off if memory serves). So by that logic creating a revenant outside of beta event and bringing it out of Verdant Brink both would qualify as such actions.

Am I reading too much into this or could it be something is in the horizon… would certainly be interesting if come next beta they let us bring revenants to the old world for example (just disable banks, crafting stations and TP access for them, or something like that).

Would be interesting to see Revenants in dugeons and Teg or TT.

Slapinator.4196:

If wvw armor was salvagable then it would be free gold for eveyone i think that is a good choice arenanet made making them nonsalvagable

Could you really turn profit on the exotics, the rares maybe… but I highly doubt salvaging the 80 exotics would make up any reliable profit.

Wanze.8410:

Dungeon armor can be salvaged. And the demand for extracting upgrades just came around when you couldnt simply transmute your gear anymore with the wardrobe upgrade. Before that, we would simply transmute our temple armor piece with our newely crafted ascended piece, choose the stats from ascended and the rune from the temple gear and whatever skin you like better. Various vendor gear was unsalvageable way before that.

My point about the inability to salvage things being an exception before and now a norm still stands though. They started restricting salvaging first due to various unintended currency conversion methods (this of course including upgrades as medium but the primary vessels back then were ectos and rare mats).

Wanze.8410:

Temple armor was in game since launch, as far as i am aware and they were never salvageable. It didnt matter that much at that time though, as until the wardrobe changes, you could just transmute your temple gear to something salvageable and retrieve the rune/sigil.

I concede the temple armor were not salvageable, but like you said they might as well have been. It’s been three years, all I remember was there wasn’t a real demand for extracting upgrades without destroying the item until they started to make all karma, WvW and Order gear unable to be salvaged and then later when Ascended gear became a thing. In other words, back then being unable to salvage something was an exception specific to few armor sets now it has become a fact that affects everyone due to the nature of Ascended gear. The whole karma weapon exploit back then was what initially caused them to make more and more items unable to be salvaged if I recall correctly.

By the way, can dungeon armor still be salvaged or is it in the same category as all the other vendor purchasable exotics and rares?

Edit: for the record, the buy once mentality would probably only affect a minor subset of runes and sigils (ie. Strength runes for example), and only until the reduced demand would normalize the price to be more reasonable. Because the process of stripping and re-applying in upgrades would always be a bigger inconvenience than having two gear sets still.

Algreg.3629:

by putting your ideas in here publicly, you almost ensure they will not adapt a storyline similar to your plot. Send them your ideas in private.

They still won’t use your ideas, unless they were already working on a similar story and can show that theirs predates yours (in which case it would be a coincidence that your story lines up with theirs).

The reasons for all of this boils down to legal issues, unless they open submissions under specific terms and rules that deal with copyright and no-royalties etc. “ownership” matters there is virtually no chance fan submissions will be used in such a way that they are anything more than things to draw inspiration from in the same vein Canthan architecture draws inspiration and elements from Asian cultures.

Wanze.8410:

Not getting your upgrade components off unsalvageable gear is an INTENDED sink for them, otherwise they wouldnt be destroyed anymore, while constantly getting new supply in from the forge, salvaged from exotic drops or crafted.

Would like to point out that there actually wasn’t any unsalvageable gear immediately after launch as far as I am aware… the primary reason they became a thing was to restrict karma to gold conversion when they realized that there weren’t nearly enough karma sinks (and arguably now there are even less).

In short it is or at least was not so much about upgrades but ultimately about ectoplasm (back then ectos were supposed to be what dark matter is now in my opinion) and crafting materials, I haven’t got the data to support this but if anything the way upgrades slot in to the economy right now is an after effect of rather than a cause for unsalvageable gear. The trade off for retrieving upgrades was always intended to be loosing the item they were used on (plus that it wasn’t guaranteed even then, excluding BL kits).

Evans.6347:

For the millionth time, there are no culinary applications for Dragonite ore. None. No good can come from feeding it to living beings.

I think a lot of good came out of feeding bloodstone dust to that stupid Grawl on Wintersday though… at least my bank thanks him :P. So I am sure there are applications for Dragonite ore as well that we could benefit from, if not directly then indirectly… as long as we find a suitable sacri… erm volunteer.

sebradle.7034:

The source of the rifle is there is a group of people who believe no two classes can have the same weapon for their elite spec (this has never been stated by anet). If you take this to be true though by a process of elimination of available weapons rifle best fits thief.

Well as for what weapon fits Thief that is assuming the weapon will act in similar fashion to how it is on other classes (ie. Staff = ranged magic stick, for example). Ergo, there is really no credibility to the rifle speculation at all, beyond that it would be nice since SB is utility and AoE more so than a viable ranged weapon.

sebradle.7034:

The source of the melee staff thief is not just the art background by also a data-mined staff skin that looks exactly like the staff in the the art background. This data-mined staff was data-mined at the same time that a large number of elite specialization weapons were data-mined.

Like sword (or more recently warhorn) was datamined for Eles. Granted it still seems to be Rifle 0 vs Staff 2 if you are to keeping score.

Personally I don’t mind a melee staff, we don’t have a two handed melee weapon on Thief as far as I know plus at least it is something that forces them to create new things rather than borrowing from old (fresh animations at the very least, granted they might be able to re-use some of the Revenant base animations, however, those are entirely defensive skills so we can probably assume Thief would be more offensive and thus different).

I don’t take a lot of screenshots, usually means something weird was going on… like in this one, after taking it I remember keenly testing several ledges in different places for extra collision, which I later realized exists to compensate for latency.

Yes please, I don’t mind paying 1g for extracted upgrade, especially if said upgrade is worth 6-14g (even if it is to become account bound as result of extraction, which is frankly a must for this type of item).

Paying ~6g to transfer runes to different gear is a whole lot better than paying 6*6g or in some cases a lot more by wasting the existing runes. Also would make stat swapping ascended gear using the new MF system a lot more appealing.

Basandra Skye.4031:

Teq and TT have unique ascended rewards in addition to the “generic” ones, one of which is a unique weapon skin, the other a couple unique armor skins. In all honesty, if someone wants ascended armor, they might as well fork out the time, effort, and gold, to CRAFT it. Anet is not going to introduce a dungeon token-esque system that would get you ascended stuff any faster than crafting it.

Exactly, the reason ascended armor exists in the first place is because Exotics as it turns out are ridiculously easy to get. Being available in way too many ways at launch and then some. Ascended crafting has hard time gates for that specific reason so that they either are slow or expensive to craft, in some ways both, and remain that way for the foreseeable future.

I’d like one too please, just for completeness sake…

Can someone point me to what is the source of the whole Thief rifle speculation in the first place. Is it still just a character in a trailer that we a) assume to be a player character b) assume to be a medium armor class wielding a rifle c) assume to be a Thief.

Seems rather flimsy, likewise the source for Thief getting melee staff is just an artistic background of what is assumed to be the specialization background image. Polearms in the initial HoT trailer come to mind, not to mention said image conveniently is missing both ends of the weapon depicted as far as I recall, so it could just as well be a Thief using a kit with a bundle that has a long haft for example.

Lord Kuru.3685:

Reset personal story to zero when race is changed.

Not sure if you actually readmy previous post, but in short what makes you think they would or could make personal story replayable in any capacity for race changes if they didn’t do it when the story journal was created.

Astralporing.1957:

Crise.9401:

This topic is amusing, people don’t actually even pay attention to the fact that it is not so much that they won’t give us access than it is that they can’t.

I am well aware that giving access for every prepurchaser to this one event is perhaps not the best idea. I am not talking about that. What i am pointing out is that having a prepurchase whose one of bonuses is a beta access, almost immediately followed by a beta that doesn’t honor that privilege is a very bad PR. No matter how they word it.

While I agree with your second point there. This is a stress test of a few hours and definitely not a weekeend, technicalities I know, but so are the reasons why this is not an open test most likely.

The fact that it is only likely three servers entirely separate from the live game alone puts a hard cap on the people involved that they can’t circumvent, so it is not really about whether involving everyone is good idea or not. It is also logistics, the fact that they physically can not accommodate everyone also means each account has to be flagged manually by someone (or entirely created depending on the inner workings of it all).

Ashen.2907:

Astralporing.1957:

Preacher.9526:

Race change could be done and there have been a million suggestions on how it could be implemented.

I don’t remember even one suggestion that offered a sensible mechanical solution. In fact, most “solutions” concentrated only on how it were to look from the player side.

This.

No player could have offered a mechanical/programming solution because no player knows the inner working of the programming.

Let’s elaborate a bit on that by looking at what is probably the most common player solution, ie. reset personal story on race change. Firstly, this kind of solution faces the same problems as allowing players to replay personal story (because that is what this solution entails) and secondly, there are bunch of minor things the choices in personal story affects, including the state of your home instance (yes that thing you only visit to mine some daily nodes, if even that) as well as numerous open world interactions related to the choice of order to join in particular.

These things seems so minor that they are easy to gloss over from players point of view because they are barely seen by most players. The problem with all of this boils down to the fact that they would have to reset your character state, but also hold partial records of every one of the previous states to an extent (ie. avoid re-earning rewards for example).

One thing to consider, when the story journal was introduced, they wouldn’t or couldn’t (because of it being either technically impossible, or cost prohibitive) allow parts of personal story to be replayed, if they couldn’t do it for the story journal all the same reasons would apply to race change.

Profession changes on the other hand, while probably easier would have a set of their own problems (namely to do with gear, and that one ultimately insignificant choice in character creation).

This doesn’t even touch on any potential design reasons against them, see Jon Peters post about why Hero Points can not be reset on demmand… of the top of my head I can’t come up with parallel for race change but that is because I too do not know how the inner systems interact with each other or have enough information on the desing behind personal story now and at launch as well as how the system accommodates for that design.

Heh, you aren’t supposed to outheal conditions, you are supposed to get rid of them (ie. cleanse or distribute) or mitigate them with boons such as Resistance.

The edge from stats as far as I know comes from one or both of two things… ie. the scaling has been adjusted to account for the existence of ascended gear and/or toned so that low level gear that has less overall stat selection (ie. 1 or 2 stats vs 3 different stats) has the same budget of stat points as downscaled 80 gets from their equipment. Meaning a lowbie that has only one stat (say power) has thus more power from that piece than downscaled 80 that is sporting say zerkers or soldiers gear.

I haven’t done the math myself but these are the kind of reasons that have been shared by people for this change here and elsewhere. Either way it is not a bug, but an intended change.

You still have a major edge as down scaled player, full trait and skill selection, more variety in stats as mentioned and above all else Superior Runes and Sigils. By the way I find it confusing that you not having statistical superiority towards lowbies would bother anoyone so much that they would loose enjoyment of the game over something trivial like that.

The whole point of downscaling is to make content in lower level areas relevant to everyone in such a way that it isn’t completely broken by your statistical advantage. In other words one could say, the very reason downscaling exists is so that level 80 players do not have that statistical superiority you long for when the content is tuned for lower stats.

This topic is amusing, people don’t actually even pay attention to the fact that it is not so much that they won’t give us access than it is that they can’t. Realistically, this test consists of three servers, and since main WvW has no overflows, well space is limited is just a fact.

How they are selecting their invited players (that we know of) can be discussed to no end, however, there are probably reasons that are technical in nature making it necessary to have separate servers and, likely, clients for this test. Stress tests by nature give them best results the more people are involved in them, but the fact is there are only three maps and no overflows (+ EB).

minbariguy.7504:

And it took this long to get an honest, concrete reply because…er, why, exactly?

Well., part of it may be that now they can actually refer to HoT as HoT rather than something totally ambiguous. Other than that, there probably wasn’t a strong need for them to say anything until the discussion picked up once more… I mean the reply isn’t exactly positive news (not negative either in that nothing has really changed, other than “no SAB before HoT” is basically set in stone now, but at least I wasn’t really expecting it before HoT, hoping maybe but not expecting).

Merlin Heir.9021:

Gear swap: when is that happening?

I don’t thing that is likely to happen any time soon, at least not done well… ie. they could probably do something akin to how PvP gear wast at launch, in other words require you to use separate gear not make it an option. Otherwise there are number of issues where items might get accidentally duplicated (unless they allow creation or conversion of special gear from existing items only applicable to WvW or something).

Either way it seems rather finicky to me. WvW uses the PvE ruleset for gear and stats and it has always had the benefit of being able to level up and gear a toon in WvW and then take it out to PvE if one wants to do so (my go to currency for exotics is still badges of honor or crafting for alts, depending on stats but often I still start off in WvW gear, I don’t want that to change if gear management for WvW were to change)-

I rather they do a proper management of builds that is applicable to both WvW and PvE (including gear), as well as templates for sPvP, than try and separate gear for WvW itself. So in other words, I would rather wait for a more comprehensive system than look for WvW specifc solution in the interim that could be more limiting in sense than what we have right now.

If past releases are anything to go by it will be a Tuesday at some indeterminate point in the future. Once upon a time we might have speculated it to be every other Tuesday, but right now there is no real basis for such speculation.

Kal Spiro.9745:

My hope is that this rewards overhaul will make SAB a legitimate game feature. Meaning you can get xp and level just by playing SAB, and potentially earn gold from more than skin drops.

I don’t think they should incentivize gold earning through the trading of the blue SAB skins any more than they have in the past to be honest. If they would make SAB more integrated in the overall reward structure of the game the opposite would be more likely.

For example (not that I think this exact approach is a good idea as is): treat normal mode runs bit like story mode dungeons (adding scaling daily account exp and currency rewards in addition to the inventory available through baubles as a currency of course) and Tribulation mode something like the explorable paths.

skullmount.1758:

CrashTestAuto.9108:

lordkrall.7241:

So, here you have your comment about where SAB is:

Rinith’s reply is probably the closest description to the reality as of today where we stand with SAB. We’ve made a number of changes to the physics engine as a result of places like Silverwastes, Dry Top, and the expac that means we need to go back and re-work SAB to use all the new movement systems. It also needs a pretty solid rewards overhaul, and I know Josh would love to make some changes to world 2 before it returns.
We’re all focused on expansion – both the announced details, and the un-announced details and simply can’t peel anyone off a team to work on it right now without it effecting expac. The two SAB worlds we’ve seen will return as we’ve said before, but simply put our focus right now is on making the expansion amazing

https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/3bqhaf/infinite_continue_coin/csoszn5

Umm… what does he mean “needs a pretty solid rewards overhaul”??? SAB has the best reward system in the game!!! The balance between “luck/money/farming” for blues and then “skill/dedication” for greens and yellows (which are just different colours, not qualitatively better than blues) was fantastic!

I’m with this guy. Why the kitten does SAB need a “solid rewards overhaul”? Its the best system in the game. If anything stuff like Teq and TT need to be overhauled so that they are more like SAB reward structure. Its like they try to kill SAB off, first with the “rework” to world 1 and the bauble changes, now this…

What he might be alluding to is looking at the differences between what the rewards for SAB were originally and what they were for the second release (see wiki for details). Because at the time of that release they did get a decent amount of critique because of those differences. Especially because stocking up on continue coins became more laborious while Tribulation mode became a huge sink for them. In my opinion an entirely valid criticism, though thanks to the Infinite Continue Coin it got completely blown out of proportion.

I doubt they would change the requirements for skin acquisition of any type from SAB in any significant way (that is the single best part of SAB reward scheme, as in the skins are truly tied to skill sans the entry level rewards of course), if they did the salt would be real everywhere, from anyone who went through the Tribulation Mode.

The kind of things they might change include how Tribulation mode treats lives or the rate at which baubles can be earned, which while likely devaluing the blue skins (not a bad thing unless you are looking to cash in on the TP long term using them, which I think shouldn’t be something they should encourage) could make going for the Tribulation skins less of an exercise in living inside the box for the duration of the release window to farm baubles for higher possible number of attempts and more about actually getting through the Tribulation mode itself.

In short, not necessarily about making the rewards easier to get as much as them being more varied (see obi shards being removed from Moto’s selection for the second release, there is no reason why this should not be reverted for example and add some ascended mats there while you are at it) and allowing people to try for different rewards with lower barrier to entry (keyword being try, as this wouldn’t take away the skill required to get the hardest skins at all).

This is just my interpretation of this of course, but seeing as how on the ball the people involved with SAB were about not allowing access to Trib mode skins on someone the coattails of the effort of someone else I don’t see why that would have suddenly changed.