Guild Wars 2

“A level 80 character that’s done none of the hero challenges should be able to unlock more than enough skills, specializations, and traits to make several unique full builds. A single character who’s done a fair amount of the hero challenges should be able to unlock all of the core specializations, skills, and traits. "

Heibi.4251:

Lemondish.3268:

Heibi.4251:

OMG!!!!
ANeT looks like they’re trying to duplicate LOTRO. I stopped playing LOTRO due to the grind and the ridiculous way the changed “specialization” tree for characters. It became a chaotic mess.
A simple understandable trait system is best. You should stick with it. This new example looks like LOTRO. But obviously you’ve made up your minds to complicate the system and we can’t change it. Look what happened when you changed the original trait system. The vast majority hated it and it was poorly thought out.

Please stop.

How is the current system better? How is it simpler? 99% of possible builds in the old system are complete crap. For example stuff like 1/1/6/5/1 with all Adept Traits, and that’s just an extreme example. Why would you want a system that has so many traps and pitfalls? Why would you think its simpler? What part of it do you prefer over this? Is it just an issue you have with the UI?

With the new system it will be much harder to create these kind of obscene crap combinations, since you’ll always get 3 Adept, 3 Master, AND 3 Grandmaster traits. The choices are a bit more limited, but it makes them much more meaningful. I’m not sure how this isn’t a simpler method. You can’t actually go wrong with this.

Simple is better. The example I looked at along with the graphics are a close comparison to LOTRO’s. LOTRO created a tree-like system and you applied points to the tree which opened up other parts of the tree and it was never really clear and was not easy to use. So, simple is better. And I’ve never seen anyone run a 1/1/1/6/5/1 build once they understood the way things work. Again, simple is better. Lots can go wrong when you complicate the process.

There are no tree systems here; unlocks are linear progressions within a trait or skill line. You spend hero points and you go up the track. As for allocating the trait points, you’re only ever picking from one of three trait choices at each tier. And picking from three of six trait lines if you have the expansion. Single, non-branching choices at all points.

I think people have slightly inflated expectations about some of these systems; there is absolutely nothing remaining to talk about with respect to Masteries that doesn’t involve revealing information about other parts of the PvE systems, for instance. We’ve seen all of the Mastery tooltips from the Beta event, and they’ve explained how they work.

We’ve seen the new sPvP map, we’ve had a ton of information about the new Borderlands, we’ve been given a glimpse into how open world, hard boss content, and personal story will work with HoT and been given insight into some really significant changes to map rewards. Precursor crafting has been detailed. We’ve gotten a little bit of lore. We’ve seen how gliding and mushrooms will work.

Other than specializations and guild halls they’ve told us most of what we’re getting. A lot of what they haven’t told us are things they probably shouldn’t, and should let us discover from actually playing the expansion.

And as to specializations, talking about them individually and in depth, before they’re relatively certain on exactly what the new trait line, 8-11 new skills (six utility + weapon), and profession mechanic look like is just asking for trouble. That kind of thing won’t be finalized until pretty late in the process. This goes double if they’re also doing work on the base professions to modernize them for these changes. They can only spend nine weeks stringing out specialization updates if there’s more than 9 weeks between finalizing them and the player base having access to them via either beta events, or the expansion launching. I suspect that may not end up being the case.

Not being able to do that greatly reduces the amount of mechanically beefy weekly updates they can make.

Khenzo.2465:

lordkrall.7241:

There were plenty of new info in this article and quite likely the blog post coming tomorrow will also contain some new information.

So what are we complaining about again?

We want info on you know, the actual expansion features, sorry I was mistaken in thinking that frog tribes was not one of them.

I get the vibe you are trying to white knight, you know full well what the complaints about information are regarding but I will help anyway.

The moaning is about lack if info on the meaty things of expac, the things you buy it for.

Understand?

There hasn’t been any such lack, the last few weeks have simply been focused on things you don’t care about; Masteries, Precursor crafting, Revenant, Stronghold, Borderlands Map, Defiance changes and the direction for new Boss encounters have all been discussed. Counting the Hylek, two updates will have been lore and story related, and they also provide info about what the pve experience is going to be like, outside of their narrower focuses. Everything else has been mechanics and feature reveals. If you look at the HoT page, and cross all that stuff out, there’s only Specializations and Guild Halls left to talk about in terms of big features; there’s room to further discuss previous topics, but they have at least been introduced.

Brother Grimm.5176:

All this discussion about if it’s needed is moot. It’s not economically feasable, so it’s not going to happen.

The argument that it’s not hard to do (so it should be done) is also not taking into account that they CANNNOT abandon the current DX9 client, so they would have to support both. That effectively doubles all development and testing costs from here on out. Again, not gonna happen.

1. You have no basis to say it’s not economically feasible; that it’s lower priority than some other feature has nothing to do with feasibility and everything to do with opportunity costs. HoT is definitely more important than DX12, for instance. That doesn’t mean they can’t do a new renderer when it makes sense versus other development priorities.

2. It does not double development and testing costs; the marginal cost of supporting a new renderer is significantly less than the cost of supporting the entire game. So it increases costs by some amount, but it does not anywhere near double them. Many code changes will have nothing to do with the renderer, not all features will be supported by both, etc etc.

Something to note: going by recent Steam Survey results, the number of people on DX9 only systems is very low. Platform support is not really an issue anymore, especially since DX12 will benefit much of the existing hardware (something not true of previous DX releases) as long as people upgrade to Windows 10.

It probably doesn’t make sense to worry about this until DX12 officially comes out though. Moving to DX11 doesn’t make any sense when the gains from 12 will be much larger, and waiting to see how Windows 10 adoption goes makes sense. If the majority of Windows 7 users move to Windows 10, moving to the new apis is more of an inevitability than a question; if GW2 wants to last a decade, and there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be looking to, it’s going to need to do graphics updates to stay with the times. Unlike GW1 there’s no fundamental limiting factor in the design that’s going to force a sequel to correct.

Also though, adopting new graphics features in addition to the multithreading benefits may result in costs from having to upgrade content pipelines and tool chains, so it’s not as simple as new renderer.

este.8651:

This needs to be play tested by over 200 person battles before the features are finalized. WvW is an entirely different game when you have more than a few dozen which is what it looks like they designed the map with.

The new PvE dynamic is way out of left field. We thought the hyleks or dredge were what we thought of as “PvE” in wvw and the community has had a gripe over that forever.

“But you don’t know what pain is!!!”

Thats how it feels. Now the PvE is something we have to deal with and cannot go around. Its not the immersive experience we were after, we can do that in Tyria. It attacks all objectives? what kind of damage are we talking about?

But most importantly, Why do the direct opposite of what the community asks for?? I mean I can understand a little different, but why specifically the direct opposite?

GG

I fail to see how racing to kill dinosaurs to grab power cores and bring them back to camps while avoiding being killed by other players so they can steal those items and turn them in themselves is some PvE style event. They’ve said the dinosaurs are very easy to kill, to the point where zerging to deal with that event is super inefficient so that should tell you something; the difficulty isn’t in the pve side of the equation, it’s in dealing with the players running the power cores. Think part race part capture the flag, and still very much focused on the player competition aspects and not mindlessly hitting dumb AI. It only starts looking like a PvE event if no one contests the capture, but that’s not any different than what happens if no one contests you taking a keep or a tower either, so…

And the cannon blows up the outer gate of all enemy held structures; so towers will be left with no gates and keeps will have their inner gates left alone.

The ledges and stability changes, along with the new shield generator, create a lot more play in the map, especially in conjunction with the shrine mechanics. Position and situational awareness will matter more, creating the need to have some deeper planning and preparation than just running across the map from objective to objective.

Making the Keep and Tower Lords not simple encounters where the zerg nukes them down in 20 seconds increases play in fights around the lords, rather than making it so that the second the gates are breached a tower is pretty much dead, or so that a smaller defending force has an actual chance of holding a keep from a larger zerg even if they break through to the Lord. And it forces the zerg to play more skillfully rather than just auto attacking the lords down.

All of these changes seem geared at making things more competitive and requiring more thought on the part of attacking forces, and opening up more viable options in terms of tactics for the defense. That’s pretty unequivocally good; it shifts the balance away from being solely a numbers game toward being something where skillful coordination and planning matter more.

Levetty.1279:

So on 1 weapon set it has a fire field and a single skill that does 3 blast finishers? How are people defending this powercreep, its ridiculous..

Because of the size and shape of the field and the blast finishers, you’re not going to get the benefit of all three. It’s designed more to help large groups without needing quite so much stacking.

There’s additional counter play for condi necros if Mallyx condi draws end up being used a bunch; epidemic will put them all right back where they came from. Revenants could provide good incentive to slot that on your bar.

dlonie.6547:

Artemis Thuras.8795:

xDudisx.5914:

Dave.2536:

Lord Kuru.3685:

My guess: mobs will move out of AOEs and so you’ll need AOE taunts to keep them in.

Why bother taunting? If they’re designed to run out of AoEs just bring 3-4 staff eles and 1-2 hammer guardians.

Huehuehue while the enemies continually knock themselves down in Ring of Warding while not attacking the group since they have been pre-programmed to flee.

For bosses just maintain cripples and chills to keep them in it.

They might have stab? They might not start stacked? We don’t know. Need more info.

2-3 staff eles, 1-2 hammer guards, 1 mesmer with time warp + null field.
One guard could start with gs #5 to pull them in then ring.

Oh man, you’re right. AoE avoidance + binding blades + ring of warding + [any AoE] would be really freakin hilarious xD

I mean, it wouldn’t be that hard to program the AI to have a priority list so that fleeing AoE fields is something it does, but at a lower priority than not walking into walls. So if you ring of warding a mob, it’d sit there and take the AoE until the ring went away, then move. Similarly, it could prioritize killing a low health player, or not interrupting it’s own skill activations, rather than moving out of an AoE field as well.

Non naïve implementations aren’t going to be so easy to break.

Few things: I think there’s an interesting interaction that no one’s brought up between Taunt and Confusion, if Taunt can force an on demand attack from a mob.

Secondly, a lot of the current pve issues arise from inadequately complex mob behaviors, not so much because of a lack of options for support or control.

Third GW2 has always had a trinity of sorts with Damage, Control, and Support, it’s just that that was never intended to be restricted to one role per character. Everyone is responsible for doing all three. I don’t see that changing, which means all dps groups, if they’re skilled enough, are pretty much guaranteed to be part of the meta; control doesn’t scale with stats and support is more about avoidance, which also doesn’t scale with stats, than strictly about healing. That means a full dps group will control and support close to, if not as well as, other options. Because they’ve sacrificed all defensive and healing stats, they’ll be on razor thin margins if they don’t apply those things perfectly, but the ideal they should be aiming for is to have it so that running more mixed builds will let you complete content that’s too hard for your group otherwise, but full dps in groups that can effectively utilize control and support will clear faster.

This does require that the content actually be hard, so my previous point needs to be resolved, but there’s nothing really wrong with zerker meta, except that everyone can do it. It should be aspirational rather than a requirement.

Muchacho.2390:

Eolirin.1830:

Condition stripping works too btw, so allies have plenty of options for removing the effect too.

What makes you think taunt is a condition? To me it sound more like a normal status effect like a stun, daze etc.

Ah, you’re right, it is listed that way. All the references to Fear, which is a condition, got me confused.

Ohoni.6057:

This means you’ll want to keep a stun breaker on your bar, or stability.

Well thank you, I’ve never played this game before so I found that comment extremely informative.

Now, maybe you could let me know what to do when I am Feared, and use my stunbreak, and am Taunted, and use my second stunbreak, because who slots just one, and then am Taunted again? Are there any stunbreaks with less than five second cooldowns that I’m not aware of? Should I pack three stunbreakers, and if so, why don’t they just remove all the utilities that aren’t stunbreakers?

Not sure how this is any different than the current situation of fear, knock down, knock back, and pull. The opportunity cost of Taunt means you have one less of some other sort of cc, and they all have the same functional effect. Condition stripping works, so allies have plenty of options for removing the effect too.

The only thing that’d really make it interesting rather than just being a reverse fear, is if it forces targets to autoattack, and then only because of the interaction with things like Confusion and Projectile reflection.

DavidH.7380:

Perhaps I am the one missing the point, but it seems like this is mostly a case of not being able to have it all, along with the additional need to have multi-month time sinks for players that invest 4+ hours a day.

If you tie rewards to going around the world doing specific goals, then either the dedicated players will blow through everything in a month and complain about there being nothing to do, or you have to set each goal to take 60 hours or so in order to gate it to two goals a month max. If you require 60 hours of, say, jumping puzzles to get a mini or a skin, then you’ve created a typical “grind” of the type Anet is trying to avoid.

To avoid that issue you can substitute gold. If everything generates gold, and gold can buy everything, then you can do whatever you want for 60 hours and buy your item, or just buy gold with cash and fund the game, or be an auction house trader, or whatever strikes your fancy. Of course, the unintended side effect seems to be that people who are playing for direct pursuit of goals find themselves in a permanent “meta grind”…. grind gold, non-stop, for everything you want.

To avoid that issue you can time gate instead, but investing “waiting time” isn’t exactly riveting or challenging game play.

I honestly sympathize with the game designers. I don’t know how you balance people who play two hours a week with those who play 6 hours a day, and people who are highly skilled with people who can’t ever finish a jumping puzzle and just mash buttons as they come off cooldown, and still have everyone feel equally entertained and rewarded.

The need for gold sinks creates problems for the gold solves all issues thing as well; in order for the economy to remain stable your average player can’t have massive surpluses of gold. That means really rare luxury items like precursors are never going to be accessible via gold to the bulk of the playerbase, not even via gems. Edit: This is actually true even if you allow rampant inflation, actually, so the lead in there is slightly misleading.

And time gating isn’t that big a deal. It just means you can only make so much progress a day. The actual content you tie the rewards to can be challenging and riveting, you just can’t binge on it super hard. I don’t see this as a problem. You can even do a scaling kind of thing like with dungeons, where you can get a drip of payout for repeating content, but the bulk of the reward is front loaded so that it’s more efficient to rotate than repeat. (While, obviously, avoiding the issues the dungeon system has in practice, where things like farming CoF is still more time efficient because of its super fast clear times)

Devata.6589:

But again we get to the point where you would almost conclude that cosmetic people should play non-cosmetic games.

You should in fact, conclude that, to the extent that that’s all that matters to the player. That’s what happens when you remove gear progression, scarcity falls to cosmetics, and demand pushes up prices; where gear progression matters, it’s all about stats instead.

“Having more time gated but consistent payout systems would alleviate some of the rng pain” no that would not make it better, in a way the gold grind already does that. It’s a really consistent payout but just takes time to get the money you need to buy. Also I do not need to get stuff for free only by putting in ‘waiting time’. That sounds interesting to you?

About the materials, that would already be nice if it would be directly obtainable in a viable way instead of the only viable way being the grind gold and buy it. Even is the total time spend might still be similar (for most).

I’m sorry, I was not attempting to imply that said time gated but consistent payout systems had to look like login rewards, they should obviously be tied to content. They need to be time gated though, or the time to item for gear will drop dramatically; presumably the amount of time it takes the average player to acquire the types of gear we’re talking about is roughly where ArenaNet wants it to be, as they have metrics for that kind of thing. And things like sudden influxes of crafting mats would cause market collapses. The point of timed systems is to provide a casual alternative to gold farming; for anything that can be purchased, that’ll remain the most efficient method of acquisition, the consistent payout is a way to provide gradual, slower, access to that kind of item for players who don’t want to do that, without inducing inflation via lump sum gold payouts.

Edit: I suppose the big argument you could make is for a much greater amount of account bound on pickup cosmetic rewards available to solo players throughout the game, rather than relying primarily on crafting and group content. There’s a legitimate issue there I think.

Devata.6589:

Sorry but what a nonsense. As if the people complaining just don’t know how mmo’s work and never played another mmo and so don’t understand Anet’s version is as grind-free as it can get.

I did play multiple other MMO’s and the fact is that if it comes to the game-play I like best (cosmetic stuff) guild-wars is the most grindy of them all, by far, the others didn’t even come close in amount of grind. (Resulting in me not doing this game-play in GW2) Sure, I had to farm a mob to get a mini to drop a few times in those other mmo’s but then there were also mini’s rewarded for quests, for dungeons (sometimes RNG other times 100%) and so on. All in all it was not so very grindy to collect all those items, it did feel much more like a hunt all over the world.

So it’s perfectly reasonable to ask for the same in GW2.

In GuildWars 2 however that is all grind gold, grind gold and grind gold.

No, it isn’t perfectly reasonable to ask the same, as cosmetic items do not fill the same role in GW2’s content design. Cosmetic variations are GW2’s replacement for epic tier loot, and cannot be compared to a more traditional mmo’s cosmetic unlocks.

When you compare time to Legendary in GW2 to time to a full max tier epic set in WoW, GW2 comes out fairly favorably (and even more so in that Legendaries are forever and that max tier epic is always one content release away from obsolete). The issue here is a mismatch of expectations arising from the nonstandard approach to gear progression; if the cosmetic unlocks were as easy in GW2 as they are in other MMOs there would be close to zero prestige items in the game. The prestige cosmetic items are meant to be as out of reach, or perhaps it’d be better to call it aspirational, for your casual player as a full raid set is in another game. And even there, there are many more ways to make progress toward those items in GW2, at much lower skill levels.

Things are just generally more accessible to a much greater portion of the playerbase than just about anywhere else, once you factor the skill and time gates of endgame content in those other games.

Edit: which to echo Colin, isn’t to say that there aren’t ways to make some of that less obnoxious or boring. Having more time gated but consistent payout systems would alleviate some of the rng pain points and provide a more consistent sense of progression, especially if tied to more interesting content, rather than just log in bonuses, and I think there’s a legitimate debate to be had surrounding the rarity/crafting requirement ratios for certain t6 materials, particularly lodestones. More normalization of time to item within a specific class of gear would be good, rather than having that vary wildly depending on material type.

DarksunG.9537:

Eolirin.1830:

If I recall correctly ArenaNet devs have straight up said there was no coherent plan until Nightfall. Nightfall’s story was written by Jeff Grubb who wasn’t with the company until then, and I believe he was also responsible for fleshing out the world into something coherent and with a developed history.

yup. Which makes me wonder why he didn’t do the story for GW2. including the LS, which is just… not good.

His job for GW2 is world building. He’s intimately involved in the dragons, the history of the races, which factions exist, where the overall arc of the world is headed, etc.

I’d argue that story has had some significant issues in every GW release, Nightfall being no exception, and that season 2 of LS is actually the closest they’ve gotten to something solid, albeit in too short a form.

Game writing, never mind for MMOs, tends to be fairly awful by the metric of more traditional mediums though, I can count the number of games that I’d consider to be well written on one hand, and they’re almost all adventure games or visual novels; holding an MMO to any sort of literary standard is just asking for trouble. When you compare GW2 to it’s peers, it holds up pretty well.

FlamingFoxx.1305:

Obsidian.1328:

lordkrall.7241:

Funny how people seems to have an issue with everything (which is not even the case) being about the Dragons and yet the same people usually praise how good Guild Wars 1 was. Despite everything (and that was basically actually everything) was about Abaddon.

That’s because everything wasn’t about Abaddon…until Nightfall. They retroactively made him responsible for both Shiro and the Searing.

It wasn’t quite as retroactive as you think. Prophecies actually had a lot of nods towards Nightfall. We encountered Turai Ossa and heard of his pilgrimage, there was a mission called “Elona Reach”, we fought back the titans at “Abaddon’s Mouth”. Sure the entire story may not have been plotted out from the beginning, but they clearly had some idea of what they were doing. And it is no different to any other MMO, expansions reveal new things that may or may not have been initially planned, or may have been planned at a later stage. It doesn’t mean they’ve suddenly gone back and retroactively changed the lore, because they never actually altered anything about Prophecies. The stories clearly link into one another, whether it was initially devised that way or not is irrelevant. It doesn’t lessen prophecies or nightfall’s story if the links were figured out after Prophecies had already been released (and there is no way they hadn’t considering Nightfall was released so soon after Prophecies).

If I recall correctly ArenaNet devs have straight up said there was no coherent plan until Nightfall. Nightfall’s story was written by Jeff Grubb who wasn’t with the company until then, and I believe he was also responsible for fleshing out the world into something coherent and with a developed history. Prophecies and Factions were making stuff up as they went along. So no, those references to Turai Ossa and Elona weren’t put in with any knowledge or intention of where things were headed, Nightfall instead took those references and built itself from them.

But you’re right that it doesn’t diminish either story.

There are structural issues at a gameplay level that make having a non-Dragon focus, and especially with regard to the race specific stuff that we’re exposed to in the early PS, very difficult. Content needs to make sense for all five playable races as the primary protagonists.

Charr have no compelling reason to care about the political machinations of the Krytan court, and Norn aren’t likely to care about the Inquest. Humans aren’t likely to care about the Norn’s Raven or Snow Leopard being in trouble, and Asura aren’t likely to care about anything that’s not part of their research. If there isn’t a Dragon involved at some level, there’s not a ton of reason why a character of an otherwise uninvolved race would be involved in the first place. And the PS follows this path too; as we move out of the early starter zones and away from race specific narrative the focus becomes increasingly Dragon driven.

I don’t see a practical way out of that except by the introduction of additional race specific story missions, and I kind of doubt that it’s practical to do that as a matter of development resources, as it requires five times the content.

Not that we can’t get content involving those racial specific things mind; we’ve gotten plenty of that in both LS seasons. But due to the structure of being an MMO with multiple playable races it pretty much has to be filtered through the lens of Dragon threats (or some other World Threatening Big Bad, which I can’t see happening while there are still Dragons to slay, but it’ll be interesting to see what Palawa Joko’s been up to once his turn comes around – and you can also do gold rush kind of scenarios where a new exciting discovery leads to everyone wanting to explore some place that’s just opened up, like, idk, Cantha, but again, that’d feel weird when there’s at least 3 Dragons actively trying to kill you in your own backyard)

Edit: The one exception to this would be if we got new dungeons. Dungeon stories allow for effective side stories, much as the current set does, and while you can do this in standard story missions, it’s a lot harder because the stories will by necessity be an aside to the primary arc. For the LS in particular, that breaks flow really bad.

John Smith.4610:

juno.1840:

QUESTIONS

1. What gold threshold would you use to classify a GW2 player as “rich” (yeah I know this is subjective, but let’s use the RL equivalent of multi-millionaires — my guess would be 6000g-ish, enough to buy a couple legendaries off the TP)

2. Roughly what percentage of the GW2 player population would fall into this “rich” category (probably tough since “smart” players would have their wealth in inflation-proof investments instead of cash in the vault — an educated percentage based upon your view of the data would be more than satisfactory)

3. How does this category of players effect the economy? (maybe a good/bad/neutral type of classification with a brief reason or two as to why)

Thanks!

These are value statements, and I don’t feel comfortable making value statements.

Okay then, how about this then? What’s the average and standard deviation of player wealth in the game?

Zenith.7301:

I count December, January, and February in the amount of time you’ve had to come with substantive changes for ailing classes like the Ranger in PvE.

And all I can see is an anemic list of changes. What gives?

The change to Burning Speed makes no sense. Burning speed is the damage staple of an elementalist. As an elementalist, because your autoattacks do terrible damage, you need to spam a chain of cooldown skills. And a large portion of that damage as DD is a burning speed.

Which means timing burning speed, a gap closer and burst opener as a defensive skill makes no sense. It’s just like making Swoop evade.

Making Burning Speed evade means you can’t be dazed or stunned or immobilized when using it to close a gap. It’s not something you use for the evade, it’s something that’s made much stronger by being immune to being shut down on response.

Alfador.7649:

It’s been beaten like a dead horse but there are 2 glaring flaws with this approach.

Ferocity: This is clearly intended to change the PvE gear meta away from berserker. It will not do that. People will continue to emphasize berserker gear. Everything will still be zerk stacked. It will just take an extra 30 seconds to kill things. Nothing short of changing fight mechanics will push people out of the zerk and stack mentality.

It’s goal isn’t really to shift PvE away from zerker meta, at least not by itself. The main reason to do it this way is to normalize the way that Crit damage works as a trait with every other trait in the game, so that scaling can be more effective, and so that there can be more options in how crit damage is put on things. Additionally choosing to reduce the maximum value by around10% is a separate thing, and something that has to happen regardless of what the content looks like, because crit damage stacking is currently too good period. So no, with the current content there won’t be any change to meta as a result of this, but this change has to happen in advance of whatever content changes they may want to make, so that the content can be balanced around more sane numbers.

It does what it’s supposed to do, it’s just not the whole solution.

Vigor: Actually like this. Vigor seems slightly too available, but the method of the nerf is not good. At 50% uptime (up to maybe 70% with the correct boon duration foods), vigor is going to be very spiky. It will not force players to plan their dodges better. It in fact will take “planning” out of the equation altogether, since without actually watching the endurance meter like a hawk, people won’t actually know if they can dodge. Instead of nerfing vigor uptime, an equivalent nerf to vigor regen rate would be much, much more desirable way to push towards the same goal.

You can still maintain at or near100% vigor uptime, depending on class, even after these changes. You just can’t do it with a single 5 point minor trait. You get 50% uptime from the on-crit trait alone, but you can still get vigor from other sources.

It’s more that you now have to build for it if you want 100% uptime. That’s a good thing.

Also, I will say that the idea that people don’t already watch their dodge meter in high level play isn’t very representative of how the game is played, and is certainly no different than it is with cheap 100% vigor uptime; you will still run out of dodges if you’re using them too quickly, even with vigor. Reducing vigor only reduces the number of dodges you get to take over a long enough time horizon, and has no other significant gameplay effect, other than, potentially, changes to builds.

At the very least, celestial needs its intended ferocity amount bumped up.

This is happening: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/balance/Celestial-Ferocity-nerf/3567702

Pedra.4381:

Nebilim.5127:

Excuse me? There is the normal mode that was made for the broader audience. So we have that to appeal to the majority and tribulation to appeal to the minority. Everyone is happy. Are you telling me that the minority should be ignored because the resources could be used for something else for you guys? Nice hypocrisy mate.

I’ll explain a bit, Mate. Nothing I mentioned that needs fixing is related to a small elite group of players. Everything; meta, balance, buggy releases, applies to everyone, so what I’m suggesting is that instead of continuing to stroke their egos and do stuff that makes it into the trade journals, they need to focus on the core of this game and get it right. Until they do that, all the resources they expend elsewhere is a ridiculous waste.

Hire someone that understands how to fix the meta. Hire someone that understands how to balance professions through a method other than “whack-a-mole”. Hire someone that knows how to run a quality assurance program and stop publishing horrendously buggy content. Stop using the live servers, and us, as their test bed.

So do I think all of that is more important than catering to a very select few of platform jumpers? Yes, I do, most definitely.

There are different teams in the company working on different projects. Things are done in parallel. Josh’s team, mostly content designers, some artists, and a minimal amount of programming support, would never be responsible for meta, balance, loot, QA, progression, or any system that touches the entire game. Nor would hiring a bunch of additional devs dramatically increase progress on those fronts; there is a diminishing return to additional developers. It’s a choice of SAB or some other content, not of SAB and gameplay improvements.

Keep in mind that ANet has actual metrics about how many players spent time in SAB, and you don’t. They clearly feel it’s popular enough to warrant continued content resources.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

You mean content that’s beyond “Liadri difficult”? OH BOY!!!

Given who’s saying it, I’d think it’s more appropriate to say harder than the Clock Tower hard.

Essence Snow.3194:

That’s incomplete information, so any assumptions made from it fail to hold water unfortunately. Had it provided sales across all prices at or across a certain time frame, then we could surmise something of value.

That’s not true. When the guides call for exactly 25 dilled cream sauce, and dilled cream sauce purchases are almost entirely being made in batches of 25, it’s not at all unreasonable to draw the conclusion that the people buying dilled cream sauce are following those guides. There being high demand for dilled cream sauce drives up the demand for dill, which is used to create it, and so the price of dill spikes.

Astraea.6075:

Aurisai.3416:

Now I’m going to really drive our Anet friend crazy with my next statement (please don’t take offence) The very fact that it is possible to buy gold with rl money, albeit through indirect trade of gems, introduces a large amount of gold into the in-game economy that wasn’t “earned” through farming. If this increase in the gold supply is not counteracted strongly enough with gold sinks, we have a textbook economic definition of inflation (an expansion of the money supply, which cannot but eventually lead to higher prices).

The gem -> gold exchange increasing the money supply in the game might be a problem if it wasn’t for the fact that the gold -> gem exchange reduces the money supply.

Are these two equal? I don’t know with any certainty, but given the gap between the 2 rates, as long as the quantity of gems converted to gold is no more than 30% more than the number of gems bought with gold, then the net effect should be to actually remove money from the economy.

If I understand how it works correctly, all of the gold in the exchange was put there by players, so the exchange always removes gold from the economy, as the amount that the selling player gets is less than the buying player put in. No gold is being generated, and so there is no need to worry about weird interactions.

So you create some of the best dye colors in the game, at least in my opinion, and then you not only lock them behind bad odds in an RNG that you need to spend gems on, you also make them time limited? In a system where all of the dyes need to be unlocked per character?

That’s not cool ArenaNet.

Orc Slayer.2780:

How does the TP show increased efficiency?

Efficiency in the way that John was using it refers to the way that price levels are determined. It is provably more efficient from an economic point of view than how WoW does things. There’s no room for debate about that.

Asglarek.8976:

They didn’t fix the major issue they passed the buck on culling a fix would be a total redesign on their gw2 engine from the ground up not a redesign on the antiquated gw1 engine. What they did with culling is the same thing they did with orbs they just removed it and kittenly I might add by only giving the client some laymanish presets lowest/low lol how pathetic is that.

What they did was expose just how bad their engine is now that culling on their end is gone the real issue will be as I have said all along skill lag and how it will eventually destroy wvw.

Skill activation lag with no other lag is a server capacity related issue, not an engine issue at all, and would only be marginally impacted by culling being turned off.

thehipone.6812:

Read how I defined a success, click on the salvage study that I linked, click the results tab and let me know what you find. I’m using the best data that I could find, which indicates that the probability is closer to 75%. If you have better data, please provide.

The sample size is too small for BLSKs to get anything resembling a correct drop rate. In absence of at least a thousand data points, I’m going to trust that the stated 50% on the tool tip is in fact accurate, unless a dev says otherwise.

thehipone.6812:

What you want is the binomial probability, which fits if:

-The experiment involves repeated trials.
-Each trial has only two possible outcomes – a success or a failure.
-The probability that a particular outcome will occur on any given trial is constant.
-All of the trials in the experiment are independent.

Binomial Calculator

If we define a success as any salvage producing an ecto we can figure out how likely it is to “fail” any 24 out of 25 salvages (in any order). Looking at the data in the Ecto salvage research thread

we see that the research has produced a chance of success (as I have defined above) of about 75% for the BLSK. Using this data we can ask what is the probability of getting 1 success out of 25 trials?

I get about 6.7 × 10^ – 14

0.00000003 or whatever % was too generous.

The chance of success of a BLSK is 50%, not 75%. Within that 50% success rate there is a chance to receive between 1 and 3 ectos. While this changes the amount of ectos you get on average, you are still at a 50% chance to get nothing for each individual use. This is explicitly stated on the BLSK tooltip itself.

Nike.2631:

I don’t discount them. I’m one of them. I’d sell probably 60% of the possible precursor drops to finance my Infinite Light project. Thing is that would still mean there are more than 230 precursors dropping per day to people who don’t want what they got – and I don’t believe that is true. The volume of Dusks changing hands is too high to be entirely – or IMO even “largely” – drop-based.

Now THERE is the magic question for John Smith, then number that would be profoundly illuminating:

How many Dusks were produced by the Mystic Forge in the last 24 hours?

I’m not saying that there isn’t some amount of forge generation, just that even 230 Precursors a day is not really that much for a game with the population size of GW2. Without actual data, it’s impossible to make a solid determination on where they’re coming from, but the numbers aren’t wildly out of bound. Half the professions can’t even use Greatswords, and profession distribution is relatively equal, so half the population isn’t going to need a Greatsword legendary.

Edit: Not to mention that Dusk covers most of the cost of Infinite Light just by itself; it being in much more demand makes it much easier to want to sell it rather than keep it and try to get all the other expensive things you’d need for a legendary

Nike.2631:

Honestly, with 10 per day entering the market someone has figured out there’s a decent long term return to buying and flushing exotics and has found the rewards outweight the risks when you can sell the results for 700g. Or possibly its further down the supply chain and they are building exotics to flush.

Why do you think this? Given the size of GW2 and the global nature of the trading post, 10 per day entering the market could be mostly due to drops. It’s possible we’re dealing with a hundred thousand active players at level 80 (maybe more, that’s only about 3% of the number of people who bought the game); when several million mobs are being killed every day (just 20 per 100,000 players hits 2 million), even one in a million odd drops will happen fairly regularly.

plasmacutter.2709:

Most other software houses, be they video games or otherwise, take action to prevent consistent good or bad streaks. Users don’t like it when they hit “random” on their playlist and somehow get a bunch of tracks by the same artist back to back.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with what you happened to be doing in game at the time when you started getting that streak, which is what I was talking about; gem sales, changing equipment, changing characters, etc, aren’t going to have any impact.

If the RNG isn’t correcting for streaks and is behaving in too truly random of a fashion it has nothing to do with anything else, and the devs absolutely should fix it if it’s doing that, but nothing at all that you do, as a player, is going to have the slightest impact.

green plum.7514:

All the conspiracy theorists here should really learn some basic statistics. There is absolutely nothing strange about a small fraction of players appearing to have better than average luck.

And conversely, there is nothing strange about a small fraction of players appearing to have worse than average luck. Your personal experiences with loot drops do not mean that there is anything wrong with the RNG. It’s just an RNG working as an RNG does. If there is something wrong with the RNG, only ArenaNet would have the sample size necessary to tell.

And all of those things that you think are impacting your drops are statistical noise; you’re seeing patterns where there are none.

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

No it isn’t. “Printing cash” does not mean physically printing money. The analogy is bad. I could also point out reserve requirements impact inflation. And a bigger money supply can lead to higher output of production which can drive down prices as well, if that capital is implemented that way.

You fail to account for the fact that only items vendored creates coins, and omnomberry bars and other coin boosters with coin drops.

The majority of wealth players bring to their accounts from farming is crafting materials, ectos from salvaging, selling rares and exotics on the TP all are taxed. Which all would have a downward drive on prices, as more supply at higher prices would create surplus.

You have to measure how much new wealth they create vs. the wealth they deplete. And how many times they make transactions with other players. V(elocity) is an important part of the equation as well.

I was not attempting to be exhaustive when I said gold generation was like printing money; I could have been more precise and said that farming generating gold is like increasing the money supply, the point should’ve been clear though. And while you can indeed situationally increase the money supply in a way that does not generate inflation in the real world, that does require specific non-normal conditions to be met. Again, I was not attempting to be exhaustive in the analogy.

I have a suspicion that you actually have a hidden assumption that I wasn’t making, and that we actually agree about this though, so let me be clearer about where I was coming from:

For an MMO economy, in general, farming is the only source of gold, this is true even in GW2. The amount of gold generated by farming (plus other stuff, but farming generates the most “stuff” regardless of what the stuff is) is the money supply for the economy as a whole. Items in aggregate cannot be traded for more than the sum total of gold harvested by players (and in the case of GW2, minus the transaction fee of trading them). If people do not farm lots of gold, prices in the aggregate, assuming we don’t move to a barter economy (which would be hard since we can’t safely trade without using the TP), cannot increase; without gold generation in excess of gold sinks, you cannot have inflation. In fact, if gold isn’t being pumped into the economy enough so that the transaction fees from multiple TP listings eats it all up, we’d be seeing rampant deflation and the entire market would be in the process of grinding to a halt.

Now there are a number of factors to GW2’s economy that mitigate the inflationary effect of gold generation. The sinks seem really well balanced, especially relative to other mmos, and the TP tax likely does a good job of soaking up excess supply. But farming has to be the primary source of gold in the game, there has to be some amount of positive growth in the gold supply, or the economy would be seeing other significant problems. Gold generation is “wages”, and you can’t have a wage-price spiral without wages going up. Even if demand massively outstripped supply, that wouldn’t matter much if players had insufficient gold to spend.

But those are considerations, in principle. They’re obviously not actually happening in game; we’re not really seeing serious signs of inflation in the economy, gold is clearly being supplied sufficiently that things aren’t being ground to a halt, and the sinks seem balanced enough that there are many goods that have had stable prices for months. So it does seem that Anet’s so far been managing the size of the gold supply very well. So in practice, it may be that farming won’t cause inflation, in GW2, because of how Anet has mitigated against it. But farming in the abstract most definitely does cause inflation.

Ashadow.6874:

John is probably a Power Trader with 6,000+ gold. =P

That could be I suppose.

Come on John, we all know very well that there are no GM tools that allow for the creation of items or gold. So even if you wanted to, you couldn’t do that.

Don’t lead the poor guy on

xxxzavulonxxx.8413:

Farmers do not create inflation.

More supply to fulfill demand never creates inflation.

Actually, that’s not right; farmers generate gold and excess gold in the economy is the big thing that will result in general across the board price level increases over time. An excess of money supply devalues the currency, and by devaluing the currency, you end up with increasing price levels. Farming is like printing money in a real economy.

Edit: though, yes, if GW2 does a good job of soaking up extra money in the system, then that increase of currency maybe doesn’t cause anything at all to happen. If the sinks are well balanced with the faucets, you won’t see inflation from farming. That’s typically never happened in an MMO before to my knowledge, so if GW2 manages to get that right and we see stable prices for years, that’ll be amazing.

Also, if you’re using Windows 7 or 8, and you run a voip program like Skype, etc, there’s a communications tab under sound that by default reduces the volume of any other open applications. So you may need to change that too if you’re having problems when you have voice chat going.

M Ham.7509:

Cost-Push Inflation… are Legendaries our Oil Crisis?

M.

Legendaries cannot cause cost-push inflation because nothing in the economy relies on them as a cost; when the cost of oil goes up the cost of doing almost everything goes up, and so the price level for nearly all goods and services increases, not the case here.

Successfully stopping as much botting as they did, did cause a bit of cost-push inflation though. If you look at the spidy charts for t6 mat costs, there’s a big spike on all of them around the middle of November, and November was about when they started the big crack downs; 34,000 accounts were banned, bot reporting went down by a factor of 100. That was a big supply shock. And it shows up in the numbers exactly as you’d expect.

Fiontar.4695:

Dropping theory and just addressing the issue of precursors, offering players other ways to obtain precursors would help to bring the inflated prices back into check.

Honestly, I don’t think that precursors or legendaries should be traded on the TP. In order to give people who get a precursor they don’t want/need some path to getting the precursor they do want, rather than selling one to fund the purchase of the other, I’d add Mystic Forge recipes for converting any precursor into any other precursor. The added ingredients heavy on vendor sold MF items, to act as a gold sink and provide some premium for the swap.

I’d also add precursors as Laurel items, with a high enough cost in Laurels to associate a proper degree of effort to the task of obtaining them. Since they would no longer be tradeable, there would be no concern that offering them as a reward would have a huge gold equivalent attached.

This combination would also eliminate the ability of gold sellers to sell precursors, which is something that is happening now. (If for no other reason than this, the changes should be considered).

The Mystic Forge, via conversion recipes, offers a viable alternative to keep all sorts of overpricing in check, with the added conversion costs being adjusted as needed.

A guaranteed way to get precursors is already being worked on. It may be several months before it is completed however.

So the big open question is lodestone supply. Speaking of, does anyone have any idea what the mystical binding agent that’s in the laurel vendor does?

Folk.2093:

As a general player, one who does fractals and likes to WvW, gets his dailies done and someone who knows jackkitten about econimcs (boring classes in undergrad and grad) stuff is just really expenive. I was looking into making a corrupted bulwurk and lodestones cost 1. odd g?! I mean cmon that’s just rediculous. It’d be nice to make a cool looking weapon but eff that price, that’s all my money, I’ll just subject myself to the RNG and farm fractals for weapon skins.

This is really due to lodestones, like precursors, being stupid rare. I think there’s a very legitimate argument that the supply of these items is much too low.

Ethros.1453:

Grazingcattle.1627:

I think the OP had a question about if you guys are going to be doing anything about the very high price of precursors and phrased it as a form of TP manipulation.

So can you answer that question John? I don’t care if someone is saying the wrong thing or making wrong assumptions

I, just like the OP, want to know if/when you are going to do anything about the rarity of precursors

That has been discussed before by some of the moderators (sry I do not have a link available). There has been some talk about starting a scavenger hunt like event for them. As far as I know, there has not been anything more discussed about it than that. Personally I think that there will be some “unveiling” in the next couple of months over this, but again, that is just my speculation.

That’s correct, but the system is still in the design, not implementation, phase, so it’s likely going to be more than a couple months, given their general desire not to talk about stuff until it’s close to done.

Tallis.5607:

Oh, I didn’t even get to the ’’maximising’’ part :-)

I won’t go as far to say that GW2 does the same thing as SWTOR. Or LOTRO. Or Skyrim.

In SWTOR they have a specific job (I saw the job posting, it is a REAL pity that I didn’t -save it, it would be an eye opener) for someone to maximise profits from the ‘gem’ store.

Someone who’s job it is to classify players into categories (like ‘likely to pay for cosmetic items’, ‘likely to pay for utility items’, ‘not likely to pay’) and then market items spcifically towards these people.

I would not dare to say that Anet maximises profit by doing the exact same thing as every company does, because I have no proof of it. I’ll take your word that Anet is such a nice company that they do not want to maximise money from the players.

There are even arguments NOT to maximise money income, because people do not like to be used as cash cows.

But saying that Anet doesn’t watch at all how many gems they sell that get converted into gold and act accordingly… sorry… I am not so gullible to believe Anet doesn’t change things to make more money with gems-to-gold people.

It pays your bills. You’re not working for a charity organisation.

I think what John is saying is that it does not maximize Anet’s profits to behave in the way being described, not that Anet doesn’t do things to generate income. That is, Anet is not deliberately making precursors and other high end items cost more gold to encourage gem sales; they do market gemstore items to encourage gem sales, but deliberately manipulating the economy so that high demand items cost large amounts of gold isn’t something that would maximize their profits and isn’t something that they do.

Tallis.5607:

No, inflation is not only affected by the volume of gold. It is also affected by demand. Stuff get more expensive when people demand it more.

This is not correct. Inflation is an aggregate measure, and does not care about the price of any given individual good per se, but about trends in the pricing of aggregate goods. High demand items will increase in price, but the economy as a whole cannot increase in price unless the volume of gold increases. Inflation is about the economy as a whole. Inflation is not “this thing costs more” – a number of things can cause that to happen – it’s “money is not worth as much as it used to be”.

RoyalPredator.9163:

@ Eolirin: Yes. They planned to be hours to complete, like most of the dungeons and even the new types and designs for them. It won’t be a 20 minute rush, but a 3-5 hours of wonderful adventure.

I think you missed my point. Fixed time costs are not “you have to do X dungeons that, under ideal conditions without you having figured out super efficient ways to complete them may take you a few hours”. Not only would that be really bad, as a mechanic, because it forces a long time commitment right now and thus excludes anyone who cannot sit at the game for that much time straight, your time estimates will always be off, and there’s nothing that stops a player from completing all of your content in a very short period of time. It also cuts against the play how you like design philosophy of GW2, because you’re forcing players into Dungeon content and into soloing, so it’s extra bad for this game.

What I’m talking about are things that, because of mechanical constraints, are mathematically impossible to complete in less than some number of months. There is no way to acquire laurels faster than one per day, ten per month. And so if something is priced at 100 laurels, like the cat tonic, there is no way to acquire it without having completed somewhere between 70-100 dailys and 0-3 monthlys. That cannot be accomplished in less than 2 months, and somewhat closer to 3, period. And that’s a dedicated 2-3 months. You have to play pretty much every day to do it that fast. If you play very casually, you can build up enough points over a longer span of time, but it’s still going to be a pretty big time commitment. The important thing though is that you have a track that you can chip away at so that there’s a sense of progression and progress, but only a little bit every day, so that getting to the end takes a really long time.

This has the added benefit of getting people to play more frequently, as there’s something for them to work on every day, and missing a day means lost progress. And to stay in keeping with GW2’s overriding philosophy, you also want these tasks to be more obtainable and something that can be done in multiple different areas of the game; you should be able to make noticeable progress in an hour or less, and it should be open to dungeon runners, people in the open world, and wvwers equally.

Tallis.5607:

John Smith.4610:

Couple of problems though:
1. Players control that market

Point 1 is simply not true. Sorry, but it’s not.

Anet determines the drop rate of any item.
Anet determines the TP fee.
Anet determines how many uses there are of the item.
Anet determines if there are alternatives for an item.

Saying that the players drive prices is simply incorrect. Players base their supply & demand on parameters that Anet sets.

Those are indirect factors at best and ineffective at worst; Volcanus is not more expensive than other Mystic Forge exotics because it’s mechanically different from them, or because it has uniquely difficult to acquire material costs. Glacial Lodestones are not cheaper than Charged Lodestones because they’re massively easier to acquire. The high end of the market is driven almost entirely by player desire for certain visual aesthetics and none of that is directed by anything Anet has gone out and deliberately set.