Guild Wars 2

You will get ruined mats, if you get hit while harvesting.

Actually… you failed to do so. (Am i surprised? Not really…)

You only fixed the endless Wintersday potions. And even those only … partially.

Things that still work:

• Using any of the SINGLE form Wintersday potions while being transformed using one of the single form potions. (Only the endless Toymaker potion got fixed.)
• The skill that breaks the transformation still has no (working) cooldown on the endless Halloween potion, so you can still spam it.
• Endless Halloween potions are still untradeable (account bound) unless you manage to put them on the same stack with one that already has been “unbugged”. (Hey, in case you didn’t got it. You have bugged instances of that item in your database!)

A few TP players actually CAN afford such prices, and they can afford the listing fees!

Thats the actual problem. Not that legendaries are tradeable, but that a small group of players managed to hoard such a wealth that a set of rare items (to be more specific: The legendaries and precursors) are now exclusive to this group as no regular player will EVER be able to pay these prices.

If nothing is done to limit playing the TP, then the prices for legendaries will be up to 10.000 gold within the next 3 months. And that is bad, really bad. 10.000 gold would mean 3.000 hours of farming for everyone, except TP players. That is over a year if farming for 8 hours straight every single day. One might now argue that you could just get a legendary yourself with that much time, but it won’t help.

If you are “stupid” enough to put a legendary for a fair price on the TP, one of those players will buy it, just to resell it at much higher prices. And they can afford to do that multiple times, so the prices will still sky rocket even though there is an supply.

The economy is completely broken in that aspect. Maybe it will recover over time if the issues are resolved soon enough, but maybe the damage is already permanent. There are at least a dozen players who have a wealth of more than 10.000 gold and i assume, at least 1-2 players have even hit the 100.000 gold mark by excessive TP trading.

Right now i see only one chance to stop that madness, limit TP trading. The limits can easily be choosen high enough so regular players will rarely or never hit it, but TP players will hit it for sure. The actual problem with the TP is, that it has no limit. You can put as many buy and sell offers in at the same time as you have money for. The gain for every iteration (buying and reselling) is somewhere around 1-5% of your current wealth. So if you repeat over and over again, your wealth grows exponentially (at some point, you can make far more than 100 gold per hour). You can’t prohibit TP trading, but you can put a limit on it, effectively limiting the flow-rate and thereby the absolute gain. Playing the TP might still be the most worthwhile way to play GW2, but there would be an upper limit (and maybe even more important: The market would be protected from willing price manipulations on common items like T5 and T6 mats.)

Read more: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Apply-storage-limit-to-the-TP-pickup-zone

The lack of stacking in the pickup tab sure is a problem, but a simple one to solve. It costs almost nothing, to perform some stacking in the pickup tab, or to compute the space requirement if it was stacked.

As for your objection, that only bad power traders would be hit: True, but thats only because there is a third zone i forgot about, which also acts as “unlimited space”, I’m talking about unsold items.

You usually won’t be able to sell an item right away after buying it, rarely with profit and it works only on very few items. So having a global (or distinct) storage limits for all 3 sections of the TP would limit the excessive power trading for sure.

A limit of 15-20 inventory slots should fit for all regular players. Buy offers and pickup zone “share stacks”, sell offers don’t stack with the previous two. 15-20 stacks is still sufficient for any regular player to have buy offers on a full armor set + runes as well as selling a complete set of T5 and T6 materials at the same time, but it makes it impossible for power traders to perform price manipulations on any item which is available in high quantities (over 3.000 units in market) or which is not stackable.

And to be honest: It’s necessary to introduce such a limit. Playing the TP is the only way to hoard such ridiculous amounts of wealth and it really damages the whole economy. Rare items have prices, which a regular player will NEVER be able to pay, not even if they saved every copper since the beginning just for that item. This kind of inflation, based on the wealth of a small group of players, must be stopped for good.

Otherwise the price for legendary items will be up to about 10.000 gold within the next 3 months, which equals around 3.000 hours of farming for a regular player, which means farming for almost 1 1/2 years, even if you farmed for 8 hours straight every single day.

Sorry, but Mike Lewis did either not know what he was talking about or he was simply lying.

There are still tons of bots out there, and just as many gold sellers. They only changed their behaviors to be either less suspicious or to be more efficient. The first type of bot is hardly distinguishable from a real player (and therefore gets rarely reported), the second type of bot uses all kinds of hacks to get maximum profit so it can pay off before it gets banned. (Especially the teleport bots pay of for the botters within less than a week, and Anet takes much longer to ban them.)

Only the number of gold sellers dropped a little (I’m NOT talking about the amount of advertising, that really went down), but less because they were banned (you know, they just make new accounts…), but because the prices for GW2 gold went down and they are still falling (a gold costs as little as 0,22€/$ nowadays (0,35$ in December, 1,50-2,00 at release) and it is still falling).

And that is for two reasons, fist of all the bots got more efficient, so it is possible to sell the gold for less. But the second cause had an much larger impact: The GW2 community is breaking away, and with the community also the potential customers for goldsellers. So many botters consider GW2 now unprofitable as there is an overproduction of gold.

On the behalf of Anet: They did fail to implement any of the automated bot detection methods they announced at release.
The only thing which ever worked (at least partially) was the gold seller detection, but nowadays only real players get caught while the goldsellers found ways around long ago. Another example was the JP at Wintersday, heavy botting, a quick and dirty “bot protection” and yet all the bot protection did, was punishing real players. The bots adjusted to both versions of the protection within less than 6 hours each and continued farming. Anet is even unable to detect such obvious things as teleport or speed hacks.

Happened to me too, sometimes. It will resolve once you progress in the map completion. (The lost progress will be reestablished.)

Appears to happen if you join a broken server instance and when the server instance crashes (you get a connection error for no reason), your progress isn’t saved or even corrupted. This means all loot you have gathered and all items you took from the TP are lost, and your achievements get bugged. Well, the achievements (at least the old state) is still there, but there appears to be some cache which also breaks whenever the server breaks down.

morrolan.9608:

Shadestrike.4372:

You realize that players dictate what price the stuff on the trading post is, not ANet, right?

You realise people buy the runes using gold bought from gems thus driving up the price right.

Thats now how things work, learn to watch more closely.

The 8g is, what “powertraders” ask you to pay. If you want to know what the “regular” customer is willing to pay, look at the buy offers. Now skip those buy offers where only a handful of players tries to buy a dozen each, because those are the same “powertraders” and they just buy those items en gross to resell them at higher prices. The “actual” prices are below that.

And the other thing: People rarely buy gold via the gem store. Well, some newbies may do, but experienced players either grind for their gold or they go the “cheap” (compared to the gemstore!) way, goldsellers.

Right now, the TP is completely unaffected by the concept of the limited storage which is present everywhere else in the game.

You have limited item space in your inventory, limited space in your bank, limited space in your guild bank and limited space in mailbox.

Only one thing in the game breaks with this concept, the TP. It allows you to place unlimited buy orders and to keep an unlimited number of item stacks in the pickup zone without actually picking them up.

This doesn’t affect regular players very much, as they will rarely have that many items to pick up that it would make a difference, but active TP traders are abusing this unlimited, free storage on a regular base.

By the lack of an limit, the throughput of an TP trader is virtually unlimited, he can place as many buy orders as he has money which leads to the strange situation, that a single player (or a few which had the same idea) can literally buy the whole market, hold several hundred to thousand stacks of an item in hold and manipulate the prices without any restrictions.

And it doesn’t even cost him inventory space or anything alike, as he uses then unlimited storage provided by the TP. It is only limited by his current wealth which follows an exponential curve. (Which also sounds like a bad thing, considering that wealth is supposed to follow a linear function in this game!)

A limit on the size of the pickup zone is therefore absolutely necessary in order to stabilize the market and protect it from the abusive price manipulations of a few traders. The limit must be applied to both, placed buy orders and items in the pickup zone, treating every buy order as if it was a new item.

Xolo.3580:

What I’d like to know is, how many of these ominous power sellers/buyers are there and what is their real impact on the TP?

There are a few hundred players with a wealth beyond 1.000 g and at least about a dozen players who exceed 10.000 g.

The wealthiest player managed to make several hundred thousand gold from the TP, abusing every little design flaw.

This is achieved by (there are more tricks, bugs & exploits used ):

• Use of “hacks” to automatically extract the information from the TP (guess how GW2Spidy works, it uses a basic “hack” to update itself by accessing the TP server directly)
• Use of external tools to calculate margins on forgeable items (includes salvaging, regular crafting and MF crafting)
• Use of external statistic tools to predict daily / weekly / event based price fluctuations
• Cheating around TP fees (it is possible, not all traders do that)
• Placing orders, selling and withdrawing items automatically (this is new, since December there are bots which can do the TP without human interaction, not all traders do that)

What does that mean?
Well, when statistic shows, that there is an “overproduction” of a certain items type during rush hour, then the programs will tell the trader to buy everything of this certain item up to an certain price. Later this day, when the prices go up again, the trader will start to sell for higher prices, again because his programs told him so. Little to no risc, but a steady profit.

But playing the TP was only enabled by a different missconception in the first place:
The TP offers you INFINITE STORAGE. You can sell as many items at the same time as you like, and you can also “store” close to infinite items by simply not picking them up.

If the devs had been consequent on the “limited storage” thing, then TP players would have been limited to a REASONABLE throughput, but right now they can hold several dozen stacks of every single items in stock.
This is also what enabled them to cause the disaster with stuffing and glue on wintersday, only a handful players decided to buy stuffings and glue, worth several hundred golds (at the original price of 2-3c / piece!) which equals several dozens to hundred(!) stacks per trader.

The global TP concept itself is vulnerable to abuse (and it’s being abused), and that can’t be avoided. But the TP can and must be protected from individuals, who have achieved such wealth, that they can manipulate the market “singlehanded”, forcing prices which are unnatural: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Apply-storage-limit-to-the-TP-pickup-zone/first#post1178359

Only those items, which have DISCOVERABLE recipes will ever show up in the left column.

That means, that items which are only part of non discoverable recipes or where you already have discovered all discoverable recipes will NEVER show up.

Thats not a bug, it works as intended. You can’t discover any new recipes for those mats, so they won’t show up while discovering.

Why always the same “eles are boring because they have no weapon swap”?

I know, switching atunements IS boring, but you actually have 5 more skillsets which DON’T follow the restrictions of the atunement swap and allow you to adjust to far more situations.

I’m talking about the conjured weapons, every single one of them contains a full new skillset and most sets are much better than all the skills you have in your regular build (even if you only pick the best skill from each atunement).

For me, taking “fiery greatsword” and “frost bow” as addition to my D/D build made things interesting again as i suddenly had 2 ranged skillsets i could switch to while in battle. (And both skillsets have higher DPS than my scepter / staff skillsets ) If i was a Charr, i would possibly have also chosen the Charrzooka.

The instruments need yet another tweak before they are usable.

Now their sounds are regular skills sounds, so you can’t turn them off without loosing almost all other sound effects too. And you can’t turn of annoying environmental sounds (including footsteps and other character sounds including dialogs) while playing music.

And: The use of instrumental skills should never produce the regular attack sounds (as for now, the unbreakable choir bell uses dagger attacks as base, so with every note you play, you also have the “risk” of your character aching or crying). Otherwise, every complex song played will always sound more like “beatboxing” than like the original melody.

Errant Venture.9371:

Find it hard to believe that botters would be able to get away with tele-hacking. That sort of thing should send up all kinds of red flags server side.

Yes, it should. As should speed hacks and all the other stuff hackers can do right now. But Anet didn’t deemed it necessary to put ANY type of server side check into the game. Protection from such hacks is just non existent. And all those hacks have been abused, known and reported since the beginning of public beta (is guess the first hacks were even developed during closed beta!), so cheaters are using those hacks for almost a full year now.

Bots using teleport hacks isn’t new either, it only became more popular among the bot owners, because of the profit. I have seen teleporting bots since 2 weeks after release.

PS: Don’t even bother to answer to this thread any more. It’s probably going to be deleted like any other thread mentioning the existence of hacks, cheats & bots in GW2. Hiding their existence from the public is the only way Anet knows to deal with them.

Mortuus.7216:

It would be a shame to purchase a 7.1 headphone peripheral only to find out that the sound system doesn’t support it.

Sorry, 7.1 on a HEADSET is waste of money. It is still only 2.0 (it has only 2 speakers, dough!) and all you get is some crappy software remix to simulate the sound distortions you would have when listening to a low quality 7.1 system. (Thats really how they work. Trust me, i have disassembled more than just one.)

So if you want proper sound on you headset, then go into the windows audio settings and set your speaker layout to “headset”. Don’t fall for 7.1, the sound driver actually produces much better results when being set to “headset” instead of “5.1” or “7.1”.

Thats because how you ears (and the headset) actually work:
You know that sound has limited speed, and your ears are on the opposite ends of the head for a good reason. So the sound emitted from a single source will arrive at your ears at different times, your brain then calculates the position of the source based on the delay.

The sound driver for any type of headset does the opposite, it calculates the precise delay reflecting a certain angle and puts the audio on both ears, delaying one channel by the calculated amount. This is done for every single source of sound.

When using the 7.1 simulation, one additional step is inserted. Instead of calculating the correct delay for each sound source independently, the individual sound sources are assigned to one of the 7 virtual speakers first. Afterwards each of the speakers is treated as a new sound source and the calculation described in the previous paragraph is performed.

Sou you actually LOOSE details, to be precise: All the positions between the 7 virtual speakers which the driver could actually have calculated if run in native headset mode. That is why you should ALWAYS prefer “headset” mode over “7.1” mode.

So why do 7.1 headsets even exist, if they actually produce WORSE results than regular headsets when used properly?
Thats for 2 reasons, first of all, 7.1 sounds better than 2.0 so people will fall for it and will pay more money for crappier products.
Second, most people owning headsets wont understand, that they need to tell their computer that they HAVE headsets and not just 2 speakers on their desk. So they run their headsets in 2.0 mode (which is plain wrong, as sounds are assigned to one of 3 possible positions (left, right and both equally) only!) so they actually feel an improvement when using 7.1 headsets. There would have been none (or they would even notice the degradation) if they had been smart enough to configure their headsets in the designated way in the first place.

TL;DR:
Ranting on 7.1 headsets, how they work, why regular headsets actually sound much better and how to configure your PC to make use of headsets so it won’t treat them like ordinary desktop speakers (which led to the poor sound impression of the regular headset in the first place).

As for the “camera is microphone” issue, it works quite well if you ACTUALLY use a REAL 5.1 or 7.1 system. If you use a headset, configure it as a headset, everything else is just stupid. (Read the text you have skipped, if you want to know why.)

Because those 2:30 appear to be the chosen sweet spot for all intervals in GW2 (gameplay design wise). You have no dialogs which take longer than 2:30, and most fights in open world (except for champions) also don’t take much longer.

You will rarely be in the same situation for more than 2:30, so it wouldn’t make any sense to add any characteristic tunes beyond that point.

That has a drawback, of course. You will never have any “continuous” background music or longer themes. Thats why (just an example, but one of the best!) Valve used a different concept for Portal 2, instead of just stitching together various songs for different situations, they used ONE single theme, but assigned each partition of the track to different entities / conditions which could be present in the scene. So you always had the same main theme, but it sounded completely different, based on what type of scene you were in.

But it is the only utility which benefits in such manner, that it can’t be expressed in numbers.

The whole battle system revolves around dodging, at least in PvE where almost every monster has one attack which requires you to dodge or to use CC to interrupt.

This means, that “skill” is only defined as the reaction test to use your 2 dodge and your 1-2 CC skills at the right moment. They could have replaced the whole “skill” system with only 4 buttons with separate cooldowns, at least for PvE, “dodge”, “interrupt”, “high DPS skills”, “heal skill” together with a slider to choose the cycling radius, being either 300, 600, 900 or 1200 units for full, 3/4, 2/4 or 1/4 damage received and dealt. Almost nobody would have noticed the difference.

Don’t get me wrong, it works almost as intended in PvP where you have short, intense battles and it’s all about dealing burst damage (which means you have to know your skills!), but in PvE it’s just broken, since most enemies are just huge health blobs (so burst won’t matter) and battles aren’t “short and intense” but rather “long and repetitive” so you are forced to take the same reaction test over and over again.

That has NOTHING to do with skill, thats just a torture until your concentration breaks and you miss a single (or maybe even 2) dodges / CC. It also causes all classes to play very similar in PvE, despite your choices. Some class mechanics like mesmer illusions or hunters pet make it slightly easier, but they don’t change the way it works. This system really hurts on those classes, where dodging is NOT the natural choice (e.g. all the caster classes).

But seriously, what did one expect? The system was broken, the moment they decided to create a system which should suite everything from solo gaming over equally balanced PvP up to zergs. Especially the first one was a bad decision, you can’t just make every single character able to play on the frontlines, without crippling the characteristic mechanics the original class had.

They never fixed it in general. They changed a few items which have been reported explicitly and a few skills which did ALWAYS miss, but they did not solve the problem in general, not for all skills and not for all entities.

Trey.8230:

If I use spike trap, then the number of ticks varies

This should never happen at all…

Looks like they were lazy and used a different shield as base – and forgot to remove the texture once done. Also seems to have major clipping problems with the chars arm and hand.

The actual bug is, that system messages (the ones with a green star) count towards the mail limit as in preventing you from receiving mails, but the GUI is broken as it tells you, that you would still have space left in your inbox. The achievement actually requires you to have 10 player / gemstore mails and NO SYSTEM MAILs in your inbox.

But don’t expect it to get fixed any time soon. Was broken since early beta, gets reported at least once per week and it still unfixed like so many other bugs, exploits and problems in Bug Wars 2.

When do the additional ticks appear? After the bleeding ran out or does the last seconds of the bleeding cause a double tick?

Appears to happen with almost any melee range attack. This also includes elemental dagger attacks.

It looks like the hitbox for most static entities is TOO SMALL and most melee attacks only hit targets at a decent hight / in a certain plain. So you can’t hit them even though the graphics show other. Real ranged (auto aimed!) attacks will always hit though, as the game will always target the center of the hitbox.

It would be pointless to list affected objects now, as most objects are affected, except for very few which seem to have been fixed already.

Fix would be to increase the hitbox-size to the actual model size or even slightly beyond that, with a MINIMUM HEIGHT for hitboxes and zero distance to ground so melee attacks can no longer hit over / under the hitbox.

But i don’t think this problem is going to be solved any time soon. It has been present since early beta, has been reported several hundred times and is still not fixed. Like so many other bugs, exploits and problems in this game…

Let me throw in one of the more “complex” notes, transposed, scripted and enacted it myself:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5383399/GW2Bells/Skyrim_upper_part1.txt
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5383399/GW2Bells/Skyrim_lower_part1.txt
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5383399/GW2Bells/Skyrim_upper_part2.txt
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5383399/GW2Bells/Skyrim_lower_part2.txt
(Sorry, just links, it’s far too much for a single post. Total of 38 tracks to assemble the original song.)

How it sounds like, when done: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5383399/GW2Bells/Skyrim.mp3

You will also find it in the linked reddit post, with more detailed instructions how to play such songs. (Let me give you a hint, it’s rather difficult to play it live.)

Gemstore chests contained various potions which were not available by any other terms. Among them the snowman and the fairy lights elemantal.

Yes, in PvP it feels quite interesting, it’s more fast paced than in other MMORPGs. But in PvE it is insufficient. Too stressful to play it for longer durations and yet not rewarding / exciting enough to keep you awake while you keep smashing the same key combination over and over again. It’s always just “doge on incoming attack, spam best skills, repeat”. Too much you have to watch out for, too many buttons to smash but yet far too less variation. Doesn’t matter which areas you visit, you always have the same skills and the enemies always have the same stupid AI. Sometimes with AoE-, sometimes with CC-attacks, but they still all act very much the same.

PvP actually offers much more variation with the real players, the lack of “i can’t reach you so you can’t hurt me” and the constant mix of various tasks (kill NPC, kill player, capture point, watch your comrades).

However, it does fail again in WvW when it all is about zerging again. It rarely is 1vs1, and even when it is, your enemy is more likely to flee than to fight. So most times it is just zerg vs zerg.

Varani.9207:

Well, if we (the internet people) don´t mean a thing to you, why post on an internet forum at all? Besides since there are no healers in this game, dodging is a must and frankly it´s a lot of fun too! Great Combat System!

Not sure if sarcastic or just very easy to please…

Probably hasn’t been disabled because of winters day, but because some of the prices required re-balancing. (Especially the 250 use gathering tools.)

Because: Only 15 uses of the mining tool make up for a new one. Thats perfect for automated harvesting (bots) as you don’t need to waste any money on those annoying small regular 100 use tools.

You also have only a very limited set of mechanics per class, and all of them do almost the same. For example, ele fells like this:

Choose a spell which takes [0,5/1/2] seconds to cast and which targets [an enemy/an area] for XXX damage and [gives you a boon/causes random condition/minor healing].

Even if it was animated more nicely (with an unique animation for each spell), it is still very limiting, compared to what we where used from GW1 or any other modern MMORPG.

To me, there are only 3 effects in the game which are somehow interesting, these are the condition “confusion”, the reflect effect and the block effect. And that is only due to the fact, that those effects allow to cause damage which is NOT based on the dull DPS calculation used by all regular skills, but instead causes damage based on enemy behavior.

But what did one expect?
The whole battle system was only created around the idea of having a perfectly calculable damage distribution, which forbids any interesting mechanics as they wouldn’t be calculable because depended on to many external factors.
I know what I’m talking about, i tried to do that for several games myself. And I have found various concepts which where perfectly balanced, but all of them felt just as boring as the GW2 system feels currently. Some where complex enough to fool the less observant players (same as with the GW2 system ), but NONE could even closely match the thrill of an heavy trigger based system with complex interactions between skills.

The accomplishment of finding a solution out of an seemingly unbeatable situation is far more rewarding than the actual kill.
And thats what the GW2 system suffers from. There are no complex situations, all characters have a hard limit what they can do (in terms of DPS and damage avoidance), so you will ever only be able to survive situations which have CALCULATED to be solvable, even if you play perfect.

Exploiting the mechanics of the battle system is not a bad thing, on the contrary, having a flawed battle system with tons of loopholes is actually far more interesting than one which only asks you to master a single set of skills to achieve a predetermined performance.
Thats why almost ANY battle system in RPGs and alike allows you, to play in such manner that you avoid almost any damage or even to kill enemies without risk. Not because developers weren’t aware of those “problems”, but because they wanted you to feel successful.

Adapted on an MMORPG (and considering how long you are going to play it), it is necessary that the developers change the challenges from time to time in order to force you to re-adapt, letting you experience the success of mastering the situation again.

Anet did something similar when they introduced the FoM, they provided a new set of scripted challenges which needed to be solved by the players. But they did only add new content for a very limited purpose, they did not swapped the challenges in the existing content.
You know why WoW gave the whole world an overhaul with the Cataclysm update? Less because the old world / system was broken, but because the players adjusted too much and fell into using a very limited set of the given options. A few players left the game prior to the changes because they didn’t want “their game” to be changed, but the players who stayed were rewarded with a “new” game experience.

If Anet wants Guildwars 2 to persist, then they may not hold on to their “perfect plan” they had for the balance in the battle system. The system must undergo changes, it needs to evolve and to give new possibilities. Perfect balance in terms of DPS may never be the ultimate goal, but a challenging and customizable play style. Overpowered skill combinations aren’t a problem, but only a call for an change to encourage players of trying something different. And if players start to use a certain combination too often, well, just modify one of the components so it enables different combinations instead.

What endgame needs, is a better reward system.

The current system with “only high DPS players get loot”, “reward chest exceeds all loot” and “force players into bigger bags with tons of unstackable crap” is just plain broken and enforces skipping. You only rush for the dungeon reward, the faster the better (doesn’t matter that you have spent 10 minutes looking for a group, just don’t waste a single second in the dungeon).

Yet another problem with endgame: Synergies are not part of the concept. You have a few scripted events in dungeons and world events where you have to split the team, but in combat there isn’t much of an synergy except for sharing passive buffs and sometimes some combos (where most of them are useless, DPS-wise). There is no such thing as effective tanking, only hitting the same targets while every player tries to evade the ridiculous amount of AoE-damage on his own. Not that scripted events or multi phase battles would be a bad thing, on the contrary, they are a nice addition and diversion from the monotonous monster bashing, but a game can’t be based on those alone.

Also you rarely have a chance to enjoy the world. It is always action loaded with the constant respawns, dodge mechanics etc. Even vistas and POI are rarely relaxing, since most of them are also protected by constantly respawning enemies in higher level areas. It feels, like Anet had to goal to “always have something happening on the screen”, despite your efforts to sort things out.

And what alternatives did we have? Mass Effect 3? That was the only other AAA title from a well known series released in 2012. And they screwed up, same as Diablo 3. Darksiders 2 on the third place, and from there on, we run into titles most of you probably never even heard of. Not that those games were bad, but they didn’t have nearly the budget for marketing. AC3 was just yet another title in a well know series, nothing new. And don’t even think about WoW, after the nth expansion, nobody cares about it anymore.

Guildwars 2 only made it to the top because they lacked competition in 2012. If the game would have been released in 2011, they would have been SMASHED by BF3, CoD and Skyrim.

That was more of “one-eyed among the blinds”. 2012 didn’t had any big AAA titles except for Guildwars 2.

Sure, quite a number of adventures and shooter sequels, yet none of them had the budget of Guildwars 2. Also many of the adventures / shooters where hardly suitable for public media, given their dark themes. One could say, that media didn’t have any choice but to choose the only game suitable for the mass. The only other title with chances on the crown was Masseffect 3, but i think all of us know how badly that one was screwed up.

All in all, 2012 was a rather weak year for gaming industry. If Anet would have dared to release Guildwars 2 in 2011, they would have been SMASHED by that years titels, among other the refresh of the shooter series Battlefield and CoD as well as Bethesdas masterpiece, Elders Scroll V: Skyrim.

Couldn’t you change the way the reports work?

For now the game will just flag the character if you report it, but you usually report him because you saw something suspicious.

So why not think about recording the last 60-120 seconds of the gamestate for every map, including all movements. When a player chooses to make a report, the log will be stored together with the viewpoint of the player so it can be replayed by GMs. Otherwise it will be discarded.

This should be easy to implement, a lot easier to check what the player actually saw and you don’t need to rely on real time observation for detecting bots and cheaters any more. Because there is yet another problem with that: Bots don’t only disappear when they see other players, the also stop using hacks / exploits if the presence of a nearby GM is detected. (GMs are not stealthed properly, they can be made visible.)

Happens when you run the JP too fast. If you skip certain parts of the JP, you will trigger the botting protection, rendering the chest emtpy.

If you are that fast, wait on the last steps until you health is down to no more than 30% before performing the final jump.

(Note the Anet Team: No need to delete this post. This is well known and the bots already have adapted. Again… First there was no protection, then it was “touch the box and you get ported to LA” and now it is “chest stays empty if health above 30%”.)

Because dolyak is the rarer item. People don’t pay for the effect, they pay for the fact that it is more exclusive. (And the price for the toymakers is too cheap, considering that you have to put in materials worth 24g on overage, but you will get it only with 1:3 because you can also get the missing potion or the dolyak.) It’s only thanks to all the bots which farm hundred thousands (yes, it’s really that bad!) of additional giant winterday gifts from the JP, that the prices are affordable.

It’s the same bots which also lead to an minimal, yet noticeable supply of additional glue and stuffings from the gifts.

If it wasn’t for the bots, the toymaker potion would be somewhere around 200-300g, just like the Halloween one.

1:20,000 is just 0.005%, not 0.00005%.

And there are even some people who got BOTH exotic legendary tonics AND the bell. Even though the chances to receive one are even worse than with the rare items in GW1.

Btw.: It’s only thanks to bots that there ARE so many bells and tonics in play. If we didn’t have a massive botting problem, the number of giant gifts in game would be significant lower and the price on the TP wouldn’t be 60c for a gift, but rather around 3-4s which would also result in 200-300g for the bell instead of mere 50g.

Oh, many people on this forum don’t believe in hacks. And Anet does anything they can, to keep that illusion up by deleting ANY threads which discuss the existence of botting/cheating as fast as they can.

And it’s this type of bot (or more precisely Anets attemp of a countermeasure) which was responsible for the bug where people got dropped back to Lionsarch after completion of the puzzle. Too bad, that the bots / cheaters required only 6 hours to adept while the real players had to struggle for 3 days until the change was reverted.

Go and contact support. The reuse of a single credit card has probably been denied due to issues with stolen credit cards which have been used to buy multiple accounts at once. (As far as the credit line goes.)

No, it’s intended that you can pass blueprints to other players in WvW.

Anet is aware of this and it is neither a bug nor has a single player been banned for this.

There were only a few exceptions where players started spamming the chat in WvW trying to SELL the blueprints they farmed from the JP and alike. They got a warning, but it is unlikely that they got banned for a single violation either.

After all, blueprints are not trade- and sellable by normal measures to keep the prices stable and discourage exploiting of the WvW JP for sheer profit!

“Lifetime Survivor Achievement” works slightly different. You are not awarded for getting to lvl80 without dieing, but rather getting 500.000EP in a single session.

A single session is defined, as not leaving the map you are in (no portals!), not logging out (no disconnects!) and not dieing. (Yes, the first two requirements are ridiculous.)

And when will the “full mailbox” get repaired?

I’m talking about the 4 month old problem that system messages (like event or dungeon announces) will count towards the 10 messages limit as in causing queuing, but will not count for the “your mailbox is full”-counter.

Thats why so many people appear to have missing mails, not because they didn’t look at the warning, but because the warning / counting is broken.

Please create a consistent behavior, either exclude system messages from BOTH counters (warning and queue trigger) or include them in both.

You can enter it, but access to the chest has been disabled. You are now forced back to lions arch after completing it. So not the whole JP was shut down, but only the part with the chest.

They used hacks to get solve the puzzle again and again, getting the reward every time without leaving the map.

He has an ability which makes him invulnerable. He does not use it in every battle (get in melee range asap!) and it is not always bugged (it should only give him a shield bubble for ~5 seconds).

All the other new tonics can be used while already transformed to switch / cycle transformations fast. You can even switch to the bells while transformed (breaks transformation).

Doesn’t work with the Halloween tonic though, if you try to use it while being transformed with any of the new tonics, you will get just get the “can’t use it while transformed”-message.

Same when trying to use any other tonic or other items like the bells while transformed as any of the halloween creatures, you can’t use any of them.

Please adjust the behavior so all of the tonics behave the same.

The princess doll dance emote is 90° off.

If you dance, the doll will turn 90° to the left and face the wrong direction when dancing. This does not happen with the original human dance.

Also a lot of clipping errors with the skirt and the leggs.

JP has been temporarily shut down due to heavy botting.

JP has been temporarily been shut down due to heavy botting.

ObliviousFool.3427:

Such bs. If you spend the time and effort to get 4 endless the endless toymaker should be a guaranty.

Everyone has the same opionion. Anet screwed up at this. Though i assume, that it actually might be a bug!

The recipe was bugged and allowed you to exploit unlimited amounts of ectos.

All 4 endless doll tonics = Endles winterday tonic (random form)