Guild Wars 2

Your ISP might have changed something. Or you might be getting hacked. I suggest sending a ticket into ANet support

I don’t know of any place that gives you a refund for an installed computer game, so you might be out of luck there.

Since the game isn’t sub-based you can just check back in a year and see if you like it better. Any new MMO is going to be a bit disappointing until they get the kinks worked out.

Discovery is basically essential to leveling any crafting. Go to the wiki, look up ingredients you have, and start aiming for recipes you can make with those. Start with recipes at your level for the most XP.

Or just open the discover tab and start playing around. The wiki helps a lot though

You can if you gather the ingredients yourself. But no, buying ingredients on the TP and crafting it’s going to net you much.

Robert Hrouda.1327:

The GW2LFG site listed above is a handy tool, but we are working on something internally to improve and upgrade our group tool.

Awesome news

When in doubt, check the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Small_Scale

For T2 ingredients, look in the zones right after starting zones. So Brisbane Wildlands, Kessex Hills, don’t know the Charr or Norn 15-25 areas.

They drop from water reptiles, so I’d just follow a river in the zone of your choice and kill all the reptiles you come across.

Yeah, at this point it definitely looks like the hacker has some kind of way around ANet security. It might not be serverside, which would be how we get the security team saying everything’s fine when it’s clearly not.

The game client has to get information about other players who are nearby, and a hacker could get information through that, which might let them spoof everything including another player’s IP.

I don’t know how leaky the client is, but maybe ANet’s security team should take a look at their client and the data sent between client and server to see how someone could eavesdrop or escalate privileges to get data they shouldn’t.

EDIT: Or maybe the mobile authenticator is the problem? That would make sense if everyone who’s been hacked uses it. It’s actually harder to secure a phone than a PC if you’re basically tech savvy. Phones hide a lot of complexity from users, but that also means it’s hard to tell if your phone has a logger or stop them once you know. If the phone has a logger or the authenticator is even a bit leaky then hackers can use that.

Helequin.2608:

…snip…

I like the Aedile rank – someone who’s organizing events should have distinct recognition I think, that’s a lot of work.

Which ever one works for you is the best. Different people have different playstyles, you’ve got to find one that works with how you think and react.

I love my D/D Elementalist (but please, use fire. Seriously, use fire. Just don’t use only fire), but she does die at the drop of a hat and Eles don’t get any traits that reduce falling damage like other professions do. It’s a much more strategic approach to combat that my warrior.

In some ways I think GW2 goes back past the WoW trinity to the old D&D roles:

Elementalist, Mesmer: Work smarter, not harder.
Warrior, Guardian: Not smarter, hit harder.
Thief: Hide smarter, steal hardware.
Necro: Summon faster, get- ow! oh geeze! Fine, I’ll start fleeing! Quit hitting me already!

;)

paraphrased from http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1057

Catcrafter.3917:

Just type: need help on map chat with this and that and then copy paste nearest waypoint. I always come if I can to help others. Am sure there’s other people like me on the servers, at least I hope am not alone

There are lots of people who do this. In some zones I haven’t gotten responses (depends on time of day usually), but even in the middle of the day usually someone responds, or if I’m online and someone needs help I respond.

BSMO.4560:

AstraStarr.5018:

BTW Anet is not providing anything for people that had items stolen. Not even a pity gift. When I played EQ, if something like this happened they’d give people exp drinks or alternate advances- something to make up for it a little.

I am not saying Anet can restore what was taken- obviously not. But since they control certain things, like black lion trading and commendation etc- they could give every proven to be hacked account an I’m sorry token like- 1000 gems, or boosters kits, 500 commendations, and not just go find a heart person and buy cheap karma armor.

Anet is killing this game.

+1
Absolutely I’m totally agreed, I don’t think Arena Net will be able to roll back every hacked account and if they still don’t annonce this very soon, players should be supported by eceiving some gems from Arena Net ….

Yeah. Even if they can’t restore an account fully (which is a stupid thing to say – even if it takes a support person actually going in and making manual updates there are ways to do this, it’s totally a policy decision and a “won’t” not a “can’t”) they should take care of paying customers. Hanging hacked players out to dry is just bad customer service, and is something I would expect from a low-tier F2P game, not P2P.

The people on a full server can switch to a not-full server, and everyone can join there. Then you can all play together.

Pick which one you want – to play as a guild or to play on Tarnished Coast. Sometimes you have to make choices in life. If you love the roleplay atmosphere, find another server that does roleplay (I think Jade Quarry or Stormbluff Isle did some RP at points), or set yourself up as an RP guild on the server you pick.

I agree that it would be great if ANet could raise the server population limit, and hopefully they’ll be able to at some point. But some limits are just there and have to be worked around.

Also, guilds are cross-server. You can still talk with each other, and if you’re all in the same server group (NA or EU) you can do dungeons together.

EDIT: You do know about downscaling right? If characters are different levels it doesn’t matter, you’ll all get scaled to the area level anyway. So don’t stop playing because you won’t be the same level.

Could be a player who logged off at a node, logged in and WP’d away. I’ve done that a few times.

Could also be a bot. I don’t mind those kinds of bots honestly (at least until the drop rate is upped), they aren’t impacting any one else’s play since we all get our own resource nodes. Mats are expensive enough as-is.

I don’t think GW2 is dying, I think the fractals and poor open-world rewards are encouraging people to focus on dungeons. The drop rate bug is part of that problem, once it gets fixed more people will be in PvE.

I see a ton of threads about this, and the answer is always the same. ASK IN MAP CHAT. There’s only a few times when asking in map chat hasn’t gotten a response, and only when I kind of expected that (middle of the workday US, for example). GW2 doesn’t have a way to see players near you unless they’re in sight, so a lot of people are missing other players. It’s pretty funny to see someone complain on map chat about how the zone is empty, and 10 people respond with “Here, but busy. Do you want something?” Or I’ll make a random remark and start a conversation if I’m feeling lonely.

Server does make a difference. – if your server is way down the population list than that makes a difference. My server (Henge of Denravi) definitely isn’t full and we always get creamed in WvW, but there’s almost always someone around in PvE. Henge is about the middle I think.

Oh, and I second Operation Union. It’s a fun group of people, and I represent whenever I’m soloing just for the guild chat. They don’t mind multi-guilding, I represent my other guild when doing other stuff. They do dungeon runs pretty frequently too, for both NA and EU.

Gems through the gem store are not a limited supply item, and the price does not fluctuate.

Gems that can be exchanged for gold are a limited supply item – the only gems available through the currency exchange are gems people have sold for gold.

The gem market is working as expected – a highly demanded item was released (makeover kits) and people exchanged a ton of gold to get gems for it. People who noticed this sold gems and got gold at a much more favorable rate than in past weeks. The market has been relatively settled for the past day at a certain conversion ratio with minor fluctuations. Everything’s working as expected, and I get that you’re kittened, puppied, or otherwise irritated about not cashing in / high prices / life is hard, but that doesn’t mean the rules should change.

Minion of Vey.4398:

snip

Thank you for that. It’s always encouraging to see people making money in ways that don’t rely on lying and manipulating other people, and makes me more confident about the general GW2 economy and the chance for I and other casual players to make money on the TP.

Puru.4217:

There’s a easy way to fix the economy.

1)Buy an item from the tp
2)It’s account bound
3)Bye bye traders, you won’t be missed.

Should’ve happened at release though, along with the anti bot campaign.

No, that is a terrible idea. Why on earth should I not be able to buy something, use it, and sell it later when I’ve got better gear?

Poor Leno.3582:

Guess what? You all, myself included, already payed your $60. Anet is not like other MMO devs that have to worry about subscription base. If you want to leave, LEAVE. THEY DONT CARE. If they really did care about the player base, they would be transparent with how they are handling the game.

Have fun spending endless hours farming so you can have your legendary items that you cant sell to anyone once new items are released.

ANet has said that Legendary items will always be best in slot. Once you get a legendary is should be at the top tier always, regardless of what that top tier is. It’s exotics that will be obsoleted by ascended over the next year (fuzzy ground there with infused slots vs regular upgrade slots).

ANet obviously cares about the players. I just don’t think they have been able to execute a lot of things very well yet (holiday events are an exception so far). So their caring is a moot point, it gets negated by the trouble they have translating it into effective action. Hopefully that gets addressed as they build in more support functionality, non-leveling activities, etc.

Well, gigantic quest for legendary weapons is coming, so you could just stockpile materials until then and get a legendary.

We know that ANet is working on all kinds of things right now. I’d wait a bit to see what kind of skins come out.

I really don’t think there’s anything in gems that’s mandatory. Nice, convenient, good to have, yeah.

Just wait until after Wintersday and the gem ratio will be more reasonable. If you want Wintersday items though, you’re basically going to need to use real money. Anet’s got to pay the server bills somehow.

tigirius.9014:

LemurTron.9261:

why are some people saying the drop rate for orr events have jumped way up while others are saying it’s way down?

I have no idea, I’ve had weeks of it being way down. You can have a bad day or even a bad couple of days but whole weeks, that’s when something is definitely wrong here.

I’ve seen reports that MF makes the drop rate worse, so if we’ve got an MF player and an non-MF player reporting, they might see different things. I also saw a few people saying they thought player level played into it, but I haven’t done testing to see if that’s true.

There definitely is something off, though. I’ve had several champions drop nothing, which is not supposed to happen.

I enjoy being downleveled so that lower-level content feels fun and I enjoy not being so nerfed that it’s just as hard as it was when I actually was lvl X. After you earn nice gear, you should keep that and the advantages of it. I think ANet got level-scaling basically right in GW2, which is harder than you’d think.

Welcome to GW2! The game really is a lot of fun, and if Wintersday celebrations are anything like as well done as Halloween, prepare to have a blast.

One note – finding a decent guild helps a lot with empty zones. Every guild’s a bit different, and fit different people, but there are plenty of guilds that are friendly for new players. Also, lower-level zones still give XP and loot, just not as much.

Chocolate bars were used in Halloween recipes weren’t they? That’s why they dropped. And I think more people are going for legendaries now that they have the precursors.

Ryuujin.8236:

Mutiny.4180:

I love people who tell others they make exuberant amounts of gold by “playing the market.” Good to know, but too bad for the rest of us who’d rather play the game and still be able to afford cool things.

Ask yourself this:
How does an adventurer make gold?

Answer:
He sells the loot he finds in his adventures.

A savvy adventurer will always get a better deal than one who just sells for asking price; this isn’t unique to GW2. Whether it be selling an item on auction in WoW or Allods, making an appraisal throw in Dungeons and Dragons, or taking ranks in speechcraft in Skyrim.

If you’re not willing to shop about for the best deal and be savvy with your gold in GW2, don’t be surprised when you find yourself having less than the next guy.

Personally I love this aspect of GW2, it isn’t a matter of grinding up and vendoring items, the civvie side of life is a mini-game of it’s own; the greatest PvP arena where the stakes pay out in gold.

Gilosean.3805:

Do you help with mobs when you see that? If you see someone doing that, ask them if they want the mobs or if you can take them. Easy 5-10s for, and they can harvest in peace.

I do actually – I’m like “Thanks for rounding them up for me” and murder them all with mind bullets. I do wonder why someone would risk training so many mobs though if they won’t survive it if something went wrong.

I need to know more people like you.

It happens accidentally is why. Mob aggro in this game is off somehow – sometimes I can be close, and sometimes they target me through huge obstacles. Maybe I just seem extra-tasty.

So I try to avoid / flee from one mob, and another mob aggros so I keep running, and then another joins in, and then it’s Benny Hill all over again with repair costs at the end. I’ve once to twice gotten a mob train to aggro another mob and looted the resulting pileup, but frequently I have to flee. I love elementalists, but we are just squishy for regular PvE right now.

I also enjoy the market mini-game. I think it’s interesting that everyone who complains about it seems to think it’s a sure-fire winning game. A lot of people lose money that way, just like a lot of people lose money in dungeons or PvE or WvW. It’s a risk just like all the other ways to make money. Some make it big in the market and some get a precursor as a random drop and some are great at PvP. People can earn money all over in this game.

God Of Fissures.8627:

game is a boring grind at this point.

not fun anymore

You used to have fun, right? Did you change anything you’re doing?

I’ve discovered I love the JPs, so I do them whenever I want. They’re fun, I know I’m getting better at moving which is helping me in combat, and I get pretty good rewards at the end. If I was doing the same DE chain over and over I don’t know that I would still be having fun. My advice is to go back to doing the things you found fun before.

Some people like to finish content and move on. There’s no sub, so you can go away for a few weeks and come back for the Wintersday event. Then go away and come back for future events and content. Taking a break works with GW2 in a way that doesn’t work with other P2P MMOs.

Ryuujin.8236:

This. I personally kill everything in my path (I like killing!), and have never wanted for gold; yet I see people sprinting all over orr desperatly searching for orichalcum with a train of mobs on their kitten that’d probably yield 5-10s if they just turned around and stab-murdered them in the face

Not everyone has the build, skills or profession to take on a train of mobs.

Do you help with mobs when you see that? If you see someone doing that, ask them if they want the mobs or if you can take them. Easy 5-10s for, and they can harvest in peace.

OT: Yeah, I used to make enough money just playing to not worry too much. But now I’m seriously outleveling my gear and repair costs are being a pain since I’m dying.

Actually, the answer seems to be there’s a bug with the drop rate. There’s a long thread about it in this very subform (https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Change-in-loot-parameters-or-a-bug-Merged) and another one in the Game Bugs forum I think. The AMA said they were looking into it.

Just found out that server population is determined by accounts assigned to that server, not by people currently playing (see https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations-ANet-ambigious-answer/first#post728364, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first#post703192). So that’s probably why the server populations in the transfer window don’t always match up to player experience.

I’d love to stay on Henge – I really like the people I’ve played with, and I think we have a good PvE community which is what I’m mostly interested in. But I am running into issues with some group DEs, and an underflow system would be nice.

I’ve read a dev post on the subject, but I don’t have a link. I’ll see if I can dig it up.

GW2’s engine has problems with lots of players (I hear GW1 was the same way), so I think the population limit is fairly low. I also think the world design just makes it really easy to miss people.

UPDATE: I found the thread, but the dev post has been edited to say something slightly different. Thread comparing original and current dev responses is here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations-ANet-ambigious-answer/first#post728364

Thread with edited dev response is here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Server-Populations/first#post703192

Makes me sad. I’m never going to get into Tarnished Coast now. Hopefully ANet raises the population cap soon.

Oh no! That’s sad. Hopefully they get another really good composer in for the Wintersday stuff.

Contacts list will show them by account name and character name if they’re online. Just account name if they’re offline.

I’ve started adding anyone I do a DE or party with to my Contacts list so I have a list of people who are fun to play with.

I can always find people to play with on the Henge, but I haven’t explored very far so far. I’ve found 2 guilds (one’s cross-server social, the other is Henge PvE), so that’s going OK so far.

I am thinking about switching to TC though, I would love to be able to do some RP. Or maybe we should start an RP guild on Henge?

The endgame is clearly grind-based (now, leveling is easy, only I keep out-leveling my gear, especially lately with the drop rate issues), and there’s huge gold sinks that either soak up a bunch of money or prevent people from exploring and playing with friends. This makes people want to earn money so they can do fun things and avoid grind. So they wind up grinding the quickest and most profitable thing. Which then gets nerfed so that it no longer provides decent returns. It’s an irritating cycle.

ledzep.9504:

Gw2 forum logic : Why do you take away our grind! This game is such a grindfest.

You got it backwards – This game is such a grindfest when you promised otherwise, why do you remove all the decent ways to avoid grinding?

@Robert Please, before nerfing any more farms, get the drop rate issues that many players are reporting fixed so that players won’t need to farm to play the game. Maybe you need to light a fire under another team or something, but that’s a big issue.

I think nodes move every server reset, which happens once a week I believe?

Magic Find is currently probably broken. People are reporting that it decreases their drops instead of increasing, starting from the time the drop rate was altered for champs and drop rates all over the world plummeted. On the AMA Chris Whiteside said it was probably a bug and they were investigating, so we’ll probably see some changes soonish.

Water-focused elementalist does good support, and can also do damage. Plus, Eles can switch attunement at the drop of a hat.

So you can be in fire at first to drop some big hits on the enemies, switch to water to heal, switch to air for more damage, switch to earth for some toughness / armor, back to water for more healing, back to fire for the final kills. Takes a bit to get used to, but it’s a blast.

Some people a jerks, and some people think being in a game makes that OK. I think server effects this too – my server is pretty nice, I’ve had only one experience that was obnoxious.

We’ve had official dev responses that it is indeed the number of players active. Multiple responses, I think.

You don’t see lots of people right near you because:
1) Most people are in LA
2) Also, dungeons, or crafting, etc
3) Some zones are populated, some aren’t. So how many players you see depends on what zone you’re in
4) Players are in the zone, they just aren’t near you. Zones are large. I’ve seen this plenty on Henge, where someone will complain in map chat about no one else being there, and players will pipe up, even in the middle of the day.
5) Some players aren’t chatty. I’ve done events with other players, none of us spoke, we all wandered off afterward. To someone who wasn’t there, map chat would be empty and the zone would seem like a ghost town, but that doesn’t mean it is.

I’m on Henge too, and I never feel like there’s no one around. Some zones are noticeably emptier than others, and some times are going to be empty, but people are there.

I do think we should have some kind of option to show players on the minimap, but people are playing the game even if they aren’t near you.

I’d rather know when enemies have taken over a waypoint, frankly. Much prefer that to teleporting into a swarm of mobs.

I would recommend it, with the caveat that it’s a new MMO and has new MMO issues. But still a lot of fun for $60.

Serelisk.6573:

Zaxares.5419:

It’s a fairly simple matter to make activities like Keg Brawl popular. ANet just needs to give it Karma and Glory as a reward, making it an alternative for PvP’ers or and PvE’ers alike to gain a currency they want.

I hadn’t noticed a lot of those activities the OP found though, only the major ones like the Busted Flagon bar brawl, the Shooting Range, Polymock and the Moa Races and Pet Arena in LA.

Idk, I disagree. Mainly on the glory part because that allows them access to PvP armor without actually PvP’ing.

They should be able to get exclusive aesthetic skins and items for playing and excelling at these games as well as host leaderboards for these things liek bonus missions in GW1.

Keg Brawl is PvP – you fight other players for the kegs. Keg Brawl specific skins would be cool too though.

The thing is, I think ANet took all the gather/craft/explore people at their word, and made a world where gathering, crafting and exploring are half of the game. Then people got irritated, so ANet added in a dungeon and more gear ASAP. Now people are irritated because of that. With the Toymaker, hopefully we get more mini-games. Or more ways to use crafting.

For a huge program that does a few things really differently from other games, GW2’s rollout has been pretty smooth I think. Bugs galore naturally, but 90% of the content is playable and even fun to play. They’ve even had 1 really fun event (and one stinker, oh well). After the AMA where they admitted the Ascended rollout was done very badly, I don’t see anything I think won’t be fixed.

People keep forgetting that if they don’t want to play, they don’t have to. No sub. You can leave and come back in a few months, no problem. You can do something else in the game, or play a different game, if you’re feeling frustrated, then come back when you want to.

And even things that aren’t stats/numbers advancement works. If (for example) we could train mini-pets to do basic actions and have them put on shows, that would be progression. Different minipets do different things, different classes train different actions. Soon you can have a whole circus going. That was a random example, but there’s all kinds of things like that where people can do something fun and get an impressive result.

The bones for that kind of play – town clothes, non-violent DEs, emotes, pets, etc – are all in the game. Hopefully ANet will get the time to start putting some together. Maybe when they make the racial cities more important.

I love how GW2 has lots of different ways to play the game (you can call them mini-games, whatever). My characters can grow by finding neat views, being athletic, finding and making stuff, killing, doing the non-violent stuff in DEs (although I wish that the violent / non-violent parts of DEs were a little better separated). I’m looking forward to more non-violent play being added, like sprucing up the housing instance, city activities, etc. That’s a selling point for me. I’d hate to play an MMO where only a few things allowed my character to grow.

Re: AI – I saw a news article saying that they had better AI, but took it out because the mobs were too smart. Kind of like in Oblivion where the NPCs would start stealing items and arresting each other. So better AI is possibly in the cards if they can work the bugs out.

AuldWolf.7598:

But GW2 feels… sterile. It’s just their numbers versus your numbers, there’s only a very minor impact that skills have. And the vertical progression will mean that there’s never any real sense of achievement. Only a fake sense of achievement. I think that’s what you’re feeling, OP. So long as the stats of you vs a foe decide the outcome of a fight, it will always feel shallow and meaningless.

You obviously aren’t playing an Elementalist. If you want a class that takes player skill to play, pick one.

The gear progression doesn’t look very WoW-like to me so far. I don’t agree with the launch, but once Ascended gear gets out into the world and everyone can get it easily it won’t be any more trouble than exotic. If it was a dungeon-only thing with better stats, that’s upsetting (and I was upset about it). But once they rebalance the crafting cost and it drops in the world, I don’t think it will be an issue.

That actually sounds awesome. These guys are doomed to be noobs forever! Such a terrible fate, you’re doing them a favor by ending their existence.

There’s a stickied thread for this kind of problem, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Issues-with-character-art-weapons-or-armor

You should post in there so the devs see this issue.

They’ve only had 1 full business day since the AMA, it takes that long just to assign the team to look into it. For a widespread bug, they’re going to need a content guy, an engine developer, a QA guy – basically a whole team. It’s probably something in a really out of the way place that will take a while to find. I suspect wrong-decimal-point or oops-that-shouldn’t-be-negative in an obscure corner of the loot tables or the drop chance calculations, which are huge parts of any MMO code.

For the dyes, that was one item so it’s easy to just change the variable. This is obviously a systematic issue and they can’t do that. Well, they could, but that would be a cheesy and stupid way of dealing with it, since the problem would just crop up again later. I respect that they’re obviously not going to take the cheap way out. I do hope it’s fixed before Wintersday, though, or that drop rates just for Wintersday stuff are upped since it’s a time-limited event.

Yeah, the krait witch champion in Caledon Forest is just as bad with one-shots, plus she’s got ridiculous range.

ANet is working on making low-level content more appealing to high level players, so that should help the issue of not having enough people around. Honestly, I like having waypoints cost money, but the way they’ve set the scale it’s really hard for high-level players to want to do low / mid level zones.

They are fixing bugs, though. Bug-fixing is a slow process, and the games only been out a few months. That’s what we get for being early adopters.

@Lil Puppy: That sounds like they’ve changed the Diminishing Returns code, or you’ve run afoul of the anti-bot mechanics.

@OP:
There have been issues with drop rates lately, on the AMA Chris Whiteside said they thought it was a bug and were looking into it. So you could be seeing that.