Guild Wars 2

vonbladewing.5973:

People said mounts was not even to happen then BOOM here they are,

It’s a completely different situation. ANet is going to add features with each new expac. They could choose mounts or e.g. dyeable weapons or a variety of things that affect everyone’s game play.

However, a new race uses the same people that would be used on the stories for expac, LS. It requires adjust armor and testing weapons for an entirely new group of designs. It requires 10 new voice actors, and, if done properly, is going to include new zones specific to the race.

Further, while everyone benefits from mounts (even if some don’t find them appealing), not everyone is interested in playing multiple races. It always surprises me just how many people there are who play only humans or avoid one race or another for specific reasons.

In other words, mounts don’t compete directly with existing needs of the game. A new race does, plus it adds to future costs of just about all content.

Now, things can change, so just because the cost:benefit is poor today doesn’t mean that will always be true. However, for the foreseeable future, folks should not be surprised or even a “little sad” that there’s no new race (Tengu or otherwise).

If we keep getting an expac every 2 years, I wouldn’t expect it to hear ANet change their mind about it until after the one that follows PoF.

TheBravery.9615:

This is needed soon.

You mean, this is 4 years overdue, right?

Technically, the jargon is misleading. It would be more accurate to phrase them as:

• Buy offers removed + fulfilled.
• Sell offers removed + sold.

However, that’s ungainly and likely still going to be misunderstood, so I don’t fault bltc’s programmer for using the more intuitive “bought & sold”, since that’s close enough for most people most of the time.

• Some content will be released as it is ready: fractals, raids.
• Some added with Living Story: new story, new skins, new legendaries, new zones.
• Some added with expansions: elite specs, guild halls, new features

slashlizardy.9167:

How easy/difficult is it to move the guild hall? And if you move it, does it come with all the existing upgrades?

• Moving is as simple as mounting the new expedition.
• Wiki: " Upon claiming a new guild hall, your current upgrades are transferred to the new guild hall and the old guild hall becomes inaccessible."

mtpelion.4562:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

mtpelion.4562:

Pifil.5193:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

One of the reasons mystic forge recipes command high premiums on the TP is that it takes a long time. Make it easier to promote mats in bulk and we’d lose a lot of the value for doing so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it is something that ANet has to consider before making a change.

Really? I always thought that mystic forge recipes command high premiums because most players don’t know anything about them.

I mean if you want to promote a few thousand materials then yeah, I can see how it’s time consuming but if you just want to promote a few hundred then it’s not so bad surely?

Either way, I’m not that bothered about TP prices, I’d just rather not have to do a few thousand mouse clicks to make a legendary: the most epic part of the journey should not be sacrificing a mouse.

The fact that most of them require enormous quantities of the most expensive items in the game to make a single item are probably also a main reason why so few make them.

You keep saying this, despite the fact that, at any given time, there are many promotion recipes worth 50-150 silver per spirit shard, after taking into account the cost to buy the inputs on the TP. The reason they command that value is that they are time consuming — some people might not know about them, but enough people do.

Promotions are not relevant to what you quoted.

Promotions are what the OP is talking about, thus it’s relevant to the question of whether changing the UI to be faster has economic implications.

With two exceptions, other recipes aren’t implemented in mass. The two exceptions, Amalgamated Gemstones & Mystic Clover can be forged in units of 10. Making the first easier to forge has a direct economic impact; making the second has an indirect one. Either/both of these could be resolved by removing the fixed recipe from the forge and making them part of crafting instead, and slowing them down the way that fulgurite production is throttled.

In effect, these aren’t “new” player character styles so much as ANet deciding to release styles they designed for NPCs in the new zones. In the past, the community has asked for us to have access to such styles, on the theory that, “hey, the assets are in the game, why not allow players to make use of them?”

This is the first time (to my knowledge) that ANet has done specifically that.

Obviously, I’d like it better if their design team also created some new assets for the other three races and the master race. Still, this is better than what they’ve done in the past which is not to make them available just because it was biased towards one race.

It’s an expansion; it’s going to, you know, expand the game. It’s specifically for post-L80 gameplay, so I doubt very much if there will be sub L80 zones. Most veterans are going to be in new zones, so I doubt those will be underpopulated.

Besides, what’s your suggestion for how to do it differently? No new zones? No post-L80 gameplay? Split the player base even more so by including sub-L80 content instead?

I’ve never been interested in mounts — to me, it’s like telling us our characters have a broken leg and must carry a crutch to get around. Plus, in core Tyria (and largely in HoT & LS3 zones), not even NPCs use ‘mounts’.

Well, that ship has sailed. ANet has decided to include mounts, perhaps for the gameplay, perhaps to cater to the traditional MMO fan. For better or worse, they are in the game.

Given that they are, let’s get a chance to see what they are like before asking for ANet to alter them in a major way. There’s a preview coming up in under two weeks; take a look and then decide how awful they are (or awesome — the video preview looked like something I could (ahem) get behind).

In effect, these aren’t “new” player character styles so much as ANet deciding to release styles they designed for NPCs in the new zones. In the past, the community has asked for us to have access to such styles, on the theory that, “hey, the assets are in the game, why not allow players to make use of them?”

This is the first time (to my knowledge) that ANet has done specifically that.

Obviously, I’d like it better if their design team also created some new assets for the other three races and the master race. Still, this is better than what they’ve done in the past which is not to make them available just because it was biased towards one race.

The expac releases in 6 weeks. Whatever they’ve decided for PoF elites isn’t going to change much.

Rauderi.8706:

It’s just nice to see that some things we say do make it into the game, eventually. Patience, virtue, yaddayadda.

That’s always been true. The problem is that many individual players expect the thing that they ask for be added sooner rather than later, without recognizing that there are other players and the costs of some great ideas might outweigh the benefits.

I think it would be better to have phrased it as a discount for existing owners.

To be fair, if you purchased HoT from ANet two weeks ago, you would have paid US$30 and another US$30 for PoF. If you purchase them together today, you’d pay US$50, i.e. ten dollars less.

So it’s not entirely misleading, it’s just a sort of marketing wordplay that leaves a bad taste in some people’s mouth. Unlike the controversy with HoT’s pricing, this one is more likely to go unnoticed by the newest players and might actually please a lot of veterans, since this is the major discount people expected last time.

tl;dr I wouldn’t have done it this way, but it’s a bit better than the pricing kerfuffle 2 years ago.

There’s probably a built-in delay while the banks verify that the credit card used belonged to you. That prevents a thief from converting the 4000 gems and distributing it, before the charge gets reversed. (Although obviously: (a) it’s annoying for us as customers and (b) they probably should make it really clear when you purchase.)

mtpelion.4562:

Pifil.5193:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

One of the reasons mystic forge recipes command high premiums on the TP is that it takes a long time. Make it easier to promote mats in bulk and we’d lose a lot of the value for doing so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it is something that ANet has to consider before making a change.

Really? I always thought that mystic forge recipes command high premiums because most players don’t know anything about them.

I mean if you want to promote a few thousand materials then yeah, I can see how it’s time consuming but if you just want to promote a few hundred then it’s not so bad surely?

Either way, I’m not that bothered about TP prices, I’d just rather not have to do a few thousand mouse clicks to make a legendary: the most epic part of the journey should not be sacrificing a mouse.

The fact that most of them require enormous quantities of the most expensive items in the game to make a single item are probably also a main reason why so few make them.

You keep saying this, despite the fact that, at any given time, there are many promotion recipes worth 50-150 silver per spirit shard, after taking into account the cost to buy the inputs on the TP. The reason they command that value is that they are time consuming — some people might not know about them, but enough people do.

mtpelion.4562:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

mtpelion.4562:

I have previously suggested that exotic Luck should be able to be substituted in a random gear Mystic Forge attempt, similar to a Mystic Forge Stone, with the added benefit of doubling the chance for a rarity promotion (i.e. if you throw 4 rare swords in, you have a 20% chance of getting an exotic sword. If you throw 3 rare swords and # exotic luck, you have a 40% chance of getting an exotic sword.)

This would give Luck a sink without significantly impacting the game’s economy.

That would have a huge impact on the economy, allowing luck to stand in for hard-to-obtain mystic forge stones and increase you chances of an upgrade.

I could imagine include a luck-purchased item with the same recipe and increase your chance modestly, perhaps four rare swords + luck having a 21% of being exotic. That would still affect prices, but not nearly as much.

It would only be a stand in for the random forge, not for any actual recipes (which, let’s be honest, are the only reason to use a Mystic Forge Stone). Plus it would require a LOT of combined luck for a single forge. So no, it would NOT have a huge impact on the economy but WOULD add value to essences of luck.

Based on how you’ve phrased it, there would be a huge impact on the economy. If nothing else, it would make industrial production of precursors even more profitable than it already is.

Shortage.5427:

costepj.5120:

I don’t think RNG means what you think it does.

Random Number Generator. It’s being used on every MMO game.

Don’t make statements you can’t support.

What do you think a “Random Number Generator” means?

Hours played have nothing to do with how many precursors you have, since how you spend that time affects your chances significantly.

Besides which, the game is designed to that you don’t have to get a precursor to drop: nearly everything we do (except sneezing and chatting) generates loot, which mostly can be monetized and saved up to buy a precursor.

Plus, you probably haven’t tracked how many less notable unusual drops you’ve received. It’s entirely possible that the player next door got 3 precursors worth 1500 gold, while you got none, but that over similar time periods, you got lesser drops worth a few percent more. That would drive your gold/time up higher than you neighbor’s — they would have the flashier drops; you’d have the last laugh on the way to your bank.

tl;dr not getting a precursor isn’t by itself evidence of a problem with RNG in this game.

They didn’t give us the name of the expac so there would be lots of threads like this, with people discussing the expac. It’s an easy (and incredibly cheap) way to generate hype.

Amaimon.7823:

LA feels so dead, and empty, as it is now. Like standing on a parking lot at disney world.

The city has already been rebuilt twice; I’d hate to seem them throw more resources at it.
(Plus, I never much liked the old LA; it was ‘old’ for the sake of being old, crowded for no reason, and haphazard in design rather than designed to feel haphazard.)

Siren’s Landing hearts can be done super quickly; Lake Doric hearts feel like they take hours (and, under certain circumstances, they can). The well-designed hearts have these things in common:

• Killing is an option, although perhaps not the quickest.
• The tasks are character-bound; we should never compete against each other to put out fires as we do in several of the Doric hearts.
• The tasks are clearly outlined and ideally intuitive.
• There’s a variety of things you can do.
• Tasks should move the progress bar noticeably.

Siren’s Landing hearts succeed in nearly all of these (although they might not be intuitive without doing the story, too). Doric hearts fail nearly all.

Many of the maps have been actually fun for me to complete multiple times; Doric was horrid the first time and I only came back to it because of the new collection.

zealex.9410:

id orefer a magic find cap increase to 500

As long as the amount of luck needed grows geometrically instead of just linearly. Otherwise, we’d just max out sooner, if not later.

Straegen.2938:

Ridiculously useful feature in GW1 that STILL hasn’t made it into GW2.

ANet stated a reason for not including them in GW2 (I didn’t agree, so I won’t bother repeating it here). However, whatever those reasons were, they no longer apply. Even ANet has said they want this feature. All that remains is for them to prioritize it.

I fear that they have held back because they don’t have the “perfect” solution for the UI, for dealing with gear. At this point, I’d even be pleased to see the ability to simply save screenshots within the build panel, allowing us to match icons manually.

Khisanth.2948:

So this just came up in map chat and in the case of the kingpins it does tell you in the description which says “Take down Event Kingpins around Siren’s Landing”

Indeed.
There are many kingpins, some part of other events. There are also specific events with kingpin in the title; those are the ones that count.

mtpelion.4562:

I have previously suggested that exotic Luck should be able to be substituted in a random gear Mystic Forge attempt, similar to a Mystic Forge Stone, with the added benefit of doubling the chance for a rarity promotion (i.e. if you throw 4 rare swords in, you have a 20% chance of getting an exotic sword. If you throw 3 rare swords and # exotic luck, you have a 40% chance of getting an exotic sword.)

This would give Luck a sink without significantly impacting the game’s economy.

That would have a huge impact on the economy, allowing luck to stand in for hard-to-obtain mystic forge stones and increase you chances of an upgrade.

I could imagine include a luck-purchased item with the same recipe and increase your chance modestly, perhaps four rare swords + luck having a 21% of being exotic. That would still affect prices, but not nearly as much.

Everything you need to know:
https://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Hungry_cat_scavenger_hunt

You have an interesting idea about what constitutes a monetary system. You’ve also set up an unusual benchmark for what makes a good system.

First, a high gold:gem ratio is desirable because it conflicts with real money traders, who end up hurting the game (whether through stealing accounts or through actual devaluation of mats & items via bot farming). Second, while generation 1 legendaries can be traded, no other legendaries since then can be, i.e. the system has adapted to handle the special case.

Thirdly, veterans are always going to keep on accumulating wealth, even if much if it can’t be converted to coin to spend on other things. To ensure that new players can have similar opportunities, yes dailies offer 2g/day — that’s a big help to newbies and a spit in the bucket for veterans.

Finally, I don’t feel any of my efforts are devalued by someone donating US$200 to ANet to purchase a legend. I benefit because that allows me to buy gems with gold, ANet benefits, and sure, the buyer gets a cool weapon without doing much work for it. But then, I can buy that same weapon just by keep a few toons parked at JPs and being careful with my spending.

In short, the system is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, which is to allow all players to play the game and choose to participate in the market place (or not), deciding whether to be patient or impatient, whether to be buyers or sellers. I’m sorry you don’t like it.

Y’all have digressed far from the OP’s post which was asking ANet not to use recycled ideas or content. There are two problems with this request:

• The content/mechanics of the expac have long since been determined. Even if ANet agreed today, the game could not possibly be changed to reflect that any time soon.
• The OP hasn’t defined what they mean by “recycled content.” Or why it’s bad.

Accordingly, there’s nothing to discuss, unless the OP wants to get more specific. Right now, we’re using the first post as a Rohrschach illustrating more about our own preconceptions than offering ideas that might be useful to ANet in making choices that we like better (or worse) than the recent ones.

Khisanth.2948:

They aren’t any more difficult to get than the rest if you get them through the reward tracks.

Let me rephrase then: they lack a feature present in the recent exotics that drop as the ultimate reward from an LS3 episode umbrella achievement. Whether intended or not, it seems reasonable to ask ANet to adjust this.

“Oddly rare” is good. If it were common, then it would become as interesting and valuable as Mini Prof Mew.

Character slots, bag slots, and copper-fed kits have been discounted more than once. I defy anyone to show evidence that these have ever sold poorly.

Discounts are offered for a variety of reason: to celebrate a festival or anniversary, to encourage people to spend RL currency on gems, to maintain a gold:gem ratio sufficient to compete with gold sellers, and to encourage people to open up the gem store and see what else they might drop some gems on.

There are plenty of reasons why it might be worth ANet’s time to add additional colors of backpacks or divert resources from new skins to make back items dyeable. We don’t need to invent reasons by claiming facts not in evidence.

I object to gating on principle — it impedes the player from exploration and running into things by accident; it forces everyone to follow a near-identical path.

However, the current implementation by ANet is as close to a good compromise as I can imagine:

• You need only complete the first instance (or in LS3.6, the first two) for a character to gain access to the new map.
• That character can purchase a portal so that all toons can reach the zone, for free. The cost is nominal, in map currency.
• You can combine all portal scrolls for LS3 maps for a somewhat less modest amount of local currency.

I’d prefer no gating, but if we have it, this isn’t too bad.

Most exotics become soulbound after upgrading.

Still given how hard it is to obtain these, it’s worth asking ANet to make them permanently account bound, regardless of what they intended originally.

mtpelion.4562:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

One of the reasons mystic forge recipes command high premiums on the TP is that it takes a long time. Make it easier to promote mats in bulk and we’d lose a lot of the value for doing so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it is something that ANet has to consider before making a change.

The promotion of materials is usually very unprofitable (or so narrowly profitable as to be a waste of time to do) due to the cost of the dust in use, or the lower price of the higher tier material so it won’t have a significant economical impact to make it easier to perform.

At any given time there are usually only 2-3 promotions that actually make sense to do.

At any given time, there are half a dozen that earn 50s+ per shard.
http://www.gw2shinies.com/shard-alchemy

Sometimes, there are more.

Whether that’s worth your time or not is up to you. However, if it were faster to promote, the number of profitable promotions would drop to zero, except during market transitions. (The same way that it’s generally unprofitable to refine logs into planks, except for e.g. Tuesday, when for a few hours, it was very profitable.)

Again, I’m not saying that this would be the end of the world. It is, however, one of the few sinks for spirit shards now and has value that would be lost if it’s a lot easier/faster to forge. The point is it’s something that ANet has to consider before changing the mechanic.

I don’t see a problem with mobs in Bitterfrost. They are high in just one spot, and there’s little need to spend much time there.

In contrast, all of Lake Doric has problems with mob density, mob toughness, mob DPS, respawn times, heart scaling (many heart contributions are not account bound, so you compete with others to complete them), with respawn rates of collection-related bosses.

I’d love to see more maps like Bitterfrost, while Lake Doric feels like ANet put together the worst elements from every other map in the game.

tl;dr can’t agree OP.

One of the reasons mystic forge recipes command high premiums on the TP is that it takes a long time. Make it easier to promote mats in bulk and we’d lose a lot of the value for doing so. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; it is something that ANet has to consider before making a change.

Heimskarl Ashfiend.9582:

Edit: Out of interest I checked how many ToK are on accounts; The mean is 193 per account, the median is 59, the maximum is 9144.

I’m not sure how the stats from GW2 efficiency’s registered users affect the point to which you were replying. For people who don’t PvE or WvW, it’s hard to level up instantly. It might be worth gold for them. (Arguably, it might be faster to ask friends to let you leech dungeons or fractals and pay them.)

All of us who have max MF would like to see a sink. Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that it’s going to be anything as ‘nice’ as unbound magic. ANet wouldn’t want people to feel under pressure to max MF or to feel forced to choose between more MF or more unbound. It’s always meant as a way to provide additional value to fine/mw items and allow people to get better loot the more they play, without having to do much.

My favorite idea is to include it in the recipes for guild decorations. That allows veterans to contribute substantially, without always making a sacrifice. And, at the same time, it puts relatively little pressure on novices to choose luck vs immediate reward. It also provides a minor opportunity for people to monetize excess luck, by joining a guild temporarily to donate it.

The problem with any RNG-based collection item is that a few people will be unlucky. That’s just the way luck works: some will get it on their first try and some not for ages.

I’ve yet to see any evidence that the items dropped by the bosses are bugged tho. Those are guaranteed drops if you meet the requirements, which admittedly aren’t always clear. In every case that someone has claimed ‘bug’, it’s turned out to fit into one of the known special cases, e.g. Hablion’s drop won’t happen unless you participate in the first phase, when he’s health is above 50% and you can only get one of Ignis or Aestus hearts on the same idea.

You still aren’t getting the point. You’ve assumed facts that aren’t true to come up with a theory that no one should complain about this puzzle. I’ve provided specific examples of that not being true and simply asked for you to be sympathetic to the possibility that other people aren’t seeing this the way you do. It doesn’t take a “severe handicap” to be bad at spatial relationship puzzles. It actually sometimes takes one horrible experience in the past to make it horrible to try any future puzzles of the same class.

Again, I am not complaining for myself. I am not even saying this was horrible for me personally. I am saying that not everyone sees puzzles the same way as you do. This isn’t about experience or intelligence, it’s about perception.

It is my hope that in the future, you won’t be “baffled” that other intelligent people have trouble where you don’t.

Thanks. One of the maps was particularly bad tonight. I would have been happy for a chance to ‘volunteer’ out.

Fluffball.8307:

I’m not assuming anyone’s age, I’m telling you these games were commonplace before the internet ruined all childhoods.

You’ve assumed all sorts of things. Re-read my post. I understand exactly what sort of ‘game’ this is and it is precisely the sort of thing that is hard for people like myself with poor spatial relationship abilities; it’s got nothing at all to do with familiarity with the game.

I’ve done Rubrik’s cubes, which are much, much more difficult versions of the same puzzle. But I can’t do it visually; I had to do it mathematically. I imagine some people haven’t done Rubrik’s cubes because they don’t like those sorts of puzzles.

So again, I’m happy that this was easy for you. I ask only that you accept that it might not be that easy for other people, for reasons that have nothing to do with their childhood gaming or lake thereof.

I like when they succeed, so it worth the risk (to me) that they try at all. You hate the cost when they fail, so it might not be worth the risk (to you) that they try.

Since you liked the game at launch, it would seem that you also like it when they succeed. Since I hate them adding gates into the game just for the sake of grinding, I also dislike it when they fail.

So it’s less about optimism:pessimism; it’s more about risk:reward.

The area probably needs to be tuned down in difficulty: it has the greatest density of mobs, the highest health mobs, the highest damage done by mobs, and it’s the only spot where you can pick up 10 stacks of condition damage if you make one misstep. There are some in-game buffs available there that make it easier, but … it seems unnecessarily frustrating at the moment.

Cyninja.2954:

Djinn.9245:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

L-weapons are more/less available to everyone, whereas l-armor is stated by ANet to be one of the perks of raiding. So, as Cyninja says, legendary armor pieces aren’t necessarily a good comparison. Notice further that l-armor pieces use 15 clover versus 77 for an l-weapon. So it might be better to compare the cost of 5 armor pieces with one weapon. On that basis, 1400-1800g for trinkets is in the ballpark.

I’m having a hard time understanding this concept. 1 trinket = 1 piece of armor from what I can see, not a whole set.

He is comparing the requirement of Mystic Clovers between legendarys and mentioning that L-armor is heavily gated thus not a good comparison.

Correct. The only thing that L-Armor has in common with other legendaries is that its legendary. Its the only one that’s gated substantially behind something that can’t be soloed. It’s the only one that’s stated to be a specific reward for game play. It’s the only one in which subsequent copies are made through an entirely different process.

L-Armor also takes fewer mystic clovers, which is the best indicator that ANet intended for armor pieces to be cheaper than weapons (and now, also cheaper than trinkets).

Aurora is comparable in costs to L-weapons, which given its aura, seems reasonable.

@choppy: you can delete the initial thread yourself. The mods will finish the clean up afterward.

Normally I encourage people to leave posts up in case someone has a similar question. In this case, I can understanding why you would prefer this thread to disappear.

@OP: thanks for posting an easy solution (and hiding it behind spoilers). That’s very kind of you.

Fluffball.8307:

This is a classic children’s game. Anyone getting frustrated is baffling to me; it’s like they never had a childhood. I had about 13 different versions of this as various board games and what not.

It is a 2-dimensonal, 2-state puzzle of the same class of exercises as a Rubik’s Cube (which is 3D with six states in its classic form). People who are bad at spatial relationships and/or have some sort of spatial dyslexia couldn’t do this sort of thing as a kid and they aren’t going to find it fun today either.

Some people can look at a Rubik’s Cube and figure out how to ‘complete’ it in the minimum number of moves. I have to study carefully to understand the impact of the transformations and work backwards from the final state to even imagine what the solution looks like. Even someone telling me ‘click here then there’ does little for me other than allow me to skip the studying; it doesn’t help me to understand why that works or how.

In short, it’s nice that this is easy for you; your brain is built to solve puzzles like this. However, it’s definitely going to be really hard for a significant portion of the community.

I’m fine with ANet including puzzles in the stories; it makes for a nice change from the standard “wait for the NPCs to speak” mode of other instances. All the same, it’s good to remember that just because this is easy or even trivial for some doesn’t mean it won’t be soul-crushingly difficult for some.

This is very impressive. Thanks for sharing vids + builds.

PS my favorite comment on reddit was how four of you are faster at breaking defiance than nine PUGs.

Ah, I thought the journal would be at her body. It’s on the ledge approximately due east (and slightly north) of the PoI where the kingpin is.

Vayne.8563:

Just use the ones one you get from playing.

Fixed that for you
(BL keys seem to drop as rarely as precursors.)

Laurels don’t drop from reward tracks; only from login rewards.