Guild Wars 2

Oldirtbeard.9834:

…a tax for being stupid .

Wow. If someone can figure out how to code that into games, we’ll never have to see artificial wealth sinks like the Mystic Forge or Apprentice Mekteki.

(Aside from that, great news for the OP; I’m glad the support team was able to help!)

I think Moa Racing was one of those experiments extremely popular within a tiny subset of the community and generally played only a few times by the rest. That makes it unlikely to return as it existed originally. I think it’s more likely that we will see competitive, repeatable challenges in HoT that share qualities with moa racing.

Serious.7083:

Oldirtbeard.9834:

Free market is free market, get over it and start farming SW Chests.

The market is, in the end, entirely controlled by anet. They could dump a trillion dyes onto the game in an instant and the prices would drop to coppers.

Anet are unlikely to do that but it does make the whole thing a MONOPOLY, not a free market.

A monopoly refers to a single entity controlling the supply, with the power to manipulate prices to their benefit. ANet doesn’t control the supply; they control the mechanics which allow players to create that supply. Further, manipulating those mechanics has zero direct benefit to ANet: they don’t make any money out of the high cost of a low-supplied item such as any of the Taimi dyes.

A free market is one in which buyers & sellers are able to pick & choose items and set their own offers (and further in which everyone has access to the same data).

tl;dr the TP economy of GW2 is a free market; ANet doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense of the word.

Again, for those playing along at home:

• ANet has, so far, always brought limited-edition dye kits back to the gem shop, at which point prices fall quickly.
• Anyone who wants the dye at a “reasonable” price (to them) just needs to wait for that to happen.
• Anyone who wants the dye now has to be willing to pay what others might call “unreasonable” prices, since the supply is low and the number of potential buyers is high.

Serious.7083:

The reason you can’t stack kits is simple, anet are trying to sell copper and silver salvagomatics, these perform the same function as salvage kits but get them $$$.

They have never been stackable, so it’s not some sort of conspiracy to get us to spend gems. For whatever reasons, ANet created salvage kits as an item that had multiple uses.

While they could create a mystic forge recipe to allow us to combine kits, I don’t see why they should:

• They’d need a different recipe for each potential combination of kit.
• The benefits are slim and only apply to that small fraction of people that (a) don’t use up salvage kits before starting a new one AND (b) aren’t willing to toss out kits (that don’t cost much) even when running out of room.
• There’s a slight inconvenience to those who forge a lot, since this would create clutter in the mystic forge dialogue, without being useful most of the time.

tl;dr the small benefit to a small group isn’t likely to justify the high cost of changing the current mechanic.

It’s a bug and has been reported before. No ETA on the resolution, unfortunately.

See also:

• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmer-Mantra-of-Resolve-bug/first#post5337047
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Mesmer-Mender-s-Purity-Mantra-of-Resolve
• https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/mesmer/Mantra-of-Resolve-Mender-s-Purity-Bug

(I link the above just to remind ANet that people keep reporting this and will continue to do so until it’s resolved or the thread is merged & stickied.)

There are some stickies in the Account & Tech Support forum. Often turns out to be resolved by:

• Deleting the gw2 cache (which sometimes gets a corrupted file)
• Repairing the .DAT file
• Ensuring that you run the game with full admin rights.

Explanations for each of the above can be found by following the “common issues” sticky.

Alternatively, you can create a support ticket (following the links at the top left of this page). Customer Service is often able to help people troubleshoot/resolve this quickly.

Good luck.

So far, ANet has always brought back dye kits, and then prices drop fast. Wait it out. Unless having a specific color is so important you need it now. In that case, you are competing with all the other people who can’t wait either, and that’s the very definition of a seller’s market.

Yashuoa.9527:

Will the elite spec be just an extra choice to play, or will it be stronger than the other choices, due to being elite?

The word elite kinda gives a feeling that its your most powerful form but maybe its just an extra and equal choice of playstyle. Not necessarily better.

“Elite” was a poor word choice. It’s not meant to big bigger, better, or stronger (even though the word “elite” means “best” both by definition and in every other context I can find in a dictionary).

Ranael.6423:

Right now those traits are really nice and useful in WvW and open world. In some Pvp map one could imagine it is an advantage to jump from the clock tower with less damage.
Maybe it could be used as defensive tool when launch or knocked back… but then the ICD should be high enough to be comparable as defense against control traits.
But I’m not sure the change would not make it worth than now.

Sure, if you are doing JPs or specifically tying yourself to a style of WvW play that encourages others to chase you near cliffs, then falling damage is very helpful. However that doesn’t apply to the vast majority of gameplay. Thus, they aren’t “nice” or “useful” in WvW or PvE; they have an extremely niche use in both and yet require taking up a specific trait line just to get that occasional value.

I don’t think ANet should add a new mechanic to try to artificially create a need that reduced-falling-damage would address. Instead, I’d like to see it removed as a trait and replaced by something else: tied to armor (maybe toughness) or upgrades (like snowfall runes), or just reduce the baseline falling damage for everyone.

Time-gating is a simplistic solution to reducing supply. It’s often chosen because it’s easy to implement and easy enough for people to understand. Unfortunately, once it’s in the game in any fashion, it’s tempting to make it the “go to” choice for other issues in the market and even to slow down horizontal progression.

Time-gating is never chosen to be fun, except indirectly, as is true for many mechanics. For example, spam filters aren’t in the game because they’re fun — they’re in the game because the alternative is less fun (i.e. allowing gold sellers to go unchecked).

I’d prefer that GW2 didn’t have any time gating. On the other hand, I don’t find it slowing me down at all, since I tend to start making charged quartz before I need it and I started producing damask before I had decided what stats I wanted on my ascended armor. Thus, by the time I’m ready to craft, I already have all I need.

tl;dr time-gating isn’t about “fun” per se; it’s about solving a problem that would reduce the fun more severely than time-gating. It’s a compromise solution, not a “best” one.

Phalange.6094:

17 days later and the bug is still there :/

Haven’t the numbers been off since LA was rebuilt, ~23 June (or closer to 8 weeks than 2.5).

The easiest way I’ve found to deal with this is to use a copy/paste trick, as follows:

• [Shift]+[click] the item
• Copy (or cut) the chat code from the chat window.
• Drag the item out of inventory (or right-click & choose ‘delete’)
• Paste the chat code to the dialogue box.
• Remove the brackets (“[” and “]”) from the field.
• The delete button becomes active.

I also use the trick when my fingers can’t seem to manage the spelling or when the word is too long or when I’m just impatient to get rid of the item.

Whenever I’ve gotten that message, I just click the button and end up in the appropriate instance. I am treating it as a “typo.” (Naturally, it should still get fixed.)

Last year, didn’t they start the anniversary sales slightly before the anniversary?

As far as I know, all the light sources are documented on the wiki:

Light source

This includes two back items, the only way I know for engineers to retain their weapon skills while illuminating the area around them. Can also try flamethrower, which will offer some lighting when you use its skills.

If they are attacking people via /map or /w chat, you can report them for verbal abuse. However, there’s no rules violation when someone wants to cut off their noise to spite their face. There are so many instances of silverwastes that it’s a waste of silver to take an otherwise successful event map and force it into a chest map. Makes it harder to chest farm than moving to a new map.

Unfortunately, once someone does that, you have only a few choices:

• Go with their program and chest farm.
• Ignore them and encourage everyone else to do so as well (makes them slightly less likely to continue if they don’t get a reaction).
• Humorously point out the error of their ways.
• Give up and move to another map.

As a work-around, you can buy “Stein of Ancient Dwarven Ale” on the TP.

BrotherBelial.3094:

But I like my breather when I’m under water. Also crafting breathers are coming.

• You’d still have your breather (as a skin) while underwater.
• The suggestion is that ANet cancel the plans to craft breathers as gear (if they want to offer the option to craft skins, that’s fine).

Substatic.6958:

Or you know, ArenaNet could fix the whole Necro doing 40-60% less damage than other classes in optimal PVE situations. I seen F2P games with better balance.

Right?

I don’t think that’s the issue, so changing how necro works isn’t going to fix it. It’s an issue of perception: for the typical PUG, it doesn’t matter that much if it’s 4 necros or 0; it matters more if the players understand the dungeon.

The game should offer a variety of challenges and a variety of rewards. Some rewards should be tied to skill, some to chance, and some to perseverance. As it turns out, that’s what we have in this game (even though many of us might quibble with the balance between the acquisition methods).

As Brooke Shields says,

If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life.

dbgfeller.8120:

Hey

I got it when I killed the boss the first time, but I chose the wrong skin..
How do I get it again? I kill the boss every day but it never drops

The vendor sells everything but not the coat box. Is this a bug?

It’s RNG for the coat box, unfortunately. The silver lining is: breach/vine wrath almost always succeeds these days.

Good luck.

Feral.3609:

To address you both at once, I wasn’t talking about diminishing returns per say (although this is probably what people may have been talking about at launch where some accounts had diminishing returns all the time; something I think my account has); more that some accounts may have a bugged level of any sort of return. I.E. incapable of finding any drops.

Although according to your responses it seems you’re suggesting it’s all luck based entirely and therefore I’m just really unlucky xD

You aren’t really unlucky; you are about as lucky in precursors as most people.

Create a support ticket (follow the link on the top left to “support” and follow the links). Include as much information as you can, including screen shots. I doubt they could have actually attacked you in the way they said they would, although, of course, that’s besides the point.

Eh, it’s just as well that people let you know ahead of time that they have preconceived ideas about how others should play. Saves you from the heartbreak of psoriasis later.

The most important things in completing dungeons quickly are: knowing the dungeon, knowing your prof, knowing other people’s profs, and least important (of the notable factors) is choice of build, including choice of prof. People saying “no rangers” are putting the least critical factor first, so it’s not so much “elitism” as prejudice.

There are always going to be people who prejudge others based on arbitrary or semi-arbitrary factors. Unfortunately, that’s a social issue and not one that ANet can really do much about.

wetwillyhip.7254:

If Karma boost are now exclusively only available via In-Game Rewards, then they are only exclusively available and obtained through In-Game Rewards. Obviously that means they won’t available via Enchanted Powder.

Um, last I checked, enchanted powder is exclusively available…in game. So the fact that karma boosts are supposed to be only available inside the game doesn’t address the change.

We just don’t know anything other than the functionality changed and ANet hasn’t formally commented on it. There are lots of posts about lots of things and ANet will never have time to reply to all the ones we think are important.

I’m just as unhappy about this particular issue as anyone, since I, too, spent time and effort to convert my boosters into enchanted rewards. I just don’t think we’ll accomplish anything by overhyping the issue.

• These things used to provide a certain functionality, for which people paid coin.
• They no longer do this.
• We’d like the functionality restored.

It doesn’t even matter if ANet intended this or not; it’s still reasonable to point out the change and to ask for the change to be …un-changed.

Back items share properties with both trinkets and with armor; they aren’t really either. (Or they are actually both, depending on your point of view.)

Jerry Attrick.5963:

Does Anet not allow Google Voice numbers for two factor authentication?

No, ANet does not consider that to be a “legit” phone number.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/a-new-way-to-protect-your-account/

it’s not as easy for a hacker to add a phone number to the account. We require a legitimate cell phone or landline phone number, not something like Google Voice, and we verify the phone number. Hackers don’t have an unlimited supply of cell phones and landlines they can use.

Alternatively, you can use something like Google Authenticator instead.

Emmalouise.1763:

Frostfang.5109:

It has never worked. Like never eve-ever….

Lol. This. Just this lol. Amazing!

It’s not in the least surprising. ANet, like many other firms that don’t work on websites directly, hire another company to build their forums. Choose the right contractor, and all is well. Choose poorly, and you can be stuck with forum issues for ages. And it’s all-too-easy to choose the wrong contractor.

Personally, I think the forum does its primary job well: it allows us to communicate with each other and ANet. It lacks important bells and whistles, such as a robust search. However, I’m not sure it’s worth the cost to vet alternatives, overhaul the existing folders, and replace it with a new one.

Here’s the question you should ask yourself:

• Would I prefer to wait 5+ months to enjoy being among the first to get one of the new style legendaries? OR
• Would I love having one the current legendaries now and take my time getting one of the newer ones.

I used “five months” because (a) we know that it’s going to be 2-3 months before HoT is out and (b) we can reasonably expect that it will take 2-3 months to “earn” a legend using the new system. Why so long? You’ll have to build up a variety of masteries, farm new materials with likely low drop rates, learn new recipes or crafts (maybe), and so on. We know that ArenaNet was surprised that people learned how to create legendaries so fast after GW2’s launch, so I imagine they will build in some gating (both forced and sort of organic) into the process.

tl;dr there’s still a long time before any of us will be sporting one of the new legends (and who knows if we’ll even like them).

Tongku.5326:

I usually complete 2-3 maps per day, 5-6 days a week.

This entire week, I finally got 1 shovel, just now, for all that. Literally, 1 shovel.

That’s about what I was getting sometimes, when I was still working on lumi armor. Literally, 1 shovel for 15-20 maps. (Other weeks, I might have gotten as many as 20.)

Pockets.3201:

Black lion keys are a horrible buy. Its very unlikely you’ll get anything good.

If you buy them to “get anything good,” they are a horrible buy. If you buy them for the excitement you get as you roll for that “anything,” then they are as good a deal as you want them to be.

As stated in the original post, they are in the list because the OP considers them to be “fun”, not because they are “useful.”

Certainly, here’s some certainty:

• Tomes of Knowledge, used by L80 characters
• Daily Completion
• PvP rewards

Keep in mind, before skill points were split into spirit shards and hero points, it wasn’t significantly easier to get skill points, outside of from challenges. Most veterans didn’t care, because they just accumulated without paying any attention, and most people don’t use them on a daily basis. Unless you paid to unlock traits, you had no reason to spend them.

Since the update, spirit shards have a greater variety of sources, with the exception of post-80 “leveling”. Plus, now they are useful for converting stats on ascended gear.

tl;dr there are plenty of sources; it just seems different now because it doesn’t happen automatically.

Google search is what I use for most websites, including the GW2 forums; it’s nearly always more efficient, accurate, and gives access to the way-back-machine, when applicable.

site:forum-en.guildwars2.com inurl:forum “findMe”

or e.g.
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum-en.guildwars2.com+inurl%3Aforum+%22concordia%22

(you can do the same thing for Bing, Yahoo, etc, if you prefer those search engines)

Zalladi.4652:

There is no such thing as “decreased returns”, only luck – I have been playing for nearly 3 years, and have only ever had one drop from a mob.

Actually, a tiny fraction of people do hit Diminishing Returns, which are mechanics in the game designed to make it difficult for botters.

• Dungeon DR is easy to hit (if you don’t know about it), since it shows up if you repeat any path twice in the same day.
• Event DR shows up if you leave a character in the same spot to repeat the same event repeatedly. Anyone who uses just a single character to fight Rhendak or the Commissar runs into this (it can be broken by doing events outside the area, especially those that involve killing other foes — this includes WvW).
• Loot DR shows up if you kill the same set of foes in the same area repeatedly. People hit this who do Maize Balm farming and a small fraction of folks run into in Orr. It’s easily broken up by leaving the area or cycling through characters.

There are a couple of things that don’t have any associated DR (based on comments by ANet and evidence from players):

• Opening containers of any sort, including champ bags, festival bags (ToTs, Wintersday Gifts, …), and loot bags.
• The Mystic Forge (20% chance of upgrade, various range for material promotion, tiny chances of precursors).

tl;dr there are diminishing returns in the game, even though the OP (according to their own post) hasn’t run into it.

Good post, OP. I agree with Rose: bank tabs save me more space (and are more versatile) than the collections expanders. I do love the fact that you included something fun along with the practical: economic efficiency is not the only important factor when deciding how “best” to spend gems.

One thing missing from your list:

• Save 800-1,000 gems — nearly every month, new stuff comes into the store and old stuff goes on sale; it’s always good to have a few available so that you don’t have to scramble to convert gold (at premium rates) or buy gems with cash.

PS to moderators: this is a good type of thing to sticky, since people ask all the time what are good ways to spend excess gems.

Menadena.7482:

I started setting up a defense team as normal (north hills). …

• Did your map succeed?
• If yes, what difference does it make what this one group did or was intending to do?

Mind you, I’m sympathetic to the feeling. I’ve found myself in maps that had people typing out unhelpful (although plausible) ideas in /map. When that happens near spawn time, I have only three choices:

• Turn off /map and proceed with fingers crossed.
• [F12] and return to a new map, that might have trouble scrambling defenses at the last moment.
• Give up on Teq for that spawn (which might mean for that day, too).

The great advantage of a PUG map means that anything could happen & the great disadvantage is that…anything could happen. If I don’t want to live with those options, I’ll join a guild like [TTS] and stick with organized spawns, forgoing the easy-going options of PUGging.

Vova.2640:

I have to say this, as someone who does farm SW a lot (practically live there) I’ve been getting a lot less shovels from events too..

What does “a lot less” mean in terms of numbers?

• How many events did you do per week 2 months ago and how many shovels did you get then?
• How many events did you do this week and how many shovels did you get?

Humans have demonstrably poor memories about things like this: we overvalue recent memories over distant ones, we undervalue average results, and we tend to remember results that confirm our preconceptions and forget those that do not. Without keeping track, most of us are mostly wrong about anything that involves comparing amounts from different periods of time.

tl;dr in the absence of specific numbers, we should “assume” that the drop rate for shovels hasn’t changed.

You’d have to open a support ticket so that their customer service team can work with you. (Follow the links from “support” at the top of the page.)

SpyderArachnid.5619:

JediYoda.1275:

but but but……players were asked in a survey if they wanted permanent open world changes and the player responded Yes! So Anet delivered based on that feedback!

If that was the case, then Orr should be a nice place now instead of still being full of undead that we killed a long time ago (and their boss to boot). Especially since Trahearne cleansed the land as well.

In the personal story, the NPCs mention that it’s going to take a long time to clean up Orr. I’m not saying it has to remain like it was at the beginning of GW2, only that it aligns with the lore that Orr is still filled with undead and isn’t a nice place. Yet.

TexZero.7910:

I seem to recall a dev saying it would only effect a small portion of players…..

But atleast weekly i hear the same complaints from people.

Could be they could tweak or make the system better by using a linked method. I.E if you have been friends with said person for x time or in a guild with them for x time the amount you can send between each group increases. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable a request.

What the devs said was that, prior to instituting the 500g per week limit, only a tiny fraction of people transferred that much. Naturally, you’re going to hear from someone every week because even a tiny fraction of 100,000 or 500,000 (or however many people play GW2 each week) is still enough for some of them to post in the forums.

I don’t think your proposed change is “unreasonable” in the sense of fairness. It’s just harder to code and harder to prevent it from being used as a work-around by gold sellers. I think it might turn out to be more trouble than it’s worth, for ANet.

Guhracie.3419:

Is it intended that I cannot turn my boosters into karma boosters using the 10s/each dust anymore, or is this a bug?

Unknown. It’s been reported on several other threads and, as of this moment, there’s no official response. (Which proves only that…there’s no official response: stuff like this has been fixed in the past without a comment before the second update.)

Tiger Ashante.1792:

I think it’s been long enough for us to look at that ToN debris. Please restore this lovely map to its former beauty. The lake shores are a mess, the loading screen is well…terrible. If you have to leave some remnants of the ToN there, then leave the bit in the lake itself, but clear the rest of it. I get depressed every time i go into this map, and actually avoid it.

As a side note, I have a friend who’s stopped playing gw2 over the changes made to Kessex Hills. It was his fav map and he was so upset over it he hasn’t logged in 4 months and probably won’t return.

I like that the game keeps evolving, so I’d hate to see them revert any maps. It strikes me that they did their job well if it gives a very strong impression. I thought Kessex was incredibly dull before; now I think it’s a lot more interesting (and dangerous).

I’m sorry that it depresses you and I’m sorry that your friend has decided that one map changing is enough to never return to the game. I suspect, however, those are views held by a tiny fraction of the community.

They aren’t going to suddenly change the PvE-only philosophy to set up PvP in PvE-only maps.

I could see them doing it in certain maps for limited periods of time.

The OP suggests that no one is going to use three core specializations, which is an incorrect assumption. I definitely plan to play the elite specs, primarily because they are new. So far, I wouldn’t say that they are so much better that I will continue to do that after the shininess wears off.

Ergo, no, we can’t “skip this stage” because there is not a “stage” to skip.

• Setting build priorities is an interesting dynamic, especially now that there are more lines with good choices.
• I have never understood why fall damage reduction is in a trait: in PvE, it’s only useful out of combat situations. In current PvP, it’s nearly useless. In current WvW, it’s only useful in very niche situations.

Knighthonor.4061:

Just went to game stop. there is no way to get Gems outside the game from them.

Is it like that for others?

I just saw them at two different stores.

None of the retailers ever know how to deal with gem cards (or similar items):

• They order a few, not sure how many will sell.
• They don’t sell right away, so they don’t order more for the next period.
• The ones they have sell all of a sudden, so…
• The store ends up without any and without any on order, so the clerks say, “we don’t carry it”

It’s hard to tell the difference between that scenario and when the store really doesn’t carry them anymore. This happens at target 3-4x/year, so I’m guessing it could have happened at GameStop too.

If I got to do it over again, here’s how I’d do it:

• Twilight to use — it’s more distinctive to me and I like seeing the ends of time in the darkness.
• Sunrise to combine with Twilight for…
• Eternity to sell, recouping most of the costs of both.

That gives one the skins of two legendaries for < 65% of the cost of one. I don’t use the “change my stats” feature of the legend often.

Risingashes.8694:

@TranquilInSpirit.6291:

I feel your pain.

Unfortunately short sighted people like the replies above are fine with the horrible lazy system currently in place.

They should have allowed people with accounts authorized for more than 3 months a much higher limit so there weren’t as many false-positives. Instead we’re stuck with being treated like criminals for no actual benefit.

Gold buyers are the ones targeted by the new system, not gold sellers. Gold sellers have a ton of accounts they can use to send mail; gold buyers have just the one. When they are limited to accepting gold in 500g/week increments, they tend not to be as eager to take the risk of losing their account to save a few bucks.

So, no, we’re not being treated like criminals; we’re being asked to sacrifice a small amount of convenience in exchange for putting a big dent in real money trading. I don’t have access to the stats to say whether it’s been effective enough to make it worth the trouble.

Haptic.7912:

Thought I would give GW2 a try again, but where is everyone, the place just seems dead, where are all the people?

Where are you that the place “just seems dead” ? There are people everywhere I go, including some relatively obscure corners of the map.