Guild Wars 2

Danikat.8537:

The ideal system … would be … to not even …choose a server until … [entering] WvW.

Wow, that’s a great idea. (The follow-up is good, too — I wanted to highlight the brilliance of this simple change.)

Danikat.8537:

Logging out and back in or refreshing the list won’t help because the server populations only change gradually over time. (I’m not sure of the specifics because they changed it recently.)

ANet has stated that the population status is based on

• WvW participation only (not PvE or PvP)
• It is no longer based on a count of accounts or logons, i.e. it only measures participation.
• It follows long term metrics, specifically designed so that the status is stable. In other words, it cannot change overnight (let alone more quickly) and it’s very unlikely to go up one week and down the next.

Over the long run, this is a more sensible system, since it focuses on the only important impact on the community (queues during peak periods) and removes the uncertainty of seemingly random ebbs/flows.

In the short run, it is lousy for new players that want to WvW with friends on full servers. This is especially true, since currently there are modest incentives for moving to higher population servers (notably: better chance of decent match up, better chance of finding like minded allies and opponents) and no incentives for moving away from high pop servers (it costs gems and there’s no guarantee of a better WvW experience).

Thus while I think the new system is the one we should have had from the start of megaservers (i.e. it’s ultimately better for the game), I wish they had also implemented a change in the costs of moving servers. For example, anyone willing to volunteer to move from Full to Middle/Low pop servers might get to waive their transfer costs or perhaps get 500 gems worth of benefits (perhaps a discounted future move, choice of boosters or choice of dye/mini kit, BL keys, etc).

tl;dr expect the current list of full servers to remain the same for months, or until ANet announces new tournaments and/or new transfer costs/incentives.

Jornophelanthas.1475:

ArenaNet did mention that we should not just throw away all those spare ascended rings just yet. They are hinting that there will be some use for them in the future, probably when the expansion is released.

They didn’t just hint. They explicitly stated that we could salvage rings for a new type of material that would have a use in creating the new legendaries.

https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/the-brand-new-fractals-of-the-mists-legendary-backpacks-ascended-salvaging-and-more/

Ascended Salvaging!

Finally, all of you who have been saving your fractal rings or bonus gear chests from the world bosses can clean up your banks! New ascended salvage kits will be added to BUY-4373; salvaging each type of item, like gloves or weapons, will yield different results, but all will provide a chance at the new ball of dark energy salvage item that will be used for crafting new legendary items in Guild Wars 2: Heart of Thorns and beyond. Salvaging ascended rings will also grant players stabilizing matrices, a necessary component for legendary crafting. These can also be traded in for fractal encryption keys.

They haven’t said if there are other sources of this material, how much we need, the drop rates, etc. So too soon to speculate. I just know I’m not deleting any of the rings for now.

randomguy.1283:

That would be impossible, gw2 crafts always shows the cheapest possible way to level crafting.

I love gw2crafts. However, let’s be clear: GW2 Crafts is cheaper than any other method if your only worry is the cost of the materials. Its algorithm ignores any other potential value, including that you might use the results yourself (either as gear or for later crafting), especially when it comes to ascended mats/components.

Even ignoring these caveats, gw2crafts is still by far the most convenient, quick, and accurate tool for leveling crafts that is out there and will probably remain that for a long time.

======

Details on the Caveats
These are the primary blind spots for GW2 Crafts:

1. You are comparing prices for mats that you can buy right now
2. The TP value of the items you craft tracks pretty well with the material costs.
3. The results of the crafting have no other use for you except to sell on the TP or delete.
4. You do not plan on refining any Ascended materials (dragonite, empyreals, bloodstone).

The first two are reasonable assumptions for chef, jeweler, and r1-400 for five of the other six disciplines. The second fails to take into account refining +1 agony infusions, since you can frequently come close to breaking even by discovering +8 AI or so and selling these. The last two are unreasonable assumptions for anyone interested in crafting Ascended gear, which is about the only reason it’s worth the expense of reaching r500.

Mitigating the Caveats

• If you run fractals, it’s worth refining the +1 agony infusions. If you don’t, it’s not worth investing in them for learning artificing unless you are a TP maven and enjoying hunting for bargain prices and precision sale prices.
• If you plan on creating ascended gear, then save stacks of each of the ascended mats, to refine when you are able (r450) and do that to reach the next tier.
• Unlock recipes and craft things that you might want for alts or for alt weapon/armor sets from r400-r425, and r450-500.

Again, even if you ignore these gaps in gw2craft’s system, it’s still better than any other system out there. I mention these for those who are willing to spend a bit more time to save a bit more coin than even gw2crafts can.

If you are a new player:

• Save your tomes for your fourth or fifth character.
• For now, spend your time exploring and trying out different builds.

I recommend enjoying that relatively brief period of playing your first sub-80 character. If you end up loving the game, you’ll spend far more time playing L80s and if you end up disliking GW2, it won’t matter how much time you spend leveling. There’s a special sort of fun in any game playing your first character; no reason to rush it.

edit: typo

You’re almost better off with other players being able to see your AP — this way, those groups with fundamental misunderstandings of the game will kick themselves and you won’t have to waste time finding it out later.

• Tens of thousands of players have alt accounts with low AP and can run dungeons/fractals more efficiently than people with 20k AP.
• Knowing the route & mechanics is more important than knowing one’s profession and both those things are far more important than gear.
• Similarly knowing the mechanics is more important than choice of profession.
• Being able to communicate is important, since even in PUGs there can be slight variations in the tactics — some groups jump a boss and some wait for the boss to turn a corner; both methods are fast and yet both fail if half the party splits to try both at the same time.

And yet 100s of groups will try to filter for AP, for gear, for profession, and so on…even though in the end, knowing the mechanics is far, far more important. Optimized builds and team comp only matter for speedclearing, so it doesn’t matter for PUGging.

tl;dr I’d rather have my AP visible so that groups expose their ignorance early (and kick me) instead after I’ve committed to running a dungeon with them.

Psychol.5783:

Often when you withdraw an item from guild bank it disappears and appears back when you withdraw a second item but if you put that second item on the same spot then the first item disappears forever.

I reported this like a 2 years ago and it still hasn’t been fixed!

They aren’t disappearing. There’s a kind of latency with how quickly items appear. If you move item A (in the g-bank) to slot ¹ and it fails to display, you won’t be able to move item B (also in g-bank) to the same slot. Instead, if you move it to slot ², then both A and B will appear.

I’m not sure that this will be a priority for them since it sounds like it’s a result of a fundamental challenge of synchronization between the part of their network that tracks your account inventory and the part that tracks guild assets. Both systems quickly catch up to each other, only I’m not sure that it’s every possible to always be within milliseconds of each other, at least not with the current structure.

Or in other words, to fix this bug, they’d probably have to create an entirely new guild asset system, along with new synchronization tools. (Since the expac includes other guild changes, ANet might be doing that as part of HoT; if they aren’t, I can’t imagine they would any time soon.)

The email is being sent to everyone in error. Your account didn’t actually lose any AP or titles.

There’s nothing that can be done about this for now. It’s a bug that we are seeing notifications in “training” for certain characters. I started seeing it before I purchased HOT.

ANet is aware of the issue and will fix it. (No ETA that I have seen, though.) In the meantime, I just ignore it. (Even if it hurts my brain to do so.)

Gkitten24:

none lost here, but what I have lost is 3 superior runes and 3 infusions off my non beta character

Why they dont keep both environments separate is beyond me.

They do keep both environments separate. There is no way that items you delete or swap on your BETA characters can affect the inventory or bank of your live toons.

exploits@arena.net

Or open a customer service ticket (following the links via “Support” at the top left). Or in game, right-click and report (or us /report) and choose “botting” — even though it might not be technically correct, someone will investigate.

Good idea.

Nineteen Characters

I didn’t feel as if I couldn’t remain in the map. However, I agree that without gliding or other elite movement skills, it does feel confining.

The original Beta Weekends for the game also had narrow ranges to explore, lots of bugged events, and some mechanics that weren’t well-explained or complete. ANet got a lot of good feedback from that, which affected what went into the final game, sometimes differing drastically from what was in BETA.

Put another way, a huge portion of our community should avoid the BETA entirely. It’s really something you only want to try if you are fully comfortable with these sorts of limitations.

I’m taking my own advice and avoiding Verdant Brink, except for the tutorial. Instead, I’m bringing the elite specializations to the core zones and trying out the new skills/traits in areas more familiar to me. I’m finding that very enjoyable and I’m still able to provide feedback.

(Of course, I’d prefer if I could explore Verdant Brink, too — I’m just not willing to spend the time until it’s fleshed out some more. I’m grateful to those who are willing to give it a go.)

I wouldn’t mind if the game saved 4 weapon sets that can be easily swapped to outside of combat. During combat, the game is already balanced with some profs able to have two sets to alternate, some with one set with 4 skill bars, etc.

You might be experiencing diminishing rewards. If you do the exact same event repeatedly, you’ll see the xp/karma cut drastically and eventually disappear and the bouncy chests in the lower right will stop appearing. Periodically, I’ll focus on escorting Red Supply until the map is more populated and I’ll very quickly reach a point where I have diminished rewards.

If you are bouncing around between events and never doing the same one more than twice or so, then either you aren’t doing enough damage to event foes to get credit or something is going wrong. The first is a lot more common, especially for those with crazy high ping (you think you are doing damage because you see damage numbers, while on the server side, the foe is already dead).

If you can rule all of those alternatives out, I’d create a support ticket with dates and time. Ideally, try keeping track of which events to which you think you should be getting credit.

Good luck and please let us know what you learn.

Knighthonor.4061:

SirDrygan.1823:

Wait, why are you looking for the board members? Is there a reason for this?

OP is a consumer. thats reason enough in a capitalist society.

If their goal is to make suggestions or offer complaints about the game design or implementation of support, they won’t be well served by starting with trying to find the board members. Sure, they can get the names; the question is whether it will help them work towards their goals.

Dinks.2478:

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/08/06/gamescom-2015-guild-wars-2s-mastery-system-takes-you-from-canopies-to-crafting

Can anet actually confirm this? Because it sounds extremely unacceptable.

How is it unacceptable?

• It’s not as if anyone is going to be able to forge a legend on day 1
• Would you prefer 19 meh legends? Or three fantabulous ones? (if they are gross designs, my argument loses a lot of weight)
• What if they have the next three introduced as part of Living Story Season 3, Episode 2? And then 3 more and so on until they are all released?

I don’t want to dismiss the importance that skins have for players. However, in the end, won’t the gameplay be far more important? If it’s a truly compelling game in scope, breadth, depth, and enjoyment, then isn’t it acceptable to wait longer for legendaries and other skins?

I think it’s a good idea to suggest ideas like this one:

• ANet might decide that they’ve exhausted the infinite tools as a good income source, in which case implementation of this idea would be straightforward.
• Even if they want to keep infinite tools as gem shop exclusives, this might spark an idea of other types of dungeon-exclusive skins/items. As it stands now, excess tokens get turned into ecto; it might be useful for them to have more token sinks.

Just a flesh wound.3589:

Haleydawn.3764:

Fair point but it’s all based on an icon, nothing is confirmed so my first comment stands.

The thing is, if it’s only an icon, why choose an icon that is absolutely sure to be controversial? That’s a really dumb icon to pick if they aren’t planning to actually use that item. They could have made an icon that said [?], like the unknowns in the beta area if they aren’t planning to use exclusive Guild Wars 1 armor or the [Under Construction] icon I’ve seen before.

That’s typical ANet — giving fodder for people to create mountains over molehills instead of having someone vet stuff before it becomes available to the public.

I’m not saying that ANet won’t do something annoying like turn other HoM-exclusive rewards into PvP rewards; I’m just saying the fact of a dumb choice of placeholder is only evidence of ANet forgetting the hype is affected by everything that people can see in the game, not just what they intend as hype.

Yes, ANet should only use the best suggestions. Only… how do they determine “best”?

• Veterans often don’t remember what it was like to start the game, so their suggestions often are unhelpful or worse for newbies.
• Elite players see little challenge while the majority might find it tough going.
• The players with the most time in-game often forget how much time they spend, and how easy it is to accumulate stuff (mats, coin, whatever) just by spending more time playing.
• Players with more money than time (and frequently convert gems to coin) have a different set of concerns than those who have more time than money.

The best way to determine the best ideas is to let everyone post their ideas, let everyone comment on those suggestions, and moderate the forums so the discussions remain productive.

Which is pretty close to what we have now.

You can also take screen shots and post here, on reddit, or elsewhere and ask people to tell you the colors/skins used.

Blush Lift.3570:

As far as I know they payout the extra slot once a week to people who have pre purchased. So you will get your standard slot when you purchased but should get the extra slot some time during the week.

I bought the regular edition late Thursday night (ANet time) and had my extra slot (for veterans) by late Friday night.

Elric Of Melnibone.4781:

Am I missing something or is the map pretty small? It’s supposed to be 25% and it seems like I got through all of it in one sitting. I could not find anywhere special to glide to that you couldn’t run to and it looks like the mushroom jumps where just short cuts.

Trying to glide down just hit a floor where you get an error and die. Is the full ‘verticality’ of the map really open? Also the events seem pretty limited but they are probably no where near complete yet.

The original BETA for the core game were also tiny. Later BETA weekends increased the amount of acreage available, although never to the point of helping us understand just how much bigger GW2 is than GW1 (in terms of total gameplay available in the open world — even if the physical size might be comparable, the density of content is far greater in GW2).

tl;dr You can’t judge the length of a movie by the duration of its preview/trailer. (Never mind the quality.)

TheFallenAngel.1320:

Its rather sad to see how u stopped giving promotion of almost anything, as a veteran player I found myself puzzled by this… you are holding stuffs for HoT I guess but still its discouraging – I can either waste gems for full price slots, or just not play the game till a promo appears… its like you assume everyone is playing the game in expectation of HoT …

I am confused. Is the OP saying that ANet is obligated to discount the cost of character slots? Sure, I personally would buy more slots if the price were lower. On the other hand, I don’t intend to spite my enjoyment of the game by cutting off access to an account upgrade that might benefit me.

biofrog.1568:

Hi All,

I’m almost certain I’ve lost achievement points. What’s more, I think this happened last beta event too.

Logging into a beta character I created this weekend, I dropped from ~19467 to 18967 AP on the beta character.. fair enough I thought, it’s a beta event.. then logged out and went on to my main character. It’s now showing 19,267 AP, but I remember saying to myself I was only a few days from my next reward chest..

Is there any way at all I can confirm this?

Create a support ticket and ask them to follow-up; that’s the only way to confirm something about your own account.

The email is in error. However, at least for me, nothing was changed on my account:

• I can show the title on non-beta characters.
• I can display it on beta toons, too.

Cyrael Pelingar.9650:

To progress in the mastery skills, including glider, you need to enter the hero panel, go to the mastery tab, and click on the desired mastery. The mastery bar will replace your EXP bar at the bottom of the screen. Once it fills, that mastery will unlock. When it fills again, the next tier will unlock, and you can spend mastery points to open it. Hope that helps clear that up for you.

As for the waypoints, from the start, head north, and around to the west. You’ll encounter a treehouse village. It’s very twisty, and took me a while to locate the route, but look around, and you should find it.

Thanks for that explanation. That was a big help.
(I feel foolish for not figuring it out, too — they told us that “masteries” were replacing post-80 “leveling,” so of course it works the same.)

Lillith.5724:

Got a mail that revoked my GWAMM title…earned it fair and square…looks like it’s only for the beta, but dang…I want it back!

I got the email. However, I still have the the associated achievement on both beta and non-beta characters and I can still pull down the title. The mail is in error; your achievement should be fine.

Solandri.9640:

Also the price needs to come way down to encourage more use. At its current price (250 gems, 200 gems in a 5-pack, or about $3), you’ll only buy it if you want to make a permanent change to your character. If they dropped the price to about 20-50 gems, I think enough people would buy them in bulk to change their characters’ appearance every couple weeks that this could become one of their best selling items.

I am sure you are correct that people would buy more at 50 gems each. However, I doubt very much if the community as a whole would buy four or five times as many as are currently sold. (Of course, I don’t have any access to the metrics ANet uses to determine pricing, so maybe enough people who never buy any now would buy a few, to make up for the loss of revenue.)

Instead, I think a ton of people would use stockpiled or free gems, without having much impact on gold:gem ratios or gem sales.

I almost always leave Tequatl instances that have a guild claiming to host completion:

• Only 25 people really need to know the event well.
• The mechanics are well-known enough that it’s easy to get 25 people from PUGs even up to a few minutes before spawn time.

So if the guild sponsorship is legit, I feel comfortable leaving so that that instance has enough room for their people. And if it’s a troll guild, then the point is moot.

(And of course, if such guilds didn’t exist before, I’m sure this thread will give someone the idea to try one. On the other hand, the time investment is heavy for a maximum of a few short minutes of LoLs, so I doubt anyone would do this repeatedly.)

Only gear that was in your bank before you created your first BETA character will be in the cloned version of the bank; any that you put in after will not be. Could this be the case for you?

Or just don’t bother. You might not look fabulous during this BETA; you’ll be able to earn more charges before the next one.

Vileste.7148:

tl;dr:
Megaservers are a main factor for EU players to not be “all friendly” with each other. If you start to write something in your language, you get laughed at and people urge you to write english. If you are not good with english, you can’t talk with each other.

I find this somewhat depressing. I had considered buying an alt account in the EU region so I could practice/learn Spanish, French, or German. I would have hoped that people would be more accommodating to each other. (INB4: yeah, it’s the internet; I should know better.)

Droake.5421:

Thanks for the replies <3

I did eventually realize that without the other two campaigns, getting points isn’t that easy. I am not planning to buy them anytime soon though, so I really appreciated the wiki link and what Aquila wrote, as all the guides I found worked only if you had all three campaigns.

If you could do that BrotherBelial, that would be amazing! The time works for me, I’ll be able to play the game from around 1pm. PM me or the forum if you want to coordinate more.

My alt account only includes Prophecies and Eye of the North and earned 30 HoM points. All it takes is the kindness of friends (and my primary account, which supplied mats and did some of the shopping).

• Minis can be begged, borrowed, or bought. (“borrowed” although the mini returned will be reduced in value)
• Of the three weapon sets, you can obtain two directly on your own and the other can be obtained for you or bought directly. Destroyer weapons are part of EotN and Oppressor weapons part of GWB/Prophecies (a free mini expansion to the game), available if you own Proph + EotN.
• There are several armor sets obtainable within Prophecies/EotN. I think they are ugly mostly; none are that hard, however, to obtain.
• Adding the EotN heroes is imo easier than Nightfall ones.
• You can add some of the relevant pets.
• Only a few campaign-specific titles cannot be obtained; the rest can be farmed or bought.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s trivial or cheap or fast — it’s none of those things. However, it’s not difficult, especially if you aren’t in any rush.

Again, the easiest method is to find people who own accounts and stopped playing and are prepared to donate to help you get the points. (Although, of course, some people really enjoy GW1, as did I, and so it would be more fun to obtain these things on your own.)

There are a couple of mechanical reasons why trinkets won’t follow the same recipe:

• Armor & weapons are crafted; trinkets are bought.
• Rings drop frequently in fractals and are easily acquired via pristine relics.
• Mystic Forge recipes for rings allow them to be infused; there are no similar recipes for armor or weapons (nor for amulets or accessories, either, at least, not yet).

I expect nearly all of the above mechanics will undergo some sort of change when HoT is released.

It’s a number of different things, the most important being that it’s easier to balance.

I believe, had they had implemented this from the start, we wouldn’t be clamoring for the introduction of multiple lines. Instead, we would demand adjustments to GM traits (over other tiers) and going forward, that will actually be far easier for them to manage.

(And I say this as a 4+-line mesmer, sometimes 4-line ele: I prefer the current system despite losing that specific flexibility.)

Dinks.2478:

Whats the big idea? I thought we were going to be able to rep guilds this weekend. Bogus

I remember them saying that guild rep would not be in place. I speculate that this is because guild representation can’t be cloned, the same way they can clone your bank/etc. (It runs off a shared database across EU/NA regions, which is why sometimes the game runs fine, while chat or friends lists are lagging.) Thus, there’s no way to reset any changes to the guild (influence, consumables, build queue) that take place during BETA.

I suspect what they meant by “play with your guildies” was that you could party up with them. It’s a typical ANet hype-team mistake: slightly overstating a minor technical point, in a way that leaves a core subset of the community really annoyed by unmet expectations. (When they could have just understated and set expectations properly in the first place.)

Someone else proposed an idea I like better:

• NPCs that allow anyone to preview hair or total makeover changes, without owning a kit.

Not only would this be a great convenience, I think it would be likely to increase sales of the kits.

GW1 has this, as well as other games. As I recall it, they can even setup a link to the gem shop, if you want to pay for changing your looks to the preview.

Sinistra.7954:

I was worried that it was a bug and being exploited! Kindly please delete this post! Thanks again!

I wouldn’t delete the post — if you had the question, I’m sure other people do, too.

Daimon Vampires.5873:

For two weeks now ground skills for my Mesmer bugged. The aoe reticle for Chaos Storm and Blink disappear before I can use the skill. The reticle disappears as I move it to place I want it.

Very frustrating. This is only in combat, and happens about 80% of the time.

Anyone else having issues????

I am not. You might want to check how you have your ground-targeting options set in the [f11] panel. That sounds like you have insta-cast turned on — could that be the case?

These are the gem store purchases that people recommend over & over again:

• Copper-fed Salvage-o-matic, especially to those who farm for hours and need to make room in their inventory on the fly. (And to those like myself that sometimes salvage 1,000s of items in a row.)
• Watchwork Mining Pick, the only gem store item that is profitable to use (although requires on to be a heavy-duty miner).
• Extra character slot. No one ever has “too many” characters; even ones you don’t play can help earn income by parking at mining nodes or jumping puzzle chests.
• Bank expander. No one ever has too many slots in the bank
• Collection expander. Similarly, hoarders never complain about too much storage for mats.

There are also frivolous purchases.

• I recommend at least one outfit. It’s great not to have to reskin while leveling (saves time and transmutation charges).
• Mail carrier: there are some really fun ones.
• Premium weapon or armor set skins: everyone (who has too many gems) should get at least one.

Aro.8275:

On a related note don’t infuse the Tempered Spinal Blades. Colour it first or colour and upgrade at the same time as you save 250 ecto. That is unless you already infused it and want to re-choose stats, in that case the ecto are already gone :/ .

Yes, that’s great advice (which I didn’t realize; I ended up spending a lot of ecto to get all the colors — if only I had known then).

The OP’s question was whether ANet would change the stats on legendaries to surpass that of Ascended. The answer is: no.

• By definition, legendaries will always have the same stats as the best-in-game weapons.
• By proclamation, ascended will remain best-in-game.
• Therefore, legendaries will never have different stats from ascended.

Of course, if something dramatic happened that the game required another tier, legendary stats would be raised to match. However, the community doesn’t want that and ANet doesn’t want it either, so it’s hard to imagine the scenario in which that could be true.

Most of the rest of the thread is a discussion (or argument) about the definition of gear grind and is, in my opinion, off topic to the question. Whether the game has gear grind or not is moot: legendaries will always match best-in-game stats, not exceed them.

Zok.4956:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

it’s not likely to be as “fun” if they entirely remove RNG from the reward system.

For the “unlucky accounts” it would be much more fun without RNG.

Except that there aren’t any “unlucky” accounts; all accounts have the same chances. Play enough, you’ll get good drops and bad ones. If you don’t play often, then it hardly matters.

fred baker.1724:

High five to Smooth Penguin.5294 !!!!! totaly agreed !!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, one of SP’s best posts.

I assume you could just apply the skin to any breather. (And I’m hoping that they eliminate breathers altogether and make them skin-only slots.)

Famine.3164:

NO one paid 10 bucks for the expansion… how do you come up with this stuff?

Using math of the “1 + 1 = 11” kind:

• Newbies could buy the base game for $40 from 3rd party vendors.
• Alternatively for $50, they can buy the expac, which includes the base game.
• $50 – $40 = $10 for the expac, or so goes the math.

That could be a fair interpretation if ANet were still selling the base game for $40. Instead, ANet only offers the expac, which costs $50 and includes the base game.

Awe.1598:

Update.
My theory seems to be confirmed. Three weeks after creating the new guild, the attendance influence has started to appear in the guild history. The first was “127 members logged in for 427 influence.” LOL.

Perhaps the wiki article on Influence could be updated?

I haven’t observed any changes to the mechanics since the game launched and I frequently track results for weeks, with various number of people and characters logging in and across multiple guilds.The wiki’s details are close enough to what I have observed. It’s not 100% consistent and never has been.

It sounds as if what might have happened in your guild is that the log wasn’t updating properly.

tl;dr I don’t think this is a new bug, just a typical variation in how influence from attendance accrues.