Guild Wars 2

atheria.2837:

Charrbeque.8729:

Every time I sell an item in the trading post my mail carrier activates for each item sold. It seems to only happen when I sell stuff instantly. If I list items that sell later the carrier doesn’t activate.

I’ve also witnessed this happening to other players standing in front of a trading post NPC with 1 mail carrier after the other flying away from them.

It seems to be the send mail animation where the carrier flies away from players as if they are sending multiple mail to other players.

Thanks for the heads up.

For those of us who have repetitive motion sickness issues that would be a game ender.

Anet should know better than to use it for the TP – it’s a bank transfer over the ethereal network that has nothing to do with carrier mail – if they want to be genre correct, they need to remove that ridiculous action.

I would never buy something that popped up every time I sold something, hundreds to thousands of times a day.

It might help if you didn’t call it “ridiculous” or claim that it was “genre incorrect.” It’s entirely sufficient to say you find it annoying and diminishes the value of the mail carriers as a premium product.

Although I like the effect, because I happen to love my mail carrier, I agree that it would have been better for the game not to apply carriers to TP transactions. However, I doubt at this point it would be a simple matter for them to separate out the mechanics.

the dialogue box gets tucked into the lower-left corner of your screen — I know it’s there, but if I swap characters mid-fractal, I always think it’s bugged first until I remember to look.

RubiBayer.8134:

Just swinging by to say thanks to all of you for participating in this thread. Josh and I sat down together for about an hour this afternoon and went through the entire thread.

You brought up a number of points we already had in the PoI show notes, so we were happy to see that we were on the same page there, but you also gave us more things to discuss, clarify, and think about for tomorrow. My goal was to make tomorrow’s PoI more valuable and informative for the people watching it. Those of you who posted good, constructive stuff helped with that, so… thanks for pitching in. (Sorry, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the Silverwastes lately.)

I hope to do this with future episodes too, if you all find it useful.

Thanks for taking time to acknowledge how you are incorporating the feedback.

Fay.2357:

I have an…idea. I don’t know if the tech even exists for this yet, but may as well mention it.

Gravity well would cause an aoe pulling effect. This effect would not interact with stability at all, it wouldn’t cause a disable. Instead, it would be as if you were on a treadmill that was pointed towards the center of the aoe area. This effect would scale up towards the center, so if you were at the outside, you could just walk out reasonably easily. If you got to the very center, it would be pulling you faster than normal running, so you’d have to dodge and then walk out. At the end, the normal float.

This way it’s still an interesting suction, but doesn’t actually lock you with hard cc.

I love that idea.

GuzziHero.2467:

Selective cognizance could be a factor. I’d like to think that it doesn’t affect me, but perhaps it does.

I’ve yet to meet anyone who didn’t suffer this, even people who are excellent scientific researchers, especially when it comes to social interaction.

I point this out as an issue frequently when it comes to people who think they are seeing reduced drop rates. And yet, despite my warnings to people that we really have to count and not just go by memory, I find myself frequently wondering whether ANet just nerfed the rate on something. The only difference between myself and those who dismiss confirmation bias/etc is that instead of posting on the forums, I start counting and writing things down to see whether the data backs up my gut feeling (it never has so far).

Just because this is a likely factor in your own impressions doesn’t mean your instincts are wrong. I do think it means it is worth collecting additional evidence, which includes asking people here what they think, so you’re off to a good start.

I highly recommend the GW1 wiki’s guide, which covers a variety of goals:

Guide to earning hall of monument rewards

(Also useful to ask your GW2 friends/guildies if they have any “spare” resources — especially minis — in GW1.)

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

What I don’t understand is why is it needed in the first place?

• All your other armor works just fine underwater why doesn’t your helm?
• Oh and let’s not go down the “The breather allows you to breath underwater” road.
  Take your breather off its equipment slot and put it in your bag inventory, now jump into the water. Guess what, you breath juuuust fine.

Originally, it was needed for going underwater. But they removed that mid-development because they felt it was an unnecessary hindrance to exploring the game.

Actually, no, it was never needed by anyone who played the game, since it was removed “mid-development.” Instead, we have (for three years) suffered an unnecessary hindrance to gearing up (16% increased rune costs, loss of stats while underwater) due to something that never mattered, because someone on the dev side forgot that they had converted breathers into more of a skin and no longer needed separate stats for it.

ANet devs have said they made a design decision long before the game was much more than a glean in their collective eye that players would not be able to dye weapons (and likewise back items). Some sort of technical issues combined with labor costs made it seem like the best move for the game, at least at that time and perhaps even today.

I still think people should keep requesting it. However, I’d hate for anyone to get discouraged when they don’t see ANet even stop to consider it.

It could very well be perception, rather than reality. A lot more people are playing at any given time than most of us realize. Are you comparing peak US hours to peak EU hours? Could it be your specific home worlds instead of EU vs NA? — despite megaserver, players tend to be grouped often with people from the same few servers, except when there’s a world boss or a 4-event daily specific to the zone.

For example, several people I know with multiple accounts chose alternative home worlds and they believe that their main account’s home world is much more friendly in terms of rezzing, map chat, and so on than their secondary account’s home. Whereas the people who have main accounts on that same world report that they think the community is super friendly.

In other words, it could just be the accident of who you have been running into, combined with the human mind’s “skill” at remembering examples that reinforce our impressions (and ignoring evidence that contradicts it).

You can run Healer in this game already, if you wanted. There are builds for “healineer” etc. They are useful for helping new players through trickier fights — I have a friend who can keep everyone alive even through some amount of Agony. It’s not efficient in the least; she just has a lot of fun keeping everyone’s health pools at ~100%.

You can sort of tank in this game, if you wanted. That’s a lot less useful, since the current foe AI is so unintelligent, you can get them to do whatever you like usually.

Aside from that, the game is designed so that you don’t need the traditional trinity of healer/tank/DPS, since it’s faster (and imo more fun) if everyone is responsible for their own active defense, with proper support from each other.

If the OP is keen on playing a traditional healer, this game might not be a good choice for the long term.

Interesting.

I’ll start keeping better track. My memory (which we shouldn’t rely upon) says that I’ve had long streaks of 3-5/day. 8-10 was more common. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Charrbeque.8729:

I was always under the impression a “mail” carrier was for sending and receiving “mail”. I’m not mailing or receiving mail when selling stuff in the trading post.

How is it that you aren’t sending or receiving stuff when you, um, send stuff to the TP or receive it? Admittedly, lore reasons don’t require them to use a carrier for that, too. (Although maybe programming reasons made it a better choice than no carrier.)

RoseofGilead.8907:

Aha, I THINK I found the way we’re meant to go now. But thanks for the offer to help, Ill.

Well done! (Your success was never in doubt — I figured by making the offer, you’d be inspired to try plan E, since A, B, C, D were busts.)

RoseofGilead.8907:

So, there’s a different way we were meant to be taking? Because that was the way I’ve taken since the very first time I did it. I didn’t see another way to get up to stash 4, and I actually had to use an experimental rifle to get to the stash this time. I’ve never had to do that before. That’s why I feel like this is a bug, unless there’s something I’m just completely missing (which is possible).

Contact me in-game later; I can show you more easily than explain it. (Or I’m sure there are various videos available as well.)

Karma items can no longer be sold (long story as to why). So all you can do is delete or forge. Most of the time, it’s a bigger waste to try to look for a way to turn that into a small amount of silver; you’re better off dealing with them quickly and using your time to do something more fun, which almost always involves loot.

It’s worth an exception for exotics, as long as you can afford the inventory space until you acquire at least 3 (and then us a mystic forge stone for the fourth slot). Rares… eh, even though I don’t really think it’s worth the time, I still find myself saving those to forge, too.

Linfang.1087:

Yalora Istairiea.6287:

What I don’t understand is why is it needed in the first place?

• All your other armor works just fine underwater why doesn’t your helm?
• Oh and let’s not go down the “The breather allows you to breath underwater” road.
  Take your breather off its equipment slot and put it in your bag inventory, now jump into the water. Guess what, you breath juuuust fine.

Because you need the Agony infusion slot for Lvl 100 fractals

We won’t get credit for any AR in the breather except while under water. So why not just make the breather a skin and have the terrestrial helm serve as aquatic armor, too?

Enko.6123:

Eh I have 187 spirit shards and need another 10,400 for the rest of the ascended armors/weapons, mystic forge recipes, and preparations for the HoT legendaries . ..

Would at least like it if leveling up gave a spirit shard until the new mastery system comes out.

10,400? That seems like 4-5 times the amount you might need, unless you just bought your account (in which case, I wouldn’t think there’s that much of a rush).

It would have to work both ways. Right now, 10 foes with 10% health left do 10x as much damage as a identical for at 100%, even though the total health is the same in both cases. Changing that would change a lot of dynamics and make damage-over-time builds more interesting.

However, it’s difficult to create the mechanics that take health into account and are fun to play.

• Breakpoint systems are mechanically easier (changes at e.g. 75%, 50%, 25%) would just split the problem in to smaller chunks. And unfortunately, it’s often less fun to play, especially using coordinated teams.
• Continuous functions would be more consistent with the idea and are much harder to balance properly. If foes deal 10% damage at 10% health or stop being able to generate conditions, then players would often feel safe to ignore them, which is usually balanced by throwing more foes into the mix. More foes means more potential interactions (requiring more processing power) and more loot (requiring rebalancing that, too).

tl;dr the idea is really intriguing and I wish there were games that use it. However, it isn’t just tradition that keeps damage|living as a binary function of health — it’s actually really hard to get it right.

Tiasguitas.4163:

this just happened to me now. yesterday was all good.
my mail box is empty, and my pick up windows is empty.
in transactions it shows it is selled, not in queue to someone buy it.
my conclusion is that its definitly a bug

You might want to start a new thread. Whatever issue was present a year ago has long since been resolved. If you aren’t getting gold today, then there might be another issue. I haven’t myself experienced the issue today, so I’m not sure this is something affecting everyone.

Tamasan.6457:

It’s supposed to.

How do you think the stuff gets to the TP? Magic?

Magical mail carriers

I am heartened by how well the statement outlines the specific issues affecting WvW. It acknowledges the complexity of the game mode, the fact that it affects different types of players differently, and that human nature drives game play as much as specific mechanics.

Although people have correctly pointed out that the devs have made similarly statements in the past, I am hopeful in this case because this is the first time I’ve felt they are trying to tackle WvW comprehensively instead of piece by piece.

Of course, it remains to be seen if ANet can turn their understanding of the scope and multiple dimensions of the mode into actual changes that will excite and inspire us going forward. I’m willing to hold my breath for a little longer.

Amazon can sell stuff really cheap for a variety of reasons:

• They buy “close outs” from a vendor who needs to get rid of stock to make room for something else.
• They use “just -in time” sourcing of products, so their storage costs are drastically reduced.
• They have warehouses but no retail fronts, reducing labor and real estate costs. Similarly, they do customer service via chat, which is a lot cheaper than by phone.

As others have stated, “sold by Amazon” and “fulfilled by Amazon” are indicators that Amazon’s great support and return policy back up their sales.

Lots of individuals and small business use “Amazon Marketplace” to sell stuff (for less than you’d find elsewhere) and that’s more of a mixed bag. Most people get great prices and good/great customer support, since over time, business that do this poorly won’t be able to succeed: they’ll either disappear on their own due to poor reviews or Amazon will pressure them to change. I’ve gotten some great deals through this, by avoiding businesses that have numerous “legitimate” complaints about the quality of the actual products delivered and have done nothing to make it easy on the consumer to replace it.

tl;dr look for “Sold by” or “Fulfilled by” and you won’t be sorry. (If “marketplace,” do your research first.)

Originally, “meta” was used to refer to a PvP dynamic: one set of builds would dominate game play. To be competitive, you’d have to learn those builds and how to counter them, including by using builds that would work well against these dominating styles (and lose against the unusual ones).

This created a “game beyond the game” or “meta game,” in which people chose builds to compete with specific group styles. For short hand, people referred to this as “playing the meta.” Over time, this evolved to referring to the dominating builds as the “meta.”

And over more time, “meta” also began to refer to the dominating builds outside of PvP.

tl;dr in fact, the OP is misinformed about the origin of the term and about why its current usage makes sense (even if it isn’t strictly accurate from the original definition).

I have long advocated that they change the current system of aquatic helm as piece of armor (requiring an extra rune and potentially AR) to one in which the breather is just a skin. Unless we change traits automatically when underwater, there’s no reason to require a 7th armor piece.

As it stands now, breathers-as-armor-pieces are an unnecessary complication — in my opinion, they violate the spirit of the NPE.

tl;dr turn breathers into skins and keep it simple®.

I agree with the OP that ANet ought to do something to shake up the current match-ups. It’s boring to fight the same groups month after month. It’s not any better in tournaments because T1 dominates T2 which dominates T3 (and same for T4vT5vT6). I agree that natural attrition is too slow.

The very thing that helped create the population stability that was so important in 2013 is now in one of the primary causes of the status quo: the cost of moving to any server is too high for anyone to volunteer to do it, without having a good idea of whether the grass is greener.

So what I’d like to see is ANet creating incentives to encourage folks to move around. I’d like to see glicko scores closer for T1-3 which diverge heavily from the nine worlds of T4-6 that are similarly close. I imagine this will involve:

• A reward system closer to that which we see in PvP now.
• Incentives for moving and staying put. Disincentives for bandwagoning.
• Use of market forces in addition to the current fixed costs.
• Ways to make it easier to move entire guilds quickly, whether sponsored by the destination server or not.
• Regularly scheduled tournaments with predictable schedules, achievements, and rewards.

• I doubt how much choice ANet had about creating ‘servers’ in the first place. GW1 was a WAN game; GW2 is MMO — GW1 only had to worry about having more than 12 players in zones that didn’t allow any combat, few sparkly skills or weapons, and no combos; GW2 has 100+ players dealing with all sorts of graphical and combat complexities.
• The point of WvW isn’t GvG — it’s epic realm vs realm. To set that up, we need something that leads towards cohesive alliances that persist from week to week. So far, none of the proposals include a mechanism to catalyze cohesion or incentivize persistence. Each of the top ‘faction’ maps would be bandwagons, as humans always choose least effort for maximum reward.

So even though I like what the OP liked about GW1 and I agree that there are problems with worlds (esp. as they have come to be in GW2 over time), I don’t agree that that this is what WvW needs to move forward. Instead, I think WvW has earned a reward overhaul (similar to that recently enjoyed by PvP) along with increasing benefits for sticking with your team as well as incentives for moving from high pop to low pop so that the matches aren’t nearly identical month after month, year after year.

Why is the OP paying for the expansion? I hope they aren’t, because it doesn’t sound like they are enjoying the game right now. Might be a good time for a break.

I’m buying the expansion because I like the game to date, I like a lot of the recent changes, and I like what they have outlined for the game in the expac (with some reservations to be sure).

I would prefer that ANet devote whatever resources they have for instanced gameplay to focus on new dungeons, new fractals, or new modes that we haven’t seen yet, rather than cater to a small fraction of the player base interested in soloing only if it has different mechanics.

We can already solo a lot of dungeon paths, including some story modes (only some of which require profession-dependent tricks to get past a gate). I don’t see any reason to make the paths easier just because some people want to have a single-player experience within a massively multiplayer environment.

Further, we already have a lot of soloable content, including jumping puzzles, champions in out-of-the-way corners of Tyria, etc.

sephiroth.4217:

I don’t get spirit shards, I got 1800 just sitting there and not sure what I’m meant to do with them…

• Promote various mats, for profit or personal use (e.g. in legendaries).
• Forging mystic clovers.
• Crafting Ascended weapons.
• Forge various special weapons, e.g. Courage
• Saving them for some future use that some of the community are expecting to see in HoT.
• Check the wiki’s article on Spirit Shards details.

Evans.6347:

Well I haven’t taken the risk, nor is there any mention of this being true on the wiki. So for the brave, they’ll have to take your word for it.

Regardless, it’s pretty pointless to reskin anyway if you plan to evolve it further.

I can confirm khisanth’s observation: you can transmute the intermediary packs and the forge will still recognize them; the note is a leftover from a previous system.

That said, I agree with Evans’ advice: there’s not very much reason to risk taking the word of two strangers, even if we are both reliable forum veterans. The non-exotic versions have limited utility and lots of temporary alternatives, plus back items add relatively little to your stats.

Instead, just set the pre-final versions aside until you have enough shards.

Start with gw2shinies.com instead of spidy. Go to the ’tool’s section:

• Shiny Salvage shows items that can be broken down for profit using Black Lion Salvage Kits, because the runes/sigils are worth substantially more than the custom buy price of the gear itself.
• Spirit Alchemy shows materials that can be promoted for profit using spirit shards, as well as special mystic forge recipes that might be profitable. The site takes into account the cost of buying up everything.
• Smart Find is designed to find all items that are most likely to yield profit based on various factors.
• Snatch It looks for profitable listings in which you can insta-buy items and flip them immediately for theoretical profit (be warned: some of the items on the list don’t sell quickly).
• Snipe It is a bulk version of the same idea, with more precise parameters.

Pick any one of the above tools and try it out and see how it works for you. If you don’t like it, switch to another until you find a niche that works for you.

Here’s my standard caveat about making money on the TP: it’s really easy for some of us to make small profits; a few of us find it trivial to make huge profits. However, the bulk of the community finds it dull, complicated, or tedious to get to that point. I’ve shown probably a few dozen people how they can make “easy” money on the TP and of those, only 2-3 were interested enough to keep doing it for more than a week or two.

There aren’t any secrets in the techniques. It’s not hard or that time consuming to do the research. A lot of people just don’t like it, in the same way that some people prefer dungeon running over silverwaste chest farming or chasing world bosses to either, even though one of the three is far more lucrative.

PS there are a lot of other useful sites besides shinies; that just happens to be my favorite to share because the tools are easy to use and the UI is, well, shiny. I hope that other respondents to your question will share their own preferences.

If ANet expected people to earn enough to make a legendary in a month or Ascended gear in a week, then sure, the acquisition rate for spirit shards feels anemic. If you recall that the devs expect that we will build slowly towards luxury gear, then spirit shards are dropping perhaps a bit too easily.

In other words, this is entirely a matter of perspective. The OP doesn’t have shards saved up and wants to make a legendary now; most of those responding can’t spend shards as fast as they earn them. It’s my guess that this is no accident.

I can think of 12 different reasons why we don’t have any content or festival updates and only a smattering of balance updates. Focus on HoT, focus on core game changes to support HoT, preparation for post-HoT living world, etc.

That doesn’t affect my opinion that someone at a high level made a strategic mistake by not devoting a bigger team to the core game. They should be releasing stuff that hints (in lore and mechanics) at the changes to come in the same way that releasing the specialization system has, so that people will not only be talking about the game, they will be actively playing it and encouraging friends to see what the fuss is already about.

Put another way, I think they put all their eggs in one basket and forgot that their veteran players are burning out instead of building hype.

Lawton Campbell.8517:

I’m not sure why, but for a lot of items there appear to be duplicate item definitions? They appear to be effectively the same but have a different id. No idea why they exist, but players probably have them (since they pop up in my whitelist) so I normally push ’em through.

As a good example: the 1-year and 2-year level 20 birthday scrolls. They’re effectively the same item, but they don’t stack because they have a different id. >_<

A lot of people have noticed the same thing: stuff that seems like it should stack but doesn’t due to multiple IDs. Tons of people notice the birthday scrolls. Less talked about are the identically named champion bags, e.g. the wiki identifies over a dozen exotic versions of the Fallen Adventurer’s Backpack (plus non-exotic varieties as well). It seems that they should have different names, if they point to different loot tables, or have the same item ID if they use the same tables.

There are similar examples for found gear versus vendor gear versus karma gear: same item name and different IDs, since each have different values of salvageable, tradeable, and salable.

Liisjak.4509:

They won’t do that cuz it takes effort. It’s easier to just throw out an all-in-one outfit, and even then they kinda fail (monk’s outfit anyone?).

The point of outfits is that it’s all or nothing. If you could mix and match parts, then it would be another set of armor.

• The advantage to ANet is less effort, which means they can release more outfits.
• The advantage to the player is that the outfits mean you can swap/upgrade armor without changing looks and there are never transmutation costs.

If all things were equal, it would be better for the game and ANet’s bottom line to have more armor sets and fewer outfits. Since, however, all things aren’t equal, outfits are a reasonable compromise.

Cele has a greater total amount of stats because it’s a jack of all trades prefix; it’s master of none of them. So the point is that there’s another stat prefix that is better for any given situation; where cele is useful is being able to adapt to lots of situations quickly and it wouldn’t be without a greater number of total points.

Arguing that the amount of points is unfair misses the point: there are fewer points dedicated to specific uses in a game where the mechanics favor specialization.

You don’t need to guest to a server to play with your friends; just be in the same party. (Even just being in the same guild is almost always enough for you to end up in the same instance of any given map.)

That said, the game doesn’t make this clear and it would be better for new players if it did so.

PS for the OP: the worlds that are currently full are due to their WvW populations and the new formula the game uses means they will remain full, until a lot of folks who play WvW leave (or stop playing WvW). The old system offers some success to those trying repeatedly to get in; the new system makes that all but impossible. In other words, don’t waste time trying and retrying. Pick another server and just get in the same party with your friends.

iGrizzly.2360:

I would like a feature that removes crafts from your character. I am aware that every character can learn all crafts and can even have up to 4 of them active with crafting licenses, but the option to completely unlearn or delete a craft is always welcome.

Aside from learning chef 9 times in a row to level a character from 2 to 80, what would be the value to the community in forgetting a discipline entirely?

Plus, it sounds like it would take a lot of code/testing to make sure it worked properly and then there would be the inevitable customer service requests to undo the forgetting. So it’s likely to be high cost and high risk for ANet, too.

I like the OP’s solution best, out of several proposed here. The difference between the ‘last charge’ and the next seems awkward at best and not in keeping with the dynamics of combat in this game.

To clarify: the old system used “capacity” as a short-term variable of total world population that could change over the week, if not over hours. The new system defines “capacity” as a long-term variable that is unlikely to change unless there are significant population changes relative to the past weeks or months; it’s also based entirely on WvW pop.

This is why the other two posters pointed out (correctly) that it will be a long time before FA is low enough pop to accept new people; it will have to change to “high” instead of “full”. That’s unlikely to happen by attrition alone; it could take a large guild or three moving and currently there’s little (if any) incentive for guilds to move servers.

SoulstitchMMO.1396:

Just ran into this when looking up Dire Gear for my Mesmer. Has Anet ever explained why certain stat combos are gated in that fashion?

Not specifically, no. In general, they’ve described wanting to mix up acquisition methods for rewards. They haven’t explained, though, why it makes sense to restrict the supply of recipes for certain stats. I’m usually 100% on board with using the market place to sort stuff out, except that only applies to “free” markets and if there’s no new supply for an item, it’s not entirely “free” (except perhaps in the strictest sense that an economist might use the term).

tl;dr no, they haven’t and I wish they’d change it, so that recipes are always in decent supply.

skyhawk.5149:

I’m 2/2 with forging soul bound exos
1) low lvl exos from level up rewards > Exo with Rune of Strength
2) 4 lvl 80 GS > Dawn

Oooh! Awesome, gz.

(PS to others: don’t try this at home; your mileage will vary considerably.)

Saiki.5147:

Hi RoseoGilead, thank you for your reply (ies).
Yeah I remember have read that somewhere but it still sucks anyway. Well, guess I’ll never buy them again.

Contact support. If it was a gem store purchase, they are typically willing to help (and even if not, they are sometimes able to do something).

Assuming the runes and sigils are worth no more than a few silver and assuming they don’t have a potentially salvageable inscription or insignia, each exotic salvaged using mystic/masters yields an average of an ecto or about 40s.

So the math is something like:

• 2 salvaged exotics ~80s in ecto, a few silver in mats.
• 3 forged (with a stone) exotics yields 1 exotic, worth 50s to 10g or more (with 1-2 g being the most likely). This number is much less if you are talking about armor and much less still for trinkets.

So my rule of thumb is:

• Always BL Kit salvage exotics, if they have a valued rune/sigil.
• Always Mystic/Master salvage them, if they have a salvageable inscription/insignia.
• If none of the above is true:
  • Forge if 3+ weapons
  • Salvage if trinkets
  • Usually salvage if armor.

Then again, sometimes I decide to forget about the math and just gamble on the forge. Getting a fancy exotic is a lot more fun than getting a few ecto, even if the odds favor salvaging.

Sorry, no one is getting a monopoly on the standard rare dyes. I track dye prices regularly and whenever there are a few days in which a particular color spikes in price, it drops quickly back to its previous equilibrium prices.

The only dyes that are crazy expensive are the limited edition dyes, because they are only available for a limited time. When the kits from which they drop are available in t he gem store, these colors never cost more than 100-150g (and typically they go for much less, sometimes dropping further a few months after the dyes leave the gem shop).

The only ones that are 800g are colors that were not nearly as popular until recently and the TP supply has dropped to nothing. Sure, some have made money speculating on these colors. And many will lose out when ANet re-introduces those dye kits, as they always have in the past.

tl;dr you can get over 350 colors for reasonable prices and each “premium” color has a cheaper alternative.

Iason Evan.3806:

Hey John! 20 pages or so of people not caring much for the RNG in this game and you add ecto gambling? You can do better and should do better.

Um, no, that’s not what I read. I see people not enjoying some of the specific effects of RNG, but no where does someone offer an alternative that people prefer. People admit that there’s some excitement in not knowing exactly what drops and there’s a greater sense of grind with the fixed rewards of token systems. Plus, different people have different tolerances, which is why the game offers a mix of reward systems: tokens, RNG, player skill, etc. This game has changed the balance across such systems and might yet have to do it again; it’s not likely to be as “fun” if they entirely remove RNG from the reward system.

Further, with regard to the ecto vendor, that is specifically designed as a sink, with enough incentives to get people to throw their wealth at it. It’s different from the idea of offering RNG rewards for content.

Randulf.7614:

I’m on the fence as to whether content should ever exist for the tower. I like the fact it has an air of mystery about it and has done since GW1

Me, too. I prefer that there are some things in the game that will never be explained.

manaflux.4986:

edit: At no point did I say that my “wants” needed to be met at the cost of everyone else’s content being delayed.

Except that is exactly what happens: the game can only support so many developers, which limits the number of features that can be added. Each suggestion that ANet accepts means that some other ideas won’t have the resources to be implemented.

A simple request could turn out to be incredibly costly, because it requires rethinking an entire mechanic. Or a complex change could be cheap, because it dovetails with other planned changes. Unless we work at ANet, we couldn’t really predict the costs of any idea we propose.

The best we can do on the forums is to help each other evaluate whether there’s a lot of interest in a change, whether that change would add a lot of benefit, and whether there are predictable complications that would make it costlier to implement.

In the case of this suggestion, I think the discussion so far shows that it has an important, small benefit for a small number of people. That generally isn’t enough to get an idea implemented, especially since it seems unlikely that this one is trivial to implement.

It’s worth raising the idea and discussing it. I wouldn’t, however bet that it will get added to the game any time soon.

The game already rewards veterans in all sorts of ways.

• Daily login reward.
• Dailies (which a lot of people get just by playing their usual PvP or WvW)
• Achievement Chests (which include gems and gold that you can choose how you want to spend).
• Festival and special event rewards (and farms) that aren’t easily obtained (if at all) afterward.

I don’t think ANet needs to add yet another reason for newer players to feel they are behind before they start.

Um, things don’t get named after people because they helped with something directly. They get named because someone donated money, someone was successful promoting themselves, for a laugh, or any of a variety of other reasons.

Yakkington’s armor is probably a reference to his tough hide, not because he wore it. Faren’s Rapier (which I believe should be called, Lord Faren’s Wit instead) seems to be more ironic than complimentary.

(I don’t, incidentally, think it’s silly to critique names — good names help make a game or book come alive and flesh it out and bad names can take you out of the moment and wonder what they were thinking as they made it.)