Guild Wars 2

FYI this thread now includes several merged threads, so it will appear as if people haven’t been paying attention. The main points are:

• Nearly any account-bound item can become unstackable with items that appear otherwise identical.
• Devs are aware, are working on a fix, but there’s no ETA.
• A reliable workaround for all cases is to place all such items in your inventory and change maps; the items will stack as expected after (‘changing maps’ includes moving to WvW/PvP, logging out the character, etc).

Tarasicodissa.7084:

Can’t believe you want to go for these crazy achievs and don’t know about that story instance. Common knowledge for every achiev hunter.
Check out forewarned is forearmed. I’ve also heard about some sylvari story instance that’s much lower level, but I didn’t try it myself, vigil story works fine.

you can google for a post in the guildwars2 subreddit on the sylvari story (terrestrial weapons); it also covers the vigil story (for aquatic weaps). It’s not difficult to set up, but I can tell you it’s mind-numbingly dull and nearly fell asleep after the first few minutes.

It is, however, very efficient, especially for warhorn and focus.

Behellagh.1468:

I’m totally being misunderstood here. I personally have no intention to ever do Fractals, ever. This makes the need to have trinkets that can hold an infusion slot rather pointless. I spent my first 75 laurels on a puppy and since then on Heavy Crafting Bags, selling off the T6 fine mats inside.

The notion that buying ascended jewelry is a no brainer assumes that players will naturally line up to run the Fractal treadmill to earn what exactly? The continuation of gear, stat and profession snobbery that permeates dungeons? Gee, that sounds like so much fun. Got to get in on some of that action.

Wait, what? Ascended gear has better stats than exotic gear. Pink trinks are worth getting for PvE and WvW. The utility amulets can add a significant buff for karma, magic find, or experience gain. All other ‘infusion’ slots can be upgraded to get minor stat increases.

In short, the decision to get ascended gear has nothing to do with whether you ever run fractals or not. And that’s why my recommendations to guildies on where to spend laurels includes getting an ascended amulet.

PS I’m glad you spent some on something frivolous. The mini puppy is definitely a good choice.

Gem Shop containers with random drops are never financially sound investments. They are great fun…for those people who enjoy scratching lottery tickets or other games of chance. The value is in the anticipation of getting lucky.

There’s a guy in my guild who loves stuff like this and he has a blast opening BL Chests and Dye Kits. I never try to talk him into more efficient investments because he is already maximizing the fun he gets per dollar/gem/gold spent. Works out great for me, too: I play the numbers and make my money; he provides me with vicarious thrills (and on rare occasion, some data I can use to adjust my own investments).

If you are going to offer a poll, you need to rephrase the question so it fits the likely scenario:

• Are you willing to pay 15-25% more for gem shop skins, if that means you don’t need to use transmutation charges?
• Do you prefer paying less for gem shop skins, which would continue to need transmutation charges after the first use (just like other skins in the wardrobe)?

If that’s the choice, I prefer the current system.

I don’t think we should make a list — I want ANet to make the list.

• If something is used primarily for crafting, it ought to be with the other materials in the account vault. (Foxfire, doubloons, blade shards — they are only used for forging or crafting.)
• If something is used primarily as a currency, it should go into the wallet. (Geodes and bandit crests are only used as currency.)

Even if ANet added 30 (or 60) free account vault slots for those items that don’t follow the above pattern, it’s still takes time to keep track of it — time that could better be spent playing the game. I’d like to spend less time in the Inventory Management Simulator and more time in Tyria.

Harrimur.7425:

But why can’t they tell us that they need some time if they do? I sadly get the feeling they will just remain silent about it and hope that people will forget about it or stop complaining :/

They did say, in this very thread.

Gaile Gray.6029:

the devs are aware of this issue and it has been and is being taken care of.

The same workaround can be used for any account-bound items that aren’t stacking properly: put them all in the inventory of one character, change maps (including just logging out/in) and they should stack fine, using ‘compact’ or manually dragging them together.

I have the same mistforged weapons unlocked as before the beta. On the other hand, I didn’t create a warrior.

Thanks for spending all those gems on SCIENCE for the rest of us. I appreciate having the data.

Inoki.6048:

Zenith.7301:

They no longer work. The 7% damage bonus fails to apply now with clones/illusions up…

Never should have worked and people caught abusing it should be dealt with.

Is there a game where people don’t cheat somehow or get a proper punishment for doing so?

How is it an abuse or cheat?

(6): +7% damage while you have an active companion.

Mesmer illusions are mechanically ‘companions’ just as much as any other summoned ally (minions, golems, etc). The only difference is that ranger pets never despawn, even if dead (which is arguably a broken mechanic compared to other professions, which have no comparable advantage).

This same idea comes up frequently. You are buying the unlock, not the transmutation. ‘Free’ transmutation is limited consistently to account rewards (zenith and HoM skins) and to outfits (which suffer from multiple disadvantages over other skins, notably only four color channels and cannot be combined with any other armor skins).

I personally don’t see a problem with the current system. Likely, if they changed it to infinite transmutes, the price would go up and I’d be far less likely to purchase.

still, it could use some improvement

• sort alphabetically within a category
• multiple sorts: group by hue, sort by rarity, group by rarity, sort by hue etc
• group by source, e.g. LA commemorative, Frost, Flame, …
• make all the limited-edition dyes exotic instead of rare (so they group separately from those available through Unidentified Dye kits)

Danikat.8537:

No, there isn’t.

This is the whole point of certain items being soulbound – to stop you from using an item (particularly an expensive or hard to get one) and also selling it for profit.

Whether that’s a good idea or not is debatable, but there isn’t any way around the system as it currently stands – you can either have the item in your collection or sell it, not both.

‘Skins’ can be acquired in a way that allows you to make money off them by throwing the soulbound item in the mystic forge with other, similar items. For exotics, you need two (2) more of the same item type and a mystic forge stone (or three of the same type, if you don’t have a stone and don’t care which type you might see spit out of the forge).

This only works for collections that require unlocking a weapon or armor skin; it will not work for minis, dyes, trinkets, or in a few other situations.

Since it’s not entirely consistent, I usually equip the item on a character with other compatible soulbound items before forging. I learned the hard way that forged minis don’t get unlocked.

Silvatar.5379:

Behellagh.1468:

That’s of course assuming you want to do fractals.

@OP – what he means is that you can get ascended rings from doing fractals rather than spending laurels on them.

I would suggest getting an amulet (Distinguished Circle of Logic – zerk stats) with the karmic infusion (for karma). Then hoard a pile of laurels for future use as you will need them to make ascended weapons and gear (laurels are required to purchase the recipes). However, if you are really keen on spending them, most people use them to acquire T6 mats either to sell on the TP or to use in crafting (such as for legionaries).

This is nearly the same advice I give to guildies:

• Utility amulet (DCoL with Zerk is a good choice for nearly anyone) with the karmic infusion. (I have karmic as default, swapping to magical/MF for specific content, such as opening Lunar New Year’s envelopes.)
• Home instance nodes (watchwork for sure; quartz & candy corn can be obtained from the TP, so only worth it if you want to get daily mining credit more easily).
• At least one non-practical thing, e.g. a tonic, a mini.
• T6 mats to sell or to use.
• Save a few laurels for future additions to the list.

DanteZero.9736:

Instead of new sigils and rune effects, I think reworking and improving existing runes and sigils are more important. As it stands, there are only a very small set of runes and sigils that are most commonly used and many sets go unused or rarely used except for testing or experimentation.

I agree. We have too many sigils/runes that have little value or only a niche use.

I decided to play as some new players might, instead of doing my usual research and analysis to figure out how to get the most of a build or an event.

• Masteries were annoying. The interface is unlike any other GW2 interface and it was hard to see what I was choosing between. Also, with so few points available, it was hard to get a feel for how much any of it mattered.
• Gliding was clunky. I know it is tied to a mastery and there needs to be room to grow, but… it didn’t captivate me from the start, as a feature like this should do.
• There wasn’t much to explore, so I don’t think I got any sort of feel for the new area. It’s fine to leave that for the full release, but as a ‘tester’, it felt cramped to me.
• The new area was gorgeous and I’m really glad to have the new camera to see it; the old camera wouldn’t have done it justice.
• I liked (but did not love) the revenant. It is going to be a fun challenge for me, to learn how to play it properly. The game’s existing skill prompts don’t seem to match the rev’s skills: aoe rectangles vs the traditional circles.
• Performance was excellent. No additional latency or stuttering.

8/10 — would pay for the expansion based on this initial taste of the game.

Kieryn.6581:

still bugged. can’t interact with mortar. can’t bring down the ceiling. can’t make mawdrey.

• stand on the ‘floor’ covering the water
• logout the character ([f12])
• log back in with same toon
• the floor will be gone and you can proceed as if you placed head in the mortar

I don’t feel that it’s empty. I am there every day, outside of when the queen spawns. There is often a karka farm, although not as often since silverwastes became the meta-gold-farm. It is usually crowded on the weekends for g-missions.

Still, it feels underutilized, regardless of whether it is or is not well-populated.

RoyalPredator.9163:

Behellagh.1468:

Because it’s not ANet’s responsibility to make sure a 3rd party injector like that works.

That’s right, it is not their responsibility, but if they don’t want a big amount of players quit the game because of it’s “so happy unicorn rainbow poo” graphics, they better let us use these shader injectors

I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect ANet to engineer their product to be compatible with software over which they have no input.

What did support say when you contacted them? To the best of my knowledge, gold/items cannot be ‘lost’ on the TP, although it can be temporarily difficult to track them (certain issues can create a delay between the transaction and when your copy of the TP updates). The Support team should be able to help you figure out what happened.

Inculpatus cedo.9234:

There is no longer support for GW1 save access and exploits. If you wish to report an exploit, send an email to exploits@arena.net

Good luck.

They’ll also follow up on bots and cheating.

Nearly every item that has been in the gem store has returned. Most of the exceptions are items that have been removed from the game for everyone (e.g. town clothes, which were replaced by tonics).

As Azrael said, some items are seasonal. There is no pattern to the re-release of any other of the limited-edition items (and yes, players have tried to find a pattern).

So, as Azrael recommends: keep an eye out. Dulfy almost always announces stuff like this on her website, so you can setup an RSS feed for that. Reddit is also a good way to find out about gem store changes that don’t get announced on the official GW2 site.

ANet decided for reasons lost in the Mists that some prefixes would be account-bound; Celestial was just the first. To the best of my knowledge, they have never explained why this is good for the game or the community.

Yes, you can infuse it after transmuting. You can see the exception text when placing transmuted items in the forge.

On the other hand, infusing Mawdrey is a lot easier than infusing most other back items, so why not do that first? The process of infusing removes consumes the original item, so you’d lose any changes you made to Mawdrey (original) when it becomes Mawdrey (infused).

Scoundrel.2139:

Why is it ok to sell a spot to a Dungeon end but not to a JP End via LFG?
They’re both PvE essentially.

I’m just curious.

Where did you see that it’s not ok to use LFG to sell access to a JP? (Mind you, I would be surprised if there were all that many people willing to pay, since people do it for free constantly, even responding favorably when people ‘beg’ in /map chat for a port.)

The only problem I have with it is clutter: typical LFG announcements disappear quickly. Portal-selling announcements would have to be persistent and/or repeated frequently. That would interfere with other people using LFG to, you know, find a group.

I wouldn’t mind if they changed the bubbles to match the type of chat: blue for /party, green for /say, etc. Other than that, I don’t see the value of the current shade of ‘green’ over the original shade of grey.

If ANet follows their usual pattern, they will be releasing information via the main website a few posts at a time. This ensures that players don’t have to digest too much information at one time and also helps to maximize player-generated hype without extra effort by the company.

There will probably be an entire week devoted to changes affecting guilds, including ‘housing’ and large-group content. I don’t expect ANet to drop that many hints before then (if any).

Shanaeri Rynale.6897:

At this point in time, I doubt it will ever be resolved. For sure it wont happen again, but playing devils advocate why would they spend developer time and effort on something that affects only a small (and dwindling) number of players?

Of course it will get resolved. This doesn’t affect future GW1 players alone; it affects everyone who linked accounts at any time.

• Players who had GWAMM and HoM scores are disgruntled because something they had to earn was accidentally given to others for ‘free’.
• Players who only recently acquired either are unable to access their rewards.

It’s only been a week since it got bugged and ANet has had other issues to deal with (including preparing for the HOT stress test). And this is a particular nasty issue to unravel. It requires solving the root cause, but also undoing all the accidental changes to people’s titles/wardrobes, without also doing something to the people who were entitled to those rewards. The coding might be simple; the testing will not be.

In addition, while this issue is more upsetting to those affected than other problems, it doesn’t actually prevent progress in the game or make content super difficult (or super easy); it only affects how things are displayed. In other words, it might be very important, but it’s not very urgent.

tl;dr it’s going to take take time. We each can choose to patiently await further developments…or we can be impatient while waiting; either way, we’re going to have to wait.

robotosis.4872:

what if they added an option to right click a player, then mute mini/backpack

one player at a time during a world boss event? I wouldn’t say no, but… wouldn’t it be much easier to provide an option to disable item/mini sounds (from other players) generally? easier to code, to test, and for player to activate.

Anyhow, I don’t think ANet should delay fixing the current bug based on whether they implement such an option or not. As you said, you paid for a gem store item in part because of the sounds.

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Ookamikun.6472:

But yeah, the backpack is eerily silent

I thought that was a feature!
(the o-tron noises are fun the first dozen times, but after hours of hearing them, I would be just as happy never hearing them again)

robotosis.4872:

i disagree, i purchased this specifically because he talked. and now they broke it gg

I apologize that I didn’t make it clear I was being sarcastic. Of course they should fix it.
(And I hope they make an option to turn it off, for those of us who have tired of hearing the same 6 phrases repeated 100s of times.)

DaShi.1368:

Brother Grimm.5176:

I sure hope everyone understands this is NOT a Lefty issue….at all.

While I sympathize with the OP, Anet cannot be expected to re-write the game because your OC disorder is triggered by it. Play first person if it’s that big a deal to you.

I’m left-handed and not OCD and agree with the OP. I don’t expect it to change, but would greatly appreciate it and Anet if they added this.

It’s not about being OCD, it’s about how different people’s brains perceive things. I’m left-handed and mildly dyslexic (possibly same physiological root cause, if not causally connected otherwise). It’s very hard for me to go the correct direction when someone says ‘right’ or ‘left’ — I have to give it some thought in the best of circumstances. Video games are more difficult for me because the visual clues are all backwards for me.

So it’s not a ‘preference’ that there be a left-handed option for some people any more than colorblind people think it’s a preference for the game to use colors they can distinguish. I’m lucky that I have managed to find workarounds for dealing with left-handedness and my type of dyslexia; not everyone has.

That said, of the 30% of people who have some left-handedness (of whom, maybe 1/3 or 10% of the population is left-handed for 99% of their actions), I doubt this matters significantly to all that many individuals. And it’s not as if ANet is an outlier in this regard: very few games of software of any sort makes any sort of accommodation for left-handedness.

So, while I think it would be great if ANet offered the option, I don’t expect them to.

Cakemeister.5792:

And I got it. It just took time and a little effort.

Well done

What did support say when you contacted them? To the best of my knowledge, stuff on the TP cannot be ‘lost’, although sometimes it’s tricky to track down where it went. If you haven’t already, create a ticket with your best recollection of the times and they should be able to help.

SoulSin.5682:

this game already has translations for different languages, wouldn’t kill to have an extra one for russians.

Actually, it’s really expensive to do translations. You have to get a translation for every single item, dialogue, text on items, skill, system message, etc. Then you have to make sure that the translation appears correctly on screen, that there are no typos, that the grammar fits, etc. There’s QA work, too. And then, once it’s all done, there are bugs and error reports and changes to the game, so you have to keep it up.

In short, it’s fairly expensive to provide any additional translations for a game this size, both in terms of one-time and ongoing costs.

Then there’s the issue of which language should be translated first. Your language? Or the one that has more players? Or the one that would get more new players?

Danface.3671:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

is a vote required?

As quoted, gut decision would be to go with the voting method,

My point is that it isn’t trivial to implement a guild rename contract: there are lots of design decisions and no good way to help guilds manage the inevitable and awkward social aspects.

So it’s a high-cost, high-risk feature, with only limited appeal. I think it’s unlikely to get a green light.

Bugabuga.9721:

Dulcinea.2640:

I got one yesterday and two the day before from my home tree. They’re still dropping. If I use the Forge to use up entire stacks of snowflakes (125 gifts), I’ve been getting around 25 per 125.

I’ll try to open more on different accounts. I was wondering if there might have been some internal limit somewhere (i.e. “opened N giant wintersday gifts = here’s a different loot table”)
Just did it on EU account that had no wintersday tree and indeed got toolboxes
(70 giant gifts opened in pvp lobby = 25 toolboxes, 25 figts opened in lion’s arch = 1 toolbox)
Will try to open all of them in pvp next

Thanks, everyone!

No, there’s no internal limit on how lucky you get.

Normally, it shouldn’t matter where you open boxes, but there have been times when stuff doesn’t work properly in PvP. I would say it’s unlikely to be the cause, but… well, bugs can be weird; let us know what you find out.

chrisbe.1428:

uh ok, it works
much thanks

It’s a bug that intermittently affects account-bound items of all sorts. The workaround gets everyone past the issue quickly, so the devs have advised using it, pending a fix to the root cause.

Bumping this thread isn’t going to get it fixed more quickly. The same bug affects other parts of the game (notably the thaumanova reactor maze). I hope all (or most) of us can agree that it’s better for ANet to work on fixing the root cause, rather than diverting resources for a temporary fix.

I know it’s hard to be patient (especially if it’s the last part of map completion), but they will fix it as soon as they can.

Ookamikun.6472:

But yeah, the backpack is eerily silent

I thought that was a feature!
(the o-tron noises are fun the first dozen times, but after hours of hearing them, I would be just as happy never hearing them again)

This bug affects a lot of things besides the one skill point (including the maze in the thaumanova reactor fractal). ANet is working on fixing the root cause, so that all of the issues get resolved together, instead of just a band-aid on the skill point. Even work-arounds require planning, development, and testing resources, so imo, it’s better that we wait for the generalized solution, even though it’s really annoying.

As I posted in the other (virtually identical) thread:

• There are existing ways to accommodate people who are tired of their character, by spending the same gems you would otherwise use for this purpose: new toon slot, name change contract, etc.
• Adding this feature means taking planning, development, and testing resources away from some other new feature.
• As noted by others, this change wouldn’t be easy to implement.

So I see this ‘token’ as something with a really high cost, but only appeals to a tiny subset of the community. Even though the specific appeal is really high (as shown by the multiple, passionate posts), that’s not enough to make it a priority.

Behellagh.1468:

Because it’s your character’s birthday in the game, not your account’s.

Except that all of the other rewards from the _character_’s birthday are account bound:

• Mini
• Experience Scroll
• Birthday Booster
• Skill Point scroll

So why is the blast character bound, but not the others?

I’ve made my peace with it, but I still find the inconsistency surprising.

I understand why people become dissatisfied with a character over time, but there are existing alternatives:

• 800 gems: add a character slot and start the new race there
• 1,600 gems: name change contract + character slot → rename the old character, start the new one (new race) and name it to the original (names remain reserved to your account for 24 hrs)

In order to enable race changes, they’d have to find a way to restore the character back to start for the personal story and racial skills; regardless of whether that is ‘easy’ or not (and I don’t think it is easy), that takes planning, development, and testing. That would result in those resources not being deployed to other features or fixes.

I’m not against the idea of changing race, I just greatly prefer that ANet devote its energies to other things.

Cakemeister.5792:

I’m okay with all the characters being right handed. I just wish the keyboard layout was more lefty-friendly.

You can change the hotkeys in the options panel, default key: f11.

Ravion Hawk.4736:

Just because the higher ups say ok, doesn’t mean the the dept. who worked on the graphics are cool with it.

Even though they are just injectors, the graphics dept. probably feel insulted and want to prevent players from “enhancing” the work they did.

With that said, it might not be ANet per se, but might be the graphics dept.

It’s not worth anyone’s time at ANet to worry about making third party programs fully compatible or partially compatible. If they had the time to do that, they’d spend it on fixing other issues or enhancing features.

If you use gemFX or sweetFX, be prepared to troubleshoot issues after GW2 patches. They will work eventually, as someone figures out what changed, but there’s no guarantee that they’ll do so right away.

The way I determine my offers for high-priced items is to study recent and long term prices. Check out gw2tp.com or gw2spidy.com, which make it easy to do that research.

If I see offers for 800, 801, and 802, I know that 803 is likely to get overbid, so (all else equal) I’d aim for 820 (something to discourage someone else overbidding). But I’m (a) prepared to wait and (b) prepared to be outbid by a lot and not get anything.

Similarly, if the historical lowest-sale offer is 1,000 over the last two months, but now it’s gone up to 1,200, with a similar increase in highest buy offers, I’ll offer a lot more than if the lowest-sell is going down.

Another way to look at things is to compare the highest buy offer with the lowest sell offer and decide how much you are willing to pay to have the item now versus how long you are willing to wait to get your preferred price. In the case of bolt, with 2751 the highest buy and 3189 the lowest sale, ask: are you willing to pay 400g to get that legendary right now? Are you willing to wait for 2-3 weeks to save 400g? Are you willing to micromanage your offer to always have the best buy offer?

I trade a lot, so saving money on each transaction is worth my time overall. Plus I enjoy trying to out-think the market. On the other hand, I know a lot of people who are less patient, hate market research, and/or want to spend as little time worrying about their bids as possible. If those people are willing to take any risks, I usually advise them to offer a bit below the lowest sale offer, e.g. 3000g: that’s a healthy round number that will make a seller happy and still feel like a bargain to my friend (189g savings from ‘retail’).

In short, like most things that involve other humans, the best strategy depends on a lot of factors. Take in everyone’s advice and figure out your personal comfort zone; price accordingly. Good luck.

runeblade.7514:

Just by having one more, you put a middle finger on me because I was supporting the game. Is this how you treat customers?

Regardless of the merits of the suggestion, it’s usually a poor tactic to ask for a favor of someone by calling them uncaring.

There are lots of ways to get dailies, lots of ways to support the game, and I don’t see anything misleading about the current offering. Besides, you can get enough nodes to get your dailies without leaving home: basic mining + oric node, basic logging + ancient, and veggies + snow truffle.

tl;dr I think dailies are fine as is; I think the home instance nodes are fine as is.

I’m against this idea. The uniqueness of Eternity comes in part from its association with the day/night cycle; remove that and you have sunrise (or twilight), with a few tweaks.

MissHedgehog.1052:

Thank you, I understand that it used to make sense way back. Now I feel like it just disadvantages small and/or new guilds. Anyone else feel this way?

This was pointed out at the time the system was introduced. Guild missions were set up to challenge larger guilds. Small guilds already had (and continue to have) content that works for smaller groups, but there was nothing (at the time) in the game that was especially designed for bigger groups.

With a really good group, you can do pretty much all the puzzles, rushes, and even the challenges with 5-6 people. 10-15 can manage comfortably, as long as a few people know what to do; only a few challenges require more than that. And now that these have been around for a while, they are really easy for 40+ people (although I’ve seen larger guilds manage to …misstep on a couple of the challenges).

I think this an OK balance and I’d even like to see more a little bit more of the game that isn’t easily available to everyone (not a lot, just a few more things like Liadri, SAB, a large-group challenges).

In the meantime, Guild Bounty Training is a great way to build influence up quickly. Two people can manage most of the bounties, especially if they call for help.