Guild Wars 2

This can be easily explained without accusing ANet of fraud, unethical behavior, or even “sneakiness.” How is it advantageous to them to misstate the dates of availability? What do they get out of it in the short or long run? Bupkus or worse.

ANet has always been lax with their proofreading skills, from “obvious” misspellings in item/skill descriptions to forgetting to update old terms to new ones, to finding the most convoluted ways to describe stuff (infusions vs agony infusions, infused vs ascended, simple infusions that aren’t simple, etc).

And sometimes they are just forgetful or thoughtless about stuff. They implement a good idea, but forget to tell us. They have a bad idea that could have been good, had they gotten some feedback first.

So, the fact that they said Chaos Weapons would be available for four weeks just means that’s what they said at the time. Maybe they meant it. Maybe things changed and the new skins weren’t ready in time.

In any case, the OP counted their chickens before the eggs hatched: any time we speculate, we take a risk that things won’t go the way we predicted. Past performance is no guarantor of future earnings, your mileage might vary, and piso mojado.

How were you managing to evade before without moving? I’ve noticed some channels seem harder to break than others, reviving an ally and 100b among them. In any case, as Tamasan says, this is neither new nor a bug.

See also: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Cliffside-hammer-bug-still-persists/first#post4418931

John Smith has commented in ways that suggest it is no accident that Damask is pricier.

SKATE.1394:

Hoping this is a bug, but expecting an incoming gem store item for guild vault access. It’s bad enough that they made guild vault summon cost 1 merit, and they never even explained what the supposed “exploit” was that required such a change.

I don’t think it’s a bug. I am not convinced that they ever intended that people use WvW as a substitute for heading into a city.

You’ll need to contact support to get them to look at your account. Good luck.

BL Keys are the least efficient way to get the skins and they always have been. The keys are setup to work exactly like a lotto: the fun is in the anticipation, not the results.

The simplest way to acquire the skins has always been to purchase them from the TP. With the exception of chaos skins, prices have almost always been 50-65g after the first two weeks and often go down for a week or two after the trade-in value increases to 3 or more tickets. Obviously, prices go up eventually, since the supply diminishes while the demand generally remains the same (or sometimes increases).

The cheapest of the skins are always within reach of casual players, although, since they play less, they would have to be a lot more cautious with their spending.

Thanks for sending the data to ANet. I, too, wish that someone on their side would let us know what sort of data is helpful for them.

With open world bots, Gaile Grey has said (on a number of occasions) that their anti-bot team reads all the reports and that place/time+date/names/behavior data is helpful. So, I assume that would also be true for TP bots. Still, in your shoes, I would probably also wait to hear something more specific.

ThePlanez.5871:

So hard to farm and so expensive! Why why why!

They aren’t that hard to farm, but they are expensive because most everyone wants them for something, in quantities unlikely to be accumulated by accident.

I was able to see/harvest them just a few minutes ago. (L80 toon)

Flitzie.6082:

They dont want us to farm because they have an anti-farm mechanic built into the game. Diminishing Returns.

Quite sad about this myself.

Diminishing Returns are in the game to discourage botting. It has the side effect of reducing the benefits of farming the exact same location for hours on end. But it’s easily countered by using multiple toons in the same location, farming multiple locations with the same toon, or some combination of the two.

eleshazar.6902:

I’m not one of the people suffering from this bug (fourtunately), but I feel like those that have submitted tickets and been living with this bug for two months should recieve some compensation. Not being able to do dungeons, no dailies/monthlies, no hotjoin progression, no timegated crafting, no fractals…. That’s a pretty huge bug for them to have dealt with for so long. I feel sorry for you guys. :-(

I agree that it would be nice to do something for those that have suffered the bug. I can think of several ways to identify such accounts and a variety of different ways to help folks out, who weren’t able to gain certain daily (and monthly) benefits.

AnniMira.2506:

As discussed in the chat, I’m reporting this as a bug:

The case (6) of the Superior Rune of Ranger is said to work with minis. It should work only with ranger’s pets.

People ask this in the chat because minis are now taken away if the map population is raising. For the game balance it is better if (6) does not work with minis. They also claimed that (6) works with mesmer’s clones/phantasms; that should be fixed too if unintended.

Since the September Feature Patch, testers have said the (6) bonus does not trigger if a mini is out. This seems more likely to be the intended behavior:

• rune of the ranger works best with rangers
• it was never intended to be a straight +7% bonus for owning a mini.

tl;dr I believe the runes were bugged originally & that bug appears to have been fixed: it no longer offers bonus damage when a mini is present.

New Chaos weapon skins are available for the next four weeks from Black Lion Weapons Specialists for the introductory price of one Black Lion Weapon Ticket. Black Lion Weapon Tickets can be found in Black Lion Chests

Technically, the statement is accurate: the skins were available for 4 weeks. They also happened to be available beyond that date.

I do agree that someone on the marketing team needs to pay attention to word choice: “exclusive dye” steers people the wrong way, when what ANet meant was “limited availability.”

However, regardless, the reason speculation can be so profitable is that it’s risky. There’s no guarantee that ANet won’t re-release items, tweak drop rates, or introduce new features/content that makes stuff worth 10g, when last week you were thrilled to get 10s.

I don’t expect ANet to make it simple for me to figure it out.

It only affects exotic outputs; there’s no changes for rares or other rarities. It only affects the L80s; other output levels show up using the old formula.

And, as noted above, evidence suggests that nothing changed about precursor chances.

Stin & Squirrel: have you guys sent your data to exploits@arena.net? Seems to me botters are moving to the TP, since megaservers makes it harder for the armies of bearbows to go unnoticed. ANet should figure out how to nerf them out of existence (and I hope they can do this without throttling legit power trading).

Most players won’t know to work around the botting algorithms and those of us who do shouldn’t have to waste our time (or risk gold) to do so.

I agree: the best use is to unlock a skin you aren’t likely to craft. The underwater weapons are usually at the bottom of everyone’s to-do lists.

VergilDeZaniah.3295:

After September 2014 patch, master tailors do not sell runes of holding anymore, while other master craftsmean still offer them.

Sigh.

Heck, LA has almost no access to the guild bank either: the only NPC who offers the service is located a short walk from… a waypoint disabled as part of the living story.

Crystal Reid.2481:

This is actually a separate bug from the one that was fixed in the feature pack. Investigating this issue, but I can’t offer an ETA on a fix.

Thanks for the response.

Can you check whether the relevant team is considering a solution to the general problem?

Y’all keep fixing different bugs affecting the hammer, but so long as even one remains, teams will be blocked. If instead someone developed a way to manually replace the hammer at a set location, it wouldn’t matter why or how the hammer goes missing; people would always be able to progress.

Dehuang.2053:

it would be nice if the guild bank would be fixed too

The guild bank isn’t a bug; it was never designed to allow double-clicking. I suspect that it has something to do with a couple of things that make the guild stash different from the personal bank:

• The audit trail requires different coding.
• There are three separate storage areas with two separate sets of permissions.
• Anyone with access can move items in and move items out of the shared storage.

The combination of these differences means that the game can’t be sure of how to process any particular item: to which storage section does it go? to which slot? is someone else trying to place something else in that slot? is someone else already moving or taking an item that could stack with the one you are trying to move?

Each of these issues could be resolved, but I believe it would take a lot more coding without delivering much Quality of Life improvements.

tl;dr they probably won’t ever get around to changing this for guild storage.

Yes, this broke with the new patch.

Fortunately, can still move items from bank to inventory and either direction with materials.

You can’t sell stuff that’s in invisible bags. Change the bags to non-invisible or move the contents to your starter pack.

Would be nice if the “hit box” for “max” (and for “min”) were bigger.

Normally, they resolve stuff quickly, sometimes within an hour or three. They might have been backed up over the weekend.

If you haven’t gotten any mail at all (even the automated ones), check your spam and junkmail folders; your provider or email program might be hiding email from ANet.

If you are getting the email and 72 hours have passed without a follow-up, you can ask Gaile Gray to take a look:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-older-Part-2-merged

There are a lot of such situations in PvE, too. Maybe instead of making some things worth 0xp, there could be some sort of sliding scale.

• Personal Story, newly respawned: 1 xp exactly, junk loot table only
• Open world, not recently respawned: 100% xp, regular loot table
• Long time since killed: bonus xp, regular loot table

The first two mechanics already exist.

No one knows if these are bugged or, if like the spoon collection, they require finding an item first before you can begin collecting. If it’s bugged, I’m sure we’ll hear from ANet about it soon™. (If it’s not bugged, we might get a hint about where to find the “box” that will “hold” these items.)

Nothing changed. You get your items when someone sells them. Stuff goes into the Delivery Box immediately.

The Box only holds 100 transactions at a time, so it might take several iterations to clear it out. Also, custom buy offers for multiple units can fulfill in dribs and drabs, i.e. you might get 10 now and 12 in 5 minutes, and the rest of the stack tomorrow.

Not remotely possible. “White Knights” don’t get better loot.

That is annoying.

My hope is that, instead of “fixing” this, they add a way to manually replace the hammer. I suspect it’s impossible to identify every scenario in which the hammer could get lost, disappear, or otherwise be unavailable to the party — any one of which will prevent completion of the level. The only guaranteed solution is to give the party a way to get it back, even if they have to run all the way to the bottom and back up.

It should be easier to swap between selling 1 and selling all. It should be easier to buy at a set price, regardless of the stock available on the TP. And if they aren’t going to let us buy or sell at less than vendor + 18%, then please (please!) hide any listings that are below that threshhold. I understand why they can’t easily be removed, but I don’t understand why they can’t be filtered out.

rhapsody.3615:

You can sell it and you will still have the collection credit. I sold and destroyed my spoons before getting the last one and I have the full achievement.

That might be a bug; in theory, you are supposed to bind the items (to your account or to a character) to get credit. I recommend selling it while you can.

There’s no question they need to make some adjustments:

• All buy and sell orders should display, regardless of age.
• All historical transactions should display, with an option to group/ungroup non-simultaneous entries from a single original listing. For performance, they might need to limit this to 90 days (the default before the patch), but it is unreasonable to limit it to 90 or even 900 transactions.
• Recent transactions stored to a local cache should depend on who is logged into the game, not just logged into the computer. One account should never show activity from another.

The original question was about the origin of the term, not about our personal feelings about it. Use “toon” or don’t use it, as you prefer, but let’s not pretend that any of us individually get to choose how language evolves.

If we did, then no one would be able to “prioritize the monetization of the cash shop for a B2P coop RPG,” because people have objected to half the words in that sentence, with cause. The game wouldn’t be called “Guild Wars 2” (because: no wars between guilds in either game), fire would burn wooden objects, and Meteor Storms would damage friend and foe alike.

tl;dr you don’t have to use a word in order to accept that the rest of the world does.

Mitch.4781:

The levelling changes for the most part have been met with nothing but derision by the players and LS season 2 has fallen into a massive slump after starting off somewhat promising.

It is beyond me why they had to dumb down the levelling experience even further to make it easier for “new players”. Weren’t we all new players at one point???

….

Give the people what they want Anet..it’s not rocket science!!!

Every veteran was a new player once, but many people left the game before that happened. ANet is targeting them, not current vets. ANet didn’t actually “dumb down the game” — the game still offers the same mechanics it had before the Feature Update. What’s changed is how many new things new players are introduced to at any given time.

If you “get” games or have played a lot, this seems like horrible gating to you. But if you have ever helped a non-techie use a smartphone to do something more than call/text, you have seen what happens: you are 10s into showing them how to add a new app, and their eyes start to glaze over. Two minutes later, you know you can’t show them the difference between Airplane Mode and DND mode until tomorrow.

It’s not that any of the mechanics are complicated, it’s that some people can only absorb new information in small chunks at a time. Me? I prefer getting thrown in the deep end and having the freedom to explore all the options in my own time. But I know a lot more people who prefer a little bit at a time.

IMO, ANet did a brave thing by listening to the feedback from their usability tests and changing the game in ways they knew would be difficult for veterans to swallow. I applaud them for it.

I, do, however, find fault with how it was explained to veterans and rolled out — their due diligence was insufficient. It shouldn’t have surprised ANet that veterans would react strongly, they should have ensured that there weren’t any noticeable “breakpoints,” and they should have ensured that leveling one’s 2nd toon is easier than the first and that leveling the 8th is trivial by comparison.

tl;dr ANet didn’t ignore the playerbase, they actually listened to ensure the long-term health of the game. The problem is that their rollout didn’t do a good job of handling the Old Veteran Experience (OVE).

Ethan Mccloud.3218:

Thank God I have the 1000 required gold and the time to farm all the stuff I need to complete the collections . ERMM wait I don’t … oh well .. hats off to all the players who received the inside info . Those prices were inflated way before the patch hit. Go figure….

Thank Kormir you don’t need to complete the collections, so you can wait until you acquire the items through ordinary gameplay. The only people spending 1,000s of gold now are people who want to be first (or speculators hoping to profit from the impatience of others). I have yet to spend any gold on these, although I might when prices inevitably drop to more reasonable levels.

Ethan Mccloud.3218:

ALL THE FARMS are pretty much gone now. All that’s left is the BLTP stock exchange an buying gems . MMM MMM sounds good to me . Time to play the game straight for the 14th or 15th time….

• There are still plenty of farms.
• You don’t have to be a power trader to earn money.

They probably won’t update either item.

1. Some people like Silver-Fed, because they can’t be bothered buying new kits. Or perhaps they don’t have enough APs to have a huge oversupply of mystic stones.
2. The extractor isn’t overpriced: it does exactly what it seems to be intended to do, offer a method for grabbing Agony Infusions, which can run into dozens or hundreds of gold in value.

Mind you, I’m not planning on buying either tool any time in the next 20-30 years.

I can imagine folks in the html design and QA teams reading this and going, “oops.”

Both games use “diminishing returns” to make it harder for bots (and to get us to explore a bit more). You can end DR easily by leaving the area you’ve been farming for hours or swapping toons. I know people who have 2-3 guardians, so that they can farm Cursed Shore without worrying about DR.

As far as swapping weapons or any other “superstitions” — it’s fine to believe in them, even though all the evidence suggests that the only thing that really matters in getting more loot is to kill more stuff more quickly, with as much Magic Find as you can afford.

The message is misleading. Map population has nothing to do with culling; it depends only on how many resources are being used in the area close enough for you to see. It’s common for the area near BL spawns to be relatively quiet, which explains why you saw your mini when you entered the map, despite the long queue times.

As shadow suggests, you need to contact Customer Support for an individualized response.

There’s no reason for dyes to go missing from your account: there’s no mechanic that would have removed items and refund dyes would have added to your stash, not subtracted. While you are waiting for Support to respond, I recommend using the search feature on each character’s inventory and your bank. If you have a personal guild bank, also check there.

There’s a bug affecting experience gains from any source. It’s most noticeable at L29, but might be affecting xp at other levels, too. I’d wait it out.

(There are a number of posts on the same topic. Consider using Google search, by adding site:forum-en.guildwars2.com to your query.)

We should probably make a comprehensive list of all the karma vendors that used to sell chef’s ingredients and let ANet figure out how to bring them back. My personal preference: every city has a tone of karma vendors that sell bell peppers; they have room to add apples and green beans, etc.

phys.7689:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

Roybe.5896:

The overall point ….is what retail has known for years, making things that make it fun to part with your money means more will come and do just that.

And apparently, ANet has done well in that regard, since they continue to make money from the gem shop.

I’m not against ANet doing even better with the offerings, in terms of pricing and selection and how they influence how much fun we have. But for now, they seem to have done quite well in terms of profit.

There are a number of likely reasons that some players (even a sizable number) might be unhappy with the gem shop, but that’s very different from saying “monetization is done wrong” for this game.

a good monetization plan gives you the most money, while improving the user desire to spend, at the same time providing what you need to keep your product viable in the long run.
That of course would be measured in different levels of success, but simply making money does not mean you have a great monetization plan. If you have a product in demand, any where below its price point, you will make money, that doesnt mean you are maximizing earnings, and giving the product a strong sustainable ability to earn

I agree with everything you said. I just don’t think we have any metrics about whether they are close or far from “maximizing” earnings or maintaining customer loyalty. I wouldn’t choose to do a lot of things they have done, but then again, I can’t see the context in which those decisions are made.

All we can go by is whether they have been successful in selling enough gems to continue to offer the game as originally intended: evolving world, B2P, and no traditional expansions. Since, to-date, that’s what they are delivering, I conclude that they are “successful” by the metrics important to them (and their corporate sponsors at NCSOFT).

Since the new TP is, erm, new, it will take some getting used to.

I wouldn’t, ahem, trade the currently tarnished version for the old TP. When selling or buying, I can see all other offers. I can filter my transactions (historical or current) by rarity and key word. It’s a lot easier to sell some types of items. Best of all, it loads quickly.

Admittedly, there are too many bugs and inconsistencies. Let’s give them a few weeks to address that and then revisit the idea; I bet most people will change their mind about wanting the old version back.

Donari’s advice is sound. You really have to check, because dyes show up differently depending on the material (cloth/metal/leather) and the specific item and the other colors used.

e.g. Midnight Fire is great with golds and reds, while Midnight Blue is better with cooler colors.

There’s a bug that’s affecting XP gain from any source and it’s most noticeable at L29. ANet knows about it, although there’s no ETA for the fix.

You can also buy the items from the TP directly (the new filter allows you to search by stats). 90% of the time, the cost of crafting is close to the same as the cost of buying the item directly, especially if you make a custom buy offer — if the prices aren’t close, people will coming in to profit from the difference and drive the prices closer together.

Roybe.5896:

The overall point ….is what retail has known for years, making things that make it fun to part with your money means more will come and do just that.

And apparently, ANet has done well in that regard, since they continue to make money from the gem shop.

I’m not against ANet doing even better with the offerings, in terms of pricing and selection and how they influence how much fun we have. But for now, they seem to have done quite well in terms of profit.

There are a number of likely reasons that some players (even a sizable number) might be unhappy with the gem shop, but that’s very different from saying “monetization is done wrong” for this game.