Guild Wars 2

Frequently, it has turned out that it’s email accounts that are getting compromised, not computers. Make sure the email account you are using is also secure: unique password (not the same as for any game or website, etc).

Good luck!

Support is telling you to submit an in-game report because it adds to the data they can collect, so they can attempt to replicate the issue. However, submitting such a report is not going to lead to any individual account getting their dailies to reset.

Keep updating your ticket and make sure it’s getting escalated. If you still haven’t had it resolved after 3-days, update Gaile Gray’s review post, so she can make sure to get you a definitive answer about what’s going on.

It might turn out that Support is at a loss to resolve the general issue, but is able to reset a few people’s dailies. It might turn out that they lack the proper tools. But regardless of the answer, you’d at least get some more information.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-older-Part-2-merged

If you want to invest for the long run, the most reliable investments are probably:

• Gems (if you buy at 12g/100, then you need them to rise to about 16.7g/100 to break even — and most people seem to be thinking that’s going to happen soon).
• Leyline Weapons (with the exception of the Lovestruck and Jade Dragon skins, BL ticket skins have typically gone from 15-50g within 2 weeks after introduction to 150-300g — best case has been the Zodiacs, already selling at over 300g).
• Limited Edition dyes (if you buy cheap, there’s good profit, even though ANet keeps reintroducing them).
• Consider investing in jewelery mats (silver, gold) and leather — people keep expecting Grandmaster Jewelery and for leather, at worst, you’re out 2s50/stack.

Past performance is not a predictor of future performance. Your mileage might vary. Don’t forget to write.

The main reason I don’t want mounts in the game is that GW2’s NPCs don’t use mounts. The sole exception is Taimi, and apparently she’s against the rest of us needing a reason for mounts, since she’s promised to fix the waypoint issues.

Outside of Scruffy, Golems tend to move more slowly (instead of faster), troops use airships (but not individuals), and people walk alongside armored transport carriers.

If & when the game starts introducing in-game characters that use mounts, then I’ll start to believe that ANet is preparing the way for player mounts, too.

Regardless of Smooth’s particular suggestions, the original post has an interesting idea: offer extras to people who buy gems with real world money. That needn’t be remotely pay-to-win (or it could be).

I like the idea of offering exclusive items with no gameplay value, such as the Mini Mr Sparkles: you buy enough gems during a certain period and you get the item for free.

This encourages people to spend cash, without creating a huge disparity among the players who rarely or never spend coin.

I would be likely to stop playing if the gem shop offered items that seem likely to be required for the meta, e.g. more combat boosters or harvesting bonuses. The gem shop started as mostly cosmetics and I think that’s a good place for it.

I disagree with the OP: I think mobs should have really challenging mechanics, including stuff that punishes you for attacking, so that we have to learn to do something other than auto-attack.

The animation is kind of wonky. I have ground targeting turned on and the laser sometimes seems to start hitting things near me and then works its way to the place I targeted. Sometimes I see the damage numbers, but mostly I don’t.

In other words, it might be working exactly as you expected, but you just can’t tell. That’s better than being bugged, but not as well as I would hope.

It hasn’t affected anyone in my guild or most of the people I play with. I recommend you create a support ticket and work with ANet directly to troubleshoot this.

https://help.guildwars2.com/anonymous_requests/new

Can anyone who’s plunked down 500 gems for the Chickenado Mini tell us if it works underwater? Thanks!

Answers to standard questions:

• Windows Client.
• Graphics settings? Generally max.
• Full screen or windowed mode? Windowed full screen.
• Is your inventory full or maxed out? Almost never.
• Do you play with bags displayed or hidden? Always hidden.

Other info:

• Problem is intermittent, maybe repeatedly for a few hours about once a month or less.
• It seems to happen more often after a patch than at other times.
• It seems to happen more often if I move the inventory window from wherever I’m usually placing it to someplace else. Especially if that places part of the window off-screen.
• Never seems related to how much is in the inventory.

I generally keep the window 10-slots wide and tall enough to accommodate my character with the most total slots (currently 16 rows if I recall correctly).

ProtoGunner.4953:

I think it’s rather ridiculous that one of the most expensive items is such a useless kitten. I mean WTF?

Utility is only one factor that determines price. Scarcity is almost always more important, especially in video games.

Shadowmoon.7986:

And to be honest, is there any characteristics to Majory to make her female, beside her voice and character model. If she was replaced by a male character, the script would not need to been changed. Otherwise if we replaced Kasmeer with a male, it would be extremely funny to have the exact same dialogue. This is why I conclude that the decision to have Majory female is so that Anet could capitalize on immature male fan service.

The point is that the standard hard-boiled detective is male. Delaqua’s personality, voice, and actions fit that trope well when originally introduced. It was only later that she and Kasmeer hooked up (and that’s also a trope: opposites that spend too much time together under dangerous conditions fall in love).

Eh, I wasn’t terribly moved by either death. I was more affected by Kasmeer’s reaction to Jory wanting everyone to soldier on, even though Ms Delaqua herself has left the fight (at least for now).

Both Belinda D and Drooburt appeared long enough on stage for me to see their Red Shirts, but not long enough for me to have any strong feelings about them.

I also think it was perfectly fine that we missed their actual death scenes (something that very few films, never mind video games, handle well).

I will rephrase my earlier comment from above as:

I don’t care about some possible canonical explanation as to for how my character knew it was a dragon and which one.

The point is that when it mattered — during the story itself — it seemed to come from nowhere, without any foundation. That took away from an otherwise well-written and excellent story.

So Mr Stein and Ms McCoy can tell us why we should have known, but that won’t make me forget that I stopped playing Entanglement for a few minutes to try to figure out whether I missed something in the last chapter or recent dialogue (I hadn’t).

I really love the story overall and I love how ANet is telling it this time, with each of the NPCs providing an alternative perspective of events that fits their personality/background. I was just jarred by how the writers handled the most important “reveal” of Season 2 (and perhaps the most important of Season 1).

There are three distinct mechanisms to which players refer as “chests” and each has a different reason for not dropping:

• World Boss event chest (e.g. at the end of Claw of Jormag): you can only get this once per day per character (except for Karka Queen, which 1x/account). If you don’t do enough damage during the event (to dragon or trash mobs), you won’t see the chest. Shows on the mini map to everyone.
• Champion Bag: this appears to each person individually, if they have done enough damage to the boss and if the boss drops loot. No limit on how many of these you can get.
• Bonus chest: these appear in the lower right corner of your screen after successful completion of world events. These are limited to once per day per account.

In all cases, the primary limiting factor to getting this loot is how much damage you do. The bigger the zerg and the more damage its individual players do, the harder it is for non-DPS oriented builds to keep up.

There are only three things you can do, in order of most efficient to least:

• Change your gear and build to dish out more damage.
• Join a party of people that do more damage. This does two things: (1) your partners’ participation counts towards your overall credit and (2) you are prioritized to receive boons and other benefits generated by your partners.
• Change your play style to fit the event. Switching to melee (to deal more damage), dodging to avoid damage (so you don’t spend time healing or being down), focusing on damage instead of support — all of these things increase your participation credit.

Good luck.

Love it.

On Reddit, DigitalRuse suggested Finisher Playlists. That is: the asura engi could cycle Golem and Laser, but leave out the Quaggan or Cow.

Hey, congratulations on the Bank Contract.

For the OP: BL Chests + Keys were never meant to be more than a lottery: it drops mostly junk, sometimes a thing of minor utility or coin, or rarely a chance to get a valuable weapon skin. Only a tiny number of lucky winners (Brother Grimm, e.g.) will see anything of true value. They keys are designed to be a poor value, because the fun is in the opening.

I love opening containers in games. But not enough to spend dollars or even gems-bought-with-coin; those currencies are too valuable to me.

I can see where everyone is coming from in terms of explaining why the player character might have known the name of this particular elder dragon.

However, while in the story (and each time that I’ve repeated it since), I find myself taken out of the story and wondering how the group jumped from wondering why Scarlet behaved as she did and what she unleashed with her drill to suddenly identifying the force behind her as Mordremoth.

In other words: great, there’s some possible explanation, but it still pulled me right out of the story.

And it’s too bad, because it was the single sour note in an otherwise wonderful symphony.

I don’t see how see how a ban on manipulative buy orders could be enforced by ANet. For example, I have 1c buy orders for a bunch of dyes. Once in a while, I get a dye for 1c; that’s why I placed those orders. How could ANet reasonably determine that my orders are legit (i.e. I intend to make use of the dyes) and someone else’s orders are misleading?

However, I do support the idea of replacing that section with something more useful. Often, the listings are static, changing only a bit during certain in-game events. Instead, what about:

• Top Value Non-Legendary Items
• Trending Up
• Trending Down

As suggested in the linked thread (that was created a few hours ago), you can also try repairing your client.

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Command_line_arguments#-repair

Apparently, the First Page of the guild menu now scales the roster portion, depending on the number of people in the guild. In large guilds, you get the full height of the panel; in small guilds, you only get a few lines.

I find this frustrating because I frequently use this panel to check who is running WvW teams before swapping to my WvW guild (click guild, sort by rank, see who is where). Now, I’d have to rep the guild before I could effectively use the panel for that purpose

On the one hand, it’s not the biggest issue in the game. On the other hand, it was working fine yesterday, so I’m not sure what needed to be fixed today that might have caused this.

It worked!

Turns out, I didn’t have to clear out my entire TP queue, just the first 3-4 pages (out of about a dozen or more — buying a bunch of mats will do that). When I pressed “Take All” for the 3rd or 4th time, I got the prompt. Finally.

Thanks, Inculpatus; I appreciate the help.

Oh man. My TP pickup is huuuuge at the moment. I’ll give that a try.

Thanks, IC. I’ll let y’all know if it works or not.

I’m unable to start the second chapter of the Living Story. I’ve completed Chapter 1 on three different characters and have not received any prompts or emails. In the journal, I have a completion icon for chapter 1 and a greyed out locked icon for chapter 2. I have the option to purchase the unlock for chapter 2 for 0 gems, but if I choose that, I get a network error (as if the gem shop was offline or the TP was otherwise bugged).

I’ve restarted the game, swapped between characters, finished the story, and manually made my way to the new area of Dry Top. Nothing changes my status.

I’m about to create a ticket, but I’m hoping the peanut gallery might have some suggestions on what else I might try to troubleshoot this while I wait.

Thanks for any help in advance.

There’s a cooldown after the event ends, but no specific timer. Or at least, not that I’ve experienced.

I doubt it’s bugged “on all maps,” because new maps are forming on a regular basis — still, it should be easier to participate in the event without having to figure out how to spawn a new map.

In your shoes, I’d create a support ticket through the link above and mention the time you were in the map. Also use the /ip command in-game and include that number in the ticket. If you try multiple times, you can update the ticket to add the additional IP addresses.

My guess is that either support is unaware that there’s a potential quest-stopping bug or they are aware, but lack enough details to reproduce the issue (usually the first requirement to resolving bugs).

Good luck.

I’m sorry you guys are having trouble still. I would recommend that you post a request in the unresolved issues thread (link below). Include your ticket number and a brief description — leave the gory details in your support ticket (although it’s probably worth adding a link to this thread).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-older-Part-2-merged

This …thread is intended for you to use to follow up on …issues that have been filed with support but have not been resolved in three days or more. …

Please allow the team time to resolve issues before posting here, so don’t submit a ticket and post, but rather follow-up if the ticket needs a review after it’s been in the queues for three days or more.

The stated issue is only a problem for people like me, who are unwilling to spend RL cash to buy gems. The higher the gold→gem ratio goes, the better it is for those people willing to spend their hard-earned money to buy gems.

If we want a free-to-play game, we should also accept that the company will make things easier on those willing to spend their hard-earned dollars, pounds, and euros. I am thankful that the gem shop only offers cosmetic & convenience items, and that top-tier gear is available without ever owning a single gem.

Guhracie.3419:

Behellagh.1468:

No it doesn’t, it simply remembers the last X number of things you bought. If it has a limited history then it can’t reliably look back and determine a total. That history is kept in the store’s database of you. Still can’t look into your account.

The reason why if you try to buy tabs of bag slots in either the bank or inventory screen and have it tell you that you can’t buy anymore is because the game database does know exactly how many limited items you have and can sanity check it before launching the store UI to complete the sale. Once you are in the TP window, that’s an entirely different program and different databases.

That still doesn’t explain how the gemstore interface knows that I can’t purchase another Black Lion Introductory Package.

I suspect that the gem shop has a flag for that specific item.

• You can only ever buy one.
• The only place to purchase the BLIP is the gem shop.

Thus, it’s easy for the gem shop to figure it out, in contrast to the situation with bank tabs/collection expanders: you can purchase more than 1, the limit has grown over time, and there are two places to purchase them (gem shop + the icon in the bank itself).

Anyhow, regardless of why this is so, it’s admittedly frustrating and/or annoying for both the customer and Customer Support. The player should not have to care about what buttons they click to purchase. Similarly, it’s a poor use of the CS team’s time to refund gems on something that can’t have provided any value in the first place.

There are about a dozen non-exotic, non-max items that sell for amounts that don’t make any economic sense. There are also max items that fit this category.

My favorite is Sam, an exotic accessory with zerker stats. [&AgGDtQAA] It comes with a rare upgrade, Embellished Brilliant Opal Jewel.

This named item has the same stats as the crafted zerker earring Orichalcum Earring of the Berserker. [&AgGTNAAA]. It comes with an exotic upgrade, Exquisite Ruby Jewel.

You cannot buy Sam for less than 30 gold. You cannot spend more than 5 gold to get the generic.

No one can see which of the two you are using. And yet… people are willing to spend over six times as much to get Sam.

Does it make economic sense? Of course not.

Still, the buyer will be very happy they have their “Sam” and you can be very happy with the coin they are willing to part with.

The current exchange rate is better for many new players:

• Veterans spent US$60 to play the game during headstart.
• New players can spend the same amount, with $20 going to gems and the rest to pay for the game.
• That $20 gets you 1,600 gems, worth over 150 gold.

The exchange rate is only terrible for people like me who don’t want to spend any real world money on the game.

There are lots of fun ideas in this thread. However, I would only want to see new traps that change the current meta. Otherwise, much of what is mentioned above can already be achieved tactically.

Stealth traps make it harder for thieves and mesmers to hide in keeps, thus providing a way to protect the keep aside from running around hoping to spot these foes when they forget to maintain stealth. Supply traps disrupt the enemy’s ability to siege (defensively or offensively).

I don’t have suggestions for how traps might work. Instead, I’d like to list some effects I’d like to see, that might be provided by a “trap” of some sort.

• Give an advantage to a server with 4 commanders of 20-player squads over a single commander with 60+ players.
• Benefit the defense of a keep that is supported by sentries when there are few allies on the map.
• Reward sentries for staying active and on-post for ages.
• Disrupt a dominating server from pulling supply from the other borderlands/EB.
• Make it harder for the same havoc team to disrupt a single objective repeatedly for hours.

In short, I’d like to see new traps that produce an impact that would make battles more interesting in ways that cannot be easily achieved now.

Orphanage and Hospital are about the same, depending on how you are geared and your play style.

• Orphanage is a smaller space. With AOEs and cleaves, you can tackle multiple foes and, as noted, guardian can attack through the walls.
• The larger arena for the hospital makes it easier to kite and the NPC allies do a better job of fighting imo.

I recommend Hospital if you tend to use vitality stats or otherwise find yourself dying often during this stage. I recommend Orphanage if you do high DPS and know how to ball up the foes.

John Smith surely uses metrics comparable to GDP to evaluate the health of the game’s economy across several dimensions.

In his shoes, I probably would not choose to share them.

• Publishing some specific stats might have an undesirable impact on the economy. Other stats might be too useful for gold sellers.
• Publishing only a few stats tends to give undue importance to those numbers — despite any caveats given, people will will mistakenly draw conclusions that are then hard to dispel.
• The data is probably available in a form useful to JS and his colleagues; it would probably take considerable work to make it publishable in a form digestible for the majority of players.

I’d love to see this sort of data, but I think JS would already be posting stuff like this if it were both easy to do and likely to be of use to the community.

edit: changed misspelled word to “evaluate” to address the kitten filter. (Although: funny result in original, I don’t think JS kittens the health of the game.)

I suspect it’s a combination of megaservers drying up the supply of rare items (perhaps only a fraction chased world bosses, but those who did might have accounted for a substantial portion of rares available), the high price of precursors encouraging people to flush more rares at the forge, and an increased appetite for ectos (among those unlocking premium skins, especially legendaries).

More interesting to me is that the average value of a Bag of Heavy Crafting materials has gone up by 20% or so since April. Prior to the Wardrobe announcement, it fluctuated between 85s and 95s per bag; currently, it’s running about 120s/bag, a 20% increase.

I would have thought that the intense farming of Boss Blitz would have made up for any supply drops due to changes in champ farming or Frostgorge/Orr event farming.

OP: your cheapest and quickest solution is to invite a trusted friend on your original server to join your guild. Wait out the anti-theft protection (I think it’s 48 hrs) and then give that person permission to remove stuff from the bank.

They can then mail stuff to you, at the snail’s pace of 5 stacks at a time.

Alternatively, you can wait for 6+ months: ANet has (finally) agreed that this is a bad situation, especially with megaservers, and they have plans to make influence-improvements universal, instead of bound to a specific world. Unfortunately, they haven’t set a date. I suspect that besides the coding being a pain, they haven’t worked out how to handle the situation when a guild has multiple chapters, multiple guild banks, and more than 250 total slots in use.

Sorry you ran into this.

If you want support to take a look for your individual account, you’ll want to create a support ticket. You can attach confirming videos.

If you post here or use the in-game /bug reporting tool, you’ll get the devs to look at the generic issue of items becoming bound unnecessarily, but the support team won’t be able to assist you personally.

Good luck.

According to the wiki, Quick Breathing doesn’t affect boon duration:

Reduces recharge on warhorn skills. Warhorn skills convert conditions into boons.

• Conditions converted to boons: 1
• Recharge reduced: 20%

This would explain why you are seeing a 1.8s gap between the end of swiftness and the ability to recast Warhorn-4.

BTW: you should be able to confirm how much swiftness you are getting by mousing over the Swiftness icon as soon as it appears (takes a bit of practice to see it properly when you cast, especially for skills with short activation times).

I think of the 5% listing fee as an upfront cost: it’s gone as soon as I post. I think of the 10% sales tax as, well, a tax: it is deducted from my proceeds, so it’s money that I never had in the first place.

In effect: I pay the 5% listing fee, but the buyer pays the 10% sales tax.

(This isn’t mathematically different from what tolunart and others have said — it’s just a point of view that helps me view the fees in a way that helps me use the TP more effectively. It probably isn’t a useful model for everyone.)

If there were only 3 available and they were bought over the course of 90 minutes, isn’t it possible this involved several buyers?

I think it’s more fun than just depositing stuff in your inventory. Plus, it highlights how your odds aren’t any better than playing slots.

Astral Projections.7320:

You can only be given the average rate over time, which is 1 scrap every 5 chests (20% chance), so 1 scrap in 30 chests is really bad luck.

It’s about a 1% chance to get 1 (or fewer) scraps out of 30 BL chests — bad luck, but one in a hundred people opening 30 chests is going to see the same.

The “expected” number of scraps from 30 chests is 6 (30 * 20%), but the actual probability of getting exactly that number is only about 18%. About 2/5 of people will get less and 2/5 will be luckier than “expected.”

As suggested by others, your best bet if you want a specific weapon skin is to buy it directly, via gold. Even if you’re buying gems with cash, convert the gems and use the resulting gold. Unless you have extremely good luck, that’s always going to be cheaper.

The only reason (in my opinion) for opening BL Chests is for the entertainment value of playing the GW2 lotto. I expect nothing and I am therefore extremely pleased when I end up with something of value to me.

Lightsbane.9012:

i’m having the time of my life farming the gold for tooth of frostfang. it’s at about 850 with buy orders as low as 491g. could i do the same thing and get it eventually? i feel like 543g(my current gold total) would still be too low for a buy offer. ideas?

There’s no harm in putting in a buy order for 543g. The worst thing that happens is you don’t get Tooth at that price, you get tired of waiting, and you remove the offer and add e.g. 50g more. However, if you have seen buy orders as low as 491g, then I think it’s more likely you’ll get it at 543g.

I admit that waiting is a lot harder than it sounds, but being patient is among the best ways to earn from the TP. Good luck.

DevonCarver.5370:

Chaba.5410:

Devon Carter…. Devon Carver… man, that’s not confusing or anything. /sarcasm

Only confusing if you thought my name was ever Devon Carter.

That’s…so… Raven?

nearlight.3064:

Is there any chance that I could place a buy order for about 500 and get it?

Absolutely. Put in a buy order for the price you are willing to pay (which might be 500, might be less). Wait it out.

nearlight.3064:

Are there specific times of the week/month/day where the buy price dips enough to be able to acquire the weapon relatively cheaply?

Mystic.5934:

http://www.gw2spidy.com/item/29176
It looks like no night/day cycle to it’s price, or even weekly.

Spidy (and other similar sites, including the TP) only show prices at a specific moment in time; they don’t show transactions that happen in between those moments.

There are fluctuations, but on low-supply, high-priced items, they aren’t going to be in an easily predictable pattern. That means you can put in your buy order whenever you like — don’t wait for the TP to drop to your desired price; put in the buy order now, but only for the amount you are willing to pay.

nearlight.3064:

While its sell price is around 620ish gold, I’ve noticed that its buy prices seem to be in the mid 500s.

That’s pretty typical on the TP for most anything: a 20%+ gap between the lowest available price and the highest offer to buy. (Flippers take advantage of that gap, especially when it’s over 100%, as it is for a large fraction of dyes.)

nearlight.3064:

And in your opinion, is there any chance of this precursor’s price decreasing significantly in the near-medium term future, or have the prices mostly stabilized since the April patch?

The consensus seems to be that the current precursor want-to-sell and want-to-buy prices are here to stay (I personally think they might go down, depending on what happens the next few Living Story updates, but that’s a minority view).

However, even so, I know people that acquired their precursors since the Wardrobe announcement/patch at prices similar to what they would have paid pre-patch. That’s because they didn’t make their offer based on current prices; instead, they only offered up as much as they were willing to pay (which was heavily influenced by pre-patch prices).

Similarly, I just picked up a skin that requires 5 BL tickets for about what it sold at when it came out. Had I placed the buy order based on what spidy (or the TP) was showing, I would have paid nearly three times as much, i.e. about 100g more.

Short story: Place the buy order at the price you want. Wait it out. If you find yourself waiting longer than you want, reconsider how much you are willing to pay.

If you have anything on your watchlist, the “Daily” progress doesn’t show up automatically. Remove everything from the watchlist and it will.

I try to zero out the watchlist right before I sign off at night, so the next time I logon (after reset), I can see the new dailies. Alternatively, you can just select which dailies you want to track as the first thing you do.

Wanze.8410:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

http://tinyurl.com/gw2-sp-2-gold

or if you want to paste the URL directly…
ec2-174-129-236-8.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8000/gw2sp2g/

There’s some minor caveats associated with the site, but it will give you the right ballpark for what’s the best bang per skill point.

That spreadsheet doesnt calculate t1 common mats at all, so why recommend it if it arguably leaves the best option out?
Anyways, i already expressed my opinion on how to use your skillpoints in this topic:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/bltc/TP-tips-and-tricks/first

If you want to bother to read up, go ahead. If you want to use outdated or incomplete spreadsheets and waste gold, go ahead.

My apologies.

I recommended it because I forgot that it doesn’t include T1 mats (when that site launched, that was the worst option — high-priced items tended to be the best). Also, I never bother upgrading T1 mats because I find the process of upgrading those too tedious, even for the value.

http://tinyurl.com/gw2-sp-2-gold

or if you want to paste the URL directly…
ec2-174-129-236-8.compute-1.amazonaws.com:8000/gw2sp2g/

There’s some minor caveats associated with the site, but it will give you the right ballpark for what’s the best bang per skill point.

See also this thread:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Sky-Cristal-Master-achievement-bug

Zomaarwat.3912:

Saucermote.9140:

We had the same problem with the marionette boss. Enemies that don’t give experience don’t count as kills for daily or for processing on kill foods. I think they count if you need to kill a certain amount of veterans however; so silver lining.

IIRC the Marionette mobs did count for Champion slayer.

Some of those mobs dropped items and generated XP; some didn’t.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

(And no, I don’t consider being able to buy gems with gold a method of acquiring those features by playing the game.)

And I wonder why…since that actually IS the point. You pay more to get more.

Even though you don’t want to consider a valid point against your own argument, doesn’t make the point any less valid.

I don’t think the point is invalid — I just don’t think that type of gem shop fits with the game that ANet presented at launch and for nearly two years since. (Note that this is my opinion of their philosophy — ANet is, of course, free to change its collective mind on the topic.)

I’m making a distinction between how the item is acquired. With the exception of the single everlasting gathering tool, every function available in the gem shop is avail in some fashion by playing the game normally. Boosters are available in the form of boons and/or consumables from other sources, BL salvage kits can drop from BL chests, and so on. You can get acquire new finishers through PvP or spend gems for fancier ones. You can even rename and make over a character by grinding a new level 80.

Generally, the gem shop has been about cosmetics and convenience. This item — and this item alone — offers functionality that isn’t otherwise in the game: a gathering tool that drops a third type of item (besides the bonus and gathered mats). None of the other gathering tools do anything similar and neither do the tools one can buy with laurels or coin or karma.

If ANet wants to change their philosophy generally, I think they should also offer more things along those lines. If they think that’s the best way to generate revenue, then I wish them luck, since I love the game and want it to be financially successful.

If they want to keep the same concept as implemented at launch, they should remove the watchwork sprocket-generating pick. It just rubs people the wrong way, which isn’t worth the small amount of revenue it might generate. It distracts people from all the good stuff in game, which is bad for GW2 and bad for ANet.

And, again in my view, the one thing they really shouldn’t try to do is claim to be keeping the same policy and yet offer items like this …and then expect the community to be pleased about it.

tl;dr ANet can (and should) do anything they need to turn a profit, but that doesn’t mean players will embrace every change, especially if ANet fails to be upfront about the types of changes or the reasons the company thinks they are necessary.