Guild Wars 2

I’m perfectly happy with the rewards from the BL chests. If good stuff dropped with any greater frequency, it wouldn’t be as fun anymore and it would it devalue the coin-worth of those items (as well as other items in the gem shop).

I consider BL Keys to be a lotto ticket for luxury items and if I really want something that drops from the chests, I save up to buy them on the TP.

Speculation: the game launched without a sufficient staff that understood how to optimize web UI. What staff was available to work on the TP at launch was dedicated to making sure it didn’t keep going down under the full weight of millions of trades each day.

Since then, the dev teams still don’t include enough people who specialize in web design (and/or are good at it) and their time is spread too thin. While everyone uses the TP a little, only a few of us deal with it a lot. So, it’s not likely to be a priority soon.

That doesn’t mean we should stop requesting improvements to the TP. But it does mean that I’m not holding my breath.

I applaud the idea and publishing the results in a clear and intuitive fashion. You have clearly demonstrated that the GW2 trading market is incredibly efficient and “works” as well as anyone could hope. In particular, your charts make it easy to show some important ideas:

• Gold prices for certain popular items haven’t increased as much as people think they have.
• Prices follow clear patterns relative to changes in availability and interest (supply and demand).

I will be pointing to your site when I discuss the TP with friends or when discussing certain topics on various forums.

However, I would quibble with your use of the word “inflation,” with the choice of items for the market basket, and your weighting of those items.

• First, inflation has a technical meaning for economists and a vague meaning for the general public. I would recommend using some other term.
• If you are going to use that word, the charts should also include how easy it is to obtain gold, something that, as you note, is much more difficult to measure. For example, the cost of T3 cultural armor is fixed, but it’s far easier to obtain the gold required, so arguably, T3 is “cheaper” now than when the game launched.
• The specific items you have chosen don’t reflect the playing experience of huge elements of the player base: relatively few people craft much, even fewer people work on legendaries (they are luxury items rather than required), and the bundle doesn’t include the sort of stuff that people seem to talk about wanting/using frequently.

I would propose instead that you consider three different bundles:

• Essentials: this covers things that everyone seems to feel the need to do for each character, specifically gear up in full exotics (trinkets, one set of armor, three sets of weapons) and expand their personal inventory. For this, I’d look at:
  • Average cost of named exotics (they aren’t directly affected by material costs and are easy to track).
  • Some average for weapons (there are a variety of ways to do this).
  • Un-upgraded trinkets (they seem to be a lot cheaper than crafted ones).
  • Cost of four, 15-slot bags (whatever is cheapest, usually leather, but in the past it’s also included cloth).
• Basic Cosmetics: This covers dyes and skins. Nearly everyone tries to obtain a few specific colors and a few better-looking skins. A reasonable proxy for color is the price of unID dyes and a stand-in for skins could be the price of the mystic weapons (mystic spike, etc), since they are among the most plentiful.
• Luxuries: Things that no one ever needs, but plenty of people covet. I would consider looking at the five priciest non-exclusive dyes, the average price of legendaries (which also covers lodestones, precursors, and T6 materials), and the average price of permanent items that only drop from the BL Chest.
• Other: Your current system already covers a couple of things well and I’d like to see that continue, e.g. materials.

Again, I love what you have done and I look forward to seeing more.

Cynz.9437:

Why are forum mods are 1000 times more strict than GMs or rather why are GMs not as strict? (i am not even extraggerating).. if i said same things i saw in game on forms, i would get instantly perma banned probably but i see people saying mad things in game and still playing

1. People type stuff in chat, without thinking. But you have time to edit your forum contents (there’s even a preview button). In other words, they cut us slack for heat-of-the-moment actions.
2. As noted above, the only people who can read in-game chat are online at that moment. Unless a post is removed (or edited), it will remain on the forums (and possibly cached on Google) for a long time.
3. In both cases, forums and in game, ANet staff are more likely to take action if there is a report. People in game might not want to take time to file a report; people reading the forums probably have time to click on the report icon and follow-up.

The game just introduced a number of new activities: Marionette, EotM, and some new stories. Everyone doing those activities is doing less of something else.

This isn’t the first time changes in the game have gotten people to leave Orr for somewhere else and that affects the supply. On Spidy, you can see pretty clearly that the amount of Omnoms avail for sale a month ago was four times as much as it is now, but the number of buy orders hasn’t changed that much. Decreased supply, static demand: prices rise.

As soon as a few more people notice, enterprising farmers will decide to go back to Orr to farm the Omnoms and the supply will start to go up again.

I don’t recommend that new speculators invest in high-priced items:

• You are putting all your eggs in one basket, always riskier than diversifying.
• To make the risk worthwhile, the price has to increase by a lot of gold.
• High-value items sell much more slowly than lower-priced ones, providing ample time for your offer to be undercut by pennies.

Less riskier alternatives are guessing which will be the most coveted items in the future, notably:

• Ascended Zealot recipes — if they are like Celestial recipes, they won’t be obtainable after Scarlet’s story ends and prices will spike.
• Similarly, Lovestruck skins cost one BL Ticket now, but will cost more in the future, so the prices will certainly go up. Based on other such skins, you can expect the increase to be substantial, although some skins will increase by a lot more than others (and be careful of competing with too many other speculators).
• Watchwork Sprockets drop like flies now, but will that be true when Scarlet’s story ends?
• If you want to stick with dyes, you can see the trends on Spidy: most masterwork/uncommon dyes will be available to purchase at 6-7s for short periods at some point and nearly all of them will be selling for 14-18s, again for short periods. Guess wrong, and you’re only out a silver or two per dye. Guess right and you can make 100% return on your investment.

Shun.9475:

How the hell did gold deflate so much? Is there a deficiency of gems in the market? did Gold moguls shovel out all the gold in the market? Is anet manipulating the market on purpose so people would buy them?

Now casual players will have to lifelessly farm for gem store items even more at this exchange rate. likely hood of that happening is none, because their casuals.

Gold didn’t deflate at all, as can be seen in that February 2014 costs for a variety of things is roughly the same now as it was in November 2013: stack of ectos, full set of exotic or rare armor, most dyes, etc.

What did change was the amount of gold required to buy gems. And a lot of things happened to affect that:

Downward trends
These contributed the rate dropping to 7g/100 gems in December:

• Mr Sparkles bonus encouraged people to spend US$50 on gems.
• I suspect that a lot of people got gem cards for Christmas, Chanukah, or Kwanzaa.
• Few truly new items for Wintersday.

Upward trends
These contributed to the rate increasing to 8-9g/100 gems in February:

• New finishers.
• New gem store toys (harp, chocolates, return of roses, …)
• Re-introducing of Flame & Frost dye kits (which included dyes worth nearly 200g just prior).
• New controversial, infinite-use mining pick.

And this is nothing unusual: the cost to buy gems with gold has been steadily increasing since launch and, on the whole, that’s good for the game:

• New players can spend a few bucks, convert gems to gold, and get a headstart on gear.
• Those with little time to play can do the same.
• Gold sellers have to farm (or steal) a lot more in order to stay competitive with the official rate.

SSalp.6423:

I think Gossamer should not be worth less than silk. I, personally, am fine with the silk price but gossamer should get something to increase its worth.

Why? What’s wrong with Gossamer being less? For long periods of time in this game, platinum, gold, and iron have been worth more than mithril. Vanilla is worth more than Chili which is worth more than Sage & Rosemary, even though all drop from the same plant (just in different regions).

Just because an item is higher tier doesn’t mean it must be worth more. As long as it drops less often, I’m fine with it.

An alternative question might be, “why does the game spike the demand for silk so high, but do little to increase the demand for its T6 counterpart?” Again, I don’t see anything wrong with this, but I am curious how the Southsun Economist might respond.

I don’t have anything against mounts per se.

However, the game (and EotM in particular) was designed without mounts in mind, so I imagine it would take a huge dev effort to ensure that the gameplay remain appropriately balanced if mounts were introduced. (Not to mention entering/exiting combat, transferring maps, etc.). I would far prefer that effort to be spent on other aspects of the game.

I also don’t like the idea of players using mounts, since NPCs do not. With the exception of Taimi, the occasional helicopter drop (Melandru, a handful of personal stories), and a few Aetherblade Airships, everyone in Tyria walks. Yeah, it’s more than a little inconsistent that people don’t use hot-air balloons or that the dredge haven’t managed to invent the steam engine (and locomotive), or that the Wheel is used for mills, but not for travel. But that’s the environment in which we live. Until that changes, I don’t really see a place for mounts in GW2.

Buy more storage if you want to hoard or delete the fragments you don’t expect to need.

The only alternatives for ANet are:

• Make it harder to get ascended mats (empyreals, dragonite, bloodstone), which will make everyone yell, “too much grind!” or
• Require ascended items to use more ascended mats, which will make everyone yell, “too much grind!”

I don’t think there’s an obvious point in between which would please the vast majority of players. For now, I prefer the problem of having too many mats to having trouble getting enough (plus: we already have that with silk and I’m exhausted from all the complaints about that).

Regardless of the merits of any particular idea, ANet can only work on and implement so many changes. Some that sound simple (like making skins re-usable) often involve more work than we think.

For example, a sensible way to implement this might be to create a locker for cosmetic items. But that involves more coding than just making skins soulbound. Similarly, if they do start making multi-use skins, how does that affect people who paid 100s of gold for skins when they were one-use? Or people who sold skins, because they were only one-use?

So, independent of any economic reasons that NCSOFT might have, there are all sorts of reasons that skins might continue to be one-use.

People can keep making the suggestion, but I don’t expect ANet to comment on the idea until/unless it’s scheduled for release or they firmly decide that it’s never going to happen.

Syryn.7591:

All jokes aside (which is hard to do at this point) exactly what will happen to Zommoros? He’s literally imprisoned within the Mystic Forge but as we know Djinn are very powerful, so will he be freed during this time? How will they transport him? Build a new forge in Vigil’s Keep and he somehow “magically” gets there? No pun intended. kitten I said no jokes.

So as pulled from the wiki “Djinn are relentless when defending the items, places, and causes they protect”

I don’t know about you guys but I really hope there is an event involved in kicking butt with Zommoros. If he considers the Mystic Forge his thing to protect, anet could make this epic.

As a practical matter, there are a ton of access points to the Mystic Forge: conduits, Div Reach’s Royal Terrace, the WvW maps, and a couple of other (less notable) ones. I think of the Forge as being hidden in the mists and it just so happens that LA includes a hole in the fabric of space/time in which we can see The Toilet. i.e. Zommy is in the Forge, but there’s nothing imo that ties the Forge to LA.

However, I really like your idea anyhow, as a way to tweak the story.

Regardless of whether my theory is true, it would still be really interesting to see some of the NPCs in LA (and elsewhere) rally for battle, for whatever personal reasons they have. The skritt in the tunnels, the raisin-faced child, the racist haggler near the trading post, and, yes, Zommy himself.

Ordered by what I think GW2 needs for improved PvE gameplay (not what I would personally prefer):

1. Ranger (poor build diversity, insufficient pet controls)
2. Engineer (not enough in between the no-skill builds vs the high-skilled builds)
3. Warrior (in PvE, it can out DPS, out AoE, out support, and out control other profs — skill to play and tradeoffs required should be more in line with the other profs).

Before the system changed, it was easier to systematically test the difference between little/no magic find, 100% MF, and 200% MF. Those people who posted their results showed consistent differences:

• About the same number of gear items, but more MF meant more greens than whites or blues.
• More T+1 drops (e.g. T6 instead of T5 in Orr).
• More rares (but not by a lot).
• More exotics (again, not by a lot).

Notably, there were runs in which the low-MF sets did better than a similar run with a high-MF set — this is where random numbers come into play. It’s similar to comparing a professional blackjack player to an amateur: the amateur might have a run of good luck and win more rounds in that time than the pro, but over the long run, the pro is going to do much, much better. (And, of course, the house will do best of all, but only over the long run.)

In addition, there’s a lot of “observational bias” from most of us regarding drops. We’re much more likely to remember salvaging 20 rares without an ecto than we are to remember getting 51e from 40 rares over the next few days (even though the average between those two runs would be be the expected 0.85e/rare).

For those who want to declare that magic find isn’t working , start keeping track of all your drops. How many gear and what rarity. How many containers (e.g. Heavy Moldy Bags), junk items, mats, and miscellany. If you do this consistently for 100s of drops, you’ll start to notice patterns…many of which will turn out to be coincidence. After 1,000s of drops, you’ll start to have enough data for analysis. If that sounds too daunting, then team up with a couple of friends with similar MF (so that each one is only responsible for a few hundred items).

knbBlackTemplar.3059:

I don’t care if Kasmeer and Marjory are in love.. i just don’t want to see ANY romantic stuff, we have way too more important things to do instead of look at two people flirt patch after patch after patch.

Returning to the original post: the OP says they don’t want to see people flirting. I respect that opinion, but personally, I think it’s kind of fun. I especially liked seeing Kasmeer try to remodel Marjory’s traditional PI’s office (dark & dingy) into something a Lady wouldn’t be embarrassed to work in.

It’s also consistent with the way the personal story evolves. In the human version, we see Logan being over-protective of Queen Jennah. In the Sylvari line, we see some of Caithe’s personal relationships with the others of her generation. In other words, the game already includes lots of relationships and so I’m not surprised to see it in the living story.

1. You still don’t have to play WvW; you can buy a WvW rank for 2 laurels + 50 badges. (And while leveling, you’ll get more badges and liquid wXP.)
2. This isn’t that much different in principle from the original requirement of 500 badges. When it was first introduced, badges were hard to acquire, so two stacks worth meant you needed to invest a lot of time in WvW. Since badges are far easier to acquire today, this change returns us to the original requirement: Gift of Battle (and a legendary) requires committing some time to WvW.
3. I support the idea of encouraging people who want kitten to try out other aspects of the game. And, in the extreme case, if one really wants to avoid WvW, one can sell all the saved mats and invest in buying a legendary from the TP.

(Mind you, had it been up to me, I would have set the minimum rank to 20 instead of 30, based on my best recollection of being around r15 when I topped off my first stack of badges.)

Mosharn.8357:

EOTM should be a roamers paradise not a zerg land. We have normal wvw for zerg land where zerging actuly matters. The mobs in eotm need to be toned down and the redonk bonuses lessened.

Why? Why should EotM be for roamers? Regular WvW is already great for roamers (most can’t take keeps, but they take control points, flip supply, and keep waypoints contested).

Edge is a really interesting map with a lot of interesting challenges, some of which I hope get migrated to the borderlands.

Also: the map hasn’t even been out a week — give it time. Who knows what the fights will look like in a month? In the meantime, my advice is that you assume that what worked in regular WvW probably won’t work as well in EotM, i.e. try new builds.

I actually think it’s interesting when someone decides to spend the time to advertise an item by posting 1,000s of buy orders for it.

I think it would be good for the TP if the tool was modified to ignore outlier buy/sell offers, but that’s just about last on my list of things I’d like to see improved on the TP.

In the meantime, I just treat it like any other advertisement: I ignore the content, but admire the skill (or lack thereof) of the marketing department.

It’s part of what makes Southsun “special.”

Most everyone I know tends to get enough additional fragments while in the lair to assemble a couple of extra keys. The chat log you copied is consistent with you assembling an additional molten cypher after you had used all your pre-assembled keys.

The only way to demonstrate conclusively that you got a busted cypher is if you had the cypher visible in inventory and you still couldn’t open the chest.

In other words, the evidence presented thus far is consistent with your having made an extra key, used it quickly, and just never got a chance to see the assembled cypher in your bags.

I recommend that you contact support (link at the top of the page) and get them to work with you individually. They can help you troubleshoot the issue.

If you want to try to work on this while waiting to hear back from Support, you might take a look at whether you are running the game with administrative rights — this can affect whether the GW2 program is able to create the cache, which in turn affects the display. (There are some stickies in the support forum that can walk you through this.)

Good luck.

The only issue at present is that the Power of the Mists is no longer being applied outside of WvW. Since this was not mentioned in the patch notes, it is presumably a bug.

Let’s give the dev team a chance to respond and not confuse the issue by bring up different issues (with similar symptoms) from over a year ago.

I bought two of the new picks, because I wanted the infinite-use convenience (especially when gathering Ori in Southsun). Even so, I would be happy to give up the 20% chance of sprockets to stop the precedent of offering functionality in the gem shop that cannot be obtained in the game. And also to stop all the arguing about this tool: it’s a great game and a great new release and people should be discussing that, rather than did GW2 just become Pay-to-Win (I don’t think it did, but my point is: the players shouldn’t need to worry about whether it might be true or not).

I think this was a particularly tone-deaf offering by the marketing department. By offering an item that is functionally different from those available in game, it should have been obvious that a significant subset of players would respond poorly: those owning other infinite-use tools are bound to be annoyed that they didn’t get the “extra” efficiency; those who can’t (or won’t) pay the 1,000 gem price are going to be annoyed that they can’t get the same functionality anywhere in the game.

But what’s worse is that the “extras” offered by this tool aren’t likely to get that many people to buy it. Speaking anecdotally, everyone I know considering infinite-use tools is only interested in the convenience; getting a few extra sprockets isn’t enough of an incentive to change a “no sale” into a “sure, I’ll pay 1,000 gems” buyer, because it’s still an incredibly poor deal financially. (It’s just not as poor a deal as the original tools.)

Gems have to remain tradeable for gold, because that is one important way that the game reduces real-money trading and RMT is a bigger threat to the economy than anything else mentioned. Excluding some items from the gem shop would decrease the effectiveness of this strategy.

In any case, even if the above weren’t true, the current set up is an ideal compromise for the vast majority of players:

• Those who have more dollars than time can spend cash to buy things that make playing more fun for them.
• Those that have more time can avoid spending cash altogether and not be at a disadvantage.

It’s true there are some outliers on both sides: people incredibly efficient at making in-game coin and people with tons of disposable income. But just aren’t enough of either that ANet needs to (or should) change their policies because of them.

The announcement you link just said it was a new item being added. The implication was that it would be on sale for the same duration, but… it was not. My guess is that it will come back at a notably higher price. (My educated guess is it would be 1,200-1,400 gems instead of 1,000, since that would make the sale price 20-40% lower than “normal.”)

You aren’t being trolled by the support team — they really don’t have the ability to retrieve the data you are asking for. (Perhaps the game should make it easier for them, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t.)

The item’s description is:

• “Will return the original appearance item and stats item from an existing transmuted item. All items will remain soulbound.” (emphasis is mine)

The “splitter” is probably poorly named:

• The plain text reading of “original” in the above would mean that if an item has been transmuted multiple times, only the very first stats and the very first skin would be split.
• Such meaning makes the “splitter” useless for a lot of people, so it’s entirely understandable to me that people would be confused and expect it to do something else.

Accordingly:

1. I support your attempt to get a refund (see below).
2. I hope that the dev team sees this and renames the splitter. It’s an “original item restoration tool” — its purpose is primarily to restore a reskinned precursor to a form that the Mystic Forge recognizes. In nearly all other cases, you can use a pair of transmutation crystals to make a soulbound skin into an account bound one.

However, since the items works as ANet intended it to, but it’s value is extremely limited, I think you should rephrase your request as follows:

• Ask for someone new to review the ticket. (Don’t create a new one.)
• State clearly that you understand now what the Splitter does (and does not) do, but you were originally misled by the word, “splitter” in its name, i.e. you thought it would split the current skin from the current stats, rather than give you the original skin.
• State clearly that you accept that you have lost an incredibly valuable skin as a result.
• And request politely that, under the circumstances, they refund the gems spent on the splitter.

Most of the time with ANet, a graciously-worded, reasonable request will get some positive results. (It might not be the resolution requested, but it will likely prove sufficient or better to the customer.)

If you don’t get a timely response (i.e. within 72 hours), post a note in sticky thread under Account Issues (“Tickets for Review”). The devs that read the bug forum aren’t connected to the support team and won’t be able to help resolve this.

Good luck and please let us know how it turns out.

It’s fixed now, since the recent server reboot.

To be fair to the OP, it wasn’t just the timers that were out of sync — the API wasn’t returning event information for a number of servers. (I could only find data from three worlds.)

Still, it’s good to remind everyone that, after an update, the websites that use the API (such as GW2 Stuff and GW2 State) will be out of sync for each covered chain on each server, until the first event in the relevant chain begins on the server.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I finally got a rely, followed the instructions and i STILL have the problem and no information what to do AFTER i have tried what they suggested and none of it has worked – anyone got any ideas?

I would be happy to help you, but (as suggested above), it’s very difficult to know what to suggest, since you haven’t shared any specifics with us.

However, I would encourage you to continue working with support. It’s my experience that if their first ideas don’t help, they are more than willing to follow-up and try something else.

For example, at some point, they will ask you to run one or more diagnostics so they can gather data that might help identify the root cause of the problem you are having with the TP.

Perhaps they haven’t communicated their suggestions clearly or perhaps you misunderstood a step — those are common issues that come up when a tech firm tries to help a customer troubleshoot a problem that might not be directly related to their product.

In any case, keep working with them. If you have exhausted all possibilities with Support, then contact Gaile again and ask her to take another look at the ticket. She’ll help them be able to help you.

Good luck.

I’m not entirely sure this is a bug, but I support the sentimement: Delusion shouldn’t be account-bound (and thanks for reminding ANet to double-check what happens after removing the relevant flag).

On the other hand, you get to choose its stats, so from that point of view, we are much better off: we get the stats we want without having to use a transmutation crystal to have the skin we want.

I strongly recommend creating a support ticket. The forums are good for reporting a general issue or for receiving generalized advice, but when you want timely assistance, the support team can help you troubleshoot what’s going on with your PC/game.

Given the season, they might take a bit longer to reply with specifics right now, but they have been very successful helping people resolve issues with the TP and/or the awesomium client.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I checked my spam/junk folder and nothing.

Which email provider are you using? Is it one of the ones that was blocking all mail from ANet?

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

request #190643
Still no answer made it on 24th December so i can understand a bit. Would just like help with my issue

I see that you added a post to the “review old tickets” post I mentioned above. That will help expedite it.

However, note that your ticket isn’t quite 3 full business days old. You made the ticket on the 24th, the 25th was a national holiday, the 26th/27th are nominally regular business days, so that puts your ticket at about 2.5 business days old. Plus, for a variety of reasons, US companies sometimes run shorter hours on the 24th and the 26th (and, since Christmas fell on a Wednesday, the 27th too). I don’t know how much that will (or should) affect the Customer Support team, but it’s something to keep in mind.

As others have suggested, this achievement is easiest to get at level 80, since your experience gained scales with your level. For example, two Tomes of Knowledge should earn an L80 toon just over 500,000 xp (but only about 63,000 xp for an L40 toon). Similarly, working on map completion in a lower level zone should grant you the title after 30-40 minutes, while reducing your risk of death.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

i am STILL having this problem …

I’m sorry to hear that. Add a post to the thread designed to expedite reviews of tickets 72 hours and older — you just need to include your ticket #, date originally submitted, and a brief note about the issue, e.g. “trading post not appearing.”

When Gaile is back at work on Monday, she’ll review all such stale tickets and make sure that your ticket is updated. She’ll also post a brief follow-up in the thread.

While you are waiting, double-check that emails from ANet are getting through your spam filters. Apparently, some email providers are overly aggressive and blocking ANet and some local filters might need to be adjusted. See this original post on the topic and then skip to the follow-up.

ANet’s nomenclature is very confusing. There are two types of slots and several types of AR upgrades:

Slots

1. Ordinary infusion slot, found on any ascended item (trinkets have one, but weapons and armor have two each). They can hold these type of infusions
   • defensive (basic or fine; however the wvw infusions have no AR)
   • offensive infusions (basic or fine; however the wvw infusions have no AR)
   • utility infusions (none of which have AR)
   • omni infusions
2. Agony Infusion slots, found only on infused ascended gear:
   • Any ascended ring can be infused, but some ascended back items cannot be infused.
   • These slots only hold Agony Infusions.
   • These slots are in addition to the ordinary infusion slot above.

(edit: removed quote, per implied request — apparently, the poster left out their intended context)

If you want ANet staff to take a look at this, I recommend you file a support ticket (click on Support on this page’s top left and then on Submit a request on the new page’s top-right).

The forums are good for reporting an issue affecting the game; support is the best choice when something affects your individual account (regardless of whether it also affects others).

Good luck.

The game already offers 400 gems every 5,000 Achievement Points, i.e. 1 gem every 12.5 points. Your suggestion would mean increasing that to 1 gem every 5 (daily) points and 1 gem every 4 (monthly) points.

I prefer the current system for three reasons:

• It rewards those who play the most.
• You get enough gems at once to actually buy something.
• People are also rewarded for gaining other achievements, not just dailies or monthlies (that already offer decent rewards imo).

I’m not opposed to some of the 400 gems being doled out via monthlies.

I’m sorry you didn’t have any luck getting the insignias.

AFAIK, there is no guaranteed method to salvage insignias/inscriptions from relevant items. The BL Sal Kit only guarantees you the chance to get the upgrades, i.e. sigils or runes; it does not guarantee that you’ll get ectos, ori (instead of mithril), dark matter, luck, or said insignia/inscriptions.

At the moment, there isn’t even enough published evidence to suggest whether BLSKs offer a greater chance of getting the scripts/insigs than mystic/master’s or less kits.

For what it’s worth, I use mystic kits, since they are relatively cheap if you because I have a bunch of mystic stones from the achievement chests. I very rarely see insignias or inscriptions drop.

There are indeed two versions of the recipe now. Those that dropped since the patch can be sold without work-around. However, those that dropped before are still bound.

Supposedly, a work-around is to move the recipe to your bank and then move it to a character other than the one that opened it. This didn’t work for mine (so I just had my tailor learn the recipe), but many other people have reported success with this method.

Another possibility is to acquire a second one, confirm that it can be sold on the TP and then stack the non-sellable one with the new one. I wasn’t able to test this myself, but has worked in the past for other items that were re-tagged from do not sell to ok to sell. (I forgot about this second work-around until the day after I used mine.)

I’m sorry you’re having trouble getting the trading post to work reliably for you. If you want help troubleshooting, I recommend you contact support and create a ticket (see the “support” link on the top left of this page).

The bug forum is a good place to let staff know about a general problem; creating a ticket is the only way to get ANet’s help for an issue affecting you personally.

It’s working as intended. AFKers will prevent someone else from getting in the game. Since none last very long, the activity timer has to be shorter than the WvW or the PvE timers.

However, I would support a suggestion to make the duration of the timer dependent on how many people are signing up to play or to increase the duration after the player has completed the competitive portion (e.g. has opened chest in Sanctum Sprint, Free Play during Choir Bells, etc.)

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

So i get infractions and messages deleted but NO help what so ever with my problem…Really!?

You guys sure have your priorities right…

(and so this post cant be deleted and me infracted)

1. The forums are for reporting game bugs. For help with an individual issue, you really do need to contact support.
2. Moderation of the forums (i.e. infractions and deleted messages) have nothing to do with either bug fixes or troubleshooting. Different groups of employees who have different priorities.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

I seem to have found something out – It is like the Trading Post is or wants to disconnect, i dc-ed earlier and was able to use the Trading Post again but for like 2 or 3 minutes before it all decided to die again

Anyone else have this?

Two other things I’ve seen in the forums that might apply:

• If you are using the Macintosh (beta) client, there are some other work-arounds you can try — check the mac support forum for the details.
• If you use the -nopatchui option to launch the game, it’s apparently interfering with the trading post. See the wiki’s talk page for command line arguments, which has a work-around for that.

Good luck

Celestial recipes cannot be discovered. You can purchase them on the TP (there is no other source currently).

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/bugs/Fractals-50-no-Daily-Chest

Devs responded a few days ago acknowledging the issue.

Ah. How very confusing.

So at least one of the descriptions is completely wrong and possibly the buff itself isn’t working as intended. We’ll have to wait for ANet to respond.

Good detective work by the OP.

For those following along at home, the unopened booster says:

Booster:

Double-click to gain a buff that grants a 100% boost to magic find, karma gain, WvW rank gain, PvP glory gain, experience from kills, and gold from kills.

(emphasis is mine)

Whereas the buff from the bonus says:

Buff:

100% boost to magic find, WvW rank gain, PvP glory gain, experience from kills, and gold from kills.

For the OP: if ANet isn’t able to respond to this post, I hope you will take the time to file a ticket with support (and perhaps ask them to replace your birthday boosters, since they didn’t work as you expected them to).

At worst, I’m sure they’ll update the descriptions of one or both. With some luck, ANet might decide to offer some more boosters to folks as a way to compensate for the confusion.

Can you take a few screenshots:

1. Receiving daily credit for today’s wintersday bonus (building five snowmen).
2. Two screens for the Wintersday meta achievement (A Very Merry Wintersday): one showing your overall progress (x/20) and a second showing how you earned the points (available when you click on the A Very Merry Wintersday achievement).

The first screenshot is to ensure the game thinks you completed today’s daily. The second is to ensure that your meta is progressing at all. And the third will actually say for which achievements (including dailies) you have gotten credit towards the meta.

Ah, I think I see the issue. The birthday booster doesn’t affect karma. According to the wiki’s birthday bonus article:

wiki:

100% boost to magic find, WvW rank gain, PvP glory gain, experience from kills, and gold from kills.

As your first screen shot shows, karma isn’t mentioned as one of the bonuses. :-/

Your last screen shot shows you are getting your account-wide bonus. The event, mata al trol de cueva campeon enfurecido is worth 205 karma normally, but you received 211 karma, i.e. 3% more, which is the amount of your account-wide karma bonus.

I hope you at least got some good or valuable loot with your magic find bonus.

Storage upgrades aren’t about economic efficiency, they are about convenience. I want to play the game; I don’t want to spend a significant amount of time managing my inventory — this upgrade was a major advantage in this regard.

I was able to free up 3 tabs of bank storage, move stuff from personal guild vault, from storage toons, and I still have plenty of room for all the exotics I crafted on the way to leveling my crafting.

Spending 800 gems on any account-wide upgrade is never going to as economically efficient as buying a new character slot. But it’s been amazingly efficient at reducing the time I spend managing inventory.

Re: gold→gem ratios.
Keep in mind that the expander went on sale at the same time the mini Mr Sparkles was being offered as a bonus for those who spent US$50 on gems in the month of December — I think that had a bigger impact on the ratio than nearly any other offer since head start. (I know people who view the deal as "buy Mr Sparkles for US$50 and get 4,000 gems for free.)

If I recall correctly, character slots have been on sale three times since launch, twice at half-off (400 gems) and once at 25% off (600 gems).

My impression is that the slots went on sale when the gold→gem conversion ratio started to dip, but that could have been coincidental (there are plenty of other troughs in the game’s history and many of them were not followed by special gem shop offers of any sort).

My guess is that toon-slots will go on sale once maybe twice in 2014 and probably at 600 gems.

I don’t see this as a problem. These are rewards offered to everyone who met the requirements for the game at the time the deal was offered.

Like all products, those who bought GW2 when it first came out got to be first to play the game — we paid for the privilege. After the initial burst of popularity, ANet (like all product manufacturers since the industrial age) started offering the game with incentives: a discount, bonus items, or some popular things otherwise available in the game only after playing for a while.

I support the OP’s suggestion.

There are two things called “auto attack” in the game:

1. The skill (usually ¹ or otherwise chosen by the player) that is the default attack. This can be stopped by using “stow weapon” or “escape”
2. The option called “auto-attack” which is extremely useful in mob fights, but terrible at other times. I would like to bind a hotkey to turn this feature on/off.

Here are some examples when auto-attacking requires something better than “stow weapon” or “escape:”

• When an elementalist uses air-staff-4, she will begin attacking foes using her auto-attack skill — even though this skill is primarily used as an out-of-combat speed boost, it will put the ele in-combat, after which it is too late.
• When a mesmer is attacked and uses veil to hide, he can find himself auto-attacking the nearest foe and break stealth. Again, it does no good to stow the weapon at this point.
• A guardian using greatsword-3 to reposition herself will instead leap to the nearest foe.

Naturally, some people hate the auto-attack option for other reasons and never want to use it. But for those of us who enjoy its positive aspects, being able to bind a toggle key for it would prevent 90% of its current issues.