Guild Wars 2

You don’t need to create a support account. Just email support using the link at the top of the forums. (Use the option of “Ask a Question.”) That will create a ticket and you can send Gaile the ticket number, so she can read the details.

The last battle is definitely odd in many ways:

• As noted above, it’s the only one that cannot be done solo.
• It’s the only one that cannot be started without the rest of your server completing certain world events.
• It’s the only one in which someone sacrifices themselves…and doesn’t end up dying. (Maybe I’m just miffed because I am unimpressed with the writing and voice acting for that particular NPC.)
• It’s the only that takes place using the dungeon mechanics (complete with the required five-player party).
• It plays unusually for a dungeon in story mode.
• It introduces a number of special mechanics & dungeon-like obstacles that the player might not have experienced before this mission.
• It’s by far the most time consuming and there’s no way to stop in the middle and come back later.

In short, as Runiir says, it’s jarring.

I’m not sure exactly what can be done to address this without completely overhauling this one mission, but the simplest things might be:

• Split it into 3-4 parts, allowing people to stop and come back.
• Put the green starburst/staring point far away from the dungeon’s normal entrance, so it’s always accessible.
• Separate Arah storymode from the last personal story. Allow people to get credit for Arah explorable by completing either the dungeon story or the personal story.

I like the idea. I see this being an improved version of the roadside marker (essentially useless — there are other ways of boosting everyone’s speed).

Delta has already suggested several limits to prevent abuse: high influence cost, short duration. Let’s add to that: only works in PvE and converts an existing WP into a free one (can’t create the WP anywhere).

The main idea of the OP is to have a discount system similar to the “Black Friday” sale after the US Thanksgiving holiday. “12 days of Wintersday” seems like a good excuse. I’m sure that ANet will have their own ideas about what to reduce (and by how much).

If people want to log out of the game to avoid death, I say let them.

• The majority of people don’t do this, so it’s still easy enough to kill foes in WvW.
• The people who do this still have to log back in and re-queue for WvW. They still are giving up on whatever battle they were in.

Even so, there are situations in which an otherwise honorable person might logout just before dying, e.g. when they really should have quit 20 minutes earlier, but are thinking they will finish one more siege. Then, they get caught by a zerg. Instead of waiting to die and then quitting, it seems reasonable to me that they just exit the game.

But even if there aren’t good reasons for [F12] before death, I don’t really see this as such a huge problem that ANet needs to take action against it. Yeah, it’s happened to me and I’m sad about the loss of potential badges and other loot, but other than that, it doesn’t affect my enjoyment of the game.

The only times I get caught by a zerg are when I’m not paying attention. Every class has some sort of escape mechanisms, only some of which include moving faster: stealth, clones, snares, other buffs, etc.

The OP raises a non-issue: players getting confused with bots. It just doesn’t happen. Sure, someone can accidentally report a real player who happens to be near some bots, but ANet isn’t going to ban them based on just your word (or even that of 10-20 people). They look at the overall picture: same area? same route? often afk in the exact same place? often afk in bot-heavy locations?

Even if this were an issue, there are existing alternatives:

• You can easily AFK by using [F12], especially if you know that you won’t be playing for more than 5-10 minutes.
• If you’re worried about loading times, you can easily move your toon to a safe area (and since it’s safe, there’s little risk of anyone reporting you).

Finally, if I see a naked toon standing near an event-rich area, I’m going to report them regardless of whether they have a special symbol above their head. I’m not able to sort out who is a bot and who isn’t — ANet has paid staff to do that and I’d rather spend my time playing the game.

I doubt ANet would see this as beneficial to the overall economy:

• It rewards people for not playing.
• It creates a new source of income, without a corresponding risk or gold sink.
• Unless it’s made into a complex system, it will reward wealthier players more than poor players. If it’s made into a complex system, then there are all sorts of other financial arrangements that could be added into the game that are probably more fun and better fit the game’s design philosophies.

In addition, there is already a pretty good hedge against inflation for individual players: convert coin to gems. It’s inevitable that the coin:gem ratio will rise over time, since players gain wealth much faster than the existing gold sinks reduce wealth.

Finally, the game already rewards players who manage their money well: they get to buy more stuff, invest more in the trading post, and afford the tools that help them play more efficiently.

Create an equipment slot for a single mini that automatically spawns that mini whenever you zone. Right-click the mini in the slot to de-equip it or replace it with another mini in inventory (just like any other equipment item).

Benefits:
Updates a relatively unused item that takes up inventory space into a more desirable cosmetic benefit.

• Prevents minis from “disappearing” when depositing collectibles.
• Makes it easier for people to display their minis more often; requires less micromanagement.

No, I think it’s a bad idea to show people’s damage — it only measures one fourth of what is important, which will cause people to overemphasize that single factor.

The designers called for a trinity of Damage, Support, and Control. If the game offers a way to measure only one of those, but not the other two, then people will tend to over-emphasize the importance of one part of the trinity. The fourth element is player skill and adaptability and I can’t imagine any meter doing justice to capturing the importance of that.

Jumping puzzles aren’t impossible, but they are more difficult to time now. The skip-jump (where you jump to a spot and then immediately jump again) seems unreliable. But now that I’m aware of the issue, I’ve managed Troll’s End in LA just fine (true, not the hardest puzzle, but it does have 2-3 tricky jumps).

Still, at the very best this makes jumping puzzles more difficult than before.

You need to file a ticket directly with support. The in-game tool can be used to file a bug report, but no one will get back to you.

Only create a single ticket for the issue: the more you create, the more time someone spends reading your tickets and the less time they spend addressing the issue or responding to you.

If you don’t receive an answer (to your support ticket) for 3 business days, post to the sticky thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-and-older-merged.

Good luck.

There are several bottlenecks for how long it takes your computer to tell ANet’s servers what you are doing:

1. In your house, between router and your computer.
2. Your ISP and the service you buy from them.
3. How close is your home to the internet backbone.
4. The physical distance between you and ANet’s data servers.
5. The first three things on ANet’s side. (Nothing you can do to change this, however.)

Only (4) is affected by the server you choose:

• US servers are based out of Dallas, TX: 8836 Miles to Mumbai
• EU servers out of Germany (near Munich iirc): 3949 Miles. (much better for India)

There’s not much you can do about (3), except to move (or change ISPs). For (2), you can purchase a different service from the same provide. You can do stuff to reduce (1), but for most people, it’s much less important than the rest.

Algorithms? the gem:coin ratio is determined by supply & demand. The supply has been increasing slowly, but the demand has been rising in leaps and bounds for these reasons:

• Players have more coin to spend (especially those that got exotics and named exotics during the karka event — watch that happen again when ANet gets the reward chest to those who got DC’d)
• There are things on the TP that people want: make over kits, keys, boosters, storage, the Black Friday deals, …
• There have been three events coming close together with associated gem shop items: Halloween, Karka invasion, and (upcoming) Wintersday.

It would be very surprising if the coin:gem ratio hadn’t spiked enormously.

For plants, there are node farms

Remember to craft on Thursday nights or Friday mornings — you get the maximum Power of the Mists (doesn’t level you faster, but reduces the amount of materials you need by a small amount).

Trading post is an exceptional good source for silver. Can purchase it for 6c easily, so you can farm e.g. copper ore and sell for 11c. Even after fees, that’s a faster way to farm silver ore.

If it’s happening often, you likely need to adjust some things on your computer:

• Make sure you have administrative rights: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-User-Account-Control-UAC
• Make sure your anti-malware software permits GW2 to run the trading post program (awesomonium_process.exe): https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-AVG
• Similarly, ensure your hardware/software firewalls aren’t blocking this same software.

Sometimes, just restarting your router will resolve a lot of the issues.

If none of the above gets you started, contact customer support; they will be able to focus on the various other steps you might need to take.

We can also track some of this via http://gw2spidy.com:

• For unID dyes and ectos (among others), the number of buy orders has stayed relatively stable since mid-October.
• The number of sell orders (for those same items) has dropped.

That means (sometimes drastically) higher prices.

It doesn’t tell us why the supply dropped: only ANet has enough data to tell us if it’s the removal of bots, a drop-rate reduction (i.e. fewer going into backpacks), people farming different things (with lower drop rates for these items), people hoarding in anticipation of need (i.e. saving dyes for Gift of Color), or something else.

How often is this an issue and for how many people? If you have the same person sending multiple invitations, that’s spam and should be reported as such. If it’s a variety of invites from the different people in the same guild, join for 2 minutes to find out the leader’s name and ask them to stop blind recruiting.

If it’s a lot of different people from a lot of different guilds, then chalk it down to people being unclear about smart recruitment tactics and cut them some slack. Or, if you want to stop the invites, spend 1s and create your own guild.

There are lots of situations in which a voting system can be abused:

1. Two lieutenants recruit 20 people each to a 25-person guild, hold a vote, and oust the leader (who had delegated recruiting duties).
2. The founder becomes unavailable due to RL and is voted out.
3. A guild is founded by friends. There’s a disagreement about how to handle a disruptive member. Tempers flare, everyone takes sides. One faction has 50%+1 votes and removes everyone who disagrees.

So let’s go back to the issues that this is meant to address:

• GL become inactive.
• GL becomes a kittenish kitten. [sic]

The first one is easy to address without voting: make sure your guild doesn’t depend on any single person to function. Have at least 2-3 people with rights to administer everything in the guild (except for the top rank). (For large guilds, you might want 5-10 executives and more than one layer of leadership.)

The second is impossible to address cleanly with technology because it’s fundamentally a social issue — it is best address by people. Sometimes, there’s nothing to be done: the leader can’t see how their behavior had changed (or the rest of the guild can’t see the brilliance of the leader’s vision). Sometimes there nothing to be done except leave and start over. That sucks, but gaming life, like RL, is sometimes messy.

We were able to advance by splitting into separate teams and going individually. It will probably turn out that two of you can do it together without the third (but it will be faster to go it alone).

It’s one of the easier of the Orrian story quests, so you shouldn’t have too much trouble (aside from not being able to stay together).

I have no problem mailing / sending goods to people on EU servers from US one. One friend & I trade small items and exchange mail regularly without any side effects.

(However, we are annoyed that we cannot actually play together, as we expected from beta testing.)

I don’t think soulbound stuff is linked to the character’s name:

1. They made this mistake in GW1 (and sort of retro-kludged it for name changes).
2. When people are asked to change inappropriate names, they don’t have to do anything special for soulbound items.

I think, however, this is why the item won’t tell us the name of the soul to which the item is bound.

I have no defense for “Veteran Young Karka.” :-/

Ah, but you can be a veteran novice. A novice can mean either new or at the bottom rung of an organization. A veteran usually means someone on the job for a long time.

For example, a life-time corporal in the armed services could be called a veteran novice.

And in this game, “veteran” typically means a stronger version of the vanilla-version of the NPC, so it makes sense in context.

However, that said, it’s a bad design when something relatively unimportant pulls anyone out of the game to have to think about the grammar/vocabulary. I support a name change.

One possibility is that you need to re-achieve the “too many mail items” hint. Delete your discretionary mail (from BLTC and other players) and then have someone send you 11-15 email quickly — when you have about 8-9, start deleting.

I don’t know if that will work for you, but it reportedly worked for 2-3 people I’ve seen post about this.

It is almost certainly not bugged, but it sure is confusing. If you get the “Content Disabled” remark, then the ’pult is being used to fire cows and we cannot use it. There are two ways to tell when the ’pult is available to reach the Vista:

1. The NPC shows the merchant icon over his head; if you don’t see that, wait.
2. The ’pult will be in motion when in-use: you can watch the cows walk up to it, insert themselves in the back, and then get shot towards the harpy nest.

(Sometimes, it can actually be used by us during the harpy event, but more likely, it’s unavailable then and for 3-6 minutes after.)

It’s also important to stand in the correct spot: even when it’s available for use, you can get the “content disabled” message. You’ll know you are in a good spot if

• You can click on the ’pult and/or
• Your action indicator says [Interact] rather than [Talk].

I’ve experimented with this repeatedly and it’s easy to see why so many people are confused about it so often. I’ve been on the map when 3-4 people are claiming it’s out-of-order/broken and never had trouble getting it to work…as long as I’m careful about when and where.

Good luck.

It’s an offensive spell that allows the ele to close on a target and follow up with damage, snares, etc.

I keep this in mind when I use it tactically for running and/or escaping, i.e. I turn off autotargeting and make sure I’m pointed in a safe direction before pressing ⁴.

Wouldn’t it be more intuitive to allow people to equip multiple tools (e.g. one Ori Axe, one Mithril axe) and then have the game auto-select which one to use? (Or at worst, show you which one you are using, so you can manually swap.)

This way, you still don’t have to waste inventory slots, but neither do you have to try to figure out how many “charges” you have remaining.

Yes, for some reason if the game kicks you to character select, the awesomonium_process.exe signs you out from the TP. And the only way to log back in gain (to the TP) is to restart.

Your original post said, “[t]his has gone on for 2 days…” which suggested a systemic problem, rather than a momentary one (easily fixed).

Glad you got it working again.

The Master tools are tiered; this appears to be by design. (However, I find them useless, since there is no way to tell if they are going to yield ruined materials or not until it’s too late.) I agree that the UI should make it easier to prevent this (and not just for the master tools — how many times has someone gotten ruined Ore from an Ori mine or wasted Ori tools on Mithril mines?)

I don’t have an issue with the respawn rates in PvE. Mobs only respawn rapidly in certain areas. Only groups/soloists who aren’t killing things quickly enough are affected and only in those areas.

Although the game does accommodate dozens of playstyles, it isn’t designed to allow people to play just any old way. I think it’s a good thing that parts of PvE are extremely challenging for a single player. It helps me to understand just how effective (or ineffective) I am.

I do support the comment that the method that mobs respawn doesn’t fit the rest of the game (and I hope that Nesetalis creates a new thread about just that idea: that spawns should “come from somewhere” rather than materialize out of nothing).

It’s not a bug. It’s to prevent gold sellers from spamming map chat.

There are a couple of reasons why the TP doesn’t work for some people. The two most likely culprits are:

1. Make sure your anti-malware isn’t blocking the “awesomonium_process.exe” that GW2 uses to connect to the trading post. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-AVG
2. Ensure that you are running GW2 with administrative rights. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-User-Account-Control-UAC.

Some people can just need to restart the computer or router to resolve similar symptoms.

There are a couple of reasons why the TP doesn’t work for some people. The two most likely culprits are:

1. Make sure your anti-malware isn’t blocking the “awesomonium_process.exe” that GW2 uses to connect to the trading post. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-AVG
2. Ensure that you are running GW2 with administrative rights. See: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-User-Account-Control-UAC.

Some people can just need to restart the computer or router to resolve similar symptoms.

The feature is “deposit all collectibles,” and by ANet’s definition, that means minis (since they appear in the Collections tab of the bank).

The principle behind it isn’t silly: before we had that feature (in BETA), people’s bags filled up with materials very quickly. I agree that the impact on miniatures is unfortunate at best.

However, if you put a mini into any invisible bag or safe box, it won’t be deposited (nor will any mats that go there).

ANet doesn’t suspend accounts just because someone reported the name as offensive. They have a group that reviews names and applies (or attempts to apply) a consistent policy about what is allowed and what is not.

Anyone who is suspended can ask ANet to re-evaluate the decision. As one would expect, most of the decisions are upheld on appeal (mostly because the name was “obviously” unsuitable), but some are overturned — perhaps the original team misunderstood the context or was too strict in enforcement.

I’m sorry there are items that haven’t gotten to their destination; that sounds very frustrating.

The first thing to do is to file a ticket with support; the people who read the forums can’t do anything to help, except to forward the general concern to the dev teams.

The second thing is to make sure that support understands that the item was sent and ask them to check on the status. In the past, I’ve read posts where the tech team was able to find out why the mail hadn’t arrived. There’s a difference between the game “ate the mail” and “the mail is stuck in the queue.” I don’t know if there’s a solution to the former, but the latter is more likely and can be fixed.

Finally (and this applies to Bugbear who has gone through step #1 and at least half of step #2) is to escalate your ticket, either by posting in Gaile’s escalation thread or asking the support team to do this. Sometimes the first person or two trying to help a customer doesn’t understand all the nuances and sometimes they aren’t aware of all the tools available to ANet. Either way, it can be helpful to talk to the next person up the support chain.

(Escalation thread: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Tickets-for-Review-3-days-and-older-merged/page/50#post701034)

Good luck.

There are a couple of reasons why you might be seeing a gray button for “buy,” the most likely of which are:

1. You need to run GW2 using admin rights or
2. You have an anti-malware program that is blocking access to the awesomonium_process.exe that connects you to the trading post.
3. Your software or hardware firewall is blocking access.

And you can find information about this at:

• Running as an admin: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-User-Account-Control-UAC/first#post3962
• For AVG, https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/tech/Configuring-AVG)

Random drops behave randomly. I’m getting dyes from the same sources and at roughly the same frequency as I did at launch. I’m sorry you guys are having bad luck, but two (or even 100 people) reporting reduced drops isn’t evidence of a change in the rate.

@blindwaves: you mean if you customize windows to use a 24hr clock, the chat system will also display e.g. 11:59 pm as 23:59?

My guild uses this to help level members who don’t play as often. 5 or 8 people of L70+ might take an L35 into an L50 area to finish the “dailies,” which allows us to hit harder content and help the person reach higher levels sooner than they would otherwise.

I realize the goal is to make it harder for bots to power level other bots, but I’d rather that issue was addressed some other way.

I would pay gems to increase storage in the following ways:

• Increase the current one-stack limit to two stacks, up to as many as five or six stacks.
• Add slots for rare materials (e.g. Destroyer Slivers or ecto).
• Add slots for special event items (e.g. Candy Corn), ideally with room for 3-4 items per month (so that it’s easier to expand this to include future events).
• Add 20 custom slots that would work with “Deposit Collectible.” For example, if I put “Moldy Bag” in one of the slots, then every time I “deposit collectibles,” any moldy bags held by the character would be transferred back to the bank.

I don’t have a price suggestion except to note that it’s always easier if there’s one price for similar things (rather than a confusing assortment of prices).

Zid.4196:

The present ratio reveals that a lot of people grind for gold, while very few buy gems for real money. It’s another sign for Anet’s financial troubles.

It only reveals that more people have more gold that they can spend on gems, which are required to obtain certain types of items in bulk (e.g. philosopher stones, mystic stones) or game upgrades (increased storage, more character slots).

Because every MMO suffers from inflation (because there are tons of ways earning money, and too few sinks), the value of gold constantly drops. As with every other game that offers an in-game currency exchange with their gem equivalents, the ratio will go up over time.

For this reason, plenty of MMO-veterans spent their first gold coins on gems, because they expect this type of increase. (Many of my friends who did this were surprised it took this long to get so high.)

Reduce the cost for waypoints and repairs for low-level characters during the first few weeks after an account is created.

Background
A lot of in-game costs are important to reduce the inflation that is inevitable among all MMOs. It’s also important, for gaming purposes, to provide disincentives to death and to warping around (instead of stopping to smell the Red Iris Flowers).

On the other hand, it’s very frustrating to be a new player and to feel at the mercy of these in-game costs. The amounts are negligible for new characters on existing accounts, but they feel exorbitant if you just started.

Similar mechanics
The game already includes limits (for other reasons) on how much money one can email to an account based on the account’s longevity and playtime. This cost reduction would work the same way: a new account would pay the least on the first day and after a week or three, would pay the same costs as everyone else.

To reduce the likelihood of abuse, this would only apply to low-level characters, perhaps up to L11.

There are different concerns here:

(1) Being able to recover from death: When you die and have no money in inventory, you can use the nearest waypoint. If you have money in the bank, the cost will be deducted.

(2) Being poor and having to pay for WP & repair: Every new player is poor in game terms. Some will be poor for longer than others, depending on how they play the game. During this time, being forced to pay for anything is frustrating, regardless of whether there are good reasons for those costs.

Without more background, it’s hard to tell if the OP was having trouble only with the mechanics (1) or was frustrated with the costs (2).

Vendors already have a “sell junk” option. I’d like to see added to that:

1. Sell all fine equipment.
2. Sell all masterwork equipment.

With additional options:

• Restrict to weapons only or to armor only.
• Restrict to items this character cannot use.
• Restrict items to lower than level 10 | 20 | 30 …

I don’t see that this makes anything easier: by the time I finishing vendor items that aren’t fetching more than vendor +25%, everything that is left needs to be sold based on more data (current WTB/WTS, past data for higher-value items, …).

I just type the name of the item I want to craft. For an insignia, “silk embroider” will restrict the listings. I like the current system better than the original proposal. You can also restrict by crafter rank (e.g. to just adept), by whether you have the mats, and whether you can gain XP.

However, I like the idea of a expand/collapse-all button for the subsections. It would also be nice to have the system remember what each toon is doing, i.e. so the master artificer sees the r400 recipes by default, but the novice artificer sees the novice recipes only.