Guild Wars 2

The point is that spidy doesn’t track transactions; it tracks offers. Yes, you can make certain evaluations of the likely number of buy and sells based on looking at offer volatility, but that’s an extrapolation — it’s not true data. And yes, those theories will be more accurate for high-end sales, but there’s no way to evaluate how close to 100% (or how far) those numbers will be.

Any site purporting to give data on actual sales is making the numbers up, because there is no way to verify that data.

Instead, it would be reasonable to report trends. For example, they could create a new term that measured the changes in the relative changes to the supply:demand ratio — typically, prices are going to drop as that ratio drops or spike as it goes up.

Spidy does this for people who can read their graphs, but doesn’t put it into a single number or icon: you can see if the supply is increasing or if prices are spiking without a change in the supply (often a sign of arbitrageurs buying up product to reset the market).

I think it’s difficult to see any long-term patterns of behavior: the dungeon has only been out a week, so there are obviously going to be differences between the people who do nothing but FotM, frequent-players who do other stuff besides FotM, and casual players (who only play a few hours each week). It’s also a holiday weekend in the US, affecting who is available and when.

With those caveats, I think it would still be worthwhile to make it easier for people to find groups:

• Expand the potential pool by creating a global LFG tool — there are lots of threads for that already.
• Add more incentives for high-rank FotMs to play in lower ranks. (One such incentive already exists: you can get a daily at each major step: 10-19, 20-29, …)
• Reduce the time commitment to complete a cycle (e.g. by allowing people to stop overnight and restart). This would allow casual players who team up to finish one fractal each night, instead of being force to play for longer (yes, some players can finish very quickly, but I don’t think that’s true of most people, especially not most casual players).

Be careful about saying “we the community” — I am happy to speak for myself.

Also, there are several new varieties of back items already in the game and I suspect several more along the way.

That said, I would be happy to see as many varieties of back items in the game as there are types for other items (e.g. 5x cultural, 3x order, …).

I’ve had items not show up immediately on the items I’ve sold list, but they eventually do. Sometimes after a few minutes, sometimes after restarting the game. That makes it more likely that there’s a problem with getting historical information to the client from the TP server, rather than a bug in the TP itself.

Unless one is salvaging 1,000s of items, it’s not possible to observe a nerf to the salvage rates for ecto. Your mileage will vary from other people’s and even from your own, from week to week.

There are a couple of potential issues that can disable the TP for some players. The easiest solutions are (in order):

1. Ensure you are running GW2 with admin privileges.
2. Restart GW2
3. Close GW2, clear your cache, and restart (as noted above, navigate to % temp %, without the spaces, and delete the GW2 folder)
4. Configure your anti-malware software to allow “awesomium_process.exe” to run. (That’s the software that actually connects the game to the TP database.)
5. Restart your router.
6. Make sure your software/hardware firewalls aren’t blocking GW2, specific websites, or the process above.

The second (restarting GW2) resolves TP issues for most people; the first (running GW2 w/admin rights) prevents issues for a substantial number of people. I’ve only spoken to a few people who have to worry about any of the other potential work-arounds.

If none of the above works, contact support. They apparently are really good at tracking down the root cause and getting it resolved.

I don’t see how gw2db could determine the number of sales/purchases of an item. That site grabs its data from gw2spidy, which in turn grabs the same data from the TP that you can see. The thing that spidy adds is that it keeps a record of the data, allowing us to compare yesterday’s prices to today’s.

But none of the data includes the actual purchases. All they can track is how many WTS and WTB offers there are (in spidy terms: amount offered for sale, amount offered to buy). When those numbers change, it could be because of purchases or because people removed WTS offers and vendored/salvaged/donated instead and/or because people removed WTB offers to spend the coin on something else.

Spidy continues to show the same data they’ve always shown (plus additional information for crafting, as appropriate and when gw2db has the necessary recipes).

Tallis.5607:

Maybe when you have 100 items in your pick-up line (but no money), the money won’t appear either?

Correct. If you buy a stack of ore and it comes in one at a time (i.e. 250 transactions) and then you sell something, the money won’t appear when you look at the pick up tab. It also won’t appear after clicking on “take all” the first time…or the second. After you’ve clear the first two pages of deliveries, then anything you’ve earned aftward will finally show up.

ANet reads the forums all the time. They read the suggestions, they read the other forums, too. They cannot be expected to respond to more than a handful of suggestions at all. There are lots of good ideas, some already being coded or otherwise developed. Some are impractical or go against ANet’s design philosophy.

When the devs give interviews, you can see them mentioning ideas that they’ve adapted from feedback posted here, as well as observing /map chat or discussing things in-game.

(And the CC staff you here are moderators: they aren’t empowered to speak on behalf of the development team.)

I agree with the OP’s problem statement: buffs are getting wasted. I also support the proposed resolution: prioritizing which NPCs are affected. (Must like the [F] action key is prioritized to search before rez and so on.)

I don’t think we need to decide all the details of the order here — I want to make sure ANet understands the concept and implements it in some fashion. (The original order is a good start, along with making room for escort NPC.)

It’s also covered on the wiki:
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Mystic_forge#Materials

Maxing chef is not that hard; mastering it (i.e. learning all the recipes) is more complicated because of the huge number of recipes that don’t conform to a specific pattern (like the recipes of other crafts do).

Power of the Mists: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Power_of_the_Mists
the Artisan bonus reduces the amount of materials you need, since, since you get a few more “criticals” while crafting (i.e. it doesn’t reduce the costs for any specific recipe, but it means you use less mats over a 30 or 60 minute session).

I agree with Ridley. Cooking → Artificing → Jewelry.

You can also save money by crafting on Thursday/Friday, when your Power of the Mist’s crafting bonus is at its peak (and remember that you don’t get the bonus while in overflow).

I’ve gotten 3 off L73 rares using basic kit twice out of five attempts. The only way to determine if there’s a drop in the salvage rate is to compare 1,000s of attempts from many players before & after any alleged change.

Unless one is buying 100s of rares of the TP on a consistent basis, there’s no way for a single person to see a change in the rate.

1. Remove some email from your box; this helps a lot of people.
2. If that doesn’t work, create a support ticket.

The staff will be able to investigate just where your transaction got stalled, which might be in email or might be even before that. I’ve seen in other posts that ANet has said that gems/items are never “lost,” only confused about what to do next and nearly always, they can fix whatever it is shortly after working on the ticket.

Good luck to you both.

People usually only use five Pirate runes instead of six for this reason. In some areas and situations, I love the bird. In most, it’s a bad thing.

I love the jumping puzzles. Mostly, I love that they are hard. I cannot do most of them. I try for a bit, sometimes get help/advice, and then move. I’ll come back later and sometimes make it through…and sometimes not. Often, I have trouble with what some people believe is an easy jump, but requires better aim or quicker reflexes than I have…and other times, I’ll manage a really difficult step without worrying about it too hard.

I’ve learned a lot about how the game works by trying the puzzles and that’s been part of the fun. Like combat, the game rewards people who rethink their approach (and the game is hard on us if we don’t). I think that’s a good thing.

I absolutely love the clocktower puzzle even though I doubt I would ever be able to finish, even if there was a guaranteed 1,000 gold at the top…only for me. But I admire the design, the challenge, and I enjoy watching people’s videos of their attempts.

In short, I think the game ought to have more JPs, more challenges that not all of us can manage…and I fully expect to be one of those who never finishes most of them.

Idolicious.6091:

I don’t understand why the options for “Personality” are even there, in it’s current form, if it does absolutely nothing as it is.

It changes dialogue options. I’ve seen this from doing similar quests on different toons with different personalities. It’s nothing earth-shattering…unless you are role-playing or immersion player…in which case, I imagine it’s fantastic.

The mailbox limit is less than 10, despite the description. (They “temporarily” reduced it to limit strain on the server that runs email, but that was many weeks ago.)

I’m sorry you are unable to find the coin you expected.

The best way to go is to create a support ticket. ANet staff can take a look at the transactions the game recorded…and be able to see if something is queued up for you, but never made it to your pick-up box.

Until they can take a look, all any of us can do is speculate about things that can go wrong. And you have to admit that user error or misunderstanding is one of the most common reasons for people reporting issues…even if they don’t apply to you or to this particular situation.

What if ANet updated the drop-down list to:

• Selling Gold
• Botting or hacking
• Scamming or Cheating
• Inappropriate Behavior
• Objectionable Character Name

Inappropriate Behavior covers anything that is believed to be damaging to the community and openness of chat, and would include spamming, over-the-top cussing, name calling, and harassment.

Regardless of who or how we report, ANet investigates the circumstances and decides whether action is appropriate or not. If you want to add more details to the complaint (as in the case described above), you can open a ticket with support, instead of relying on the in-game system.

I, too, am sorry that this happened to anyone. I think the circumstances described fall into a form of “verbal abuse,” and, even if it didn’t, I’m sure ANet staff would figure out the issue. (And if they can’t, then changes to the drop down list aren’t going to change things.)

Let’s not exaggerate what happened. To get the event chest, you had to get credit for the final event. You couldn’t just logon for five minutes. The chest included:

• 2 rares (at character level)
• 2 exotics (at character level) — tiny chance of named item, smaller chance for precursor
• an account-bound 20-slot bag (would cost ~11g to buy your own)
• an account-bound trinket, L80 (might cost ~2g to get your own)

So:

1. People who couldn’t play: 0
2. People who lagged out: 0
3. People who logged on for five minutes: 0
4. Vast majority of participants: 2-10g in marketable goods + 13g in account-bound items
5. Tiny number of participants: 100g+ in marketable items + 13g in account-bound items

One could argue that ANet created an unfair situation for the first three groups or one could take the point of view that ANet helped convert less than 1% of the 99% into one-percenters themselves.

(I didn’t happen to be one of those people.)

When near a harvesting node, the display should indicate the type of tool equipped. For example,

• [F] Mine (Orichalcum Pick)
• [F] Gather (Mithril Sickle)
• [F] Cut (no axe equipped)

Ideally, the display could also show

• The number of uses remaining.
• Whether the equipped tool is sufficient (e.g display in red if it would result in ruined ore, fiber, or logs).

Currently, the only way to determine if you have the proper tool equipped is to open up the [h]ero panel; the only way to know that you have used up the tool is when you are unable to harvest.

Nice post by Ryuujin. I agree completely with the background and the summary of the issue.

Also props to the OP for bringing up the issue and for reminding everyone that one of the changes did fix a skill that was working improperly, i.e. not all the changes were bad.

I agree with the original OP. Here’s how members of my guild would make use of more slots:

1. Primary guild, socializing and daily activities
2. Roleplaying guild
3. WvW guild
4. Dungeon/fractal guild
5. Personal storage
6. The guild for a group that only plays 2-3x/month (but doesn’t belong to my guild).
7. Our European friends with whom we cannot play (since there is no guesting and party-joins don’t work across the Atlantic).

I understand that not everyone wants to join multiple guilds, but there are plenty of us who would be interested in joining more.

I would like the opportunity to carry my own towel, the better to not panic while adventuring (and to help clean-up those nasty bloodstains on my armor).

Some cheap previously-owned versions for low amounts of karma/tokens and high quality, dense, plush versions for exotics.

There are lots of ways to make money on the TP, but they don’t involve selling low-demand/high-supply items. Maybe the OP is right and people who are selling for vendor +1c should just STOP, but it’s not going to make that much of a difference to the economy if they do.

Let’s say ANet intervened and set a floor price of vendor + 20%, so the lowest price anyone could ask for would earn back the 15% in fees and add a tiny profit. Would this change the economy? Would people be able to make a lot of money? No and no.

First, this doesn’t do anything to the demand for these items. Second, it does little for the supply: everyone selling for vendor + 1c up to vendor +20% would end up selling at that floor price. How about the people selling to the vendor now? Since the supply of vendor +20% items would be high, they have their choice of selling to the vendor for cash now or posting on the TP for a tiny bit more later; they aren’t likely to change their behavior.

And finally, anyone who is new to the game and pinching coppers is going to be (slightly) hurt: they will have to pay 19-20% more for low level weapons than they do now.

It’s not obvious from the wiki article (although it’s implied): the number of mats you get from the promotion recipe decreases with each step. So T1-T2 has the best yield and T5-T6 has the worst.

I played around with the recipes with very favorable price ratios (e.g. the lower tier item was very cheap and the next tier equivalent was very expensive). And, after all of that, the next time I want to promote a mat, I’m going to sell my stack of the Tier X item on the TP and use the cash to buy the Tier X+1 — that’s just less work for me.

If the price ratios are excellent, you can make some money (or save some, if you are crafting), but it’s a lot of trouble for a relatively small profit margin. Why? well, smart traders know these recipes too, so if the mat prices are out of equilibrium with each other, a lot of people will swoop in to claim the profits, increasing the supply of the T+1 (and depressing prices) and reducing the supply of the T-mat (thus increasing prices), resulting in the new equilibrium.

Unfortunately, ANet cannot answer all the reasonable questions that people ask.

So, I am just going by research notes like the ones you post. I think there’s enough evidence for me that I’m not bothering to invest in the more expensive salvage kits. Yes, they do drop more of something, but

• The amount is so small that it doesn’t make up for the cost (or the extra inventory slot).
• It doesn’t appear to change the amount of side items, like ecto.
• If I want to salvage an upgrade, I’ll use a BL Kit (since I get enough of those from dailies).

For some super nerdy stats, see: http://inquisitive-myths.blogspot.com/

the vendors nearest the crafting stations sell recipes — chest the last tab (before “sell”). Outside of the cities, there are 1-2 locations where these master-crafters do not sell recipes, but in town, they all do.

Right, there are a few exceptions to the rule of thumb, notably recipes.

Banning bots has caused prices to spike 50-200%, across wide sectors of the economy? That seems implausible. As I look at data from GW2spidy.com, the supply of items hasn’t dropped by much, but the demand is rising. This is something that I would expect as the game matures: more people playing longer have more money and are willing to spend more to buy things that they want.

Things bought with karma and skill points are soulbound.

I like the idea of making the dye window more customizable. I can think of all sorts of things I’d like to see, including some of your ideas above.

Regarding feedback loops: ANet cannot possible respond to every post for a variety of reasons. However, individual developers post from time to time and mention (in blogs or interviews) that they (and their colleagues) read forums and take suggestions very seriously. You can even see how some ideas are posted here make their way into updates (usually, the lead time is long, but not always).

My loading screens last anywhere from 15-30 seconds at the best of times (at the worst, up to a minute), even when moving between waypoints in relatively quiet zones (e.g. Hoelbrak). Has anyone found a reliable way to speed this up? Or, alternatively, is there a way to slow it down so that I can wait once when entering a map and use the WPs without seeing the loading screen again?

I’ve reinstalled the .DAT file, there’s plenty of unused RAM, plenty of unused processing power. Thanks for your suggestions.

I can see all three items mentioned by the OP in an r0 chef: bananas, starch, and yes, Blueberry Pie Filling. So, I’m not sure why it’s not showing up for you.

The three things I mentioned above are reasons that have caused people, including myself, to think that something was missing from the discovery pane. I posted them, because that information has been useful to many people in leveling their chef rank. I am sorry that it is not useful to you.

This game is a lot more fun when playing in a group. A guild is a good way to be sure you can usually play in a group, but there are other ways to do that.

But there are other ways to level, for example:

1. Craft
2. Map completion (partial or full)
3. Go searching for Vistas (and find fun stuff to do along the way).
4. Follow cascading-event chains (where one quest leads to another and another).

I find it best to try to get 10+ levels ahead of my personal story, so that it’s unlikely I’ll have to pause in the middle of an interesting plot development.

1. You can only make one transfer every seven days. So if you change to Yak’s Bend today, you’ll have to wait a week before you can change to JQ (or any other world).
2. JQ is a US-based server, so the worst time is during US peak hours, which are typically about 3 pm – 11 pm PST weekdays. (Yes, there are non-US people and plenty of people who play outside of peak hours.) The best time is probably after midnight Pacific Time.

You get four things out of crafting:

1. Experience
2. A usable item
3. The ability to control your own supply/demand, without regard to the market.
4. Something that can be sold on TP or vendored.

But even if you discount the importance of the three things that aren’t the vendor/tp price, the main reason vendor prices are so low (relative to the opportunity costs of the inputs) is that it reduces inflation. If crafting always increased the value of the output goods, even by a small amount, the supply of gold in the game would increase even faster than it already does. And in the end, that’s bad for everyone (more so for new players, but also long-term players who don’t aim for maximum economic efficiency).

Same as selling anything on the TP: there’s an associated fee. In this case, you pay in both directions: selling gems or selling gold for gems.

I suspect it’s working as intended; you won’t see all the mats all the time.

• Some mats only show in discovery after reaching a certain rank.
• Mats stop showing in discovery when you’ve learned all the relevant recipes.
• They don’t always show in the expected order.

Can you describe your character’s current chef rank and which items aren’t appearing? I probably have a toon I can compare.

A lot of people are publishing test results for salvaging ecto, using various different types of kits. There are tens of thousands of results (sometimes 1,000s from a single individual). So far, it seems that the type of kit doesn’t impact the chance of ecto, while the level of the item does.

There’s no evidence of DR or changes to the drop rates over time.

There’s enough data out there to convince me that I can use basic or mystic kits for ecto and reserve the BL kits for saving runes. I’m also not going to worry about getting 0 ecto from 20 salvages; that would be very unlucky, but with this many players in the game, many of us will see somewhat aberrant results. I’m not happy when it’s me, but that’s how RNG works.

According to the wiki, the experience gains from crafting depend on your level (like everything else in the game). Therefore, each toon that raises their rank from r0 to r400 will gain 10 levels, no matter what level you start with. Buffs (from Power of the Mists or the Crafting Booster) will affect how many resources you use; they won’t affect the experience gained.

I believe that test results show that both will work. (The main vs off-hand never matters.) The 20% chance to heal has a cooldown, but the might/kill doesn’t, so they shouldn’t interfere with each other.

However, if you had a 20% chance of heal paired with a 20% chance of lightning strike, you would see interference: after a heal or lightning, both effects have to wait out the relevant cooldown before they have a chance to trigger. That’s not much of an issue if both have the same cooldown, but will prove annoying if one has a minimum 9s delay and the other is 30s.

I agree with Robin — we already have similar functionality now. if someone links a POI/WP that you don’t have, the map scrolls to the appropriate location. You can’t see anything, but you can drop your personal starburst there.

However, either way — location names are more meaningful if they are easier to find. The current situation is like having someone’s phone number without owning a phone.

I’d like to see a search field on the world map that allows me to type in the name of a landmark and have the map center on it. Ideally, we could filter on POIs, WPs, or areas. Even more ideally, type in the name of an NPC to find them on the map.

Thanks for considering the idea.

There are several types of sigils; some of the effects stack and some do not. If you have dual weapons:

1. Effects on kill do not stack. You have +luck/kill and a +/might/kill sigil in your set, whatever triggers on your first kill will continue to stack. You can swap to your other set and stack another buff.
2. Effects on swap: only one of these triggers and there is always a cool down (whether it is stated or not).
3. Always on effects stack.
4. It doesn’t matter which weapon the sigil is on.

And so on. (See also the wiki: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Sigil#Notes.)

So the game is internally consistent, although it perhaps doesn’t meet everyone’s expectations.

Thanks for cross-posting. (Not everyone remembers to read the forums, twitter, facebook, the wiki, the official site, and reddit to see if there’s any new info.)

It’s inconvenient to have to switch toons to craft, but I find that easier than revisiting the NPCs and paying 40s each time I want to switch. I’m also finding it handy to max new toons in a craft, because I dislike the L1-15 “training” period — once they are L15, you can learn new weapon skills with basically 1 kill.

I’d pay gems to add a rare material items storage tab (for the charges/crystals/slivers). I would also pay gems to have be able to store more than one stack of the current items.

I would not pay gems for a place to store meatballs and pasta before I can make spaghetti & meatballs.