Guild Wars 2

earendil.1290:

It is not fun.

You had massive transfers from powerful WvW guilds to low level servers. Still can’t figure the reason. That leads to:

a) – overpowered servers in low tiers, that are slowly going up – see SoS and Kaineng. Anyone with such a server in their tier knows what we are talking about.

b) – dead servers with lots of points, that take weeks/months to get on a tier where they can actually compete (see HoD and SBI). Meanwhile, any tier this server is is extremely annoyed since it’s a poor 1 vs 1 on.

So – a lot of tiers are not balanced in any way – therefore not fun. Fortunately this will not occur after the paid transfers – but it will take at least a month or two before it stabilizes. Could have been done better and earlier IMO.

Oh, and probably next week SBI will be fighting Kaineng – this will be so fun for everyone.

Well said. Lets accelerate the process of getting servers in the right rankings so people can have fun again.

ANet I know you are super busy what with 28th coming up but could you say something/anything about this proposal pls?

Facet.5914:

Pain.3756:

Anet: I know this is hard to hear… many talented developers have spent 4-5 years designing a game to be “fun”. In many ways GW2 is a AAA game and did some innovative things that MMORPGs for years to come will imitate.

Unfortunately this does not translate into a WvW environment that is fun for every server/match.

Current Tier 4 scores:

Kaineng: 50,856
Yak’s Bend: 15,131
Crystal Desert: 9,138

After 19 hours, Kaineng has proven they are superior to the other severs in this teir (congrats to them). We have to wait 149 hours (6 days) to attempt to be competitive once again.

Last week Tier 4 final score:

Maguuma: 497,675
Yak’s Bend: 83,648
Isle of Janthir: 33,157

I don’t have scores after 19 hours from the previous week but I know it was roughly the same deal. After 19 hours Maguuma had proven they were superior to the other severs in that match (again, congrats to them).

We had to wait for 6 days (149 hours) for our next chance to be competitive.

I urge Anet to get into emergency mode or at the very least, talk openly and often about this problem. Your player base will not wait around long.. anyone remember Warhammer online?

If I set the technical direction for WvW, which I obviously do not I would limit the WvW matchups to 24-48 hour periods until we can find a time to create an environment that offers a competitive matchup for the duration of the event.

-g

The only reason that Maguuma or Kaineng are in those tiers in the first place is because free transfers allowed a top-9 population to inhabit the body of a low tier server. As they climb up you get matches like this until they reach a tier that matches them. Once free transfers are over an equilibrium will be established where everyone will fight opponents of similar coverage, so you will very rarely if ever see scores like this.

A lot of the people transferring under the logic of “well if this is how its going to be from now on…” don’t seem to understand this.

Disagree we get it. We just do not want to wait a few weeks for it to happen.. A few days of 24 matches would more swiftly bring competitive matches for everyone and then we go back to 1 week matches perhaps in time for Friday reset.

Drasleona.5049:

to the hurting servers waiting for a competitive match. i have an accurate target to send your hate to. IN BIG LETTERS so u dont miss it THEY ARE THE GUILDS WHO LEFT YOU AND JOINED KAINENG along with other lower tier servers. those people deserted you and are now ruining your gametime in wvw, please send the hate to them! i know a few guilds that deserted isle of janthir to go kaineng, find them and hunt them down! kill them, harrass them and get your revenge

Its not hate. We get not all servers are equal and that’s why we have a ranking system. However due to recent announcement the system is even more borked than usual and in my opinion the best option to avoid white wash matches is to accelerate to a 24 hour match system for a few days as it will self correct things in short order.

Kaineg get better matches and so does CD and YB and any other triumverate of servers in a similar position

JPSnow.8296:

24 hour matches arn’t really fair compaired to week long matches. Some servers would do really well on weekends then get smashed during the week.

It would only need be for a week until things settle. No system is perfect but making people wait 1,2,3 weeks when they simply cannot play due to such imbalance is in my opinion the worse evil

Guesting and removing free Server trfs is great however it has caused a significant shift in WvW server strengths that invalidates current ranking.

Therefore to speed up the correcting of the rankings from 2-4 weeks to a week I fully support a change to 24/48 hour matches.

Please ANet we really your decisive support on this one else matches will be terribly boring and consequently people will stayaway from WvW/GW2 until things are fixed.

The point is rewards for WvW suck compared to PvE

% of classes that on average play WvW

List top players re kills / to death ratio

Judas.5432:

Gaile Gray.6028:

I think you folks are looking at forum threads and seeing a mountain where there is merely a molehill. There are more than 2 million Guild Wars 2 accounts. Yes, 2,000,000+ accounts! With player volumes that high, there will be cheaters, exploiters, scammers, and of course, the occasional and deeply regretted error on our part, the unwarranted suspension or closure of an account. I don’t know of any system that doesn’t have some degree of false positives, but we are working to reduce those as much as possible.

………

The latter is not to say that we dismiss any appeal or that we never make a mistake. Everyone who submits a ticket is given a review (sometimes multiple reviews) and if we made an error, we reverse it. We review; we uphold or reinstate, as appropriate; and we try to improve so that we don’t make the same mistake again.

So when you see “I was suspended, and all I did was [this thing]” keep in mind that (1) the issue will be given a fair review and (2) you may not be seeing the facts of the case.

Here’s the problem I have, Gaile (good to see you in GW2, btw! It brings me waaay back when I see your name…). I would have been banned for the most recent crafting ‘exploit’ if I only had someone in my guild who figured it out early.

I don’t run numbers on the TP. I don’t figure out the math in detailed numbers like many people do. I would have just seen a way to make money and I would have gone for it without ever even considering that I was doing something wrong.

That definitely scares me a little. If, one day, a guild-mate says, “Hey, take advantage of these trading company prices and craft/salvage/Mystic Forge dynamics before the community catches on!” do I have to say no and ask ANet’s permission first?

I am an honest player and always have been but I could easily be banned right now. How can I feel free to just play without having to over-analyze everything I do when something like this (that I wouldn’t have recognized as an exploit) can get me banned?

This won’t impede my play style or anything but it’s certainly a little disconcerting, you know?

Hopefully I would have picked up this was an exploit had I considered the snowflake route which I did not, but I am still quite concerned how vague and blurred the lines are regarding the TP and economy. I enjoy buying materials in large quantities (150 gold at a time) and crafting with them. I have sold thousands of crafted items in the last couple of months. I liked doing this in Lotro, Eve and now GW2. I am concerned albeit only a little that I will stumble on something and get hammered.

Can you guys at ANet clearly state why salvaging rares for ectos is normally ok but on this occasion not. I have seen players give their views on Reddit and here but thats meaningless. I want clear direction from you so I have something to review against in the future.

thx

Thanks for announcement of your upcoming announcement Colin. I know you guys are working hard but I really am expecting some sensational stuff for WvW which has had nothing added since launch.

this post is ridiculous as badges are so easy to obtain relative to cost of a precursor/lodestones.

Buttercup.5871:

erigais.6805:

this is such a stupid discussion. if you do it right your crafting should be 100% profit. If you buy from the TP to craft YES YOU ARE LOSING MONEY. I can make gold ez on any of my crafts simply by going out and farming the materials. farm all of it, even ectos. Just do fractals, salvage the rares turn around make profit with crafting. yes it might take a while to make a few items. is it worth the time? who knows but the fact of the matter is you will not make a quick buck off craft. you can make a slow buck but its 100% proft.

This is a common misconception for two reasons.

1. You can only use your time in so many ways. Farming materials is wayyyyyyyyyyyy less profitable than buying a ton of materials at a low cost, and process them into something which is profitable. I think the trick of succesful crafting is not about profit margin. It’s about volume. Most products with a high profit margin do not sell quickly. However, a lot of products with a low profit margin sell quickly. Usually, it’s more profitable to craft one low profit item 1000 times, than to craft another item that has a high profit margin. One thousand times 20 copper is still 2 gold. It’s boring, yes. But it’s not hard by any standard.

2. One method (crafting) does not exclude the other (farming). Once you know what you should craft, you just craft it and put it on the TP for the price you want. It will sell. Once you’re done crafting, you do the other stuff. Fractals, WvW, whatever you like. You can even farm materials if that’s what you really want.

I agree with buttercup

If the price of an ecto has not got above 29 silver then no nerf has happened.

Rewards are very poor relative to PvE, Too much zerg too little skill, Ascended gear unobtainable. nothing is meaningful (needs ranking and reduction in nightcapping)

Sadly until more of those things are fixed I am preferring SC2 for my PvP fix at the moment.

I estimate 70% of all crafted items bought is berserker gear so most people leave off MF for glass cannon builds

Bartas.4908:

Ireniicus.2167:

I make 10-15gold an hour from crafting

Judging from your name (old Baldur’s Gate char) you are not 12yo so pls be serious. By “make” you probably mean you sell for that amount but it is hard to believe that you actually get 10-15g profit from crafting. Anything that sells for more that 2 silver require mats that are worth bit over 2 silver (for common stuff) and anything exotic is usually priced less than mats used.

As has been mentioned many times crafting with mats you obtain by yourself is not free. You have to spend the time and resources (WP travel, repair fees) and you pay the tax for listing and selling stuff on TP.
If you buy mats from TP it is even worse. For example, you buy mats for 2 silver and sell stuff for 2.50 (if you are lucky and the market demands your product which is usually not the case), you pay the 15% tax which cuts your income by roughly 37c so your real profit is 13c. I wonder how much of that stuff you should make to make 10g profit per hour even if people wanted to buy such masses of goods for your price.

With rares/exotics it is even worse just because there is no huge market for those. Best bet is to make weapons as they do not require additional mats from NPC and even then making Rare sword lvl 80 costs bit more than mats needed. In fact, if you are lucky, you can make lvl 80 rare sword, salvage it and get back 1 ecto, 1 mithril and sell those FOR MORE than the actual sword.

I reiterate. I spend 3-4 hours crafting each day. I could not hope to gather the materials I need to consume so that leaves just one place.

I have 7 of the 8 crafting professions maxed (my wife has one I do not so yes I am old 40+)

I make 10-15 gold an hour from crafting. It is boring and certainly not for everybody, but I can watch VoDs, TV, listen to music, talk to my wife whilst doing it.

It is working though 11 with nothing sounds terrible

Rukh.9287:

To me there’s two primary causes:

1) commerce tax. This isn’t a sales tax, it’s a commerce tax. If you list something in GW2, it has a chance not selling and you lose money because you’re paying a commerce tax. This also means that you want to list low in order to ensure your thing sells, you are punished if you do not, so people try to sell very low and prices are squashed. In real life, the reason people use sales tax on the person buying the item is to not punish people for contributing to the economy which is what is happening in Guild Wars 2. You are punished for contributing to the economy.

2) No scarcity. In lots of games, its either somewhat difficult to level up crafting, or crafters can specialize in order to create some scarcity, which raises prices. Final Fantasy XI had both in large amounts. Crafting was very hard to level up so if you had a decent level crafting, you were one of the few who could make certain things, so there was going to be a bit of profit there. Also, there were crafts that required two different combinations to make, so even if you had high level bone craft for instance, you may not be competing directly with all other bonecrafters. WoW on the other hand, uses a gated system for some crafts. You have to do dailies for tokens that you redeem for recipes. That means that not every jewelcrafter will have the same recipes as you so there is some built in scarity. They used to also let people specialize in certain crafts, like a smith could be weapon or armor, then sword, mace, axe etc, but they kind of went away from that and back more towards token gating to create scarcity.

In guild wars 2, it’s even worse because you have all servers on one AH so you’re not competing against the 100 other max level smiths on your server, you’re competing against 10,000 smiths with access to the same recipes all looking for that one thing that might eek out a slight profit, that means that your market is very efficient (more people looking for profit) and any chance of profit is much more slim. Combine that with taking a chance PUNISHES you, and you’re generally going to lose money crafting.

I make 10-15gold an hour from crafting

IT would be good to hear more from ANet at the turn of the year. Perhaps the CEO Mike could provide a 2012 roundup and what priorities are, moving into 2013.

How is GW2 going to push into eSports market. Will it be this coming year?

What is his thinking on stickiness for players who have completed the majority of content?

Are supporting organised guilds with increased functionality and purpose a priority or not?

Guesting? I understand danger of committing to time scales but something needs to be said on this one

WvW. Ascended gear coming in Jan/Feb? New map in Q1 or Q2 etc?? Orbs reintroduced or scrapped for foreseeable future. Breakout events …success / failure?

The list could go on but I think a monthly article from the top man is not too much to be expected.

Can I just say this thread provides a lot of LoL. Which is good considering how many thieves are out there that I have to contend with.

Great Video, Great Server , Great Game.

There is a lot of reading here but can I ask have you thought/answered the question as to why Corrupted Lodestones are in such demand?

I believe its because they are needed for the most sort after items in the game. Now if prices fall due to a shift in drop patterns,for the most sort after items, more people will acquire them and everyone will be running around and looking the same.

Oh dear…This is not good. I was hoping for more. They developed fractals in 5 weeks and was anticipating 6 months of WvW Dev time reap some cool stuff. Alas they must have only a handful of people (if that) working on this aspect of the game.

This is very well stated and I agree.

But then everything in WvW is 10 times less rewarding than playing PvE.

PS would love ANet to roll out their dev team and show us how a class balanced 5 man team can take out 5 appropriately traited and equally skilled thieves.

Theoretically the balanced team should win but I doubt it is the case.

I play in a guild of 700+ players some of which WvW only whilst others play both PvE and WvW.

The main gripes about WvW I hear over why people leave mostly to play Planetside are that the reward structure is unfavourable compared to other aspects of the game and that there is class imbalance particularly with the thief which becomes almost unkillable if traited and played correctly whilst still being able to deal significant damage.

There are 8 classes however I see a disproportionate number of thieves and due to their portal utility, mesmers on the battlefield.

I agree it was unfortunate timing however I really do not like the title of this post, and feel anything constructive you had to say was rendered meaningless because of it

My main is a thief however it is thieves and not Engineers that need the nerf bat

Iove.3902:

!THIS EVENT IS USELESS AND COMPLETELY POINTLESS!

If a World does this event that’ll cause the other world to do the event then the other world to do the same. Essentially all that happens is that you basically traded towers and the scores remain the same.

Uhh… what? How’s that helping anything?

I’m glad that ANet is working on developing content for WvWvW, but there’s no point to this addition to the game.

You are welcome to your point of view however I had about 7 hours of WvW since reset and enjoyed the change immensely. It is not perfect but definitely created more dynamics and people moved maps more often and the dozen or so with me agreed.

Aveneo.2068:

Brendar.3548:

Nah, they’ll just charge 500 badges for one piece. They won’t add it to JPs

Correction: they’d probably charge 500 badges for a chest/bag that might contain a random ascended ring.

/sarcasm

:P

Maybe they could tweak it so wearing MF would help even more. pffft

My opinons below….

Yaks Bend is a good Tier4 server having been in tier3 for the last 3 weeks without being smashed.

We have decent NA prime time coverage and good Oceanic coverage whilst not so good during European time zones.

Defence wise its kind of what we are known for. Our BL’s are always well defended with strong communication between Commanders and tons of siege built and manned.

Attack wise we are ok but that’s it.

To improve we need to work on defending our BL’s more thinly to free up more players to go on the offensive and like everyone else get a larger WvW population.

My main is a Thief and even I think the perma stealth builds are totally OP

Really sorry to report but I think performance as worse tonight both in terms of lag and culling. Will try again tomorrow

Same. Drops are typically blue or nothing. They are a waste of time compared to killing normal mobs as they take longer and give nothing better in return

To be honest I would be more interested in watching if this a VoD highlighting the minority classes of PvP namely Necro, Engineer and especially Ranger

watches Thieves kill players in PvP is nothing unusual in fact its a given

MF is a horrid concept all round

uhohhotdog.3598:

I just wanted to add in my 2 cents on this matchup.

Clearly TC has a numbers advantage and just zerg whatever they feel like zerging at the moment.

Yak’s is simply happy with being second place which is why they rarely attack TC and take advantage of them attacking FA.

FA is just disorganized.

YB are certainly not happy with second, however our numbers are significantly lower than TC for large periods of time each day and as a consequence we have had to defend more than attack

I am not talking about tasks for us to complete but what should ANet be prioritising?

Here is my list of the most urgent get it in PDQ changes/updates that I want to see. I understand it is not practical to get all this in before January but I am an optimist! They are in my order of priority!

Roll out ascended items game wide, especially in WvW
Introduce Guesting
Rewards for WvW aligned to PvE
Deploy a functional cross server LFG tool
Implement Guild Functionality
Make being in a guild more meaningful through some change to game
Fractals – Enable players who are booted to rejoin
DE Debugs..Especially Meta events like Baltazar
Update personal story whereby we can chop off Trehearne’s Head

It looks ok. More interested in them focusing more devs to fixing bugs.

Kouken.8604:

For me, no matter how much fun/creative the fractals are, Having the masses stand around in one city and never leave is game destroying

I hope the devs phase them out and give the player base a reason to explore the world
Until then simply play another game

Completely agree

Makes sense. We have a 1600 player guild and only a fraction of them log in daily

They made a commercial. Sadly it was poorly received by practically everyone and I surmise ANet do not have the $$ budgeted to make another at this time

YB is considered a full server, yet it is pretty quiet bar LA, especially in WvW which has become a ghost town for large stretches of time which causes more guilds to at least consider moving away from it.

I really enjoyed this great game and definitely got my money’s worth but it seems its declining very quickly.

Perhaps if guesting is technically too tough we could merge servers?

The OP is spot on. No patch update speaks far more than words. I understand there will be a decent update in Q1 but why can’t ANet address the loot tables so playing WvW is commensurate in rewards to PvE now?

Casual WvWers that used to supplement Hardcore players now spend all their time in Fractals or PvE as its just far more rewarding.

Very disappointed

I just dipped my toe with 8 tries and got one clover. I hate RNG

I think the most important thing I would like to see are more players in WvW, especially though not limited to my own server

Isslair.4908:

DarcShriek.5829:

.. there’s 2-3 other players in the area. ..

Yeah, good luck killing champion at the end of meta-chain with 2-3 people.
Good luck trying to complete Balthazar temple event.
Etc.

That’s exactly the problem. A lot of events are designed for really large group of players. But there’s like 2-3 people doing quests. All other are already in LA spamming “lfg xyz”

They have an overflow mechanic..They need an underflow mechanic this would fix areas being dead or not enough players for Meta events

I dislike MF as a concept and even more so as it has been implemented in GW2.

Why should I and others undertake a dungeon or other content with the best gear and compensate for someone else who has everything with MF. If people want to nerf themselves for opportunity of better loot fine, just do not hamstring me

Bruno Sardine.2907:

Minute.7293:

I’d like to see in Fractals are dungeons/paths that don’t have a boss, where you go from start to finish to find something and that’s it.

I mean I guess the cliffside fractal has a boss… but his presence is minor and it’s really more what you’re describing. It’s pretty fun exchanging the hammer and working together to climb your way up to the top. Honestly, this is one encounter I think Anet did a fantastic job with.

Cliffside/colossus Fractal is my favourite Dungeon in GW2. More of this and less of the Jellyfish with its huge HP and boring mechanics. I am able to browse the news whilst hitting that boss, it is very poorly designed

So….Have you decided where you are moving to?

Yaks Bend would love to have you. We are in a highly competitive Tier where we are the underdogs and are especially light in comparison to peers at the key NA primetime.

Good luck with whatever you guys choose