Guild Wars 2

Close. What I’m saying is they are including what the bulk discount should be in the listed Black Friday 50% off figure. Not all of it but a good portion. If they were to only include the Black Friday deduction itself the listed sale would be 30% off or slightly less.

And you can now see my earlier problem. The 5-pack does not display any sale implying that the bulk-discount is not part of the Black Friday sale itself (and this is consistent with all the other item sales as well). The only inconsistency is the new 25 key pack.

It’s an incentive for new players to buy, it would make no sense if you got it. Your reward for buying early was that you got to play it in the first 3 months. Just ask yourself this: if you had known this special was coming, would you have delayed buying the game until now? Probably not. Why? Because getting to play earlier has inherent value. Plus giving it away free now would be unfair to players who actually bought the deluxe edition on release.

Besides I don’t see how this is different from any other sale. All video games (and everything really) go down in price after release, and this sale is no exception.

neon.4863:

Jabberwock.9014:

Heh, we have a battle of the edits here. You can see my previous edit for my answer to your new edit.

Edit: I completely agree with your final edit, that is what they should have done. But in the end it is the same as listing the current 25-pack as 30% off, the only difference being that you must buy 5 times as many keys at one time.

Editception!

I don’t think the new 25 pack is a loophole, more a common marketing strategy of just offering a bigger discount for more items as an incentive to get people to spend a little extra. The onus would be on people to not buy more than they need in this case.

It may just be a difference in what we consider to be a bulk pack, in the end – if you consider a 25 pack to be 5 packs of 5, then the discount is 30%, but if you consider it to be 25 packs of 1, then it’s 50%. So you’d pick the discount to display based on that.

I would just personally have gone with offering a 30% discount for the 5 key bundle instead of creating a new one for the duration of the sale only. It would have looked less attractive, but there’d be no room for confusion then.

The 25 pack is certainly an incentive to buy more at a time, I agree. However, if that was its only aim, they still would have listed it as 30% off. As it is, it is plain to see that it is also used as a device to make the sale sound better than it is. There is no point in the argument that the 25 pack could either be “25 singles” or “5 5-packs”. It is more keys in bulk than 5, and thus should have a the same or greater bulk discount, period. However, they are treating it like there is no bulk discount just so they can make meet their “50% off!” goal without actually meeting it (since all they do is include the bulk discount in what should be the segregated listed Black Friday discount).

And for those telling me to vote with my money, that argument doesn’t really hold water. I actually like the deal itself (30% off is still pretty good) and am still considering buying a few gems to support development of the game (which I feel they have done an excellent job on overall despite my critiques). Honestly the only thing holding me back is the fact that this marketing is so dishonest that I would feel bad rewarding it. And that is what I’m posting for: I want Anet to know that they don’t have to stoop to this level just to make money. And let’s face it, being actively vocal about something you’re upset with is a lot better than passively waiting and blindly hoping something will be done about it. It’s like only voting yourself in an election versus spreading the word to get other people to vote in addition.

Heh, we have a battle of the edits here. You can see my previous edit for my answer to your new edit.

Edit: I completely agree with your final edit, that is what they should have done. But in the end it is the same as listing the current 25-pack as 30% off, the only difference being that you must buy 5 times as many keys at one time.

I never suggested that, I merely noted that since the bulk discount of the 5 pack is (correctly) not included in the Black Friday discount, the same should apply to the 25 pack (which should theoretically have a bulk discount, but doesn’t thanks to the loophole of it being a new category). The inconsistency should be solved by changing the listed discount of the 25 pack, not the 5 pack.

You seem to be stuck on the fact that the 25 pack is a new item and had no bulk discount. However that is the loophole. They created a new category for the purpose of taking advantage of this technicality, not just to encourage buying more at a time. I’ve noted many times that if the 25 pack had existed before it would have had a bulk discount.

If you are planning to make the Halloween Endless Tonics non-account bound, could you pretty, pretty please (with a cherry on top) do the same thing with the other endless tonics? I have one of them (the tree one) but it is nigh impossible to collect the other two since even if by some miracle I ever got another it could very well be a duplicate.

ovan.5947:

OK……

guys, do you realize what you’re saying?

Let me tell you sons.

Anyone who ever went in a shop know that when you see : 1 = 1$ 4= 3$ and 8=4$ mean you’ve had 25% first (buy 4) and 50% (buy 8 ) reduction. In real life, in a real shop where you see real people, that’s the way it worked.
That’s the way it works. Now, that’s your way : you make 50% decrease on 8 and since 4 cost 3 than 8 cost 6 but with a 50% it’s 3 in fact. kitten that sounds quite…ridiculous no?

Now, let’s see jabberwock’s math, which are correct btw.

1 stone cost 40 gems, that’s its base price.
Now, you can buy 25 for 480 gems right? which means a 52% price decreases for each gem, that’s definitely right.
Now then tell me why you’re arguing on the fact that they said 40% (obviously making a mistake) but doing in fact 52% ?

I guess we should ask them to be honnest, they said 40%, then they should do 40% and so, since that’s the way it always work, do this 40% on the base price.

So please Anet, i want to pay 25 gems 600 gems. That way, it will really be a 40%

You’re math are good, you’re conclusion is terrible, you’re market sens is tremendously horrible, but hey, 40% is 40%

Don’t dare telling me “they should use the logic they use on the stone but on the key” cause that’s irrelevant and even your mother would laugh at you saying such nonsense.

Oh no, not my market sens.

But seriously, if you can’t see the deceit you are kidding yourself. No, I would not be happy with them saying Fine Transmutation Stones are 52% off. I merely used an example to show that they KNOW how to advertise in a non-treacherous way, but in the case of the more popular black lion keys they purposefully chose not to do so.

And I forgot to mention the MOST misleading and inconsistent part.That is the fact that they DON’T note that 5-pack has a discount compared to a single key. Technically since it already existed previously and had the bulk discount they can say this, but it implies that the bulk discount is NOT factored into the Black Friday savings rate. However, the 25 pack is not consistent with this. If the 25 pack had existed previously there WOULD have been a bulk discount. So in the case of the 25 pack they group the bulk discount into the visible Black Friday savings rate. Then by a technicality they can still tell us it is correct since it is possible that the 25 pack could have existed before with no bulk discount (even though this is completely illogical as the smaller bulk quantity of 5 does). Thus when viewed side by side the 25-pack appears as if it should be 50% off of the 5-pack rate (or maybe even better since logically the 25-pack should have a better bulk discount). They used a loophole plain and simple to make the deal appear better than it is. Is it saavy? Yes. Is it morally sound? No.

I realize that most companies use treacherous tactics like this (and I guess I was naive hoping Anet would be any less repugnant), but that doesn’t mean you should sit back and take it. If more people called out this kind of crap on a regular basis maybe the state of advertising wouldn’t be in such a sorry state.

Yes except you are being totally inconsistent compared with the other deals with obviously deceitful intent. Look at the fine transmutation stones:

-Normal price is 200/5, 360/10, 800/25. The base cost for one stone is 200/5= 40 gems per stone
-If you buy in bulk you get 800/25 = 32 gems per stone. This is [1-(32/40)]*100% = 20% off
-Yet you call buying 25 stones for 480 gems “40% off” (since 480/800 = .60). Yet if you used the same logic as your black lion keys you would call this “52% off” since the cost per stone is 480/25=19.2 and 19.2/40 = .48.

I agree, this is just plain shameful. It is obvious they only added the extra “25” category in order to do this deceitful ploy. If they had advertised the 5-pack as 50% off they would have actually had to list it at 225 gems (50% off of its original price of 450), but instead they found a loophole and added a new category which if it had existed previously would NEVER have sold for 3125 gems (since it would offer WORSE value than the 5-pack, being the same value as buying 25 singles). Absolutely disgusting.

The embarrassing thing is I actually bought one (thankfully not with real money, which frankly I never want to give them any more of at this point) because I didn’t check the math and assumed Anet was trustworthy enough to not pull this kind of moneygrabbing crap. Silly me. That’s a mistake I’ll never make again. You are ruining your brand more and more with every passing week and that is a truly sad state of affairs.

Yeah, it’s probably so you can’t just put a rune on a piece of armor that happens to sell at a high price when it has that rune installed but is cheap otherwise (it happens).

They also last 45 minutes. Honestly I’m surprised the pumpkin cookies haven’t been more of a sink since they are already WAY cheaper than omnomberry stuff. But it’s probably because they have many other ingredients besides candy corn.

Anyways, it’s not really fair to make more sinks just so people with candy corn can make a profit. You can already make a meager profit by buying at 1c and selling at 2 or 3 (yes the buy orders do come in eventually, and usually all at the same time).

Rare drop rate is certainly down in orr. A week ago I got like 2 yellows per event average (up to 5 max possible), and now I get maybe 1 every other DE. Exotic drop rate is slightly up though, as I got an exotic when farming penitent/shelter today, and that’s never happened before.

Even their trash items are worse. lol crab meat, at least porous bones give you some decent copper.

Can’t the tabs only hold 250 of one item? So you save exactly one bank slot? Not exactly extraordinary.

There have been so many posts about this (including one I made), it is truly amazing that Anet has not responded. Have they seen what LA chat looks like? It is ALL lfg.

Can’t we get a response from Anet? This is a serious issue that is drastically hurting many peoples’ enjoyment of the game. Threads are now popping up about people who can’t even find a group for difficulty 1 because they started too late.

Thank god a topic about this is finally building steam. I really can’t understand what Anet was thinking leaving this feature out. Maybe before it was bearable, but now that they put fractals in, there is absolutely NO excuse. Do they realize just how insanely difficult it is to find a group for a specific difficulty? When they implemented FotM, they didn’t add just one dungeon, they added 20, since each difficulty essentially functions as a different dungeon for group finding purposes. And if you think it’s hard to find groups now, wait until next week when the novelty wears off and boatloads of people stop running.

Yes, you’ve really hit the nail on the head. Taking in MF screws your group but you get personally rewarded for it. Rewarding selfish behavior is not something that should EVER be implemented in a co-op game.

It’s obscure compared to mats and such is what I mean. For example, I ended up receiving 5 of a similar item with a buy order of 4s2c when its sell price was also at 25s, so what I experienced seemed pretty unprecedented. Still, thanks for the strawman argument.

The important point is that I tested it for a good 5 minutes and the buy orders NEVER came unless I placed one, and then it was always 3 instantly, and never at the same price as would be expected with multiple players who often overcut by 1c. Yes some players placed some orders above 10s afterwards, but that was bound to happen over the course of a night. Topping it off with the fact that all orders below 10s except the lowest one are now gone (there were probably 30-40 before) is just way too suspicious.

Yeah, I just made a thread about this as well (Dungeon Group Finder Becoming Necessary), and it really is a big problem. I spend half an hour in between every run just trying to find another group for the next difficulty (almost as much time as the dungeon itself). And this is when the dungeon is new and everybody and their mom is running it. Imagine in a few weeks how ridiculously hard it will be to find groups for specific difficulties.

We need a dungeon group browser, plain and simple.

I know this issue has been discussed to death, but with the new fractal dungeon does anybody think that the lack of a dedicated cross-server group finding tool is becoming a real sticking point? I am not in a large dungeon-running guild, and I found that I spent nearly as much time shouting “LFG difficulty x” in LA between runs as I did actually doing a fractal run. I think half an hour was my average to find a full group after the second run, and it will only get worse as people spread out in difficulties and stop playing after the novelty wears off.

Agree, disagree? Discuss.

Yeah I have to say it’s basically mandatory at this point. No lie I spent almost as much time shouting lfg in Lion’s Arch as I did in the fractals. It’s nearly impossible to find anybody when looking for specific difficulties, which is really something you’d think Anet should have foreseen.

Well the wisp part basically IS the dungeon. All that’s left is a leisurely swim and mossman afterwards. I agree however that the walls were such a pain. If you can jump over them I guess it might be ok. I’ll have to check that out next time I go.

Hmm, that’s dumb if so. You could go with armor of earth, cleansing fire, and lightning flash (or w/e it’s called). Works well for me.

Yes, but this is different. This is a very obscure item, and whenever I placed a bid, three bids were placed instantly: one at 1c above, one at a few more c above, and one more a few c above that. The faster I bid, the faster these bids accelerated in pricing. And most importantly, whenever I waited (sometimes for a full minute), exited the tp, and came back, there were never any more bids. Only when I placed an order, and then the bids came instantly.

Agreed, I was hasty in creating topic. Although to be fair half of the purpose of it was to find out from others if it gets better (and apparently it does).

Mod can delete this topic.

Eh, it’s still not fair. The bot can place a max bid but potentially get it for lower, while we have to pay our max bid no matter what (even if the market value was lower and we made our max buy higher than necessary). The bot doesn’t have to know the true market value, just a general range. If you’ve ever used ebay you know how much of an advantage this system is.

The item in question btw was “Carrion Banded Legs of Flame Legion” (lvl 75). Not surprisingly now that the buy order is above 10s all bids below 10s except one (at 4s1) have disappeared (part of the script most likely).

Ah ok, I guess I was a bit hasty in my judgement. I was under the impression you had to start from level 1 every time. Is a difficulty permanently unlocked upon reaching it? And do you get a superboss every other run no matter what?

Still could end up a ridiculous grind, but I’ll reserve judgement for at least the time being.

Darkk.3018:

Jabberwock.9014:

Yes, but if its only an increase of 5 per run it’s still insanity. Not to mention you have to have uninterrupted access to the game for hours on end in order to get up high enough to make more than jack-squat.

You’re raging prematurely and ignorantly. Firstly, you haven’t done all levels of the Fractals to know how it scales, and secondly, why do you need “uninterrupted access to the game for hours”? The game will remember your progress so you can leave and come back to do a fractal of the same level (as long as everyone else is at or higher than that level)

Wait so the game remembers what run you are on? I thought it didn’t. Since my group left after the first run and I exited the dungeon, can I now go back and do the second run or will it restart at difficulty 1?

Yes, but if its only an increase of 5 per run it’s still insanity. Not to mention you have to have uninterrupted access to the game for hours on end in order to get up high enough to make more than jack-squat.

Somebody in map chat told me that got 20 + 9 from bags for the second run. So it is still horrendous. And above that agony will probably kick your kitten so until you actually GET an ascended item you’ll be stuck on the lower diffs.

I think you can bring ascended gear outside the dungeon into WvW and PvE. And it is actually quite a bit better than exotics. So now we have a situation where the .1% of players who have enough time to grind this crap will have a power or farming (in the case of MF) advantage over everyone else.

On the other hand if you can’t bring it out, then it’s just plain useless.

Regizer.1763:

Where does it say you have to ignore the rest of the game? Where does it say you have to get a new item as soon as it comes out? Do what you find fun in game. No one is forcing you to rush in order to get an item.

Ahem, let me repeat myself: If we want the best. And who said anything about rushing? You can spread it out as long as you want, but in the end you’ll still need 100 hours or more for ONE back item. ridiculous.

And yes, I would still like input from people who have done more than one run in a row.

Is this serious? For gift of ascension we need 500 tokens and the back accessories (which I assume you need to Mystic forge) are over 1000 (I think it was 1350). I got 15 for a run that took an hour. That’s 123 hours if I want it! For one back item! Are you kidding me? And what if I want to run different builds (eg MF and condition damage)? I’ll have to grind 246 hours JUST FOR THE BACK ITEMS! This is madness.

Has anybody done more than the first 3 fractals? Maybe I could understand if they quintuple token drops after the first run… my group all ditched after the first so I don’t know. Although aren’t you supposed to NEED an ascended armor with infusion in order to combat agony after the first run? Bit of a catch-22 there…

And unlike other dungeons which are an alternative to acquiring exotics by other means, this dungeon is the ONLY way to get ascended gear. So if we want the best, we now have to ignore the rest of the game. Great…

Found an item today that whenever I placed a buy order a bot/script overcut me immediately. This occurred until I placed a buy order above 10s (seems they setup some ebay type of bidding script with a maximum bid value).

It’s intentional most likely. After all, trait books have been on the tp all this time along with jugs of water, etc. Players sometimes will pay a small premium for the convenience of tp.

Xenon.4537:

My friend complains of this too, but I’ve never been alone in a zone so I have no idea what yall are talking about. Any zone, any time, any day/night I always run in to someone every 10 minutes.

lol someone every 10 minutes. Wow man, those zones must be hella populated.

Seriously though, you are correct in that you might not be the LITERAL only person in a zone, but outside of Orr you’ll be lucky to ever find a decent sized group of players.

Sometimes when farming in cursed shore certain warriors piss me off. There are some that run pure dps instead of MF and ruin things for everyone with their whirling axe. In my opinion, d/d elementalist (which I run) is still best for tagging all mobs on a consistent basis (due to low aoe cooldowns and multitasking mob groups with glyph of storms), but no class is quite as infuriating as dps axe warriors when it comes to melting a single tightly packed group of mobs by themselves before anybody else can react. It’s complete overkill when it comes to tagging (you can do 1/10 the damage and still get kill credit), but ends up denying other players loot while sabotaging your own drops (due to lack of MF).

T6 mats doubled again so it would make sense. Or is there another reason for this?

Joiry.2504:

Svenn.5209:

You might want to check out my post about this. I put up a very detailed solution on how to solve this problem.

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/suggestions/Improvements-for-Collectors/first#post499627

The problem doesn’t need a detailed and complex solution. It needs a simple solution.

The best solution is one where we have 2 slots for each armor location. A stat slot and an appearance slot. Its simple and provides the maximum flexibility. However, Anet wanted to make money off of transmutation stones, so the best solution is a victim of monetization of the game. I’m not against Anet making money, or the gem store in general, but this is a case of the store effecting game design negatively.

Yes, as noted this would be my preferred solution. If they really wanted to they could monetize this as well by requiring you to pay gems to unlock skin slots. Honestly I would have no problem with this, and they would probably make more money on gem sales with this than the transmutation stones (I’ve already enumerated the reasons why they are currently undesirable).

The only issue is what to do with all existing transmutation stones. However they could easily just allow people to exchange existing transmutation stones back for gems, or even do some kind of mystic forge dealio (similar to the mad king chests).

With the announcement of the new ascendent armor, the deficiencies of the current cosmetic system are becoming more and more obvious. If this gear treadmill is to continue (and even if it doesn’t), it will soon become necessary for PvE players to choose between one of two things: build adaptability or cosmetic variance. The system was already severely lacking, which I can demonstrate easily in a quick example:

- I want to be able to swap between two different looks whenever I want
- I want to be able to swap between two different builds whenever I want (eg MF and condition damage)
- Presume the armors for both builds cost 15g each (this can even be on the low end for exotics) and the looks are free (which is not even close to accurate in some cases since order armor costs ~10g and t3 cultural over 100g)
- To meet my goal, I must buy 4 sets of exotic armor at 15g each: setAlookA, setAlookB, setBlookA, and setBlookB.

That is already 60g while making VERY generous assumptions. If you want more than two builds and/or more than two looks PLUS looks that actually cost significant gold, you will be broke almost before you begin.

All this is BEFORE even taking into account the possible new gear treadmill. Now after spending ludicrous amounts of money you can’t even be sure that you’ll be future proof for more than a few months. This is coming from somebody who actually enjoys farming, so as horrible as all this is for me casuals will be hit even harder.

Much of this agony stems from one thing: transmutation stones consume BOTH original items when transmuting. A simple yet powerful fix would be to make it so that only the stat-based item is consumed: therefore you end up with the skin you applied and the newly skinned exotic.

Now, Anet is probably weary of skin “duplication” since some of their gem store items are skins. However, I think that they would actually end up making MORE money on gems because transmutation stones would actually be worth something, and more people would buy them. To put it in perspective, I currently have 270 transmutation stones (from blcs). How many have I used? Probably about 5. This is because I don’t want to waste my expensive cosmetic items (like vigil armor) on exotic armor that I may not end up using much. If I did decide to get some new exotics, I would be forced to either transmute the old exotic armor onto the new (losing 15g) or buy some new cosmetic items to transmute onto the new armor (losing ~10g in the case of vigil armor). So for me the bottleneck is not transmutation stones, but gold. I think Anet would have something to gain if transmutation stones were the bottleneck instead.

Of course I would prefer above else just having a “skin” armor (where we can swap in and out any armor at will) that we can display instead of our stat-based armor, but it might be hard to implement given the current framework (what to do with all the transmutation stones in circulation).

TLDR: It’s already WAY too expensive to have different builds and different looks at the same time. A new gear treadmill will make it mind-bogglingly worse to the point of impossibility for most players.

I would be fine with this, IF the cosmetic system wasn’t so royally screwed up. With this new ascended armor, now I’ll have to pay even more out the nose for the combinations of stats and looks that I want (I guess I should be happy I’ve only bought one exotic set to date). Why can we not have a sane system where we can apply any look we’ve already collected to any armor without consuming anything, instead of this draconian one where we are forced to bind looks with stats? I shouldn’t be forced to either trash a look or a 15G set of armor just because I want to get some new stats…

Market Manipulation. It crashed again now.

Yeah, some armors really annoy me. I assume you’re talking about apprentice skirt when you mention gradient. I’ve found I can only dye it white or black otherwise it looks like trash. Another one that annoys me is the light vigil armor. The “skirt” and mantle simply cannot be dyed a light/bright color. Celestial shows up as a middling grey, which sabotages a great number of potential looks.

Exactly. People keep saying that I can combine gear in PvE to get the same stats as in sPvP. NOT TRUE! There is NO PvE armor/weapon which gives you pure toughness, healing power, and condition damage. If you want that combo you’re going to have to throw in some useless stats like precision (eww… this stat is so bad unless you’ve stacked power).

And by the way, I play PvE MORE than sPvP, and have farmed enough gold to afford whatever gear I want. The problem is that the gear I want isn’t available.

PvE and PvP don’t intersect you say? Then what the hell is WvW? I could care less what my gear is in actual PvE because I just use all MF gear anyways. In WvW though I should be able to have the same playstyle while roaming that I have in sPvP.

Your post is pedantic. If you haven’t realized, sPvP amulets combine PvE armor and accessory stats into one package. The problem is that some of the armor that gets “combined” doesn’t exist in pve. We are talking about possible stat combinations, not their distribution about armor or accessories.

Signed. Been wanting this set in pve for a while.

So I’m not the only one. I just made a thread about the Shaman’s Armor in pve. In spvp it gives toughness, healing power, and condition damage, but in pve it gives vitality in place of toughness. Useless. And there is no other armor which has this combo in pve. This screws me in WvW since I can’t use the same build I use in sPvP.

Better yet, exotic level 80 shaman’s armor doesn’t even exist. It only goes to rare. So even if its stats were right I wouldn’t be able to use it.

Qelris.6901:

Jabberwock.9014:

Those are only the weapons, which I already knew existed. However there is no armor.

FURTHERMORE, I just noticed that the shaman’s in PvE is not even the same as Shaman’s in sPvP. In sPvP you get toughness but in PvE you get vitality. What the heck?

You might want to reinstall if you don’t see the armors. Did you click the 2nd tab? First tab has Lv45 items, while 2nd one has Lv80 items(Shaman is there).

I didn’t even notice it was vit instead of tough, sorry, but still, there is Shaman from CM.

Like I said, there is no exotic variety. The highest Shaman’s goes is rare. Try searching “shaman’s” with exotic, level 80-80, and armor filters. There is nothing. But now that I see it’s vitality and not toughness, I suppose I don’t even care anymore. This is beyond stupid. Stop limiting our builds Anet! (especially considering I CAN get the build in sPvP).