Guild Wars 2

Something to keep in mind for aggro which I’ve seen work in another MMO I was in is that CC and condition damage type stuff could have a big impact as well. That Blind AoE you threw up for no damage could well override a Thief’s dps coming from behind, depending on how such factors are weighted. Similarly, some trivial DoT poison might each increment the aggro counter more then a burst from someone else. It could be pretty tough to separate all these factors out.

Jia Shen.4217:

I forgot to include to search for the item as if you were going to buy it to check the buy and sell offers for all the listings to help a bit to judge what you decide to sell the item at.

Right, this is important because sometimes there may be dozens of something for sale at 10 silver and up, say, and one person put one up at 8 silver just to get rid of it fast. You only see the 8 silver sale listing going from your sale screen, but if you could see all the listings you might want to post it closer to the 10 silver it is “mainly” going at. Of course you risk that the price may be in the middle of racheting down to a new equilibrium.

Hippocampus.8470
So there’s no demand and a lot of supply?
Yep, price will (and absolutely should) go down in that case. And this has nothing to do with access from anywhere, since people can place buy orders from anywhere as well, so a complete lack of them means no one particularly wants this item. And they wouldn’t suddenly start wanting it in droves just because sellers have to walk all the way to a BLTC NPC to list it.

And, Deboog, to add to Hippocampus’s point, perhaps this gem is not really “high value” if there are a lot for sale and no good offers. Perhaps it is merely “medium value”, on its way to “low value”.

While you are right that reducing TP access would overall raise prices somewhat on the market, because it makes it more inconvenient to bring things there, that has good effects for some (crafters) and bad effects for others (buyers who don’t craft). As long as Anet thinks there are more noncrafting buyers then crafters, they aren’t likely to change this.

Bitesize.2539
Also practising my kiting skills has helped a lot so I may experiment with nades or bombs in the future, but right now I’m finally enjoying my engi!

Glad it was helpful, I’ve still got a lot to learn along those lines but found it worked best to start with something simple, like how to move while keeping facing for autoattacking, and add in dodging, and add in kits, and add in other weapons and so on as I got the hang of the basic stuff. Then you have a repertoire which lets you start experimenting with alternative builds.

I like the game a lot and expect to play it for a long time with my friends from another MMO, now sadly shutting down, but I do see the OPs point that you can do quite a bit of play here without ever seeing anyone say anything. My longest conversation with a stranger to date was when someone was lying dead at the TP in a city and I asked them how they managed to die there. Even with my friends, its not unusual that while in the same party for ease of chatting we are doing different things in different zones, so we aren’t really “playing” together in a cooperative sense of learning each others powers and so on. We finally got high enough to run a dungeon together, so have made a start on that. Four hours in AC helps that way. . .

Some people enjoy starting conversations, recruiting for guilds and party, and so on but in my experience that is a minority of people, so it would be nice to have something that encourages a social aspect. I don’t think events requiring larger teams are the answer, when you are playing with 10 or 20 other people in my experience you are less likely to learn anything about anyone but the few most vocal, with only a few present you can see who is doing what and make comments.

I agree that server specific forums would help with that, especially after they get guesting going and lock down free server transfers. Those tend to be good places to organize things, like “planning on doing 0-100% map complete in zone X Saturday afternoon, who wants to join me?” Server-wide chat channels can help with that too, as mentioned earlier City of Heros ended up with at least one, sometimes several, per server because they were player created. They tended to have very little spam because they were usually by invite of one of the channel moderators only, so a gold seller (pretty uncommon there, game cash was easy to get) wasn’t going to get an invite. That could be a bit tougher to regulate here, as there is much more incentive for them, I’m not sure what the best solution would be.

City of Heros also had something like the /inspect, but it only showed the equivalent of stat bonuses (i.e. +130% Toughness, etc.) not specifics of what “gear” you had. What got conversations going was that you also could write a custom biography for each character which was visible with this inquiry, maybe 200 words or so. That was nice for giving everyone a chance to be creative, distinguish themselves from the other 20 Human Warriors around, and invest emotionally in particular characters. GW2 has this great “personal story” questionnaire for generating the character, but no way for anyone else to see that backstory, let alone any you make for yourself.

Reducing or eliminating respawns on top of characters might also help get a bit more chatting going, I’ve died at least once typing a message to somebody when I had spawns pop in on top of me. Outside of cities and towns, this is a kind of dangerous game to do much chatting in.

Zenith.6403:

It you put all 8 classes in front of training dummies with 100,000 health each and have each of the classes deal damage to their own dummy the best way possible, there’s going to be a profession that kills their dummy the fastest. There’s nothing subjective about a game that deals with math. If you don’t know the answer which class deals most damage on spot, it doesn’t mean that there is no correct answer.

Of course, if you are downed or dead, your damage drops considerably, so this test would only be relevant if nothing was shooting back. In addition, it doesn’t account for how much damage is AoE (useful in some situations, not others), how much is Condition (works on some targets, not others), and what the damage vs. time looks like. 10,000 damage in 1 second which can’t be repeated for 20 seconds may be more useful in a PvP situation, for example, then 20,000 damage per 10 seconds which can be kept up indefinitely, but the latter may be more useful in a dungeon.

And that’s just the damage side, it doesn’t include support which may win more PvP and dungeon encounters then just hitting stuff or versatility for different situations. Which is why if the OP ever gets a consistent answer to their question in a MMO, they should avoid that MMO, as the game hasn’t balanced their classes well.

Great information, thanks.

Something I’m not clear on is if someone uses a Blast Finisher, for example Rocket Boots, in the Healing Turret Water combo field, is the AoE heal a fixed amount based on the Healing Turret and associated healing stats of the person who dropped the turret, or does it scale in any way with the actual Blast Finisher power and/or stats of the person who used the Finisher?

OP, I know your pain, in my first 10-15 levels of play I must have died at least 20 times in just regular outdoor fights, not even DEs, while I tried to get the hang of coordinating everything.

If you are struggling to fight one or two critters out in the open world with rifle or pistol, I wouldn’t suggest grenades in general to fix this, as it is IMHO even trickier to target and fire them off competently while kiting around. I’m just barely starting to get the hang of it, I usually use grenades in DEs where a bunch of foes may be fighting other people so I can stand relatively still and throw them. What could be handy is swapping to it for Smoke grenade when you have several foes on you to buy yourself some breathing room.

What I found works well for me if I"m fighting one foe with Rifle is open up with autoattack. As they run close, when they are just out of melee range hit them with the net. Fire Blunderbuss (#3), it does more damage at close range, back to autoattack 1. As they get free of the net, use #4 to knock both them and you back (be aware of whats behind you! Usually that way is clear of critters, since you came from there). Pick up with autoattack, net, blunderbuss again and they will generally be dead as they reach you. This is also a good way to start learning telegraph signals of big attacks to practice dodging, since you just have one guy to focus on and they are usually close to you when they are attacking.

I think P/S has similar tactics, either way, work on getting the hang of one consistent way of fighting things then start branching out once you have that mastered by touch (without having to look at the keyboard).

Practice doing controlled circle kiting in small circles, facing the right way so you could shoot things, in spots that don’t have foes. I have probably put close to an hour into that at different points, while waiting for something on the market or friends to arrive, and am still only fair at it.

P/P is probably the most offensive and least defensive of the three weapon sets, I dropped it early on for Rifle until I could get good enough at “active defense” to start moving back to a more offensive weapon set. I don’t anticipate that being before level 80, if then.

Oh, one other thing, look for armor and jewelry on the Trading Post that has Vitality and Toughness. That can make a big difference in your survivability, and you can buy it cheaper then you could craft it even if you learn the right crafting profession.

Parthis.2091:

There is no incentive to be a high-level crafter focusing on hard to craft items. It’s just not financially viable.

Suppose the concept of the devs for this game is that the only incentive they WANT to have in place for crafting is an alternative way of leveling for people who enjoy that, and as a roleplaying venue for people who want to make their own gear? Perhaps they don’t intend for people to earn money crafting without quite a bit of work, perhaps even more work then earning it just by beating stuff up in the game?

The only way to make it easy for a crafter to make money is if people can’t get adequate gear from just playing the game, i.e. from drops and such. That helps the crafter, but hurts the person who doesn’t want to either learn to craft or use the TP. Whether or not its correct none of us know without the data, the devs seem to be betting there are more of the latter player then the former.

I do agree with you and the others that a preview feature would help a lot, though, since looks are the only differentiating feature between high end items selling unique items like what you made will only be possible with that, or if you get lucky and that buyer saw it on someone else or a website and liked it. And its not like you can equip it and decide you don’t like it, since it soulbinds.

dimgl.4786
It seems that this game caters to gamers who simply log on for a few hours and log off. That is why there are literally at least 12-20 waypoints a zone.

Well, thats not such a bad market to cater to. Of myself and six friends who play, hopefully a couple more soon, only two of us will get over a 2-3 hour long session to play in the average week. Once in awhile one of us will get a full weekend day, but they don’t often synch up. Since we also have different amounts of interest in having alts, we are also usually in different zones at different levels when we get on, so if we are going to get together and do anything in an hour or two we need fairly fast travel.

The main thing that generates a sense of a “populated world” for me is seeing people at DEs. I’ll see how well that keeps up in the 40-70 zones as I progress (only one of us has made it to 40 yet, just a couple of days ago). I’ve read they may be more thinly populated.

Waraxx, as a buyer I would not want to be forced to pay 2G for the item you placed earlier, if someone else is willing to sell it to me for 1.99G, regardless of when they placed that item up there.

There are a lot of tweaks to a MMO marketplace that can make it more favorable for buyers or more favorable for sellers. This one seems to have been overall tilted somewhat in the direction of buyers. That is a valid decision on the part of the developers, and one I think is justifiable given their target of “casual” players. You are welcome to try to change their mind though, as is any other forum goer.

To those posters who feel that increasing the difficulty and coordination level needed to run dungeons will raise the skill level of the player base, I would say based on my experience in another MMO and more than one real life organization I have been in that that is unlikely to happen. What does tend to hapkitten that people who either can’t or don’t want to learn to have to play at that higher skill level don’t get involved in those events, leaving you with a smaller population to draw from. The same population that can do them easily now. So, if you don’t like death zerging as an exclusive tactic, limit your grouping to that small, competent population. If that subset of the population isn’t large enough right now for you to find competent teams when you want them, that situation is not likely to improve by making dungeons harder. The harder the content, the smaller the group of players who is willing to put the effort into learning it, that is a universal truth about any hobby that most people play to relax and have fun. I’m not praising death zerging as a tactical option, far from it, I’m just saying I don’t think the changes you propose will lead to the outcome you want.

If the developers want to add still another tier of difficulty both down, as a learning curve towards “real” dungeons", and up, for the players who find Explorer Mode insufficiently challenging, I’m always a fan of more content. In fact I think adding an easier mode for dungeons might actually be more likely to lead people to higher skill levels, since they could be a chance to find out that “hey, if I get a couple of combos off this suddenly works a lot better” vs. hitting a rather high difficulty wall pretty suddenly and giving up on the whole dungeon idea. A carrot is more likely to get a mediocre player to up his game then a stick, I think.

Anecdote time; a group of friends and I just tried our first dungeon, AC, since the highest of us was 41 and nobody else was over 35. Only two of us even have “planned” stat groupings for our gear, the rest are in whatever weapon and armor drops looked good, with minimal or no jewelry. None of us know each others powers yet, and can barely figure out how to do combos with our own. Only one of us had his Elite skill yet. Four grueling hours and a couple dozen deaths (each) later we finished, and we are already discussing how we can improve our tactics. If we hadn’t been able to recover at Waypoints and even do quite a big of zerging from them, we would not have been able to finish, and at least 2, maybe 3 of my friends would never have been willing to try another dungeon. Getting through at least gave us hope that we can improve, and I am already applying some of the things I learned in that to my regular play.

TL:DR – Making existing dungeons harder is likely to lead to fewer people playing them, not more people resolving to improve their skills. People who don’t enjoy hard content for its own sake will just give up.

If the devs want to make a system where getting “almost the best stats” is easily obtainable for the majority of players, but the min-maxers still have the carrot of slightly better stats for a LOT more effort, then this is the way to do it. Marginal improvement at the very highest end for a lot of effort.

That seems to be the philosophy they have for the game overall, and it is probably a good one to keep more casual players competitive and thus involved with the game long term.

I think its a combination of several factors;

1. As Hippocampus said, there are people willing to exchange in-game money for XPs. When someone has an 80 who can collect a gold a day farming, its a fairly rational decision to spend several gold to powerlevel an alt by crafting, and dumping whatever they make at a loss. It was clearly a design decision by ANet to do this, so I doubt they’ll change it.

2. ANet also wants people who hate the TP to have “decent” gear, so there is a high drop rate of gear that is just fine for playing most of the game. While they may tweak this, I’d be surprised if they drop it enough to force people to buy from crafters. And if they did, more people would learn to craft, still keeping margins tight.

3. ANet wants to keep the supply of gold low in the game. They had some issues with this with a few early bugs, but its pretty clear that is their intent. So I think they consider it just fine if a crafter invests 50 silver each in 10 items, and sells eight of them for a few silver profit and loses a few silver on the other two, because you won’t make much more per hour then someone else who is out there killing stuff. They risk loss if they die and have to repair their armor, you risk loss if someone undercuts you. Someone really good at fighting, or marketing, has less risk, but its never zero. Remember GW2 is a fairly PvP focused game, this is market PvP.

Imani Hype.8235
I would keep an eye on the market and wait for its price to peak, then that’s when you sell.

And when you are done with that, wait for the price of your stocks to peak and sell them. But not before, or after. You can make a fortune on Wall Street!

Might not be a bad idea to offer to trade, if there is a different one you want, that way neither of you really risks price increases or decreases as they will probably track with each other.

As Kelgrim said, the price shown on the initial search page is no longer correct, with a recent patch (?) it started showing some other historical value. Until you click on that item to place a buy or sell order, it doesn’t update, though if you go BACK to the search page after clicking on it, that one item’s value is now correct.

Zambino.3061
More variety of content, more challenge, endgame. I’m not paid to develop videogames and come up with solutions, so it’s up to them to decide on what to do about these problems that are affecting the game’s longevity.

Given that the developers have a finite amount of resources, and as with any business project they would have limits on how long they could wait to start making money, what would you like to have seen less of on the game’s release in order to have more content, challenge and endgame?

I am curious, having only played a couple of other MMOs, one seriously, are there any MMO examples people can mention that at initial release had enough content to satisfy hardcore players for more than a month? For this purpose I define hardcore as anyone playing enough that it would qualify as a full time job, i.e. >30 hours/week.

AndrewWaltfeld.4621
Of course, who builds their homes on giant ice bergs! Crazy I Tell you.

Next thing you know someone will be building a giant pyramid city floating in space, which requires vaporization of precious metals to provide lift. Even more precious metals then they collect from transit system fees. And if you ask too many questions, well, there is a reason for the alarming lack of guard rails. . .

Hippocampus, one reason a crafter might buy a 3-plank rifle stock eventually is that its more convenient/quicker then buying the basic materials to make it. You will rarely go broke betting on the laziness of people, especially with imaginary money in a game.

Loc, I think the reason the devs put crafting in was for people who enjoy crafting. The XPs are so it doesn’t penalize the time you put in too badly. Given the high drop rates they put in the game for useful gear, completely comparable to what can be crafted, they clearly want people to be able to play through most content without ever having to use the TP if they don’t like it. That goal is directly contradictory to the goal of letting crafters make substantial money, which would require restricting equipment drops so people would have to go to the TP to get a majority of their gear. So it seems the devs favor players not interested in crafting (almost certainly the majority) over those interested in crafting, which is probably a sound business decision if you are marketing to fairly casual players.

Thus, while they might tweak drop rates here and there, I wouldn’t expect to ever be able to sell the majority of crafted stuff for a significant profit in this game. There will probably be some niches where it can be done (I’ve already found a few, not huge profits but something).

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Yes
4. Yes
5. Yes

Note that #2 is really three questions, I’d say yes to 2a and 2b but I’m less confident of 2c from what I’ve read on the forums. Then again my experience with game forums is that those who dislike something are more likely to come complain, those who are happy are busy playing the game.

yooms and Morphemas, what happens when you set a limit on market prices is that items that have more demand then that price get traded off market. I saw it happen in another game I was in, a few very high priced, hard to get items got done entirely by private trades.

In one sense, its a good thing if some players got a bunch of these legendary precursors through exploits early on, as they can now trickle out onto the market. If none had been generated that way, the supply would be even less. And I’d be surprised if the devs make them easier to get, since they are purely optional/cosmetic its hard to make an argument that anyone NEEDs them.

Playing for over two weeks now, and I have managed to get almost 8 hours of actual play time in (plus a few hours tinkering with the crafting/market system), one character, just dinged level 14. Already a better value then a movie, and I expect to definitely get my money’s worth as I approach 80 over the next year, especially since with my schedule I suspect they will add content faster then I can consume it.

I just thought a perspective from a casual player might be interesting to contribute.

As a note, there are two valid reasons in addition to being mathematically challenged that someone might list things at vendor+1 and “lose” money;

1. They are lazy/impatient, and happy to dump everything on the TP from wherever it dropped and not have to run to a vendor. Particularly if they just got a Bag Full message mid instance, and they already dumped their collectables. With 2 million players, that probably happens to hundreds every minute.

2. They value XPs or learning a crafting skill higher than money, and after they make a Widget of X, toss it up there to get rid of it.

Both of these rationales are, in fact, reasonable for a game where you don’t actually need money much, even for the best gear.

I’ve been in another game where some items were routinely sold on the market for less than vendor cost, and did it myself. And low level characters often stripped those sub-vendor priced items from the market and ran them to a vendor, but it was not considered an exploit even by the developers, since it was much easier to get money in that game. A maxed level character could get as much “cash” from 20 seconds of fighting as a lowbie could from a couple minutes of running back and forth, so it was used mainly to get starting cash for a new character.

The basic reason is that different people have different priorities for their time vs. in-game money. If you place a very high value on your time, and low value on the in-game money, perhaps because you have made a lot already or just don’t need that much stuff beyond what you already have, its easy to just post all the stuff you have collected or crafted in the process of leveling up your crafting skill on the market. Especially if you are “out in the field” and don’t want to pay to come back to somewhere with a vendor, since Waypoints aren’t free.

If, for example, you can kill 3 more critters in the time it would take you to run back to a vendor, the drops might be worth more than the handful of coppers you would save by getting the “full” price for your stuff. And many people would find it more fun then having a bit more cash.

In another MMO I was in, “very soon” meant within several months.

I suspect the small orders before large is intended, though, so that the casual player who drops off a few of an item gets processed before the marketer who buys or sells large stacks. They designed the game and diminishing returns so that you didn’t earn a lot of gold, or need it, and I doubt they want a marketer to be able to make money vastly faster then someone running around playing it as intended.

I’m almost positive from my experiments that the market processes small buy or sell orders before large ones, and I suspect it is working as intended. It is the equivalent of the “diminishing returns” found with mob farming, but for marketing.

Thus, the “casual” player who puts their 17 copper ore up after running around the starter zone sees it cleared in a few seconds, and goes on their way, happy. The “marketeer” who puts in 10 orders for max stacks of 250 each waits, making it more tedious to earn gold by flipping large stacks of fast traded items. This fits with the design philosophy of the game, that its hard to earn a lot of gold quickly, but you also don’t need a lot of gold to succeed in it.

A separate question, of course, is how it processes multiple buy/sell orders of the same size. Hopefully that would be FIFO.

jackpot.4503, I strongly suspect the devs put the crafting system into the game for the same reason they put their other systems into the game. So that people who want to play around with crafting because they enjoy it can do so, and won’t feel like they are sacrificing playing around with OTHER things because they will still earn XPs. If they had intended that people make a lot of gold crafting, they could fix that at any time by eliminating drops of gear, so you would have to buy crafted stuff from the TP, or learn to craft it yourself, neither of which is of interest to a lot of people. All the systems they have put in place, from Diminishing Returns on mob drops to how order stacks get processed on the TP with smallest first and largest last makes me think they want a game where (1) its very hard to earn a lot of gold quickly, and (2) you don’t need a lot of gold to do just fine at it, so #1 doesn’t matter much. Thus I think its going to be an uphill battle to get them to change anything to allow anyone to make gold more easily.

On your specific complaint, if the 15% trading fee was removed, what makes you think people wouldn’t start selling the Pearl Carver for a little under 3 gold? Your fundamental quarrel isn’t with the trading fee, its with other crafters willing to take a slight loss to mostly recoup their investment as they level Crafting and get XPs at the same time. That’s not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing, its how other people are behaving, regardless of what either of us think.

Rather than having a gear grind being the motivation for a guild to do raids, which I agree is a bad idea for the audience this game is aimed at, perhaps a more direct motivation would be high Influence rewards for the guild. Some thought would be needed by the developers to find ways that guild Influence Points would be a desirable commodity, but one possibility might be to allow it to exchange for certain components needed for things like Legendary weapon skins, PvP seige equipment, etc. That way those things could still be gotten solo, but a guild that runs “raids” would get an alternate path.

Other possibilities are allowing for construction some kind of Guild Hall instance which members could go into for roleplay. That opens up a lot of other rewards which could be offered for Influence, from cosmetic for decorating features to additional storage, perhaps keyed to individual members, and so on. That would be typical of what the developers have tried to do in other reward systems of the game, you don’t NEED a Hall to succeed in PvE or PvP, but a well designed one could be nice to show off and provides some flexibility for guild members. This would obviously be a more major design effort to add into the game, though perhaps easier if NCSoft swipes the Superbase ideas from the City of Heroes game they are already shutting down. . .