Guild Wars 2

From my perspective your problem with this is vastly larger than the problem itself (a notion that remains nothing more than an unsupported contention). I’d wager that very few if any would agree with you that this is a valid problem that warrants any dev time at all, much less whatever real time it would require to implement whatever fix suits you. Perhaps this is why the general responses have focused more on the validity of your issue rather than how to “make the situation better”.

Something else that makes the OP’s concept flawed, IMO is this:

Seller1 wants 950c for an item.
Seller2 wants 949c for an item.

OP wants to buy the item from Seller1 because he doesn’t want to “reward” the trivial undercutter.

In effect, the OP wants to reward the seller that’s the “greediest”. The fact that it’s 1c difference doesn’t degrade the notion that Seller2 is the more reasonable ‘vendor’.

Both sellers are out for money. One was just in line earlier and didn’t put their item up at a price that was attractive enough to move before someone else put their identical item up for less. Six of one, half dozen of the other. The net result is a buyer will save a copper, Seller1 will have to wait a tiny bit longer (unless their item plummets in value). This is what we in the real world term as “No Biggie”.

The devs have far more important and impactful things to work on (many of which have been on the burner for eons as it is); no need to waste time on trivialities.

There’s something wrong somewhere with the various “By <x>” dye display options.

Today I wanted to use my Abyss to dye a new piece of armor I acquired, only to find that it was missing from my “Rare” dyes set. I kinda know I have it, because there are currently other pieces of the same character’s armor dyed Abyss.

This was when the display was “By Set”. I changed it to “By Hue” and it showed up in the Gray group. I changed it to “By Material” and it showed up in the Natural Metallics group. Changed it back to “By Set” and the bottom group showed exactly two rows of rare dyes, and none were Abyss (it hasn’t been miscategorized in one of the other rarity groups, by the way).

However, something else (or related) is funky, because I counted all the dyes in the three display options and all showed exactly 251 dyes. I’m not about to crosscheck all 250+ dyes by hand, but it should be obvious that something’s amiss when you consider Abyss shows up in two lists and not in the third, yet all three have 251 entries. I’m left to assume that at least one dye is being pushed off/lost from each display setting, and maybe lots more—I have no idea how many dyes I’ve actually unlocked.

I dunno. I think you’ve got your numbers wrong, or I entirely missed this huge spike that instantly vanished (when did this spike occur, again?). From what I’ve seen they haven’t even broken 40s since patch, and that was only leftovers from pre-patch. A quick fall to ~17s (when I rebought some of what I sold a few days pre-patch), and maybe lower that I missed, then began to rise steadily to where they are now, around ~25s.

Regardless, it’s something that the gem store should prevent. It’s best for the Firebaall’s out there and the cust. service rep that has to spend time easily saved fixing such cases.

Seerstrange + Khairiya: Thanks for your description and vid. This may be academic now with no real change to the rewards being confirmed, but it’s still interesting to see how quickly these sorts of things can be done.

Hehe, Mesmer portals are bad enough. ;-)

Seerstrange: If you would, to satisfy my curiosity, describe your Rata Sum map completion circuit that you can complete in 10 min, including the time it takes to get through the initial starter event to kill the golem. The latter usually takes about 5-6 minutes alone from rollup to completion, as far as I remember, and I can’t imagine how you can do the completion circuit in a sum of just a few minutes. Maybe there’s a way to just skip the initial golem encounter I don’t know about. I’m also curious about how you can even do the circuit alone in 10m without speed buffs, since they’re not offered in Rata Sum like they are in the other starter cities (maybe you’re using some other buff?).

The prices of dyes will rebalance over time, so I would think it would be pretty dodgy of ANet to make the compensatory unid’d dyes account bound given the amount of lead time they’ll have had to mention it. Making those versions account bound and saying so up front might irritate some of the opportunists, but it would be 100% legit and respectfully transparent to the player base. Springing it on people—despite the “fact” that there are boatloads of folks trying to game the system for profits on this (what’s new there?)—would be a big slap in the face. “Ha ha ha, you fools! We gotcha!”

This is primarily an in-game thing, rather than a marketing thing, so I think it’s safe to assume by now that the dyes will be tradeable since ANet’s devs have been good about not willfully screwing people over with such bait and switch tactics so far.

IIRC, these used to be 25% off, 600g vs the now 640g… sigh

Glad I bought a load of new slots last time around. Saved me several hundred gems.

I don’t detect sarcasm in your reply. I detect hot air.

So, what items can you buy in the gem store that are P2W again? And what is it you’re winning that makes them so?

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kruhljak.2705:

DarkSpirit.7046:

Or better yet, actually introduce something in their gem store that is mathematically proven to be worth buying FOR ONCE!

Hehe, but all infinite gathering tools are mathematically proven to be worth buying. It’s just a question of whether you believe you’ll be playing (and gathering) long enough for it to pay off.

That is total BS. None of the infinite gathering tools are mathematically proven to be worth buying, quite the opposite. These people simply failed their elementary school math. They will take so many years to break even that most of them probably wouldn’t even be playing this game by then, much less mining consistently every day between then and now to break even.

Two things.

You have an issue with the facts behind how math works. Infinite tools cost X in-game gold. Those tools can, eventually, mine enough goods that after being sold, will turn a profit beyond the initial cost. Assuming no major changes to in-game economy or mechanics that would render it impossible. If you wish to continue to refute this simple fact, go right ahead.

The other item is that you are conflating the two common meanings of worth. You brought up the math in the context of worth so it would be assumed you’re talking about raw numbers. But then you qualify your statement of fact that they are not worth the price by assuming no one would ever use one long enough to return the profit. Which is a matter of pure speculation which is essentially the same as opinion…the other context of “worth.”

I spent in-game gold to buy my set of infinite tools because the convenience is worth it to me. My opinion. Your opinion differs, but it isn’t fact either way.

In either context your vigorous remarks are easily dismissed.

DarkSpirit.7046:

I am not even going to mention karma and the option to buy cheaper picks for mining the lesser ores.

No need. Infinite mining picks are convenience items. The high price, to me, is trivial against the total lack of concern about having to run around refilling tools or swapping them in an out to save a few copper per node. So, don’t bother mentioning such things, since I have no doubt the vast majority of people that bought these things did so for convenience and didn’t give eventual profit a second thought.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Kruhljak.2705:

Having said that, gem store items need to stay very close to purely cosmetic to avoid long term, potentially undesirable, ripples in the game economy. I’d wager most of the people that have bought infinite gathering items will never see any major payoff in terms of in-game profits. Instead, they’ll just get major payoffs in terms of convenience, which is the point. In which case, these items are working as intended.

Then they are paying too much for too little convenience as most of them do not even realize that WvW merchants also sell gathering tools and you can enter WvW where ever you are.

Irrelevant. Whether the price is high or not, the value of convenience is not set by you except for yourself and is entirely a matter of opinion. Perhaps you’re just cheap or poor in-game, I wouldn’t know. Perhaps you have some deep-seated reason not to pay for convenience items. Go ahead and run around doing all the things I never have to do again. I don’t mind. But take care telling others what the cost of convenience is as you have nothing but your own opinion on those matters, and there’s a well-known saying that covers that topic.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Besides, this thread is all about claiming that the watchwork pick is P2W because it returns more gold, in the form of sprockets, than you put into buying the pick itself. This is totally BS.

Sorry if I inadvertently derailed your thread, but I didn’t say a word about this new pick being P2W (or otherwise, for that matter). FYI, I don’t think this item is P2W. While others may think differently, as long as I can convert in-game gold to gems (ignoring ratio creep that makes the conversion highly impractical) and buy literally anything in the gem store, I look at the gem store as nothing more than a very expensive in-game vendor. Of course, there are lines that I’d prefer not be crossed out of concern for the balance between gem store and pure in-game pursuits, but this pick doesn’t cross any of them, in and of itself. Slippery slopes and last straws on camels remain to be seen, but I’m not really a follower of the Chicken Little principle.

DarkSpirit.7046:

Or better yet, actually introduce something in their gem store that is mathematically proven to be worth buying FOR ONCE!

Hehe, but all infinite gathering tools are mathematically proven to be worth buying. It’s just a question of whether you believe you’ll be playing (and gathering) long enough for it to pay off.

Having said that, gem store items need to stay very close to purely cosmetic to avoid long term, potentially undesirable, ripples in the game economy. I’d wager most of the people that have bought infinite gathering items will never see any major payoff in terms of in-game profits. Instead, they’ll just get major payoffs in terms of convenience, which is the point. In which case, these items are working as intended.

Scenario:

“New vendor added to the ruins of Lion’s Arch. He satisfies all your gathering tool needs, and in addition, he’s sealed a deal to be the sole outlet for the new Watchwork Infinite Mining Pick! Not like other infinite picks, no sirree! Due to its unique construction, it has the ability to magically extract sprockets from any ore node you mine! Amazing, no? Of course, this brand new technology comes with a steep price, but you’d expect nothing less for cutting edge machinery! 90G cash on the barrel and you walk away with it, and can whack nodes to your hearts content forever more!”

Ok, dubious advertising material aside, the gist is there.

Would those still claiming this pick is P2W consider THIS P2W despite the item being 100% accessible to all players via in-game currency?

As noted many times, anyone can generate gold, eventually, to buy this thing. Likewise, and all along, anyone could dish out real world cash to buy gems to convert to gold, to come into the game and buy it immediately.

Still P2W? Maybe looking at the gem store as just a really expensive in-game vendor could offer perspective.

A living world also implies mimicking what we know about how humans do things. Seeing as how LA is primarily a human location.

What do humans do after their town is demolished by a flood, hurricane, or tornado. Even after the tenth time?

Rebuild.

In the same place.

The idea that the populace would just abandon LA is preposterous and unbelievable IMO. Having a long term rebuilding process in place, with certain areas being focused on to be returned to usefulness, although preferably not to an identical state as before, would make sense and be interesting to observe along the way.

It’s not like the terrain of LA is uninhabitable, it’s just a mess. So, perhaps a rebuilding of key areas, and (at least for the foreseeable future) a wave of the hand to other areas leaving them to become wilderness, complete with mobs and such, would be an interesting approach.

Yep, I got one yesterday in a BL Chest. Not that the alternative booster it could have been is that big of a deal, but yeah, they should not be dropping when they’ve effectively been rendered a defunct pseudo-currency.

Karma boosters were removed with the Jan 21 Update, IIRC.

Mystic.5934:

daily has a chance to give keys… I assumed monthly does too.
in the past year, I’ve got the majority of keys I’ve used in that time from daily chests. a close second is map completion (I don’t do map completion on my alts very often)

At the moment, I’ve kept track of what bonus items I’ve gotten from the last 140 daily bonus chests. No BLKeys (Merchant Express has been the most common, btw). I know they used to show up, but I haven’t seen one in a loooooong time. If they’re still possible, as you imply, they’re too rare to be counted as any sort of useful source. Same goes for getting any in the field. They do drop as I’ve gotten 2 in the last 8 months. I think that’s about 10 billion to one odds per kill….

Good luck. Enemy mobs path (usually) and attack fine. Minions/summons from enemy mobs path (usually) and attack fine. Ranger pets path (usually) and attack fine.

The code, or relevant element, is there and working. Why do necro minions use something else, and why hasn’t the code relevant to this problem been adopted from any one of those other applications to necro minions since beta?

No excuse. None. Nada. Heading towards two years with no actual fix, while every other frickin’ mob in the game can path (usually) and attack without much issue.

At this point I feel like I’m coincidentally quoting ANet when I say for myself…

“Whatever.”

I agree with Donari. Never being entirely sure something that seems to be an essentially immutable fixture in the world won’t suddenly go poof or morph into something measurably different is exactly what a tumultuous “Living World” should imply. Much as with the characters in Game of Thrones. Where the vast majority of shows are locked into their pivotal characters until the actors bail out, GoT obliterates them from the face of the storyline based on that very storyline not on whether fans like a given character or not. And that makes the storyline (especially for those unfamiliar with it ahead of time) so much more engaging.

It also rewards long time players with “in my day” memories, and even for newcomers, it gives them something to reference…like an actual history. All good IMO.

For my part, this is the first LW I haven’t even bothered with. I’m entirely uninterested in being funneled into required repetition to get some dubious meta reward. Until now, they’ve provided those alternative things to do, most importantly to me, things I could do by myself most of the time (and given my odd schedule and often short/unstable play time windows, this is critical).

I really dislike this notion of LW—aka storyline—content devolving into annoying mega-raids. Unlike many others, I’m not quite desperate enough for content to just dance on the strings like their Marionette.

As the OP laid out, there are plenty of things that could have been offered to satisfy the meta for those that don’t have time to goof around with overflow problems, bugs that don’t award proper achievement credit, and/or having to “organize” with gaggles of random others.

Hopefully, this shoehorning of all players into your open world raid content stops here. LW should be story-focused and thus easily accessible to all players, primarily solo if that’s the path they want to take. Drop your raid bosses, dungeons and other stuff in as additional content for those that will enjoy it. My advice: take care with the player manipulation concept; it breeds resentment.

I’m just one player, but I’ll definitely be going elsewhere (as I’ve done mostly since this patch dropped) to spend my time and money if this sort of content becomes the main focal point of GW2.

Bottom line: souldbinding already unlocked BLCs is pointless. There’s no scenario I can think of (can anyone?) that would be exploitable making them account bound. Further, as far as I know, none of the items IN the chest are soulbound to the opener, so if there’s intent behind soulbinding rather than account-binding them, it’s beyond me.

Could be it’s just a result of other systems that deal with soulbound items, but either way it should be corrected as it serves no other purpose than to annoy people, even if just in unusual circumstances.

I’ve not seen this one, but I’ll bet it’s related to the knockback bug where you knockback a mob and it instantly teleports back to the spot it was knocked back from (i.e. right in front of you unless you’ve since moved). I reported that one weeks ago. Still happens every day.

There are non-glitch methods to get you under the world in many areas as well as the various odd glitches that achieve the same result. From all observations, the entire world has that watery realm beneath it.

Oh and, yes, the music in the vid was incredibly annoying. Muting is much, much better. Though this vid was just a quick-shot one, I wish people would just use in-game sounds in game vids.

…you guys at ANet are ever going to fix the disease that affects minions, making them clueless as to what their master is attacking much/most of the time?

Getting close to a year and a half after launch, bunches of major updates…and yet…nothing? My minions remain brain dead—even more than expected for things that are actually supposed to be dead.

I don’t recall reading anything from a dev that explains what’s so hard about:

I attack mob -> minions attack same mob.

Works for Ranger pets.

Works in reverse for mobs and whatever THEY summon (hello toxic hallucinations, for example).

To be blunt: What the hell’s the problem with minions which are essentially in the same boat?

Now, for those Necros that like minions and havent’ figured this out, I have a trick I employ to make mine move their kitten to attack an initial target:

Get near your target, but not near enough that your attack can hit it or within the mob’s aggro range. Then start attacking the target with your #1 skill (so you can repeat without any/significant cooldown). Your minions (usually after some brief durping; certain minions will durp more than others) will begin running off to attack the target, after which you can join in.

This works 100% of the time for me (with scepter and axe, and presumably would work with daggers; staff’s long range #1 skill grasping hand is generally not usable here), but obviously limits certain opening tactics you might want to use. Even so, better than them standing around gossiping while you do all the work without the help of those utility skills they’ve displaced.

Hope that trick serves to help out some of you annoyed MMs while we await the end of the univ…the patch that actually fixes this silly situation.

Not sure if it’s connected, but about two weeks ago I sent a bug report noting that after logging thousands of green salvages using normal basic kits (which is what the S-o-M was supposed to be emulating), that my return rate on sigils was almost exactly 5%—far less than the 20% it was supposed to be, and that they might want to look into it since the sample size was reasonable given the expected percentage. I broke the results down into 100 item blocks to help notice any unusual lumpiness and none of those 100 item block results came close to 20% individually; each came close to the same 5%.

Haven’t read the entire thread so I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned whether regular Basic kits have been modified like the S-o-M. Time to do a little re-testing.

This is why I suggested that the so-called “harder” parts (the champion walls, for instance) should be shunted off down a side path with, perhaps, unique achievements and the potential for unique rewards attached so IF there’s a sufficient zerg around they can tackle it, but all the rest of the story stuff around is still reasonably navigable by a solo player.

Let the intervening mobs scale as needed, but introduce some downscaling to correct it when the number of players in a given space has waned for a while. I’m not privvy to why this seems such an alien concept to the devs—seems entirely obvious to me—so I’m going to assume there are pitfalls I’m not aware of. Even so, getting around them seems a worthwhile job to tackle.

We have dungeons that force a 5-player limit that serve perfectly well as sites for “harder” content as the devs can upscale as they see fit knowing there will (usually) always be exactly 5 players facing off against their designs. Open world is too volatile for this sort of thing in its current state if the devs really want people to participate out of choice and not just when carrots are dangling before them.

Yes, wookiee has it right. These major events should be aware of one another and not overlap if it would create any measurable problems for any event involved.

On the topic of Scarlet’s invasions…is there ever enough people bothering to get past stage 1 anymore? The last several times I’ve been in or gone to a map that was being invaded I was pretty much alone, or so it seemed. I do play off hours (for NAmerica), though. I’ve been thinking the devs should consider things on the fly for some of this stuff and modify how these events work subjectively rather than objectively just laying down procedure and ignoring the reality of the player base. But again, I’m unsure if these still work at peak hours.

I don’t recall anyone saying the usual mindless zergfest approach was hard. Soloing is the part that’s hard, for what I think is the majority of players. Most of the comments regarding soloing isn’t about soloing by choice, but soloing out of necessity after the orgasmic rush to get achievements has passed.

The end result of “making it group-centric” is what happened after about 5 days: a precipitous dropoff in players (not necessarily the direct fault of being group-centric) resulting in a vastly more difficult/annoying time for those left still doing the content either by choice or by necessity (the fault of being primarily group-centric without effective scaling after the groups dwindle to trios, pairs, and lone wolves).

As for “forced group”ing—frankly, I prefer to make the decision to group/zerg or not on my own. Crafting what amounts to an entire zone with the mindset that people will need to group in order to get through without either requiring the high skill of a hardcore player or the patience of a lump of stone, is misguided once anyone looks at the actual nature of a given MMO player base (in a nutshell: they will do pretty much anything to get their toys, then scurry away to do whatever they normally do—which is usually the best loot producing routine they’ve found). Thus, you have content that is fine for the first few days, then a total mess for most people thereafter.

While there’s scaling, unless there has been no group significantly larger than yours around for a long time and/or they killed off the mobs rather than running through them, the enemies tend toward the overwhelming in many cases, both in numbers and power, forcing you to either run like a little girl and hope for the best, or to slog slowly through them (and that ignores the issue with hyperactive respawning, something that is, as far as I can see, not at all reactive to the number of players in an area).

For me, bottom line is that storyline content such as anything to do with the LS should be soloable by any character with a half-way decent build and a player with average skills. Set the forced grouping stuff and champion walls and whatever other stuff you want off to the side where anyone that wants to can get to it (and hell, tie exclusive achievements and rewards to them for all I care). That way more players can enjoy the parts they want. Whether that would see more people still playing the content or not is speculation, but I’d think so, and I’d wager that would be a better end result in the minds of the devs than what’s actually occurred (if their comments about wanting people to play content repeatedly because it’s rewarding and fun is sincere—and I see no reason to doubt that).

Hmm. Ok, so I drifted and rambled. I’m old…get off my lawn!

sigh

I assume there’s a good reason why the first run through doesn’t count.

Hahaha…j/k. No, I’m sure there’s no good reason at all…at least outside forced grinding for achievement points. I guess it’s really all the farmers that are going to finish this antitoxin thing, anyway. Clever design.

Maybe I’ll join the crowd that reads through Dulfy guides before even bothering to tackle new content.

At least she provides useful info rather than the frequent lies of omission we get in achievement blurbs. I’ve grown weary of the trial and error crap this LW content is requiring just to figure out something that should be clearly explained in-game.

Oh, and thanks to nagr for the reference link.

A group I was in today killed the Hybrid, but I received no credit for the Tower Hybrid Slayer achieve. Still says 0/1. Did get credit for the Antitoxin injection achieve (this was the first time) so I obviously got through the instance properly which requires killing the hybrid.

Is this a bug or is there some unspoken trick to getting credit for something I actually already did?

Logging in/out did nothing?

The gemstore armor skins are one-use aesthetic items. That is, they can be used one time each on a particular piece of armor (of the correct “weight”: light, medium, heavy, depending on the skin in question).

They do not change your stats, they just update the look of the armor piece.

If you want to use it on armor prior to your intended “keeper” set, you can carry over the new skin through use of transmutation stones. Bear in mind that once your armor is at L80, you must use Transmutation Crystals, which must be acquired from the gemstore, or if you’re lucky, you can get them as a bonus to your Daily completion award or from Black Lion chests.

Can someone with some knowledge of the subject explain/describe why we only have a maximum of 4 dye channels available?

It would be so much nicer, in terms of self-expression/artistic freedom to be able to have many more, so we can dye the details as we see fit, add/create highlights, increase visual depth, mimic color gradients, etc. and so forth.

Is it, perhaps, an intentional limitation to avoid players running around looking like clowns or rainbow ponies? Cuz, you know there’d be plenty. I’d just love to be able to tint the metallic details gold or silver, my buttons white, or whatever, my cuffs a shade darker than the sleeves, create a nice color gradient from blue to green on my coat, etc.

The tooltip (or some associated thing) is definitely buggy. I’ve encountered a number of perturbations on the soul/account-binding issue where items do not reflect the proper status. It can also get wonky when transmutation or skin application is involved. It’s not consistent (or not consistent generally), so it’s often difficult to know what’s what at any given time without trying to equip the items.

Solomon Darkfury.3729:

It better not come back… I don’t mind if they offer new weapons but in no way shape or form should the old ones come back… They should be limited edition to be owned by the priviledged few who were there for the original event and busted their tails to get it…

If the skin were bound on acquisition from the MK Chest, you’d have a case. As it stands, it’s no more special than the amount of gold you’d have to dump onto the TP for one.

Meh. I prefer it the way it is. Dead weight is irrelevant unless it can be shown that it materially reduces the function of the TP.

I routinely put up items fairly significantly higher than current sell levels knowing they have a tendency to grind up to that level over time. I fire and forget and reap the benefits later on. Sometimes that may take a few weeks, but I don’t see it hurting anyone.

Same here, since the Teq patch; never before.

One thing that’s consistent for me is that when I go to a scout and listen to their info, when I come out, I’ve lost about 80% of the game sounds. Not sure it happens everywhere, but I was doing the Boss Week achieves, and the relevant zones were ones I hadn’t been to very much, so I was visiting all the scouts. Each time, same thing.

I have the notion that it’s been happening in other cases, but can’t think of any at the moment. Just thought it was entirely random until today.

The chests aren’t really the problem, as I see it, it was the change to near absolute lack of keys as drops. It pushes people to farm the personal story with temp characters (which is hardly desired), or people to buy them with gems and get royally kitten ed off at the tiny chances for anything most people consider good.

IMO, they should just change the drop rate of keys back to something rare (and actually rare, not just called rare), but still common enough that a regular player can actually remember the last time they found one.

But as is always mentioned time and again in these sorts of thread, they will never make a change as long as people continue to buy them and those who make assessments behind the scenes find the revenue outweighs the bad vibes (and whatever actions follow from them) the whole routine generates from the player base.

Oddly enough, that very shortcut was shown—in passing—by one of the devs in a Twitch live stream not too long ago. I’d found out about it quite a while ago via a YTube vid, but I sorta thought it would be something the devs wouldn’t want you to do (i.e. an oversight).

Ah, so that makes sense. The supply jacked up and screwed the value.

As for limited minis not being a good investment, I disagree. I think they are even if they aren’t bound. There will always be a steady, if small, flow of new players that want to go the mini-collector route (not just for the title), and will have an eye on these sorts of minis. Eventually, if there’s no new supply injected, they will become more and more rare on the TP with more and more being locked up in collectors’ banks.

The time frame is the sticky part. Most people don’t want to sit on things, especially things they’ve dumped a fair portion of their capital into, for very long. So, again, it seems as though it will depend on the flow of new collectors.

Right now, the low sells are actually below the average expected cost in bets that was needed to acquire it (which is 28.41G). This is really weird for an exotic, limited edition anything.

But what I find even more strange is that the Yellow Moa, a mini that’s available to anyone with a bit of patience and about 30G, right now, is selling for more. Sell volume dropped from ~50 to ~ 20 in less than 24hrs over Sep3-4. Could be some manipulation/investing going on there, but regardless, the Helmed one seems inordinately low for what its presumable rarity is.

If I had the cajones, I’d be tempted to just buy out the current stock of Helmed Moas to see what happens.

They said the Helmed Moa would no longer be available after the initial event, and the Yellow Moa would replace it. However, the wording used (I don’t recall exactly, and one quote isn’t going to mean anything, as they’ve re-worded claims made in the past) remains open to the possibility of it returning during any future Dragon Bashes, and once again being replaced by the Yellow (or perhaps a Puce one) each time once the event concludes that season.

The price of BL Keys will be predicated almost entirely on the rare chances of the Good Stuff™ such as skins and permanent use items. The rest are essentially boobie prizes, albeit arguably useful ones in most cases. On the other hand, when one considers what you’d end up with by spending $5 a day on lottery tickets (i.e. a minor workout tearing up and throwing worthless tickets)…it’s not entirely unfair, and a lot of people do that without batting any eye.

Now, when you find a BL Key out in the wild, at the odds equivalent to scoring a 100,000:1 shot at the race track it should end up being something really momentous. But it isn’t. I’ve found 1 BL Key in the last couple months, and I play every day. Aside from the brief, “OMG! WTF!” of actually seeing one show up, I knew when I used it it’d be a suitably contrary “Meh!” moment. And I was right. Again.

Having said all that jibber-jabber, look on the bright side: you can farm up keys and open chests for a grand total of $0, if you care to. Granted, all that time spent still exchanges in-game gains in open world play for a single key, but the option is there, which is better than I can say for similar situations in other MMOs.

You can still get the gemstore item along with the rest. I’ve gotten a couple of them since the initial Luck patch. One was a BL Kit, so they definitely haven’t removed them from the RNG list (yet).

Yep, as of yesterday, I’ve been experiencing the same random disconnects and/or severe lag spikes (mostly the former). A fellow guildie out of California (same as me) claimed the same issues, while others online at the same time from other locations noted they were having no issues. May or may not mean anything, but worth mentioning.

This is probably the most annoying thing in the game right now, for me, since the option was added to remove right-click select.

A large number of non-attack skills are erroneously triggering an autoATTACK response just because the autoTARGET option is checked in the options.

This causes you to attack the nearest target if you’re wielding a ranged weapon (or melee weapon, if within melee range). In most cases this ends up being the opposite of what you’d like/logically expect to happen. When I invoke Retreat, I don’t want to attack a nearby moa that will cause me to slow down. When I Drop Stimulant, I don’t really want to drop a bandage in a futile attempt to attack a nearby mob. I don’t want my Ranger pet racing off to attack something without being told to do so by me. I don’t want my Necro minions to begin attacking the nearest target, much less aggro things while I’m still in the process of conjuring up the rest of my mini-army. Etc. Etc….

I prefer to have autotargeting on. It’s useful and serves a purpose. I also prefer to be the one that decides when (and what) to attack.

Here’s a bug/issue that I didn’t see above:

Wall of Reflection doesn’t reflect (or even block) bottles thrown by Skritt Lobbers. Unsure if this also applies to gears thrown by Gear Lobbers or other varieties similar to them.

When using the “bags hidden” option to display our inventory, I’d like to see the background and borders of cells that are part of invisible/safe/etc. bags to be shaded some special color apart from the generic brown background.

When we want to know, shaded cells would tell us instantly and conveniently which are “protected” and which aren’t, without having to manually toggle the display layout.

I expect this to be ready for the next patch update. Chop chop!

Yes, yes…me too. I’ve been sorely disappointed with my current Mystic Kit. I haven’t seen a SINGLE ecto in my last 18 salvages (all L78+ rares). I gave up for a while, then decided to try again with a Master’s, and though so far my return is a bit less than the supposed average it’s close and obviously is working better than the Mystic which I bothered to spend actual time and resources to create. Simple observation would imply there’s something funky with Mystic kits.

As for kneejerking with limited samples, let’s put it this way, in my prior logs of rare salvages, I never went more than 4 without at least one popping an ecto. I decided to make a mystic kit, and IMMEDITATELY went to zero until I went back to Master’s. Small sample, sure. Anecdotal, sure. For me, the proof is obvious, even though it could theoretically have been nothing more than highly unlikely coincidental bad luck. If I weren’t thinking I’d just be screwing myself over, I’d let the other 232 Mystic charges have their chances and see how it shakes out, but…nah.

Perhaps someone with more disposable income could do it FOR SCIENCE!

I’ve noticed the lack of ghostliness. I chalked it up to my having to downgrade my gfx settings to practically rock bottom to forestall the inevitable out of mem crashes re-introduced by the Queen’s Jubilee patch.

That, along with people rezzing by jumping up and down like they’re punching the downed target’s chest (which is actually more believable than rubbing their butts) and everyone standing around with their weapons hanging out (not a euphemism).

If you’ve had to reduce your gfx settings to relatively low settings (or even any particular setting), that may be the reason.