I think this sort of thing has just changed over time. It’s a problem with mmos in general. Mmos used to be more group oriented and people would socialize but there was an increasing demand for soloable content by players. Now the majority of mmos are largely soloable. What I like about GW2 is that it gets people playing together, even if they aren’t grouped, as opposed to all other mmos where people play solo, compete for everything and are hostile to each other.
I read this as gamers want their games to be more like games. Groups take all the challenge out of the game, and content that is balanced for groups is often unrealistic to do solo. When you fight in a group, gameplay tends to degenerate into mindless zerging, because nothing more is required.
To answer the OP, it’s not that gamers aren’t sociable. It’s that gamers prefer to play the game. When they want to chat with their friends, they go to Facebook. What I want to know is why so many people seem to treat games as a social platform. (And by the same token, I’d also like to hear why Anet thinks gamers want to go to Facebook or Twitter to read game announcements.)
Easy enough to see in Diablo 3. Almost no black market gold sellers. One thing you left out of your analysis is that, if selling gold is allowed, it opens up the entire player base to provide supply. Like with narcotics IRL, the only reason the black market is lucrative is because it’s the black market, it’s officially disallowed so most people won’t engage in it so supply is short. In actuality, black market gold represents a tiny percentage of the amount of gold in the system. So open up the rest of the system, flood the supply of gold available for RMT, and it pretty much destroys the black market overnight. It also helps to stabilize the economy since RMT becomes a permanent part of the system rather than a cat-and-mouse game like we have now, where suddenly banning thousands of farmers causes prices to skyrocket.
Crafting in most MMOs is just another progress bar to max out. There are so many people who pursue crafting as a matter of completionism that the crafting economy works backwards — raw materials command a premium and the finished product is driven down to vendor price. And for the crafters it’s basically a command economy, they have to keep producing stuff that nobody wants in order to level up. It’s not their choice to make worthless crap, the game forces them to do it.
In most cases the quality of the item doesn’t matter, the supply of items (every crafter) outstrips the demand several times over. There has to be a fundamental change in the way crafting systems are implemented for them to work the way people expect. For one thing, from an economic standpoint it’s a huge error to allow every player to take on every crafting profession by themselves. In GW2, you can accomplish that with 4 characters and still have room left over with your basic number of slots. How can you have a healthy crafting economy when people are encouraged to do everything themselves and not trade?
A little logic here… if Anet charged the average price, then by definition the average would never change.
There is clearly some goal in terms of sales volume that they want to track (what precisely the goal is, can’t quite say, but the goal is not to maintain the average). When sales are high (over goal), they will bump up the price to extract higher margins and prevent a glut of gems. When sales are low (under goal), they will lower the price to attact more buyers.
The average just tells you what the trend is when compared to the current price. It might go up or down, it might be moving slowly or quickly.
In preparation for the announced friends trial, I would like to invite someone who lives far away from me. They’ve expressed interest in the trial but there doesn’t seem to be a download page for it. I know it’s early, but it’s also a big download, so if possible we’d like to get started on it.
If nothing official is available, there’s probably a torrent out there for it, does Anet have a problem with people using it to distribute the client?
I sat back and thought about this idea for a bit.
At the end of the day, I decided that I like it. When you go to a real life auction the auctioneer sets the bid increments, Bidders can try to cut the increment by half or another amount but it is left to the auctioneer to accept their bid or not.
An auction house or trading house could very well have a minimum increment based on a percent of the original set price. This would stop the situation that an item is listed for, as an example, 1000g and then someone comes along and posts an item for 999.99g. In this situation, the second person posting an item is, effectively, getting 1000g for the item but due to the ruleset of the trading post their item will be sold first.
That isn’t ‘supply and demand’ in a market place.
You’re talking about an auction house, which the TP is not. An auction house has those rules because they don’t want to stand there for an hour processing bids just so that the total price goes up by $1. For them it’s a matter of efficiency.
The TP has more in common with electronic stock trading, where buy/sell orders differ by fractions of a cent per share.
Undercutting is not an issue. If the difference between your item selling and not selling is because you’re being undercut by 1c, your price is already higher than equilibrium. If you feel that undercutting by 1c is dirty, then you can undercut by 10c.
If the lowest price for an item is 50c and there are 100,000 units available, then in actuality that price is a bit high and aren’t selling as quickly as they could be. So you will find some people putting up blocks at 49c/unit which sell more or less instantly. If enough people would rather take 49c than wait for 50c, then 49c becomes the new lowest price. Let’s say at this price the inventory level hovers at 50,000. Repeat until equilibrium is reached. Undercutting is a vital tool for finding the correct market price. If you don’t like to wait in line for the ask price that everyone else is in line for, then you should be undercutting them as well.
What you’re suggesting though is called price-fixing, and is harmful to the marketplace. Though IRL price-fixing is illegal, a lot of industries get away with it, which is why certain items are always the same price regardless of make or quality, and prices never go down even when costs do.
(edited by Leablo.2651)
Seems stuck at 97%, launcher is just sitting there not doing anything.
EDIT: Okay, forced restart and it is fine. WTF.
I made a simple request for a member to represent us, as it is a requirement to be in the guild which everyone agrees to before joining. I get a whisper back with "Listen I don’t know who the ____ this is, but I’ve been asked this question every day for a ____ing week, enough already. kitten "
Me: “Excuse me? I’m sorry if I messaged you previously about this, it’s just that there’s no way for me to tell who I already talked about without a note feature and I just go down the list and send the same message to anybody not representing. It’s a guild rule you know, as well as respect and I don’t think it’s wise to talk to your guild leader that way – or any player for that matter.”
“LOL Like I give a ____! I’m in plenty of other guilds, go ahead and kick me, see if I give a s___! Hahahahahaahahahah”
It’s as if nobody cares about guilds. They are just things that come and go and don’t have any value (especially since nearly every guild now has max upgrades unlocked) and can just be replaced in seconds.
Correct, and this is always how fringe members have felt, in every guild you’ve ever run. Only before, they would just find a better guild and mysteriously quit from yours (oh right, btw that is what happened all those times). Now, they don’t need to do that, they can switch guilds as they please and if you don’t like it, they lose nothing because they’re not repping you anyway but you lose headcount for whatever that’s worth. More power to the individual.
A better question to ask is, why did you invite him in the first place? Or, does he have a reason to give a kitten about staying in your guild?
Random recruit is random.
Yes, <5 kb/s. I have to wonder if Anet is using BitTorrent protocol to distribute the data, and if so whether it might help to open BT ports on the router? Do let us know…
Not that I disagree with any suggestions here, but sometimes you just have to appreciate cheesy/badly acted dialogue for what it is. The most memorable VO from GW1 for me is in the Prophecies mission after you save the Chosen from the spiders. You get this really corny dialog like:
PC: “We have you surrounded. You have FIVE seconds to explain yourself.”
party gets surrounded by enemies
Evennia: “It looks like YOU’RE the one who’s surrounded.”
PC: “What are you going to do us?!”
And that last line in the female VO is just… classic. The way she is instantly cowed by the tables being turned just after she finished lording her victory over Evennia. I try to imitate her IRL whenever the opportunity arises. I would not change that VO for anything.
Let me first say that this all-fours running is a horrible retcon. Charr did not run on all fours in GW1. Beyond that, having a well-dressed Charr scholar dragging his fine robes on the floor just looks ridiculous. It also (perhaps as intended) gives them a more beastly appearance, but which is not consistent with the way they are presented in the game as intelligent, thoughtful creatures.
Finally, the all-fours animation is only used outside of combat, so the animation assets for bipedal running are already in the game as seen when running in combat. So I don’t think I’m asking for too much here. Just give us an option not to use the all-fours animation.
I found it cheaper to just buy a second account and use it to store tradable items.
PLUS, I get the option of mailing items to myself when ever I want.
GW1 pro knows how to do it.
There’s a reason for taxes IRL too. Most people don’t like to pay it though. But unlike RL, our physical well-being doesn’t depend on paying Tyria tax. We get no benefit from it (the waypoints will always be there regardless of whether we pay or not). For example, we also pay a tax on the TP, but we actually get a benefit from it — namely, we actually get more money from selling to other people than by selling to a vendor. And it’s effective as a gold sink because all that money is already existing, whereas selling to a vendor creates money in the system. The TP tax is an example of a good gold sink that is correctly implemented. The waypoint tax is a poorly implemented gold sink that only exists to blatantly drain your wealth, and that’s why everyone hates it. Another form of implementing this is to charge you an amount of money every day, or every time you log in. Yes, that would have a “purpose” too, but it doesn’t make it any less stupid. Like the waypoints, they would be unavoidable taxes that you have to pay as a penalty for playing the game.
They should fix the need to “exploit”.
Give everyone a Town Portal skill that can take them to any of the major cities. Eliminate the two-way travel cost.
When fighting I prefer to use the double-tap for dodging.
However, it has no use outside of combat, and it’s already happened once that, as I was positioning myself for a jump to reach a vista, my tapping the movement keys resulted in me catapulting off a cliff.
Can you please make an option so that the double-tap is only active when the character is in combat?
What is this? I open my BLTC window and this is displayed in nearly-unreadable black-on-almost-black text. Refreshing the window does nothing. Logging the character does nothing. Gonna try restarting the client now…
LOL guys. A secondary profession? Like in Final Fantasy or Lineage?
Surely, SURELY you guys meant a secondary profession like in GUILD WARS 1. Thanks.
1. Go to Brisban Wildlands, near Koga Ruins.
2. Go to the arboreal husk as required in “Return the arboreal spirit to its husk, and drive away the hylek”.
I am getting disconnected whenever I am near the husk. Either the game lags and silently drops the connection until a timeout occurs, or I receive a “network error” dialog.
At this point, blocking server transfers would do more harm than good. The existing imbalance would become permanent. Even after the fact, as soon as one server establishes dominance, people might find it worthwhile to pay a one-time fee to transfer to it, and stay there.
For this system to even work, you first have to ensure that people have a good enough reason to stay where they are, and to stay spread out as evenly as possible. Or at least to the degree that it would not be worth it to pay for even a single transfer.
As long as the system promotes the creation of a single super-server, locking transfers accomplishes nothing except to lock which server that is.