Guild Wars 2

Saulius.8430:

easy for database programmers – keyword ‘unique’ is self explanatory

If you defined something as UNIQUE and you have two of them, you messed up son.

panzer.6034:

When i saw the sclerite pack i was blown away by how sweet it was until i realized that everyone is going to have it. While the RNG weapon drop scheme is complete garbage, IMO, i’d like to some of the super awesome items have a little prestige because they are hard to get, whether that means completing harder content or gathering rare mats.

> got free item within hours of patch
> hard to get

My sides.

Gilosean.3805:

Honestly, filesize and storage space shouldn’t be an issue unless the game is coded weirdly on the back end. Which could well be, but it’s just odd. If they’re that worried about it, just charge a lot for it, or maybe make bank slots more expensive after the X number or something.

I don’t think it’s a technical limitation necessarily. Every game I know of has some upper limit on total inventory space, even offline games where the dev doesn’t have to worry about file sizes. IMO this is more a discussion on design and whether inventory limits serve a real purpose or whether it’s just a habitual trope inherited from decades of RPG experience.

Sorry kid, your mom is staying kidnapped.

Not shown: they also have siege weapons.

This is the bandit camp in Kessex Hills.

I do find the expectation to play on a daily basis a little demanding, and would prefer that they extend the rotation and scale the requirement/reward so that people can do it on their own schedule.

Dailies are ostensibly supposed to be small rewards for small, frequent play, but that’s not the case on most days. Getting a daily done usually takes at least an hour and that’s if you’re actually focusing (on most days you have to focus at least a little). Anet should rethink their daily approach: it should either be much faster so it can be obtained casually, or the rewards should be better so that it’s actually worth investing the time. They need to decide whether dailies are for casuals or core players. As it stands right now, I find the requirement to be more hardcore but the reward to be casual, and that is the worst possible outcome. The fact is that you get a better reward from browsing dragon timer and dropping in on a boss for 10 minutes than you do from completing the daily. There’s clearly an imbalance of risk/reward.

Converting to or adding a weekly might help balance what they want players to do for and get from these achievements.

Keta.9601:

My personal opinion is that stuns in any way shape or form are a bad thing when applied to any human player for any reason. Taking away peoples ability to play their toon annoys them.

Yes, this. Stun, knockdown, etc. are mechanics that translate into blocking player input. To a lesser degree it’s also true of effects like immobilize or daze, which block a specific portion of player input. It is telling that in every RPG that has such effects, the big bosses are immune to them. GW2 is no exception with Defiant. Therefore at some level, it seems all game designers acknowledge that this is a very cheese-prone mechanic which is why you have artificial limits on its use against bosses. Why not just do away with them entirely? This type of effect is another one of those RPG tropes that needs to just go away and die.

Wow, this is a stupid amount of effort for a level 10 quest. Just sayin.

The heart NPC mails will max out at 15 in your inbox, but the extras ones don’t get queued. Instead the oldest ones get deleted with the rewards still attached to them. No warning about this or anything.

Nick.6972:

Wouldn’t you love to play extremely hard elite 12 player dungeon which would require 2-3+ hours to complete , which would require you to be skilled, a good player, and require immense teamplay, strategies and preparation?

To spice things up, say, this dungeon would be only open for one time in a week and to enter you would have to pay 5G.
And no waypoints/checkpoints and armor repair.

Personally, I’d love this, I’d even pay arena net for a DLC including this.

As for the rewards, I wouldn’t personally care all that much, perhaps an end chest.

/*********************************************
The question is, why not?

> thinks game is too easy
> asks for more pve

lel

You want a weekly instance that is a big gold sink with little reward, can be played for hours at a time, has no waypoints, and requires a lot of skill, teamwork, strategy, and preparation? Good news, the game launched with WvW.

A challenge that requires 2-3 hours to play is just artificially gated and is necessarily a grind. A challenging boss can either wipe your group in 5 min or he never will. PvE is PvE.

CharrGirl.7896:

If you noticed, females always get more revealing stuff. I guess it reflects real life fashion to a degree. I never really saw any guys with very short pants outside.

It was called the 70s, and many difficult lessons must be learned on the path to civilization.

Flaps are retro.

jenasaykwa.8327:

No one would wear something like that.

Lara would, and… is that a thigh holster?

It’s worth noting that the ones that are still left no longer have any icons to show them. You have to look for them by their nameplate.

Ursan.7846:

What other non-sub MMO comes out with this much free content?

Non-sub wasn’t one of my stipulations, nor should it really be since subs and stores accomplish the same thing for the companies. You’ve a strawman. And still the answer is GW1.

Even GW1 pales in comparison to what we got. In Prophecies within the first 7 months, I believe we got…

Halloween
Wintersday
Titan Quest
Sorrow’s Furnace

Firstly, we just started month 9 in GW2, and Dec is month 8 for GW1. The 7 month-mark is not in your comparison or mine. And you’ve completely ignored my point which is that Factions progress is now at 8/12 (67%) completion at this relative juncture, whereas according to Anet GW2 is currently 0% of the way to an expansion-magnitude update.

And Wintersday/Halloween/SF is far smaller in scale compared to GW2’s Wintersday/Halloween/Fractal updates. (GW1’s first Wintersday was a few quests going through maps that already existed. GW2’s Wintersday was a jumping puzzle, a dungeon, and 2 minigames. Completely new areas.)

New areas don’t imply more content and it’s exactly due to this illusory thinking that people just don’t “get” why so many GW1 players consider it to be the superior game. But to illustrate the first part of that sentence I give you Southsun Cove, an entire zone of nothing. Content is calculated by play time, and divided by a subjective factor of repetition (grind). Wintersday’s dungeon for example was a half-hour instance that you were forced to repeat daily for a week. So for me, it was 30 minutes of content + grinding because I found the instance to be quite boring, and out of it you had to work hard to get only a limited number of reward minis. Fractals is probably the best and only example of improved content in GW2 – 9 different mini dungeons with challenging and varied gameplay, several solid hours of legitimate gameplay experience, and the grind gives you decent rewards. So it has a pretty good content:grind ratio. Whereas Southsun Cove basically has no content and only grind. The rest of GW2, outside of dungeons and including the post-release additions, tends more toward the grind.

Let’s make a detailed comparison.

Here are significant content updates in the first 8 months of GW1 (not counting end of April, May-Dec2005):

• Introduction of FoW quests (May) – permanent
• New FoW and various world quests (June) – permanent
• Sorrow’s Furnace (September) – permanent
• Titan quests (September) – permanent
• Wintersday quests (December) – seasonal
• And all of the above are character-based activities, each earns and is eligible to receive their own rewards
• Halloween – I’m not even counting this because early Halloweens had no content
• On release – varied maps with highly customized terrain and unique quests, all content designed specific to that zone

And 8 months for GW2 (not counting end of Aug, Sep2012-Mar2013):

• Halloween (October) – seasonal
• Southsun Cove – permanent zone with no content to speak of
• Fractals (November) – permanent
• Wintersday instances (December) – seasonal
• Flame and Frost chapters 1-3 – temporary
• And all of the above are mostly or entirely account-based activities, with shared rewards and except for Fractals have little replay value
• SAB was added on the last day of March and falls more into April for all intents
• On release – lazily designed heart quests copy/pasted throughout each map, each map copy/pasted rectangle with flat, wide open terrain, change the level of mobs and that is what passes for “more complete” content in GW2

To summarize: GW1 had 5 major content additions, 4 of which represent permanent expansion of the game. GW2 had 6 major content additions, 1 of which permanently expanded the game. This is what I mean by illusory content – most of it is in your head, because it’s certainly not in the game. In terms of actual, non-grinding play time accrued/accruable by a player for each of these additions however, the GW1 quests probably far outrank everything in GW2 except fractals, for which the dungeon quests are on par. We can go back and forth all day about which block of updates might subjectively have “more” content than the other, but in the context of my original post I see no head-and-shoulders winner here, and unless Anet has a big, expansion-magnitude surprise coming in the next 4 months, the development of Factions will have clearly outpaced whatever else GW2 is going to release, despite GW2’s revenue seeming to far outstrip that of GW1. If they are using that extra money for something, then we either haven’t seen it yet, or if we have, then I rest my case.

low quality… nobody wants… no demand… inferior… selling for vendor price

That’s a good train of logic there, which brings us to the conclusion:

Working as intended.

To answer the question: no, you cannot buy gems through Anet’s website. At one point in the beta they did have a web-accessible version of the gem store, but it didn’t really work and was taken down prior to launch. It might return at some point when Anet decides to actually get BLTC working out-of-game.

Ursan.7846:

They aren’t coming out with tons of new content?

They have been pushing out tons of new additions to this game since launch, all for free, if you haven’t noticed.

Let’s make sure we are using the same “ton”. What we’ve seen thus far in terms of expansion content is Fractals, maybe guild missions if you are in to that, holiday festivals, and a few other talking points. I would note that what we’ve seen in terms of free updates is on par with the rate of free additions that we saw in Prophecies (Sorrow’s Furnace, Titan quests, etc) or for that matter any active MMO. This is not what I’d call “tons” of new content.

But in addition to all of that, at GW1’s 1-year mark we had Factions which was basically a whole new game’s worth of content. That is what I mean by “tons”. The free updates to GW2 are nowhere near that, and Anet has said they aren’t even working on one. It’s 4 months to the anniversary.

jazzllanna.1278:

You have to remember though if people are not giving them money they have no money to pay their staff or pay for a building or anything business related.. so if everything you wanted in the game was easy to get with gold then no one would use money. Cannot have the game without them making real life money to pay people making content and things for you to enjoy in the game.

Or… they could make paid expansions with tons of new content, which they aren’t doing now only because they’re earning so much money from the gem store for doing practically nothing. Money ruins art, every time.

I agree with kicking the guardian, firstly because he lied to get into the group, and secondly just because you got through an easy fractal without his help doesn’t mean it wouldn’t have been a huge risk to take him into the next one.

I think if someone is being an elitist jerk, they can be kicked for that if it is bothering the other people but in this case not the way it was done. The group leader was too interested in punishing the guy than simply getting rid of an unconstructive team member ASAP. If he wanted to kick he should have done it right then and not waited for the boss. I have seen elitist types before and they can be a risk – in one case he had opened the instance, and was having a bad time of it – the group didn’t really care, but he kept making excuses for why he got downed, and after getting one-shotted a few times at the beginning of the cliffside fractal he just rage quit and we got booted out. Unfortunately there was nothing we could have done in that case, but if you can, get rid of these players before they decide to bail in the middle of a boss just because they can’t handle not being the best player in the group.

The last example is the only one I really disagree with. You had already taken him that far and honestly Jade Maw doesn’t require 5 people anyway, you could have easily started without him. Unless the group had communicated that they did not like his constant switching and he was doing it anyway, there was no justification to kick him especially at that point in the run.

In my experience, I’ve only ever requested/agreed to two kicks (other than dc/afk problems) and in both cases it was because they were leechers, just following behind the group and letting us do all the work.

All I do is pugs, and I have never been kicked, though I have seen groups that were kick-happy. (I silently blocked them after the run, so as not to group with them again.) And what’s funny in my observation is that, though the worst player might get kicked, it’s usually the second-worst player that is most insistent on doing the kick. I don’t think it’s just a matter of patience, I think inferiority complex has something to do with it and that shows in the way so many kick stories involve “punishing” the kicked player by denying them the reward from a boss kill (which doesn’t really make sense if the group was able to make the kill). It seems like an ego trip for these people, to make themselves feel better for their own poor performance.

Senri.6308:

So you guys are arguing about the wiki, but not showing any proof of the information being wrong.

7 months ago

The way it sounded to me in one of JS’s comments is that the difference in gold between buy and sell prices is effectively destroyed; it takes 15% of the gold in either direction (double taxation).

Firebaall.5127:

We should all resolve to buy the $10 option (multiple times), to arrive at the amount you intended to purchase.

Worst boycott ever.

Mother’s Day has been denounced by its own founder for its rampant commercialization. She spent the rest of her life trying to undo it. Just saying ’cause you brought it up.

Firebaall.5127:

With the higher option, we are doing nothing but saving Anet the transaction fees of multiple lower denomination purchases.

Using Paypal fees as guidance, you would be saving Anet about $3 over the $100. If that’s your justification you’d be entitled to a 3% gem bonus.

NevirSayDie.6235:

Having half of your heal also affect allies is undeniably a buff.

I doubt the change includes that. Has anyone been able to test?

Joeroenho.4231:

Just to be sure: you do realize you can use the BTC interface to buy and sell stuff from anywhere in the world, right? You only need to go to an actual trader if you want to pick up the stuff from the pick-up tab. Stopping by the trader once a session should be enough on most days.

A Black Lion merchant is a merchant, not a trader.

Ayrilana.1396:

Leablo.2651:

Ayrilana.1396:

Why play an MMO if you don’t like to play with people?

This is a non-argument.

Because you like to play against other people.
Because you like trading with other people.
Because you like watching other people.

In most MMOs, you spend most of the time doing activities and interacting with fewer people than you would on an FPS server. From a gameplay perspective, playing with other people is rarely the point of playing an MMO.

Have you played other MMO’s? You generally team up for most content that is considered endgame.

I think that went over your head. You were asking why you would play an MMO if not to team up. I pointed out that MMOs don’t have a monopoly on team play, and in fact have less team interaction than other kinds of games, so playing on a team isn’t the point of an MMO.

Ayrilana.1396:

Why play an MMO if you don’t like to play with people?

This is a non-argument.

Because you like to play against other people.
Because you like trading with other people.
Because you like watching other people.

In most MMOs, you spend most of the time doing activities and interacting with fewer people than you would on an FPS server. From a gameplay perspective, playing with other people is rarely the point of playing an MMO.

lothefallen.7081:

With this structure missing, it’s really just a shallow zerg of enemies to make up for the lack of mechanical depth from the encounter design. In GW1, creatures had player available skills so it made it clear cut how to build to counter certain areas and mob dynamics. Here, it’s so casualized and homogenized that it doesn’t even matter. More akin to a hack n slash than MMORPG group combat.

Did you even play GW1? Even if you want to pretend GW1 is a trinity game, it clearly did not stop Anet from using enemy zergs as a primary means of creating challenges at the top level of difficulty. So either way a lack of tanks and healers has nothing to do with the prevalence of zergs. Unsurprisingly, simply increasing the odds against the players is a universally, mathematically reliable way of making things harder.

Meglobob.8620:

If you took SAB back in time to the late 80’s and released it as a game in its own right what would it score/review be like?

Probably 6-7 out of 10, medicore to average…

You can get a free emulator and play completely free platform games from that time and there are loads that are far, far better…

And you would still miss the point: SAB isn’t a game in its own right, and it wasn’t released in the 80s. It’s an elaborate tribute, an incredible homage, to those games and it manages to do this as a sideshow inside of another game. Do you think Lost Viking was meant to be better than classic shmups, or was it just a really cool thing to do with an RTS?

Random recruits + trust = drama waiting to happen

Don’t do it.

Apolo.5942:

Well i was not talking about GW2 in particular, but rather a tendency i see with this games.

This being the GW2 forum one might consider that off topic. Especially since the only example you gave was WoW. I’m still not sure what the topic is supposed to be. You don’t like something about the game. What? If you feel that strongly about it then say it, don’t just hide your gripe behind a sensational subject line.

Puandro.3245:

4 + 4 * (0% – 65%) = 5.4

This is simple math and you are failing pretty hard so far.

This is simple math and you have failed spectacularly.

Put it in a calculator since you are unable to perform simple subtraction and multiplication.

Puandro.3245:

1st) your way of thinking that’s how it should work is flawed. You thinking your condi duration should counter his condi reduction but what if you have 0 condi duration? Then the reduction does nothing. So it makes sense it works like I posted up top.

Huh? It looks to work as expected. Why wouldn’t it?

4 + 4 * (0% – 65%) = 1.4
4 * 0.35 = 1.4

So you’re RPing a cosplayer in the game within a game? Well done.

yosslives.1345:

Leablo.2651:

Of course if you kill more mobs in an instance your chances of a drop increase, because you’re increasing the number of drops. Not sure what is interesting about this.

Read the posts. What I am suggesting is that when an instance is loaded, there is a 100% chance to include a certain item related to that instance (in this case, mists). If this is true, the implications are very important. Especially for future content releases that may follow a similar pattern.

Your posts never actually stated the claim that there is a 100% inclusion of the drop in the instance. You repeatedly phrased this as “the more you kill, your chances increase, up to 100%”. Which is interpreted as, “if you kill enough mobs, you’ll eventually get a mist” and as I said, that is completely uninteresting.

I’m glad to have assisted you in stating your hypothesis clearly. You’re welcome.

Of course if you kill more mobs in an instance your chances of a drop increase, because you’re increasing the number of drops. Not sure what is interesting about this.

Niim.9260:

The game does not prioritize buffs/heals/cleanse based on group first, which means when we go up against a tough fight and I am trying to remove my groups conditions to keep them in the fight, it is a negative impact to have someone in the middle of our group sucking up something I intended for another.

It is elitist to intend something for another when another ally could use it just as much. The other implication being that you withhold support when an ally could use it but you instead save it for when your friend needs it. IOW you probably let the other guy die for no better reason than he isn’t in your group. That’s pretty elitist too.

Xephens.3217:

The only valid reason groups dont want you to follow them is because the enemy can rally on your death. On the other hand let the enemy rally is something you shouldnt allow in the first place by finishing off downed players.

The enemy can rally on anyone’s death. What makes it elitist is the assumption that this random joiner is going to die before any of us do. Some guy they don’t know can’t possibly be a better player than the people on their team.

These groups need to get over themselves.

1000 influence is only for the vault itself. You first need to get the architecture upgrades which are 500 and 1000 each. So in total the vault will cost 2,500 influence.

morrolan.9608:

Krag.6210:

Right now it feels like the bosses were made with the trinity in mind then they added the dodge system and removed the trinity afterward without reworking the bosses.

Yeah I agree they removed the trinity but didn’t replace it with anything.

They replaced it with groups that can actually go to dungeons.

I agree there should be more anime girl bosses. That was the point of the video wasn’t it?

tolunart.2095:

My computer has a “calculator” app and it takes about 10 seconds to multiply vendor price by 1.15 to find the minimum TP listing price. Even if you’re not looking for sales you can set it to this price and break even if it sells or take it back later for a 5% storage fee and use the item or break it down for crafting.

That’s 10 seconds per item, and if you have 100 inventory that’s 16 minutes, give or take, of time you could have farmed another couple dozen items worth ~1s each instead of trying to determine whether each of those pieces of junk can get you an extra 15c from a vendor. Even if you determined that they would, you still have to make a round trip to get back to a vendor and then return to farming, which is another 5 min wasted.

IMO there’s no excuse for being too lazy to set a real price on an item, and it brings the overall price down because 100s of players simply list at the current lowest sell price making it impossible for someone who actually wants to make money to sell the items to other players because you get more money from a vendor.

No matter how busy I am, I refuse to throw money away.

The point is that you are throwing away more money by adhering to ideology than by simply doing what is efficient. Those other players aren’t using an “excuse”, they are making more money than you, period, because they understand opportunity cost and you do not. Now if you are doing it out of principle with the understanding that it is costing you money to do it, then more power to you, but other people should not be forced to lose money just because you want to bring everyone down to your level of efficiency.

If you have to check prices against vendor, you are wasting time because the difference is only a few copper. You would be making more money by farming more junk than by trying to squeeze margins out of individual pieces.

And no you can’t prevent filling up. If you are out in the wild farming for hours you are going to max out your inventory even if you started empty. (For context, a single trip through daily fractals takes about 60 inventory.) Especially when you are chain farming group events it’s not really feasible to stop for 30 minutes to check prices on all your items.

Your mentality only makes sense for the type of player who kills a few deer and calls it a day.

Zaxares.5419:

The last 5 bits could also be used to store data about what the byte contains.

Even assuming you meant the last 5 values, that’s not how it works. You need all 8 bits to represent 0-250. To effectively free a bit for another purpose you would have to start from the big endian bits, and with only one bit missing the range of possible values is reduced to 0-127.

We do it with rollerbeetles in these parts son.

Problem solved.

For historical context: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Aftercast_delay

Not sure if this is the same thing happening here as I’ve not tried to test it.

Not a big issue but if possible can we please get collections tab storage for baubles/bubbles/continue coins?

That’s the funny thing about putting up an “experienced only” flag. You’re not necessarily getting more experienced people, but you are getting people arrogant enough to say or think that they are. I wonder if reverse psychology also works here. I could try starting a group that is “hopeless noobs only” and I bet you’d end up getting helpful veterans who wanted to assist noobs.

So it’s not just an issue of reading the ad, I think human psychology has a lot to do with the results you see.