Guild Wars 2

JustTrogdor.7892:

Or wait 10 seconds. I know that is a long time “forever” and all but I think most people can handle it.

if you have to do 50 effigies and wait 10 seconds at each, that’s 500 seconds, which is 8 minutes and 20 seconds total!

panzer.6034:

You basically either try to run through it and get it over as fast as possible, causing it to feel like a grind, or you do it casually as you explore that map, in which case it completely feels like forgettable non-content. Either way, its a stinker as a mechanic.

This. Exactly. It seems the developers are getting lazier and lazier. Each event having less and less actual content.

Consider the holograms. Why are they there? Who put them there? Is there a story behind them at all? Did the devs just steal the idea from Wintersday and repackage it?
During Wintersday, you had Tixx’s airship which was presumably dropping the gifts as a form of self-promotion. Any story attached to the holos here at all?

Having you do all 30 effigies is defendable — perhaps it’s supposed to make you see the world again; which makes some sense (though personally, I still think 30 is too much, considering nothing exciting happens).

However, having to repeat 20 of these is grind.

I just don’t like the inconsistency between corrupt boon and blood is power. Either both should hit you with conditions always, or both should do nothing to you on miss.

Varakkys.2490:

How on earth are you getting 100+ coffers per hour? I’ve been running around starter zones for completions, killing everything I see along the way, and I’m getting 20-25 an hour at best

I do it farming holos. Find an area where you can do a circle of holograms where the first one respawns just as you finish the last.

I do an 11 holo cycle for 20 mins (usually about 24-25 holos total) and get 38-50 coffers total. I only run 20 mins at a time so I’m not sure how DR would affect this method (my circle is pretty big, though).

Too bad. I have over 100 of these and was waiting for Anet to say they were bugged in WvW but would soon be usable. (I definitely remember using fireworks from boxes o’ fun in WvW). WvW would be a great place to use these since we have so much to celebrate (taking SM, towers, keeps, camps…).

Now I’m just gonna delete the whole stack.

There seems to be some controversy as to how +condition duration and -condition duration work together.

Let’s assume:

• Player A uses a skill that applies a base of 10 seconds of bleeding to Player B.
• Player A has a +50% condition duration buff.
• Player B has a -40% condition duration buff.
• I’m using +50% and -40% so that numbers below will all be whole numbers.

Theory 1:
Buffs are calculated first, so that the +50% and -40% are added together for a total of +10%. In this case, Player B receives a total of 11 seconds of bleeding.

Theory 2:
Player A’s buff is applied first so that he is sending 15 seconds of bleeding to Player B. When Player B receives this buff, he subtracts 40% of it away. This means Player B receives a total of 9 seconds of bleeding.

So which is it? I’ve been lead to believe Theory 2 was correct. I did some testing by myself:

My Test:
Using my necro, I gave myself +50% bleed duration: +30% from the condition duration trait line together with the hemophilia trait ( +20% bleed duration).

The skill Blood is Power applies a base of 10 seconds of self-bleeding. With the +50% bleed duration, it gives 15 seconds of self-bleeding (tested it).

I then ate some Lemongrass Poultry Soup which gives -40% condition duration and used Blood is Power. I ended up with 11 seconds of bleeding.

So it seems Theory 1 is correct. A better test would be where two people from different servers try this out with one giving conditions to the other (the longer the condition the easier to tell which theory is correct).

Anyone tested this with a friend from another server?

Loyo.8526:

Lord Kuru, there actually already had this discussion on the necromancer forums with multiple testing done By Rennoko. here are a few threads with the test in it: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Sigil-of-Paralyz-works-on-fear-exceeds-cap/first#post2229416

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/necromancer/Off-hand-dagger-is-meh-more-love-to-warhorn/page/2#post2181881

And of course, a video Rennoko made about condition duration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLexyzHyeO4

As far as those threads are concerned, Condition duration is additive (or atleast only effects the base with the exception of the trait lingering curse) , and can even go farther with fear due to certain applications.

But the point is that negative duration is not determined by the base condition duration of the condition giver. It is determined by the condition receiver. So the receiver subtracts percentages off whatever duration he sees. Thus there is an imbalance which favors the receiver and thus the minus-condition-duration food is OP.

I do not believe your links address negative duration.

Edit: the above is wrong. Condition duration is not calculated in two passes, but in a single pass.

Somehow this got really off-topic. On topic: Even though I absolutely despise thieves and their totally broken steath+initiative combination, I don’t believe anti-stealth food is a good idea. The game should not be balanced via food.

penatbater.4710:

It might still push other servers over the top. I say, instead of stat boost, an increase in exp, karma, MF and Wxp (kinda like the ones you get when you’re outmanned).

I like this idea. If a team is winning by a good margin, then they’ll go for the orb. Having the orb naturally encourages double-teams by the other two teams — something that’s definitely not encouraged in the current environment but is really needed. Thus we get better matches (ideally).

Wallace MacBix.2089:

And I am happy to find people that understand probability (I swear before the next living story event we should hold a class on prob so hopefully less people rage over “I opened X thingys and didn’t get Y”).

Unfortunately, I think a lot of the rage comes not from lack of understanding of probability, but rather from belief that the probabilities are a lot better than they actually are.

Onshidesigns.1069:

Minos.3450:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Minos.3450:

Onshidesigns.1069:

marnick.4305:

Onshidesigns.1069:

Pick your two favorite moas
Main moa
2nd favorite moa
Don’t ever bet on another one
Always bet against your winning moa
Only bet on 2nd favorite moa after Main moa wins, then switch back to main moa.

This plan made me slightly more gold. At the very least you would break even.

And how would this system work? You do realize it’s one of the most common gambler’s fallacies?

You quit before you lose your winnings. This idea keep you near breaking even. When your on a winning streak you quit.

You do realize that the probability for your “winning moa” to win again after its first win is the same than the one of your “2nd favorite moa” ?
As it has been said it is a very common misconception based on a misunderstanding of the way conditional probabilities work which is often reffered as gambler’s fallacy.

It’s 20%, but over two races that 20% is not likely to repeat itself.

Moa’s have 20% chance of winning 2 out of 10 races. But the odds that it will be consecutive is small.

Once again , that is why it’s called CONDITIONAL probabilities. The fact your moa have already won a race (or a thousand for what is matters) doesn’t impact in ANY way the result of the next race.

So yes the probability for a Moa to win 5 races in a row is very small but after he has already won 4 his probability to win a 5th is still 20 % : the same than every other Moa.

TLDR : you can’t judge on past results to forecast the outcome of the next race because every races are independent events.

It’s more of an educated guess based on past results. I’m not disagreeing the chances don’t chance. But I have been able stay near even with this tactic. It’s just knowing when to quit before your luck changes.

Wow. This is why Anet (and casinos) loves the gambling. It makes them lots of money.

There’s a few dungeons you can solo. It’s really fun and challenging. You actually have to learn the boss mechanics instead of simply facerolling everything head on.

I’m not sure “tiny minority” is correct.

I move the merchant window so that the buy button appears in the same location as the confirmation button. That way, it’s just a double click for purchase: no mouse movement necessary!

The reason those lvl 80s are there is because they can farm as fast as possible. Asking them to slow down to wait for someone with no swiftness isn’t going to work. If anyone in the zerg declines to slow down, then those who do slow down will miss out, so in the end, no one slows down.

You’re not going to change players’ behaviors. What you really should be asking for is better downscaling. Everyone is farming in lowbie areas because downscaling doesn’t downscale enough and level 80s massacre the mobs too easily. So it’s Anet you should be discussing this with.

The very last thing WvW needs is more people moving to the upper-tier, stacked servers.

Kiriakulos.1690:

A lot of the skills in this game lead me to believe that very little in the engine is programmed for dynamic values, instead having static instances that get swapped around as needed.

This seems to be true. Another example is in skill descriptions. It seems when a skill changes, the in game mouse-over descriptions (for example damage, range, etc.) are not automatically changed! It appears that someone has to manually change the description (in the case of a skill balance) or that an alternate skill description needs to be written (in the case of skill being changed by traits). See all the problems we had with Spiteful Talisman!

There seems to be a lot of poor programming practices here.

Attrition means that you whittle down your opponents’ health over time until they die. Death shroud was supposed to help with that. However, the longer a fight goes the worse off we actually are because life force is lost very quickly and doesn’t regenerate fast enough.

Most of these other stomps mentioned come with a heavy price. Elixir S has 60 second recharge. Mist form has 75 second recharge. Stealth is pretty much free.

Glenn.3417:

Same for necro’s focus #4 Reaper’s Touch. It gives my jagged horror regen instead of stacking more vulnerability on foes.

Those jagged horrors are so useless and die so fast the regen is completely wasted lol.

It has bounced off minions for many months now.

sounds like it’s programmed such that first one mob is chosen to be the condition recipient, then all foes of that mob give their conditions to that mob.

That mobs of the same type never fight each other indicates that they look green to each other, so no conditions are transferred between them. However mobs of different types can be foes and thus can have conditions transferred.

In other words, instead of “allies to foes” as stated in the ingame skill description, it’s “foes of the foe.” The enemy of my enemy… I guess

So for wintersday, the presents that appeared in the open world were presumably dropped by Tixx from his airship. So what’s the story behind the open world holograms for this event? Is there one?

If you’re a female human necro and get hit by Tazza’s mirror blade, the clone created speaks with a male voice. Very disturbing.

I wouldn’t be surprised if you took the amount of gems spent on RNG boxes per ticket handed out (the total amount spent on RNG boxes divided by the number of tickets dropped from those boxes) is equal to a gem value so high that it would cause sticker shock.

With RNG boxes, you don’t get sticker shock because you’re spending only what you believe to be a reasonable amount of gems at a time. It’s kind of like small monthly payments over a long period of time looks better to many people than one lump sum payment — but much worse, of course because of RNG.

If the chance to get a ticket is indeed 0.02% as others have stated (is this from the wiki?), then here are some probabilities for getting (at least) one ticket:

• if you open 100 coffers, you have 2% chance.
• if you open 1000 coffers, you have 18% chance.
• if you open 3466 coffers, you have just over 50% chance.
• if you open 10000 coffers, you have 86% chance.
• if you open 20000 coffers, you have 98% chance.

(By the way, if you open 20000 coffers, you have 100% chance to hurt your mouse clicking finger )

Terrahero.9358:

dani.1956:

Ban the abusers and players will stop doing it !
Who will risk a ban for 10 wvw lvls ?

A lot of people. Because WvW levels are something you grind, a mechanic that should never have been introduced, and grinding is boring. People would happily risk walking the shady side of the rules if it dramatically speeds up the grind.

Hammering down on people setting up WXP trains is just a temporary and rather poor solution. Infact, its not even a solution at all, people will just be smarter about it in the future.
The whole grind behind the WXP needs to change. I’d take the sledgehammer to the system and drag the broken pieces back to the drawingboard.

yeah.. isn’t this WXP grind exactly what Anet said that we wouldn’t have to do in GW2… that grind would only be for aesthetics?

come to NSP! Sounds like your kind of place.

I do think population should be spread. I think the population being aggregated in the higher tiers is probably the biggest single problem in WvW. However, I don’t think the solution should involve handicapping the bigger servers. I prefer the actual combat to be as fair as possible: if you have more people, you have more chance to win.

Also I’d say, give incentives instead of disincentives — something positive for people who are willing to move instead of punishing people who don’t move.
Perhaps something like: servers with lower WvW pops get higher magic find.

Love the seige in those chests, but “A lot more ectos” is not even close to being true.

Lots of made up statistics in this thread. Anet has the real data. They use RNG boxes for every event almost certainly because their data tell them the RNG boxes make more money. They’ve probably even accounted for the ill will caused by RNG boxes and yet the RNG boxes still come out ahead.

Personally, I’m guessing that we’d all be shocked at how much a ticket is actually worth (in other words, the number of rich coffers sold divided by total number of tickets in them) and would never buy one at that price.

TLDR: the only way to stop RNG boxes is to not buy them.

Are pinatas in Tyria made of steel? Because when you break them it sure sounds that way.

Are these every going to be fixed?

For example the one in SW camp in BL that’s behind the grove of trees and partway up the hill.

It’s really frustrating when defending the camp by yourself and having one foe constantly harassing then fleeing to the spot when near death.

There’s a similar spot just outside southeast spawn in the BL as well, but it’s not as bad as it’s not near anything important.

Any others? Maybe we can help out Anet with a list of these.

Necros weep every time an Epidemic has failed because of this. Anyone noticed whether boons stay or go when downed? Anyway, there is no reason for conditions or boons to be removed upon being downed.

I didn’t like Cantha from GW1.. I felt the architecture (Kaineng area) was too much of a copy of asian architecture and that broke immersion for me .. for example, all the red in the palaces/temples took me out of guild wars and into China.

I did like the Luxons and Kurzicks and the Jade Sea however.

Anyway, I’d be happy not to return to Cantha and instead see a new world, especially architecturally (I really like the circle-themed Orr.. seems very new)

it seems you can’t use the fireworks in WvW… is that intended? Boxes o’ fun (which sometimes have fireworks with the same effects) can be used in WvW.

I only remember doing one dragon festival in GW1… those who did multiple ones: did vendors return? Did the same currencies (Zhaitaffy in our case) return? Or is the event repeating, but the currencies, vendors, skins unique?

I missed most of wintersday, but weren’t the presents similar? The mobs were much much tougher, I remember. Did people have similar issues at that event, or was it the tougher mobs that made it ok?

kokocabana.8153:

Or you can save up for next year or the year after that. It’s a long term goal like legendaries or other holiday rewards. This game was not meant to simply exist for one year and then get shut down because GW3 gets announced later this year.

Are you sure next year we won’t have an all new currency? What is your evidence?

One major problem is that many of the posters here who have been burned seem to have made baseless assumptions about the ticket probabilities. I see many posts where people are angry because they bought, say, 100 rich coffers and got nothing. However, there is zero evidence that you are likely to get a ticket after opening 100 rich coffers.

When you put your faith in baseless assumptions, prepare to be disappointed.

By the way, 100 rich coffers is actually not that many. For example if the probability of getting a ticket is 1% from a rich coffer, then you still have a 37% chance of getting nothing from opening 100.

Harper.4173:

It would be INCREDIBLY easy to check for exploits such as these. Just get 100 randomly selected players and promise 100 gold to the first player who can break ( exploit) your content. Then fix it before you release it. Is that so hard?

This. And I’m pretty sure you don’t need to offer even close to 100 gold.

Shiren.9532:

So their game design has been reduced to players having to actively protest their heavy casino gambling design before the company tries to implement fair and reasonable reward systems? Shouldn’t the best interests of the company be the best interests of the players, not two things competing with each other?

Unfortunately the best interests of the company is simply to make as much money as possible — especially a public company like NCSoft. Now they can go about making money in many different ways, some of those ways will align closely with the best interests of the players and some will not. They have chosen one method of making money that does not align with the best interests of the players.

If the drop rate is indeed 0.4%, then the probability of getting at least one ticket from opening 1000 chests is 98.18%. So either the OP was extremely unlucky or the drop rate is not 0.4% (my guess is the latter).

By the way, if the drop rate were 0.4% and you opened 4000 chests, the probability of getting (at least) one ticket is: 99.999989%.

In general, the probability of getting zero tickets after opening n chests would be: (0.004)^n. And thus the probability of getting one or more tickets is 1 – (0.004^n);
assuming 0.4% rate.

I’d say your best bet is to farm as much gold as possible right now (i.e. CoF p1) while encouraging everyone to farm as much taffy as possible. Then hope that the price of taffy goes down enough by the end of the event that you can afford to buy them off the TP.

Jeffs.2183:

One thing I loved in GW1 was finding areas to farm and creating builds around them…

That was amazingly fun. I still remember my awesome necro build for solo farming Flesh Golems in the fire islands! To bad this is completely gone in GW2 as mobs are so few and far between and we have so few skills.

On topic: This is terrible. I think a health buff to these minions could possibly solve the problem. You don’t even need berserker gear to finish these guys fast. I use knights + carrion and my guardian greatsword #4 followed by #2 pretty much finishes them in maybe 2 seconds. Give yourself stability and you don’t even have to get up from being knocked back.

The real problem is that you don’t know the odds. It could be 1 in a hundred, or 1 in a million, or 1 in a billion — you don’t know. So playing this is, in a way, worse than playing the lottery where you know the odds and can thus make an informed decision as to whether it’s worth playing.

Don’t gamble when you don’t know the odds!

jaka.9635:

For people saying that whoever bought these coffers and didn’t get a ticket is their own fault:

How would you suggest we go about getting these skins?

I wouldn’t have nothing to say about it, if there was a ticket in the gemstore for 1k gems and we decided to buy the coffers for a gamble to aquire one.

WE DON’T HAVE A CHOICE, IF WE WANT THE SKIN WE HAVE TO BUY THE COFFERS, thus get rapped by money-grabbing anet/ncsoft.
And unfortunately we cant do anything about it, it seems. (150 post topic without a single dev reply)

Except that it is your fault. You knew that it was a gamble. Anet told you it was gambling. And yet you chose to partake in it. Do you get angry when you don’t win the lottery after buying 100 tickets? This is the same thing (only slightly worse because you don’t know the odds, whereas you do for the lottery).

Anet will continue with the RNG boxes until it is no longer profitable for them. So the best thing you can do is to pass on these skins — if enough people do this, then Anet may put future skins in the gem store directly.

Gambling can be defended — when you know the odds of winning. That’s because you can make an informed decision as to whether it’s worth it to play.

But gambling when you don’t know the odds of winning is just insane.

TLDR: don’t gamble when you don’t know the odds of winning.

Paul Belz.7351:

Hey folks,

While we do have the ability to turn some types of content on and off dynamically, the text for achievements are not one of those things. Unfortunately, this means if we have content that turns on before our next release, the achievement text will have to be available on patch day.

Many players require a bit of direction and context and we have found that the achievement text is a useful way for us to direct them. While there is a big downside of presenting some spoilers, we are working hard to frame the text so as to not spoil the actual events that will be happening over the next two weeks.

I will say that unlike the southsun achievements, all of the achievements in the dragon bash category will be accomplishable before our next release (hotfixes don’t count :p).

Everyone goes to the achievements tab to see what you need to do to get the achievements. So either you avoid spoilers and put vague descriptions on how to get the achievements (not good at all) or you put spoilers in there (not good at all). You can’t win with the current system so the current system has to be changed.

Rallad.3802:

Really hoping for a polymock mini-battle game where each mini has a set of skills.

That would really make minis more interesting- and crank up their collectability status.

Near the WvW gates at LA there’s these circular enclosures that to me, have always looked like arenas for mini combat — maybe something that Anet never got around to implementing?

NSP for sure. We lost 2 guilds just a few days ago. One dedicated person can definitely make a difference on our server and that’s why you should come here!