Guild Wars 2

100th kill confirmed

Thanks to our community for all the support and coordination in the past months. You are great. Some images of our celebration can be found here:

http://imgur.com/a/NoDtY

~MRA

Festivities are underway.

We also have a live stream: http://www.twitch.tv/kobiqq

Because I have been asked: Yes, this is EU. Sorry, NA.

On Saturday, August 9, 2014, the German Wurmslayer Community [WUMS] will go for their 100th Triple-Wurm kill. (Yes, we did keep record.) To celebrate accordingly, we and our friends at gw2community.com will give the three-headed monstrosity its well deserved 100th beating at 7pm CEST. Afterwards, several fun events are planned.

Everybody who wants to kill a Triple-Wurm (or two) or who just wants to party with us is cordially invited. Just join us

• 6pm CEST (4pm UTC, 9am PDT) at the latest on
• ts.gw2ommunity.com, Channel Tri-Wurm (Team 2)

to be ferried to our map. We will do our run most probably in German, but we will also be able give an explanation of the Triple-Wurm basics in English.

~MRA

Atlas.9704:

I apologize for the off topic question, but how difficult is python to learn?
I’ve dealt with C++, played around with C#, and currently working with classic ASP and ASP.NET.
I have been told that if I know C# I should be able to grasp basics. I didn’t know how accurate that was.

Python is orders of magnitude easier to learn that C++, C#, or any other language. Basically, if you know how to write a program in a “pseudo code”, then you know how to handle Python. The rest can be found in the online documentation.

Two caveats:

• Python will ruin you for every other programming language you know or learn after it, and you will become notorious among your colleagues for constantly using phrases like: “Well, that sounds complicated in <other language X>. In Python, all you have to do is …”
• Use a proper editor (or even better a proper IDE) that knows the difference between a a “space” and a “tab” right from the start to avoid early confusion. I am old-school so I still use emacs in python-mode, but I am pretty sure that there are better choices available.

~MRA

(edit:) A must-read when starting to learn Python is PEP 20 — The Zen of Python.

Vlad Morbius.1759:

I have a question, that goes back a ways…

“Posted by: John Smith
The mystic forge changes are a work in progress. What I will promise is that when it is done you will like it much better than you do now."

Are you done yet? Because I am still not liking it one bit!

In this very thread:

John Smith.4610:

Illconceived Was Na.9781:

A recent patch made some changes to the mystic forge output for L75+ average gear inputs. You stated at the time that you thought we’d be pleased with the results. Have you been?

I stated that you would be pleased with the final form. When it reaches the final form you may tell me.

~MRA

Lodius.5392:

The economy centers around wealth of the players. This could be graphed on a bell curve

I highly doubt that. Bell curves usually arise when averaging over (nearly) independent observations. There are very few things in economy that are properly modeled if they are assumed to be independent.

For the distribution of wealth, you are more likely to find them following the “Pareto law” (which you may have heard before of in the form of a 80-20 law like “80% of the wealth is owned by 20% of the people” or something similar). Such “natural” observations arising from social interaction tend to follow “heavy/long tail” distributions instead of the exponentially fast shrinking tail that is characteristic of a bell curve. That is, they behave completely different in the regions “away” from your mode which mathematically makes a kitten of a difference.

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

The markets need a more fundamental change.

Do you intend these fundamental changes to happen on some future day?

~MRA

AnthonyOrdon.3926:

I definitely agree that in-game world boss availability messaging is something that should be implemented and it’s something we would like to do.

[…]

Do you think that showing all of these events makes the map feel cluttered? Would it make finding the information you care about more difficult?

(Preface: I am not a big fan of timed boss spawns/timed invasions anyways since they completely ruin the dynamic event promise of “a world that cares whether I am there” or not, but I won’t cry over spilled milk.)

I would advise against putting such notifications in the UI. You started the game with a very sound design philosophy of “playing the game, not the UI”. Hence I would recommend to use that principle for event notifications, too.

There are so many way you could use the gaming world to make us aware of distant events instead of just adding another loaded piece of UI. People could gossip about Bridgewatch Camp having fallen under centaur control in the Harathi Hinterlands. A merchant could report about dragon sightings in Blazeridge Steppes. A town crier could run through Lion’s Arch, screaming: “People, there are reports about a three-headed monstrosity attacking the Bloodtide Coast! Step forward an defend our southern borders!” Or, If you want to do something really awesome, then a big dragon could fly across adjacent maps (casting a big shadow don below) into the direction of Sparkfly Fen.

This would also help bringing some of that lost “dynamic” back into that now statically scheduled world. Having just another “exclamation mark above an NPC’s head” (or whatever variant the UI feature you would end up using) is just the lamest way of doing it.

Erick Alastor.3917:

I may be wrong, but if I remember correctly you already dismissed the idea of showing events from others maps, so we are just talking about events in the current map and bosses on schedule, right?

This is also my understanding. For all other events, there is no definitive state anymore.

~MRA

Shiren.9532:

Dynamic events which occur on a timer and encourage players to “learn the map” and trigger things en mass is such a huge departure from one of the great things about dynamic events – they are dynamic!

Big +1 to this!

As much as I love and appreciate the many improvements ANet has brought to the game (such as mega-servers, more interesting enemy mechanics, fun boss fights, improved character development and story telling, lots of convenience features, etc.) I always find it a little bit sad to see that they must have lost all their trust in what I still deem as the most intriguing innovation that they could have brought to the genre. What is left of that original concept of dynamic events is little more than just timed invasions or public quests as they have already been done before.

Also, I like that there are always players around to join an event, but I don’t think that it had been necessary to basically implement farming trains directly into the game by giving boss events a public time schedule, or by announcing champions map-wide. It takes a lot of fun from events when you are no longer able to tackle bosses in small groups of, say, 5 random players who happened to randomly tumble upon that event, since within seconds dozens of players will port in to make essentially every boss fight a big 80v1. The mega bosses (minus Teq and Tripple-Wurm) are currently essentially unplayable since they are just zerged down in mere seconds by way to many players.

Well, I don’t want to sound too negative (since I still basically like the way how the game improves with each update), but there are also some developments that I am not particularly fond of.

~MRA

darkace.8925:

If I’m really the boss, I want her off the team. She has the judgment of a child. She’s a fool, a liability. And if that weren’t enough, she’s impudent. At least let me put her in some command center where she ckittene her talents to help the team without putting everyone in harm’s way.

Pah. You are just jealous since she won’t make you a coauthor of her upcoming seminal treatise about ley lines.

~MRA

tota.4893:

If Windows is trying to generate 5.1 audio but you only have stereo speakers connected, parts of positional audio will almost certainly be lost. Music and some ambient sounds might play ok since they don’t go through the same mixing.

Thanks very much for your help, it seems you were absolutely right. I have a 2.1 setup, but the configuration was strangely set to 5.1 (actually not be me, or at least not intentionally). Setting to stereo fixed the problem.

~MRA

I am experiencing a strange sound glitch. While the background music and the environmental sounds seem ok, the volume of all voice-overs depends on the direction the camera (not the character) is facing. While one might expect some sourround sound effect here, the volume is actually totally conter-intuitive: Voices directly in front of the camera and directly behind the camera do have a volume of about zero (and are essentially impossible to understand) while voices directly to the left or right of the camera are loud an clear to understand. In between, the volume changes gradually.

The strange thing is: This glitch only appears when I have chosen my desktop speakers as output device (“Realtek High Definition Audio”). It has never happened when I switch to my headset (“Logitech G930 Headset”).

Does anyone have advice on how to fix this? Thanks in advance.

-MRA

PS: Some of my sound settings:

• All volume sliders between 40% and 60%, except for dialog volume which is 100%
• Highest Sound Quality
• Shorter Music interval
• Lowest Latency Mixed Buffer Size

EvanTeicheira.3962:

What game client are you using? (Windows / Mac)

Win

What are your current graphics settings?

1680×1050, small interface size, all settings to max

Are you playing in full screen or windowed mode?

Full screen

Is your inventory full or maxed out?

• In the sense of bag slots? No, I have only six bag slots.
• In the sense of all available bag slots having capacity 20? Yes.
• In the sense of “no space left for items”? This does not seem to have any influence on the issue.

Do you play with bags displayed or hidden?

Hidden

I am kind of under the impression that the issue is related to switching from full screen to windowed mode and/or back (using that “box” icon in the top right corner) but I am unable to reproduce, either.

Good luck hunting that kitten glitch.

-MRA

Milea.6043:

They are BACK!!! New dialogue. Ascalon Settlement Waypoint in Gendarran. They are on their way to Caledon and want to make a Pod! Squeeee!

Foo, good news! They are adorable. I like ’em. Although it might not be the best of ideas for them to travel straight into the direction those scary thorny tendrils are spreading from …

Shiren.9532:

remember when asura looked like this: http://wiki.guildwars.com/images/0/02/Oola.jpg and were generally unlike-able?

Hey! My Asuran Engi still lives up to that ideal.

~MRA

Is this here some kind of social experiment of how long a single person can keep a forum thread alive without advancing the discussion by even a single nanometer?

~MRA

Prophet.6257:

7.3 million. Not bad at all.

Does this makes GW2 the 2nd biggest western MMO?

No. It’s second place, just like GW1 was.

http://users.telenet.be/mmodata/Charts/Subs-1.png

~MRA

Bolthar.7192:

GW2’s version of quests was basically the Hearts on the maps. In addition to these there was the dynamic events.

IIRC, this is actually a twist of the true design intention.

At the core of GW2’s design are the dynamic events. In the initial concept, those should have been the one and only world content of GW2. There once was something like a “dynamic event design workshop” (a press event) at some convention where Eric Flannum correctly summarized that if you want to do true dynamic in an MMO, you cannot just throw in a number of public quests here and there, you have to make them the core content of your game or they will not deliver the intended effect. (I am obviously paraphrasing here. I wish a could give you the video source, but I am unable to find it.) In those days, ANet even claimed that there would be no quests in GW2.

The renown system (aka “tasks” or “renown hearts”) was a late addition to the design concept. At some event a dev (I guess it was Colin?) explained that prior to the hearts, they learned in play testing sessions with focus groups that the lack of “exclamation marks over the heads” was not well received by MMO veterans. The concept of just going out their and exploring the world on their own, maybe finding a dynamic event or two, was not understood by the focus groups and they didn’t know what to do. Hence, they added the heart tasks to regions with dynamic events to attracts players to that regions. While they were doing the mundane tasks, events would start and require the players full attention. The heart tasks were essentially progressed to completion while doing the events, since they would have been no longer relevant.

At a later iteration, ANet expanded on the hearts concept to also serve as karma vendor once enough renown had been earned in that region. Unfortunately, the contribution of events towards the tasks progress had also been greatly reduced, which made them a little bit more of a chore. And in addition to that, hearts were severely over-communicated in the game, making them essentially the most obvious element of the UI.

Personally, I still consider the over-communication of the renown tasks as GW2’s most dire design flaw. This over-communication was spawned from the understandable intention to cater the veteran MMO crowd that so desperately needed a checklist for them to know what they should do. (You could also call that a lack of confidence in ANets own initial design concept.) However, this approach backfired. Since heart tasks were so prominently visible in the UI, and dynamic events were very often quite immersively, if not subtly, melted with the environment, in the perception of journalists and players the mundane and rather boring hearts were mistaken as the core content of GW2. I have seen countless review, “let’s play”, or walk-through videos showing that so many players were running straightly past all the wonderful content of GW2 just to reach the next heart, to fill it, and to move on. I have heard people explicitly stating stuff like “Nah, don’t go over there, that invasion is just some crazy world event. Here, my quest says I should plug some daisies for farmer Ree, so let’s go there …”

So, step-by-step, hearts changed to eventually end up as GW2’s version of traditional, boring checklist-quests. In some regions with very low dynamic event density, they even seem to have taken over as core content, since otherwise there would be very little to do. It certainly did not help that dynamic events turned out to be so prone to bugs and blocking errors, either. (Seriously, has anyone ever seen Save the merchants from the Bloody Buccaneer kidnappers in a bug free state since release?)

Hence, I was very happy to see that ANet did not include a single heart in the new Dry Top map and rather packed the map with events. Although those events are still lacking the dynamic aspect (the “cascading out”, the “cause and effect”), I consider this a step in the right direction.

Just my 2 copper.

~MRA

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Per devs, there is only “Firstborn” (which we have learned were born in 1302 AE), the “Secondborn” (which we have learned were born in 1308 and/or 1309 AE), and then “everyone else”.

Can someone please direct me to a source where this trichotomy comes from? I was under the impression that there where only two groups: “Firstborn” (the twelve) and “Secondborn” (= “everyone not Firstborn”), as you can also find implied in the Dream and Nightmare blog entry:

Caithe shrugged and interrupted, “Why should she care? She has thousands of children now, Cadeyrn. You are either firstborn…or you are simply sylvari."

In particular, it seemed to me that the tragedy of Cadeyrn was that he, as the “First of the Secondborn”, wanted to be special. The insult that Caithe offered was that he isn’t; he isn’t even Secondborn above “everyone else”.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

~MRA

BobbyStein.2315:

Hmm. We added a story step that made interacting with the Ceara/Scarlet hologram required so that people wouldn’t miss it.

Actually, i find it a little bit sad that you did. :/

I was excited like a little kid when I found the device although nothing pointed to it beside a short remark by Taimi. I very much liked the fact that there was “bonus content” to discover (and I count the “coffin blueprints” as such, too) if you kept your eyes and ears open, instead of just clicking the UI in brain-afk mode to skip forward.

To me, the game has always been at it’s best when exploration was rewarded with interesting and non-obvious findings. Please keep adding such hidden treasures, don’t destroy them. Personally, I don’t want to play a game where the 100% complete step-by-step walk-through is intrusively integrated in the UI so that I will never ever miss a thing. If so, where are my choices, why playing at all, why not watch a movie instead?

~MRA

One guy had this little idea while we were chatting in our servers TS (sorry, I forgot who it actually was), and I quite like it:

Sentry Trap
If at least 5 enemy players are within the radius of this trap when it is activated (e.g., a zerg), a pair of big orange crossed swords are made visible on the map for 20 seconds regardless of the players being in combat or not.

JonathanSharp.7094:

I can’t make any promises on fixes, but I can say we’re debating this issue internally just like you guys are, and we use your points/counterpoints as reference in our discussions.

I am a little bit sad that this non-issue creates a diversion to the devs tight schedule, but this is just my opinion. To my understanding, condi roamers are fine in WvW. They are currently in the sweet spot where the actual proficiency of a player in using her tools at hand (being it condis, stun-locks, stealth ambushes or whatever) decides a 1v1, and not just the simple cookie cutter spec she is running. But, again, that’s just my two cents.

If you guyz really believe that condi damage needs a shave (of which I am certainly not convinced) I’d argue that the +40% condi duration food line would be the best aspect to change. I’d say condi builds wouldn’t be utterly broken if this bonus would be scaled down to, say, 30%? (to 25? to 20%?) Plus, this change would not interfere with sPvP.

I even wouldn’t mind if the -40% condi duration buff food line would stay at their percentage at the same time. If someone is mindful enough to prepare for certain limited circumstances accordingly, I don’t mind if that player is in a strong position if this circumstances actually happen. After all, it also meant that at the same time the player was sacrificing an offensive or another more versatile defensive buff.

~MRA

The Sixteenth.2561:

I must say that once again, Scarlet is a nice person !

I also wouldn’t rule out the possibility of Scarlet at least thinking that her actions were for the Greater Good of Tyria™ in the twisted and/or flawed logic of her crazy lettuce-head mind. (You know, like breaking some eggs to make an omelet.) But this would still be a far cry from being a “nice person”.

Tobias Trueflight.8350:

I know, there are still people who like Phantom Menace, after all.

Hey! The pod race was great!!! (Says my 7-year old nephew, and he’s an expert on The Clone Wars, too.)

~MRA

tigirius.9014:

I suggest that everyone here go and immediately make a reddit account so that we can get the devs to notice what’s happening with the game because it’s obvious they don’t come here.

Actually, I made a reddit account for the sole purpose of getting away from such pointless posts. :/ So, please don’t.

~MRA

Welgaia.7523:

Getting rid of creative skill usage and promoting DPS checks once again, seems about right with their design philosophy.

Well, to be fair, deboofing was a kind of lame tactic anyways (just one guy killing a whole boss mechanic?) and was most certainly not intended by the designers.

However, given that reflections in general have been changed and not a single word is mentioned in the patch notes, I assume that this change might be unintentional.

~MRA

Since today, guardians and elementalists seem no longer to be able to destroy the Tripple Wurm’s eggs as projectiles in flight (using Shield of Absorption or Swirling Winds). This essentially cripples the current “meta” tactic of killing the wurm.

Is this an intentional “fix”, or a sad mishap?

~MRA

Tamias.7059:

Renuu

Do you ever wonder what sort of cargo these people are transporting? I get the feeling that it’s not just supplies. One of the ships is giving off an unnatural glow.

I think we all know the one she means. I haven’t the time at the moment to go and explore myself; has anyone found any clues as to what that strange golden glow might be?

I don’t know, maybe it is just some valuable freight glinting inside that cargo hold …

~MRA

Kulvar.1239:

Tyria is Charr’s homeworld.
Humans are the extratyrians invaders.

Yet, it is the charr that are building their Death Star thingy. Makes one at least what they plan to do with it once it is finished …

And don’t come telling me it is just an architectural landmark of their city. That is so obviously a ruse.

~MRA

Konig Des Todes.2086:

Y’know, this has been bugging me. I get you cannot comment on unannounced future releases, but Ree and Jeff’s projects has been in the shadows since release. This is… befuddling.

I wouldn’t call it befuddling, I’d rather call it … full of opportunities!

I like the idea that there is something big cooking in the dark, hopefully something that has not been teased yet and something that we do not expect. Yes, I am as ready as the next player for some new and fresh content. But since the release of GW2 there has not been a single competitor in the MMO market been able to put some pressure on ANet, so there is actually no real need for a reveal now. And this also means that Anet can spent this extra time on development and polish, and does not have to rush to a release again as with the original game. I say overall we win for not knowing what Ree, Jeff, Eric, Daniel and the rest of the “invisible half of the dev team” are doing.

~MRA

I guess this (rather old) video sums up nicely the hopes and dreams of 98% of the non-engi playing population:

http://youtu.be/6q3em9s5I4c

~MRA

spiritus.7983:

When I join this game I tought Black Citadel (charr home town in gw2) its a ruin but after watching some movies and read a bit I see its a fairly new place build in top of Human capital city, but….

It will ever be completed? Looks like a skeleton and scaffolds so far and in last year of playing it did not changed (look at the picture).

I am also waiting since day one for the Charr to finally finish building their Death Star and to see them fly away to their home planet. Yet, this might be Guild Wars 3 material.

~MRA

Aberrant.6749:

My problem with turrets is that they are too strong/useful …

This is the first time since release that I have heard or read such a statement …

~MRA

Aaron Ansari.1604:

I’m not sure how much of this is entirely true, but I’ve heard that that patch was supposed to be the first of several that focused on introducing new dynamic events on a broad scale across Tyria. On account of the playerbase barely noticing the change (which was itself on account of the fact that we hadn’t even had time to track down all the events that had been part of the game from launch) the plans were discontinued and considered to not get enough attention to be worth the effort put into them.

This is also my understanding of what happened. Which is such a shame, since I still consider the dynamic event system the most interesting aspect of GW2 (and therefore pretty much liked the 22 October 2012 in particular because of the new events). But decoupling mega bosses from the event dynamic and generally moving more and more over to traditional scheduled events (e.g., in the Living Story) implies that ANet thinks otherwise.

BTW, is the Skritt Burglar still in the game? I really liked that event, too, and hoped ANet would expand on it, but I haven’t seen her in ages …

~MRA

Evan Lesh.3295:

Work. Work. Work. Work. Work. China. Work. Work. Work.

Nice. That’s exactly how I like my developers: Developing stuff instead of procrastinating in the forums.

Evan Lesh.3295:

No time to discuss, but I still read near every thread.

Oh, well … never mind.

~MRA

Kalavier.1097:

LA could use one of their airships to go pick up supplies though.

Shouldn’t it rather be “their one airship”, or how many airships are currently at the Captains Council’s disposal?

~MRA

Kalavier.1097:

The authorities of LA are not defunct… they are simply keeping the city as clear of people as they can to make reconstruction, repairs, and clean-up as easy as possible without dealing with hordes of citizens throwing things around trying to find loved ones or their valuables in the rubble.

That sound like a little bit of an euphemism to me.

As far as I know they are not even assembled anymore, at least half of them are scattered around in refugee camps, Ellen Kiel is wherever (in her airship?), and Captain Peter is, well, most likely lost. Even if not defunct, I hardly see this government working at peak efficiency.

~MRA

Aaron Ansari.1604:

A nomadic existence in the skies doesn’t exactly lend itself to a surplus of resources, especially bulky building materials.

True, they most certainly would not have stockpiled those materials. But as airship traders they would have the means of acquiring and delivering them when necessary.

~MRA

Anatoli Ingram of the Flameseeker Chronicles actually brought up the idea of the Zephyrites helping LA already yesterday in his blog post. I agree with his speculation and I was also considering this idea for quite some time as an interesting potential development:

This speculation might be born out of wishful thinking, but what would you think about the Zephyrites anchoring above Lions Arch early on in Season 2 and helping to rebuild the city. After all, they had a profitable trade agreement with the now defunct LA authorities, and they might have an interest in reinstating this agreement. They could build a temporary “upper level” with the Zephyr Sanctum hovering atop, while in the ruins below slowly the rebuilding takes place. And with their airships, they could easily be the ones to provide the necessary resources for rebuilding LA.

While I understand that the Zephyrites might not anchor anywhere exposed for a too long period without attracting the attention of Kralkatorrik’s agents (or whoever it is that they are hiding from) it might be an interesting opportunity for the devs to rebuild LA in a more “vertical” way, maybe even realizing some of the earlier concepts they had before launch.

~MRA

I also have a constant crush on WvW …

I found that for me the “disconnecting while amid a big fight with lots of effects”-crashes can be avoided to some degree by going to the graphics options tab and

• setting Shaders to lowest,
• setting Post-Processing effects to lowest, and
• setting Character Quality to lowest (with this one being the most important setting).

While this still is not a 100% bullet proof solution and you will encounter crashes once in a while, I can almost reproducibly get my client to crash in a zerg fight if I switch those settings to something other than the lowest options.

(And according to my experience this does not really depend on your hardware. I have a rig that should be able to handle higher settings and I do encounter crashes regardless. Having said that, I also came to believe that 64-bit Win 7 and 8+ GB RAM did help the game to do better.)

~MRA

redslion.9675:

CHIPS.6018:

Ritualist

1) Summon the spirit of the recently killed.
2) Ask the spirit who killed him/her.
3) Profit.

Problemo?

That would make the most awful detective story the world would have ever seen.

See Pushing Daisies to learn that this can actually be quite entertaining.

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

I fail to see how requesting that you lay out your proposed method for proving there is a problem is “busy work”. This is how science is done, create a hypothesis, create a test method, carry out a test. I’m sorry if this sounds pedantic.

Actually, in an age past the Fourth Paradigm and right in the mid of Big Data, this also sounds a little bit old-fashioned.

Not saying that you are wrong, though.

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

There are about 17 reasons I cannot answer that question.

An awesome John Smith answer as always, although I cannot say that helps very much in learning or understanding anything …

DarkSpirit.7046:

That is an ideology called socialism that strives to achieve the same ideals as you, but it fails miserably because people are intrinsically different.

First of all, I am not asking about politics here, so the socialism analogy is inaccurate. I am asking about an in-game mechanic. And as far as I understand, especially a multi-player game like GW2 should aim for “fun for everyone”, or “fun socialism”, if you find this term more fitting.

Behellagh.1468:

My answer is why would you need “an effective tax on the rich”?

Fair question. I know from personal experience that there are huge differences in the personal in-game financial situation. (I know someone who had millions of gold, I know of people who have thousands of gold, and I know guys like me who have barely above ~50g). Having these differences by itself isn’t a problem, but we are all actors in the same in-game market. If we want to acquire goods, then we have to compete with everybody else for those goods, especially in markets where the supply is sparse. And I don’t necessarily mean “luxury” items like legendaries or ascended weapons, I mean “everyday” items like, say, buying sigils and runes when trying to test a new build, or buying a recipe for cooking your buff food. My understanding is that the prices of these items are so high because there are many financially potent buyers willing and able to pay that price. Hence, the “richness” of one part of the community does have a direct negative effect on the other “not-so-rich” part, it keeps the price level high. (Feel free to correct me if this is wrong.)

I’d like to note that me just having ~50g isn’t because I have not played the game enough (I played 2300+ hours), it is just that I personally don’t play for farming in-game currency. I understand that there are many players that have have lots of fun farming in games, and this is totally ok, but this just ain’t my understanding of fun. I do also not have the time and economical knowledge to “play the market” to make money. And I assume, many players, especially the many casually oriented players who “just play the game” and do not want to work on a farming schedule, are in a similar situation like me.

For all these players, not having much in-game currency means that there are items and parts of the game that are very hard or nigh impossible to access (crafting the recent ascended backpiece item is a good example for such a very hard to reach content). Now, you can of course say “suck it bro, your problem, you should have farmed CoF like me, haha!”. Or, you could ask yourself whether an in-game mechanic is conceivable that allows all players a somewhat similar — but by no means “completely equal” — access to the different parts of the game, and without forcing one half of the player base to adopt the play style of the other half.

Hence, I am wondering if a little bit of closing the gap betweens the wealth levels of players might not in fact be healthy for the game. I imagine this could make more of the game’s content broadly available for a large number of players.

And just to be clear: I don’t have an answer, I am just wondering.

~MRA

John Smith.4610:

An increase in the tax rate would simply get passed on to consumers, with a little bit being absorbed by sellers. It would not be an effective tax on the rich.

Ok, that sounds reasonable.

But please allow me ask: According to your (or everybody else’s) professional expertise, what would be “an effective tax on the rich” that would help to fight the dire income inequality within the game? Or is this social inequality among player characters something we just have to accept as set in stone?

~MRA

Conncept.7638:

bri.2359:

These events, particularly Wurm, requires a very high level of organisation that the average and / or casual player are simple incapable of or not willing to do.

Bahahaha, ‘organization’, that’s a good one! You have any comedy routines I could see? :P

From this I take you don’t ever have participated in a serious wurm try?

~MRA

Xillllix.3485:

Please Merge WvW in a system that functions well and make EOTM count for PPT.

Only if you want to get rid of all of your established WvW communities in one single change.

~MRA

Hyperionkhv.1978:

The megaserver system means you won’t encounter overflow maps anymore.

And how we will make organised raids for Wurms? No overflow means no taxi to same map?

Yeah, “taxi to overflow” might be a thing of the past, soon. But it is hard to deny that purposefully creating a (private) overflow in order to be able to beat a (public) event is somewhat of a broken system. If this event was meant to be played that way, then it could just as well have been a 150 person instance right from the beginning, without any need to abuse the overflow mechanics.

With ANet going for megaservers, I hope they will also address this problem (maybe in the next two blog posts?) by providing means to do even hardcore events like the tripple wurm in the public and without having to shoo everybody away that is not part of your team. Dynamic events were meant to be open to everybody, and ANet even stated that is is their goal to bring traditional instance raiding content out into the public space.

After having succeeded to do so for moderately difficult bosses recently (new Tequatl, Marionette, and Scarlet’s Hologram), they still have to prove that they can also succeed in

• making hardcore events (i.e., tripple wurm) public, and
• making easy events (essentially all initial mega bosses minus the new Tequatl) interesting.

~MRA

So that’s wht ANet was secretly doing all this time instead of finally giving us the the expansion we all want … (-cough-, Tengu, -cough-)

The dynamic map allocation according to your group, guild, world, etc. raises some questions, of course, so if any dev happen’s to be on Q&A patrol in this thread I’d be glad if this question could be addressed:

Does the map allocation only take the currently active (represented) guild into account, or also the inactive ones?

With up to five guilds per player, there is some pretty neat social network information given in the guild co-membership graph. I hope this information is taken into account as a whole, and that the system is not only focused on the guild that is currently active.

For instance, I am a member of a 300 member German wurm slayer guild from all existing [DE] servers which is regularly beating the crap out of this three headed beast. We, of course, try to meet on a common map to do our work. However, this guild is used only for organisational purposes, and most members are usually only representing their “main guild” (and some members are even forbidden to represent any other guild than their main guild). If we would try to meet on a common map under the new system, would we have all to represent the same guild, or will the system be smart enough to understand that we are all members of the same guild even if we are not representing?

Just wondering. It will surely be interesting to see how this shakes up the current PvE experience.

~MRA

IMO, the solution for this needs to be:

• in PvE/WvW traits can be equipped by characters that unlocked them,
• in PvP traits can be equipped by characters that have them unlocked by at least one character of the account.

As it has been in GW1.

Jasher.6580:

The real reason behind unlocks!

drumroll

Gem Store

Sorry, I don’t get this point. What has the gem store to do with unlocks? Or is this just forum paranoia?

~MRA

kalzana.3192:

I’m a Sylvari, whom Kasmeer has constantly belittled, and feel little to no kinship with her, and to a lesser extent Marjory.

If so, then you should definately stop meeting with them whenever you are invited, or doing stuff like attending their victory parties and drinking and joking with them.

Maybe deep inside you are bitter and you do despise them, by your actions seem to have made the biconics belive that you are actually a friend. So please stop taking advantage of their kindness.

~MRA

khani.4786:

After working my tail off since pre-launch to be able to make two legendaries myself I’m pretty disgusted at them just giving away a legendary weapon.

Malediktus.9250:

Really? A legendary for winning a single tournament while others have to farm 100s of hours for one? Disgusting. Guess Anet only knows extremes with rewards, either almost nothing or precursors/legendaries lol.

Most irrational complaints ever. Something like a legendary is exactly what I see as the right choice as a price for an such a tournament.

~MRA