Guild Wars 2

I don’t really expect a reply, but trying cannot hurt…

Any chance off-peak capping and its extremely unbalanced effect on final scoring will be tackled in any way, shape or form?
Or, to put the question in another form: are there any plans to give us matchups which aren’t already decided by Monday morning?

For all those that “my guild/group/best friend/me is the best at PvP/GvG/WvW”, you do realize that:

A) WvW is nearly exclusively about coverage
B) were it not for point A), WvW would NOT be about who can kill whom in open field fights, but who better employs the resources to keep most of the map capped. Which means for example building a zillion arrow carts when you defend a tower with the explicit intent of making the fight as unfair as possible in your favor.

Just saying..

Is it true that several guilds are moving from SFR back to Piken, or is it some weird form of trolling?

tagnut.8621:

Wouldnt worry about ranks – strikes me as odd how few people realise how pointless wxp is.

While the abilities are rather underwhelming as a whole, making them stronger would create a huge barrier to entry for new players. Imagine a new player starting one year from now, surrounded by monster toons with all the ranks unlocked.

What they could (and should) have done though is to increase the toons’ anti-zerg capabilities with those ranks. Stuff like increasing the range, radius, damage and number of targets of siege weapons, or the number of targets you can hit with your AoEs (only damage, not boons/heals) etc.
The cannon and ballista lines seem a step in the right direction but they’re so little, so late…

The numbers you’re seeing now are only due to the novelty effect and to people who go and try grinding WXP.
As soon as the novelty wears off and most people realize that WXP abilities are lackluster and in any case useless outside of WvW, numbers will drop down to normal… unfortunately for Desolation.
Today is the first morning in months we’re clocking at over 200 points/tick. But it won’t last

gamerul.2509:

You mean if you want big queue join Deso

No, he means no queues. I had outmanned “buff” on SFR borderland during weekend late afternoons, immediately before the main primetime period.
What Deso is doing given the lack of manpower and coverage is nothing short of amazing.

It has already been proposed but I’d like to repeat the invite to have a look at Desolation, EU T1.

I won’t sugar coat it though, it’s not what you’re looking for in your OP, as you will end up fighting outmanned most of the time. We have essentially no coverage outside of EU prime time, and your prime time coincides with our weakest spot (EU mornings). You only have to check the MOS points graph for EU T1 in the past few weeks to have a pretty accurate picture of what’s going on.

The plus side of course would be that your impact would be massive. We’re the server with the second longest presence in T1 on the EU side after Vizunah, but unlike them, we did it with little to no off peak coverage (the two weeks we ended up having one, 43-44, during the now infamous RUIN move, we won one and came close second in the other, beaten by a massive morning cap due to a friday French holiday which allowed Vizunah to fill all 4 maps).
Usually what goes on at those hours is that we manage to hold on “our” part of the EB map with our residual presence, but either 2 or all 3 of the BL are essentially devoid of Desolation players. You’d have your work cut for you, that’s for sure, being essentially the main force driving our effort on at least 2 out of the 4 maps.

Good luck with your move in any case, hopefully you’ll end up on a server providing you with plenty of fun.

Anatolian Turk.4057:

i hope this march patch lures our pvers into wvw, otherwise we are always going to be outmanned.

I seriously doubt it. The achievements apparently are WvW-based only, so why would someone who isn’t interested in it in the first place start grinding them?
No scoring change in sight, no correction of the fact that getting more or less anything which isn’t badges is much easier in PvE, zerg-friendly implementations all over the place… I don’t foresee a brilliant future for GW2’s open world pvp system.

Ran with an AC group yesterday for the first time after the revamp, path 3 was chosen.

Finally managed to complete the path after the two pugs ran away (one at spider, the second at kholer) and we ended up with an all-guild group. We skipped Kholer. Managed to 3-man the burrows (one was still coming after having replaced last pug, another died halfway during the fight). Killed Colossus using the bugged zone where boulders don’t drop. Tried a couple times doing it the proper way, was utterly and completely impossible to keep the idiotic NPC alive as he immediately parked himself straight in front of the boss and kept getting smacked to death by its melee knockback attack doing massive damage.

My opinion: AC path 3 in its current incarnation is ludicrously overtuned and has NO BUSINESS WHATSOEVER being the first dungeon most players will meet in their career. It’s not as ridiculous as old Simin was [haven’t tried new one], but it’s in the same general area.
My personal guess is GW2 is losing 10-15 players to frustration for every hardcore who’s happy with this version. Colossus needs either a massive nerfbat, or an NPC who can actually be useful.

All this means is Vizunah slacked today in preparation for the reset.
SFR has no chance of ever booting Vizunah out of T1 unless you can find another server with same/better morning coverage, and Desolation certainly doesn’t have it right now. Either that or you would need a true, week-long 2 vs 1… and Deso isn’t going to do that either.

The source problem is the crap loot you get from almost any activity in this game. When this is the case, you can’t really be surprised that people desperately flock to the few activities whose chance of getting even just a simple rare is not another outstandingly accurate approximation of the absolute zero.

Troma.3250:

Hey Magnus

just a thing man, why do you ask 100-150 people when we are 20-30? i played all morning since thoses days, and this is our exact numbers right now:

Number of players in a chat channel shows nothing. I myself often play in WvW without being logged on a chat server, so I’d seldom show up in such a count.

Already had several discussions about this point. I really don’t want to argue again about this. Let me just say this: I don’t believe for a nanosecond you can get a cap of 600+ points (or even for that matter 450+) with 35 players, unless there is exactly ZERO players on all 4 maps from the other two servers. As soon as one of the other servers has even just 5 players on one map, you immediately need much more to keep your points.

In T1, as a rule, you always have a minimum amount of players at least in EB, so you’d need 30-35 players just to keep your own 1/3 of the EB map; then you’d need at least one more zerg to go cap the other 3 maps, plus scouts… especially now that swords don’t even appear anymore unless the enemy has 25 or more. And the more towers/keeps you hold, the more scouts you need to keep them; otherwise all you’d do is to cap a map then lose everything again as soon as you move to another map and a small group of even just 10 enemies enters the map you just left. 10 players can take an undefended keep in 5 minutes with a couple golems, if there’s no one to stop them, and nowadays you’d not even see swords appearing on the map.

Tl;dr: with 35 players, in T1, you just keep your portion of EB, and nothing else. With 65-70 you could keep your part of EB and go cap an empty map, but then you’d lose it as soon as you move out to another one. To reach 450+ points and KEEP THEM FOR HOURS, as Vizunah always does, you need as a bare minimum 150-200 players.

And all this without even taking into account what I saw with my own eyes on those rare occasions when I was able to play in the morning against Vizunah. Trying to take a tower in a borderland with 7-8 players and getting hit by a 30-men zerg while you had over 1/3 of EB and almost everything on the 3 other maps. 35 players total.. yeah right, you had 5 in EB defending against the other two groups of 30-40 players from the other two servers, right? Man, those 5 players sure have to be amazing.

Vizunah always morning caps at 400+, even in the days when it’s not needed because you’ve already won. This means you have hundreds of players whose natural play time is the morning, plain and simple. Nothing to be ashamed of… what’s annoying is your prolonged denial of this, and you complaining every time another server tries to achieve the same coverage and trying to stop them by inventing rules (“only EU players count, Arenanet block US players from coming here please!”), without even realizing that a better coverage from 2 other servers would make for better, more balanced and thus MORE FUN games instead of this crap where 99% of the matchups are already decided at the start of mondays after your first morning sweep.

Vizunah only alarm clocks when it’s needed – which is very rarely. They “naturally” have hundreds of players on the maps at every time of the day without the need to set things up – it’s just intrinsic coverage. Just check the scores’ graphs on friday mornings on weeks where Vizunah already has 50-60k+ advantage… they still cap at 400+ points, even in situations where it’s useless for the score. They simply have a truckload of WvW players, period.

Which is why it’s a bit ridiculous to talk about “dedication” about it, since they get it for free so to speak… but whatever.

Until one other EU server gets an influx of, at the very least, 100-150 WvW players who can cover every morning of the week during the 6-12AM period the current situation is never going to change.

My 2 cents after having played 3 of the guild bounty missions (T1, T2 and T3):

the event is boring and not very well designed in its current implementation. The way it is now, you’re essentially forced to waste 90% of the event time in preparatory activities, i.e. assign scouts to every map in which bounties spawns and track them down; when you start the mission, the actual event is over in the blink of an eye.

It is also annoying how you need to re-track targets if some other guild kills it first because they just activated their mission; especially for some of the targets (Sotzz the Scallywag anyone?) finding them is so hard that you really cannot afford to “risk it” and try to start the mission if you don’t already have a lock on on him, as finding it in the 15 minutes of the mission timer is essentially impossible unless you luck out.

And of course, given you need to track 15 potential targets, small guilds are completely excluded even if we discount the massive influence costs of the research.

As a bare minimum, I’d extend the mission timer to one hour, and would make the targets for any given guild spawn only after mission activation keeping the mechanic of only allowing guild members to activate those targets by talking to them. This would also imply several copies of a single NPC could appear on the map at any given time, so the sheriff star should only be visible for “your” target and not appear on other copies of the NPC.

At least this way you spend the time playing the actual event instead of just scouting before it…

Enhancer.1385:

look the score !

up to deso and sfr to do their job now

What has Deso to do with this? If anything, Desolation should focus Vizunah as always, although it’s obviously useless anyway from a scoring position point of view.

Tygra.4570:

Since when 8:20 AM is the night ? It’s like saying EU primetime is at 7 PM, it makes no sense.

Never said you cap us at night. Anyway I don’t see what changes whether it’s night, morning or afternoon.

Tygra.4570:

However the other parts of your posts i can agree : we win thanks to our coverage. And only a fool could say such an organization required no hard work. We don’t have more players than you since Deso is probably the most populated EU server. We just bring our players to the battle since day 1, because Grenth and fractals are not as fun as you guys.

Cheers

This I keep reading a lot. I agree and disagree at the same time.
I agree that you need organization to make the most out of a numerical superiority situation. Vizunah is certainly very good at playing the point game.

I disagree it takes organization to have more players. You either have more or you don’t. If tomorrow an asian guild of 500 WvW players comes on Desolation and covers the mornings, we will start winning every week just like Vizunah is doing now. It won’t take organization, the numerical superiority will simply happen because we will have more players interested in WvW.

Jaghen.8314:

Now magnus think before you write please, never since there has been a night team against us has VS ticked ~600 at night… if anything lately we have 200 while deso has above 300.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/16/

February 13, 8:20 AM. Vizunah Square 625, Desolation 55, Elona 15.

Also, it doesn’t show in the graph as no one entered the data at that point, but yesterday morning Vizunah had a moment in which they were ticking at over 600 points. I know because I was logged in at the time and checked the WvW scores.
They don’t cap us at night, but in the morning.

Yaro.3251:

I wonder if following is correct assessment (quoting ashlenty.9358 from closed thread):

“RAID guild off around 12pm-1am, so Multimapswitch is on. When a BL is in peace there is only scouts (~5) while all the others are in an BL at war. When the peace is broke, the multimapswitch …switch to restore the peace. :p
Basicaly, example: RBL 5ppl, BBL 5ppl, GBL 5ppl, CBE 35ppl.”

Because if it is, issue is nonexistent. In its current formulation at least.

Have you seen the numbers in EB alone that both Deso and Elona field every day at that hour?

35 people would never be able to even hold their part of EB, never mind if they had to switch all over the 4 maps.

Also: you seriously believe you can cap at 600+ with 5 people per map? At that score level, you need more than 5 scouts per map just to cover all the keeps and towers you hold. That’s before considering you need at least a 5-men group roaming in every BL to recap supply camps that lone enemy stragglers could get.

A more realistic assessment would go something like:

40 people in EB at all times to not lose most of the map
10 scouts + 5-men roaming group recapping camps in every BL
A zerg of 30 hopping from map to map

We’re at 115 players already, and even with such a setup, you can hold over 500 points only until BOTH enemy servers are only present in EB + a maximum of a 20-men group in one BL. As soon as either of the two opponents starts fielding 25-30 men zergs you’ve just tied your main multimap zerg in one place, meaning you’re now vulnerable to losing the two whole other bl maps in minutes unless lots more players come online.

You need 200, not 20, to do what Vizunah does. It’s simple math.

Qwixx.5923:

Our night and morning crew rarely exceeds 40 players for all borderlands, always the same players. If you do not want to believe it, too bad.

You’re right, I don’t believe it. I seriously doubt Vizunah ever drops below 200 players on the 4 WvW maps, and if it does, it happens rarely and for very short timeframes.

40 players are barely enough to hold your 1/3 of EB during the night, especially against the numbers Desolation can field. If that was all Vizunah had, you’d regularly drop below the 100 points/tick mark for hours at a time, and I don’t see that happening.

Lord Rager.8543:

So players like me that main play time isn’t your playtime can help my server less since my playtime is wrong……

Nope, you’d only get less points if you’re having it easy by massively outnumbering your opponents.
And if that happens, assuming the formula is correctly designed, you’ll end up helping your server just as much as the other players playing at peak time because while any single cap point will be worth less, you will be able to cap many more of them, and keep them for a longer time, due to the numerical superiority you’re enjoying.

Altie.4571:

ITT:
OP: People are playing WvW when I don’t, STOP THEM!

Not at all. More like “people are getting ridiculous amounts of points bashing doors when no one is around, factor in the amount of opposition they have in the number of points they get”.
But I understand reading can be a complex skill to acquire…

MikaHR.1978:

just make points tick for 1/10 of day value during night and problem solved.

No. It has to be based on ratio of players in the map for every server, not on time of the day.

Gaudrath.6725:

EvE Online has a nice solution for “night-capping”; when a tower gets hit by an enemy fleet, it goes into “reinforced mode” where it becomes invulnerable for a set amount of time which is known both to attackers and defenders. I believe the time can even be set by players, not sure which side though. Very nice and completely does away with one side demolishing stuff when the other one is asleep.

This ensures that both parties have a fair chance at destroying or defending the tower, since essentially the crucial battle is pre-arranged.

Eh. Eve online also has one single, global server, so the timezone problem is nicely sidestepped because every guild/alliance has access to the same worldwide recruitment pool, unlike what happens here.

But at this point I doubt we can hope for a drastic change in the server structure, so the most realistic hope is for a change in the scoring system.

username.4932:

The important thing is that you believe what you said.

I don’t need to believe it, I’ve observed it with my eyes. Vizunah has hundreds of players in the WvW maps on a true 24/7 basis, hence why they can simply alarm-clock at whatever time they know the opponent server has the least amount of players online; the other servers can’t do that to Vizunah because such a time window does not exist for them.

Unless you want to keep claiming that myth about 20 players, but I never believed it in the first place and then one night (and then another, and then another… and several mornings too…) I got to see 40-men Vizunah zergs in the BL I was playing in while EB was in an even 3-way split. Then I started insta-jumping between the other 2 BLs, and on all of them it was my server, not Vizunah, to have the outmanned buff…

username.4932:

MagnusLL.8473:

And the proof is…

L2P issue, morning cap happens before 9AM.

First of all, if you need to be at the office at 9AM you need to logoff earlier. Second, and more important, the exact time is irrelevant. If you are around until 9AM and then have to go, the other server can simply start recapping at 9:05AM. All you’ve done is reduced your vulnerability window, but that window is still going to be there until you have enough players to be able to match the opponents’ numbers at every hour of the day.

Also, I fail to see how not being able to stay online due to RL commitments qualifies as “L2P”.

Yaro.3251:

I’m not sure what you are getting at.

“something is broken until it gets fixed” – what it is exactly? 27/7?

The scoring system.
Well actually there’s plenty of broken stuff in WvW but I was referring to that in my post.

Yaro.3251:

That’s a horse beaten brutally to death, Magnus. No need to repeat same things over and over again. That’s one of the core ideas of WvW. If you can’t get coverage as a server, you are not at the top as a server.

I happen to think there’s a need to repeat that something is broken until it gets fixed, but in this case I was not even doing that. In my original post, I was simply pointing out that “dedication” has to take into account real life commitments.

Lucas of the Desert.2165:

@MagnusLL
I guess we understand that you are not happy about it but could you offer a solution on the other hand that would:
1) Satisfy most people
2) Be unexploitable
and 3) Without harming or destroying the hard work (yes i consider playing the market as work too) others have putten into it.

The problem is you can’t make it right for everyone. You don’t have to go for high-end items but if you do they are considered to take loads of effort.

Considering the rise of prizes: that’s just how it works. I doubt that Arenanet will just allow an overall inflationary economy. My guess is that prizes will rise until players themselfs stop buying something because it is too expensiv. Then sellers will have to adapt and it reaches an overall average of the value an item is supposed to have. That value is clearly not met at the precursors because people will still buy them even if tbey are 700-800g.

It’s not Arenanet being unfair, mean or illogical. It’s us players that drive the market. The buyers make the prizes. If i could sell my storm to 2 people one’s willing to pay 100g the other up to 300g guess how i’d choose

Actually I’ve not many problems with the economy since I know how to play the TP to get money (and I do it regularly, although I’m certainly nowhere near being a power trader) and I don’t really care about legendaries. If I really started to go after one, my estimate would be 2 months to get any one I pick, including the 2 greatswords.

But if you’re asking which economy model I’d like to see implemented in an MMO: a claim window which gives you for free any item in the game, on all characters in your account, whenever you want.

Common wisdom says this would destroy any MMO game since these games “are all about progression”. But I’ve never been one to follow common wisdom..

styx.7294:

I dunno how realistic your dream is. 150vs150 sPvP would require a great deal of organization. It’s one thing to get 10 people to agree to a schedule. It’s very different to get 300 people to show up for anything and agree on the rules. The more people you want to do something, the less organized it has to be.

There are 64 vs 64 fps maps, aren’t there?

You don’t need people to agree to a schedule or rules at the moment. The rules are there beforehand, and as for the schedule… all you need is a queue of 300 getting filled, much like a queue of 10. If the overall population is big enough, even a queue of 300 ought to be filled in a matter of minutes.

Leorcyn.1063:

Seriously, you should cut it off on that kind of topic as well. It’s almost as useless and “troll feeding” as “Deso/VS/ER is a cheater server”.

No, not a single server is made of jobless people. No, people do not constantly take days off to win a wuvwuv match. And no, no country works in such a specific way that its whole population does not work between 8am and 3pm.

Never said every player of Vizunah is jobless, never mentioned France.
On the other hand, it’s pretty clear Vizunah’s population has a much higher number of players who can afford to play during the period 8-12AM GMT+1 than any other european server.

Dedication can’t do much if you’re needed at the office at 9AM. And the proof is…

ashlenty.9358:

With all due respect, it’s what I do. I’m in my office from 9am to 6pm and guest what ? I’m a morning crew member !!

Who say I can’t sleep at 11pm, woke up at 6am and fight for my country server till 8am ?

Very nice of you, but it’s not going to win Deso anything, unfortunately, because Vizunah morning-caps at 8AM. We’d need a significant number of players able to stay in the game until at the very least 12AM or so.

NYRKKIPAULA.8051:

So what, we know their morning team is stronger whilst our night team is stronger. We should make the difference during night to offset their morning. Or get an organized morning group.

Unfortunately morning is superior to night, because it trails in the afternoon. I.e. our night superiority gets completely nullified once the morning cap team comes, since they can easily cap even T3 structures while they’re empty, while the advantage and the T3 structures they build in the morning keep being there later on.
Listen, the situation is really cystal clear. You don’t get 600+ caps if you don’t have at least 3x the numbers of the other 2 servers combined. Until and unless this situation changes, Vizunah will keep winning forever because all they need is 2 mornings to gain over 50K on the other two servers. That’s too big of a gap to be recovered, and they don’t even need to keep doing it for the whole week.

Syeria.4812:

The burden of proof continues to fall upon those who claim that the current economy is harming the game. No matter how many fancy, selfish, silly ways people want to try phrase things “I’m unhappy” is still not an argument. The people who have defended the economy have defended it against the claims that have been made against it. As no one has provided an actual argument (besides the “I want a legendary but it’s hard” one that is constantly put down) as to the economy detracting from the game, no one has felt obligated to defend it.

I’ll reiterate again:

If you or anyone else believes that the economy of the game is causing things to be “unfun” feel free to make that argument. However, you must be prepared to present evidence or logic to support that claim. The burden of proof is upon you.

There is no burden of proof if I’m relaying a personal experience. If I come on this forum saying “the economy setup in GW2 makes me not want to play the game” I’m stating a fact relating to myself, I don’t need to prove it. You’d need to prove that I’m lying in this case, i.e. I’m claiming to not have fun due to the economy while in fact I have fun playing the TP (or whatever). Unless you have a mind reader device, good luck doing that.
Also, “I’m unhappy” might not be an argument but is a perfecty valid feedback.

About the economy “objectively” harming the game overall, that’s not provable because you’d need access to data which only Arenanet has (mainly if the number of players is increasing or decreasing, which reasons players cite causing them to leave the game etc.). By the same token though, you cannot prove that the economy is helping the game either.

Here’s a simple thought. What if it turns out that the best economic model for MMO success is an highly inflationary one?

Mourningcry.9428:

Essence Snow.3194:

Much like how flying is not mandatory to go around the world when one has the option to walk/swim. Yeah walking/swimming will get you there eventually but the difference between the methods is noticeable to the extent to where the latter is really no longer deemed acceptable.

And much like airlines and cruiseships and buses, there’s a cost associated with doing so.

Can’t afford to fly? Take a train.
Can’t afford the train? Take a bus.
Can’t afford a bus? Walk.

Don’t want to walk? Don’t go.

There’s no free lunch. Whether or not an alternative is acceptable is irrelevant if the cost can’t be met or otherwise accounted for.

Uhm. In the game, everything could be rendered a free lunch if the developers chose to.

Whether that would be good or bad for the game is an entirely different matter, however I’d like to point that both those who claim that it would make the game worse and those claiming it would make it better just go for the usual unprovable “lots of people would quit”-type assertions.

Syeria.4812:

Way to completely not address the comment that was made. No one has established how the TP adds “fun” to the game as that has never been challenged. Therefore you have no point. If you would like to make the argument that the current economy detracts from the “fun level” of the game, feel free to do so, but be warned that you will be expected to back your claims up with logic or evidence.

If you want that challenged, you don’t have to look further away that this thread’s first post.

I was probably a little bit too terse, but one of my points was that all the people who jump at the defense of GW2 economic system whenever someone whines about it miss the forest for the tree. It’s pretty obvious that people like the OP feel the current setup of the economy makes their game experience miserable. Whether their assessment that the economy “is bad” has any “intrinsic value” (assuming such a thing even exists) or not is irrelevant. Your best explanation of why the economy is, in fact, totally brilliant, won’t change anything regarding those people experience of the game.

To the OP, the economy is terrible because it makes the game unfun to play. Considering one plays this game to have fun, that’s pretty hard to confute.

There would also be a discussion here about which criteria you need to use to judge the economy as “good”, since it doesn’t exist in a cosmic vacuum, but it’s supposed to be functional to the MMO’s needs. Many of the explanations I’m seeing about why the economy is in fact so good limit the analysis to the economy itself, but fail to take into account the surrounding framework.

Personally I believe it does indeed further the underlying design philosophy as it’s pretty obvious that e.g. Arenanet doesn’t want everyone to have a legendary and the current setup does actually make it hard to acquire one.
My other point (hence the reference to WoW) was that I have doubts this is the best choice. But hey, it’s not like it’s my game anyway so…

Braxxus.2904:

MagnusLL.8473:

the actions of 50 players make the actions of 5000 moot

You’re right, this IS the best game design ever. D.I.A.F. Zerglings.

Oh, if the game was set up so that the action of 50 smart players undid the work of 5000 brainless zerglings I’d be all for it. You can’t even begin to imagine how much I’d like it.

The problem is, the way it’s setup now, the impact you have on the game is not a function of your skill but of the time of day you play. Or, to be more precise, the impact you have is inversely proportional to the amount of players playing in WvW at the time, which given the server setup translates to “whoever has more people on at 8AM (local time of the server’s region) autowins”.
It also means, by definition, the game is decided by the actions of a tiny minority.

Esoteric.5490:

There will never be a system that makes points worth less at certain times of the day. What if a server, such as Kaineng, which has mostly SEA and Korean players got less points when they are on? Then the work of the 5,000 on the other side would be wiped out by the 5,000 on the NA side simple because they play on this side of the ocean. If that doesn’t wipe this theory, I don’t know what does.

I’ve not seen that many proposal based on timezone. Most of the corrective proposals are a variation of “reduce the number of points scored by the server who enjoys a significant numerical superiority, while keeping a minimum lower cap to avoid stupid tricks like everyone logging off to deny points to the other servers”.

Any modification based on such a system would be completely independent of timezones; the only criterion would be “if you’re having it easy because you massively outnumber your opponent, you get less points”. Which sounds completely reasonable to me. In your scenario, the points of both oceanic and NA players would get a reduction resulting, ironically enough, on both sides having the same contribution to the respective scores.

I’m also starting to get a little bit tired of the whole “you can’t screw the players who play at off peak”. Again, by definition, those are a minority (otherwise it wouldn’t be called “off peak” in the first place) and the current system ends up screwing those who play at peak, which are, again by definition, the majority. I fail to see how screwing 100.000 to avoid screwing 10.000 is supposed to make sense.

styx.7294:

sPvP is a football game, WvW is a gang war.

The problem with this (and all the other variations on “if you want balance go sPvP”) is that it leaves people like me, who’d like 150vs150 sPvP, with no options. As far as I know there’s no offering on the market for something like that. On the other hand, there’s lots and lots and lots of crappy, unbalanced open world pvp games…

Vizunah simply has several hundreds players available at any point in time. It has always been like that, despite the myth about the 20 mythical heroes who could cap all 4 maps just by themselves, hence the prolonged domination.

The fault is not with them, the fault is with the design. They are simply making the best use of a colossal design flaw as they’re in the lucky position of being able to do so. Anyone else finding himself in that position would do exactly the same.

If you want changes, vote with your wallet.

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/16/

600+ points/tick during morning (it’s going on even today btw, 625/tick as I logged off, it just doesn’t show on the graph has no one entered the data), in the EU T1 bracket, after free transfers have been closed off. 25k+ point swing in a few hours. Completely impossible for anyone to make up for it, no matter how well you play.

Don’t know the situation firsthand in T1 NA but…:

http://mos.millenium.org/servers/view/29/

… doesn’t look like all that different.

This is going on on the servers supposedly having the better all around coverage too, so in theory the ones in which this kind of situations ought to happen less often. You can have fun checking what’s happening in the last tiers.

I remember several months ago, when people were already complaining about how moronic this scoring system was and how it would lead to an intrinsically unstable situation in which even the smallest population imbalance would completely lopside a match, the standard reply to defend the indefensible was “just wait, it’s going to balance out after a while”.

Still convinced it’s going to balance out? If yes, could you give a suggested time frame we ought to still wait until we reach this mythical land of milk, honey, and balanced matchups (“balanced matchup” = “a matchup in which the winner is unknown at least until friday morning”… although friday evening would be better, but I’m feeling generous).

Because, you know, playing any type of game in which the winner is known after 20% or less than the game duration has elapsed doesn’t sound like too smart of a time investment. At least if the duration is 30 minutes or less you can always say “well ok 80% of the time you’re playing for nothing but it’s still so brief as to not be a problem”. But when the game duration is a week, that 80% means whole days wasted in an utterly futile exercise.

And now a straight question to Arenanet about this tiny little itsy bitsy elephant in the room. Are you still planning to keep the current scoring system, in which the actions of 50 players make the actions of 5000 moot, or do you plan to ever revise it?
Not asking about time frames, just a statement of intent.

Syeria.4812:

The “white knight” claims are more than tiresome, and rather pathetic. People disagree with you, and they have provided solid logic, evidence, and explanations as to why. If you have reason to disagree with that, provide that reason or remain quiet. Crying about how everyone who disagrees with you is [random ad hominem attack] is unbecoming.

Ehrrr…. what? People disagree with me on what, exactly?
If you’re talking about the state of the economy, I’ve never claimed the economy was either good or bad in any of my previous posts.

Ursan.7846:

MagnusLL.8473:

I never used that argument

MagnusLL.8473:

And yet Blizzard/Activision goes to town with billions of $$$/year. I wonder who’s the one being smart there.

Translation: Blizzard/Activision makes lots of $$$/year, they obviously have the smarter system.

Yeaaaaa no, you definitely used that argument.

“I wonder” is different from “they obviously have”. To be honest, it was also a remark directed at the accessibility of in-game goals rather than the economy itself.

Syeria.4812:

MagnusLL.8473:

By your same metrics, though, I’d like to see hard proof of how GW2’s player base as a whole is ecstatic about its brilliant economy and how everyone is convinced it’s the best thing since sliced bread and how it makes the game 1000% more fun for everyone.

The difference is that I’m not making claims such as “players will leave because of X.” Nor am I saying “Players love this game because of X.”

Show me where I did. While you try to do so, however, keep in mind that enunciating a possibility is different from making a claim.
I get the feeling you read a lot of things in my previous post I simply never wrote.

Syeria.4812:

The 2nd is terrible for lengthening game longetivity. Many players are motivated by progression of their characters, in this game cosmetic. If everyone was able to get everything rapidly, many people will lose motivation of play

How many is “many”?

Who is making claims now?

Ursan.7846:

“WoW’s economy is better than GW2’s, because the game earns more money” is hardly a compelling argument.

EDIT: Though I would love it if someone could show me some compelling data that the player base is actually decreasing, for any reason really. No one knows, except Colin Johanson who has stated their core player base is actually increasing (And I’ll believe him. You see a similar trend on xfire too). You can use anecdotal evidence all you want, but in the end your personal opinions don’t really reflect the opinions of the player base as a whole.

I never used that argument, nor did I claim anywhere GW2 is failing/having success. I was just remarking about how all the white knights spend a ton of energy explaining how this whole TP thing is so brilliant and no one takes a second to explain how it makes the game, you know, more fun. And also, how saying to someone “if you don’t like it go away”, like lots of people are doing about legendaries, can be a double edged sword because people could actually follow the tip and go away, and I fail to see how Arenanet is going to profit from that.

By your same metrics, though, I’d like to see hard proof of how GW2’s player base as a whole is ecstatic about its brilliant economy and how everyone is convinced it’s the best thing since sliced bread and how it makes the game 1000% more fun for everyone.

My hunch is that if you’re after the big money, the smart bet is on games where everyone can get everything [and no, I’m not claiming it’s the only thing you would need]. But I’m not trying to convince anyone of it.

Mourningcry.9428:

Most importantly, no where is a player required, or entitled to acquire these “high end materials”. Doing so, or attempting to do so, is a voluntary choice, and shoudl be undertaken with the understanding of what doing so will require and entail to do so. If those requirements are not favorable, or particularly enjoyable to that person, then they simply should opt not to.

This, though, applies to the game as a whole, too. Guess what happens once a high enough % of the population finds the game unfun and leaves for good?

I have yet to read a compelling argument about how this brilliant economy is making the game more fun, barring those players who get their enjoyment out of the act of making money itself.

Everyone makes fun of WoW, and how stupid it is, how dumbed down, how ridiculous it is to hand welfare epics and yadda yadda yadda. And yet Blizzard/Activision goes to town with billions of $$$/year. I wonder who’s the one being smart there.

Tarang.7562:

At what point do you subjectively deem a price fair?

Free would be ideal, but I’ll settle for one copper.

Tarang.7562:

Is it unfair for people in the real world to have nice things too?

Most definitely, especially in those cases where the only thing they did was to luck out at birth.

Tarang.7562:

That dude you saw with a fancy Ferrari, should he make sure you get one too?

At least one.

Hey, you asked… :P

Ganzo.5079:

MagnusLL.8473:

For all those that “guardian does not need anything, you’re megagimped in anything else than support/defense because you’re really good at it so don’t cry”.

When is support/defense ever better than offense in this game?

Here is not a matter of offense is better then defense, or viceversa.

Oh but it is. The usual line of arenanet’s white knights regarding the constant gimping of the guardian is “you are good at defense so you cannot be good at offense”.

They conveniently forget to mention how for example at high level pve play every mob can one or two shot you so defense is useless, or how pvp is all about burst damage etc.

Being good at defense is worthless in a game where you cannot defend efficiently anyway.

For all those that “guardian does not need anything, you’re megagimped in anything else than support/defense because you’re really good at it so don’t cry”.

When is support/defense ever better than offense in this game?

Elusive power gives you more damage when you are in a situation you don’t want to be (low endurance).
Radiant power gives you more damage in a situation you want to be (enemy affected with conditions). It also stacks with fiery wrath since most of your condition application will be burning, and you have easy ways to apply it (torch, renewed justice).
Not to mention, if you get as few as 5 points in honor, you should almost never be on low endurance (Vigorous precision).
Which one would you rather get?
If you want both the meditation and shout CD reduction, just go 10/30/20/10/0 or something similar.

With your choice of weapons, not going 30 in radiance is a waste IMO. Radiant power, radiant fire, two handed strength and 300 points of precision all in one line is just too good to pass up.

Just go x/30/x/x/x glass cannon.

I’ve started to dabble in TP playing a little over a month ago and, I think, I’ve had some decent success, raising the amount of gold available to me from somewhere in the low 20 to nearly ten times that amount.

I’ve made a bit of research on flipping, on mystic forge gambling, straight up manipulation of single items etc. I use a spreadsheet with a few simple queries on it to identify new good flipping candidates and the like.

My problem is that the ratio between the amount of time sunk into the TP and the total amount of gold gained tends to suck. After all is said and done, I think if I had just farmed CoF 1 for the same amount of time I’ve wasted on the TP I’d probably have more money by now. Admittedly, playing the TP is at least vaguely more interesting than redoing the same dungeon path over and over again, but it’s getting boring fast anyway.

I keep reading of these people who have 100-150g to invest and just do “login – 15 minutes to place buy/sell orders – logout” and the next day they have made something like 20-50 gold out of it. Every day.

How the hell do you do that?

I’m not that naive to expect specific directions but at least some generic hint would be appreciated. Is it linked to simply find one specific item (or crafting chain) which guarantees crazy margins and about which no one else knows [yet]? Is it to go through an almost automatic routine where you already know the buy/sell prices of a long list of items and just go forward with it without even checking the current situation?
I just don’t get it… I mean I spend much more than 15 minutes just checking my gw2spidy watchlist every day, for much worse results…

Booler.6598:

I dont get it , so you have someone solo or the 4 other people have to kill the boss with you? because i surly wouldn’t pay money to have to kill the end boss with you when im a paying customer , and if that is the case do they get upset if you wipe. that’s like buying a big mac and having to make it behind the counter as well with a chance of an old pattie

In case of Arah 4, you pay 15g because they killed Simin for you. The end boss is trivial.

As an example, I managed to complete that path after 3 runs totaling 12 hours of tries. If all I cared was to achieve completion, it’d have been more efficient to pay 15g, since 15/12 = 1.25 and I can gain more than 1.25 gold per hour when not wiping on Simin.

From previous observations (on other types of items), the mystic forge gives approximately a 20% chance to output an item of the next superior class to the 4 you put in, and an 80% chance of giving an item of the same class.

If you put in 4 level 80 exotic weapons, there’s no higher class which can be given, so you have a 100% chance of obtaining an item of the same class of the 4 you just put in – i.e. another level 80 exotic weapon.

I’m guessing every specific exotic has the same chance so to know how many tries you need ON AVERAGE just check how many exotics of that weapon type exist in the game and you’ll know the odds. E.g. let’s say there are 100 different greatsword level 80 exotics, that would mean you’d have 1/100 chance of getting Dusk every time you put in 4 level 80 exotic greatswords in the MF. From there it’s pretty easy to compute the average price for producing any given precursor.

Of course, it’s probability, which means you CAN get unlucky streaks…

Leave the search string empty, select weapons from the main drop down and rifle from the subtype drop down. You can also filter for rarity and weapon level.

help.2645:

Well, the way I got Dusk was a test which seem’d to work..But with only one test and none after..It’s hardly been proved but my friend is 100% sure it’s bullkitten and don’t work, Basically I had loads of blues and kept putting them in for ages getting out blues, once I got about 15 failed attempts at getting a green I put the rare’s in and got that out.

Oh god no, not the gambler’s fallacy again….

Yup, noticed it too. Now I’m kicking myself for not holding a few thousands I had a few days ago :P

Oh well, just need to wait for the bubble to deflate, I guess.

Well after another 4 hours of tries finally managed to kill her, but I still think it’s ridiculous. Arah 4 is already the less efficient dungeon path of all even without Simin, add in this fight whose difficulty is so much out of whack with the whole rest of the game and the path should give something like 10.000 tokens to be worth it.

As far as I’m concerned my first impression remains valid, this fight is grotesquely overtuned and should be nerfed into the ground. That, or you should fix the sparks, but something tells me a nerf will be a far quicker fix.