Guild Wars 2

It was also probably a mistake to release W2 at the same time as ascended weapons.

If SAB is really dead, at least bring back the SAB finishers/minis/backpacks/boomboxes/funboxes one last time.

Regardless of how you feel about children in combat, or whether interactions are “forced” or “organic,” I think it basically boils down to: show, don’t tell.

The living story is like the Star Wars prequels. It never really shows how characters bond and grow in response to events. Rather, they simply are and the writers use narrative to explain why they are that way. It’s incredibly dissatisfying and hamfisted.

That sad part is, Jeff Grub is on the writing staff. He should know better. He used to write DragonLance novels for TSR, and the original DragonLance trilogy by Weiss and Hickman is one of my favorite fantasy series in terms of characterization. I thought the authors did a great job of showing how a group of people changed in response to events; struggled with insecurity, stereotype, and desires; and ultimately developed as separate individuals over time.

That’s why hobo-tron works and why people respond to him. Put aside whether you like him as comic relief or not, or have problems with the details of his Golem sentience with respect to the larger game lore – something a favorite English teacher of mine called the “shut up and drink your beer” response to minor fact inconsistencies. The character itself is very dynamic and we, the players, can see how he changes in response to the events of the world, what motivates him, and emphasize with his struggles. First, he loses his job. Second, we find him begging on the streets of Divinity’s Reach. Third, he’s kidnapped by scarlet and falsely accused of aiding her. Fourth, his redemption arc begins as he tries to clear his name and show that he’s a good person. We’re involved in all of that.

In contrast, we’ve been told things about DE2.0’s backstory, but we didn’t see them then and the characters don’t seem to evolve at all now.

/signed

I put on my storm wizard backpack and honors in applied jumping title last night when I got home from work. I started running around doing my usual slew of nightly activities and found a bunch of other people who had done the same/similar.

Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if their data analysis consisted of “bad numbers, sky is falling, kill the project” — without critically thinking about why the numbers were bad , what may have caused it, and what it means about the prospects for further project expansion.

Mounts already exist. See witch’s broom, sonic tunneling device. If they just made more of these mount-toys — no speed boost, no combat use — no one would care and people who want to ride in fashion can do so.

God knows I want a charr motorbike soooo badly to compliment my FF7 Cloud Strife cosplay.

Well, if you let rabid hardcore fanbois dictate development you wind up with something like wildstar, which no one likes to play. that said, one thing raw analytics can’t account for is if you have tainted data. I know SAB W2’s data was bad, and god knows the bugs in 2-1 were terrible and 2-2 too long and hard (gong room)… but I wonder how much of that drop off can be accounted for the fact that ascended weapons were released at the same time, and that players would be really interested in a more casual (and not gamebreaking) SAB w3 if it was released. Because people really, really loved W1, so the W2 numbers may not really mean that people aren’t interested in SAB for the future.

Esplen.3940:

Malkavian.4516:

Seriously, guys. Just chill. I read the interview and nothing is mentioned in verbatim indicating that SAB is not going to come back. I am confident it will come back eventually. Perhaps around mid-season or near the end of the season, who knows?

SAB is not going to come back during the course of LS2 because Mordremoth > Jumping around. Makes sense, but then they go on to say that we may not be seeing SAB after LS2, depending on if, when, how they can fit it in into the overarching story. Also, it sounded like LS was going to be a big, big, big continuation annd that means it’s too intense for jumping around.

You need to learn to read between the lines. SAB is not going to come back ever. They’re not even planning any development for it, at any point. SAB is dead.

I think they should just stop doing these interviews, unless their reps are going to be authorized to give real details. It just makes the company look evasive, and then look at how they handled the SAB announcement.

RIP SAB. Almost a year later, my kid still asks when we can play “the jumping game” again.

W2 had its problems, sure. I have no doubt this decision was based on the metrics, which were likely terrible when (a) 2-1 was broken at launch and (b) 2-2 so long that it desperately needed to be broken into two different levels.

Hopefully they will decide to turn the box on and let us enjoy what already exists. Until then, SAB, you will be missed.

2nd anniversary is coming up. I’d bet on that or Christmas, if we’re going to see another gem store sale on it.

The elite Vabbian armor set.

You can loose every single game you have ever played and still get a set of glory armor from the PvP reward track. I don’t call that skill based.

RIP gates of arah farm. It was like a staff guardian family reunion, every two hours.

The second idea is completely unworkable, given that people like myself use the instant-cast setting. I haven’t seen a targeting circle since that patch hit.

The first idea is fine though.

Bring back Panic and Clumsiness too.

I’ve seen other people fly in and out of my niche before, but the rapidity with which the bid increases come in is something novel, that’s all.

John: I’ve been making money on a nice little TP niche for a couple months now, dutifully providing liquidity for those who don’t want to wait for sell orders to fill. Over the past week, however, I’ve noticed that none of my buy orders have been getting filled. I did a little experiment and placed buy orders at various times over the past day, including three sets of buy orders this morning, spaced around 30m apart each. I’ve found that within five or ten minutes of posting a buy order, someone else had posted an order for five items at 1c higher. I’m also noticing the 5 order increment in items I’m not buying.

I suspect this is the work of a bot or the greatest p-socker in the world.

I’d rather not disclose what I’m buying here on the forums, but would be happy to discuss in private. I’m also curious if anyone else has noticed this in other markets.

What kind of tools do you use to manage the economy? Did you develop them in house, get them from a third party, or is it just excel gone wild?

maha.7902:

No it wouldn’t. Builds are already tight on trait choices, what would end up happening is condition builds miss out on something to make their build stronger because they have to take a passive on-crit trait instead of something else, and then direct damage builds either don’t change in the slightest or they move a couple points around.

Here’s the problem – condition damage builds are able to perform a solid 6 – 6,500 DPS, but direct damage builds do 10 – 15,000 DPS. You are never going to be able to bridge that gap.

Your complaint can be fixed with simple balancing; tweak some damage here, improve the effect of certain traits there. Right now, for systemic reasons, there’s zero place for condis in small group content because they’re effectively neutered. Un-neutering them would be a huge leap forward.

fake edit: to be 100% clear, you’re talking about whether condi builds will have a place in the dps meta. Of course what I propose isn’t going to fix that, but the proposal isn’t meant to fix that either. I’m advocating that a condi user not be rendered effectively worthless in semi-organized content because guardians can’t turn off VOJ, etc…

Kaiyanwan.8521:

There is no easy solution, otherwise it would have been fixed by now.

Well, there’s no easy solution to the condition cap. I just wonder if they’ve ever considered a trait-based solution. It doesn’t solve all of the problems, but at least it would give condi builds a solid place in the game.

^^^ That’s called getting rid of the condition cap. I think that’s already well off the table at this point in the game’s development.

In small group content (everything but the world boss zerg), the problem with condi builds is (a) the limit on stacks and (b) overwriting good condis with bad condis.

My proposal effectively lets people chose when they are going to deal what I term “incidential condition damage.” Right now, those traits that proc condis are mandatory. I propose to keep them in the game, but make them optional, ie, as one of the selectable traits (major), and put something more neutral in the unselectable spot (minor). That way if you want to keep your condi procs, you can. But people who don’t build for condis arent forced to take skills that interfere with condi builds.

I don’t think it would be hard to implement nor hard to balance.

Get rid of all incidential condition damage minor traits. Do that, and there’s always room in a party for at least one condition damage build.

You know what I’m talking about – all those unavoidable minor traits that you wind up having to take in power builds:

Warrior – Precise Strikes
Elementalist – Arcane Precision & Flame Barrier
Necromancer – Barbed Precision
Thief – Serpent’s Touch
Engineer – Sharpshooter
Mesmer – Sharper Images

Make them major traits, which would allow people to avoid dealing incidential condition damage. Voila, there’s a huge leap forward for condition damage builds in dungeons, fractals, and WvW small group content.

I know Virtue of Justice presents a unique problem for Guardians, so how about a major trait that disables the burning effect in exchange for a small buff to power?

John – (1) how do you view your role in economic management . . . although a micro person, how much, if at all, do you incorporate macro modeling into your work, (2) do you have any real life role models that you follow, and (3) what papers/blogs do you read?

Make aquabreathers a cosmetic slot that actives when you are in the water. Your stats/rune remain on your normal head gear. It’s already near impossible to get aquabreathers with the right stats/item quality. Just make them a novelty item and then add some cool skins to sell in the gem store.

Also, let people use underwater legendaries above ground. I want to make a sharkspear, but just can’t justify the expense of the t6 mats given its limited use. Free sharkspear!

I bet the crippling bugs and negative feedback re: 2-2 has scared them off SAB for now. There was a post from Josh Foreman a while back noting the sharp decrease in player numbers for W2 vis-a-vis W1.

That said, I hope it comes back too.

To explain the GW1 reference: There are a couple missions in GW1 where you have to plant vine seeds in the maguuma jungle in order to progress through the mission.

Now, if only they led to a bloodstone

I’m for it as long as they give you a better title. The 1k skins title is awful. “Fashion Collector”? Come on, really?

How about “Fashionista”, “Vanity Fair” or “The Fabulous”?

The problem is that they are taxable as property, not income. So correctly accounting for the value of anet’s bitcoin receipts (for capital gains purposes, GAAP/IASB accounting, etc…) could pose some interesting finance, accounting, and tax problems.

Psientist.6437:

Mckeone.9804:

John Smith.4610:

What I would personally, as a player, love to have is a derivatives market. It could be a lot of fun, but there are also a huge quantity of problems that go along with it, so it would most likely need to be build into the game from the very beginning.

Yes yes a thousand times yes. You could even implement it as an escrow-contract system with money and items held by a special type of BLTC agent. Adding leverage could make it difficult, but it couldn’t be that hard to implement a futures and options system. I’d volunteer

Would this derivatives market have anything to do with the unique features of Tyrian lore or just be an addition to our mercenary marketplace?

Wells Charrgo and J P Morgahn are most prestigious financial institutions in Tyria.

John Smith.4610:

What I would personally, as a player, love to have is a derivatives market. It could be a lot of fun, but there are also a huge quantity of problems that go along with it, so it would most likely need to be build into the game from the very beginning.

Yes yes a thousand times yes. You could even implement it as an escrow-contract system with money and items held by a special type of BLTC agent. Adding leverage could make it difficult, but it couldn’t be that hard to implement a futures and options system. I’d volunteer

Ayrilana.1396:

I’m curious and perhaps John Smith could answer this if possible.

How many people have over 10,000 gold?
What’s the highest amount of gold that someone currently has?

Why does it matter? People with that much money probably don’t have any legitimate way to spend it, except on gems. There’s a practical limit on the ability to consume, particularly in this game, so gold has a sharply deteriorating marginal value. Assuming JS doesn’t allow people to manipulate markets (abuse of dominant position), there’s no harm in someone having and accumulating lots of gold.

(1) There’s no need to create solutions where no problems exist. Well, political problems, and that may be limited to an extreme minority of forum whiners.

(2) Why should we create barriers to entry? Right now one of the great things (in the big picture) is that people can (and do – see increase in buy orders for mid-level weapons lately?) pile into markets and drive sell prices down / buy prices up. All this would do is obstruct the ability of the TP to set a market-clearing price, which would make everyone worse off.

What I find amazing is the extent to which this troll is being fed. The OP is either so parochial that he cannot grasp anything beyond “I don’t like that other people have something that I don’t have and don’t want to work for, so it’s bad” or is just being a deliberate troll. In either event, you can’t convince someone of something they don’t want to believe (or admit to, for trolls).

Based on the evidence, I don’t see any structural problems with the GW2 market/TP. It’s fair, it’s transparent, and anyone who cares about making money can put in the effort to research prices and take advantage of the fact that a large portion of the playerbase just wants to (a) cash out their drops right now and (b) not take on the risk of posting a sell order. This isn’t like Wall Street, where (a) you have privileged access to free money from the federal reserve and will get bailed out if you fail, and (b)to get access to Wall Street firms, you have to have the right ivy league school on your resume or family connection to get in the door. There are no barriers to entry and no safety nets if you make bad investment decisions. And if everyone cared about making money using the TP, no one would because margins would crash to zero.

Moreover, the whole thing about “dungeon runners should get better rewards because they have more skill” ignores that (a) dungeon running has no risk of loss and (b)would allow players to introduce currency into the game at an unlimited rate. In contrast, TP is a currency suck, which helps mitigate against monetary inflation.

I sincerely think that threads such as this should probably just be closed.

I’m also guessing that those unenlightened masses just use a single set anyways and don’t mix and match, so we may see more outfits going forward.

How about just letting us trade out of our “to be claimed” funds and setting some basic things like linked orders?

My guess is that the item database doesn’t have a field for armor weight. They’d have to go back through, add the field, and classify all the armor items in the database to make it searchable. I suppose the manpower effort required to do that is why it hasn’t been done.

Ludo.1820:

Same problem, can’t unlock living story. got this “Buy” button instead of “Play”

Same problem here too.

fishball.7204:

Toxic Spore skin also come from chances not box which is also weird. I think everything got buffed except Chaos of Lyssa

If this stealth buff encourages more people to farm gauntlet, then it is going to incidentially buff Chaos of Lyssa availability. More people will farm gauntlet in general if they don’t feel its a futile effort, which will result in more CoL on the market.

I suspect that as more people catch on to the stealth buff, and with more people farming/panic selling over the weekend, the price of Chaos of Lyssa will gradually fall to ~125 buy range over the weekend.

I’m guessing its the boss blitz chests or the bazar reward chests, since CoL seems stable.

What games don’t have an economy? Single player games? All MMOs I can ever think over have some form of economic system, i.e., a method of exchanging goods/services/currency.

The fact is this game has one of the best economic systems because the TP design facilitates sufficient liquidity and forces price discovery out into the open. Most of the things people are kittening about concern the sad state of individual rewards and have a hard time grasping that the paltry individual rewards are balanced by the scale of the marketplace.

And just like in real life, there’s a vampire squid financial class that puts an inordinate amount of focus on the market because you can make massive profits off of general ignorance. People get mad because they see what they believe to be outsized rewards compared to the effort they put in at playing PvE/PvP/WvW, but discount the time and energy it takes to do anything on a scale that is going to net you more than a few gold here or there through simple arbitrage strategies like flipping or salvaging.

PS/Fake edit: disallowing trading and requiring all transactions to occur over the TP was one of the most brilliant, yet underappreciated moves. No longer do people have to guess about whether a price is, broadly speaking, fair. I do not miss having to yell “PC for X item” or find a trusted source in the vain hope I’m not going to get ripped off in a transaction.

Inflation can be caused by supply and demand – like CPI measures the change in the prices of a basket of goods, without regard to the cause of the change in prices. People just tend to flip out about monetary inflation because they tend to get crazy about “sound currency”/“monetary debasement”/Weimar Germany Hyperinflation-kitten -kitten facism tropes/ronpaul2016

RIP infographics

That’s it. We clearly need JS to publish GW2’s CPI, consumer sentiment surveys, and M1 (gold coins in circulation and in guild bank accounts) / m2 (M1 + gold value of gems). Forward guidance would also be nice.

PartyPanda.1960:

Mckeone.9804:

I’d like the Royal Terrance Pass to return. Come on, it’s Crown Pavillion time!

It already is back. Came back with the Bazaar/Gauntlet stuff.

I assure you, the Royal Terrace Pass is certainly not back. Not the permanent, one at least. Only thing comparable in the gem store is the 2 week airship pass.

Durps are gonna durp. They durp already about gem prices and everything else under the sun that they don’t like.

Beyond us people who are interested in the economic side of the game, however, I think it would be good from a marketing POV. Eve seems to get a lot of good press for its economic system, and beyond Eve’s superior trading tools (please, JS, give us better trading tools and let us trade on the balance in our “pick up” account), it still has a fairly fragmented (inefficient) market system.

It’s been a while since we’ve had fun infographics.
Any chance we can get some general statistics about the health of the market and differences by region?

For example:

• Average player engagement with the TP
• Average number of transactions per day
• Average size of transactions
• Average value of transactions
• Average trader activity
• Market Momentum (Change in Value x the Aggregate Size of Market)
• Market Size (in USD/EUR/CNY terms – perhaps based on the cumulative mean of the bid-ask spread for items on TP in gold value, converted to gems and then real currencies)
• Most popular gemstore items

I think it would be interesting to see what the GW2 economy stacks up to, in GDP terms.

I’d like the Royal Terrance Pass to return. Come on, it’s Crown Pavillion time!

As I can’t open google docs at work, what does the spreadsheet show? Curious about real data collection, not “I ran a fractal and didn’t get anything; quitting for WS k thx bye”