Guild Wars 2

I have a question for JS:
when designing the gem exchange, did you consider making it more like the rest of the TP instead? where players will list gems for whatever coin price they want, then buyers can do buy orders or buy sell listings like every other commodity in the game?
I guess I’m just curious why that method wasn’t utilized and an entirely different system had to be made for converting gems.
I could see a couple benefits to what I just described, but also a couple problems. biggest problem would be zero starting gems (when the game opened). instead of 20s = 100 gems, the first person would of listed 1 gem = 10g. but that would quickly drop. the main benefit would be how quickly it equilibrates to supply/demand and how transparent it is in terms of functionality.
I am aware that with either system, the current gold → gem price would be about the same

dude, you may be on to something there.
when I read your response at first, I thought you’d give the ol’ delete application support recommendation and I was already planning on replying with “that’s not a solution, that’s a workaround” reply, but then I was pleasantly surprised.
I’ll give this some testing.

a volcanus or whisperblade is not required to play, especially for the casual player.
casual players never expect bis gear, why should they expect best-cosmetic gear?

KumajirouSan.3527:

250 gems cost me 17 gold and 80 silver i believe. Seriously, This is starting to get ridiculous.

and yet you decided to spend 17.8g to buy those gems. THAT is why it costs so much gold to buy gems – because people are willing to pay it. If you (and everyone else) stopped buying gems for ridiculous prices, the prices would become less ridiculous.

I get what you describe often.
for me: sometimes the TP will never work. always able to pick up items, but sometimes the gem store won’t show, or the gem exchange, or the trading post and sell.
logging out and back in will fix it about 50% of the time for me.
whatever working state the TP is in it seems to stay that way for the duration of being logged in.
From what I’m aware of, this problem is not limited to macs.

ohhhhh, khisanth beat me to it. http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Gift_of_Entertainment

/taunt = /threaten

I want to have:
/neenerneenrneener or /nahnahnahnahnahnahnah
I expect it will look something like:

I did know back then how much gem price would go up. I still chose to not buy a lot of gems, and here’s why:
at 40s -> 100 gems, I could buy 100 gems for ~10% of my net worth
at 6g -> 100 gems, I could buy 100 gems for ~0.1% of my net worth
those first few gold are really hard to get when you start playing from nothing.
In the first few weeks of me playing, the price rose from about 30s to 60s. I saw the pattern, knew how gems changed price, and knew that always more people will spend gold for gems instead of money, so it will always go up.
I guarantee that if Anet doesn’t change anything, gem price will continue to go up on an exponential curve. looking at spidy, I’m estimating the price will double every 6 months. you mark my words: 100 gems will cost 14g on May 1 2014 (today is 11/5/13).
The reason I’m not buying a hoard of gems now is because I expect that when gems are at 14g -> 100 gems, that 100 gems will cost 0.01% of my net worth

Warning: not all crafted exotics with those stats can drop their inscriptions.
near as I can tell, items crafted with ‘Pearl’ and ‘Quaggan’ in their name do not give inscriptions. If you’re obtained an inscription from these items, let me know and I’ll double-check it, but I’ve definitely salvaged 10 of each of those before and got 0 inscriptions.

Korossive.7085:

I bought my legendary mats with TPWars2.

2 × 10 minutes a day and you make +10% of whatever amount. Read: Percent.
The masters reach +35% no matter the amount. These buy Eternity for their alts.

So you kids can go on debating if it’s 2g / 10g / 15g champfarm per hour nonsense.
It looks fun. It also looks like a pathetic way to make gold.

Good luck on arguments though!

it’s good to know where I stand in terms of TP profits
I make about +50% profit from 400g once a week, then +30% from 1,000g every couple days. +10% could be made from another 5,000g or so, but it just becomes too grindy at that point :P

Alex.9567:

would it be fair to say Anet keep in-game gold acquisition low to "encourage’’ people to trade real money for gold?

no. we decide gem price. a year ago, it was around 40s = 100 gems. so $10 = 800 gems = 3.2g. so that 36,500g/year becomes 2,433g/year. the only reason you get so much gold per gem is that there are more people buying gems with gold than $€£.

a t s e.9614:

Champions :100g a day
Dungeons: 20g a day
Fractals : 5g a day

Nice balance between risk vs reward .

I believe your fractal estimate is wrong. if you get a good group, you can do an even-numbered fractal run in about 45 min. I would estimate you get about 2-3g per run (I get about 4-8 rares per run, not to mention dredge bags and an exotic about every 5th run). your champion estimate looks like you’re assuming about 16 hours of play per day, so 2.5g / .75 * 16 = 53.3g/day.
dungeons looks a bit low as well, but I don’t have as much experience with those, so I won’t comment further.

of course, all this pales in comparison to TPWars2’s 500+g/day, even compared to getting a RL job. but this requires already having 5000+g, so it’s less common.

to answer OP: TP trading will get you the most gold. if you’re already doing it, do it more. a lot of things give profit with high turnovers.

not much from the achievement chests take up much room. mystic forge stones, perhaps, but that’s just 1 space.
badges of honor have a space in the wallet
zenith weapons you can destroy, as you can get more copies whenever you want. same for radiant/hellfire
karma potions can be consumed
boosters will either stack with the ones you already have, or just use them immediately because you like using them.
blueprints can be sold
pvp skins can be deposited. rest would need to be stored. or just dont open that chest, but then require storing. this is the only one that’s a bit troublesome. personally, I just deposit them, then salvage the ones that don’t deposit because I already have one of it.

When I converted all my dust, I found that: 1 dust → ~3c
right now, I think it’s actually: 1 dust → -2.6c
yes, you lose money. those spores and crystalline are just too expensive atm. time to buy some toxic potions

it would probably help to explain how it’s not working.

one or more of the graphics settings, when set to high, cause crashing in zerg battle. not sure which, but setting your graphics to best performance should fix 99% of the crashing.

iStat menus
it tells you things like network, cpu, memory usage, temperatures, and also lets you control fan speeds.
if you know yours gets hot when playing a lot, turn the fan speed up a notch or two before starting.

the did say ‘skills’, though. 1 skill does not the plural form ‘skills’ mean.

lol, that would be just like them, to say you’ll soon have the ability to craft precursors, then limit it to only legendaries that aren’t in the game yet, where the precursors you craft are non-tradable, can’t be obtained elsewhere, cost more to craft than previous precursors cost to buy, and are time-gated. I look forward to this message: “Only 1 precursor can be crafted per day”.

I guess I’m confused on what trinity actually is if GW2 doesn’t have it.
what would a GW2 with trinity look like?

From what I gather:
berserker’s or assassin’s would literally die from a grub in 1 hit, but kill a champ in under a min
soldier’s or sentinel’s would be able to survive one of those flowers exploding in SAB tribulation
cleric’s or giver’s or winter would be able to fully heal themselves or another player every 5 seconds.

like the major difference is that we have a base 700 or so of every stat, and gear can’t even double that number but just increase a few of them by a bit.
dodge, in particular, kinda throws kinks into that distribution.

the first one I posted was direct from Anet.
they didn’t specify how they rated each profession’s percentage. could be total characters (so if you have 8 characters, one of each profession, then each would be 12.5% represented). or it could be time played (the game does keep track of how long you’ve played each of your characters). time played seems like a good way to measure character distribution.

it doesn’t matter what you get from harvesting from the node, just how many times you harvest.
find a garden of 7 nodes from which you get 0 pristine samples? 35% complete!
finish a spore event and harvest the node that is left behind where you get 5 pristine samples? counts for 5% of that ach.

the highlight of my evening was gathering from a node, got 4 pristine samples, node still there, gathered another 3, node still there, gathered another 5. today was a good day.

Quarktastic.1027:

firing a miniaturized version of the bow itself

that is an awesome bug! why would you want to change that?

Quarktastic.1027:

As an aside, when is Kudzu going to give us a unique barrage animation? It could be something as simple as changing barrage’s arrows/arrow trails to the arrows/arrow trails of Kudzu, and perhaps adding some sporadic footfalls to the barrage circle.

I hadn’t thought of this. does Dreamer barrage have unicorns smash into the ground? it should.

when I am the only mesmer in a 5-player party, there are sometimes 10 mesmers and 4 non-mesmers. we have great fun
you start from far away and just keep casting clones and shattering, all done within a couple seconds; there’s an army of clones kamikaze running at the unsuspecting grub.

I think it’s more impressive you’re at 2%. 0% would, of coarse, be better. shame on you.

I can see your opinion, and I agree they need more event chains rather than isolated events. not much we can do to really change that, though.
check out gw2stuff.com, that will show you the world events that are going on. temples in particular are usually talkative and a long investment in terms of several events that all need to succeed in a row to win. usually a lot more people. they will be vocal if you are. use /map to tell people which wp to go to to help with the big events.

‘make’ the most gold = listen to everyone else here
‘get’ the most gold = TP Wars 2

150% from luck.
it’ll take almost 12,000 luck to get to 151 = 400 masterwork items = almost 3 full inventory screens of salvaging (or 8 screens of fine items). god bless unlimited salvage kit, but that is one boring night. best to put a movie on.
ecto->dust is orders of magnitude faster, but more expensive.

invisible and the fotm item-type bags have unique properties when it comes to compacting and selling and stuff.

hehe, yeah. mesmers are a minority, but they have a lot of obvious skills that let you KNOW they are there – time warp, temporal curtain, a million clones, signet of inspiration, portal. Other professions give boons and heal and w/e, but mesmers’ party boosts are much more apparent, making it seem like there are more of them than there are.

my mesmer has traveler runes. combined with some temporal curtain swiftness and blink, I’m faster than most characters out there.

Anet released some numbers at their 1-year anniversary: https://www.guildwars2.com/en/news/guild-wars-2-the-first-year/
and some 3rd party reports: http://gw2census.com/charts.php?pie=total÷=charprofession

I’ll tell you that pretty much every player could be happy with pretty much every profession. in my opinion, they all are 9+/10. it all just depends on your play style, which pretty much every profession can accommodate to.

with iMacs, you can upgrade the RAM as easily as changing batteries in a remote. the hard drive can be done fairly easily. on older imacs that have a disk drive, you can replace it disk drive with a 2nd hard drive. I hear it’s possible to upgrade the graphics card on some, but very very very hard.
RAM and SSD are the likely things he’s planning, neither of which will dramatically affect your ability to increase graphics settings (unless you currently have like 2 GB of RAM)

I just realized the filter said I was recommending kitten… what that filtered out was “a Solid State Drive = SSD”, same for later in that paragraph :P

for some reason I read that title as something like “quickly explain quickness plz” and started laughing.
all skills have several timers.
casting time = time it takes the skill to cast.
cooldown = after the skill is cast, this is how long before you can cast it again.
quickness decreases the casting time of skills by 50% (used to be 100%, just in case you find an out-of-date explanation elsewhere)
auto-attack swing a sword? sword swings 50% faster. auto-attacks typically have 0 cooldown, relying only on casting time to limit them. other skills usually have like 1/2 sec casting time and 5 sec cooldown, so they are much less affected.
one example I’ll use is the mesmer’s phantasmal defender. (http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Phantasmal_Defender)
1-1/2 sec casting time, 30 sec cooldown.
when you press the key, your character raises her hand then drops it, then a phantasm appears. that process takes 1-1/2 seconds. If you have quickness, she will do that in 1 second instead, and still have to wait 30 sec before it can be used again.

the math for how that is 50%:
1.5 sec delay = 0.666 per sec
100% faster = x2 = 1.333 per sec
50% faster = x1.5 = 1 per sec
1.333 per sec = 0.75 sec delay (100% faster = 1/2 the time required)
1 per sec = 1 sec delay (50% faster = 2/3 the time required)

eisberg.2379:

You get keys as drops? I didn’t even know that was a possibility. I have never received a key as a drop. Literally I thought the only way to get them was from some personal quests completion and from the Gem store, never knew they dropped as well.

This just give more proof that I am the most unlucky SOB in MMOs. Every MMO I have ever played I was always unlucky. I am the guy that had to kill 300+ yetis in WoW to get a quest item to drop, where everyone else I knew would get the drop in under 20 yetis.

RNG has never been good to me. IF there are RNG gods, they hate me.

a year ago they were much more common; like 1 key every 20 hours. I was overflowing with BLSK and boosters (had like 14 of every booster and 30 BLSK)
now, they are less common than precursors.
I’ve found about 3 from random mobs in the past 8 months. (played around 1,400 hours during that time)

I had a key drop on me, got 1 scrap. put it in the bank as it was only like 1/70 of what was needed for a useable item. yay.
then I leveled some alts to get racial story achievement completion, which includes a key as the reward. got another scrap. 1/35 of the way…
In short: 2 scraps from 4 chests in the last 2 months. I’d give you mine if I could.

Every theory we have for why it’s there always includes the phrase “this is the worst way to do it”.

anti-bot? nope. bots are currently able to list 20,000 items per day while humans can only do like 40 before we throw the computer across the room. better would be captcha or limit it one every 2 seconds.

server congestion? no limit on buying means you can buy 40 times as many things in the same time. selling is inherently slower than buying, so why would you limit the slower part but not the faster? buying and selling have to use approximately the same server resources. better would be limit it one every 2 seconds for buy and sell, also to increase the per-stack size to 10,000.

compared to this, a captcha every 30 min would be a blessing. I run into this 80% of the time I use the TP. selling crafting materials, 3000 items I had invested, crafted things, everyday items found from mobs, etc.. leveling a crafting profession is the worst. it takes like 30 min to level it, then another 30 just to sell the crafted items afterwards.

it depends on what’s socketed in your exotics. if it’s something valuable, you’ll be able to sell it when you recover it from salvaging. if it’s nearly worthless, it’s likely more valuable to throw in the MF.
check the socket’s value. if it’s worth more than 4.16g, use a Black Lion Salvage Kit. If less than 4.16g, use a Master Salvage Kit. I’d estimate that if the socket is worth less than about 50s, throw them in the Mystic Forge.
It’s hard to estimate because what you get out is random. could be worth 2g, could be worth 20g. I average it to be about 4g. ectos from 4 exotics would be worth 1.5g, so 2.5g / 4 = 62s for each socket. but, again: RNG vs. salvage near-guarantee.

they continue to confound. why adjust the part that should be fixed (scrap → bolt) when they should be adjusting the adjustable part (drop rate)???

more science!
I salvaged 400 exotics with Black Lion Salvage Kits:
1) still no 4 or 5 ectos. I checked Every. Single. One. ooph. I’m downgrading the likelihood of that possibility from unlikely to nope. Sorry if you know differently.
2) got 703 ectos, which puts the rate at 1.7575 ectos per exotic. To summarize ecto production:
rare with MSK = 0.9 ecto
rare with BLSK = 1.25 ecto
exotic with MSK = 1.27 ecto
exotic with BLSK = 1.75 ecto

I just realized… they said the updated TA Assault path is permanent. it has scarlet in it – sorta. meaning she isn’t going away any time soon.

I just realized that I should just go underwater if I’m losing a 1v1 in WvW

I see no reason you can’t have it installed on multiple computers so your friends can play together when they come over. it’s still one account per one computer

yes this can be done. I recommend doing it when the items don’t stack and it’s very long term and are cheap.
price comparison:
adding a bank tab = 600 gems = 38.4g for 30 slots = 1.28g per item slot
buy guild with vault = 2,500 influence = 5g for 50 slots = 10s per item slot
buy a guild with a trove = 22,500 influence = 45g for 150 slots = 30s per item slot
buy a guild with a cave = 52,500 influence = 105g for 250 slots = 42s per item slot
list an item on the TP = 5% of price. if you list the item for 1g, you pay 5s per item
the major difference is that bank and guild storage is reusable.

well, there’s 450 gold wasted. enjoy!

for science!
I salvaged 400 exotics with Master Salvage Kits.
1) I got 509 ectos out of them. so you get 1.2725 ectos per exotic with a MSK (it is more than rares!). I’m betting BLSK gives around 1.5 (due to results listed above), but I haven’t tested thoroughly enough yet.
2) The highest ectos I got from a single exotic was 3. not once did I get 4 or 5. could just mean the chance of them is even lower with MSK, or could not be able to get them at all. It’s still up in the air for me (I realize some people claim to have gotten them – I consider that hearsay. sure, you may believe it, but I want more proof)

I used to. For the longest time I never crashed. Then, starting around june or so, I started getting crashes during high-action events, and I found that if I went to best performance I would be crash-free. I’ve heard of others being on best visuals and doing just fine, so it might be weirdness with my computer.
specs:
2011 Mac Pro, 6x 3.33 GHz processors, 16 GB RAM, PCIe SSD, ATi Radeon HD 5870

I would first recommend getting kitten. OCZ is my favorite, maybe a Vertex 4. you don’t need a lot of space here; I put the OS and all my applications on my SSD, then store photos, videos, music, etc. on a 2nd 2 TB HDD drive. get the speed where you need it, cheap storage where it doesn’t need speed. getting kitten will cut your time between load screens to about 1/3 what they currently are.

alevans.9327:

Just had a support ticket reply from Kenda. At the moment GW2 doesnt support Mavericks and there isnt an eta on when a new build will be available as of yet. Shouldn’t worry though because Mavericks hasn’t been out long so it would be foolish to expect there to be a 100% working build straight away.

Apple (and other OS companies) release developer versions of their OS months before public release for these exact reasons. Looks like Mavericks has had developer previews out since June 10. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS_X_Mavericks)

In response to this bug:
I upgraded and GW2 works the same as it always has. at least nothing noticeably different. I have a Mac Pro from 2011 (looks like the only non-laptap around here)

I would think the OP’s macro would be allowed. reason being that Anet said ‘action’, not ‘command’.
the difference being: press 3 for a ground-targeted skill, then click with mouse where you want to put it. that whole process is one action. if you made a macro that placed skill 3 at the location of the mouse at the press of one button, I would think that would be within the rules.
similarly, the 1 action the OP wants is to post something in chat.
now, it would break that rule to post several things in chat, or whisper several select people, for example.

combat speed is slower than non-combat speed. it doesn’t just lower the cap from 33% to 25%.
http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Movement_speed
forward normal = 300. with 33% swiftness = 399
forward combat = 210. with 33% swiftness = 279
25% would be 375 and 262

I was looking through my sell transactions last night… a year ago I sold a silver doubloon for 2s19c. ahhhhh, what times!