Guild Wars 2

Harp would be the most amazing thing ever.

Even as someone who enjoys playing songs on the in-game instruments, I think this is fair. A lot of people tell me that they enjoy what I play, but those that don’t shouldn’t be forced to listen to it.

I’m quite happy with the unbreakable choir bell and Marriner’s horn, but it would be really nice to have a stringed instrument, for RP purposes.

Also, if you guys tuned it to A Major, I’d throw my money at you.

I know I’ll probably catch some flak for this, but I’d like to sy THANK YOU ANET for another musical instrument. As someone who very much enjoys being able to play songs in game, having another instrument is like having a whole new box of toys.

I know some people will misuse them and just make noise with them, but I suspect that they’ll move on to other things soon enough.

I also LOVE how the horn is in a different key than the bell, allowing us to play songs that just didn’t sound good at all on the bell. Is there any chance we’ll be seeing more musical instruments down the road? If we could get one in A Major, I’d squeal with delight and throw money at it.

“Frere Jacques”

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sly nightmare.9486:

Nevermind now we have a new issue, I get to my character select and go to select one, and then it can’t connect!

I’m having this same issue.

EDIT: Working now, thanks ANet for getting this resolved so quickly.

From Twitter:

“The team is investigating the login issue and working to resolve it. Thanks for bearing with us. ~RB ^RB”

From Twitter:

“The team is investigating the login issue and working to resolve it. Thanks for bearing with us. ~RB ^RB”

No need to panic, folks.

Crazybexta.7945:

Adding my + 1 to this issue….

And my axe!

Araziel.7201:

Keep trying. They changed it to an RNG log in system.

I found this amusing. +1

Having the same issue.

Request: “Gerudo Valley” theme

locoman.1974:

Agree with the op.

One thing we have to understand here. We, the forum community, while we are very passionate at times and very vocal, are neither a big nor representative of the game community as a whole (I’d even go ahead and say that I bet most of the game community doesn’t even know or care there are forums). While I’m sure they do take feedback from the forums, I bet that the biggest source of feedback arenanet looks at is what are people doing in the game.

Which leads us to this thread, people in the forums are mostly against RNG boxes, myself included, but unless that outcry against them isn’t accompanied by NOT buying them in the first place it’s useless, from their point of view ends up as a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.

So what can we do, other than complain?… well just stop buying them, and after two bouts of RNG boxes (sclerite and flame and frost) the “I though I might get a ticket easier” isn’t an excuse by now, even if you bought the gems with gold (from anet POV is the same, the gems were still paid by someone, and it’s even better because a healthy exchange market encourages people to buy more gems to exchange for gold and serves as a gold sink as well), and encourage your friends and guildies not to buy them either.

And also, if you have enough disposable income of course, buy any skin introduced that you might be interested into. To get them to stop using RNG we have to show them two things, first, that using RNG boxes isn’t profitable enough, and second, that selling skins directly or other alternate methods IS profitable.

I think they would have gotten that message if they hadn’t tried direct sales with the Wintersday skins. I think I can count on one hand the number of people who would pay for a wooden weapon. I didn’t buy any, but I certainly would have bought 2 or 3 fused and 5+ of the jade ones.

Let’s start this thread off with the facts:

There have now been three phases of “RNG Boxes” for weapon skins. First the “fused” weapons, then the “sclerite” weapons, and now the “dragon’s jade” weapons. I am not counting the halloween weapons because those can be traded.

Players have expressed extreme frustration with this method of acquiring skins, mainly because there is no guarantee that any player, no matter how much effort they put in, will EVER see the skin that they desire.

—

What we have here is a conflict of interests between players and developers. Developers need to make money to keep the game going and pay their salaries, and RNG boxes are very good at doing this. Players need to feel that their goals are realistically attainable in order to have fun playing the game, and RNG boxes can be infuriating and disheartening to even the most dedicated of players.

I really think we can find a compromise here that eliminates the extreme frustration of the RNG while preserving the thrill and profitability of gambling for worthwhile rewards.

—

Proposed solutions:

1) Sell the tickets outright for gems

PROS: Allows everyone equal access to the skins they want, eliminating frustration factor, but still making money
CONS: Probably doesn’t make as much money as the RNG boxes.

-

2) Keep the RNG box system, but make the tickets tradeable

PROS: Allows everyone access to the skins they want while still leaving room for players to get “lucky” by gambling. Encourages players not interested in the skins to gamble in hopes of selling them.
CONS: If skins are permanently discontinued, this creates a rare luxury good that can do serious damage to the economy over the long haul. This effect can be minimized by having limited-time ticket redemption NPCs, making the tickets lose all but novelty value after the event period.

-

3) Use a “dynamic” RNG box system, where each box opened without a ticket increases the chance that the next box opened will contain one. Modifier resets when a ticket is obtained. Could also be done with account-bound tokens in every box that could be traded in.

PROS: Gives even the unluckiest of players a light at the end of the tunnel while still requiring players to get the boxes in order to get the skins.
CONS: Possibly difficult to implement.

Well… I really wanted at least one of these skins. I ended up buying 30 rich coffers and getting a few pastries out of them, which was pretty infuriating. Then I decided to give the regular green coffers a shot. 70g, several hours, and 1500 coffers later, I had seven or eight minis, but still no ticket.

Then I went out to run some dungeons and blow off some steam – mostly anger at myself – and picked up a few dozen more coffers along the way. Opening those gave me two tickets almost back to back. I’ve since gotten about 200 more from drops and only another two minipets were worth mentioning.

===

Total numbers:

30 rich coffers, 0 tickets, 0 minipets. Don’t waste a dime on these, they’re a scam. Lesson learned, I certainly won’t ever buy another “random” item from the gem store ever again.

~1750 (give or take 20 or so) regular coffers, 10 minis, 2 weapon tickets. Lines up pretty well with my guild’s data, which shows that tickets seem to have about an 0.05% drop rate. Overall, you’re better off buying these, especially as the price starts to fall, but it still is a shot in the dark.

At the end of the day, I got my pair of jade swords, but I happily would have spent twice what I did on the boxes just to get them outright and avoid the hours of frustration and gut-wrenching possibility of being overwhelmingly disappointed.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think that a customer spending 20 bucks and walking out happily satisfied is a better long-term business scenario than a customer spending 50 bucks and walking out fuming, especially in the MMO world, where player retention is so critical to continued success. If fused and sclerite skins had just been sold outright, I happily would have spent money on them and never had a second thought about it. Then again, I’m just a customer, what the hell do I know.

I knew the risks going into the gamble, and I got my skins, so I’m satisfied. I would have been a lot more satisfied, however, not to have had to wade through all of this random chance and uncertainty to get there. It might not affect the money ANet already has from me, but it will certainly affect my purchases in the future. And believe me, ANet, I’m really dying to throw my disposable income at you if only you’d give me something concrete to hold onto.

Happened to us on Stormbluff, but we didn’t have to fail it for it to bug. As soon as we got there, it was unresponsive.

I don’t see why making them tradeable would be such a horrible thing… If they really are rare enough that next to nobody is actually getting one, their market value will be high, enticing people who don’t even like the skins to buy boxes for a chance at a fortune to spend on something they DO like. It would also silence just about every complaint about the topic.

I understand that NC and ANet are out to maximize profits, but as a gamer and a customer, this account-bound gambling thing leaves a foul taste in my mouth.

Metal Plating (III), Autotool Installation (X), and Rifled Turret Barrels (XI) do not function at all, except for turrets placed with the supply crate elite.

Chewablesleeptablet.3185:

If you are having problems against a stealthed character , you really don’t know all the facts on how to deal with stealth. Probably don’t even lift.

Wish I could +1 this more times.

I think the problem (for PvE at least) is that most of the high-end encounters involve bosses flinging out so much damage that toughness and vitality become moot points.

If you’re fighting Lupicus, the difference between a toughness set and a zerker set isn’t that significant because you’re getting hit for 8-11k if you do get hit. Basically, that only allows a toughness-geared character to survive maybe one or two more hits than a zerker character while severely hampering their damage output, making the fight last longer and increasing the chance that everyone takes more hits. In such a situation, if a player is skilled enough to know how to avoid the attacks, the advantages to a berserker set massively outweigh that small decrease in survivability.

What the game truly lacks are “pressure” encounters – where damage is dealt in smaller, more regular packets rather than huge spikes that are either all-or-nothing. We need some encounters where bosses are flinging out attacks that can’t reasonably all be avoided or blocked, which puts characters with toughness and vitality gear in a better position to weather the storm. Remember Kanaxai from GW1, where everyone had a constant and unremovable health degeneration effect while fighting him? It would take something like that to shift the focus from damage to survivability.

Right now, the closest thing we have to one of these encounters is the Grawl fractal boss, but since almost all of his “pressure” comes from burning (which toughness doesn’t affect), it really only elevates healing power as a desirable stat.

No Walking.6349:

That and $10 for a perma pick is pretty stupid…..Ori pick axes are cheap as hell.

Please don’t give them ideas. >.<

Orrian karma helm
Exotic acolyte’s shoulders
Exotic acolyte’s coat
T1 Asuran gloves
T3 Asuran pants
AC boots (I’ve since swapped them for SE boots)

If there’s been any sort of decline in AC’s popularity, it’s been for one or more of these three reasons:

Reason #1: AC tokens cannot be converted into rares that salvage for ectoplasms. This makes them inherently less valuable than, say CoF or HotW, which provide tokens that can.

Reason #2: AC does not have a unique crafting material associated with it. TA’s tokens cannot buy rares that salvage into ectos, but TA remains popular because of onyx cores and lodestones – something AC has no real answer to. Garlic bread doesn’t count.

Reason #3: AC’s recent changes may have made the content more interesting to established groups, but in the process have made the dungeon extremely unfriendly to lower level characters. Low level characters running AC to level up while still getting some dungeon tokens for gear – once a common practice – are now practically nonexistent.

So why run AC? Because of the low-level tokens and item drops, it’s less profitable than any other dungeon run. Because of the lack of a unique crafting material, it’s unattractive to anyone looking to test their luck. Because of the rebalance, it’s a terrible place to try to level up. Really, the only reason left to run it at all is for the unique skins or the Gift of Ascalon.

—

Now some people (myself included) enjoy doing it just for fun and for the mechanics, but if I have a monetary goal to reach for or a character to level up, AC doesn’t provide the kind of rewards that I can get in the same amount of time elsewhere. Not even close.

The developers need to make up their minds on what they want AC to be – if it’s meant to be level 80 endgame content, the rewards need to match up with that. If it’s meant to be an instance for lower level characters to learn, level, and practice, it needs to be doable by characters without exotic gear and full skill/trait loadouts in a reasonable time frame. Right now, it’s trying to be both and succeeding at neither – which is a shame, because brain-dead Warmaster Grast aside, it really is a fun encounter.

I’d throw gems at a mysterious stranger mini.

This is glorious. Please keep it around.

Josh Foreman.8250:

We are a very small team. The more skins we made, the less stuff we could make in the Box. So we settled for a minimal set, with plans to add to it with each new World we release. I love Engies and I wish we could have served them and Thieves better this time around, but had to make some tough choices.

This is good to hear. I don’t mind waiting a bit. Quality over quantity.

Warhammer Online, Bright Wizard. That’s all the reason you need to justify the AoE limit.

That being said, scaling down the damage based on the number of targets affected wasn’t a bad idea.

Khal Drogo.9631:

Nar.8327:

Khal Drogo.9631:

GW2 Core is fun. Super Adventure Box is not, imho. Maybe works differently for people who will turn into cheerful old women according to you.

Then don’t do it. What exactly are you missing out on by not doing it?

Nothing at all, but I dont insult ppl who enjoy Super Adventure Box over GW2 core either.

I don’t insult people who prefer GW2 core over Super Adventure Box. I offer a simple, frank reminder that people enjoy the game in different ways, and that just because you don’t enjoy something doesn’t give you the right to demand it be taken away from everyone else – which seems to be the entire purpose behind this thread.

Khal Drogo.9631:

GW2 Core is fun. Super Adventure Box is not, imho. Maybe works differently for people who will turn into cheerful old women according to you.

Then don’t do it. What exactly are you missing out on by not doing it?

And my point was that if you’re playing a game for any purpose other than for enjoying it, you might as well try to weld with a toothpick. Games are designed for fun. If you expect them to be something else, expect to be disappointed.

Or you could farm the money to buy one of the non-account-bound versions in a few hours…

Honestly, people expect to be handed everything the second it goes live. It’s not bad at all.

Heaven forbid a company with a tradition of lighthearted fun on April Fool’s Day continue that tradition. April Fools pranks are as much a part of Guild Wars as Charr, Wintersday, dragons, or different builds. The majority of the GW1 community loved them, and by the look of the responses this one is getting, they’re not going anywhere.

Warlander.1384:

Im not saying i dont like it, its fun, however …

snip

…im done with the game…

Have any of you ever wondered what grumpy old men look like before they grow old? I present exhibit A.

A game that’s fun? What is this blasphemy?!

AlietteFaye.7316:

John Smith.4610:

Gasoline.2570:

Let’s see what the average will be

Statistically inaccurate

Surveying forums leads to massive biases including Sample Bias and Response Bias. In this case there are at least 3 other biases not being accounted for off the top of my head.

So why don’t you guys just release the “accurate” statistics, then? Stop people from having to guess and make these kinds of threads in the first place.

You mean tell people exactly what it is that they’re buying? But that would be, you know, an honest business practice which might cut into sales.

Welcome to the new, ethics-be-kittened world of video games. If you’re as disgusted with it as I am, vote with your wallet and save your money. Maybe someday enough of us will get fed up with it for something to change.

I’m voting with my wallet. You should, too. Every moron who spends dozens of dollars on these gambles is part of the reason that this happens.

Go get a CoF or destroyer weapon and let the keys rot in the gem store where they belong.

I’ve actually found Well of Power to be a pretty reliable source of vigor. It seems like it always grants me vigor when I’m removing bleeding.

So… Blood is Power + Well of Power = vigor for 10s. Not sure how useful that is, but I thought I’d at least draw some attention to it.

Heinel.6548:

The mask isn’t new. My guardian had been using it since day 1.

Though if they add more variety to headgears it’ll be nice. More intricate ornaments instead of helmets for heavy, masks for light.. my Mesmer still uses the necro starter face markings and I found no better substitude. Really disappointed about headgears in game.

What they need to do is scrap the “town clothes” idea and make the special costume helms available for all professions. It mystifies me why they haven’t done this already – they’d see a huge spike in gem sales if they let us actually use the things in the store that their artists worked so hard on.

We had a costume system in Guild Wars 1, and I don’t recall any major complaints about it. They’re already barred from sPvP anyway, which is the only community that I can think of that would really complain about more cosmetic items. If Valve has taught the world anything, it’s that more cosmetic options are NEVER a bad thing, and that classes can still be easily recognized even with silly things on their heads.

Open on Stormbluff Isle.

Title says all. I know there are a grand total of two aquatic helm models right now, but this would be a good thing to set up. It irks me to no end being able to preview dyes for your aqua helm, but not being able to actually use them.

Confirmed. Tested with ethereal, fire, and water fields.

Title says all. Skills 2-5 work fine, but skill 1 doesn’t ever hit since the patch.

How to reproduce:

Go underwater with a mesmer, equip spear, attack something with #1, watch the “miss” text show up over and over again, even well within melee range.

Please prioritize this, I’ve spent over 150 hours working on Kamohoali’i Kotaki and now I can’t even use a spear anymore because of this bug.

…So I put it on the forum.

:D

Velvet Symphony (Mesmer, SBI)

In before nerf.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I beat those 375 million others with SKILL.

In-game link = [&AgGDeQAA]

It’s a dagger that looks like a harvesting sickle. Not listed on trading post, no one seems to know where to get it or even if it can be obtained at all. Is it a drop from something or an undiscovered mystic forge recipe? Does it even exist?

I know that Final Rest gets all the attention as the “last big secret” of gw2, but I’m really more interested in finding this one. The mystic forge does not permit harvesting sickles, so I’m at a loss as to what the recipe could possibly be. I’m not looking for someone to hold my hand and show me where it is, but it would be really awesome if a dev could confirm or deny that this weapon is currently in game and working.

A charr named “Lee Charrvey Oswald” takes the cake in my book.

Engineers will periodically refer to their healing turrets as “dispensers.” Reference to the engineer from Team Fortress 2.

“In retrospect Ascended should have been deployed pre launch and earn able throughout most activities in the game (which is how we are moving forward).”

Thank you, Chris. You’ve won back at least one player by admitting that it should have been done differently.

Phy.2913:

They said Ascended gear will be added to WvW, so you wont have any reason to not have this gear. Unless Anet goes full kitten and adds the pve gear long before the WvW gear, but that would be beyond stupid.

You mean the way it is right now?

Merthax.5172:

Nar.8327:

Iarkrad.8415:

illgot.1056:

I feel we need a gear score.

If people can’t at least bring top of the line exotics, they may as well not exist or even reply to my LFG spam.

Gear score where MF contributes nothing to the item’s score.

I’d go one further and make it count against it.

All MF on non-ascended gear should be stripped and replaced with something else. Then…ascended gear is statted equal to exotic gear, but with MF on it.

This solves 2 problems in one fell swoop:
-No one can complain about anyone running MF gear, because the option to sacrifice combat stats for MF no longer exists.
-Ascended gear is “better” than exotic, but doesn’t give anyone an actual combat advantage.

I actually really like this idea.

“We don’t think it’s ok for players who didn’t like doing dungeons before to, suddenly, once you get to the max level, you’re forced into dungeons.” – Eric Flannum

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjxvj2I_CCA (1:18)

So here I was, at my max level with my max level gear, having a jolly old time, when suddenly, new, better gear comes along and I have to do a dungeon to get it.

Developers: I’m not upset with what you did, I’m upset that you had the nerve to tell me you wouldn’t.