Guild Wars 2

I’ve been into crafting for a long time, and in my time here in GW2 (since Oct 2012), I’ve gone through all the crafting professions up to 400 (working on 500 now), along with crafting a number of items in the Mystic Forge.

While crafting can be fun to create items for yourself, my advice is to only craft items for yourself. Do not fall into the trap of thinking you can craft things in GW2 and make money at it. The reason behind this isn’t that there isn’t a big enough profit margin, nor is it about material prices, it’s the issue of undercutting. No, I don’t mean “undercutting” as in some guy comes in and sells his stuff for a copper less. I’m talking about people who have more money than brains going through on high value items and deliberately sell at a loss over the cost of the materials. You’ll find it’s not just one time events on this. These are people who systematically will place 5 to 10 items on the trading post below cost, and then lose even more money to make sure that their items are always 1 copper lower than anyone else. It’s tempting to out-copper them, but you’ll lose even more money in the abysmal listing fees and taxes. I currently have an item worth around 20gold in materials value, and have watched the price on the trading post for that item go from 21 down to 10, with multiple steps in between, always with the same person out-coppering everyone else. In the long run, I’m completely screwed on my investment in making the item because I bought some of the components for it.
Again, craft items for yourself or friends, but do not get settled on the idea of crafting for profit in this game. It simply is not possible on a casual basis, and there are plenty of people with thousands of gold to waste looking to prove it.

GW2 is an amazing game. The Art, audio, and design are wonderful. The combat is great (if a little “press 1” at times). Moving about isn’t overly difficult, and the waypoint system is very useful. Crafting, while somewhat limited, has enough options to keep you busy for a long time. There are many wonderful things to be said about the game.

Every last one of them is negated by the monetization methods used by Anet.

If one were to assume that the race in the image is accurate, Caithe would have to undergo a big transformation to end up like that.

Some observations:
the covering of the chest would suggest the person depicted is a female.

Necromancers have glowing eyes and can also use daggers.
Additionally, Necromancers particle effects generally have a green & black theme to them, which goes with the overall coloring of the image.

It’s not impossible it is Caithe, but I’m leaning towards this character, whoever she is, being a necromancer of some sort.

*edit: maybe Traherne has a little sister? “this won’t end well”

Varonth.5830:

Suggestion:
1-3 Glob[s] of Dark Matter per exotic instead of 0-3.
So no matter how unlucky you are, you know, that after 10 exotics you have enough.

Will never happen. Anet wants people to lose gold playing the various slot machines they’ve set up, and so long as there is a zero return, there’s a slim chance the user might drop real cash for gems→gold to buy more exotics.

Monetization in a B2P model is ok to an extent. Anet has gone full on psychosis with it.

Celebratty.1632:

manddras.1794:

Anet, instead of knowing that bug and do nothing for those who find this kind of code/bug/ or anything else, that should be bannable, and try it without knowing that, WHY NOT send an in-game mail at everyone saying that THIS code/bug/ or anything else to do, is currently an exploit and should be not be used ?

Yes it will advertise the code/bug/whatever, but EVERYONE would be warned if they use it, they will be banned.

I would have appreciated this, honestly. Yes, it was dumb of me to use a random code from reddit, then when I know what it is use it twice more, but nothing was said even when we asked an Anet employee about it.

Ok, I know one of the last things people might expect from me is for me to defend Anet, but there’s a first time for everything. Anet employees may want to tell you not to use something, but there are also limitations on their interaction with people in game that they may be bound by. Additionally, if they were to make a statement that turned out to be wrong, there are all sorts of ugly issues that arise. So I wouldn’t hold it against that particular individual for not telling you. It’s entirely possible that they didn’t have the authority to make a judgement on the situation.

Celebratty.1632:

Neural.1824:

Celebratty.1632:

No source, just a sad panda and pulling facts.
But its safe to assume the ban is somewhere around 2 weeks for people who used it, although someone claims to have done it 3 times and gotten 3 days, even though I posted 3 times and got 2 weeks with no other infractions.

Well, it’s not that I don’t feel for you on this, but you’ve also graciously accepted what happened, which is commendable. It’s distressing that Arenanet appears to be going so light on the people who are abusing it though.

Yeah, I’m being banned because its an exploit and filtering through the hundreds of people doing it to see whos trying not to grief with it isn’t going to happen.

I’d honestly want a harder ban for the people manipulating it in sPvP and WvW, but y’know, whatever keeps my account not permabanned..

Figuring out who is doing it deliberately, for starters, would be as simple as looking at chat history. It would be clear as day who is doing it deliberately, and to be honest, they should be liberal with the application of permaban in those cases, and then let the users deal with customer service on a case by case basis to determine if anyone had a legitimate reason for doing so. (Note: again, that’s for people using it in local and map. There are people who legitimately tested it)

Celebratty.1632:

No source, just a sad panda and pulling facts.
But its safe to assume the ban is somewhere around 2 weeks for people who used it, although someone claims to have done it 3 times and gotten 3 days, even though I posted 3 times and got 2 weeks with no other infractions.

Well, it’s not that I don’t feel for you on this, but you’ve also graciously accepted what happened, which is commendable. It’s distressing that Arenanet appears to be going so light on the people who are abusing it though.

Celebratty.1632:

But I got the same punishment as the people who were using it to troll Teq, LA, sPvP and manipulate WvW.

Celbratty, can you provide a source for the info about the 2 week ban for people deliberately using this for griefing exploiting? If Anet is going soft on this sort of stuff, people will really take this game to new lows. :/

Celebratty.1632:

Teege.4623:

Celebratty.1632:

Teege.4623:

That’s not an excuse.

I never said it was an excuse.

Do I think I should be banned for testing it between friends to see if the people spamming it in map chat were correct? Yes. It was an exploit and I stuck my nose in stuff I shouldn’t deal with.

Do I think I should be banned just as long as everyone who spammed it multiple times in map chat and WvW, causing real damage and harm? No.

So you tested it a few times, but that’s different than the other people who tested it a few times because they did it in different chats yet itall yields the same result which is crashing the entire map. That’s not damaging? Logic be kitten ed.

It didn’t crash the entire map.
It crashed two people, me and the person I whispered. And this person was in a party with a ANet employee at the time, and that person then told them about it. But I got the same punishment as the people who were using it to troll Teq, LA, sPvP and manipulate WvW.

Wait. You said you got a 2 week ban.

So Arenanet is only banning these trolls for 2 weeks?

Way to go Anet. That will solve the problem for sure. Right up until the next time something like this comes up. :sigh:

I filed an in game bug report on this one, but I was hoping to get a response from someone at Anet on this one for some clarification.

I logged in today, and happened to catch the tail end of a Teq event (this was before the silliness with client crashing code started). The Teq event failed, but when it failed I got not one, but two daily achievement chests, for a total of 2 mystic coins, two drips of karma, and two green luck essence items plus a mystic stone.

Is this a known issue, and if so, what are users supposed to do about it? I don’t want to assume that we should just keep the loot and game-on, because Arenanet has an overkill policy for exploits. Bottom line, I do not want to get banned because I deposited a mystic coin, or used a luck essence.

So what do the users do in this case?

I hope Anet has the stones to actually ban the kittens that have been spamming this in chat. EVERY ONE OF THEM. Even if I was a dev I might let once or even twice slip if the person filed a report with it, but now is an excellent time for Anet to clean house and get rid of a good number of people who don’t belong in this game (or likely on the internet in general).

*edited for clarity (I am not a dev)

Go for it Celebratty, we all know that only good and honest people use the forums, and no information like that would possibly ever be used maliciously, right?

Knote.2904:

What’s funny is they don’t even gain anything from such a change, it’s like it’s done out of spite.

More like someone with a big wallet complained about wanting it changed.

If this is true, someone in Yak’s Bend LA is posting it constantly. It is making it impossible to do anything.

Obviously Anet can not be trusted with any product offering that is cosmetic only, since they’ve no proven they will change it however they see fit, even if it was marketed completely different

No more cash from me at this point. I might buy bank slots, but Anet can forget me ever buying another cosmetic item.

Dasboba.1652:

It’s a bit fishy that they now will allow us to buy up to 12 bank tabs instead of just 8 with gems a mere two weeks after ascended crafting entered the game. I expect an item to increase crafting stacks to 500 to show up in the gem store soon.

I highly doubt Anet has any intention of doing that, they want people to max their bank slots, and would probably increase it to 16 before increasing stack size. The dollar is their god.

tolunart.2095:

Mesket.5728:

It’s a shame what a beautiful game can slowly turn into. Well, it would be naive to consider they would keep up the same release quality a year later.

Oct 2012: Queensdale is overrun by skeletons and Candy Corn elementals. Giant pieces of Candy Corn appear all over the world. You can mine them.

Yeah, quality has really declined a year after they released the game.

I think it’s been a sort of industry standard that holidays were a time in which exceptions could be made to the general rule, though in GW2, Halloween was likely a good indication of things to come.
City of Heroes always had a great Christmas/winter theme going on in December, but unlike GW2, when it was gone, the only real evidence that it had taken place was the ability to purchase candy-canes at Wentworth’s, along with a couple wintery costumes. Beyond that though, at least until it’s last year, it was not an in-your-face deal like things are here in GW2.
No use in talking about it though. Anet is going to do whatever makes them the most money for their investors, users be kittened.

I’ve never heard of Extra Credit until the vid post above, but wow. They nailed it with their commentary. I was active in Eve Online during the whole Incarna disaster, and watching it all unfold brought to mind a number of issues. One of the big ones is that game companies seem to hire real world economists to build the financial models on how virtual world economies will work.
Yes, there are parallels, but there are some strong differences as well. The end result is overpricing, poor implementation, and expectations by the company that go far beyond what the users will even think twice about.
Anet is doing quite well at making the wrong decisions, but considering some of the people they’ve hired, they probably have “greed is good” plastered on the walls of their office.

Mesket.5728:

Artists are fired, devs are doing artists jobs.

Not sure if serious. If yes, do you happen to have a source for the info? I’ve heard in the past that the original development teams are gone now. It would explain a LOT.

Nova Stiker.8396:

So, two weeks later. Despite multiple threads about bugged visuals and failed updates. ArenaNet still hasn’t fixed let alone acknowledge the bugs existence.

So thanks ArenaNet, for lying about updating visuals and completely ignoring the bugs. You hate Legendaries almost as much you hate Elementalists.

Actually, Anet cares a lot about legendaries. They make up a sizable portion of their gem purchase income along with being a massive gold sink in the game.
The problem is that even though they’ve made changes some people are unhappy with, those changes have not significantly impacted the income that legendaries generate.
Just watch. If Anet does something that messes up a legendary so bad that it’s weekly moving volume on spidy drops drastically, along with lots of complaints on the forum, they’ll have it fixed with the next patch.

Remember, if Anet does, or does not, do something and it doesn’t make sense or you can’t figure out why, always ask yourself if it affects their income.

SundayTrash.9562:

we need to punish Anet by boycotting gemstore.

If you did that and it started to show signs of picking up steam, you’d find yourself unable to ever log in again.

…and another thing. What fool manager told the devs to implement this without sitting down and asking the simple question “how could griefers and exploiters abuse this potentially?”

Really wondering what is going on inside Anet these days. From an outsiders perspective, the new time limits on the world bosses like Jormag seems like a huge backfire waiting to happen.

Due to champ trains and such, there are already times in which Jormag takes a while due to lack of player attraction, now, with the new time limit, people will start to pass it up when they feel like there aren’t enough people to pull it off. This, in turn will wind up guaranteeing that people won’t be able to kill said boss.

The rewards for killing Jormag and others no longer are strong enough to entice the champ farmers, even with the 0.000000000000000001% chance (may have left out some zeros there) of getting an ascended box.

I’d love to know who thought this was a good idea. I can see a one hour cap as realistic on these bosses, simply because you don’t want it hanging around in the zone for a long time, but 15minutes for Shatterer is just asking for it to be skipped more than played.

Just my opinion.

Not only are the griefing opportunities quite obvious, there is the issue also of someone simply trying to use the turrets in the first place.
Does anyone doubt that if only 6 people man the turrets that the other 100+ users will contain about 50 who will spend half the fight yelling at the people on the turrets to inform them of how stupid they are for not fighting exactly the way someone else says they should?
Map and local chat are going to be really ugly in about a week.

If you stay with the concept of blues being the primary color for a guardian, along with the association of healing (even though they aren’t really clerics), Monsoon isn’t a bad staff. If I ever develop my Guardian character to a high enough level, I will likely equip him with that one. Great looking staff.

Zanryu.3417:

You can go directly farm coin and buy them, same effect really, though honestly that tends to be more effective than farming for mats alone. Farm 6g in an hour, or try to farm 2-3 T6 in an hour.

That’s where it gets to be a playstyle issue, and I’m apparently one of the few, if not the only, people in the game that believes part of the crafting process involves finding the materials you need, as opposed to just buying them. Even so, this game has broken that for me to the point that I’ve gone against my own guidelines and purchased some items directly (drop rates on specific T6 crystals is pretty silly).
The problem I have overall with the farm-to-buy vs. explore-to-obtain is that if Anet is going to make the drop rates so low that it’s easier to buy the mats by farming gold, why not just nuke the drops all together and put T6 mats with an NPC? There is no point in having them drop anymore if the primary method of obtaining them is through indirect methods.
Right now I need over 100 of at least seven of the eight types, is it that wrong to want to be able to choose mobs like spiders and wurms, etc. and hack them up for powerful venom sacs, then move to things like risen for powerful blood, etc.?
To top it all off, Anet is still trying to combat bots, which I think we all agree on, but with Farming Punishment and only 4 zones to pick up T6 mats in, the bots are the only thing keeping the prices of T6 mats somewhere below the cost of precursors.

ozmaniandevil.6805:

And thus explains why champ trains are born.

Merely playing the game, it would take so long to get all the materials to make a legendary weapon that I would personally just get bored and eventually leave. Even in places like Orr the direct loot drops are pathetic….. no… REALLY pathetic. How many porous bones can one person get? So, here I am fighting level 80 veterans… no drops at all or something worthless.

It’s taken me about half a year so far to get 1/3 of each of the mats I need, so.. yeah. it takes a while. Most of those mats, however, were through champ farming and running the Scarlet invasions.

Anet needs to strike a solid balance between current drop rates and the drop rates of vicious fangs in Crown Pavillion. In CP I picked up 250+ vicious fangs in about a week.

@Draco.2806: “Farming Punishment” is my pet term for Diminishing Returns, because I feel it more accurately describes what that code is for.

What’s the farthest you’ve ever gone on auto-run without jumping or turning?

Zanryu.3417:

I get a fair amount of Powerful Venom Sacs, Vials of Powerful Blood, and Ancient Bones while farming champions in Frostgorge. Nothing super amazing, but certainly not too horrible of a rate, not to mention what I get from the boxes I open afterwards.

You might want to complain about SOME T6 mats, rather than lumping them all together. It sucks that you can’t get a whole lot with ease I suppose, but they are required for the most powerful armors and weapons in the game. I don’t imagine it should be a cakewalk.

With all due respect, I think you missed my point about “direct” vs. “indirect” drops. Champ loot does drop a moderately dismal amount of T6 mats, but, for starters, you have no control over what type you get.

Surprised we made it to page two before someone cried “sample size!”.

Ever notice how the people claiming sample size matters always demand a sample size that is larger than anything done by the people they disagree with?

You could put up stats that support your view by salvaging 10,000 exotics, and they’d come back with “Sample size is too small, there are millions of players”, and so on.

Vol.5241:

Why?

They’re incredibly easy to get

It’s the latest trend, Vol. Legendaries are now special, so now there’s going to be a huge push to make everything down to trash items have selectable stats, so everything can be equally different.

Proper code documentation and naming methods for things such as variables, functions, etc. is vital to fixing bugs. Modern coding software usually has extensive search features designed specifically to track down information related to a problem.
The main issue with GW2 is likely not a problem of finding random errors in code, but that they are more interested in fixing ones that affect their revenue in the short term, simply because money is all they care about.

There are lots of runes and sigils in the game, but they are most likely all the same object class in the code (assuming they use a software language that uses OOP), wherein their effects/attributes are defined. This doesn’t simplify the issue of finding a bug like a speed buff not happening, but it’s also not a needle-in-a-mountain-sized-haystack problem either.

Anet has chosen to go with a high-pressure environment for their development team, and in two weeks of blitz-coding, lots of bugs show up, but that’s where the money is, so those are the only bugs that get attention for the first few days. After that they ignore them and start prepping for the bugs that come in with the next two weeks worth of content.

Definitions I use for the purpose of the thread:
Directly: Killing a critter and getting an item in the loot from the body
Indirectly: obtaining the item off the TP via money made from selling other loot obtained directly.

I find it highly irritating that the best method of obtaining T6 mats is indirectly. Even without Farming Punishment, Anet has gone through and gutted T6 resources in regards to obtaining the items directly. About the only T6 mat I’ve been able to reliably loot directly is Karka shells. All other areas where you used to be reliably get T6 mats have been nerfed so hard you are lucky to get any drops at all.

What was a drop rate of around 3 or 4 every half hour (before Farming Punishment kicks in), has dropped to less than 1 per hour. Heavy bags drop stuff on occasion, but that is classified as “indirect” because it’s a random chance that it’s a T6 mat of a given type that you need.

Essentially Arenanet has forced players to choose indirect methods of obtaining specific loot types required for the gear they may want to craft. They’ve also skewed the values of given T6 mats on the trading post, simply because a higher priced item would cause more people to hunt for it in the areas where it’s known to drop until the price came back down to a reasonable level.

Farming Punishment has been heralded by Anet as effective against bots, but if it’s so effective, why is Anet keeping a strangle-hold on the T6 market by deliberately forcing scarcity instead of promoting free trade?

It is ridiculous that someone wanting to craft a given item should have to give up the tradition of exploration and adventuring in order to obtain a given material, but with GW2, you have to do exactly that. You have to play the game the way they choose, buy either zerging champ farms, or participating in completely unrelated content which may or may not interest you in the first place.

It’s like having to buy a boat in order to trade it for a car, because you are not allowed to buy a car directly, only through an “authorized” source.

The only things the current lunacy is doing is frustrating honest players and keeping bots in business, Farming Punishment or not.

edited for clarity

I have a complaint in general about the standard human female underwear (don’t know if this has been pointed out, but it’s worth repeating as it is).
When swimming, there is a very obvious problem that appears with certain dress/skirt types of armor. In short, it looks like my characters underwear is split. On one character with a dark purple color to her skirt, it shows up as a bright red line up the middle, however on my main character, it actually shows up as skin color.
My guess is that someone dropped the vertices on the UV seam right on the edge of the UV region, and anti-aliasing and such takes care of the rest when applying a texture to the UV. It really should be fixed because it simply looks sloppy if not inappropriate.

No, I’m not loading a screen shot pervs :P

Doesn’t WvW have some affect on that as well?

Fox Soul.4809:

foofad.5162:

I wish that Guardians got a longbow that fired death lasers.

The lasers have 240 sec CD and do 40 damage.

I wish a precursor for everyone.

Granted, every account now has a precursor, unfortunately it is part of the “town clothes”.

I wish rangers could move while using barrage.

Behellagh.1468:

Yes but then ALL the heavy salvagers were seeing it and ecto supply dropped off sharply.

And Anet jumped on the RNG bandwagon right off the bat, knowing they had made the changes. There is absolutely no reason what-ever to trust them to not tinker with the numbers again in order to change their financial numbers.

If the character slots were purchased but never used, there really isn’t a reason for Anet to not refund the gems and remove the slot. They are just being greedy (as usual)

Not something that bothers me necessarily, but it’s a great idea, and the reasoning is solid, in my opinion.

Hopefully other people will chime in with support before a mod dumps it in the trash-bin (a.k.a. suggestions forum)

yep, it’s RNG, and Anet is a pristine, pure, benevolent company that has never been proven to act questionably in their own favor. :roll eyes:

I’d like to have a passive/aggressive control option for pets on all classes. Or at least the ability to call them back like the F3 skill for rangers. There are times when on my necro, my flesh golem gets into a fight when I want to leave, and I’m basically stuck in combat while rangers have the ability to just hit F3 and break the pet out of it’s fight.
For all the control of dead things that necros have, you’d think they’d be able to call their critters back to them. Same for elementalists.

Kyocciola.2518:

some are really rare and expensive. :/

Your answer is related to the word in bold. Anet makes money because of this. Even if people stopped buying gems to pay for things, dyes, legendaries, and the like would remain soulbound because of the massive gold sink called the Trading Post.

+1 for third weapon-set.

And here I was expecting a thread about how customer service for GW2 nearly always answers questions with “suggest you ask on the community forums”.

On topic: Defiant and the AoE cap do pretty much make CC useless. The “buffing” of support skills pretty much only affects fights where it’s player(s) vs one or two non-bosses. In many cases, fights like that don’t need CC.

I think that, in GW2 at least, the term “nerf” has morphed into a term used to define change in general.
For myself it’s always been about taking power away from something, whether that be a player or a creature. You “nerf” a boss, making him easier to kill, by removing the damage he does, for example. Or you “nerf” a class type by taking away from the overall dps it can produce. While I use the term “nerf” due to the decrease of numbers (removing dps, thus making something less dangerous, similar to the original Nerf brand toys), if I really look at it, the proper term I should be using is “balance”.

In the past I’ve used the term “nerf” in regards to loot, which is similar to the above usage, only it relates to a change in the profitability of a given action. “Nerfing” the loot from a boss is removing the chance at loot items it previously contained.

That is likely a sign of the overall issue, in that each person may have their own extended definition of the term “nerf”. Though it appears to me that there is a valid link between “nerfing” meaning to make something less dangerous, and “nerfing” to be seen as making something more difficult. The two terms are not necessarily exclusive of each other all the time. If you remove the damage output of a specific class, you are technically nerfing it, because you are making it less dangerous to it’s targets, but overall you are making things more difficult because the players now have to fight longer to do the same amount of damage.

Perhaps the difference in definitions is more about where you apply the term. Is the term “nerf” applied to the cause, or the effect?

Legendaries need to remain top notch, and the world would implode if they made the stats better in any fashion. Ascended weapons don’t need to be equal to legendaries in functionality.

You know, you could have saved yourself and a whole lot of people a lot of time if you’d just written “L2P imbeciles!”, because that’s pretty much what your post boils down to. In fact, I’d say that’s the real point of the post. It’s nothing to do with communicating with devs, you just want to be smug about insulting everyone that you don’t consider as l33t as yourself.

fellyn.5083:

Anet reps (even Colin himself) have flat out said it’s not worth their time to fix all numerous issues with charr and their armor and weapons.

So basically this game is being “developed” by people who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Lovely.

Someone help me out here. Did Jonathan actually say they were working on the targeting system, or am I hallucinating?

Kilic Bela.4680:

Ships / weapons / anything in Eve Online aren’t bound to a character, and can be swapped about and be stolen by other characters if left unattended somewhere silly

I wouldn’t know a thing about stealing an Orca ..er.. ship.

The problem there is that Eve is a sub game. The only reason Anet messes around with soul-bound items is because of their obsession with monetizing every last aspect of the game. Soul-binding results in more money transactions in game which they can tax or make direct cash off of (gem purchases for buying transmutation stones, etc.).