Guild Wars 2

I just want one change to stealth: stop dropping my focus on the target.

I’ll wait for them to come out before I can make single target attacks. I’m cool with that. But having to fight the worst auto-targeting I’ve ever seen in over a decade of MMO playing to get them re-targeted again is infuriating.

And I HATE surprise releases on that magnitude because they are kittening stupid.

This game exist in a competitive market. People come and go. Staying visible and relevant in the gamer awareness takes constant work. Committing a huge investment in creative man-hours to a project like Tengu without maximizing your gains in awareness and player attraction is how good companies become empty buildings. Media presence takes coordination and a fair bit of advance planning.

You do not hide selling points under a heap of leaves. “We’re adding a new race!” is a BIG selling point.

Daydream all you like, but its not going to be something they spring on the live servers by surprise. Frankly I don’t think their test server information security is good enough that they could do something that big by surprise if they wanted to.

John Smith.4610:

It’s unlikely that you’ve ever traded on a market that hasn’t sold an item in the last 2 hours.

Out of curiosity, is that 2 hours for there to be a “sell now to highest offer OR buy now to lower offer” or just counting the buy nows?

((shrug)) I’ve placed mid 50s rares as the lowest asking price and seen them turn a day or two later. Similar stories with some more boring low 70s exotics. I’m sure the addition of essence of luck has sped up the “back corners” lately, but my memory does reach (hazily) into the before time . By purely anecdotal experience there should be far more comparatively worthless dusty corners than there are grinning shields waiting on the rack for someone to come and love them.

Still, it seemed like an interesting approach. But it sounds like the scaling needs to be keyed to average velocity then.

Drago Ivansen.5398:

I find it interesting the majority of the people arguing against a simple flat ~1%, are seemingly ok with a much more complicated system with increments up to 5 times larger than 1%. Is this because you believe majority of items on the TP trade every 20 mins and the system for the most part will have 1c increments?

Look at the second post in this thread . I’ve no interest in protecting sellers …who price in a fashion that doesn’t move. Sellers that price close to equilibrium never needed the 1% protection in the first place because their goods sell before the undercutter comes along. My target is stale, stagnant prices and the people who list them. A time-derived undercut gap that spreads with time doesn’t help them. What it does is whisper in the ear of the next guy that they’re about to get into a market that is either slow or full-on stagnant, and rather strongly encourages them to make a move towards equilibrium. They can match prices and get in line they know is not moving, or they can post at a price that is far more likely to actually move. Right now we make a lot of uniformed choices. This gives you more information in exchange for giving buyers a better price. And by better I mean closer to equilibrium.

I believe this sort of system-mandated push towards equilibrium is more relevant in slower markets. High volume markets already manage themselves with greater speed and finer nuance than a mere 1% or even a 1 minute timer. They can flex and correct in seconds…

“Time since sell order processed” is just one way of measuring that. I’m a game designer not an economist (related disciplines to be sure, but not the same). I’m hopeful that Agent Smith or others can point me to different/better means of identifying velocity that could be used to guide the undercut gap generation. But the goal is a faster, more robust economy, not “protection”.

Aidan Savage.2078:

Well, there’s another hidden flaw in your suggestion. If it needs to sell within X minutes for a 1c undercut, what’s to stop someone from buying a single item at Y price, then relist Z+1 items at Y-1c price and eat the minor loss associated with that purchase?

Good question (and I’m glad to get some aggressive but also thoughtful feedback – good ideas get better when challenged). There are a couple of events we can use as the start point for the timer. “From the last time the item sold from a standing offer” is one — which would be vulnerable to a single buy to reset the gap as you suggest. It could also be based on the current age of the lowest standing offer… with each purchase essentially peeling off a layer to reveal the offer before that. Less vulnerable but a lot less dynamic, and I think the TP is best served by very dynamic systems.

I don’t have a best answer for you yet . I’m going to have to ponder the game theory interactions a bit for dealing with stacks of past sale offers or putting up 100 items at once.

Nike.2631:

The controlling factor could be Time.

Use the lowest that is true:
Item has not sold in the last 72 hours — 5% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 72 hours — 3% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 12 hours — 2% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 2 hours — 1% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 20 minutes — 1c undercut required

Wanze.8410:

I actually like the thought behind this but i dont think it would change much on the status quo as even precursors propably will never go longer than 12 hours without at least 1 selling.

It seems since that the usual argument for setting a larger threshold to undercut is based on the idea of staking a claim on the order of interactions based on having arrived first, this takes that reasoning to its logical conclusion that the more “first” you are (time spend sitting at the “next to sell” position), the larger the gap should be to jump ahead.

Since we have been granted “perfect knowledge” to prove the utility of our algorithmically generated minimum gap, Agent Smith is obliged to mentally edit my table to timescales relevant to the actual velocity of the market . I picked factors of 6 to space the categories in a way a human reader can easily respond to, but if meaningful brackets are more like~

5 minutes -> 30 minutes -> 3 hours ->18 hours -> 4 days

~I would not be surprised. There are a number of thing in the market that look like they sell less often than precursors though, so I don’t really want to use the “10-12 per day” of those as a ceiling for the scale.

Essentially my premise is if an item has sat for 2-3 days not selling, it actually HELPS the market move towards equilibrium faster for the market to tell the new lister “Hey, cut you price more, ‘cause that price isn’t working.” rather than allowing them to dilly dally with 1c undercuts that aren’t likely to bring buyer and seller together anymore than the seller before them.

Its damage, healing and interaction with Virtue of Justice are balanced around its current tempo.

Nick.6972:

Still waiting for a dev reply after 2000 posts.

Seriously? Why?

Did you not see the “Cantha?” interview?

I think the standard for ABSOLUTE SILENCE on the topic has been well established.

I envision Charr “capes” as a metal spine guard with two capes attached to it – one on the left and one on the right, with each cape essentially draping over the ribs instead of towards the tail. =|=

Bogdanus Magnus.8143:

Viking Jorun.5413:

I don’t get the offense of mixing different Asian cultures to achieve an entirely new one. Cantha is not Chinese, Korean, or Japanese. It’s Cantha. The sooner NCSoft comes to accept it as it’s own culture within a fantasy world, the sooner development can begin on it. ^^

You, my friend, said in three lines everything that has to be said.

If someone made an obvious FANTASY setting where Mice-people in their quest for racial purity started marching Cat-people into ovens, no one is going to say “what a novel fantasy setting you’ve come up with.” If anything the very first post on that game’s boards is going to be “You cast the Jews as Cats??!? And somehow its the Jews’ own fault they get put in ovens now because they used to hunt the Mice-people?!!? Are you insane?”

No argument of “but its obviously a fantasy setting” will mean jack squat.

That you don’t understand the minefield that Cantha tramples through is pretty much the EXACT reason why the game shouldn’t go there. There are hot-buttons you just don’t push in a mainstream game. Its ignorance of the context those “fantasy elements” are drawing on that creates the problem in the first place.

In PvE reaching 25 stacks could force the mob to spend 1 second performing a self-cleanse as its next action (with an 8 second internal cooldown), making high volumes of condition act as soft CC.

John Smith.4610:

Let’s simplify the debate a bit. We have a lot of variables in discussion, let’s say that TP Fees are still a factor, but controlling inflation and gold sinks are not.

Furthermore let’s assume that we all agree that 1c holds a virtual non-value on goods above X price. How do you determine a system that effectively chooses what an appropriate value is that doesn’t
1. Injure the market 2. Discourage use of the TP
Note: this value may be algorithmic, but you must PROVE the values are effective. You may assume you have perfect data of the TP if you need it to support a hypothesis.

The controlling factor could be Time.

The goal is (I think) to reach equilibrium price quickly – but without forcing an overshoot by having a minimum undercut larger than the distance from current lowest offer and actual equilibrium (hence the concerns around algorithmically generated undercuts for lower cost items).

What if the minimum undercut changes as a particular item stagnates? Specifically: the longer its been since an item has sold, the larger the undercut becomes – the item is clearly not at equilibrium and we want the system to speed things along.

Hmm. This is human look-up chart for a moment, rather than a formula, but bear with me.

Use the lowest that is true:
Item has not sold in the last 72 hours — 5% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 72 hours — 3% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 12 hours — 2% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 2 hours — 1% undercut required
If the item has sold in the last 20 minutes — 1c undercut required

High volume items would be unaffected relative to our current model, but things that sit now require a sincere effort to get them back into motion.

Smooth Penguin.5294:

Farming monsters creates coin.
Map completions creates coin.
Guild Missions creates coin.
Daily/Monthly metas creates coin.
Event completions creates coin.
Dungeon completions creates coin.
WvW ranking up creates coin.
Trading Post move coins between players, and eliminates 15% of them from the game.

Farming monsters creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Map completions creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Guild Missions creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Daily/Monthly metas creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Event completions creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Dungeon completions creates coin as a function constrained by time.
WvW ranking up creates coin as a function constrained by time.
Trading Post concentrates coin as a function constrained by how much coin you already have.

People’s emotional involvement with the economy isn’t based on the inflow and outflow of coin across the entire system — it can’t, they are individuals, not demigods floating above and looking down dispassionately. And they are frustrated specifically because people who are not earning coin end up having most of it.

As a theoretical construct, its brilliant. As a social system with voluntary participation, it leaves something to be desired, or maybe it just carries a bad taste because it so successfully mirrors a real world environment many of us are seeking relief from in our leisure time by playing of all things a game that doesn’t have a fixed subscription fee.

Seriously, how does a game that’s major selling point is not requiring any more money than you choose to give maintain this pose of ignorance that its players might be annoyed at fat cats being rewarded in their fantasy world as much or maybe even more than they are in the real world?

John Smith.4610:

I do think it’s fair to say though that in many countries there is some unrest with the level of political power being wielded by smaller groups (note I’m making 0 value judgement on the concept itself, but it’s fair to say the idea exists) and this idea can sometimes be extended to an argument of wealth disparity. That unrest may be being projected into this environment, but I still see no evidence of that being an issue in GW2.

Really? Then your reluctance to publish a second distribution of wealth chart like the one released near launch makes no sense .

I think the main thing keeping the vast gulf between rich and average denizens of Tyria from boiling over into widespread fury is the systematically enforced ignorance of how bad it’s gotten.

If you really think it’s not a big deal, them more info is good, right? Post a current chart and get a real feel for whether it matters to people.

Foreshadowing there is no longer any need to get Lord Beetlestone a boar’s head trophy as he’s received about 15,000 a day for months?

I think its hilarious people are pretending Ferocity is somehow the LAST step that will be taken towards shattering the stranglehold the DPS Role has on gameplay .

Dee Jay.2460:

True, and I still don’t see a downside to it. Yet people here are getting their panties in a twist because why?

I still don’t know….

Then go find and read the 47 page thread. Google it, since the in-house search tool is poo.

If people are defensive its because we’ve DONE THIS DANCE BEFORE.

I see this in many ways offset by “I’d never pay 60g for a dye for one of my characters” “…Dude, its for ALL your characters now…” “oh…? OH!” and that its now a lot more credible and easy undertaking to collect dyes since you no longer end up with a patchwork scattered across all your alts. It won’t eaqual the old demand, certainly, but I still don’t think demand will plummet nearly as fast as supply…

Either way, there’s money to be made .

Part of the problem remains a quirk/bug/oversight in their stats scaling. Below level 40 they are amazingly effective. It’s like their stats are based on “green” gear scales and they don’t migrate into yellow/orange/red scales properly as you level up.

If they stay on the harvesting table their value will turn to slightly less than ash (normally I’d say “dust”, but that stuff is pricy ).

That’s really the big mystery to me and something I’ll be checking vigorously over the next few hours after the patch I think.

Arguably the (rare) cooking-crafted ones are better than the UIDs since if you have a specific color in mind you can narrow things down a bit.

But so much of this game is built on a gambler’s mentality, I think UIDs will still have that siren call of containing Abyss/Celestial that’ll keep a few people coming back for just one more pull on the slot machine.

But the store exclusives? Were talking low orbit on the price for those now.

Perhaps after town clothes mutate into all-weight armor skins we’ll finally get these lovely assets to mix and match as we please…

DarcShriek.5829:

What’s the point of taxing the rich, other than to punish success?

Technically the purpose of taxing the rich is to provide for the wellbeing/stability of the environment in which their wealth exists. We’re way past hard currencies here. If faith in the system collapses, you lose everything — the most progressive tax of all.

Hypothetically, if it came down to flatten out the disparity between the ultra-rich and the median player or watch the game go dark because it it’s bleeding citizens, you can bet they’d install any of the half-dozen subtle progressive gold sinks I can think of.

I expect about 500. I am not going to be selling them off that afternoon. I probably won’t even check again until June. At which point they have three sources – gem store, cooking-crafted, and fellow hoarders.

I have no doubt that the hundred or so commons I’ve bought in the last week and every UID I’ve had drop since the announcement will pay off nicely in the mid-run…

Heck, if people are so stupid as to sell into the crash, I may just buy up another stack or three. Because people still have the idea in their heads that its just a “oh, what a spiffy drop!” when after the patch that item in their minds NO LONGER EXISTS. There will be a new item that shares the name and the icon, but plays by entirely separate rules. Its going to take a few weeks but it will sink in you will never get another casual UID drop… Ever. Again.

And then I expect the price to climb quite a bit.

TheGaryTh.1649:

How about some of those 4 stat combos like the ones we already have for trinkets (e.g. Berserker + Vitality)

The ascended trinkets aren’t really new combos: ALL ascended trinkets have their jewel slot pre-filled with a fixed hypothetical ascended jewel. For most of them the jewel is the same adjective as the main item. For a few of them its a different stat combo fused into place.

I listed the formula already : N x (N-1) x (N-2)/2. The divide by 2 at the end is because the second and third option have equivalent weight, so they are interchangeable (e.g. Power + Ferocity/Precision & Power + Precision/Ferocity are the same thing and halve the total count)

7×6×5/2 = 105 (plus Celestial which is a different format altogether)

I’m guessing the Superior Runes of Resistance would jump in price about 4-5 fold if any of this happened.

Deathmond.7328:

Just add into BLTC item that change stat combination(one time ability). Most of people will be very greatful.

I’m trying to envision that absolute chaos that would cause for crafters…

Sakri.7234:

Stop being so negative, people! This is a good change and I can see no drawbacks to it. Sit back and enjoy the game!

If you can’t see them, you can’t see any situation but your own.

There are 7 (possibly 8 ) healer classes already. Thief is the only existing profession I haven’t made a perfectly serviceable healer out of and I haven’t tried since they came out with the healing poison.

Classes have to fulfill all the roles in this game, depending on build.

And here’s why no on cares:

I did all those things to get my 3rd 80 leveled up.

Don’t believe me? NO ONE can prove otherwise.

If the game doesn’t provide absolute verification, its all chest-thumping bullcrap.

This is why the Liadri fight/miniature works. There is no doubt, no alternative, no short cut, no exploit. If you have one, you can make the claim you beat her and no one will question it.

Oranisagu.3706:

why are people so fiercely against mounts? I mean, I think I haven’t seen a single reason in this thread except people screaming no louder and louder.

Then you skipped over my post. Scroll up. You’ll find it .

You may find this discussion interesting .

A position so powerfully put, so compellingly framed, so eloquently stated that we know the Devs will have no choice but to capitulate completely and do as you say (like drooling zombies).

…Unless we band together and ignore it until it slides of the front page.

Who made it? There tends to be a lot more patience extended to people mangling their own cultural heritage than to “outsiders” doing so .

Its also not really a question of “accuracy” so much as inadvertent, offensive juxtapositions.

Honestly, I do too. I am bored to bloody tears with pseudo-European feudal fantasy tropes. But I also come from a much more casual and frankly homogenized culture than the ones Cantha would be raiding for parts. Combined with GW2 directly courting a market that is very, very much more familiar with the well Cantha dips it’s bucket into, and its — sadly — probably for the best AreanNet leaves it alone.

Omne.4603:

Wtb expansion for this.

Ok, realpolitik time:

While to many outside of eastern Asian the region looks like one big blob of dirt and a few island occupied by a lot of people with epicanthic eye-folds, the region is actually filed with a complex array of cultures and ethnicities that on the whole hate each other and have been killing each other for thousands of years right up to and including some massive atrocities in the last century. Seriously, ask the man on the street in Osaka and Shanghai about their opposite number in the other city and odds are you’ll hear things that would make the klu klux klan blush. During my stay in Japan I had some of the most pleasant folks imaginable go absolutely feral over things as small as casting a Chinese-descended actor to play a nominally Japanese-American character. We’re talking Hollywood day-to-day business as usual taken as a call for lynch mobs. Ugly.

Now introduce a bunch of dudes and dudettes from the American west coast who have a fondness for Asian architecture/visual stylings and maybe a little understanding of feudal cultures but little or no grounding in the actual historical events of the region. They roll out a setting featuring a mash-up of cultural cues about as insensitive and inappropriate as decorating a classical synagogue with swastikas to people who grew up in the cultures being mangled.

It kittened some people off. And it should. Rather than put a historian on staff to spot check a setting that’s largely unworkable from the ground up they have wisely decided to just NOT put their foot in that particular wolf-trap again after getting out of it once already by gnawing that limb off.

And what do you want them to do?

Make it smaller for everyone? Bend the arm position for everyone? Put a crack in it that exactly lines up with that particular shoulder design?

It literally is a one-size-fits-all situation for every shield in the game so if you insist on wearing that shoulder on a character with a shield, what do you want to happen to every other shield user in the game to make you happy?

So.

Again.

What do you want them to do?

Gasoline.2570:

John Smith.4610:

There are about 17 reasons I cannot answer that question.

So why bother posting at all?

Maybe so that people who are paying attention know when the topic has wandered into trade secrets territory.

John Smith.4610:

There are about 17 reasons I cannot answer that question.

Awww. Not in the mood to give away for free a big part of the subtle cunning AreaNet pays you for? I’m not at all surprised. It’s a competitive industry, and I know I’d be taking notes…

For your amusement – the “Control Rod” strategy (something which cannot exist in a real world economy, but might make you laugh ).

Each time a Trading Post sale transaction goes through where a buyer pays the lowest sell price offered there is a 1% chance that the TP itself generates a copy of that item, sends it to the buyer, and takes the entire 100% of the coin paid out of the system (leaving the original item in place).

It makes the TP an invisible vendor that sells goods for coin at market-guided prices…

Oh… you think that this one time — out of all the hundreds of click to discover contents items/bags in the game — they’re going to make me take the risk of opening them instead of selling that risk to others.

Nope. I don’t believe that’s how its going to play out for one second.

But, as you say, well know in a week .

With that particular combo, what exactly do you want them to do?

Cassocaster.4576:

I don’t know how the credited dyes CANNOT be account bound. Once discovered is one thing but people thinking these won’t be account bound are taking a bet against pretty large odds. I won’t be taking part in any future dye purchases, I would rather focus on increasing my ore holdings in hopes that JC500 actually takes place.

And I don’t see how they can possibly be account bound. My ‘dye main’ has every single common and uncommon color and all but about 4 rares. What the hell am I supposed to do with the 500+ unidentified dyes I’m going to get from my other characters when I already have all the colors and can’t sell them? I’m not making 5 Bifrosts…

The game is alive. Some servers are in pretty rough shape though.

If you want to go faster you can – the game (rightly) considers it a major advantage that you have to make sacrifices to get. You either eat up runes, utilities, or traits/weapon variety for passive +25% bonuses or you work to get +33% through swiftness uptime.

Speed is not free. Most implementations of mounts destroy those tradeoffs.

Rare (yellow) versions would mostly offer the chance of salvage for ectos.

BeardRex.6739:

My only concern is based on a scenario like this:

I’m adventuring in an Queensdale (part of the megaserver). Along the way I meet another player (from another server), and we decide to group up. When it’s time to move on to Kessex Hills (not part of the megaserver), my new friend is placed in his server’s instance of that zone. When I go through the portal, will I…

A) be placed on his server without guesting
or
B) be placed on my servers instance of that zone ?

Will you still be required to guest on a server in order to join a party member in a zone on that server?

I would think ‘join current party’ would be a higher order flag than ANYTHING else.

Betrayer of Hopes.9124:

Epic. On first look I thought that this was a step to good old gw1.

They jyst need to make a list of owerflow zones so we can choose which zone we want.

Jyst that Anet pls.

Not going to happen – because then you could see how many/few people are playing.

That’s state secrets level stuff to an MMO company.

More “give better loots” instead of “create fun gameplay”. Why do so many suggestions come down to better bribes for doing something repetitive?

Morsus.5106:

Major: Profession Stat
Minor: Vitality, Power

Now THAT is interesting…